The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  The pathways shovelled into the snow, by which I had approached and half circled the clock on my last visit, were still in place, well maintained despite the mountains of snow on either side, a testament to the industry of the townsfolk, and especially that of Adolpheus, who, as I had seen, tirelessly laboured to keep the paths shovelled, the covered passages repaired, the lamps lit.

  Corinna led me forward. The bronze hands of the clock were in motion, the hour hand creeping slow as molasses in a clockwise direction while the minute hand drifted in retrograde. I could hear, above the whistling of the wind, muffled sounds of activity from within the edifice as the mechanism governing the automatons engaged. As before, I felt a kind of trepidation or wariness, a hesitation to come too close that grew stronger as I drew nearer, until my heart was thumping in my chest and a sheen of sweat broke from my skin, chilling me further. Once again I saw, in my mind’s eye, those gigantic legs scissoring across the proscenium. Though I more than half believed it had all been a vision, or at best a memory stretched out of recognition by the blow that had felled me, as if I had glimpsed the legs of my assailant before I had lost consciousness, on a visceral level I was crawling with dread. It was all I could do not to pull out of Corinna’s grasp and rush back to the safety of the passage. But, again, I did not want her to think me a coward.

  She seemed to be in the grip of sensations as intense as my own, though different, for, rather than resisting an urge to flee, as I did, she appeared to be fighting an opposite inclination, as if she were being drawn towards the tower by a force I could not feel. At last, by a mutual if unspoken decision, having reached a point of equilibrium between our conflicting desires, we stopped, each of us holding the other, and, still silent, waited for the bells to ring. We were the only ones present; the townsfolk had grown so accustomed to the marvels in their midst that they no longer recognized them as such; Wachter’s creations had become ordinary. In a way, that seemed the most incredible thing of all.

  I felt a shudder pass through Corinna and heard the catch of her breath. Then, with no more warning than that, the bells pealed out. The clock itself might have been wild and without sense in its time-keeping, but the carillon – though I had heard it crash like thunder, or wail like a pack of banshees – now produced a music as clear and bright and cold as the day. It echoed from the buildings around the square, until the sounds seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, produced not by the bells but by sunlight striking the ice and snow. At the first chime, my apprehension shattered like glass, and I felt the shards of it falling inside me, soft as snow but sharp enough to draw blood, like feathers from an angel’s wing, so that I shivered now not from cold or fear but in a kind of exquisite agony.

  ‘Do you feel it, too?’ Corinna asked in a whisper.

  Before I could reply – if I could have used my voice at all – the door on one side of the proscenium swung open with a clap, and the automatons began their parade. Corinna had been right. There were no giants now, no impossibilities of scale. Just a succession of child-sized mechanical figures moving through their ordained paces as the echoes of the bells faded away. Soon the only sounds were the keening of the wind and the whirs and clicks that rose from within the clock and from the figures themselves as they pantomimed the actions of living men and women out for a stroll: knees rising and falling in a parody of locomotion, heads turning, eyes moving, as if to take in the view, arms rising in greeting or farewell, yet all with a stiff and jerky artificiality, like wooden puppets moving without the benefit of strings, that could not have been more different from the smooth counterfeit of life I had witnessed in the operation of Inge’s cuckoo clock and certain other timepieces of Wachter’s that I had seen. Even Corinna’s mechanical mouse was more lifelike. Relieved as I was at the absence of the giants, I was disappointed as well. I had expected more.

  Yet it seemed a further revelation of the eccentricity of the clock and its maker that there should be no angels or devils, no figures of Father Time with his scythe and hourglass, no saints or martyrs, none of the garish and fantastical crew such clocks always feature. Instead, what emerged from within the clock was what I had already found outside it: nothing larger than life but rather life itself, in all its mundane variety, as if Wachter, or whoever had crafted the automatons, no doubt at his direction, had used ordinary townsfolk as his models. Burghers, farmers, tradesmen and -women. All roughly, even crudely executed, as if they had been carved in a fit of inspiration, or at the last moment, and painted with equal haste. Yet their slapdash quality, which spoke of enthusiasm more than skill, somehow gave them a vitality more meticulous representations might have lacked; they seemed, as it were, in their rude expressions and painted-on clothes, to aspire to the lives they mimicked. Their small size only added to this impression, as of a parade of children dressed in the clothing of adults.

