The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  Again he reached his objective just as night was falling, and again he saw no light as he toiled uphill towards the crumbled stonework, until he lit his own candle – but this time, there seemed at first glance to be no roof at all to offer him shelter, merely a tangle of tumbled walls, cracked arches and heaps of debris.

  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.

  “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 than 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 St 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 once 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 Château 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 clo
ckwork since you were a child, your own work must have maintained your dexterity; my escapement is not as delicate as a fusée. 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 replace-ments. 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 with no 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 château,” 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.”