Arachnodactyl (5 page)

As his eyes adjusted to the dark, a woman called out, “You seem to have picked up a shadow while outside.”

“Eh,” Cross grunted. “What’ll you have, Ikey?”

Shapes emerged from the dark. A bar appeared at one end of the room. Cross took a seat at one of the stools.

“Ikey?” a woman asked. She stood beside a table and held a small serving tray before her so that her arms framed the tops of her breasts exposed by the low-cut bodice. “Is that Irish?” the woman asked.

Ikey looked up to her smiling lips, then glanced to the bar and back. Heat flushed his face. “I guess so.”

“I like Irish men. They know how to have a good time,” the woman said. She tilted her face forward.

“Don’t waste your time,” Cross called back as he turned around on his stool. “Ikey, that’s Willa. Willa, that’s an Irish man who works for Admiral Daughton.”

Willa tossed her head aside and lifted her nose at Cross. “He’s still cute, even if he doesn’t have two coins to rub together.”

A bald man behind the bar stepped up to Cross. “If he doesn’t have two coins—”

Cross held up his hand. “Get him a whiskey. What have you got that’s Irish?”

The barman turned around and examined an array of bottles.

“I don’t want anything to drink,” Ikey said.

“You don’t want anything to drink?” Cross asked in mock indignation. “You’re standing in a bloody pub!”

“And you’re Irish,” Willa added.

“If he doesn’t want anything—” the barman started.

“I asked for a whiskey, didn’t I?” Cross said over his shoulder. “He’s going to drink it.”

“He’s Irish,” Willa quipped.

The barman selected a bottle off the shelf and poured an ounce into a stout glass.

“One for me as well,” Cross said and tapped the bar.

“I’ll take one, too,” Willa said.

The barman scowled at Willa. “You’re on the job.”

Willa held out her arms and made a show of looking about the pub, empty except for two men sitting quietly at a table, a cribbage board between them.

“There’s no one here yet. And besides, you only get one chance at a first impression, and I want to make a smashing impression on our newest regular.” She slinked an arm around Ikey’s shoulder and pulled him close.

“I mentioned he worked for the admiral, right?” Cross said as he picked up his whiskey.

“I mentioned he’s cute, didn’t I?” Willa winked at Ikey.

His stomach gurgled. He slipped out of Willa’s grasp and stepped away.

Cross laughed and slapped the bar with his palm. “Why, Willa, I do believe you’ve been scorned.” He punctuated his observation with a pull off his glass.

Willa planted her hands on her hips and pursed her lips in a dramatic moue. “Don’t you like girls, Ikey?”

Ikey looked to the floor and nodded. “I…”

“Nothing personal, Willa,” Cross interrupted. “It’s just that if you’re not shaped like a hand, he doesn’t know what to do with you.”

Cross, Willa, and the barman erupted into laughter. Ikey stepped back from them, heat rippling up his face. He grasped his wrist before him, closed his eyes, and thought of his dad’s cart. Once, when the axle snapped and a wheel fell off, his dad had taken to kicking the cart, thrashing it with boot and fist until his face blistered red, and redder spots peppered his knuckles. Panting, he snatched a shovel out of the bed and further beat on the cart as Ikey cowered behind a nearby rock, ready to bolt should his dad’s anger leap to him. As the cart took his dad’s punishment, it occurred to Ikey that the cart felt nothing. It took the beating and the blows and the chops from the edge of the shovel blade and it made no cry. It did not wince. It did not flinch. Its wood planks and iron bands and hard nails felt nothing.

Since that day, every time Ikey took a beating, he thought of the cart and imagined himself made of unfeeling wood, banded with unyielding iron, and held together with unshakable nails.

“Oh, sit down,” Cross spat. “Your drink is getting old.”

Ikey looked up at Cross.

“Don’t mind him,” Willa said. “He’s ornery because he’s a sour old cuss. I don’t mind men who haven’t been with a woman yet. I prefer it, because you’re not all jaded and like him.” She jerked her head back at Cross.

“Well then take him in the back room,” Cross said, “and get it over with already.”

