This Monstrous Thing (9 page)

“I’m sure the comparisons are endless,” Geisler continued, “but you aren’t like him at all, aside from the physical resemblance. After knowing Oliver so well, I find your stoicism startling. Nothing on your face, whereas with your brother—as soon as he felt something, you knew it. It was written all over him.”

“I know,” I said.

Geisler picked up
Frankenstein
again and turned it over. “Your father, he was never very clever,” he said after a moment. “A good man, yes, but not particularly clever. When I met him, you were just a boy. Do you remember?”

“I remember,” I said. I had been small, but not too small to recognize when life changed. Near my sixth birthday, Father had started taking apart clocks, skipping supper, carrying spanners and hammers in his bag alongside his
surgical instruments. Our Edinburgh town house had been overrun by a new and unfamiliar group of men with limps and twisted arms, and it had all been prefaced by the first visit of the red-bearded man that Father called Geisler. I hadn’t been certain what it all meant then, but I understood well enough that some irrevocable shift had occurred.

“We need good men for our cause,” Geisler continued. “But I’d rather have clever men, and I find that most are one or the other. You’re either good, or you’re clever.” He smiled as he took another sip of tea. “Now, your brother, he was clever. Not with machinery—he was never interested in that—but certainly clever. He wrote well, thought deeply. When I heard that he’d died . . .” He trailed off and ran a hand over his beard.

It had never occurred to me what I’d say if Geisler asked for the details of Oliver’s death. I couldn’t use my rehearsed story about the accident in the clock tower—the only living person who could say otherwise was sitting across from me.

But he didn’t ask. Instead he finished, “I was devastated. I was very fond of him.”

I almost laughed. Oliver hated Geisler, even before he thought him responsible for his death, and from what he’d told me, they’d never gotten on. The only reason Oliver hadn’t been at the workshop the night Geisler was arrested was that they’d had a row and Oliver had come storming home early. But I didn’t correct Geisler. I just let
him sigh for a minute until he said, “I still wonder if I could have done anything to prevent it.”

“Nothing,” I said. “You couldn’t have done anything.”

“If I hadn’t asked you to go back for those damn journals.”

“You couldn’t have done anything,” I repeated. My insides were in hard knots.

“But you found them—my journals?” I nodded. “What happened to them?”

“I don’t know, sir. I think the police got them when they cleaned out the workshop.”

I thought he’d be angry about this—perhaps he’d called me here hoping I could reunite him with his research, but I’d abandoned them in the clock tower once we took Oliver to the castle and never gone back—but instead he smiled. “But not before you put them to good use.”

My heart made a sudden hurtle into my throat. “Sir?”

“Did you read them?”

I tugged at a stray thread on my trousers and focused on keeping my face blank. “A little.”

“So you saw the problems. The holes. The gaps where my work fell short. I’ve never been able to surpass the research I conducted in Geneva, or even duplicate it. Even then, at its best it was flawed. There were too many problems I could never puzzle out.” He looked up at me, firelight glinting off his spectacle lenses so that he seemed to be staring at me from brimstone pits. “But you did.”

My heart kept up its frantic rhythm, but I said nothing. I wasn’t certain I’d have been able to get words out if I had tried.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Geisler continued, still watching me. “Your father isn’t clever enough, but you are.” He sat up a little straighter, bringing his eyes back into focus. “Oliver is alive,” he said, and it was hardly a question, “because you brought him back from the dead.”

It seemed pointless to deny what he had already guessed, pointless to continue carrying this heavy load on my own any longer. My heart sank back to my chest; muscles I hadn’t realized I’d kept clenched for two years loosened as I handed the weight of Oliver over to him. “Yes,” I said.

Geisler sprang up out of his chair—he seemed to be resisting doing some sort of jig or pulling me into a hug. “And he’s all right, is he? Still alive, clockwork heart still ticking two years later?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s hiding in Geneva.”

“You are a wonder, Alasdair Finch, an absolute wonder!” he cried as he sank back into his chair. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to say to that. I expected him to press me for more details of the process itself—the exact weight of the copper I had used, the circumference of the gears and the placement of the mainspring. But instead he said, “How difficult that must be for you, keeping your brother’s life a secret.”

“It is,” I said, and admitting it felt like taking a deep breath after being underwater. “I think I did something wrong when I brought him back. He lost parts of himself.”

“Speech? Memory? I thought that might happen.”

“It’s more than that. He’s not the same as he was. He’s wild. Impulsive.”

“He was like that when he was younger.”

