by Peter Bunzl
“I recognize this place,” Deedee whispered, peering over Lily’s shoulder. “It’s Droz’s surgery.”
“It doesn’t look very homely,” Malkin said.
“It’s not.” Luca shook beside him.
“They can’t be taking us back,” Angelique said, her voice sounding higher and thinner. Fretful. “They wouldn’t dare.”
“There’s no saying what they’d do,” Luca said.
They sat for a long time listening to the muffled voices of Madame and the two clowns, Auggie and Joey, coming from the driver’s cabin.
“What do you think they’re up to?” Silva whispered.
“Who knows?” Dimitri said. “They’ve some horrible plan.”
Deedee’s face was white. Luca bit his lip. Angelique had gone silent again, lost for words. Malkin shifted uncomfortably in Robert’s lap. One of Robert’s arms was stuck under him and his fingers were starting to go to sleep.
Lily’s pulse rattled like a sewing machine. She pressed her nose to the window glass and peered out. They were parked in front of a grand stone archway. A flickering coach lantern mounted on the wall above it illuminated two huge doors that must once have been the entrance to the coaching mews of what looked like a large derelict hospital.
If this really was Dr Droz’s surgery, that couldn’t be good news. She waited with trepidation for whatever was to happen next.
Click! The door in the driver’s compartment opened and Madame stepped out. She passed the window, approached the arched entranceway, and rang a bell on the wall. Then she waited, wringing her hands together impatiently.
Eventually, the door creaked open.
In the slit of light, Lily saw a tall and broad mechanical man. He was as large as the Lunk – if not bigger and more heavyset – and he had the same soulless lantern eyes. They gleamed in the darkness as they swept across the bonnet of the steam-wagon.
Finally, he looked to Madame and they spoke back and forth, before Madame gave him a curt nod and gestured to the rear compartment of the hearse.
“What do you think they’re saying?” Robert asked, stroking Malkin, who was now lying across his chest.
“I don’t know,” Malkin said. “But I don’t like the face of that mechanical. He won’t be any help to us – he seems like another of those evil reprogrammed types.”
Malkin was right. The mechanical looked like more of Droz’s work. Lily shivered and pressed her ear against the window.
She could make out only a few words of their conversation, enough to know it was being carried out in French. She wished now that she’d paid a little more attention in her studies with Madame when the woman had been her governess, and in Mademoiselle’s French lessons at the academy.
Finally the heavyset mechanical man nodded and stepped back inside the doorway.
Madame turned to the steam-wagon and beckoned to Joey in the driver’s seat. With a phut-phut and a hum and shudder, the vehicle started up again.
By this time, both the grand doors of the building were opening inwards. The steam-wagon inched forward through the archway, until the darkness swallowed them up in its devilish mouth.
“Get out, tout le monde!” Madame commanded. “And vite!”
The steam-wagon had juddered to a stop, and the doors to the rear compartment had been flung open. Madame was looming in the gap, with Joey and Auggie, both clasping lanterns.
Lily, Malkin, Robert and the other children scrambled down from the hearse and looked dazedly around. They were in a cobbled courtyard, walled in by the backs of various tall buildings. The exit to the street had been blocked by the mechanical man, who was closing the grand arched doors behind them.
Lily’s scars tingled on her chest, beneath her coat and the silk of her red dress. She gritted her teeth and tried to calm herself. Beside her, Deedee whimpered uncontrollably, and Luca looked ashen-faced. Angelique had gone silent; her wings drooped and she was gradually folding in on herself. Silva clutched her stomach with one hand and held onto Dimitri with the other. Robert cradled Malkin in his arms and flinched away from the clowns.
Madame led the children and the fox past a row of broken windows and through another archway into a grey, concrete lobby, filled with dripping pipes. She seemed to know the place well.
At the end of the lobby, a wide staircase of low stone treads, with a black metal bannister flanking one side and a flaking plaster wall on the other, ran up and up and up into the dark.
