Duvall had already astonished the clockmaking world by constructing a timepiece comprised entirely of living components. The clock was a marvel of mechanical and biological engineering. Every single part was fashioned of animal tissues, flesh and bone formed from animals that had been captured in the grubby streets outside his atelier. The interaction of the clock's components took place at both the physical and the physiological levels. In short, it was a machine created by a master clockmaker for no reason but the keeping of organic time.

Duvall's initial designs for the clock had underlying structural elements fashioned of bone, carved and bent to support the flesh of the timepiece. These components were essentially dead, in that they required no external nourishment to survive, as would living flesh. Duvall thought he would utilize the tensile properties of cartilage and tendon to create the main spring of the clock.

However, these materials soon proved to be problematic. Tendons and cartilage initially possessed the desired elastic properties for a main spring, but Duvall found that they quickly ceased working due to the effects of drying and decay. It was then that he decided to create a clock that was fully alive. He applied the fine skills and precise concentration he had developed as a clock maker to the dissection and use of the bodies of trapped animals, extracting and reworking the pieces he desired in their bodies.

He soon found he could keep the tendons of his main spring functioning considerably longer when they were continuously nourished in a saline broth. However, decrepitude soon set into his clock, and the components rotted away to stinking fluid within a few weeks.

Duvall had long admired the body's ability to regenerate itself after it was damaged. He himself had snapped a bone in his middle finger in a bar fight when he was young and thought he could hold his liquor. When he heard the crack of the bone, he had stared at the visibly broken digit and wept openly, fearing his young career as a clock maker was over. There was remarkably little pain, only a terrible numbness and cold. Later that night in his tiny apartment, two friends took hold of him while another pulled as hard as he could on the crooked finger, straightening it out to begin its healing. The evening's drunken fog was suddenly, mercilessly swept aside, and Duvall screamed and cursed them all as he struggled uselessly against the gentle restraint of their arms.

But astonishingly, the finger healed. It soon moved again according to his will. He bore down on the wayward fragments of the clocks he created in the tiny atelier, and they too became supple to his desires. Even the tiniest pieces grew into large, rough planks that he pulled up and rebuilt into fantastic new structures with diminishing effort. His works grew in value, and his patrons held on to his clocks faithfully. Duvall eventually began to see his own timepieces come back to the shop for repairs, their parts eaten by time and the grinding monotony of days that it was their duty to mark.

It was not enough to construct a clock from the dead organs of dead creatures. Duvall realized that the ultimate clock would be one that fixed itself, that never wore out or died. What better to mark the passage of time than the ever-renewing flesh -- the stuff of God's mind, the culmination of the Creation?

The clock grew in complexity. Merely constructing an organic system to service and nourish the cartilaginous core structures of the timepiece was no longer sufficient. The clock had to observe and display the passage of time through its own organic processes. Duvall abandoned the idea of a flexible tendon as the main spring. Rather, the clock would chart time by tracking the constant rate of decay and cellular replenishment of its own internal tissues. Its deepest functions would take place at the physiological level, rather than merely as an anatomical effect.

Duvall quickly realized that he could not create life where none existed before. He could not manufacture a complete, functioning set of organs to feed the constant growth of his timepiece. So he adopted a new approach, which would eventually lead to his success: he built the clock on an existing framework. He used the bodies of living creatures. He did not kill them for parts, as he had so blindly done before, but operated upon their forms and shaped them to his needs. He made their flesh supple to his vision and recreated it in the mechanical shapes he desired.

Many of the early subjects died even as they underwent surgery, or before Duvall could assess the function of his new clocks. Even those that lived were so grotesquely deformed and weakened by the ordeal that Duvall found them too esthetically displeasing for display. Several more months of hard work eventually led to the creation of a living, breathing clock. It was grafted to the body of a dog: the timepiece an engorged red weal of scar tissue that appeared on the animal's back. It was inexact; there were no hands, only scarred marks that symbolized the numbers of the clock face, each of which would in turn swell up and change to a bruised blue color to indicate the passage of hours.

Duvall's subsequent living clocks would approach the accuracy of his mechanical creations. Several months later, he astonished colleagues by displaying an improved clock in his workshop, again formed from the body of a living dog. This one actually had clock-hands that marked the hour and quarter-hour, powered by the relentless flow of the animal's blood through its arteries. The only factor to mar the clock's perfection was that the animal had to be given regular injections to numb the flesh around the timepiece. Otherwise, Duvall found, it would become feverishly consumed with the task of chewing and rending its own body to remove the integral device that it could not understand was formed from the fabric of its own flesh.

Duvall's contemporaries were simply astonished at his works. This bold effort to combine the living and the mechanical heralded a new age, and they looked into the future with both fear and awe. They saw in the shaved and mutilated bodies of the clock-dogs the pulsing marker of progress. Fitting tiny hard cogs and metal gears of clocks would soon be a lost art. The future was supple as willing flesh under the reconstructive scalpel of the surgeon.

When the excitement subsided, Duvall sat in his atelier and watched one of the clock-animals limp through the workroom. Few of his creations lived more than several months, a far shorter lifespan than a mechanical clock. Yet he no longer cared much to extend their lives. He had lost interest in the project after the last wash of public acclaim. What could he do to surpass this accomplishment?

The dog began to settle down on the floor near Duvall's stool, instinctively avoiding putting any weight on the clock face set into its side. Duvall looked at it and thought: it doesn't make any noise. I wonder if its flesh can be made to strike the hour.

I will make them ring like bells. Their bodies will sing the praises of the hours.