The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (14 page)

His grandmother had described this plate as a magic mirror, on which words appeared and disappeared by diabolical command, but his grandfather had assured him that there was nothing magical about it. There was actually a series of twelve plaques mounted on the rim of a hidden wheel, which rotated as the clock’s spring unwound and the hands made their own rotation. Each plaque was itself held back by a tiny spring, which would release as the hour struck, displaying the motto inscribed on the plaque with startling suddenness in a space that had been occupied only a second before by a blank face of copper.

The original set of plaques furnished by Master Zacharius, Aubert Thun had assured his grandson, had been inscribed with conventional pieties, many of them take from the Sermon on the Mount—but once the clock had been installed at Andernatt, its owner had replaced the plaques with a new set offering different maxims.

“Your grandmother is convinced that the replacement was the work of the Devil,” Aubert Thun had told him, “but it was not even a task that would have required a locksmith’s metal-working skills, once the wheel’s casing had been removed. Her father was already mad, but the discovery that his work of art had been altered was the ultimate insult. That is why he tried to stop the clock—but the spring broke because its iron was too poor to sustain its stress. No spring could power a clock like that for very long, for the alloy is not yet discovered that can bear the strain of continual winding in a strip so vast. Now that the necessity is obvious, better materials will doubtless be devised, but Zacharius could only work with what he had, and it was not adequate to his ambition.

“It was Zacharius’s vanity, not his soul, that was embodied in the mechanism—and it was his vanity, not some diabolical bargain, that struck him dead. My wife would never believe it, though, and she will swear to her dying day that she saw the dwarf Pittonaccio disappear into the bowels of the earth with the spring in his grasp, bound for the Inferno. She believes that she and I were cursed on the day he died, and that all the force of her constant prayers—and mine—has only served to keep the curse at bay. Your father is an exceedingly devout man, and I do not criticize him for that, but you must make up your own mind what to believe, and there are better fates than to live in fear.”

Jehan had taken his grandfather’s word over his grandmother’s, far more determinedly his father had, and had tried very hard not to live in fear. Aubert Thun had not lived to see the death of his son on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, and Jehan driven into exile—but Jehan knew that Aubert would have been adamant that it was the way of the world that had brought that evil day about, and that Jehan’s printing-press was no more to blame for his father’s death than the residue of any curse that had one attached to the Clock of Andernatt. Jehan Thun’s grandmother had, however, carried the conviction to her grave that she and her son were cursed—and now that Jehan had seen the cellars and inner rooms of the Chateau of Andernatt, he understood far better how she might have witnessed the broken spring being borne into the hollows of the mountain, whether or not it was bound for Hell.

Jehan asked the dwarf about Zacharius’s broken spring, but the present Master of Andernatt told him that it was long discarded, replaced by a far better mechanism.

As the dwarf had said, the clock was not quite finished, but very nearly so. The parts scattered on the floor of the room were all tiny, and they all required to be fitted into the narrow space above the rose-window, behind the part of the facade that resembled a bell-tower—an awkward task, hampered by the casing of the wheel bearing and concealing the motto-engraved plaques.

“The face of the tower can still be removed,” the dwarf told Jehan, “and I can compensate for my lack of stature by standing on a stool, but I don’t have your slender fingers or your delicate touch. Even if you have not dabbled in clockwork since you were a child, your own work must have maintained your dexterity, and my escapement is a not as delicate as a fusee. You could complete the work in a matter of days.”

“I don’t understand the mechanism,” Jehan Thun objected. “I’ve never seen its like.”

“It’s simple enough, once explained,” the dwarf assured him. Jehan Thun’s gaze redirected itself then to the blank copper plate that would presumably be eclipsed by a plaque if the mechanism were actually to prove capable of moving the hands and activating the chimes.

“You need have no fear on that score,” the dwarf said. “I’ve replaced the maxims that caused your grandmother such distress.” “With the original set?” Jehan Thun asked.