  As I watched, it struck me that certain of the figures looked familiar, as if I had glimpsed them somewhere before, but I ascribed this at first to their caricature-like quality. Until, to my astonishment, I saw Adolpheus emerge from the tower, a stepladder strapped across his back. Indeed, I thought at first that it was the man himself playing a trick on me, though a closer look dispelled my confusion, as he, or rather it, was as crudely rendered as the others. But there could be no doubt that the automaton was modelled on Adolpheus. Why, it even incorporated his limp, and the handicap that caused it! Nor was this the only shock in store for me. Behind him came Inge, with her flour-dusted apron and apple-red cheeks, a loaf of bread in her hands and Hesta jumping up again and again at her feet, as if begging for crumbs. She was followed by Herr Doppler, stiff and stern in his colonel’s uniform, white whiskers bristling as if sheathed in ice, a sword buckled at his side, which he drew and flourished, then sheathed again, over and over, as he marched, looking neither to the left nor to the right. Following him like a dutiful daughter was Corinna, eyes downcast, steps slow and hesitant, as if she were yoked to him by an invisible leash and was being led off to some altogether unpleasant fate.

  I turned from my contemplation of the painted wooden figure to the flesh-and-blood original at my side. ‘How is this possible?’ I demanded.

  Corinna only shook her head, her gaze fixed on the unfolding tableau. The expression on her face was one of surprise and, or so it seemed, horror, as if the display was as new and unexpected to her as it was to me … though I did not see how that could be.

  ‘Corinna,’ I insisted, ‘is this your father’s work? Is he playing some kind of twisted game?’

  As if in answer, she gasped and raised a hand to her mouth. I looked back at the clock, and there, trailing the figure of Corinna like a lovesick bumpkin, Sylvius vainly importuning cold-hearted Phoebe, I saw what could only have been intended as a mocking representation of myself. But it was the mere fact of the thing’s existence, rather than its satirical intent, that left me reeling; I felt as though my reality had been called into question, as if I should look into a mirror and see reflected there the chiselled features of a marionette leering back at me. For the thing wore my stolen clothes and hat, or so it seemed to me.

  By the time I had collected my wits, or at any rate enough of them to feel in command of myself again, my doppelgänger had completed more than half its journey across the proscenium; already the figure of Adolpheus had left the stage, disappearing into the interior of the clock through a door opposite the one from which it had emerged, and my own figure came at the very end of the parade – soon it, too, would vanish, and the door would close.

  Impulsively, I pulled my hand free of Corinna’s and ran towards the clock, ignoring her shouts for me to stop. Slipping and sliding over the icy ground, I reached the bristling façade and without hesitation flung myself upon it, finding hand- and footholds amid the ice-and-snow-crusted figures there, hauling myself upwards like a mountain climber. Earlier I had rejected the idea of just such a climb, judging it too perilous to attempt, but now I flew up the slick surface, surprising myself
with the sureness and ease of my ascent. Before I knew it, I stood bare-headed on the proscenium, my hat lost in the climb. Only then did it strike me that the space was free of snow and ice, and I wondered, at the back of my mind, if Adolpheus were responsible, for though it was somewhat sheltered from the elements, it was open to the wind. But there was no time for such puzzles.

  To my left, the figure of Corinna was re-entering the clock. Below me, the real Corinna was yelling at me to come down. I paid her no heed. With a cry, as if I might thus command the procession to halt, I hurried forward, reaching out for my counterfeit’s painted shoulder as I would for some urchin cutpurse overtaken on a London street. Indeed, I felt that something had been stolen from me, though I could not have said what. I half imagined that the mannequin would turn to face me when I laid hold of it.

