My Clockwork Muse (34 page)

Gessler hobbled inside and I followed. We
found ourselves in a small room that housed some type of
complicated machine upon which Coppelius sat with Olimpia draped
across his lap. To my eye, it appeared to be nothing more than a
jumble of brass tubes and copper plating. If any of this mass of
metal had been arranged to comport to some meaningful design, its
form was lost on me. It recalled the guts of the clockwork Pluto,
only at a much larger scale. If sheer incomprehensibility is a mark
of great intellect, then here Coppelius had surpassed even his own
baffling genius.

I do not believe he was even aware of our
presence as he turned dials and pulled levers. His hands moved from
one to the next with practiced dexterity. Then he pulled a final
lever and sat back in his upholstered seat, bracing himself. All at
once, a great cloud of steam burst from a valve and the machine
began to vibrate wildly. Whatever the contraption did, it was on
the verge of doing it.

That was when I heard the bookcase swing
open. I turned and saw Poe standing in the opening. He wore a wild
expression and in his hand was Coppelius' pistol which, in my haste
to open the bookcase, I had carelessly left outside. I don't know
if he even noticed me, but Coppelius saw him. He looked back over
his shoulder with fear in his eye as the clockwork Poe leveled the
barrel of the pistol at the height of Coppelius' head.

I did not know what to think. But once again
I was consumed by the idea that Olimpia was in greater danger from
Coppelius' creation than from Coppelius himself. Who knew what
effect the death of Coppelius would have on the operation of his
incomprehensible machine? With Olimpia unconscious upon it, I could
take no chances. I grabbed my twin's hand and thrust the muzzle of
the gun towards the ceiling just as the shot rang out.

Clockwork Poe's fury erupted and he violently
thrashed his arm to free it of my grasp. But I would not let go. I
forced him back, slamming him into the wall.

I feared he would kill me on the spot, but
our attention was suddenly seized by the action of the machine. It
had begun to hum loudly, the pitch increasing with every passing
second. I was dumbfounded. Even if I had tried to cry out for help,
I would not have been able to make myself heard, though Gessler
stood just feet from me. I could see the fear in his eyes and my
own blood ran cold when I witnessed the forms of the passengers on
the machine begin to waver. Sparks of electricity shot all around
them. In another second, I found that they had become translucent,
that I could see through them to the wall on the other side. The
humming grew to intolerable levels. I covered my ears. The
vibrations increased in intensity. The machine's bronze feet began
to clatter on the stone floor. I feared the whole thing was about
to explode and that we would be torn apart by searing shrapnel.
Transfixed, Poe had forgotten about me. Not knowing what else to
do, I turned to flee, but stopped when I saw Gessler begin to
move.

"Inspector, no!" I cried, but could not even
hear my own voice, much less coax Gessler back from what I feared
was certain death.

He took a flying leap onto the machine and
grabbed Coppelius around the neck. Now the electricity encompassed
all three of them. There was a crack and a flash.

And then they were gone.

The room fell silent. All traces of Gessler,
Olimpia and Coppelius had vanished. Only the smoking machine
remained.

Clockwork Poe sneered at me with a look of
unyielding hatred. "Ah, the moment for which my soul did pine," he
said. "We are alone at last, Poe, you and I." I saw that he was
still carrying the discharged pistol. He started towards me.
"
'Take this kiss upon the brow'
," he hissed, raising his
hand. I flinched.

And then everything went black.

I dreamt of Coppelius' infernal machine.

Whatever its purpose, the thing had
malfunctioned, reducing its operator and passengers to ash,
vaporizing them in a flash of fatal electricity. Though it did not
have wheels, it was my distinct impression that the machine had
been intended to move—though where it would have gone within the
confines of the small room that housed it, I could not say. But it
seemed to be endeavoring to do so when it had suffered its tragic
malfunction. Coppelius' reach had finally surpassed his genius—as
undeniable as it was—and it had cost him, and my friends, their
lives.

