The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  How long I fell, I cannot say. Time had no meaning in that place, that Otherwhere. My vision never cleared; the colours never faded. It came to me after a while that I was the source of them: like a meteor flaring with a fiery peacock’s tail, I was shedding colour as some otherwise ineffable part of me was burned away, ablated. This only increased my terror, for it seemed to me that I must be consumed entirely, in hideous ruin and combustion, as the poet says. Yet I never felt so much as a twinge of heat or pain as I fell, faster and faster it seemed.

  Then came another flash, as blinding as the first. Only, if that flash had signalled my entrance into a kind of dream, suffused as it was with menace and wonder, this one signalled my emergence from it. What blinded me now was the simple, pure light of the late morning sun peeking over the tops of mountains I had despaired of ever seeing again. Thus did I awaken and find myself stretched on a cold hillside at the foot of Mount Coglians in the Carnic Alps. I was home. Corinna had kept her promise.

  I had arrived at Märchen at the turning of the season, autumn giving way to winter, but the chill in the air now was of a different quality, and the frost-rimed grasses and wildflowers that blanketed the hillside in soft splashes of colour, the lowing of distant cattle and the hollow clanking of cowbells that echoed from the heights – all testified to the burgeoning of spring. I thought of the old tales of Fairyland and how time flowed so capriciously there. Perhaps I had been gone for years, decades, entire lifetimes.

  Yet I was not thinking so much of what awaited me in the world to which I had been returned. No, all my thoughts were bent towards the world I had left behind – and Corinna.

  I got to my feet – I felt as hale as I ever had in my life – and retraced my steps up the mountain, determined to enter Märchen again despite all that Corinna had told me. I was not thinking clearly. I was not thinking at all. It was the yearning of a broken heart, bereft and disconsolate, that drove me. But when I reached the spot where I had first set eyes on Märchen, there was nothing. I knew I was in the right place, for I could see the icy dagger of the glacier upthrust and glittering in the sun. But of the town not a trace remained, as if it had never been there at all.

  PART THREE

  14

  The Otherwhere

  QUARE HAD LONG since put up his pipe, listening to Longinus’s story like a child entranced by a fairy tale. And indeed, as his host sat back and gazed at him, seeming to invite comment by his silence, it struck him that he had been hearing just that. But now, in the comfort of the garden belvedere, with late summer clinging to the afternoon air, the spell of Longinus’s words melted away like some fantastic ice sculpture. While it was true that Quare himself had experienced any number of inexplicable occurrences of late, not the least of which being the wound that by rights should have killed him, he found that something in him remained sceptical in the face of what Longinus had related. For what, really, had he been told? He knew no more about the nature of the pocket watch than he ever had; the timepiece remained as mysterious as ever, both in its workings and its purpose. And as to the town of Märchen and its fabulous inhabitants, angels or fairies or whatever it was they were supposed to be, he had no proof that they were more than figments of an eccentric, if not deranged, imagination. The watch, however uncanny its behaviour, was something he had held in his hands. He had seen it, felt it, witnessed it drinking his blood to provide its motive power. It was unquestionably real. Though he did not understand how it worked, how it achieved the effects he had witnessed, Quare still believed that there must be a scientific explanation for it all. He was not ready to abandon his faith in science for a superstitious credulity in magic. He did not wish to insult the man who, at great personal risk, had rescued him from the dungeons of the guild hall, yet he was not prepared to take Longinus at his word, much less to follow him back into danger.

  ‘Well, Mr Quare?’ asked Longinus at last. ‘What do you make of my tale?’

  ‘In truth, I hardly know what to think,’ he answered. ‘The nature of the watch is as clouded to me as ever, and I confess I am utterly at a loss how to account for Corinna and the other townsfolk.’

  ‘I felt the same as I stood upon that empty hillside all those years ago. Yet I knew that something miraculous had happened to me, something that would change the course of my life, even if I did not understand everything about it. After all, I had the watch in my hands. And the memory of all I had witnessed.’

