This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  That and Geisler’s chatter. Now that we were on our way, a scientific expedition in progress, he seemed to feel permitted to interrogate me about Oliver and his resurrection. How long had it taken? What stock weight had I used for the gears? How had I handled the severed arteries?

  I dodged the questions as valiantly as I could, uttering “I don’t remember” more than anything else. “I hope you remember a bit more once we start work,” he snapped at me after what felt like hours of it. “Or else you won’t be much good for holding up your end of the bargain.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I’ll remember.”

  He grunted, eyes forward on the snowy lane. “Any more ideas about the authorship of your memoir?”

  I bristled at the term but kept my face straight. “Not yet, sir. I’ve been thinking.”

  We fell into a tense silence after that. I could feel Geisler stewing beside me, but he must have consoled himself with the thought that soon the three of us—he, Oliver, and I—would be together in Ingolstadt and there would be a living experiment for him to examine.

  On the fourth night of our journey, we crossed into Switzerland on an unmarked vineyard road and stopped at an inn a few miles from Geneva’s walls. Traveling had left me with a deep, full-body fatigue, but I dreaded sleep. I’d had nothing but nightmares since we left Ingolstadt, and they grew worse each night. Clémence didn’t seem inclined to go up to bed either, so after Geisler retired, we ordered warm wine and chouquettes and sat in the common room long after most people were gone.

  Three drinks in, I found myself warm and airy and talking about Oliver. I’m not sure how we arrived there—maybe it was the wine—but suddenly I was telling her stories from when we were boys, things I hadn’t thought about in years, let alone told anyone. Clémence listened, hands around her mug, and it was a while before I realized she wasn’t really saying anything, just letting me talk myself hoarse.

  “Oliver always got up to stupid things just to be daring, like nicking sweets and sneaking us into places we shouldn’t be. He had to touch everything we were told not to touch. Climb whatever said ‘keep off.’ That sort of thing. It got more serious when we got older. I bailed him out of jail twice. And he was so bleeding impulsive. Once, when we lived in Brussels, Oliver and I went to school, but everyone was mean because they knew what our family did. One boy threw rocks at me in the yard, so Oliver pushed him down a stairway and he broke his collarbone.”

  “God’s wounds,” Clémence said. I couldn’t decide if she sounded horrified or impressed.

  I tore a chouquette in half but didn’t eat it. “The headmaster asked us what had happened, and Oliver said we’d been acting out the Bible, and he’d been playing God.”

  Clémence laughed. “I’m not sure if that’s gallant of him to look out for you, or stupid.”

  “Both, I suppose. He was reckless. It’s a miracle he survived as long as he did.” I stopped and took a quick drink, but that deep, permanent ache that came with talking about Oliver had already surfaced strong as ever. At some point, wasn’t this meant to stop hurting so badly?

  “Are you all right?” Clémence asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just . . .” I scrubbed my hands through my hair. “You know how when you’re a child, you think you’re never going to die? You’ve survived everything so far, so you don’t realize that’s going to stop. I never felt that way. I was always so aware that I wasn’t indestructible—I suppose that’s a side effect of living in the world we did. But it never occurred to me that Oliver might die. He was half of my whole life, and no matter what happened or where we went, no matter how shitty things got, there was always the two of us. I always had him.” The candlelight reflected in the surface of my wine rippled as I worked my fingers around the mug. “And then, the week before we left Paris, Oliver cut his knuckles boxing when a man threw a bottle into the ring. It got infected, and all the travel and the sleeping on cold floors and not having enough to eat really knocked him over. When we got to Lyon, he could hardly stand, he was so ill.”

  I remembered it suddenly, clear as water—how pale and shaky he’d been, the slick fever sheen in his eyes, how I’d had to hold him on his feet as we stood in line to get our papers stamped because they wouldn’t let us on the boat if they knew he was sick.

  When we were finally on board, Father pulled me aside. He looked very serious. “We’ll be in Geneva in a few hours—Geisler will have a place for us to stay once we get there. But you need to keep Oliver awake until then. He’ll want to sleep, but you can’t let him.”

  “You should tell him,” I said, but Father shook his head.

  “He won’t listen to me.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “He’ll listen to you, Alasdair. He always listens to you.” He clapped me once on the shoulder like it was all ordinary, but his fingers went tight just for a moment, and I felt their print in my skin even after he let go. “Keep him warm and keep him awake.”

  Oliver was already below deck, curled up against our trunks with a blanket across his knees. When I sat down beside him, he pressed his forehead against my shoulder. His skin was burning. Then, like he’d overheard my conversation with Father, he said, “I’m so tired, Ally.”

  My heartbeat jumped, and I said quickly, “Well, stay awake.” He moaned and I added, “Recite something for me.”

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “Rubbish. Tell me something from Paradise Lost.”

  I felt him take a long, slow breath. “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” he murmured, then fell silent. When I looked over, his eyes were closed.

  “That’s good,” I said loudly. “Is that Shakespeare?”

  He opened his eyes. “That’s Milton, you ninny.”