“But it’s sharper now, it’s different. He’s . . . wrong. I must have done something that ruined him.”

Geisler pressed his fingers together and surveyed me over the top of them. “And your parents know nothing?”

“No,” I said. “I never told them.”

“Perhaps I can offer you some assistance that you so clearly need.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “What if you were to begin at the university in January? If I were to give my department head a recommendation on your behalf, you’d be allowed to start classes in the new term without having to bother with an application.”

“What about Oliver?” I asked.

“Bring him with you,” Geisler replied. “The German Confederation is far kinder to clockwork men than France or Switzerland or any of the cities where your family has worked. And in a town like Ingolstadt, a progressive university town that values research . . . well, he may not be wholly accepted, but he will not have to hide like he does now. He could attend some classes at the university himself. He was fond of poetry, wasn’t he?”

“Once,” I said, and I could hear Oliver’s voice reciting Coleridge in my head.
Because he knows, a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread
. “I’m not sure he still is.”

“Well, perhaps we can rekindle that. And if not, we can find him a job, something to keep him occupied. But the main point is that he will not be your burden alone, Alasdair. I can help you care for him. You don’t have to think of him constantly, as I’m sure you do now. You can go to lectures. Meet young people your age. You don’t have to be the only one taking care of your brother any longer.”

It was like I had been sitting at the bottom of a river for two years, weighed down by Oliver, and with every word Geisler removed a stone from my pocket and I felt myself begin to rise, the surface in sight and sunlight rippling off the water. I felt light, lighter than I had in maybe my whole life.

I thought I could rise no higher, but Geisler continued. “You will work alongside me, of course. Not as my assistant, but my partner. You’ll show me the process you used to resurrect Oliver, and we can see that the psychological defects he suffered won’t happen again.”

A stone sank back into my chest. “I’m not sure it should be done again.”

“Nonsense. Do you have any idea what people will pay for it? And think of the notoriety! You are a pioneer of one
of the greatest achievements of all time! Alasdair, you will be canonized in the bible of science.”

I could have lived and died in those words, but then I thought of what I had put Oliver through when I brought him back—his waking in agony with no memory, the way he suffered every day at the mercy of his clockwork body, the gears that pinched his skin and tore what was left of him to shreds. I wasn’t sure I was ready to inflict that on anyone else, nor the pain of being an outcast. But perhaps with Geisler behind me we could rid the outcome of the less desirable side effects. And with more people like him, Oliver wouldn’t be so alone.

“Of course, if you are to work with me, our research would have to be kept secret until we were ready to reveal it,” Geisler said as he picked up his teacup. He chuckled as the rim touched his lips. “No more embarrassing little slipups.”

That tugged me from my thoughts. “Sorry, what?”

“Alasdair.” He held my name with a long, lean smile. “Did you think it was so opaque that I wouldn’t see your signature all over it? Surely all this was meant to attract my attention. And you wanted to brag. It’s natural.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about this.” He held up
Frankenstein
, spine toward me so I could see the title. The gold-leaf letters smoldered in the firelight.

“You think
I
wrote that?” I laughed out loud before I could stop myself. Oliver told me once I was borderline illiterate, and though he’d said it to be mean, it was barely an exaggeration. The thought of sitting down and writing an entire book, slim as it was, was daft. “Hell’s teeth, what makes you think that?”

Geisler cocked his head like a bird. “Have you truly not read it?”

“I only heard about it for the first time last week. I know it’s about clockwork. That’s all.”

“God’s wounds, Alasdair.” His face went pale, and when he spoke again, his voice wavered. “It’s about bringing back the dead.”

I’d already guessed it, but hearing him say it made everything inside me hush—a quiet so absolute it was several long seconds before I could drag words from it. “Using clockwork?”

“A resurrected mechanical man,” Geisler replied. “The story is fictionalized, of course, but the premise is a damn ringer for what you’ve told me. And it’s quite clear that the two leading characters are you and your brother.”

“You . . . you think that book is about Oliver and me?”

“I have no doubt. How else did you think I guessed what you’d done? As soon as I read it . . .” He leaned forward and seized my shoulder. “Alasdair, you can be honest with me. I have people—friends—who can help us. We can still turn this in our favor.”

“I didn’t write it.”

“If you’re lying—”

“I’m not lying, sir, I swear it!”

“Then someone already knows.” He stood up and took several halting steps across the hearth rug. “Who have you told about this?”

“No one. Not even my parents.”

“You’re certain no one knows? No friends, no one could have overheard you?”

