The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (13 page)

Then, finally, he caught sight of a strange hump outlined on a slanting ridge. He was not certain at first, given the distance and the fact that he was looking at it from below, that it really was the remnant of an edifice, and it seemed in a far worse state than he had hoped, even after hearing Alther’s judgment.

Because it lay in a direction diametrically opposite to the route that would take him towards Evionnaz, Jehan Thun knew that he would be in difficulty if there were nothing on the site but broken stones, but he had to make the choice and he was not at all confident that he could find his way back to his present location if he did not press on now. He decided that he must trust to luck and do his utmost to carry his quest forward to its destination.

Again he reached his objective just as night was falling, and again he saw no light as he toiled uphill towards the crumbled stonework, until he lit his own candle—but this time, there seemed at first glance to be no roof at all to offer him shelter, merely a tangle of tumbled walls, cracked arches and heaps of debris.

He did not realize for some little while that he had only found an outer part of the ancient edifice. He might easily have lain down to sleep without making any such discovery, but, as chance would have it, he was fortunate enough to see a flock of bats emerging from a crevice behind a pile of rubble. When he climbed up to see if he could insinuate himself into the gap, he did not expect to find anything more than a corner of a room, but he was able to make a descent into a much broader and deeper space that had two doorways. These gave access to further corridors, each of which contained a stairway leading into what had seemed from beneath to be the solid rock of the ridge. He quickly came to the conclusion that the chateau must have been much larger than it now seemed, built into a groove in the ridge rather than perched atop level ground. The lower parts of its walls had been so completely overgrown that the casual eye could not distinguish them from the native rock that jutted up to either side.

One stairway turned out to be useless, the wooden-beamed storage-cellar to which it led having caved in, but the other led to further rooms and further portals, some with ceilings and doors still intact. The route was awkward, not least because of the stink—the bats had been depositing their excreta for generations—but he managed to open three of the closed doors to expose further spaces beyond, two no bigger than closets but one of a more appreciable size. This one had a slit-like window, through which the stars were clearly visible, although no such aperture had not been discernible from the side of the hill he had climbed on his first approach.

That first room was uninhabitable, but when he went on again he found one that the bats had not yet turned it into a dormitory, because the shutter on its window was still intact. The bare wooden floorboards seemed more hospitable than stone, and they seemed remarkably free of dirt, so Jehan set his pack down. He was so exhausted that he stretched himself out and blew out his candle without making a meal.

His thoughts immediately returned to what Nicholas Alther had said about Master Zacharius, and he began to regret not asking exactly what story it was that Alther had heard. According to his grandmother—who believed far more of the tale than her husband— her father had put his soul into the spring of a clock commissioned by the Devil, thus conceding the Adversary power to transmogrify and finally obliterate his work. Aubert Thun’s son, Jehan’s father, had been as skeptical as the old man, and Jehan had the same attitude; he would never have come here had it not become impossible for him to stay in Paris—but once the capital of France had become as unsafe for Protestants as Geneva had once been for Catholics, the only choice remaining to him was the direction in which to flee. Since he had had to go somewhere, and had no other destination in mind, it had seemed to Jehan that he might as well do what his grandmother—who had died of natural causes thank God, long before the massacre—had always wanted his father to do. Now that he was here, though, he could not help reflecting lugubriously on the fact that he had come in order to have a destination at which to point his automation limbs, not because he believed that there would be any treasure to find or any curse to lift.

He decided before he fell asleep that he would explore the ruins as thoroughly as was humanly possible on the following day, and then make further plans. The food he had bought in Evionnaz would be enough to sustain him for more than a day, although it should not be difficult to find pools of rainwater to drink. He would have to decide soon enough whether to retrace his steps in the direction of inhospitable Geneva, or to make his way back to the Rhone and follow the path that Nicholas Alther had presumably been walking, or make his way eastwards along the north shore of the lake—or go on into the Dents-du-Midi, into a bleak and empty region that the people of Evionnaz took to be the limit of the world.

* * * *

In the morning, Jehan Thun was awakened by a hand placed on his shoulder. The room was still gloomy but the shutter had been partially opened; the beam of sunlight streaming through the narrow window brightened the plastered walls, reflecting enough light to show him that the person who had woken him was very short and stout: a dwarf.

That was a terrible shock—not because it was unexpected, but for the precisely the opposite reason. His grandmother had told him that the Devil had come to her father, Master Zacharius, in the form of a dwarf named Pittonaccio.

“Who are you?” Jehan stammered, quite ready to believe that he was face to face with the Devil. The moment of awakening is a vulnerable one, in which deep impressions can be made that are sometimes difficult of amendment.

The little man paused momentarily, as if he had not expected to be addressed in French, but he answered fluently enough in the same language. “I am the Master of Andernatt,” he said, proudly. “The question should rather be: Who are you? You are the invader here— are you a bandit come to rob me of my heritage?” His Germanic accent was not as pronounced as Nicholas Alther’s, but was evident nevertheless.

“I’m no bandit,” Jehan said.

“Are you not? Are you a guest, then? Did you knock on any of the doors you passed through last night? Did you call out to ask for shelter?”

“I saw no light,” Jehan protested.

“You would have seen a light had you taken more care to look around,” the dwarf replied. “My chamber has a broader window than this one, and I lit my lamp before sunset. I suppose you did not see my goats on the ledges either, or my garden in the vale.”

“No,” said Jehan, becoming increasingly desperate as the challenges kept coming. “I saw no goats—but if I had, I’d have taken them for wild creatures. Nor did I see a garden, but it was dusk when I approached and I was fearful that I might not reach the shelter of the ruins before night plunged me into darkness.”