“No,” Willa said and touched the tip of her fingers to Ikey’s shoulder.

Ikey jerked away and stumbled back into a table as he recalled the way his dad had treated his mother, the cries and screams. Ikey closed his eyes and wished Willa to go away. He would never want to treat a woman like that.

“He understands that your first time should be with someone special. Not someone like me.”

“I think you’re special,” the barman said.

“Only because no other barmaid will put up with you for this pay,” Willa said as she cocked a hand on her hip. “I must be right special in the head.”

Cross chuckled and patted the stool next to him. “Sit down, Ikey. Otherwise, if you insist on standing, you can do so outside.”

Ikey glanced back at the door. Standing outside would be preferable, but it would sour Cross further. Ikey trudged over and sat on the stool.

Cross nudged the glass toward Ikey and leaned in to say that if he played his cards right, Willa might be convinced to see him after work.

Ikey shrugged and stared into his drink as Willa slapped Cross on the back of his head.

Cross lifted his cap and ran his hand through his hair. “Not your type, is she?”

Ikey shook his head.

“What is your type?” Willa asked as she rounded the bar and stepped before Ikey. She placed her serving tray down, propped her elbows on the bar, and perched her broad chin on her fists.

“Wait,” Willa continued, “I bet you like mousy girls. Little things with brown hair and tiny, pointed noses that they wrinkle like so whenever something displeases them. Am I right?”

“I’m telling you,” Cross said, “it’s women who look like a hand.”

Willa glared at Cross. “Shut up, or my hand is the last thing you will ever see.”

Cross and the barman traded snickers.

Willa picked up the glass of whiskey before Ikey and took a sip. “So what kind of women are special to you, Ikey?”

Ikey studied the bar for a few seconds.

“I don’t want a woman,” Ikey whispered. “Not in that way.”

“What other way is there?” Cross asked.

Willa tsked. “You wouldn’t know, would you, you thick sot.”

Cross lifted his drink to Willa. “I wouldn’t.”

Willa waved a dismissive hand at Cross. “Pay him no mind. You haven’t found the right woman yet. But when you do, you’ll want to be with her.”

“Bloody Nora,” Cross spat. “If you two ladies are done with your morning call, I guess we ought to be going, seeing as you ain’t interested in anything in here.”

Cross downed the rest of his drink, leaned over toward Ikey, and held his open hand over his glass. “Done with this?”

Ikey nodded.

Cross picked up Ikey’s drink and finished it as well. After he produced a half crown from his waistcoat and plunked it onto the bar, he motioned for Ikey to come along as he made his way to the door.

“Nice to make your acquaintance,” Willa called after them.

Outside, Cross turned to Ikey. “So you don’t drink, and you don’t chase after women. Exactly what is it they do for fun out in The Dales?”

Ikey studied the stucco wall beyond Cross’s chest. He shrugged.

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“I don’t know,” Ikey said. “I fix things, I guess. Tinker.”

“I see you’re going to be a boatload of fun,” Cross sighed. “Well, it’s too late for a tour of the ship today. I suppose I ought to take you back to the house.”

Cross pointed a finger at Ikey. “But I’m telling you here and now that I won’t take any guff from you about my home or my wife. If you don’t like my house, you can piss off and sleep in the street and I don’t give a deuce what the admiral says. Got it?”

Ikey nodded.

Cross leaned forward until he might fall like a felled tree.

“Clear?” Cross asked.

The thought of what might be found at Cross’s house dampened Ikey’s armpits. Was he yet another man who thought in colors of violence? Would children be found cowering in a corner of a dark room, so intent and practiced in being quiet that they moved through the house like ghosts?

“Yes,” Ikey said.

“Good,” Cross said with a dip of his chin. He turned and stalked down the street.

I
key adjusted
the strap over his shoulder and hurried after Cross, almost jogging to keep up. The tools in the satchel clinked with the effort. The sound satisfied him—a reassuring word from an old friend. As long as his tools remained at his side, he had help. If life at Cross’s house proved unbearable, he could strike out. Slip away. Get lodging at a boarding house in return for fixing things. His breath came easier, his feet fell into a rhythm as the plan settled over him.

