The Smell of Telescopes (25 page)

Lest my readers also accuse me of missing key descriptive passages, I shall take the opportunity to belatedly delineate the house in which our Humphrey and his furniture dwell. It was a large edifice, a folly whose Gothic appearance was due more to crumbling stonework than architectural intent. A web of cracks covered the exterior plaster, turning the grubby façade into a spider’s lair. Broken chimneys resembled rearing gargoyles or half-finished sculptures; the gutters had sagged, so that the black pipes now frowned over the myopic windows like brows. It seemed, owing to its height, to deliberate wings—bat’s or griffin’s—but there were none. The dilettante cared naught for making repairs and had allowed the wooden balconies to rot to powder and blow away.

After deciding on a rare course of action, Humphrey took to his bed with alacrity and slept soundly for a while, clutching the leaflet under his pillow. Before dawn, he was troubled by dreams of a sensational, but rather confused, nature: the clock was calling to him. Inside, snug as a wasp in an apple, or an insult in a compliment, a skeletal figure coaxed him, again and again: “Let me out, sir, let me out!” This thing was more than just bone, of course; it had a tongue and larynx with which to call him, but the skin was stretched so tight over the frame that it appeared more like a fleshy paint on the ribs and limbs. “Let me out, sir!” There was no great malice in the tone; rather it was sad and cynical, suffused with an ineffable jealousy. Humphrey compared the voice to that of a man whose girlfriend, having spurned him, still fusses his cat. Finally, the sibilant plea broke into a choking laugh—half ecstatic, half terrified—which made the dilettante sit bolt upright.

Naturally, when fully awake, the voice was no longer to be heard. A ghost or bugaboo has a knack of keeping in the margins of the senses. So Humphrey was easily persuaded of the insubstantiality of his experience; he put it down to hallucinations occasioned by gastroenteritis, which in turn had been brought on by licking an unsterilised timepiece. Dressing, he made an early breakfast and, for the first time in his life, observed a sunrise. The speed with which the solar disc climbed over the horizon surprised him. He closely studied the leaflet he had taken to bed; there were precise directions on how to find the antique shop in Abell. As has been stated, Herr Fluchen was very eager for customers to cross his threshold. Humphrey, unaware of the ridiculous myth which surrounded the proprietor, had no fears about entering the shop. Had he known, it would have altered nothing—the dilettante was a sceptic.

Accordingly, he ventured out into the morning, carefully locked the door of his abode and trotted down the road toward the village. The tall dunes blocked the rays of the low sun; it was still as chill as night in their lumpy shadows. Mr Humphrey was not a fast walker: he reached Abell after Herr Fluchen—a conventional riser—opened shop. There is little need to queue in this store; the dealer was delighted to welcome the one customer he thought he would never entice through his portals. After the standard period of browsing, the dilettante turned to him and cautiously inquired as to the comprehensiveness of his stock of books. Herr Fluchen led him into a side-room, with a sagging ceiling whose rafters were held up by pillars of tomes, and gestured at the scene.

“What exactly did you have in mind?” he asked, with a note of pride in his voice. “My collection is extensive.”

“Yes, indeed, I am sure,” said Mr Humphrey heartily, “and I note an impressive column of atlases. But, tell me, as you are a foreign fellow, and knocked about in Central Europe during your youth, I would be gratified to know if you have ever heard of Chaud-Mellé?”

“Often,” answered the proprietor; “but it appears to belong to that category of places which exist more in the geography of memory than in a concrete form. Other examples might be quoted—Mirenburg, Binscombe, Dalkey, Lladloh. Do not all these towns have a familiar ring to them? Yet I challenge you to locate them on any map.”

“Perhaps you are right; only, looking at a clock last night, I came across the name being used as the home address of the designer who built it, so you will understand my eagerness to learn more. Have you a volume printed in Chaud-Mellé, for instance? I can afford to reward you well; I can exchange a brace of Churriguera desks.”

“Excuse me,” cried Herr Fluchen, “but my upbringing in Berlin means I can appreciate only furniture conceived in the Jugendstil style. Yet I will see what I can do for you—there are some dusty missals written in Romansch here. Yes, this may be of use: a work discussing the quality of pâtisseries. Chaud-Mellé had a very good one.”

