This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  “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.

  I started forward cautiously, good arm extended so I wouldn’t smash into anything. Rust and metal shavings crunched under my feet. My heart was slamming like a piston, and I kept waiting for someone to grab me. If they were kind, they’d cut my throat right there and spare me from having to sort out the wretched mess I’d gotten myself into.

  But there was no one. The factory seemed well and truly deserted. I walked the floor end to end and found not a soul, nor any hint of a revolution being built there. No rebels. No clockwork men. No Oliver.

  Then, just as I was about to give up, I found a gated set of spiral stairs that led underground. At their base, a pale light flickered. I hopped the gate and jogged down, a bit unsteady without a hand to put on the rail.

  The stairs opened onto a storeroom a quarter the size of the floor above. The air was different here, sulfurous and chalky instead of metallic. In the center of the room was a Carcel burner with a glass shade—not a fine piece, but too delicate for a factory—and the flame cast a sheen of pale light across the low ceilings and the cracked stone floor. Beside the burner were a few loose sheets of paper, and when I picked one up, I realized it was a leaflet, same as the one Mirette had given Clémence and me. The paper was brushed black with something that looked like soot but felt coarse when I scrubbed at it. It was on the ground too,
I realized, a light dust like something had spilled. I held my fingers above the burner shade and rubbed them together. A bit of the powder wafted down into the lamp, and the flame sparked with a loud pop. I jumped back, realizing what it was. Gunpowder.

  I dropped the leaflet and crouched down in the center of the underground room, trying to figure out what I was meant to do with this empty room and a few leaflets laced with gunpowder, but the only thing I could think about was Oliver with his wild heart and now with devoted revolutionaries at his command, ready to let himself and his men loose on Geneva. I looked down again at the leaflet, black powder gathering in its creases—FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER LIVES!

  There was a soft patter from behind me like scuttling footsteps on the stone. I looked up just as a brass gear the size of my fist was lobbed out of the darkness and clattered to the ground at my feet. “Hello?” I called.

  Silence. Then a small voice replied, “I know you, Shadow Boy.”

  And from the corner came Mirette, black hair striped amber in the lamplight and another gear in her hand.

  I kicked the one on the ground. “Did you throw that at me?”

  “I meant it to hit you.”

  “Bleeding awful aim.”

  “It’s heavy.” A pause as she took a step closer to me, head cocked so her tangled hair raked over her shoulders. “Were you crying?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t know boys cried.”

  “I wasn’t . . .” And then I stopped, because the light from the burner had sliced across her face and I realized she had tears on her cheeks. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “They told me to stay hidden down here, but I wanted to help. Then I heard someone upstairs and I thought it was the police come for me.” She dragged her hand across her cheeks and gave a throaty sniff, then added, “You were wrong, you know.”

  “What was I wrong about?”

  “The resurrected man.” She pointed at the drawing on one of the leaflets. “He’s not just in the book. He’s real. I saw him with my own eyes.”

  I sat up. “So he was here?”

  “He came to lead us. I told you he would.”

  “Where have they gone?” I asked. “Where’s he taken them?”

  Mirette sucked her bottom lip. “I’m not supposed to say.”

  “It’s important, Mirette, please.” She turned away from me, her face out of the lantern light. I crawled forward so I was right beside her, and I nudged the burner into the space between us. “How’s your foot?” I asked.

  “I can still move my toes,” she replied, then thrust out her foot to demonstrate for me. She’d wrapped it in rags so that the socket fused into her skin was covered. “And I’m going to nick some shoes soon as I can. You fixed it good.”

  “I wish I could do better.” I picked up one of the leaflets and held it between us. “The resurrected man,” I said, “he’s my brother. I’m trying to find him. Please, Mirette, will you help me?”

  Mirette pressed her metal foot hard into the floor, leaving a clear print in the black dust. Then she said, “First we went to the castle.”

  “The castle?”

  “Up in the foothills. They let me come along to carry the lantern.”

  “All right, then what?”

  “Then they brought the crates back here.”

  “They brought what?”

  “Crates. All the crates. That was yesterday.”

  “What did the crates . . . ?” And then I realized. Oliver was running around with Clémence, the daughter of a bomb maker, and they had gone back to Château de Sang for the gunpowder packed in the basement and left a trail of it here between the stones. “Mirette, where’ve they gone?”

  “The tower. The clock strikes again tonight.”

  I could have hugged her for that, but I was worried she’d whip another gear at me if I tried, and I was a much easier target with just a few feet between us. “You have to promise me you’ll stay here tonight. Don’t go anywhere near the clock tower.”

  “But I want to help.”

  “You can’t help. You need to stay here.”

  “Are you going?” she asked. I hesitated, which answered the question, and she grabbed my coat sleeve. “Take me too!”

  “No, it’s dangerous.”

