This Monstrous Thing Read online

  Morand retrieved his hat from where he’d hung it on the back of the chair. “Tell your father if he ever tires of Geneva, I have a job for him. My boarders could use a Shadow Boy. Or maybe you’re interested. You’ve got quite the talent for it.” He looked at me like he thought I would answer, but when I stayed silent, he added, “Or, God forbid, if you’re ever in trouble, you can always find your way to Ornex. You know that. So do your parents.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He extended his metal hand and I shook it. “You’re a good lad, Alasdair,” he said. “Be certain you stay that way.”

  I hung back in the workshop when Morand went to say his good-byes to Father. As soon as the door hissed shut behind him, I reached for my bag and the copy of Frankenstein Mary had sent. I’d rather have my teeth pulled out than read most books, but I’d be damned if I didn’t slog my way through one about Geisler and his work.

  It wasn’t there. I emptied the bag, ran my hands along the pocket, even held the whole thing upside down like an idiot, but the book was gone. I thought for a moment I’d left it up in the flat, but I’d stowed my bag in the workshop before going upstairs to dinner. Perhaps I’d left it on the bus or dropped it on the way up to the castle. Perhaps I’d given it to Oliver by mistake with the other books.

  I groaned aloud at that thought. If it was truly about Geisler, that was the last book in the world I wanted him reading. I’d have to go by later and see if I’d left it.

  But it was already late. Father would have things for me to do, and wouldn’t let me slip away as easily as he had the day before. I could go tomorrow, I thought, but then remembered we had the Christmas market. The next day, maybe, but I knew I’d be exhausted. Perhaps after that. Wait until Sunday, when everything was settled.

  A thousand reasons not to go.

  I lamented less the loss of the book and more Mary’s letter that had been tucked inside it. I cursed myself for not reading it as soon as I got it. Damn Jiroux and the clockwork veteran on the bus. Damn my stupidity for losing it. Damn the way Mary still had a hold of me, my heart as true as a compass.

  I still couldn’t fathom why she’d sent the book. Perhaps she’d heard it was about Geisler. She’d known we were familiar with him, and she’d left Geneva before he and Father had their proper falling-out over Oliver’s death, so she wouldn’t know we’d parted ways. Perhaps she’d seen it was about clockwork and thought of me. Or perhaps she meant it as a warning. I thought of that small brass badge blinking up from Morand’s lapel.

  I pulled my legs up on the bench and stretched out, lying flat on my back and staring up at the dark shadows that the lamplight carved on the pocked ceiling. Mary had been nineteen the last time I saw her. She’d be twenty-one now, same age as Oliver was. Would have been. I wasn’t certain how I was meant to measure that anymore. We had that dreary summer together and the warm fall that followed it—Mary, Oliver, and I, thick as thieves, my mum had called us. Until Mary came along, I hadn’t known what it was like to sit in the sunshine on the lakeshore and think about absolutely nothing except the pale triangle of freckles peering from the bunched neckline of her dress. Life had never been that simple before, and certainly hadn’t been since.

  Mary, the first girl I ever loved. First girl I ever kissed. The girl who’d dug up my brother’s body with me. The sorts of things that stay with you.

  The workshop door hissed, and I sat up as Mum appeared in the doorway. “You want some supper?”

  “If you’re offering.”

  “Come upstairs, then, it’s hot. Your father’s closing up early to get things in order for tomorrow. Were you sleeping?”

  “No.” I looped my arms around my knees. “Just thinking.”

  She came and sat beside me on the workbench. We weren’t a very familiar family—never had been—but she put her hand on top of my knee and her thumb worked in a slow circle. “It’s a hard time of year, isn’t it?” she said, and I knew she wasn’t talking about the Christmas market. Then, like she’d overheard my thoughts, she asked, “What did Miss Godwin send you?”

  “A book. And a letter.”

  “What did she have to say?”

  I didn’t want to admit I’d lost it, so I said, “Just a hello. Nothing important.”

