This Monstrous Thing Read online

  I don’t know how long I was trapped in my bedroom—my newly repaired clocks had been abandoned in the workshop. But Frankenstein was still in my lap when a key scraped in the lock above my head. I tried to stand but wasn’t fast enough, so when the door opened behind me, I fell backward onto the hearth rug.

  Geisler looked down at me from the doorway, Clémence peering over his shoulder. “God’s wounds, Alasdair, what’s the matter?”

  “Your automatons,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “One of them locked me in.”

  Geisler scowled. “Stupid things,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. Please understand, they are imperfect creations, and they always seem to take things a bit too far when dealing with strangers.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I thought . . .”

  Geisler raised an eyebrow. “Thought what?”

  I glanced at Clémence. She was scrubbing at a spot on her hand. “I don’t know,” I finished.

  “Well, you’re all right.” Geisler smiled, then clapped me sharply on the shoulder. My arms were still sore from the automaton’s grip, and I felt the throb all the way to my fingertips. “Were you out in the workshop, by chance?”

  The question felt like a trick, but I knew I’d left evidence there and couldn’t get around the truth for long if I lied. “I was working on some clocks,” I replied. “It helps me think.”

  “That must have been it, then. My automatons work on strict instructions to keep intruders from the workshop. There’s always the danger of thieves, you know.”

  I nodded, though I couldn’t think of a thing there worth stealing.

  “If you stay away, I expect they’ll leave you alone.” He smiled again, but it felt like bit like a warning. “Apologies, Alasdair, my deepest apologies.”

  Geisler trooped down the hallway and disappeared into his bedroom, but Clémence stayed behind, watching me with no hint of a smirk on her face. “Are you all right?” she asked once Geisler was out of sight.

  “What? Yes.”

  “I know they can be rough.”

  “I’m fine.” I held up Frankenstein, cover toward her. “Have you read this?”

  “Why?”

  “Just tell me, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The main character, Victor,” I pressed on. “What do you think of him?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really remember.”

  “Well, try to.”

  I must have looked wild, because she leaned backward, away from the door. For a moment, I thought she was going to walk away, but then she sucked in her cheeks and said, “I think he’s thoughtless and arrogant.” My heart sank, but she wasn’t finished. “But I understand it. I understand why he did it. He didn’t mean for things to get out of hand, and he didn’t handle them well when they did.”

  “Do you know—maybe this sounds daft.” I scrubbed a hand through my hair. “Do you know if Geisler wrote it? I mean—that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? When I say it aloud—”

  “I thought that too, when I first read it,” she said.

  “Truly?”

  She glanced down the hallway behind her, then took a step into my room. “I think he must be involved somehow. It was all he talked about for months. Had copies shipped in special from London when it was first printed there. It must have cost a fortune. He was just so . . . I’m not sure how to describe it. Feverish about it, I suppose. This sort of wild thrill, though I never quite figured out if he was excited by it or panicked. Perhaps a bit of both.” She glanced down the hallway again. “Look, I have to go to the market in town and then fetch Geisler’s keys from his office, but I’ll be back later if you want to talk more about it.”

  “Can I come with you?” I asked.

  She arched an eyebrow. “It’s still snowing.”

  “I don’t mind. I’d like to get out.” I tried to look innocent, but it had suddenly occurred to me that if I could get into Geisler’s office with her, I might be able to find something that would either tick him off the list of possible authors or confirm it.

  I didn’t know if Clémence would let me come along if she suspected I was planning on snooping, and for a moment she stared so intensely at me that I was certain it must be written all over my face. But then she shrugged and turned away from the door. “Get your coat.”

  The walk to the town seemed longer than when we had taken it with Geisler. The storm was lightening, but the bitter wind drilled snowflakes into my skin. Clémence and I kept our faces deep in our scarves, hands fisted in pockets. She had swapped out her trousers and linen shirt for a blue dress, but she still wore the gray wool coat that I was certain had been made for a man. Her hair was loose, and the strands falling from her cap twirled in the breeze like ribbons. “I’ve never heard of a laboratory assistant doing the shopping,” I said to her as we walked.

  “Well, there’s no one else to do it,” she replied. “The automatons certainly can’t, and Geisler won’t do it himself.”

  “He could hire a housekeeper.”

  “Why? He’s got me.”

  “But that’s not your job.”

  Clémence blew on her hands, then shoved them back into her pockets. “I don’t mind. I do whatever makes me useful to him.”

  The market was set up in the main square, walled in by buildings that mercifully blocked the worst of the wind. In spite of the storm, there were still a fair number of people wandering about. Clémence kept her gaze on the produce she was buying and didn’t speak to the merchants until she spotted a man selling baskets of strawberries from a crate.