The reader must be informed that, although true, this statement did not help Humphrey. The book in question had a whole chapter missing; the very one they sought. Muttering about mice, Herr Fluchen searched among the columns for less edible tomes. There was nothing actually published in Chaud-Mellé, but a few texts composed in neighbouring states held the occasional snippet of gossip. In Janez Vajkard Valvasor’s
Die Ehre Des Herzogthums Crain
, the dilettante learned that Chaud-Mellé was crammed with clock-towers, so many that there was an hour for every citizen; in the depths of Thomas Ariel’s
Kruptos: the Micropaedia
, he was pleased to discover that most of these timepieces had been designed by one man, Mortice d’Arthur; in Papus Levi’s
Arcane Enabler
, a manual devoted to extending mortal longevity, the collector was intrigued by the writer’s claim that d’Arthur had achieved a lifespan of over three centuries. Mr Humphrey felt a picture was gradually emerging.

He was shocked, it must be admitted, to find that his vision of the tiny republic was almost completely wrong. Here was no jovial town awash with melting snow and vibrating to the rhythms of yodellers. Chaud-Mellé was an urban pit more gloomy than Ipswich—a chaotic place with a maze of narrow streets, an ineffectual government and a morbid populace. With houses packed so tightly together that daylight never filtered into the thoroughfares, it was a metropolis which bred villainy and vice at every corner. Devilish was the word which jumped into Mr Humphrey’s mind. Even the cable-cars went down, rather than up: into yawning fissures where no mortal could be expected to ski. As for chocolates and alpenhorns, there were murderous cartels controlling both; mittens were banned outright. In short, the city was not a tourist destination.

Turning the pages of other tomes, and breathing that bookish fungus which makes bibliophilia such a heady pastime, Humphrey at last stumbled on an account of the clock-maker. Mortice d’Arthur had gathered one myth about his shoulders. Here was a book called
The Ingolstadt Legends
, by a Bavarian scholar, Pastor Rowlands, and it told the tale in verse. This is a standard satirical technique, but Mr Humphrey suspected it operated less on an allegorical level than might be supposed. With the linguistic aid of Herr Fluchen, the dilettante was soon thrilling over the impudent cantos, lush stanzas and mock-ghastly rhymes.

“This is what I wanted,” he said to the proprietor; “it explains my troubles neatly, though I believe not a word.”

“Always keen to be of assistance, sir,” answered Herr Fluchen, with a click of his heels. “Perhaps you will allow me to giftwrap it for you? You may pay on credit: a single good deed.”

“Admirable! Tie the ribbon tightly, my fine man. I intend to reread it over an early supper. Many, many thanks!”

Before the dilettante could depart, his host pressed a small object into his palm and whispered cryptically: “Please also accept this little cake. It was made by my wife, Anna. Be sure to weigh it carefully before you dine!” Then he tapped his nose meaningfully.

With a curt nod, Humphrey strolled back through the shop, past huge mounds of anachronistic clothing, cutlery, painted jugs, wicker baskets, phonograph records, lamps, battered coins, and up to the front door. He stepped out into a light shower and made his way at a brisk pace back to his house. Herr Fluchen followed him, taking a parallel route along the beach, panting as he climbed the groynes, keeping the dunes between him and his quarry. He managed to beat Mr Humphrey to his manse and found an excellent hiding place in the shrubbery. The dilettante arrived back not a minute later; Herr Fluchen noted he had torn off the wrapping and was writing in the book as he loped down the road.

Muttering to himself, Mr Humphrey entered his dwelling and cast the volume before the clock, much in the manner of a challenge. Herr Fluchen witnessed developments by rushing to the rear of the house and squinting through a window. The dilettante’s lips were moving: he was conducting a conversation with the clock. An amateur ventriloquist, the proprietor of the antique shop was able to work out the words.

“So, you are in there!” Humphrey was bawling. “And you have in your possession the power to make me happy. I want all you can offer: tell me how to release you! Show me the secret lock!”

It was obvious to Herr Fluchen, if not yet to the reader, that this somewhat poor hero of ours, Mr Humphrey, had abandoned his scepticism of things supernatural for unabashed belief. The legend of Mortice d’Arthur as revealed by Pastor Rowlands is as follows: the clock-maker, a student of chronometry, wanted to cheat mortality by merging himself with one of his creations. He invented a new kind of clock, with an escapement fixed directly to his mind, so that when his thoughts, as electrical impulses, jumped between his scheming lobes, they were converted into a mechanical energy, which could then, with the aid of gears, be reversed. The ageing process should be defeated: by thinking backwards, and reactivating dead brain-cells, Mortice would grow young again.