Cross led Ikey back over the bridge and through narrow streets. Buildings stood with their toes in the gutter, faces tall and gaunt and pressing in so that the city formed a series of canyons, and the canyons brimmed with people. If not for Cross’s height, he would have disappeared into the crowd; especially when they cut across a market. The crowd thickened into a paste of flesh and cotton and leather and silk as it gathered around costermongers who called out offers of teas and pies and ices and all sorts of items with odors that collided against the strong stench of men basted in sweat.

The dales called out. Among the hills with nothing but sheep and sky as far as he could see, Ikey sought hope that there might yet be a place for him. Towns were the antithesis of such a place. He couldn’t begin to imagine the proper cities in his uncle’s books. Places like London seemed so impossibly huge, and yet cramped for the slightest space.

His eyelids pressed heavy on his vision. He wanted to shut them, blot out the throngs of people, the buildings hemming him in, the tall man who delighted in embarrassing people. But a moment’s rest for his eyes would surely cause him to bump into a person, raise ire, bring about the words and the fists and the blows.

Ikey pulled a deep breath through pursed lips. He gritted his eyes and surged forward, keen to keep Cross in his sight and do nothing more to sour him.

A throng of men laughing and slapping each other’s shoulders passed between them. Ikey dodged and twisted around them. He broke into a run to catch up with Cross, and as he closed the distance between the two of them, Cross halted.

Ikey skidded to a stop inches from Cross as he turned around. His head shifted back on his neck as if surprised to see Ikey standing there, almost on the toes of Cross’s boots.

Without a word, Cross slipped a ring of keys from a pocket and opened a door in one of the terraced homes lining the street. Before stepping inside, he produced a match from a pocket, struck it on the doorjamb, and stepped inside.

Although clouds obscured the sun, plenty of day remained for the single window beside the home’s entrance to light the room—that is, if it were not for the heavy curtains pressed against the glass, their blackness sun-faded to a dirty gray. Beyond the open door, Cross touched his match to the wick of a lantern sitting on a small table beside the door. A flickering light pushed the darkness back and revealed a pair of high-backed, upholstered arm chairs positioned on either side of a dark fireplace. As Cross replaced the lamp and picked up the lantern, the shadows cast by the chairs shifted. They cowered and shivered against walls papered in a complicated floral-and-vine arrangement of black on purple.

Ikey’s hand tightened on the satchel. A shallow shelf ran along the wall barely above his eye-level, and it circled the entire room. A variety of objects filled the shelf, and they had no apparent function or purpose. Most of the objects were dome-shaped with a height of 12 to 18 inches. Others were cylindrical, or spherical, cubed, or had no geometric shape at all, but sat on the shelf and cast a shadow of jagged edges and asymmetrical curves.

Ikey stepped inside and pitched himself onto his toes to get a closer look. The items were made of a dark wood, but splinters of lantern light glinted off slivers of glass or rods of brass or steel showing from where the insides sat exposed.

“Close the door,” Cross said.

Ikey pushed the door shut. It stuck on the jamb. He gave it a shove. As the door snapped into place, the room blossomed with a symphony of tinkling noise. It came from every direction. Though it reminded him of wind chimes, Ikey picked up pieces of rhythmic songs played out by dozens of music boxes. But the songs were hard to discern under a soft, glistening rain of glass and metal chimes.

Ikey held his breath and willed his heart to silence as the noise unfolded around him, swelled, and then subsided. Cross proceeded to a set of double doors at the back the room. With each clomp of his boots on the hardwood floor, the cacophony stirred, as if the house had a thousand beating hearts made of hammers and chimes.

The forms that played out these functions escaped Ikey’s imagination. He closed his eyes, tried to picture what would make each sound, but every attempt at building these structures in his head fell apart until he pictured nothing more than a brook behind his house; a narrow sluice where water shot through fast and hard and broke against a spray of gray stones.

“What is that?” Ikey asked as Cross slid one of the doors back.