  “They grow them in the university greenhouses,” she explained as she dragged me over to see. “Where else could you get strawberries in weather like this?” She had a quick exchange with the merchant, shifting from French to German and then into what seemed like a crossbreed of both of them. I didn’t speak any German, so I stood stupidly at her shoulder while they chatted. The merchant held up a basket for her, and I noticed with amazement that his hand was mechanical, spindly silver fingers twitching as cogs meshed beneath them. In Geneva, a mechanical man walking openly at a market was rare, but selling goods from a university and having people purchase from him was unheard of. People spoke to him, addressed him like a human being, and didn’t run the other direction when they saw he was made of metal. I wondered if they’d treat Oliver the same way if I brought him here. Maybe not everyone would think him a monster.

  Clémence handed over her money, and as the merchant gave her a basket of strawberries, he pointed to me with a thin silver finger and said something in his German-French.

  “What did he say?” I asked Clémence.

  “He wants you to eat one,” she replied, holding the basket out to me. “He says they’ll make you live long and die happy.”

  I took one and bit into it. I must have made a ridiculous face, because Clémence laughed. “Good?”

  “Brilliant,” I replied.

  She took another from the basket, and for a while we just stood there in the snowstorm eating strawberries and sucking the juice off our fingers. Clémence closed her eyes and tipped her head back so that the snowflakes tangled in her eyelashes. “I can’t remember the last time I had strawberries.”

  “When my family was in Bruges,” I said, “there were good strawberries there.”

  “Well, you’ve just been everywhere, haven’t you?”

  I shrugged. “We had strawberries a lot when we lived there because they grew wild along the canals. Oliver and I snuck into this merchant’s yard to pick some once. We took our shoes off, because it was muddy, and then a servant from the house chased us away and we had to leave them behind and walk all the way home barefoot. Father gave us a good telling-off for that, but we got to eat ourselves sick on strawberries, so that made it all right.” I realized suddenly that I was babbling and stopped. “Sorry.”

  “You need to stop apologizing for everything. It was a good story. I liked it. You’re shit at endings, though.” She sucked the fru
it from a stem, then hurled it into a heap of rubbish piled against one of the shops. “I’m sorry your brother’s dead. It sounds like he was a riot.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and stared up at the university spire rising above the rooftops. Halfway through the story, I had remembered why he’d taken me to steal the strawberries in the first place: it had been my birthday, and I’d wanted them. That had been Oliver’s gift to me.

  “Yes,” I said, “he was.”

  We stood in the square for a while, sheltered from the wind, eating strawberries and not talking much. A group of boys from the university passed by, one of them proudly thrusting an exam sheet in the air while the others shouted and slapped him on the back. I watched them as they stopped for glühwein, all of them laughing and chatting like it was so easy.

  That was going to be me, I thought, and the weight in my chest lifted again. It was going to happen. Ingolstadt and uni. I could be back here in weeks, in this small, remarkable town, meeting interesting people, working with Geisler, studying things that fascinated and challenged me, not doing the shop work for Father I could finish in my sleep. I would buy strawberries at the market from a man who didn’t hide his mechanical bits, live in a flat all my own, and worry about exams and revision and class rankings and absolutely nothing else. I wanted it all so badly it felt like some part of me was stretching outside my body to reach for it.

  Half the strawberries were gone when Clémence declared she was cold and we should head for Geisler’s office. As we started to make our way between the last of the market stalls, the strawberry seller called out from behind us in German. Clémence turned and called something back, and he swept his hat off with an exaggerated bow.

  “I told him those were the best strawberries we’d ever had,” she translated for me as we turned out of the market. “I may have omitted the fact that you had better in Bruges.”

  “Where did you learn German?” I asked.

  “I had a tutor when I was young.” She slipped another strawberry from the basket and sucked on it. “Latin, English, and French as well.”

  “Dead posh schooling.”

  She snorted. “It was.”

  “Is your family still in Paris?”

  “Oui. In a large white house on the Seine.”

  “And what do they think of you working as an assistant to Europe’s most infamous Shadow Boy?”

  She looked up as we passed beneath the university gates, their gold letters muted by the spraying snow. “I don’t believe they think of me at all.”

  She said it so casually, like it didn’t matter, but when I looked over, she ducked her head and started walking so fast I had to jog to catch up. I didn’t ask her any more about it—I knew families could be sharp and fragile things.

  I had hoped there’d be a hunt for Geisler’s keys that would buy me time and justify opening desk drawers, but they were lying in plain sight on the floor behind the desk. Clémence snatched them up. I was ready to invent some excuse to stay longer, but when she straightened, she was smirking at me. “Well, while we’re here . . .”

  I stared back at her. “While we’re here what?”

  “We might as well see what we can find about Frankenstein.”

  “We?”

  “Since I’m helping you with some light burglary, I thought I should at least get equal partnership.”

  “What burglary? The door was wide open.”

  “I meant this bit.” She found a key on the ring and unlocked the top drawer. A set of pens rolled forward with a clatter.

  “You rascal.”

  “Don’t pretend this isn’t the whole reason you came.”

  When I didn’t deny it, her smirk went wider. I cast a quick glance at the door, then crossed behind the desk to her side.

  She shifted several books out of the way and peered in. “What are we looking for?”

  “Something to do with Frankenstein, I suppose.” I pulled a stack of papers out of the drawer as Clémence unlocked another. “No idea beyond that. Manuscript pages, maybe? Correspondence with a publisher. Does he have a laboratory on the campus where he keeps things?”

