Arachnodactyl (9 page)

“I wanted to see how you do it. What it was like.”

Silence stretched out. Ikey resisted the urge to thump his boot on the floor for the noise, for the jittery chatter of the music boxes.

“What did you think?” Rose asked.

“About what? Knitting?”

“Knitting without eyesight.”

Ikey blew a breath past his lips. “It’s hard. Harder than I thought. How do you know where the yarn is?”

Rose sat silent a few seconds. A slight squeeze flickered across his shoulder. “It’s where I put it,” she said. “I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“But how do you know where the tip of the needle is?”

“It’s where I put it. It’s always at the end of the needle.”

Ikey smirked at her comment. “I couldn’t find the tip. I was searching for it when I dropped the needle. I wasn’t sure how far away the tip was from my hand.”

“Are you able to tell where your hands are in relation to one another?”

“I am.”

“Then next time, set the shaft on your arm and draw the needle back until you find the tip. Would you like to try again?”

The thought of Rose removing her hand left a cold spot in Ikey’s belly; a fear that he would be set adrift without her touch to moor him in her world. Furthermore, he wasn’t finished soaking up the only tender act he had encountered in a long time. Yet it felt daft to continue sitting on the ottoman, demanding her attention like a dog nuzzling one’s hand.

“Sure. I’ll try again,” he said. “Let me fetch the needle…”

Rose’s grip tightened. “Allow me.” Her left knee and thigh found purchase on Ikey’s hip as she leaned forward and over, her torso brushing Ikey’s back.

The thought of Rose disappeared. She was no longer this womanly creature, tall and long and willowy in her black satin skirts and veil. She ceased to be anything more than a pattern of movement and touch. She became the ripples on the pond.

The needle scraped along the floor, then Rose’s torso brushed past him. Her leg pulled away from Ikey’s hip and suddenly Rose was gone. Out of existence. And Ikey sat adrift in her universe without paddle or rudder or sail. He tapped the toe of his boot.

“Rose?”

“Hmm?” Her voice rippled through the dark.

“Thank you. For teaching me.”

“You’re welcome. But I haven’t taught you anything yet.”

The needle’s shaft pressed against his arm.

Ikey took the needle. “I dropped the yarn.”

Rose snickered. “I’ve got the ball right here.”

Once she had the ball wound, she demonstrated again how to cast on. Before long, Ikey had 25 stitches on the needle, and he knit back and forth across the row. He imagined each knot crafted at the end of the needle, and he imagined those knots linked together to form the tongue of a scarf. After every few stitches or so, his needle pierced nothing but air, and he would draw it back and feel along the other needle with the tips of his fingers, pressing lightly against the shaft like a flutist searching for holes. Instead, he felt for the slight bumps of stitches, and finding the last one, passed the working needle through it and hoped to feel the tiny pull of tension as the friction between the needle and the stitch registered in his wrist.

By the time he wrapped the yarn around his working needle, he had forgotten the network of stitches he had constructed in his imagination. They were gone. Absent. All of the work done up to that point evaporated. Only the stitch before him mattered. The loop under his finger. The needle in his hand. The yarn across his palm and wrapped around his forefinger. The tug and slide of yarn. The click and swish of the needles. The feedback in his wrists that suggested his needle was stuck in something more than pitch black. The knitting became the motion, the management of tension like an instrument—a violin played in silence, its quiet song spooled into a tapestry to be handled with fingers, felt and drawn to the face, the cheek, pressed to the lips where one could inhale and smell the wool and its slight vinegar scent.

Ikey missed a stitch several times before finally catching it. He took a deep breath, stretched his back, and blinked into the dark. The knitting sank into his lap as he yawned.

“Tired?” Rose asked.

The instinct to deny it flashed through him, but the excitement of the day wore on him. Furthermore, both the rhythmic motion of knitting—when he could briefly achieve a rhythm—and the dark lulled him towards sleep. He nodded, then added, “I am. It’s been a long day.”

