This Monstrous Thing (2 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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T
he clockwork arm jumped on the workbench as the pulse from my gloves hit it.

I stepped backward to Father’s side, both of us watching the gears ease to life and intertwine. The ball joint in the wrist twitched, and Father’s eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. His fingers tapped out a quick rhythm on the top of the workbench that set my teeth on edge.

Finally, eyes still on the arm, he said, “You used the half-inch stock for the center wheel.”

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.

“I told you to use the quarter.”

I thought about showing him the four quarter-inch gears I’d snapped the teeth off of trying to follow his
directions before I had gone with my gut and used the half-inch, but instead I simply said, “It didn’t work.”

“Half-inch is too wide. If it slides off the track—”

“It won’t.”

“If it slides off the track—” he repeated, louder this time, but I interrupted again.

“The ratio wheel’s running fine on half. The problem is that the ratchet’s catching on the—”

“If you don’t do the work the way I ask, Alasdair, you can stand out front and mind the counter instead.”

I shut my mouth and started putting my spanners back in their sling.

Father crossed his arms and glared at me over the workbench. He was tall and thin, with a boy’s frame that he’d passed on to me. I kept hoping I’d bulk up a bit, grow lean and toned like Oliver had been, but so far I was just skinny. Father looked dead harmless, with his tiny spectacles and receding hairline. Not the sort of man you’d expect to be illegally forging clockwork pieces to human flesh in the back of his toy shop. Some of the other Shadow Boys we’d met looked the part, with scars and tattoos and that sort of shady, underground air about them, but not Father. He looked, more than anything, like a toy maker. “Morand’s coming for this tomorrow before he leaves Geneva,” he said, tapping one finger against the clockwork arm. The pulse had been so small that the gears were already starting to slow.
“There isn’t time for trouble with it.”

“There won’t be.” I dropped the sling of spanners into my bag, careful to avoid the stack of books nestled in the bottom, and turned to meet his frown. “Can I go now?”

“Where are you rushing off to?”

I swallowed hard to push back the dread that bubbled up inside me when I thought of it, but I had put it off for the last three days—longer than I should have. “Does it matter?”

“Your mother and I need you home tonight.”

“Because of the Christmas market.”

“No. We need you for . . .” He pushed his spectacles onto his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because of what day it is.”

My hand tightened on the strap of my bag. “You thought I forgot?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“How could I forget that today’s—”

He cut me off with a sigh, the weary, heavy sort I’d heard him use so many times on Oliver but now belonged just to me.
I know
,
I wanted to say,
your older son was a disappointment, and now your younger son is even worse.
But I kept my mouth shut. “Just be home on time tonight, please, Alasdair. And put your coat on before you go out into the shop, you’ve got grease all over your front.”

“Thank you.” I swept the rest of my tools and the set of pulse gloves into my bag, then picked my way across
the workshop toward the door. There were no windows, and the flickering shadows cast by the oil lamps made the room seem smaller and more cluttered than it was. My breakfast dishes from the morning were still stacked on the chair where clients usually sat, and my teacup had tipped over so the dregs soaked into the worn cushion. There were gears and bolts everywhere, and a layer of rusty shavings coated the floor like bloody snow.

“French in the shop,” Father called to me as I pulled my coat on.

“I know.”

“No English. You sound more Scottish than you think, especially when you and your mother get going. Anyone could overhear you.”

“Sorry.
Désolé
.” I paused for a moment in the doorway, waiting for the rest of the lecture, but he seemed finished. He was still staring at that damn center wheel with his hands folded, and I wondered if he’d switch it out while I was gone. He’d get a pinched finger if he tried, and it’d serve him right for doubting me. I turned and headed down the short corridor that led to the shop.

The workshop door couldn’t be opened from inside—Father had rigged up that precaution after Oliver opened the hidden door in our shop in Amsterdam when there were nonmechanical customers out front. I gave a light tap and waited. There was a pause, then a
woosh
of air as the door chugged open.

After all morning shut up in the workshop, the winter sunlight through the front windows nearly knocked me over, and I had to blink hard a few times before the toys lining the walls came into proper focus. “Come in quick,” Mum said, and I stepped past her as she threw her shoulder against the door and it eased back into place with a piston hiss, leaving the wall behind the counter looking again like a shelf stacked with dollhouse furniture.

Mum wiped her hands off on her apron, leaving a smear of plaster dust from the door, then looked me up and down. She was dark haired, same as I was, and thin as my father, but I could remember a time when she hadn’t been. The last few years had carved her out. “Goggles,” she said, pointing to the magnifying lenses slung around my neck. As I shoved them under my shirt collar, she added, “And you’ve got grease on your face.”

“Where?”

“Sort of ”—she gestured in a circle with her hand—“everywhere.”

I scrubbed my sleeve across my cheeks. “Better?”

“It’ll do until you wash up properly. Did you get Morand’s arm finished?”

“Yes.” I decided not to mention the spat over the center wheel. “Don’t let Father hear you speaking English.”

“Is he in one of his moods about it?”

“Isn’t he usually?” I did my best imitation of Father.
“Nous sommes Genevois. Nous parlons français.”

She picked up the interior of a gutted music box and the set of jeweler’s pliers beside it. “Well, he can say it all he wants, doesn’t change the fact we aren’t Swiss, same as we weren’t French when we lived in Paris.”

“Or Dutch in Amsterdam,” I added, adjusting the strap of my bag as I turned.

“Hold up, where are you going? I’ve got something for you.”

I stopped halfway to the door. “Just an errand.”

“This late? It’s nearly supper.”

