The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  ‘He has his reasons, of that you may be sure. But it is useless to try and puzzle them out. They do not think as we do, Herr Gray. They are not—’

  He broke off at the sound of approaching footsteps, turning to the door as Inge entered, carrying a tray on which she had balanced a steaming jug, a bottle of schnapps with a small glass turned upside down beside it, and a pile of folded white cloths. ‘What is the prognosis, Doctor?’ she inquired.

  Dr Immelman blanched at this innocuous question and, switching back to German, stammered out his diagnosis of a broken ankle.

  ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said Inge, shaking her head in sympathy as she crossed the room to us and set the tray on the bedside table; her bosom strained against her blouse as she leaned down, but somehow, as before, failed to overspill it. That was as astonishing as anything else I had seen, I assure you. When I tore my eyes away from the display of ripe pink flesh, it was to find her gazing at me with what I can only describe as hunger, as if I were a feast spread before her. At that moment I felt an answering hunger, as though, were it not for the presence of Dr Immelman, each of us could have devoured the other. I felt ashamed of my feelings, and guilty, as if by having them I was being unfaithful to Corinna , but I couldn’t ignore them, either. Inge smiled, seeming to divine my thoughts. ‘I shall take good care of you, Herr Gray, never fear.’

  The spell was broken as Dr Immelman once again manipulated my ankle, this time without the gentleness he had displayed earlier. I cursed more loudly than ever, and the doctor apologized profusely. His hands were shaking.

  ‘For God’s sake, Doctor,’ Inge erupted, ‘can you not be more careful? Pull yourself together!’ She fetched a chair from across the room and sat beside him. ‘Come, I will assist you.’ She poured a small portion of schnapps into the glass and handed it to him. ‘Here, this will steady your nerves.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said and gulped it down. Then, by what seemed an immense effort of will, Dr Immelman asserted control over his trembling hands. He opened his black bag and began to lay out his instruments. The routine of it seemed to calm him further. Yet the sight of those instruments only increased my apprehension.

  ‘Now it is your turn, Herr Gray,’ said Inge meanwhile, filling the glass from the bottle and offering it to me. ‘Drink it down, now, all of it.’

  I did not need any encouragement. I drained the glass as if it held water. I have never been fond of schnapps – I find its sweetness cloying. Give me a good English port any time. Yet this was like no schnapps I had ever tasted. When I had first arrived in town and secured my room at the Hearth and Home, I had poured myself a glass of water – a glass that had seemed, instead, to contain a most potent liquor, cold and sharp as an icy needle to the brain, which, upon melting, had diffused its numbness through my body, sending me into a sleep so profound that Corinna’s presence at my bedside had not awakened me, but had only, as it were, become transmuted into the stuff of dreams. This draught of schnapps was like that, except more so: it was as if I had swallowed a magical elixir, the ambrosia of the gods, something too strong for mortal senses, as far beyond normal schnapps as that water I had tasted was beyond normal water. The sleep that claimed me was beyond sleep, and if I experienced any dreams, they were beyond the grasp of my memory, for I have never, in all the years since, been able to recall even a glimmer of what passed through my mind from the time I swallowed the schnapps until I opened my eyes again to find the room lit by candlelight and, instead of Inge and Dr Immelman, Herr Doppler himself seated at my bedside.

  ‘The sleeper wakes,’ he said, closing the thin leather-bound volume he had been reading and setting it on the mattress.

  I was too groggy and disoriented to reply, but merely lay there, half reclining against the headboard, trying to situate myself.

  ‘Here, Herr Gray, allow me to assist you,’ Doppler said, getting to his feet. He poured me a glass of water and, with an arm behind my neck, helped prop me up to drink it. I sipped; the water was cold but not intoxicating – invigorating, rather. It brought me fully awake. As if sensing this, Herr Doppler set the glass down on the bedside table, plumped the pillows behind me, and resumed his seat. ‘How are you feeling?’ he inquired. ‘Any pain?’

  I shook my head. I lay on top of the covers, fully dressed save for the absence of my boots. One foot was in its stocking; the other was wrapped in pristine white bandages and elevated upon a pillow. It was twice the size of its fellow. Beneath the bandages, I could feel nothing at all. ‘Where is Dr Immelman?’ I asked, recalling his warning to me.

