Edgar Allan Poe — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

I set down this account, as I have set down others, in the conviction—perhaps vain, perhaps salutary—that the mere act of committing horror to paper diminishes, by some small and grudging fraction, its dominion over the mind that has witnessed it; and I begin, therefore, not with the mechanism itself, though the mechanism is the whole burden of my narrative, but with the manner of my introduction to it, on an evening in late October when the fog lay upon the city like a shroud imperfectly fitted to its corpse, and I, being of that idle and inquiring temperament which finds in the cataloguing of curious institutions a substitute for more profitable industry, had wandered—as was my habit—into the disused wing of the Municipal Archive, where the clerks no longer ventured after dusk, and where the dust lay upon the ledgers in a pale and uniform felt, undisturbed, so far as I could determine, since the closing of that department some seven years before. It was here, among shelves given over to the obsolete records of a bureau once charged with the registration of unmarried persons—their ages, their properties, their dispositions, their prospects—that I discovered, wedged between two cabinets of iron, a mechanism of considerable size and evident antiquity, resembling in its outward case an astronomical clock, but furnished, in place of the customary dial, with a bank of small drawers, each numbered, each sealed with a wafer of black wax bearing an impression I could not then identify; and it was only upon drawing near, and stooping, that I perceived the single, arresting circumstance which has occasioned this entire history: that the mechanism was in motion, that its great brass hand crept steadily and audibly backward across a graduated arc, and that with each retrograde tick a fine mechanism of pins and levers, buried somewhere in its interior, produced a soft clicking discharge, as of cards being shuffled and re-sorted by some unseen and untiring hand.

I confess that my first sensation was not of dread but of that peculiar and guilty pleasure which the scholar feels upon encountering an artifact whose purpose exceeds his immediate comprehension; for I reasoned—as any man of ordinary faculties would reason—that a clock which counts forward measures the encroachment of the future upon the present, whereas a clock which counts backward can only be measuring the encroachment of the present upon something already concluded, already filed, already dead; and it was this reflection, simple as it appears upon the page, which first suggested to me that the drawers before me did not contain the dust of forgotten courtships merely, but were being, at that very moment, unfiled, reopened, and returned—by the action of the mechanism itself—to a state of active candidacy, as though the machine possessed the power to reverse not merely its own escapement but the settled fact of a life's romantic disposition, drawing the departed back into the roster of the eligible. I had, I own, encountered rumor of the bureau's original function: it had been constructed, in the years before its abandonment, to perform by cog and card what our present age performs by luminous glass and silent calculation—the comparison of temperament to temperament, fortune to fortune, the generation of a ranked and numbered list of suitability from data submitted by the hopeful and the desperate alike—and I had always supposed the device a mere curiosity of clerical ambition, no more sinister than an adding-machine; it was only upon witnessing its reversal, its unweaving of matches already made, its patient unmarrying of the dead, that I began to apprehend the thing had never ceased its labor, had only been shut away, and continued—continued still—to work.

"It was at this juncture, and no other, that I became aware of a second presence in that dim gallery: a man of perhaps my own years, but of a countenance so practiced in easy geniality that I distrusted it upon the instant, who introduced himself, with a bow somewhat too deep for the occasion, as one Mr. Rethwick, formerly of the very bureau whose remains lay strewn about us, and who regarded the ticking mechanism not with my scholar's wonder but with the frank and calculating eye of a man assessing an inheritance; and when he asked me, in a tone of confidential warmth, whether I had yet drawn a single card from those numbered drawers, I understood—though he had said nothing further, though the mechanism continued its patient backward crawl behind us both—that I stood at the threshold not of an antiquarian curiosity, but of a commerce in which the dead do not remain filed, and the living are sorted still.

Observing that I had not yet answered him, Mr. Rethwick allowed his smile to widen by that precise increment which a tradesman permits himself when he perceives that his customer has already, though unknowing, made the purchase; and he informed me, with the unhurried complacency of a man reciting a catechism long since worn smooth by repetition, that the bureau in its active years had not merely recorded the eligible but had ranked them—had reduced temperament to numeral, fortune to fraction, disposition to a column of weighted digits not unlike, he observed, the luminous engines of our own century, which perform by silent calculation what his predecessors had performed by brass and card, presenting to the solitary supplicant a ranked profusion of countenances and qualifications, each attended by its measure of compatibility expressed to the second decimal—a resemblance he pronounced, I thought, with more pride than shame, as though the antiquity of the method conferred upon it some patent of priority over the glass and silicon that had supplanted it. I own that this comparison, offered so lightly, struck me with a chill disproportionate to its apparent triviality; for it occurred to me, with the suddenness of a deduction long prepared and only now completed, that if the mechanism before us had once ranked the living according to their suitability, and if it now moved backward, unweaving matches already sealed, then it must be performing this labor upon some register that persisted, that had never been discontinued, that continued—by what

The drawer, when it slid free upon its runners with a small dry shriek of long-disused metal, contained a single card of stiffened paper, and upon that card, in a clerk's copperplate faded to the color of dried blood, my own name stood recorded beside hers, with a numeral—ninety-seven of a possible hundred—denoting, I collected, the measure of our former suitability; but across this numeral a fresh line had been drawn, in ink yet wet, and beneath it a new entry had commenced in a hand mechanical and precise, restoring my name, my age, my properties, my prospects, to the roster of the actively eligible, as though the woman I had buried had this very hour been struck from my life a second time, more thoroughly, more finally, than the earth itself had struck her; and I became aware, in that moment, of my pulse beating with an audible insistence at the temple, of a coldness gathering along the forearm and creeping toward the elbow, of my own breath arriving in shallow and ill-measured increments, none of which sensations I named to myself as grief, for grief, I have since concluded, is a luxury permitted only to those who believe their dead remain filed where they were laid, and I no longer possessed that belief. Mr. Rethwick, observing my hand tremble upon the card, proposed to me—in a voice grown suddenly practical, the geniality fallen from it like a garment loosened for business—that for a consideration he could arrange the drawer's resealing, could restore the numeral, could return me, as he phrased it with a delicacy I found more dreadful than any oath, to my prior condition of settled bereavement; and I understood, in the space of that proposal, that I stood before a commerce older and colder than any I had before conceived, a trade not in the living nor even in the dead but in the disposition of the dead toward the living, bought and sold by the drawer, sealed and unsealed at a fee.

I left him there among the ticking cabinets, his hand yet extended, his figure receding into that felted dust as I withdrew through the disused wing into a fog grown, if anything, denser than before; and though I did not purchase his silence, though I have never returned to that gallery nor learned what disposition was finally made of the card bearing our two names, I have observed, upon nights when the wind sets from the direction of the old Archive, a faint and patient clicking borne upon it, as of a mechanism continuing, unwatched and unpaid, its backward labor—unmarrying, unmarrying, unmarrying still.