The Iron Thorn (22 page)

I laughed, hoping Dean had let the scar go at mild curiosity. “That last part, I didn’t know.” The key wound tight, and I stepped back, shutting the glass over the sinister paintings on the clock face.

“Now you,” Dean coaxed. “Come on. What’s your favorite lantern flick? Favorite record? Preferred flavor for a milk shake?”

I watched the gears of the clock whirr to life. “You don’t get my secrets that easily, remember?”

Dean shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Secrets are my stock-in-trade.”

I gave Dean a small smile, a genuine one. I hadn’t felt much like smiling since I’d gotten Conrad’s letter, but Dean made it a little easier. “Maybe you should try a bit harder.”

The clock hands flipped over on ten o’clock, and the chime drowned out any secret I might have been tempted to slip into Dean’s grasp.

“That’s something,” Dean said when the sonorous tolling
had ended. At least it didn’t make my head spin anymore. “I know my way around a jitney engine, but this …” He smiled. “You’re a bright penny, kid.”

I wiped the grease from my hands with my toolkit’s supply of rags, watching in satisfaction as the clock spun on with nary a hitch. “You can call me Aoife, you know.” Not that I minded very much being called princess.

Before Dean replied, a great rumbling like a waking beast began under our feet. Dean’s eyes snapped wide. “What on scorched earth is that?”

The books on the shelves vibrated, as if they were itching to shed their covers and fly away. I grabbed hold of a shelf to keep my footing, and Dean reached for me as well. “I don’t know,” I shouted over the rumbling. From far off, I heard crockery falling and Bethina give a scream. What had I done now?

“Aoife?” Cal stumbled into the library on the bucking floorboards. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know!” I didn’t, truly, and my panic rose along with the rumbling from under the floor, as if we were standing in the bowels of the Lovecraft Engine, chambers turning at full capacity and pressure building without a relief valve.

Then, abruptly as it had come upon us, the rumbling ceased and a section of wall above my father’s writing desk rolled back, soundless as the servant’s passage to the kitchen. But this was smaller and older, clearly built into the house at conception. It hid a brass panel, half as tall as I was and twice as wide. Dials and switches, valves and an antique static board using glass breakers filled the tiny recess in the library wall.

I approached it, wondering at the artfulness of the
construction even as I felt trepidation build. Hidden rooms and hidden panels that controlled hidden things never boded well.

Dean let out a breath, his fists uncurling. “That’s a new one. What d’you suppose it’s for?”

“I have no idea,” I said. The panel reminded me of the controls on the
Berkshire Belle
, except these were older, more archaic, and there were a lot more switches and keys than a simple airship flight board.

“Don’t touch it!” Cal cried when I took a step toward it. I cast a glare back at him.

“Cal, it’s brass and wood. It’s not going to grow teeth.” I was cautious, but not scared. Machines were what I was good at.

I approached the hidden panel with its rows of switches labeled with painfully neat, handwritten placards:
Library, Front Hall
and
Cellar Traps
among at least a dozen others, all in an orderly, masculine hand on yellowed vellum squares.

Conrad had told me to fix the clock and in doing so I’d revealed Graystone’s secret heart. Conrad had vanished before he could perform whatever task he needed this panel for himself. But he’d had the forethought to send me the letter, to hide the note. He knew I’d come if he asked.

What I knew ever since that awful day in my dormitory room a year ago came true when I realized that Conrad had been planning for me to come here, to carry on where he couldn’t.

My brother wasn’t mad.

And if he wasn’t mad, then he was in a world of trouble.

The Iron Bones

D
EAN JOINED ME
at the panel, examining the controls. “Slick setup. Dare you to press one of those switches.” He reached for the closest lever, marked
Kitchen
.

“Don’t,” I said. For some reason I couldn’t define, I wanted to be first. It was my father’s house, my father’s device, and I wanted to be the one to discover how it worked.

Bethina peered around the library door. “Miss, what was that awful racket? Are we safe?”

“For the time being,” I murmured, touching each dial. Every facet of Graystone somehow connected to these antique controls.

“Awful shaking and shivering,” Bethina continued. “Like the Great Old Ones returned from the stars. My mum was raised in a Star Convent, and she told me—”

“That’s all mumbo jumbo,” Cal told her. “This is engineering.”

“Flash work, too,” Dean said. “I don’t think Bethina’s that
far off, cowboy. This thing Miss Aoife woke up ain’t just cold metal and gears. Houses have blood and gristle and bone, just like a person. Houses have souls.”

Cal jerked a thumb at me, at Dean. “Aoife, are you going to let him just babble heresy all day long?”

I rather liked Dean’s heresy. Graystone
was
like a living thing, old and dessicated, but alive still.

“Give it up,” I told Cal. “Let’s see if we can piece these controls together.”

At the top of the row of knobs, there was a dial marked
Front Hall
. “For what it’s worth, Dean,” I continued, “I don’t think you’re just speaking heresy.” Because Graystone did talk. It had warned me away like a wounded animal; when I’d fixed the clock, it had come into the open and showed me its face. Graystone wasn’t like any house I’d ever stepped foot in, and I knew that it had more secrets to give up, secrets that would lead me to my brother.

I put my hand on the dial. “I’m just going to turn it on and see what happens. If anything harmful was in the workings, it would have gone off when I fixed the clock.” Giving what I hoped was a reassuring nod—because in reality, I had no idea what would happen—I ran my fingers over the row of knobs, then settled back on
Front Hall
. If something in Graystone’s bones
was
malicious, the front entry was far enough away that we’d probably be safe.

“So you said, miss. I’m having no business with that thing,” Bethina said, scuttling away. Cal backed off too. Dean stayed where he was, hands in his pockets. His pale storm-sky eyes were implacable as thunderheads.

