This Monstrous Thing (20 page)

I swallowed the urge to curse.

“So we don’t know where they are,” Jiroux continued. “And we don’t know where your brother is. But I suspect you do, and if you help us, we’re prepared to reward you for your services.”

I kept my mouth shut, hoping he would let me in on what sort of reward he had in mind, but he was looking at me just as intently, waiting for me to ask. I swallowed, then said, “What do you mean?”

“If we are able to capture your brother and suppress this rebellion based on information or aid you provide us, we will release both you and your father. We’ll give you time to get out of the city. No charges attached to your names. You’ll be free.”

My heart leapt, but I kept my face blank. “And if I don’t?”

“As a convicted Shadow Boy, the best your father can
expect is life imprisonment. With the evidence that you’ve been helping your brother, I’d imagine it would be significantly worse for you.”

They’d kill me if I didn’t help them, that’s what he was saying. But they’d kill Oliver if I did. “How do I know I can trust you?” I asked. “You made some deal with Geisler that you clearly never intended to deliver on.”

“Geisler was a fool,” Jiroux snapped. “His bargain was a desperate plea made by a desperate man. But you will trust me for the same reason he did: because it is your only choice.” He looked deliberately down at the chain on my ankle. I fought the urge to look down too.

“How long will you give me to find Oliver?” I asked.

“Twenty-four hours should be sufficient.”

“A day? That’s it?”

“I have a sense you’re not as ignorant as you claim, and I hope that a deadline will encourage you to work quickly before the rebellion has a chance to act.” He crossed his arms, his eyes narrowing as he studied me. “I know you don’t think much of me, Mr. Finch, but I hope you can see that I am simply trying to do the best for the city I have been charged to protect. Surely you understand that your brother and his rebellion are a threat to the safety of Geneva, and I hope we can count on your assistance to see that the threat is counteracted.”

He was staring at me like he was waiting for an answer, but I didn’t have a clue what to say. It felt like a trap. He
was asking me to choose between Oliver and Father, so whatever I did, I lost something important, and that felt so unfair it made my blood boil.

I had to swallow hard several times before I found my voice. “Can I see my father?”

Jiroux blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I want to see my father,” I said, louder this time. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

“He is.” He considered this for a moment; then he turned to the stocky officer still waiting by the door. “Go on, Ottinger, take him down. Five minutes, Mr. Finch,” he instructed as Ottinger came forward to unshackle me. “Then we’ll continue this discussion.”

My feet had gone so numb against the cold stones that I almost toppled over when I stood. Ottinger caught me by my unslung arm. “Easy.”

“I’m all right,” I murmured, stamping my feet against the floor a few times to get my blood flowing again.

“Here.” Ottinger cast a quick glance at the door to be certain Jiroux was gone, then bent down and unfastened the manacle from around my ankle.

“Thank you.”

He shrugged. “That way you aren’t clanking like a machine the whole way.”

We left the interrogation room and took a flight of narrow stone steps down. This was the police station, I realized as we walked. It wasn’t a proper prison, but there
were holding cells below ground and the interrogation rooms above. And it seemed I was going to have the privilege of seeing both.

Ottinger walked a few feet behind me, and at my side when the halls were wide enough. He kept one hand on my elbow, but his grip wasn’t strong. When I looked over at him, I realized he couldn’t be more than a few years older than me—maybe the same age as Oliver.

Out of nowhere, I missed Oliver so badly. I wanted Oliver here with me, by my side, holding on to me and steering me the way I should go like he always had when we were young. Not the Oliver that had stabbed Geisler in the throat. The Oliver I’d grown up with. The Oliver I’d killed and meant to bring back. I felt his absence deep and aching inside of me, the piece of myself that belonged to him broken off and buried. I could have cried from the hurt of it.

We descended a short set of stairs that opened into a dark hallway lined with cells. Ottinger stopped outside a door at the end of the row. “I can only give you five minutes,” he said as he unlocked it. “But my watch is sometimes slow.” He smiled, and I tried to return it but I think mine ended up looking more like a grimace.

