Out on the
foaming blue ocean, a small flotilla of yachts was tacking into the breeze, and
seagulls circled the deserted beach. The long grass on the lawn whipped against
my legs as I walked toward the overgrown sundial. I shaded my eyes so I could
get a better view of the turret
There
was very little
to see. The windows were impenetrable from this distance, and there was nothing
unusual about its outward appearance. I walked up to the stone pedestal of the
sundial and tried to perch on the edge of it to give myself a better vantage
point, but it didn’t make any difference. The turret remained dark, silent and
secretive.
I looked down
at the face of the sundial to check it against my watch. I used to love that
sundial when I was a kid. For me, there’s always been something mysterious
about the way the sun moves across the sky and the shadow deflects to time its
course. When I see a sundial, it always reminds me of hot, long, childhood
summers, when the days seemed to pass so slowly, and being a grownup was
something you never even thought about
But today, this
sundial didn’t remind me of anything like that. Instead of the usual Roman
figures on the dial and the maker’s name on the brass plate, there was a
completely different arrangement of pictures and engraved numerals. I examined
it closely. All around the outside were circles containing Arabic lettering,
and in the center of the circle were elaborate drawings of extraordinary
insects and animals. The pointer was different, too. It had a series of holes
and perforations that ran down it like a serpent.
I heard
footsteps coming across the lawn, and I said, “Anna, come and take a look at
this.”
I turned
around, and it was Marjorie. It must have been some trick of perspective,
because at first she seemed very small, as if I was looking at her through the
wrong end of a telescope, but as she came nearer, she grew larger and larger,
quite out of proportion to the distance she was walking. By the time she
arrived at the sundial, she looked perfectly ordinary, but the sensation of
watching her grow like that gave me a strange and unsettled feeling.
“Marjorie,” I
said. Not cheerfully, because her face was too drawn and strained, but with
good godsonly respect.
She looked at
me without saying a word. She was wearing an ankle-length black dress that
furled and unfurled in the ocean breeze, and her hair was twisted into a
steely-gray bun. She was wearing a small pair of yellow-tinted pince-nez and
dangling earrings that tinkled when she walked.
“Are you all
right, Marjorie?” I asked. “You don’t seem-quite yourself.”
Marjorie didn’t
seem to be listening. “Have you touched the dial?” she said.
I looked down
at the sundial.
“No, of course not.
I mean, I was just
taking a look at it. It’s different.” Somehow I didn’t think it would be a good
idea to say I had laid my hands on it.
There was
something oddly threatening in the tone of her voice.
“Yes,” she said
baldly. “It’s different.”
I waited to see
if she’d say anything else, but she didn’t. She stood there, quiet and
unmoving, and if that wasn’t a straightforward invitation to leave, I’ve never
seen one.
“Marjorie,” I
said earnestly. “There’s something wrong here, and I want to help you. I just
want you to tell me what’s wrong.”
“Wrong?” she
said quietly. “No, there’s nothing wrong. You mustn’t fret, Harry, mustn’t
fret.
Everything’s
going the way it should. We’re all happy.”
I reached for
my cigarettes. Tense situations always make me smoke too heavily. I cupped my
hands against the breeze and lit up. I almost singed my eyebrows with my Zippo.
“Marjorie, I
thought I saw someone else here last night.
Apart from Miss
Johnson.
A man or a woman in a kind of robe.”
Marjorie looked
back at the house. On the turret roof, the weathervane was squeaking and
swinging, a rusty scimitar pointing west.
“Did you,
Harry?” she said vaguely. “That’s nice.”
“Nice?
Marjorie, I don’t understand this at all. There’s some mysterious person
wandering around your house in a robe and all you can say is ‘that’s nice’? Who
is he, Marjorie? What’s going on here?”
Marjorie began
to walk away, back toward Winter Sails. She walked so fast I had trouble
keeping up with her.
“Marjorie, I
can’t help you unless I know what’s going on.”
“We’re all
happy, Harry,” she repeated in a flat, expressionless tone. “We’re all as happy
as larks, Harry.
Happy as larks.”
