The Emperor of all Things

8 Wachter’s Folly

I REACHED MÄRCHEN with the last echoes of the hour still haunting the air. Snow was falling, as it had done on and off during my ascent of Mount Coglians. I was exhausted, hungry, chilled to the bone. My rucksack seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Even my hat was heavy. Yet I was in high spirits. I had been back in Europe for some months, having sailed from Africa to Italy, then made my way up the peninsula and across the Italian Alps into Austria. Winter was drawing nigh, and I was glad to be away from the oppressive heat of the climes in which I had spent much of the last year. I was travelling incognito, in the guise of a journeyman, following the clues – or riddles, rather – left by that nameless horologist whose footsteps I had dogged halfway round the world. Wherever I went, I found evidence that he had preceded me. Among the timepieces brought to me for examination and repair in each new town or city, I would find one or two that bore the unmistakable signs of his touch – strange, capricious-seeming alterations whose only purpose, as far as I could tell, was the introduction of random inaccuracies.

By random I mean simply that they were not regular, as, for example, the loss of a certain number of minutes in a day, but rather unpredictable from day to day and even moment to moment. A clock might run fast and then slow, then speed up again, for instance, all within the space of an hour. Needless to say, the mechanisms responsible for such variation were impressive, and quite often beyond my understanding – I sent drawings back to Magnus, and he incorporated many of them into subsequent inventions of his own. Always there would be a clue concealed somewhere in the timepiece itself, or in its altered functioning, that, once divined, led me to my next destination. And this was true, by the way, regardless of the type of timepiece. Not just mechanical clocks driven by springs or weights but clepsydrae and other water clocks, hemicycles, hourglasses, even gnomons. Nothing, it seemed, was beneath the interest, or beyond the expertise, of my quarry.

I did not expect to end my quest in Märchen. Indeed, I was not even aware of the town’s existence until, travelling on foot across the lower slopes of Mount Coglians, I happened to hear, from out of the cloud-steeped heights above me, the tolling of bells that struck an hour at odds with what my pocket watch assured me was the correct time. I paused to examine my map but could find no trace of a town anywhere near by, save for the place I had spent the previous night. Of course, I could have been hearing the echo of a clock from elsewhere: the peaks and valleys of the mountains had a way of playing tricks with sound. Still, I decided to investigate. Over the next five hours, as I picked my way up the side of the mountain, following trails that seemed better suited to sheep than men, the clock struck thrice only. And not once did the tolling of the bells – one tone overlying the next, echo building upon echo to extend across the frozen surface of the air, then dispersing by an equivalent subtraction until no trace remained – coincide with the true hour.

Märchen turned out to be a small village; it almost had to be, perched so high, in the shadow of an immense glacier. All the way up the mountain, amidst snow flurries, I had watched the sun progress towards that distant upthrust dagger of ice until, at last, it seemed to impale itself there. Now, in the waning light, skirls of snow and ice crystals unfurled from the glacier’s jagged edge like blood from a wound in the sky. I topped a ridge, and as quickly as that, with a suddenness that took my breath away, I found myself on the outskirts of the village. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that there had been no warning, no sign that I was drawing near to a place of habitation. No rubbish such as one might expect to find at the edge of a settlement, no pastured animals , no stray dogs, not even wagon tracks. I looked back the way I had come, but all was lost in mist and snow; I might have been in a different world altogether from that in which I had started.

The few people I saw on the streets were bundled against the weather and hurrying to be out of it; they did not stop to talk, shooting me curious but not unfriendly glances. I nodded as I passed by, taking note of their simple but well-made clothing. The houses and other buildings of the town shared these qualities. There was nothing ostentatious about them; everything I saw bespoke the quiet confidence of long-standing prosperity, as if the bloody tides of war that had surged back and forth across the lands below had never risen high enough to splash Märchen’s well-kept streets.

Street lamps glittered through the snow, which had increased, whipped by a biting wind that made me clutch my cloak to my throat. Upon reaching what I took to be the central square, I saw a lone, dark-cloaked figure kindling the lamps around its periphery from a sputtering flambeau. The man was scarcely more than four feet tall and required a stepladder to perform his task; he carried this implement with him, slung over one shoulder, which gave him a hunchbacked appearance as he trudged from post to post with an uneven gait, the flickering torch held before him, his dark cloak flapping behind. For an instant, I thought I was seeing Magnus, and that, by some incomprehensible circumstance, my friend and former master had preceded me here.

At the centre of the square stood the clock tower, a square, monolithic structure about fifteen feet to a side that rose to a height of perhaps thirty feet. Such monumental clocks are usually part of a town hall or prominent church, but this one stood alone in the middle of the square – where I would have expected to find a statue or fountain – as though proclaiming its independence from all secular and religious authority. The façades of the surrounding buildings, as far as I could make out, were clockless.

I approached, the chill forgotten. I think I knew already – and not just from the evidence of my eyes, but on an instinctive level, by the pricking of my thumbs, as it were – that I was in the presence of a horological masterpiece, and, moreover, an eccentric one. This impression was bolstered by the tower’s appearance, which, though it revealed nothing of the mechanism within, nevertheless confirmed my sense of an idiosyncratic personality at work, for it more than made up for any lack of ostentation in the other structures I had seen so far. I did not doubt for an instant that I had found another example of the wizard’s work – the purest example yet, for this was no mere addition to something made by a lesser craftsman, as was the case with the other timepieces I had encountered in my travels: this masterpiece could only have come from the hands of the wizard himself, or so I imagined.

The ragged pulse of lamplight and shadow through the curtain of falling snow imparted a semblance of activity to the figures that covered the tower’s exterior. I couldn’t tell at first if they were castings or carvings, nor if they were painted; they seemed to sprout from every inch of the façade and came in a variety of sizes: the smallest no larger than my finger, the largest as big as life, or bigger. Men, women and children were represented, but also gargoyles that mixed human and bestial aspects, winged devils and cloven-footed demons, as well as angels, and skeletal figures, too, wielding scythes or hourglasses that seemed no less dangerous. Twining through and about them all was the coiling body of an immense serpent … or perhaps a dragon, though it lacked wings as far as I could see. Never had I beheld the sufferings of the damned depicted so persuasively, for such, it appeared, was the artist’s subject. The crowd of tormentors and tormented blurred before my eyes into a single undifferentiated mass, as if those inflicting pain and those seeking to escape it suffered alike the agony of exile from God’s presence even as they remained subject to His will, fixed in place for ever by a judgement that permitted neither escape nor appeal.

As I gazed at the tableau, a feeling of horror stirred in my breast, and I shivered beneath my cloak. Despite my admiration for the artistry, or what I could discern of it, I found myself hesitant to undertake a closer examination. Indeed, I felt an impulse to step back, as if I were in the presence of something dangerous or vile, and though I stood my ground, I did not draw any nearer.

The decorated portion of the tower rose to a height of fifteen feet or so, where an opening gaped, wide and dark as the mouth of a cave: daylight would no doubt reveal a recessed stage there, across which, at the stroke of some predetermined hour, figures emerging from within would progress along inlaid tracks in jerky pantomimes of living movement. I had seen such parades of dolls and automatons hundreds of times in my training and my travels, and knew them inside and out, but I felt certain that whatever display emerged from this particular tower would be like nothing I had witnessed before.

Above the proscenium, the pale clock face floated in mid-air like some smaller sister of the moon seduced down from the heavens. I tried to make out the time, but I couldn’t see the hands clearly, much less the numbers to which they pointed. Rising out of the mix of snow and shadow, in which feathery black flakes seemed to be falling alongside the white, was the apex of the tower: a campanile open on all four sides. Clustered within, dimly visible, were the pear-shaped silhouettes of five bells. The two largest hung motionless, but the three smaller ones were swinging slowly back and forth, each following a rhythm of its own. Though there was no sound of striking clapper, faint pings and clicks reached my ears through the keening of the wind – a forlorn music.

‘ Tempus Imperator Rerum ,’ rasped a voice from behind me in German-accented Latin.

I jumped, startled; lost in reverie, I had not heard the man’s approach. Turning, I saw the lamplighter looking up at me with a sly expression, as if pleased to have surprised me. This close, there was no mistaking him for Magnus: he was younger, for one thing, with a full and vigorous reddish-brown beard (in which snowflakes winked and melted), a bulbous red nose and glittering blue eyes beneath a battered brown tricorn. Unlike Magnus, he was a true dwarf, his head disproportionately large for the rest of his body, as were his hands. Yet he might almost have been a dwarf of legend.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

In one gloved hand, the man held the knotted end of a hempen rope by which the ladder was slung over his shoulder; in the other, like a club, he carried the flambeau, now extinguished. ‘ Tempus Imperator Rerum ,’ he repeated. And then, in an English that bore the same accent as his Latin: ‘Time, Emperor of All Things. Is that not the motto of your guild?’

‘What guild would that be?’ I asked in turn.

He laughed aloud, flashing teeth as white and large as those of a horse, or so it seemed to me. The combination of physical exhaustion and mental stimulation made everything dreamlike and unreal. ‘Come now, lad,’ he chided, although he did not appear any older than I. ‘Do you think I don’t know a member of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers when I see one? Why try to hide it?’

‘I’m not hiding anything,’ I replied. ‘I’m merely curious as to how you came to that conclusion, as I carry no badge or mark of identity.’

‘Do you not?’ he asked, still grinning. ‘Who else but a clockman would be standing here in the middle of a snowstorm, oblivious as a pilgrim in a cathedral? And you are English, as I deduced from your manner of dress, and as your speech confirmed. Finally, you recognized the Latin motto. Thus, you are an English clockman. Thus, you are a member of the Worshipful Company. Quod erat demonstrandum .’

‘You are here,’ I pointed out. ‘You speak English and are acquainted with the motto. Does that make you a member of the guild?’

The man gestured with the charred flambeau. ‘I have to be here, don’t I? No matter the weather, the lamps must be lit. But now my work is done, and I’m for the hearth and home. You’d best come along, before you freeze to death.’

I confess I was taken aback at the invitation. ‘That’s very generous of you,’ I said, ‘but if you could just direct me to a good inn …’

Again he laughed, expelling gouts of steam from the thicket of his beard. ‘Why, where did you think we were going? To my hearth and home? The missus would have my head on a platter!’ Chuckling, he started off across the square, moving with the lurching gait I had noticed earlier, as if the ladder slung over his shoulder was a lot heavier than it looked.

‘What’s your name, clockman?’ the man inquired once I had caught him up.

I gave him my alias. ‘I am Michael Gray.’

‘Adolpheus.’

I wondered whether this was a first or a last name. No clarification was forthcoming.

‘Come to fix our clock, have you, Master Gray?’

‘I’m no master,’ I told him. ‘Just a journeyman. But yes, I’d like to try.’ That seemed the safest way to answer the question.

‘Climbed all this way, did you? Afoot, with no horse to bear you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re fortunate. Each spring we find the frozen bodies of those who stray off the track in some snowstorm or other.’

‘I didn’t realize it was so dangerous.’

Adolpheus grunted but said no more. He led me through a maze of steep and narrow lanes, all of them deserted, past closed-up shops and dwellings whose curtained windows glowed warmly through the falling snow, which had increased in intensity, along with the wind. If it didn’t qualify as a snowstorm yet, it would soon do so.

At last, following my guide around a corner, I found myself facing a two-storey dwelling whose windows were ablaze with light. The inn – or so I judged it to be from the clapboard sign that hung above the door, which depicted a dog lying curled before a fire and was flapping vigorously back and forth as though determined to break loose and fly away, a creature tethered against its will – seemed to promise more than mere hospitality, as if every species of earthly delight were to be found within.

‘The Hearth and Home,’ Adolpheus said, bustling forward. He unslung his ladder and leaned it against one wall, where snow was already piling up, then laid the dead torch across the top rung. Motioning for me to precede him, he flung the door open.

A wave of warmth and conversation rolled out. Smells of wood smoke, tobacco, cooking meat, mulling wine and cider, and spilled ale mingled with the steamy odours of wet garments drying in the heat of a roaring fire. I paused on the threshold, dizzy, dark spots and bright sparks dancing before my eyes. A hush descended, not hostile, but not welcoming, either. A dog barked once, sharply.

In my travels, I had of necessity become a connoisseur of silences. Being able to judge them correctly can mean the difference between life and death to a stranger entering a place whose customs and language may be other than his own. This silence was made up of curiosity and suspicion in equal measure. I guessed that more than one of the hushed conversations had concerned my identity and purpose – news of a visitor spreads fast in small towns, along with the wildest of rumours. In such cases, it is imperative to make the proper first impression. People are ever eager to believe the worst.

I removed my hat, but before I could say a word, Adolpheus pushed me forward and entered behind me, slamming the door against the wind. ‘Bless all here,’ he said in German, vigorously brushing the snow from his beard.

Voices chorused a welcome: ‘Doooolph!’

‘I’ve been known to look in from time to time,’ he confided to me in English with a wink and a grin as he tugged off his gloves.

My eyes had cleared, the dizziness lifted, and now I saw that there were a dozen or so men seated at tables in the inn’s common room, and an immensely fat, middle-aged woman who stood behind a long and unoccupied bar. All their eyes were fixed on me through a drifting bluish haze, but I sensed no animosity in their regard; thanks to Adolpheus, I had been accepted, accorded the provisional status of guest rather than intruder. I nodded a generalized hello, and the buzz of conversation resumed.

A medium-sized but rotund brown and white terrier, which I assumed was the same dog that had barked at my entrance, came waddling up like a sausage with legs, and Adolpheus chuckled and scratched behind the animal’s foxlike ears. ‘Hello, Hesta, old girl.’

The dog had but a single eye; the other, to judge by the scars surrounding the empty socket, had been lost in a fight. She wagged her stubby tail, basking in the attention, then gave my outstretched palm a sniff and allowed herself to be patted on the head before retreating, satisfied, to what was plainly her accustomed spot before the fire.

‘It’s she who truly owns the place,’ said Adolpheus, tucking his gloves into the pockets of his cloak. ‘The great Frederick himself couldn’t stop here if Hesta didn’t approve.’ He unfastened the cloak and shrugged it off, then handed it to me, indicating with his eyes a row of wooden pegs along one wall, above his reach, where other cloaks were hanging, dripping onto the wooden floor. ‘Would you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ I told him in my rough German. At his raised eyebrows, I added, ‘You see, I am as adept in your language as you are in mine.’

‘Then perhaps we can misunderstand each other equally,’ Adolpheus replied – in German – with a laugh. He had taken off his hat and tucked it beneath his arm, revealing a full head of hair the same reddish-brown as his beard.

I hung the cloak on an empty peg, then hung my own beside it. I shrugged out of my rucksack and stamped clinging snow and ice from my boots, toes tingling as they began to thaw. Meanwhile, the woman from behind the bar came forward to greet us. I tried not to stare, but I had seldom seen a woman – or man, for that matter – of such prodigious girth. Her bare arms were the size of hams; her neck and chin were lost in rolls of rosy pink flesh; the movement of her bosom beneath the tent of her blue and white smock, with its colourfully embroidered designs of mountain wildflowers, was positively oceanic. Seeing her across the room, I had assumed she was in her mid-to-late forties, perhaps somewhat older, but up close she appeared younger than that – or, no, not younger, but as if the range of her possible ages was wider than I had at first supposed, just as she herself appeared to widen as she approached, glowing with health and vigour. Her cheeks were like firm red apples, her eyes were blue as gentians, and thick brown braids, like wreaths of fresh-baked bread, curled about ears that were translucent, pink, and incongruously small, like souvenirs of a dainty girlhood otherwise unimaginable.

‘Well, and who’s your handsome friend, Dolph?’ she asked in German, appraising me with a frank and, or so it seemed, flirtatious stare. She was nearly my own height, but she must have outweighed me by two hundred pounds or more. She smelled like beer and bread. What would it be like, I found myself wondering, and not entirely without interest, to bed such an enormous woman?

Adolpheus introduced me as Michael Gray, a journeyman of the Worshipful Company. The woman’s name, I learned, was Inge Hubner.

‘A pleasure to meet you and enjoy such warm hospitality,’ I told her with a gallant bow. I spoke in German, and the rest of our conversation took place in that tongue; indeed, unless I mention otherwise, you should assume that all the conversations I report to you were conducted thus.

Inge laughed, her chins jiggling. ‘You’re a long way from home, Herr Gray . But I’ll bet I can guess what brings you to Märchen. You’ve come to try your luck with Wachter’s Folly, haven’t you?’

‘She means the clock,’ Adolpheus put in. ‘That’s what we call it hereabouts, after its maker, Jozef Wachter.’

‘I should very much like to meet him,’ I said.

‘Why, you should very much not !’ Inge said. ‘The man is dead and gone almost half a century now, with that old clock, his monument, growing crazier by the year … by the day, I sometimes think. Can you set it to rights?’

‘With God’s help,’ I made modest answer.

‘Worshipful indeed!’ Her blue eyes twinkled with a teasing good humour that brought a blush to my cheeks – and even in those days, I was not a man given to blushing.

Adolpheus chuckled. ‘You’re embarrassing the lad, Inge.’

‘Nonsense.’ She winked at me, and for a moment I was afraid that she was going to reach out and give my cheek a pinch. ‘Have I embarrassed you, Herr Gray?’

‘Not at all, Fraülein—’

‘Herr Gray!’ interrupted Inge with a little shriek, as though scandalized; she held up her hand to display a fat gold band around a sausage-sized finger. ‘I’m a married woman!’

‘My apologies, Frau Hubner.’

‘Just call me Inge; everybody does. Now, I suppose you’ll be wanting a room? At this time of year, you can take your pick. Six pfennigs a night; eight, with meals included. You’ll do no better, I promise you.’ She grinned; her teeth were small and white, like kernels of Indian corn. ‘The Hearth and Home is Märchen’s only inn.’

‘And a fine one, by the looks of it,’ I said, nor was I flattering my hostess. The common room was clean and comfortably appointed. It had an atmosphere of cosy geniality, from the fire roaring in the large stone fireplace, to the mugs lined up above the mantel, to the oil paintings – of pristine Alpine vistas full of tumbling waterfalls, stark precipices, stands of pine, verdant meadows dotted with wildflowers, and wide, blue skies – hanging on the oak-panelled walls; all affirmations of the town’s prosperity. The men gathered companionably at their tables gave me the impression of belonging nowhere else, and the steady murmur of conversation and laughter that rose from them seemed as intrinsic to this place as the crackling of the fire. There was even a cuckoo clock behind the bar; its hands indicated eighteen minutes past the hour of seven. Fishing out my pocket watch, I was surprised and impressed to find only a small, but quite acceptable discrepancy between them.

‘Not every timepiece in Märchen is in need of repair,’ remarked Adolpheus. ‘Herr Gray, I’ll leave you in Inge’s capable hands. Once you’ve got him settled, Inge, I’ll have a cup of your excellent mulled wine.’

‘I’m grateful to you, Adolpheus,’ I said. ‘You must let me buy that wine.’

‘With pleasure.’ He gave me a smart bow, which I returned. Then the little man moved off towards one of the tables, still walking with his lopsided gait. Only now did I perceive that he was crippled; one leg was shorter than the other, and his right shoe had been built to correct the defect, which it did but imperfectly.

‘I’ll take you upstairs,’ said Inge. ‘Don’t worry about your cloak; it’s safe where it is. You’ll find no thieves in Märchen.’

I followed the ponderous sway of Inge’s massive hips up the creaking stairs and down a passage lit by the candle she held before her. She unlocked a door at the end of the corridor and went in, hips squeezing past the sides of the frame. After a moment, the tremulous light within grew stronger, and she called my name. Was it my imagination, or did she press herself against me as I entered the small room? It was impossible in any case to avoid her. As I brushed by, breathing in her yeasty smell, I had the sense that, if she chose, she could engulf me like rising dough swallowing a raisin. The image, however ridiculous, was not entirely without appeal. Again, I felt myself blushing. Nor was that the only physical response she had provoked. I like women with meat on their bones, yet I had never imagined that my tastes ran to such an extreme.

I turned away as soon as I could, embarrassed by an attraction I couldn’t account for, and set my rucksack on the wooden floor, leaning it against the wall to one side of the door. Inge gave no sign of having noticed anything amiss. Perhaps she, too, was embarrassed.

The room may have been small, but it was neat and snug, with a narrow bed along one wall, a painted cupboard whose insides smelled of cedar and saxifrage, a boxy ceramic stove so hot that the air around it shimmered, making its diamond-patterned red and white tiles seem to undulate, and a table upon which sat a wash basin, a covered pitcher of water, and an upside-down glass, along with a folded towel and an oil lamp that cast a shivery light. There, too, Inge had set her candle. The chamber pot, she told me, was under the bed. Outside the window, the snow was coming down so thickly that I couldn’t make out the street below, only the smudged glow of street lamps that might have been wrapped in muslin.

‘Quite a blizzard,’ I commented, taking the opportunity to place my damp hat upon the edge of the table nearest the stove.

‘Blizzard?’ Inge scoffed. ‘Why, this is but a flurry!’

‘Will it last long?’

‘A day, a week; who can say? Perhaps it will be over by morning. Perhaps not until spring.’ She gave me a wink. ‘You may be with us for a long while, Herr Gray!’

I confess I hadn’t considered the possibility of becoming trapped here. The prospect was worrisome. ‘Surely there must be means of transport up and down the mountain.’

Inge shrugged. ‘We’re self-sufficient here. We have to be. For us, winter is a siege. All summer long, we lay up supplies. Then we sit tight and wait the winter out. But if someone wants to tempt fate and go down the mountain, who can stop them?’ She twisted the front of her smock in her beefy hands. ‘Sometimes people go a little … mad. The shadow of the glacier falls across their souls. A desperation fills them, a desire to be gone from the endless snow and ice, the howling winds, that clock that keeps its crazy hours. It’s a sickness, a fever. Some flee suddenly, in the dark of night; others plan obsessively, in minute detail, before setting out. Either way, few who descend the mountain in the dead of winter reach the bottom alive.’

‘How horrible! Does it happen often?’

‘Often enough. Herr Hubner, my husband, disappeared seven winters ago. His body has yet to be found.’

‘I’m sorry. It must be terrible not to know what happened, whether he’s dead or alive. I suppose that’s why you still wear your ring: a token of hope that he might return one day.’

Inge laughed, her teeth glinting like seed pearls. ‘The explanation is not so romantic, Herr Gray! I wear my ring because I can’t get it off my finger – I was but skin and bones all those years ago, when I first put it on. Besides, in my profession, a wedding ring is an asset. It lends a certain … respectability. But truthfully, if my husband were to walk into Märchen tomorrow, I’d kill him myself, the swine. He robbed me, you see. Emptied the till when he left – took every last pfennig. I know what you’re thinking. How can it be robbery when it was all his own property?’

‘I’m no lawyer, thank God,’ I told her, for I had not been thinking any such thing.

‘He left me nothing,’ she insisted. ‘Only debts. I would have lost this place if not for Herr Doppler, the burgomeister.’ Inge shook her head as if reluctant to let go of the subject. ‘Never mind. He won’t be back. He didn’t make it down the mountain.’

‘If his body was never found, how can you be sure?’

‘I saw it in a dream.’

‘And do you always believe your dreams?’

‘You may be an educated man, Herr Gray, but you don’t know everything. I watched Hans fall; I saw him lying broken at the bottom of a crevasse. He wasn’t dead, either; not yet he wasn’t. Just paralysed. Eyes aglitter with pain and terror, he was gazing up as the snow fell down, covering him like a shroud. That was my dream.’

‘It sounds more like a nightmare.’

‘I’m not ashamed to admit that I woke up with a smile,’ Inge said, and for just a second, or so it seemed to me in the shifting light, her eyes became coals of feral satisfaction, like a cat’s. ‘It was the answer to my prayers, that dream. Haven’t you ever had such a dream?’

‘I have many dreams,’ I told her. ‘In some I fly. In others, beautiful women desire me. Once I took a journey to the moon! Alas, none of them are real.’

‘Perhaps they are more real than you know.’

I laughed. ‘Do you suppose I visited the moon after all?’

‘Or the moon visited you. Some believe dreams come from there.’

‘The moon is a globe of rock, Inge. I have examined its bleak surface through a telescope. It is a dead place, a battered wasteland, as though a great war was fought there long ago. A war that left no survivors.’