“It’s for the Christmas market,” I lied, then added quickly, “What have you got for me?”

She fished a wrapped package from the mess strewn across the counter and held it up. “It came this morning.”

I’d never gotten a letter in my life, let alone a package, and I took it curiously. There was a London port-of-origin stamp in one corner, and across the front was my name in thick, loopy handwriting that caught me under the chin and zapped me like an electric shock from the pulse gloves. “Bleeding hell.”

Mum frowned. “Don’t cuss.”

“Sorry.”

She poked hard at the pin drum with the tip of her pliers. “How’d I end up with two boys who cussed like sailors? We didn’t teach you that.”

I held up the package so she could see the front. “It’s
from Mary Godwin. Do you remember her?”

“That English girl who hung about you and Oliver the summer before—” She stopped very suddenly and our gazes broke apart. I looked down at the package, but that made my heart lurch, so I looked back up at Mum. She was staring at the music box, her fingers running a slow lap around its edges. “Everything happened that year, didn’t it?” she said with a sad smile.

It was such an understatement I almost laughed. 1816 had been the year that cleaved my life into two jagged halves, the before and the after—before Mary had come and gone, before Geisler had been arrested and then escaped Geneva, before Oliver had died.

Mum twitched her pliers in the direction of Mary’s package. “What do you think she wants?”

I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t imagine Mary would stick any of the unsaid things between us in a letter and drop it in the post after a two-year silence. “Probably just a catch-up,” I said lamely. “You know, how are you, I miss you, that sort of thing.”

I miss you.

I checked my heart before it ran away with that one.

Streets over, the bells from Saint Pierre Cathedral started chiming four. I should have been long gone by now, I realized with a jolt. I dropped Mary’s package into my bag, then started for the door again. “I’ve got to go, I’ll see you later.”

“Be back for supper,” Mum called.

“Yes.”

“You know what day it is.”

The inverted shadow of our name painted on the glass—
FINCH AND SONS, TOY MAKERS
—fell at my feet as I turned the knob. “I’ll be back,” I said, and shoved my shoulder into the door.

A gasp of December air slapped hard enough that I pulled my coat collar up around my jaw. The sun was starting to sink into the foothills, and the golden light winking off the muddy snow and copper rooftops was so bright I had to squint. A carriage clattered across the cobblestones, the clop of horses’ hooves replaced by the mechanical chatter of the gears. I got a faceful of steam as it passed.

I didn’t have money for an omnibus ticket, but I was running late and the books bouncing around in my bag made it heavier than I was used to. It was a good bet no one would be checking tickets today. When the police force had redoubled their efforts at exposing unregistered clockwork men in the autumn, things like free riders on the omnibus had slipped down their list of concerns.

I crossed the square and joined the crowds spilling toward the main streets that led to financial district and the lake beyond it. On the stoop in front of Hôtel de Ville, a beggar was sitting with his head bowed and a tin cup extended. One of his sleeves hung empty, but the arm
shaking his cup was made of tarnished clockwork, the leather gauntlet that covered the gears starting to feather with wear. Three boys in school uniforms sprinted by, and one spit at him as they passed. I looked away, though, and without meaning to, I started thinking about how I’d fix that rusted arm if he came into our shop. He needed thinner fingers with smaller gears, a hinge pin at the wrist—I would have added that to Morand’s arm if I’d thought Father would let me get away with it.

The omnibus was already at the station when I arrived, and I found a spot to stand beside the door, close enough that I could bolt if a policeman got on to check tickets. As the omnibus pulled away from the curb with a pneumatic growl, I retrieved Mary’s package from my bag and stared again at my name in her perfect handwriting across the front. Somehow it felt strange and familiar at the same time. I slid my finger under the seal and tore the wrapping off.

It was a book, green and slim, with the title printed in spindly gold leaf on the spine:
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

I didn’t have a clue what a Frankenstein was, or a Prometheus. I thought for a moment it was some of the daft poetry she and Oliver had spent all summer obsessed with, but there wasn’t an author’s name on the binding—not Coleridge or Milton or any of the others they obsessed over. I flipped through the first pages,
then back to the spine to be certain I hadn’t missed it, but there was only the odd title.

Curious now, I turned a few more pages and glanced at the first line:

My dear sister, you will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

The omnibus jerked to a sudden stop as a steamcycle cut into the street ahead of it. Someone bumped into me, and I lost my place on the page. I was a slow and stumbling reader on the best days, and the noise and swaying of the omnibus combined with all those massive words made it even harder. I tipped the cover shut. Mary knew I didn’t like to read—that had always been what she and Oliver shared. They’d spent the whole summer trading books, though he didn’t have many, and everything he gave to her she would return the next time we saw her, finished. When Oliver asked her how she read so quickly, she told him with a sly smile that she took books to bed like lovers. Perhaps she hadn’t meant
Frankenstein
for me at all, but as a gift to pass on. The fact that it had
arrived today of all days wasn’t lost on me.

The omnibus sped forward out of Vieille Ville, the old town built around the cathedral, and along the Rhone toward the financial district. As the street opened into Place de l’Horloge, the clock tower loomed above us, the clock’s black hands suspended at midnight and still as sentries. Built in celebration of Geneva joining the Swiss Confederation, it was the tallest tower in Europe, all industrial struts and iron beams, and boasted the largest clock as well—inside were gears wider than a grown man was tall, designed to operate on an electric charge. It was a spectacle, even though if the clock wasn’t running yet. The scaffolding had finally come down, the frosted-glass face repaired and a sparkling reflection of the frozen lake beyond the city walls. I pulled my coat tighter and looked away from it.