Nightshade and Damnations

by Gerald Kersh

  “Why?” asked the duke.

  “She has very bad teeth, that vain and empty woman,” said Leonardo, laughing, “but I have been thinking——”

  “Very bad?” asked the duke.

  “Rotten. Her smile is the secretive smile of a woman with bad teeth. Touching the matter of the water supply; I believe——”

  “I detest women with bad teeth,” said the duke, yawning. “And to the devil with your pipes and water-tanks.”

  THE KING WHO COLLECTED CLOCKS

  Secrets such as Pommel told me burn holes in the pockets of the brain. If I could tell you the real name of the king and his country, your eyebrows would go up and your jaws would go down—and then, more likely than not, you would damn me for a sensational rogue and a dirty liar.

  I met the Count de Pommel in the casino at Monte Estoril, in Portugal. At first I thought that he was a confidence trickster operating under a mask of shy reserve. The Count de Pommel had lost all his ready money on the third block of numbers, and was feverishly convinced that his luck was about to change. Offering me his watch as security, he asked me to lend him a thousand escudos; about ten pounds. In England, as things were then, almost any watch that ticked was worth ten pounds. I gave him the money. Then he began to win. In three-quarters of an hour he won eleven thousand escudos, stopped playing, and returned my money in exchange for his watch, with a thousand expressions of gratitude and the offer of a glass of champagne. He gave me, at the same time, six square inches of visiting card: he was the Count de Pommel, of the Quinta Pommel at Cascais and the Villa Pommel, Lausanne, Switzerland. The watch, he said, was worth four hundred pounds.

  “Who made it?” I asked.

  “I did,” he said.

  “There is something about you that made me think you were a clever man with your hands,” I said.

  He held out his hands. Transparent, bloodless, reticulated with narrow black veins, they seemed to vibrate like the wings of an insect. “Once upon a time, yes,” he said. “Now, no. A nervous disorder. There is nothing worse than nerves in my profession.”

  “Your profession?”

  “Or trade, if you prefer the word. I am, or was, a watchmaker. I got my title of nobility from King Nicolas, Nicolas the Third,” he said, and added: “I am not a nobleman by birth. Actually, I was a Swiss.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said, remembering. “Nicolas the Third collected clocks and watches.”

  “His was the finest collection in the world.”

  “And you—of course, of course! Pommel—now I get it—Pommel is a name I associate with the Nicolas clock.”

  The Count de Pommel smiled and said: “It was a toy rather than a clock in the proper sense of the word. Birds sprang out singing and flapping their wings, Father Time held up a mechanical calendar in the shape of an hourglass; and I devised a barometer also worked by clockwork, so that figures representing the four seasons appeared according to changes of atmospheric pressure. The Nicolas clock was overcomplicated. I am far more proud to have made the watch I pledged with you this evening.”

  “It seemed to me to be made of gold.”

  “Only the case. It is a very simple watch, but perfect; foolproof and waterproof—absolutely accurate. It seems silly, perhaps. I am a retired man, and time does not matter to me. Still, I like accuracy for the sake of accuracy—it is something to be achieved. I cannot work any more; my hands are unsteady, as you see. So I have a regard for that watch. It is the only thing left to me of all that I have made. The others are museum pieces, collectors’ pieces—dead!”

  “Did you also make the figures on the Nicolas clock, Count de Pommel? They are works of art.”

  “No, a Belgian artist made those: Honoré de Kock. We worked together.”

  “Ah, yes, Honoré de Kock. He died, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, poor Honoré. . . . He was a very good fellow. I liked him very much. It was a pity.”

  “He died in an accident, I believe?” I said.

  “He died on purpose,” said the Count de Pommel.

  “You don’t mean to say he killed himself?”

  “No, far from it.”

  “Are you telling me that de Kock was murdered?” I asked.

  “I would rather not talk about him just now, if you will excuse me.”

  “I beg your pardon, Count,” I said.

