This Monstrous Thing (16 page)

Mary and Oliver stopped a few paces in and looked around like we’d stepped into some grand cathedral. I stood behind them, ringing rainwater out of my waistcoat. They both seemed so impressed that I decided not to mention how bleeding creepy I thought the whole place was.

There was a hiss like a piston behind us, and we all turned in time to see the door steam shut. Oliver tried the handle, but it wouldn’t give. “Dammit, it locked.”

“Of course it locked, it’s a prison,” Mary said, and we both looked at her.

“A what?” Oliver said.

“A prison,” she repeated. “Or it was, once.”

Oliver scowled. “You might have mentioned that before we got locked inside.”

“Don’t you know the story?” Mary asked, and I shook my head. “A hundred years ago, the man who lived here killed his whole family, so the city made him serve his sentence under house arrest. They wanted him to live with the ghosts of what he’d done. I think he hanged himself before they could execute him. The family name was Sain. It’s called Château de Sain but I’ve heard everyone calls it Château de Sang
now.”

“Blood Castle,” I said, and I could have sworn the room got colder.

“Hell’s teeth,” Oliver murmured. “You and your grim stories. Think there’s dungeons as well with skeletons hanging from the walls?” He looked like
he was about to say something more, but his gaze snagged on me. I realized I was standing very close to Mary—
very
close, close enough to feel the damp material of her skirts brush the tips of my fingers as she shifted her weight. A sly smile started to spread across his face, and I panicked, certain he was about to say something teasing that would make me blush and her step away.

But instead he turned on his heel and started across the room. “You two stay here,” he called, and shot me a knowing look over his shoulder. “I’m going to find another way out. Or the ghosts, whichever comes first.”

Neither Mary nor I moved as he disappeared through a door across the room. We stood shoulder to shoulder, wet clothes dripping onto the floor and the silence between us filled up by the muted echo of the storm. I could feel her next to me, a static charge pulsing all up my side. She was still staring up at the cobwebs and the dust and the peeling wallpaper with such a look of reverence on her face that I wondered if we were seeing the same thing. “What are you thinking of?” I asked her.

She took a long, deep breath, like the prelude to a sigh.
“The many men, so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie: / And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.”

I didn’t know what she meant by that, but when I looked over at her, I thought for a moment she was crying. It might have been just the raindrops left on her face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. “All empty and broken down. Sort of makes you want to . . .” She caught me looking at her and trailed off. I felt my cheeks get hot, but
I didn’t look away. Her gaze was fervent, so intense that it felt like a physical touch.

“Sort of makes you want to what?” I asked, my voice suddenly hoarse.

Between us, hidden in the folds of her skirt, her fingers slid into mine. Her skin was dewy from the rain but still impossibly warm. I felt the electric flare of her touch straight up my arm and all the way through me, our pulse points meeting like charged wires and sending up sparks.

“Sort of makes you want to write about it,” she said.

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I
wasn’t certain how we were going to get into the city, being possibly the two most wanted men in Geneva and traveling with a clockwork girl, but Geisler seemed unconcerned. He gave me a set of false identification papers that labeled me a student named Dieter Hahnel from Ingolstadt. Clémence had her own name on her papers, though I assumed they too had been forged, since nothing on them designated her as clockwork.

Geisler decided it would be better to travel apart in case one of us was recognized, so he left for the city just after breakfast; Clémence and I waited until nearly midday. The queue snaking along the city walls to the checkpoint was long when we arrived, and we waited for the better part of an hour, moving forward in shuffling
steps as everyone around us buzzed nervously. The muddy snow was soaking through my boots, and I kept shifting from foot to foot to keep my toes from freezing. Beside me, Clémence kept her hands in her pockets and her gaze straight ahead. She seemed dead calm. When the girl in front of us dropped her scarf, Clémence plucked it out of the snow and tapped her on the shoulder. The girl turned, and smiled as she took it. “Oh!
Merci
.”

“De rien,”
she replied, and ducked her head as the girl turned forward again. Clémence’s cheeks went pink, and she kept glancing up at the back of the girl’s head as we moved forward.

We reached the front of the queue sooner than I’d anticipated. I kept my scarf over my face and my knit cap pulled low as I handed over my papers to a tall officer. He glanced at them, then up at my face, then back at my papers. I held my breath.

“Parlez-vous français?”
he asked.

Dieter Hahnel was supposed to be German. I didn’t have a clue if he would speak French, so I kept my mouth shut and my face blank like I didn’t understand. The soldier watched me for a moment with his eyebrows raised, then shrugged and flipped to the second page.

He was reaching for his stamp when another officer appeared and tapped him on the shoulder. “Your shift’s up,” he said in French. “I’m here to relieve you.”

The first officer looked up from my papers. “Fantastic.”
His hand was still on the stamp but he didn’t seem like he was going to use it until his conversation was finished. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from shouting,
Just stamp the damn thing!
“What happened with the protest?” he asked.

