This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  The other possibility was that Geisler himself had written it. How he had captured some of the details, I didn’t know—maybe he’d pieced together stories he’d heard, stories from Father or Oliver, or perhaps he had puzzled it out and gotten lucky. After all, it was us, but it wasn’t our story, not exactly. But he knew the research. The novel could have been his invitation to me to come find him, but as I had not come quickly enough, he had sought me out. Perhaps he meant it as advertising for the work he wished to undertake with me. But that theory had more holes than my idea that it was Oliver.

  And more than that, there were the small things in the book, the uncanny things that no one outside my life should know. Those few lines of Coleridge Oliver had recited. An epigraph from Paradise Lost. A mention of a hot springs near Geneva we’d visited with Mary, and a story about a lightning-struck tree that I could have told from my own memory of a night in Amsterdam. Phrases I couldn’t read without hearing them in my brother’s voice. It was these fragments more than anything else that made me certain it was a story about me by the only person with reason to tell it: Oliver.

  There was one other person who knew what had happened: Mary. She knew nearly all of it, about Oliver and the resurrection and selected scenes from our strange lives before Geneva. Mary, the girl who lived in a lakeside villa with a gang of poets and novelists and loved scary stories and hauntings and tales about monsters. I thought suddenly of the letter she’d sent, sealed and lost somewhere in Geneva, and wished with a hollow pang that I’d had a chance to read it.

  But it couldn’t be Mary who wrote the book. I was so sure of it. It couldn’t be Mary because I couldn’t believe that the only person I’d ever chosen to put my trust in could turn on me.

  All the while I’d known her, she had been my most valiant secret keeper. Oliver and I had both fed her secret after secret—what our father did, Oliver’s work with Geisler, how much I wished it was me in his place—and she’d kept them all for us, stored away inside her as though they were her own. It couldn’t be Mary because the whole reason we met her—the whole reason we all became more than just a forgettable moment in each other’s lives—was that we had given her the secret of what our family did entirely by accident and had to put our trust in her before we knew her.

  It happened the second week of May, the start of that summer in Geneva, with a storm beating in the season. I was alone in the shop—Mum and Father were at Geisler’s trial, and Oliver had gone to meet Morand—when the door opened and the bell sang and a young woman with dark auburn hair came in, shaking the rain off her cloak.

  “Bonjour,” she called to me brightly. “May I wait here until the rain stops? I forgot my umbrella and I’m all the way in Cologny.”

  She was so pretty, and she spoke so fast and posh that my brain got tangled up. All I managed stammer was “Uh,” which she seemed to take as permission to stay.

  “Thank you so much, the weather’s just frightful.” She swept off her bonnet and flashed a brilliant smile in my direction. “It’s been so wet lately, hasn’t it? Even for spring. Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.”

  “That’s Coleridge,” I said without thinking. I was proud I recognized it, even though she said it in French.

  She beamed. “Yes! Do you like Coleridge?”

  “No, I’ve got a brother who does. But he’s good,” I added when she looked disappointed. “Coleridge, I mean. So I suppose I do, I like him. I don’t know, I don’t really read.”

  “Oh, he’s marvelous. When I was young, my father used to do recitations of the ‘Ancient Mariner’—”

  She was interrupted by the bell over the door, and in came Oliver, wet to the skin, with Morand behind him. Oliver looked in good spirits, but he stopped dead when he saw the girl standing across the counter from me. Morand turned away quick and tucked his clockwork hand in his pocket, eyes on a shelf of windup frogs.

  Oliver crossed his arms over his chest and fixed her with a stare. “Can we help you find something, mademoiselle?”

  “Oh, no thank you,” she replied. “I’m just seeking shelter from the storm. You must be the brother who likes Coleridge.”

  He looked so startled that I almost laughed, but he shot me a scowl nasty enough to shut me up and stalked to my side behind the counter. “You need to get her out of here,” he hissed at me in English. This had been our favorite trick for years—using one of our acquired languages so we could talk about clockwork business in the shop when there were nonmechanical customers about. We’d decided English suited Geneva best. We hadn’t met another soul in Switzerland who spoke it. “Morand got his arm smashed up by some men at the trial who were trying to make trouble for clockworks.”

  “Is it bad? I could fix it for him, if you don’t want to.”

  “I’ll manage. The framework’s bent, but most of the gears are all right. But I need to get him into the workshop now.” He cast a meaningful look at the girl, who was studying a shelf of windup horses.

  “What am I supposed to do about her?” I replied, still in English.

  “Find her a cab. Stick her on the omnibus. Bleeding hell, Ally, you knew we were coming, why’d you let her camp out? You can’t go falling over your feet every time a pretty girl looks your way.”

  “Shut it,” I snapped.

  “Get her out of here,” he replied.

  I glared at him, even though he had already turned away, then went around the counter to where the girl was still standing. “Would you like me to find a cab?” I asked her in French. “I don’t think the rain is going to let up for a while.”

  “That would be good, thank you,” she replied, and her voice was more clipped around the edges than it had been. Perhaps Oliver had put her off.