“I imagine so.” Her arm brushed against his as she leaned forward. The veil tickled his ear. She picked up his wrist with one arm. The needle tugged at his hand as she plied the bit of scarf he had managed to produce.

“That’s not so bad,” Rose said. “Not for a first time. In the dark, no less. Finish your row. It’ll make it easier to start tomorrow. Then be sure to push your stitches down to the bottom of the needle so they don’t fall off.”

Ikey did as instructed, then swept his hand under the needle to feel the scarf. He ran his hand over it and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. Unlike the scarves his mum had knit, his was full of bumps and holes. As he explored the texture of it, his thumb snagged a series of holes that laddered up to the needle. Eyes weren’t needed to know it was a mess.

“It’s a mess,” Ikey said.

“It’s a start. You can’t be good at everything on your first try. Cross tends to disappear each evening to either his workshop or the pub. If you’d like, we can work on this. Though I understand that sitting in the dark and playing with sticks and string may not offer a young man the same allure as the pub, I can, however, tell you that you’ll be far better off in the long run by learning to knit as opposed to learning to drink.”

“I’d like that,” Ikey said. He hesitated, then added, “Cross wouldn’t want me along anyway. He doesn’t care much for me.”

Rose stood. “I wouldn’t take it personally. Cross doesn’t care for much of anything other than drink and his own thoughts.” Her knee brushed across Ikey’s back as she moved away from their seats.

“Come along,” Rose said. “I’ll show you to your room.”

She passed into the dining room. As she walked, the music boxes broke their stubborn silences and sang their tilted and loping songs to her, their time measured by her long strides.

Ikey closed his eyes and concentrated on the layout before him; the boundaries of the doorway and the dining table beyond. Landmines lay between him and the stairs. Everywhere sat invisible corners and forgotten edges to bark his shins and trip him up. He shook his head. How ridiculous that he should be the one limited, handicapped in this house.

Rose’s footsteps stopped. “Are you all right?”

“I’m coming,” Ikey said. He slipped a match from his pocket, then crouched to the floor. He laid the head of the match against the wood and flicked his wrist across the grain. The match flared into a brilliant aura of white that twisted his eyes shut against the smart of the light. A second later, he opened his eyes and saw the orange cap of flame wavering over the blackened head of the match. His fingers and knuckles were whisked back into existence again, solid and observable with bits of grease worked deep into the wrinkles, along with a thin ribbon of pink flesh where the yarn had wrapped around his forefinger for control of tension.

Ikey lit the lantern on the table, and under the umbrella of light, he followed the black-clad shadow of Rose up a flight of stairs. On the third floor, Rose motioned to the water closet as they passed. At the end of the hall, she showed Ikey into a bedroom cramped with furniture. After seeing the sparse decorations around the rest of the house, the bedroom looked out of place with its large, four-post bed and dresser with matching wardrobe. At the foot of the bed sat a trunk with a folded nightshirt resting on top.

“Since you didn’t bring any baggage into the house with you, I assumed you’d need a set of night clothes,” Rose said. “I cut off one of Cross’s old nightshirts. He never wears them. If you need more covers, you’ll find them in the blanket chest. Anything more I can get you?” Rose asked. She folded her hands behind her back.

“No, thank you,” Ikey said. None of the music boxes appeared in the room. Ikey stepped forward to the dresser and hunched over to examine a glass dome. Inside stood the taxidermied form of a gray-and-black striped kitten wearing a miniature fisherman’s hat and rain slicker. It stood on its hind legs on the prow of a ship, and in its forepaws it wrestled with a fishing pole curved down to the painted water.

“What is this?” Ikey asked.

“What is what?”

“This,” Ikey said with a nod, then added, “the glass dome with the kitten.”

“This used to be Cross’s father’s room,” Rose said as if that provided an explanation.