  “Is that the first time she’s written to you?” When I nodded, Mum made a soft humming noise with her lips pursed. “She was such a strange creature, wasn’t she? Always running around with you two.”

  “Oliver and I weren’t that strange.”

  Her mouth twitched. “I meant . . . well, there are rules about that sort of thing. About a young woman being out on her own with two lads. Though that never seemed to bother her. She was so contrary.”

  “Mistress Mary, quite contrary,” I said without thinking, then laughed. It was what Oliver and I used to call her—I had forgotten until I heard myself say it. Mistress Mary, quite contrary, like the nursery rhyme, because Mary seemed not only to ignore the rules everyone else lived by—like ladies don’t drink beer in pubs, they don’t say exactly what they think about clockwork rights, they don’t go gallivanting around Geneva with Shadow Boys—but to make a display of how much she didn’t care to follow them.

  Maybe it was the book from Mary, or maybe it was seeing Oliver, or maybe it was both those things squashed together in one day, but all at once I remembered standing at the top of one of the grassy foothills with the pair of them, the sky above us gray and rumbling with a storm. Oliver was saying we were going to race down to the tumbled pine tree on the lakeshore where we launched our rowboat when we didn’t have money to use the docks.

  “Wait a moment,” Mary interrupted, and bent down like she was going to take off her shoes, but suddenly she was hiking her skirts up around her waist, so high I could see her stockings up to her knees. All the blood left my head so fast I nearly fainted, and I turned away on reflex, though I would have been happy to keep staring. Next to me, Oliver was looking pointedly up at the sky, but when he caught my eye, we both started to laugh.

  “What?” Mary demanded. “Running properly in skirts is a nightmare.”

  We looked at each other again, then chorused, “Mistress Mary, quite contrary.”

  “Oh, don’t pretend like a lady’s legs are the most shocking thing you’ve ever seen, Shadow Boys.” She swatted at us, and we dodged in the same direction and smashed shoulders, which just made us laugh harder. Mary took advantage of our hysterics and shouted, “Ready, go!” Then she took off down the slope without looking back.

  Oliver shoved me off him with a shout and started to run, and I took off after. The tall grass was still sparkling with that morning’s rain, and it whacked sharp and wet against my shins. I was faster than Oliver—always had been—and I had passed him before the ground began to slope in earnest. He made a grab for the back of my shirt to slow me down, but I skated away. “Dammit, Alasdair,” he shouted, and though he tried to sound cross that I was winning, a laugh shattered inside it.

  I passed Mary as well and slammed into the tree ahead of both of them. Clutching at the stitch in my side, I turned back and watched them hurtle toward me, Mary with her skirts flapping around her knees and her hair coming loose as the wind grabbed at it, Oliver just behind her, his steps so high that each one seemed a leap.

  And in that moment I remember a very clear and sudden certainty that there was no one in the whole world that I needed but them.

  “How long has it been since Miss Godwin left Geneva?” Mum asked, and I had to blink hard to clear that overcast sunshine from my mind.

  “Two years,” I said. Same as Oliver.

  We didn’t say much over supper. Father was eating at top speed, and I swore I could feel him making mental lists of everything that needed to be in order before the morning. Then he put down his fork and looked across the table at me. “I spoke to Morand before he left today.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “He said he offered you a job.”

  Mum looked up as well. “Alasdair
?”

  I tore a piece of bread in half and traced the rim of my plate with it. “Not really. He just said he could use a Shadow Boy in Ornex. I think he meant it more for you than me.”

  “He said he’d be pleased to have you, if I could spare you.”

  “Can you? I thought you needed my help here.”

  “We could manage. It would be good for you to get out of Geneva for a while.” He was watching me with the same tight scrutiny he used on mechanical limbs, but I just shrugged. Father blew out a taut sigh and pushed his spectacles back onto the top of his head. “Well, what do you want, Alasdair? We can’t seem to interest you in anything lately.”

  “Bronson,” Mum said, his name a verbal step between us.

