This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  “I have no doubt. How else did you think I guessed what you’d done? As soon as I read it . . .” He leaned forward and seized my shoulder. “Alasdair, you can be honest with me. I have people—friends—who can help us. We can still turn this in our favor.”

  “I didn’t write it.”

  “If you’re lying—”

  “I’m not lying, sir, I swear it!”

  “Then someone already knows.” He stood up and took several halting steps across the hearth rug. “Who have you told about this?”

  “No one. Not even my parents.”

  “You’re certain no one knows? No friends, no one could have overheard you?”

  I thought briefly of Mary, but I didn’t want to have to explain her to Geisler. He was finally starting to see me as something other than Oliver’s younger brother, and I wasn’t going to spoil that by looking like a lovesick puppy. “No, sir.”

  “Oliver doesn’t have contact with anyone?”

  “Oliver could have written it,” I said.

  Geisler stared at me for a moment, then waved that away like stray smoke. “No.”

  “He used to write,” I said, “before he died. He wanted to write poetry, why not this?”

  “Because the portrayal of the resurrected man is less than favorable. Oliver would never paint himself such a way if he wanted any sort of recognition for it.”

  “He doesn’t think himself a hero,” I said. “He thinks he’s a monster.”

  Geisler frowned. “I’ll take that into account.” He tossed the book to me, and it landed with a flump on the chaise. “You should acquaint yourself with it, Alasdair. This may prove more trouble than I’d care to deal with.”

  “How could a book be that much trouble?” I asked, though even as I said it I thought of the Frankenstein badges in Geneva.

  “Because the whole continent is reading it,” Geisler replied. “The account of a man turned monster. No one on God’s green earth would want to come back if it meant coming back like this.” He drained his teacup and set it back in its saucer so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter. “I recommend you spend the day reading,” he said, glancing out the window at the sky turning from black to gray as the day surfaced. “I can’t imagine you have anything else to occupy yourself.”

  He started for the doorway, but I called after him, “What happens . . . ?” and he stopped. I swallowed. “What happens if I say yes? If I agree to study with you?”

  “Then we’d go to Geneva immediately,” he replied. “We’d fetch Oliver and bring him here, where you both will be safe.”

  “What about my parents?”

  “If you’re certain they’ve been arrested, then our time may be running out. With enough evidence, a conviction could happen before the end of the year.”

  I tallied the days in my head and realized that left us just shy of three weeks. “Could you help them?”

  “I could try. I promise I will try.”

  I stared hard at the fireplace for a moment, my teeth working on my bottom lip. It seemed too far away to touch, too unreal to imagine that in a few weeks my whole world could be different. I could be free of my parents, free from Geneva and running and being so bleeding afraid all the time. I could be doing real, important work, work I’d dreamed about doing most of my life. And I’d have Geisler to help me take care of Oliver—I’d be free of him too.

  “We can’t leave until the snow clears,” Geisler said. I could feel him watching me. “If you need to think about it.”

  “I don’t,” I said, and I looked up at him. “I’ll go with you. And I’ll show you where Oliver is.”

  His face relaxed back into almost a smile. “I’m glad to hear it. It’s the only sensible option, you do realize that, don’t you?” I nodded. Geisler took a few steps back into the room and placed his hand on my shoulder—a gesture more fatherly than anything I could remember receiving from my own father. “You’ll be safe this way,” he said. “You both will.”

  “And what about Frankenstein?”

  His eyes narrowed, mouth tightening to a thin razor in the firelight. “I suggest you take some time to read it,” he replied. “Perhaps you can figure out who wrote your story.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Talking with Geisler left me empty and exhausted, and I went straight up to my room and collapsed onto the bed. My ears were ringing and I felt so thick with what he’d told me that I couldn’t think clearly. As the sun rose behind the storm, I tried to sleep for a few more hours, but my eyes kept snapping open—like they were attached to springs—and finding their way to the writing desk where Frankenstein lay. The green binding looked more acidic than emerald now.

  I didn’t last long against it. I threw back the bedcovers and snatched the book off the desk, then slid down in front of the fire, my back against the headboard, and cracked the spine.

  It only took a few pages before my stomach started to roll.

  The story starts on a steamship expedition in the north, when a group of explorers pull a man called Victor Frankenstein, half-starved and frozen, from the ice. And as he dies, Frankenstein tells the captain the story of his life and the work that led his to dying in the Arctic.

  Reading Victor’s narration was like listening to myself speak, as though I’d been hurled years into the future and was reading the diary of an older version of myself. It wasn’t my exact history, but the parallels were clear. We both began our lives as children of privilege and science, fascinated by clockwork and mechanics and the men made from it.

  And Ingolstadt!—God’s wounds, Frankenstein left Geneva when he turned eighteen for Ingolstadt, same as I wanted to, to study clockwork and medicine and making metal limbs that move at the body’s command. He even had a professor to guide him, and I kept picturing the man red-bearded like Geisler. But Victor took things further than his professors thought he could. He wanted to use clockwork to reanimate dead tissue and restore life. He was cleverer than everyone else, and he knew he could do better work than anyone before him.

