The Iron Thorn (2 page)

My stomach closed like a fist, but my voice came out soothing. I’ve had practice being soothing, calming. Too much practice. “Nerissa,” I said, because that’s her name and we never address each other as mother and daughter but always as Nerissa and Aoife. “I’m listening to you. But you’re not making any sense.”
Just like usual
. I left the last part off. She’d only find something else to throw.

I picked up the mirror and ran my thumb over the backing. It was silver, and it had been pretty, once. When I was a child I’d played at being beautiful while my mother sat by the window of Our Lady of Rationality, the first madhouse in my memory, run by Rationalist nuns. Their silent black-clad forms fluttered like specters outside my mother’s cell while they prayed to the Master Builder, the epitome of human reason, for her recovery. All the medical science and
logic in the world couldn’t cure my mother, but the nuns tried. And when they failed, she was sent on to another madhouse, where no one prayed for anything.

Nerissa gave a snort, ruffling the ragged fringe above her eyes. “Oh, am I? And what would you know of sense, miss? You and those ironmongers locked away in that dank school, the gears turning and turning to grind your bones …”

I stopped listening. Listen to my mother long enough and you started to believe her. And believing Nerissa broke my heart.

My thumb sank into the depression in the mirror frame, left where an unscrupulous orderly had pried out a ruby, or so my mother said. She accused everyone of everything, sooner or later. I’d been a nightjar, come to drink her blood and steal her life, a ghost, a torturer, a spy. When she turned her rage on me, I gathered my books and left, knowing that we wouldn’t speak again for weeks. On the days when she talked about her dreams, the visits could stretch for hours.

“I went to the lily field …,” my mother whispered, pressing her forehead against the window bars. Her fingers slipped between them to leave ghost marks on the glass.

Time gone by, her dreams fascinated me. The lily field, the dark tower, the maidens fair. She told them over and over, in soft lyrical tones. No other mother told such fanciful bedtime stories. No other mother saw the lands beyond the living, the rational and the iron. Nerissa had been lost in dreams, in one fashion or another, my entire life.

Now each time I visited I hoped she’d wake up from her fog. And each time, I left disappointed. When I graduated from the Lovecraft Academy, I could be too busy to
see her at all, with my respectable job and respectable life. Until then, Nerissa needed someone to hear her dreams, and the duty fell to me. I felt the weight of being a dutiful daughter like a stone strapped to my legs.

I picked up my satchel and stood. “I’m going to go home.” The air horn hadn’t sounded the end of hours yet, but I could see the dark drawing in beyond the panes.

Nerissa was up, cat-quick, and wrapping her fingers around my wrist. Her hand was cold, like always, and her nightgown fluttered around her skin-and-bones body. I had always been taller, sturdier than my slight mother. I’d say I took after my father, if I’d ever met him.

“Don’t leave me here,” Nerissa hissed. “Don’t leave me to look into their eyes alone. The dead girls will dance, Aoife, dance on the ashes of the world.…”

She held my wrist, and my gaze, for the longest of breaths. I felt cold creep in around the windowpanes, tickle my exposed skin, run fingers up my spine. A sharp rap came from outside the doors, and we both started. “I know you’re not making trouble for your lovely daughter, Nerissa,” said Dr. Portnoy, the psychiatrist who had my mother’s care.

“No trouble,” I said, stepping away from Nerissa. I didn’t like doctors, didn’t like their hard eyes that dissected a person like my mother, but listening to Portnoy was preferable to listening to my mother shout. I was relieved he’d appeared when he had.

Nerissa’s eyes flickered between me and Portnoy when he stepped into the room. Anxious eyes, filled with animal cleverness. Portnoy patted the breast pocket of his white coat, the silver loop-the-loop of a syringe poking out.

“I’ll kiss you goodbye,” my mother whispered, as if it were our secret, and then she grabbed me in a stiff hug. “See, Doctor?” she shouted. “Just a mother’s love.” She gave a loud laugh, a crow sound, as if it were a colossal joke to be a mother in the first place, and then she backed away from me and sat in the window again, watching the dusk fade to nighttime. I turned my back. I couldn’t stand seeing her for another moment.

“I’m very concerned about your mother,” Dr. Portnoy said. He’d walked me to the end of the ward and had the mountain of an orderly open the folding security gate. “Her delusions are becoming more pronounced. You know if she continues this behavior we’ll have to move her to a secure ward. I can’t risk her infecting the other, trustworthy patients if her madness worsens.”

