My Clockwork Muse

by D. R. Erickson

  Feeling weary as well as morose, I stood and made my way to the bedroom door. I had no more than laid my hand on the knob, however, when I was overcome with a sudden impulse to wait. Was it a sound from inside? Or mere intuition? The knob was cold in my palm as I listened.

  Faintly, I heard a sound like the rustling of bed sheets from behind the door.

  Bed sheets?

  Yes! As though someone had flung aside the covers. There could be no mistaking it. Someone had just risen from my bed!

  The hairs on my arms stood on end. I had not thought to check the bedroom. Now a picture formed in my mind. Having heard me approaching the back door, the intruder had dashed through the kitchen, toppling the basin in his haste, and had concealed himself in my bedroom. My hand recoiled from the knob as if it were some repulsive thing I had mistakenly grasped in the blackness of the night. I was shaking as I reached for my revolver.

  I pressed my ear to the door and stood listening, wide-eyed. In a moment, the sound of a soft footfall reached my ear.

  Having risen from the bed, the thing now took a step towards the door.

  Thing, I say, because I realized that if it were Gessler's man, why had he not just arrested me already? Why conceal himself?

  My mind raced. What form of being had lain upon my bed and now stood, I was certain, just inches from my face? When I flung open the door, what would I see? Burton, dead again, his swollen tongue protruding between blackening lips?

  "Who's there?" I called, my voice tremulous despite my best efforts. I pulled back the hammer on my pistol, making no attempt to conceal the audible click. "I am armed," I warned in case the thing on the other side of the door did not understand the meaning of the sound.

  But there was no reply.

  I turned the knob, waited for a moment, and then threw open the door. Amid a piercing yowl, a black shape leaped at me, striking my face. Thrown off-balance by the attack, I whirled on my heel and the air was rent with the crack of my pistol shot. Plaster dropped from the ceiling in a cloud as my eyes found the shape of my attacker, a black cat, racing across the floor. The thing stopped and turned, baring its sharp white teeth, hissing—and glaring at me through a single big yellow eye.

  Pluto!

  I had had enough. I cocked my pistol, but the damned thing had the sense to scamper away out of my sight before I could pull the trigger and end my torment once and for all.

  It wasn't until some minutes later that I contemplated the impossibility of what had just happened. I had left Pluto just moments before in the yard. There, he was a loving little kitty, as I had remembered him from when he had been Virginia's beloved two-eyed cat—and as he had been just nights ago, purring in my lap.

  Then, just moments later, he was the hissing, foul beast I had grown accustomed to since ... the incident.

  That he had periodic changes of heart I could perhaps accept. Even beasts have moods, I knew. But how, I wondered, had he come to be inside a closed house? Some unseen crack in the foundation? A gap in a floorboard somewhere? Cats, of course, have the ability to slip in and out of tight spots as adroitly as seeping water. So, intellectually, I could accept his presence inside. That is, it was at least possible.

  But that he had somehow gotten there before me—when I had just left him and not taken my eyes from the cottage since—was not.

  Just as I had puzzled to the point of madness over the idea of Billy Burton in two places at once, in two states at once—and now, I would add to the mix, of two minds at once—man—I was left with the idea that I may have been dealing not with one cat, but two, just as I was certain there were two Burton's, albeit one a fraud.

  Could one of these Plutos have been a counterfeit? And if so, to what purpose?

  I felt a chill run through me...

  And a peculiar tickle on my neck.

  When I reached up to scratch it, my fingers came away bloody.

  Intrigued, I stood and walked to the bureau—from where Pluto had lunged at me—and inspected my neck in the mirror. The glass was cloudy and warped, but I could see that the top of my collar was soaked red from the fresh claw mark on my neck. Looking closer, I saw that Pluto's attack might have missed me altogether had it not been for the welt of raised flesh that ringed the peculiar puncture wound I had noticed the other day while shaving. Pluto's claw had apparently snagged on it, leaving a red stripe just above my collar.

