The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (16 page)

“I doubt that the Devil possesses a clock, or needs one,” Friedrich retorted, boldly. “If he does, he certainly does not keep it here. The only clock here is mine.”

Jehan was not in the least displeased to be offered no credit for he restored Clock of Andernatt. He had seen the expression on the captain’s face before. There had been soldiers abroad on Saint Bartholomew’s Eve and the day that followed; there were always soldiers abroad when there was killing to be done, for that was their trade.

Jehan felt fingers plucking at his sleeve, and allowed himself to be drawn aside by Nicholas Alther.

“It was not I who betrayed you,” the colporteur whispered, fearfully. “They do not know that I met you on the road. For the love of God, don’t tell them. I could not refuse to lead them here, for they knew that I knew the way, but I mean you no harm. Say nothing, and they’ll let you alone—but you must say nothing, else we’ll both be damned.” He stopped when he saw that the captain was looking at him, and raised his voice to say: “This man only took shelter in the chateau—he has nothing to do with the clock.”

The captain immediately fixed his stare on Jehan’s face. “Are you Jehan Thun?” he demanded.

“I am,” Jehan replied, knowing that it would do no good to lie. “What business have you here?”

“I was a Protestant in Paris, until it became impossible to be a Protestant in Paris,” Jehan said, flatly. “My father was born in Geneva, which is a Protestant city, so that was where I came—but everywhere I went in the city, people who heard my name looked strangely at me, and I was afraid all over again. My grandmother had spoken of a village named Evionnaz as a remote and peaceful place, so I decided to go there, but when I arrived I found the same dark stares, so I continued on my way. Friedrich Spurzheim is the first man I have met hereabouts who did not look at me that way, and he made me welcome as a guest.”

“Are you a clockmaker?” the captain asked.

“No,” Jehan said. “I’m a printer. I made Bibles in Paris. My father was murdered, my press smashed and my home burned.”

“Have you seen the Devil’s clock?”

For the first time, Jehan hesitated. Then he said; “There is only one clock in the chateau. It is shaped to resemble a church. There is nothing devilish about it.”

“Lead us to it,” the captain instructed.

Jehan exchanged a glance with Friedrich; the little man risked a brief nod of consent. Jehan led the way around the chateau, through the garden ad in through the door on whose step the basket of apples still lay. Then he led the captain and his men to the Clock of Andernatt.

It was an hour after noon; while the soldier was studying the clock, the hour struck and the words CARPE DIEM appeared, as if by magic, in the space beneath the rose window.

“What does that say?” demanded the captain of Nicholas Alther, his voice screeching horribly.

“I don’t know!” the colporteur replied.

“It says Carpe Diem,” Friedrich told them. “It’s Latin. It means Seize the Day. The other mottoes....”

But it did not matter what the other mottoes were, any more than it mattered what carpe diem actually signified. It would have made no difference had the motto been in French or German rather than Latin, or whether it had been a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount.

Much later, Jehan guessed, the captain and all of his men would be willing to swear, and perhaps also to believe, that the mysterious legend that had appeared as if by magic had said HAIL TO THEE, LORD SATAN or DAMNATION TO ALL CALVINISTS or CURSED BE THE NAME OF GENEVA, or anything else that their fearful brains might conjure up. They would also be willing to swear, and perhaps also to believe, that when they attacked the clock with half-pikes and maces, sulfurous fumes belched out of its mysterious bowels, and that the screams of the damned could be heard, echoing all the way from the inferno. They would probably remember, too, that the chateau itself had been buried underground, extending its corridors deep into the rock like shafts of some strange mine, connected to the very centre of the spherical earth.

When they had finished smashing the clock the soldiers smashed everything else Friedrich Spurzheim had owned, and cast everything combustible—including his printed Bible—into the flames of his fire. They killed his milking-goat, and as many of the others as they could catch. They ripped up all the vegetables in his garden and stripped the remaining apples from his trees. Then they smashed the shutters that remained on some few of the chateau’s windows, and the doors that remained in some few of its rooms. But they did not kill the dwarf, nor did they kill Jehan Thun. They worked out all their ire and fear on inanimate objects, and contented themselves with issuing dire warnings as to what would happen if Friedrich Spurzheim or Jehan Thun were ever seen again within twenty leagues of Geneva.

Afterwards, when the captain and his men were preoccupied with the items they had kept as plunder-which included, of course, the silver disc that had served as a pendulum bob—Nicholas Alther took Jehan aside again, and offered him something wrapped in silk. Jehan did not need to unwrap it to guess that it was the colporteur’s watch.

“Your grandfather made it,” the colporteur said. “You should have it, since you do not have one of your own. It keeps good time.”

“Thank you,” Jehan said, “but it isn’t necessary. You owe me no debt.”

“I didn’t betray you,” Nicholas Alther insisted. “I didn’t want this to happen.”

“I know that,” Jehan assured him, although there was no way that he could.

“I won’t repeat the tale,” the colporteur went on, in the same bitter tone. “If this becomes the stuff of legend, it shall not be my doing. There will come a day when all this is forgotten—when time will pass unmolested, measured out with patience by machines that no man will have cause to fear.”

“I know that, too,” Jehan assured him, although there was no way that he could.

When the soldiers had gone, Jehan went back to the clock’s tomb. Friedrich was waiting for him there.