“What is what?” Cross paused in the doorway and looked back at Ikey. The lantern in his hand cast half his face in shadow.

Unsure of which instrument to point at, Ikey fluttered a hand around the room, his eyes following. “That,” Ikey said. “The noise.”

“Oh,” Cross said with a bob of his head. “Music boxes. You never encountered one before?”

Without waiting for an answer, he ducked past the doors. The parlor plunged into darkness. The barest trace of light lined the edges of the drapes.

Ikey started after Cross. As he reached the middle of the room, his steps fell with greater deliberation in order to chide the boxes back into their songs and pings and tinkles.

“I’ve got some bad news,” Cross said from the next room. “Admiral Daughton feels it necessary to assign me an apprentice. And being the absolute gentleman he is, he’s left it to me to see after this new apprentice.”

Ikey hurried to the door. Cross stood in a kitchen that would be dark if not for his lantern, and he spoke to a figure clad in a black dress, hands behind her back, face covered by a dark veil.

Ikey sidled over until the doorway obscured most of him. He rubbed his palm along the edge of the door in a slow stroke and felt the cool, polished wood run under his hot and sweaty palm. The woman was unlike anything he had ever seen. She stood at Cross’s height. Ikey glanced at the hem of her dress. It brushed against the floor and concealed whether or not she wore heels on her shoes. Regardless, the long, willowy length of her arms, the thin rise of her torso, the graceful fountain of her neck—all of it suggested that she stood as tall as she appeared.

“See after him?” the woman asked. “So you will be preparing his meals and cleaning up his mess?”

Cross snickered, then glanced at Ikey. His brows deepened into a furrow. “You trying to hide?”

Ikey stepped out from behind the door. “No, sir.” He placed his hands at his sides and stared at the floor before Cross’s feet as he would address his dad.

But then he looked at the woman again. His mouth went dry. The sulfurous odor of smoldering stove coal filled his nose and watered his eyes. The woman was unreal.

“Ikey, this is my wife, Rose. Rose, Ikey,” Cross said.

“Nice to meet you, Ikey,” Rose said. She turned her head in his direction, but she did not face him.

“Ma’am,” Ikey said with a half-bow.

Instead of offering Ikey her fingers to grasp, she remained before the counter, hands behind her, her back to a cutting board on which sat a knife and a carrot, half-sliced.

Rose turned back at Cross. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“Admiral Daughton sprang it on me just now. You know how he is.”

“No,” Rose said, “I don’t.”

“Be that as it may, Admiral Daughton’s got some coal up his britches. I have to humor him until the ship is finished.”

“If you spent less time in the pub, he might feel better about the situation.”

Cross screwed up his face in a comical snarl and stuck his tongue out at Rose as she spoke.

Ikey’s eyes widened.

As Rose finished her statement, Cross winked at Ikey. “Is that so? Well, when you’re chief engineer, you can run your crew as you see fit, right? Until then, make up Pa’s old room for Ikey here. Set places for three, and when will dinner be ready?”

“I wasn’t expecting the pubs to close early today,” Rose said in a flat tone. “It’ll be another hour.”

“We’ll be in the workshop, then. Come along, Ikey.” Cross mounted the first few stairs at the back of the room.

Ikey crossed the kitchen with slow steps. A set of music boxes tinkled and stirred from a shelf underneath the stairs. He couldn’t look away from the dark length of Rose. The grace of her thinness appeared mechanical in nature—all excess stripped away until nothing of the form remained; only function.

As Rose turned to the counter, she reached for the knife.

Ikey stopped mid-step.

Her fingers were pale, impossibly long and spindly. She grasped the knife and wrapped her incredible fingers around the handle until her fingertips touched the pad of her wrist.

Ikey’s heart stuttered.

He opened his mouth to ask about her hands. How did she get them? What was it like? Could she please grasp something else so he could watch again the great, exaggerated parade of motion like a swan folding its wings?

“Oh, bloody Nora. Do you need directions to cross the room?” Cross asked from the stairs. He jostled the lantern in his hand and the kitchen shadows careened back and forth.