  ‘But I have neither of those things.’

  ‘So, you require more proof, do you?’

  ‘More? Why, sir, you have offered none at all! Only a tale whose airy wonders I might find appealing enough were I still a child, but which, I regret to say, lacks the substance required by an adult apprehension.’

  ‘Then perhaps this will be sufficiently substantial.’ Without further ado, Longinus bent over his right foot. Quare watched in bafflement as the older man removed his slipper and then pulled off the white hose that covered his leg from ankle to knee. Beneath it, he was wearing a second slipper, white as bone, that came to just above his ankle.

  Quare was about to remark on this curious affectation when he realized that the slipper was not a slipper at all. It was, instead, a foot. Or, rather, a prosthetic that resembled, in all but colour, the appendage it had replaced. Carved, no doubt, out of whalebone, and with an exquisite attention to detail that would not have been out of place on a statue by Michelangelo.

  Longinus, meanwhile, gazed at him with an expression of amusement. ‘Is this proof enough for you, Mr Quare?’

  ‘What … I mean, how …’

  The toes of the prosthetic wiggled.

  Quare shot to his feet with a cry.

  At which Longinus laughed heartily. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, his eyes flashing with mirth. ‘But you cannot imagine how often I have wished to do that.’

  Quare could make no rational reply.

  ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? However, I confess that my first reaction upon encountering this object at the end of my leg was not one of fascination but horror. It was that same night, after I had hiked back down the mountainside and retraced my steps to the town I had last visited, what appeared to have been many months ago. There I obtained a room, and a hot bath … and it was then, when I stripped away the bandages that still swathed my foot, that I made the awful discovery. After I had calmed somewhat, and regained a modicum of reason, and pacified the alarmed proprietors who, summoned by my screams, had first threatened to break down my door, and then to evict me from the premises, what must have happened became clear to me. As I had lain unconscious in the Hearth and Home, Dr Immelman – or, as I now had reason to believe him to be, Herr Wachter himself – had amputated my mangled foot and replaced it with a prosthetic … a prosthetic that in all respects functioned as well as – and in some respects, as I was to discover, a good deal better than – the flesh-and-blood original.’

  Quare had by now taken his seat once more. Not because he had regained possession of himself, but because he did not trust his legs to support him.

  Longinus crossed his ankle over the opposing knee, bringing the prosthetic near enough to Quare that he could perceive where the white bone – if it were bone – met pale flesh. There was no scar, only a seamless joining. As he marvelled at this, senses reeling, Longinus removed a small tool kit from his coat pocket, calmly opened it, and, holding it in one hand, selected an instrument from within – a slender pick-like tool useful for prising open watches and probing their insides. Quare carried just such a tool in his own kit. But the sight of this familiar object did not soothe him. On the contrary, it underscored the perceptual clash he was experiencing, of two things fundamentally antithetical to each other brought into an impossible proximity.

  Setting the open tool kit upon his thigh, Longinus tapped the probe against the side of the prosthetic. It made a sharp clicking sound, as if it had struck marble. Then, though to Quare’s discerning eye the appendage appeared smooth as an eggshell, he somehow fo
und an opening, and with a flick of the wrist caused a narrow panel in the side of the foot to swing open. Beneath, exposed to Quare’s all but stupefied gaze, was a system of gears and fine chains that resembled nothing so much as the insides of a clock – or, rather, a watch. And not just any watch, but one in particular: the hunter he had examined in the work room of Master Magnus.

