This Monstrous Thing Page 8

  “Here, let me.” Clémence passed me the clock and I opened the face. I saw the problem right away—the gears were still moving, but the balance wheel slid out of place. As soon as I tugged it forward on its axel, the clock sprang to life, and I replaced it on the mantelpiece.

  “Well done,” Clémence murmured.

  “Couldn’t you fix it?”

  She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re Geisler’s assistant. How’d you come about that job if you don’t know how to fix a clock?”

  Clémence stared into the fire, and I wasn’t sure if it was the reflection of the flame on her face or if she was actually blushing. Then she looked back at me, pale as ever, and I guessed I had imagined it. “I could have fixed it,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you are as clever as Geisler seems to think you are.”

  When two of the automatons took over the kitchen to fix breakfast, I carried my tea into the sitting room and settled in a chair beside the fire. Clémence followed me, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, and took a spot on the chaise across from me. “Are you afraid of them?” she asked.

  “Of the automatons?” I shrugged. “They’re a bit unnerving, aren’t they?”

  “More than living men who are half mechanical?”

  “At least with clockwork men, there’s some bit of them that’s human.”

  “That’s not a common opinion. Most people think you surrender your humanity if you adopt clockwork parts.”

  “I grew up a Shadow Boy—I’m not most people.” I took a sip of tea and winced. It needed sugar, but there was no chance I’d brave the kitchen now that it was full of metal men.

  A gust of wind blew down the chimney, and the flames in the grate parted for a moment. Clémence turned her gaze out the window. “We’re lucky we beat the storm,” she said. “It’s not usually this bad.”

  “It used to snow like this all the time in Bergen.”

  “You lived in Bergen?”

  “When I was young.” I took another sip of tea, stupidly hoping it would taste better. It did not. “My family was thrown out of Edinburgh when my father started working with Geisler, so we went there.”

  “I’ve heard Norway is cold and dark all year.”

  “No, not at all. At least Bergen isn’t. It looks out on this bay and across the fjords, and they’re mostly green and lovely.” I remembered something suddenly, and almost laughed before I’d told the story. “There was this poem Oliver—my brother—was really keen on when we were younger. It’s about a pond or a lake or something. Some sort of body of water. And Oliver read somewhere that the pond—the real one, the one the poem is about—is outside of Bergen. So one day he took me out into the country, up into the fjords, and we walked for hours looking for that stupid pond. . . .”

  I trailed off. I hadn’t spoken about Oliver like this—stories from before—to anyone since he died, not even to my parents, and suddenly I could see him so clearly from that day, the sun on his face and the wind running its fingers through his curly hair as he darted up the path ahead of me, then turned back to wait until I caught up. Oliver, the way he used to be. The memory snarled something up inside me.

  I watched the flames stretch up into the chimney, hoping Clémence wouldn’t say anything more about it, but after a moment she asked, “Is there an ending to that story?”

  “It wasn’t really a story,” I replied. “Just something I thought of.”

  “Did you find the pond?”

  “No, turns out it was fictional.” I picked up my teacup and drained it in two swallows. “Not a real place at all.”

  An automaton came in with its arms full of kindling, and we fell silent. I didn’t want to talk about Oliver anymore. I didn’t want to talk at all, but Clémence was watching me like she had more to say. I searched around for something to show I was done with her, and my gaze caught on a book on the end table. I recognized the green binding, and knew what it was before I picked it up—Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The same book Mary had sent, with that strange title and no author, and I remembered that Morand had told me it was about Geisler.

  I flipped through it, scanning the pages without really reading, wondering if I’d see his name somewhere. A block of text stood out, centered and lonely, and I stopped.

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  I had to read it twice before I realized why it sounded familiar. It was the Coleridge poem Oliver had recited last time I’d gone to see him. It felt like such an impossible coincidence that I scanned the rest of the page. The last sentence jumped out.

  “Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed by the infernal engine that made me; being formed of metal, I was not even of the same nature as man.”

  My stomach lurched. The words were familiar—not because I’d read them before, but because they sounded like Oliver. I flipped a few pages further, so fast I sliced my finger on the edge.

  “‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a mechanical monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?’”

  I slammed the book shut hard enough that Clémence glanced up from her tea. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” I said, but the words were beating in my brain like blows from a hammer, a hollow echo of every conversation I had had with my brother over the past two years.

  This book wasn’t about Geisler. It was about resurrection.

  “Oh, you’re awake.”

  I jumped and almost dropped the book. Geisler was standing in the sitting room doorway, wrapped in a maroon dressing gown with his spectacles perched on his forehead. I jammed Frankenstein between the cushions and stood up. “Good morning, Doctor.”

  “Hardly morning yet.” He brushed past me and sat down in the chair I had just vacated. Clémence had sat up straighter and was watching him warily from across the room. Geisler returned her stare. “You have work elsewhere, mademoiselle,” he said to her. She stood without a word and glided from the room like a ghost. I tried to catch her eye as she left, but she kept her head down. Geisler gestured at her empty place on the chaise. “Please, Alasdair, sit down.”

  I perched on the edge of the stiff cushion as one of the automatons came in with a tray. “Would you like some tea?” Geisler asked me as the automaton poured him a cup.

  “I’ve already had some.”

  “I’ll have it left if you want more.” Geisler frowned and reached between the armchair’s cushions, emerging a moment later with Frankenstein. He smiled at the cover, then held it up for me to see. “Have you read it?”

  “No, sir,” I replied, though the words accursed creator were still ringing around my head like church bells.

  “Really?” He set the book on the table and took up his teacup. “As a piece of fiction, it’s sloppy and inept at best.” He glanced at me over the rim, then, just before he touched it to his lips, said, “But it has its merits in other areas.”

  I nodded, though books—even ones about clockwork and resurrection—were the last thing I wanted to talk about. I was burning to ask why he’d called me here, but I kept my mouth shut. He went on sipping his tea and staring at me with that same keen intensity he’d had when I first arrived. I felt dissected. Finally he set down his cup and steepled his fingers before his lips. His spectacles slipped off his forehead and settled on the tip of his nose. “How very like your brother you look,” he said softly. “In this poor light, I could almost swear you were Oliver sitting across from me two years ago.”

  I didn’t say anything. Behind me, the windows rattled as the snow struck them.

  “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 t
ore 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?”