In my dream, Olimpia was strapped to the
machine with a ring of needles piercing her heart. She was crying
out for me to save her. Then she vanished and there was nothing
left but the machine itself. No trace of Olimpia remained, save the
sound of her beating heart.

I heard it faintly at first as it slowly grew
out of the cessation of the machine's deafening clatter, one sound
replacing the other. Gradually, it increased in volume until it
came to dominate my entire consciousness. At length, I fancied that
the heart itself had grown to enormous proportions and the sound
was that of the blood sweeping through it.

Whoosh!

I might have been standing inside the heart
itself.

After a pause, the sound came again, even
greater than before.

Whoosh!

My eyes snapped open and I quickly became
aware of a sharp pain in the back of my head. I winced.

"Ah, Poe, there you are!" The voice seemed to
come from a long way off, somewhere to my right.
Whoosh!
Something passed before my face, from one side to the other, and
then vanished. It carried the voice with it. "Now where were we?"
the voice asked, now from my left.

Only gradually did I become aware of my
surroundings. The sound, which in my delirium I had fancied to be
the beating of an enormous heart, was, in fact, that of a massive
pendulum such as you might find suspended from a clock. It swung
from side to side several feet above my chest. The weighted brass
disk that would normally occupy the terminal end of the swinging
rod had been replaced by a razor sharp crescent of glittering
steel.

I did not understand the intent at once,
until I realized that I had been strapped to a wooden table by a
narrow leather cord coiled tightly about my legs and torso. It
bound my legs one to the other and my arms to my sides, leaving
only my head at liberty to move. I followed the arc of the pendulum
with my eyes. I noticed to my horror that in addition to its
back-and-forth motion, it was also descending slightly with each
oscillation.

"Oh, yes, I remember." The voice started on
my left and—
Whoosh!
—moved to my right. "I was just about to
kill you."

I could see the blade clearly only as it
passed directly above me, a glittering blur of silver metal.
Perched atop it was my nemesis, the clockwork Poe. He squatted
there, clutching the pendulum arm. I could see his—that is,
my
—face grinning down at me every time the blade passed. The
blade itself appeared to be about five feet wide, from tip to tip.
How long it had been descending while I lay unconscious I could not
say. But the ceiling from where it must have begun its descent was
a good thirty feet above the floor.

I strained at my bonds to take in my
surroundings. I could see a long set of stone steps leading up to a
landing where a door was set in the wall. If I was still in
Coppelius' house, then I was below the level of the laboratory and
I believed the door must have been the mysterious locked portal
about which I had queried Olimpia on my previous visit. Small
wonder that she had never been allowed inside.

"Ah, I see you have taken an interest in
Coppelius' pendulum. I wasn't sure you would notice."

I followed him with my eyes as he swung atop
the pendulum from side to side. As I watched, I noticed the slight
descent of the blade. Its rate of fall was almost
imperceptible—perhaps an inch per pass, no more. I tried to work
out how much time I had left, but my mind was reeling. Each
whoosh
of the blade scattered the numbers as quickly as I
compiled them.

"Behold the clockwork heart, Poe!" my nemesis
cried, ignoring my lack of response. "Imagine the irony when your
own heart is sliced in two by the very mechanism that keeps your
killer alive!"

I could hold my tongue no longer. "What are
you talking about, you scoundrel?"

"This pendulum. It is a model of the heart
that beats within the breast of every clockwork man. And woman, for
that matter. Coppelius constructed it, at this enormous scale, to
work out certain troublesome elements of its design. Inside here,
the pendulum is but this big." The scoundrel patted his chest and
then held his fingers about an inch apart. "The whole is encased
within a tiny glass bulb containing a mixture of gasses and liquid,
hermetically sealed, of course." I remembered back to the object we
had found inside the clockwork Pluto. Yes, I saw it now. And here
it was, swinging above me: the thing's heart, writ large. Coppelius
had pretended to admire the genius of its creator, when it was he
himself who had designed it. I should have suspected the connection
then, knowing that the perpetrator of such a vile crime would have
to expose himself, if only to accept the credit for the brilliance
of his creation. "The action of the pendulum is powered by the
expansion of the gasses due to changes in temperature and
atmospheric pressure. This large-scale mock-up, however, is powered
by a steam engine in the ceiling and controlled by that lever in
the floor over there. The addition of the blade that will soon
slice you in half is my own small contribution to science." In
desperation, I tried kicking my legs to loosen the bonds, but I was
wrapped tight as a mummy. The clockwork Poe laughed at my
struggles. "The only downside is that no one—not even
Coppelius—knows how long such a machine can continue to operate
without human intervention. It could be hundreds of years, perhaps
more."

