The 13 Clocks Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster 1950

  Published by Donald I Fine, Inc. 1990

  Published with an introduction by Neil Gaiman by The New York Review of Books 2008

  Published in Penguin Books 2016

  Copyright 1950 by James Thurber

  Copyright renewed 1978 by Helen W. Thurber and Rosemary Thurber Sauers

  Foreword copyright © 2008 by Neil Gaiman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9781101666340

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Thurber, James, 1894–1961.

  The 13 clocks / by James Thurber ; illustrated by Marc Simont ; introduction by Neil Gaiman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 9781590172759 (hc.)

  ISBN 9780143110149 (pbk.)

  1. Clocks and watches—Fiction. 2. Time—Fiction. 3. Uncles—Fiction. 4. Princesses—Fiction. 5. Minstrels—Fiction. I. Simont, Marc, ill. II. Gaiman, Neil. III. Title. IV. Title: Thirteen clocks.

  PZ7.T422Th 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007051647

  Cover design by Lynn Buckley, from four illustrations by Marc Simont

  Version_1

  To Jap and Helen Gude

  who have broken more than one spell cast upon the author by a witch or wizard, this book is warmly dedicated.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by NEIL GAIMAN

  Foreword by JAMES THURBER

  The 13 Clocks

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Epilogue

  Introduction

  Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

  “What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.

  “I don’t know what it is,” said Hark, “but it’s the only one there ever was.”

  This book, the one you are holding, The 13 Clocks by James Thurber, is probably the best book in the world.

  And if it’s not the best book, then it’s still very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever really seen anything like it since.

  I had a friend call me one evening in tears. She was fighting with her boyfriend and her family, her dog was sick, and her life was a shambles. Furthermore, anything I said—everything I said—only served to make matters worse. So I picked up a copy of The 13 Clocks and began to read it aloud. And soon enough my friend was laughing, baffled, and delighted, her problems forgotten. I had said the right thing.

  It’s that sort of book. It’s unique. It makes people happier, like ice cream.

  James Thurber, who wrote it, was a famed humorist (most of his stories and articles were for adults) and a cartoonist with a unique style of drawing (lumpy men and women who looked like they were made out of cloth, all puzzled and henpecked and aggrieved). He did not illustrate this book because his eyesight had gotten too bad. He asked his friend Marc Simont to illustrate it instead. In England, it was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle, and that was the version I read when I was about eight. I was fairly certain it was the best book I had ever read. It was funny in strange ways. It was filled with words. And while all books are filled with words, this one was different: it was filled with magical, wonderful, tasty words. It slipped into poetry and out of it again in a way that made you want to read it aloud, just to see how it sounded. I read it to my little sister. When I was old enough, I read it to my children.

  The 13 Clocks isn’t really a fairy tale, just as it isn’t really a ghost story. But it feels like a fairy tale, and it takes place in a fairy-tale world. It is short—not too short, just perfectly short. Short enough. When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed. I watch Thurber wrap his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words. It is a miracle. I think you could learn everything you need to know about telling stories from this book.

  Listen: it has a prince in it, and a princess. It has the evilest Duke ever written. It has Hush and Whisper (and Listen). Happily, it has Hagga, who weeps jewels. Terrifyingly, it has a Todal. And best and most marvelously and improbably of all, it has a Golux, with an indescribable hat, who warns our hero that

  “Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself.”

  “But why?”

  “I thought the tale of treasure might be true.”

  “You said you made it up.”

  “I know I did, but then I didn’t know I had. I forget things, too.”

  Every tale needs a Golux. Luckily for all of us, this book has one.

  There are stories out there where it helps to have an introduction, where you need someone to explain things for you before you begin. An introduction to set the scene, where the introducer shines light into dark places and lets the story shine more brightly, just as a precious stone polished and placed in a fine setting looks better than it might in a dusty corner or glued to a Duke’s grimy glove.

  The 13 Clocks is not one of those stories. It doesn’t need an introduction. It doesn’t need me. It is like one of Hagga’s jewels of laughter, and likely to dissolve if examined too long or too closely.

  It’s not a fairy tale. It’s not a poem, it’s not a parable or a fable or a novel or a joke. Truly, I don’t know what The 13 Clocks is, but whatever it is, as someone else said of something else at the top of this introduction, it’s the only one there ever was.

  Neil Gaiman

  February 2008

  Foreword

  I wrote The Thirteen Clocks in Bermuda, where I had gone to finish another book. The shift to this one was an example of escapism and self-indulgence. Unless modern Man wanders down these byways occasionally, I do not see how he can hope to preserve his sanity. I must apologize to my publishers and to the talented Marc Simont, who were forced to keep up with the constant small changes I insisted on making all the time, even in the galley proofs. In the end they took the book away from me, on the ground that it was finished and that I was just having fun tinkering with clocks and running up and down secret stairs. They had me there.