The interior of the cell was barren and dark, the only light coming from a slotted window on the far wall. Matted straw was scattered across the floor, and there was a wooden bench shoved in one corner with a ragged blanket
draped across it. I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom.

Then, from one corner, came a voice. “Alasdair?”

I turned, and there was my father. He looked sick and pale, but he pulled himself onto his knees when he saw me.

“Father!” I was worried he’d tip over if he tried to stand, so I dropped down beside him.

“God’s wounds, Alasdair.” His hands were chained, but somehow he managed to maneuver me into a hug. It was the first time I could remember him holding me since I was a boy, and my body went stiff with surprise for a moment before I relaxed into it.

“I didn’t know what had happened to you,” I said.

“I’m all right.” He leaned back and peered into my face. “And you’re all right. How’s your shoulder?”

“It’s fine.”

“What happened?”

I hesitated. I wasn’t certain how much he’d been told. “Someone stabbed me.”

He didn’t press me on that one. Just nodded, like this was ordinary, then said, “I’ve been worried sick over you.”

“Well, don’t sound so relieved. I’m in prison.”

“Yes, but I thought . . . I thought it might have been worse. At least you’re alive.”

“What about Mum?”

“She made it out,” he replied. “Morand came to see
me—she’s with him in Ornex. She’s all right.”

“I should have helped,” I said before I could stop myself. “When you were arrested, I shouldn’t have run, I should have—”

“You did the right thing,” he interrupted. “You always . . . you always do the right thing.” His face darkened, and he slid down the wall. After a moment, I sat beside him. I was trying to shore up my courage to tell him what was going on, but he spoke before I could. “I saw Miss Godwin.”

“Mrs. Shelley,” I corrected.

“Yes, Mrs. Shelley. She told me . . . Oliver’s alive.” He shuffled his hands, and the chains around his wrists clattered against each other. “He was dead, and you brought him back, that’s what she said.” He paused for a moment, like he was waiting for me to tell him that was wrong, but I didn’t say anything. I’d gone suddenly breathless. Father tipped his chin to his chest, eyes downcast. Then he said, “That’s incredible, Alasdair.”

I hadn’t expected that. “What?”

“You brought him back. You did what even Geisler couldn’t.”

“But he’s not Oliver anymore,” I said. “I did something wrong and I ruined him. I made him into a monster.”

“I doubt that very much. From what Mrs. Shelley said, you made a human being. And humans are, by nature, monstrous.” He turned like he was going to meet my gaze,
then changed his mind at the last second and leaned back against the wall so that he could stare up at the ceiling instead. “That’s the thing no one seems to understand. I’m not even sure Geisler did. There are monsters inside all of us, clockwork men no more so than the rest. None of us are made to be one thing or another.”

“I should have told you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how.”

He nodded once, and a vein in his neck flexed. “Oliver was always a bit of an unexploded firework, we knew that. But you . . . I could always count on you.” And then he reached over, clumsy in a way I chose to blame on the chains, and put his hand on my knee.

I didn’t know what to say to that—probably couldn’t have spoken if I tried. All I could think about were the things I could tell him that would change his mind right then. That I’d abandoned Oliver to run away to Ingolstadt. That I’d nearly handed him over to Geisler’s experiments. Why he’d ended up dead in the first place. All the horrible things I’d done between that day and today. I should have at least told Father about Jiroux’s offer and asked him what I should do—that was the whole reason I’d come.
Don’t count on me
,
I thought.
I’ll let you down.

But I didn’t want to spoil the moment.

Now it was me staring at my bare feet with his gaze
on my face—I could feel it. I could feel, too, the seconds of our time left together falling away, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

After a long minute, Father said, “You need a haircut, Alasdair.” In spite of everything, I laughed. It was feeble, but still a laugh, and I heard the smile in his voice when he spoke again. “Your mother won’t like it if I return you to her all scruffy looking.”