Ikey set the lantern on the dresser, then pushed it away from the dome so he couldn’t see it so clearly. He turned around.

Rose shifted her weight.

“I’ve never slept in a bed like this,” Ikey said. He sunk his hand into the plushness. “It’s not a straw mattress.”

“In his final days, Cross’s father grew painfully thin. Cross took extra care with the mattress. It’s quite soft. He wanted it to comfort his father since he had no flesh to pad his bones.”

Silence swirled about them. Ikey tried to think of another way to engage Rose.

“If you think of anything more you need, my room is down the hall,” Rose said. “Good night, Ikey.” Rose walked away, skirts swishing, heels clicking, and the ever-present music boxes sang their thin songs to Rose as she walked down the hall, entered her room, and shut the door.

Ikey surveyed the room again. It felt claustrophobic compared to the rest of the house.

He closed the door. The silliness of shutting out a blind, mechanical woman while he changed his clothes struck him. It was polite, nonetheless, so he turned from the door and shucked his clothes. As he reached for the nightshirt, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror mounted to the back of the dresser. He had never seen his reflection in any mirror greater than a tiny shaving mirror. Before him, his reflection reached for the nightshirt, and in the glow of the lantern, he saw the pale welts and shallow shadows of scar tissue flecked across the back of his shoulder. He stopped, blinked once, and when the image didn’t leave, he twisted his torso around and craned his neck back to take in the mass of scars across his back like dozens of worms burrowed under his skin and ready to crawl over his shoulders, up his neck.

He closed his eyes against the sight. A shiver flickered through him as he thought of the whistle of the switch as it lashed through the air. Ikey turned around, away from the scars, and found the scrawniness of his naked body. His ribs poked out from his chest like the fingers from a pair of monstrous hands beneath his flesh, each poised to clutch his heart and lungs and dig in with sharp, bony tips. His belly caved in, stretched between his bottom rib and the peaks of his hips. The tip of his pecker poked out from its thatch of dark hair like a blind and sightless creature burrowed in the caverns formed by his pelvis.

Ikey closed his eyes and turned his face away from the mirror. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he stepped over to the lantern and blew it out with a puff.

As the darkness fell around him and the heat dropped away from his face, he expected to find Rose’s hands on him again, her fingers on his back, their tips tracing the scars that mapped the history of his existence. If she asked, he’d tell her that the scars were what good came from people. Not much good at all.

T
he door flew open
.

“Wake up, buttercup!” Cross shouted.

Ikey started and sat up in bed, heart pounding, fist balled.

“You going to sleep all day, Princess, or might you be bothered for a bit of work?” Cross asked.

Strong daylight streamed in through the window overhead, unobscured by the curtains Ikey had pushed open last night for a whiff of air. An urge flitted over him to scramble up and yank the curtains shut.

“I’m up,” Ikey said. He rubbed his hands over his face, then threw back the covers.

“One of my shirts, eh?” Cross said with a cocked eyebrow. “I’ll be taking that from your pay as well, if you ever manage to earn any. Wash up and meet me downstairs in five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the same rules that applied yesterday still apply today. Got it?”

Ikey stopped himself from nodding. “Got it.”

Cross stomped down the hall. The music boxes in the hall sang of his departure.

The first thing Ikey wanted to do was get up and sweep his arm along the shelves and plow the music boxes off, allow them to cascade to the floor in a cacophony of jangling chimes and raining bits of metal. Instead, he got up, reached for his clothes, and found they had been replaced by a new set of clothes.

He picked up the shirt and held it before him. He would swim in it, but it would fit. He pulled on the shirt, rolled the sleeves up a turn, then slipped his legs into the trousers. Rose had hemmed them, but Ikey needed a cinched belt, and the crotch of them hung down past his own. A taller man had owned them.

Four minutes later, as he descended the stairs, the glow of a lantern greeted him. At the table sat Cross behind a newspaper. At Ikey’s place waited a tin cup of dark liquid. He glanced around. No sign of Rose. Once he grasped the cup, Cross folded his paper, then dropped it to the table.

