Clockwork Redux

Chapter One

hey, pig

yeah, you

-Nine Inch Nails, "Piggy"

----

A cold night in Gotham, wind-ripped and damp; sad weather, like a young mother crying over her moaning baby. Someone is walking along the sidewalk at a quarter to midnight, huddled into their flapping coat.

He strides against the scattered drops of rain, arms folded tight against his chest. The Narrows rear up and around him; sagging redbrick apartment blocks glaring down at him, ugly flat-roofed Portacabins squatting like frogs on the kerb.

He's looking for somewhere to spend the night. Craning his stiff neck back, he spies the sharp wink of a broken-in window in the streetlight. It's set in a five-storey-tall building on his right, one of the casualties of the Seventies depression. Maybe, back in the days of jazz and classy, beaded whores, it was a nice place to live.

The fire stairs are tucked into an alley, blocked by a pair of overflowing Dumpsters. He clambers over them and pulls himself up onto the first flight of steps. The fire door on the fourth floor hangs ajar, the twisted hinges snagging his hair as he forces himself through the gap.

The hallway inside is underlit by a thin sheet of light spilling out from underneath a door. Behind it, a young couple are having a fight. A slap rings out-he winces in sympathy-and the woman's wheeling scream shivers out into flat sobs.

He's glad the broken window isn't on this floor.

Up a creaking flight of stairs. The linoleum squeaks beneath his shoes, grates a little against the underlay where it's loose. The fifth floor is entirely dark. Going up into it, he thinks he is ascending to his death.

He stumbles down the corridor with his flat against a sweaty wall to guide him, counting in his head. The broken window was the tenth from the left. He's sure he's parallel to it. This is the ninth door. The wooden frame of its neighbour has been broken. It swings inward at a gentle shove, and he releases a breath he's been holding since his eyes first caught on that glassy pinprick.

He steps inside, pushes the door shut with his heel, and fishes a box of matches out of one of his pockets. He flicks a match across the lighting strip. It lights with a faint hiss. The black washes to a wan grey.

The place has been trashed. There's no other word for it. Someone's gone nuts on the sofa with a knife. Long, straggly cotton clouds trail out of the slashes. A ratty fabric tongue hangs off one arm, as though the couch is pulling a face.

There's a hole in the screen of the tiny portable television. It's shaped like a Nativity star, hairline cracks running to the void as all roads lead to Rome. A chair leg lies nearby, broken into jagged splinters at either end. The very room seems to slant as though punchdrunk.

He snorts at the mess, disgusted, and holds the guttering match aloft as he pokes his head into a tiny adjoining bedroom. Inside, there is nothing but a single bed-a tangle of bedsheets set in a bockety-looking metal frame. The mattress is dappled with old stains, and the covers are all astrew. Beside it, a ramshackle armoire, its battered gentility anachronistic in this vignette of squalor.

The armoire creaks.

He starts back as though it growled, the match flickering out in the breeze, every single horror movie he's ever seen or even heard about flooding through his head filling his eyes with ghouls and demons filling his ears with screams just like that woman downstairs but closer but louder LOUDER he's not gonna get out alive you can't outrun a ghost his knife in in his hand and flicked open without him thinking about it-

"Mama?!"

The door peels open wide. Not a poltergist, as it turns out; a living child, without gender in the gloom, its voice a stab of memory in his numb heart.

Once upon a time, he called for his mother like that.

He sheathes his knife.

----

"You're....you're not Mama."

"I'm real sorry to disappoint ya, kiddo. You live here?"

"Uh-huh."

"Do the lights work?"

"Yeah. D'ya know my mama?"

He doesn't answer her at first. Groping along the wall, he finds a switch, flicks away the dark. Only then, blinking in the yellow light, can he see the child in the armoire.

She only comes up to his knee. Her body is shaped like a bundle of kindling. Her face is all eyes, muddy brown puddles set in a face like a broken plate.  Her hair is slipping out of her sloppy ponytail. The way it's limp and shiny with grease, gleaming black in the light, gives him a queasy memory of liquorice.

He looks at her and sees no fear in that bony face, no fright, no disgust-nothing so simple. If anything, she looks pissed off.

Stooping down to her level, he reaches out and rests his hand on her shoulder, feeling no fat beneath the flesh.

"You gotta name, kid? Huh?" She twists up her mouth and looks away. "No, don't be like that. What's your name? C'mon, tell me."

"....Taylor," she mutters, sullen, holding herself rigid beneath his hand. He grabs her other shoulder to steady her.

"Taylor. Well, now. Isn't that a nice name. So. Tell me. Who did this to your house?"

She stares at him from underneath her lashes (crazy long, like spider legs), white sclerae showing all around her irises. For a moment, he wonders if she's going to attack him. He puts steel in his arms and holds on tight.

The little mouth opens, yawns wide, shows yellow baby teeth. She doesn't bite him, though; she's just working her lips, trying to get the words out. Her voice catches in her throat.

"You don't have to tell me," he says, and lets her wriggle out of his grip. "And I really am sorry about this situation with your mama."

Off she goes, her sneakered feet going tap-tap-tap as she scuttles out into the kitchen. Cupboard doors thump against walls as she snuffles through them. How long has she been in that wardrobe for? She's talking to herself, hissing and murmuring like an overboiled kettle as her grasping fingers scrabble on bare wood.

He creeps up to the doorway, hides himself behind it, and listens to the damaged child.

"They were bad boys," she's whispering, over and over and over. "They were bad, mean boys, an' Mama gonna spank 'em when she sees all the mess."