everything in the sky

Hello Alice!
I am here in Switzerland! It is everything you see in the papers - gray, drab buildings, constant state-control, the strange, strange people… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our tiny biplane touched down only briefly in a remote corner of the country, landing on an smooth tarmac strip in the midst of a lush, grassy field. I found it hard to get a sense of perspective as I clambered down, with no buildings in sight and a deep fog covering the landscape.
The pilot had seemed terse during the flight but was positively grim as he hastily tossed my bags to the ground. I noted with concern that his left hand hovered just above the Luger strapped to his hip the entire time his plane was on the ground.
“Simple peasant suspicion,” I assured myself.
I had only just picked up my strewn-about luggage before he had taken off again, such was his haste to leave. With nothing else to focus on, I simply stood and watched his plane disappear into the fog.
For the thousandth time I wondered whether this trip had been a good idea.
Rumours of the country vary, of course, but I had assumed there would at least be an airport, some kind of starting point - not this green, gray, empty landscape.
It was the exact moment that the plane seemed to wink out of existence that I realised I could hear a car.
And what a car it was. It rose out of the fog like a dinosaur looming out of history - a Ford Model T, black, seemingly new as the day it rolled off the production line. It was something so ancient it would mesmerize even the dullest of history students, but it was the driver that held my attention.
With its wooden face, brass eyes and carved features, it seemed a puppet with no puppeteer. Its entire body, I knew, would be clockwork.
A Switzer, as the broadsheets say.
I confess I simply gawped as it drove up. It stopped quickly and precisely mere centimeters from where I was standing, but I noticed nothing of it. Through the glass plate in its chest I could see a thousand little gears and cogs turning; pinions and flywheels and tourbillons were moving and clicking, and I knew that somehow it was… alive.
Mesmerised, I leaned forward to peer in further, and realised there was something else entirely deeper inside it.
Something strange.
Something… pulsing.
Suddenly it, he, spoke.
”<NAME>?”
“Y.. yes?” I said, trying to compose myself.
”COME.”
That was all that was said during our journey. We drove fast, the featureless landscape moving by in the fog. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask, a million lines I had rehearsed, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but sneak glances at this mechanical man.
It never even occurred to me to ask where we were headed.
Before I could muster my courage to speak, we had arrived. Our destination, it seemed, had been a small, stone cottage set on the side of a hill. With a thatched roof and stone walls, it could almost have passed for an English cottage, but for the lack of paint and garden. Instead it seemed sterile, cold, utilitarian. In the foggy distance I could just make out what seemed to its exact replicas evenly spaced out across this rolling hill.
While I had been gazing at this strange tableau, the Switzer had unloaded my bags and was, I realised, starting the car to leave. I summoned my courage.
“Could I… could I listen to your chest?” I asked. Spoken out loud, it seemed an arbitrary, silly question. I regretted it instantly, and was sure violence of some sort was to occur.
He paused, brass eyes staring straight ahead, and the moment seemed to stretch out. I fancied that his whirring and clicking became a little louder, and I thought of the brutal strength of hydraulics.
Instead, after what seemed an eternity, he simply nodded.
I slowly pressed my ear against his cool, varnished chest.
The sound was a texture - a thousand gears spinning, cog teeth gnashing. Layers upon layers of regular sounds, each to a different beat, to a different time, and of a different nature. And deep below this all, under these layers of sound, a pulsing whoosh; something other, and something I’m sure no English Clocksmith has the knowing of.
It is hours later now, and I sit here in bed writing to you. The inside of the cottage turned out to be sparse but homely. The bed itself is large and sat in the middle of the only room, and the fire I managed to start is providing more company than it would do in anywhere but this strange place. The thick duvets smell faintly of chocolate and coffee, the only hints of food or drink I’ve had so far. Food will be a problem for tomorrow, I think.
The first full day I will have here in Switzerland - who knows what that will bring?
First, though, I must sleep. Us intrepid explorers must keep up our strength, mustn’t we?
Of course we must.
Until then,
I remain yours,

<Name>