All these effects, I reminded myself, could be achieved with clever photography; and that to my perception the Circle seemed no more than a simple hoop enclosing air did not absolutely rule out the possibility that it was in fact an ultra-thin holographic screen complete with micromechanisms. But at the fifth world—”M. Frostflower!” I exclaimed. “Can you hold this one for a few moments? Thank you! What—if I may ask—what, M.’s, do you see?”
“It looks a very curious world, what I can see of it through all those low-lying clouds,” said M. Frostflower. “Like a wide, flat plain, with little red cottages set in a ring near its border, mountains rising behind them in the distance, and a high tower in the middle.”
“And seven faces to that clock tower?” cried I.
“If you mean those white circles near the top of the tower,” said M. Thorn, “there could be seven. Can’t see more than three from this angle.”
“The people seem agitated,” M. Frostflower observed, having to peer closely, since the householders and vrows looked no larger than ants, with the boys and pigs even smaller and the cats invisible.
“What would’ve gotten ’em agitated?” said M. Thorn. “Those clouds can’t be smoke, can they? I don’t see any fires. Can you use that enlarging trick, Frost?”
M. Frostflower closed her eyes again, and the Circle grew to a meter in diameter. Now, even through the smoke, we could see the clock hands—all pointing straight up—and the cats, and the green rows of cabbages in the tidy little gardens.
“Is that a watchgirl or a what?” M. Thorn asked, squinting. “There, up in the tower?”
“The Devil!” I shouted. “The Devil in the Belfry!”
At my shout M. Frostflower started, the Circle suddenly shot to two full meters in height, and—forgetting myself in my excitement—I sprang up and stepped through.
The two women and their dog crowded in after me at once, M. Thorn mixing her comments with figures of speech which my pen would blush red ink to reproduce. Delivering them, too, in a voice sufficiently loud to carry easily over the din of screeching, caterwauling, fiddle music very badly scraped, and—even at this distance—the continual, overpowering tolling of the great bell in the clock steeple.
For the moment, I paid M. Thorn scant heed. “Vondervotteimittiss!” I exulted, breathing in the air so thickly wreathed with fumes from the burghers’ pipes, and promptly choking.
“What a g—d——d filthy stench!” shouted the guerilla. “Come on, we’ve got to get back—”
“No!” M. Frostflower cried mournfully. “From this side, it doesn’t show ...” Quickly shrinking the Circle back to a handspan’s diameter, she flipped it around in her hand and shook her head. “It isn’t showing the same world we just left!”
No doubt the implications ought to have struck me at once; but, having somewhat pacified my throat and lungs by inhaling through my handkerchief, I was still exulting—despite the noise, turmoil, and confusion—in the wood-carved clocks and cabbages that bedecked the quaint little cottages, the boys’ cocked hats and red stockings, and the bunches of yellow ribbon on each goodwife’s pink leather shoes. Again I exclaimed, “Vondervotteimittiss!”
“Is that the name of that demon up in that blasted tower, or what?” M. Thorn shouted back.
“No, no! The name of this borough—this country—this world, if you will!” I explained as best I could, and set out at a fast pace for the clock tower in the center of the plain.
As is perhaps no longer entirely common knowledge, the little borough of Vondervotteimittiss used to be, at least in the eyes of its inhabitants, the finest place in the world, devoted to its clocks and cabbages, its tranquility and sauerkraut, and especially to its good old course of synchronizing pocket watches and replenishing pipes with tobacco punctually every hour on the hour, until the day that the Devil set all at sixes and sevens by getting into the steeple to scrape music out of measure on a fiddle five times larger than himself, and continually toll thirteen o’clock.
“Dirteen o’clock!” rose the hoarse wail on all sides, from burghers, vrows, and boys more interested, now, in their long-awaited lunches than in playing practical jokes upon the long-suffering, frenzied pigs and cats. “Der Teufel! It hass pen dirteen o’clock vor years und years!”
