This Monstrous Thing (13 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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C
lémence was crumpled on the floor beside the empty fireplace, bare arms wrapped around herself, but I could see she was naked from the waist up. Her skin looked bone-white against the darkness. On the floor next to her, her coat and blouse lay in a heap, the large spanner from the workbench beside them.

I stopped short, one hand on the door. Clémence looked up at the same time, and for a moment we just gaped at each other. I had to focus on keeping my eyes on her face instead of letting them wander down—even with her arms crossed over her chest, her bare shoulders were enough to make the air around me feel hotter.

“Clémence,” I said, her name the only word that shoved itself through my surprise.

She didn’t say anything, and I realized each of her deep breaths shuddered and cracked like a static pulse.

It seemed an idiotic question, but I asked anyway. “Are you all right?” Her hair swung over her shoulder as she shook her head. I took a step forward. “Can I help?”

She nodded and I went the rest of the way across the room and knelt beside her. When she spoke, her voice sounded like ripping paper. “Can you fix me?”

“Can I . . . what?”

Then she moved her arms, and I saw what she meant.

The skin across her chest wasn’t skin at all, but a hard steel panel that swung open like a door, and inside she was mechanical. Her rib cage on one side was gone, replaced by steel rods and a small cluster of churning gears connected to oiled paper bellows that jerked up and down as she gasped for air.

Mechanical, like Oliver.

She took another drowning breath and I realized one of her steel ribs had come undone and was sloping inward at an odd angle so that it pressed on the bellows and kept it from inflating properly. By some miracle, it hadn’t punctured her skin or the oiled paper.

“I can fix it,” I said. “A bolt’s come loose, that’s all.”

She flapped her hand toward the spanner she had discarded on the floor. “Wrong size,” I said, pulling the smaller one out from my braces. “I’ve got the right one here. Sorry.”

“So this is . . . all your fault,” she murmured.

“Did you actually try to fix it with that massive thing?” I nudged the large spanner with my foot.

Clémence laughed weakly. “Made it worse.”

“Yes,” I said. “Stop talking for a minute.”

It was hard to see in the dim light, and I wished fervently for the magnifying goggles that were probably in pieces back in my father’s ransacked shop. I reached down with one hand to the steel plate beneath the bellows where the bolt had fallen, then nudged the loose rib back into place with the other. Clémence gasped like she was surfacing from water.

I set the bolt in place and twisted it with the spanner, still holding her rib cage where it should be. “You’re going to be all right,” I told her as I worked. She didn’t say anything, but I felt her heartbeat slow. It was strange, the way I could feel it echoing through her chest, so close I might as well have been holding her heart in my hand. When I worked on Oliver, it was always gears ticking, but Clémence was real and alive, flesh on top of metal.

When I finished, she took several deep breaths, each steaming white against the cold air. I watched the bellows flex, returning more to their original shape with every inhalation.

“Better?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice still feathery but stronger. She shut the panel across her chest, then climbed to her
feet with a hiss of pain. I looked away as she retrieved her coat from the floor and wrapped it around herself, pulling it tight at the waist. For a moment, it seemed like she was going to walk out without saying anything else and we’d be left with each other’s secrets, but then, with one hand still pressed to her rib cage, she sank down again, and I slid from the balls of my feet so we were sitting side by side, with our backs against the wall.

Neither of us said anything for a while. We didn’t look at each other either, just stared forward into the darkness. Then Clémence asked, “Would you like to go first?”

“First at what?”

“Asking questions. I suspect you’re a bit slower to trust that I am, so I’m hoping that if I tell my story you’ll be more inclined to tell me yours.”

“All right, uh . . . ,” I fumbled, mostly because I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start, but Clémence interpreted my silence otherwise. She tipped her chin to her chest and smiled sadly.

“Am I that repulsive?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not that at all. I think you’re . . . remarkable.”

She looked up, and her hair caught a button on her shoulder so that it fell into a swinging arc beneath her chin. “You don’t have to—”

“I mean it.” I said. “How did it happen?”

She took a deep breath, and I heard the bellows inside
her inflate with a crackle. Now that I knew it was there, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t heard it before.

“I was born in Paris, you know that,” she said. “My family survived the Revolution by making bombs for the Jacobins, and when everything settled down, my father turned that enterprise into a business manufacturing mining explosives, and he made a lot of money doing it. It was a good life, I suppose, if you enjoy uncomfortable shoes and boring conversation.” She pushed the strand of hair behind her ear. “The spring I turned fourteen, I went to Geneva to see a friend. Against my parents’ wishes. Not that it matters. While I was there, I was in a carriage accident, and one side of my body was crushed. I was treated by Dr. Geisler, and he saw me as a chance to test an experiment he had been perfecting in his mind for years. Internal repairs, I suppose you could say.”

“I’m familiar with it.”

“He saved my life, but when I returned to Paris and told my parents, they threw me out.”

“God’s wounds. You’d think they’d be pleased you weren’t dead.”

“To them, I was. Being mechanical is as good as dead, and I’m worse because I can’t survive without clockwork in me. I’ve never met anyone else like that.”

I thought of Oliver but didn’t say anything.

“So I was a girl alone in Paris with no home or family and no money when I got word that Geisler was looking for
me. He wanted payment for his services, and I had nothing. I could have taken debtors’ prison, but that seemed like throwing away my second chance at life. So Geisler agreed to let me work for him and pay off my debt that way.”

“How long are you contracted with him?”

“Fifteen years.”

“So you’re not his assistant?”

