Chaos Clock by Gill Arbuthnott Page A

pursuit of the perfect specimen, never quite satisfied with what he produced.
    Under the critical gaze of a crow and two field voles, he heated some tinned soup and made toast. He’d meant to shop on the way home, then realisedhe didn’t dare keep the specimens in the car for that long. This sort of thing was happening too often. Maybe he should get a housekeeper, then he could come home to a lit fire and the prospect of a proper meal.
    He went through to the sitting room to check on the progress of the coal fire he’d lit half an hour before. It was drawing well now, the coals glowing red, and he decided to bring his frugal supper through here. He went across to the window, set in its eighteen-inch-thick wall, to draw the curtains.
    Below him, mist lapped the tower like water, opaque and milky. On impulse he pushed the window up, listening for the sound of the sea a hundred metres away. It was a calm night, and the unseen water made small shushing noises against the rocks as the tide fell. It was overlaid by other, closer sounds, which Nixon strained to hear.
    The area between the tower and the shore held some scrub, a small car park, and one corner of the building site where they were installing the new sewage treatment plant. Normally it would be quiet at this time of night, but it sounded as though a large number of people were gathered down there in the mist. He could hear shouts and laughter, and the sound of metal striking metal. Now that he looked more closely at the mist, he thought he could see the flicker of flames through it.
    Normally, he would have closed the window, drawn the curtains and forgotten about it, or if it was something which worried him he would have phoned the police,but now he found that almost without thinking about it he had pulled the window closed and gone down the twisting stairs to where his coat was hanging.
    He was out of the door before it occurred to him that these people, whoever they were, might not be pleased to see him, and that really, what he was doing was most unwise. However, his feet kept carrying him towards the noise somewhere on the building site.
    There was definitely a fire – no, fires – flickering through the mist in several places. It dawned on him that he shouldn’t be able to see them. There should be a four-metre plywood barrier around the site.
    They must have torn it down. They were probably vandals, or travellers maybe. He’d better watch his step. He continued to move forward cautiously. He could hear the voices clearly now, but couldn’t make out what they were saying; in fact it didn’t sound like English at all.
    He could see figures, gathered round the fires indistinct through the fog. There seemed to be tents too, and he could smell meat cooking. He caught another snatch of conversation, strange and yet familiar in its pattern of sounds. The figures he could see round the fires seemed to be wrapped in blankets, as if this were some sort of camp for the homeless people he normally saw bundled up in doorways in the city centre.
    Moving carefully, he stepped over the boundary where four metres of plywood should have stood.
    At once, the mist was gone, and he stood frozen to the spot, looking around him. Now he knew why the language had sounded familiar and what it was.
    Latin.
    He stared about him at a Roman army camp – tents, cooking fires, soldiers in rough woollen cloaks playing knucklebones. Had he wandered onto a film set? If so, where were the lights and cameras, and why were people speaking Latin? He felt his hackles rise at the profound
wrongness
of the scene.
    Just then, a soldier at the nearest campfire looked up and straight at him. Nixon saw his eyes widen with fear as he jumped to his feet, knocking the knucklebones flying. Following his gaze, his companions were standing up, making the sign against evil with the hands that weren’t reaching for weapons.
    Andrew Nixon ran. He ran as he had never run in his life, blood pounding in his