writing: Clockwork

Here is a story. I leave it to my valued online readers to judge its worth.

Clockwork

My friend Sigmund and I had for many weeks on our way to school taken a lengthy detour on Hauptstrasse to stop outside the old shop. The ancient fieldstone building gave an impression of sagging everywhere, as if in despair of its smart redbrick neighbours and the newly cobbled street, but despite this some merchant had decided to move in. We would press our faces against the tiny panes of leaded glass, but had so far observed nothing more than the back of a cracked leather curtain.

Today however, there was a change: the barest crack between the rotted leather hangings. Shifting my head every which way to take advantage of the still feeble light, I was able to discern a few obscure shapes within: tables, shelves, a doorway, and a single antique mantel clock, displayed in such a way that I was certain I had the answer.

I had been hoping for a confectioner, or better, a gunsmith. A disappointment equal to over a month –an eternity!– of expectation settled on my shoulders and forced the air from my lungs. “He is a watchmaker,” I sighed.

“A what?” Sigmund’s mouth, which was given to hanging open anyway, gaped a little wider. I gestured that he should look for himself, but he just stood and continued to gape.

“He makes timepieces,” I said bitterly. “Just what our town needs, a man who sells clocks to lawyers and money-lenders. Listening to that ticktock ticktock all day must drive a man mad.”

The first I knew of the watchmaker was his fingers biting into my arm like four separate awls.

After turning me about, he scrutinized my person with a rheumy gaze, like a farmer examining a suspect pig for wasting disease. My mouth opened as if it would protest, but faced with the uncommonly hideous, I closed it again without a word. Each of his features was swollen and crowded together on his face, as if having been filched from the head of a much larger man, they would never properly fit. He wore a tattered and colourless greatcoat, and what was visible of the body beneath it was wizened and bent as a rotted branch. He stank as well, as you will likely have guessed.

Yellowed eyes flicked suddenly to Sig who, though not manhandled as I, appeared equally helpless. My captor gave a jerk of his head. The sound of my friend’s shoes beating the cobbles was the tale of his courage.

“I am Oppol, yes?” the man said in a creaking whine, “and you are Jorg Hayner, the carpenter’s son. Come in, please.” He turned, and without relaxing that grip, walked inside.

Within the dim cave of the shop he released my arm. My first instinct was to bolt for the door, already soughing shut on the last bar of light, but thinking of Sigmund, I stayed. It would be less satisfying to denounce him as a coward if I turned up my heels now.

Oppol shuffled to the front window and pulled the hangings down from their hooks. Beams of light, made solid by swirling dust, pushed reluctantly into the room. “My humble shop. I open today, and you are the first in Weiz to see it.”

Careful to keep him in my field of view, I turned. The shop was indeed humble. The morning sun revealed a dilapidated hodgepodge of tables, crates and shelves, every available surface of which was piled with gears, springs, musty old manuals, and detritus of less obvious portent. Here and there the indistinguishable junk was relieved by the profile of a worm-scarred clock. And over everything, from the bare stone walls to the shade of the single, unlit lamp, lay a patina of rust and grit. I had supposed the watchmaker to be an Austrian like myself, but we care deeply for order and cleanliness. I didn’t think this shop would meet with any success, even somewhere like France, much less in our respectable little town.

Oppol’s bulging eyes tracked me as he wandered about, with one finger absently adjusting the bits and pieces, as if perfecting a pattern visible only to him. I thought, ridiculously, that he should sweep up the trash on the floor first.

“You do not like clocks for some reason?” he asked, halting his circuit. “I heard you talking to your gawping friend outside.”

At home, I was schooled most strictly against insolence, but I could think of nothing less rude than to shrug.

“Come, look at this.”

I followed his beckoning claw to a corner of the room where the exhausted light had all but given up. He lifted a greasy cloth from an object as out of place in that shop as a candle flame at the bottom of a stagnant pond. It was a bird, or rather an exquisite facsimile, modeled on some exotic species I had never seen. The statuette was posed with its beak nestled under one wing like a sleeping mallard. Studying it closely, I saw the jeweled plumage had been reproduced with impossibly thin, overlapping segments. It did not appear to be painted, but how had he produced such an array of colours in raw metal?