“Those were discarded long ago. I made my own replacements. They’re all in place, but now that the casing is sealed they can’t be seen until the clock is completed and started. I trust that you didn’t come here without any bolder hope than to melt down the remains of the mechanism and separate out the precious metals therefrom. You did say, did you not, that you are no bandit?”

“I expected to find the clock in ruins, like the chateau,” Jehan Thun said, hesitantly. “My grandmother told me that the place was considered accursed, and that no one would be living here.”

“Calvin redoubled the fear of the Devil that the good people of Geneva already had,” the dwarf told him, “but there are always men who are careless of curses. Had I not been here to hide and stand guard over the pieces of the clock they’d have been looted long ago. Even I could not resist a whole robber band—but it’s a clock, after all, not a gold mine. You wouldn’t have come so far just for a little metal, I’m sure—but I’m equally sure that you haven’t come in the hope of reclaiming the spring that might or might not have been the soul of Master Zacharius.”

Jehan considered the possibility of telling the dwarf about his grandmother’s sorrows and delusions, and how she had begged his father to make the journey in order to destroy the last remnants of the clock and lift the family curse with prayer, but he did not want to do that. “I came to examine the fusee,” he said, eventually, although he was not entirely certain that it was true. “One of the few things on which my grandparents agreed, save for the fact that they loved one another very dearly, was that it was a new type, better than any previously used in a spring-driven clock. Aubert thought that he could reproduce it, but he never contrived to do it, and came to believe in the end that he had misremembered some small but essential detail. Alas, he was in Paris by then.”

“You came to study the fusee?” the dwarf repeated, in a tone that had a strange satisfaction in it as well as a certain skepticism. “But you say that you’re not a watchmaker, Master Thun—merely a printer.”

“There’s nothing mere about printing,” Jehan retorted. “Had printers not put the word of God directly into the hands of every man who can read there would have been no Lutheran armies, no Calvinist legions. Printing is changing the way that men think, believe and act—but I’m a printer without a press, and there are hundreds of clockmakers in every city in Europe eager to discover a better escapement for watches. Is that escapement the one my greatgrandfather built to regulate the missing spring?”

“No—but your grandparents were mistaken about the originality of the first escapement. There was only one thing new about the fusee I discarded, and that was its material. It was brass, not iron; it did not rust, but, if it worked any better as a regulator than any other, it was by virtue of the quality of its workmanship, not the detail of its design. The one I have made is better adapted to its own mechanism; it could not regulate a watch spring any more than a pendulum could drive the hand of a watch. On the other hand, what you say is perfectly true: there are a hundred clockmakers in every city in Europe who would be eager to know what might be done with my mechanism, and you shall share in the profits that will accrue from the dissemination of the secret if you will help me finish my work. Once we have completed the clock, you will be better equipped than you could have hoped to spread new knowledge throughout the continent—and beyond, if you care to. The world is, as you doubtless know, a sphere, and there is always further to go in every direction than the cities we already know. There’s a new world now, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and a vast number of undiscovered islands in the far Pacific.”

It did not seem remarkable to Jehan that the dwarf’s comment about the world being a sphere was echoing a statement he had made the day before, in another place. “Very well, then,” he said. “I shall fetch my grandfather’s tools. If you will explain what needs to be done, I shall do my very best to carry out your instructions.”

* * * *

Jehan Thun was as good as his word, and so was the dwarf. Working to instruction, Jehan’s nimble hands pieced together the last parts of the mechanism, although it was no mere matter of assembly. There was a good deal of drilling to be done, a great many threads to be worked, and an abundance of accurate filing, as well as a certain amount of casting. Fortunately, the dwarf possessed a crucible and a vice, and a good stock of charcoal with which to charge his furnace. The dwarf’s own fingers were thick and gnarled, and he could never have done the delicate work that Jehan did, but he was a clever man with plans and his strong arms could certainly work a bellows hard.