“All taken care of,” the second officer replied. “A few arrests, but no one was hurt.”

“Was it the Frankenstein lot again?”

Suddenly I was quite content to stand and eavesdrop.

But the officer chose that moment to stamp the second page of my papers and hand them back to me.
“Danke, Herr Hahnel,”
he said with a smile, and waved me forward.

I didn’t have a clue how to respond in German, so I said in my best imitation of schoolboy French,
“Merci, monsieur.”

He laughed, and I kept grinning like an idiot as I walked past him and Clémence took my place. I was starting to relax when someone caught my arm, and I turned. It was another officer. He must have heard his fellow speaking to me in German, and must have spoken none himself, for he simply mimed instructions to me to hold out my arms. I’d gone through the checkpoint dozens of times and never had to do this before. Maybe they’d recognized me after all.

I kept my face straight as I held my arms out from my sides, bracing myself for whatever was about to happen.
But the officer didn’t grab me; instead he traced my silhouette with his hands, fingers a few centimeters away from me. I didn’t realize what was happening until the tin buttons on my coat wobbled, and I realized that his gloves were magnetic. He was checking for hidden metal parts.

I resisted the urge to look back at Clémence. I would make it through without a problem, but she’d be caught. And with
Frankenstein
on everyone’s mind, clockwork lungs would earn her more than just a bronze cog badge.

After a quick check of the rest of me, the officer beckoned Clémence forward. I watched her from a few steps away. She said something to the officer that I didn’t catch, but he laughed. She smiled, a different sort of smile than I’d seen her give anyone before. Not a smirk, just a genuinely lovely smile as she raised her arms in an elegant sweep like she was making a snow angel. They kept chatting as he ran his hands along her arms and down her back. One hand lingered for a moment on her waist before sliding down to check her knees. I hoped he’d skip any area of her body that would attract the magnets, but as his fingers passed her collarbone, they flinched to her coat. He frowned.

But before he could say anything, Clémence said, with that same sweet smile, “Oh, my pendant!” And she reached under her coat and produced a short gold chain with a heavy pendant dangling from it. The pendant tottered in midair, defying gravity as it swung toward the
guard’s magnetic fingertips. “Perhaps this is why you find me so attractive.” And she winked at him. Actually winked, like some dopey schoolgirl.

The guard smiled. “Not the only reason, mademoiselle.” He pried the pendant from his fingers and she tucked it back down the neck of her coat. “You can go on,” he said, waving her forward to where I was waiting. Clémence gave him a quick bob of a curtsy, then trotted off to join me.

“That was lucky,” I said when we were far enough away from the checkpoint that we wouldn’t be overheard.

“That wasn’t lucky,” Clémence replied. “That was carefully planned.”

“You knew about the magnets?”

“Geisler told me. He heard about them in France.”

“They weren’t doing that when we left.”

“Maybe something happened.”

The officer had said protests. And
Frankenstein.
I shivered.

“Is that your necklace?” I asked as Clémence tugged the pendant over her head and dropped it into the pocket of her coat.

“No, I lifted it from a woman at the inn last night. I thought I’d sell it and see what money we could get.” And then she smirked at me, herself again.

“Why don’t you smile more?” I asked her.

“I smile all the time.”

“Not like you smiled at that guard.”

She knocked the heel of her boot against the base of an industrial torch to get the snow off. “Some men think a smile is an invitation to put their hands wherever they want.”

“He didn’t.” Clémence snorted. “He was flirting!” I said. “You were flirting. I’m just saying, you look nice when you smile. It’s attractive.”

“I don’t want to be attractive,” she replied. “I don’t want to smile, and I won’t have you telling me I should. I don’t want attention from men like him.”

“But that girl with the scarf, you’d like her attention, wouldn’t you?” I snapped. It felt mean even as I said it, but I didn’t retreat.

Clémence went red as a cranberry, then jerked her coat tighter around her.

We didn’t say anything as we crossed the river into the city center. The streets were busy, snow trampled into slush by shoppers and the spokes of omnibuses and carriages. I led the way, sticking to side streets and alleys as much as I could to avoid the crowds. It was nearly Christmas, I realized as a group of women with holly in their hair passed us, singing a wine-soaked round of “C’est le jour de la Noël.” So much had changed that it felt impossible I’d only been gone a few weeks.

We found a pawnshop in Vieille Ville
and I stood beside Clémence at the counter while she negotiated
with the shifty-eyed shopkeeper over the pendant. As he was counting out coins from the cash box, the shop door opened behind us with a rush of cold air. Before I could turn to see who’d come in, a tiny girl with jet-black hair spilling out from under her cap popped up between Clémence and me. “Take one,” she said, and thrust a battered leaflet into my hand.

