This Monstrous Thing (12 page)

I was sitting on the steps to the flat in the dying light, reassembling a pocket watch I’d found smashed to bits in the street. With my head against the wall to the flat, I could hear muffled voices from the other side: Father, Mum, and Oliver, joined by Geisler. It was two days since he’d escaped prison and he had been hiding with us while the police turned over the countryside, thinking he’d fled Geneva. Tomorrow night, when their search moved back inside the city, he would make his dash for the border and return to Ingolstadt.

Oliver was meant to have some part in the escape, though I wasn’t sure what. He’d been reading out on the stairs with me when Father called him in to discuss it. I kept waiting for them to start shouting, because one of them was bound to be upset over something sooner or later, but it all stayed quiet. That was somehow more alarming.

As the sun began to drop below the skyline, I heard
the flat door open, and before I could turn, Oliver flopped down on the step beside me and pulled his knees up to his chest. “I’m being sent away.”

My finger caught under the ratio wheel and it pinched. “What?”

He was staring straight ahead, down at the street, with his mouth set in a hard line. The sunlight splintered through his dark hair. “Once Geisler’s settled in Ingolstadt, he’s going to send for me so I can keep studying with him at the university there. He and Father still seem convinced they can make a Shadow Boy out of me.” He said it all so quiet and calm. He didn’t even look angry, though he’d spent so long being angry at Father and Geisler for nearly everything. He just looked empty.

I let go a breath, so heavy and disbelieving it sounded like a laugh. He looked over at me. “What was that for?”

“Oliver, that’s . . .” He had to know. He had just been handed what I’d been wanting and working toward my whole bleeding life and nobody had ever noticed. “Studying with Geisler at Ingolstadt is what I want to do,” I said softly. “That’s what I’ve
always
wanted to do.”

“No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t want to join the mad doctor in his devil work.”

“He isn’t mad—”

“And how would you know? You haven’t seen what he’s doing. It’s not
you
cutting up bodies for him in the clock tower.”

“It’s science!”

“No, it’s insane. And I don’t want you telling me I should be grateful for this. I’ve heard enough of that already. Hell’s teeth, Ally, I thought you’d be on my side.”

“I am,” I replied. “I don’t want you to go!”

“But you’d go, wouldn’t you? If he asked you instead.”

“Oliver—”

“Don’t be an idiot, Ally.” He stood up and stomped down the stairs, skipping the last one so he landed hard on the cobbles, then glared backward at me. “God’s wounds, I thought I could count on you.” Then he disappeared around the front of the shop, and a moment later I heard the bell over the door sing.

I sat there for a moment with my eyes on the spot where he’d been. I felt clenched up and boiling and just a smidge panicked, because I’d never been apart from Oliver for longer than a night before and here he was leaving me for Germany. On the other side of the wall, I heard Father’s voice, then Geisler’s, and the shuffle of footsteps toward the door. I didn’t want to talk to either of them, and I sure as hell didn’t want to stew down in the shop with Oliver. There was only one person I could stand the thought of right then.

I stood up so fast the pieces of the pocket watch spilled off my lap, then I jogged down to the street and turned away from where Oliver had gone—across the square and toward the lake.

Mary was smiling when she came to the villa door, but I must have looked wretched, because it faded fast. “What’s the matter?”

“Oliver’s leaving,” I said. “He’s going to Ingolstadt with Geisler.”

A shout went up in the house behind her, a raucous and ravaged sound. A woman shrieked. Something crashed. Mary glanced over her shoulder, then put her hand on my arm, like she was holding me back. “Let’s walk down to the shore. Stay here, I’ll get my coat.”

We took the path through the vineyards and down to the lake, where we sat, with our shoes off, on the trunk of a bare cedar that had toppled into the water. Our feet made ripples in the dark water as I told her what had happened. “You shouldn’t be angry at Oliver,” she said when I was finished. “He didn’t ask for it.”

“But he says it’s wicked work, and that I shouldn’t be interested in it.”

“But you are, and he can’t change that. Neither can you.” She dragged her toes across the top of the water, leaving a pattern like skipped stones. The cattails on the shore whispered as the wind snaked through them. “What is Dr. Geisler’s work, precisely?”

