Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘The music, of course.’

  ‘It was …’

  Erik tried to describe how it had made him feel. He didn’t want to just say it was ‘good’ – it was so much bigger than that. He wasn’t used to describing things like music, however. Most of his language skills were dedicated to conveying information about his family’s farm, like whether the mud in the field was averagely wet and grim today, or notably deep and depressing.

  ‘It was like mountains talking,’ he said, feeling foolish. ‘It was the things they say to each other when we’re asleep, or looking the other way. Like every tree on the mountain saying how interesting it is to be alive, all chattering at once and yet always listening to each other.’

  The man thought about this for a moment. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I like that. What’s your name?’

  Erik told him, and then the man told him his name, and explained he was choirmaster of this church. He was writing the music for a performance to be held on Sunday and so while he didn’t mind Erik having heard what he’d done so far, he needed private time now to refine the music. He hoped Erik understood.

  Erik did, though he was sad this meant he wasn’t going to be allowed to hear any more. ‘But how do you do that?’ he asked. ‘Make music?’

  The man held up one hand, and pointed to his head with the other. ‘Somewhere between here and here,’ he said, ‘is Heaven. You only have to open the door.’

  Erik realized that though the man had at first looked forbidding, he was not, merely focused on his work of creation, and that what he meant was that somewhere between a person’s brain and their fingers lay the power to create things that were bigger than the world itself. Bigger than the universe, perhaps.

  ‘But how do you open the door?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve already begun,’ the man said. ‘Once, a long time ago, I walked over two hundred miles to hear a man play. You’ve done the same today, without knowing it. You’ve found your door. All you have to do now is keep pushing against it for the rest of your life. Here. Take this to help you remember that.’

  The man put his hand to his lapel and pulled out something that had been threaded through it, like an austere brooch. A pin, of a tarnished gold colour. The man threaded it through the rags of Erik’s coat, winked, and strode back to the organ.

  Erik left the church and walked back out through the streets. The people coursing through them did not frighten him any more because he realized their movements and the sound of their thousand voices were notes in a vast piece of music, a story made of sounds, sometimes dissonant – like the shouts of men trying to sell bits of meat, or old, rusty tools – and at others sweet and pure, like mothers fondly calling their children, or greeting their neighbours. What he’d heard in the church, along with the realization that these things did not just come out of the mind of God, but could be born in the fingers of men, changed him forever.

  He walked home in the rain. It was a long, long walk, and he was very tired when he got home.

  The next day it was only raining a little, and so everybody got back to work. Erik toiled alongside them as always, but from that day on he knew he would eventually leave the farm, and his family, and find a place where he could learn to do something like the man in the church.

  Something that changed the world.

  When he got to that part in the story, Granddad stopped.

  Hannah frowned. It had been quite a nice story, though short on action and talking animals and events of interest to eleven-year-olds. She didn’t get the point of it, however, or how it related to her key questions:

  How did Granddad know the man in the black suit?

  Especially if he really and literally was the Devil?

  ‘Ask him the name of the man playing the organ.’

  Hannah jumped, and saw the other man had re-entered room and was standing over by the window. The mushroom was still outside, looking cold.

  She looked at Granddad. ‘OK. Who was he?’

  Her grandfather’s voice was quiet. ‘Johann Sebastian Bach.’

  This was evidently supposed to mean something to her. It did not. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Kids today really do know shit,’ muttered the man in the black suit. ‘Even I listen to Bach, and he was so working for the wrong side.’

  Hannah was scandalized. ‘“Shit” is a bad word.’

  He glared at her. ‘I’m the Devil. I’m a very bad man.’

  ‘No. You’re just a rude old person,’ she said. ‘But … what’s that story even got to do with you, Granddad?’

  Her grandfather smiled, ruefully, as if giving up a secret he’d been holding for a very long time.

  ‘Hannah … Erik Gruen is me.’

