Timepiece
is a steampunk time
travel adventure about a girl, a pocket watch, Frankenstein's monster, the Battle of Waterloo, and giant clockwork robots taking over London.
Its
sequel Timekeeper
picks
up where Timepiece
left off, bringing to a conclusion the story of Elizabeth and William
(though not of Maxwell – there will almost certainly be a third
book at some point).
They
are available from:
Timepiece
was born when a
friend of mine told me about a dream she’d had, in which a package
arrived in the mail for her then-infant son. Inside the package
addressed to him was a package addressed to me (how odd, she thought)
and inside that
was
a velvet bag containing a pocket watch. Opening the pocket watch, my
friend discovered that the period casing contained a
futuristic-looking screen cycling through images of different
historical times and places. “I think I had your dream, Heather.”
I
tried to write a story about her son and the pocket watch and me,
including a reason for the nested packages, but I couldn’t get it
to gel. I sat staring at it and wondering if I could turn it into
some other story instead.
A
pocket watch seemed to belong to an older era anyway, I thought…so
maybe this wanted to be a Victorian time travel story. Maybe
steampunk, with huge mechanical monsters stomping down a gaslit
street. Stomping after what? What would mechanical Victorian monsters
hunt? Something natural run amuck, of course—the Victorians would
totally build monstrous scientific artificial things to constrain
monstrous natural things.
Okay,
so where did the run-amuck natural things come from? And when? It
would have to be long enough before the Victorian era—long enough
before, say, 1885—for the run-amuck natural things to have become a
problem, for the humans to generate a solution, and for the solution
to have time enough to become its own problem. So something on the
order of seventy or eighty years. What was going on in England
seventy or eighty years before 1885?
Five
seconds later, I was scrambling to look up the dates of the Battles
of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Five seconds after that, I knew exactly
what the story was about.
The
more I researched, the more awesome real-world (or established-myth,
at least) details I found that fit neatly into place. The Battle of
Waterloo was a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat—“the
nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” in the words of
Wellington himself—a day that could have very easily gone very
differently. Before that stretched the years of the Napoleonic Wars,
a time of very real danger that might well have prompted the
beleaguered British to take more desperate measures to defend
themselves than they actually stooped to. And in Mary Shelley’s
novel, Viktor Frankenstein does in fact set up a laboratory in the
Orkneys in about 1790. With those anchor points, the rest of my
alternate universe slipped into place with the neatness of falling
dominos. At that point it became obvious to me who the protagonists
had to be: youngsters from 1815 who would endorse any action taken to
defeat Napoleon…at least until they see the consequences.
Excerpt:
For
a moment, Elizabeth thought she was in a thunderstorm, though no rain
fell. Lightning lit up the sky in a flash of blue-white, then was
gone. It was followed by a crash of thunder, deafening, just
overhead. A sudden cold wind sprang up and rushed over her, tugging
her breath along with it.
“William—”
she gasped.
“Here—”
The wind tore the word away from her ears, as it had torn the breath
from her throat. But he was right beside her, a vague source of
warmth, and then a definite one as he pulled her closer. “I’m
right here.”
But
where was “here?” Somehow, impossibly, they were no longer in the
orchard. The lightning flash had shown her not trees, but high brick
walls. The wind carried with it not leaves, but sheets of paper,
tumbling against her skirt and plastering themselves there.
There
was no second flash of lightning, but there was a second boom of
thunder. It shook the ground under Elizabeth’s feet.
And
it shook the ground again.
She
couldn’t see, no matter how hard she tried, but she knew that there
was something enormous coming toward her. It took another stomping,
earsplitting step. For the first time in her life, Elizabeth was too
frightened to move. Beside her, William drew a breath to say what she
knew would be “Run!” and tensed to drag her with him—
Something
grabbed her arm and tore her from William’s grasp.
Her
shoes scrabbled for purchase, but found none on the slick surface
beneath her, and she went down, hard, onto bruising cobblestone. She
couldn’t catch her breath or find her footing. She couldn’t do
anything except fumble in the slippery muck. There was someone above
her, looming over her—someone she could sense but could not see.
Farther away, William called her name in a tone of desperation, while
the ground all around them shook, and shook again, as something
immense passed them by. The jolts grew fainter and less frequent as
the thing, whatever it was, moved away.
A
light flared, dazzling in the darkness.
“Get
away from her!” William shouted, and flung himself forward. The
flame went out. “Unhand her, sir, at once—”
“I
don’t want to hurt you!” a second voice snapped, but William did
not wait for explanations. There was a brief scuffle that Elizabeth
could feel and hear but could not see. She had just time enough to
think again of gathering herself and struggling upright, and then the
fracas before her ended in a “oof” of pain—from William, she
thought with a jolt of sickness. The flame flared alight again, a
blinding glare that set Elizabeth’s eyes tearing before it settled
into a larger, duller gleam. A lantern.
“I’m
not trying to hurt her!” the voice behind the light repeated. It
was an old man’s voice—it had the crotchety, creaking sound of an
exasperated old man. “I’m trying to save you both, you young
fool! What on earth
possessed to go wandering about after curfew? And what the devil were
you doing, standing in the middle of the street?” The voice and the
lantern moved closer to Elizabeth, and the owner of the lantern
crouched down beside her. “You could both have been killed!” he
continued. “Don’t you know enough to get out of their—” The
lantern shone full on her face then, and the words broke off.
“ .
. . way,” he finished after a moment. “Well. Well, I imagine . .
. I imagine you don’t, in that case. I . . . presume this is your
first foray.”
“What?”
was all Elizabeth
could manage.
“I
have one too,” the man said. He transferred the lantern to his left
hand, and withdrew his right into the darkness beyond the spill of
light. He motioned in a way Elizabeth thought was a fumble at his
waistcoat—and then the right hand reappeared, holding for her
inspection an overly large golden pocket watch. Lantern light gleamed
softly in the crevices of etching and scratches.
From
the darkness behind the old man, something screamed.
Elizabeth
jerked and kicked and somehow got enough purchase against mud and
cobblestones to lurch upright. Her outflung arm struck something warm
and solid, and William seized hold of her and pulled her the rest of
the way up. The swinging circle of lantern-light told her the old man
was on his feet now too. He slammed down the lantern’s shutter,
dropping inky blackness over them all, and then his hand met her
shoulder with almost the same force.
The
brick wall bruised her back and knocked the breath from her lungs for
a second time, and between that and his hand over her mouth, she
could not possibly scream. “Hush,” he commanded, his lips close
to her ear. “Both of you.” Still pressing Elizabeth to the wall
with his body, he took his hand off her mouth long enough to reach
out and pull William to huddle with them. “It will come back this
way, and it mustn’t find us.”
Bio: Heather Albano is a writer
of speculative fiction, historical fiction, and interactive fiction
(and works which combine one or more of the above). In addition to
Timepiece and Timekeeper, her published works include
short fiction appearing in Electric Velocipede, Aoife’s Kiss,
the More Scary Kisses anthology from Ticonderoga
Publications, and others. Her game design work includes five titles
released by Choice of Games and one by Reactive Studios. Find out
more at www.heatheralbano.com.
Twitter: @heatheralbano
Google+: +Heather Albano
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