“Reanimating the dead with clockwork.”

“God’s wounds. That isn’t . . . real, is it? I mean, it can’t be done.”

“Not yet.” She sounded so horrified I didn’t dare
tell her the fiery fascination the idea lit inside me—the chance it
might
be possible—in case she too thought I was mad and wicked for it. I pushed my hands through my hair and shivered. Now that the sun was gone, it felt like autumn again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You shouldn’t keep it all tucked away.”

“I’m all right. Tell me about something else. Recite a poem or something.”

“I don’t want to recite. I want to talk to you.” She said it so quietly that I had to look sideways at her to be sure I hadn’t imagined it. Her shoulders were hunched as she braced herself against the fallen log, and the reflection of the first stars on the lake caught her face from below and freckled it with light. Even through my anger, I could feel her presence ringing inside me like a tuning fork struck against my rib cage. I had been dizzy over her all summer, but it wasn’t until that moment that I realized how badly I wanted her, in every way. Someone to talk to. Someone to hold and touch. It took everything in me not to reach out and touch her right then.

“It’s so quiet here, isn’t it?” she said. “Everything’s so loud at the house all the time. It was making me anxious, being shut up with all that noise. But I feel quiet here. I feel steady.” Her head was drifting onto my shoulder. I held my breath. “I feel steady when I’m with you.”

“You don’t like being at the house, do you?” I asked,
and immediately wished I hadn’t, because she raised her head.

“What?”

“At your villa—you don’t like it there. You always leave like something’s chasing you.”

“I like it fine,” she said, though her voice pitched on the word
fine
.

“So why are you always out with me and Oliver instead of them?”

“Is it so hard to believe I simply like being with you two?”

“Both of us?” I could have kicked myself for how disappointed those words came out sounding. I knew Mary and Oliver weren’t interested in each other in any sort of romantic way—they’d both told me so, and always seemed so disinterested in each other beyond whatever antics they were daring the other into. But even knowing that, I still wanted it to be me—just me, for the first time in my life, just me and not Oliver—that she liked best.

She looked over at me and her mouth twitched. “Well, Oliver’s good for a thrill, but he’s exhausting. You’re different. You’re very . . . simple.”

I snorted. “Thanks for that.”

“Oh God, sorry, I didn’t mean that you aren’t clever. You’re very clever. Much cleverer than me.”

“Now you’re overdoing it.”

“Sorry.” She laughed, one short, sharp burst. “What I meant is that I sometimes feel as though everyone around me is trying so hard to be complicated and coy all the time, but you’re so sincere in everything. You make me remember people can mean what they say.” And then she put her hand on mine, and pressed her thumb into my palm.

A charge went through me, and when I turned and she was right there, so glowing and lovely that I almost closed my eyes again because looking at her felt like staring into the sun. And before I knew what I was doing, before I had time to think or plan or let the part of my brain that usually kept me from doing irrational things have a chance to speak up, I leaned forward and kissed her.

And as soon as we touched, I knew I was wrong to have thought that we’d been building to this boil all summer. It wasn’t what I expected it to be, not warm or splendid, no fireworks or poetry. Mary’s lips were cold, and the moment we touched, she went corpse rigid. Then she put her hands against my chest and pushed me away. “Don’t.”

I was so mortified that for a moment the most sensible thing to do seemed to be to let myself slide into the water and drown. “I’m sorry,” I croaked.

“It’s all right.”

“God’s wounds, I’m so sorry, I thought . . . I thought you wanted it too.”

“Alasdair, I’m married.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in, but when they did, I felt them deep and cold, all the way down to my bones. “What?”

“I’m married,” she repeated. “Well, not yet. I mean I’m going to be. Once his wife . . .” A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “He has a wife, but he doesn’t love her. We eloped when I was fifteen, and we’ve been traveling while things . . . calmed down a bit at home. That’s why I’m here in Geneva. We wanted to get away.”

“That’s . . .” I couldn’t think how to finish, so I just gaped at her, treading silence like it was water. My ears were ringing, the twilight rippling around me as though I were seeing it from below the surface of the lake. I stared at Mary for as long as I could bear it, then dropped off the log, landing up to my knees in the frigid lake, and splashed to shore.