  She waited under the shop awning while I got drenched hailing a cab on the street. When one finally stopped, I held the door so the driver wouldn’t have to climb out. The girl lifted her skirts, hopped a puddle that was collecting between the uneven cobbles, and took my outstretched hand, her glove smooth as water against my skin.

  “Sorry for the trouble,” I said as she hoisted herself onto the step.

  She glanced over her shoulder at me, and the corners of her mouth turned up in a pointed smile. “It wasn’t any trouble,” she said in bright, clear, Britain-born English.

  My heart jumped, and before she could climb the rest of the way inside, I grabbed her arm and yanked her back down onto the street. She raised her chin, and a stream of rainwater cascaded off the brim of her bonnet.

  “Kindly release me.”

  “You speak English?”

  “I’m from London. I thought someone ought to teach you and your brother to be more careful.”

  “You can’t—” I started, then changed course and tried, instead, “Please don’t—” They’d hang us, all of us. Oliver and I were old enough, and we were both Shadow Boys in our own right. They’d string us up right alongside our parents. We’d known Geneva was dangerous, more than anywhere else we’d lived, but I hadn’t truly felt it until that moment, with my life and my family in the hands of this stranger, whether she knew it or not.

  Perhaps she did understand, or perhaps I just looked so panicked she took pity on me, for her face went soft again. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have frightened you like that. You won’t have any trouble from me, I promise.”

  “You can’t—” I tried again, but I was interrupted by the cab driver shouting at us over the rain, “What’s going on? Are you in or not?”

  “Just a moment!” she called up to him, then turned back to me. “Why don’t you come see me tomorrow and we can chat? I’m in Cologny, at Villa Diodati.” She said that name like it should have meant something, but I shook my head. “Oh, do you not know . . . ?” Her words trailed into silence, and she looked away. “I’m staying with some friends there. Come see me. Ask for Mary Godwin. Now, please, I need to go.” She pried my fingers off her arm, then climbed into the cab and shut the door. The clockwork kicked to li
fe with a crackling hiss, and a jet of steam exhaust dissolved against the rain as the cab pulled away.

  I waited until Morand had left and it was just Oliver and me in the shop before I rounded on him. “You bleeding idiot.”

  He hoisted himself onto the counter, grinning in an unconcerned way that made me want to slug him. “Are you still sore I made you get that girl a cab?”

  “That girl was from London. She spoke English, she understood everything you said.”

  He froze. “Shit.”

  “Right.”

  “Shit,” he said again, louder this time. “God’s wounds, I’m sorry Ally, I didn’t think . . .” He pushed a hand through his hair, leaving a track of dark curls standing straight. “Shit.”

  “She told me to come see her tomorrow. She wants to talk to us.”

  “Probably wants money to keep her mouth shut.”

  “We have to tell Father.”

  “No, don’t tell Father,” he said quickly. “We’ll go talk to her, but we won’t tell her anything more. We’ll figure out what she knows and then come up with some clever story that will explain what I said. We can do it. Everything will be all right.”

  I don’t remember what clever story Oliver came up with, or how long it took before Mary saw straight through it. I do remember going to see her that next day. She caught us before we were shown into the grand house and took us to a hillside overlooking the lake, just the three of us for the first time. Oliver and I were both dead certain she was going to ask for money to keep silent or else call the police on us, but instead she wanted to talk about Coleridge. Then Wordsworth. Then Paris, then the best places for pastries in Paris, then the pneumatic lift that had just been installed in the opera house there. Then somewhere along the way we started talking about castles and ghosts, and Mary told us she’d heard about a haunted château in the foothills, and then we weren’t standing any longer, we were sitting on the damp grass, then sprawled across it with our shoes off, and I told a story about Oliver thinking our shop in Amsterdam was haunted when really it was a squirrel living in the rafters, and Mary laughed so loud I swore the boaters across the lake must have heard her.

  When we finally got around to talking about clockwork, I was already certain: Mary Godwin wouldn’t tell a soul we were Shadow Boys.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  So it seemed to me that Frankenstein had three possible authors, and though each of them felt impossible for their own reason, I kept them ranked in my head: Mary, the least likely; then Geisler; then Oliver.

  As the storm outside continued to swell, I kept mostly to my small room, sick with the mystery of it all and growing sicker with every page I got further into Frankenstein. Victor returned to Geneva, where he and his creation were reunited. Then it was the monster’s story. He told Victor how he’d survived in the world he didn’t understand and that didn’t want him, having no memories or language or understanding of himself or anything around him. How he suffered at the mercy of his clockwork body, the gears that shredded him from the inside, the scars and sutures that twisted his skin; how no other man he met could bear the sight of him and he was thrown out of every place he went. But he was strong and fast, with the power of both metal and man, same as Oliver. I kept hearing the words in his voice: When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?

  And when the world had turned away from the monster, he turned his back on it. Burned a house to the ground. Murdered Victor’s friend Henry. Victor’s bride, Elizabeth. And his brother.

  I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, Victor said. Had he not murdered my brother?

  I shut the book hard around those words, tossed it onto the floor, and stood up. I had done nothing but read since we arrived, and I was starting to feel restless. My hands were itching after days without clockwork, and I was certain if I had to read a page further in Frankenstein, I’d throw up.