  ‘Downstairs, eating his dinner. I will call for him in a moment, never fear.’

  ‘I cannot feel my foot,’ I told him. ‘It is as numb as a block of wood.’

  Herr Doppler chuckled at this. ‘Calm yourself, Herr Gray! The good doctor knows his business. I arrived in time to watch him at his work – a steadier hand I have seldom seen. Why, he cut away your boot as if he were peeling an orange, then set your ankle so smoothly that you did not so much as twitch in your sleep. Then he applied some kind of poultice – a numbing agent, he called it, to keep the pain at bay while the break begins to heal. He can explain it better than I, and will do so, I am sure – but first, you and I must have a chat, sir. I dare say you can guess the subject.’

  ‘My head is somewhat fuzzy,’ I temporized. ‘If you would enlighten me …’ It seemed safest to let him take the lead.

  ‘Ah, Herr Gray, you think I am angry with you because you climbed the clock tower. I assure you, I am not. The clock, as you see, has ways of protecting itself.’

  ‘That is what Inge said,’ I exclaimed. ‘But surely you can’t believe—’

  ‘That one of Herr Wachter’s mechanisms might defend itself?’ he broke in. ‘Come, Herr Gray. Do you mean to tell me, after all you have seen, all you have experienced, that you could doubt it?’

  I let this pass. Frankly, I did not wish to dwell on the possibility, which I found disturbing. ‘If not that, then what?’

  ‘Why, if not the effect, what else but the cause? That is to say, the reason you climbed the tower in the first place. What was it, Herr Gray? Something you saw, perhaps? Something out of the ordinary?’

  At this, I had to laugh. ‘ Out of the ordinary? Herr Doppler, I have seen little else since I arrived here!’ Then, mindful of Corinna’s evident desire that I keep secret what we had seen, I asked him, ‘Have you not spoken to your daughter?’

  He frowned. ‘Rather, she has spoken to me. And confessed that it was all her doing – that she tempted you into making the climb with the promise of a kiss. I could well believe her capable of such a wicked promise, the minx, but the fact that she volunteered the information freely makes me suspicious. I know my daughter, sir. She is hiding something. And I think you know what it is.’

  I had no intention of revealing what I had seen. I did not understand the significance of it, but I had no doubt that it was significant, for not only Herr Doppler but Dr Immelman and even Adolpheus had pressed me on the matter. In any case, it was sufficient that Corinna wished me to say nothing of it.

  ‘I would not have you think badly of your daughter,’ I told Herr Doppler. ‘She is only trying to protect me, and in her innocence does not understand the injury she does herself. The truth is, it was I who set the terms for that climb, not Corinna.’

  ‘You, sir?’

  ‘I had been pressing her for a kiss all morning. But she had resisted my every advance. At last, as we stood before the clock tower, watching as the automatons crossed the stage above us, I secured her promise – reluctantly given, I assure you, and only out of a desire to put an end to my importuning – of a kiss in exchange for my climbing the tower and planting a kiss of my own upon the cheek of a wooden maiden there.’

  ‘A wooden maiden?’ Herr Doppler echoed, his eyes narrowing. ‘What maiden is this?’

  I wondered if I had said too much and inadvertently revealed what I had hoped to keep secret. I saw no recourse but to press
on. ‘Just one of the automatons,’ I answered with a shrug. ‘I hope I do not give offence, Herr Doppler, but to speak frankly, I had expected better. So wondrous are the outsides of Herr Wachter’s timepieces that I had thought anything emerging from within them must be equally wondrous. But the figures I saw seemed to have been executed in haste, and otherwise were no different than hundreds of others I have encountered in my travels.’

  ‘Ah, so now you know our darkest secret,’ Doppler said with a chuckle, as if relieved. ‘The truth is, Herr Wachter had nothing to do with those figures. When it came to such things, he preferred to work on a smaller scale, as with the dragon in Inge’s cuckoo clock. There he lavished the full measure of his genius. Do not misunderstand – the clock tower is indeed his masterpiece. But its size and complexity were such that he felt compelled to delegate certain aspects of its fabrication, like the automatons, to others … or so I was told and do believe. The truth of it seems evident in the craftsmanship, as you say. So,’ he added, returning to his subject, ‘having secured my daughter’s promise, you ascended.’