I flinched. My mother was undeniably mad, but a secure ward? That meant a windowless room and a bed with straps. The contents of the syringe in Portnoy’s pocket. No visitors.

“Now, I know you’re a ward of the city,” Portnoy continued. “But she’s still your mother, and you have a better chance of connecting with her than I. You must impress upon her the urgency of her situation, the need for improvement in her diagnosis.”

I put my hand on the big front door of the madhouse. I could feel the cold air seeping in around the cracks. “Dr. Portnoy.” I felt the stone again, dragging me back, back to my mother no matter how I struggled. “Nerissa doesn’t listen to anyone, least of all me. She’s been crazy my entire life.”

“The preferred term is ‘virally decimated,’ ” he scolded me with a smile. “Those poor souls who lose their mind to the necrovirus can’t help it, you know. No one would choose to have viral spores eat her mind away until only delusion is left.”

I did know. Too well. Before the necrovirus had appeared and begun its spread across the globe, seventy years before Nerissa was even born, I supposed the mad occasionally got better. But never in my lifetime. Never my mother.

Done talking, I pushed open the door, letting in the roar of Derleth Street at the foot of the granite steps and the smell of cooking from the diner across the sea of jitneys and foot traffic. Steam wafted from exhaust pipes in the pavement and the vents of wheeled vendors’ carts alike, making a low mist that hung over the asylum like a cloud of ill omen. Far away, just a whisper under my feet, I could feel the din of the Lovecraft Engine as the great gears in the heart of the city turned and turned. Trapped aether powered the machine that gave the city steam and life.

Portnoy waited for an answer like an unpleasant professor in a class I was already failing. I sighed in defeat. “However you call it, she’s mad and I can’t help you, Dr. Portnoy.”

I stepped out the door, and he caught me. His grip was hard, but not desperate, not like Nerissa’s. This grip was hard like the grasp of a foundry automaton lifting a load of new iron. “Miss Grayson, you have a birthday coming up.”

I swallowed the millstone in my throat. Panic. “Yes.”

“And how are you feeling? Any dreams? Any physical symptoms?”

His grip tensed as I did, and I couldn’t get away. “No.”

Portnoy frowned at me and I looked at my shoes. If he couldn’t see my eyes, he couldn’t see the lie therein.

At last, Portnoy said, “I suggest you think about your mother’s final disposition before your birthday, Aoife. Make arrangements with the city while you are able. It can go badly for charity patients with no one to care for them. Cristobel is an experimentation facility, you know.”

Experimentation
, a glorious word to most of the students I studied engineering with, sent a spike of nausea straight into my stomach. It didn’t mean the sacred tradition of hypothesis, theory and proof here. It meant electricity. Locked rooms. Water tanks and halogen lights. Portnoy didn’t fool me—he wanted to be the one to cure viral madness, to find the golden key where all before him had failed. I’d seen some of the creatures he wheeled through the halls. Twitching limbs, shaved heads, empty eyes. Experiments.

My mother tethered me to her madness, but no matter how much I wanted escape, I didn’t want it to happen like that.

The bells on St. Oppenheimer’s cathedral started tolling five, and I pulled my arm out of Portnoy’s grasp. He looked at me, the steam from the outside world fogging the lenses of his spectacles. “I have to go,” I said, and tried to still my hammering heart.

“A pleasant evening to you then, Miss Grayson,” he said. The sentiment didn’t reach his eyes. Portnoy slammed the door behind me with a final bang, a tomb sound. All of the madhouses had the same heavy doors, the kind that let you know they always kept a piece of you, even when you could leave.

As I walked, I wrapped my school scarf around my face to keep the cold air out of my lungs. Leaving the madhouse always felt like a temporary stay of execution. I’d just have to go back next week, assuming my mother hadn’t lost her visitor privileges again. I hurried, letting the cold burn the torrent of anger and panic out of me, calm me, turn me back into an anonymous girl rushing to catch the jitney. The White Line, back to the Academy and the School of Engines, was three blocks away, on the corner of Derleth and Oakwood, and it only ran once an hour after five bells.