  But I never did. Instead, a wrenching pain in my ankle brought me to a sudden stop; my boot had become wedged in the track that carried the automatons across the proscenium. I felt the grinding of bone as the train continued to move, carrying me along with it willy-nilly, and my cry now had nothing of command in it, only pain. It was no more effective in stopping the mechanism.

  The image is a comical one, I will grant you, like some allegorical study: ‘The Clockman Caught by Time’. But I confess the humour escaped me at the moment. All I could think of was the likelihood that my foot would be mangled in the gears of the train. Yet try as I might, I could not tug my boot free. Overriding the pain, panic filled me as I watched my diminutive double disappearing through the door and into the dark insides of the clock. I would be next. Earlier I had wished more than anything to be privy to the secrets hidden away there, but this was not the way I had imagined myself gaining access to them. What had beckoned with the promise of untold riches, like the treasure hoard of a dragon, now seemed forbidding, hostile. Some tardy instinct warned that to enter the clock in this manner would mean my death, and I did not doubt it for a second. I resumed my efforts to pull my boot free, or, failing that, to extricate my foot from the boot before it was too late. But the motion of the train, disturbed by my interference, was no longer as smooth as it had been; it had grown as jerky as the movements of the automatons, and in attempting to keep my balance and remove my foot, I accomplished neither, falling onto my backside, from which undignified position, more or less of a height with my wooden double, I saw him swallowed by the darkness behind the door that was now swinging shut, even as I continued to be drawn towards it. I say darkness, yet from out of it there shone, like a scattering of stars, glints of silver that I would have taken for reflections of sunlight from metal or ice were it not for the fact that grey clouds had once again spilled over the jagged tops of the mountains and begun to drop their heavy loads of snow, quite obscuring the sun that had just moments before had the sky to itself. So swift was this change that it seemed as much a mechanical effect as the tolling of the bells and the parade of automatons, as if the influence of Wachter’s Folly extended even to the heavens.

  But my attention was on lower things. I saw that the door would shut before I was drawn through it, yet not before my trapped boot was carried over the threshold. The door looked substantial, and I had no doubt that the mechanical force behind it would be sufficient to crush my foot. I redoubled my struggles, in vain. I could neither free myself nor, from my prone position, on my back now, my free leg extended to push against the closing door, employ sufficient leverage to stop or even slow its progress. I cried for help, but there was no answer from Corinna. I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was to come.

  But instead of the agony I was expecting, I felt myself lurch to a sudden halt. Opening my eyes, I beheld Adolpheus. His appearance was so sudden and unheralded that it was almost as if he had emerged from the clock. The dwarf had used his stepladder to prevent the door from closing, and this, in turn, had stopped the train – though I could feel it straining beneath me, its motive force frustrated for the time being but still exerting itself, like a trapped behemoth flexing against its bonds, building towards an explosive escape. Perhaps only another clockman would credit it, but at that moment my apprehension was not for myself but for the well-being of the timepiece. I feared it would suffer some irreparable harm.

  ‘This is getting to be a habit, Herr Gray,’ said Adolpheus, a grin flashing through his rusty beard. ‘If Corinna hadn’t found me, you’d be shorter by a foot about now.’

  ‘My boot is caught,’ I told him. ‘I can’t get it out!’

  He gave my leg a tentative tug, at which I gasped as pain shot through my ankle. ‘Ach, you’re wedged in there good and proper,’ he commented as though admiring a fine bit of carpentry. ‘Looks as though I might have to cut the boot away …’

  ‘There’s no time for that,’ I replied. ‘The clock is going to damage itself – can’t you feel it?’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Why, pull it out, man! You’ve got the leverage.’

  Adolpheus grinned again. ‘It’s going to hurt.’

  ‘Best hurry then,’ I replied.