Not wanting to show my admiration for this stunning craftsmanship, I remained silent.

“All the world, and every moving thing within it, is a machine,” he said, as if lecturing to a room full of people, “and one who understands the inner workings of a thing, how the gears fit together, controls it. That is the watchmaker’s joy, to know that once you set something in motion, you can predict its every action and reaction. It is at your command.”

The bent old man had been stroking the head of his figurine as he talked. Now he tickled it somewhere in its iridescent plumage. The creature gave a sound like a spring suddenly uncoiling and I stumbled back in shock. As if waking from a nap in the sun, the metal bird stretched its neck and spread its wings. While I watched in awe, it snapped its beak twice and proceeded to fidget about on the perch.

I struggled, with poor results, to conceal my wonder as it began to groom itself. “It is a fine toy, Mein Herr, but I am too old for such things.”

“Hm.” The watchmaker’s brow furrowed, against all reason making him yet uglier. “You are too old for toys you say, but you are not apprenticed yet. I will need someone young, with clear eyes, to help me here.”

Even the priest would forgive me for laughing at this offer. “My father is a Master Carpenter, Herr Oppol. Perhaps you would like to discuss my apprenticeship with him.”

“Does tree sap run in your veins then, Master Hayner? None of this” –gesturing with one crooked arm as if we stood in a bank vault bursting with gold instead of a room full of junk– “interests you? If you worked with me you would see that my work goes beyond clocks and pocket watches, the simple gadgets you hold in such contempt, to the greatest machine of all: Man.”

“Man is no machine,” I sullenly replied. The man’s rambling recalled snippets I had heard about the atheist, a strange sort of heretic rumoured to frequent Vienna.

“He is, young man. He is a machine, and not so much more difficult to understand than any fragile mechanism. And then, some men are easier to understand than others.”

He paused and there was nothing to fill the silence between us but his bird, which now emitted a metallic cooing sound.

“But your heart is set on woodwork. Then there is one more thing for us to discuss, Master Hayner, and you may go on your way. Your sister, er– Madchen is her name? I would like an introduction.”

My lips contorted and sputtered nothing at all before my brain could work out a sensible reply. My initial fear of this scarecrow had dwindled to nothing, but now anger rose up in me instead. How did this foul creature know of my sister? Or of myself or my father, come to that?

At last I came out with, “My sister is eleven years old.”

“Yes, yes, my boy. I am no longer a young buck, it is true.” He wheezed once in a poor imitation of gaiety. “Doubtless to you I seem ancient, but that is all the more reason to seek out young flesh. Any roads, it will be for your father to decide.” Turning his back to me, he covered his bird once more. “Now you’ve seen something to tell your friends. Be off.”

The horrid, shadowy shop was far behind me, and the sun thankfully well above the horizon, before in my mind the whole encounter was reduced to the nonsense it really was. The idea of my sister with that crusted old watchmaker!

I resolved to give Sig a thrashing when next I got him alone.

----

The watchmaker had made me late for school, for which I received a painful stroke of the switch on both hands, but by the end of the day I had forgotten him. Unfortunately, my father was soon to remind me.

“I was approached at work today by Herr Oppol, the watchmaker,” he said to me. We were gathering wood for the firebox while my sister and mother cleaned up the remains of supper. “He says the two of you are acquainted.”

“Yes, he invited me into his shop. He said he wanted an apprentice.” I waited for my father to laugh as I had, but his mind was elsewhere.

“Jorg, I need to ask your opinion on something important.”

“Of course,” I replied. He had never asked my advice before, and pride like a fiercely worked bellows inflated my chest.

“He wants to court your sister. I know you will say she is young, but she won’t remain a girl much longer and it is always prudent to consider all proposals. .”

“But Papa, that is a terrible idea!” I had so many objections to this I hardly knew in what order to raise them. “Madchen would never marry someone so old and ugly. He smells you know. She would be better off marrying the tanner’s apprentice.”

He paused, taken aback at my outburst. “But he has the shop–”

“His shop is dirty!” This, in my opinion, was the most damning point against him. If father had seen that shop he would never have answered such an insult. “He will never make any money in Weiz. Next year at this time he will be out on the street.”

