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.