Something about the impossibility of that hope stung deep, and my throat went tight. I felt Father’s shoulder brush mine. “Look at me, Alasdair,” he said. I did, and as our eyes met, I realized—maybe for the first time in my life—that his were the exact same color as Oliver’s. “We’re going to be all right,” he said. “
All
of us.”

It was a stupid promise. The sort that couldn’t be kept, and I think we both knew it. But right then, that didn’t really matter. It was something to hold on to.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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T
hey let me out that afternoon. Jiroux came to the infirmary with Ottinger and explained clearly the terms of my release: I had twenty-four hours to sort out my loyalties and find where Oliver and the rebellion were hiding out, then deliver that information to the police. If Oliver was caught and the rebels stopped thanks to me, Father and I would be freed and given passage out of Geneva. If not, we’d both be kept in prison, likely executed. If I didn’t come back before the end of my allotted time, they’d kill Father.

It was December the twenty-fourth. Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, I’d have to decide who I was going to sell out.

The last provision, and my only say in any of it, was
that I would get my boots back.

I walked barefoot beside Ottinger down to the waiting room where Mary was standing, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak with her hair pulled up beneath a bonnet and my scuffed boots in her gloved hands. Seeing her again made my insides tighten. I took the boots from her without a word, and she stood at my side while I struggled to pull them on and then lace them, with one arm useless in its sling. Ottinger noticed, and he bent down to help, leaving me standing stupidly while a police officer did up my boots for me like I was a lad. But my shoulder hurt enough that I let him.

When he was finished, he gave me my coat, and I turned without putting it on and walked out of the station. I didn’t say a thing to Mary, but I heard the door catch as she followed me out.

The day was gray and foggy, with a canopy of sparkling mist blotting out the sunlight and making the snow look silver. The streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, and I could hear sleigh bells down the way.
Christmas Eve
, I thought again, and my eyes found the clock tower silhouetted against the sky. I started down the street, my unslung hand fisted in my pocket and my face turned into my collar, away from the wind. Behind me, I heard Mary call my name. “Alasdair.”

I didn’t stop. Her bootheels clattered on the cobbles. “Alasdair, wait.”

She managed to catch up, and suddenly she was in front of me, blocking my path. Her dark hair whipping out from under her bonnet trailed behind her like a kite string.

I stopped. “What?”

She crossed her arms, breath smoking white against the air. “How’s your shoulder?”

“It’s fine.”

“If you’re lying to me, I’ll skin you alive.” I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, but I was so weary and sick it came out sounding meaner than I meant.

Mary scowled. “What are you laughing at me for?”

“If I’m lying. What a joke coming from you.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Mary—” I broke off and looked away from her. The two years between us were building at my back, the weight of all those unsaid, unexplained things, and it felt so heavy that I nearly sat down where I stood. I was angry—at her for
Frankenstein
and the way she was looking at me like she didn’t understand, at myself for this whole tangled mess, at Oliver because I had been certain there was something inside him worth saving but then he’d put the pliers in Geisler’s throat.

Mary looked away from me, up at the sky with the clock tower cut like a cameo against it, then down at the cobblestones, muddy snow congealing in the cracks between them. “I’m sorry about your parents,” she said. “And Oliver.
And . . . everything.” She reached out and took my hand, just for a moment, and squeezed it. A bolt went through me, somehow both ice and electricity, and I pulled away. Mary looked up. “I need to tell you what happened.”

“I know what happened,” I said. “You took my life and Oliver’s life and you made them into this book. You made us into monsters, both of us. I don’t see much more than that going on here.”

“That’s not it, Alasdair, I never meant—”

“Mary, I don’t have time to talk to you about this right now.”

“Well, maybe I need to talk about it!” she cried, and for a moment she was the same fierce, beautiful creature who had captivated me two summers ago. Then she looked down, face shadowed, and I lost her again like a reflection in a lake cracked by ripples. “Will you listen to me, please? There are some things I need to tell you.”

