I went to see the Edinburgh clock tower when I was a young boy. It was a slow day at the museum. When we arrived on the front steps and passed through the huge arched doors, the hallways were practically empty but for a handful of lingering souls dotted across the five floors. Tourists, mostly, muttering and laughing in foreign languages, and families with kids like me, who seemed much less excited to be there than I was.

I led my parents through hallway after hallway, ignoring their yells to slow down. The halls were ill-lit, which had the effect of accentuating the exhibits that leant out of the shadows in all their freakish glory. Medieval torture devices with chains and nails and spikes; famous banned comic strips replete with gore and twisted, screaming bodies; a stuffed, glass-eyed specimen of some nonexistent mutant thing somewhere between a bear and a wolf and a human; a whole room filled with photographs of luminous deep-sea fish with mad eyes and teeth that barely fit in their mouths; and everything else, everything that humanity’s collective fevered imagination could summon up. Everything I saw carried the vague thrill of the taboo, the perverse, the forbidden. There was a sense that you  weren’t supposed to be there, that you were intruding in the home of some mad king. I had to keep reminding myself that my parents had paid for admission.

Naturally, the main exhibit was the one you saw before any other: the clock tower. It stood in the lobby to greet everyone who walked in, and I would spend hours at a time staring at it. It was about fifty feet tall, crowned with a frenzy of jagged iron spikes above the numberless clock-face, and had no façade. The insides of the clock were exposed; a maze of clockwork, ratchets, and giant gears spinning round and round. That labyrinth was home to a host of animatronic creatures maintaining the clockwork, turning the gears. It was a cast of characters plucked from hundreds of years worth of nightmares; murderers, ballerinas, porcelain soldiers, yowling animals, top-hatted smiling ringmasters, witches burning at the stake, stern-faced dictators clad in dark suits. In the belfry, a group of kids on a carousel were frozen in motion, and men in ragged suits and bowler hats were standing around like shabby birds. Hanging down from the clockface was the giant pendulum; a convex disc of reflective metal about three feet long and three feet wide, and Death hanging onto it, a naked skeleton with a humor-filled grin. It was the grin of someone apologizing for killing you, but enjoying it too much to really say it with a straight face.

I remembered the face of Death for years afterward, even as I got older and moved out of town and got married and had kids. I remembered it when my wife died. I was sitting beside her bed, holding her hand, trying to summon a tear and not really succeeding. She died looking into my eyes, and the moment she did, I thought I saw through the chalk-white, mottled skin of her face to the skull underneath. For a half-second, that familiar grinning face was staring at me. The next moment, my wife was dead, and I had some new concerns to deal with.

At the base of the clock, standing in the center of a tangle of clockwork and gears, was Evil God. The information card on the wall identified it as an ancient pagan deity specifically, but it didn’t look like anything else. Taller and larger than all of the other waxworks, clad in regal robes, he was nonetheless trapped by the mechanical prison around him, and he didn’t look happy about it. His porcelain face was contorted in a vicious scowl. It was a face that might have been handsome if he had been smiling, with its proud, aquiline nose and pointy golden beard and intense, staring eyes. Somehow, the sculptor had captured such smoldering, righteous rage in those eyes that I felt certain it could consume the whole clock tower, burning the hideous thing to the ground, if it were released. Standing guard to ensure that didn’t happen was the figure standing at Evil God’s feet, a porcelain monkey dressed in a colorful costume. The monkey was turning a large wheel that kept the other gears in motion. I wondered how long the monkey had been standing there, in the mythos of this great clock.

Most of the time, none of these creatures moved. But every thirty minutes, a bright red light would come on, illuminating the inside of the clock tower’s body, and the animatronics would come to life. The clockwork would turn, the carousel would spin, the waxwork actors would make their jerky motions, the witches would dance in a circle, the pendulum would swing, and the monkey would turn his wheel. A tinny little music-box jingle would play. This would go on for one minute, and then the red light would turn off and the waxworks would fall still again. I was hypnotized. I insisted we wait there for thirty minutes at a time, so we could witness the animatronic wizardry. I tried to absorb every intricate, ornate, macabre detail, imprinting it all in my memory, and when the red light turned on, I would watch the waxworks dance and feel like I was in a dream.