Mary Shelley — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

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To you alone, Emmeline, who have borne with patience the recitation of griefs not your own, I confide this record, written beneath a candle that gutters as though it grudged me the hour; for I am given but a season to set down what I saw within my uncle's archive, and when that season closes, be it long or short, I shall be past all telling. Read it, I
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beg you, with the same charity you have shown to lesser histories than mine; for what follows is no crime that any statute names, but a contamination of the spirit, root and lichen and blight together, against which no court may sit and no absolution serve. My uncle's archive stood at the north end of the house, a chamber given over wholly to dust and to time: the brass astrolabe upon its stand, green with age; the ledgers, furred like moss along their spines; the casement that looked upon the churchyard, so that a man at his desk might lift his eyes from figures and behold, without rising, the very ground that should receive him. Amid this stillness there labored one mechanism that never rested — a clock of curious workmanship, its hands moving backward through the hours, ticking, ticking, as though it counted not what was to come but what had already been spent past recall. My uncle called it his oracle. I called it, before the end, my executioner.
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He was himself a scholar of the wandering kind, a flâneur of the intellect, who had gathered from every capital of Europe some fragment of forbidden mechanism or heretical treatise, and who walked among his acquisitions with the mild curiosity of a man in a garden of flowers he does not intend to pick. It was he who showed me the card — for so I must call it, though it was unlike any card fashioned by human hand — drawn each midnight from the belly of the reversed clock, bearing upon it a column of qualities, a tally of humors, a reckoning of affinities expressed in numbers such as a merchant might use to balance his accounts, and at the foot of it, a name. Mine own name stood there the night I first looked; and beneath it, joined by some infernal arithmetic, another.

That other name was Mr. Corvin's. He came to us within the fortnight, as though summoned by the very ticking that had produced him upon paper; he was all address and easy compliment, a rogue of the opportunist sort who had, I did not then know, procured a duplicate of that same card by bribing a servant of the house, and who wooed me not from love but from the calculation that a girl persuaded of her fate will not long resist it. I asked him once, in the garden where the yew hedge held its shape against an early frost, by what right he claimed to read my heart — whether by starlight, by science, or by patient theft — and what, in the name of all decency, gave him leave to speak my name as though it were his own property. "It is not for you to ask," said he, in accents suddenly stripped of their former warmth. My uncle, when I carried my trouble to him, would not answer plainly either, but turned my face toward the casement, observing only that the yew, at least, did not alter with the season of a man's affections.

I need not multiply the particulars of my ruin; enough that I discovered, too late for remedy, that the mechanism ticked backward because it did not foretell — it recorded, having already witnessed, in some manner past my comprehension, the very grief it seemed to promise; blessings by their use turn to curses, and the chart that named my suitor had named also, in figures I had not troubled to construe, the term of my uncle's life and, I now believe, the term of my own. He is buried these three months beneath the window he so loved; Corvin is fled beyond recovery, his duplicate card burned, I am told, upon the same night he quit the country; and the clock itself I stopped with my own hand, though the stopping brought no peace, only a silence more dreadful than the ticking had been.

The glacier of my hope, the arve of my former gladness, the pine-shadowed hour of my youth — I catalogue them, Emmeline, as a dying woman catalogues the furniture of a room she is not permitted to feel; for feel them I cannot, whatever their beauty, my heart being already given over to that backward-counting dark. Judge me, then, or pity me; the candle gutters lower; I have no further hour to spend in the telling.