  “But you’re going. That’s not fair.”

  “Mirette, if you follow me, I’ll tell the resurrected man that it was you who blabbed about where he and his men had gone and you’ll be in trouble.”

  Her fist twisted on my coat sleeve, so tight the material tugged at my skin. “No, please don’t!”

  “Then promise me you’ll stay here and stay hidden.”

  Her mouth puckered into a scowl. “Fine. I’ll stay here.”

  “Good. And for God’s sake, put the light out before you blow yourself up.”

  Mirette twisted the knob on the side of the burner and the flame died into nothing. She was gone before I could stand—I heard her footsteps fade into the darkness—and I went in the opposite direction, fumbling my way back to the bottom of the stairs, the powdered remnants of my brother’s bombs crunching under my feet.

  I left the Cogworks and sprinted through the north quarter until I came to the river and crossed back into the financial district. Every inch of me was buzzing. I knew should have gone to the police first, but there wasn’t time. All I could think about was Oliver and his army somewhere in the crowd in the clock tower square, waiting to make their move, and Mary there too, waiting for me, not knowing that something was about to happen.

  The noise from the square reached me from streets away, the sound of the market and so much happy chatter and the voices raised in carols. When I turned the corner into the square, I found Place de l’Horloge packed. The Christmas market stalls were walled in by people shopping and eating and staking out their spots to watch the clock strike for the first time in years. The frosty air was spiced with wassail and sweet smoke from the braziers. I shoved my way through the crowd toward the base of the clock tower, hoping that by some miracle I’d smash into someone I recognized—Ottinger or Oliver or Mary, especially, so I could drag her away from here.

  I searched the sea of upturned faces pinched red by the cold, and across the square I spotted Clémence.

  She was standing in the middle of everything, looking straight ahead instead of up at the clock like everyone else. Perhaps she sensed my gaze, for she turned her head and I caught a glimpse of the left side of her face, where the bruise from the automaton’s fist was blushing violet. I thought for a moment she was looking right at me; then I realized her attention was on someone else across the crowd. She tapped two fingers to her lips like a greeting or a signal and started to move. I changed course and followed her.

  Clémence was smaller than I was and she moved easily through all the people. I kept getting whacked by elbows and shopping bag and scarves as they were whipped over their owners’ shoulders. I stopped apologizing after stepping on a man’s foot, nearly cost me the sight of her.

  She broke from the rows of market stalls and trotted around the side of the clock tower, away from the crowd. I followed, but when I rounded the corner, she was gone, as suddenly as if she’d vanished into thin air. It was only me standing at the edge of the river, trying to work out where she went.

  Then, from high above me, there was a flash like a sudden sunbeam, accompanied by a coarse grinding sound. A cheer went up from the square, and I looked up. Someone inside the clock had given it a pulse, and I could hear the gears starting to churn, weights sinking and rising on heavy chains as the chimes began to sing. I heard it all, and I felt it inside of me, like my own heart syncing to the clockwork.

  Then a murmur ran through the crowd, cheers turning into a collective gasp. Something was wrong.

  I jogged back to the edge of the market and looked up at the clock face. The minute hand, poised to strike when the clock was started, had moved one step backward instead.

  Then the doors to the glockenspi
el under the face opened, and the platform began to roll out. The clockwork figures that were meant to be there had gone, and in their place was a single crouching form. I knew him before he stood, but stand he did. Stood and looked out across the city like a grotesque gargoyle from a cathedral buttress.

  It was Oliver.

  He was wearing nothing but trousers, and it seemed a miracle that his metal joints hadn’t frozen at that height in this cold. He raised his chin as the wind teased his dark hair, the light from the clock face shafting through it like veins of gold in obsidian. He had his shoulders thrust back, his twisted clockwork body on display.

  For a moment, the crowd didn’t seem to realize that the strange brass form gleaming above them was not a clockwork figure from the glockenspiel but a living man made of stitches and metal. Then people began pointing and shouting. Someone screamed, high and shrill.

  “Geneva!” Oliver cried, his voice carrying over the wind and the river and the crowd. “You have tried to silence us, but we cannot be silenced.”

  A man in front of me bolted, knocking into my shoulder as he ran. My stitches flared. “What’s going on?” a woman nearby whimpered.

  “Your monsters are unleashed,” Oliver cried, raising his arms before him as though in presentation. “And they come for the men who beat them and broke them.”

  He looked down, and the crowd followed his gaze to the archways at the base of the clock tower. Shadows were breaking from the darkness, joining the cobblestone square and taking the shape of people. Clockwork people, I realized, with their mechanical limbs on display. Men and women with brass legs and iron fists and silver shoulders and kneecaps, trousers and skirts and coat sleeves rolled up so their limbs could be seen. They walked toward the crowd, with Oliver shouting above them, reciting: