The Watchtower

performer had trained her dogs to remain so still; they even managed to mimic the doleful expressions of the hounds on the fountain, and they didn’t even flinch when a white peacock strolled by within an inch of their noses. I was so caught up in admiring them that I didn’t notice the time passing until the clock in the town hall began chiming midnight.
    Damn, I thought, how will my escort appear with all these witnesses?
    I needn’t have worried. As the bells tolled, the tourists and performers began to file out of the garden as if called away by the sound of the bells. They moved robotically, their eyes strangely glazed. It reminded me creepily of a scene from The Time Machine, in which the gentle Eloi responded to a summons to sacrifice themselves to the cannibal Morlocks. I had an uneasy feeling, though, that they were being led to safety while I was being left alone like the goat tied up for T. rex’s snack in Jurassic Park.
    When the clock had chimed twelve times, the only other living beings left in the garden were the Diana impersonator, her dogs, the peacocks, and myself. Perhaps the performer was my escort.
    “Pardon moi,” I began. “Êtes-vous mon guide?”
    She didn’t even blink. She was frozen in the perfect guise of a statue. I thought this was taking her act a bit too far and was going to tell her so when I felt something tug at my hand. I looked down into the amber eyes of a verdigris hound. It held my hand in its mouth gently, but when I tried to pull away, his jaws clamped down. There was a hound on either side of me, hemming me in, and one behind me. I could feel its hot breath on the small of my back.
    “Okay,” I said, “you don’t have to ask twice. I’m ready to go.”

14
    Euclid
    Will’s unease began the moment he dismounted from the carriage in front of the crumbling ruins of what the Mortlake watchman had called the Cottage. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come. The cottage looked like a ruined miniature castle, heaps of stones along its flat, timbered roof resembling the remnants of turrets; slits instead of windows in the stone first-floor walls; and a huge pile of rubbled masonry to the side that exceeded the scale of the standing building. A gleaming scimitar moon floated over the roof to the east. The place looked like the frontier outpost of a medieval army for which the battle had gone badly, and Will even felt an empathetic twinge for how these soldiers might have fared. For a fleeting second he even thought he could smell the hint of still-burning, tortured flesh in the damp and darkening air. But the remaining timbers looked sturdy enough, so at least the roof was unlikely to collapse on his head during the hoped-for interview.
    Will watched the driver, whom he was paying a hefty fee to wait for him, tie up his horses and carriage to a wind-weathered timber pinned upright between two paving stones. Then the man returned to his elevated seat and put his chin in his hands, as if preparing to rest in that posture. Will knocked on the front door.
    After a few moments, it was opened by a slender man with a gray, triangular beard and auburn mustache. His long face, with deep-set amber eyes and a prominent nose, resembled the sketch of Dee in the pamphlet Guy Liverpool had given him. But there was something penetrating, and condescending, about his gaze that no sketch could communicate. Dee stared at him with interest, but did not extend a hand. As Will continued to return his gaze, the man’s appearance unnerved him. His eyes were intelligent and deep, but also cold, and, in a shadow cast by moonlight, they began to look more yellowish than amber, certainly a pigment he’d never seen in human eyes before. The catlike pupils were so narrow they were almost slits. Will observed that Dee’s skin, despite his age, was relatively free of wrinkles, as if Dee, too, had immortality on his mind and had been making alchemical progress in that direction. Despite his age  … but what was his age, anyway? It was hard to tell in this blade-angled moonlight. In any event, Dee was about to close the door and retreat without another word when Will forced himself to break the silence.
    “Good evening, Sir Dee,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m—”
    “Here to quiz me about Euclid, are you son? I don’t mind the attention, but it’s not fair that Henry Billingsley doesn’t do his share of tending to the public nowadays,” Dee said in a low, meticulous voice. “Oh, well,