“One day,” Jehan said, “you will build another. In another city, far from here, we shall start again, you and I. You will build another clock, and I shall be your apprentice. We shall spread the secret throughout the world—all the world. If they will not entertain us in Europe, we’ll go to the New World, and if they are madly fearful of the devil there, we’ll go to the undiscovered islands of the Pacific. The world is a spinning sphere, and time is everywhere. Wherever men go, clocks are the key to the measurement of longitude, and hence to accurate navigation. What a greeting we’ll have in the far-flung islands of the ocean vast!”

The little man had been picking through the wreckage for some time, and his clumsy hands had been busy with such work as they could do. He had detached half a dozen of the plaques from the wheel that was no longer sealed in its housing. Now he laid them out, and separated them into two groups of three. TIME OVERTAKES ALL THINGS, TEMPUS FUGIT and TIME NEVER WAITS he kept for himself; THERE IS TIME ENOUGH FOR EVERYTHING, THERE IS A TIME FOR EVERY PURPOSE and FUTURE TIME IS ALL THERE IS he offered to Jehan. “I’d give you the pendulum itself,” Friedrich said, “but they stole it for the metal, and the escapement too. It doesn’t matter. You know how it works. You can build another.”

“So can you,” Jehan pointed out.

“I could,” Friedrich agreed, “if I could find another home, another workplace. The world is vast, but there’s no such place in any city I know, and wherever there are men there’s fear of the extraordinary. It’s yours now; you’re heir to Master Zacharius, and to me. You have the stature and the strength, as well as the delicate hands. The secret is yours, to do with as you will. The world will change regardless, so you might as well play your part.”

“Wherever we go, we’ll go together, Friedrich,” Jehan told him. “Whatever we do, we’ll do together, even if we’re damned to Hell or oblivion.”

And he was as good as his word—but whether they were damned to Hell or oblivion we cannot tell, for theirs is a different world than ours, unimprisoned by our history; all things are possible there that were possible here, and many more.

* * * *

Author’s note:
Jules Verne is rather vague about the exact time-period in which the events of “Master Zacharius” take place and exactly what kind of escapement mechanism the Genevan clockmaker is supposed to have invented. So far as history is concerned, though, small spring-driven clocks and watches were reputedly invented by Peter Henlein circa 1500; given that “Master Zacharius” takes place before Calvin’s reformation of Geneva, that implies a date somewhere in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. Verge escapements, consisting of crossbars with regulating weights mounted on vertical spindles, had been in use in weight-driven clocks for some time by then, so the escapement credited by Verne to Zacharius must have been either a stackfreed (a kind of auxiliary spring) or a fusee—a conical grooved pulley connected to a barrel round the mainspring.

The latter invention is usually credited to Jacob the Czech circa 1515; I have assumed that to be the device Verne might have had in mind, but I have also credited Zacharius with manufacturing a fusee in brass, although history has no record of that being done before 1580. The discovery of the isochronicity of the pendulum is, of course, credited by our records to Galileo in the early seventeenth century; pendulum clocks first appeared in our world circa 1650 and were first equipped with recoil escapements ten years thereafter, some eighty-seven years later than the device credited to Friedrich Spurzheim in the story.

“Master Zacharius” was one of the earliest stories Verne wrote, and embodies ideas that he subsequently set firmly aside; this sequel is, I think, far more Vernian in the best sense of the word.

THE IMMORTALS OF ATLANTIS

Sheila never answered the door when the bell rang because there was never anyone there that she wanted to see, and often someone there that she was desperate to avoid. The latter category ranged from debt collectors and the police to Darren’s friends, who were all apprentice drug-dealers, and Tracy’s friends, who were mostly veteran statutory rapists. Not everyone took no for an answer, of course; the fact that debt-collectors and policemen weren’t really entitled to kick the door in didn’t seem to be much of a disincentive. It was, however, very unusual for anyone to use subtler means of entry, so Sheila was really quite surprised when the whitehaired man appeared in her sitting-room without being preceded by the slightest sound of splintering wood.

“I did ring,” he said, laboring the obvious, “but you didn’t answer.”

“Perhaps,” she said, not getting up from her armchair or reaching for the remote, “that was because I didn’t want to let you in.”

Even though she hadn’t even reached for the remote, the TV switched itself off. It wasn’t a matter of spontaneously flipping into stand-by mode, as it sometimes did, but of switching itself
off
. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, so she hadn’t so much been watching it as using it to keep her company in the absence of anything better, but the interruption seemed a trifle rude all the same.

“Did you do that?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We need to talk.”

The phrase made her wonder if he might be one of her exboyfriends, most of whom she could hardly remember because their acquaintance has been so brief, but he certainly didn’t look like one. He was wearing a suit and tie. The suit looked sufficiently old-fashioned and worn to have come from the bargain end of an Oxfam rail, but it was still a suit. He was also way too old—sixty if he was a day—and way too thin, with hardly an ounce of spare flesh on him. The fact that he was so tall made him look almost skeletal.

Sheila would have found it easier to believe in him if he’d been wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a scythe. He was carrying a huge briefcase—so huge that it as a miracle he’d been able to cross the estate without being mugged.

“What do you want?” Sheila asked, bluntly.

“You aren’t who you think you are, Sheila,” was his reply to that—which immediately made her think “religious nut.” The Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses had stopped coming to the estate years ago, because there were far easier places in the world to do missionary work—Somalia, for instance, or the parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban still ruled supreme—but it wasn’t inconceivable that there were people in the world who could still believe that God’s protection even extended to places like this.

“Everybody around here is who they think they are,” she told him. “Nobody has any illusions about being anybody. This is the end of the world, and I’m not talking Rapture.”