  He was troubled. “No,” he insisted, “no, no, no! You have been very kind, very accommodating. I liked your face as soon as I saw you; and you were very good, too, charming! I should never have been so bold . . . only when I start playing, which is seldom, I am carried away. I take only a certain sum with me, and if I leave the table—then I lose the thread of the game. I can’t imagine what possessed me to . . . to . . . to . . . Will you dine with us tomorrow, sir?”

  “With pleasure,” I said, and so we finished the bottle and parted; and I walked back to my hotel, thinking of incongruities. I remembered a temperamental plumber, a clumsy oaf with a soldering iron, who convinced everyone that he was a great craftsman because he was ferociously arrogant; and I thought of Pommel, the greatest living master of his craft, clock and watchmaker to King Nicolas himself—and singularly like a trapped mouse in his pitiful humbleness, in spite of his title of nobility.

  I wanted to know more about him. Among other things, I wondered what sort of woman he had married. Pommel must have been more than seventy years old. I imagined a bloated, faded woman of fifty or so, soured by cumulative marital discontent.

  I was wrong. She was fifty years old, and fat, but still attractive. Pommel called her Minna. Her hair was dull red, her eyes were blue and clear, and she had the warm, creamy, calm air of a woman who has achieved happiness, so that nothing can hurt or touch her. She was a Hungarian, and had been a needlewoman in King Nicolas’s palace—the kind of girl that sings as she works and likes to sit still. She was well beloved, secure, healthy and contented—a woman who could grow festive over a crust, or dance to her own singing. Before an hour had passed I gathered that she had been poor Honoré de Kock’s mistress, not because she liked him but because he was so unhappy; that she loved Pommel because he was happy with her and because he was kindhearted; and that there was a big, dark secret about which she had promised not to speak.

  This, of course, was the inside story of the death of Nicolas, the king who collected clocks. In the end I got that story.

  When I was twelve years old (said Pommel, after dinner) I was apprenticed to Tancred Dicker, and I learned a lot from him. You have, perhaps, seen pictures of him—Tancred Dicker, the one that looked like a sheepdog. Soon he let me work for him as a journeyman; I had the knack. By the time I was twenty I worked with Dicker. I went with him when King Nicolas asked him to come and stay and work on clocks, more than forty-five years ago, when I was twenty-two. When Dicker and I arrived we had first to meet a gentleman named Kobalt, a distant relation of King Nicolas’s queen, a very powerful man indeed. The king relied upon him: the poor king was getting old, and had rheumatoid arthritis. He no longer cared very much for affairs of state, you see. He liked best of all his pastime, his hobby, which was collecting clocks and watches. Oh, yes, yes, the king had had other hobbies in his day; but he had got old—more than seventy-three years old—and turned his mind to higher things, being more or less tired out.

  Before we saw the king we saw Kobalt, as I was saying, and Kobalt talked to us about what we had come for. You will have heard of Kobalt, no doubt—or it may be that he was a little before your time. It was Kobalt who ran away with Marli Martin, the wife of the minister; your father, more likely, heard of that affair. Kobalt is probably no longer in the land of the living; he must have been fifty years old when I first saw him more than forty years ago, and he was still good-looking. He was wicked, and a pig, but all the same he was a nobleman and a gentleman—a dangerous beast, and cu
nning; very brave—a wild boar, as you might say. He had light hair and moustaches, light-colored eyes, no eyelashes. As soon as I saw him I disliked him: there was badness all over him. He said to us:

  “I am very happy to meet you. His Majesty is very anxious to consult with you. He is . . . but listen!”

  He raised a finger, pulling out his watch with his free hand; smiled and said: “Exactly five o’clock.” Almost before he had finished speaking, the place became full of music. Birds sang, bells rang, silver and golden gongs sounded—dozens and dozens of striking clocks chimed the hour. A German timepiece sent twelve lame-looking Apostles staggering out to strike a gold-headed Satan with bronze hammers. From a cheap wooden affair leapt a scraggy-looking little cuckoo with five hiccups, while a contraption under a glass dome let out five American-sounding twangs.