  I searched the house for Geisler to ask if he had any projects I could muck about with, but I found his bedroom door closed and got no reply when I knocked. I was too impatient to wait for an answer. I rescued several of the antique clocks from around the house, including the ones in my room I had gutted, and took them out to the workshop in search of tools. The wind was gusting, and even the short walk across the yard was a fight. Fresh tracks stretched between the house and the workshop, and I tried to step into them to keep the snow from falling down my boots. I was ready to pick the lock if I needed to, but it was unlatched, and I let myself in. The wind slammed the door shut behind me.

  The workshop was built like a coffin, long and narrow with bare walls and a wood floor. The fireplace was empty, and the room was cold enough that my breath clouded before my face. I had hoped for some half-assembled project of Geisler’s that I could study, but Geisler had spoken in earnest when he said he hardly used the place. It looked abandoned. There was a neat worktable with an unlit Carcel burner resting on one corner and a few tools arranged in a straight line across the wall. When I picked one up, it left an imprint in the dust. There were drawers full of gears rusted together, and a few steel rods propped in one corner, but it was altogether disappointingly empty.

  I set my clocks on the workbench, selected tools from the slim lineup, and started in. It was dull work—once you’ve fused cogs to skin and bone, pure mechanics is hardly a challenge. I had the clocks reassembled in under an hour but I didn’t want to go back to the house, so I started taking them apart and putting them back together again just for something to do. I worked until my fingers were clumsy with cold and I decided to start the clocks again and go back inside.

  I found an old pair of pulse gloves in a drawer, their metal plates rusted red around the edges. It took a long time rubbing them together before I got a charge built and pressed them against the exposed mainspring of the first clock. There was a snap of blue light like the center of a gas flame, then the gears began to turn. The clock hands did a full rotation, and a small cuckoo jutted out, shrieking. I watched it for a moment, letting it run its paces before I reached for the next one.

  A hand fastened suddenly around my wrist, and I yelped in surprise. I twisted around to see who had me prisoner, but all I needed was a glimpse of the silver cogs to know it was one of Geisler’s automatons, head rotating slowly so its glassy eyes were fixed on me. “Let go of me!” I shouted, but it didn’t make a damn difference. I tried to slide out of its grip, but its fingers felt strong enough to snap bone. As it dragged me to my feet, I clamped my free hand around its forearm, trying helplessly to pry it off.

  Blue light leapt from my pulse gloves and into the automaton. A bright shock traveled through its whole body, then its grip loosened and it stilled, head nodding forward against its silver-plated chest.

  I stared, waiting for it to spring back to life, but it didn’t move. Either the pulse had overwhelmed the clockwork and the automaton was out of commission for good, or it had tripped an automatic shutdown before something blew and another pulse would restart it—Father and I had built systems like that into some of the more complicated limbs we’d made to prevent the circuit from burning up. Curiosity started to creep through me as my heartbeat slowed. As horrified as I was by the metal men, the mechanic in me was dead keen to know how Geisler had designed them to handle a burst of current.

  I reached out experimentally and pressed my palm flat against the conducting plate on the automaton’s shoulder. There was another flash and it sprang back to its feet, system restarted and hand shooting out toward me again before I could properly dodge it. I stumbled backward and tripped on the edge of the workbench, but the automaton seized my collar before I fell and I was hauled back to my feet. I cursed aloud, though there was no one to hear, and tried to zap it again, but the charge had gone from the pulse gloves
. Before I could get them going, the stiff clockwork hands closed around my wrists, wrenching them apart and jerking me toward the door. I dug my heels into the floor, but they slid like I was on ice.

  The automaton dragged me from the workshop and across the yard, metal fingers digging grooves into my skin. My arms were burning by the time we reached the house. I tried to bolt again in the kitchen, but the automaton adjusted its grip so its arms crisscrossed my chest, pinning my arms to my sides and making it hard to breathe, let alone escape.

  I was tossed into my room so roughly that I stumbled, caught my foot on the edge of the rug, and crashed to the floor. The automaton stood at the threshold, eyes fixed on me, then slammed the door. A moment later I heard the shudder of a lock.

  I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t give. There wasn’t a keyhole to pick, just the slick iron handle. I started pounding on the door first with my fist and then with my whole arm, shouting, though I was certain neither Geisler nor Clémence was about, and the house’s only other inhabitants would likely side with their fellow who had locked me in. When that got me nowhere, I tried knocking off the handle with the fire poker, though I only half expected that to work, and giving it a shock from the pulse gloves, but that did even less.

  When throwing myself into the door only left me with a bruised shoulder, I tried the window instead, but I could barely get my fingers wedged into the narrow gap between the latch and the ledge. When I finally did, I found the window had been frozen shut by the storm, and no amount of tugging freed it.

  After a good quarter of an hour spent trying to crack the ice, I gave up and sank down with my back against the door, still halfheartedly hammering as I tried to work out what to do. I picked up Frankenstein from where I had left it on the hearth rug and stared at the neat type without reading, until my eyes crossed.