The man sat down. "They say," he said, "that you can do anything with the old ventriloquism. Why don't you have a go?"

"No," said Bernard.

"Go on," said the man, irritatingly jocular still but with an odd piercing stare. "Just a little demonstration."

The man looked around the room and then pointed to a Toby jug behind the bar.

"Make that jug speak. Can you do that?"

The Toby jug was a fat faced smiler in a tricorn.

"I could do it," said Bernard, "but you know once I started it talking it might never stop."

It might talk all the time, comment on everything, speaking even inside your head, even if you left it at home. Never leaving you alone.

"You're a card," said the man, But at last he got up and wandered back to the bar.

Outside it had turned cold. Bernard waited for some comment from Ollie on how he'd handled the situation but there was nothing. He headed over to the British Museum. Ollie hadn't liked it here when they'd come. He'd comment, 'load of rubbish, what'd you want to look at all this stuff for?' Now, with his new inner silence, Bernard could look around properly.

Inside the footsteps and voices of the visitors played inside his head for a moment. He wandered through the Egyptian mummies but it was crowded so he went to another gallery where there were displays of papyri, all elaborate ritual on how to enter the afterlife, the weighing of the heart, the unjust to have their souls eaten. All that religion was bunk or at least Bernard had always thought so. He had a ventriloquists knowledge of how the old priests had made statues talk, made voices come from heaven. But now Ollie had seen things after Bernard had buried him.

Further on he wandered and found a room full of ornamental clocks. None of them were wound but for a moment he imagined them all ticking, whirring like Ollie's vision of heaven, the clockwork resurrection; yet everything here was dead, the museum was a gigantic tomb. The only movement came from the tremor along his arms.

Come on Ollie, make some sarcastic comment. But Ollie must already have been transformed by the lord of the dead he had spoken of.

Unless it was all a wind up.

He laughed at his own pun. Or rather Ollie's pun, realising it was all just that, that all that talk had been Ollie playing a joke. It was not Ollie that had been turned into clockwork but Bernard that had been wound up.

Oh you clever little bugger. Played me for a fool.

And Bernard realised how much he loved Ollie and that the only thing to do was to go back to the graveyard. As he walked out of the museum he realised that he was no longer shaking.

#

He waited until it was dark, changing into his old clothes still damp and dirty from the night before. He held the trowel inside the sleeve of his jacket.

There was no-one about in the streets and Bernard moved through a light drizzle between the yellow patches below each lamp post. The graveyard was behind iron railings with a locked gate but it wasn't too difficult to get over; he'd managed it carrying Ollie in his box the night before. Just a foot up on a little concrete sign for a water main then pull yourself over. Oh yes, not too difficult even though the railings were wet.

I'm coming Ollie, I'm coming.

The shallow grave he'd made on top of an older burial was in shadow well back from the railings near to a piece of wall, all that remained of the church that had once been here. The headstone of the grave was moss covered, unreadable. Bernard had buried Ollie a couple of feet down, well above whoever had been buried originally.

After digging with the trowel for a few moments Bernard was so overcome with the feeling of being watched that he had to stop and look around. The rain had stopped now but the shadow of a plain tree moved with it in the breeze; other shadows intersected with each other, the railings, the headstones.

Bernard dug on. The ground was soft from the rain and from being turned over the night before. It wasn't far now and he put the trowel to one side and writhed with his fingers in the dirt, rooting about for Ollie's box. It was only after a few seconds that he became aware of the ticking. It was distant, insistent, as though it had been there all the time.

They were all around him.

Standing on the gravel path and on the top of the broken wall.

Behind the tilted gravestones small figures silhouetted by the night.

All of them were ticking, some lightly like pocket watches, others heavier like grandfather clocks. The ticks were not in sync, so that Bernard felt as though he was caged by a sound without any interval of silence.

"Bernard," a voice said.

Ollie stepped forward, his little legs powered by drives rods attached to the clock that had been put inside his exposed stomach. His gait was awkward, a jerk, his head nodding forward as he walked.

"Ollie," Bernard said, "I've come back for you."

