for two people to squeeze past each other – Inge would have been stuck like a cork in a bottle – might have been miles beneath the surface of the ground, cut deep into the bowels of the Alps. I began to be aware of a great weight pressing down from above, more than could be accounted for by the snow, and I felt the first stirrings of panic, as if the ceiling were about to collapse on top of me, or as if I had strayed somehow beyond the borders of the town.
It was then that a gust of icy wind blasted past me from behind. The lamps guttered and went out, plunging me into a darkness more absolute than I had ever known. I carried a tinderbox, of course, but it was not easily accessible, and was difficult to use in such draughty conditions. But I did not lose my head. Laying my hand along one wall, I pressed on in the direction I had been going, reasoning that sooner or later I would emerge into another lighted area or come upon a side passage leading to a house where I might request assistance.
Neither proved to be the case. In the dark, it was all too easy to imagine that I had slipped between the cracks of the world, as if I might fall at any moment, like Inge’s husband, into a crevasse where I would lie helplessly until death claimed me. I lost track of time – for a clockman, a most disturbing sensation. Finally I swallowed my pride and called out for help, but there was no answer.
Or, rather, the answer that came was less welcome than the silence that had preceded it. For what issued from out of the darkness at my back was a sound that had nothing human about it. A harsh chuffing, as of some bestial exhalation. I froze, hackles rising. It came again, closer now, and I felt a shudder pass through the ground, as if whatever was back there was heavy as a bull. I felt as if I had re-entered my dream of the night before – or, rather, that the dream had entered the waking world, pursuing me. I ran. I had no light, no weapon save my dirk. But I did not imagine it would afford any protection against this unseen foe.
Was this some plot of the townsfolk? Had Herr Doppler arranged to have the lamps extinguished, then introduced some large and angry animal into the labyrinth? I didn’t know what to think; I barely retained the capacity for thought. More than once I struck a wall or other barrier that sent me reeling or even to my knees, head spinning, but I pressed on every time, certain that my pursuer, whatever it was, would strike at any moment. I sensed its presence at my back, felt the hot wind of its breath; I could have reached out and touched it, had I dared – which I did not.
Then a last collision … and I was outside. I fell to my knees in the midst of howling wind and snow. After my immersion in darkness, even the wan light of the day was blinding, an explosion of white and grey that seemed as much inside my head as outside it. I was exhausted, spent; I knelt there in snow up to my waist, shivering, clutching my dirk with one hand, my hat with the other, ready to fight but with no idea of what I was fighting or from which direction an attack might come.
But no attack did come. After a while, my eyes adjusted to the light – though the blizzard still made it difficult to see – and I was able to rise to my feet. Looming out of the gloom before me I saw the outlines of a building, and I made for it as though my very life depended upon it.
As I drew closer, I recognized the distinctive shape of the clock tower and heard, tangled in the keening of the wind, a raw and random music: the muffled chiming of storm-buffeted bells. I could barely make out the campanile; as for the bells within and the clock face below, I could not see them at all, and the proscenium seemed less a potential shelter from the snow and wind (assuming I could somehow climb so high) than the source of both, like a cave from whose frigid depths winter was exhaled upon