“You can drink that on the hoof.” He stood, picked up the lantern, and made his way to the stairwell.

Ikey sniffed the cup. Tepid tea. He drained the cup in several long gulps, then replaced it and hurried after Cross.

At the bottom of the stairs, Ikey found disappointment in an empty kitchen. Across the front parlor, Cross set the lantern on the table by the frontdoor.

“Where’s Rose?” Ikey asked as he scurried after Cross. He then skidded to a stop. “My tools.” He turned around.

“Never mind your precious little nose-pickers,” Cross said. “They’d get stolen the first minute you looked away. Let’s get moving. Day’s a-wasting.”

Cross blew out the lantern. The room plunged into dark a brief second before Cross opened the door. Light, noise, dust, and the sour stench of fresh horse manure tumbled through the door. It felt like violence visited on the house.

Ikey took one last look for a sign of Rose.

“The hangar is this way,” Cross said. “Ain’t nothing back there unless you’re thinking you might want to make biscuits for the crew on your first day.”

Ikey plunged into the street after Cross. Whitby hammered Ikey’s senses. Although the sun hadn’t cleared the tops of the buildings crowding the street, it still twisted at his eyes. The streets teemed with the clatter of wheels and hooves on cobblestones. An occasional steam carriage chugged past as if propelled by the racket it made. Costermongers on the corner called out their wares and haggled over tea, coffee, scones, pies, papers, and other goods. The flavors of many of their wares mingled with the less pleasant odors of the streets and killed his appetite.

The long strides of Cross forced Ikey to hurry along. Each alley they passed called to him with a promise and an offer of a dark nook to crawl into. There, he might press his hands to his ears, clench his eyelids, and bury his nose in the shoulder of his shirt. After an evening of peace and quiet with Rose, the hubbub and bustle of people struck him as nearly intolerable.

Cross stopped briefly to buy two meat pies, one of which he handed to Ikey without a word. Together, they made their way along Pier Road. As they approached the end of the river, Ikey marveled at the sight of the sea. Growing up in The Dales, he was used to the land always rising around him, hemming him in. And if he climbed to the top of a valley, the world appeared to end over the next hill. The sea, however, spread out flat and gray to the horizon, which lay farther away than possible. The sight of it brought Ikey back to the sensation of sitting in the dark, quiet and alone, nothing more around him than the clothes slumped on his frame. As fishermen trawled their boats away from the pier, sailing seemed like the maddest thing a man could do.

A flurry of screeching white swooped down before Ikey. He jumped back as a seagull struck his hand and knocked his pie to the ground with a splat. Squawking and calling, the seagull climbed back into the air and swirled overhead as it regarded the abandoned pie, as well as the one in Cross’s hand.

Ikey looked from the gull, to the pie, then to Cross, who stood and laughed and slapped at his thigh.

“Welcome to Whitby,” Cross wheezed, his face red and terrible with glee.

Ikey hurried up Pier Road, content to leave Cross behind. In no time, however, the tall man strode beside him and made a show of eating his pie while keeping an eye on the swirling seagulls above.

Around the hairpin turn of Khyber Pass and up a flight of stairs, Ikey and Cross emerged onto a bluff that overlooked the sea. An arch of whalebone greeted them, and beyond, several blocks away, the chrysalis-like building sat among a half-dozen buildings that curved around it in a half-moon shape and balked at the utter view-blocking rudeness of the structure.

“Something to see, ain’t it?” Cross said and gestured toward the building, not the sea. “Wait until you get a load of what’s inside.”

Cross’s pace quickened until Ikey had to jog along every few steps to keep up. Once they reached the side of the building, Cross opened a door and stepped inside a small antechamber. Above them, a tarp pinned to the tops of the walls cut off the view of the ceiling.

