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| Childermass Clock |
A large shelf clock designed and built by Professor Childermass's father, Marcus, over the course of five years [The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull]. Described as being two feet wide and about four feet high. The case was made of dark, close-grained wood that shone with varnish. The bottom half, where the pendulum would be, contained a shadowbox of Victorian house.
...In the bottom part of a clock of this sort, you usually saw a pendulum behind a square glass door. But in this case, what you saw was a dollhouse room. It was made to look like the parlor of a well-to-do Victorian house of the 1870s or '80s. Everything was done very carefully in miniature: when Johnny squatted down and peered into the shadow-box room, he saw a red Turkish carpet on the floor and an oval antique table with a green plush cover. On the table were an oil lamp, a pair of glasses, and a Bible. The wall to the left of the fireplace had a built-in bookcase, and before it stood a doll that was made to look like and old man. It had a silky gray beard, a black suit, and a black string tie. The doll appeared to be studying the bookcase, and its hand was stretched out in the act of taking a book from the shelf [11-2].
The timepiece, more so the miniature display it reveals, is one of Bellairs' more memorable moments and another homage to the work of author M.R. James. In its own way, The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull greatly expands on James' short story The Haunted Dolls' House, the tale of one Mr. Dillet who comes across a larger than life dollhouse. Not knowing about the allusion does nothing to spoil the book and those keenly aware of the James short story will further appreciate Bellairs's work even more.
In the story, Mr. Dillet who comes across a larger than life dollhouse, itself a gothic manor full of diminutive items of impeccable detail. Living there are dolls:
"...a gentleman and lady.... There were two children, a boy and a girl. There was a cook, a nurse, a footman, and there were the stable servants, two postilions, a coachman, two grooms."
Both the clock and dollhouse are models commemorating actual people and situations. Though nothing is said of their history, the figures in the dollhouse represents a family that went through personal tragedy in the 1750s. Professor Childermass however knows the history of the clock all too well:
The clock was made by my father, Marcus Childermass, and it took him five years to do it. He began work on it shortly after my granduncle, Lucius J. Childermass, died. The doll is supposed to be represent Uncle Lucius, who died in a very strange manner, and very suddenly, in this room - or rather, in the room of which this is a replica [14].
But what makes both dioramas special is that causal viewing tells only half the story. Each is an enchanted item that requires some sort of activation, in this case, the touching of something inside the miniature rooms.
The curtains of the four-poster in the bedroom were closely drawn round all four sides of it, and he [Mr. Dillet] put his finger in between them and felt in the bed. He drew the finger back hastily, for it almost seemed to him as if something had - not stirred, perhaps, but yielded - in an odd live way as he pressed it.
Professor Childermass, too, sets the magic in motion by touch.
With a sudden indrawn hiss, the professor jerked his hand back. The tip of his finger had accidentally touched the miniature skull.
Johnny was alarmed. "What is it? What's wrong?"
The professor examined his fingertip curiously. "Hmmm. . .Well, there's nothing wrong, actually. I just got the oddest sensation from toughing that skull. But I suppose it's all my imagination - there seems to be no harm done [13]."
Still, touching items does nothing immediate to the story. Both Dillet and Childermass examine the tiny rooms, continue on to the evening, have their dinner, and retreat to bed without incident. It is here where Bellairs shifts gears. Where it was Dillet that touched the dollhouse and is subject to supernatural visions, Childermass goes unaffected. Instead, it is young Johnny Dixon, during a restless night, who awakens suddenly and has the urge to investigate the clock.
Johnny was surrounded by darkness, not the darkness of a small room, but an immense well of blackness. It was as if he were standing in a great hall or a cathedral. Before him, like a window in the night, was a lighted room. It was small and seemed very far away, yet somehow he could see very detail. It was like the dollhouse room in the old clock, but it was a real room in a real house. It was night, and Johnny could see snow falling outside the window at the back of the room. The oil lamp on the table was lit, and a fire burned in the white marble fireplace [18].
Dillet awakens as well to find the object of recent memory flooded in supernatural light and is drawn to the haunted object.
There was no striking clock within earshot - none on the staircase, none in the stable, none in the distant church tower. Yet it is indubitable that Mr. Dillet was startled out of a very pleasant slumber by a bell tolling One.
He never asked himself, till the morning hours, how it was that, though there was no light at all in the room, the Dolls' House on the kneehole table stood out with complete clearness. But it was so. The effect was that of a bright harvest moon shining full on the front of a big white stone mansion - a quarter of a mile away it might be, and yet every detail was photographically sharp. There were trees about it, too - trees rising behind the chapel and the house. He seemed to be conscious of the scent of a cool still September night. He thought he could hear an occasional stamp and clink from the stables, as of horses stirring. And with another shock he realized that, above the house, he was looking, not at the wall of his room with its pictures, but into the profound blue of a night sky.
From here out the two stories diverge and go their own way, with neither Dillet nor Dixon connected in any way to the observed actions. The midnight vision Dillet sees in the dollhouse tells the story of revenge on innocent offspring for the sins of the parents. Similarly, John Dixon steps into a dream-like vision where, in a full-size room, he sees Lucius Childermass smothered to death by a supernatrual figure. Here the vengeful Warren Windrow seeks retribution against the family name that condemned him to death, attempting murder through supernatural means on an innocent member of Lucius's family that would only touch the skull and activate the spell.
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