“Alasdair!” she called after me, but I didn’t stop. I snatched my boots from where I’d left them and tried to yank them on over my wet skin as Mary skirted across the fallen tree like a tightrope walker and came to stand beside me. “I should have told you,” she said.

I flung the boots to the sand and raised my face to hers. She seemed so small, standing there on the shore with her arms wrapped around herself and her hair trailing in inky curls over her shoulders. “Yes. You should have.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you felt—”

“How could you not know?” I cried, my voice ringing across the empty shoreline. “I’m so bleeding
sincere
you probably read it all over me. And Oliver told you, I know he did.”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“And did you tell him about your almost-husband?” She looked away, which was answer enough. My hands curled into fists. “God.”

“I only told him last week, because he saw Percy and me at the market. Please don’t be angry with him, I asked him not to say anything to you.”

“I am angry with him,” I replied. “And I’m angry with you. You told me you were traveling with friends. What the hell have you been doing hanging around with two
boys
all summer when you’ve got an intended? God’s wounds, Mary, why did you lie to me?”

“Because I didn’t think you’d want to be around me anymore once you knew,” she cried. “Everyone back home was so cruel about us traveling together without being married. I hoped things would be better here, but it’s even worse. Percy and his friends have a reputation for being sordid, so everyone seems to think that’s permission for them to make our lives their conversation. The papers run vulgar stories about us every week. People steal our underthings off our washing lines. Tourists rent telescopes so they can stare into our bedroom windows from across the shore, did you know that?”

“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop, that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t explain why you lied to me.”

“Then how’s this: when I met you, you didn’t have a clue who they were, or who I was, and I saw a chance to be free of that and I took it.”

The moon had risen in earnest now, and in its light, I could see her clearly across the beach from me: arms crossed, chin raised, Mistress Mary, quite contrary, daring me to blame her for what she’d done. “Mary, I have told you
everything
about me. Things I’ve never told anyone before. Secrets that could get me killed. So why couldn’t you tell me that you were engaged?”

We stared hard at each other for a long moment, and I silently willed her to say something that would take us back to just before I kissed her, some reason to go back to trusting her without question and adoring her just as blindly. But when she finally spoke, all she said was, “I’m sorry.”

I snatched up my boots without putting them on and stalked off, sand caving under my feet. I wanted to say something more, wanted to think of something mean to throw back in her face. Oliver would have had something to say. He always did. But all I could do was walk away, trailing broken pieces behind me.

The flat was dark when I got home. I stumbled through the kitchen and pushed back the quilt strung up to divide our corner from the rest of the room. Oliver was lying on
his pallet, sucking on his unlit pipe while he read by the light of a candle stub. He looked up when my shadow fell across him. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out,” I replied, already stripping off my clothes.

“You’re all wet.”

“No shit.” I flung myself down on my pallet so that my face was away from him. I was too hot for blankets and too exhausted to change.

From behind me, Oliver asked, “What’s wrong?”

I thought about confronting him. About rolling over and letting him have all my anger, because how could he act like Ingolstadt didn’t matter, how could he say Geisler’s work was wicked, how could he not tell me that Mary was married?

But instead I packed it up tight and deep inside me and said, “Nothing.”

“Are you angry at me?”

“No. I’m tired.”

There was a pause; then he said, “All right,” and a moment later the candle went out.

And that was the last real conversation we ever had.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

B
y nightfall, the storm had settled into a whisper. Snowflakes wafted across the yard and a faint sliver of moon peered out from between the feathery clouds. Over supper, Geisler announced we’d be leaving the next morning.

I should have been ecstatic, with the promise of the return to Geneva to fetch Oliver, track down my parents, and end the nightmare of the last two years, but it felt as though a splinter had lodged inside me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong. I kept thinking about the list I’d found in Geisler’s office, and the other pieces of this strange puzzle that I just couldn’t quite make fit together in my head.

Geisler disappeared after supper, muttering something
about orders to be filled, and Clémence went with him. This left me alone with that nagging, deep and persistent like an itch in my lungs. I tried to press on with
Frankenstein
, but I kept losing the thought at the end of every line, and found myself reading paragraphs over and over without getting anything from them. I finally gave up and turned in early, but I lay in bed for hours, not even dozing, staring at the window with my eyes wide open.