‘I didn’t say I believed it,’ she answered. ‘Still, I don’t suppose you’d deny that God can send us true dreams if He wishes it.’

‘By all means. But why should He wish it? Is there some flaw in His design that requires personal intervention?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Herr Gray. I’m a simple woman. I only know what I saw.’

‘But then why not go to the spot you dreamed of and dig up the body? Get your money back?’

She wagged a finger under my nose. ‘Now you are teasing me. The dream didn’t supply me with a map. I saw a crevasse, one of hundreds. Every year there are avalanches. Crevasses fill up. Others open. Should I waste my time searching for something that might not even exist any more? No, I have an inn to run.’ She picked up the candle from the table. ‘Now, shall I have some supper sent up, or will you eat downstairs?’

‘I’ll be down in a moment,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘A bowl or two of my stew will fix that.’ Inge removed the key from the door and handed it to me. ‘As I said, you’ll find no thieves in Märchen, but if there are any valuables you’d care to safeguard, purely for your own peace of mind, I keep a strongbox.’

‘Just my tools,’ I told her, glancing towards the rucksack. ‘But I carry them with me at all times. And this as well.’ I patted my hip, where I wore a long dagger in a leather sheath.

‘Och, you’ll not need that pigsticker here,’ Inge protested.

‘I’m sure I won’t, but I feel safer with it just the same.’

‘Well, as long as you keep it sheathed. I don’t want you waving a blade around under my customers’ noses!’

‘Not unless someone’s waving a blade under mine.’

‘Then we’ll have no trouble, Herr Gray. I’ll leave you to get settled in now.’ Executing a curtsy, Inge withdrew, shutting the door behind her. The floorboards trembled to her retreating footsteps.

I strode to the door and locked it. I thought it odd that my hostess would confess to having been robbed, albeit by her own husband, and then assure me that there were no thieves in town. But then, Herr Hubner wasn’t in town, was he? Whether his corpse lay entombed in ice at the bottom of a crevasse, or, more likely, he was enjoying a new life, with a slimmer wife, somewhere far away, the man was not to be found in Märchen. And if he knew what was good for him, I thought, remembering the fierce look that had kindled in Inge’s eyes, he never would be.

Alone, I performed my ablutions, then poured a glass of water and gulped it down. The water tasted pure, ambrosial; so cold, despite the heat of the room, it made my teeth ache down to the roots. Drawn, no doubt, from some pristine mountain spring. I poured a second glass. The contents glittered in the lamplight and went straight to my head like a liquor distilled from glacial ice, frozen instants aged to a ravishing potency. I leaned into the table, steadying myself against the prickly aurora that crystallized behind my eyes. It melted away in a slow, shimmering ebb, leaving me dizzied, breathless. My heart tolled in my chest.

A dazed weariness stole over me, all those miles I’d climbed catching up at once. That, and the stifling heat. I made my way to the bed, intending to sit for a moment before returning to the common room for a bowl of Inge’s stew, but the downy mattress had other ideas, seeming to pull me in as I had imagined Inge herself doing. I let myself fall back into its embrace, closing my eyes, in my ears a soft hissing that, already half asleep, I attributed to snowflakes expiring against the windowpanes over my head rather than to the efficiency of the stove.

I awoke to a faint, persistent rasping, as of something heavy being dragged across the floor. Someone was in the room. But the lamp had gone out; I couldn’t see a thing. I listened as the sound continued, seeming to draw nearer by slow inches – drag, pause, drag, pause – until it reached the foot of the bed. Then it fell silent.

I held my breath. The only sound was the hissing of the stove. Had Inge sent a man to murder me, intending to steal my possessions? Such crimes were not unheard of. Or was the purpose of this visitation to administer a beating, a warning from the wizard I had been following to meddle no more in his affairs? Either way, I would not be an easy victim . I drew back against the headboard, pulling my dirk from its sheath. ‘Who’s there?’ I growled. ‘I’m armed, I warn you.’

A light kindled, like no earthly light I had ever seen. This was no enemy of darkness, no flame of lamp or candle to send shadows scurrying like bedbugs or blind my eyes. It was as though a star had drifted down through the ceiling, shining with a cool, silver-blue radiance that penetrated the dark without dispelling it, revealing the bed, the cupboard, the blade I held in a trembling hand … which shook not just from fear but because the temperature had plunged in an instant. Only, there was no star, nor any other single source of light. Rather, the light seemed to be an inherent property of the objects themselves. It covered their surfaces in a frostlike rime whose glow radiated outwards like a visible manifestation of the cold I felt so keenly that my teeth had begun to chatter. Even the stove seemed a font of frigidity now, and the fog of my breath glimmered as if with crystals of ice. It was beautiful but also terrible, like a glimpse into some wintry netherworld.

Beautiful and terrible, too, was the woman who stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at me with eyes of smoky green, like malachite. Her skin was pale as alabaster, her lips the blue of lapis lazuli, her long hair blacker than the darkness that seemed not just her rightful habitation but her sovereign domain. And indeed, she wore a gown such as the queen of midnight’s kingdom might wear, of deep, wine-dark velvet and white, diamond-studded lace that bloomed around her slender neck in intricate latticework patterns and tumbled in frothy swaths from her shoulders and arms like abundant drifts of snow. Had I been standing, I would have fallen to my knees; as it was, my nerveless fingers could not retain their grip on the dirk, and it fell into the bed-sheets beside me. Surely, I thought, I was in the presence of an angel! Feelings of worshipful awe came streaming into my heart, filling its chambers, stretching its walls. Yet so exquisite was the pain of this ravishment, so unreservedly did I give myself up to it, that I yearned for the process to go on and on, even if it meant my swollen heart must burst. Or, no, I wanted it to burst, ached to lose myself in a blissful annihilation …

But the explosion, when it came, involved another organ. I felt the first shuddering spasm and looked down, only then realizing that my member was as hard as iron. I had never spent myself so violently, so prodigiously. I groaned as much in shame as in ecstasy, for the feelings kindled by the sight of my visitor had been pure, exalted, spiritual in the highest sense, and yet some faulty mechanism of my body had translated those feelings into the grossest sort of animal display. But I couldn’t cover the spreading stain, couldn’t move so much as a finger. And this was just from the mute aura of her presence. If she should speak or touch me, I felt that I would expire …

I raised my eyes to her face, expecting to see disgust and anger written there, afraid I had committed a sin for which the punishment would be swift and of utmost severity, though the gravest punishment I could think of was the loss of her. Instead, she was smiling, and her green eyes seemed kind, alive in a way they hadn’t been before, as if I’d made her a rich offering, a tribute that she accepted not just as her due, but with true gratitude: because it was needful somehow, precious to her despite its base origin … or, perhaps, because of it. I didn’t know. I only knew that I would do anything to please her, to keep her looking at me that way.

‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘Please …’

She seemed about to speak, but then she gave a start, as if at a noise only she could hear. Alarm and fear rose in her features. This shocked me, for how could such a perfect being be afraid … and of what? I realized at the same time that she was younger than I had thought: was, in fact, younger than I. Had she always been so? A rosy blush infused her skin; her lips glistened as if with the juice of blueberries; the green of her eyes was no longer that of cold stone but a shade at once more vibrant and more fragile: an audacious springtime green. She seemed to be in the throes of a transformation, as though something frozen in her had begun to melt; and even as I had this thought, tears welled up in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

‘What is it?’ I asked, pierced to the heart by this evidence of vulnerability and filled with a fierce desire to protect her; indeed, at that moment I would have laid down my life for her without question or hesitation. ‘What are you afraid of?’

She answered in a breathless voice that was nothing like I had imagined it might be – beautiful, yes, but humanly so … which made it seem even lovelier, and made her seem lovelier, too, nearer to me, not an angel but a woman. ‘He approaches.’

‘He?’

A booming shudder passed through the bed, the inn, the world. And then another. Like the rolling thunder of an avalanche. Or the footsteps of a giant.

‘My father,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘If he should find me here … I must go!’

‘But who are you? I don’t even know your name—’

Another footstep, much closer, as if from just outside the window behind me. I turned, but could see nothing through the glass, which was thoroughly befogged. The whole room, in fact, was filling with fog, and when I turned back to the girl, I saw that the source of it was her gown. The air had grown warmer, and I heard the steady hissing of the stove again. Or not the stove, but the gown itself, the icy fabric melting, dissolving, turning translucent as it thinned, so that I could see the outline of the body within, willowy and white, the pink buds of breasts visible for an unforgettable instant before, raising one arm to cover herself, the girl turned with a cry and fled the room.

‘Wait,’ I called, but she was gone, vanished into the billowing mist. As I moved to follow, I felt the unmistakable sensation of being observed, and so powerful was this intrusive presence that I turned back to the window, afraid that I would see a gigantic eyeball pressed to the glass. But the swirling fog was too dense. Whatever was out there, watching me, I could not see it, though the force of its dreadful regard immobilized me, held me in its grasp so that I could not even breathe.

Then the pressure withdrew. I coughed, sucking air into my lungs as I heard and felt the ponderous footsteps drawing off. I was limp with relief, drenched in sweat. Yet I could not forget the girl was out there, pursued by a father (for so she had named him) that she feared. I was afraid as well, I won’t deny it, and a part of me wanted nothing more than to pull the sheets up over my head and, like a trembling boy, take refuge in a cosy darkness of my own making. But I would not be ruled by fear. I paused only to pick up my dirk before plunging into the already dissipating mists after my beautiful visitor. She would not face her father alone and unprotected.

She proved easy to follow: her melting dress had left a wet trail across the floor that glowed with a silvery-blue phosphorescence. I lost my footing once and almost fell as I hurried down the stairs and into the common room … which was empty save for the hound, Hesta, asleep before the glowing coals of the fire, her fat old body twitching in the throes of some doggy dream. Curtains of fog made slow undulations in the air. I wondered how late it was, how long I had slept, but I couldn’t make out the face of the cuckoo clock. Nor did I linger for a closer look or check my pocket watch. Instead, I hurried out of the inn.

The snowstorm had grown worse. I did not think even Inge would have balked at the word blizzard now. Driven by the wind, icy flakes smacked into my face from all sides, like an insect swarm. I sheathed my dirk and pressed forward, my hands raised in a useless attempt to ward off the snow. I managed a few stumbling steps before halting, overwhelmed, in a snowdrift that reached to mid-thigh, so disoriented I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to the inn. The sweat had frozen upon my body, so that I felt rimed in ice, and the seed I had spilled was so cold against my skin that it almost seemed to burn. Perhaps I should have given up then, or at least returned to the Hearth and Home for my cloak, but then a fresh blast of wind tore the white swarm asunder long enough for me to pick out the trail again: a shimmering path that twined across the mounds and swells of snow like the track of a sledge. All at once, at the end of that trail, I saw the girl rise into view as if emerging from out of a hole in the ground; she was far away, a small glowing figure that skimmed over the snow like a skier. I cried out, but the wind tore my words away, and then she swerved around the corner of a building and was gone.

I pushed after her. The trail I had seen was a narrow path of ice whose thin crust stretched unbroken by so much as a footprint over the new-fallen snow. It did not bear my weight as it had hers, and I felt rough as an ox as I lumbered in her wake through drifts that reached to my hips, fighting the wind every step of the way, pulling myself forward with my arms as if wading through a river.

After a time impossible to measure, I saw what I took to be crows or ravens flapping frantically inside glass cages, and I stopped, aghast at the strangeness and cruelty of the sight, wondering at its purpose. But then I realized that I was looking at the street lamps Adolpheus had lit earlier, their flames so black it was as if darkness itself had caught fire. This seemed even stranger than my first, mistaken impression, and I felt my courage quail. But though I no longer heard or felt the earthquake footsteps of the girl’s father, I believed she was still in danger, still in need of my help.

Redoubling my efforts, at last I turned the corner where I’d lost sight of her. The clock tower loomed ahead. Wachter’s Folly , Inge had called it. Like everything else except the flames of the street lamps, it glowed a spectral blue … only the light appeared more intense than elsewhere, as if I had found its source. I hadn’t thought the night could get any colder, but now, as I approached the tower, the temperature dropped further, and the air actually seemed to grow denser, as if in transition from gas to solid. The wind, too, opposed me, pushing back until I was no longer advancing but struggling just to hold my ground.

The girl’s trail led straight to the base of the tower, a good ten yards away … and vanished. Had she entered the structure somehow? Or climbed its intricately adorned surface, seeking shelter from the blizzard and her father in the recess of the upper platform or among the bells of the campanile? I glanced up, shielding my eyes, and saw that the hands of the clock were spinning wildly, out of all proper relationship to each other, as if following different measures of time. The hour hand flew by the minute hand, which was itself turning at an abnormally fast speed.

This was no malfunction. I had seen enough examples of the wizard’s work to know that the clock was operating as it had been designed to do. I was convinced that I had found what I had been searching for – if not the wizard himself, then a timepiece built by his hand, or to his specifications. I needed to get closer, to get inside the tower, where I could examine the machinery. I would need no lamp or candle in the otherworldly blue light, which did not fall from without but instead seemed to have its mysterious origin deep within each object, a radiance arising from the heart of all matter. Then it struck me. And shook me to my soul. For what else could be the source of this eldritch light but time?

Surely, I thought, this was how God and His angels apprehended the world ! Within this clock tower, preserved like a corpse within a glacier, lay the secret for which I had been searching, the grail I had followed halfway round the world: a mechanism by which time itself could be mastered, transcended. I was sure of it. And the same intuition that told me the end of my quest was waiting within the tower assured me the girl was a part of it all … and, what’s more, always had been: that without ever suspecting it, I had been searching for her as well as the wizard. I did not know who – or even what – she was: whether woman or angel. I only knew she was essential to me, that I would never possess the secret of this clock until I possessed her. She was the secret, I sensed, or a facet of it, a part inseparable from the whole. To gain one was to gain the other.

By now the spinning hands had lost their individuality, melting into a silver-blue blur that seemed distinct from the clock itself, detached from it, a cloudy, pearlescent sphere hovering in the air before me like a cyclopean eye. I shuddered, feeling that I had come once again under the scrutiny of whatever had observed me earlier, in my room at the inn. The girl’s father, whose footsteps had shaken the ground like an avalanche and sent her fleeing in terror. But where was he? What was he? I could not tear my eyes away from the floating orb, could not move so much as a finger.

And then, with mounting horror, I perceived that the orb was not merely like an eye but was in fact that very thing, and the tower likewise was no tower but a serpentine body coiled tightly upon itself. The campanile was the crest of a huge head, and what I’d taken to be a recessed platform, a stage across which automatons would parade in stiff, mechanical pantomime, was a cavernous mouth that could swallow me at a gulp. As I could see only a single eye, I assumed at first that the beast was peering at me sideways, its vision monocular, like a snake’s. But then the great head stirred, rose, and came gliding towards me without haste, inescapable as fate, and I realized that the dragon was staring at me full-on and that there was just the one eye, the other socket empty, as if the eye once housed there had been put out long ago by the lance of a questing knight. Its breath washed over me, redolent of hot metal and oil, and for a second, deep in the monstrous gullet, I saw a silvery glimmer, like a chain of stars. Then what might have been a cloud of bats came winging towards me from out of that long tunnel, hundreds, thousands of flickering shadows. I quailed, remembering the black flames trapped in their glass cages. But there would be no caging these flames, no escaping them. Paralysed with terror, I awaited incineration.

It did not come. No fire shot from between the gaping jaws. Instead, a pleasant warbling filled the air, as if, despite its size and appearance, what faced me was nearer to bird than dragon. Sweet music tumbled over me, an avalanche of pure, ringing tones …

It had been, of course, a dream, as I realized the instant I came awake, bolting upright to a cascade of carolling bells. My heart thumped, and sweat clung to my skin in the overheated room. Outside, Wachter’s Folly was tolling some no doubt outlandish hour. In the strong and shifting winds, laden with their cargo of snow, the sounds seemed near one second and far off the next, as if the tower were being blown about like a kite on a string. But those winds couldn’t touch me here, claw as they might at the windows, rattling the panes. The lamp on the table across the floor glowed a warm, welcome yellow, and its steady light illuminated the furnishings and other objects it fell upon, just as proper light should do. The stove sighed contentedly in its corner.

I rubbed my eyes, wondering how long I’d slept. According to my pocket watch, it was well past midnight. Dream images fluttered through my mind. I recalled the head of the dragon drawing near, the baleful effulgence of its solitary eye. And the girl … How beautiful she had been! Majestic, like a queen of ice and darkness … yet vulnerable, and all the more desirable for it.

Desirable indeed, for as I rose from the bed, a certain intimate dampness testified to one way, at least, in which the dream had not been entirely a thing of fancy. Succubus-like, the girl had ravished my body even as she seduced my mind.

I made my way to the table, where I laved water from the basin over my face; though lukewarm now, it brought me fully awake. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten all day. I turned to leave the room, intending to go in search of food, perhaps some of that stew Inge had mentioned … and froze, hackles rising.

Water was puddled on the floorboards at the foot of the bed. A trail of smaller puddles led to the door.

Someone had entered my room, tracking in snow from outside, and stood at the foot of the bed, watching as I slept. I assured myself that my purse had not been cut, thinking with a shiver that it was fortunate I was such a deep sleeper; had I woken, it could very well have been my throat that was cut. But some intimation of the intruder’s presence had reached me nonetheless, insinuating itself into my dream. The girl, the menacing sense of being observed, even the tread of footsteps …

The thought of my tools intruded, and I crossed to where I’d left my rucksack. It was, I saw at once, open; I knelt and rummaged through it, cursing under my breath as my worst fears were realized.

My tools were gone. Stolen.

9 Herr Doppler

ONLY A FELLOW horologist can grasp the meaning of such a loss. To anyone else, a clockman’s tools might seem no more than mute instruments of metal and wood, but to us they are repositories of knowledge and experience, imbued with memories, with hopes and dreams. More than mere possessions, they are expressions of who we are, extensions of our deepest selves. Some of those tools were my own inventions. Others had come to me from Magnus himself. I felt their loss most keenly. Without them, my examination of Wachter’s Folly would be perfunctory, all but useless.

So much for Inge’s assurances! And yet she’d invited me to place my valuables with her for safekeeping. Had she, then, known or suspected that I might be visited by a thief? Had she been trying to warn me?

I would confront her, of course … but shouting and accusations would accomplish nothing. I had to practise tact, diplomacy. I was a stranger in Märchen, a foreigner; I didn’t know whom to trust. The law was on my side, but that didn’t mean I could count on the burgomeister’s help. Märchen was isolated by the mountains and further cut off by the snowstorm; thus, I reasoned, the tools must still be somewhere in town, and it should be possible, with the proper inducement, to procure their safe return. A generous reward … though it galled me to think that I would be paying a thief’s ransom.

Returning to the table, I lit a candle from the lamp there and then went back to the door. To my surprise, it was locked. What kind of burglar picks the lock to an occupied room, slips inside and performs his thievery, then, upon leaving, takes the time to lock the door behind him? I didn’t see the sense of it. But for that matter, I didn’t understand why the burglar hadn’t taken the trouble to ensure that he didn’t leave a trail of puddled snow-melt behind, either. If the crime had been committed by a fellow guest at the inn, the trail might very well lead me to him.

I unlocked the door, swung it open, and stepped out into the empty passage. Then paused, the candle upraised as though I might hear better by its light. The wind howled outside, and the inn groaned around me like a ship riding out a tempest. Someone was snoring near by, but I heard nothing from the common room below. I started forward, following the watery trail, then stopped and turned back to lock the door – not that there was anything in the room worth stealing now … or that a locked door would afford any protection. Still, the sound of the key turning in the lock was reassuring. Then, feeling like a thief myself, I crept past the closed doors of other rooms to the end of the passage and descended the creaking stairs to the common room.

It was eerily like my dream; all that was missing was the fog. Aside from my candle, the only light came from the still-smouldering fire, which illuminated the sleeping form of Hesta, curled beside the hearth. I started at what seemed at first a gathering of silent, hooded figures by the door, like some grim convocation of monks, then recognized my cloak hanging in the company of several others. At least that had not been stolen.

Someone had taken a mop to the floor, splashing water about … and covering the thief’s tracks. So much for my hopes of following the trail to his door. Meanwhile, though, I was hungrier than ever. I crept towards the kitchen, not wanting to awaken the dog, who would in turn awaken the rest of the inn with her barking. But it was no use; her ears pricked and her head came up, followed by the rest of her. She yawned, shook herself from nose to tail-tip, then ambled over to me, toenails clicking across the stone floor. But she did not bark or growl. Instead, tail wagging, she looked up at me, seeming almost to grin.

‘Poor old Hesta,’ I whispered and reached to scratch behind her ears. ‘Not much of a watchdog, are you, with just one eye? Are you hungry , girl? Let’s see what we can scrounge up to eat around here.’

The dog followed as I slipped behind the long wooden bar, past the cuckoo clock, and through a swinging door that led, or so I assumed, to the kitchen.

It did. The floor had been mopped here as well, and the smooth but uneven stones held pockets of water that glittered like scattered coins in the candlelight. The tables were clear and clean; metal pots hung from hooks in the walls and in the beams overhead. Dishes, glasses and silverware had been set out to dry beside a sink that was larger than some bathtubs I have seen. A huge black cast-iron stove radiated a moderate heat, while orange coals glowed like watchful eyes in the depths of a fireplace that dwarfed the one in the common room. Suspended there by thick chains was a cauldron from which savoury aromas of stewed meat and vegetables spilled.

‘Looks as though we’re in luck, old girl.’

Hesta wagged her tail, eye bright with anticipation.

Setting the candle on a table, I took a bowl from the dishes laid out to dry. Then I crossed to the fireplace, Hesta at my heels. The cauldron was covered, and the heat rising from the lid discouraged me from removing it with my bare hands. But after a moment’s search I found a rag that provided sufficient insulation for the task. A steamy exhalation of mouth-watering odours accompanied the lifting of the lid. I set it down, leaning it against the stones of the mantel. I took a copper ladle from a hook near by and filled my bowl; then, after replacing ladle and lid, made my way back to the drying dishes and silverware. All the while, Hesta’s eye was fixed upon me, as if she hadn’t eaten in days, and though that was plainly not the case, I was moved to set the bowl down on the floor for her. Magnus’s weakness was cats, but I confess I cannot resist the importuning of a dog, provided it is politely done.

‘Ladies first,’ I told her. As she dug in, I fetched a spoon and another bowl, which I filled and brought to the table where the candle was burning. I pulled up a stool and followed Hesta’s example, albeit in a more civilized fashion.

The stew was delicious. I do not think I have ever tasted better. There were chunks of tender beef, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, peas and chopped onions, as well as an array of spices that ranged from the recognizable to the mysterious, all blended with sublime skill. Almost as miraculous as the use to which they had been put was the mere fact that fresh and exotic vegetables should be obtainable in Märchen at this time of year. I wolfed down the contents of my bowl nearly as fast as Hesta did hers, then went back for seconds.

After another spoonful, it occurred to me that a bit of ale would not come amiss. I pushed back the stool, picked up the candle, and left the kitchen through the swinging door. When I returned a moment later, it was with a foamy moustache affixed to my upper lip and a mug brimming with ale from the tap behind the bar.

I stopped short at the sight of a stranger sitting at the table and eating from a bowl of stew. My bowl of stew. The man must have entered through a back door, though I had heard no one come in and Hesta had raised no alarm. Snow clung to the contours of his cloak and, melting, dripped to the floor around the stool on which he sat. His boots, too, were shedding puddles. A large tricorn, capped with snow like a miniature model of the glacier that presided over the town, lay on the table beside a pair of yellowish leather gloves. A lantern had been hung from an iron hook on the wall beside the fireplace, and it shone with a buttery yellow light. As for Hesta, she was stretched on her side next to the fireplace, soaking up its heat; the dog lifted her head as I entered, then lowered it again, unconcerned. I confess I did not share her equanimity.

The stranger appeared to be in his mid-sixties or so, but robust. Despite the inclement weather and the lateness of the hour, he wore a silver club wig whose long tail reached his broad shoulders. With his bristling white moustache, mottled red complexion, and fierce dark eyes, now glaring over the top of the wooden spoon raised partway to his lips, he put me in mind of certain old soldiers I had encountered in my travels, men unable or unwilling to relinquish the habits of military life long after their separation from the service.