  The bone-white gears turned smoothly, soundlessly, meshing as if they were not pieces fitted together by hand but instead organic parts of a single whole; the chains slid past the narrow opening at varying rates of speed, here a silvery blur, there a measured inching. Behind them, deeper in the recesses of the prosthetic, Quare could make out other gears, other chains; the impression was of constant, complex motion. It dizzied him to look at it. Yet he could not tear his eyes away. Twined through the cluttered insides, as out of place as worms in a watch, were thin red threads that shone against their pale surroundings, seeming to pulse with vitality: veins, Quare registered with some distant part of his mind, or something analogous to them. Then a nearer, more visceral part of him rebelled against what he was seeing, against the wrongness of it, and he lurched to his feet and out of the belvedere, where he spewed the contents of his stomach upon the green lawn of Lord Wichcote’s garden.

  By the time he returned to the belvedere, Longinus was once again wearing his hose and slipper. The tool kit was tucked away. He stood gazing at Quare with a look of concern. ‘Are you quite all right, Mr Quare?’

  Quare managed a nod. ‘I-I’m sorry, my lord,’ he stammered.

  ‘Nonsense,’ his host replied, waving away both the apology and, it seemed, the offence that had prompted it. ‘You have seen something I have shown no one else, not even Magnus. Something that by all rights and reason should not exist. It would be a wonder if you did not have a violent reaction to it.’

  ‘But …’

  Longinus raised a forestalling hand. ‘And none of this “my lord” business, if you please, sir. We have been over this already. You must get into the habit of calling me Longinus, for it is imperative that my true identity remain unknown to our enemies – whom we shall soon enough be facing.’

  Everything was happening too quickly for Quare to process. ‘I…’

  ‘Come, Mr Quare,’ Longinus said, gesturing towards the house. ‘Let us go inside. I shall have this mess attended to. But there is more I must tell you. Much more.’

  Quare allowed Longinus to shepherd him back into the house. They entered by the same door through which they had gone out some hours ago. The room where they had breakfasted was now arranged for dinner, but the sight and smells of the rich food that had been laid out upon a sideboard left Quare feeling as if he might become ill again.

  Alert to his discomfort, Longinus led him through a side door and into a sitting room plainly used by Lord Wichcote and his male guests for card-playing, pipe-smoking and drinking. As with all the rooms in the house, and the belvedere as well, a variety of clocks were in evidence, none showing the same time, the soft, hollow clatter of their ticking like a gentle rain falling against the roof of an empty house.

  Quare took the seat that Longinus indicated, watching as his host crossed the room and poured out a glass of brandy. This he brought back to Quare. ‘Drink it down, sir. You will feel better for it, I assure you.’

  The warm burn of the brandy settled his stomach and rallied his reason. Longinus, meanwhile, went to the door, where a velvet bell pull hung; this he tugged, then opened the door to speak to someone Quare could not see: a servant, presumably. When he was done, he returned and seated himself in an adjoining chair. Quare observed closely as Longinus walked but could see no evidence that he favoured his false foot over the other; had he not witnessed it with his own eyes, he would never have guessed that the man was crippled in any way. It was extraordinary. He said as much to Longinus, who seemed to take his words as a compliment.

  ‘Whatever else, Wachter was a craftsman of the very first order. Not once in all the years I have worn this appendage has the mechanism failed or even faltered. In that time, it has caused me pain but twice. The first time was the same night I discovered it, when in my revulsion I thought to have the thing removed. Amputated. Repelled, I swore to myself that I would have it cut off as soon as I returned to London. I felt I should prefer a block of dead wood to such a monstrosity! But the mere idea of it so racked my body with agony that I never again considered it. And the same thing happened again some time later, back in London, when I made an attempt to probe the workings of the mechanism, to learn its secrets. In both cases, the prosthetic defended itself, you see. Just as the great clock in Märchen had done. Like that clock, Mr Quare, my appendage is not simply alive in some sense: it is aware .’

  Quare could not suppress a shudder.

  Longinus chuckled. ‘Oh, it does not speak to me, sir. I should be a fine figure of a man were I to engage in conversation with my foot. No, speaking with my footman is as far down that road as I care to go. And yet it does communicate after a fashion. It connects me to the realm Corinna spoke of: the Otherwhere. Some men sense changes in the weather by the ache in their bunions. I sense perturbations in that dreamlike dimension, which lies, I am convinced, just alongside our own, separated by a barrier thinner than the thinnest veil yet impossible for humans to cross unaided. That barrier, Mr Quare, is time.’