I thought briefly of Mary, but I didn’t want to have to explain her to Geisler. He was finally starting to see me as something other than Oliver’s younger brother, and I wasn’t going to spoil that by looking like a lovesick puppy. “No, sir.”

“Oliver doesn’t have contact with anyone?”

“Oliver could have written it,” I said.

Geisler stared at me for a moment, then waved that away like stray smoke. “No.”

“He used to write,” I said, “before he died. He wanted to write poetry, why not this?”

“Because the portrayal of the resurrected man is less than favorable. Oliver would never paint himself such a way if he wanted any sort of recognition for it.”

“He doesn’t think himself a hero,” I said. “He thinks he’s a monster.”

Geisler frowned. “I’ll take that into account.” He tossed the book to me, and it landed with a
flump
on the
chaise. “You should acquaint yourself with it, Alasdair. This may prove more trouble than I’d care to deal with.”

“How could a book be that much trouble?” I asked, though even as I said it I thought of the Frankenstein badges in Geneva.

“Because the whole continent is reading it,” Geisler replied. “The account of a man turned monster. No one on God’s green earth would want to come back if it meant coming back like this.” He drained his teacup and set it back in its saucer so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter. “I recommend you spend the day reading,” he said, glancing out the window at the sky turning from black to gray as the day surfaced. “I can’t imagine you have anything else to occupy yourself.”

He started for the doorway, but I called after him, “What happens . . . ?” and he stopped. I swallowed. “What happens if I say yes? If I agree to study with you?”

“Then we’d go to Geneva immediately,” he replied. “We’d fetch Oliver and bring him here, where you both will be safe.”

“What about my parents?”

“If you’re certain they’ve been arrested, then our time may be running out. With enough evidence, a conviction could happen before the end of the year.”

I tallied the days in my head and realized that left us just shy of three weeks. “Could you help them?”

“I could try. I promise I will try.”

I stared hard at the fireplace for a moment, my teeth working on my bottom lip. It seemed too far away to touch, too unreal to imagine that in a few weeks my whole world could be different. I could be free of my parents, free from Geneva and running and being so bleeding afraid all the time. I could be doing real, important work, work I’d dreamed about doing most of my life. And I’d have Geisler to help me take care of Oliver—I’d be free of him too.

“We can’t leave until the snow clears,” Geisler said. I could feel him watching me. “If you need to think about it.”

“I don’t,” I said, and I looked up at him. “I’ll go with you. And I’ll show you where Oliver is.”

His face relaxed back into almost a smile. “I’m glad to hear it. It’s the only sensible option, you do realize that, don’t you?” I nodded. Geisler took a few steps back into the room and placed his hand on my shoulder—a gesture more fatherly than anything I could remember receiving from my own father. “You’ll be safe this way,” he said. “You both will.”

“And what about
Frankenstein
?”

His eyes narrowed, mouth tightening to a thin razor in the firelight. “I suggest you take some time to read it,” he replied. “Perhaps you can figure out who wrote your story.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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

T
alking with Geisler left me empty and exhausted, and I went straight up to my room and collapsed onto the bed. My ears were ringing and I felt so thick with what he’d told me that I couldn’t think clearly. As the sun rose behind the storm, I tried to sleep for a few more hours, but my eyes kept snapping open—like they were attached to springs—and finding their way to the writing desk where
Frankenstein
lay. The green binding looked more acidic than emerald now.

I didn’t last long against it. I threw back the bedcovers and snatched the book off the desk, then slid down in front of the fire, my back against the headboard, and cracked the spine.

It only took a few pages before my stomach started to
roll.

The story starts on a steamship expedition in the north, when a group of explorers pull a man called Victor Frankenstein, half-starved and frozen, from the ice. And as he dies, Frankenstein tells the captain the story of his life and the work that led his to dying in the Arctic.

Reading Victor’s narration was like listening to myself speak, as though I’d been hurled years into the future and was reading the diary of an older version of myself. It wasn’t my exact history, but the parallels were clear. We both began our lives as children of privilege and science, fascinated by clockwork and mechanics and the men made from it.

And Ingolstadt!—God’s wounds, Frankenstein left Geneva when he turned eighteen for Ingolstadt, same as I wanted to, to study clockwork and medicine and making metal limbs that move at the body’s command. He even had a professor to guide him, and I kept picturing the man red-bearded like Geisler. But Victor took things further than his professors thought he could. He wanted to use clockwork to reanimate dead tissue and restore life. He was cleverer than everyone else, and he knew he could do better work than anyone before him.