  ‘The climb was easier than I had expected – the carvings on the façade provided all the hand- and footholds necessary. But I never got the chance to deliver my kiss. My foot became caught in the train almost at once. If not for Adolpheus, I shudder to think what would have happened. I do not think I would have escaped with just a broken ankle.’

  ‘Indeed, you might have lost your leg to the mechanism,’ Doppler agreed. ‘I hope this will be a lesson to you, Herr Gray.’

  ‘I do not think I am likely to be climbing anything for a while,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as all that,’ Doppler said. ‘Dr Immelman will have you hobbling about in no time, you’ll see. But as to the matter of the kiss …’ He paused and stroked his moustache as if considering how best to proceed. Then, in a grave tone: ‘I’m afraid you have disappointed me, Herr Gray. I do not like to be disappointed. I thought we had an agreement. You were to instruct my daughter in horology, all the while subtly discouraging her interest. I did not intend that you instruct her in anything else. But you seem to have mistaken me. My English is lacking, I know, yet I do not believe horology begins with a w .’

  ‘Come now, Herr Doppler,’ I told him. ‘That is harsh and unworthy. What blame there is attaches to me, not Corinna. I assure you, I had no designs beyond a chaste kiss, and, indeed, had not really intended for things to go even that far. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘See that it does not,’ he said, laying a hand upon my bandaged foot. I could feel the pressure of it, the weight, but no pain or other sensation penetrated the numbing effects of Dr Immelman’s poultice. Still, I understood the threat that Herr Doppler had left unspoken.

  ‘Then, am I to continue her lessons?’ I inquired.

  ‘I see no reason why not,’ Doppler said and lifted his hand. ‘She has already insisted upon nursing you back to health – though it seems your landlady also has intentions in that regard. Well, we shall let the women battle it out. In the meantime, you may as well continue the lessons. Only, no more talk of kisses, eh? And I would like to see some progress. As of yet, she shows no signs of discouragement. On the contrary, she seems more enthusiastic than ever.’

  ‘The one must precede the other, or else the blow, when it comes, will be insufficient to achieve the result you desire. It is not so easy to kill a dream, Herr Doppler. If the slightest fragment is left, it may take root and grow again – especially when, as is the case here, a genuine talent exists.’

  ‘I leave the details to you,’ he said and pushed himself to his feet. ‘What matters to me are results. If I do not see some progress by the time you are on your feet again, we shall have another discussion, Herr Gray. A less pleasant one.’

  ‘I understand,’ I told him.

  ‘Good,’ he said with a satisfied nod. ‘I will inform Corinna. And now I must bid you good night – my dinner is waiting. As, no doubt, is the good doctor, eager to check on his patient. I will send him up directly.’

  I was glad to see him go. There was a mercurial aspect to Herr Doppler that disturbed me, especially where Corinna was concerned. Why, he had all but called his own daughter a whore! He seemed almost more like a jealous lover than a father. Yet I reminded myself that he had been both father and mother to the girl, and so had, by necessity, been forced into a relationship outside the normal bounds of father-hood. How could I, who had no children, presume to criticize? Still, it would have gone better for both of them, I could not help thinking, had he taken another wife.

  Alone, my attention was drawn towards my bandaged foot, but the sight of it – combined with the absence of sensation – left me feeling queasy. It was as if the appendage belonged to me and yet was foreign. I had an urge to unwrap the bandages but was afraid to touch them.

  To distract myself while waiting for Dr Immelman, I picked up the slim volume that Herr Doppler had been reading and had left behind on the bed, forgotten. The cover was of green-dyed leather and had upon it no writing, just a gold-embossed image of the sun – or what I took for the sun but then realized could just as easily be a stylized representation of a cogwheel. Intrigued, I opened the book.

