The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (34 page)

There was a long slow moment before he was forced to acknowledge that the figure that he saw in the window was that of the body he was occupying, himself. The face was ancient, late sixties at least. A pair of fierce eyes stared angrily out from under bushy white eyebrows. He had a great hook of a nose and long grey hair framed a mean and narrow face. Was he bald beneath that shovel hat? Rider did not want to know.

To the accompaniment of the urchin’s harsh laughter he turned round and round in the snow, mad with bewildered fright. There was no escape. He had drugged himself out of his own reasonable body and into that of an ancient Dickensian grotesque. He would have screamed aloud if it had not been for the mockery of the boy.

Rider now had to stop to confront the reality of the impossible. He was in the snowy street of an old town. He was an ancient, ugly man. At least, for the time being he was, until death in its complete darkness robbed him of all illusion.

He bent down to pick up the stick which he had dropped in his fall. When he held it once more he felt steadier. He started to walk across the snow towards the boy who had now ceased laughing and was staring at him with something approaching abject terror. Rider stopped.

‘I won’t harm you, boy,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’ His voice was cracked and peevish.

‘Tim, sir!’ said the boy. ‘Tim Button.’

Tim Button indeed! This was absurd. Anger was beginning to take over from astonishment.

‘What town is this, boy?’ he asked.

‘What, sir! Don’t you know what city you’re in? Morchester is the city, sir in the county of Loamshire.’ The boy had a faint rural accent.

‘Yes. Yes, of course. I wonder if you could tell me—’

But just at this moment the door whose step the boy had been brushing was opened by a tall, brutal looking woman in a brown floor-length overall. She seized the boy by an ear and dragged him indoors, then addressed Rider.

‘You! Old Man! Haven’t you got anything better to do than keep idle young varmints from their work? Be off with you before I fetch you a box on the ear.’ And with that she slammed the door behind her.

Rider stood in the snow alone. Faint sounds of city life reached him, voices, the rattle of wooden wheels, sounds innocent of nothing except modernity. He had hoped to hear the strains of the Mozart he had put on—that would at least have reassured him he was in a dream—but though he strained to hear, there was not a trace of it. The air was beginning to darken and turn from cold to icy. Every physical sensation was present to him, piercing rapier-like through to the centre of the old lean body which he inhabited.

He began to shuffle along, in no particular direction, just for the sake of moving. The streets were not busy. Occasionally he saw in the distance the odd individual, no more than a shadow in the gathering gloom, hurrying along. Their movements seemed furtive, perhaps even fearful, as if they were anxious to get to their houses before night fell. There were no street lamps and what illumination there was came from the windows of the houses, some of which now had their curtains drawn. Soon, Rider conjectured, when the last curtain had been drawn, there would be complete darkness, and then death? He began to feel that of all things, he must avoid that utter darkness.

Rider now kept close to the houses as he walked the snowbound street. Perhaps there would be an inn that was open. (He felt there would be an inn, as the place had the picturesque intensity of a Dickensian world.) The buildings were mostly Jacobean in structure, half timbered, with mullioned casements, often sagging and uneven, leaning drunkenly against their neighbours for support. There were some more regular and classical eighteenth-century buildings but they were set back from the street and their windows, mostly shuttered, yielded few chinks of light. Snow had begun to fall, a windless gentle descent of flakes from an opaque sky that darkened by the minute.

Turning one of the strange, irrational corners in the city maze, Rider was relieved to see a light shining from a ground floor window that bulged onto the street. He went up and pressed his face to the glass.

Within he saw a parlour lit by many candelabra and warmed by a fire in the grate. Yes, he had somehow strayed into a mid-nineteenth-century world, for there was a bright, busy overcrowded air to the scene he saw, and the women wore ringlets, and the men tightly fitting Nankeen trousers and embroidered waistcoats. There were about a dozen of them, an extended family with velveteened and ruffled children. On the table a bowl of punch—Smoking Bishop perhaps?—was being attended to by a bald, rubicund gentleman who laughed as he dispensed the steaming liquid into cups. Rider could not hear what was being said but he saw jollity and heard laughter.