And then—there it was.

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.

The resurrection: it stared up at me from the pages like a ghost.

I lingered over that scene for a long time, read it three times over and tried to wed it with my memories of my own dreary night in November and map how they differed. It was bleeding strange to see what felt like the climactic moment of my life boiled down to a single page of short sentences that bellowed true inside me.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the mechanical wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form from cogs and gears? I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

That was how it had felt—wanting Oliver back so badly, knowing I could bring him back, and then as soon as I had, wishing I could undo it. Mary had told me once that we saw ourselves in books because humans, being creatures of vanity, look for their own reflection everywhere, but I didn’t think even she could have disputed that this was a thinly veiled version of my life.

I knew it deep in my bones, in a way I couldn’t explain.

It was Oliver, and it was me.

It took everything in me not to hurl the book into the fire. The story deviated from mine and Oliver’s after the resurrection—Victor fled Ingolstadt with his friend Henry and left his mechanical creation to navigate the world alone, which seemed the most cowardly thing he could have done until I thought of Oliver, locked up in Château de Sang. Had I run from him in just the same way?

I couldn’t stomach it any longer. I set the book spine-up on the floor and flung myself into bed, hoping desperately for sleep. But I lay awake for a long time, the memories of Oliver’s resurrection night flitting like moths through my mind.

A
fter Oliver died, my father had wanted everything taken care of quick and clean, like it might somehow hurt less that way. There was no church funeral, no flowers or mourning clothes. Just four of us at the graveside—Father, Mother, and me with a priest—two days after Oliver’s fall. The sky was salt gray, the ground soft and black after a night of rain. It was the first week of November. The first proper cold day we’d had since spring.

My parents stayed to make arrangements for the headstone, so I returned to the flat alone and lay on my pallet in the colorless afternoon light. Oliver’s mattress was still unrolled beside mine, and I reached out and rested my hand on the bare ticking. It felt like keeping his memory in place, like there was still some shadow of him in the room
and it was my responsibility to hold on to it. I didn’t move, even when I heard my parents come in. I just lay there, thinking, with the sharp corners of Geisler’s journals digging into my back from where I’d hidden them under my mattress.

Mary came that evening and threw stones at my window until I met her on the stairs to the flat. She was wearing a white cotton gown, too summery for the cold, and she looked so pale and bright against the overcast sunset. I stopped a few steps above her and looked down.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the cemetery,” she said.

“I didn’t want you to.” I’d hardly spoken in two days, and my voice came out coarser than I expected.

She nodded, looked down for a moment, then back at me, her eyes squinting up against the reflection of the sun on the shop windows. “Are you all right?”

“No.” The question was so daft, I didn’t even try to make my tone cordial. “Of course I’m not all right.”

She licked her lips. “What can I do?”

Nothing
,
I thought.
You can’t do a bleeding thing. You can’t make me love you less. You can’t change what I did or loosen the knot inside me or fill the hole that Oliver left. You can’t bring my brother back.

But I could.

I’d read the journals. I’d gone to the trial, heard all the details the police had scrounged up about the work Geisler was doing in the clock tower. And I knew what
was wrong with it. On the first day Oliver and I sat up in the gallery, the barrister was describing the dissection Geisler had been caught in the middle of, an attempt to bond clockwork parts to the inside of a corpse, and I knew instinctively why it had gone wrong. Without ever seeing his laboratory or watching him work—I just knew it.

The possibility of trying it for myself had seemed mad when I’d first considered it, but the last two days without Oliver—of living with myself and knowing what I’d done—had been so painful that when held up against them, the idea seemed strangely sane. The memory of Oliver falling from the top of the clock tower was clawing at my insides, begging to be written over, and even if everything went wrong, it couldn’t be worse than what I’d done already.

“You can come with me,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”

Mary followed me all the way to the cemetery without a question. She must have thought I wanted to go to the graveside, show her where we’d buried him, and have my own funerary rites, but instead I led her along the fence to the shed where the gravediggers kept their spades and handcart. I had my hand around the lock and was fishing a needle file out my pocket before she finally asked, “What are you doing?”

My fist closed around the file, so tight I felt it break my skin. “I need . . . ,” I started, but my throat closed up
around the words and instead I tried, “I want . . .” When I looked up at her, she had taken a few steps backward, away from me. “I know I can do it,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Geisler’s journals. I’ve got them. I know . . . I can do something. I can fix this.”

Her eyes widened with understanding, and she shook her head so hard a strand of her hair tumbled from its pins. “No, Alasdair, stop. You can’t use Geisler’s research. It’s just theories—it’s fiction!”