A column-like cage was wedged in the central stairwell, its sides rising up the full height of the building between the flights of stairs. Madame pressed a brass lever near the bottom of the cage. With a shudder, some pulleys inside it began to move. For a moment Lily thought it was some new and horrible torture device, but as a platform slowly descended from the top floor, she realized it was a lift.
“Joey, Auggie, lock up the mechanimal and these children,” Madame said, pulling back the lift’s rickety gate. “Lily and I will take the ascenseur to the top floor to visit our host.”
Where were they taking the others? Lily tried to pull herself free to stay with her friends, but she was too tired and disoriented, and Madame easily manhandled her into the lift. She peered worriedly through the closing doors at Robert, Malkin and the others being corralled away by the clowns down a long corridor.
As the tiny wooden box rose, the polished brass fixings stuck into Lily’s side and she found herself squashed against Madame’s shoulder. The sickly stench of the woman’s perfume made her dizzy and the worry of being separated from her friends stretched inside her like taffy.
The lift reached the top floor, grinding to a halt with a lurch that made Lily’s stomach roll queasily. Madame shoved the metal gate aside and ushered her onto the landing, where a woman with deep-set staring eyes and silver-grey hair waited for them. She looked to be about sixty years old, and was wearing a long woollen skirt and a velvet waistcoat and white shirt buttoned up to the collar.
“This is somewhat of an egregious interruption,” she snapped at Madame. “What are you doing here at this hour? I thought we were to meet tomorrow? I’m in the middle of the delicate last-minute work on your machine.”
Madame hailed her. “Bonsoir, dear doctor. Désolée, but there’s been a change of plan. Lily, this is Dr Droz, a good friend of your parents. And this, Dr Shelley Mary Droz, is Lily Hartman, our special guest and the circus’s new show-stopper.”
A terrible fear blossomed in Lily’s chest. She felt suddenly stupid to not ever have considered that Dr Droz might be a woman. She’d assumed that, like most mechanists, the doctor would be male. But then she remembered Droz had taught her mama at Histon Ladies’ College all those many years ago.
She wondered how on earth she could’ve made such a stupid assumption. For now that she saw her up close, Lily did recall Dr Droz. Her cloud of grey hair, and the habit she had of sweeping it back from her face with that flicking gesture, seemed awfully familiar. She remembered her coming to tea on that summer’s day her mama had written about in her notebook.
“My dear Miss Hartman,” said Dr Droz, stepping forward excitedly and putting a hand on her shoulder. “This is a surprise! I wasn’t expecting to meet you until tomorrow.” She turned to Madame then. “I think perhaps you’d both best come inside.”
She turned and pushed open the door behind her, and Lily wondered, her heart sinking, what new shocking things lay beyond it.
Robert could hear Joey and Auggie pacing around outside the door. As soon as Madame and Lily had taken the lift to the top floor of the abandoned hospital, the two clowns, along with the large mechanical man, had ushered them along a corridor filled with broken tiles and rotting equipment to this small room and locked them in.
A chill breeze invaded the space. The glass was smashed in one window and a little jagged light drifted in from the coaching lamp outside. The walls of the room were lined with shelves full of broken dishes and jars of colourful liquids and powders, all of them labelled with chemi
cal names.
“We appear to be in the hospital’s abandoned pharmacy,” Malkin said, sniffing at a pile of yellowing prescription pads on the floor. “I prescribe there will be trouble.”
Robert strode past him and approached the window. His heart dropped as he saw that outside the aperture was barred.
“I can’t believe we’re back in this building.” Luca’s eyes anxiously flicked from the room to down at his bound hands. “This is where I first got these terrible claws!”
“Me too,” Deedee said. “It’s where Droz gave me my legs.”
“I was the last,” Angelique said. It was the first time she’d spoken in a while. “The last hybrid Droz created.” Then she went silent again.
“This place used to be an asylum,” Deedee whispered. “But they closed it down around the time Dr Droz came and began her experiments. She stayed on anyhow, to continue with her work. She hid out on the top floor, making new machines from the leftover equipment.”