A boy, about seven at a guess, in plum-coloured velvet knickerbockers, was chasing a little golden-ringletted girl of about five around the room. In the general merriment they were ignored, but Rider’s attention was drawn towards them. The boy had a pale, hollow-eyed clever face and his chasing of the girl had an air of deliberation to it which Rider did not quite like. The girl, pink, bright-eyed, seemed oblivious of any malignity. She was running for the sheer joy of running.

Rider saw that, in his pursuit, the boy picked up a lighted candle from a table still unnoticed by the adults whose merriment was augmented by one of the young women sitting down at the piano and beginning to play and sing. The boy by now had cornered the little girl, who was beginning to show signs of fear. He put the lighted candle right up to her face, then, quite deliberately, set fire to the little girl’s dress. The adults, by this time fully occupied in singing along with the pianist, were oblivious. Rider tapped frantically on the window pane. The adults stopped singing and turned towards the window. One of the women screamed, seeing Rider gesticulating wildly as he tried to draw attention to the little girl whose dress was now ablaze. The rubicund man, who had been dispensing punch, came sternly to the window, waved Rider away and drew the curtains. He never knew what happened next, the sounds that emanated from within were so confused.

By this time it was almost completely dark in the street, so Rider felt his way along. Presently he saw a few chinks of light and heard raucous laughter. The laughter was not of a pleasant kind, but it was a human sound and it did indicate that there was an open door somewhere. He moved towards the faint traces of light, crossing the street, now calf deep in snow. He could just discern a low, unevenly shaped building, in the centre of which a scratch of light could be seen under a door. Above the doorway hung something which creaked slightly as it swung, an inn sign perhaps.

Rider approached the door and opened it. Three wooden steps, supported on one side by a rickety balustrade, led down into a wooden chamber lit by a few dim lanterns. At the far end of the room was a bar. Huddles of men sat on settles and at tables, supping from pewter tankards. One or two looked up sullenly as Rider entered, then went back to their beer. Rider stood at the bottom of the steps, wondering what he should do next. He felt in his pockets for money but found nothing. Behind the bar the landlord—or so Rider assumed—gave him a brief appraising glance before returning to his task of polishing glasses. Rider, whose senses felt unnaturally sharp and exposed, became aware that someone else was looking at him, fixedly.

In a dim corner sat a big man on his own, with a pewter mug on the table in front of him. He had a large red face that looked intelligent enough, in a mean sort of way. His small, wary eyes met Rider’s and then flinched from them. Rider walked towards the man who sat still, made immobile by what looked like fear. This encouraged Rider who sat down opposite the man.

‘You seem to know me,’ said Rider. ‘Who are you?’

‘I do know you; and you should know me,’ said the man in a whisper. ‘I’m Joey Gadby.’

‘And who am I?’ said Rider, trying to put an amused tone into the croak of his voice but failing dreadfully.

‘By rights you should be a dead man, Izzy, for that’s what they told me you were.’

‘Oh, and what was it they told you, Gadby? And who are you to call me Izzy?’

‘All right then, Mr Skeggs,’ said Gadby, lowering his voice still further. ‘They told me that the law was on your track at last. Someone talked after Mobbs was found dead. Mobbs’s girl, they said. They said they followed you to your crib at the old Smokehouse and got you trapped there. But you was always smart, Mr Skeggs. You was always one step ahead and they wasn’t going to trap you alive. They said that when the peelers broke in to the attic, they found you swinging from a beam by a rope and you were dead as mutton. But they lied.’

‘They lied,’ said Rider dumbly repeating his words. ‘Here, give us a sup of that drink of yours. I’m half parched.’

Gadby slid the tankard across the table to Rider, never taking his eyes off him for a moment. Rider put the tankard to his lips and drank. The next moment he was clutching his throat in agony. He felt a burning sensation in it. A greasy scarf had been knotted around his neck. Rider tore at it and wrenched it off, but the pain was no better. It was worse. Gadby was staring at him in horror.

‘Gawd strike me,’ he said. ‘You did top yourself. I can see the marks. The rope!’

