Tanglewreck (6 page)

And Silver’s eyes were full of tears but she was brave too. She burrowed herself deep under the blankets and let herself go to sleep.

Down in the study, Sniveller was serving wine to his Master and Mrs Rokabye.

‘I am going to hypnotise Silver,’ said Abel Darkwater.

‘I was once hypnotised,’ observed Mrs Rokabye. ‘I was told I was a chicken and I laid an egg.’

‘This is not seaside entertainment,’ snapped Darkwater. ‘I shall draw Silver back through Time until I reach the moment where her father tells her what he intends to do with the Timekeeper.’

‘If he ever did tell her,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘I believe that child is as ignorant as a cockle.’

‘Even cockles have their uses,’ replied Darkwater. ‘Silver has already fallen into a deep sleep. All that remains is for Sniveller to bring me to the child and I shall do my work.’

Mrs Rokabye had no worries about what might happen to Silver, but she was brooding about Bigamist.

‘I hope your horrible henchmen haven’t upset my rabbit,’ she said. ‘When I said you could search Tanglewreck, I told you to be especially careful of Bigamist.’

Abel Darkwater’s eyes swelled with irritation. ‘My henchmen, as you call them, seem unable to answer their mobile phones. We must assume they have failed in their mission and that possibly they are dead.’

‘Dead!’ cried Mrs Rokabye. ‘What are you saying, Mr Darkwater? Is it not enough that I have to pass my days in a horrible house without carpets or central heating or even a fridge, and now you tell me that there are two dead bodies there as well?’

‘I cannot say, but I can say that Sniveller will go back with you if you prefer, and remove any offending objects.’

Mrs Rokabye was about to say that she found Sniveller himself an offending object, but he had returned to the room to tell Darkwater that the child was ready for hypnosis.

‘Are you sure she is quite asleep?’ said Darkwater urgently.

‘Quite asleep, Master. I put opium in the tomato sauce.’

‘What a marvellous idea!’ said Mrs Rokabye, looking at Sniveller with new eyes. ‘I hope you will tell me where I can buy some. London has everything!’

‘I get mine from a Chinaman in Whitechapel,’ said
Sniveller. ‘Three stops on the Underground and a hundred years back in Time.’

Mrs Rokabye was looking confused and Darkwater was glaring. He took out his enormous gold pocket watch, and examined it closely, like a face in the mirror.

‘Excuse us, Mrs Rokabye. Help yourself to wine and chocolates, won’t you?’

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Mrs Rokabye, settling down as best she could in the hard high-backed wooden chair. Still, the wine and chocolates were very nice and she was suddenly feeling sleepy herself.

‘Don’t mind if I do …’ she said, as the glass slipped from her hand.

Abel Darkwater and Sniveller made their way slowly up the stairs.

‘What did you put in her wine?’ asked Darkwater.

‘Chloroform drops,’ said Sniveller. ‘Undetectable in claret.’

‘Excellent,’ said Darkwater. ‘Help me with the child, then carry Mrs Rokabye here up to bed. Are we heads or tails tonight?’

‘Heads is North-facing. Wind quite bracing,’ said Sniveller.

‘Heads,’ repeated Darkwater, opening the door into the shadowy room. ‘Heads.’

Silver heard the door open, as the boards creaked under
the weight of the two men. She pretended to be asleep.

Sniveller stepped forward quickly and clipped a thick cloth, stretched like canvas, to the four upright rails of the little bed. It was like lying under a flat tent.

Abel Darkwater drew what looked like two interlocking triangles, making a pointed star on the canvas, and in the middle of the star, he placed a ticking clock. Then he said something in a language Silver couldn’t understand, and a bright green flame lit up the room. She could see the outline of the men clearly now, at the foot of the bed.

Abel Darkwater began to pass his hands across the top of the canvas and directly over her feet.

‘You are going back in Time,’ he said, ‘back in Time, not far, not far at all, but a few years, oh yes, just a few, and your father and mother are still alive.’

Silver lay absolutely still and rigid with terror. Then a very strange thing started to happen.

As Abel Darkwater spoke on and on in the language she couldn’t understand, she felt herself slipping and shifting, like she was disappearing from her own body and going somewhere else. She felt very light. She was moving very fast. She was crossing time like it was a street. She was moving from Time Now into Time Then.