Once Jehan had set to work the hours seemed to melt away. Because there was no natural light in the room where the clock was kept Jehan did the greater part of his work in a different one much higher in the chateau’s hidden structure, but he soon became used to shuttling back and forth between the two. He worked long into the evening, conserving that fraction of his labor that did not need good light, but the dwarf was conscientious about interrupting him, not only to make meals but to explain the new mechanism he had built for the clock.

“It’s a secret that no one else has discovered,” the little man bragged, “although it’s obvious enough. How long have there been slingshots and other devices in which solid objects swing freely at the ends of cords? At least since David slew Goliath. Children play with such devices—and yet no one has observed, as I have, the isochronism of the freely-swinging weight—or, if anyone has, he could not go on to the naturally consequent thought, which is that a pendulum might do as well as a system of weights or a mere spring to regulate the motions of a clock. Just as the descent of weights require refinement by escapements, so does the swing of a pendulum, so I devised one appropriate to it.

“I have tried out my pendulum in humbler boxes with elementary faces, but never in a clock with two hands, let alone a masterpiece like the Zacharius Machine. I could have got it working, after a fashion, but a masterpiece is a masterpiece, and it sets its own standard of perfection. I might have gone to Geneva in search of a skilled clockmaker, but how could I dare, given my appearance? Even before Calvin came, Master Zacharius was remembered by many as a sorcerer, and those who hold such opinions are always among the first converts to any new fad—including Calvin’s philosophy. Of all the cities in the world, why did Andernatt have to be placed so close to Geneva? No one actually casts stones at me in Evionnaz, or any other village within hiking range, but they way they look at me informs me that it would not do to linger too long in any such place, let alone make any attempt to settle there. I was a wanderer before I came here, although I did not want to be. I am a recluse now, although that would not have been my choice before I realized how fearful people are of anything out of the ordinary. Dwarfs are not rare, you know, and they cannot all be the Devil in disguise, but men who do not travel far do not realize how many kinds of men there are.”

“Noblemen employ dwarfs as clowns and jesters in France, Italy and the Germanic states,” Jehan observed. “They like automata too, to strike the hours on church clocks or merely to perform mechanical acrobatics for credulous eyes.”

“I am not a clown, Master Jehan,” the dwarf said. “Nor am I a jester. I am the man who discovered the isochronicity of the pendulum, although I would wager that history will give the credit to a taller man—perhaps to you.”

“History often makes mistakes,” Jehan assured him. “Master Zacharius never received credit for the fusee, because there was a man named Jacob the Czech who worked in Prague, and Prague is a far better source of fame than poor Geneva. I do not charge this Jacob with theft, mind, for the device is obvious enough once a man’s mind turns in that direction, just as your pendulum-clock might be. There may well be another man who has already made the discovery—in Florence, say, or Vienna—whose discovery has not yet been noised around. I think that luck has more to do with matters of reputation than height.”

“Yet Pittonaccio was reckoned an imp,” the dwarf reminded him. “Had he been as handsome as you, he might have been reckoned an artificer himself, and your great-grandfather might never have gone mad. But Pittonaccio’s long dead, for men of my kind rarely live as long as men of yours.”

“My father might have lived a while longer,” Jehan said, somberly, “had he not been a Protestant in Paris at an unfortunate hour. Hatred is not reserved for those of strange appearance; it thrives like a weed wherever faith puts forth new flowers.”

The dwarf allowed Jehan to have the last word on that occasion, perhaps because he did not want to offend his guest in advance of the clock becoming workable. On that score, he did not have much longer to wait, for Jehan still felt that he was more automaton than man, and the work that he did allowed him to conserve that placid state of mind, absorbing him completely into matters of technical detail. The hours sped by, and the days too—six in all—until he arrived at the time when the last piece of the puzzle was correctly-shaped, and ready to be fitted.