  But what excited my attention more than the seeping wound was the character of the strange puncture itself. While the mark of Pluto's last attack was fading to invisibility upon my cheek, the puncture on my neck, which I had discovered at the same time, seemed not to have healed at all. In fact, if anything, it had gotten worse. Rather than festering, the wound seemed to be freshening. It might have been inflicted upon me yesterday.

  I wiped away the blood with a cloth and sat down heavily on the bed, overcome by a feeling of hopelessness. Mysterious wounds, masked swordsmen and counterfeit cats... My troubles were multiplying. Covering my face with my hands, I leaned back into my pillows where I soon fell into a troubled sleep.

  ~ * * * ~

  Even in my sleep, it occurred to me that it was a dream of my father, John Allan, that had ushered in this whole wretched affair to begin with. I had been suffering some torment of his when Gessler's men had wrested me from my nap. So I wondered if my ordeal had entered some new phase when I found myself confronting the man once again.

  Our meetings were never pleasant, but this time he wore the black mask of my 'Rue Morgue' assailant and swatted at me with Burton's walking stick. Being unarmed, I had no choice but to run. I was beside myself with panic, and even though I could feel the revolver in my pocket slapping my hip, it did not occur to me to draw it. It either was not really there, or had been put off-limits to me for some reason known only to the mad physics that ruled the world of my dreams. It seemed to me that the same logic that put Burton's stick in Allan's hands should have put the rapier in mine. But I knew from experience that the logic of my nightmares served only to undermine my advantage, never to bolster it.

  So I ran.

  Past the upended wash basin, out the door and through the creaking gate into the churchyard, casting anxious glances over my shoulder the entire way with that infernal stick, wielded by my faithless father, aimed at my head, sweeping blurry arcs before my eyes.

  I was halfway to Virginia's vault before I realized that I was no longer being chased. Breathing hard, I stopped and looked back. The gravel path was empty. In the moonlight, tall crooked grave markers and crumbling tombs cast angular black shadows across the path. When I looked down, I saw that I was dressed in my stocking feet, the dampness of the gravel soaking through to my skin.

  I peered in the direction of Virginia's burial vault. There I glimpsed a figure dressed in white gliding across the path, seeming to float like a bank of mist through the gloom. I immediately thought of Olimpia. She had moved in exactly that same fashion and in exactly that same spot just days before, drifting over the ground as if her toes hung suspended in the air. I would not mistake her for a ghost this time. Still, my heart quickened, not with fear, however, but with longing. Olimpia! I thought to cry out to her, but my tongue was tied. I hastened to the spot where I saw her pass.

  Before I had taken two strides, a form stepped into the path from behind the vault. I stopped dead in my tracks. It was a woman in a white dress. I squinted at her through the gloom, no longer certain of her identity.

  "Olimpia?"

  There came no reply. She moved towards me. I shook my head to cast the vision from my eyes, for, though the night was still, her white dress seemed to billow around her in some preternatural breeze. Yet, she was far from gliding now. I distinctly heard the crunch of the gravel beneath what I soon became aware was an unusually heavy tread. She walked toward me step by crunching step.

  "Eddy..."

  The voice came to me, sweet and plaintive. I felt it more than heard it and my skin crawled, for the voice seemed famil
iar to me. And not only the voice, but the form itself.

  Now I knew I was dreaming—and I wanted John Allan back.

  "Virginia?"

  She presented a flawless, milky white cheek to me. Virginia! It was! I started to run to her, but a sudden sense of foreboding restrained me.

  "Eddy..."

  I realized that the dress she was wearing was the same one in which I had buried her. Her dark hair, jet black in the moonlight, had fallen forward, concealing half of her face. A faint smile began to quiver upon her lips. She held out her arms to me, and I all but collapsed into them, such was the trance I had fallen into. This was my Virginia, after all, come back to me. My beloved.