The moon was high when I decided if I couldn’t sleep, I was going to work on something. I needed clockwork, and I needed it badly enough that I was willing to risk both Geisler and the automatons to go back to the workshop and finish reassembling the clocks I had torn apart.

I dressed in the dark, not bothering with a waistcoat and instead throwing on my coat over my shirt and braces. I remembered the empty fireplace in the workshop last time I had visited, and stuck a matchbox in my pocket for good measure. I’d have candles, if nothing else.

I padded softly through the house, peering around every corner like a burglar to make certain the automatons weren’t about. The keys to the workshop were hanging beside the back door, and I eased them off the hook with my breath held, hoping they wouldn’t rattle. The keys didn’t betray me, but the kitchen door did—it creaked when I opened it. I stood still for a moment, certain I heard ticking machinery coming my way from the hall, then dashed out into the night. The snow between the house and the
workshop was well trodden enough that my footprints would go unnoticed.

I unlocked the workshop door and peered around the frame to be certain I was alone before I went in. The room was as bare and chilly as before. I retrieved the Carcel burner from the workbench and fished a match from the box, but my hands were so shaky from the cold it was tricky to strike. When it finally caught, I tipped it against the burner wick, not realizing how close to my fingers it had burned until it singed me.

“Dammit.” I dropped the match onto the floor and stuck my smarting finger in my mouth. The wick’s flame wavered but stood tall as I replaced the shade one-handed and moved it to get a better look at the tools. There weren’t as many out as there had been before; they’d all vanished except for two clunky spanners with bright rust creeping across their edges. I did a quick lap of the room, opening drawers and searching for more, but everything except the broken clocks had been cleared out.

I cursed under my breath, then retrieved one of the clocks and moved it to the table nearer the window, into the moonlight. I didn’t have tools, but, at the risk of pinched fingers, I could still mess about. I pulled back the chair and sat down.

Next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back on the floor. I blinked, shaking stars from my eyes, and realized the chair had tipped backward when I sat and sent me
flying. I pulled myself up and examined the chair, which was now sprawled on the ground beside me. It only had three legs; the fourth, which was still sticking straight up from the floor, wasn’t a leg at all. It was a lever.

I crawled forward for a better look. There was a thin seam between the base of the lever and the floorboards, but when I pressed my eye to the gap, it was too dark to see what was below. I ran my knuckles along the wooden floor and rapped hard. The sound that returned was hollow. There was some empty space underneath the floor, tucked away and hidden.

I didn’t stop to think what I was doing. I just I seized the lever and pulled.

Immediately the floor beneath me began to tremble, accompanied by the low rasp of gears interlocking. Then a trapdoor began to sink into the floor, leaving a half-meter square of pure darkness beneath the worktable. The pale beam of my burner illuminated a set of rungs, but I couldn’t see a thing beyond the pale splash of lamplight. Not how far it went, or what waited at the end.

I backed away from the trapdoor, my eyes still on it like something was about to leap out at me, then retrieved the smaller of the two spanners from where it lay on the workbench and tucked it into my braces. I didn’t know what was beneath the floorboards, but my mind kept drifting to the automatons, and I felt a spanner might be a better weapon against them than anything else. I wished I’d
brought the pulse gloves, but they were still stashed up in my bedroom.

I returned to the trapdoor and peered down again. The light from the burner seemed somehow fainter, though that may have been just a trick of my waning courage. Before I lost my nerve, I picked up the burner and placed my foot gingerly a few rungs down, easing myself into the hole. My head was beneath the floorboards when I heard a creaking above me. The gears were lurching forward again, the trapdoor moving back into place. For a moment, everything inside me screamed to scrambled back out to safety, but I banished that swell of panic with the knowledge that the gears were on my side, under the floor, and I could get them moving again if I needed to. I wouldn’t be trapped.

It was a short descent, probably half as long as the stairs in Geisler’s house, but the smell assaulted me immediately. It was rotten and metallic, heavy with dead flesh—I knew it from our workshop back in Geneva, but this was sharper. Fresher. I edged down, letting my feet explore the darkness for a moment before they found the next rung.