  “His Majesty the King has a collection of more than seven hundred clocks,” said Kobalt, as soon as he could make his voice heard. “He has a sort of weakness for clocks—like Louis XVI. But never mention Louis XVI in his Majesty’s presence; the name of that unhappy monarch strikes a not-too-pleasant note in the king’s ears. We’ll see more of each other, I hope, my dear Monsieur Dicker. I am sure that we have much in common. Much!”

  Dicker bowed low, and so did I. But I was full of a new idea. If his Majesty liked clocks, he should have clocks—toys, novelties, nonsense—clocks with figures and contrivances. That was when I first conceived the Nicolas clock. Tancred Dicker and I worked on it for four and a half years. Some of the technical innovations are his, but it was I who got the credit for the whole; and so I became watchmaker to King Nicolas III.

  De Kock designed, modeled, and cast the case and the figures. He had talent—almost genius, the genius of the old Dutch Masters who could portray a man, an apple, a monkey, a grape, a bit of linen or a ray of sunshine, exactly as it appeared. He had a photographic hand; and it was this that made him unhappy—he wanted to make his own things, you see—it humiliated him merely to imitate the handiwork of the Lord God Almighty. He ate his heart out in his longing to create something with life of its own, but he never could. It is a sad thing when a man like de Kock becomes at last convinced that au fond he is a mediocrity; it breaks his heart.

  Although he was very popular and successful and made a great deal of money, poor Honoré was very unhappy. He had already taken to drinking. Personally, I liked him very much indeed, and had a great admiration for him. He was a craftsman rather than an artist, he could work in any medium. Bronze, ivory, wood, marble, glass, gold, iron—anything and everything. Yet, because he could not reconcile himself to the fact that God did not see fit to give him the divine spark, he was always deep in melancholy. So it may, after all, have been true that poor Honoré de Kock committed suicide in the end. But I am by no means sure of this.

  But where was I? Ay, yes, Dicker and I were talking to Kobalt, that smooth, terribly dangerous nobleman. It was a marvelous thing to hear all those clocks striking at once, and afterwards, when the last chime had died away (there was one vulgar little beast of a clock that was always a little late, and arrived breathless after all the others had done)—it was marvelous, afterwards, to listen to the ticking of all those clocks. The whole palace was full of it. At night, first of all, you could not sleep; you lay awake, listening, waiting for the concert that almost deafened you every quarter of an hour. There was one silly figurine of a dancing girl. Every hour she performed a little can-can, showing her underclothes, and kicking a tambourine which she held in her right hand. Another contraption—an old French novelty clock—was decorated with a dozen fantastic musicians. When their hour came they all went raving mad, throwing their limbs in all directions, while an extraordinarily strident musical box, concealed in their platform, played a lively jig. And there was a German clock—somehow a typically German clock—upon which there stood, in a painted farmyard, a farmer, his wife, his son, his daughter, and a pig. Without fail, twenty-four times a day, the farmer beat his wife, the wife smacked the son, the son kicked his sister, she pulled the pig’s tail, and they all shrieked. A crazy clock! I could see that Dicker and I would have our hands pretty full, because these tricky toy clocks tend to be too sensitive, and sometimes have to be nursed like quarrelsome old invalids. What a business! His Majesty employed a staff of nine highly-skilled men who had nothing to do but wind up his clocks and see that they were set at the correct time. But he would not let them tamper with the works. That is what we had been employed for, at a salary that took even Dicker’s breath away; and Dicker was accustomed to eccentric millionaires to whom money was of no importance.

  I am sorry. I am boring you with all this talk of clocks, clocks, clocks. But clocks, you see, are my whole life: I know nothing else. Also, if I am to tell you the really remarkable part of this story, I cannot avoid reference to clocks. His Majesty Nicolas III, in his old age, thought of nothing but his collection. You might have thought that a man, even a king, so old and broken (or, I should say, especially a king) would not like to be reminded of the passing of time. But no, his love of clocks was stronger even than his fear of death.