“The stars were shining,” the dwarf observed, “and there’s near half a moon. Your eyes must be poor—but I suppose you came from the direction of Evionnaz, from which my window would have been hidden. You still have not told me who you are, or what business you have here.”

Jehan Thun hesitated fearfully; he felt a strong temptation to declare that his name was Nicholas Alther, and that he was a colporteur who had lost his way—but he had no pack of goods and trinkets, and no good reason to lie. In the end, he plucked up his courage and said: “My name is Jehan Thun. My grandfather was Aubert Thun, apprentice to Master Zacharius of Geneva.”

The dwarf recognized the names, but he did not look sideways in suspicion, let alone recoil in horror. Instead, he smiled beatifically, and the expression caused his unhandsome face to become quite pleasant. “Ah!” he said. “The answer to my prayer! There have been others here before you, searching for the clock, but none named Thun. Zacharius must have been your great-grandfather, Master Jehan, for Aubert Thun married the clockmaker’s daughter, Gerande.”

Jehan was terrified already, so the fact that the dwarf knew all this gave him little further distress. “And you?” he said, in a quavering voice. “Are you...?” He could not say the word. His grandmother had been twice devout, once as a Catholic and once as a Protestant, and had prayed incessantly for her father in either mode, but Jehan had never been able to put quite as much trust as that in the attentiveness of Heaven or the menace of Hell. Even so, for the moment, he could not say either “the Devil” or “Pittonaccio.”

“Not even his great-grandson, Master Jehan,” the dwarf said. “My name is Friedrich—very ordinary, as I’m sure you’ll agree; but I’m Master of Andernatt nevertheless, at least for now, and I do have the clock. I have nearly completed its reconstruction, but have faltered lately for lack of proper tools and a skilful hand. Have you brought your own tools?”

“I’ve brought my grandfather’s,” Jehan confessed.

“Then you’re a wiser man than those who came before you. Did you also bring his skill?”

The truth seemed to have taken firm hold of Jehan Thun’s tongue; he could not seem to twist it. “I’m not a watchmaker,” he confessed. “I’m a printer—or was. The mob was as anxious to smash up my press as it was to break my neighbors’ heads. I can cast and trim type, and work in wood, and I have some skill as an engraver, but I haven’t curled a spring or wrought a fusee since I helped my father in his shop as a boy. Times have changed, and it’s the printing-press that has changed them. There are hundreds of clockmakers in Paris, but only a dozen printers as yet—at least one less, now.”

The dwarf looked at him long and hard then, as if he were following some train of thought to an unexpected terminus. “I have a printed book,” he admitted, finally. “It’s a Bible.”

“I printed a great many of those myself,” Jehan told him. “Too many, perhaps.”

“Well,” said the dwarf, “whether you called out or not, Master Jehan, you’re a guest now, and the most welcome one I’ve ever had. Come to breakfast—and then I’ll show you the clock.”

* * * *

The corridors that Jehan Thun had thought rather labyrinthine the previous evening were even more extensive and complex than he had imagined. They were, however, far better ventilated than the initial barrier of bat droppings had suggested and many of them were dimly illuminated by daylight creeping through window-slits and cracks in the masonry. One such slit overlooked the “garden” to which the master of the ruins had referred—which was actually a vegetable-plot and orchard. Jehan Thun saw immediately why he had not caught sight of it before; the dell in which it was situated was itself a covert, hidden by a massive buttress of rock. There was evidently another way into the cavernous part of the edifice from that side, which allowed the dwarf to avoid the difficulties of the way by which Jehan had gained entry.

The dwarf took him to a room more brightly lit than the rest, which also looked out over the garden. It had a fire burning in the grate, but the chimney let out into the same covert, so its smoke would not have been easily visible as Jehan Thun had approached on the previous evening. There was a cooking pot simmering beside the fire, and various items of game hung from a rack on the chimney-breast. The furniture was sparse but there was a sturdy table and two good chairs. Jehan sat down gladly, and ate a good meal.

The printed Bible that the dwarf had mentioned was laid flat on a shelf; the dust on its binding implied that it had not been opened for some while. Jehan lifted the cover to inspect the quality of the printing, but the type was florid Gothic and the text was not in Latin.

“Come, Master Jehan, my godsend,” said the dwarf. “I will show you what you came to see.”

According to Jehan’s grandmother, the iron clock of Andernatt had been fastened to the wall of a great hall. It had been shaped by Master Zacharius to resemble the facade of a church, with wrought-iron buttresses and a bell-tower, with a rose-window over the door in which the clock’s two hands were mounted. The same witness had testified that the clock had exploded and its internal spring had burst out like a striking snake to secure the damnation of its maker.

The clock was not in a great hall now but in a small room that had no window. The buttresses and the bell-tower must have been transported in several pieces, but they had been reassembled so carefully that they seemed whole again. The window had been pieced together, and all of its glass replaced, although the cobwebbing cracks made it obvious that the stained-glass had once been shattered. The doors of the church had been replaced, with newer wood, and they stood open to display the inner works of the clock—but the giant spring that Master Zacharius had set in place was not there now, nor was the verge-escapement that had regulated it. There was, instead, a more complex mechanism, whose most prominent feature was a mysterious brass rod, mounted vertically on a spindle, pivoted so that it might swing from side to side, whose lower extremity was shielded by a polished silver disc.

This remarkable object caught and held Jehan’s gaze for several seconds, delaying his search for the clock’s most unusual feature: the copper plate between the door and the dial, in which words appeared as each hour struck.