“Marjorie –
please!” But she kept on walking, right down to the brick steps by the gravel
driveway. I reached out to catch her sleeve, but it was impossible to grasp. It
didn’t seem to have any substance at all. The next thing I knew, Marjorie had
fled across the drive and disappeared inside the house. It all happened so fast
I didn’t really understand what was going on.
I went up to
the front door and rang the bell again. Then I hammered on it with my fist.
“Marjorie!
Marjorie! I want to talk to you, Marjorie!” I shouted, but there was no reply.
Just then, Anna
came around the other side of the house from the direction of the garage.
“The car’s
still there,” she called. “I guess they must have overslept. Were you calling
me?”
I punched my
fist into my hand. “No, dammit, I was calling Marjorie. I was out on the side
lawn and she came out. The next thing I knew, she scuttled back into the house.
Now she won’t answer the door.”
“Are you sure?”
said Anna, frowning. “That seems very strange.”
“Sure?” I said
angrily. “Of course I’m sure. I’ve known the woman for thirty years. Who else
could it be?”
We stepped back
from the house and tried to see if we could see anyone looking from the
upstairs windows. The drapes were still drawn, and there was no sign of life.
“Perhaps we
ought to break in,” said Anna. “Maybe they’re sick or in trouble.”
I sniffed.
“Maybe they’re just being bolshevik.”
Anna held my
arm. “Harry,” she said, “you know that there’s something going on. I think you
ought to make the effort to find out. I mean, supposing
the
djinn’s
escaped or supposing it’s done the same thing to her as it did
to Max?”
I walked over
to the brick steps and sat down. Anna stood beside me, and for a few moments we
thought our thoughts in silence.
“I don’t know,”
I said, after a while. “I don’t know where my responsibilities begin and I
don’t know where they end. She said they were as happy as larks. They were all
as happy as larks.”
“All?” said
Anna.
“Marjorie and Miss Johnson and who else?”
“Oh, don’t ask
me. I’m beginning to think we’re making a mystical mountain out of a mundane
molehill.”
Anna pulled a
face. “You’re very alliterative today.”
“Well, it’s
better than chasing Persian genies. Come on. I think we ought to forget this
whole mess and find ourselves some lunch. I could do with a cold bottle of Bud
and a hot dog.”
Anna shook her
head. “It’s no use avoiding the issue, Harry. I have to find that jar because
it’s my job, and you have to find it because Marjorie’s your widowed godmother.
We can’t shirk it.”
I shrugged. “It
seems to me that you have a far more compelling reason for finding it than I
do,”
I told her.
“Why don’t you just grab the pick, knock the door down, and explain it to
Marjorie yourself.”
Anna looked
serious. “I wish I had the nerve,” she said.
“How about the
turret?
Do you think we could get a ladder up there?”
“I guess so,” I
said reluctantly. “But you do realize that, technically, we’re trespassing?”
Anna unbuttoned
the cuffs of her gray silk blouse. “I’m only trespassing when I’m caught,” she
said. “Where do they keep the ladders?”
I pointed to
the tool shed. “I suppose I can’t persuade you otherwise?”
“No way.
It’s about time we had a good look at this jar in
the light of day.”
I stood up.
“Being a feeble female, I suppose you’ll want some help. Okay, let’s go get a
ladder and see what this goddamned jar is really doing. Maybe it’s changed as
much as the sundial.”
Anna raised an
eyebrow. “What sundial?”
I inclined my
head toward the lawn.
“That one there.
The dial’s been
altered into some Arabic thing.”
“Are you sure?”
“O£ course I
am. Stop asking me if I’m sure all the goddamned time. I’m the surest man I
ever met. But don’t take my word for it, go and look for yourself.”
“I will,” she
said, and she rushed off toward the sundial so urgently that I had to follow
and find out what all this was about.
“There,” I
said, pointing to the pictures and the Arabic writing. “When I was a kid, this
was an ordinary sundial.”
Anna was
examining the dial with the horrified intentness of a middle-class mother
searching her daughter’s hair for lice. Her lips moved a little as she
translated some of the words for herself, and every now and then she said, “My
God.”
I stood there
patiently until she had finished. Then, when she looked up, I said, “What is
it? Is this another creepy Persian manifestation?”
