Haggopian and Other Stories

Even now Joe was doing just those things: looking at and listening to the clock. He had switched on and adjusted the reading-lamp so that its light fell upon the face of the peculiar mechanism. At first sight of that clock-face Pasty had gone an even paler shade of grey, with all his nervousness of a few minutes earlier instantly returned. Crow sensed his perturbation; he had had similar feelings while working on the great clock, but he had also had the advantage of understanding where such fears originated. Pasty was experiencing the same sensations he himself had known when first he saw the clock in the auction rooms. Again he gazed at it as he had then; his eyes following the flow of the weird hieroglyphs carved about the dial and the odd movements of the four hands, movements coinciding with no chronological system of earthly origin; and for a moment there reigned an awful silence in the study of Titus Crow. Only the strange clock’s enigmatic and oddly paced ticking disturbed a quiet which otherwise might have been that of the tomb.

“That’s no clock like any I’ve ever seen before!” exclaimed an awed Joe. “What do you make of that, Pasty?”

Pasty gulped, his Adam’s apple visibly bobbing. “I…I don’t like it! It…it’s shaped like a damned coffin! And why has it four hands, and how come they move like that?” He stopped to compose himself a little, and with the cessation of his voice came a soft whispering from beyond the curtained windows. Pasty’s eyes widened and his face went white as death. “What’s that?” His whisper was as soft as the sounds prompting it.

“For God’s sake get a grip, will you?” Joe roared, shattering the quiet. He was completely oblivious to Pasty’s psychic abilities. “It’s rain, that’ s what it is—what did you bleeding think it was, spooks? I don’t know what’s come over you, Pasty, damned if I do. You act as if the place was haunted or something.”

“Oh, but it is!” Crow spoke up. “At least the garden is. A very unusual story, if you’d care to hear it.”

“We don’t care to hear it,” Joe snarled. “And I warned you before—speak when you’re spoken to. Now, this…clock! Get it open, quick.”

Crow had to hold himself to stop the ironic laughter he felt welling inside. “I can’t,” he answered, barely concealing a chuckle. “I don’t know how!”

“You what?” Joe shouted incredulously. “You don’t know how? What the hell d’you mean?”

“I mean what I say,” Crow answered. “So far as I know that clock’s not been opened for well over thirty years!”

“Yes? S…so where does it p…plug in?” Pasty enquired, stuttering over the words.

“Should it plug in?” Crow answered with his own question. Joe, however, saw just what Pasty was getting at; as, of course, had the “innocent” Titus Crow.

“Should it plug in, he asks!” Joe mimed sarcastically. He turned to Pasty. “Good point, Pasty boy—now,” he turned back to Crow, menacingly, “tell us something, recluse. If your little toy here isn’t electric, and if you can’t get it open—then just how do you wind it up?”

“I don’t wind it up—I know nothing whatsoever of the mechanical principles governing it,” Crow answered. “You see that book there on the occasional table? Well, that’s Walmsley’s Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms and Ancient Inscriptions; I’ve been trying for years merely to understand the hieroglyphs on the dial, let alone open the thing. And several notable gentlemen students of matters concerning things not usually apparent or open to the man in the street have opinionated to the effect that yonder device is not a clock at all! I refer to Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, the occultist Ward Phillips of Rhode Island in America, and Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole in Yorkshire; all them believe it to be a space-time-machine—believed in the case of the first two mentioned, both those gentlemen now being dead—and I don’t know enough about it yet to decide whether or not I agree with them! There’s no money in it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Well, I warned you, guv’,” Joe snarled, “space-time machine!—My God!—H.G. bloody Wells, he thinks he is! Pasty, tie him up and gag him. I’m sick of his bleeding claptrap. He’s got us nervous as a couple of cats, he has!”

“I’ll say no more,” Crow quickly promised, “you carry on. If you can get it open I’ll be obliged to you; I’d like to know what’s inside myself.”