  I knew that, because he was in his phase where he never shut up about Milton, but it seemed the only sure way to rouse him. He was so sick and pale at that point and I couldn’t remember a time I’d seen him that way.

  Somewhere, from a distance that felt like another world, I heard Clémence say, “Alasdair, you don’t have to talk about this.”

  I wrenched myself back to the present and looked across the table at her. She was watching me like she was afraid I might shatter. “I’d never thought about it,” I said. “Not until that moment on the boat trying to pretend I was just keeping him awake when really I was keeping him alive. And suddenly I realized that someday I might have to live in a world without Oliver. That one of us might die young and it might be him. I’d thought about dying, but never about being left behind, and that was so bleeding terrifying.” I could feel something in me starting to fray, so I put my head in my hands and held it there for a long, deep breath. My throat was tight, but I didn’t cry. I was afraid if I started, I’d never stop.

  Clémence’s fingers brushed my arm. “Alasdair.”

  I tried my best to rearrange my face into something like calm, but when I looked up at her, I still felt shaky. “I can’t hand Oliver over to Geisler.”

  “Have you been trying to work that out the whole trip? You should have asked me—I would have told you that a long time ago.”

  “Don’t be an ass, you don’t understand.”

  “So explain it to me.”

  I traced the rim of my mug with my thumb and stared down at the inky surface of the wine. “All I’ve ever wanted my whole life is to study at Ingolstadt with Geisler. And when I brought Oliver back, I had to give that up. But coming here, and what Geisler offered me—I could have it back again. I could have Ingolstadt and Oliver.”

  “So you really were going to assume your rightful place as Victor Frankenstein.”

  “Never mind.” I shoved my chair back and started to stand, but Clémence caught me around the wrist.

  “Sorry, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Sit down.” I stood still, face away from her, until she gave another tug and I let her drag me back down. She ducked her head,
staring down at the chouquettes, and nodded once. “All right. So you’re not giving Oliver to Geisler. What made up your mind?”

  I took a drink so I didn’t have to answer right away. I wasn’t sure how to explain that Oliver had been so good before he died—wild and impulsive and absolutely mental sometimes, but good. The more I’d thought about him since I left Geneva, the more I had remembered that. And if there was a sliver of that left somewhere inside of him, it was worth giving up Ingolstadt and clockwork and studying with Geisler. Because more than any of that, I wanted Oliver back the way he had been—the boy who’d stolen strawberries for my birthday and skated with me and knocked out a man’s teeth when he tried to hurt a clockwork beggar. If there was even a chance he was still there, I couldn’t hand him over for Geisler to take apart in his laboratory

  But instead of any of that, I said, “He’s my brother.” Right then, it felt like reason enough.

  The clock above the mantelpiece struck two. The common room was nearly empty. Clémence glanced up as a couple down the table from us departed, then back at me. “So you go to Geneva, play along so Geisler thinks you’re still on his side. Then you grab Oliver and run.” That was the extent of my plan, so I nodded. “And what happens to Oliver after that? Have you thought that maybe you should let him go?”

  “You mean on his own?” I shook my head. “I can’t do that, he’s . . .” I trailed off, remembering she had gears running inside her, but she finished for me.

  “A monster?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “You were going to use a sweeter word, but it still means the same thing.”

  “People wouldn’t understand him. He’d never find somewhere safe to live on his own, especially not with Frankenstein out. Can you imagine anyone would want Frankenstein’s monster renting a flat from them or working at their shop?”

  “Have you ever thought,” she countered, “that maybe Oliver only acts like a monster because you treat him like one?”

  I frowned. “How do you mean that?”

  “You keep him locked up, away from everyone. You’ve taught him what he is by that alone. There are places in this world that are safe for clockwork men. I’ve heard that in Russia they’re actually employing mechanics in their hospitals to help put men injured in the war back together. Most places are better than Geneva anyways, so get him out of there. Find somewhere to settle him. It doesn’t have to be far from you, but if he’s on his own, he won’t feel like he’s something that has to be hidden. That alone might change his temperament.”

  “What about this?” I pulled Frankenstein out of my coat pocket and set it on the table between us. “Oliver’s not like other clockworks—people will figure out it’s about him wherever he goes.”

  “Maybe you need to find the author,” she said. “Talk to him.”

  “I’m worried it might be Oliver.”

  “I don’t think so. He would have made himself the hero of his story, don’t you think?” She picked up Frankenstein and turned it over like there was some clue hidden in its binding. “The remarkable thing about this book is that everyone’s trying to make it a political statement, but I don’t think the author was. It just feels like a story. If you’re lucky, perhaps most people who read it will assume it’s fiction.”

  I thought of the badges issued to clockworks in Geneva. Frankenstein badges. People had already taken it as fact. “It’s too strange to be fiction,” I said. “There’s got to be a reason someone wrote it.”

  “And there’s no one else who knows?” she asked. “You’re certain?”

  “No one. Just me and Oliver and . . .” I trailed off.

  But Clémence heard the trail. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “You said and. There’s an and. Who’s the and?”

  I sighed. “Do you remember the girl I told you about, Mary Godwin? The first girl I kissed.”