Robert felt sick. That was where Madame had taken Lily. What had she and Dr Droz got planned for his friend? He knew it had something to do with an X-ray machine. He wished he could be at Lily’s side right now, looking after her. X-ray machines were a new invention, still being developed, and were very dangerous. Robert remembered how John had said the rays from them could kill you. He hoped the machine was only for the magic trick Madame was planning for tomorrow night, and that Dr Droz and Madame wouldn’t try anything dangerous on Lily now. He glanced at the others sitting around him. Silva and Dimitri looked scared out of their skins.
“What’ll happen to us here?” Silva asked in a whisper.
“Don’t worry,” Deedee said. “Droz won’t do anything to you. It’s Lily she wants.”
“Droz only takes orphans to experiment on,” Luca explained. “Children no one will miss. You have parents, Silva, and, Dimitri, your family is the circus – she would never dare destroy either of you. That would be a step too far.”
“Or,” said Dimitri, “you may be wrong. Maybe we’ll disappear, like those others who disobeyed Madame. Maybe they’ll keep a piece of each of us for Slimwood’s wall of shame.”
Deedee shuddered at the thought of that, and Angelique crawled further into her corner alone. Robert saw that she was barely speaking to anyone; it was like she had regressed to some former lonely state.
“I’ll bite their ears off before I let them do that to any of you,” Malkin proclaimed. “You know what they say: ‘It’s not the size of the fox in the fight, but the size of the fight in the fox.’”
“Malkin’s right,” Robert said. “We can’t sit here and wait for them to make the next move. We need to fight back.”
“What with?” Deedee asked. “We don’t even have a plan.”
“If we band together we can come up with something,” Robert told them. “It’s the only way. Together we can be strong.” The faces around him nodded in relieved agreement. But Robert was thinking anxiously of Lily, who right at this moment was facing Madame and Droz on her own.
Dr Droz showed Lily and Madame into a warehouse-sized space lit by dim gaslights on brackets attached to the walls. In the centre of the room was a chaise longue, an armchair and a coffee table – an island of plush furniture, at sea in an industrial space of concrete. An irregular ticking noise echoed from the walls at the room’s edges, where bookshelves and display cases filled with jars lurked in the shadows.
In the far wall was a huge iron-barred window looking out over the whole of Paris. Houses spread out behind the reflections in the glass, and the Eiffel Tower Airstation skewered the distant sky, lights burning on each of its decks, illuminating the moored zeppelins.
“I would very much like to inspect my machine,” Madame said to Droz.
“All in good time, Hortense,” Droz replied. “First, let’s have some tea and refreshments.”
Lily wondered what fresh insanity this was. She’d heard of midnight feasts, but tea in an abandoned hospital at the unearthly hour of two in the morning? That seemed another level of erratic behaviour.
Dr Droz led them over to the chaise and bade them sit. Then, when they were both seated, she picked up a bell from a side table and rang it, summoning her mechanical servant.
He finally arrived, clattering through the doorway, and Droz spoke with him. “Mr Creaks, I realize it’s rather late, but could you possibly fetch our guests some tea?”
Mr Creaks nodded and lumbered off.
When he was gone, Dr Droz sat in the armchair opposite Madame. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at Lily, as if she was a miracle the doctor was seeing for the first time.
Finally, she leaned forward in her seat. “Ever since I read your papa’s papers,” she said, “I’ve been dying to meet you again, Lily.”
Lily did not reply, though Madame gave her a sharp kick on the ankle to try to provoke one.
“Say something, Lily. Mon Dieu! Anyone would think you had no manners. And after I recommended your father send you to finishing school!” She smiled apologetically at the doctor.
Droz shifted awkwardly in her seat. “She’s probably quite tired. It’s late, and you have brought her rather a long way in difficult circumstances to see me.”
Lily wondered if Droz meant the kidnapping, or merely tonight’s excursion from the circus in the hearse.
Madame shrugged, as if to say, So what?