  ‘Time?’

  Longinus gestured, indicating the gossipy assemblage of clocks. ‘What I have deduced over the years, through trial and error, and from my memories of Märchen, is that time is as much an artifice as the clocks that purport to measure it. It is not some intrinsic property of the universe, an extension of the mind of God or a manifestation of the natural order. It has been imposed upon the world – upon us. Indeed, we have been infected with it, like a plague. Or, rather, we are the plague, for we are not separate from time, Mr Quare. We are its very embodiment.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Quare confessed.

  ‘Time is foreign to Corinna and her kind. So she told me, and so I have come to believe. It is something strange and terrifying to them. Unnatural, as it were. Yet beautiful, too. It attracts them. Draws them like moths to a flame. And then burns them. Being immortal, they do not die of it. They do not age, as we do – for what else is aging but a slow burning, a fire that consumes itself in the end? Mortality is the fire in our veins. It feeds on us, swells and gutters over the course of our lives, leaving naught but ashes. But it spreads, too, does it not, that fire? Through procreation, we pass it on to our progeny, who do the same in turn, ad infinitum. Do you not see that we are mere vehicles for its expression? We are like lumps of coal endowed with mobility and reason, yet ignorant of our true nature. But not Corinna and her kind. They know what we are, what we carry. And do we not make tribute of it for their sake? Recall the effect that the townsfolk of Märchen had upon me. I was helpless to resist the demands of their desire, whether openly expressed or not. I spilled my seed at their whim. I employed the metaphor of fire, yet you might also think of us as bottles of wine, Mr Quare. We must age a bit to achieve our full potency. But then we must be drunk. And a true connoisseur of wine does not drain his bottles at a gulp. No, he sips them. Savours them. So it is with these connoisseurs of time. They sip at our mortality, at the wine of time that has matured within us. And they do not perish of it, as we do. No doubt that is why the taste of us is so sweet to them, Mr Quare – sweeter than we can imagine. That is why they are fascinated by us. Why they long for us … yet hate us, too. We are their laudanum. Their weakness. They are addicted to us. Addicted to time.’

  Quare made an effort to marshal his thoughts. ‘You said imposed. Imposed by whom? And for what purpose?’

  ‘As to whom, why, Doppler, of course – that is, Corinna’s father, whatever his true name may be. It was plain to me, as I thought back over the circumstances of my escape from Märchen, that Herr Doppler, not Wachter, was the real power in that place. Corinna had told me, you will recall, that the Otherwhere was
shaped by strength of will, and that her father’s will was the strongest of all. Wachter, or Immelman, rather, seemed a pathetic creature, frightened, his spirit broken. He claimed to be as human as I. No doubt he had been brought across the border much as I had. They had need of him, just as they had need of me. Indeed, Corinna said that I was meant to replace him. But for what purpose, to what end, I do not know. Only that it must have had something to do with time. With clocks and time, Mr Quare.’

  ‘What, then, of the watch that Corinna gave to you? What is its purpose?’

  ‘I cannot say for certain. But I have some ideas. It is plain that Doppler does not rule over his realm unopposed. Clearly, there are factions among his kind. Some, like Adolpheus, are loyal, while others are engaged in a rebellion of sorts. Corinna went in search of the rebels at the end, to join their fight. Why, if the hunter were some powerful talisman, would she entrust it to me, rather than take it with her? The answer must be that it is too dangerous for them to employ, or even to possess. Thus I deduce that it is a weapon of awesome destructive power. And what is it that these creatures seem most to fear … and most to desire? Why, time, of course. The watch, then, must be a kind of bomb, Mr Quare. A time bomb, if you will. Now, let us consider what the effects of such a bomb might be, were it ever to be triggered.’