“When you are older Jorg, you will understand that although it is pleasant to have girls around the house, a daughter can be a great burden on a family when she gets older. I will invite Herr Oppol for some cocoa and we will let Madchen decide.”

My instinct was to argue, but instead I stroked my chin –still as smooth and hairless as a cured ham– and nodded my head wisely. It would come to the same thing.

----

I lay awake long into the night. Our family was far too sensible for the watchmaker to get what he wanted, but still I was unsettled. When it seemed I had a few minutes past eased into sleep, I was woken by a loud bang. The window of our room was yawning wide, and the curtain flapped free in a raw, dank wind. I rolled to my feet to close it. “Madchen, it is far too cold to—“

My sister’s bed was empty and the wooden clogs that typically sat at its foot, gone.

Scrambling up onto the sill, I squinted against a blowing rain. She was walking away up the street, unconcerned with the rain slicking her hair to her head. She wasn’t given to sleepwalking, but what else would call her into the night without coat or hat?

I lost several minutes scrambling down from the roof to the street, but soon caught sight of her again. I was out of breath and still a block behind by the time we reached Oppol’s shop. Madchen had calmly approached the front door –which sat slightly ajar despite the hour– and entered. Not waiting to speculate on what I would find, I rushed in after her. A lone candle lit the room in a greenish light. Beside it was a door which had somehow escaped my notice before, to the right of that which led to the work room. Madchen was reaching for the polished glass handle, but I grabbed her in both arms before she could touch it and dragged her out to the street.

My sister was in a daze, but did not resist as I hustled her back towards our home. The burgeoning rain had become a storm, and for some reason the entire town was dark, as if under a curse. What a pitiful pair we made, fighting the wind in nothing but our shirts, and with not a light to help us.

I gave thanks to God when we stumbled in the front door of our house. My attempt at a shout for assistance produced nothing but a consumptive wheeze. At the threshold, Maddy’s trance turned into a swoon. I carried her up to our attic room and lay her on her cot. Then I collapsed on my own bed, and without so much as removing my soaking shirt I slept.

The next morning I woke late and seeing my sister’s empty bed almost cried out, but the homely clinks and conversation wafting up from below meant everyone was at breakfast, as they should be of a Saturday morning. I raced downstairs in my nightshirt.

“Did she tell you?” I cried. The three of them looked up as one. “How can you sit there and eat sausage after what happened? Have you sent for the constable?”

My mother gave an irritated toss of her head. “Save your jokes for later, Jorg. The rest of us have been up for over an hour, you know.”

“Didn’t she tell you where she went last night?” I asked, all but hopping from foot to foot.

My mother’s sigh was the embodiment of resignation. “Maddy, what is your brother on about? Did you go somewhere last night?”

“No, Mamma. I slept the night through.”

“You were sleepwalking, Madchen,” I said. “I followed you all the way to that foul watchmaker’s shop.”

“Watch that tongue.” My father pointed at me with his fork. “I don’t want you going about calling your elders foul.”

“Sorry, Papa. But listen: I woke late last night when I heard our window bang open–” I related the whole tale, omitting nothing but my own terror. My father continued eating, but nodded from time to time as if carefully considering every part. Before I could speculate on how Oppol had witched Madchen out onto the street, he stopped me with a raised hand.

“But son,” he said, giving me a rough but fatherly shake, “it has not rained in days. Were your shoes on your feet this morning, or did you run down the street barefoot? If, as you said, you were caught in a storm and everyone’s lights were dark, how did you find your way home?”

I flushed to the roots of my hair as everyone had a long laugh at my expense.

----

A gray sky hung low over Weiz, sealing in the fishy stink from the river on the occasion of Oppol’s visit.

Madchen and I were sitting upstairs in our Sunday clothes. When Mother came to fetch her, my sister stood in a corner and shrieked loud enough that the whole house, and possibly our neighbours, could hear, “The beastly man who lives in that old stone milking shed? I told you I don’t want to see him!” Mamma could never raise a hand to my sister, and when she was feeling slippery couldn’t get a grip on her either.

“He’s uglier than the Archibald’s goat,” she continued in earnest. “I’ve heard the wind off him kills flowers.” Madchen had wholeheartedly embraced her role. Mamma’s icy glare was fixed on me however, and I carefully repressed a look of triumph. When our front door slammed she threw up her hands in defeat and returned to the kitchen.