  Chapter 12

  Granddad unlocked the passenger door of his car. The man in the suit lowered his head to peer inside. Hannah was confused to see he seemed to be looking at the big old suitcase-thing with dial attached to it, the object that had been in the way of her feet on the drive from the airport.

  ‘Test it,’ he said.

  ‘I did yesterday,’ Granddad said. ‘As always. As I said, it was fine.’

  ‘I need to see it with my own eyes. Not the daily check. A thorough examination. Now.’

  ‘It’d need to be indoors.’

  ‘So take it there.’

  ‘I can’t carry it by myself. That’s why I keep it in the car.’

  The Devil looked at Hannah.

  ‘No,’ Granddad said firmly. ‘She’s a child. If it’s going inside, you’re helping.’

  The Devil looked speculatively at the large mushroom, who was standing some distance away in the darkness, so cold now that it had turned a rather ghastly blue colour.

  ‘Seriously?’ Granddad said. ‘An accident imp?’

  The Devil opened his mouth, but evidently saw Granddad’s point. He sighed bad-temperedly and rolled up his sleeves.

  Fifteen minutes later, after a lot of puffing and a certain amount of extremely bad language, they had the suitcase inside the cabin, standing upright on the floor. The Devil had taken up residence in the big armchair. Hannah and the imp had been told to sit on the sofa.

  ‘I’m not sitting next to a mushroom,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s icky.’

  ‘I am not a mushroom,’ Vaneclaw said, indistinctly, because his teeth were still chattering. ‘I am an imp.’

  ‘You’re a mushroom.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Well, you look like one.’

  ‘That’s merely how he appears,’ Granddad said. He knelt on the floor near the old suitcase, wincing as his knees popped, and laid out a set of very precise-looking tools on the carpet. ‘I’m surprised you can see him at all. I suppose you’re still young, and flexible. It’s the closest the human mind can get to a shape it recognizes. Other imps might look like gnarled trees, or rotting pumpkins, or empty coats.’

  ‘Well, he looks like a mushroom. And I hate mushrooms.’

  ‘Not keen on children, myself.’ The mushroom sniffed. ‘Unless I’m especially hungry.’

  ‘Be quiet, the pair of you,’ the Devil snapped. ‘Let the Engineer concentrate.’

  ‘Why does he call you that, Granddad?’

  Granddad selected a screwdriver with a long, thin blade and started undoing the screws around the edges of the suitcase. There were a lot of them. They were very small.

  He didn’t answer her question directly but went back to his strange story. ‘Erik Gruen eventually left the farm,’ he said. ‘He walked back to the city and supported himself doing whatever job he could find. Working in the markets, sweeping the streets, anything that would earn a coin or two. Then one afternoon – when he was walking back from listening to the man in the big church playing the organ again – he happened to pass a workshop, and saw clocks and watches inside. He was fascinated by them, their intricacy, and by what they were. Pieces of metal, working together, physical objects somehow capturing and describing someth
ing abstract and untouchable: time.’

  Granddad finished undoing the outer screws and carefully lifted off the piece of leather-covered wood on the front of the case, and put it to one side. This revealed another wooden plate, with even more screws in it. He selected a different screwdriver, and got back to work.

  ‘Erik went into the workshop,’ he continued, ‘and convinced the clockmaker to take him on as an apprentice.’

  ‘If Erik is you, Granddad, why do you keep talking as if he’s someone else?’

  Granddad laughed. ‘I suppose it feels that way, sometimes. Erik – OK, I – worked hard. I soon learned everything the clockmaker had to teach me. After five years I set up in business on my own, working on clocks and watches to my own new and improved designs.’

  ‘Like a start-up,’ Hannah said, having often heard her mother use the term approvingly, as though it was the most interesting thing anyone could possibly be involved in.

  ‘Perhaps. It took a long time to establish myself, but after ten, twenty, thirty years, I had become by far the best watchmaker in the city. The best in the country, in fact. All the wealthiest citizens came to me to make their timepieces. The king himself wore one of my watches. I became, I suppose, a little famous for my work.’

