Free Clock Work by Jameson Scott Blythe Page A

squirmed from the grip and she stabbed her elbow back, felt it connect with something soft, and her attacker let go.
    She spun, swinging her fist. She had her keys in her hand, the points protruding between her knuckles.
    The clawed fist caught her attacker in the side of the face, just below the eye.
    She was drawing her foot back to kick him between the legs when she was grabbed from behind, again. The other attacker, the one who'd been crouched by the door. She'd momentarily forgotten about him. Parker was pulled off her feet. She landed hard. The man held her in some kind of wrestling hold.
    She continued to struggle, twisting her body, kicking her feet. The other man, the one whose face she'd raked with her keys, knelt next to her. Close enough to smell his breath, which reeked of spoiled meat.
    He was bruised and bleeding where she had hit him, and Parker realized that he wasn't wearing a mask. This was his face—lipless, scaled, hairless. The face of a snake stretched onto the skull of a man. Had her rational mind been fully able to process it, she would have screamed.
    She didn't know what she expected to happen next. A hard punch to the jaw to knock her unconscious, maybe. Not teeth.
    But teeth was what she got.
    The snake-man grabbed her by the wrist with a cold hand. Time seemed to slow. She heard herself scream and watched as the thing opened its mouth, revealing a black tongue, and clamped its rows of sharp teeth onto the pale flesh of her forearm.
    Pressure and piercing pain, beyond the point she would have imagined possible. She felt as if her bones would snap. Numbness spread throughout the limb and every ounce of her strength seemed to evaporate. She felt her body become dead weight. Her vision blurred and then went black.
     
    ***
     
    Parker had been in Cork for two months. Prior to that, she'd been in Dublin, studying abroad for a semester. With the term over and three months left on her visa, she'd traveled south to work at the antique shop, a job she'd found through her university. She was a studio arts major with a focus in pre-industrial machinery. The shop needed someone to repair clocks and show customers around.
    The repair work was good practice, but helping customers was, for the most part, boring. The majority were middle-aged professionals on day trips from Dublin or somewhere further north, trying to hock heirlooms passed down from dead or dying relatives, impatient and eager for a few extra Euros. Parker preferred the eccentrics, the collectors and art dealers with designer clothes and strange haircuts.
    But her favorite customers were those who brought in some personal item to be fixed—the widowers w ith pocket watches, the old women with music boxes. Gifts from lost loves and artifacts from long-gone youths. The way they smiled, the way their eyes lit up when some broken thing worked again, it was as if she had not merely fixed some small mechanical function, but restored some part of their life. This work was rewarding to Parker in a way she had never experienced or thought possible. She'd gotten into her area of study because she'd had a thing for steampunk since her early teens. She had vague future career ambitions where her income would be divided between art sales and conceptual design for film and television.
    Even with the occasional days where the work was rewarding on some deep and personal level, most of the time she felt like a piece of clockwork herself, a cog going through the same motions, over and over. Her social life was almost nonexistent. The only friends she'd made in Cork were a local girl who did freelance graphic design (they'd connected over Craigslist) and a waitress at one of the local pubs. Most nights, Parker stayed in, too often playing with her iPad when she could be reading or writing letters to friends.
     
    ***
     
    The warehouse was dark again. They'd carried her to the front and left her on the floor, slumped against a shelf. Something was digging