Madchen was instantly calm. We crept to our window, where we could quite clearly hear Father and Oppol talking outside.

“The terms I have offered are generous.” This was Oppol’s tinny screech. “Maybe you are too polite to ask for more–?”

“There is nothing wrong with your offer,” Papa said, his teeth clicking on his pipe as they did when he was angry, “but, as I’m sure you’ll agree, there is more to consider than money, Herr Oppol.”

“No, sir, I confess I do not see. You are the girl’s father and she will do as you see fit. You must act the man now and do as commerce dictates. In fact, I insist on it!”

I was glad I could not see his face as my father replied, very calmly, “Leave my property at once, sir, and take care your shadow does not fall here again, or I promise you will sorely regret it.”

----

The switching we received for our insolence was as usual brief and passionless, and the unpleasant interview with the watchmaker was forgotten. How I wish the story had ended there.

But a week later I was woken again by a loud bang sometime after midnight. This time it was the sound of the sash falling shut, as happens when Madchen isn’t careful. Again her bed was empty. I opened the window and crawled out on the slates. Across the way, a hunched figure was failing to blend in with the shadows. I did not know what Oppol’s game was, but I was not surprised.

I checked my feet and saw they were bare, and the night’s chill cut through my nightshirt. I was not dreaming. I turned, intending to grab up my shoes and coat, but this time it really had rained and I lost my grip on the slick tiles. After a brief scramble, I slid over the edge, and fell several yards to the cobbles below. Something twisted in my left ankle, but before the pain could catch me up, I spotted him: a figure in a greatcoat limping away up the lane. Standing, I put my weight on my injured leg and a spike of shivering cold split it from heel to hip.

I woke stretched out on our parlor sofa. My father, watching over me in his night clothes, shook his head but said nothing.

“It was Madchen, Papa! She snuck out the window again. I was about to go after her–”

Madchen and my mother appeared in the doorway.

“Jorg,” my mother said, not unkindly, “she was in the kitchen drinking a glass of milk.”

----

My ankle was badly sprained, and on the advice of Dr. Mueller I was to stay off it as much as possible for two weeks. Mamma was starting to suspect it was my head that needed a doctor. I acted as if the incident was simply the embarrassing result of another nightmare, but privately I took careful stock of the situation.

I pretended an interest in books, and did my best to help with whatever small chores I could do in the house.

I kept watch over my sister.

I first noticed the change at church. There was no giggling, no whispered asides and no pushing her nose up with one finger while singing hymns. She sat quietly, and opened and closed her bible just when she should. At home she continued with this charade of obedience and respect. My parents were fooled, thinking she was repentant for what happened during Oppol’s visit. That is the last thing I would believe.

My mother began forcing a glass of warm milk on me every night, so one day when everyone was out to market, I took my father’s hammer and shut the sash with four stout nails. Later, while trying to cultivate an afternoon nap, I saw father wander into the room and run his finger along the sill. He saw what I had done, but said nothing.

In time I noticed other details about Madchen. Her hair was becoming tangled from neglect, not so surprising for a girl who spent as much time climbing trees as sewing or cooking, but she had used to brush it one hundred strokes every night, an obsession learned from an aunt who visited occasionally from Salzburg. I was convinced these little clues had something to do with Oppol. One evening we sat on our beds, reading. I was not really reading, and for some reason I suspected the same of her.

“Ach, will this rain never quit?” I said. Madchen made no reply. “It makes loafing around the house still more unbearable than before. Even school would be a relief. You look sad too, Maddy. Come give me a hug.”

With a smile as dishonest as my prattle, she came close. I held her with one arm, and stroked her hair with my free hand. What was this? A raised ridge ran horizontally for several inches below the bump of her cranium, like a bad scar. I had no idea what the import of this discovery was, but my hand shook nonetheless.

“That’s enough hugging for now, brother,” she said, and stood away from me, the smile fixed in place.

In the morning I told my mother Madchen had hit her head quite badly, and Dr. Mueller should be called. Mother was skeptical of most anything I said these days, but she asked Madchen –who neither confirmed nor denied my claim– over and started running her fingers over her scalp. I leaned forward.