  Hannah grinned, feeling vindicated. She’d always known her grandfather was special, though Dad and Mom never seemed to behave as though he was, instead discussing him as if he was an erratic old buzzard who couldn’t even be relied upon to stay in the same place for any length of time. Aunt Zo always talked as though she thought her dad was pretty cool, though. It was one of the things Hannah liked about her.

  Meanwhile, Granddad continued to methodically remove screw after screw from the suitcase. ‘I had a good life,’ he said. ‘I married, though we never had any children.’

  ‘What? Yes you—’

  ‘Listen, Hannah. I wore expensive clothes and I ate fine meals. Every week until he died I would go to hear whatever new piece of musical wonder the choirmaster conjured in his church. It made me feel glad to be alive every time, and the pin he’d given me remained my most treasured possession. But after a while … something happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of life’s dreariest truths, my dear, is that something once wonderful can come to seem … ordinary. This doesn’t matter if the thing was ordinary in the first place. But when something that once seemed extra-ordinary, perfect, even wondrous, stops being that way, it feels like a betrayal. It makes you bitter at the world. When that happens people may do strange things. They become desperate to change their lives in search of the intensity they once experienced – that feeling of being engaged and alive, of knowing they are a piece of infinity. They run after anything they think might make them shine again. They may even leave their perfectly good—’

  He glanced at her, but shook his head. ‘Never mind. The point is I was the best clockmaker and watchmaker I knew of. I had plenty of money, more than I could spend. But there were no challenges in my life. I came to work every day but I was bored. Dreadfully bored. I wonder sometimes if this ever happened to Bach, though he was on a different level to me. To everyone.’

  ‘You do yourself a disservice,’ the Devil said, an unexpected note of kindness in his voice.

  Granddad shrugged. He undid five more tiny screws. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘I have to concentrate for this part. Move your feet back everyone, please.’

  He pulled at the panel he’d unscrewed and it swivelled out at an unexpected angle. This caused another, thinner panel to appear, and this too swivelled, in a direction that again was contrary to what you would have expected.

  This caused a further chain of new panels to rotate into view, and then the entire interior mechanism pivoted out, splitting into further parts that swivelled in yet different directions.

  Granddad was completely focused on his task, hands moving over the workings as if it was a musical instrument. By the time he’d finished, something very odd had happened.

  The machinery filling the interior of the suitcase had unpacked and unfolded itself into something significantly larger, about the size of a very large refrigerator – a full foot taller than Granddad – and four feet deep, and almost the same wide.

  He slid aside a final panel, the door swung back, and the inner mechanisms were fully revealed.

  Cogs, wheels, little spinning things, and springs. Thousands upon thousands of them. All working together, utterly silent, yet moving in such harmony that they seemed to hum, or sing.

  ‘What is that?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘The Sacrifice Machine,’ the Devil said.

  Chapter 13

  ‘One long, slow afternoon I was alone in my workshop,’ Granddad continued, using first one tiny tool, then another, and then another; checking tightness, alignment, torque; reaching into the interior space to adjust this and that. ‘My wife had died several years before, and I had nowhere else to be. The bell over the door tinkled, and I looked up to see an old man with white hair and big hands. I was rather old myself by then. I said hello, but he didn’t answer. He walked around, looking at things. Eventually he came over to my workbench.

  ‘“Erik Gruen,” he said.

  ‘I said nothing. I knew that was my name, and it was on a sign above the door. I continued with my tinkering, and waited for something more interesting to happen.

  ‘The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. It was very thin paper, folded many times. “I want you to build something for me,” he said.

  ‘I shook my head. I had stopped taking new commissions. The only work I did was repairing items I’d previously made. I had reached that stage in life where you start to circle in upon yourself, as if waiting for everything to be over – like a bird making loops in the air, dropping ever closer to the ground, looking for a place to land forever.

