of training!”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it, the Tick-Tock Man said. “Now close the door, Cash—was yon lx>re in a barn?”
A dark-haired woman laughed shrilly, a sound like the caw of a crow. Tick-Tock flicked
his eyes toward her; she quieted at once and cast her eyes down to the grilled floor.
The door through which Gasher had dragged him was actually two doors. The
arrangement reminded Jake of the way spaceship airlocks looked in the more intelligent
science fiction movies. Gasher shut them both and turned to Tick-Tock, giving him a
thumbs-up gesture. The Tick-Tock Man nodded and reached languidly up to press a button
set into a piece of furniture that looked like a speaker’s podium. A pump began to cycle
wheezily within the wall, and the neon tubes dimmed perceptibly. There was a faint hiss of
air and the valve-wheel of the inside door spun shut. Jake supposed the one in the outer
door was doing the same. This was some sort of bomb-shelter, all right; no doubt of that.
When the pump died, the long neon tubes resumed their former muted brilliance.
“There,” Tick-Tock said pleasantly. His eyes began to look Jake up and down. Jake had a clear and very uncomfortable sense of being expertly catalogued and filed. “All safe and
sound, we are. Snug as bugs in a rug. Right, Hoots?”
“Yar!” a tall, skinny man in a black suit replied promptly. His face was covered with some sort of rash which he scratched obsessively.
“I brung him,” Gasher said. “I told yer you could trust me to do it, and didn’t I?”
“You did,” Tick-Tock said. “Bang on. I had some doubts about your ability to remember the password at the end, there, but—”
The dark-haired woman uttered another shrill caw. The Tick-Tock Man half-turned in her
direction, that lazy smile dimpling the corners of his mouth, and before Jake was able to
grasp what was happening—what had already happened—she was staggering backward,
her eyes bulging in surprise and pain, her hands groping at some strange tumor in the
middle of her chest which hadn’t been there a second before.
Jake realized die Tick-Tock Man had made some sort of move as he was turning, a move so quick it had been no more than a flicker. The slim white hilt which had protruded from
the scabbard looped over the Tick-Tock Man’s shoulder was gone. The knife was now on
the other side of the room, sticking out of the dark-haired woman’s chest. Tick-Tock had
drawn and thrown with an uncanny speed Jake wasn’t sure even Roland could match. It had
been like some malign magic trick.
The others watched silently as the woman staggered toward Tick-Tock, gagging harshly,
her hands wrapped loosely around the hilt of the knife. Her hip bumped one of the standing
lamps and the one called Hoots darted forward to catch it before it could fall. Tick-Tock
himself never moved; he only went on sitting with his leg tossed over the arm of his throne,
watching the woman with his lazy smile.
Her foot caught beneath one of the rugs and she tumbled forward. Once more the
Tick-Tock Man moved with that spooky speed, pulling back the foot which had been
dangling over the arm of the chair and then driving it forward again like a piston. It buried
itself in the pit of the dark-haired woman’s stomach and she went flying backward. Blood
spewed from her mouth and splattered the furniture. She struck the wall, slid down it, and
ended up sitting with her chin on her breastbone. To Jake she looked like a movie Mexican
taking a siesta against an adobe wall. It was hard for him to believe she had gone from
living to dead with such terrible speed. Neon tubes turned her hair into a haze that was half
red and half blue. Her glazing eyes stared at the Tick-Tock Man with terminal amazement.
“I told her about that laugh,” Tick-Tock said. His eyes shifted to the other woman, a
heavyset redhead who looked like a long-haul trucker. “Didn’t I, Tilly?”
“Ay,” Tilly said at once. Her eyes were lustrous with fear and excite- ment, and she licked her lips obsessively. “So you did, many and many a time. I’ll set my watch and warrant on
it.”
“So you might, if you could reach up your fat ass far enough to find them,” Tick-Tock said.
“Bring me my knife, Brandon, and mind you wipe that slut’s stink off it before you put it in my hand.”