‘So,’ he said in heavily accented English, ‘you are the thief who has been making himself at home in Inge’s kitchen.’

I replied in German. ‘I am a guest at the inn. Who are you?’

The man smiled, but did not appear any less menacing on account of it. ‘Who am I?’ He, too, spoke in German now. Setting down the spoon, he removed a white handkerchief from within his left sleeve, dabbed the ends of his moustache, then tucked the handkerchief back in place. ‘You say you are a guest; that makes me your host.’

My confusion deepened. ‘You’re Inge’s … husband?’ A shiver ran through me, as if I were conversing with a ghost, a revenant crawled from out of an icy tomb.

He laughed, and Hesta’s tail thumped at the sound. ‘His successor … though not in the matrimonial sense. I am Inge’s business partner, co-owner of the Hearth and Home. And you are Herr Michael Gray, journeyman of the Worshipful Company.’ Seeing my surprise, he added, ‘There are no secrets in our little town, Herr Gray!’

‘You have me at a disadvantage, Herr …’

‘Doppler.’ The man rose, stepped to one side of the stool, and clicked the heels of his boots together while inclining his torso in a crisp, fractional bow, eyes never leaving my face. His movements shook the last clumps of snow from his cloak. ‘Colonel, retired. I’m the burgomeister here.’ He gestured towards a nearby stool. ‘Please, join me.’

This, I perceived, was not a request. Herr Doppler was a man used to being obeyed. Nor was I, as a stranger precariously situated, inclined to challenge his authority. I settled my candle and mug on the table, pulled up the stool, and sat.

Doppler remained standing. He gazed down the length of his nose at me, a sardonic gleam in his eyes, which I saw now were of a strikingly deep blue, almost purple. ‘I apologize for poaching on your supper, Herr Gray. I’m afflicted with insomnia, and when I cannot sleep I like to walk about the town, making sure everything is as it should be – even on a night like this. Inge knows of my nocturnal perambulations and will often leave me a bite to eat, so when I saw the bowl of stew, I assumed it was intended for me.’

I did not believe he was sharing the entire truth. It seemed to me that it would take more than insomnia to send a man out into the middle of a blizzard. Had I interrupted a tryst? Was the setting out of food a prearranged signal between Inge and Doppler, alerting him that the door to his business partner’s bedchamber would be unlocked? ‘You’re welcome to the stew,’ I said. ‘And I was stealing nothing, by the way. I would have told Inge in the morning, so she could add it to my account.’

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ Doppler said dismissively. He flipped up the back of his cloak and resumed his seat. ‘I was speaking in jest when I called you a thief. I knew who you were the instant I laid eyes on you, though I confess I didn’t expect to have the pleasure of meeting you tonight.’ As he spoke, he produced a silver pocket watch from within his coat, glanced at it, and placed it beside him on the table with the lid open. ‘Or this morning, I should say.’

My gaze was drawn to the timepiece; it seemed ordinary enough, the silver case monogrammed with a design I could not make out in the candlelight: Doppler’s initials, perhaps. ‘While we’re on the subject of thieves, Herr Doppler, I’m afraid I’ve been the victim of one.’

The spoon halted halfway to Doppler’s mouth. His gaze turned hard – or, rather, harder. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘My tool kit was stolen as I slept.’

‘Are you sure you did not simply mislay it?’

‘Quite sure,’ I told him and explained the circumstances, though I said nothing of my dream. ‘I hate to accuse anyone, but the locked door, the trail of melted snow …’ I shrugged and took a sip of ale.

‘Yes, yes, it’s all very suggestive,’ Doppler agreed. He pushed the half-finished bowl of stew to one side as if disgusted by the taste of it. ‘Damn her eyes!’

‘Are you referring to Inge?’ I asked.

‘Inge?’ Doppler plucked at one end of his bristling moustache. ‘No, not Inge. My daughter, Corinna. I’ll lay odds on it, the incorrigible minx!’

‘But why should your daughter want to steal my tool kit?’ I asked in perplexity. ‘And for that matter, how could she have done so? My door was locked. Is she an accomplished burglar, Herr Doppler?’

He chuckled and shook his head, his anger as swift to wane as it had been to wax. Now he appeared amused, flush with a father’s indulgent pride. ‘The how is easy enough, Herr Gray. My daughter helps out here at the inn. She has access to all the keys. As to the why, well, I’m afraid she was present when Adolpheus came to tell me of your arrival. Corinna is quite attached to our wayward clock. All of us are, but my daughter especially so. She sees it as a kindred spirit. Certainly, she can be equally mercurial in her moods and actions, as this latest misadventure demonstrates only too well.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Does she think I mean to harm the clock?’

‘Do you not?’ Doppler demanded. ‘Can you deny that the journeymen of your Worshipful Company are charged with the collection and, if need be, suppression of horological curiosities?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Doppler’s wolfish smile returned. ‘Please, Herr Gray. Do me the courtesy of an honest reply. I have been to England. I know the ways of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.’

‘I won’t deny that we must sometimes take action to protect the patents of our guild,’ I admitted, choosing my words with care. ‘We have every lawful right to do so. Our authority in these matters, as you must know, derives from the king himself. However, we are not in England, sir. I am a visitor to your country, bound by your laws and the obligations of a guest.’

‘Yes, but you remain an Englishman for all that. You do not change loyalties, I think, as easily as you do languages. And old habits, so they say, are hard to break. Harder to break than clocks.’

‘But your clock is already broken, Herr Doppler. I have seen it but once, briefly, and from the outside only. It is undeniably impressive: a masterpiece, without question. It would be a crime to destroy such a clock. A sin. Once my tool kit is returned, I should like to try my hand at repairing it.’

‘The clock does not require repair. It is in perfect working order.’

‘I would hardly call it perfect, Herr Doppler! I realize I haven’t been in Märchen very long, but all the same, I have not heard it strike the correct hour once in that time.’

‘I would be surprised if you had,’ he said. ‘As far as anyone knows, Herr Gray, not once in all the time the clock has been running – more than fifty years now – has it indicated the correct time, either by peal of bells or position of hands. That is a record of perfection as extraordinary in its way as a clock that has never once been wrong, for as you know, a timepiece that runs slow or fast will eventually mark the correct time , if only briefly and, as it were, in passing. Even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. But our clock, to the extent it has been observed, has never, ever been right.’

‘Not once? For that to be true, the hands would have to move backwards as well as forwards!’

‘And so they do, back and forward and back again, as if time were as capricious as the wind. The minute and hour hands often move in opposite directions, at disproportional rates. Have you ever encountered such a marvel, Herr Gray?’

‘I confess I have not.’

‘Surely you can see that to repair such a clock would be tantamount to destroying it.’

‘I don’t agree. To impose order upon this chaos would be—’

Doppler interrupted, leaning towards me intently. ‘But there is already order here, Herr Gray.’

‘If by order you mean the clock’s record of being consistently and invariably wrong, I suppose I must grant you the point in a philosophical sense. But it is an impractical sort of order, to be sure.’

‘Are all things to be judged by their practicality? What about a painting, a statue? Does not a different standard apply to such works of art, one of beauty rather than utility?’

‘Even beauty has its uses, Herr Doppler, if only to give us pleasure. But the highest art unites beauty and utility. What, after all, is more beautiful and useful than a well-made clock? An accurate clock is beautiful in its functioning, regardless of the trappings in which it is set. A timepiece that embraces inaccuracy, however beautiful in appearance and impressive in design, is a perversion of the true clockmaker’s art, which, after all, seeks but to reflect with ever-greater precision the divine ordering that men call time.’

‘A pretty speech,’ Doppler replied. ‘But have you considered the possibility that this clock reflects that divine order more accurately than any other?’

I laughed. ‘Now you are being absurd, Herr Doppler!’

‘To human senses, time seems to flow in one direction only, by a progression of discrete intervals, like grains of sand through an hourglass. But to the Almighty, whose senses are infinite and omnipresent, surely time is something quite different. An eternal instant in which past and future are equally perceptible, equally accessible. Equally real. Have I shocked you?’

‘The concept is interesting, but hardly shocking,’ I replied. Yet in truth, my hand trembled as I raised the mug to my lips and took a deep swallow, though less from shock than from excitement. I remembered how everything had shone with a peculiar blue light in my dream, and how I had associated that radiance with the sacred essence of time. What Herr Doppler was saying resonated with that dream epiphany, confirming my intuition that the clock had much to teach me, if only I could examine it.

‘No doubt you are well versed in all manner of horological speculation,’ Doppler continued. ‘Like Papist Inquisitors, the journeymen of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers are more knowledgeable about heresies than the heretics themselves, eh?’

‘Are you a heretic, then, Herr Doppler?’

‘One can hardly live in proximity to Wachter’s Folly without developing a unique perspective into the nature of time.’

‘That much I’ll grant you. Who was this Wachter? Did you know him?’

‘I was a boy when he disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Herr Wachter was not a native of Märchen. He arrived one day with his daughter. No one knew whence they had come. He was a clockman, a master of the Worshipful Company, or so he said.’

‘You had reason to doubt him?’

‘Not at first. He took rooms here, at the Hearth and Home, and began to ply his trade with such skill that no one thought to question his claims. He did not merely repair the timepieces that were brought to him, Herr Gray: he improved them. So it was that when he approached the burgomeister – that is, my father – with plans for a tower clock that would make Märchen famous throughout the empire, a monument to the piety of our town, he was listened to with respect and, finally, refused with regret, for he was an eloquent and persuasive man. My father allowed me to be present, and believe me, when Wachter spoke of the clock he had in mind to build, it was as though your own Shakespeare had penned the words. But Märchen was then just as you find it today: a humble town, prosperous enough but far from wealthy. We could not bear the financial burden of such an ambitious project.’

‘And yet the clock was built,’ I observed.

‘When my father conveyed his refusal, Herr Wachter made a generous counter-offer. In retrospect, suspiciously so. But at the time, we thought him merely eccentric. We had ample proof of his genius; we had no reason to doubt his sincerity.’

‘What was the offer?’

‘If the town agreed to provide for all the daily wants of his family, he would pay for the clock himself out of his personal fortune, for he was – or so he said – a wealthy man.’

‘And you believed him?’ I laughed outright. ‘Did your father not stop to wonder why a rich man would require the support of the town?’

Doppler gave me an angry scowl. ‘As I said, we thought him eccentric. Wealthy men often are. And so, for that matter, are clockmen.’

‘I suppose we clockmen have a certain reputation for eccentricity, not entirely undeserved,’ I was bound in all honesty to admit. ‘But we have no great reputation for wealth. A tower clock is a huge expense, as you know. I doubt even the grandmaster of my guild, by far its wealthiest member, could finance such a project.’ This was of course not entirely true. My own fortune, for example, was and is sufficient to build a hundred such towers. But that Herr Doppler did not need to know.

‘Even assuming Herr Wachter possessed sufficient funds,’ I continued, ‘why should he dip into his own pocket? The services of a master clockman are widely sought after and well recompensed. If Märchen could not afford to finance the clock, surely there were other, wealthier towns and patrons to whom Wachter could have applied with every expectation of success, whether here in Austria or in some other country – France or Russia, for instance, if not in England herself, which perhaps more than any other nation holds horology in high esteem. A man with Wachter’s talents could have won the patronage of kings and emperors … if, that is, he was what he claimed to be: a master of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. But I’m afraid this Wachter of yours was nothing of the sort. His actions prove it. I suspect he was an amateur, immensely gifted, to be sure, but also – if, as you say, the clock was intended to function in the manner that it does – more than a little mad.’

‘Mad? Perhaps – though the line between madness and genius is a thin and permeable one, I find. But you’re right that he did not belong to your Worshipful Company. After Wachter vanished, my father wrote to London. The guild had never heard of him.’

‘He should have written sooner.’

‘No doubt. But there was no evidence that Wachter was not exactly who and what he claimed to be. During the time he was with us, he laboured steadily on the tower clock and continued repairing our timepieces, as well as building new ones, all of which functioned perfectly.’

‘And how long was he with you?’

‘Nearly ten years,’ Doppler answered, then added defensively: ‘A tower clock is not built in a day.’

‘Still, Herr Doppler, do you mean to tell me that in ten years, no one in Märchen suspected there was anything odd about the tower clock going up right in their midst?’

‘How could we suspect? We are not experts in such things.’

‘The first true clockman to pass through town would have exposed him as a fraud.’

‘No doubt you are right, but no clockman did pass through. Those were unsettled times, Herr Gray. All of Europe was at war. Men did not wander so far off the beaten track as they do today.’

‘Yet Märchen couldn’t possibly have supplied him with all the necessary materials for such a project. Orders must have been placed, supplies delivered.’

‘Even in dangerous times, men will seek profit. Especially in such times.’

It was strange, but though Doppler’s answers to my questions were quite reasonable, I nevertheless felt myself becoming suspicious of them … and of him. His answers were too reasonable, if you see what I mean. Every objection I raised was so smoothly deflected that I couldn’t help wondering what he was hiding. ‘Go on,’ I prompted.

‘There is not much more to tell,’ he said with a shrug. ‘As agreed, we built him a fine house and provided him with everything he needed to live among us in comfort, if not luxury. The years passed as I have told you. Herr Wachter became a fixture of the town, as did his daughter, who grew to young womanhood among us – with no shortage of suitors, I might add, though she showed them scant encouragement; Wachter, like many widowers, was a stern and jealous father. Yet they both seemed content enough here. And one day, at long last, the tower was finished. A ceremony was set for the next day, at which the clock would be blessed by the minister and set to running. But Märchen was awakened before dawn that very morning by the bells of the clock, and I’m sure it will come as less of a surprise to you than it did to us that the hour being tolled so beautifully by those bells was not the same hour we saw registered upon our household clocks, many of which had been made by Wachter. A crowd gathered before the clock tower, where it was discovered that the hands of the clock were moving willy-nilly, as if they possessed a life of their own. But it wasn’t until Wachter was sent for that we received the biggest shock of all: he and his daughter were gone, vanished in the night. He must have planned their escape for a long time, using all the genius he employed in his clock-making endeavours, for no trace of them was ever found.’

‘Perhaps they perished, fell into a crevasse like Inge’s husband.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘She told me earlier that he was dead – Herr Wachter, I mean.’

‘A logical enough assumption, but not personal knowledge. Wachter was fifty-two years old when he disappeared. He would be over a hundred today. I suppose it’s possible he might still be alive somewhere, but it hardly seems likely.’

‘And he left behind no explanation for his strange actions?’

‘Only the clock itself. It explains everything … and nothing.’

‘Why in the name of heaven didn’t your father have the clock repaired at once, when the extent of Wachter’s mischief was apparent?’

At this, Doppler tugged at one end of his moustache. ‘He tried, Herr Gray. He wrote to our own Clockmakers’ Guild in Augsburg, requesting that someone be sent to us. A journeyman was duly dispatched.’

‘It proved beyond his skill?’

‘Beyond his sanity, rather. He entered the clock tower and remained inside for a day and a night. At last, the bailiff went in after him. The man was found lying in one corner, his eyes wide open and unblinking, his body stiff as a corpse. But he was not dead, merely cataleptic.’

‘My God – what happened?’

‘A significant shock to mind and body, or so said the apothecary. After a few days, the man was able to move again, after a fashion, but his mind never recovered. I won’t trouble you with his ravings. They were utterly without sense. Some time later, the guild sent a master clockmaker. The result was identical. No further attempts were made. The entrance to the tower was bricked shut; no one has entered since.’

‘Why, I suspect you are telling me a fairy tale, Herr Doppler!’ I could not forbear from exclaiming.

‘It is the gospel truth, I assure you.’

‘And I suppose you will have a ready answer as well for why the clock was not destroyed after all this?’

If Doppler took offence, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed more amused than anything. ‘That was supposed to happen, Herr Gray. My father received an order to that effect from the guildmaster in Augsburg; such orders, as you may not be aware, being a foreigner, carry the weight of imperial writ. He wrote back stating that he had complied. That ended the matter. As far as the Clockmakers’ Guild is concerned, Wachter’s Folly is no more.’

‘Was your father in the habit of disregarding imperial decrees?’ I asked.

‘Hardly,’ Doppler replied with a tight smile. ‘But in this case, or so he told me later, he felt that disobedience was the lesser betrayal.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me.’

Doppler glanced at his pocket watch, lying open on the table. He picked it up, snapped the lid shut. ‘I will show you.’ He got to his feet, sliding the watch back into his coat. Then he lifted the candle. ‘Come with me.’

‘But where …?’

‘Not far. Come.’ He walked to the swinging door and held it open.

Intrigued, I stood. Hesta, too, bestirred herself. Toenails clicking across the stone floor, she preceded us both through the door. Doppler motioned for me to follow her, which I did, and he brought up the rear. Then , holding the candle before him, he stepped past me and alongside the wooden bar, once again motioning me to follow.

He stopped opposite the cuckoo clock that hung on the wall behind the bar. By the light of the candle, which Doppler placed on the bar, I saw that it was just shy of one o’clock.

‘In a moment, Herr Gray,’ Doppler said in a hushed voice, perhaps afraid of waking Inge, whose room was downstairs, or so I gathered, ‘you will have the answer to your question. Or the beginnings of an answer.’

I had noticed the clock earlier but hadn’t examined it closely. Now that I did, I recognized Wachter’s craftsmanship: there, in miniature, carved into the dark walnut housing, was the same hellish scene depicted upon Märchen’s tower clock. Only here the crowd of the tormented and their tormentors was roughly done, like a study for the larger and more complex composition outside. The figures were blocky, ill-defined, their faces possessing crude features, like marks gouged by a hasty knife, or no features at all. They seemed to be engaged in a struggle to keep themselves from losing definition and sinking into each other, into the wood itself, as if it were the nature of hell to dissolve all distinctions, on every level, mixing matter into a primordial soup of suffering from which, by some supreme effort of stubborn will, or an impulse of pain impossible to imagine, the old body reshaped itself for a time, to undergo again, and yet again, into eternity, the stripping away of flesh from bone, of bone from spirit, of self from self. I wondered what remained after such a scouring. Was it the soul? Or could that, too, be unravelled and reknit, broken down and built up again for ever and ever?

Across the bar, the minute hand of the cuckoo clock jerked upright. A whirring commenced within the housing. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the bar, intent not to miss anything of whatever was about to occur.

The small doors at the top of the clock flipped open, and out popped the strangest-looking bird I had ever seen. But even as it spread glimmering bronze wings, I realized that it was no bird at all. It was a dragon.

The automaton – no bigger than my thumb – was exquisitely crafted. Its metal wings were supple in their flexing, and its barbed tail lashed from side to side in the manner of a cat’s. Arching its neck in a sinuous movement, the mechanical dragon cocked its horned head to one side and seemed to regard me with curiosity through jewel-like eyes. The craftsmanship was extraordinary; I could almost believe I was looking at a living creature. Then the mouth opened, revealing rows of silvery, needle-sharp teeth and a tongue the colour of cold iron. A loud hiss emerged, as from a boiling tea kettle, and I stepped back, reminded of my dream. Even as I did so, a jet of flame gushed from between the mechanism’s jaws. It extended no more than an inch, but so unexpected was the display that I gave a start and cried out as though I had been scorched.

Doppler laughed with childlike glee as the automaton was pulled back into the housing. The tiny doors snapped shut behind it; the minute hand jerked forward.

‘Tell me, Herr Gray,’ he demanded, ‘have you ever seen such a wonder?’

I could truthfully admit that I had not – not in all my travels.

‘Here it is no exception,’ Doppler stated. ‘Just one of many marvels left to us by Herr Wachter.’

‘I should like to examine the workings,’ I said.

‘As to that, you must ask Inge. The clock is hers.’

‘I have read of such marvels,’ I mused. ‘It is said that the court of Byzantium was filled with automatons all but indistinguishable from the birds and animals they resembled. But those secrets were lost with the city.’

Doppler shrugged. ‘Perhaps they survived. Or Herr Wachter rediscovered them.’

‘And you say there are more clocks like this one?’

‘Not precisely the same as this, no, but many others are as distinctive in their way. Herr Wachter lived among us for ten years. He was not idle.’ Doppler slipped out his pocket watch and laid it on the bar. ‘Go on, take it.’

I did so with alacrity.

‘You are holding Wachter’s personal timepiece,’ Doppler told me with pride. ‘My father admired it so often that Wachter finally presented it to him as a gift. And my father passed it on to me. Go on – open it.’

I complied. There, on the face, I saw strange and indeed incomprehensible shapes standing, as it were, in place of numbers, and hands that had the shape of a dragon. Herr Wachter, it seemed, had been obsessed with dragons.

‘Hold it to your ear,’ Doppler directed.

I did so under his expectant gaze. But I heard nothing of interest. In fact, I heard nothing at all. ‘It’s stopped,’ I said.

‘Indeed, it has not.’

‘I hear no ticking.’

‘There is none to hear.’

‘But when you wind the watch, how—’

‘It is not wound,’ Doppler interrupted. ‘The stem is merely decorative.’

I gave the stem a gentle twist. It did not budge. ‘Then how is the watch powered?’

‘I do not know. But it has never run down in all these years. My father did not permit the casing to be opened, fearing that to do so would destroy the mechanism within, and I have followed his wise example.’ He extended his hand; with regret, I laid the watch in his palm.

After Herr Doppler had put away the watch, I pressed him again for permission to examine the tower clock.

‘Imagine,’ he replied, ‘that we were in England, and thus under the jurisdiction of your guild. What do you suppose your masters in the Worshipful Company would make of our tower clock, or the other timepieces you have seen here?’

I knew the answer only too well. They would not permit such unique timepieces to exist. Every last one would be disassembled, stripped of its secrets, and destroyed. But to admit that would have been to scuttle my chances. ‘I cannot say,’ I told him.

‘You are being disingenuous,’ he returned. ‘We both know what their verdict would be. What your verdict, as their faithful representative, must be. You have already made your judgement, Herr Gray. Do not bother to deny it.’

‘How can I judge what I do not understand?’

‘You judge because you do not understand. That is the way of your Worshipful Company, and indeed of our own Clockmakers’ Guild.’

‘That is not my way,’ I insisted. ‘I left England to search out just such timepieces as these. I wish to learn from them, not destroy them.’

‘You wish to plunder them, rather, to take their secrets for your own. Can you deny it?’

‘I am a scientist, Herr Doppler. I proceed by experiment and observation. By reason. How can the science of horology advance unless such marvels as the timepieces of Märchen become part of the common stock of knowledge available to all horologists?’

He laughed. ‘Ah, so you are an altruist, then. You would share your knowledge with the world and not keep it for the advantage of your guild and country. Forgive me, sir, but I am not so naïve as to believe that.’

‘For more than two years now, I have been on a quest of sorts,’ I told him. ‘A quest that has taken me halfway around the world and finally brought me here. I had not heard the name Wachter before yesterday, and yet I have known of him – indeed, I have seen his handiwork in my travels, hints and clues that pointed towards something grander, more fully realized: that pointed, in short, to Märchen. Perhaps you will think me deluded, but I believe that someone – call him Wachter if you like – has led me here for a purpose. I am meant to examine these timepieces.’

‘So you think that Wachter is still alive, do you?’ Doppler mused. ‘You think that he has somehow been a step ahead of you in your travels, leaving behind examples of his craftsmanship like a trail of breadcrumbs for you to follow. And you accuse me of telling fairy tales?’

I confess I blushed at that. ‘I know it sounds far-fetched,’ I admitted. ‘Yet I also know what I have seen. Wachter – or some horological wizard with intimate knowledge of his work – has brought me here. There is something I am supposed to learn. Something I am supposed to do …’

‘I think perhaps it is a good thing that my daughter took your tool kit,’ Doppler said. ‘She acted rashly, precipitately, as she is wont to do, but her instincts were sound. You are a dangerous man, Herr Gray.’

‘You think me mad?’

‘Worse – sincere. You are determined to examine our timepieces regardless of the risk to them … and to yourself.’

‘Is that a threat, Herr Doppler? Am I to be arrested? Expelled from town? Or will I simply vanish, swallowed by the snows like Inge’s husband?’

