This is a teaser for the novel I’m currently working on. It will probably go through a lot of revision from this state to the final draft, and I haven’t edited it all that much as I’m focusing on finishing the first draft. If you want something a little more polished from me, I would recommend reading one of the short stories on the previous page. But if you’re looking for a little teaser of what I’m working on right now, this is it.
Note: This is not the final draft, and therefore is subject to change. For completed short stories, please navigate to the “Stories” tab of the website and scroll down to “Short Stories.”
Chapter One: The Runaway
One night on the east end of Oxford Street, a young woman broke out of her cell and snuck down the stairs of a fortress.
Well, calling it a “cell” is probably a bit of a catachresis. It was actually a lovely indoor observation deck, overlooking all of Oxford Street. But referring to the Caballine Clockwork Conservatory as a “fortress” is accurate enough in its current state.
The woman went by the name of Scarlet. Though that was not the name she was given at birth, it was the name she’d chosen to go by now that she’s escaped her prison on the observation deck. Scarlet was once an ordinary woman, in a different timeline from this one. In that timeline, you could probably imagine the type of woman she was just by the “ordinary” descriptor—long, golden locks of hair, soft-spoken, modest, and a bit of a ditzy daydreamer.
But a version of her had been placed within this particular timeline against her will, and the person responsible for it was the same man who locked her up in the observation deck for multiple months.
But, I’ll share more about that man later. I wouldn’t want to get too far ahead of myself, right at the beginning of the story. Now’s the part of the story where Scarlet takes her first steps away from the ordinary woman that she still believes she is.
She slowly moved down the steps, rolling through her feet so as to not make any noise. The steps were quiet. Eerily so. These stairs had been around for at least ten years already, but they sounded as though they were installed only yesterday. That was something Scarlet could sympathize with. Trapped in a permanent state of time, in a place you should have never been in to begin with. Never growing, never changing.
As she eased herself off the steps and onto the landing, a person dove for her, pinning her to the wall.
Scarlet saw that the person was actually her abettor. The woman’s wild, curly hair was thrown into a low, messy ponytail, and the lumpiest part of the ponytail, which Scarlet knew sat around the crown of her head, was hidden underneath a grey paperboy cap. She wore a soft pink sweater over a white collared shirt, with a brown-plaid skirt way too small for her with falling suspenders. Her hazel eyes lit up with a stern flame that matched what seemed to always be a reserved scowl on her face. She had her hand against Scarlet’s chest, and she was looking at something at the other end of the hallway.
“Emmy, what are you–”
“Shh…” Emmy pointed down the hallway. At the other end of the hall, two men fully decked out in black navy suits and army caps were on patrol, keeping anyone from using the only staircase down. The men wore thick, black belts, with black holsters hanging against their thighs. But there wasn’t a gun, like you may or may not expect from your own place in the sea of time. Rather, it was a pocketwatch, about the size of a man’s palm.
The sight of those pocketwatches sent a chill up Scarlet’s spine, as they rightfully should. As we established earlier, Scarlet was not from this world. Or at least, she wasn’t anymore. It was those watches that gave her life, but they could also be the ones to take it away. Or worse, they could factory reset her to the day that she re-entered this world. Scarlet felt her heart start to pound.
“The Watchers rotate shifts any moment now, right at midnight,” Emmy said. “After that, we’ll have two minutes to get all the way down to the street. Are you ready?”
Scarlet nodded. She was terrified. She was definitely crazy for what she was about to do– she knew that if she were to get caught by the Timekeeper, she would not be able to go through with her plan. But she can’t be trapped here any longer. She had to put an end to the Timekeeper’s reign.
They watched and waited as the Watchers in front of them left the staircase landing. Shortly after they did, they heard it. A clock’s first grand chime of midnight.
That first chime was like a pistol’s crack at the beginning of a race. The two women sprinted down the hallway at a breakneck pace. Going down the first staircase, Emmy took every three steps while Scarlet took every two. Scarlet chased after Emmy down a narrow hallway, looking out at the next staircase they needed to go down on the other end.
