The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,136

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