  I want to thank these helpful friends:

  Sara Linda Williams, for letting me use her name for the Princess (Miss Williams, who is four, insisted on oleanders in the Princess’s hair instead of freesias, and there were several grueling conferences about this, from which I barely emerged the winner); John and Nelga Youn
g, who provided the perfect place to write the story; Fritzi Kuegelgen, who was able by some magic of her own to make out and transcribe some five hundred sheets of pencil scrawl and to read the whole thing aloud from beginning to end at least a dozen times; Ronnie and Janey Williams, for brightening the weather by their presence on an island in the ocean seas; and my wife, for constructive criticism and for waking me out of nightmares, some of them about the Todal, I suppose, but the worst ones, on the darkest nights, about the whole enterprise in general.

  J. T.

  West Cornwall

  Connecticut

  I

  NCE upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made it difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was. One eye wore a velvet patch; the other glittered through a monocle, which made half his body seem closer to you than the other half. He had lost one eye when he was twelve, for he was fond of peering into nests and lairs in search of birds and animals to maul. One afternoon, a mother shrike had mauled him first. His nights were spent in evil dreams, and his days were given to wicked schemes.

  Wickedly scheming, he would limp and cackle through the cold corridors of the castle, planning new impossible feats for the suitors of Saralinda to perform. He did not wish to give her hand in marriage, since her hand was the only warm hand in the castle. Even the hands of his watch and the hands of all the thirteen clocks were frozen. They had all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle. Travelers and mariners would look up at the gloomy castle on the lonely hill and say, “Time lies frozen there. It’s always Then. It’s never Now.”

  The cold Duke was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried. Now might bring a certain knight of gay and shining courage—“But, no!” the cold Duke muttered. “The Prince will break himself against a new and awful labor: a place too high to reach, a thing too far to find, a burden too heavy to lift.” The Duke was afraid of Now, but he tampered with the clocks to see if they would go, out of a strange perversity, praying that they wouldn’t. Tinkers and tinkerers and a few wizards who happened by tried to start the clocks with tools or magic words, or by shaking them and cursing, but nothing whirred or ticked. The clocks were dead, and in the end, brooding on it, the Duke decided he had murdered time, slain it with his sword, and wiped his bloody blade upon its beard and left it lying there, bleeding hours and minutes, its springs uncoiled and sprawling, its pendulum disintegrating.

  The Duke limped because his legs were of different lengths. The right one had outgrown the left because, when he was young, he had spent his mornings place-kicking pups and punting kittens. He would say to a suitor, “What is the difference in the length of my legs?” and if the youth replied, “Why, one is shorter than the other,” the Duke would run him through with the sword he carried in his swordcane and feed him to the geese. The suitor was supposed to say, “Why, one is longer than the other.” Many a prince had been run through for naming the wrong difference. Others had been slain for offenses equally trivial: trampling the Duke’s camellias, failing to praise his wines, staring too long at his gloves, gazing too long at his niece. Those who survived his scorn and sword were given incredible labors to perform in order to win his niece’s hand, the only warm hand in the castle, where time had frozen to death at ten minutes to five one snowy night. They were told to cut a slice of moon, or change the ocean into wine. They were set to finding things that never were, and building things that could not be. They came and tried and failed and disappeared and never came again. And some, as I have said, were slain, for using names that start with X, or dropping spoons, or wearing rings, or speaking disrespectfully of sin.

  The castle and the Duke grew colder, and Saralinda, as a princess will, even in a place where time lies frozen, became a little older, but only a little older. She was nearly twenty-one the day a prince, disguised as a minstrel, came singing to the town that lay below the castle. He called himself Xingu, which was not his name, and dangerous, since the name began with X—and still does. He was, quite properly, a thing of shreds and patches, a ragged minstrel, singing for pennies and the love of singing. Xingu, as he so rashly called himself, was the youngest son of a powerful king, but he had grown weary of rich attire and banquets and tournaments and the available princesses of his own realm, and yearned to find in a far land the maiden of his dreams, singing as he went, learning the life of the lowly, and possibly slaying a dragon here and there.

  At the sign of the Silver Swan, in the town below the castle, where taverners, travelers, tale-tellers, tosspots, troublemakers, and other townspeople were gathered, he heard of Saralinda, loveliest princess on all the thousand islands of the ocean seas. “If you can turn the rain to silver, she is yours,” a taverner leered.