"Perhaps less!" I shouted in defiance.
"Perhaps much less!" The blade had descended several inches during
his speech and I was no closer to formulating a plan of escape. I
had given up calculating the span of my life and wished only for a
speedy conclusion to his.

"You're quite right, Poe. It could be much
less. One thing is certain, though: my heart will beat longer than
yours."

"Villain!" I cried in hopelessness as I
struggled at my bonds. "Why do you hate me so?"

"Because you have what I want, Mr. Poe."

"Tell me what it is, and I will happily give
it."

"But you cannot give this, for it is your
life. In order for me to live as a real man, you would have to die.
But your lady-friend has made that quite impossible. I was well on
my way to becoming a real man, Poe. One more injection and I would
have been complete. Perhaps I could find some more of Coppelius'
serum around here somewhere. Perhaps I could even learn to
manufacture the stuff on my own. But that could take years, and I'm
afraid you'll be quite dead by then. It makes little difference to
you either way, for there can only be one Poe, Mr. Poe—and you, I'm
afraid, are one too many."

"But you will live as a machine forever."

"Perhaps I can learn to love that as well—at
least to the same extent that anyone loves being human. You, for
example. Which is to say, not always very much, it seems."

"I am afflicted by melancholy, you fiend! It
is not a question of will or an indictment of my contentment—"

"Oh, Poe! This could have been so much
easier. I was going to expose my face to you just before I ran you
through at the Rue Morgue house. Burton and I would then have
walked out hand-in-hand with no one the wiser. Poe goes in, Poe
comes out.

"Then, later, when Coppelius brought me your
story about the lady with the teeth ... Well, that was just
irresistible. The coincidence of a Berenice living so close to your
cottage and under the care of Coppelius was to be your undoing—and
it almost was. Planting the teeth at your bedside would drive you
over the edge, I thought. I knew you would visit the crypt just as
you had the Amontillado and Rue Morgue scenes before it. And I knew
you would meet the revenant Berenice inside, much to your
detriment. I was waiting and watching you the whole way. Once
Berenice had finished with you, I was going to stuff your body in
her coffin
—
New Roman"
\s 12for who would ever look for you there!—and walk out of the
crypt no different than when I had walked in. Again, Poe in, Poe
out. But you brought the policeman with you and survived the
attack. You were saved every step of the way by dumb luck. Only to
find yourself here. Of course, now, I'm afraid your luck has run
out."

As he crouched upon the blade, I saw his face
as he passed above me and I reflected how ill-suited was my visage
to an expression of smug self-satisfaction. I had never considered
myself a handsome man, but now I found that I hated the very sight
of me. I began to wonder: Even if some miracle should occur that
allowed me to escape the plunging blade, would not the hatred I
bore for my clockwork counterpart burden me for the remainder of my
days with a grim self-loathing? It occurred to me then that I would
be happy to perish if only by so doing I could guarantee the demise
of my tormentor.

A quick end under the slicing blade would
fail to accomplish this. So I strove to calm my mind while
endeavoring to conceive a plan of escape.

I found it difficult to concentrate, for as
the blade
whooshed
past my ear, I could hear the dark
laughter of my evil twin. The maniacal cast to his voice unnerved
me, scrambling my thoughts.

"'From childhood's hour...'" He shouted, the
sound filling my right ear.