I finally reached a dirt floor, and straightened. My head brushed a beam. I held up my burner, trying to see what lay ahead, but its light barely stretched beyond the base of the ladder. Not far enough to see the room or its contents properly.

“Hello?” I called. My voice echoed faintly, but there
was no reply, just the steady slither
of water running down the walls.

I reached out behind me until I found damp stone and walked along it until my fingers knocked into what felt like a cold, smooth tube. I raised my lamp. A transparent half cylinder of glass about the width of my fist protruded from the wall with what looked like a thick candlewick inside of it. The tube ran parallel with the floor just below my eye level and disappeared ahead of me into the darkness.

I set my lamp on the ground and fished for the matches in my pocket. I lit one and held it experimentally against the end of the wick. It caught just like a candle and smoldered, still too faint to see into the room. But its light illuminated a knob, at one end of the tube, that connected to a rusted pipe just above it. I twisted it. There was a click like gears, followed by a slow drip, then suddenly, with a
whoosh
, the flame began to spread along the wick, stretching the perimeter of the room and bathing it all in a bloody light.

The room was clearly Geisler’s laboratory, but it wasn’t the workshop full of cogs and gears I had expected. This was less a workshop and more a morgue, or a scene from some medieval dungeon. There were human limbs—
fresh
human limbs, I realized with a jolt—wilting on a gouged, bloody bench. Some were split down the middle, with gears spilling out between the seams as though they had
been stuffed in rather than lined up to actually operate. Unmistakably human organs were stacked in pickling jars on a shelf above them, floating in a frothy yellow liquid, and skin was stretched and pinned against one wall like tanning leather. In the center was a heavy metal table, blood and rust on its bolts glinting the same flaky orange.

The glass lighting tube stopped at a spot on the wall where the darkness seemed somehow deeper. I took a few steps toward it before I realized it was a barred cell like a prison. Inside were two naked bodies, one lying facedown, the other on its side with its back to me. I reached through the bars with my spanner, hooked it around an arm, and tugged. Instead of the body rolling over like I had expected, the torso crumbled away from the legs and fell onto its back. The entire front of the chest was missing, rib cage nothing but bloody splintered stumps and the inside stripped clean. The corpse was empty.

I stumbled backward, tripped over myself, and sat down hard on the dirt floor. The thought of what might have occupied the floor before me sent me scrambling back to my feet so fast I knocked over my burner and snuffed it. I had to swallow hard several times to keep myself from being sick. I had seen bodies before, seen them gutted and stripped and reconstructed, seen metal fused with muscle and bone, even done it myself, but there was something about this, the brutality and obsession of it, that made me light-headed.

I needed to be out of here. There was no chance I’d forget what I’d seen, but I didn’t have to stare at it any longer. I groped along the wall for the knob that had ignited the glass tube and turned it the opposite direction. Like the Carcel burner, the flame sank and died with a chatter of gears, leaving me in total darkness. I stumbled forward until my shin smacked against the bottom rung of the ladder and I started to clamber up, one hand groping above for the trapdoor. My fingers brushed cold gears, and I started clawing at them, feeling for the lever and the mechanism that would get them moving again and set me free.

Then, above me, the workshop door opened.

I froze, listening hard. Footsteps crossed the floor, passed above me, and stopped, followed by a soft
flump
like the sound of a heavy cloth hitting the ground.

I eased myself down onto the top rung, trying to determine who was walking above me and what chance I would stand if I made a run for it. I would risk the automatons—I was certain I could outrun them back to the house. But if it wasn’t an automaton, it would be Geisler, and I couldn’t let him catch me sneaking out of his underground laboratory.

A loud, hollow
thunk
on the other side of the floorboards made me jump. Something heavy had been dropped. Slow footsteps followed and the distinct buzz
of machinery. It had to be one of the automatons. If I snuck out the trapdoor and hit the floor running, I could make it out.

I gave a hard tug on the cogs beside me, then yanked my hand out of the way as they started to turn, lever churning like a piston. A sliver of pale darkness began to expand above me as the trapdoor opened. I waited, my body a loaded spring, until the gap was finally wide enough, then I hoisted myself up into the workshop and ran. As I reached the door, I tossed a quick glance over my shoulder to where I was certain the automaton was waiting.

But it wasn’t an automaton. It was Clémence.