  He nodded and stepped aside to take hold of my leg with his gloved hands. ‘Ready?’ he asked. ‘On three. One … two …’

  There was no three . Adolpheus yanked with what seemed the strength of a giant, and my boot came free – but with such a surfeit of pain that I screamed as if, rather than liberating my appendage, he had torn it off. I rolled away, howling and clutching my leg below the knee; my boot had been shredded in the gears of the train, and I saw a dark stain of blood on the leather, and splashes of crimson glistened on the proscenium. Meanwhile, Adolpheus must have removed his stepladder, because I felt a lurch as the stalled train resumed its course, and the door did likewise, clapping shut with a bang, after which the train stopped again, this time by design.

  ‘Can you walk?’ Adolpheus asked.

  I could not speak, but only shook my head.

  He bent down and, before I could protest, lifted me as if I were no more than a child and slung me across his broad shoulders. The movement brought another stab of pain to my ankle, and everything went dark.

  12

  The Cogwheel Sun

  THE NEXT THING I knew, we were on the ground again, at the base of the clock. I was lying with my back propped against the stepladder, gazing into the concerned faces of Adolpheus and Corinna as snow continued to fall around us. Corinna knelt at my shoulder, cushioning my head against her arm, while Adolpheus squatted by my foot, which he appeared to have been examining while I was unconscious. My ankle throbbed in time to the beating of my heart: two perfectly synchronized timepieces.

  ‘Are you all right, Michael – er, Herr Gray?’ Corinna asked. Her face was pale with worry, though a faint blush coloured her cheeks as she corrected her use of my Christian name – but not before Adolpheus had taken note of the slip, as I saw from the sharp glance he gave her.

  ‘Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, Fraülein,’ I admitted with an attempt at levity, both because I wanted Corinna to think me brave and because I didn’t want Adolpheus to report back to Herr Doppler that she and I were in the habit of addressing each other so informally. One intimacy might lead to another, after all … at least, in the mind of a father so determined to guard his daughter’s innocence. But the sight of my foot – or, rather, the torn and bloody boot that covered it – wiped even the hint of a grin from my face, and all bravery from my heart. What would I find beneath that mangled boot? The thought of it made me sick with apprehension.

  ‘Hard to tell how bad it is without cutting off the boot, or rather what’s left of it,’ said Adolpheus. ‘Let’s get you back to the Hearth and Home, and we’ll see where things stand. And speaking of which, I don’t suppose you can – stand, that is.’

  ‘I should not like to try,’ I answered.

  ‘Then I will carry you,’ he said. ‘I will be as gentle as I can.’

  Again he lifted me effortlessly, cradling me against his chest. What a ludicrous sight we must have
made as he bore me back to the Hearth and Home! A dwarf carrying a man almost twice his own height! But there was no one to witness my humiliation. The square was deserted, as were the covered passages. Corinna followed us, the stepladder slung over her shoulder by its rope, which she held in both hands, bent forward to better distribute the weight of the ladder, as if she bore a load of kindling on her back. Though she said nothing, her concern for me was palpable.

  True to his word, Adolpheus was gentleness itself. Not once did he bang my injured foot against the sides of the corridors, which, though spacious enough for two people to pass abreast, were yet not very much wider than my own length. Even so, the trip was a torturous one, and it took all my self-control to keep from crying out when, as was inevitable, some movement jostled my foot, or, as happened despite Adolpheus’s care, my boot brushed against a wall as he turned a corner.

  ‘Herr Doppler will not be pleased when he hears of this,’ Adolpheus remarked as we neared the inn.

  This seemed so self-evident as not to require a reply. Besides, I feared that if I opened my mouth to speak, I might whimper like a beaten dog.

  But Corinna spoke up from behind. ‘Oh, must you tell him, Adolpheus? The only harm done was to poor Herr Gray. Surely there is no reason for my father to know.’

  ‘I have never lied to your father,’ Adolpheus answered without slowing or looking back, ‘and I do not mean to start now. I am the watchman of this town, and it is my duty to report such transgressions. Herr Doppler has been indulgent where you are concerned, Fraülein – what father would not be? But I do not care to tempt his wrath by dissembling. I will tell him what I know. In any case, the story would soon come out. The injury, after all, speaks for itself.’

  ‘Then let it,’ she returned pertly.