  A slow smile spread across her face. “Alasdair Finch. Did you go bragging about your clockwork resurrection to impress a pretty girl?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that,” I said. “I mean it was, she was pretty, and I . . .” Clémence’s smile was going wider and I stopped before I made a fool of myself. “Oliver and I were friends with her in Geneva. After he died, I didn’t know anyone else I could ask and I couldn’t do it by myself, so she dug up his coffin with me, and went to the clock tower to bring him back. She was there the whole time.”

  “Then it’s her. She wrote it.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It has to be.”

  “No,” I said. “Mary didn’t write it.”

  “Yes she did,” Clémence replied just as firmly. “You just don’t want it to be her.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re still sweet on her and you can’t bear the idea that she gave up your story to the world, so you’ve talked yourself into believing there’s no chance it could be her. It’s much easier to suspect Geisler or Oliver or someone who you’re already not fond of.”

  “She wouldn’t write it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when you trust someone, they don’t do that to you.”

  “And you trusted her?”

  “I did.”

  “Do you, or did you?”

  “She wouldn’t write it,” I protested. “She knew everything about us and what we did, but she never told anyone. She promised . . .”

  I stopped. Mary had kept all her promises—that was the way I had decided to remember her. All I’d thought about for two years was that she was gone and how much I missed her, not how she’d left. I’d forgotten the day she disappeared, the last time we spoke. The last promise she’d made me. The one she hadn’t kept.

  We’d taken Oliver up to the castle, and it had seemed for those early days that no matter how badly things had gone, at least I had Mary to help me through. And so when she promised I could have my first sleep in three days and she’d stay awake to watch Oliver, I hadn’t even questioned that she meant it. I’d fallen asleep with my head on her shoulder and woken curled on the cold stone floor, just me and my alive-again brother, and when I went to find her, the man at her villa said they’d all gone home to London, just like that, without a word.

  I didn’t want it to be Mary who wrote it because I didn’t want to think she could break promises to me so easily. But she already had, the day she left Geneva, long before Frankenstein.

  “It’s Mary Shelley,” I said. “She wrote it.”

  Clémence crossed her arms. “To think I kissed you for this when you knew the answer all along.”

  “God’s wounds.” I dropped my head into my hands with a moan. “I’ve been such an idiot.”

  “You’ve not been an idiot. It’s hard to believe that the people we love can do terrible things to us.”

  “But why would she write it?” I snatched up Frankenstein and flipped through it like I’d find her name somewhere. “It’s not her story. She didn’t do any of it, she was just there.”

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is, you know it’s her, and you can find her and talk to her. Get Oliver out of Geneva, then find Mary Shelley. Convince her to tell everyone she wrote it and it’s all a bunch of tosh, none of it real. Then people will stop looking for the resurrected man and Oliver can have his life back. You both can.”

  My heart was racing, but I felt steady. At the end of a long, dark road, a faint slash of dawn seemed to be finally breaking against the horizon. “That’s what I’ll do,” I said.

  Clémence looked down at her mug, then up at the clock above the fireplace. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Are you going to be all right?”

  I nodded, though I still felt charged. Clémence stood and I thought she was going to leave, but she reached back across the table and put her hand on top of mine. “You can’t make people the way you want them to be, Alasdair. Sometimes you just have to love them how they are.”

  And with that,
she left me, and I sat up the rest of the night alone.

  Once I realized Mary had written Frankenstein, I felt foolish for not letting myself believe it sooner. She knew us. She knew about the resurrection, and Geisler’s work, and just enough of the stories of our lives to create these shadow versions of us in Victor Frankenstein and his monster.

  And she had wanted to be a writer. The whole time she was in Geneva, she’d been fed a steady diet of gothic stories by her friends, and she had devoured them like sweets. Some of them she passed on to Oliver and me, like the legend of a castle tucked in the foothills outside the city, a hundred years abandoned and supposedly stuffed with ghosts.

  So of course, she decided, we had to find it.

  “I don’t know exactly where it is,” she confessed as we started hiking up into the pines. “I’ve only heard about it from my friends.”

  “If it’s your friends who told you about it,” Oliver called over his shoulder as he jogged ahead of her, “why don’t they take you?”

  Mary fisted her skirts and tugged them up out of the mud. “They don’t go for that sort of thing.”

  “So what sorts of things do they do?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, spirit summoning and exorcisms and demon worship.”

  I stopped dead, at the same time Oliver turned back to her and said, “God’s wounds, are you joking?”

  She laughed, but she didn’t say she was.

  The slope had barely begun in earnest when a storm broke overhead, the hard-driving sort of rain that plagued the city that whole summer. The pathway went slick and muddy under our feet, and we all slipped more than once. I kept suggesting we turn back, but Oliver was in the lead and he had never turned back from anything in his life. Between him and Mary, everything was a dare. Everything was a contest of who would give up first. Mary wasn’t reckless like Oliver, just brave enough to make me feel boring in comparison.

  By the time we crested the final ridge, all three of us were soaked through. The château seemed to materialize from the gray darkness, soot-stained bricks wrapped in fog risen from the rain.