The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (6 page)

He did not realize for
some little while that he had only found an outer part of the ancient edifice.
He might easily have laid himself 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 château 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 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 into a dormitory; 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 sceptical 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 automaton limbs,
not because he believed that there would be any treasure to find or any curse
to lift.

He decided before he
fell asleep 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 Évionnaz
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 which the
people of Évionnaz took to be the limit of the world.

In the morning, Jehan
Thun was woken up 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 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 Évionnaz, 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, Gérande.”

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 to break my neighbours’ 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 fusée 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 cookpot 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. Its 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.

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 taken 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.