Alicia and the Watchmaker’s Forest
From the sky, Alicia found the dirt road snaking through the countryside leading to the mouth of the Watchmaker’s Forest. “Buckle up! We’re landing!” She called back to her passenger Lily, who was tightening her embrace around a small pail with one hand and reaching for a rope to strap across her chest with the other.
Once on the ground, Alicia stretched her arms out, took in the fresh air, and walked out to a warm sunlit rock and started cleaning her rifle. Lily lugged her pail across the field to a nearby stream to clean it out. The broken mechanical boy was lying in the back of the plane with a tarp over his body.
“All this for a doll?” Lily asked, setting her damp bucket on the ground. She sprawled out across the grass besides the airplane.
A loud crack came from the forest. Birds scattered from the rustling treetops. Alicia aimed her rifle towards the trees. Lily jumped to her feet but took hold of the plane’s wing to steady herself. A roar followed the gunshot along with a sudden, loud thunk.
The girls looked at each other. Lily shook her head in protest but Alicia slung her rifle over her shoulder and ran for the gaping, black maw of the forest. She hopped over the rocks, brushed aside the gnarled branches, and sidestepped the overgrown roots as she followed the constant thumping noise of the beast marching away from its kill.
Lily caught up to Alicia and planted her hand on the closest tree trunk she could find. Panting she said, “Wait, wait for me.” Alicia hushed Lily and waved for her to stay low. Her eyes followed the strange animal. Each leg of the beast moved one after the other as it marched over the the forest floor. It looked like a ten men walking side by side, goose-stepping. Alicia pushed Lily out of her bewildering stare and dragged her by the hand through the woods in the opposite direction from the monster. They found the bloody body of a man wearing hunting gear up against a tree with a circular indention in his chest. A journal lay next to him. Alicia picked it up and flipped through the pages skimming the entries.
Alicia stood in a lone patch of sunlight reading the journal. The chirping songs of birds and gentle rustling of tree branches replaced the thumping, regular footfalls of the animal. “He’s been looking for the Watchmaker,” Alicia said. “Seems like stories of the forest have spread far and wide. This hunter was going to kill one of the creatures that roam this forest and return him for a handsome reward.” She opened the man’s backpack to reveal tranquilizer darts and a bottle of chloroform.
“Is that why you’ve come?” Lily asked studying the dead man with wide, startled eyes. She looked ashen and ready to throw up again.
“No,” Alicia said. “The Watchmaker can repair the mechanical boy. I want to learn from his engineering techniques.”
A crackling static filled the air and a roar blasted out from behind both of them. Startled, Alicia raised her rifle in the direction of the noise. Lily snapped her fingers and flickering flames sprung from her fingertips. The birds stopped whistling and the breeze died away leaving a crackling noise all around them. Trees to their right shook; Alicia studied them from behind her rifle’s sight. Twigs snapped to their left and a small grove of trees swished in the air raining green and yellow leaves down upon them. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Alicia pointed between where both noises had come from. Footfalls fell one after the other. The trees Alicia pointed too parted and flattened as a rectangular, brown-furred beast broke through them. The creature was all legs – it looked like a twenty legged spider.
Lily arched her arm back to hurl a fireball but Alicia grabbed her wrist. She took a deep breath and stared her enemy down. Where was the face? The eyes? Arms? A mouth? Alicia counted only the twenty legs and they moved one after the other down a row. Once the last leg moved forward the first leg stepped again and the wave-like pattern of moving legs repeated. It roared and crackled at them as it approached.
“Alicia!” Lily tried to break her hand free of her grasp.
“It’s too regular moving to be an animal.” Alicia said. “Allow me.” She stepped in front of Lily and studied the monster barreling down on her and steadied her sight against the stalker’s central leg right where she thought it would meet the body. At the moment when the leg in front of her barrel was about to step forward, Alicia fired.
Crack! The bullet splintered the leg. It twisted and smashed into the next moving leg tripping the creature. Each leg afterward rubbed up and snapped against each broken appendage and the animal fell over. The legs continued to move and jut out of the creature’s backside in every direction tearing and mangling its fur coat.
“W, what kind of possessed creature is this?” Lily asked.
Alicia ran across the field and jumped up on top of the body and avoided the moving legs. Wooden limbs jutting out of the back gyrated back and forth. Alicia grabbed some of the loose flesh and tore it away. “Look! It’s just a fur rug!” Underneath the rug was a cone and the crackling noise came from inside of it. “A vibrating cone to make noise, interesting.” With her knife she unhooked it found wires running from it into the body of the animal. With a sharp pull, she yanked one of the wires out of the cone silencing it. Deeper within she could see gears spinning and pistons gyrating. “Ha!” Alicia wadded up the rug and stuffed it into the gears and the legs stopped moving. “Just like the doll!”
Alicia smiled at Lily. She stared back and dropped to her knees.
“The Watchmaker must have built this to keep intruders out of the wood,” Alicia said jumping down from its back. “There must be more than one. This is a large forest.”
“In that case, we’ll never find this Watchmaker,” Lily said.
“Actually.” Alicia smiled at the fallen monster. “I have an idea.”