Cross stepped out of the antechamber and swept his arm across the room. “May I present the
HMS Kittiwake
.”

Ikey stepped from the antechamber. In the middle of the cavernous room sat a sailing vessel of roughly 80 feet in length. But it lacked a keeled bottom, and so it rested against the cement floor as if the remainder of the ship was submerged. Where masts would have risen from the ship’s deck and supported its sails, two poles rose up and disappeared into a cloud of oiled canvas that hung limp and draped along a framework. Towards the back of the ship, a great, wooden cylinder sat mounted to the side of the ship. Inside, the blades of a large propeller waited among shadows. To complete the oddness of the picture, a length of stovepipe jutted from the back of the ship a good ten feet. Several places along the length of the pipe, wire lines wrapped around it and fed back up to the aft wall of the ship.

Ikey’s jaw dropped. A few of Uncle Michael’s books mentioned them, and though several had drifted over the farm, he’d never seen one so close before.

He turned back to Cross, eyes wide and mind burning. “An airship? How…”

Cross rubbed the tip of his nose, then sunk his thumbs into pockets in his waistcoat. “There’s a gas we produce that fills up a series of bladders tucked inside the envelope. You’ve seen a regular old airship, right? Normally, those things can only drift from mooring tower to mooring tower, and they can’t take on gas except when moored. You can’t set those airships down just anywhere. But this…” Cross said with a grin and a nod, “she produces her own gas. She can waltz straight out of this hangar without a tower, set herself down in any old field for a picnic, and then up you go and back to the hangar before supper.”

Cross clapped Ikey on the back and they walked toward the ship. “There’s a boiler on board that drives those propellers. They’re mounted on swivels to provide some steering. The rest comes from a series of rudders.”

Cross pointed at canvas-covered flaps along the edges of the balloon. Thin lines of rope attached to the rudders ran through a series of pulleys before running down alongside the envelope and disappearing into narrow slots in the ship’s side.

“To control vertical movement,” Cross said as he mounted a short rope ladder resting against the side of the ship, “we have a series of special bladders that vent gas when we need to descend. To ascend, we use a bank of tanks—like the one I showed you last night—to produce the gas with electricity and a brine solution.”

As Ikey climbed up the ladder, his neck craned back to take in the expanse of the envelope above them, which extended an additional ten feet beyond either end of the ship, and several feet beyond the sides. Netting of rope covered the envelope and descended down its side where the lines were gathered together and knotted around great steel rings mounted to the deck of the ship.

Questions bubbled through Ikey’s head, but he never settled on a particular one to ask. Instead, he continued following Cross. As their boots clapped along the floorboards with hollow thuds, Ikey glanced about, and with surprise, realized he was listening for the response of Cross’s music boxes. Nothing inside the building made a noise more than their footfalls and an occasional, muffled flare of hammering.

At the rear third of the ship, where the deck split and half a flight of stairs ascended to the continuation of the deck, Cross opened a door and hollered down a flight of stairs for Sharp to come above board. A moment later, a stocky man in a cheese-cutter hat and rolled shirtsleeves appeared at the bottom of the steps.

“Whaddya want?” he asked in one of the thicker Yorkshire accents Ikey had heard.

“I want you to come up here. Like I asked,” Cross said. He grabbed the gable above the door and leaned against it.

Sharp hitched a thumb over his shoulder. “I gotta get the boiler tip-top yet.”

Cross rolled his eyes. “Piss on it. I told you to get up here.”

“But Wendy—”

“Bugger Wendy. But not until you’re done with what I got for you.”

Sharp huffed. “Just one…” he said and held up a stubby, dirty finger. He disappeared down the hall. A door clanged shut, and then he reappeared and began to ascend the steps. A patch of white skin flashed through the worn knee of his coal-stained trousers.

Cross leaned forward a bit more. “Please tell me that I didn’t just hear you shut the boiler room door.”

