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Fourteen years I was apprentice and assistant to the man renowned as the greatest clockworker of the Nineteenth Century, and fourteen years before that, a boy. Patterns in numbers, balances and cycles, are, to the watchmaker, as calm seas and fine weather are to the fisherman, and I do not think it entirely a coincidence that I should find myself now neither boy nor watchmaker in this third cycle of my life, although I may lament I am become a mere wastrel.
I could not be so bold as to call old man Conel a friend. He was my master and mentor who, throughout those fourteen years I spent in his employ, imparted, and never begrudgingly, all the knowledge (and what a knowledge it was!) of cogs and springs, jewels and balances, that was his to give.
If not friends then, Conel and I had at least grown to become esteemed colleagues. For my part I respected his mastery of clockwork and was in awe at those skills he chose to share with me. I would like to think that for his part he found me, at the very least, a willing apprentice and an able assistant; at the very most, and here I may flatter myself, his only protégé, the empty watchcase to which he fitted the cogs of his craft and the jewels of his talent. His final crafting. Oh, that I should so choose to waste what talent he bestowed!
When one lives and works in close proximity to another human being for so many years, one becomes accustomed to them, recognises their every smallest quirk and minor foible, and so it was that in the six months or so prior to the events I am to describe, I noticed a change in the demeanour of György Conel.
Our relationship being entirely professional, this added distance was almost imperceptible at first, but when he began to withdraw further from the public face of his business, preferring to work in his private cellar workshop rather than the public workshop at the back of the shop itself, I began to realise something was very different indeed.
Conel had always taken great pleasure in his reputation as a watchmaker and had relished his dealings with the varied customers of his shop. He could talk for hours on the intricacies of a particular repair a gentleman wanted made and for hours more on the fine mechanisms of an elegant piece a lady had enquired about. And those customers would listen for as long as he talked, enthralled by the fervour he brought to what had only moments previously seemed to them perhaps the most tedious of subjects imaginable. But now it seemed he did not care to pass his days in this way. I was left to run Conel’s of Clerkenwell, Watchmakers and Repairers, while Conel himself retreated more and more to his cellar.
On the final occasion Conel chose to work beside me (we had received a job lot of urgent repairs from the household of a rather esteemed gentlemen and I was glad of his assistance) he had seemed overly distracted.
We would normally work in silence, with Conel giving me advice and assistance with any particularly awkward mechanism, but that day the silence was most often interrupted by the old gentleman’s sighs and I would look up to find him gazing at the door to his cellar or at seemingly nothing at all, the watch forgotten in one hand, his pin tool fallen from the other. Worse than that he would make simple mistakes that even a years apprentice would have avoided, and would huff and puff as he dismantled the mechanism to begin over. I was about to broach the subject of his troubles when he finally stood up and, rudely discarding the piece he had been working on, strode wilfully to the cellar door, banging it shut behind him.
I continued working diligently, but could not shift the sensation that the change in the old man’s behaviour marked a change for me as well, that this happy and pleasing cycle of my life was soon to be over, to be replaced with I-do-not-know-what.
I was to find out what life had in store for me sooner than I imagined and what the future held for me was altogether more strange than anything a poor Clerkenwell watchmaker could imagine.
No sooner had my mind started to wander from my work than I was distracted by a strange vibration that seemed to pass from the floor at my feet and through my whole body. I gently laid my piece on the workbench only to see it too quiver and turn as the vibration throbbed from the floor again, this time accompanied by a low hum.
I stood.
The vibration and hum came again. More insistent than before, the watches and tools on the bench trembling towards its centre like swarming insects.
This time the vibration did not cease but came on in faster waves, growing in intensity with the hum, now almost a roar, until it seemed the whole room was full of it and the air itself seemed to shimmer before my eyes. I felt nauseated, and it took all my will just to stay upright, even bent double, as I tried to make it across the room to the cellar door, behind which I was sure I would find the cause of this uncanny happening.
The room shook, and everything in it shifted with each swift oscillation. The clocks on the walls turned to the left and to the right. Cogs and balances jumped from their neat boxes to hang shivering in the air. Watches clustered together and moved apart before being drawn together again. Tools span and bounced. The glass in the high windows bowed in then out again, in and out. And I found myself hauled from my feet, quite expecting to be dashed against the wall and that would be the end of that! I braced myself, but rather than feeling my skull crushed as I was thrown to the wall, I seemed to hang in the air with the shimmering watch parts, the vibrations and the roars suddenly quietened to a whisper.
And then everything was flying apart, clocks, watches, cogs, balances, tools, hands, feet, arms, legs, feet, hands, head, bench, walls, floor, windows, ceiling, balances, cogs, watches and clocks, as a mighty explosion of throbbing noise tore at my ears and wrenched at my flesh.
And that is the last I remember of Thursday, the 21st of May, Nineteen Hundred and Eight.
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