The Doomsday Vault (14 page)

With a nervous glance up and down the street for the grinning figure, Alice handed the address card to the driver and sat back to think. In the space of a few hours, she had received a marriage proposal (of sorts), intercepted a strange message from a rogue clockworker, learned that her aunt Edwina had been missing for months and had managed to declare herself dead, and inherited a large house she had never actually visited. It was all a bit much. And oh yes—she had discovered that Click could talk, after a fashion.

“When did you visit Mr. Stoneworthy's office so he could give you that message?” she demanded of the clockwork cat. “I quite forgot to ask him. And how long have you been able to reproduce a human voice?”

Click looked out the cab window with phosphorescent nonchalance. Alice made an exasperated sound as the cab rolled over the stony streets. Exasperation was easier to deal with than fear, uncertainty, or sadness. Aunt Edwina was dead. Actually, she was merely missing. Actually, she had failed to alert Mr. Stoneworthy's office in a prescribed way for one year. Perhaps she wasn't dead or truly missing at all. Perhaps she had forgotten or grown tired of the arrangement.

After twelve months?
she thought.
Unlikely.

The ride took more than an hour, and it was nearing dusk by the time the cab arrived at a high stone wall well outside of town, in a place where houses and factories gave way to trees and meadows. The wall ran nearly a hundred yards down the road before curving away and out of sight. Presumably it surrounded Aunt Edwina's house, of which only the top half was visible. Alice couldn't see much of it except the roof, or roofs. Several of them poked upward in odd places and directions. A large gate of wrought iron guarded a long driveway, and a smaller entry gate stood beside it. Coming up the road toward them was a barefoot girl of twelve leading a pony. The driver halted near the gate and helped Alice down from the cab with Click jumping down beside her. It occurred to Alice that she had no way of getting home.

“Can you please wait, driver?” she asked, paying him from her meager supply of coins. “I had no idea it would take so long to get here.”

“Not unless you'll only be a moment, mum,” he said. “I have to put the 'orse up for the night.”

Flummoxed, Alice stared at the set of gates. She would have to go back right now. A long ride for nothing.

“Mum?” The girl leading the pony had approached. “There's a train station, mum. Less than half a mile up the road. Trains run at night, too.”

“Why, thank you.” Alice gave the girl a farthing from her handbag. “What's your name?”

“Gwendolyn, mum. My dad calls me Gwenny.”

“Do you live nearby, Gwenny?” Alice asked.

The girl remembered herself and curtsied. “All my life, mum.”

“What do you know about this house, then?”

“I'll just be going, then, mum,” said the driver, who had climbed back onto the hack.

“Yes, thank you,” Alice said. “If you could just—”

At that moment, beautiful violin music floated by. It pushed the air ahead of itself, floated and rippled, shivered and sighed. All three people listened, entranced. The tune was even lovelier than the music Alice had heard in the mists of Hyde Park. After a moment, Alice realized her heart was beating quickly and her mouth was dry. Click touched noses with the pony, which whickered.

“Where is that wonderful song coming from?” Alice asked.

“The house, mum,” said Gwenny. “Strange lights used to flash in the windows, and we heard odd noises when I was little, but those stopped a year gone. The music is new, something like two weeks old. I don't like it. It's ghosts.”

“Don't be silly,” Alice said. “It's a person. Or an automaton.”

“The house is empty, mum. No one lives there.”

The music continued, soft and insistent. The driver clicked at the horse and the hack jerked into motion, temporarily ruining the violin. Alice was seized with a desire to slap the man for interrupting the instrument's perfection.

“What about the lady Edwina?” Alice said. “The woman who lived here?”

“The strange lady, mum? I only heard about her. She never kept no servants, and we always stayed away.”

“Hm. Would you consider coming inside with me? I might have a coin or two for you.”

“Me, mum?” The girl backed away. “I'm sorry, mum, but I couldn't. Not ever.” And she fled, taking the pony with her and leaving Alice alone on the road.