I arrived at the corner just as the jitney pulled away in a roar of gears and a dragon belch of steam. Cursing, I kicked the pavement. A passing pair of Star Sisters glared at me and made the sign of the eye, two fingers to their foreheads. I looked away. The Star Sisters and their Great Old Ones could curse me all they liked—it wouldn’t supersede the curse that was already ticking time down in my blood.

I put my scarf up over my head and walked on, since there was nothing to do but walk until I caught up to a jitney that would take me back to Uptown. Dr. Portnoy’s words turned in my mind, mingling with Nerissa’s dreams. My head hurt, steadily throbbing in time with my heart, and I still had studying to do, an exam in the morning. My day wasn’t likely to improve.

When I’d gone a few blocks, my mood worsening with each step, I heard a voice yelling to me from across the traffic stream.

“Aoife? Aoife! Wait!”

A nimble figure darted in front of a pedal jitney pulling a roast-nut cart, and the driver shouted something in
German. I’d taken enough courses to know it wasn’t the least bit polite, but Calvin Daulton hadn’t.

“Made it to you!” he panted, pulling up beside me, his cheeks twin combustions of red in the cold. “Almost didn’t. Saw you walking by.”

“Why are you all the way in Old Town?” I said, surprise coloring my question. Cal hefted a sack from the stationer’s store across the way.

“Nibs and ink. Only store in the city that carries a decent india ink. We’ve got a schematic due tomorrow—or did you forget again?”

“Of course not. Mine’s already finished.” Only a small lie. Not like my lie to Dr. Portnoy about my dreams. The sketches for my schematic were finished, but the transcription to good paper, the writing in of technical specifications, the math—all of that was waiting for me back at the girls’ dormitory. That bit, I’d forgotten about. Nerissa ate up my thoughts the way the Great Old Ones were said to devour suns on their journey through the spheres.

“Course it is,” Cal said, catching his breath. “You missed the jitney too, huh?”

“Only by a little,” I said, feeling furious all over again. If Portnoy hadn’t kept me in the madhouse …

“I guess it’s leftovers for us,” Cal sighed. Even though Cal was the rough size and shape of a pipe-cleaner boy, he ate like a barbarian at a feast. He’d been my friend since the first day of our time at the Academy, and if he wasn’t thinking about comic books or asking me for advice on getting my roommate, Cecelia, to notice him, Cal was thinking about food. Leftovers was a tragedy of the same order as being expelled from the School of Engines and
having to transfer to the School of Dramatics. Me, I couldn’t care less tonight. My stomach was still in knots.

We were at the foot of Derleth Street, the wide blood-rust expanse of the Erebus River boiling with slow-moving ice before us. To one side lay the river walk, lit up ghost-blue by aether lanterns and packed with late-evening tourists and shoppers. The arcade whistled enticingly, the penny prizes a temptation that I could feel pulling at Cal.

On the other side crouched Dunwich Lane, a completely unlit expanse of cobble street, except for the old-fashioned oil lantern hanging in front of a pub called the Jack & Crow.

Dunwich Lane ran under the feet of the Boundary Bridge, the iron marvel that Joseph Strauss had erected for the city some thirty years before. Cal and I—along with the rest of the sophomore class—had taken a field trip to it at the beginning of the year. It was the model we practiced drawing schematics with, until we were judged competent to design our own. If you couldn’t re-create the Boundary Bridge, you had a visit with the Head of the School and a gentle suggestion that perhaps your future was not that of an engineer. There had been three other girls in the School until that exam. Now there was only me.

The bridge looked much different from below, crouched over the river like a beast at rest, its iron lattice black against the dusk. I plucked at Cal’s arm. “Come on.”

He looked blank. “Come on where?”

I started down Dunwich Lane, the cobbles slick under my feet from the frost. Cal bounded after me. “Are you crazy? Students can’t be down here—all of Old Town is off-limits. Mrs. Fortune and Mr. Hesse will have our hides.”

“And who’s going to tell either of them?” I said. “This is the quickest way back to the Academy on foot. There’s nothing to be worried about if we’re together.” I didn’t know that for fact. I’d never walked through Old Town after dark. Students, especially charity cases, couldn’t afford to bend the rules of the Academy, and like Cal said, Old Town, night or day, was not a place where a nice girl went. Not if she wanted to stay nice.

Still, we were in a city, far from necrovirus outbreaks and the heretics that Rationalists preached against. No storefront fortune-tellers or charlatan witches, or the “virally decimated,” were going to leap out and attack us.