By my reckoning, this dismal state of affairs must already have endured for approximately two centuries and a half since the Venerable Edgar first set it down in writing. High time, then, to eject the troublemaker and let the good folk get back to their good, old, orderly course of clocks and cabbages. Such opportunities do not occur every month, not even in the dreams of fantasy perceivers.
With this good deed in mind, I soon covered one radius of the circular plain, weaving and dodging and pushing between householders, goodwives, boys, cats, and pigs, frequently having to slap and pull away from clutching hands as I progressed. Some of the boys and burghers actually seemed to be barking in their consternation.
Reaching the House of the Town Council, from which the clock steeple rises, I found the Councilmen, each looking more oily and perturbed than the next, sitting at their long wooden table attempting to hold a meeting, but obviously unable to hear one another’s words over the tolling of the clock bell, which, this close, was absolutely intolerable in its volume. They were all red in the face from decades of shouting.
It was only here, as I strove to shut the door behind me, that I discovered some of the clutching hands which had sought to impede my passage belonged, not to the harried citizens of Vondervotteimittiss, but to M.’s Thorn and Frostflower, who had come along behind me. Their dog, also, had kept close to M. Frostflower’s side, wagging his tail as though in feverish puzzlement. From the expression on M. Thorn’s face, I felt very grateful that I could not hear her voice.
In order to be heard to toll in series of thirteen, however, the bell must stop and rest a bit after each thirteenth stroke. At the next hiatus, the guerilla lost no time in beginning: “What the bloody h—lbog do you think you’re doing, you—”
“Who pe you?” cried several of the Councilmen, springing to their feet as M. Thorn’s words called us to their attention.
“Friends!” quoth I at once, glad of their asking. “Friends, come to eject that rascally little fellow from your steeple. If you’d just point out the door to the stairway—”
All their right hands pointed it out in a silent chorus of gesticulation, as the infernal tolling recommenced. Pulling free once again from M. Thorn, I dashed to the door, yanked it open, and took the narrow steps three at a time, the ladies and dog ever at my heels.
Bursting into the belfry, we found the Devil just as I had expected to find him: a swarthy, hook-nosed, bewhiskered little dandy in black knee-breeches and swallow-tailed coat, sitting with his oversized fiddle in his lap, the erstwhile dignified and now supine belfry-man serving him for a seat-cushion, and the bell-rope proudly clenched in his magnificent white teeth, enabling him to toll the clock bell by jerking his head, never missing a scrape—one could scarcely honor it with the name “beat”—upon his ill-tuned fiddle.
“Villain!” I bellowed, approaching him. “Untooth that bell-rope!”
Up he jumped, tweaked my nose painfully with one hand, with the other swung his monstrous fiddle by its neck, and dealt me a blow that sent me spinning to the far wall. All this while his teeth remained clamped on the bell-rope, as proved by the continued tolling of the bell.
My white angel flew to my side. M. Thorn began to close, sword drawn, on the Devil; but he held her off at fiddle’s length. After looking from one to the other, the dog came over and crouched near M. Frostflower’s skirts. By the time I was able to observe these maneuvers, the belfry-man, released at long last, had gained the doorway to the staircase, down which he was rapidly disappearing.
The rest of us waited, en tableau, until the thirteenth stroke of the present series was fading away. Then M.
Thorn began, “All right, what the demon’s bloody claws is—”
“Wait, Thorn!” cried her friend. “M. Corwin seems to understand whatever’s going on in this world. Let him—”
“Not claws at all, young woman,” said M. The Devil, scrutinizing his fingernails. “No, I should say very nicely manicured.”
“Indeed, I understand it very well,” said I, getting to my feet. “About two centuries and a half ago, this king of all the ghouls came into the hitherto peaceful and orderly borough of Vondervotteimittiss and turned it into the charivari you have seen about us, by tolling thirteen o’clock to a people who had never before heard more than twelve strokes at a time!”