The sweet strings continued to play. Alice couldn't think where she'd heard anything more perfect for a spring evening in the country, odd and unexplained though it was. If no people were in the house, it must be an automaton or perhaps a reproduction. Click had come from this house, and he had recently shown an ability to reproduce a human voice. It stood to reason that whoever had created him could do the same with music.

Alice drew the key ring from her handbag and sorted through the cold bits of iron until she found one that would open the little entry gate next to the large main one. When she tried to use the key, however, she discovered the entry gate's lock twisted and broken, the gate itself slightly ajar. Mystified and a little nervous, she pushed through with Click at her heels and followed the crunching gravel driveway toward the manor.

The house was a rambling affair, clearly put together and added to over at least a hundred years. A stone building squatted in the center with wooden additions piled all about it. Several outbuildings dotted the overgrown gardens, and an attached tower rose up behind. The cool evening air smelled of damp grass intermingled with decaying flowers. The violin music continued, but Alice couldn't pinpoint the source. She climbed the uneven front steps to the main doors and found them ajar as well. What on earth? Hesitantly, she pushed them open and entered the darkness beyond.

The moment she crossed the threshold, lights blazed to life, revealing a huge room three stories tall. It was filled with machinery that swooped to life with a great, grinding hum. Giant gears whirled; pendulums swung; huge pistons dipped and soared. Spidery automatons far more complex than the ones Alice had at home skittered everywhere on mysterious errands. In the corner, a giant arm swung back and forth with a loud, steady ticking sound. It was like standing inside a three-story clock. Alice glanced down at Click, who was watching the intricate metal dance with twitching tail and glowing eyes. Only one sort of person could have built all this.

“Aunt Edwina
was
a clockworker,” Alice breathed. “But how?”

That was when she saw the pool of blood.

A
lice supposed she should scream or faint or flee, but Areally, what was the point? Blood couldn't hurt her, unless she slipped in it and fell. Besides, it was long since dry. Red-brown smears of it smudged the floorboards nearby.

“Good heavens, Click,” she said. “What happened?”

She stepped forward to get a better look, but Click abruptly threw himself in front of her shins, nearly tripping her. “Click! What in the world are you—”

The door slammed shut behind her, and a pair of pistons leapt out of opposite walls. Their blunt ends smashed together at head height directly in front of Alice, right over the blood pool. The crash nearly knocked Alice off her feet, and she dropped her handbag. The pistons sucked themselves back into the walls again, leaving behind nothing but a waft of stale air.

“Oh,” Alice murmured. “Oh.”

That explained the blood. Now that she knew what to look for, she could make out the faint outline of a square cut into the floor directly in front of her—a section that was no doubt sensitive to pressure. Click looked up at her reproachfully.

“Yes,” Alice said. “I do need to be more careful. Thank you, Click.”

Satisfied, Click sat down while Alice studied the room and the noisy clockwork machinery. Did the blood belong to Aunt Edwina? Somehow she doubted it. Aunt Edwina had built the trap, and while it was possible she had been caught in it herself, it seemed unlikely. Of course, that left open the question of whose blood it was and what had happened to the body.

She tried the door. Locked, and from a drop bar on the other side, if she were any judge. Nothing she could open with the materials in her handbag. And all the windows were high off the floor. In any case, fleeing the house would leave many mysteries unsolved, including what had happened to Aunt Edwina, why she had left her house to Alice under such odd circumstances, and who was playing that amazing violin. No doubt everything was intertwined.

Alice retrieved her handbag and continued to study the room. Clockworkers were known for their paranoia, and where there was one trap, there would be others. The trouble was, such traps could be small or large, obvious or subtle. It might appear impossible that any one person could build so much, but clockworkers had two advantages over normal humans. One was that they needed little sleep. The plague that focused their minds also served to keep them awake, which, some theorized, contributed to their instability. The other advantage came in the form of progressive automatons. A clockworker might build an automaton, which might then tirelessly assist with the building of another automaton, and then another and another, each one exponentially adding to the amount of work that the clockworker could accomplish until the clockworker finally burnt out. Alice was looking at several years' worth of work.