Ikey’s pent-up breath hissed from him far louder than intended; almost a rasp. He closed his eyes against the swinging sensation, the rocking motion cast by the shifting shadows. He turned around and opened his eyes to find Cross glaring, a foot planted on the next step.

“Coming.”

As Cross took the stairs two at a time, Ikey lingered at the sight of the back of Rose’s neck, where black hair twisted up and disappeared under her hat. As Cross’s lantern reached the top of the stairs, shadows fell over the kitchen and plunged it into darkness, save for the faint, red glow that seeped from the cracks and joins of the stove. It was definitely not sufficient to see by.

A wet, snicking noise washed up out of the dark as Rose resumed slicing her carrot in what sounded like a quick, rocking motion.

“Ikey!” Cross called again.

He scurried up the steps, ascending into the bubble of the lantern’s glow and a fresh wave of chimes. Again, a shelf encircled the room and every square inch of it sat occupied with more of the odd music boxes.

“Do you normally get lost climbing a flight of steps?” Cross asked with a flat tone.

“No.” Ikey felt compelled to look to the floor, but he couldn’t help staring at the music boxes around the dining room.

“Come on.” Cross clapped his shoulder and shoved him towards a door along the back wall.

Ikey glanced back at the stairwell as they moved through the dining room. No light issued from the kitchen. He strained to hear the slicing of the carrot, but he heard only the thuds of Cross’s and his own boots and the tinkling reply of more music boxes.

Cross opened the door in the back of the room and ushered Ikey through a narrow scullery before opening the backdoor onto a walled-in yard behind the house. A dirt path led to a shack with a pitched roof at the rear of the yard. Its walls were made of wood, but patched here and there with scraps of tin. Streaks of rust ran from the nails and gave the outbuilding the appearance of eroding away.

Cross blew the lantern out and placed it on a small table beside the door. “I ever catch you out here without me, I will snap your legs clean off and stuff them down your scrawny throat. Got that?”

Ikey nodded.

“Good.” Cross led Ikey to the shack and pushed the door open. Hinges groaned and the bottom edge of the door scored the earthen floor.

Shelves lined either side of the shack from floor to ceiling. Junk lined the shelves and bowed the boards between their brackets. Numerous music boxes sat in various states of assembly among bins and cans brimming with bits of metal.

Ikey drifted by and cataloged items. He paused in front of a collection of music boxes and peered into their exposed guts. As suspected, he found delicate hammers made of a variety of materials; metal, wood, even glass and stone. Springs and delicate gears and tiny, twisting loops of wire held slivers of glass or brass or tin and waited like tiny wind chimes on a breathless summer day.

“You made these?” Ikey asked.

Cross looked up from a waist-high pile of junk in a far corner of the shack. “Uhn? Yeah. Nevermind those. This is what we’re out here for.”

With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated a large, glass tank on a table in the center of the room. Filled, it would have held ten gallons or so. Inside, a white film coated the bottom. Two coils descended from either end of the glass lid to two-thirds the tank’s depth. Above the coils, rubber tubes poked from the lid. Coarse wires connected each coil to a rubber stopper in the center of the lid, and out of the stopper poked the wires like a few unruly hairs from a mole.

There was nothing mechanical about it.

Ikey returned his attention to the music boxes. He imagined each movement from each visible piece, but his brow furrowed as he tried to imagine the orders and systems that would rise up from the various functions. In Smith’s arm, movement of his muscles set into motion the function of each part until entire systems did what they were designed to do, and the end result was a hand clutching Ikey’s dad’s hand. In Cross’s music boxes, the point of origin eluded him. Where did the motion start? What triggered it?

Ikey reached out to poke one of the boxes.

“Thirsty?” Cross asked.

Ikey turned around.

From the pile of junk, Cross lifted a tin can affixed with a mean, angry face. Glass lenses served as eyes. A gaping mouth with teeth of screws snarled blindly at the table. As Cross tucked the head under his arm, he reached under a wad of rags and pulled out a half-full bottle of brown liquid.

Ikey stepped back. He shook his head.

Cross dropped the head onto the pile with a clatter.