Epilogue
Dr Madeleine’s clockwork heart continued its journey outside our hero’s body, if we can call him a hero.
Brigitte Heim was the first to notice it. On a low wall, the cuckoo-clock heart looked like a toy offered to the dead. She picked it up, to add to her collection of unusual objects. And so the clock lay for a while between two ancient skulls, on the floor of the Ghost Train.
On the day that Joe recognised it, he lost his powers as a Scareperson. One night, after his performance, he decided to get rid of it. He took the road towards the cemetery of San Felipe, with the clock under his arm. Whether as a mark of respect or whether out of pure superstition we’ll never know, but he laid the clock down on Little Jack’s untended grave.
Miss Acacia left the Extraordinarium during the month of October 1892. On that same day in October, the clock disappeared from the cemetery of San Felipe. Joe continued with his Ghost Train career, haunted to the end of his days by the loss of Miss Acacia.
Performing under her grandmother’s name, Miss Acacia went on to set hearts alight in cabarets across Europe. Ten years later, when she came to Paris, she could have been spotted in a cinema that was screening Voyage to the Moon by one Georges Méliès, who had become cinema’s greatest precursor, its inventor par excellence. Had they met, they would have conversed in hushed tones for a few minutes after the screening. He would have given her a copy of The Man Who Was No Hoax.
A week later, the clock resurfaced on the doormat of an old Edinburgh house. It was wrapped in a shroud, as if a stork (or a pigeon) had just dropped it off.
The heart remained on the doormat for several hours before being picked up by Anna and Luna – who had reoccupied the deserted house, founding a different sort of orphanage that looked after older children too, such as Arthur. After Madeleine’s death, rust had invaded Arthur’s spine. The slightest movement made him creak. He grew afraid of the cold and the rain. The clock came to the end of its journey on his bedside table, together with the book that was tucked inside the parcel.
Jehanne d’Ancy, Little Jack’s nurse in Granada, never saw that clock again, but eventually found the way to Méliès’ heart. They spent the rest of their days together, running a shop specialising in pranks and hoaxes close to Montparnasse station. The world had forgotten about Méliès by then, but Jehanne continued to listen passionately to his stories about the man with the cuckoo-clock heart and other shadowy monsters.
As for our ‘hero’, he grew taller and taller. But he never got over the loss of Miss Acacia. He went out every night, only at night, to roam the outskirts of the Extraordinarium, in the shadow of its fairground attractions. But the half-ghost that he had become never crossed its threshold.
Then he retraced his own boyish footsteps all the way back to Edinburgh. The city was exactly as he remembered it; time seemed to have stood still there. He climbed Arthur’s Seat, just as he had as a child. Great big snowflakes landed on his shoulders, heavy as corpses. The wind licked the old volcano from head to toe, its frozen tongue goring the mist. It wasn’t the coldest day on earth, but it wasn’t far off either. Deep inside the blizzard, the pitter-patter of footsteps rang out. On the right-hand side of the volcano, he thought he recognised a familiar figure. He saw wind-tousled hair, and that distinctive strut of a proud doll prone to bumping into things. Just another dream I’ve got muddled with reality, he said to himself.
When he pushed open the door of his childhood home, all of Madeleine’s clocks were silent. Anna and Luna, his two garishly dressed aunts, had great difficulty in recognising this person who could no longer properly be called ‘Little Jack’. He had to sing a few notes of ‘Oh When the Saints’ before they opened their skinny arms. Although he already knew the story, Luna gently explained to him how Méliès had written to ‘Dr Madeleine’, informing her of Little Jack’s coma, only to receive a reply from Arthur instead. In it, the bed-bound former tramp laid out the details of his original letter, the one that had never reached Jack, but which Méliès would include in The Man Who Was No Hoax. And Luna also owned up to the fact that the other letters sent by bird had been written by her and Anna. Before the silence could make the walls explode, Anna took Jack’s hand very firmly in hers and led him to Arthur’s bedside.
The old man revealed the secret of Little Jack’s life to him:
‘Without Madeleine’s clock, ye would never have survived the coldest day on earth. But after a few months, yer flesh and blood heart was strong enough. She could have removed the clock, as expertly as she removed stitches. That’s what she should have done. Ye ken what I mean?
No family dared adopt ye because of that tick-tock contraption sticking out of yer left rib. Over time, she grew attached. Madeleine saw you as a tiny fragile thing, a wee bairn to be protected at all costs, linked to her by an umbilical cord in the form of a cuckoo clock.
Ach, she was terribly afraid o’ the day when ye’d become an adult. She tried to adjust yer heart so that she could always keep ye close to her. She promised us she’d try and get used to the idea ye might also suffer in love one day, because that’s how life is. Ye ken what I mean?
But she never did.’