Setting to work, the craftsman made a grandfather which encased him like a coffin. With his body forming the clock-workings, he was required to turn the minute hand with his finger. For each hour he moved forward, he gained a corresponding hour of youth. He kept good time: visitors to his workshop set their watches by him. He planned to spend twenty years inside the timepiece, which would take him back to an age when women, in suitable lighting, might find him not unattractive. On no account was he to be disturbed during the process; nobody was permitted to probe inside the instrument. He arranged matters so that the door of the machine was fitted with a secret lock, which could only be opened from outside by an assistant employed to watch over him.

Predictably enough, this assistant—whom Mr Humphrey suspected was Pastor Rowlands himself—grew bored with his task. He decided on a more profitable form of work: the looting of d’Arthur’s workshop for valuable items and the distribution of the objects in pawnshops. Anxious to avoid reprisals for this, the assistant made doubly sure Mortice was unable to escape his confinement: he levered off the alarm bells on the top of the device. These had been set to go off two decades hence, when it was time for the clock-maker to cease turning the minute hand. Without their aid, he would never know the correct moment to stop.

Realising he had been betrayed, but helpless to do much about it, a seething Mortice d’Arthur kept doggedly at his task. The assistant never did return, and the decades ticked by excruciatingly slowly. Eventually, just before the turn of the century, bailiffs forced entry into his home and seized his few remaining possessions: he had not paid the rent for a conventional lifetime. His goods, including the clock, were distributed throughout Europe. The bailiffs treated the grandfather so roughly that the pendulum inside—also a part of the clock-maker’s anatomy, we shall refrain from saying which—broke free of its bearings. Unregulated, the timepiece now took its essential rhythms from the silent curses muttered by the creature smouldering in its stomach.

One day, Mortice vowed, he would be free again: he would reward his liberator extensively. The exact nature of this intended munificence was not stated, save in somewhat ambiguous terms. There was an abrupt ending to Pastor Rowland’s speculations on the issue.

This was the tale read by Mr Humphrey in the book of poems. And the moral? Doubtless that it is foolish to hoodwink time. The dilettante did not disagree with this diagnosis, but desired the promised rewards. Thus he was determined to be the one who liberated Mortice d’Arthur. Once the secret lock was found, his life would improve.

Humphrey struggled with the clock for the best part of the day. The lock was hidden very cunningly; at any rate, it evaded his fingers. With reluctance, he took a break for dinner. As he ate, he thought the device gave another chuckle and repeated its earlier plea: “Let me out, sir!” A sudden sob seemed to rack the frame. “Let me out!” The dilettante turned to it and cried that he did not know how.

He was on the point of leaving the table when he recalled that Herr Fluchen had given him a cake. Removing it from his pocket, he studied it carefully. It was very delicate—an aerated strudel. Why had the trader insisted he weigh it before popping it into his mouth? He shrugged and carried it over to a pair of scales which rested on top of a pipe-organ in a far corner of the room. The scales were presently comparing scores by Bach and Handel. As the sheets of sacred music rocked back and forth, a whine issued from the measuring instrument. Though a secular soul, the dilettante listened to the occasional mass.

Sweeping the scores aside and adjusting a set of counterweights, Mr Humphrey was astonished to discern that, in metric terms, the cake had a weight no greater than a single gram. “Herr Fluchen’s spouse, Anna, must be a wondrous cook,” he mused. And then inspiration struck. “Heavens! It is a clue! The chap knows how to open the timepiece. He gave me a pastry solution. Anna and a gram! Anagram!”

With this insight, the dilettante rushed back to the clock. Now the words on the tarnished face seemed to glow with an inner light. Studying them more closely, he realised that some of the letters could be used to spell a different sentence. ‘Mortice d’Arthur, Chaud-Mellé’ might now be seen as concealing a more direct exhortation: ‘Let me out’! This was the sort of trick to be expected of foreigners.

Pressing the letters in this order, Humphrey was gratified, after a moment’s pause, to hear a click. Reaching down to open the suddenly ajar door, he happened to catch sight of Herr Fluchen at the window. Desirous of keeping the promised reward all to himself, but aware that the trader had given him the method of opening the grandfather, he dithered; he let his arms drop and grimaced. This was possibly the last facial expression he made to be witnessed by a fellow human being.