A short, bandy-legged man hopped to do as he had been bidden. The knife wouldn’t come
free at first; it seemed caught on the unfortu- nate dark-haired woman’s breastbone.
Brandon threw a terrified glance over his shoulder at the Tick-Tock Man and then tugged
harder.
Tick-Tock, however, appeared to have forgotten all about both Bran- don and the woman
who had literally laughed herself to death. His bril- liant green eyes had fixed on something
which interested him much more than the dead woman.
“Come here, cully,” he said. “I want a better look at you.”
Gasher gave him a shove. Jake stumbled forward. He would have fallen if Tick-Tock’s strong hands hadn’t caught him by the shoulders. Then, when he was sure Jake had his
balance again, Tick-Tock grasped the boy’s left wrist and raised it. It was Jake’s Seiko
which had drawn his interest.
“If this here’s what I think it is, it’s an omen for sure and true,” Tick-Tock said. “Talk to me, boy—what’s this sigul you wear?”
Jake, who hadn’t the slightest idea what a sigul was, could only hope for the best. “It’s a watch. But it doesn’t work, Mr. Tick-Tock.”
Hoots chuckled at that, then clapped both hands over his mouth when the Tick-Tock Man
turned to look at him. After a moment, Tick-Toc looked back at Jake, and a sunny smile
replaced the frown. Looking at that smile almost made you forget that it was a dead woman
and not a movie Mexican taking a siesta over there against the wall. Looking at it almost
made you forget that these people were crazy, and the Tick-Tock Man was likely the
craziest inmate in the whole asylum.
“Watch,” Tick-Tock said, nodding. “Ay, a likely enough name for such; after all, what does a person want with a timepiece but to watch it once in a while? Ay, Brandon? Ay,
Tilly? Ay, Gasher?”
They responded with eager affirmatives. The Tick-Tock Man favored them with his
winning smile, then turned back to Jake again. Now Jake noticed that the smile, winning or
not, stopped well short of the Tick-Tock Man’s green eyes. They were as they had been
throughout: cool, cruel, and curious.
He reached a finger toward the Seiko, which now proclaimed the time to be ninety-one
minutes past seven—A.M. and P.M.—and pulled it back just before touching the glass
above the liquid crystal display. “Tell me, dear boy—is this ‘watch’ of yours boobyrigged?”
“Huh? Oh! No. No, it’s not boobyrigged.” Jake touched his own finger to the face of the watch.
“That means nothing, if it’s set to the frequency of your own body,” the Tick-Tock Man said. He spoke in the sharp, scornful tone Jake’s father used when he didn’t want people to
figure out that he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Tick-Tock
glanced briefly at Brandon, and Jake saw him weigh the pros and cons of making the
bowlegged man his designated toucher. Then he dismissed the notion and looked back into
Jake’s eyes. “If this thing gives me a shock, my little friend, you’re going to be choking to death on your own sweetmeats in thirty seconds.”
Jake swallowed hard but said nothing. The Tick-Tock Man reached out his finger again,
and this time allowed it to settle on the face of the Seiko. The moment that it did, all the
numbers went to zeros and then began to count upward again.
Tick-Tock’s eyes had narrowed in a grimace of potential pain as he touched the face of the watch. Now their corners crinkled in the first genuine smile Jake had seen from him. He
thought it was partly pleasure at his own courage but mostly simple wonder and interest.
“May I have it?” he asked Jake silkily. “As a gesture of your goodwill, shall we say? I am something of a clock fancier, my dear young cully— so I am.”
“Be my guest.” Jake stripped the watch off his arm at once and dropped in onto the
Tick-Tock Man’s large waiting palm.
“Talks just like a little silk-arse gennelman, don’t he?” Gasher said happily. “In the old days someone would have paid a wery high price for the return o’ such as him, Ticky, ay, so
they would. Why, my father—”
“Your father died so blowed-out-rotten with the mandrus that not even the dogs would eat
him,” the Tick-Tock Man interrupted. “Now shut up, you idiot.”