  I could feel her fingers caress the back of my neck and when I opened my eyes I saw that it was not just the moonlight that had given her skin its unnatural pallor. It might have occurred to me that she was as pale as a ghost, if part of me did not think she was one.

  "Eddy," she said again. This time I could feel her breath in my ear—and it bore to my nostrils the stench of the grave.

  In fear, I started to draw back when a mark on her neck caught my eye. Upon closer examination, I saw that it was a puncture wound, the same sort of wound that existed on my own neck. Only this one was cracked and dry, a dead hole into her throat. I remembered that it was the mark that I had thought nothing of in life. In death, it took on a sinister aspect.

  "Virginia, what has happened to your little neck?"

  Instead of answering, she raised her face to mine. I thought she meant to kiss me and I felt myself falling once again. But when she turned her head, I saw that while one cheek was flawless and fair, the other was gashed and torn. The dry flesh hung in tatters, eaten away by decay, and foul with the corruption of the grave.

  I staggered back. But for every step I took, she took one towards me. I soon ran out of path and stumbled backwards into the grass. I did not want her to touch me. I knew now that the thing that ambled towards me was not Virginia, but some revenant occupant of the churchyard that only a trick of my troubled soul had transformed into the image of my dead wife. In my mind flashed visions of Burton in his fool's motley accompanied by the faces of John Allan's household blacks from my childhood back in Richmond with their wild-eyed tales of zombies and ghosts.

  I scrambled to my feet and groped in my pocket for my revolver.

  "Eddy..."

  In a panic, my fingers frantically sought out the handle of the gun. Finding it, I drew, remembering at the last moment that 'it's not an aimin' gun.' Just draw and fire, I told myself. My finger tensed on the trigger, but I could not pull it. The Virginia-creature took a step towards me, and then another. I brought the gun up and held it straight out from my shoulder. My hand shook, but I knew I had six loaded barrels, none of which could fail to hit a zombie-sized target from four and then three paces despite my tremulous grip. My finger tightened and the cluster of barrels began to rotate...

  I diverted my aim at the last instant.

  Bang!

  God help me, I couldn't do it. The shot went into a bush at the side of the path.

  A scream filled the air, a mad feline howl. A black cat dashed out from beneath the shrub into which I had fired and disappeared into the night.

  Startled, I watched it dart away. And when I looked back I found Virginia's decay-ravaged face moving close to mine, and I knew she didn't mean to kiss me this time.

  Chapter 13

  I couldn't say how long I slept. But when my eyes snapped open, I was happy beyond measure to find myself in my own bed. From the quality of the light, I could tell that it was early morning. I flung my covers aside and my happiness vanished at once.

  Swinging my feet free of the blankets, I could see that I was still dressed in my clothes from the previous night. To my horror, I found that my socks were soaked through to the soles of my feet. The knees of my trousers were shiny and slick with mud and clinging to the fibers were rancid flecks of—of what I could not say. Worse still, I saw that my door was slightly ajar and lying in the crack, half in and half out of the room, was the form of an obviously dead animal. A black cat.

  Pluto!

  Even with his eyes closed, I could see that it was poor Pluto. I immediately felt a wave of guilt surge through me. Surely I had managed to kill the creature in my sleep, as—judging from the condition of my feet—I had obviously been walking about and God knew what else. I stooped and picked him up from the floor. His body was still supple and I held him at arm's length, shaking him gently and speaking his name. But this cat was beyond revival.

  It was only a short moment before I found the cause of his death, a small bullet hole in his flank. My "dream" came flooding back to me. I could hear the bang of the pistol when I had fired into the bush, followed by the scream of the cat. I had shot him.

  But which Pluto? The one that constantly tried to kill me or the one that purred on my lap?

  I was convinced that this was the latter. Pathetically, he had come to me to seek comfort in his final moments, unaware that it was a bullet from my gun that had finished him.