  And then—there it was.

  It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.

  The resurrection: it stared up at me from the pages like a ghost.

  I lingered over that scene for a long time, read it three times over and tried to wed it with my memories of my own dreary night in November and map how they differed. It was bleeding strange to see what felt like the climactic moment of my life boiled down to a single page of short sentences that bellowed true inside me.

  How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the mechanical wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form from cogs and gears? I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

  That was how it had felt—wanting Oliver back so badly, knowing I could bring him back, and then as soon as I had, wishing I could undo it. Mary had told me once that we saw ourselves in books because humans, being creatures of vanity, look for their own reflection everywhere, but I didn’t think even she could have disputed that this was a thinly veiled version of my life.

  I knew it deep in my bones, in a way I couldn’t explain.

  It was Oliver, and it was me.

  It took everything in me not to hurl the book into the fire. The story deviated from mine and Oliver’s after the resurrection—Victor fled Ingolstadt with his friend Henry and left his mechanical creation to navigate the world alone, which seemed the most cowardly thing he could have done until I thought of Oliver, locked up in Château de Sang. Had I run from him in just the same way?

  I couldn’t stomach it any longer. I set the book spine-up on the floor and flung myself into bed, hoping desperately for sleep. But I lay awake for a long time, the memories of Oli
ver’s resurrection night flitting like moths through my mind.

  After Oliver died, my father had wanted everything taken care of quick and clean, like it might somehow hurt less that way. There was no church funeral, no flowers or mourning clothes. Just four of us at the graveside—Father, Mother, and me with a priest—two days after Oliver’s fall. The sky was salt gray, the ground soft and black after a night of rain. It was the first week of November. The first proper cold day we’d had since spring.

  My parents stayed to make arrangements for the headstone, so I returned to the flat alone and lay on my pallet in the colorless afternoon light. Oliver’s mattress was still unrolled beside mine, and I reached out and rested my hand on the bare ticking. It felt like keeping his memory in place, like there was still some shadow of him in the room and it was my responsibility to hold on to it. I didn’t move, even when I heard my parents come in. I just lay there, thinking, with the sharp corners of Geisler’s journals digging into my back from where I’d hidden them under my mattress.

  Mary came that evening and threw stones at my window until I met her on the stairs to the flat. She was wearing a white cotton gown, too summery for the cold, and she looked so pale and bright against the overcast sunset. I stopped a few steps above her and looked down.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come to the cemetery,” she said.

  “I didn’t want you to.” I’d hardly spoken in two days, and my voice came out coarser than I expected.

  She nodded, looked down for a moment, then back at me, her eyes squinting up against the reflection of the sun on the shop windows. “Are you all right?”

  “No.” The question was so daft, I didn’t even try to make my tone cordial. “Of course I’m not all right.”

  She licked her lips. “What can I do?”

  Nothing, I thought. You can’t do a bleeding thing. You can’t make me love you less. You can’t change what I did or loosen the knot inside me or fill the hole that Oliver left. You can’t bring my brother back.

  But I could.

  I’d read the journals. I’d gone to the trial, heard all the details the police had scrounged up about the work Geisler was doing in the clock tower. And I knew what was wrong with it. On the first day Oliver and I sat up in the gallery, the barrister was describing the dissection Geisler had been caught in the middle of, an attempt to bond clockwork parts to the inside of a corpse, and I knew instinctively why it had gone wrong. Without ever seeing his laboratory or watching him work—I just knew it.

  The possibility of trying it for myself had seemed mad when I’d first considered it, but the last two days without Oliver—of living with myself and knowing what I’d done—had been so painful that when held up against them, the idea seemed strangely sane. The memory of Oliver falling from the top of the clock tower was clawing at my insides, begging to be written over, and even if everything went wrong, it couldn’t be worse than what I’d done already.

  “You can come with me,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”

  Mary followed me all the way to the cemetery without a question. She must have thought I wanted to go to the graveside, show her where we’d buried him, and have my own funerary rites, but instead I led her along the fence to the shed where the gravediggers kept their spades and handcart. I had my hand around the lock and was fishing a needle file out my pocket before she finally asked, “What are you doing?”

  My fist closed around the file, so tight I felt it break my skin. “I need . . . ,” I started, but my throat closed up around the words and instead I tried, “I want . . .” When I looked up at her, she had taken a few steps backward, away from me. “I know I can do it,” I said.

  “Do what?”

  “Geisler’s journals. I’ve got them. I know . . . I can do something. I can fix this.”

  Her eyes widened with understanding, and she shook her head so hard a strand of her hair tumbled from its pins. “No, Alasdair, stop. You can’t use Geisler’s research. It’s just theories—it’s fiction!”

  “I can do it, I know I can, I can do it better than Geisler. I can do it.”

  “Oliver’s dead—that isn’t something you can fix.”

