‘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.’