Then she saw it. She saw it exactly as though someone was projecting it on to a wall. Behind Abel Darkwater was the face of her father. Her beloved father!

Darkwater turned, and because Silver was lying the wrong way round, she risked raising her head on the pillow, hoping
he wouldn’t see her under the canvas. They were back at Tanglewreck …

It was a cold day and the bear in the garden was covered in snow. It was a hedge bear, made out of box plants and shaped and trimmed by their father. There were foxes too, and a deer standing with its face towards the forest
.

‘Once,’ said her father, ‘these creatures lived here when the forest came as close as the edge of the garden. There were still bears in England when this house was new.’

Her father was wearing a knitted tie and a thick wool shirt, and a big loose heavy jacket. He took something out of his pocket and the children looked at it in wonder
.

‘This is the most beautiful object in the world,’ he said, ‘but I think it is alive too.’

‘Is it a watch or a clock?’ said Silver
.

‘It’s called the Timekeeper,’ said her father. ‘Its mysteries are hard to understand. I don’t really understand it myself. I’m taking it to London tomorrow to show it to a man who will tell me everything about it. He wants me to sell it to him, but I won’t do that.’

‘Can I come with you?’

‘Not this time. Next time. This time we’ll take Buddleia because she needs to see a doctor about her leg.’

Their father was gazing at the clock. ‘Our ancestors were given it to keep safe by someone who was very unsafe himself. It was a long time ago, and they looked after him, and he asked them to keep this for him. It’s been in the family for hundreds of years – nearly as long as the house – and now it’s my turn to look after it,
and one day, it will be your turn.’

‘You never showed it to me before.’

‘No. I keep it hidden.’

‘Why do you hide it?’

‘Oh, just because I have a feeling that someone else might want it.’

‘Where do you hide it?’

As she said that, the image of her father holding the clock became bigger and bigger, then it began to waver and fade. Abel Darkwater started shouting at the top of his voice, and the light in the room was so bright that Silver fell back and closed her eyes.

Abel Darkwater was leaning over her feet. ‘He hid it somewhere, didn’t he? Where did he hide it? He hid it in the house or the garden, didn’t he? Take me there, follow the day that I have given you – follow your father. Where is it? Where is it?’

Suddenly the room went dark. Abel Darkwater was breathing heavily. Silver felt in her body that whatever had happened to her was over.

Sniveller and Abel Darkwater left the bedroom and went into the adjoining room where Silver had eaten her supper. She could hear them talking in low voices, but they had shut the door and she couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Without really planning it, Silver slid quickly out of bed and pulled on her jeans, fleece and socks over her pyjamas.

She slipped out on to the landing and padded silently
down the stairs. How dark it was! The stairs wound down and down like the spring of a clock, and as her fingers felt the walls to steady herself, her body made giant shadows thrown by the candlelight.

She reached the wide hall. There was the telephone on the table. It was a funny-looking thing; upright, like a black candlestick, with a microphone at the top to speak into, and a listening tube hanging at the side, and a dial at the base that you had to spin round to get the numbers. She had seen Abel Darkwater using it that afternoon, so she knew what to do.

Looking round nervously, she lifted the tube and dialled 999.

A voice answered. ‘What number are you, caller?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Silver. ‘I want the police, please.’ ‘Yes, tell me your number, caller.’

‘It’s not my phone. I want someone to help me.’

‘Details, please. Name. Address.’

Before Silver could say anything else, there was a great roar from upstairs, and she heard Abel Darkwater shouting at the top of his voice, ‘You snivelling idiot. Where is the child?’

Silver dropped the phone and ran to the front door. It was locked and bolted. She slid back the big bolt at the bottom of the door, and turned the hoop-topped iron key in the boxy brass lock, but she couldn’t reach the top bolt, and Abel Darkwater was coming down the stairs. She turned away and frantically shook the door handle into the shop. It opened. She rushed inside and closed the door behind her. Was she trapped or was there another way out?

In the shop there was no sound at all except for one ticking clock – just one. The time was five minutes to midnight.

