This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  Curious now, I turned a few more pages and glanced at the first line:

  My dear sister, you will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

  The omnibus jerked to a sudden stop as a steamcycle cut into the street ahead of it. Someone bumped into me, and I lost my place on the page. I was a slow and stumbling reader on the best days, and the noise and swaying of the omnibus combined with all those massive words made it even harder. I tipped the cover shut. Mary knew I didn’t like to read—that had always been what she and Oliver shared. They’d spent the whole summer trading books, though he didn’t have many, and everything he gave to her she would return the next time we saw her, finished. When Oliver asked her how she read so quickly, she told him with a sly smile that she took books to bed like lovers. Perhaps she hadn’t meant Frankenstein for me at all, but as a gift to pass on. The fact that it had arrived today of all days wasn’t lost on me.

  The omnibus sped forward out of Vieille Ville, the old town built around the cathedral, and along the Rhone toward the financial district. As the street opened into Place de l’Horloge, the clock tower loomed above us, the clock’s black hands suspended at midnight and still as sentries. Built in celebration of Geneva joining the Swiss Confederation, it was the tallest tower in Europe, all industrial struts and iron beams, and boasted the largest clock as well—inside were gears wider than a grown man was tall, designed to operate on an electric charge. It was a spectacle, even though if the clock wasn’t running yet. The scaffolding had finally come down, the frosted-glass face repaired and a sparkling reflection of the frozen lake beyond the city walls. I pulled my coat tighter and looked away from it.

  A group got on at the clock tower station, and I had to slide into the corner to make room. I nearly dropped Frankenstein in the shuffle, and as the pages fanned, a thin envelope slid from between them. I snatched it from the air before it fell.

  There was my name again on the front in Mary’s looped handwriting. I stared at it for a long moment as the omnibus jerked forward, and I tried not to let all that stupid hope inside me fill in what it might say. As angry as I was at her after the way we had ended, it thrilled me to think that maybe, at long last, she wanted to make things right between us. All she needed was to say the word, and I would have been hers in an instant.

  I started to break the seal, but then a harsh voice from down the car growled, “Get up, you piece of machinery.”

  I froze. A police officer was standing a few feet down the car, navy greatcoat sweeping all the way to the floor like a shroud, and I’d been so busy mooning like an idiot over Mary’s letter I hadn’t noticed him get on. I knew him at once—Inspector Jiroux, head of Geneva’s police force—by the heavy gold cross he kept on a chain through the buttonhole of his waistcoat. It flashed as he crossed his arms, glaring down at an old man with a shock of white hair and a brass button in the shape of a cog pinned to his coat collar. I shoved Mary’s letter back between the pages of Frankenstein and started to shoulder my way to the door, my heart stuttering.

  Jiroux kicked the old man’s leg. There was a low metallic clang. “Get up,” he said again. “Don’t you see all these whole human men standing up around you?” He turned suddenly and pointed his baton at me. The old man and I both flinched. “Give this young man your seat.”

  “It’s all right,” I mumbled, eyes on my boots.

  “No it isn’t,” Jiroux said. “It’s not all right for men like you to be second to mechanicals like him.”

  “He’s fine, really,” I said.

  “He’s not fine, he’s a machine.” Jiroux seized the knee of the old man’s trousers and tugged it up, revealing the metal skeleton and mess of gears sinking into scar tissue beneath. “Not even a man anymore,” Jiroux said, and nudged the bars with the toe of his boot. They clattered softly.

  The old man’s shoulders slumped. “Please, I can’t stand well. I lost it in the war.”

  “And so you chose to spit in the face of God by letting a man make you mechanical?”

  “It is not disrespect for God, sir—” the old man began, but Jiroux interrupted him, voice carrying through the cab like a priest from the pulpit.

  “The form of man, as designed by God’s hand, is perfect. If God had wanted men made from metal, we would have been born as such. With the decision to install a mechanical piece, you have made yourself an offense against Him and His divine creation, and you forfeit the God-given rights of a human man.” He seized the old man by the collar and dragged him out of his seat. “Sit down,” he barked at me. I didn’t move. Everyone in the car was watching us. “Sit,” Jiroux said again as the omnibus began to slow.

  “I’m getting off,” I said.

  Jiroux glared at me, then shoved the old man, who tripped, barely stopping his fall on the edge of a woman’s seat. She jerked away from him like he had a catching disease. The doors to the omnibus flew open, and I stumbled down the stairs and out onto the pavement. It was two stops earlier than I’d meant to get off, but it still took the whole walk to the city’s edge to convince my heart to slow again.

  The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed had left people across Europe with missing and damaged limbs and, in turn, more people than ever wanting clockwork parts to replace the ones they’d lost. Lots of the political expatriates from France had come down to Switzerland, and Geneva had become a haven for them, a city that boasted neutrality and sanctuary for war refugees. The veterans were a new set of clients for our shop, though we still saw the sorts of injuries we’d treated before we came to Geneva: limbs ripped up and ruined by factory work, arthritic joints, and club feet to be replaced with moving metal pieces, twisted spines swapped out with metal vertebrae. We’d grafted a set of steam-powered pistons to the hips of a man paralyzed from the waist down so he could walk again.