Sharp froze on the stairs. He lifted his round face. Furrows creased his heavy brow as something slow and crunchy ran through his head.

“But, Cross, we’re suppose to keep the boiler room door shut at all times, ain’t we?”

Cross nodded. “That’s right, Sharp. Very good. And why are we supposed to keep the boiler room door shut at all times?”

Sharp rubbed his chin. His jaw worked at his cheek. “Uhm. Fire.”

Cross nodded again. “Brilliant, man. Absolutely brilliant.”

Sharp smiled. He took a step up.

“So why,” Cross asked, “did you have to go back and shut the door?”

Sharp stopped again. His brow furrowed and he considered the steps before him.

“You called for me?”

“Oh, bloody Nora,” Cross grumbled into his arm. He pushed himself off the gable and turned to Ikey. “You see what I got to work with here, right?”

Ikey looked away.

“Sharp,” Cross said, “that door is to be closed at all times. If you enter the room or leave the room, no matter for how long, shut that bloody door behind you before you blow us all to kingdom come. Got that?”

Sharp pulled his hat off and revealed a pale, sweaty bald spot like a halo over his coal-stained face. He nodded.

“Now, Sharp, this here is Ikey Berliss. He’s new. Admiral Daughton wants him to work with us. To start him off, I want you to give him a tour of the ship and show him what you do. Can you handle that?”

Sharp nodded and grinned a spread of missing and discolored teeth. He held his hand out to Ikey. Smoke and pungent body odor rolled off him like a fog.

“Pleased to meet you,” Sharp said.

Ikey smiled and took his hand.

“Ikey’s not much for talking,” Cross said. “Which I figure makes him a good partner for you.”

“A bit puny, isn’t he?” Sharp looked up at Cross.

Cross shook his head, closed his eyes, and rubbed at his brow with the tips of his fingers. “Ain’t my doing.”

Ikey gritted his teeth. It hardly seemed fair to be dismissed before given a proper chance to show them what he could do. His hand patted absently at his side, where his satchel should be hanging.

Sharp cocked an eye at Ikey. “No matter. We’ll have you filling that shirt and splitting its seams in no time.” He cocked his fist up by his ear. His bicep bulged with stout muscle.

Ikey swallowed. His eyes watered in the presence of the man’s scent.

Cross lifted his face to the canvas above. “Well, it doesn’t look like you’ve been perfecting your physique much today.”

“My what?” Sharp asked.

Cross pointed a finger at the envelope above. “It’s flat. Where’s the gas?”

Sharp threw his hands up. “Ain’t my doing! Talk to Wendy. I been giving him all my back this morning. All my fire might be for baking biscuits for all the good it’s done. What a shame!”

“All right,” Cross said, then turned to Ikey. “I’m handing you over to Sharp. Do as he says. You’ll find if he had twice the smarts he still wouldn’t be a half-wit.” Cross winked. “Try not and take advantage of him, too much.”

Cross clapped Ikey on the shoulder. Ikey straightened his back.

“Right,” Cross said. “I suppose I’ll find Wendy in the engine room?”

“Aye.” Sharp nodded. “Tell him I want some of them biscuits he’s been wasting my fire on.”

Cross brushed past Sharp and ducked his head as he passed through the doorway and descended the stairs.

“Well then,” Sharp said, “it looks like Wendy will be too busy pulling Cross’s boot out of his arse to notice I ain’t in the boiler room. That means we got plenty of time to show you around.”

Ikey nodded.

“First off. You ain’t standing like a man used to pitching with the sea. Lander, are you? No matter.” Sharp pointed in the four cardinal directions and said, “Fore, aft, port, starboard.” He went on spilling terminology. It ran from his mouth like drool. Ikey kept nodding as Sharp circled the deck, pointing at everything, his mouth never ceasing for a moment. Eventually, he took Ikey below deck and pointed to an electric light bulb jutting out from the wall and giving off a harsh, white glow.