  We were hurried to his presence. You might have thought that we were doctors and he was dying. Oh, dear me, how very old his Majesty was! He was sitting stiffly in a great velvet chair, wrapped from neck to ankles in a wonderful dressing-gown; and even with this, in spite of the fact that the windows were sealed and a fire was blazing, he seemed to be blue with cold. He was dried up, so to speak. There was no moisture left in him. Even his poor old eyes looked dry and he kept blinking as if he were trying to moisten them. The king was suffering from a sort of paralysis which, it was said, was the price he had to pay for certain youthful indiscretions. Also he had arthritis and moved with great difficulty, dragging his feet. I shall never forget how shocked I was when I first saw him. I had had some silly childish idea that a king in real life looks like a king. And there was this little, corpse-like man, old as the hills and weary of the world, quivering to the fingertips, shuddering and sighing and groaning, swaying his tired old head from side to side like a turtle. Only his beard was magnificent; it was like floss-silk, and covered most of his face and part of his chest.

  But when he saw Dicker and me he came to life. He brushed aside the formalities and came straight to business. Oh, that awful voice! It was like a death-rattle, punctuated with groans. From time to time, forgetting his afflictions in his excitement, he started to make a gesture; but his arthritis stopped him with a painful jerk and he let out a moan of pain. He said that we were welcome, very welcome. We could have anything we liked, all we had to do was ask; even for money. We were to live in the palace, where a workshop had been fitted up. His clocks had been neglected. His beautiful collection of seven hundred rare clocks was going to the devil. We were to go to work at once. First and foremost, there was a job to be done on a unique Swiss clock. It had stopped. It was all the fault of one Fritz Harlin, who had poked his clumsy fingers into the works, pretending to repair it. This was to be put right at once, and he would watch while we worked. It was his only pleasure, that poor old king—watching workmen tinkering with clocks. He has sat and watched me for eight hours on end in my workshop; even taking his meals out of a vessel like a tea-pot—he could digest nothing but milk—on the spot.

  We were conducted to this workshop, which was a workshop out of a dream. Upon the bench stood a silent clock upon which stood a bronze Father Time about two feet high, and a dozen other figures about four inches high. There was a king encrusted with jewels and wearing a golden crown; an enameled cardinal in a red robe; a knight in silver armor; a merchant carved out of lapis lazuli; a surgeon with a knife in one hand and a human heart made of a spinel ruby in the other; a nun of silver and ivory; an infanta of ivory and red gold; a painted harlot hung with oddments of jewelry; a peasant, all sinews, in old ivory and bronze; and an aged beggar made of bone and studded with sores which were little rubies. The idea wa
s, at the striking of the hour, Time mowed these figures down, one by one, finishing with the king, who came under the scythe on the last stroke of midnight. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship, and we approached it with reverence.

  Soon the King came in between two attendants. One of these was an old doctor and the other was a sturdy young man with a nondescript face; they supported him under the arms and led him to another red velvet chair. When Dicker and I began to bow the king said: “No, no, no need, no need. Get on with the work.” Then, trying to make an imperious gesture with his hand, he cried out in agony and groaned with terrible oaths and curses. Dicker and I went to work. This Fritz must have been a fool. I will not try your patience with technical details; but he had not seen one dazzlingly simple thing—one steel wire, less than half an inch long, bent at an angle of about sixty-five degrees, upon which the movement of the main figures, and therefore the movement of the whole mechanism, ultimately depended. Wear and tear and tiredness—for even steel gets tired—had reduced this angle by half a degree. I adjusted it in thirty seconds with a pair of pliers, wound and set the clock, and then—swish went the scythe, down went peasant, soldier, priest and king while the clock was still solemnly chiming (it had little golden bells like church bells). His Majesty uttered a cry of delight, a groan of anguish, half a dozen shocking words and a gracious compliment. We explained that it was nothing; that we would make a new angle-pin of the finest tempered steel, and Time would cut down men for another hundred years.