You open your eyes.
The bells here are enough to drive anyone mad. The city is full of towers – dark, grim, pointed towers, with great iron bells hung below. They chime out the hours and the quarter-hours, one-two-three-four-five, and when the bells in your immediate vicinity have ceased, the wind shifts and carries to you the noise of a thousand other bells ringing across the water, one-one, twothree one, two, threefour.
There is a tower beside the house you are staying in, as it happens, with a great unlovely harsh-voiced bawling iron monstrosity of a bell. Your ears ring for a good ten minutes after it has gone silent, and you have a few precious moments to realise why you paid so little for such a well-appointed room – then, of course, it chimes out the quarter hour.
And then there are the clocks. Their ticking thrums the air – you count three in your room, two working in uncanny syncopation, and the third broken. Every now and again it emits a single loud tick, and falls silent. Through the door you can hear, too, the sound of the tall case clock on the landing, its sound deliberate and slow, a never faltering tick – blank – tick – blank that makes your nights unquiet and your dreams – but no. Perhaps it is best not to speak of the dreams.
Rain streams down the windowpanes, turning the world beyond into a greying blur. It has been raining since you arrived last – week? Three days ago? You press your face up against the glass to observe that the bell tower next the house has a clock too, a wide creamy face with hands pointed like knives. The black numbers on its face are knobbly and strangely shaped; at first you squint, believing the distortion to be a trick of the rain, but it is none; the numbers are monsters with mouths, eyes, and spines. They gaze back at you with the pitiless look eternal stones reserve for mortals.
The room presses in on you, with its dark and heavy chairs, crabbed corners, and general atmosphere of damp gentility. Not unsurprisingly, you elect to take a walk, though you can see that it is scarcely more cheerful outside than in.
The staircase that you descend is long and steep, with many landings covered in a fraying carpet seeming to depict vines and eyes entangled. A clock leans against the wall on each one, identical case clocks with yellowing faces and dull, languid ticking. If you pause for a moment and hold your breath, you can hear the rain, and the clocks on the landings below, a multiplied single stroke which never echoes – tick – hush – tock – hush – tick – hush.
Dark portraits of faces you can never quite make out hang on the walls, framed in tarnished gilt and water-stained wood. Every door you pass is closed, the paint peeling and the iron knobs rusting. The house is silent except for the sound and the echo of bells and clocks, without which you would have not a single idea of time passing.
You find a door leading out to the street at last, a door which creaks on stone hinges, above which gargoyles prance and scowl. These monsters are present on the rooftops too, hunched and lichen-spotted, water pouring from their mouths in thin grey streams.
You set out into the narrow streets, where not a single passerby greets you. You wander as if alone beside the black stone houses, between the windowless walls that border canals where boats run down to the harbour, their gears a constant whir. The bells are worse in the open air, pounding and reverberating between the houses, sailing down the alleyways in thrusts of sound. Or so it seems to you – no one else lifts their head, and the men in the boats steer on without a twitch.
In the streets, you pass dozens of alcoves which house altars and statues, or painted figures on the wall, now barely distinguishable from the rock. The statues have lost eyes, or fingers, and have turned white in the rain, but eyeless or faceless, they still seem to regard you with a charitable look, and still stretch out fingerless hands in blessing.
These are the city’s saints, whom they neither love nor remember nor understand. They are the baggage of a previous age, the remnants of the city that stood here a thousand years ago – two succeeding ages have risen, burned, and been buried, before to-day ever came. The saints themselves have outlasted their names, and now they gently crumble and peel away, nameless, resigned.
You pass the rows of leaded lightless windows, the doors of offices and shops and houses. The rain has soaked through your coat and blurred your vision; you are no longer sure how far you have come. Still no one turns to you, or even looks at you out of the corner of an eye; they do not even speak to each other. They might as well be dead.
You find yourself alone in blind alleys, caught between high, smooth walls, at the edges of canals where only the stumps of bridges remain, and the grey-brown water washes up over your shoes. You turn back and back upon your road, but never find yourself in quite the same place. The houses are always slightly different, the gargoyles winged instead of clawed, the lamps dimmed or lit, the bells in the towers of silver or iron. Still you walk on, with no thought of return.
Perhaps, in your travels, you come to a shop. The lettering on the sign is unfamiliar to you, as is the language, so you peer into the window, behind which there are mannequins in various attitudes. One, with its head tilted forward, displays a line of cogs running down its back, each neatly labeled, while another’s forearm has been slit open to reveal copper wires instead of veins and tendons. A third cocks its head so that you can see the mesh of metal running down one side of its neck, each part noted and priced. Its single glass eye observes you coolly, with a hint of what? Contempt? Despair?
The eye blinks.
You stare.
It does not blink again, and the mannequin is otherwise completely still. There is no movement in the window, no movement in the shop beyond, and yet you saw it, the flicker of that eye always staring out into the street, trapped behind the glass, the eye of a thing less than human and yet – and yet – it lives. It lives forever, aware of each second as it passes and is lost, aware that it can never be more than padded cloth and metal, and yet must pretend. It has lost what was never given to begin with.
Your eye is caught by the reflection in the glass, not of the shop on the other side, but of the street behind you. Passersby flash into view, and are gone, with hardly a glance at the window in which they are reflected. You see long coats, collars turned up against the cold, tall hats, bobbing umbrellas. And beneath one of these umbrellas, you see a face in the glass, and the eyes meet yours curiously, once, before the face is gone. You turn.
Behind you, the mannequins have begun to dance, their movements soulless, yet graceful and precise. But you do not see them. Instead, your eyes are fixed on the people in the street, who have come alive at last. They smile, and speak, and go about their business.
And it seems to you that their eyes are gears, wheeling in their sockets, blankly gazing out. Men grind and creak as they lift boxes onto shelves – you can see, beneath tightening jackets, the ridges of teeth along their spines. Tongues click and clatter and whir, while figures pause and stand in the street to stare at you, their arms held up rigidly, and you stare back, all the while nursing a nagging in the back of your head that your left foot moves a trifle more stiffly than it did this morning. You observe that the ankle is now attached to your leg by wires, and movement is accomplished by a set of shining brass cogs.
Your heart begins to pound. You cry out, a strangled cry with a metallic echo, and then you scream. Everything stops in the street, each movement frozen, each face caught between words or thoughts. There is not a sound, except the gently ticking clocks.
Then everything begins again, and the sound of bells and conversation washes over you. You note, with cool detachment, that the skin of your fingers is gone, to reveal delicate masses of spinning clockwork, each twitch accomplished with mechanical precision.
Just quite when this new detachment began you cannot say – you have the sense it was not always so. No matter. You admire the efficiency of your fingers, and reflect upon the fact that the movement almost feels real.
You pass a mouthless saint in its niche, which nods gravely to you. You return the greeting, in passing, and continue on your way, at length stepping into a boat, feeling a mild but not-wholly unfamiliar revulsion at the water beneath. So much water – so much rust. You find the notion distasteful.
The boat pulls away from the dock and glides out into the canal. You take your watch from your pocket and hold it up to the light – up to the face of the nearest clock, whose hands tick smoothly onward. The time is identical on both faces, exact to within a second. At that moment the bells begin to ring, sounding out across the city, conversing in the language of time. One two three four, four, one two three two, three, four.
You smile, and put the watch away. At last, you close your eyes and listen to the bells.
Thank you! Yes, turning into clockwork parts would definitely be a downside.
I love the landscapes you paint. I wish I could be in them (without the turning into a clock part.)