I only had a day. It felt like no time at all, like I didn’t have a second to waste on Mary Shelley, but there were answers I needed whether I wanted them now or not. It didn’t feel like the right place—three doors down from the police station, on a street corner in Geneva on Christmas Eve—but I couldn’t think of anywhere that would ever be right for this.

I sighed and sank down onto the stoop of a watchmaker’s shop. Mary hesitated, then eased herself down beside me. She pulled off her bonnet so I could see her
face, and her dark hair unfurled across her shoulders. Our arms brushed. For a moment, we both sat completely still as pedestrians and carriages clattered by. Cathedral bells were singing from the square.

Then Mary said very quietly, “Here’s the truth of why I spent so much time with you and Oliver that summer. All my life I thought I was a wild and brave girl who was not afraid of anything, but then I came here with Byron and Shelley and they were so much wilder than me. With them, everything felt so real and dangerous—all that sex and opium and acting as though we were living inside dark stories. I was frightened of the things they did, and I started to feel cowardly, like perhaps I wasn’t who I had always thought I was. Perhaps I wasn’t brave at all. But then I found you and Oliver, and you were . . . different. You were danger without ever feeling dangerous. You did adventurous things and I shocked you by doing them with you, and you made me feel wild without my ever having to do things that truly frightened me. You especially—I always felt so daring with you. And I loved you for it, because it was like you gave me myself back when I thought I’d lost it.”

She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes like she was drawing these memories from a deep darkness inside of her. “But then Oliver died, and it was so messy and complicated and the realest thing I’d ever seen. I was so frightened because I was a part of it. It wasn’t me doing the work, but I was there.
I was complicit. My God, Alasdair, look at what you did. You changed the rules of the universe. I think you were so caught up in the fact that it was Oliver, you didn’t realize that. But I did, and I didn’t know what to do with it. After it happened, you wouldn’t talk about it, and I couldn’t tell anyone else and I needed to make sense of it somehow. I tried to leave it behind—I went back to London, but it was still haunting me and I couldn’t run from it. You can’t hide from the things inside your own mind. So I wrote it all down, just to try and be free of it. It started with just you bringing your brother back from the dead.”

“On a dreary night in November,”
I said, the first line of the resurrection scene in
Frankenstein
.

She winced, like it was a jab. “But then my husband found it. I couldn’t tell him it was real, so I said I’d made it up. They were all writing horror stories while we were here, and I told him that was mine. And he liked it so much he wanted me to write more. If I had said no, I’d have had to tell him why, so I kept writing. And it felt so
good.
It was like I was finally making peace with what we had done.”

“So you should have burned it.”

“I couldn’t have done that. I’m its creator, same as you’re Oliver’s.”

I hated that word,
creator
. I wanted to spit and stomp on it. I hadn’t
made
Oliver. He’d done that himself.

“Then Percy showed it to his publisher,” Mary continued, “and they wanted to print it and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. So I hid you as best as I could.” She looked over at me. “I wrote it because I couldn’t keep it inside of me. You were always so good at that, but that was never who I was. I needed some way to work out how the rules of God and man and creation changed after you brought your brother back from the dead.” She pulled her legs up next to her on the stoop as a group of carolers shuffled past us, singing softly. “Do you know the story of Prometheus?” she asked. I shook my head. “It’s from Greek mythology. He’s a Titan who makes mankind from clay. It’s a creation myth, a way to explain the creation of man.”

“I know what a creation myth is,” I snapped.

“Then you understand that
Frankenstein
is mine. My creation myth, for men made of metal and gears. The only way I knew to explain what happened. It’s not your story, though,” she added.
“It started that way, but I didn’t know what happened after I left Geneva. It’s all made up.”

“It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true, Mary, because it’s us. It’s me and it’s Oliver—that’s where it started, and people will recognize that. They already have.”

She tucked her chin into her collar and said nothing.