“What the h—l,” M. Thorn asked, almost amiably for her, “is thirteen oaklock?”
“Precisely!” said I. “This happy folk had presumably never heard of the twenty-four-hour system, but even they could guess that it was an hour past noon—except that it was not, for the rogue tolled his first thirteen at the very hour when the clock ought to have tolled twelve, and Heaven knows what time it has been here ever since!”
“A very good time for all,” the Devil replied with a jolly leer. “Why, young man, they were all bogged down in their humdrumness! Bet your head it did ’em a world of good to be shaken out of it.”
“They were happy in that humdrumness,” I argued, “and you have made confusion their new everyday routine. Sir, you have but traded one species of monotony for another and less comfortable species, and it is high time to end it!”
Whilst I engaged the fellow’s attention in debate, M. Thorn had sheathed her sword and begun creeping up from behind. Even as M. Devil said, “Enough for now!” and reached for the bell-rope, she made a leap, caught it over his head, and quickly sawed it in two with her knife, leaving the frayed end to dangle above his reach.
“Well!” she announced, grinning broadly, as the reverberation of the single stroke occasioned by her effort died away. “I may not understand this ‘thirteen oaklock’ business, but I guess I understand how to stop it.”
“Not necessarily,” replied the little Devil. Setting his fiddle down flat on the floor, he hopped up onto it. It elevated him just sufficiently that, by executing one further tiptoe balancez, he contrived to catch the frayed end of the rope still attached to the bell and swing upon it as upon a trapeze, tolling forth its peals more out of time than ever.
M. Thorn and I looked at each other, then around at the interior of the belfry. Seven arched windows surrounded us, each one directly beneath the inner mechanism of one of the seven great clock faces that showed, or ought to show, the passage of hours to the entire valley. Perhaps a meter and a half above each window arch, a small aperture pierced through wall and outer clock face, so that small squares of blue sky peeked in at us. Between the windows and the clock mechanisms extended a narrowish ledge, running the entire length of the inside perimeter, and reached by either of a pair of ladders tastefully concealed from outside view by their location in the shallow corners between windows. A third ladder, located for some obscure reason above neither of the first two, rose from the ledge toward the shadowy vault overhead, most of which was filled by the bell itself.
Why there should be so few ladders, such seemingly lackadaisical accommodation for maintenance work, might have seemed peculiar were I not aware: 1. That the Devil had occupied the belfry for so many years; 2. That before his coming, the clock had never been known to need any repairs whatever, so that the belfry-man’s office had been a perfect sinecure; and, 3. That in any event, I was merely dreaming.
Following the bell-rope up with my eyes as far as the increasing gloom near the top would allow, and gauging from the direction of the bell’s movement, I judged that the upper ladder led to a foothold within reach of the rope’s attachment to the bell’s casing. By severing it there, we could effectually prevent any further manual tolling.
I attempted to convey my idea to M. Thorn; but, sharp though she had just demonstrated her brain to be, it seemed nevertheless not quite capable of understanding my gestures and pantomimes alone. She only made a face. All this had taken less time to do than to describe, and the bell had reached only its seventh or eighth stroke. Gesturing again, this time for M. Thorn’s continued attention, I hurried over and scrambled up the nearest ladder, gaining the ledge by about the tenth clang of the bell.
The square apertures in what I knew to be the clock faces naturally caused me more apprehension than did the narrowness of the ledge; but, finding this to be about fifty centimeters wide, and comforting myself that I need pass only one of the apertures, and that in any case all the hands of all the clock faces had been pointing straight up for some centuries, I began edging toward the upper ladder.
As I reached the midway point of this length of ledge, the little Devil, making a mighty swing on his remaining length of bell-rope to achieve the ultimate stroke of this series, swooped upon me and somehow curled one leg, nimble as that of a small ourang-outang, round my chest, flipping me into position as with his other foot he slammed my head through the aperture.