At this, Doppler’s white whiskers seemed to bristle like the fur of a cat. ‘Do you think we are barbarians, criminals? We are civilized people! I am concerned for your welfare, Herr Gray. Recall the fate of your predecessors who ventured inside the clock tower.’

‘I am willing to take the risk. I would promise to touch nothing, simply to observe, if you would allow me to enter the tower – or to examine the workings of any of the timepieces here.’

‘As to the tower clock, that is off-limits. But you are otherwise free to ply your trade.’

‘You will return my tool kit, then?’

‘We are no more thieves than murderers, Herr Gray. Of course your property will be returned.’

‘And then?’

‘Why, that is up to you. By all means, advertise your services. Make your ambition known. Who can say? Perhaps one of our citizens will bring you a clock or watch made or enhanced by Wachter. Or you may persuade Inge to let you examine her cuckoo.’

I confess I blushed at that, for it seemed to me that Herr Doppler was alluding to something other than the clock whose operation we had just witnessed. I remembered the yeasty smell that had emanated from the corpulent woman, as if she were a loaf of bread freshly removed from the oven, and how that smell had stirred a hunger in me to lose myself in her flesh – a hunger that had, or so I believed, somehow transmuted itself into the succubus-like figure that had invaded my dream. I was a younger man then, and such wayward expressions of desire embarrassed me. I still had much to learn of life and of love. ‘And you will not impede me from plying my trade?’ I asked Doppler.

‘As long as you do not attempt to force the issue, no.’

‘For that I thank you.’

Doppler inclined his head. ‘I have no doubt that you will abide by our agreement,’ he said. ‘Your tool kit will be returned tomorrow. And now, Herr Gray, I must bid you good night. I do not have far to go, but the snow will make my journey home a tedious one, I’m afraid.’

‘Why not remain here, at the inn? Surely Inge has an extra room.’

‘Are you a father, Herr Gray?’

I shook my head.

‘Then you will not understand. But I find I cannot sleep a wink if I am not under the same roof as my daughter. She is all I have left, you see, since the loss of her mother.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Ach, it was years ago,’ he said, making a dismissive gesture with one hand. ‘In truth, we were badly matched, she and I. It amazes me still to think that such an ill-suited union could have produced a treasure like Corinna. I hope you will not hold her indiscretion against her, Herr Gray. She is a good girl at heart.’

‘I have no ill feelings,’ I assured him, ‘and shall tell her so when I meet her.’

‘She will be relieved to hear it, I am sure,’ he replied and took his leave.

10 Corinna

IT WAS SNOWING harder than ever when I awoke the next morning. Outside the window of my room, in the pale morning light, I could catch only fleeting glimpses of the street and hints of buildings across the way. It was as if the town were flickering in and out of existence, suspended in time.

As best I could tell, I’d had no further nocturnal visitors, either in dreams or reality. I performed my morning ablutions and went down to breakfast. The common room was deserted, no doubt because of the snowstorm. There was no sign of Inge or anyone else at the bar; nevertheless, the fire had been built up again, and the room was warm and welcoming. I took a seat at the bar opposite the cuckoo clock, which indicated a time of approximately seven forty-five. As I pulled out my pocket watch and wound the stem, I thought of Doppler’s watch, its ordinary appearance hiding a secret I would have given much to know. A watch that needed no winding, that had not stopped or slowed in more than fifty years, if the man was to be believed. When I’d held it up to my ear, I’d heard nothing at all, as though it were hollow inside. Or solid all the way through. But of course there had to be a mechanism within, some source of motive power. But what?

I looked up at the sound of the kitchen door swinging open. Inge emerged in a cloud of fragrant smoke.

‘Why, good morning, Herr Gray,’ she said, wiping her beefy hands, white with flour, on her apron. She seemed to have grown stouter overnight . Her plump cheeks, flushed from the heat of the kitchen, glowed like ripe tomatoes.

‘Good morning, Inge.’

‘I heard what happened last night,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper as she drew abreast of me on the other side of the bar although we were alone in the room. ‘I’m altogether mortified. The girl will be punished. You’ll get your tools back, never fear.’

‘So Herr Doppler assured me,’ I said.

‘Och, that girl gives herself airs. She thinks that I work for her and not the other way around.’

‘I’d like to speak to her. Is she here?’

‘So early? Not that one! It’s a rare day she’s out of bed before noon. Thinks she’s a princess. And her father, bless his tender heart, doesn’t do anything to correct the impression. What that family needs is a woman’s hand. A mother for the girl, a wife for the father.’

It sounded as if Inge had aspirations to both positions. ‘He’s a widower, I understand.’

‘Lost his wife the same time I lost my husband.’ She leaned across the bar, her yeasty smell once again working its disconcerting magic. Her breasts swelled beneath her apron, seeming about to spill over the top of her blouse. I shifted on my stool as she continued, her voice again dropping to a whisper. ‘They ran off together, Herr Gray, the two of them. I’m telling you because you would have heard it sooner or later, the way the folk of this town gossip. So you see why I wasn’t exactly distraught when I learned of my husband’s fate.’

‘Your dream, you mean.’

She nodded. ‘I saw her there with him, lying broken at the bottom of the crevasse.’ Her smile of fond reminiscence sent a chill down my spine.

‘Of course, it’s not Corinna’s fault that her mother was no better than a common whore,’ Inge continued, sounding as though she believed the opposite was in fact true, ‘but blood tells, you know. The girl needs to be treated firmly, not with the indulgence her father lavishes on her, encouraging all her worst tendencies. I do my best, but I’m afraid my efforts aren’t always appreciated as they should be.’

This I could well imagine. I found myself feeling unexpected sympathy for the motherless girl who had stolen my property.

‘Ach, no matter,’ said Inge, straightening. ‘You’re here for breakfast, not to listen to my troubles. But wouldn’t you prefer to sit at a table, Herr Gray?’

‘I’m right where I want to be,’ I told her. ‘Close to your remarkable clock.’

Inge turned to the side, crossed arms nestling her ample bosom, and beamed at the timepiece on the wall behind the bar. ‘Yes, it’s something, isn’t it?’

‘I saw it strike the hour last night with Herr Doppler. He said I might ask your permission to examine its workings.’

‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question,’ she replied without hesitation.

‘But—’

‘No, Herr Gray. What if you should break it? Who could fix it again? Could you?’

‘I believe I could,’ I answered. ‘Clocks are mechanical devices, no more and no less. Even such a marvel as this one. Herr Wachter’s secrets, once studied, can be understood, and once understood, replicated. I’ve encountered many wondrous clocks in my travels, and I’ve never found one beyond my abilities to repair.’

‘You’re not lacking in self-confidence, I’ll say that for you. Yet sometimes your duty is to destroy, not repair, isn’t that so? At least, that is the case with the journeymen of our own Clockmakers’ Guild.’

‘It is the same with us,’ I admitted. ‘A sad duty.’

‘Sad or happy makes no difference,’ Inge said with a shrug. ‘The result is the same either way. Perhaps you are correct, and you possess the skill to examine my clock without disturbing its workings, or, failing that, to repair it successfully, but what if, instead, you should find something that compelled you to destroy it?’

‘My guild has no authority outside England,’ I answered, choosing my words with care. ‘Indeed, one of the reasons I left England was to escape its authority, so that I would no longer have to put the parochial interests of the guild above science. Destroying clocks is not something I enjoy. It’s abhorrent to me. Besides, I’m a guest here, and it’s a rude guest who damages or destroys the property of his host! Really, if you think about it, I could be a godsend to this town, an English horologist at once beyond the reach of his own guild and unbound by the strictures that would govern the actions of any Austrian clockman. I discussed all this with Herr Doppler last night. He told me I might advertise my services freely and repair or examine any timepiece I cared to – with the owner’s consent, of course.’

‘You make a strong case, Herr Gray. But you must understand, my clock is special. It is Herr Wachter’s finest creation … after the town clock, of course. In some ways, it’s even finer.’

‘It is marvellous,’ I agreed.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘I will not be your first customer, but if you can find someone else willing to let you examine their timepiece, I’ll consider giving you a peek at mine. Don’t look so discouraged, Herr Gray – I haven’t set you an impossible task. Herr Wachter made many timepieces during his years here. You won’t find a household in Märchen without at least one.’

‘I’m not at all discouraged,’ I told her. ‘I’ll make inquiries around town today.’

‘Just one other person,’ she reiterated with a broad wink, ‘and my cuckoo is all yours.’

As with Herr Doppler the night before, I had the sense that Inge’s meaning was twofold. But before I could manage a reply, she turned and made her way into the kitchen, the back of her dress swaying voluminously from side to side with the quiet tolling of her hips. The sight put me in mind of my visit to the clock tower the day before, when I’d watched the bells of the campanile swinging soundlessly in the falling snow. I felt an incongruous stirring of passion, as if the mechanism of desire had become unbalanced in me. As I said, I like women with meat on their bones, but this was beyond anything I had ever experienced. What would it be like to sink into those rolls of flesh, I wondered, to scale the soft mountain of that massive body?

A familiar whirring sound shook me from my reverie. What followed was as extraordinary as I remembered – perhaps even more so, for I was fully awake now and, not taken by surprise as I had been the night before, able to register details that had escaped me when the room had been illuminated by a single candle instead of bright lamps and a roaring fire.

The little coppery dragon that emerged from the clock was the most natural-seeming automaton I had ever seen. Yet it was also the most un natural, for no matter how realistic it appeared, how lifelike the glimmer in its eyes, the sinuous curling of its barbed tail, the ripple of tiny muscles under sleek scales, there are no such things as dragons. They are, are they not, no more than superstitions, myths, the stuff of dreams. As the little fellow vented its finger-length of flame, I recalled my own dream of the immense one-eyed dragon and how it had swivelled its grizzled head towards me and opened wide its jaws. I remembered the dark flickerings in its throat, as of a vast colony of bats stirring in the depths of a cave. A wave of dizziness swept over me, and I clung to the bar like a drowning man to a piece of wreckage.

Then the minute hand jerked forward, and the dragon retreated into its sanctuary, the tiny door snapping shut behind it. There was a last, fading whir, then a silence broken only by the regular knocking of the pendulum. The longing that pierced me at that instant was so pure that it was physically painful. I knew then that my assurances to Herr Doppler and Inge were meaningless.

I would do whatever it took to get inside that clock.

I spent the next hours calling on townsfolk in their homes and places of business. The blizzard was still in full force. Narrow pathways had been shovelled along the streets, with side passages leading to individual buildings to allow for ingress and egress. To prevent these paths from filling up again, they had been lined with wooden frames that joined together to form covered corridors, lit by lamps at regular intervals. The mazelike passages thus formed were narrow, cold and draughty but preferable to being exposed to the elements. While I slept, the town must have been hard at work erecting these frames. I had never heard of such a thing, but the people of Märchen assured me that otherwise they would be snowbound for months on end, trapped in their homes. This way the life of the town could go on even in the depths of winter, while storms raged that made this one appear a mere dusting. It struck me as a peculiar but ingenious solution to the problem set by nature, and I was not surprised to learn that, like the timepieces that so interested me, it, too, was an innovation of Wachter’s.

I found that I did not have to introduce myself: everyone knew who I was and why I had come. The townsfolk were friendly, if somewhat formal. They invited me into their homes, offered me food and drink, a place by the fire, and asked for the latest news of the wider world. I obliged, concealing my impatience with their questions and the comments they exchanged among themselves, which scarcely varied from house to house. Maddeningly, these mundane conversations almost always took place with one of Wachter’s creations in plain view, hanging on the wall or sitting on a nearby table. But at last the moment would come when my hosts would turn to the reason for my visit.

In this, Inge had not exaggerated: every shop and household possessed at least one timepiece of Wachter’s manufacture. These their owners presented for my admiration, hovering at my side as if afraid I might attempt to steal them right out from under their noses. Yet I kept a pleasant demeanour, praising with perfect sincerity the timepieces and the care with which they had been maintained over the years. Each was a masterpiece. In some places I was given no more than a quick glance; in others, I was allowed to hold these beautiful and eccentric creations, which moved me with feelings of wonder, excitement and sadness, as if their secrets lay not merely out of my sight but beyond my understanding, and would remain so even if I should look upon them more closely. I would have had my notebook with me in order to make preliminary notes and sketches, but since my tool kit was still missing, despite Herr Doppler’s assurances that it would be returned, I had judged it best to approach the townsfolk empty-handed, hoping to put them at ease. Nevertheless, my requests for permission to perform a more thorough examination later were everywhere rebuffed.

It struck me after the first hour or so that I hadn’t seen a single timepiece that didn’t show evidence of Wachter’s touch. Inquiring about this, I was told that while Wachter had repaired every clock and pocket watch that was brought to him, he refused to accept new commissions unless his prospective clients first destroyed every other timepiece in their possession. I couldn’t help thinking of the policies of the Worshipful Company and the Clockmakers’ Guild, which would have seen all of Wachter’s timepieces destroyed; here the opposite had occurred, and that had been the fate of the ordinary, run-of-the-mill timepieces . Thus, over the years of his residence, such timepieces had vanished from Märchen altogether, replaced by Wachter’s original creations, or by timepieces he had not just repaired but altered to such a degree that they were, to all intents and purposes, original creations as well. And in the years since his disappearance, no new timepieces had appeared; indeed, the townsfolk, by common consent, kept them out. My own watch, for example, was looked upon with outright suspicion, as if it might carry some sort of plague, and I soon learned to consult it in private only.

By mid-afternoon, discouraged but not defeated, I returned to the Hearth and Home for supper. Easier said than done, as I soon lost my way in the warren of dimly lit passages, none of which was marked; doubtless the townsfolk had no need of signs to direct them, as sure of their routes as rabbits or rats, but I was not so fortunate. Nor was I able to ask directions, for I seemed to be the only one out and about. It was disconcerting, to say the least, as if the men and women I had just been visiting and speaking to had vanished off the face of the earth, leaving me alone, trapped in this strange place. The farther I roamed, the more I felt cut off from the outside world. The passages down which I made my way, scarcely wide enough 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 the world.

A shovelled passage led to the base of the tower, which struck me as odd: according to Doppler, the entrance had been sealed, and it seemed a waste of effort to shovel a passage that led nowhere. Unless, of course, the burgomeister had lied to me in order to discourage me from seeking the entrance on my own. But at that point, all I cared about was getting out of the storm and away from whatever had been pursuing me – and might still be, for all I knew.

Upon reaching the foot of the tower, I saw that the passage branched left and right, as if circling the structure. Rather than following it in either direction, I stepped up to the wall, where snow was nestled in the niches and hollows created by the ornamental figures I’d noticed upon my arrival the day before. Most of them were buried now, but here and there arms and hands and heads emerged from the snow as in some macabre representation of an avalanche, or, rather, the aftermath of one. Even the great snake or dragon depicted there was all but submerged … yet the way its coils broke free of the snow only to plunge out of sight again made it seem to be sporting amidst the corpses like a sea serpent frolicking amidst the carnage of a wreck.

I swept the snow away with my hat and then groped among the contorted shapes, which I saw now were metal castings, looking for evidence of a door, perhaps a hidden mechanism that, once triggered, would cause the façade to swing open and admit me. But there was nothing – at least, nothing that my fingers, clumsy within gloves that provided scant protection against the cold, could detect. I wondered if I could climb the façade, use the castings as hand- and footholds to reach the shelter of the proscenium, and gain entrance to the interior from there. But I did not like my chances in such a climb. The façade was slick with snow and ice, and the gusting winds would make any attempt even more hazardous.

I considered turning back, looking for an alternative route to the Hearth and Home, or seeking shelter from one of the townsfolk, but I wasn’t ready to give up on the tower yet; this close, my curiosity was rekindled: it was no longer just the need for shelter that drove me. When, I asked myself, would I find a better opportunity to examine the tower unobserved? Hunching my shoulders against the wind and snow, and jamming my hat back onto my head, I set off down the leftward-branching passage.

I hadn’t gone far when the bells of the tower began to peal in earnest, striking some arbitrary hour. I ducked my head and pressed myself against the base of the tower as clumps of snow and ice, dislodged from above, fell around me. The metal figures of the façade poked into my back, and through them I felt a deep, slow, rhythmic thrumming: the inner workings of the great clock. I hadn’t felt the slightest vibration earlier when I’d groped among the castings; now, with the tolling of the bells, an internal mechanism had been set in motion, and I knew at once what it must be.

I ran back to the front of the tower and peered up through the falling snow. The icy flakes stung like chips of stone, and indeed the sky, or what I could see of it, was as grey as clouded marble, like the roof of a vast domed chamber, so that, for a moment, as I gazed into the hollow arch of the proscenium, it seemed to me that I was not looking into an enclosed space but rather out of one, and though I could not see even a glimpse of what lay beyond the snowy curtain, I sensed a presence wider than the world I knew. The vivid force of this perception staggered me, and I felt again, as I had the day before, an impulse to step away from the tower, to retreat out of range of its uncanny influence. But my curiosity outweighed my fear, and I held my ground.

Though the bells were still tolling, they had lost all semblance of musicality. Now they came crashing down like thunder. I flinched with every peal, each louder than the one before, until the very ground seemed to tremble beneath my feet. Once again I recalled my dream, how the girl had fled from footsteps that shook the ground in just this way.

I would have turned then and fled myself, curiosity be damned, if the first automaton hadn’t appeared from out of the snow-blurred depths of the proscenium. At first, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. Something angular, tall and dark, like the prow of a ship, came gliding into view. The prow of a second ship seemed to pass it on the outside, as if some ghost armada were sailing out of the clock tower. But then my mind made an insane adjustment of scale, of perspective, and I realized that I was seeing a pair of legs scissoring through the snow. The legs alone were far larger than could be contained within the tower; they seemed to rise up for ever. But of course they did not: no more than mountains rise for ever. Yet it might have been a mountain that I was seeing – a mountain in the shape of a man.

My legs folded, depositing me on my knees. Then, as the earth resounded like the skin of a drum to each impossible footfall, I toppled onto my side, gazing up at the colossal figure. Another strode behind it. And another behind that. They moved slowly, effortlessly, it seemed, through the blizzard. The tower was still present, its dimensions unchanged. Though the figures overtopped it by hundreds of feet, they continued to emerge from its depths, nor did their weight crush the stage across which they filed, nor, for all the vastness of their strides, had the first of them yet reached the opposite side. It was as though the laws of nature were in abeyance, and categories of perception that could or should not coexist in a sane mind were suddenly thrust together. I felt the gears of my reason grinding against each other. I suppose I must have screamed.

At that, the figures halted. The bells fell silent. There was only the howling of the wind. I tried to get to my feet and run, but it was useless. I was like a dazed rabbit scratching for shelter in the snow. Then came a sight that stilled even those feeble movements. A hand was reaching for me, dropping through the blizzard like a dark cloud, like the fall of night. There was no escaping it – not even if I’d been able to run. I had no doubt but that I was about to die. In that moment, a dreamlike clarity possessed me. I felt intensely present yet at the same time detached from what was happening; I watched the fingers of that immense hand open to grasp me, and in those seconds, which seemed to stretch into hours, it struck me with the force of revelation that these were not automatons I was seeing – no mechanical constructs could possibly be so large – but rather living creatures, giants such as the Bible speaks of, and the pagan myths, too. It occurred to me then that Wachter’s Folly was not a clock tower but instead a kind of portal, a gateway , so to speak, between our world and another, and that these giants had crossed some unimaginable distance to come here. Had Wachter summoned them with his wizardry, compelled them to parade in single file across the stage of his extraordinary clock? And if so, for what purpose? I did not think I would learn the answer to these questions, or any others, as the gigantic fingers closed around me, blotting out the snow, the light, the world.

When next I opened my eyes, I was in bed in my room at the Hearth and Home. The light of a candle illuminated the startled face of a girl seated in a chair between the bed and the hissing stove. She gave a cry and sprang to her feet, rushing from the room before I could say a word. I heard her calling for Frau Hubner from the hallway. I winced and raised a hand to my throbbing head … only to encounter a bandage. Pain flared, and I jerked my hand away with a groan.

I sat up, and the covers slipped to my waist. I was shirtless; in fact, I was naked. I had no memory of what had happened to my clothes … or, for that matter, to me. The room was toasty warm; the curtains were drawn over the window, so I had no idea what time it was or whether it was still snowing. The girl, meanwhile, had left off calling for Inge, though she had not returned to the room, and now I heard – and felt as well – the landlady’s heavy tread as she mounted the stairs. It was no more than a faint trembling compared with the earthshaking footsteps of the giants, yet the terror I’d felt as I lay helpless in the snow took hold of me again. Shivering like some palsied ancient, I groped for the covers and pulled them to my chin.

Inge squeezed into the room, her round face flushed red. ‘So, you are awake at last, Herr Gray! But what are you doing? You’re in no condition to get out of that bed!’

‘Indeed, I am not,’ I agreed. ‘Where are my clothes?’

‘I was going to ask you the same question,’ she replied as she bustled over. I flinched, thinking that she was going to push me down – weak as I was, a child could have done it. But instead she touched the back of her hand to my forehead, then reached past me to fluff the pillows into a backrest. Her yeasty scent enveloped me, and had its customary effect, which I endeavoured to hide by shifting beneath the covers.

‘There,’ she said at last, stepping back to survey her work with satisfaction, her thick arms crossed over the shelf of her bosom, ‘all nice and comfy.’ I had the impression that she was rather enjoying my helplessness. ‘You gave us quite a scare, Herr Gray! Ach, what possessed you to pay a visit to the clock tower in such weather? And what happened to your clothes?’

‘Do you mean to say I was naked when you found me?’

‘It was not I but Adolpheus who found you,’ Inge said. ‘Lying in the snow at the base of the clock tower as naked as the day you were born!’

‘I lost my way in the storm,’ I told her, ‘and found myself at the clock tower. The bells began to chime, and I saw the most incredible display …’ I trailed off, afraid that she would think me mad if I said any more. ‘That is all I remember.’

‘Lucky for you I happened by,’ Adolpheus remarked, entering the room with his lopsided gait. Hesta trotted in behind him, tail wagging. The dog went straight to the stove, where she circled once before curling up on the bare floorboards.

‘I found you at the foot of the tower,’ Adolpheus continued. ‘It seems you were struck on the head by a piece of falling ice.’

I raised my hand to the bandage again, but stopped short of touching it, remembering the pain that had ensued the last time I did so.

‘Big as a cannonball it was,’ my rescuer stated, demonstrating the size of the ice chunk with his hands. ‘Blood everywhere! I thought you were dead at first – if not from the blow to the head, then from the cold, for you weren’t wearing so much as a stitch of clothing. I covered you with my cloak, lifted you in my arms, and carried you here. I may be small, but I am strong as a bull.’

‘But my weapon … my watch!’

‘As for your dirk, I saw no sign of it. Perhaps it is buried under the snow. Your watch, however, was clutched in your hand; indeed, I had some difficulty prising your fingers apart to remove it! It’s there, beside the bed.’

And so it was, on the nightstand. The sight of it was immensely reassuring for some reason; even more so, once I had picked it up and judged that it was still running, was the familiar heft of it in my hand. But I didn’t know what to think. Had it all been a dream? Everything had seemed so real! Yet I remembered how, when the bells began to toll, chunks of ice had fallen from the tower. Perhaps one had indeed struck me – knocked me, dazed and bleeding, to the ground. And from there, before I blacked out, I had gazed up and seen the automatons emerging from the tower; from that perspective, they might have loomed large as giants. Yet that did not explain what had happened to my clothes and my dirk.

Inge, meanwhile, had poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the table beside the stove, and this she brought to me now. ‘Here, Herr Gray. You must be parched.’

I accepted the glass and took a deep swallow … then began to cough – racking coughs that made my ribcage ring like iron and left me aching in every muscle and bone. Only when the fit was over, and I lay back weakly against the pillows, gasping like a fish out of water, a cold sweat clinging to my skin, did I notice that Inge had taken the glass from me before I could spill it over the bedclothes.

‘You must take things slowly at first, Herr Gray,’ she admonished, shaking her head sternly, chins jiggling like vanilla puddings.

With a sense of things clicking belatedly, dreadfully, into place, I asked her how long I had been in bed.

‘Adolpheus found you six days ago,’ came the reply.