  Father swiped the corner of his mouth with his thumb, eyes still on me. “You’re nearly eighteen,” he said. “Time to start making a life for yourself.”

  “Alasdair,” Mum said from my other side, “why don’t you want to go?”

  I tossed my napkin on the table. “I just don’t,” I said, and my chair clattered against the floor as I stood. “I’m going to start packing things up for the market,” I added, then headed for the door before either of them could protest.

  Downstairs in the shop, I sat on the counter and shifted doll furniture from the back shelf into the straw-lined crates Father had prepared, and I thought about the offer from Morand. Father had seemed so keen on me taking it that I didn’t dare tell him how suffocated I felt when I imagined working at a boardinghouse in a tiny French town. I didn’t want to be a shop boy forever, not to him or to Morand. I thought of Ingolstadt again and the spot it held inside me, a spot hollowed out and smooth from running my fingers over it again and again. That stupid dream I just couldn’t let go.

  But any of that—even moving twelve miles up the road to France—was hopeless so long as Oliver was locked up in the foothills. There’d be nowhere to hide him in a town as small as Ornex, and there was no chance of letting him out on his own. The rest of my life seemed firmly shackled to Geneva and my resurrected brother, too wild and rough for the world.

  With the strict regulations on clockwork men and the Shadow Boys who made them, Geneva had always felt like a prison, even before Oliver kept me here. Geisler had encouraged my father to claim home in places where clockworks most needed allies—there was always more work for us there. We’d skipped from Edinburgh to Bergen when I was a child, then to Bruges, Utrecht, and Amsterdam in such quick procession that they started to blend together. All the timbered houses and canals, and the running and the fear and the never having enough to eat. It was hard to separate them anymore—everything was just seasons and years and the ages Oliver and I had been when we’d arrived and fled.

  But it was always Oliver and me, together, everywhere we went. I did remember that.

  I had better memories of Paris, where Father had started pressing Oliver harder and harder to start studying mechanics, and Oliver had pushed back with just as much strength. He horrified our parents by falling in with a group of boxers and coming home past dawn with his knuckles bleeding. Started smoking like a chimney. Never once showed up to the job Father had gotten him fixing clocks.

  Then he’d taken up with a dancer and told her about our work. She’d threatened to turn us in to the police unless we paid her off. Father had been ready to throttle Oliver, but our only choices seemed to be complying and hoping she died soon of consumption, or fleeing. At the same time, Geisler had been commissioned to do repairs on Geneva’s new clock tower and he suggested we join him. He’d had his eye on Oliver for years, and when he offered an apprenticeship, Father had snatched it up in yet another hopeless attempt to mold Oliver into the Shadow Boy and older son that he so badly wanted.

  And so we had left Paris for Geneva, and spent an uneventful year with Oliver and Father on the cusp of murdering each other, Oliver moaning to me about working with Geisler, and me pretending I wasn’t sick with envy over it.

  Then Geisler had been arrested, and Mary Godwin had arrived, and Oliver had died, and a piece of me had died with him, and unlike Oliver, it never came back.

  The bell above the shop door jingled and Father entered. I slid off the counter, because he hated it when I sat up there—mostly, I knew, because Oliver used to. With his arms crossed, he gave the packing I had done a critical inspection. “Don’t stack them too deep or the paint will chip,” he said. Then he slid his spectacles down onto his nose and took his place on the other side of the counter, and I stood across from him, crammed in a shop, in a city, in a life that was far too small.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Father was up earlier than usual the next morning, mucking about in the kitchen and clattering the teakettle to rouse me. I’d been awake for a while but I stayed curled on my pallet with my head all the way under my quilt, delaying actually getting up as long as possible. Sunlight was worming its way through the stitching, but when I pressed my hand against the bare floorboards the cold snapped at me, and I retreated. Too cold to be anywhere but under blankets, and I was about to spend all day standing outside.

  By the time I dressed and dragged myself into the kitchen, the tea was lukewarm, but Father was putting his coat on and I knew I didn’t have time to heat it. I choked down a cup as Mum, still in her dressing gown, watched from the table, with her hands wrapped around a mug. “Will you come down to the market?” I asked her as I laced my boots.