  My father liked to say that prejudice didn’t have to make sense, but I’d still never worked out how anyone could think what we did was wicked. People like Jiroux thought that as soon as metal was fused to bone and muscle it took something fundamental and human away, and that men and women with mechanical parts were machines, somehow less than the rest of us.

  The clockwork men either lived broken, or hated. It was a shitty choice.

  Through the checkpoint and beyond the city walls, the foothills stretched like open palms raised toward the sinking sun. I left the road and started upward along the vineyard roads that turned into narrow mountain paths, mud sucking at my boots as I climbed. Around me, the cliffs were silent, their stillness broken only by the somber wailing of the winter wind through the pines and the far-off industrial hum of the city, growing fainter with every step.

  At the top of the final ridge, I stopped to catch my breath and look out. Far below, the surface of the iced lake sparkled like diamonds, with the villas of the magistrates and merchants that rimmed it peering out between the evergreens. On its banks, Geneva was outlined black against the sunset—turreted roofs and spires divided of Vieille Ville divided from the factory by the Rhone, with the clock tower standing in solitary silhouette above it all.

  I counted backward from a hundred as I stared out at the view; then I turned. Across the craggy hilltop, a small dark-stone castle was perched, a feather of white smoke rising from one of its chimneys. Château de Sang, skeletal and dark, like a hole cut in the winter sky.

  The cold was starting to get under my coat, but I didn’t move. Part of me wanted to stand there and let the time run down until I had to return home. The gut-twisting mix of dread and necessity was rising like bile inside me, and I knew I couldn’t swallow it. I’d just have to let it burn in my stomach until I could leave, but even then it never faded entirely.

  I took a deep breath, braced myself, and started down the slope toward the gates.<
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  I let myself into the castle through a service entrance in the back, the only way in that wasn’t boarded. I had picked the lock the city installed and replaced it with my own that locked from both the inside and outside when it was closed, same as the one in our shop. I stuck a rock into the frame to keep the door propped.

  Inside, everything was smoky with shadows. Dust motes wafted across the thin bars of sunlight that filtered through the high windows, all boarded up, and cobwebs decorated the walls like spun tapestries. The air was thick with the smell of age and mold, underscored by the sharp sulfur of the gunpowder and explosives the city kept stored in the cellars.

  I took the familiar path across the kitchen, making only a quick stop to check that the pantry was stocked, then climbed a long set of winding stairs, listening hard to the silence and trying to decide where he would be. When I reached the upstairs hall, I spotted the amber glow of firelight at the end and followed it.

  The room looked like a heavy windstorm had swept through just before I arrived. Crumpled papers were scattered across the floor, and pens stuck out of the wall like darts in a pub board. A goose-down pillow I had stolen from my parents had been left lying in the center of the room, feathers blooming from a rip down its middle and carried by the wind slithering down the chimney. Plates festering with dried food were stacked in random spots, and most of the furniture left by the castle’s previous owners, already spindly with age, was battered and abused. It looked like the remnants of a battlefield, somewhere looted and then left behind.

  And in the center of it all, like a king on his throne, was Oliver.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  Before his resurrection, Oliver had been a good-looking lad, the sort girls would stare at as he walked by on the street. He was trim and athletic, not skinny like me, and he had a swagger that I was beginning to doubt I would ever grow into. He hadn’t lost the swagger in his second life, but it was different now, less confident and more menacing.

  We shared most physical features—dark, curly hair and dark eyes, most notably—but we didn’t look alike anymore, not the way we once had. Oliver’s resurrection had added nearly a foot to his height, and now he was made mostly of sharp lines and strange angles. Clothes didn’t fit him properly, and he wore a loose-fitting linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, braces hanging down to his knees and trousers sagging in odd places. His dark hair had grown back as thick as before, but the strips of it atop his scars never would, leaving him with a bald stretches amid the curls.

  The resurrection had robbed him too of the bone structure that had given him sharp cheekbones and a square jaw before. Now one eyelid sagged, and the skin of his face, like the rest of his body, was rippled and perpetually bruised from the machinery that pressed against it from inside.

  Two years later and it was still hard not to look away from him. I forced myself to meet his gaze and hold it steady as I stood in the doorway. When he didn’t say anything, I dropped my bag on the floor beside the chaise and said, “Sorry I haven’t been by.” My chest was already feeling tight, and it was hard to get words out without sounding winded.

  Oliver watched me from his perch atop the writing desk as I peeled off my coat and scarf, an unlit pipe jammed between his teeth. Smoking was hazardous now that his lungs were made of waxed paper and leather, but he still liked gnawing on his pipe as if it were lit. They were strange and unpredictable, the things like smoking that had carried over from before.

  I kicked a balled-up bit of paper out from under the chaise. “What happened here?”

  “I’m bored,” he replied, sliding down off the desk so that he was straddling the chair. His mechanical joints creaked when he moved. I had replaced one of his arms entirely with a clockwork one, and both knees as well, since that was easier than letting the bones grow back wrong.