By this time every man in the room was staring at Rider, whose pain was so great he barely noticed the stir he was causing.

‘As I live and breathe, Ezekiel Skeggs, you’re a dead man!’

At that moment Rider passionately wanted to say something which would explode the whole grotesque situation. He thought of several things to say, none of them particularly pithy: ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!’ ‘This is absurd!’ ‘I don’t believe a word of this pathetic melodrama!’ He would have said them, but none of them could come out, his throat was in such agony.

He saw all the men in the inn moving towards him, fearful but united in hostility. From behind the bar the landlord emerged, less afraid than the others, his hand round the neck of a squat black bottle. Rider took advantage of the few moments of grace left to him and hurled himself up the steps into the snowy street.

He did not count on anyone following him, but he ran nonetheless. The pain in his throat was still great, and the sheer exhaustion of pounding along the street through the snow distracted him from the tearing burn in his throat. Any moment now, I am going to faint and fall at last into oblivion, he told himself. This is what his old brain told him, but some other part of him told him that it would not be so. So what was happening to him? Were these the streets of Hell?

Rider stopped. He wanted to weep; he wanted to scream; but he knew the pain that would come from doing so and he checked himself. Here he was, trapped, neither alive nor dead, neither asleep nor—surely!—fully awake. If there had been misery before it was nothing to this moment. Could there be anything in the universe worse than this? What God other than a monster could inflict such timeless cruelty?

The next sound he heard, of all improbable sounds, was the chiming of a clock. He counted the chimes, silvery, melodious even: one, two, three, four . . . eleven! Was it really that late? But, more importantly, where had the sound come from? He looked about him for some sign of where the sound came from. Then he heard another clock, also chiming eleven, a high-pitched ping; then another, then another, some clanking, some ringing high, some deep and sonorous, almost like a church clock. He listened hard to the cacophony, cupping his ears to get a better sense of their location.

By this time the sky had cleared a little and a moon behind ragged clouds was giving a dim and fitful light to the street. A little old building that jutted its upper floors into the street seemed to be the source of the chiming. Against the tattered moonlight Rider could just see a thin thread of smoke emerging from one of its chimneys, so there must be occupation.

Physical sensation continued to oppress him. He was utterly exhausted from his running and he still felt the raw burn marks of the rope at his throat. He had long since stopped trying to make sense of his situation; was he Rider, or Skeggs, or both? Despair drowned all answers. His one object was to reach the house of the clocks; not because he hoped for any relief there, but because it was a place to go.

Beneath the sign of a dial which indicated not only hours of the day but phases of the moon was a small narrow doorway. Upon the door there was an iron knocker in the shape of a hand, long-fingered and sinewy but strong. He could just make out an inscription in brass letters on the door.

KNOCK AND IT SHALL BE OPENED

Rider knocked and heard a penetrating reverberation from within. They could not fail to hear. A long silence ensued and Rider was just about to knock again when the door opened.

He could not see who had let him in at first because whoever had done so stood behind the door and let him pass into a narrow passage lit by a single candle in a sconce.

Before Rider could turn round the door was shut behind him, and there stood a small, thin, bespectacled man in his late sixties who seemed faintly familiar. The man carried a little oil lamp which he held above his head, as if in deference to Rider’s height.

‘Who are you?’ asked Rider.

‘I am the clockmaker. Come through,’ said the man, walking past him towards a door at the end of the passage.

The room they entered was unexpectedly large, as high as at least two floors of the house, and filled with clocks and their multitudinous clanks, whirrings and tickings. A great brass chandelier, hanging from a high beam, illuminated the vast horological landscape: grandfather clocks, lantern clocks, carriage clocks, water clocks, wooden clocks, delicate porcelain clocks with ormolu mountings, and on benches there were heaps of pocket watches of all shapes and sizes in gold and silver and pinchbeck, hunters, half hunters, repeaters: their heartless hearts noisily beating, all busily pursuing their relentless, soulless lives.

Rider spoke no word while the clockmaker went to a bench and began to scrabble in a pile of pocket watches. Having found what he wanted, a rather large and clumsy fob watch made of gunmetal, he came over and presented it to Rider.