The
Front Hall
dial was inlaid with tiny darts of onyx,
pointing to the four stations of the compass, labeled in stamped brass with
Open, Shut, Lock
and
Trap. Lock
was engaged, and the dial was sticky when I tried to turn it. There was a squeak of rust as I put force behind the motion, and then the dial came free and flew all the way to the left, to
Open
.

A cool wind rushed over my cheek and blew back my hair, darting from the entry along with a flock of oak leaves. Cal hurried to the library door and peered into the front hall. “Door’s open,” he exclaimed. “I’ll be a shoggoth’s uncle.”

“Cal, please don’t talk about shoggoths,” I said. I read the rest of the dials.
Master Bedchamber, Attic, Widow’s Walk, Crypts
. Lastly, on its own at the bottom of the panel was a pure ivory dial with a large black spot of onyx in the center.
Lockdown
.

Lockdown
sat bookended by two valve dials that connoted pressure of some kind.
PSI
, wrought in proper brass script under the glassed-in dials, most likely meant steam. It was, I thought, probably an elaborate setup for a simple water and boiler shutoff. Even the stately homes that made up Lovecraft Academy had two large valve wheels, deep underground in their basements where the boilers resided.

“I think it’s just a setup for the mains,” Cal said, voicing my thought. “And maybe a release for the doors. Kinda frilly for that sort of work. And why plunk it in the library where the Master Builder and everyone can see it?”

“It’s an old house,” I said. “I guess they built things differently in those days.” My disappointment at the ordinary nature of the hidden panel was vast, and I stroked the
controls once more. It looked like it should be able to fly to the red planet and back, like the vessels the Crimson Guard were rumored to have.

“If it
is
only shutoffs,” I said, “why link it to the clock? Why hide it so you can only open it by turning the clock-hands to ten?”

“This place doesn’t make any sense,” Cal grumbled. “It’s all passages and shoddy layouts. It’d never pass muster with city architects.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” I whispered. The panel vibrated under my fingers, and a little static from the circuits pricked me. Graystone was still talking to me.

I turned
Front Hall
to
Shut
. The door slammed with a whirr of gears. “Maybe these aren’t just shutoffs and door locks.” I turned the dial to
Lock
. The door locks snapped into place along with a pair of iron rods that extended on rotating arms to lock in an embrace, securing the doors.

I turned the dial to
Trap
. There was a shriek of little-used, rusted metal from outside and then a great clang, like someone had slammed a metal coffin lid into place over the whole of the house. The crows took flight outside the library windows with a chorus of
caws
, their black silk wings flickering in the pale sunlight.

“Eyes of the Old Ones,” Cal exclaimed, peering out the front library window. “Aoife, you have to see this.”

I joined him and saw that a pair of iron plates had slid into place over the front doors of the mansion, knitted together at the seam with a series of spikes like the jaws of a Venus flytrap that would imprison any intruder trying to break the locks.

“The whole house is alive,” I whispered. “Rods for nerves and gears for bones and an iron skin to hide it.”

I went to the panel and clicked the dial back to
Lock
. The metal plates retreated with irritable clanking and rumbling, opening Graystone to the world once again.

Cal whistled. “You could lock somebody up like Attica in this place.”

“Or lock something out,” Dean muttered. “I don’t much care for locks, tell you the truth. We in the Rustworks spend a lot of time thinking about cold iron on our legs and stripes on our shoulders in some Proctor work camp.”

Entranced as I was, I waved him off. “The whole house is clockwork. The whole house is knitted together with these gears, and this is where one can make Graystone do whatever it likes.” The feat of constructing a clockwork house was something that a student at the School of Clockworks could only dream about. The assembly to cobble an entire structure together, to calibrate and time it so that it ran smooth and soundlessly, and then to bring it all into the central mechanism of the clock and the controls … the amount of time and care the clockmaker who built the house must have invested boggled my conception of mechanics.

My father hadn’t built it—it was much older, Victorian in style—but he must have known about it. He lived in this clockwork marvel.

And it was mine to learn and to control, and only mine. My father had left and in doing so left me the iron bones of Graystone, sleeping and waiting for me to wake them. Until he came back. If he did.

“Well,” Cal said. “We should test it out. See what it can
really do. I mean, for our own safety.” His eyes were bright and I could see that his fingers were twitching, itching to touch the controls of the clockwork as much as my own were.

“Sure,” I said, giving him a small smile. “How about you stay here and try out the dials? Dean and I can explore.” There would be no more talk of leaving once Cal got his hands on the panel. And I could show him I didn’t begrudge him wanting to go home by letting him play with the house’s mechanics.

Cal’s jaw jumped once at the mention of Dean, but only once. “Watch out for the traps,” he said. “All these switches have the setting.”

“She’s in good hands,” Dean told him, ushering me from the library.

I removed my elbow from his grasp. “I’m not in anyone’s hands at the moment.”

Dean’s back stiffened for a heartbeat, but then he gave me a nod. “My mistake.”

“It’s not a …” But I stopped myself before I became an even bigger fool. I wasn’t shying away from Dean because I wanted to. I was staying away from him because he was dangerous to me in the same way as an aether flame—bright, hypnotizing and hot enough to burn. I was here to find Conrad, get him out of danger and then go home. Not to let a boy fill my head with dreams and ideas that I could have
if
I didn’t go mad,
if
I had been born to a different family. No matter how much I wanted to see how he was different from the boys I knew. And I did want to, but I resigned myself to only wanting.

“Hey.” Dean called me into the back parlor. “Think now
we can get the wireless working?” He pointed to the old-fashioned console, its tubes set into ruby and emerald glass, the gas inside them drifting lazily back and forth.