A Riddle in Bronze

stood before me barely topped five feet. His grey hair was cropped short, and as he turned to glare at us I saw his piercing blue eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue. "Why does nobody pay me attention these days?" he demanded, in a petulant, reedy voice.
There was a crackling sound to my right, and I turned to see a bolt of lightning passing between two slender metal rods. I was all too familiar with lightning, having been raised in a part of the country where storms were commonplace, but I have to confess that indoor lightning was a new experience for me. The crackling blue strand was sustained for several seconds, so bright it illuminated the entire room, and then there was a bang and a puff of smoke. The metal rods vanished, vaporised instantly, and the rest of the delicate equipment slowly toppled over with much creaking and groaning and shattering of glass tubes.
"Heavens, my experiment!" shouted the professor. "You've ruined it!" He ran to the bench, where he plucked pieces of equipment from the wreckage, flapping at the smoke as he carefully inspected each piece before setting them aside. All the while he kept up a stream of complaints, directed either at myself or the unfortunate Mrs Fairacre. "Never should have hired you in the first place… interfering busybody… no peace… stale bread in my sandwiches… toying with my belongings…"
"I shall leave Mr Jones here for when you're ready," said the housekeeper, completely unruffled by the professor's outburst. And then she was gone, firmly closing the door behind herself.
The professor was still rescuing bits and pieces of charred equipment from the ruins on top of his workbench, and to him I no longer existed. For my part, I had absolutely no intention of revealing my presence. I did wonder how long I might have to stand there before I could safely inch the door open and depart, and as the seconds began to drag I glanced around the room. The professor was busy at his workbench, to my right, and a gaslight hissed on the wall above. The large desk was about ten feet away, ahead of me, and behind it stood an enormous bookcase which covered the entire wall. To my left was a wardrobe, and beside it a glass-fronted cabinet, with another of the patterned cubes on the top shelf. The other shelves in this cabinet were filled with rows of tiny metal cylinders, none bigger than my thumb, each with a handwritten label, the details of which I could not discern. These cylinders were an impressive feat of engineering, with smooth sides and perfectly rounded ends, and they were arranged in varnished wooden racks. The cylinders gleamed with reflected light, and I was still wondering at their purpose when the professor's reedy voice broke my reverie.
"So, you activated one of my cubes, did you?"
The professor spoke without turning round, his voice calm, and for a moment I thought he was addressing the failed experiment. Then I realised the question could only have been directed at me. "Yes, sir. I apologise for my actions, and I promise to make good any damage I might have caused."
"You are well spoken," he said, and I detected a hint of approval. "But tell me, what made you pick up the cube in the first place?"
I thought back to the instant before I'd stood to retrieve the device. "The side table was illuminated by a beam of sunlight."
"The entire surface?"
"Yes sir."
"There were two picture frames, a candle holder, and several wooden carvings of exotic animals. Why the cube, and not one of those?"
I was surprised at his recollection of the precise contents of the table, given the variety of such items in the sitting room, and I found myself revising my opinion of the professor. At first he'd appeared impatient and more than a little scatterbrained, not to mention acerbic and ill-tempered, but now I realised his wits were sharper than I'd thought. "Sir, my eyes were drawn to the cube. It was as though it spoke to me, strange as that sounds."
The professor still had his back to me, and was yet sorting through components on the workbench. The smoke had mostly cleared now, but there was still an acrid, metallic smell to the air… not unpleasant, but somehow out of place. "And so you stood, crossed to the table and picked it up."
"I'm sorry, sir."
"Why do you keep apologising?"
"I had no right to touch your belongings."
"Had you not, Mrs Fairacre would have dismissed you with the others."
Exactly, I thought.
Now, finally, the professor turned to face me. His appearance was startling, for he'd donned a pair of glasses with heavy lenses, each of a different hue. One was as red as the finest ruby, and it glinted in the light from the nearby lamp. The other was as dark as the night sky, and unlike its twin it reflected not the slightest hint of light. Instead, it seemed to grow darker the more I looked at it, as though it were draining my vision. "What do you make of this?" asked the professor, and he threw a small object at me, underhand.
I tore my gaze from those unusual spectacles and caught the item in mid-air. It was heavier than I expected, and as it lay revealed on my palm, a frown creased my brow. It looked like a playing piece from a draughts board, a disc perhaps a quarter-inch thick, with smoothed edges. However, rather than ivory or teak, this item was fashioned from metal, and to my eye it appeared to be solid bronze. Then, even as I was studying the piece, I felt it… move. The strange twisting sensation was like that of the cube in the sitting room, as though the inert, warm metal contained a living, breathing organism.
Hastily, I tipped it from my hand, and the metal disc fell to the floor, where it landed on the rug with a solid thud. There was no