  She shook her head. “It’s always so crowded the first day. Next week, maybe.” She smiled at me as she took a sip of tea. “Take a walk around for me and see if you can find the best-priced marzipan.”

  “There won’t be any walking around, we’ll be working,” Father snapped from the doorway. He flipped his pocket watch open and frowned. “You’ve made us late, Alasdair.”

  I swooped in to kiss Mum on the cheek.

  “Stay warm,” she said.

  “Not likely,” I replied, and followed Father out of the flat.

  We retrieved the crates from the shop and started up the road toward the Christmas market. With sunrise still blooming along the rooftops, Vieille Ville was closed and quiet, but as we approached Place de l’Horloge, the city began to wake around us. Clockwork carriages chugged past, expelling clouds of steam that sparkled in the sunlight, and merchants unlocking their doors shouted to each other across the walks. Some of the shops already had their Christmas decorations up, evergreen branches and strung cranberries draped between the icicles clinging to the window boxes. Bakeries were advertising Yule log cakes, and the metal mannequins in the dressmaker’s window were wearing exaggerated hats studded with mistletoe and candles. The air smelled like pine and steam.

  Place de l’Horloge had been lined with market stalls built to look like miniature chalets, each with a dusting of snow on its beams, and holly garlands threaded the walkways between them. There were already vendors setting up shop, laying out everything from meats and cheeses to fine glasswork to children’s puzzles and marionettes. A giant mechanical Christmas pyramide had been erected near the center, the tiered wooden platforms lined with clockwork Nativity figures that rotated slowly. It was as tall as the buildings lining the square, but it looked small in the shadow of the clock tower. The whole market looked smaller beneath it—all the Christmas nonsense was usually held in Place de la Fusterie, nearer to the lakeshore and the financial district, but it had been moved this year in honor of the renovated tower and the clock scheduled to strike on Christmas Eve.

  I followed Father up one of the narrow paths between the chalets, trying to ignore his grumblings about being the last ones there, until we found our assigned stall. The wooden sign above the counter was still painted from the previous years—FINCH AND SONS, TOY MAKERS.

  It took most of the day to lay out the toys in a manner that Father deemed acceptable. The market didn’t open until sundown, and
by midafternoon he was making minuscule adjustments to the lines of windup mice and jack-in-the-boxes. I watched him as I chewed idly on a piece of bread Mum had sent for our lunch, and I tried to ignore the smell of roasting chestnuts and gingerbread from down the row.

  As twilight bled navy across the sky, clusters of candlelight began to appear around the square. The tree was lit and braziers smoldered orange against the night. Somewhere amid the stalls, a violin began to play “Un flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle.”

  The shoppers arrived with the darkness, first in solitary groups of twos and threes, then in packs, until our time between customers shrank to nothing. A choir started singing just down the way, and I had to speak over them whenever I addressed someone. My voice went hoarse counting out change, listing prices, explaining how to wind the dancing dogs.

  When I felt as though I was swallowing sand, I grabbed Father between customers. “I’m going to get a drink.”

  He readjusted his gloves, their tips cut off to better handle the toys. His fingers were red and chapped. “Don’t linger.”

  “I won’t. Do you want anything?”

  “No,” he said, like it was a daft question, then turned back to a woman weighing a windup mouse in her hand. I took that as permission, vaulted the counter, and set off in a snaking trail through the market. I didn’t linger, but I certainly wasn’t direct about it either, and I kept a sharp eye out for marzipan.

  I bought a mug of glühwein under the giant pyramide and stood at one of the tall tables while I drank it. Above the noise of the shoppers, I could hear the bells of Saint Pierre Cathedral up the hill chiming eight. It was going to be a long night. The market didn’t close until eleven, and after that we’d have to clean up. I leaned over my mug and took a deep breath, letting the cinnamon steam from the glühwein dampen my face.