  The page before me was covered in printed symbols I neither knew nor recognized, a sinuous typeface that reminded me of the Arabic writing I had seen in my travels. But I knew it was not Arabic. It was something stranger, more foreign. The shape of the letters – if that was what they were – was such that the lines seemed to move as I studied them, to actually flow across the page. Or, rather, not the lines themselves, but a force within the lines, moving through them like water through an elaborate system of pipes, as if the ink itself were in motion, impelled by some vital power. I seemed to hear the murmur of that activity, and it struck me that the book was whispering to me, telling me its secrets, if only I had the wit to understand them.

  As I stared, mesmerized as much by the soft susurrus of sound as by the undulations of the script, I felt a kind of sickness spawn inside me, and I would have flung the book away if I could. Book? Was it a book that I held, or was it instead a living thing, not ink but blood rushing through the exotic markings on the page? I did not know. I only knew that it held me as firmly as I held it, that I could no more tear my hands away than I had been able to wrench my foot free of the train that had caught me and would have carried me into the clock had it not been for the arrival of Adolpheus. Then I had cried for help, but now I could not so much as whisper. I could barely even breathe as the book spilled itself into me, or so it seemed, entering through the skin of my fingers as much as through my eyes and ears, though I still could not have said – nor can I to this day – what was being communicated to me. But I could feel it filling me up, squirming its way inside me, changing me. Perhaps it was teaching me how to read it. Perhaps, on the contrary, I was being read. Maybe both at once.

  All I know is that, as time went by – and whether minutes or hours had passed, I could not say – the markings on the page began to seem familiar to me, and I thought I could discern a kind of sense in them. Not the sense of words, inseparable from the sounds we associate with particular shapes, and the meanings thus conjured in our minds, but the sense of machines. Of clocks. Yes, the thought grew in me that I was holding something akin to one of Herr Wachter’s timepieces. The shapes on the page, I now perceived, or recognized, were not words at all but parts of an intricate mechanical system; the flowing movement I had detected was the motion of each separate part in harmony with the others. If I looked closely, I could see it all quite clearly, as if through a jeweller’s loupe – tiny gears meshing, chains moving, pulleys rising and falling. It was like looking at a sketch for a mechanical device and suddenly realizing that the sketch was the device: that the two were one and the same, the representation of the thing, and the thing itself, identical. But to what end did such a machine exist? What work was it performing? I confess that I could not form an answer, or even the beginnings of one. Yet surel
y if I read further into the book I would discover the answer – or, rather, the answer would make itself known to me.

  So deeply was I caught in the coils of the book that I did not register the arrival of Dr Immelman until he wrenched it from my hands. At that, the spell was broken. I fell back against the pillows, bathed in a cold sweat and shivering. The doctor, meanwhile, was gazing at me wide-eyed behind his spectacles, the book – closed now – clasped to his chest. Between his fingers, over his heart, I saw the embossed image of the cogwheel sun. It was turning. Not swiftly, but at a steady rate, as though driving an invisible hand across an invisible clock face. Yet even as I watched , it began to slow. For some reason, this terrified me more than anything.

  ‘What is that book?’ I demanded, pointing with a shaking finger.

  Immelman did not answer, but turned and crossed the room to the table where he’d left his black bag. His back was to me, so I couldn’t see clearly what he was doing there, but when he returned to the bed, the book was gone, and he held a small glass vial in his hands. It was filled with a pearlescent liquid.

  ‘Doctor, the book,’ I persisted, groping for the right words but not finding them.

  ‘It belongs to Herr Doppler,’ he said. ‘I will return it to him. You should not have tried to read it.’

  ‘Read it?’ Laughter bubbled between my lips. I felt as if I were going mad. ‘There is no reading such a book – if it is a book, and not some kind of infernal machine!’

  ‘Every book is a machine, is it not?’ the doctor queried as he opened the vial and poured a few drops into a glass on the bedside table. This he filled with water; it clouded and then cleared as he swished the water around the glass. ‘Drink this,’ he said, holding it out to me.

  I looked at him stupidly.

  He sighed and spoke as if to a child. ‘You are having a reaction to the poultice, Herr Gray. It contains a potent numbing agent which can sometimes induce hallucinations. Do you understand?’