  ‘“You may change your mind,” the man murmured. “Or … you may perhaps decide the challenge is beyond your abilities.”

  ‘This gained my attention, as he’d known it would. I was good at my job, famously good at it, and still proud of my skills even after I’d stopped caring about them.

  ‘I looked up, ready to make an impolite reply. He was holding the folded piece of paper out to me. I took it, somewhat reluctantly, but intrigued. I unfolded it, and unfolded, and unfolded some more. By the time I’d finished, and laid it out flat on the floor, the paper had revealed its true size – it was over ten feet square. Upon it, someone had made a diagram. A fantastically intricate drawing of the insides of some kind of machine containing hundreds of thousands of parts. It was clearly not a clock. It was far too complicated for that. Too complicated for any purpose that I could possibly imagine.

  ‘“What is this?”

  ‘“It’s what I want you to build.”

  ‘I took out my spectacles and spent a whole hour looking over the drawing, while the man sat in a chair on the side.

  ‘Finally I shook my head. “It’s impossible,” I said. “This machine cannot be built.”

  ‘“Oh, but it can,” the man said. “It already has been.”

  ‘My professional jealousy was stirred. “By whom?”

  ‘“You will not have heard of him. And he could not have done it on his own. It took a very long time. I had to engage some of my … helpers to give him assistance.”

  ‘“So then why do you need another such device?”

  ‘“His device is ailing now, as previous versions have before. He is unable to repair it. And what you see, this drawing, includes a number of significant improvements to the design. He is not up to the task of constructing it. I believe that you might be.”

  ‘I looked again at the diagram. I still didn’t believe it could be possible for any one man – or even a team of the most skilled craftsmen in the country – to cut and shape the near-countless parts involved, never mind hope to get them to work together. And yet … and yet I found myself drawn to the task.

  ‘For the first time
in many years I felt challenged. Excited. I sensed the possibility that between my brain, my hands, and this drawing, I might be able to create something extraordinary, perhaps for a final time in my life.

  ‘I realized that it would be a total commitment, however. To stand any chance of building this machine I would have to close down the rest of my business, turning down any other commissions, even repair work.

  ‘“If I were to take on this job,” I said, “how much would you pay me?”

  ‘The man smiled a strange smile. “Nothing at all,” he said.’

  At that point Granddad stopped telling the story. He spent fifteen minutes inspecting different parts of the machine. Sometimes he leaned towards the interior – which was about the width of an old-fashioned phone box, but a little deeper – and then went and stood completely inside the machine.

  Hannah watched, bewildered at how large the interior was. There would have been plenty of room for her to go inside too, though she did not, and did not want to.

  After another few minutes, Granddad stepped back out and looked at the Devil. ‘The machine is in perfect working order.’

  The Devil nodded. ‘I felt so too. It’s a long time since I have been in its presence, but I recognize the aura of its proper functioning.’ He sat back in his chair, perplexed. ‘So what’s wrong?’

  Granddad was looking thoughtful. ‘The problem must lie elsewhere. In the … in that place to which this machine delivers its power, before it is channelled back to you.’

  ‘And you can’t check that from here?’

  ‘No.’

  Hannah stared into the machine, awed by its complexity. All those tiny wheels and cogs, made of steel and silver and … ‘Some of them look like they’re made of gold.’

  ‘They are.’

  Set into some of the cogs were minuscule dots of jewels, red and green. She looked closer, and realized that beyond the parts she’d seen were even more parts: many of the cogs were themselves made up of even smaller cogs, working together, and the wheels were made of even tinier wheels, rotating in unison. And then …

  She stuck her head into the mechanism and saw that even these smaller parts were made of yet smaller parts. Scarcely able to believe this possible, she pulled her iPod out of the pocket of her nightgown and found the magnifying glass app on it. This showed that there was yet another layer after that, and after that, until even with her keen young eyesight she couldn’t make out the next level. She knew it was there, however. She could feel it. But how could that be?