  She reached out, and all at once something inside me broke like a snapped wishbone. The world tipped, the file slid out of my hand, and I had to crouch down so I didn’t fall over. That raw, bleeding mess inside me that had been curled up for days had detonated suddenly, and the pieces embedded in me were so sharp that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I had never felt worse than I did right then, crouched in the graveyard dark, with everything building on my back, bile rising in my throat and my insides twisted up and pulled tight. I thought I might be sick, but I wasn’t. I just crouched there, head in my hands, and let myself shake until Mary’s fingers slid along the back of my neck.

  When I raised my face to hers, she looked so concerned that it made me want to scream. I didn’t deserve compassion or pity from her—from anyone—when it was my fault my brother was dead. I felt like screaming. I felt like swearing and shouting and ripping something apart.

  I felt monstrous.

  I shook Mary off and retrieved my file from where it had fallen. Three sharp clicks with it and the lock snapped open. Mary watched with her arms wrapped around herself, and I knew from the way she was looking at me that there was something wrong with what I was doing. I didn’t care.

  I retrieved a spade from the shed, but Mary stepped in front of the doorway, blocking my way out. “Alasdair, don’t do this. You need to go home.”

  I swallowed back the urge scream again and instead said as calmly as I could, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. That was too much. You can go. You don’t have to help me.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone,” she replied stoutly. “You’re out of your mind and you’re going to do something you’ll regret. You need to go home—”

  I held out a spade. “If you won’t leave, then help me.”

  I didn’t need her help, but the thought of being alone—truly alone for the first time in my life now that Oliver was gone—terrified me, and she must have seen that fear in my face, for after a long, still moment of staring at my hand, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the handle, on top of mine.

  It took us hours to dig up Oliver’s coffin. The ground was soft and heavy after the rain, and we were both covered in it before long, mud and grime running in tracks down our skin. It was cold but I was sweating, and I kept stripping off layers until I was in just my undershirt and trousers. Mary had cast aside her bonnet and jacket, and her hair had fallen out of its arrangement and into a single plait that whipped about her face. We didn’t say a word to each other all the while we dug.

  And then my spade hit wood with an empty thunk. The guilt sank its teeth in again, but this time I held myself together. The deeper we had dug, the more focused I had felt, and with the solid planks of the coffin under my feet, all the helplessness left me in a rush, and into its place funneled a cold and frightening calm.

  Above me, I heard Mary murmur, “This is mad, Alasdair, this is absolutely mad.” She lowered herself from the lip of the trench into the grave so she was standing beside me. She was so spattered with mud I could hardly see her apart from the night. “No more secrets,” she said. “You have to tell me what we’re doing.”

  I didn’t quite know myself. But I had Geisler’s journals, and I had read them, and I knew what had ruined his resurrections. I had Geisler’s journals and Oliver’s body and a snarled mess of grief and anger and guilt inside me, and I was going to do something about it.

  “We’re going to the clock tower,” I said. “We’re going to bring Oliver back.”

  The snow fell hard and heavy for three days. I hadn’t seen the sun since I arrived, and gusty winds made the windows clatter like something outside was trying to get in. Everything was wet and cold, and though the automatons kept the fires blazing, I never felt properly warm.

  Geisler was adamant in his refusal to le
ave for Geneva until the snow settled and we had the promise of a safe journey. Waiting became a study in torture for me. I paced around the house, unable to sit still without my mind shuffling from images of my parents in prison, waiting to be executed, to my brother locked up in Château de Sang, probably ripping it apart brick by brick in an attempt to get out. I could already be too late, my new life tossed away before it had begun, yet here we sat, holed up in the ticking house, waiting for the snowstorm to pass.

  And the only thing to do was read Frankenstein.

  I pressed on with it, but it never got easier or better. Even when the story ceased to be ours, reading Victor and knowing he was me stung. Victor Frankenstein was a clever man, and it made me think of what Geisler had said—you were either good or clever, and Victor was clever. He’d made his clockwork monster because once he knew that it was possible, he had to try it for himself. He didn’t consider what he would do if it worked until the corpse was sitting up on his laboratory table. That wasn’t me, I told myself. I’d brought Oliver back because it was Oliver, and I’d missed him, and felt so damn guilty for what I’d done that I had to do something about it. I hadn’t done it to be clever.

  But I’d spent two years lying to everyone about what had happened. Maybe this lie had snuck in too, and I’d spent all this time thinking that I’d brought Oliver back because I didn’t know how to live without him when really it was because I had to test myself, see if I truly could fill the holes Geisler had left in his journals and do the thing no one else had.

  Maybe it had been about me and my own cleverness all along. Maybe I was just the same as Victor. And the Oliver I’d meant to bring back felt so far away that sometimes I forgot he’d ever existed to begin with. Maybe this book was precisely who we were: Frankenstein and his monster, neither of us as good as we once had been.

  Like Geisler, I began keeping my own list of possibilities for who had written the novel, but mine was significant only for how short it was. There had occurred to me one true possibility: Oliver. He was the only person with any reason to tell this story. But even that was unlikely. I didn’t know how Oliver would have communicated with a printer and publisher without me knowing.