Perfect Circles

Midnight in the Room of Clocks

The Old House? The Hermit"s House? No one lives there now do they? Used to be an old man who did. Never came out; never saw anyone. Just stayed locked up there in his own little world. People used to see lights coming on at night, but no one ever actually saw him. Don"t know who he was or what he was doing. Children all thought the place was haunted, of course. I myself remember sneaking up to a window once with my g**g of friends, before we lost our nerve and dashed away, giggling madly with relief.

But he"s gone now. Died up there they say: died as he lived, in the old house all alone.

When I first came to The Old House it had stood empty for a little over thirty years. I had, I recall, been asked by its then-owner, a distant relative of the previous occupant, to look over the place and assess its value with a view to selling it and its contents. This owner lived abroad and had no interest in the place, I think. She wished to be rid of it and was seeking professional advice as to the price she could get.

I knew all about the house, of course. It was widely known in the area, not only as The Old House, but also as The Hermit"s House and even as The Treasure House. Its true name, I knew, was Blackstone Hall, after the family that had owned it for so long. Stories and rumours about the place were many, the stuff of local folklore. The family was ancient, its ancestry lost in the mists of history. Its members were known to have been collectors of all manner of strange artefacts and curios: the ancient, the alien, the bizarre. Then there was the Hall itself, built and rebuilt and altered over many centuries so that it had more or less grown into its current odd, rambling, ramshackle shape. People called the place The Treasure House because it was reputed to be full of ancient relics and contraptions, the product of generations of travel, investigation and collection.

But the family had finally died out. The last of the line had been a shadowy figure: the man who came to be known as The Hermit. He had lingered on in the house for many years, keeping to himself, his only companions the long, dusty lines of his forebear"s portraits, with their rich clothing from many different eras and their enigmatic expressions. But he, too, finally left to join them, and then the house stood empty, gathering dust and a dark reputation for thirty years. Until, finally, some remote relative from a forgotten branch of the Blackstone family was found and informed of her inheritance.

And so it was that I came to the Hall and became the first person in three decades to turn that ancient iron key in the resentful lock and to push open the carved wooden doors of the Hall. It was a beautiful day, I remember: a hot and sleepy summer"s day. The sort of day when there is no breeze and all the plants and trees stand motionless and drooping, as if slumbering in the sun.

I clearly remember stopping on the threshold and seeing nothing but darkness within. I remember stepping inside and being filled with musty smell of the place. A smell of pure oldness: old wood, old stone, old fabric; an old, old house. I remember the contrast with the world outside, the sudden transformation from light and warmth and life to this cobwebby, airless place. It was as if I had somehow found my way underground.

After that, I remember very little. Other details have become vague and indistinct. They seem unimportant now. I know that I never completed the job I was sent to do. I know that it was I, the antiquarian advisor to the house"s owner sent to look over and value the place, who ended up making an offer to buy it. I distantly recall the owner"s surprise at this, but also her eagerness to accept my offer.

Since then my mind has been so fully occupied that I think rarely of those earlier times, of how I came to be here, of outside. The memories fade into dust.

It was in the Clock Room that I first noticed something strange. I was making my initial survey of the house, passing from room to room in a state of mounting wonder at the profusion of objects I was finding. In my mind, the anticipated day"s work was already beginning to stretch out into a week, a month, a year…

But it was in the Clock Room that I found the start of the trail. This room is a jumble of clockwork devices: tin-toys, planetaria, automata, astrolabes and every conceivable sort of mechanical timepiece. All the clocks had long-since stopped moving, but I was struck as I looked about that all the clocks had stopped at precisely the same moment. All, that is, except one. One clock only, an old musical timepiece with a primitive escapement action, showed differently. It said twelve o"clock – midnight or midday – whereas all the others had stopped at six. Absent-mindedly intrigued, I began to examine this clock. I remember clearly unlatching the back of its oak casing and looking inside.

Within, there was a small, delicate, Japanese lacquer-work box. Out of place hidden away inside an old English clock. I took out the box. Opening it, I discovered that it contained a smaller box - this one decorated with ornate lapis lazuli mosaic-work and silver filigree - and also a folded sheet of paper. The inner box rattled as, tentatively, I shook it. But it was locked and I could not open it. The sheet of paper was a page torn out of an old book: a thick, yellowed sheet of parchment, covered with indecipherable handwriting, like the magical runes of some ancient alchemist.

Slowly, without knowing it, I became caught by that box and that piece of paper. I remember thinking they must have been placed there for a reason, and I remember wanting to find out what that reason might be. Where was the book the page had been torn from? How did I get into the inner box? As I went about the house that day, pursuing my survey, these questions troubled my mind more and more. I found myself looking at all the objects not as items of value, but as possible answers to the riddle.