  “If you can slay the thorny Boar of Borythorn, she is yours,” grinned a traveler. “But there is no thorny Boar of Borythorn, which makes it hard.”

  “What makes it even harder is her uncle’s scorn and sword,” sneered a tale-teller. “He will slit you from your guggle to your zatch.”

  “The Duke is seven feet, nine inches tall, and only twenty-eight years old, or in his prime,” a tosspot gurgled. “His hand is cold enough to stop a clock, and strong enough to choke a bull, and swift enough to catch the wind. He breaks up minstrels in his soup, like crackers.”

  “Our minstrel here will warm the old man’s heart with song, dazzle him with jewels and gold,” a troublemaker simpered. “He’ll trample on the Duke’s camellias, spill his wine, and blunt his sword, and say his name begins with X, and in the end the Duke will say, ‘Take Saralinda, with my blessing, O lordly Prince of Rags and Tags, O rider of the sun!’”

  The troublemaker weighed eighteen stone, but the minstrel picked him up and tossed him in the air and caught him and set him down again. Then he paid his due and left the Swan.

  “I’ve seen that youth before,” the traveler mused, staring after Xingu, “but he was neither ragamuffin then, nor minstrel. Now let me see, where was it?”

  “In his soup,” the tosspot said, “like crackers.”

  II

  UTSIDE the tavern the night was lighted by a rocking yellow moon that held a white star in its horn. In the gloomy castle on the hill a lantern gleamed and darkened, came and went, as if the gaunt Duke stalked from room to room, stabbing bats and spiders, killing mice. “Dazzle the Duke with jewels,” the minstrel said aloud. “There’s something in it somewhere, but what it is and where, I cannot think.” He wondered if the Duke would order him to cause a fall of purple snow, or make a table out of sawdust, or merely slit him from his guggle to his zatch, and say to Saralinda, “There he lies, your latest fool, a nameless minstrel. I’ll have my varlets feed him to the geese.” The minstrel shuddered in the moonlight, wondering where his zatch and guggle were. He wondered how and why and when he could invade the castle. A duke was never known to ask a ragged minstrel to his table, or set a task for him to do, or let him meet a princess. “I’ll think of some way,” thought the Prince. “I’ll think of something.”

  The hour was late, and revelers began to reel and stagger home from inns and taverns, none in rags, and none in tags, and some in velvet gowns. One third of the dogs in town began to bark. The minstrel took his lute from his shoulder and improvised a song. He had thought of something.

  “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,

  But only one in three.

  They bark at those in velvet gowns,

  They
never bark at me.”

  A tale-teller, tottering home to bed, laughed at the song, and troublemakers and tosspots began to gather and listen.

  “The Duke is fond of velvet gowns,

  He’ll ask you all to tea.

  But I’m in rags, and I’m in tags,

  He’ll never send for me.”

  The townspeople crowded around the minstrel, laughing and cheering. “He’s a bold one, Rags is, makin’ songs about the Duke!” giggled a strutfurrow who had joined the crowd. The minstrel went on singing.

  “Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,

  The Duke is fond of kittens.

  He likes to take their insides out,

  And use their fur for mittens.”

  The crowd fell silent in awe and wonder, for the townspeople knew the Duke had slain eleven men for merely staring at his hands, hands that were gloved in velvet gloves, bright with rubies and with diamonds. Fearing to be seen in the doomed and desperate company of the mad minstrel, the revelers slunk off to their homes to tell their wives. Only the traveler, who thought he had seen the singer some otherwhere and time, lingered to warn him of his peril. “I’ve seen you shining in the lists,” he said, “or toppling knights in battle, or breaking men in two like crackers. You must be Tristram’s son, or Lancelot’s, or are you Tyne or Tora?”

  “A wandering minstrel, I,” the minstrel said, “a thing of shreds and zatches.” He bit his tongue in consternation at the slip it made.

  “Even if you were the mighty Zorn of Zorna,” said the man, “you could not escape the fury of the Duke. He’ll slit you from your guggle to your zatch, from here to here.” He touched the minstrel’s stomach and his throat.

  “I now know what to guard,” the minstrel sighed.

  A black figure in velvet mask and hood and cloak disappeared behind a tree. “The cold Duke’s spy-in-chief,” the traveler said, “a man named Whisper. Tomorrow he will die.” The minstrel waited. “He’ll die because, to name your sins, he’ll have to mention mittens. I leave at once for other lands, since I have mentioned mittens.” He sighed. “You’ll never live to wed his niece. You’ll only die to feed his geese. Goodbye, good night, and sorry.”