The Compleat Crow (22 page)

“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 or 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 of 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.”

“Come off it, guv’,” Joe grated, then: “Okay, but one more word—you end up immobile, right?” Crow nodded his acquiescence and sat on the edge of his great desk to watch the performance. He really did not expect the thugs to do much more than make fools of themselves. He had not taken into account the possibility—the probability—of violence in the solution of the problem. Joe, as a child, had never had much time for the two-penny wire puzzles sold in the novelty shops. He tried them once or twice, to be sure, but if they would not go first time—well, you could usually
make
them go—with a hammer! As it happened such violence was not necessary.

Pasty had backed up to the door. He was still slapping his cosh into his palm, but it was purely a reflex action now; a nervous reflex action. Crow got the impression that if Pasty dropped his cosh he would probably faint.

“The panels, Pasty,” Joe ordered. “The panels in the clock.”

“You do it,” Pasty answered rebelliously, “that’s no clock and I’m not touching it. There’s something wrong here.”

Joe turned to him in exasperation. “Are you crazy or something? It’s a clock and nothing more! And this joker just doesn’t want us to see inside. Now what does that suggest to you?”

“Okay, okay—but you do it this time. I’ll stay out of the way and watch funnyman here. I’ve got a feeling about that thing, that’s all.” He moved over to stand near Crow who had not moved from his desk. Joe took his gun by the barrel and rapped gently on the panel below the dial of the clock at about waist height. The sound was sharp, solid. Joe turned and grinned at Titus Crow. There certainly seemed to be
something
in there. His grin rapidly faded when he saw Crow grinning hack. He turned again to the object of his scrutiny and examined its sides, looking for hinges or other signs pointing to the thing being a hollow container of sorts. Crow could see from the crook’s puzzled expression that he was immediately at a loss. He could have told Joe before he began that there was not even evidence of jointing; it was as if the body of the instrument was carved from a solid block of timber—timber as hard as iron.

But Crow had underestimated the determined thug. Whatever Joe’s shortcomings as a human being, as a safe-cracker he knew no peer. Not that de Marigny’s clock was in any way a safe, but apparently the same principles applied! For as Joe’s hands moved expertly up the sides of the panelling there came a loud click and the mad ticking of the instrument’s mechanism went totally out of kilter. The four hands on the carven dial stood still for an instant of time before commencing fresh movements in alien and completely inexplicable sequences. Joe stepped nimbly back as the large panel swung silently open. He stepped just a few inches too far back, jolting the occasional table. The reading-lamp went over with a crash, momentarily breaking the spell of the wildly oscillating hands and crazy ticking of de Marigny’s clock. The corner was once more thrown in shadow and for a moment Joe stood there undecided, put off stroke by his early success. Then he gave a grunt of triumph, stepped forward and thrust his empty left hand into the darkness behind the open panel.

Pasty sensed the
outsideness
at the same time as Crow. He leapt across the room shouting: “Joe, Joe—for God’s sake, leave it alone…
leave it alone!
” Crow, on the other hand, spurred by no such sense of comradeship, quickly stood up and backed away. It was not that he was in any way a coward, but he knew something of Earth’s darker mysteries—and of the mysteries of other spheres—and besides, he sensed the danger of interfering with an action having origin far from the known side of nature.

Suddenly the corner was dimly illumined by an eerie, dappled light from the open panel; and Joe, his arm still groping beyond that door, gave a yell of utter terror and tried to pull back. The ticking was now insanely aberrant, and the wild sweeps of the four hands about the dial were completely confused and orderless. Joe had braced himself against the frame of the opening, fighting some unseen menace within the strangely lit compartment, trying desperately to withdraw his arm. Against all his effort his left shoulder abruptly jammed forward, into the swirling light, and at the same moment he stuck the barrel of his gun into the opening and fired six shots in rapid succession.

By this time Pasty had an arm round Joe’s waist, one foot braced against the base of the clock, putting all his strength into an attempt to haul his companion away from whatever threatened in the swirling light of the now fearsome opening. He was fighting a losing battle. Joe was speechless with terror, all his energies concentrated on escape from the clock; great veins stuck out from his neck and his eyes seemed likely at any moment to pop from his head. He gave one bubbling scream as his head and neck jerked suddenly forward into the maw of the mechanical horror…and then his body went limp.

Pasty, still wildly struggling with Joe’s lower body, gave a last titanic heave at that now motionless torso and actually managed to retrieve for a moment Joe’s head from the weirdly lit door.

Simultaneously Pasty and Titus Crow saw something—something that turned Pasty’s muscles to water, causing him to relax his struggle so that Joe’s entire body bar the legs vanished with a horrible
hisss
into the clock—something that caused Crow to throw up his hands before his eyes in the utmost horror!

In the brief second or so that Pasty’s efforts had partly freed the sagging form of his companion in crime, the fruits of Joe’s impulsiveness had made themselves hideously apparent. The cloth of his jacket near the left shoulder and that same area of the shirt immediately beneath had been
removed
, seemingly
dissolved
or burnt away by some unknown agent; and in place of the flesh which should by all rights have been laid bare by this mysterious vanishment,
there had been a great blistered, bubbling blotch of crimson and brown—and the neck and head had been in the same sickening state
!

Surprisingly, Pasty recovered first from the shock. He made one last desperate, fatal, grab at Joe’s disappearing legs—and the fingers of his right hand crossed the threshold of the opening into the throbbing light beyond. Being in a crouching position and considerably thinner than his now completely vanished friend, Pasty did not stand a chance. Simultaneous with Crow’s cry, of horror and warning combined, he gave a sobbing shriek and seemed simply to dive headlong into the leering entrance.

Had there been an observer what happened next might have seemed something of an anticlimax. Titus Crow, as if in response to some agony beyond enduring, clapped his hands to his head and fell writhing to the floor. There he stayed, legs threshing wildly for some three seconds, before his body relaxed as the terror of his experience drove his mind to seek refuge in oblivion.

Shortly thereafter, of its own accord, the panel in the clock swung smoothly back into place and clicked shut; the four hands steadied to their previous, not quite so deranged motions, and the ticking of the hidden mechanism slowed and altered its rhythm from the monstrous to the merely abnormal…

Titus Crow’s first reaction on waking was to believe himself the victim of a particularly horrible nightmare; but then he felt the carpet against his cheek and, opening his eyes, saw the scattered books littering the floor. Shakily he made himself a large jug of coffee and poured himself a huge brandy, then sat, alternately sipping at both until there was none of either left. And when both the jug and the glass were empty he started all over again.

It goes without saying that Crow went nowhere near de Marigny’s clock! For the moment, at least, his thirst for knowledge in
that
direction was slaked.

As far as possible he also kept from thinking back on the horrors of the previous night; particularly he wished to forget the hellish, psychic impressions received as Pasty went into the clock. For it appeared that de Marigny, Phillips and Walmsley had been right! The clock was, in fact, a space-time machine of sorts. Crow did not know
exactly
what had caused the hideous shock to his highly developed psychic sense; but in fact, even as he had felt that shock and clapped his hands to his head, somewhere out in the worlds of Aldebaran, at a junction of forces neither spatial, temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by man except in the wildest theories, the Lake of Hali sent up a few streamers of froth and fell quickly back into silence.

And Titus Crow was left with only the memory of the feel of unknown acids burning, of the wash of strange tides outside nature, and of the rushing and tearing of great beasts designed in a fashion beyond man’s wildest conjecturing…