I remember coming to the slow realisation that this was a house with a secret. Somewhere within it, I realised, there was something, some treasure or wonder, which someone had hidden. Hidden with infinite subtlety and guile. Hidden at the end of a trail of labyrinthine complexity. That, among all the myriad artefacts and arcane curios filling the house, there was something which everything else was there only to obscure and protect. Like a book hidden not in a locked room, but in a huge library amongst a million other books.

And who had created all these riddles? I have asked myself this question many times. Was it the hermit? Or some earlier family member? Was my predecessor in the house merely following the trail, or was he creating it? At the end I will understand all.

And now here I am. How can I describe all the links in the chain that I have uncovered over the years between then and today? There are many, many. There was the day when, after being here for just three years, I found an entire room the existence of which I had previously been ignorant of. The Militaria Display: a dazzling collection of flintlocks and Samurai armour and boomerangs and halberds and broadswords, all hidden away in a room with no doors. A room I only found by virtue of a long process of meticulous measurement and charting. Or again, years later, there was the abacus with its oak beads set carefully to a particular number, the meaning of which escaped me for many months. Eventually, I discovered that the number was a date and that, by setting the planets on an old brass orrery to that date, a mechanism was triggered which opened up a secret compartment on the surface of the planet Jupiter.

So many wonders, so many clues.

But now I have made another discovery. In this, my thirtieth year of this long, terrible search, I think I have finally found the end. For some time, the clues have been moving back into familiar territory: old themes recurring as if I returned home after many years away. But instead, I have found - what? I do not know. This newest puzzle is the greatest of them all.

The facts. About a week ago, I had only two clues left; two leads to follow. The first was that original box pulled innocently from inside a clock long ago, by a man much younger than I. For that is one puzzle that still eludes me. I have carried that box with me ever since, always hoping to find some means of opening it. But I never have. Often have I longed to smash it open, but I know I never can. If I do that, maybe I will destroy what it contains. All I can do is wait. Wait and wonder. A locked box, with no key. With something small and metallic rattling around inside it…

But I digress. The other object: an ancient, iron implement of unknown function, like a button-hook, but oddly shaped. I had found it months earlier in the Egyptian Hall, concealed inside a sandstone obelisk covered with certain particular hieroglyphics which I had learned to look out for. It was a week ago that I found out the meaning, the purpose of this strange little implement.

In the small passageway between the Map Room and the Chamber of Mirrors, surrounded by the hundred shelves and niches crammed with their Buddha-figures of gold and amber and rosewood, my attention was suddenly caught by a certain flagstone which my feet must have trodden upon hundreds, thousands, of times. But there was, I now noticed, a c***k in it. A tiny sliver of blackness in the polished stone. A hole the same size as the tip of my button-hook. I had found my keyhole.

Inserting the implement, I found I could turn and manipulate it down into the stone by a series of precise, smooth actions. Then it seemed to lock, and I found that when I pulled upwards, instead of the iron tool coming away, the entire floor-stone lifted slightly, held solidly by the metal instrument.

By pulling harder, I was able to lift the entire stone out of its place in the floor. Underneath, I found a small cavity, filled with an old layer of yellow-brown sand. A few moments digging in this sand unearthed the treasure: a gold bracelet, inlaid with turquoise and sapphire, intricate in design.

On its inside, I soon noticed, there were some marks: a line of tiny, deliberate etchings. A magnifying glass borrowed from the collection of microscopes, cameras, telescopes, prisms, glass orbs and lamps in the Observatory soon revealed their nature to me. Musical notes.

And there is the great riddle. For it seems I have succeeded only in finding the centre of the maze. I have now, today, found out where the simple melody engraved upon the bracelet leads. Only one item in all this house produces that particular tune. Only one item! And even as I wind it up and make it pick out the delicate, sweet notes on its little, silver bells, I know I am lost. For it is the clock. The small clock set to midday - midday or midnight - opened with vague inquisitiveness all those years ago. My trail of thirty years has led me nowhere but back to the very place where I started, and all I have left is the little rattling, lacquer box, locked and with no key anywhere to be found to open it.

The Old House? The Hermit"s House? No one lives there now do they? Used to be an old man who did. Never came out; never saw anyone. Just stayed locked up there in his own little world. People used to see lights coming on at night, but no one ever actually saw him. Don"t know who he was or what he was doing. Children all thought the place was haunted, of course. I myself remember sneaking up to a window once with my g**g of friends, before we lost our nerve and dashed away, giggling madly with relief.

But he"s gone now. Died up there they say: died as he lived, in the old house all alone.