Ник Харкуэй - Angelmaker

He sets it aside for the moment, and continues his inventory: here’s the whojimmy, right enough. One end carved mahogany wood with a pommel or stud, the other a funny, tangled thing with a circular mouth and a roller-coaster track of polished metal which doubles back on itself. Some ornamentation on one side of the track, the other side very smooth. Some mistake, perhaps, in the connecting of one with the other? This could be a child’s game, a wild, weird variant of ball-and-cup. Cut steel, by the look of it, and quite pretty in a way. The Victorians rather liked steel for ornamentation, though this isn’t that old. Still… hard to see what possible use it could be. Heavy, too. Oh, blast, and how has that happened?

He peers, vexed, at the whojimmy, and scolds himself. The tool is covered in a thin layer of grime and grease. A culpable error, to allow that to happen.

Or, no: not grease. He runs a finger over the strange stuff. Eyes are overrated. Touch. Touch is important. It feels dry and feathery. Cold. Iron filings .

The whojimmy is magnetic.

He sits back again, considering. The tool and the ball must interact, if any of them do. The whojimmy is the key. The ball is the keyhole. The book and the fragments fit together with the ball to make… what?

Question, then: what is the defining characteristic of this thing? He grins. “This thing.” Not “these things.” He has decided they are one object. Good. Follow the instinct. So: it is baroque, even Byzantine. It is complex. And yet, above all, it is elegant. His grandfather’s voice comes back, excited.

I once saw a very elegant design from Shanghai. A sealed box in ivory. Traced on the outside, a pattern. Move a magnet over the pattern outside, and on the inside a metal rod slides through a maze and touches all the pins in the right order to open the box. Voilà! The original magnet was set in a ring, of course, so that the whole thing was like magic. A child’s toy, for a princess. Like casting a spell, yes?

I showed it to your grandmother. She made love to me. Then we opened it together. The magnet was hers .

He remembers the conversation, an evening spent in this very room with a bottle of Ardanza and a plate of Italian sausage. Joe the apprentice, Daniel the mentor, sharing confidences and romances over glass after glass of Spanish red. Tricks of the trade and reminiscences, rolled together, and so convivial that Joe had eventually been so emboldened as to ask the unaskable question.

“Who was she, Grandfather?”

But Grandpa Spork did not answer questions about the woman he loved. It was known that he met her in France in the thirties, and together they had a child. It was all very Bohemian, very modern, and they never married. When the Germans invaded, Daniel and the boy escaped, but his lover was elsewhere and had to be left behind. She found him again after the war, but by then everything was different for reasons which could not be spoken aloud.

Mathew’s mother, Frankie.

Frankie was the almost-glimpsed dream of the House of Spork, invoked with caution lest the use of her name summon her—or rather, fail to do so, to the jagged sorrow of her husband and the startling fury of her son. Swamp gas. An atmospheric phenomenon. A myth.

So, then. A magnet and a box. He waves the magnetic whojimmy in the general direction of the doodah. Something clunks, but beyond that it has no effect. Not surprising: you wouldn’t make something like this and then set it up so that a single movement near a magnet would do the job. He grips the whojimmy. It’s awkward. What’s this wild tangle good for? Except, it can’t be awkward. This thing is elegant. It is the shape it should be. More, the holding of it suggests the employment. With the handle against his palm, he is abruptly certain: it invites you to do the right thing. What I want to do is what I am supposed to want to do .

So… what does he want to do? Flourish it. But not wildly. Slowly. In a measured way. He wants to roll it.

To roll it.

He peers… Roller-coaster track… track. Now that he looks closely, part of the tangle is ratcheted… oh.

He hefts the ball in one hand, weighs the whojimmy in the other. Fiendish yet obvious. Hidden in plain sight. Perfect for preventing casual scrutiny, not hellishly hard to use in real life… very much in keeping with the mind behind this puzzle. A mind, he is increasingly sure, which was as bonkers as it was brilliant.

He slots the ball through the mouth of the whojimmy. It fits. It rolls along the tracks, the spiral engraving on the surface meshing nicely with the ratchet on the whojimmy, turning and turning. A complex pathway created by a simple structure. Very nice. Puh-clink! That’s a new noise. Very good. Clinkclunkscrrrr… glack . The ball emerges from the pattern. Joe tests it gently with his hands.

It opens.

He looks at it for a while.

“… Bloody hell…” says Joshua Joseph Spork.

When he can breathe again, he reaches for the phone.

“Billy, I don’t care. No, I don’t. I don’t care how limber she is or if she has three sisters. No. Billy, shut up. Shut up! I need to meet the client. I need to know where it comes from!”

Resolve is in his voice, and the novelty of this alone is almost enough to exact a moment of obedience from Billy Friend. All the same, Billy dislikes making introductions. It is against his middle-mannish creed. He objects that the client might be unhappy.

“Well, if they needed me for this they’re going to need me again. Whatever it does, it’s not going to do it without me and you can say I said so. It will need maintenance and it may need work doing in situ . It’s a bloody treasure and I want to know—What? Yes. Yes, I am shouting! Because it’s important!”

Joe Spork draws a breath. He is aware that this is not his normal way of interacting with the world. One, two, three. All right. “You have to see it to understand, Billy. Or actually, I’m not sure you would. It’s a clockwork thing. The point is, it’s unique. All right? I mean, absolutely unique. What? No. No. Still no. Well, you could call it priceless. It depends on your perspective.”

Just a little bit unfair, that. It might be more accurate to say that you couldn’t put a value on it. From a scholarly perspective, it’s a diamond unlooked for. In sheer monetary terms, it’s probably not all that exciting, unless the machine of which it is a part does something really interesting or is as ridiculously beautiful as the item in front of him, which would be… well, epic. And not impossible. Billy Friend, however, has senses beyond the merely human, and words like “priceless” are a sort of dog whistle to him.

“Yes, Billy, I did say that. Yes. This is six o’clock news stuff. No, before the swimming bunny. Before the sports. Yes. Exactly. So we’ll deliver it together, won’t we? In person. Very good. Yes. Yes, ‘priceless’. I’ll see you at the station, then.”

Joe puts down the phone.

On the work bench in front of him, the ball lies revealed in all its glory. He has photographed it already, so that he can prove it exists.

Metal like soft cotton, not linked but threaded; warming in his hand: Woven Gold.

The trick is whispered from time to time in kasbahs and jeweller’s shops and at conventions and gatherings and markets, almost revealing itself and then vanishing so thoroughly that many consider it a fiction.

Joshua Joseph’s grandfather came upon it this way:

“Good morning, madame. How may we be of service?”