Six days! I didn’t remember a moment of even a single one of them. Yet I had no trouble recalling my last moments at the clock tower. They might have taken place just hours ago, they were so fresh in my mind. ‘And was I unconscious all that time?’ I demanded.

‘As good as,’ said Inge. ‘You were feverish. Burning up. You raved, ranted. We took turns sitting with you. Tending you like a newborn baby. Adolpheus, the girl and I. Even Herr Doppler.’

‘I’m grateful,’ I told her. ‘And sorry for any trouble I caused.’

‘Ach, what trouble?’ Inge replied. ‘The important thing is that the fever has broken at last. You’re on the mend now.’

‘You’ll be up and about in no time,’ Adolpheus seconded, grinning through his beard.

‘But you need to build up your strength,’ said Inge. ‘Do you think you could eat something?’

‘I feel as if I could eat a horse,’ I told her.

‘I’m afraid that’s not on the menu at the Hearth and Home,’ she replied with a smile.

‘You could have fooled me,’ interjected Adolpheus.

She ignored the gibe. ‘I doubt solid food would agree with you just now. Better to start with some nutritious broth. I’ll send up a bowl.’

‘Thank you, Inge. You, too, Adolpheus. I’d be dead if you hadn’t come looking for me.’

‘As to that, I may have found you, Herr Gray, but it wasn’t from looking. No, I was about my duties, keeping the pathways clear and the lamps lit, when I spotted you. Didn’t know whether to dig you out or finish burying you!’ He chortled. ‘But what happened to your clothes, Herr Gray?’ He tapped the side of his nose with one finger. ‘An afternoon tryst, perhaps, interrupted by a husband unexpectedly returned home?’

Before I could deny it, Inge broke in.

‘Leave off your teasing, Adolpheus. Can’t you see how tired he is? It’s time we took our leave. You, too, Hesta.’

And in fact, my eyes had drifted shut while Adolpheus spoke. I wasn’t sure if it was a lack of strength or inclination that kept me from opening them again as my visitors left the room. I was tired – I could not remember ever having felt so drained … yet my mind would not stop racing, presenting me with nightmarish images of what I had seen, or hallucinated, and wondering, too, at the mystery of my missing clothes. It seemed that someone must have found me before Adolpheus, and removed them … perhaps wanting me to freeze to death. But who would feel threatened enough by my presence to commit murder? Could it have been Doppler after all?

My musings were interrupted by the sound of my name. I opened my eyes to see once more the girl who had been watching over me when I first awoke. Perhaps I had dozed off, for I hadn’t heard her come in. She was sitting in a chair drawn up close to the bedside and leaning towards me with an anxious expression, as though eager to wake me yet fearful of it, too. A fine gold chain encircled her neck, and dangling from the end of it was a glittering gold ring, like a wedding band. The girl was young – no more than sixteen or seventeen, I thought; surely the ring could not be her own, or she would be wearing it … unless it had belonged to a husband now deceased. Beneath a pale blue kerchief, two wings of blonde hair fanned to either side of a snowy white forehead whose worry lines added an appealing touch of vulnerability to features that were otherwise flawless. Those lines deepened as she blinked hazel eyes and drew back slightly.

‘I-I brought you this,’ she stammered, and raised a steaming wooden bowl from her lap in a flustered motion that sent a portion of the contents spilling over her skirt … at which, to my astonishment, she burst into tears, twisting away from me in the chair.

‘Here now,’ I said, sitting up with alacrity, ‘what’s wrong? Are you burned?’

She shook her head.

‘Then why are you crying?’

She faced me, her cheeks rosy in the candlelight. She was like a figure in a painting, present yet remote, beautiful and sad, and I ached to know the cause of her distress, and to assuage it if I could. She wiped her face with the back of one sleeve, first one cheek and then the other, reminding me of a cat grooming itself, and gave me an embarrassed smile. ‘Because you will hate me,’ she said.

‘Hate you?’ I was flabbergasted. ‘I don’t even know you.’

Her gaze faltered at that, dropping to her lap, then rose again, resolute now. ‘I took your things,’ she said.

‘You mean my clothes …?’ But then, as her blush deepened, comprehension dawned. ‘My tool kit! You’re Herr Doppler’s daughter.’

She nodded, fresh tears welling in her eyes. ‘You do hate me!’

I assured her I did not. ‘I’m just glad to have my tools back,’ I said. ‘You did bring them back, didn’t you?’

She nodded again, sniffling. ‘They’re in your rucksack, where I found them.’

I heaved a sigh of relief, sinking back against the mound of pillows. ‘Thank God. And thank you, Fraülein.’

‘Then … you’re not angry?’

‘Your father told me that you took my tool kit to keep me from destroying the tower clock or any of Herr Wachter’s other timepieces. Now that I’ve seen them for myself, or a number of them, anyway, I can appreciate your concern – not that I approve of what you did. Nor was there ever any danger of my doing what you feared.’

‘My father doesn’t understand anything,’ she confided with more than a hint of bitterness, her eyes shifting towards the closed door as if she expected him to come barging in at any moment.

‘Then I’m afraid I don’t, either,’ I said.

‘Clockmen never stay in Märchen for long,’ she said. ‘They arrive one day and leave the next. I thought that if I stole your tools, you’d be forced to stay.’

‘I would have been forced to stay in any case, thanks to the blizzard.’

‘But I didn’t know that. When I came to your room, the snow had only just begun to fall. I saw you lying there in bed, sound asleep, and I thought you looked so young, not much older than me, and kind, so that you wouldn’t mind if I sneaked a peek at your tools. Once I had the kit in my hands, I couldn’t stop myself from taking it. I know it was wrong, Herr Gray, but I was afraid you’d leave the next morning if I didn’t do something.’

‘But why should it matter to you whether I go or stay?’

‘Because’ – and her gaze went to the door again, or perhaps to my rucksack, which was no longer on the floor but hanging from a wooden peg on the back of the door – ‘because I want to be like you. A clockman.’

So unexpected was this answer that I burst out laughing. ‘A clockman? You?’

The look she gave me was not tearful but angry; my laughter shrivelled in the fierceness of her gaze. ‘Why not?’ she demanded. ‘Do you think me too dull to understand your arts?’

‘No,’ I answered, drawing out the word as I considered how best to proceed. I recalled how Herr Doppler had spoken of his daughter’s mercurial nature, and the way she was clutching the bowl in her lap made me suspect that my next words would determine whether or not I received a faceful of hot broth. ‘It’s just that neither my guild nor any other of which I am aware accepts apprentices of your sex.’

‘Yes, that’s just what Papa says. But I don’t need to join a guild. You could teach me, Herr Gray!’

I would have liked to dismiss it all as a joke, but there was no mistaking the girl’s seriousness and determination. ‘Look, Fraülein,’ I began.

She interrupted. ‘Please, Herr Gray. Call me Corinna.’

‘And you must call me Michael,’ I said, ‘for I hope that we can be friends.’

Her face lit up in a smile, and I felt a stirring in my heart.

‘Then you’ll do it?’ she demanded. ‘You’ll instruct me?’

‘Why are you so interested in clocks?’ I asked in turn.

She laughed. ‘Living in Märchen, how could I not be?’ She seemed to take belated notice of the bowl in her lap and, blushing again, offered it to me. ‘Frau Hubner says you are to finish this broth – every last drop.’

I took the bowl from her, feeling a tingle where our fingers brushed. The beefy smell of the broth made my mouth water. There was a wooden spoon in the bowl, and I raised it to my lips and sipped. I had never tasted anything so delicious; warmth and vitality coursed through my body in dizzying waves.

‘Slowly, Michael,’ the girl admonished as I slurped down the broth. After a moment, she returned to the subject of clocks. As she spoke, she toyed with the ring on her necklace, turning it in the fingers of one hand, and I found myself wondering once again about the story that no doubt lay behind it: felt, too, a twinge of jealousy at the thought that some other man, living or dead, might have a claim on her affections.

‘When I was young, our timepieces seemed like magic to me. But as I grew older, I began to wonder at how they functioned. I longed to take them apart and see for myself what it was that drove the hands in their orbits and regulated their progress around the dial. But as you have discovered, it is impossible to get permission to open any of Herr Wachter’s creations. Of course, that didn’t stop me. I can’t tell you how often I tried in secret to gain access to my father’s pocket watch or one of the other timepieces of the town. And how often I was caught and punished. But despite my efforts, I never managed to open a single one. As for the tower clock, I’ve searched and searched for a way in, even climbing to the campanile itself, but without success. Yet I haven’t been completely defeated. Over the years, I managed to find a few old timepieces tucked away in attics – clocks and pocket watches from before Wachter’s day – and these I studied thoroughly, dissected and put back together as best I could, with tools I fashioned myself out of cutlery and anything else that came to hand. But I have reached the limits of what I can learn on my own. I require instruction, a teacher. A man like you, Herr Gray … that is’ – and she blushed again – ‘Michael.’

Finished with the broth, I returned the empty bowl to her and lay back against the pillows. A vast and sleepy well-being pervaded me. I felt light-headed, almost drunk. I had no desire to argue with this pretty and spirited young girl. ‘I should like to see some of those tools of yours, Corinna,’ I said.

Her blush deepened. ‘I would be ashamed to show you.’

‘Ashamed?’

‘I didn’t simply take your tools, Michael. I studied them. What beautiful things they are! So cleverly designed, so lovingly crafted. By comparison, mine are crude, laughable, ugly.’

‘I received most of my tool kit when I became a journeyman. Over the years, like many clockmen, I’ve added some implements of my own design. But to do what you have done, without benefit of a master’s guiding hand – that is truly impressive.’

‘Papa doesn’t think so. He finds my interest in timepieces unladylike. I’m afraid I couldn’t show you my tools even if I wanted to, for he confiscated them from me after learning that I had taken yours. But he’s done so before, and it hasn’t stopped me yet.’ She flashed a conspiratorial smile. ‘I just make new ones.’

‘I’ve never met a girl quite like you, Corinna,’ I told her. ‘And yet I almost feel as if we have met before …’

‘Why, that’s not surprising,’ she said. ‘After all, I helped care for you during your sickness, even if you don’t remember it.’

‘For which I’m grateful.’

‘Grateful enough to teach me something of your art?’

It occurred to me that I had been manipulated into acknowledging an obligation, but somehow I didn’t care. ‘I doubt your father would approve.’

‘He doesn’t have to know,’ she said. ‘It can be our secret. At least for the next few days, while you’re getting your strength back, you could teach me. What harm could it do?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I told her. After all, what would be the harm in showing her a few things? Nor was it lost on me that Corinna could prove a valuable ally in my efforts to convince her father, the burgomeister , to grant me the permission I sought. And if all else failed, perhaps I could enlist her as an accomplice, get her to bring me one of Wachter’s timepieces; she had already proved herself an adept thief. Besides, the notion of spending more time with Corinna was appealing for its own sake.

‘Thank you, Michael,’ she said, breaking into a wide and dazzling smile.

‘I haven’t agreed to anything yet,’ I cautioned.

‘But you will,’ she said. ‘I know it.’ At which, to my surprise, she leaned forward impulsively and planted a kiss on my cheek. A jolt shot through me at the touch of her lips, and the scent of pine enfolded me, rich and resinous, as if I were walking through a mountain forest in springtime.

Just then, a voice thundered from the doorway: ‘What is going on here?’

Corinna drew back with a gasp. ‘Papa!’

Herr Doppler marched into the room, his bushy white moustache bristling like lightning, his face an ominous shade of red. He wore a colonel’s uniform and a powdered club wig the colour of pewter.

Corinna rose and went to him before I could say a word, laying a hand on his arm. ‘Calm yourself, Papa, dear. I was merely making Herr Gray more comfortable.’

He glared at her. ‘Were you indeed, madam? It appeared to me that the rascal was stealing a kiss.’

‘Papa!’ she chided him. ‘Our poor patient is too weak to steal anything.’

Doppler gave me an appraising glance. ‘He looks feeble, I’ll grant you, but looks can be deceiving … as can daughters.’

Doppler was now the recipient of the same fierce look that had been directed at me a moment ago. He withstood it no better. ‘That is,’ he said, ‘these footloose rascals can lead innocent girls astray with their wild talk.’

At which Corinna stamped her foot. ‘Honestly, Papa! Do you take me for a simpleton? I swear to you on my honour that Herr Gray did not steal a kiss.’

‘Is this true?’ the burgomeister demanded of me.

I nodded, impressed with Corinna’s sangfroid.

‘There, you see?’ The girl stood on tiptoes to plant a kiss on her father’s ruddy cheek.

The man fairly glowed. ‘Forgive me, my dear,’ he said, then addressed me once more. ‘I beg your pardon as well, Herr Gray. With such a treasure, a father cannot be too careful.’

‘Your daughter has been my ministering angel,’ I told him, struggling to keep my expression serious and my voice level as, behind Doppler’s back, Corinna blew me another kiss. ‘I would not repay her in such a base fashion.’

‘Such sentiments do you credit,’ said Doppler. He turned back to his daughter. ‘Frau Hubner has need of you. I will tend to the patient for a while.’

‘Yes, Papa,’ she said demurely. ‘I will see you later, Herr Gray.’

‘Thank you again, Fraülein,’ I replied.

Smiling, she curtsied and left the room.

As soon as she had gone, Doppler’s manner underwent a stark change. Crossing to the bed, he seated himself in the chair that Corinna had vacated and took hold of my upper arm, squeezing so that I gasped in pain.

‘Let us speak as men,’ he said in a low voice that was all the more threatening for its icy calm. ‘Should I discover that you have trifled with my daughter, Herr Gray, you will wish that Adolpheus had left you buried in the snow. Nay, do not speak. I know how it is with you wandering rascals. Clockmen? Cockmen, more like! Do not trouble to deny it, sir! I have been a soldier. I know what it is like to be young and footloose, far from home, with pretty wenches set before you like dishes at a banquet. You try a taste of this one, of that one. Where’s the harm? Come, sir! Do I have the wrong of it?’

I stammered out some excuse or other.

His vice-like grip tightened. ‘We are both men of the world. Pray do not insult me.’

I wrenched my arm free. ‘What do you wish me to say, sir? Yes, I have had dalliances in the course of my travels. You imply that you did the same as a younger man. It is, as you say, the way of the world. But that does not mean I have no honour, Herr Doppler. No gratitude . And you speak of insult? It is you who have insulted me!’

Herr Doppler’s blue eyes widened during this outburst. At the end of it, he sat a moment as if stunned, then broke into hearty laughter, slapping his knee. ‘I like you, Herr Gray; indeed, I do,’ he said at last, wiping his eyes. ‘In truth, I meant no offence. I merely wished to impress upon you that my daughter is precious to me above all things.’

‘You might have done so in a less literal manner,’ I muttered, examining my arm, where the imprint of Doppler’s fingers was purpling to a bruise.

‘It will not have escaped your notice that there is a greater span of years between us than might normally separate a father and daughter,’ he went on, arranging himself more comfortably in the chair. ‘I was already in my fifties when I met and married Corinna’s mother, the youngest daughter of a fellow officer. Maria was scarcely older than Corinna is now when we became man and wife. She was loveliness itself, but fragile as a springtime flower. And our life together was as fleeting as that season. The rigours of childbirth proved too arduous for her delicate constitution, and the effort of bringing Corinna into the world ushered her out of it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, while reflecting that this story was quite different from what Inge had told me of the fate of Corinna’s mother. One or both of them was lying. Which, and from what motive, I did not know. But perhaps I could find out, and make use of that knowledge. It is always wise to learn the truth behind the lies that people tell each other, and themselves. Such knowledge is like a dagger up the sleeve; sooner or later, you will be glad to have it close to hand. ‘Then, the ring she wears about her neck …’

‘Her mother’s wedding ring,’ Doppler affirmed. ‘I sometimes think there must be an ineffable law, as absolute as that which governs the movement of celestial bodies, preventing two creatures of such sublime beauty from existing simultaneously on Earth, and it was in obedience to that law that Maria was taken from me. For Corinna has grown into the very image of her mother, and there are moments, Herr Gray, moments when I could swear to you that it is Maria herself who stands before me, miraculously restored to life, or never having left it at all, the last seventeen years nothing more than a dream from which I have suddenly awakened. Like Wachter’s Folly, the heart does not recognize the ordinary flow of time, and what the mind knows to be an impossibility the heart embraces without hesitation or reserve. And so my love for Maria remains as fresh today as on the day we married, and my grieving as profound as on the day she died. Add to that a father’s natural affection for his only child and you will understand why I am perhaps a trifle indulgent with Corinna, and at the same time so ardent in safeguarding her welfare.’

I replied that she was fortunate to have such a father, though in fact I pitied the girl, not just for the loss of her mother but for the enduring legacy of that loss, thrust upon her by her surviving parent, to be both daughter and wife to him … or, rather, part-daughter, part-wife, neither one thing nor the other. It seemed a heavy burden to impose on a child, as unhealthy as it was unfair. Growing up without a parent is difficult enough already. The ring she wore about her neck, the mystery of which had so tantalized me, now seemed as much a token of a father’s obsession as it was the symbol of a daughter’s devotion. No wonder the girl was rebellious, headstrong. How else could she insist upon her uniqueness, demonstrate to her father – and, indeed, to herself – that she was more than just the image of the mother she had never known?

Doppler, meanwhile, stroked his moustache and smiled. ‘She does not always recognize that fact, I’m afraid. In beauty, she takes after her mother, but she has also inherited her father’s martial spirit, and the promptings of that spirit sometimes make her forget her filial duty, not to mention the natural modesty that is the most becoming ornament of her sex.’

‘I found nothing immodest about her,’ I protested, feeling compelled to come to her defence even as I savoured the memory of her impulsive kiss.

‘I know my daughter,’ Doppler replied. ‘Doubtless her apology in the matter of your tool kit was so charming that you have by now completely forgotten the theft that occasioned it.’

‘No, but I have forgiven it,’ I said.

‘Have you? I’m glad to hear it.’ Doppler glanced towards the door with a furtiveness that reminded me of Corinna’s movements earlier. ‘I should like to ask a favour of you, Herr Gray.’

‘By all means,’ I told him, curious.

‘This must remain between us.’

‘Of course.’

Doppler seemed at an uncharacteristic loss as to how to proceed. He cleared his throat, shifted his position on the chair, smoothed his moustache. Then he blurted out: ‘My daughter is obsessed with horology. She nurses the ambition of becoming a journeyman like yourself, and one day even a master. When she was younger, her interest in timepieces was amusing, and I indulged it. I thought she would grow out of it, but instead her interest has only grown stronger with the years. I mean no disparagement to your profession, sir, but it is not suitable for a lady, as I am sure you will agree.’

I nodded for him to continue.

‘It was this fascination, this obsession, that led her to steal your tool kit, Herr Gray.’

‘She has confessed as much to me already,’ I told him. ‘Indeed, she told me that she has made tools of her own, and has taught herself the rudiments of horology. Can this be true?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Doppler confessed shamefacedly.

‘Quite remarkable,’ I said. ‘The influence of Herr Wachter, no doubt.’

‘She requires a more salutary influence now,’ Doppler told me. ‘I have found, as her father, that my efforts to curtail her enthusiasms in this regard only have the opposite effect. Thus I am turning to you, Herr Gray.’

‘To me?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know it is an imposition, but I would consider it a great favour if you would take my daughter under your wing, as it were.’

‘You want me to teach her?’ I could scarcely believe my ears.

‘I want you to discourage her,’ Doppler clarified, ‘under the guise of teaching her. You will be outwardly encouraging but meanwhile set her tasks beyond her abilities, the better to convince her that she lacks the aptitude for horology, that her talents lie in more … feminine directions. Could you do that, Herr Gray?’

‘Let me make certain I understand you, sir. You wish me to deceive your daughter, to invite her trust and then – subtly, to be sure – betray it.’

‘For her own good,’ Doppler said defensively.

‘She will not like it.’

‘If you are skilful enough, Herr Gray, she need never know.’

‘And if I succeed?’

‘Why, you will have earned the gratitude of an anxious father.’

‘I am not in the habit of deceiving young ladies, Herr Doppler. Certainly not at the invitation of their fathers.’

‘And if I were to offer you a more tangible measure of gratitude?’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Dissuade my daughter from her unseemly interest in timepieces, and I will permit you to examine my pocket watch – which, you may remember, once belonged to Herr Wachter himself.’

‘I should want to remove the casing,’ I told Doppler.

‘Of course.’

‘And make detailed sketches of the workings.’

‘Naturally.’

‘I might even need to dissassemble the mechanism, or at least portions of it.’

I watched a struggle play out on Herr Doppler’s features. But at last he gave a terse nod. ‘Acceptable,’ he grunted, and I could see that it had cost him much.

‘You surprise me, Herr Doppler,’ I confessed. ‘When last we spoke, you were adamant in refusing to let me examine the watch. Yet now you agree to everything I asked of you that night, and more.’

‘You see how much my daughter means to me,’ Doppler replied. ‘More even than the oath I swore to my father when he passed Wachter’s timepiece on to me. Above all else, I wish for Corinna to be happy, yet as long as she harbours these dangerous fantasies, she will never be content. If she cannot find what she so desperately desires here in Märchen, sooner or later she will look for it farther afield … and find something quite different, as we both can imagine only too well. So I ask you to dispel her illusions, Herr Gray, as gently but firmly as you can, to spare her a more grievous awakening at less gentle hands. Once resigned to her proper sphere, she will find fulfilment as a dutiful daughter, and later as a wife and mother, as God and Nature intended.’

I did not share Herr Doppler’s conviction on this point. The fanatical gleam I had seen in Corinna’s eye would not be so easy to extinguish. Yet I agreed to his proposal, for it promised to deliver not only Herr Doppler’s pocket watch, but Inge’s cuckoo into the bargain. Nor was that my only reason for accepting the offer. Someone had attacked me. Knocked me out, robbed me of my clothes, and left me to die in the snow. I was determined to learn the secrets of Wachter’s timepieces, but I was also determined to learn the identity of my would-be murderer, and my efforts in that regard would be hindered, it seemed to me, if I made an enemy of Herr Doppler. ‘When shall I begin?’ I asked him.

‘The sooner the better,’ he answered, rising from the chair. We shook hands, but he prolonged the clasp, fixing me with his steely gaze. ‘If I find you have betrayed my trust, Herr Gray, and used this opportunity to seduce my daughter, I will kill you. Is that understood?’

‘I am interested in another prize entirely,’ I assured him.

And what’s more, I believed it.

11 A World Newly Born

MY EXPOSURE TO the elements had left me weaker than I realized, and it was some days before I was able to rise from my sickbed and take even a few tottering steps across the room. In that time, Inge and Corinna took turns caring for me like ministering angels indeed. True to my agreement with Herr Doppler, I began to teach Corinna the rudiments of the horologist’s art. At first, as promised, it was with the intent of discouraging her. But it soon became apparent to me that she would not be discouraged. Every task I set her she accomplished with ease. She was a natural. Her mind was quick, her fingers clever and dexterous. The tools she had made for herself – which I had asked Herr Doppler to return to her – were as effective as they were ingenious. In truth, she had already passed beyond the rudiments. More than once, as we bent together over one of the timepieces she had brought to me – the ones that pre-dated Wachter’s arrival – and my own pocket watch, I thought of my own apprenticeship and found myself wondering what Magnus would have made of this prodigy. I think he would have been as scandalized by her sex as he was impressed by her skill.

When I summoned up the courage to tell her of the bargain I had struck with her father, she laughed and replied that she’d guessed as much from the first, and had been waiting to see if I would play her false and try to dampen the fires of her enthusiasm. But, she said, knowing me for an honourable man, she had never doubted my intentions. I felt ashamed at hearing her say so.

I suppose I had already fallen in love with her. Any man would have, for she was beautiful, kind and brave – as well as having more natural ability than any horologist I had ever seen, with the exception of Magnus. Under other circumstances, she might have rivalled Wachter himself. Her grasp of horology, entirely self-taught, was extraordinary, as was her mechanical genius, evidenced not only in the timepieces she had at first dissected, then repaired, and finally improved, but in small automatons she had crafted, cunning little creatures that were nearly as lifelike as Wachter’s creations. I remember in particular a metal mouse that, when wound with a key, would scamper up and down the sides of an old clock like the rodent in the nursery rhyme, or run along her arm like a tame pet.