From the shadows others came, lost dolls, broken puppets, a vicious looking Mr Punch waving his slapstick. They closed in with mechanical strides. Bernard saw in Ollie's hand a screwdriver or perhaps a bradawl. As he tried to scramble up Ollie stabbed him in his flank and he collapsed like a punctured tyre. The ticking sounded inside his head as the automata crawled over him, grabbed his legs and started to pull him along the ground, through the dirt of the graveyard, the gravel and stones tearing at him. The pain in his side burnt through him and then his head was battered as he was dragged over the hard masonry of a grave. All the while the ticking continued, even as he sank into unconsciousness.

#

"It's all right, Bernard," Ollie said, "everything is going to be all right."

He was lying in the darkness on a hard surface. His head throbbed. Echoing all around him was the ticking.

"Where are you Ollie?" Bernard said.

"I'm on the shelf above your one."

"You stabbed me," Bernard said, the memory coming back with the pain in his side.

"You buried me, Bernard," said Ollie, "so I think we're quits."

"Where are we?"

"We're in heaven, Bernard."

Bernard tried to sit up but banged his head. The ticking spun through him as though it had got louder.

"Calm down," said Ollie, "it's all right. You'll see things differently soon. The way I do. You'll come to understand everything is right and as it should be."

"What are you talking about?"

"I begged him," said Ollie, "because although this heaven is not really for the likes of you I told him that me and you, well, we're part of each other aren't we?"

"Just tell me what's happening?"

A light came on, a yellow sickly light some way off. Bernard managed to turn his head around. The room was some sort of workshop, with the great work bench in the middle. The walls were covered with shelf after shelf, each filled with dolls and puppets. They had their faces towards him, glass eyes, painted eyes staring. Then a shadow flitted across the light. Standing in the middle of the room in a long leather apron was the man from the Museum Tavern, his nose looked even more like a beak now. He wore goggles and in his two outstretched hands he carried a large book.

"Who are you?" Bernard said.

He tried to slide off the shelf but suddenly the pain in his side became worse. The man began to read from the book, intoning loudly above the ticking.

I am the mainspring that is wound in the morning. The face of the clock that is the gate. The pendulum at the heart of the universe. Come with me and dwell in the arc of the pendulum, the silence between the tick and tock. All of us are the potential stored in the spring, the life measured out by the escarpment, the thought spun on cogs, the dream that began with the first winding….

Bernard rolled on one side and managed to half fall, half scramble from the shelf onto the floor. He propped himself up on one knee. His side was agony and he put his hand there. It had been bandaged.

"Let me out of here," he said.

The man looked over the top of the book, his eyes gleaming through the glass of the goggles, over his beak-like nose.

"I can't do that," he said, "you see Ollie needs you. Ollie has always needed you. How can Ollie speak without you?"

"I'll take Ollie with me."

"Oh no," said the man and he put his book down on the bench, "Ollie has been given eternal life."

The man nodded. Bernard looked up at the shelf where he saw Ollie. The same cheeky red face as always but now his jacket was gone, his stomach hollowed out for the mechanism.

"It is time," said the man, "with you the transformation will have to be more extensive. The replacing of the neural system that governs behaviour as well as that of motion."

And from his bench he picked up a large lancet and moved towards Bernard.

#

There was a routine in heaven. Every evening, when dusk dimmed the light outside the cob-webbed windows, the Clockwork God would wind up his creatures, gently inserting a key into them and turning delicately. Then when the room was filled with ticking he would read to them from the great book. There was such beauty in those stories about the crafting of the universe, its ordering, its steady progress of unwinding.

Sometimes the automata ventured out, at dusk they would go to some deserted part of the city, on some errand of other: breaking into clock makers for supplies, beating and robbing isolated strangers to bring offers to the God.

Mostly they remained in the splendour of heaven spending each night with their companions until they slowly wound down to sleep through the hours of light.

Bernard and Ollie hardly needed to talk anymore, it was enough to be together. Their thoughts were now discrete and efficient, and they were both truly content at last.