Anna nodded. “I
suppose you could call it that.
I’ve read about
these, and I’ve seen drawings of them, but this is the first real one I’ve ever
actually seen. It’s called a night-clock.”
“You mean it’s
a sundial that tells the time at night? I knew these Arabs were pretty smart,
but I didn’t know they were that smart.”
She shook her
head. “It’s not a clock in that sense. It’s a spiritual device. You’ve heard of
stars and planets coming into conjunction with each other in astrology?”
I pulled a
humorless grin. “Madam, you’re talking to an expert.”
“Well,” she
said, without returning my smile, “it was always rumored that some of the
ancient Arabs found ways of drawing the influences of the planets to one focal
point on the earth, rather like focusing of rays of the sun through a
magnifying glass. They could adjust their night-clocks to line up with different
galaxies and star formations, and concentrate whatever kind of spiritual power
they wanted in an area no larger than my thumbnail.”
I flicked the
tip of the night-clock’s pointer. “So this is an original genuine spiritual
device?” I asked. “Maybe it’s just here for decoration.
Something
that Max picked up on his travels.”
Anna looked
serious. “You don’t just ‘pick up’ a night-clock, Harry. They’re still
forbidden in Iran, although no government official will tell you that
The
last known night-clock was impounded in Bagdad
twenty-five years ago and destroyed.”
I frowned. “Are
you kidding?
One of these?
But what the hell can you
do with it?”
“You can do a
great deal with it,” said Anna. “You can use it to strike down your enemies.
You can use it to give unnatural power to your friends. It needs experience and
tremendous talent to operate properly. I guess the nearest nonspiritual
activity to working a night-clock is flying an airliner in a hurricane. You’re
dealing with tremendous, tempestuous forces, and all the time you’re trying to
focus them with pinpoint accuracy.”
“Sounds fun,” I
said. “The only question is – what’s it doing here?”
Anna pushed her
curly hair out of her eyes. “That’s probably not too hard to find out,” she
said.
“Kneel down
beside it and look through the side of the pointer until all the perforations
line up.
That’s what my
old books said you had to do, anyway.”
“All right,” I
said. “I’m game.”
I knelt down
beside the sundial, closed one eye, and squinted at the perforations on the
side of the pointer. The curious thing about these holes was that, even though
they were pierced in the same fiat two-dimensional pointer, they seemed to
close up together when you looked at them from certain angles. I shifted around
the sundial until they all appeared to converge into one small hole.
“What can you
see?” asked Anna.
“A hole, what
do you think?”
“Yes – but look
through the hole.”
I squinted
again and focused my gaze through the extraordinary hole in the pointer. I saw
nothing but white light at first, until I realized I was looking at the
reflection of clouds on window-glass. I moved my head to the side and saw just
what it was. The night-clock was set up to focus on the Gothic turret of Winter
Sails.
“The turret?”
said Anna.
“Yes,” I told
her.
“I thought so,”
she said. “I think we ought to find Professor Qualt right away and ask him what
we can do.”
I shrugged.
“Okay, if you want to. But if this night-clock’s so dangerous, why can’t we
just smash it up ourselves?”
“No.” said
Anna. “It might have influence on innocent people as well as evil spirits. A
night-clock ties people to it like babies on umbilical cords. If you’ve been
affected by a night-clock, then you’re totally dependent on it for your spiritual
survival.”
“Well, as long
as you know what you’re talking about, we’ll leave it,” I said. “My personal
feeling is that we ought to break it up.”
As I took a
last squint through the hole, I thought I saw a slight flicker of movement. I
looked again, and I could have sworn that, through the hole, I saw a pale
shape, half-obscured behind reflected light on the turret window.
“Anna -” I
started to speak, but the shape disappeared, and there was nothing but the
silent house and that repetitive weathervane, squeaking like a pain that
wouldn’t go away.
It took us all
afternoon to find Professor Qualt. We called at his apartment in a rambling old
house just outside of New Bedford, but his landlady said that he had left
around 7:30 in the morning, with a lunchbox. He usually went to the beach, she
said, and wrote up his notes.