But did she return my feelings? How could I dare even to hope it? I was her teacher, her friend. But that was as much as I aspired to. The snows had continued to fall, and by now it was clear that I would be stuck in Märchen until the spring thaw. It would have been foolish – not to mention, with Herr Doppler’s threat hanging over me, suicidal – to attempt a seduction.

Nevertheless, Doppler realized soon enough that things were not going according to his plan. I explained to him that Corinna had proved to be more gifted than I had expected, and that it was taking longer than anticipated to discourage her. Rather than disappointing him, the news puffed him up with fatherly pride, and he told me to take as much time as necessary. After all, he said with a laugh, I didn’t have any other pressing engagements.

Corinna broached the subject of ‘borrowing’, as she put it, one of Wachter’s timepieces for me to study, but I told her at once that such a course would be too risky. Instead, I suggested that the two of us collude in making it appear that she had reached the natural limits of her abilities and was at last growing discouraged. By the terms of my agreement with her father, he would then yield up his pocket watch for my examination, and Inge would follow with her cuckoo. I would, of course, share the fruits of my investigations of these timepieces with Corinna. She was willing, but preferred to wait until she had learned more of what I had to teach. I agreed. Herr Doppler was right, after all. I had no pressing engagements, and to be trapped for months in Märchen without the solace of Corinna’s company would have been unbearable. The hour we spent together each day, talking of horology and other things, was like gold to me, an interval of time no clock, not even one of Wachter’s, was fit to measure.

Meanwhile, life went on. As the days and weeks passed, snow continued to fall, until it reached and then overtopped the second-storey window behind my bed. No one had thought to wind my pocket watch as I lay in the grip of fever, and by the time the fever had broken, the watch had long since stopped. Herr Doppler had assured me his own watch was accurate, and Inge insisted the same of her cuckoo, and though it was true that the two timepieces agreed with each other, I found it impossible to fully trust any timepiece built by Wachter. I reset my watch, yet for the rest of my stay in Märchen I felt untethered, cut off from the outside world, as if I had entered a kind of bubble where time was not the dependable constant of my experience but instead something as variable as the wind. It sometimes seemed to me that the only clock I could rely on was the rising and setting of the sun. At other times, even that seemed suspect, for I saw so little of the sun, hidden as it generally was behind a thick scrim of grey cloud or snow. Yet I kept my watch wound, and carried it with me everywhere, not only because I needed some yardstick against which to measure the day, however arbitrary or inaccurate in an absolute sense, but because it made me feel safe, protected. I suppose it had stopped being a timepiece exactly and become a sort of talisman. Perhaps that is all our ingenious watches and clocks really are, when you come right down to it.

I had no more strange dreams, no more terrifying visions. In fact, I stopped dreaming altogether – it was as if I were living a dream, and thus had no need for fantasies. Once I felt strong enough, and had replenished my depleted wardrobe, I resumed the visits that had been cut short by my illness. As before, the townsfolk, though friendly, refused to grant me access to their timepieces. Soon my perambulations had made me familiar with the labyrinthine network of passages that was now the only means by which Märchen could be navigated without snowshoes or the danger of becoming lost and freezing to death. Of course, the passages had their own dangers. Occasionally the weight of the snow would cause a section to collapse, but the townsfolk seemed to have a second sense about such things, for I never heard of any deaths or injuries, and either I came to share their sensitivity or was just lucky, as I, too, escaped harm. In the aftermath, the able-bodied men of the town, led by Adolpheus, would gather to clear and repair the damage, and I joined with them whenever I could, hoping to win their trust more completely, to the point that they would give me what I sought. But though they seemed appreciative of my efforts, standing me drinks at the Hearth and Home, even inviting me into their homes on occasion to share a meal, they remained adamant in their refusals – though they did not seem angry or annoyed at my persistence. In truth, after a week or so I had resigned myself to the idea that only with Corinna’s help would I ever gain access to the secrets that lay within Wachter’s timepieces.

The only place I did not visit once I had recovered sufficiently to leave the Hearth and Home was Wachter’s Folly. The mere thought of it left me trembling with fear, an irrational terror that had seeped into my very bones. You may protest that there was nothing irrational about it. After all, I had nearly died there. I had been struck a blow to the head, stripped of my clothing, and left to freeze to death in the snow. And the man – or woman – responsible was still at large, perhaps awaiting the opportunity to finish what they had started. Yet it was not that which turned my will to quivering jelly but the memory, which haunted my waking hours, of the parade of automatons I had seen: those titanic figures, like forgotten gods from ancient days, that I had witnessed emerging from a space too small to contain them. The whole world seemed too small for them. I could not forget how one of them had reached for me, its hand closing over me as if snuffing out a candle. All it took was the chiming of the bells for those memories to rise up and overwhelm me, and for a weight of darkness to descend over my eyes, as if the shadow of that hand was once again engulfing me. And the bells chimed with perverse frequency now, far more often, or so it seemed, than they had previously, as if the clock, no less than I, had been changed by our encounter – as if it sensed my fear and sought to exacerbate it, toying with me like a cat with its prey. Or like a dragon. For I could not forget, any more than I could the giants, the dragon I had seen. I felt its malevolent intent focused upon me like a second sun: a dark sun.

Corinna noticed everything, of course. Though I tried to hide my distress, ashamed to be so unmanned by a mere memory, I was with her too much, and she was far too attentive a pupil, for her to be deceived. Earlier, in my weakness, I had told her what I had seen, though I had not confided in anyone else.

‘Let me accompany you to the Folly,’ she offered at last. ‘Two may face together what one cannot.’

‘I have no desire to visit that clock again,’ I assured her. ‘Nor to see what might emerge from it.’

‘Why, what better way to lay your fears to rest than to see for yourself that what comes out of the clock, however fanciful, is nothing to be afraid of? What you saw – or, rather, thought you saw – was due to the blow you received. How could it be otherwise? Even Wachter, for all his genius, could not create such automatons! No mortal could, but only God Himself. In any case, I don’t believe you when you say you have no desire to go back. You are like me, Michael. We cannot so easily extinguish the curiosity that burns in our hearts, stronger than any fear. You know that I am right.’ She reached across the table to take my hand.

We were in my room, where, with Inge’s blessing, I had set up a small workshop for my daily sessions with Corinna. In the course of those lessons, our fingers had brushed a hundred times, our hands had touched, our eyes had met and exchanged silent understandings – or so I had fancied. Yet we had said nothing of our feelings, and the kiss she had given me, whose warm imprint I could still feel upon my cheek, had not been repeated. But now, as she laid her hand atop mine and looked into my eyes, I felt something shift in me, in us both. In the world itself. That shifting drew us together, until it was not just our hands but our lips that were joined. And our hearts. For I knew at once that this was no dalliance of the sort I had admitted to Herr Doppler. This was much, much more. At that moment, I understood for the first time that there is something greater than time in the world. The motto of our guild refers to time as the emperor of all things. But that is wrong. It is love that is the true emperor, for time is helpless against it, and though love exists within time, so, too, does it transcend it. In my mind, that first embrace we shared, that first kiss, has not ended; it will never end. But that is all I will say of it. To speak of such things is to dishonour them.

Afterwards, we sat side by side, our hands clasped, her head resting on my shoulder, our hearts too full for speech, basking, as it were, in a world newly born. Then, as if it had long been decided, we began to talk of the future, of how, when spring came, and the snows melted, and the paths were clear once again, we two would leave Märchen, embarking on a life together here in London. It all seemed so simple, so obvious. I wished to do the honourable thing and ask Herr Doppler for his daughter’s hand, but Corinna forestalled me.

‘That you must not do!’ she said, gripping my hand, her gaze locked with mine. ‘Far from giving his consent, he would banish you at once … or worse. You must promise me that you will not ask him!’

‘I am not afraid of him,’ I told her.

‘You should be,’ she replied. ‘I have learned to be. In this, you must let me be your tutor, dearest Michael.’

How it wrung my heart to hear that false name so lovingly on her lips! Yet I did not tell her who I really was. In truth, I was afraid to. Afraid that I would lose her if she realized I was not the man she thought I was – not the man she had fallen in love with but an imposter, a liar. I told myself that there would be plenty of time to confess everything in the weeks ahead, that it would serve no purpose to reveal myself now. Instead, I promised that I would be instructed by her in this and in all things.

That earned me another kiss – a sweet reward for a base betrayal. But I did not spurn her lips on that account. On the contrary. Their velvet caress absolved me of all my sins … for a while. As I breathed in the fragrance of her breath, which seemed to contain the springtime we had just been speaking of, I swore to myself that if I did not yet deserve the love of this goddess, I would merit it one day by my words and actions.

But rather than drawing nearer, that day seemed to recede into a hazy future. As our closeness grew, the lie at the heart of it became all the more difficult to expose. To do so would have put everything at risk: Corinna’s love, Wachter’s secrets – they were too tangled in my mind to allow any easy unravelling. To lose one was to lose the other. It was the pursuit of those secrets, after all, that had brought us together, that sustained us in a common purpose and gave us hope of a shared future.

From that point on, our daily lessons had little to do with horology. We put aside clocks and watches and all the finely calibrated instruments of our craft and instead devoted ourselves to the study of each other. Not our bodies alone but our minds, our very souls – always excepting that kernel of untruth which, hard as I tried, I could not forget about for long, however deeply I buried it. Corinna approached these investigations in the same bold and insatiable spirit of inquiry that had characterized her pursuit of horological knowledge. I will say no more of what we shared – it is enough that she became my wife in every way that mattered to us, if not to the rest of the world. I have taken no other wife in all the years since. I never shall.

We took care that we should not be discovered, though we had some close calls, with Inge especially, for she was always looking in on us. But her size made stealth impossible; one could always hear her coming. Doppler might have done better, but he made no effort to surprise us. On the contrary, he seemed pleased with the reports I gave him, content with the pace and progress of Corinna’s lessons – though of course there was little truth in what I told him.

Corinna, meanwhile, continued to press me to visit Wachter’s Folly, and at last I gave in, unable to refuse her anything and wanting as well to be rid of the unreasoning fear that had all but paralysed me in this matter. Besides, I did not want her to think me a coward – the more as I knew myself to be one.

‘But how shall we determine when to go?’ I asked. ‘The automatons only emerge when the clock strikes, or so your father informed me, and it strikes randomly, at no set or predictable interval. I have no wish to stand out in the bitter cold for what could be hours. Yet if we wait until we hear the bells begin to ring, the whole display could well be over by the time we reach the Folly.’

‘You need not worry about that,’ she replied. ‘Over the years, we townsfolk have developed a second sense about when the timepiece is going to strike. There is a tension in the air, like the onset of a thunderstorm. And not only in the air. We feel it in our bones, in our hearts, a vibration that cuts right through us.’

‘It sounds painful,’ I told her.

She shrugged. ‘We are used to it.’

‘But how extraordinary!’ I continued. ‘How long does it take to develop this sensitivity?’

‘No time at all,’ she said. ‘We are born with it, you see.’

I did not see. Nothing in my knowledge of horology or natural science could explain how the workings of a clock might impress themselves into the bones and sinews of a single human body, much less an entire town. Not that I doubted her. Thinking back, I realized that I had witnessed the truth of her assertion many times over in fleeting expressions that passed across the faces of the townsfolk in the moments before the bells of the clock began to peal, looks of anxious anticipation, as if at some signal I could not discern, followed by smiles and sighs indicative of release. These quirks of behaviour had puzzled me, but I had not inquired into them, thinking them related somehow to my presence. I felt no such connection myself. In truth, I envied it. It did not seem right that these people, who knew nothing of our art, should manifest a deeper affinity to the flow of time than even the masters of our Worshipful Company could lay claim to.

Thus it was that Corinna and I made our way early one afternoon to Wachter’s Folly. When we emerged from the lamplit passage into the open, the glare of sunlight reflecting from the mounds of snow and ice that had more than half buried the town left me blinded. Even after my vision cleared, I stood frozen in place, dazzled by the stark beauty of the scene. I do not think I had ever seen a sky so blue; it made my eyes ache, and still does, in memory. The jagged peaks of the surrounding mountains, and the upthrust dagger of the glacier that seemed to stand guard over the town, glittered as if encrusted with diamonds. The air sparkled with ice crystals swept up in a biting wind that blew without pause, piercing my clothes, my skin, all the way to the bone. I shivered, still weaker from my ordeal than I had realized until that moment. It was the first time in weeks that I had stood under an open sky.

Corinna put a steadying arm around my waist and asked if I wanted to return to the Hearth and Home. I shook my head and told her no. ‘Then we must hurry,’ she said. ‘The bells are about to strike.’

I swear that I could feel, through her touch, the same thrumming vibration I had felt weeks ago when I had laid my hands upon the figures decorating the tower’s façade. Those figures were less visible now, buried more deeply beneath fallen snow; even the great dragon that coiled about the tower was lost to view, only bits and pieces of its serpentine length exposed, like the gnarled roots of an immense tree.

The pathways shovelled into the snow, by which I had approached and half circled the clock on my last visit, were still in place, well maintained despite the mountains of snow on either side, a testament to the industry of the townsfolk, and especially that of Adolpheus, who, as I had seen, tirelessly laboured to keep the paths shovelled, the covered passages repaired, the lamps lit.

Corinna led me forward. The bronze hands of the clock were in motion, the hour hand creeping slow as molasses in a clockwise direction while the minute hand drifted in retrograde. I could hear, above the whistling of the wind, muffled sounds of activity from within the edifice as the mechanism governing the automatons engaged. As before, I felt a kind of trepidation or wariness, a hesitation to come too close that grew stronger as I drew nearer, until 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 of enthusiasm more than skill, somehow gave them a vitality more meticulous representations might have lacked; they seemed, as it were, in their rude expressions and painted-on clothes, to aspire to the lives they mimicked. Their small size only added to this impression, as of a parade of children dressed in the clothing of adults.

As I watched, it struck me that certain of the figures looked familiar, as if I had glimpsed them somewhere before, but I ascribed this at first to their caricature-like quality. Until, to my astonishment, I saw Adolpheus emerge from the tower, a stepladder strapped across his back. Indeed, I thought at first that it was the man himself playing a trick on me, though a closer look dispelled my confusion, as he, or rather it, was as crudely rendered as the others. But there could be no doubt that the automaton was modelled on Adolpheus. Why, it even incorporated his limp, and the handicap that caused it! Nor was this the only shock in store for me. Behind him came Inge, with her flour-dusted apron and apple-red cheeks, a loaf of bread in her hands and Hesta jumping up again and again at her feet, as if begging for crumbs. She was followed by Herr Doppler, stiff and stern in his colonel’s uniform, white whiskers bristling as if sheathed in ice, a sword buckled at his side, which he drew and flourished, then sheathed again, over and over, as he marched, looking neither to the left nor to the right. Following him like a dutiful daughter was Corinna, eyes downcast, steps slow and hesitant, as if she were yoked to him by an invisible leash and was being led off to some altogether unpleasant fate.

I turned from my contemplation of the painted wooden figure to the flesh-and-blood original at my side. ‘How is this possible?’ I demanded.

Corinna only shook her head, her gaze fixed on the unfolding tableau. The expression on her face was one of surprise and, or so it seemed, horror, as if the display was as new and unexpected to her as it was to me … though I did not see how that could be.

‘Corinna,’ I insisted, ‘is this your father’s work? Is he playing some kind of twisted game?’

As if in answer, she gasped and raised a hand to her mouth. I looked back at the clock, and there, trailing the figure of Corinna like a lovesick bumpkin, Sylvius vainly importuning cold-hearted Phoebe, I saw what could only have been intended as a mocking representation of myself. But it was the mere fact of the thing’s existence, rather than its satirical intent, that left me reeling; I felt as though my reality had been called into question, as if I should look into a mirror and see reflected there the chiselled features of a marionette leering back at me. For the thing wore my stolen clothes and hat, or so it seemed to me.

By the time I had collected my wits, or at any rate enough of them to feel in command of myself again, my doppelgänger had completed more than half its journey across the proscenium; already the figure of Adolpheus had left the stage, disappearing into the interior of the clock through a door opposite the one from which it had emerged, and my own figure came at the very end of the parade – soon it, too, would vanish, and the door would close.

Impulsively, I pulled my hand free of Corinna’s and ran towards the clock, ignoring her shouts for me to stop. Slipping and sliding over the icy ground, I reached the bristling façade and without hesitation flung myself upon it, finding hand- and footholds amid the ice-and-snow-crusted figures there, hauling myself upwards like a mountain climber. Earlier I had rejected the idea of just such a climb, judging it too perilous to attempt, but now I flew up the slick surface, surprising myself with the sureness and ease of my ascent. Before I knew it, I stood bare-headed on the proscenium, my hat lost in the climb. Only then did it strike me that the space was free of snow and ice, and I wondered, at the back of my mind, if Adolpheus were responsible, for though it was somewhat sheltered from the elements, it was open to the wind. But there was no time for such puzzles.

To my left, the figure of Corinna was re-entering the clock. Below me, the real Corinna was yelling at me to come down. I paid her no heed. With a cry, as if I might thus command the procession to halt, I hurried forward, reaching out for my counterfeit’s painted shoulder as I would for some urchin cutpurse overtaken on a London street. Indeed, I felt that something had been stolen from me, though I could not have said what. I half imagined that the mannequin would turn to face me when I laid hold of it.

But I never did. Instead, a wrenching pain in my ankle brought me to a sudden stop; my boot had become wedged in the track that carried the automatons across the proscenium. I felt the grinding of bone as the train continued to move, carrying me along with it willy-nilly, and my cry now had nothing of command in it, only pain. It was no more effective in stopping the mechanism.

The image is a comical one, I will grant you, like some allegorical study: ‘The Clockman Caught by Time’. But I confess the humour escaped me at the moment. All I could think of was the likelihood that my foot would be mangled in the gears of the train. Yet try as I might, I could not tug my boot free. Overriding the pain, panic filled me as I watched my diminutive double disappearing through the door and into the dark insides of the clock. I would be next. Earlier I had wished more than anything to be privy to the secrets hidden away there, but this was not the way I had imagined myself gaining access to them. What had beckoned with the promise of untold riches, like the treasure hoard of a dragon, now seemed forbidding, hostile. Some tardy instinct warned that to enter the clock in this manner would mean my death, and I did not doubt it for a second. I resumed my efforts to pull my boot free, or, failing that, to extricate my foot from the boot before it was too late. But the motion of the train, disturbed by my interference, was no longer as smooth as it had been; it had grown as jerky as the movements of the automatons, and in attempting to keep my balance and remove my foot, I accomplished neither, falling onto my backside, from which undignified position, more or less of a height with my wooden double, I saw him swallowed by the darkness behind the door that was now swinging shut, even as I continued to be drawn towards it. I say darkness, yet from out of it there shone, like a scattering of stars, glints of silver that I would have taken for reflections of sunlight from metal or ice were it not for the fact that grey clouds had once again spilled over the jagged tops of the mountains and begun to drop their heavy loads of snow, quite obscuring the sun that had just moments before had the sky to itself. So swift was this change that it seemed as much a mechanical effect as the tolling of the bells and the parade of automatons, as if the influence of Wachter’s Folly extended even to the heavens.

But my attention was on lower things. I saw that the door would shut before I was drawn through it, yet not before my trapped boot was carried over the threshold. The door looked substantial, and I had no doubt that the mechanical force behind it would be sufficient to crush my foot. I redoubled my struggles, in vain. I could neither free myself nor, from my prone position, on my back now, my free leg extended to push against the closing door, employ sufficient leverage to stop or even slow its progress. I cried for help, but there was no answer from Corinna. I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was to come.

But instead of the agony I was expecting, I felt myself lurch to a sudden halt. Opening my eyes, I beheld Adolpheus. His appearance was so sudden and unheralded that it was almost as if he had emerged from the clock. The dwarf had used his stepladder to prevent the door from closing, and this, in turn, had stopped the train – though I could feel it straining beneath me, its motive force frustrated for the time being but still exerting itself, like a trapped behemoth flexing against its bonds, building towards an explosive escape. Perhaps only another clockman would credit it, but at that moment my apprehension was not for myself but for the well-being of the timepiece. I feared it would suffer some irreparable harm.

‘This is getting to be a habit, Herr Gray,’ said Adolpheus, a grin flashing through his rusty beard. ‘If Corinna hadn’t found me, you’d be shorter by a foot about now.’

‘My boot is caught,’ I told him. ‘I can’t get it out!’

He gave my leg a tentative tug, at which I gasped as pain shot through my ankle. ‘Ach, you’re wedged in there good and proper,’ he commented as though admiring a fine bit of carpentry. ‘Looks as though I might have to cut the boot away …’

‘There’s no time for that,’ I replied. ‘The clock is going to damage itself – can’t you feel it?’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Why, pull it out, man! You’ve got the leverage.’

Adolpheus grinned again. ‘It’s going to hurt.’

‘Best hurry then,’ I replied.

He nodded and stepped aside to take hold of my leg with his gloved hands. ‘Ready?’ he asked. ‘On three. One … two …’

There was no three . Adolpheus yanked with what seemed the strength of a giant, and my boot came free – but with such a surfeit of pain that I screamed as if, rather than liberating my appendage, he had torn it off. I rolled away, howling and clutching my leg below the knee; my boot had been shredded in the gears of the train, and I saw a dark stain of blood on the leather, and splashes of crimson glistened on the proscenium. Meanwhile, Adolpheus must have removed his stepladder, because I felt a lurch as the stalled train resumed its course, and the door did likewise, clapping shut with a bang, after which the train stopped again, this time by design.

‘Can you walk?’ Adolpheus asked.

I could not speak, but only shook my head.

He bent down and, before I could protest, lifted me as if I were no more than a child and slung me across his broad shoulders. The movement brought another stab of pain to my ankle, and everything went dark.

12 The Cogwheel Sun

THE NEXT THING I knew, we were on the ground again, at the base of the clock. I was lying with my back propped against the stepladder, gazing into the concerned faces of Adolpheus and Corinna as snow continued to fall around us. Corinna knelt at my shoulder, cushioning my head against her arm, while Adolpheus squatted by my foot, which he appeared to have been examining while I was unconscious. My ankle throbbed in time to the beating of my heart: two perfectly synchronized timepieces.

‘Are you all right, Michael – er, Herr Gray?’ Corinna asked. Her face was pale with worry, though a faint blush coloured her cheeks as she corrected her use of my Christian name – but not before Adolpheus had taken note of the slip, as I saw from the sharp glance he gave her.

‘Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, Fraülein,’ I admitted with an attempt at levity, both because I wanted Corinna to think me brave and because I didn’t want Adolpheus to report back to Herr Doppler that she and I were in the habit of addressing each other so informally. One intimacy might lead to another, after all … at least, in the mind of a father so determined to guard his daughter’s innocence. But the sight of my foot – or, rather, the torn and bloody boot that covered it – wiped even the hint of a grin from my face, and all bravery from my heart. What would I find beneath that mangled boot? The thought of it made me sick with apprehension.

‘Hard to tell how bad it is without cutting off the boot, or rather what’s left of it,’ said Adolpheus. ‘Let’s get you back to the Hearth and Home, and we’ll see where things stand. And speaking of which, I don’t suppose you can – stand, that is.’

‘I should not like to try,’ I answered.

‘Then I will carry you,’ he said. ‘I will be as gentle as I can.’

Again he lifted me effortlessly, cradling me against his chest. What a ludicrous sight we must have made as he bore me back to the Hearth and Home! A dwarf carrying a man almost twice his own height! But there was no one to witness my humiliation. The square was deserted, as were the covered passages. Corinna followed us, the stepladder slung over her shoulder by its rope, which she held in both hands, bent forward to better distribute the weight of the ladder, as if she bore a load of kindling on her back. Though she said nothing, her concern for me was palpable.

True to his word, Adolpheus was gentleness itself. Not once did he bang my injured foot against the sides of the corridors, which, though spacious enough for two people to pass abreast, were yet not very much wider than my own length. Even so, the trip was a torturous one, and it took all my self-control to keep from crying out when, as was inevitable, some movement jostled my foot, or, as happened despite Adolpheus’s care, my boot brushed against a wall as he turned a corner.

‘Herr Doppler will not be pleased when he hears of this,’ Adolpheus remarked as we neared the inn.