Then she realized that the hallway they were going down had one, massive window going down the left side, looking out onto a street riddled with Watchers on patrol.
She recoiled from the window, pinning her back to the wall behind her. But it was too late. One of the Watchers stopped walking and looked up to her window, crossing his arms at his chest.
Scarlet couldn’t stop herself from taking sharp, panicked breaths as the guard squinted up at the window she was in. She felt especially exposed, her face illuminated by the streetlamps outside the window, her golden locks running down her back on full display. Her white, silk dress she had been put in, which was so frail and thin that she’d be warmer without it, reflected the light so much it glowed. Besides her breathing, she didn’t move an inch, hoping that the night’s fog was so thick the guard wouldn’t be able to discern the silhouette of a person from so far away.
It felt like forever, but was probably closer to ten seconds, when the Watcher apparently assumed that he’d just imagined what he saw and went back to his patrols on the ground. Scarlet steeled herself and pressed on, making a break for the next flight of stairs.
Down, down she went, the stairs spiraling around and around. Arriving on the ground floor, she scanned the showroom for signs of any Watchers, or worse, her captor.
The shop had changed so much since she last remembered it. She recalled how the place looked on opening day. Cases of clocks behind glass created a grid of aisles through the showroom. There were every kind of clock you could name and every one you could imagine. Wristwatches, pocketwatches, standing clocks, alarm clocks, and even ones that simply don’t have a name in your own timeline. The walls were covered in wall clocks and grandfather clocks, and in some places even had cubed shelving to hold more standing clocks of various different shapes and sizes.
The material the clocks were made out of varied. Some were in wood, darkly stained and polished, while some were painted to be other colors. But all of them had one thing in common—any metal used in the making of the clock was gold. Apparently, the gold fixturing is what makes the time travel capabilities work, though Scarlet was unsure what the metal had to do with the actual working mechanics that made the time travel possible.
The showroom was massive, taking up the entire first floor of the shop—except for the storage room in the back behind the counter, which was its own room. For being such a large building, the first four floors of the shop are actually all hollow down the center, which gave the showroom incredibly tall ceilings with glimpses into the higher floors of the shop. Scarlet recalled from her days stocking the shelves that each floor above was dedicated to a different time period, and contained narrow aisles upon aisles of clocks. It was almost like you were in a department store, but only for clocks. The showroom was mainly reserved for custom Caballine clocks, in which customers could have their own specific past memories placed into a clock, that way they could always revisit them. Back in the day, those were always the most popular clocks.
Now, the place has gone into ruin. The display cases were covered in dust and grime so thick Scarlet couldn’t see inside. Strange silver devices with tubes sticking out of them and decorated with clock faces cluttered countertops, surrounded by notes scribbled in such bad handwriting it was completely illegible to anyone but the author themself. Crates stacked nearly as tall as Scarlet herself also filled the space, with the acronym “B.O.A.T.” stamped on the side. Many of the crates overflowed with Caballine clocks, even the crates at the bottom of the stack, and Scarlet could see that those unlucky clocks had suffered terrible cracks from the pressure. Seeing the cracked clock faces sent a shiver up Scarlet’s spine. Jumping into a broken Caballine clock was a death sentence. How many death traps had the Timekeeper unknowingly created within this very room?
Scarlet rolled her shoulders in an attempt to stop the chills racing through her arms and kept pressing on, further into the showroom. She found Emmy just behind the back counter, who faced a door on the back wall. Scarlet joined her behind the counter, and watched as she pulled out a gold key from the polished leather messenger bag she wore crossbody over her left shoulder.
“Where did you get that?”
“Off of a Watcher.” She shrugged and opened the door. “Let’s go—”
“Going on a midnight stroll?”
Scarlet and Emmy wheeled around. Above their heads, perched atop the railing of the first floor balcony, was a tall man in a black top hat, white scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, and a black suit decorated in silver chains and gears.