“I can do it, I know I can, I can do it better than Geisler. I can do it.”

“Oliver’s dead—that isn’t something you can fix.”

She reached out, and all at once something inside me broke like a snapped wishbone. The world tipped, the file slid out of my hand, and I had to crouch down so I didn’t fall over. That raw, bleeding mess inside me that had been curled up for days had detonated suddenly, and the pieces embedded in me were so sharp that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I had never felt worse than I did right then, crouched in the graveyard dark, with everything building on my back, bile rising in my throat and my insides twisted up and pulled tight. I thought I might be sick, but I wasn’t. I just crouched there, head in my hands, and let myself shake until Mary’s fingers slid along the back of my neck.

When I raised my face to hers, she looked so concerned that it made me want to scream. I didn’t deserve
compassion or pity from her—from anyone—when it was my fault my brother was dead. I felt like screaming. I felt like swearing and shouting and ripping something apart.

I felt monstrous.

I shook Mary off and retrieved my file from where it had fallen. Three sharp clicks with it and the lock snapped open. Mary watched with her arms wrapped around herself, and I knew from the way she was looking at me that there was something wrong with what I was doing. I didn’t care.

I retrieved a spade from the shed, but Mary stepped in front of the doorway, blocking my way out. “Alasdair, don’t do this. You need to go home.”

I swallowed back the urge scream again and instead said as calmly as I could, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. That was too much. You can go. You don’t have to help me.”

“I’m not leaving you alone,” she replied stoutly. “You’re out of your mind and you’re going to do something you’ll regret. You need to go home—”

I held out a spade. “If you won’t leave, then help me.”

I didn’t need her help, but the thought of being alone—truly alone for the first time in my life now that Oliver was gone—terrified me, and she must have seen that fear in my face, for after a long, still moment of staring at my hand, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the handle, on top of mine.

It took us hours to dig up Oliver’s coffin. The ground was soft and heavy after the rain, and we were both covered in it before long, mud and grime running in tracks down our skin. It was cold but I was sweating, and I kept stripping off layers until I was in just my undershirt and trousers. Mary had cast aside her bonnet and jacket, and her hair had fallen out of its arrangement and into a single plait that whipped about her face. We didn’t say a word to each other all the while we dug.

And then my spade hit wood with an empty
thunk
. The guilt sank its teeth in again, but this time I held myself together. The deeper we had dug, the more focused I had felt, and with the solid planks of the coffin under my feet, all the helplessness left me in a rush, and into its place funneled a cold and frightening calm.

Above me, I heard Mary murmur, “This is mad, Alasdair, this is absolutely mad.” She lowered herself from the lip of the trench into the grave so she was standing beside me. She was so spattered with mud I could hardly see her apart from the night. “No more secrets,” she said. “You have to tell me what we’re doing.”

I didn’t quite know myself. But I had Geisler’s journals, and I had read them, and I knew what had ruined his resurrections. I had Geisler’s journals and Oliver’s body and a snarled mess of grief and anger and guilt inside me, and I was going to do something about it.

“We’re going to the clock tower,” I said. “We’re going to bring Oliver back.”

T
he snow fell hard and heavy for three days. I hadn’t seen the sun since I arrived, and gusty winds made the windows clatter like something outside was trying to get in. Everything was wet and cold, and though the automatons kept the fires blazing, I never felt properly warm.

Geisler was adamant in his refusal to leave for Geneva until the snow settled and we had the promise of a safe journey. Waiting became a study in torture for me. I paced around the house, unable to sit still without my mind shuffling from images of my parents in prison, waiting to be executed, to my brother locked up in Château de Sang, probably ripping it apart brick by brick in an attempt to get out. I could already be too late, my new life tossed away before it had begun, yet here we sat, holed up in the ticking house, waiting for the snowstorm to pass.

And the only thing to do was read
Frankenstein.

I pressed on with it, but it never got easier or better. Even when the story ceased to be ours, reading Victor and knowing he was me stung. Victor Frankenstein was a clever man, and it made me think of what Geisler had said—you were either good or clever, and Victor was clever. He’d made his clockwork monster because once he knew that it was possible, he had to try it for himself.
He didn’t consider what he would do if it worked until the corpse was sitting up on his laboratory table. That wasn’t me, I told myself. I’d brought Oliver back because it was
Oliver
, and I’d missed him, and felt so damn guilty for what I’d done that I had to do something about it. I hadn’t done it to be clever.