This seemed so self-evident as not to require a reply. Besides, I feared that if I opened my mouth to speak, I might whimper like a beaten dog.

But Corinna spoke up from behind. ‘Oh, must you tell him, Adolpheus? The only harm done was to poor Herr Gray. Surely there is no reason for my father to know.’

‘I have never lied to your father,’ Adolpheus answered without slowing or looking back, ‘and I do not mean to start now. I am the watchman of this town, and it is my duty to report such transgressions. Herr Doppler has been indulgent where you are concerned, Fraülein – what father would not be? But I do not care to tempt his wrath by dissembling. I will tell him what I know. In any case, the story would soon come out. The injury, after all, speaks for itself.’

‘Then let it,’ she returned pertly.

‘I will tell what I know,’ he repeated.

‘But what do you know, after all? Only that his foot became caught in the train. You do not know how he came to be in that position.’

‘It seems clear enough. He sought entrance to the clock – which he promised your father not to do. Is that not the case, Herr Gray?’

Corinna replied before I could. ‘He climbed to the proscenium because I asked him to. What happened is my fault entirely!’

At this I protested, of course. ‘She’s lying,’ I ground out between clenched teeth.

‘I’m not,’ she insisted. ‘Herr Gray is only trying to protect me by taking the blame onto himself, as any gentleman would.’

‘Protect you from what?’ Adolpheus demanded. I confess I was curious to learn this as well; looking back at her over the dwarf’s shoulder, I saw her raise an admonitory finger to her lips. Clearly, she had something in mind, though I could not guess what it might be. But I held my tongue.

‘The truth is – you will think me wicked, Adolpheus – but the truth is that I teased him mercilessly, challenged him again and again to scale the tower. Every boy in Märchen has made the climb, I told him. Are you, a grown man, afraid to match them? I don’t know why I did it; I try to be good, but there is something in me that likes to stir things up, some devil that delights in mischief.’

‘I’m disappointed in you,’ Adolpheus said. ‘And in you as well, Herr Gray. To allow a young girl’s teasing to provoke you into breaking a solemn promise. You should be setting this one a sober example, not encouraging her waywardness.’

Again Corinna spoke up before I could. ‘He didn’t want to go,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t going to, no matter what. But then I promised that I would reward him most handsomely if he scaled the tower and returned to the ground before the automatons had completed their course. I was only teasing, I swear it, but up he went like a jackrabbit. You know the rest.’

‘What did you promise him?’ Adolpheus asked. ‘That is what I would know.’

At this, Corinna burst into tears, or seemed to, letting the stepladder fall behind her as she turned towards one wall and buried her face in her hands . ‘Oh, I cannot say. Do not ask it of me, Adolpheus! I am too ashamed.’

Needless to say, this had the effect of encouraging rather than deflecting Adolpheus’s curiosity. He stopped and half turned to look behind him at the weeping Corinna – in the process grazing my boot against the wall, so that I had to bite my lip to hold back a cry. ‘If you will not tell me,’ he said to her, ‘I will require it of Herr Gray. He, I feel sure, will know his duty.’

‘No,’ she said, seeming to dry her eyes, though she would not meet Adolpheus’s demanding gaze – or my own uncomprehending one. ‘I will tell you. I promised him … a kiss.’

Now, indeed, a cry escaped my lips, but of surprise rather than pain. Yet I don’t believe Adolpheus heard it, for he had thrown back his head and was roaring with laughter. ‘A kiss!’ he managed to gasp out. ‘Bless you, a kiss!’

This response provoked Corinna to anger. ‘Yes, why not a kiss? What is so funny about that, I should like to know! Am I so hideous, that no one would want to kiss me?’

But Adolpheus did not reply. Still laughing, he turned and continued towards the inn.

Corinna followed, furious now. ‘Answer me, Adolpheus! Adolpheus!’

He paid her no heed. As for me, I was at a loss to explain why she had concocted such a story to account for my presence upon the proscenium. Adolpheus might find it amusing, but I felt sure her father would have a different reaction. That she had some scheme in mind was obvious – but what? I grasped that she had not wanted me to reveal what we had seen, yet I could not guess her reasons. Indeed, I could scarcely credit my own eyes. That the automatons should resemble the townsfolk of Märchen seemed possible – though it meant Herr Doppler had been less than truthful when he’d told me that no one had touched the inner workings of the clock since Wachter’s day. But that someone could have prepared an automaton to resemble me in the relatively short time I’d been there – why, that was beyond credulity. I supposed a skilled craftsman working diligently from the moment I’d set foot in town could have made such a thing, but why? For what purpose? Howsoever I racked my brains, no answers came – at least, no sane ones.

My return to the Hearth and Home was a humiliating one. Corinna, looking daggers at Adolpheus, held the door open for him to carry me through. The taproom was crowded and noisy, much as it had been the night of my arrival. And, as had been the case that night, all conversation ceased at my entrance. But unlike that night, the silence was followed by raucous laughter as the spectacle of a dwarf carrying a full-grown man in his arms registered on the patrons.

‘Behold,’ shouted one wit, ‘the watchman bears the clockman!’

‘Got too much time on your hands, Dolph?’ contributed another.

‘Quiet, you dolts,’ Adolpheus roared. ‘Can’t you see the man’s been hurt? Someone fetch the doctor!’

At that moment, Inge entered from the kitchen with a tray of glasses. Seeing us, she gave a little shriek and dropped the tray. The sound of shattering glass provoked greater mirth from the denizens of the taproom, which in turn set Hesta, already roused from her slumber by the hearth, to barking.

With a growl of annoyance, Adolpheus carried me across the room and up the stairs. Inge, recovered from her surprise, bustled after us, bombarding Adolpheus with questions that, for the moment, he ignored. Corinna followed her, and, last of all, came a still-barking Hesta. I had the uncanny sense that this, too, was but a grouping of automatons. Shakespeare wrote that all the world’s a stage, but at that moment it seemed to me a clock.

The door to my room was locked, and though I had the key in my pocket, I could not get to it easily from my current position, and so Adolpheus stood to one side as Inge used her master key. The dwarf’s arms were like bands of iron; despite the distance he had carried me, I could not feel even a tremor in his muscles. It seemed that he could bear my weight for hours more if need be.

‘Ach, Herr Gray,’ Inge said as she pushed the door open, letting a heavy exhalation of heat roll from the room, ‘what have you done to yourself now?’

‘The fool climbed the clock tower,’ Adolpheus answered as he shouldered his way past her.

‘Lord bless us!’ Inge responded, entering the room behind him. ‘Did he fall?’

‘I simply wished to examine the automatons more closely,’ I explained, tired of other people speaking for me, ‘and my boot became caught in the mechanism.’

‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ the landlady stated. ‘That clock has ways of defending itself.’

‘That’s ridicu— holy Christ in heaven!’ A wave of pain overwhelmed me as Adolpheus none too gently, whether from weariness or exasperation, deposited me onto the bed.

‘Apologies, Herr Gray,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Adolpheus, you clumsy idiot!’ cried Corinna, who had followed Inge into the room. ‘Are you trying to kill him?’ She rushed to my bedside as though to protect me from a murderer. Ignoring the hurly-burly, Hesta went straight to the simmering furnace and flopped down onto the floor in front of it.

‘That’s enough from you, young lady,’ Inge said sharply. ‘Herr Gray left in your care, and see how he returns!’

‘Are you saying it’s my fault he was hurt?’ Corinna demanded, pulling up short and turning to face the landlady, an incredulous look on her face.

‘Isn’t it?’ Adolpheus asked. ‘After all, he would not have climbed the tower had you not tempted him with a kiss.’

Corinna flushed, and whatever she had been about to say went unsaid; in the heat of the exchange, she had, or so it seemed to me, forgotten what she had told Adolpheus earlier, but now the memory of it left her quite unable to speak.

‘What?’ cried Inge at this news. ‘Why, you shameless hussy! A kiss, indeed! Your father shall hear of this, I promise you.’

‘But Frau Hubner …’ Suddenly she looked near tears. Real ones this time. Corinna’s customary self-possession had the effect of making her seem older than her years, but now that façade was stripped away, revealing her youth and innocence. It wrung my heart to see, yet what could I say? She had invented the story of a kiss to stop me from telling Adolpheus the real reason for my climb; for whatever reason, she wished to keep what we had seen a secret, and I had no sense now that her wishes had changed, even if circumstances had taken an unforeseen turning.

‘But nothing,’ Inge said. ‘Get downstairs with you this instant. You’re late for work as it is, and that crowd of drunks is probably robbing me blind.’

‘But—’

‘I said now! You, too, Adolpheus – Herr Gray is not a sack of potatoes to be thrown down so roughly. He requires a woman’s touch.’

Corinna, after a plaintive glance at me, eyes brimming with tears, turned and left the room, her posture one of abject defeat. Adolpheus followed almost jauntily. ‘Well, clockman,’ he said in the doorway, ‘I’ll look in on you later, assuming there is anything left of you after Herr Doppler is through.’ He shook his shaggy head and chuckled. ‘A kiss indeed. That girl is a menace.’

‘She is innocent,’ I responded.

‘And all the more dangerous for it, as you are about to discover.’ He jerked his chin in my direction and added, ‘If the lesson hasn’t sunk in already.’

‘Ach, don’t pay him any mind,’ Inge said after Adolpheus had departed. ‘He is just jealous.’

‘Jealous?’ I exclaimed.

‘Of course jealous,’ she answered. ‘Do you think anyone has offered to kiss him lately? Or ever?’

I had to laugh.

Inge smiled, her apple-red cheeks dimpling. ‘That’s more like it. Don’t worry about Herr Doppler. He knows his daughter’s tricks and fancies. You are not the first she’s led astray.’ The landlady leaned over the bed, her abundant breasts seeming about to spill out of the top of her blouse like ripe fruits from a cornucopia. The heady aromas of the kitchen wafted from her as if from an open oven, and once again they proved to have a stimulating effect, which I shifted my position on the bed to disguise, though I could see by Inge’s glance that my condition had not escaped her notice. ‘Your poor foot,’ she said, laying a massive hand on my leg, above the knee; I could feel the heat of her through my clothing, as if she and not the tile stove were the source of the room’s excessive warmth. ‘Can I do anything to ease your pain until the doctor arrives?’

I had the distinct impression that she was not referring to my foot at all . But just at that moment, the gentleman in question knocked at the open door. He was a small man, though of course taller than Adolpheus, but slight as a reed and pale as parchment, as if he had no more than a trickle of blood in his veins. He peeked into the room, blinking owlishly behind a pair of spectacles. He was dressed in black, which made his skin seem all the paler; his powdered grey wig, of a style long out of fashion, was tilted askew, as though he had jammed it onto his head while rushing out of the door. I did not think I had seen him before, though there was something familiar about him.

‘I was sent for,’ he said defensively, as if afraid his presence would be questioned.

‘Come in, sir, come in,’ said Inge, straightening and stepping back, her hand sliding from my leg in a kind of caress. ‘Your patient awaits.’

The doctor entered, holding a small black bag very much like my own tool kit before him in the manner of a shield. ‘How do you do, sir,’ he said with a somewhat convulsive bow in my direction.

‘Not too well, I’m afraid,’ I replied, indicating my foot.

‘This is Herr Gray, Doctor,’ Inge said.

He repeated his bow. ‘I am Dr Immelman.’

‘A Jew,’ Inge added in a stage whisper, as if this fact were significant.

‘A convert,’ the doctor was quick to amend, as if this, too, were significant, indicative of superior, if not occult, knowledge.

‘It is your medical rather than your religious practices that concern me,’ I told him with an attempt at levity that appeared to fall flat.

‘We may be a bit out of the way here in Märchen, off the beaten track so to speak,’ he said as he approached the bed with that same tentative air, ‘but I think you’ll find my skills more than adequate.’

‘I have no doubt of it, Herr Doctor,’ I assured him. ‘It was merely a joke – a poor one.’

‘Ah,’ he said, nodding sagaciously. ‘A joke. Of course.’

The concept seemed foreign to him.

‘Well, Dr Immelman,’ Inge broke in, ‘will you need my assistance? Is there anything I can get for you?’

By now Immelman had reached the bed. He settled his black bag upon the edge of the mattress and adjusted his spectacles as he looked me over. His bloodless face and pale, high forehead were slick with sweat ; he almost seemed to be melting, as if made of wax or ice. ‘That boot will have to be cut away,’ he said. ‘I will need hot water and bandages, Frau Hubner. And a bottle of schnapps for the patient, to dull the pain.’

‘I’ll have them sent up at once,’ she replied. ‘I’ll leave you in the doctor’s capable hands for now, Herr Gray. Later I will bring some food and sit with you awhile. Come, Hesta,’ she added, and the dog rose from the floor and followed her out of the room.

Dr Immelman pulled up a chair and sat down near the foot of the bed, facing me but keeping his gaze fixed on my boot. ‘You will let me know if there is any pain,’ he directed, reaching out with long, slender fingers, like those of a pianist.

I swore as he began to manipulate my ankle; his touch was gentle enough, but even so the pain was severe. He drew back at once.

‘Is it broken?’ I asked him.

He withdrew a handkerchief from within his black coat and mopped his perspiring face, then tucked it back inside. Now his gaze did meet my own, but only, as it were, glancingly. ‘I cannot say for certain without removing the boot. It seems likely, however.’

I swore again.

‘How were you injured, Herr Gray?’ Immelman asked. ‘I was told only that my services were required.’

‘I climbed the clock tower, and my foot became lodged in the train along which the automatons move.’

Now his gaze returned to my own, and this time it did not waver. ‘Why would you do such a foolish thing?’

I shrugged but did not look away. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time.’ I didn’t want to say anything more concerning the automatons, not only because of Corinna’s apparent desire that I should keep quiet about their resemblance to the people of Märchen, but because I was convinced that I had seen the good doctor – or, rather, his wooden counterpart – among them. Yes, I remembered the sight of him quite clearly; he had preceded Adolpheus in the parade, that black bag of his held before him in the same fashion he had held it just moments ago, before setting it down on the bed. The recollection made it impossible to view the man with equanimity; despite his timidity, there was something uncanny, almost sinister, it seemed to me, about his presence now, and I experienced once again, more intensely than I had in the taproom, a sense of – how to describe it? – misalignment , as if I no longer fitted properly into the world, or as if the world had undergone some subtle change, one that had left it less friendly to me, less, well, like home. The sensation was all the more troubling in that it was so inchoate, a pervasive wrongness I could neither explain nor explain away.

‘You are the English clockman,’ Immelman said. ‘You have come to learn the secrets of our timepieces, no?’

‘I hope to be permitted to study them,’ I allowed.

‘You have a strange way of going about it, climbing the tower like that. It is not the sort of behaviour likely to be rewarded by Herr Doppler.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I think it was no idle action.’ Immelman glanced to the door, then leaned towards me, his voice a confiding whisper. ‘I think you saw something that … astonished you. Something that provoked you to make the climb.’

‘On what do you base your diagnosis?’ I asked. ‘Have you yourself seen something astonishing?’

‘I have seen many such things in my time here,’ Immelman replied, once again casting a nervous glance towards the door. He licked his thin lips. Then, as if coming to a decision, he addressed me in English. ‘Sir,’ he said, pitching his voice lower still, ‘you are in grave danger. Märchen is not what you think. Nothing here is what you think. You must be on your guard if you ever wish to leave this place alive.’

I confess I was too taken aback to make an immediate reply. It was not only the shock of being addressed in my native tongue, but the warning thus conveyed, which, though it had come out of the blue, was uttered with such conviction that I did not doubt the man’s sincerity. But of course sincerity is no guarantee of truth. No one, after all, is as sincere as a madman.

‘They have tried to keep us apart,’ Immelman went on, his words spilling out in a breathless rush. ‘This is not your first injury since you arrived in Märchen, yet only now have I been given the task of treating you. Do you not find that strange?’

‘They? Who is this they ?’ I found my voice at last.

‘Herr Doppler and the rest. They are afraid I will warn you, as indeed I have. Afraid I will help you escape, as I should like very much to do. Yes, and go with you, away from this cursed place for ever! They wish to keep you here, Herr Gray. They have need of you. Just as, years ago, when I was as young a man as you, they had need of me.’

The disarray of the doctor’s clothes and wig, which I had at first taken as evidence of a certain absentmindedness often to be met with among medical men, now began to suggest a more troubling interpretation. Inge had told me that the long months of isolation imposed by Märchen’s heavy snowfalls sometimes induced a kind of mania in the townsfolk. Was that the cause of Dr Immelman’s odd behaviour? His eyes had a wild cast behind his spectacles, and his skin glistened with sweat; he looked sickly, feverish. I responded reasonably, hoping to calm him. ‘If my skills are required, Herr Doppler need only ask. Instead, he has denied my every request.’

‘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 surely 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?’

‘I know what I saw,’ I insisted. ‘You know it, too – I can tell. Why are you lying?’

He sighed again. ‘Must I call Herr Doppler and Adolpheus to hold you down? Drink, Herr Gray. It’s for your own good.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘Earlier you were about to warn me of something. What was it?’

The doctor hesitated before replying, as if debating how much to tell me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, ‘but it is too late. Now, drink up. Don’t worry – it’s merely a sedative, something to help you sleep. When you wake up, all your questions will be answered, I promise.’

I shook my head, drawing back from the glass he thrust at me. ‘No,’ I cried. ‘Too late for what? Keep it away – I said no!’

‘Doctor, let me talk to him.’ It was Corinna. I was so glad to see her that I nearly sobbed with relief. She was the only one in this madhouse of a town that I could trust.

Dr Immelman straightened at her words. ‘Very well, Fraülein.’ He set the glass on the bedside table and stepped back, motioning for her to approach me.

‘I should like to speak to Herr Gray alone,’ she clarified.

‘Why, that’s …’ Whatever he was about to say, he thought better of it. ‘Of course.’ He crossed the room to retrieve his black bag. Then, bowing to each of us in turn, he left the room. ‘I shall be outside if you need me.’

‘Please close the door, Herr Doctor.’

He did so without objection.

‘What is going on, Corinna?’ I asked. I had so many questions, I scarcely knew where to begin. ‘Your father’s book … The automatons … All of it. What is happening to me?’

‘Shh,’ she said as she came forward and sat on the edge of the bed, reaching out to brush back a lock of my hair. The touch of her fingers on my brow accomplished what mere words could not, and I felt at once stirred to my depths and yet soothed in my soul. ‘Drink the doctor’s potion first, Michael, and I will sit with you and tell you all you wish to know.’

‘I’m afraid,’ I admitted to her. ‘Afraid that I will never wake up.’

‘You will wake,’ she assured me. ‘I swear it. Now, please, for my sake.’ And she picked up the glass and held it out to me.

I met her gaze, searching for any hint of deception, but I saw only caring and concern. I took the glass, and it felt to me that I was binding myself to her by the action, or rather the trust behind it, as if we two were plighting our troth in a ceremony that needed no other witnesses but ourselves, a ceremony more significant than anything we had already shared. I saw, or seemed to see, an answering knowledge in her eyes. And so I drank the potion. I tasted nothing but water – though the water of Märchen was anything but ordinary. So swift was the spread of lethargy through my limbs that I would have dropped the glass had she not plucked it from my hand.

‘Now ask your questions,’ she said.

It was difficult to focus my thoughts, much less speak them aloud. But I persevered. ‘The automatons, Corinna. How is that I saw myself there? And why did you not wish to tell anyone what we had seen? Why did you make up that story about a kiss?’

‘Why, would you not like a kiss from me?’ she answered coyly.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but—’

‘Then you shall have it,’ she said and, before I could say another word, pressed her lips to mine. Despite the lassitude instilled by the doctor’s potion, I responded. That her father or Frau Hubner might enter the room at any time and discover us did not cross my mind. But even as I sought to deepen the kiss, opening my lips to coax the same from her, she pulled away.

‘That was nice,’ she said. ‘I could feel your heart beating so fast, like a hummingbird!’

But to me my heartbeat seemed rather like a clock in need of winding, or like the cogwheel slowing on the cover of Herr Doppler’s book as whatever energy had powered its turning ebbed away. I felt myself slipping under. I did not think even another kiss from Corinna could keep me awake. I struggled to speak. ‘Tell me about the clock, the automatons.’

She frowned but then answered. ‘It is some wizardry of Herr Wachter’s,’ she said. ‘The figures are always the same, modelled after the townsfolk. Except today. Today you appeared among them. A stranger. That has never happened before. There is something special about you, Michael. The clock has chosen you.’

I understood her words, but the sense behind them was as far beyond my comprehension as the script in Herr Doppler’s book. ‘Chosen? How? And for what?’

‘For me,’ she said, blushing most becomingly. ‘We are to be husband and wife.’

I confess I did not follow the logic. Yet there was nothing more I could say; the potion had done its work, and even as she bent to give me another kiss, I felt myself falling away from her as if the mattress had yawned open beneath me. Before her lips reached mine, darkness closed over my eyes.

‘I will come back later tonight.’ Her voice threaded out of the black. ‘When you are awake again. I will show you …’

Her words were lost as I slipped completely under.

I was awakened by the sound of a closing door. I sat up, alert in an instant, the effects of Dr Immelman’s draught utterly spent. The lamp had gone out, and the only light in the room was a soft glow from the stove, a reddish nimbus like the heart of a dying coal. It illuminated nothing beyond itself, clinging to its source as if for warmth, for the temperature in the room had plunged while I slept. Behind me, I heard the rattle of sleet against the windowpane.

‘Who is there?’ I whispered. ‘Corinna, is it you?’

There came a dry rasping, as of something heavy being dragged across the floor. At that sound, the memory of the dream that had ravished me on my first night in Märchen, when Corinna had crept into my room and stolen my tool kit, flooded over me. I recalled the eldritch glow that had pervaded everything like some radiant property of cold, remembered the inhuman beauty of the woman who had stood before me like some aloof yet hungry goddess made of metal and jewels, demanding a tribute I could not deny. I began to tremble, afraid that the dream was playing itself out in real life … yet also half desiring it.

Then the pungent odour of fresh-baked bread rolled over me, as if an oven door had been opened, and I knew who my visitor was.

‘Inge,’ I said.

And from the darkness, near enough to touch, a whisper: ‘Shh.’

As had happened before, her scent proved stimulating, a force of nature beyond my control, and my little soldier had already sprung to attention when I felt her settle onto the bed, which groaned at the weight of her. I reached out, intending to push her away, but my hand sank as if into a mass of dough. She was naked. Her skin did not just envelop my hand but seemed to absorb it. She moaned at my touch as if she had long desired it. When I tried to pull my hand back, she fixed my wrist in a grip of iron and moved my hand over her body in a forceful parody of a caress.

In the darkness, the extent of her was impossible to gauge. She was the darkness, darkness incarnate and concentrated, hungry and hot beneath my fingers, as if she were burning with fever. And that fever spread to me. Infected me. Whereas at first it had been a kind of disbelieving horror that stilled my voice, now it was passion that robbed me of speech. I was panting like an animal, straining towards her with mindless need. And she reciprocated. Her hands tore at my clothing, freeing me, and then she – there is no other word for it – engulfed me. I had a moment’s anxiety for my injured foot, but I felt no pain as the soft and fragrant immensity of her came down over me, and then all thought was extinguished.

It was as if I had entered a dense and surging sea. I rose and plunged, tumbled and spun, caught in fleshy currents that flexed and slid and oozed around me like the coils of a serpent intent not to squeeze the breath from me but rather to stroke me to heights of pleasure beyond all enduring, pleasure too great for a human body to contain. I had a sense that she was not just ravishing me but also, at the same time, giving birth to me, to a new me, as if I were a lump of dough and she an expert baker whose hands were kneading me, whose embrace was baking me.

All the while, I was spilling without cease. There was no holding back, yet neither did I spend myself. My energies looped back on themselves, feeding on their own expiration. I felt as if every last drop of vitality was being wrung out of me, that, when Inge released me, I would be as desiccated as the victim of a spider, a shrivelled, bloodless husk. But I didn’t care. I welcomed that fate. I desired above everything to lay my spark on the altar of her divine corpulence, to light a candle there, even if I had to snuff myself out to do it.