  I crossed the room and laid him on the table. I decided to check to make sure this was indeed Pluto, so I thumbed back his eyelids and was not surprised to find one dead yellow eye and one empty black socket. I noticed some object glimmering there. Looking closer, I saw entangled in the fur around Pluto's missing eye—protruding from the hole, in fact—a small metal object. Inspecting it closely, I found it to be a tiny spring, such as you might find in a pocket watch. It was clotted with dried gore. The little spring must have gotten lodged in Pluto's former eye somehow. During some thrashing of his death throes, I supposed.

  Then I parted the fur around his bullet wound. I found it peculiar that the wound itself was dry. More peculiar still, the fur was also dry and not matted or sticky with blood as I would have expected.

  Inside the hole, a glint of something caught my eye, probably the bullet. I plunged my fingers into the wound, the edges of which expanded elastically as I delved deeply under Pluto's dead skin. Expecting to find slimy bits of tissue and tendon enveloping the lead slug, my fingers instead found a piece of thin metal. I grasped it and pulled. Something snapped lightly and I drew the object out of the hole, tilting it one way and then the other until it came free of the wound.

  It was a gear, a finely-tooled cogged wheel.

  Curious.

  Unlike the little spring, I saw no possibility of the gear finding its way inside Pluto by natural means. Perhaps he had swallowed it. With a rising sense of apprehension, I went back to the wound and fished around inside again, producing this time a short length of brass tubing. As I held it to my eye, I saw that a drop of some kind of translucent red liquid spilled from its hollow end.

  My breathing came fast and heavy now. Prodding inside the creature once again with my finger, I felt nothing but oily gears, springs and tubes. Hooking a tangled mass of the stuff with my knuckle, I yanked out a brass and copper snarl of cat gut, realizing then to my horror that this was not a cat at all—clearly not a biological entity of any sort—but some kind of clockwork mechanism.

  I looked around frantically for a knife, meaning to cut the thing open, when my eye fell upon a little wooden box I had never seen before. What it was and how it came to be on the table in my bedroom, I did not know. I could see about its base smudges of caked soil such as I had found on my trousers and, as I reached out to grasp it, I was filled with a sense of foreboding.

  I had been sleepwalking, I was certain of it—and more than just the shooting of the cat came back to me now. A chill ran through me. But I quickly tamped down my fears. Even though they were filled with ghastly visions, I had grown accustomed to my dreams and nightmares. These were my constant companions and I had learned not to fear them.

  Yet, my nightly wanderings took me through more than horrifying dreamscapes. I walked worlds corporeal enough to offer evidence of my passing: caked mud and ear-splitting gunshots, wet socks and dead clockwork cats�
��and strange little wooden boxes.

  Steeling my resolve, I grasped the box in both hands and shook it gently. I could feel the rattle of many small objects inside. My heart leapt into my throat. Already I suspected what I would find. Do not let it be. The rattling intensified with the trembling of my hands. I pressed my thumbs to the lid and lifted.

  Whether a cry issued from my throat or was contained inside my brain, I could not say. To me, it was deafening.

  Staring back at me from the velvet lining of the box was a full set of human teeth, their long pointed roots smeared with traces of watery blood.

  I shuddered with horror and the box slipped from my fingers, spilling teeth onto the table and floor. With a sound like pelting hailstones, they scattered to the four corners of my room. I cried out in dismay and scurried after them, chasing them down one-by-one on my hands and knees. I counted them as I replaced them in their ghastly box. 29 ... 30 ... 31 ... One missing! Scrambling to find it, I looked under the table, the bureau, all along the baseboards. Then, pressing my cheek to the floor, I looked under my bed and there is was. Sighing with relief, I dropped it in the box with the others. 32.

  That was when the true horror of the thing sank in. I stared at my trembling hands in disbelief. What had I done? But my hands were as mute as my memory and I could find no trace of their recent history imprinted on them. Yet inside the hideous box the evidence of my horrifying crime was all too plain to see. Next to it, a clockwork cat seemed a trivial commonplace, belonging to a world of frivolous distractions where men in somnambulistic trances did not extract the teeth from disinterred corpses.