It was like he was part human, part mechanical monster, especially with the large, doubled-layered glass eyepiece covering his right eye. Silver plating fixed upon the side of his head kept the eyepiece in place, and the sheet of metal had its own decorum of gears and coiled lights blinking on the side. His face was completely black in shadow—an effect he managed to place on himself using his “timekeeping” powers, or so he calls them.
His appearance was clean, yet offputting. He was orderly, yet mad.
He was the Timekeeper.
He awaited an answer, not doing anything to them, but his hand rested dangerously close to his holster of stopwatches, all connected to him by chains that ran below his clothes. Emmy once told Scarlet that rumors circulated the town that those chains were actually attached to his body, feeding off his life and fueling his powers. Emmy, while being the most knowledgeable on the Timekeeper out of anyone else, hadn’t been able to confirm nor deny those theories yet.
“Is that a problem?” Emmy asked, her tone a bit more defiant than Scarlet liked.
“Of course it’s not. For you. I never formally evicted you from the shop, so you’re free to come and go as you please. For her, on the other hand…”
The Timekeeper lifted one of his stopwatches off his holster and pointed it at Scarlet, the clock hands started whirling like propeller blades.
“Get down!” Emmy shouted, but Scarlet was way ahead of her, diving for cover underneath the counter with a squeal just as a bullet of silver glitter hit the ground right where she had stood.
“I brought you back to life, my love,” she heard the Timekeeper say. “It breaks my heart to see that you are becoming ungrateful for the life I’ve given you. Perhaps I will just try again with you, hmm? Make the next version of you more grateful.” She heard something else got shot off to her left on the other side of the counter.
Curling up tightly, she started to hyperventilate. The Timekeeper. A man shrouded in mystery. A man Scarlet loved, once upon a time. Oh, she couldn’t lie to herself. She still loved him. She wouldn’t be doing all this to save him if she didn’t.
While it was still quite a mystery to her on how the Timekeeper’s “timekeeping” magic worked, she knew that it had the ability to add things from other timelines into this timeline (for the purpose of your understanding. Mr. Caballine and his companions see time as an infinite expanse, utilizing the many-worlds theory that there are an infinite number of timelines for each decision ever made), but it could also take things out of it. In other words, the Timekeeper could easily delete the counter from the timeline with a single shot from his stopwatch, and then delete her with a second shot.
She hadn’t even begun thinking of a plan that could get her out of this predicament when a bright flash of silver came from out of the corner of her eye. She heard the Timekeeper shout, and then his voice grew incredibly muffled.
Scarlet snuck a peek over the countertop. He had fallen backwards, trapped underneath a thick, red velvet curtain Scarlet would think to see in a theater. She knew nothing like that existed in the clock shop; Albert didn’t like to furnish his shop with anything too regal.
She turned to Emmy. “What did you just do—”
Emmy grabbed her hand, pulling her to her feet. “Let’s go!”
Scarlet decided that she would ask her later about it and started to run after Emmy as they burst into the back storage room.
The moment Scarlet stepped into the room, her eyes landed on a large, silver machine that reached almost to the top of the towering ceiling. The storage room was almost the size of a warehouse, with this device taking up most of the center of the room. Silver rings swirled around glowing, blue and yellow orbs, on gold and silver posts protruding out the top and sides of the device. The posts on the sides slowly orbited around, with the orbs flashing brightly seemingly at random, the light flickering out after just a few seconds.
“What…is this thing?” she whispered.
“I have no idea,” Emmy responded. “But I know we don’t have time to stare at it. Come on!” She ran nearly straight under the machine, heading for the back of the storage room. Scarlet was more cautious, taking the long path around to avoid being so close to that peculiar device.
At the other end of the hall was their way out, a small, inconspicuous door that blended in perfectly with the bronze and brown wall around it. The only way you’d be able to tell it was a door is because of its bronze handle.
Emmy swung the door open, and they ran into the skinny alleyways of Oxford Street and disappeared into the night. The alleyways of Oxford Street seemed as though they were built for concealing great secrets, and Scarlet’s own secret had already been rooted in them, thanks to Emmy’s help.
Scarlet was free at last. Free to start putting her plan into action.