“Are you in it?” I asked. “I thought maybe you were Victor Frankenstein’s wife, but I don’t think so anymore.”

“I think I was Henry at first. The observer. The best friend. The least clever out of everyone.” She smeared a patch of snow with the toe of her boot. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’m the monster. Perhaps we all are.”

I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself that speaking to Mary was poison flowing from my veins, but it was still poison, and it still burned. “Do you think I’m horrid?” I asked.

“What?”

“Victor Frankenstein is horrid. He’s arrogant and he’s cowardly and he puts his own cleverness ahead of anything else. Do you truly think that’s the way I am?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and her silence made my heart sink. “The night it happened,” she said slowly, “you weren’t yourself. You were so fixated on bringing Oliver back because you knew you could. You kept saying that to me,
I know I can do it.
You didn’t care about creation or morality or any of that. And that frightened me, because it was like I didn’t know who you were. That night, I thought I’d lost both.” She held her breath for a moment, then asked, “Do you know where Oliver is?”

I couldn’t say anything, so I just nodded.

“And you’re going to tell the police.”

She sounded so sure of it that I looked up. “You think I should?”

“Don’t you?”

“He’s my brother, Mary.”

“You really think he’s still your brother? That man who stabbed you, who killed Geisler and tormented me for days? I knew Oliver, and that creature isn’t him.” Her voice pitched, and she put a finger to her lips for a moment before she finished. “He never came back, Alasdair. We both know it.”

Something inside me splintered when she said that, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes. I felt her fingers run a whispered track along my spine. “You need to tell the police where he is,” she said. “You can save yourself and your father. If you see Oliver again, he’ll kill you.”

“Well, he’ll have to get in line, since Jiroux seems quite keen on it as well.” I stood up and brushed my unslung hand off on my trousers. “I’ve got to find Oliver. I have to be certain I know what the right thing is before I do anything.”

Mary stood too, shaking out her skirts. “I can’t talk you out of it?”

“No.”

“Then come see me after, so I know you’re all right. I’m at the villa in Cologny again.”

“I can’t leave the city.”

“Then I’ll meet you somewhere. We’ll find you a room for the night. The Christmas market—meet me there.” She reached out for my hand again, and this time I didn’t pull
away. “Please be careful,” she said, and when her fingers pulsed, mine responded with a spark.

We parted on the corner. Mary started back the way we’d come, into the sunset, and I went in the opposite direction, toward the Cogworks and the only place I could think to look for Oliver. If he wasn’t there, I didn’t know what I’d do.

I crossed the Rhone to Rive Droite, the north quarter of the city where the factories churned. The buildings here were all industrial brick, stained black by soot and grime, and the steamstacks belching into the sky made the air sweat. There were no casings on the industrial torches, just open flames tearing at the sky. Everything smelled damp and foul, and the shadows all around me seemed to stretch and curl like smoke.

If Oliver and Clémence had fled into the city like Jiroux thought, I was certain it was so she could take him to the rebels in the Cogworks. I could find him there, though I didn’t have a clue what I’d do if I did. When I closed my eyes, I could still see Oliver jamming his pliers into Geisler’s throat, and his fist on my shoulder when he stabbed me, and I couldn’t wed those images with the boy I’d grown up with, wild and reckless but good straight to his core. Perhaps Mary was right and I was foolish to try again. Perhaps he truly was gone.

The Cogworks was a single-floored, sprawling structure made of cut gray stone and grimy windows. The
door was bolted, which rendered my lock-picking skills useless, but there was a window that opened without much coaxing. I managed to hoist myself up with only my good arm, grateful for once that I was so bleeding skinny, and dropped onto the factory floor with a stumble. The darkness made the room look as though it stretched for miles, all haunted shadows and impassable shapes. Black outlines of workbenches lined with saws and factory tools cut through the gloom, their edges made molten by the pale dregs of the day’s coal still smoldering in the forges. The air was heavy and metallic, so sharp it almost smelled like blood.