  “There are student labs, but they’re all shared.”

  “So nowhere safe to hide a . . .”

  I trailed off. I had pulled a blotched sheet from the bottom of the stack. Written across it in shaky penmanship was:

  12 December 1818

  Male, five foot ten inches, 152 pounds, consumption

  Female, five foot two inches, 104 pounds, whooping cough

  Male, six foot three inches, 198 pounds, heart failure?

  Male, six foot, 159 pounds, stab wound, two inches, lower abdomen

  Female, five foot three inches, 102 pounds, ???

  Female, five foot, 91 pounds, broken neck, some damage to skull

  There were small marks in pencil next to the first two descriptions on the list.

  “What have you got?” Clémence asked, and I handed it over for her to see.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  Her eyes ran down the list; then she folded it in half and dropped it back in the drawer. “No,” she replied, but she didn’t meet my gaze.

  “Let me see it again.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know it’s not important?”

  Her mouth twisted. “Forget it, all right?”

  “You do know.” I made to snatch it from the drawer, but Clémence batted me away hard enough that her fingers left a red imprint on the back of my hand. “Ouch! Bleeding hell, what was that for?”

  “Leave it alone, Alasdair. I thought you were here to find—”

  She stopped suddenly, and I heard it too—footsteps coming down the corridor toward us. The office door was wide open, and we were standing elbow deep in a professor’s papers, clearly doing something we shouldn’t be.

  The footsteps stopped just outside the door. We were both silent for a moment, then someone called, “Dr. Geisler?”

  I started to shove papers back into the drawers, but Clémence seized me by the front of my coat and yanked me toward her. Her face was suddenly very close to mine. “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Kiss me,” she replied.

  And, having no better plan, I did.

  She knocked me backward against the desk, one elbow slamming hard into my chest, and I barely caught myself before I fell properly. My hand sent an inkwell smashing to the floor. “Like you mean it,” she said, lips still on mine.

  I didn’t have a bleeding clue what she was doing, but I dug one hand into her hair while the other went around her waist. She wasn’t wearing a corset, I realized as she shimmied up against me, and when she inhaled, I felt her heartbeat skip against my chest like a broken clock.

  “What in God’s name—”

  Clémence bounced to her feet like a loosed jack-in-the-box. My hand was still so wrapped up under her coat, she nearly pulled me over. A professor in full robes was standing in the doorway, gaping at us. Me, I realized. Mostly gaping at me.

  “What do you think you’re doing, young man?” he snapped.

  “The door was open,” Clémence said breathlessly. She had somehow convinced her face to go as red as the strawberries.

  “Keep quiet,” the professor snapped at her, then turned his steely gaze back to me. “We expect better of our students. And in a professor’s office. I should have you suspended at the very least.”

  I tugged at my clothes and remembered suddenly that I had a uniform on under my coat. Clémence’s plan finally fell into place in my head. “Sorry, sir.”

  The professor took a menacing step forward. “I’ll have your name, young man, and I will be reporting you to the head of your department.” He folded his arms and glared at me. His foot started tapping as well, and I was reminded of Father and the big show he always liked to make of waiting for me. “Your name, please,” the professor repeat
ed.

  “Victor Frankenstein,” I blurted.

  His eyes narrowed. “Are you being smart with me?”

  “God, I wish I was.”

  The line of his mouth tightened. “Get out, both of you.”

  I reached behind me for Clémence, found her hand, and together we skirted out of the office. At the end of the corridor we broke into a run, and we didn’t stop until we were through the university gates. I could have kept going—probably could have sprinted back to Geneva—but Clémence stopped, hand pressed to her chest as she caught her breath, and I halted too.

  We stood in silence for a while, both of us breathing hard. I wasn’t sure if she expected me to speak first and give some sort of permission for what she had done, so I said, “That was clever.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve been cleverer. Sorry, I didn’t mean to throw myself at you like that. It was just the only thing I could think to do.”

  “It’s all right, I figured it out.” The rush was fading and I was starting to feel the cold again. I pulled my scarf up over my face. “God’s wounds, I left the papers all over his desk. He’s going to know we were snooping.”

  “I left the strawberries too,” she said. “If it’s any consolation.”

  I laughed louder than I meant to. A few people passing stared at me, and I clapped a hand over my mouth. The smirk crept back across Clémence’s lips. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I’ll go back later and tidy things up when that ass of a professor isn’t prowling.”

  “So we didn’t find anything,” I said as we started walking. “A complete waste.”

  “Don’t be so gloomy.” She knocked me lightly with her elbow. “Things will come together for you.”

  I almost laughed again, because for the first time in years, it seemed like they might. The snow was clearing along the mountaintops. We’d be on our way to Geneva in days. Oliver would be free, and I’d be free too.

  As we crossed the square toward the road to Geisler’s house, Clémence asked, “Was that your first kiss?”

  My heart pitched. “No,” I replied. “Was it yours?”

  “No.” She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, then grinned. “So I guess you haven’t always been like this.”