  “So clean this place up, that’ll keep you busy for a while. I mended your shirt,” I added as I pulled it out of my bag and threw it to him. He caught it with his mechanical hand. “Anything else you need?”

  “Tobacco.”

  “No.” I pushed a ragged copy of Paradise Lost to the other end of the chaise and sank down onto the cushion. “Why’d you shred all the paper I brought?”

  “Because writing’s dull. Everything’s dull. I’m so bored.” Oliver tossed the shirt on top of the feather pillow. There was a metallic whine, shrill as a teakettle, and he winced.

  I sat up. “Is it giving you problems?”

  “Not the arm,” he said, and rapped his knuckles against his chest. It rang hollowly.

  “I brought my tools.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Don’t be daft, let me look.” I pulled my work gloves out of my bag as Oliver raised the flame of the lamp balanced on the writing desk and pulled his shirt off over his head. The skin under it was so puckered and punctured that it hardly looked like skin at all. You could still see the stitches, the bolts, the blue patches where the needles had gone in. There were places in his side that bulged and rippled as the gears ticked beneath. My fingers stumbled as I wedged them under the seam in his chest and opened it.

  Inside, Oliver was pure machine, all gears and pins like an engine. In a way that’s all it was, an engine doing everything that his irreparably broken body no longer could. His rib cage on one side was gone, replaced by steel rods and a cluster of churning gears connected by leather tubes to a set of bellows that opened and closed with each breath. Where his heart should have been was a knot of cogs around the mainspring, pushing against each other as they ticked like a clock rather than beat like a heart.

  The trouble was easy to spot. One of the bolts had come loose so that a gear was grinding against the oscillating weight as it turned. I tugged my magnifying goggles up from around my neck and fished in my bag for my needle-nose pliers.

  “Can I ask you about something? It’s been bothering me that I can’t remember.” Oliver held up his flesh-and-blood hand for me to see. A thin white scar ran across the knuckles. “What’s this from? It’s older than the others.”

  “Boxing, I think.” I gripped the gear with my pliers and jammed it back into place. Oliver sucked in a sharp breath. “Sorry, should have warned you that might hurt.”

  He shrugged like it didn’t matter, but his voice was tighter when he spoke again. “It doesn’t look like a boxing scar. I thought I must have put my hand through a window or something.”

  “No, you told me someone threw a bottle in the ring and you sliced up your hand.”

  “Did I win the match?”

  “God, Oliver, does it matter? You hurt yourself doing stupid things so many times. They all start to blur together.”

  “Were you there? Did you ever box?”

  I slid the pliers from under the weight and swapped them for a spanner that fit around a loose bolt. “No, boxing is too wild for me.”

  “Wish I could box now.”

  I tightened the bolt harder than I needed to, and Oliver yelped. “And then as soon as you took your shirt off in the ring, they’d see you’re mostly metal and haul you away.”

  “God’s wounds, Ally, it was a joke.” He flexed his hand, watching the scar move with his skin. “It’s strange, you know. Having scars and not knowing where they came from.”

  “Well, any others you can’t remember?” I asked.

  “All of them.” He ran his fingertips along a seam in his skull. “I don’t remember getting any of them.”

  I scrubbed at an oily spot on my spanner and said nothing.

  Most of Oliver’s memory had come back to him, slowly and with coaxing on my part. He’d returned to the world blank, but things like speech and reading and motor skills had come back quickly. The memories had been harder. I tried to supply him with what I could, but I had a sense that instead of genuinely remembering things, he mostly just took my word for what I said
had happened. Sometimes he’d surprise me with a memory I hadn’t fed him, though what came back was unpredictable—he remembered specific fights with Father but not a thing about Mum, the color of the walls in our shop in Paris though he had lost Bergen entirely, that he hated Geisler though I had to remind him why. It scared me a bit, the things he found without my help. Mostly because there was still a chance the truth of the night he died might return without warning, and it wouldn’t line up with the story I’d given him.

  I snapped the band of my goggles to keep them from sliding down my nose. “Well, lucky you’ve got me and I remember everything. Take a breath.” Oliver obeyed, and I pressed two gloved fingers against the gear to test the placement. “That’ll work for now. One of the bolts is stripped, so it won’t stay in place for long. I’ll bring a new one next time I come.”

  “And what am I meant to do until then?”

  “You can hold on to my pliers in case you need to tighten it.” I fished around in my bag until I found them, then tossed them on the desk. They skidded to the edge with a clatter. “They’re not really meant for bolts, but Father will miss a spanner. How’s everything else running?”

  “My arm feels stiff.”

  “Probably needs to be cleaned. I haven’t got oil today, but I can give it a pulse. It might help.” Oliver made a face, and I almost made a smart remark about how he should be used to the pain by now, but changed my mind at the last second. I retrieved the pulse gloves from my bag and swapped them out for the leatherwork ones. Oliver slumped in the chair as I rubbed my hands together, both of us watching the pale energy gather between the plates. “Sorry, they take so bleeding long to get a charge going.”

  “Tell Father you need new ones.”