This brought up another question—Aunt Edwina's continued survival. No clockworker Alice had ever heard of lived very long. Charles Babbage, the most famous clockworker in history, caught the clockwork plague in 1837 and died only two years later, just after he created the analytic engines that made modern automatons possible. The great composer Wolfgang Mozart, one of the first recorded clockworkers, wrote stunning operas and piano concertos in the final year of his life before the clockwork plague claimed him in 1791, only six months after he caught it. Many wondered what both men might have created had the plague allowed them to live longer. Aunt Edwina, on the other hand, had sent Alice her first automaton for her sixteenth birthday—five years ago. Could Aunt Edwina have been infected with clockwork plague all this time? It would certainly explain the interior of the house, though it wouldn't explain how she had survived the plague for so long.

Alice continued to think. If Aunt Edwina had wanted Alice to have the house, she wouldn't have created it in such a way that Alice wouldn't be able take possession of it. There had to be a way to circumvent the traps, or shut them down. On the other hand, clockworkers didn't think the way normal people did, and what made sense to one of them appeared mad to everyone else. A clockworker might think it perfectly sensible to help someone by killing him.

Machinery parts large and small continued to swing, drop, turn, and clank in the clockwork mansion, but the violin music filtered through the noise. Alice was finally able to pinpoint a direction—the back of the building. Very well, then, that was where she would go.

A pair of automatons rushed past her, creating a slight breeze with the speed of their passing. Three spiders clicked forward, paused, clicked forward, paused. A man-sized gear rolled along its track while pistons popped up and down out of the floor behind it. Alice pursed her lips and studied the system carefully. Even assuming there were no more traps laid—and she wasn't ready to assume that—the clockwork machinery took up quite a lot of the floor space, and it was always moving. Any bit of it could easily crush her. But the more she studied the place, the more she began to see a regularity, a pattern. A series of deep grooves was cut into the floor, and the automatons moved through the grooves in specific ways. Even the ones that flew followed the floor grooves. And the fact that the automatons moved throughout the room without harm told her she could, too.

When another automaton passed close by, a slower one, Alice leapt over the pressure square and, grateful she had chosen a simple dress for her luncheon with Norbert, landed behind the machine so she could follow it exactly. Her heart beat fast with fear and excitement. Another leap and step brought her behind the trio of spidery automatons skittering in another direction. She paused when they did, ducked beneath a swinging pendulum that would have brained her, twirled on her toes, and made a fast turn to stay behind the spidery trio. A few more steps brought her to the bottom of a staircase that circled the back wall, where she paused to catch her breath. No more traps triggered so far.

After a moment's thoughtful stare at the staircase, she put the wooden handle of her handbag in her mouth, flung herself astride the banister, and hauled herself hand over hand up its length. The process looked ridiculous and immodest, she was sure, but no one was around to see, so what did it matter? Better that than to risk an unhappy surprise on the stairs.

A certain amount of exertion got her to the top, breathless and panting around the handbag handle. Click was waiting for her on the final stair.

“How did you get up here?” she demanded.

Click didn't answer. Grumbling to herself, Alice clambered down from the banister. She was standing on a balcony that encircled the great room. A quarter of the way round, a set of double doors stood partly ajar. Below her, the automatons, pendulums, and ticking machinery continued in their strange, intricate dance on the grooved floor. The pattern hovered at the edge of recognition, but the longer Alice stared at it, the more her head began to hurt. Instead, she closed her eyes and listened carefully. The sweet violin music she had heard earlier seemed to be coming from beyond the double doors farther along the balcony.

Alice started carefully across the wood floor. One of the boards shifted beneath her foot, and she leapt back. Nothing further happened. Alice drew her skirts back and tapped at the flooring with a quick foot. Still nothing. She prodded harder. This time an entire section of the floor tilted and flipped over on a pivot. Alice barely had time to yank her foot back and catch a glimpse of the yawning space beneath the boards before they smashed back into place.