The display cabinets of watches and clocks were lit by dim red lights that made the gold and silver casings glow like the bodies of luminous insects, and the shiny glass faces of the watches were like great round eyes. Like Abel Darkwater’s eyes, she thought.

Silver was too frightened to be frightened. Her whole body was numb but her mind was racing. She had seen that the door at the back of the shop led into a small courtyard. Perhaps there was a way out there.

As she made her way towards the door, the one and only ticking clock suddenly paused, and then began to strike midnight. As it did so, every single clock and watch in the shop, all the ones that hadn’t been ticking at all, chimed and belled and rang the hour, MIDNIGHT, MIDNIGHT, MIDNIGHT.

Silver put her hands over her ears. There were cuckoos flying out of wooden clocks on the wall, and brown-faced men wearing fezzes walking out of a clock shaped like a pyramid, and a dog that flew from its kennel barking the hour, and a woman banging a kettle with a stick, and a bell tolling from side to side in the steeple of a church, and over the top of all of them was Abel Darkwater’s voice coming from nowhere.

‘The universe was not born in Time but born with Time. Time and the Universe are twin souls birthed together. Whoever controls Time controls the Universe. Whoever has
the Timekeeper controls Time.’

Abel Darkwater was standing in the open shop doorway in a triangle of light. As he came towards Silver, she dashed between his legs, but he reached down and caught her, and picked her up and slung her over his shoulder.

‘Let me go! Let me go!’

Laughing, Darkwater stepped slowly into the hall, and stood with his back towards the front door of the house, looking up the stairs as Sniveller came down with a steaming purple glass.

‘Drinking stops you thinking,’ he said. ‘Give her this and she’ll be asleep in no time, Master.’

‘You said that earlier and the child is wide awake, as you can see.’

‘I dosed the tomato sauce, yes I did,’ said Sniveller, cowering.

‘I hate tomato sauce!’ yelled Silver, her legs kicking, her head staring at the door. Then suddenly she saw what to do, yes, now that Abel Darkwater had lifted her up, she could pull back the top bolt, then if only she could just …

She wriggled forward with such a thrust that Darkwater lost his balance, and Silver had the bolt in her hands before he stumbled and dropped her. Sniveller lunged forward to catch her but tripped over Darkwater, who was too heavy and slow to move quickly. Silver knew that the door was fully unlocked now and if only she could just turn the knob …

She was free! She was outside in the street! She had no
shoes on her feet, but she could run, and run she did, she didn’t know where, until the lights of the city seemed far away and, breathless and sweating, she stood on one sore foot, on a bank by the River Thames.

Midnight was chiming as Fisty and Elvis lay in the damp cellar, hands and feet tied.

Bigamist was not the only rabbit in the house, and once he had his enemies safely dropped down the hole, he signalled to a few of his friends and relations, and they all came along with twine from their carrot sacks and ran round and round the unhappy pair until they were as tightly bound as wasps in a spider’s web.

Fisty had tried kicking them at first, but they were all black, all identical, and if he sent one of them flying through the air, another one bit him. Elvis was no use at all. His KILL button had been disabled in the fall, and the rabbits had taken away his remote control. He was a dog without means or purpose.

‘What am I supposed to eat?’ demanded Fisty, wondering why he was talking to a rabbit, but Bigamist seemed to understand, and before long half a sack of soft mouldy carrots was pushed down into the cellar. With his hands and feet tied, the only way that Fisty could eat them was to lie on the floor and dig in the sack with his head.

‘Fur ’ats, every one of ’em,’ he said to himself between mouldy miserable bites. ‘I’ll make ’em all into ’ats and sell
’em on eBay.’

But no one was listening, because Elvis had lost his ears, the rabbits had gone, and Thugger was in another part of the dungeon having some very unpleasant problems of his own.

The River Thames at Limehouse bows away from the City. The river glitters darkly. The river reflects the starless London sky. The river flows on to the sea. The river flows in one direction, but Time does not. Time’s river carries our spent days out to sea and sometimes those days come back to us, changed, strange, but still ours. Time’s flow is not even, and there are snags underwater, hesitations in Time where the clock sticks. A minute on Earth is not the same length as a minute on Jupiter. A minute on Earth is sometimes a different length all by itself.