“You probably don’t recall,” Droz continued, facing Lily, “but we met when your mama was alive.” Her voice ran with a treacly sickliness and Lily found her accent hard to place. It was not French like Madame’s, but it also wasn’t English. “I was working with your father and Professor Silverfish at the time. This was before my name was discredited in English scientific circles, and I left England. Since then, I heard of your reincarnation from Madame here, and read of it in your father’s scientific papers. And I gather it’s something of a miracle that you’re alive. Your father’s notes had much to say both personally and professionally about the creation of the Cogheart.”
“I don’t know anything of that,” Lily said nervously. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of the woman. “Anyway,” she added, “those notes don’t belong to you. Madame stole them from Papa. And Mama’s red notebook.”
“They were only my due,” Madame interjected.
Droz ignored this remark. “But your father has spoken of me, yes?” she asked Lily.
“Not really.”
“Funny.” Droz’s face clouded with anger. “I discussed the concept of hybrids with him many times, and with your mother too. My ideas are in both their papers, though I took their theories further than any of us could’ve imagined.” She paused and pursed her lips. “They would never aid me with my projects. Only Silverfish offered help. And then solely because your father had disappeared with his clockwork heart and he needed assistance in creating a replacement.”
“You created Silverfish’s heart too?” Lily asked. She was intrigued now, despite herself.
“Of course,” said Droz. “After your father’s betrayal, there was no one else he trusted to do the work. And it had become illegal.” She rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. “That’s also part of the reason your papa hid you, Lily. Although he would never have told you so himself. That, and the fact he had a lucrative reputation to protect.”
“That’s a lie,” Lily said. “The real reason Papa hid me was to save me from people like you, who wish me harm.” Although, she realized, it had never worked. Somehow bad fortune always found her, no matter how far away Papa tried to shield her from it.
Dr Droz laughed. “I wish you no harm, Lily. I merely want to look at the invention inside you. It’s quite sophisticated compared to my creations – my freakish children that I made for the circus.”
“They’re not freakish,” Lily said. “They’re people. Just because you made them into lab rats and Slimwood and Madame treat them like prisoners, it doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a proper place in the world.
Everyone should accept them for who they are.”
“Nonsense,” Madame said, pursing her lips.
Dr Droz smiled. “And do you think everyone would accept you for who you are, Lily? If you were honest about yourself?”
“I…I don’t know,” Lily said. “Robert did. And Tolly. And Angelique and the other hybrids.”
“Lost boys and freaks need as many friends as they can get,” Madame muttered.
Lily felt her scars itch angrily beneath her shirt. Would the world accept her if it knew about her hybrid nature? Reflexively, she put a hand to her chest… Deep inside her she wondered if, perhaps, they would not.
“My papa made his machines to help people and do good, to save lives,” Lily said. “Yours have only made people miserable, imprisoned spectacles.”
“Then why, if he was so pure-minded, did he abandon his work? Ask him that.” Dr Droz’s face was etched with fury. “I’ll tell you why – because he was afraid to defy a system that banned such inventions. Whereas I bravely continued and was punished for it, my work curtailed by those meddling men at the Mechanists’ Guild. I was forced to come here and sell my creations – my children – to the Skycircus to make a living.”
Dr Droz looked off angrily into the distance. Only the tinkling of teacups brought her back. The large mechanical man had returned, carrying a tray.
Her face brightened. “Ah,” she said, “at last! Here’s Mr Creaks with the tea.”
The mechanical man had arrived bearing a grand floral teapot, a jug of milk, a tea strainer, three china cups and saucers, and a plate of delicious-looking biscuits. Lily’s stomach rumbled at the sight of them. The only thing she’d eaten in the last few days was gruel and stale bread.
The mechanical man was about to set the tray down on the table when he started shaking awfully.
“Clank it all!” Droz cursed. “He’s malfunctioning. We need to reset him! Where’s his winding key?” Dr Droz searched around in her pockets, but she couldn’t appear to find it. The mechanical’s fit was getting worse. He was spilling tea everywhere.