“Stop it! Stop tickling,” she squealed. Maddy had always been ticklish, but her protest rang false to me, who had lately observed her so closely. She began wrestling in earnest and soon my ruse was forgotten. I knew it would be useless to mention it again.

----

The day the doctor declared me recovered, I forgot my troubles with the watchmaker and spent the day running around town with my friends. Sigmund had acquired two bottles of ale from his older brother and we shared them with a few others. Having lost all sense of time, I returned home after sunset to discover the game had entered a new stage.

My mother was slumped at the table, staring out the window at the empty dark as if a mountain rested on her shoulders. It was clear she had been weeping for hours, the type of weeping that has but one possible cause. She did not look at me when she spoke.

“It was the apprentice, Ludger. He made a mistake with the scaffolding, and your father fell...” A black circle appeared around my vision. “They said nothing like this had ever happened with Ludger before, he was such a good worker, reliable… just like clockwork.”

As if I were looking through the wrong end of a spyglass, I saw world shrink away from me. I sat to keep myself from falling. She was still speaking. For her sake, and for my own sanity, I tried to focus.

“Remember how that watchmaker, Herr Oppol, was so taken by your sister? He made us an offer to take her in, Jorg. We refused of course, but without Papa’s wages how will we pay for your apprenticeship? Perhaps if we returned to him now–”

I slapped my mamma across the face. The sound of it was like a door crashing shut, a door separating what had been from what would be.

I rushed to the attic, thinking that Madchen must know something, or at least that the shock of our father’s demise would wake her from her trance. Have you guessed what I found, my friend? She was nowhere in the house.

----

A brilliant moon lit my way to the cursed shop, where in the stillness I saw the door to the street standing open. The chamber within was again lit by a single candle, and again –I shook my head, but there it remained– the second door in the back wall.

The glass handle turned silently in my hand. Behind was a dim stairwell cut from the same fieldstone as the building itself. Telling myself I was afraid only for Madchen, I descended. At the bottom of the cracked stone steps bright gaslight illuminated yet another surprise.

Gleaming rows of tools and implements were carefully laid out in a broad, square room as clean and orderly as any surgery. Much of it was for the fussy work of timepieces, but there were knives and saws as well, and other more curious implements. It occurred to me then that perhaps Oppol had not arranged the front shop at all, but that the half-ruined room had sat in just that state for decades.

Everything centered around a long table about the length of a tall man, with a long depression running down the middle. At one end was a deeper, bowl shaped concavity with an open circle at the bottom, presumably a drain.

My sister was nowhere to be seen, but there was no question this was the heart of Oppol’s plan, whatever it may be.

“Jorg!” I jumped and all but upset a tray of silvery scalpels. It was Maddy’s voice, frantic with fear, but she herself was still invisible. “Brother, is it you? Come here, please!”

I followed the sound to a cabinet covered with a flowered drape. Removing the cloth, I was faced with a featureless metal surface, warm to the touch, from which protruded a pair of curved brass tubes. Maddy’s voice came from the funnel on the left.

“I’m here,” I cried, any caution I might have had forgotten. “I’ve come for you. I found you. I’ll take you out of here, I promise.”

“Brother, thank God. I somehow ended up in that horrid old man’s shop. You were right all along, I must have been sleepwalking.” I ran my hands over the curved metal container, but it had no openings or catches. It also rested flush on the floor, and looking at it more critically, I decided it was too small to conceal her. “He put a cloth over my mouth. He used some chemical to put me to sleep and now I’m trapped.”

“Don’t worry about Oppol. If he dares show his face I’ll smash it in.” The cabinet was fixed in place so I did a circuit of the room, thinking that the speaking tubes must lead into another room or down under the floor. A single wall hanging concealed nothing but an empty alcove, and the floor was bare bleached stone. Was it a trick door, like the one to this room?

I returned and spoke into the right hand funnel. “Maddy, I can’t find the door. Can you tell me how to reach you?”

“I’m in a dark place. He tied me down on a bed or something soft. I- I can’t move at all, even to turn my head.”

A long, rusty creak bolted me upright: the front entrance.

“It’s him, Jorg!” Madchen hissed. “He mustn’t catch you. Can you get out? Can you hide?”

I slipped to the alcove, and as the curtain settled, fortune favoured me with the merest gap through which I could watch the room. Footsteps approached.

With a trembling effort of will I stilled a gasp as Maddy emerged from the bottom of the stairs. Had her voice been some magician’s trick? She walked slowly, entranced, and wore a plain white gown like folk who must stay in hospital. The fiend Oppol, studying a heavy vellum document in one hand, followed.

They stopped at that strange workbench in the middle of the room. The watchmaker unfurled his diagram on a nearby tray and guided my sister to lay upon the table, face down. It was a surgeon’s table, of course, any idiot could see that. Her body fit in the center depression and her face rested in the hollow at one end.

My throat ached with swallowed curses, but I continued to wait. I had to know what was the watchmaker’s hold on Madchen. Next, he withdrew a tiny key from his pocket. He seemed to insert it somewhere at the top of her neck. In the next instant, the back of her head came apart. A perfect section of skull, scalp and all, angled smoothly open, and her long blonde hair draped the top of the table.

I stepped from behind the curtain.

“Yes, I know you are there, Master Hayner,” he said, not deigning to turn. “As you can see, your sister needs no rescuing. She is in capable hands.”

I raised my father’s gun and pointed it at him. It was an American pistol, a Colt 1849. My father and I had taken it shooting at a neighbour’s dairy farm several times in the summer. At this range there would be no question of skill, nor of the result.

“I am the master of machines, my boy. That toy won’t harm me, I won’t allow it.”

Without taking my eye off him, or moving anything but my thumb, I pulled back the hammer until it settled with a satisfying click.

“You murdered my Papa. That apprentice who sets up the scaffolding, he works for you.”

Oppol turned to face me. He was grinning, a rictus I had seen once on a dead dog. “Ludger doesn't work for me you fool, he belongs to me.”

“You are a monster!” I cried, sounding like a lost child. “Make me kill you and God will not judge me.”

“There is no God!” Oppol raised his voice and this once it sounded strong and commanding, yet his eyes were as dead as two marbles. “There are only greater machines and lesser machines. I am offering you a choice of which you will be. Do not scorn it.” He gestured to the table where Madchen lay like a bled hog waiting to be butchered. “Your sister–“

The Colt roared. He had been about to say Madchen, and that I could not allow.

As the pistol’s thunder reverberated and diminished to a persistent ringing in my ears, the watchmaker fell back a step and his head swung around on a neck gone slack. Struggling to keep his balance, he pushed himself up against a shelf, his chin resting on his chest and his dead eyes drawn like lodestones to the smoking hole in his jacket and the creeping black stain that spread therefrom.

I ran to my sister.

The open portion of her skull rested on a delicate hinge which had somehow been sutured to the bone, and the contents nestled within as if in a fruit bowl. It was full with mechanisms of every gauge and type: springs, levers, sprockets, cogs, every component perfectly aligned.

Yet they were still, like the guts of a silent clock, waiting for a touch to set the pendulum swinging. Had he turned it off with his key? As my hearing recovered from the Colt’s retort, I became aware of an infinitesimal ticking. One tiny, paper-thin wheel rocked gently on its axis, as if waiting. Plunging my hands into the vessel of Oppol’s madness, I seized up the wheels and parts and scattered them in fistfuls on the floor. I yanked and tore until my fingernails bled, until the inside of Madchen’s skull was as clean as an eggshell.

Finally I stood paralyzed, eyes starting out of my head, looking at what I had done, and then I heard her voice again, from the brass tube, from the box in the corner: “Brother, what is happening? Jorg, are you there? I want to go home.”

----

I was quite clear with the detectives that they must preserve her body. They said the coroner was keeping it for the investigation. Yes, I told you already: it was a trick, what you found in the watchmaker’s shop, sheep brains or offal or something. You can get such things at any butcher.

Listen, you must find Oppol! He has my sister you see, my real sister, and he’s the only one who can put her back together, the way she was, the way we were...

What do you mean he is in his shop right now?

That bullet did not miss. You must have seen the hole in his coat. Pull open his chest and you will see he is all clockwork inside, nothing but a machine, an abomination in the eyes of God!

Where are you going? Remove this jacket, do you hear! Take it off at once!