She gave a brittle laugh. “No, nothing like that. I don’t know anything about mechanics, or medicine. I’m just paying off what I owe. Geisler doesn’t like me and he doesn’t particularly want me here, but I’m obligated to stay silent about the things he’d rather most people didn’t know about his research. Which is a good quality in a worker, I suppose.”

“So why did you tell me you were his assistant?”

“I don’t know.” She pursed her lips in what might have started as a smile but ended up looking like pain. “Because it’s a kinder word than
slave
.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my elbows on them. The cold was staring to come back now that I wasn’t working, and I shivered. “What sorts of things do you work on with Geisler?”

“You mean do I work downstairs?” She rapped the floorboards with her knuckles. “No point in pretending it isn’t there.”

I could still smell it, sharp and foul in the back of my
throat, and I resisted the urge to spit. “What’s he trying to do?”

“You saw it. And if you were in Geneva two years ago, you know. He wants to bring back the dead.”

I had guessed. But I needed to hear her say it.

“He’s been obsessed with it for a while,” she continued. “It sort of dropped off after we first left Geneva, and I thought he’d given it up. But since
Frankenstein
came out, he’s been back at it, more manic than ever. I don’t understand what he’s so upset over. He’s acting like that book’s an instruction manual for resurrection, but it’s just a stupid made-up story.”

“You came from Geneva with Geisler?” I asked, and she nodded. “So you were with him when he fled.”

“No, after he was arrested I hid out in Ornex for a while. We met up there after his escape and came straight here.”

“Oh.” The knot that had been forming in my chest loosened. She hadn’t been with Geisler the night he left the city, so she couldn’t refute my story about Oliver’s death. I was still safe.

She arched an eyebrow. “Why?”

“My brother died that night,” I said. “That’s all.”

“How did he die? You never told me.”

“You don’t want to hear that story.”

“I do. If you’ll tell it.”

I looked down at my boots. It occurred to me suddenly that I could tell her the truth. For the first time, I could tell
someone the real story of how Oliver had died. Clémence hardly knew me, and I hardly knew her. We’d probably part for good in a few days, and whatever she thought of me was of little consequence. I had gotten so rehearsed in my lie that I’d forgotten telling the truth was even an option.

“Geisler hid with our family for two nights after he escaped from prison,” I began, not quite sure which version was about to come out of my mouth—they both started the same. “The police were looking for him, and security around the borders was tight, so he thought it would be safer to lie low in Geneva before he made a run for it. The night he left, Oliver and I went with him. We were meant to be some sort of cover, and to be certain he made it safely to the river.”

I stopped. For a moment, I had thought I was going to say it—to say what I’d done. But then, all at once, I couldn’t. The words were caught inside me, too stiff and scared and soaked in guilt to find their way out.

There was no chance of telling the truth, I realized, not because of Clémence but because of me. I couldn’t say it out loud. It was hard enough to admit it was truth at all. So I reverted to the same story I’d told Oliver and my parents and myself over and over in my head across the last two years. “Geisler took us to the clock tower first, where his laboratory was. He wanted to get his journals with all his notes on resurrection. Oliver didn’t like the resurrection work—he’d been helping Geisler
with it as part of his apprenticeship, but he thought it was mad and he was angry that Geisler wanted to keep it going. They got in a row, Oliver jumped at Geisler, Geisler pushed him into the clock face, and it broke, and . . .” My voice snagged. “Oliver fell.”

“So Geisler killed you brother.”

“It was an accident,” I said, louder than I meant to. “Oliver thinks Geisler did it on purpose, but it was an accident.”

There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Your brother died.”

When I looked up, she was watching me with her head tipped. “Yes.”

“So how did he tell you what he thought about his death?”

I almost laughed at my own mistake. How many times had I thought I was so guarded and ready to face any question that would ever be thrown at me? But I had spoken without thinking, the same gormless way I’d addressed her in English when we met. Something about her disarmed me. “I misspoke.”

“I don’t think you did.” She studied me hard for a moment, like she was trying to find some answer in my face, then said, “That’s why Geisler sent for you, isn’t it? You brought your brother back from the dead, and he wants you to show him how you did it.” When I didn’t deny it, Clémence let out a long breath and slumped a
little farther down the wall. “How did Geisler know? Did you tell him?”

“No, he read it.”

“Read it where?”

“In
Frankenstein.
”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Geisler thinks it’s about Oliver and me.”

“Is it?”

I swallowed hard. Saying it out loud somehow made it feel truer than it had before. “I think so too.”

“God’s wounds. Are you some sort of genius, then?”

“No,” I said quickly. “I understand mechanical things. That’s all.”

“It takes more than that to bring someone back to life. Even Geisler couldn’t do it.”

“I didn’t know he was still trying. I assumed he gave up on his resurrections after they nearly got him executed.”

“He’s just gotten more obsessive. And brutal. You saw the laboratory. He tried to do that work at the university, but they shut him down. Threatened to have him arrested if he didn’t stop. That’s why he had this place built. The police keep an eye on it but they haven’t found him out yet.” There was a pause, then she asked, “Did he invite you to come do research with him?”

“Yes. He wants me to study at the university. He said I could bring my brother here if I showed him how the resurrection worked.”

“How much did you tell him?”

“Just that I brought Oliver back. Nothing specific.”

“Do you know Dr. Geisler well?”

“Not well. He was friends with my father. The first proper conversation we had was when I arrived here. Oliver knows him better than I do.”
And Oliver never liked him
,
said a small voice in my head.

“Did he tell you his bit about good men and clever men?”