For a moment, what with the force of the kick and the clangor of the bell, I stood dazed, blinking down at the minute forms of the Vondervotteimittissers below. My first clear returning thought was of the narrowness of the ledge, so that I made sure of my footing before attempting to pull my head safely back inside.
Too late! Even as the thirteenth stroke echoed to slow silence, the long minute hand had been sweeping down, if not precipitately, at least faster than any minute hand in good health had a right to proceed—about as fast, I should guess, as a second hand—until it reached the side of my neck and paused there as if momentarily stymied.
“Unfair!” I shouted. “It was never I who uttered a word about betting you my head! Nor did I ever assent—”
“Nor ever say nay,” came his mocking voice, with a chortle. “And, my boy, ‘Silence is assent’!”
“—to your proposed wager,” I continued, “the terms of which were unclear and ambiguous in any event, so that there’s some doubt—”
“What say?” he remarked, and recommenced scraping away on his abominable fiddle.
I could hear…and feel…the rusty grinding of the mechanism as the minute hand shook questioningly against the cords and sinews of my neck, causing, incidentally, rather exquisite pain. Sharp, however, as the edge was of that clock’s minute hand, like the blade of a slightly overused scimitar, it was obviously not the Devil’s intent to maintain its former rapidity of descent. Now that it had sufficiently blocked the aperture to prevent the backward passage of my head, it might proceed at its own wonted ... or temporarily impeded ... pace.
Remembering to my increased chagrin that my predicament was not even particularly original, that its sensations had already been fully described and recorded, and that the Signora Zenobia’s similar encounter with the minute hand of an Edinburgh clock had had results which might well prove equally fatal if repeated in my case, I decided that it would be as well for me at this juncture to wake up. Conceive my alarm on finding this impossible! Although of perfect lucidity, this dream seemed to allow of no self-awakening!
“‘Is all that we say or seem,” cried I in my agony, “but a dream within a dream?’”
“Shut up,” came M. Thorn’s voice, “and tell us something sensible before the stinkscrew starts pulling that d——d rope again.”
“The minute hand has fallen,” I explained, “and is about to sever my neck. It feels centimeters deep even now, and I think the pressure has already begun to start my eyes bulging from their sockets.”
“What the h—lbog is a ‘moment hand’?” was M. Thorn’s response.
Both ladies leaned from the arched window below me and frowned upward. M. Frostflower gave a gasp and stretched up her right arm. Her fingertips could not quite reach the point of the minute hand.
Recollecting that they professe
d to hail from a culture that might, happily, lack clocks and clock faces of this type, I explained further, “It’s a device for measuring time.”
“Good,” said M. Thorn. “Should be just your kind of thing, Frost. My friend’s a marvel with time,” the guerilla went on to assure me. “She can speed it up or slow it down for anything, breathing or not.”
“If that power works in this world,” M. Frostflower worried. “And if I can reach ...” She began easing herself out further and higher on the window frame.
“Take care!” I urged her, finding fresh agonies of apprehension. For, though I perceived her as my white Psyche, I much feared that the wings I glimpsed on her shoulders were pure transparent fabrications of my own brain, and that even this ethereal creature might be as liable as any other mortal to fall. “Its descent,” I went on, “may have been a fluke. For centuries all these hands have stood straight up at the number ‘XII.’ So long as the Devil continues to keep time frozen by tolling thirteen, we may have nothing to fear from the mechanism, and even should he stop, we ought to have half an hour before it catches up. You might check the other clock faces—”
The tolling began again—for the Devil’s pauses between series were as unpredictable in their duration as were all his actions lacking in any discernible rhythm—and I winced as the minute hand bit deeper yet. At first I hoped this was in simple vibration with the bell’s heavy tones, but another instant left little room for doubt that the minute hand, understanding, if only in the dim comprehension of a mechanism, that it ought to point straight up whenever the bell tolled, was seeking to re-attain that lofty position.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 64
