He had never been interested in stories, at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He’d never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes, because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.
He tried to read Grim Fairy Tales. They had titles like ‘How the Wicked Queen Danced in Red Hot Shoes!’ and ‘The Old Lady in the Oven’. There was simply no mention of clocks of any sort in any of them. Their authors seemed to have a thing about not mentioning clocks.
‘The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein’, on the other hand, did have a clock. Of a sort. And it was… odd. A wicked man – readers could see he was wicked because it said he was wicked, right there on the page – built a clock of glass in which he captured Time herself, but things went wrong because there was one part of the clock, a spring, that he couldn’t make out of glass, and it broke under the strain. Time was set free and the man aged ten thousand years in a second and crumbled to dust and – not surprisingly, in Jeremy’s opinion – was never seen again. The story ended with a moral: Large Enterprises Depend upon Small Details. Jeremy couldn’t see why it couldn’t just as well have been It’s Wrong to Trap Non-Existent Women in Clocks, or, It Would Have Worked with a Glass Spring.
But even to Jeremy’s inexperienced eye, there was something wrong with the whole story. It read as though the writer was trying to make sense of something he’d seen, or been told, and had misunderstood. And – hah! – although it was set hundreds of years ago when even in Uberwald there were only natural cuckoo clocks, the artist had drawn a long-case clock of the sort that wasn’t around even fifteen years ago. The stupidity of some people! You’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragic!
He put the book aside and spent the rest of the evening doing a little design work for the Guild. They paid him handsomely for this, provided he promised never to turn up in person.
Then he put the work on the bedside table by the clocks. He blew out the candle. He went to sleep. He dreamed.
The glass clock ticked. It stood in the middle of the workshop’s wooden floor, giving off a silvery light. Jeremy walked around it, or perhaps it spun gently around him.
It was taller than a man. Within the transparent case red and blue lights twinkled like stars. The air smelled of acid.
Now his point of view dived into the thing, the crystalline thing, plunging down through the layers of glass and quartz. They rose past him, their smoothness becoming walls hundreds of miles high, and still he fell between slabs that were becoming rough, grainy…
… full of holes. The blue and red light was here too, pouring past him.
And only now was there sound. It came from the darkness ahead, a slow beat that was ridiculously familiar, a heartbeat magnified a million times…
…tchum…tchum…
… each beat slower than mountains and bigger than worlds, dark and blood red. He heard a few more and then his fall slowed, stopped, and he began to soar back up through the sleeting light until a brightness ahead became a room.
He had to remember all this! It was all so clear, once you saw it! So simple! So easy! He could see every part, how they interlocked, how they were made.
And now it began to fade .
Of course it was only a dream. He told himself that and was comforted by it. But he had gone to some lengths with this one, he had to admit. For example, there was a mug of tea steaming on the nearby workbench, and the sound of voices on the other side of the door…
There was a knocking at the door. Jeremy wondered if the dream would end when the door was opened, and then the door disappeared and the knocking went on. It was coming from downstairs.
The time was 6.47. Jeremy glanced at the alarm clocks to make sure they were right, then pulled his dressing gown around him and hurried downstairs. He opened the front door a crack. There was no one there.
‘Nah, dahn ‘ere, mister.’
Someone lower down was a dwarf.
‘Name of Clockson?’ it said.
‘Yes?’
A clipboard was thrust through the gap.
‘Sign ‘ere, where it says “Sign ‘Ere”. Thank you. Okay, lads…’
Behind him, a couple of trolls tipped up a handcart. A large wooden crate crashed onto the cobbles.
‘What is this?’ said Jeremy.
‘Express package,’ said the dwarf, taking the clipboard. ‘Come all the way from Uberwald. Must’ve cost someone a packet. Look at all them seals and stickers on it.’
‘Can’t you bring it in-?’ Jeremy began, but the cart was already moving off, with the merry jingle and tinkle of fragile items.
It started to rain. Jeremy peered at the label on the crate. It was certainly addressed to him, in a neat round hand, and just above it was the seal with the double-headed bat of Uberwald. There was no other marking except, near the bottom, the words:
THIS SIDE UP [?this text upside down]
Then the crate started to swear. It was muffled, and in a foreign language, but all swearing has a certain international content.
‘Er … hello?’ said Jeremy.
The crate rocked, and landed on one of the long sides, with extra cursing. There was some thumping from inside, some louder swearing, and the crate teetered upright again with the alleged top the right way up.
A piece of board slid aside and a crowbar dropped out and onto the street with a clang. The voice that had lately been swearing said, ‘If you would be tho good?’
Jeremy inserted the bar into a likely-looking crack, and pulled.
The crate sprang apart. He dropped the bar. There was a… a creature inside.
‘I don’t know,’ it said, pulling bits of packing material off itself. ‘Eight bloody dayth with no problemth, and thothe idiotth get it wrong on the doorthtep.’ It nodded at Jeremy. ‘Good morning, thur. I thuppothe you are Mithter Jeremy?’
‘Yes, but-‘
‘My name ith Igor, thur. My credentialth, thur.’
A hand like an industrial accident held together with stitches thrust a sheaf of papers towards Jeremy. He recoiled instinctively, and then felt embarrassed and took them.
‘I think there has been a mistake,’ he said.
‘No, no mithtake,’ said Igor, pulling a carpet bag out of the ruins of the crate. ‘You need an athithtant. And when it cometh to athithtantth, you cannot go wrong with an Igor. Everyone knowth that. Could we go in out of the rain, thur? It maketh my kneeth rutht.’
‘But I don’t need an assist-‘ Jeremy began, but that was wrong, wasn’t it? He just couldn’t keep assistants. They always left within a week.
‘Morning, sir!’ said a cheery voice.
Another cart had pulled up. This one was painted a gleaming, hygienic white and was full of milk churns, and had ‘Ronald Soak, Dairyman’ painted on the side. Distracted, Jeremy looked up at the beaming face of Mr Soak, who was holding a bottle of milk in each hand.
‘One pint, squire, as per usual. And perhaps another one if you’ve got company?’
‘Er, er, er … yes, thank you.’
‘And the yoghurt is particularly fine this week, squire,’ said Mr Soak encouragingly.
‘Er, er, I think not, Mr Soak.’
‘Need any eggs, cream, butter, buttermilk or cheese?’
‘Not as such, Mr Soak.’
‘Right you are, then,’ said Mr Soak, unabashed. ‘See you tomorrow, then.’
‘Er, yes,’ said Jeremy, as the cart moved on. Mr Soak was a friend, which in Jeremy’s limited social vocabulary meant ‘someone I speak to once or twice a week’. He approved of the milkman, because he was regular and punctual and had the bottles at the doorstep every morning on the stroke of 7a.m. ‘Er, er … goodbye,’ he said.
He turned to Igor.
‘How did you know I needed-‘ he tried. But the strange man had gone indoors, and a frantic Jeremy tracked him down in the workshop.
‘Oh yeth, very nithe,’ said Igor, who was taking it all in with the air of a connoisseur. ‘Thatth a Turnball Mk3 micro-lathe, ithn’t it? I thaw it in their catalogue. Very nithe indee-‘
‘I didn’t ask anyone for an assistant!’ said Jeremy. ‘Who sent you?’
‘We are Igorth, thur.’
‘Yes, you said! Look, I don’t-‘
‘No, thur. “We R Igorth”, thur. The organithathion, thur.’
‘What organization?’
‘For plathementth, thur. You thee, thur, the thing ith … an Igor often findth himthelf between marthterth through no fault of hith own, you thee. And on the other hand-‘