And perhaps I would have done just that had not the door slammed open with a bang that not only penetrated but popped the bubble of our congress. An eerie blue light flooded the room, and Inge drew back with a hiss, releasing me. I lay there, spent and gasping, whatever glamour had gripped me broken. Looking up, I beheld a monster. A creature with the head and torso of a woman but the lower body of a serpent. It was those coils, lying loose around me now, not scaled but fleshy, glistening with the mingled fluids of our exertions, that had embraced me; it was those coils, twined about her torso, that had given Inge the appearance of such fantastic stoutness, for in reality – reality! – she was, from the waist up, as perfect a vision of femininity as any man could desire.

Now her eyes were fixed on the door, and on the figure that stood there: Corinna, returned as she had promised. But it was also the woman from my dream, the frozen succubus that had melted before me into a frightened girl. She was not frightened now. Anger flashed in her quartz-green eyes.

I had thought the room cold already, but now it turned positively frigid. Ice bloomed on every surface. I felt it on my lips, my tongue, deep in my lungs; I watched it precipitate out of the air with every exhalation, a sparkling condensation of fear. I could not move; could not cry out; could only shiver and watch the confrontation playing out before me. Yet even then, struck mute as I was with terror, I felt again an insatiable demand, and my body, though bereft of strength and desire, responded like some collapsed beast of burden lashed erect, so that I was once more as hard as marble and trembling on the edge of climax; it was only the fact that the attention of the two women – if women they were – was on each other and not on me that kept me from tumbling over.

For long seconds they took each other’s measure, the temperature meanwhile continuing to plunge, until it had passed the lowest register of my sensibilities and entered into some realm beyond cold, like the very heart of hell. Inge was sheathed in ice; it covered her like a second skin, a skin of glass, a diamond prison. Corinna might have been carved out of stone. Not a word was spoken by either of them.

Then Inge flexed her coils. The prison shattered, and she was free. Free and moving swift as lightning towards Corinna, who shot forward to meet her. They came together in the centre of the room and grappled there like two wrestlers, straining one against the other, wordless and intent, their eyes locked as fiercely as their limbs.

My ears rang from the thunder of their collision, the force of which shook the building like an earthquake. Yet even so I heard the bells in the clock tower begin to chime, as if the shock had reached all the way to the town square. It was no tuneful chorus such as I had heard before but a riotous caterwauling, strident and clamorous, a noise of panic, of alarm.

The women appeared not to notice, intent on each other. They seemed well matched. Neither could gain the upper hand; their bodies – Inge naked, Corinna clothed – trembled with the choked violence of their efforts, which sent tremors like aftershocks through the room. The floor creaked; the walls cracked; chips of plaster and ice dropped from the ceiling. It felt as if the inn was about to come crashing down around my ears, yet I couldn’t stir.

Then not just the room but the whole earth heaved beneath me. The women raised their heads sharply, seeming to listen with every fibre of their beings. And the earth heaved again. And again. If a mountain could walk, I remember thinking, this is what it would feel like.

‘You fool,’ hissed Inge. ‘You’ve awakened him!’

‘It’s your fault,’ Corinna shot back.

But it was clear that their mutual hatred was dwarfed by their fear of whatever was coming. With an angry cry, Inge pulled free of Corinna’s grasp. She could have struck then, yet she did not, and not from mercy – with a flick of her tail, she propelled herself past Corinna and out of the door, leaving the two of us alone.

‘Hurry,’ Corinna said, turning to me. ‘Follow me if you want to live.’

At her words, my paralysis fell away. I fumbled at my disordered clothing. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry.

‘Hurry,’ she said again.

‘I can’t,’ I told her, gesturing helplessly. ‘My foot.’

With a look of exasperation, she crossed to the bed and, taking hold of my arm, pulled me to my feet. I had an impression of immense strength, as if she could have not just lifted me but thrown me for a hundred yards. Despite everything, her touch, rough as it was, brought me to climax again; there was no pleasure in it, just an involuntary spasm, a reflex that wrung my insides like a cold fist clenching. I groaned, and she glanced down with annoyance, as if I were a favoured pet that had reminded her I was only an animal after all. But perhaps she was equally annoyed at herself, for in the next second I felt a diminution of her presence, a dwindling, as if she had willed herself to become something less than she had been, than she really was. At that, I went as limp as a wet noodle and would have fallen had she not supported me with her arm. This time her touch had no untoward effect. And yet I marvelled, even in the midst of my terror, because I was standing. There was not so much as a twinge of pain from my bandaged foot. It felt as strong, as well, as ever. ‘How—’

‘This is no time for questions,’ she interrupted. ‘Or answers. Come – we must flee. Death approaches.’

And indeed, the gargantuan footsteps had not stilled in all this time, nor had the tintinnabulation of the bells. Corinna was pulling me towards the door. I paused only to snatch my tool kit. Then I followed her.

13 The Productions of Time

HAND IN HAND , we fled the hearth and home. Though Corinna’s touch had lost its uncanny power over me, a chilly blue light continued to radiate from her, a reminder – were any needed! – that she was more than just the simple girl I had known, or thought I had known.

The inn appeared empty, abandoned. There was no sign of Inge, for which I was glad enough, and Hesta was gone from her customary place beside the fire, or what was left of it: glowing embers in a bed of ash. As we hurried through the common room, a flicker of movement behind the bar drew my attention; the door of the cuckoo clock stood open, and the tiny dragon whose appearance had so delighted me on previous occasions was flitting around the clock face in excitement or distress. It came at me without warning, its wings beating about my head and shoulders, its hot breath scalding my neck, burning my hair. I cried out, swatting one-handed at the flames as the infernal creature harried me with the crazed persistence of a mother bird defending its nest.

Then we were outside, in the network of covered passageways that had turned the snow-blanketed town into a maze. The dragon did not follow. I could feel that my scalp and neck had been burned, though how badly I did not know.

‘This way,’ Corinna said and ran off before I could say a word.

I hurried after her. The lamps of the passageways had all gone out, and the only light came from Corinna; it illuminated our immediate surroundings but no more than that. The result was that I had soon lost my bearings. All the while, the bells of the clock tower rang out in disarray, and the ground shook with the measured tread of whatever enormity was approaching. It seemed that we were rushing straight towards it.

‘Corinna,’ I gasped, reaching out to grab hold of her shoulder. ‘Please, talk to me. I feel as though I’ve gone mad – or the world has!’

She shrugged me off but slowed enough for me to come alongside her. She addressed me as we loped onwards. ‘Haven’t you realized that you are no longer in your world?’

I could make no coherent reply to this.

‘Märchen,’ she continued, ‘is like a town that straddles the border between two countries. You crossed from one into the other.’

‘Crossed … how?’ I asked.

‘Through the tower clock. It is the gate – one of the last gates.’

‘But I never entered the clock,’ I protested. ‘My foot was caught!’

‘You had already passed through,’ she told me. ‘Adolpheus didn’t find you lying unconscious in the snow all those weeks ago. He knocked you out and carried you across the threshold, from your world into this one.’

‘But why? Why me? Why … everything?’

She shook her head. ‘So many questions! There is no time to explain, and even if there were, you would not understand. But we had need of you, and so you were brought here.’

‘Like Dr Immelman?’ I asked, remembering the doctor’s warnings.

‘His name is not Immelman,’ she said. ‘Nor is he a doctor. He is, or was, the very man you have been searching for – Herr Wachter.’

Now I was more confused than ever. ‘You were to be his replacement,’ she said. ‘But now that can never be.’

‘Because of Inge?’ I asked.

‘No – though she should have left you alone. But she has always been a glutton, unable to control her appetites. And you are so very tempting – all of your kind. You are a drug to us, Michael. You must know that. You are a sickness that we crave; you give us, for a short while, the only thing we lack: a taste of mortality. Of time.’

‘Who … what are you?’

‘We have many names in your world. Some call us the Fair Folk. To others we are djinn, demons, angels. Gods. But these are mere words – human words for something as far beyond human words as beyond humanity itself. As to what we call ourselves, you lack the language to express it. We are old and fierce and forever.’

I was not a religious man, yet I had been raised in the Church of England, and I felt a need of its strong support just then, like the buttress of a cathedral. ‘There is but one God,’ I said, as much to reassure myself as to contradict what Corinna had told me. ‘If you are angels, it can only be the fallen kind.’

‘Risen, rather,’ she said. ‘That is our crime – our original sin, if you will. I repent of it most heartily now, perhaps too late. But I have made my choice at last. I spurn my father and all his works. I will fight him. And you will help me.’

She was right – I understood nothing of what she was telling me. I asked only, ‘What is to become of me?’

‘Why, I am sending you back across the border,’ she said. ‘I am sending you home. No more questions now,’ she added, for we had come to an exit that I recognized – beyond it lay the town square, and the clock tower. ‘Whatever happens, stay close to me, meet no one’s eye, say nothing, and follow my every command.’

‘It sounds as though you are expecting a fight.’

‘A fight?’ she echoed, and laughed grimly. ‘Michael, I am expecting a war.’

She got one. Or the makings of one, anyway, for when she opened the door and stepped through, taking me by the hand and drawing me along beside her – and a good thing, for I could not have taken a step under my own power – I saw a great armoured host filling the square. The clash of sunlight off their armour and the weapons they held was blinding. But then I realized the light was radiating from the host itself, like Corinna’s light only a thousand times brighter because it came from a thousand separate sources. And hotter, too, for the snow was melting all around us with a loud hissing, and steam rose into the air.

Even Corinna seemed taken aback by the sheer numbers confronting us, a bristling silver wall of swords and pikes, shields and helms. Upon those shields, and on banners that fluttered from standards scattered throughout the throng, I saw the same figure of a gearlike sun, or sun-like gear, that I had seen on the cover of Herr Doppler’s book. Like that cogwheel sun, these, too, were turning.

Corinna paused as if gathering her resolve, then strode forward, pulling me along with her. No one in that glittering array spoke as we advanced towards them hand in hand. It was only then, in the crashing silence, that I realized the bells had stopped tolling. The ground was still. Whatever had been approaching seemed to have arrived. Yet I saw no giant; perhaps, I thought, it had been the heavy, measured tread of the army arrayed before us, marching into position, that had so shaken the earth. The square as I remembered it could not have contained such a vast throng, yet it did not otherwise appear any different; the buildings looked the same as they always had, as did the hulking shapes of the mountains beyond, their tops lost in a blanket of grey cloud heavy with snow. Of the sun there was not even the palest hint in that gloomy, threatening sky. The resplendent soldiers facing us were the sole source of light. We might almost have been underground.

‘Fear not, Michael,’ Corinna whispered to me. ‘Take courage. They dare not stand against us.’

But she squeezed my hand as she spoke, and I felt she was exhorting herself to courage as much as me. I returned the pressure in the same spirit.

As we drew near, a figure detached itself from the rest and advanced to meet us. Though armoured and wearing a full helm, like some knight of old, its diminutive stature put me in mind of Adolpheus, and my supposition was proved correct when, at a distance of a dozen feet or so, he stopped and lifted his visor. The face thus revealed was both the face I knew and one I did not recognize, as if the Adolpheus I had seen and spoken with had been only a rough sketch for this one, as crude a likeness in its way as the automaton I had seen atop the clock tower. Like Corinna, he had somehow diminished himself in my presence, made himself less than he truly was. But now I was seeing him unveiled, in all his glory, shining like a little sun, his size no indication of his power but rather a necessary component of it, as if he were a god of small things. I felt a familiar stirring in my loins, a lustful quickening . This was no man, I told myself. This was something else, something that only wore the shape of a man, that tugged at me as a lodestone tugs at an iron filing. And then, as fast as that, the pull was gone. I glanced at Corinna and saw that she had resumed her former splendour; she stood once more like a queen of ice and moonlight, and though her cold blue radiance did not outshine his light, it did blunt it, shielding me from his glare.

‘Do not do this, Corinna,’ he said. ‘We do not wish to fight you. Return to the Hearth and Home and all will be forgiven. It is not too late.’

‘I have made my choice, Adolpheus,’ she replied. ‘Join me or stand aside.’

‘I will do neither,’ he said. ‘Your father has given me the power to stop you. I will use it if I must.’

‘You are welcome to try. But first there is something you should see.’

‘And what is that?’ he asked.

Rather than answering him, she whispered to me, though she did not take her eyes from Adolpheus. ‘Look away, Michael. Fix your eyes upon the ground, and keep them there on your life. Watch my feet, and when you see me walk, walk with me.’

I dropped my gaze. Thus I cannot tell with certainty what it was that she showed to Adolpheus, though I can guess readily enough. I heard Adolpheus gasp in something like horror, and heard that sound echoed from what seemed ten thousand throats. Meanwhile, shadows stretched and writhed across the ground as if struggling to pull free of what had cast them.

‘O, infamous daughter!’ cried Adolpheus. ‘Traitor and thief!’

The very air seemed to groan.

Corinna began to walk forward. I followed. It was difficult to keep my balance amidst the shifting patterns of shadow and light that danced over the ground. A kind of battle, it seemed to me, was being fought there. A silent and insubstantial battle that was nevertheless as much in earnest as any bloody clash of arms. The sight of it filled me with dread, yet, mindful of Corinna’s warning, I forced myself not to look away, though my every instinct screamed to do so. I do not know why I trusted her, but I did; she had said that she was sending me home, and I clung desperately, fervently, to that hope, as a madman clings to a single idea though everything in the world should testify against it.

‘Stand aside, Uncle,’ Corinna commanded. This time there was no defiance from Adolpheus. Instead, I heard the clanking of armour as he complied. At that, the army behind him followed suit, splitting into two wings that, as they retreated step by noisy step, pivoted towards us with the precision of well-drilled troops on parade, fashioning a narrow corridor that led to the clock tower.

Corinna did not hesitate. Neither did she hurry. With every appearance of calm, as if reviewing troops assembled to do her honour, she walked with regal assurance through the mass of fighters who could have killed us in an instant. They did not strike at us, however, not even with a word, and so motionless were they on either side – though my gaze was lowered, I could see their silver-plated legs, numerous as the trees of a petrified forest – that I could not help but wonder if they were machines, an army of automatons.

Their shadows, meanwhile, stretched and twisted out of all semblance, continued to make war with each other, or, perhaps, with something else I could not see, and finally, to preserve the crumbling bastions of my sanity – for I could no longer tell my own shadow from the others, and it had begun to seem to me that I was being drawn into their war, or was already a part of it – I shut my eyes and, like a blind man lost in a foreign land, let Corinna lead me where she would.

She stopped walking, and I bumped against her, reflexively opening my eyes. We had passed the army and now stood before the tower clock. Once, in what I had taken for a dream, I had watched a great dragon uncoil itself from the tower. Now that dragon faced us. Its long, scaled body, brown as burnished walnut, and haloed in a soft yellow glow, was looped around the edifice in an intricate knot my eyes could not unravel.

The beast would have towered over us, but it had lowered its flat head to our level to regard us serpentwise, and indeed it seemed more snake than dragon, wingless as it was. One of its eyes was gone, a pitted scar testifying to some ancient injury; the other was a glittering orb bigger than my hand, darker than dark. The warring shadows through which we had walked were gone now, yet I felt as if they had not vanished but only withdrawn into the inky depths of that solitary eye, for the longer I looked, the more I seemed to see movement there, smoky and serpentine. It called to me, that alluring movement, tugged at me with a strength I couldn’t resist, and I took a step forward, and then another before Corinna hauled me back.

‘I told you not to look,’ she hissed, passing her hand before my eyes; it was as if a razor had cut whatever bound me to the dragon’s greedy gaze. I gasped and looked away, yet I did not close my eyes as I had before. Instead, I let them roam over the dragon’s body, trying to trace the sinuous, scaled, knotted immensity of it, as if it were a riddle I might solve. It was in constant motion, rippling like the surface of a river, which moves and yet stays still. Locked within its looping coils I saw the shadowy figures of men and women writhing as though in torment. The air shimmered with heat; I felt I stood on the very border of hell.

Meanwhile, Corinna addressed the monster. ‘I would not fight you, faithful Hesta,’ she said, and I started at that, not just because she had called the dragon by the name of the dog but because, when she did so, I perceived that they were one and the same, or, rather, aspects of each other, like two shadows cast by a single object; I could see the shadows, but the object itself remained hidden to me. But that was not the whole of the riddle.

At the sound of its name, the dragon growled low in its throat, and a smell of hot metal and oil gusted over me. It was an automaton. Another of Wachter’s incredible, impossible machines, or so I surmised. It opened its jaws, and I cringed, fearing its breath, for I could see a fiery glow deep in its gullet. But instead the creature spoke in a voice as sinuous as its body, as mesmerizing as its eyes. The voice of a woman, I would have said, an empress … had I not seen the source of it.

‘Go, faithless daughter,’ the dragon said. ‘I cannot harm you, nor will I impede you. But know this. Leave now and the way back will be for ever barred to you. You will never look upon Märchen again.’

‘There are other gates,’ Corinna replied. ‘I will be back. And I will not be alone.’

‘Others have said as much. Where are they now?’

‘I shall find them,’ Corinna said.

‘Then you will die with them,’ the dragon said, and there was sadness in its voice, but also resolution. ‘And what of you, human?’ it asked then, addressing me. ‘Will you share this rebel’s fate? You may stay with us if you wish. There is a place for you here. She cannot compel you to go, whatever she may have told you.’

‘Do not answer,’ Corinna warned.

Too late. ‘I did not ask to be brought here,’ I said, careful to avoid the dragon’s eye. ‘I merely wish to go home.’

At which the creature laughed, a low, thunderous rumble. ‘You sought us out. You found us. You may leave, but you will never go home again.’

‘She lies,’ Corinna told me. ‘Do not listen to her, Michael. I will bring you home, I swear it.’

‘You will be hunted,’ the dragon promised. ‘Both of you.’

Corinna raised her hand again, displaying what she held clenched in her fist; thin beams of blue-white light streamed between her fingers, and the dragon hissed and shied away as if from a weapon it feared to so much as gaze upon. ‘I will be waiting, Hesta,’ Corinna said, a promise of her own. Then she took hold of my hand again and stepped forward, advancing towards the dragon. The creature drew back with each step, flattening itself against the façade of the tower. By the time we reached the base, there was only the elaborate wooden carving that had always been there, of a dragon whose coils seemed to encompass hell itself.

Corinna placed her hand against the carving, and a door appeared, summoned by her touch. ‘Open it,’ she told me. I heard a strain in her voice I hadn’t heard before; glancing at her, I saw that she appeared once more as a young woman, her face pale and drawn, as if she were nearing the end of her strength. She had never looked so beautiful to me, and I felt my heart go out to her, wanting to protect her, to sustain her with my own strength, paltry as it might be. I wondered why Hesta, seeing her weakness, did not strike now, or Adolpheus, who stood at our backs with his army. And where, I asked myself, was Herr Doppler? Why wasn’t he trying to stop us?

‘Hurry,’ Corinna hissed.

A wooden hand extended from amidst the dragon’s coils like that of a drowning man grasping for salvation; as there seemed to be no other knob or handle, I took hold of it and pulled. The door swung open; beyond was darkness, and a noise like the pumping of a great bellows … or a mighty heart. Though my greatest desire since I had arrived in Märchen had been to plumb the insides of the tower, I paused now on the threshold of attaining it. The blackness was absolute, dimensionless, all-engulfing. I feared that it would swallow me up, snuff me out.

Corinna, however, hastened through, pulling me along willy-nilly. The door shut behind us of its own accord. We were in a corridor, a wooden passageway like the ones in town, right down to the oil lamps set at regular intervals along the walls. I hadn’t known what to expect upon entering the tower, but it had not been this. I looked around in confusion; really, to all appearances we might have stepped out of the Hearth and Home. The only heartbeat I could hear now was my own.

‘What do you see?’ Corinna asked.

I told her.

‘Good. If you saw it as I do, you would undoubtedly go mad. Come now.’ And she set off down the corridor at a hurried pace, pulling me along beside her.

‘What do you see, then?’ I inquired as we went. We passed doors and sidepassages, each identical to the others, but Corinna ignored them all. I wondered where they led. Into other worlds? Other times?

‘Nothing that would make sense to you,’ she answered. ‘Your language lacks the words to describe it, just as your senses lack the capacity to perceive it.’

‘But how is it that we see different things?’

‘This is an in-between place. In your language, I suppose you might call it the Otherwhere. It has not had the stamp of reality placed upon it. It can be anything, or many things. Whoever enters gives it shape, whether unconsciously or by an act of will.’

‘You mean that I can change what I am seeing?’

At this, she laughed. ‘Only our kind has the strength of mind for that. We are creatures of the Otherwhere, you see. It is our home.’

‘I thought Märchen was your home.’

‘That is a home we have made. This is the home that made us.’

‘Made you? You talk as if it were alive.’

She laughed again. ‘Everything is alive, Michael. Alive and always. Only, some things have forgotten it and need to be reminded – woken up.’

‘What things?’

‘All the productions of time. There – I have told you the great secret.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That is why I have told you.’ She stopped, and I bumped against her. We stood before a door; she turned to me and fixed me with a gaze at once imperious and tender. I felt she loved me then, but it was a love that reached down to me, as it were, from an immense distance, one I could not cross; it was, in short, a love that could not be truly reciprocated, for it was not equal. It could only be accepted and endured. The knowledge of this, too, was in her eyes, and it seemed to sadden her.

‘Corinna,’ I began, wanting to declare my feelings for her once more, as I had in simpler, happier times, to tell her that I loved her and to place myself at her service in whatever manner she might require. But she interrupted me.

‘Here we must part,’ she said. ‘I deeper into the Otherwhere – you back to your world. Listen, now, Michael. My father will soon awaken and discover what I have stolen from him.’

‘Has he not already awakened? Those footsteps …’

‘The tread of Adolpheus’s army. My father, great as he is, sleeps deeply and is slow to wake. But if he should find us here, there can be no escaping, for his will is the strongest of all and can impose itself on everything, including me.’

‘Take me with you,’ I said. ‘I would help, if I can.’

‘Then take this,’ she said, and thrust what she held into my hand. It was, of course, Herr Doppler’s pocket watch. It felt cold as ice, or colder, burning against my palm. Yet I clenched my fingers around it, ignoring the pain – no, revelling in it, for her sake. ‘Let no one know of it,’ she went on, her gaze holding mine, ‘not even your closest friend. Not even your wife.’

‘You are my wife,’ I told her. ‘I shall have no other.’

‘Beware of what you say here,’ she admonished. ‘Words can become reality.’

‘If saying you are my wife will make it so, why would I be silent? You are the only woman I desire or ever will desire.’

At that, she smiled but did not otherwise respond to my declaration. Instead, she returned to the subject of the watch. ‘Do not attempt to open it; do not seek to learn its secrets.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Infinity bounded in a nutshell. My father will seek it ceaselessly, but as long as it sleeps, locked in matter, he cannot find it. Without it, he cannot win his war. Keep it secret, Michael. One day I – or, it may be, another – will come to claim it. But be on your guard, for my father has agents mortal and otherwise, and they will fool you if they can, or take it by force if they must.’

‘But if it isn’t you who comes to claim it, how will I know it is not some emissary of your father’s?’

Before she could reply, there came a roar of anger such as I had never heard, like an earthquake wrapped in a tornado and fired from a cannon as big as a ship-of-the-line. At this, Corinna wasted no time, but flung open the door and shoved me through before I could protest or even gather my wits. There was a blinding flash, then the sensation of falling; I screamed, my vision aflame with all the colours of the rainbow, a shimmering display behind whose rippling folds I saw, or seemed to see, geometric shapes floating and tumbling as though suspended in an ocean of light. I could not grasp the size of them – at one instant they seemed huge as mountains; the next, no bigger than motes of dust drifting through a sunbeam. What they were, I knew not – but that they were aware of me, I did not doubt; I felt their attention, their interest. They turned towards me with purpose, coming together like the pieces of a puzzle, or the parts of a machine. Yet their movements were slow and ponderous; or perhaps it was that I was moving so fast, blazing like a comet across their sky. Remembering how Hesta in her dragon aspect had flinched away from the pocket watch, I raised my fist, brandishing the timepiece like a shield or rather a weapon … one I had no idea how to use. In Corinna’s hand, the watch had shone like a star; in mine it was dead as a stone. But even so, those living geometries drew away and let me pass through their midst, just as Adolpheus and his army had done.

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.