The shopkeeper dropped the coins he’d been counting and charged around the counter, flapping his hands at her. “Out of my shop! Out out out!”

The girl shoved another leaflet at Clémence, then took off, skittering flat-footed across the shop and flailing out the door with her hair flying behind her. The shopkeeper stopped on the threshold and glared after her, then shambled back to the counter with his head bent. “Apologies,” he murmured.

I glanced down at the crumpled paper the girl had forced on me. Printed on it was an illustration of a man, half mechanical, half human. His chest was drawn to look like an open clock, and a long scar ran the length of his face. Above the illustration, in heavy, bold letters, it read
FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER LIVES!

Next to me, Clémence drew in a sharp breath. I held up the leaflet for the shopkeeper to see. “Do you know anything about this?”

He didn’t look up from his cash box. “I’ve told her to
stay away, but she keeps coming in and harassing my customers.”

“Does she work for someone?” I asked. “Or do you know—”

The shopkeeper shut the lid of the cash box so hard the change inside rattled, then slid our coins across the counter and turned toward the back room. “Excuse me.”

I didn’t wait for Clémence. I spun on my heel and dashed out of the shop, looking both ways down the street for the tiny girl with the black hair. I spotted her a few shops down, thrusting leaflets at passing pedestrians. Behind me, the bell jingled as Clémence followed me out. “Alasdair, what are you—”

“Oye, you!” I called, and started down the street. The girl looked up and for a moment I thought she was going to bolt, but instead she flung her hands in the air, one still fisted around her leaflets. I jogged forward to meet her, Clémence on my heels. “Don’t run,” I called as we drew closer.

“I can’t,” she replied.

“Can’t?” I looked down. One of her bare feet was wrapped in muddy strips of cloth. The other was tarnished metal, connected to the socket around her ankle with a heavy bolt rusted orange.

“Can’t,” she repeated. “It’s too stiff. But I’ll take the leaflet back if you don’t want it. Printing’s expensive.”

Clémence appeared at my shoulder. “She needs a mechanic,” she said as she stared down at the rusted foot. Then, to the girl: “Where are your parents?”

“In a grave,” she replied, straight-faced.

“Do you stay at the orphanage?”

“They wouldn’t have me.” She knocked her metal foot against the ground for emphasis. “The woman told me they only take human children.”

“Bleeding hell.” I shoved the leaflet into my pocket and tugged my gloves off. “Sit down, let me look at your foot.”

She didn’t move. “I can’t run, but I’ll scream.”

“He won’t hurt you, he’s a Shadow Boy,” Clémence said. “He takes care of people like you.”

The girl stared at us for a moment with her chin up, then sat down hard on the frozen street. I crouched down and took her foot in my hands. The ball joint in her ankle had gone stiff and the rust was starting to creep along the socket welded to her leg and invade her skin.

Clémence leaned over my shoulder, though I wasn’t certain she knew what she was looking at. “What do you need?”

I needed my tools, and my files, and my magnifying goggles—all smashed up in our shop. I needed to know why this girl who looked like she could be knocked over by a winter breeze was handing out leaflets with my brother’s picture on them. I needed to get Oliver out of Geneva and I needed Geisler gone.

“Vinegar—it takes rust off. It’s not ideal, but it’ll work.”

“There’s a market around the corner,” the girl piped up. Then she added, “I haven’t got any money.”

“I do,” Clémence said. “Stay put, I’ll be back.”

Neither of us said anything for a while after Clémence disappeared. The girl was sucking on her bottom lip while she traced patterns with her finger in the muddy snowbank next to her. Her nails were black around the edges, and the chapped scrape of frostbite decorated her knuckles.

“You keep doing that, your fingers will fall off,” I said.

She glared at me, then stuck her hand up to the wrist in the snow. I sighed and turned my gaze upward, over the rooftops to the golden clouds settled above the chimneys. At the end of the alley, above the houses and shops, I could see the outline of the clock tower cut against the sun. “Do you know what day it is?” I asked her.

“Don’t you?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t ask,” I replied through gritted teeth.

“December the twenty-second,” she answered. Her eyes followed mine up to the clock. “The clock strikes again on Christmas Eve. Did you know that?”

“Yes.” I pulled my gaze away from the clock tower and instead took the leaflet out of my pocket and spread it flat against my knee. “Why are you handing these out?”

“They asked me to.”

“Who asked you?”

She crossed her arms. “I’m not supposed to tell
because you aren’t made of metal. You aren’t like me.”

“If I fix your foot, will you tell me?”

She considered this, teeth still working on her bottom lip. She didn’t say no.

Clémence returned a few minutes later with a bottle of vinegar. I poured some onto my glove and scrubbed at the rusted joint until it consented to bend again. It badly needed to be replaced and the whole foot could use a good cleaning, but I didn’t have the means for either. The girl watched me with her elbows resting on her knees and her nose wrinkled at the smell.