This Monstrous Thing

by Mackenzi Lee

  Then darkness fell into place again. The weight began to rise, and Clémence’s arms dropped away from it. Her body slumped backward, landed softly on the bridge, and curled like a feather of cooling ash.

  “Clémence!” I scrambled to the edge of the platform and screamed her name over the noise of the gears, hoping, praying, willing her to leap to her feet and smirk at me. To sit up. To just bleeding open her eyes. “Clémence! Clémence!”

  She didn’t move.

  My vision flinched and for a moment I couldn’t see anything clearly, like I was looking through frosted glass. I pressed a hand against my eyes and let them burn, but even behind my lids all I could see was her body, so small and still, and that flash of light. I didn’t want to leave her there, crumpled on the clock tower bridge. I was here because of her. I was alive because of her.

  But I could feel the tower throbbing around me, the charged air trembling as each second left before the explosives detonated passed. Somewhere above me, I knew, Oliver was waiting, ready to take the city down with him. I had to find him.

  I gave myself ten seconds—counted them backward in time with the ticking clock—then opened my eyes again and looked up into the tower at the glowing silver face high above me.

  A rope ladder with wooden rungs stretched between the glockenspiel and the clock face. I had to jump to catch the bottom and then pull myself up, arms shaking with the effort. I managed to loop my leg around the last rung and began to climb, hand over hand, until the glockenspiel below me shrank, its clockwork figures as small as the windup toys we sold in the shop. The ladder wobbled, swaying as the tower shook with the strength of the gears, but I clung on, arms wrapped around the rungs.

  The ladder ended at another walkway, similar to the bridge from below but shorter and leading to a semicircular platform beneath the luminescent clock face. On the other side of the glass, the black hands loomed, seconds running like water through my fingers. Somewhere nearby, I heard a cog kick into place. A weight dropped. Then the black hands shuddered, one step closer.

  Thirteen minutes to go.

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  The platform below the clock face had been Geisler’s workshop before he was caught, and it looked almost the same as it did in my memories of when I resurrected Oliver on it. The workbench was still there, and the cabinets, and Geisler’s green leather chair with a bookcase at its arm. But everything was empty—the shelves were bare, the workbench stripped of tools and beakers and bell jars. As I crossed the bridge, the moonlight shifted so that the clock face shone semitransparent like the frozen surface of the lake. This close, I could see the faint lines where the cracks had been patched over, veins and seams like scars left behind.

  Oliver was sitting on the platform with his back against the spot where the shards met. His knees were pulled up to his chest, face buried in his arms and shoulders shaking. It was a moment before I realized that he was crying. I’d never seen him cry.

  I stepped off the bridge and onto the workshop platform. The metal wailed beneath my feet, and Oliver looked up. He didn’t try to pretend he hadn’t been crying—just swiped his face with the heel of his good hand and said, “Tell me what happened. What really happened. No more lies.”

  “No more lies,” I repeated, but I stayed silent. I let Oliver ask again, to be certain he wanted to know.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I took a breath, so deep I thought it might burst my rib cage. “The night you died,” I said, “was the night Geisler escaped Geneva. That part was true. You and I saw him from the flat to the river—I don’t know what the plan was after that, but that was our role. But before we left, Geisler pulled me aside and he told me his journals were still in the clock tower. He asked me if I’d find them, and keep them safe for him, and I said yes. I was so proud he asked me. Me and not you. I thought maybe he was starting to notice me, and if I found them, it’d impress him, and he’d want me as his student instead of you.” I closed my eyes for a moment and let the memory spread through me like wet watercolor, released at last. “So on our way back home I begged you to bring me here. I told you it was so we could nick some things from the workshop before the police cleared it out, because I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you it was about the journals.” I pointed to a spot just over his shoulder. Oliver didn’t look. “There’s a panel in the rim around the clock that comes away. They were hidden there.”

  We stared at each other hard for a second. I kept waiting for him to stop me, but he didn’t.

  So I went on.

  “I found the journals,” I said. “But you saw me with them, and when I told you I wanted to give them back to Geisler, you said it was wicked work, and if I wanted any part in it”—something tore inside my throat like paper, but I pressed through it—“then I was wicked too. And I was so angry about that. I was so angry about so much. That you were Geisler’s apprentice and you were going to Ingolstadt. That you thought his work was mad. That you knew Mary was engaged and you didn’t tell me. And I’d pushed it all down for so long, but something about what you said . . . I just let it all go.”

  “What happened then?” Oliver asked softly.

  “You grabbed the journals,” I said, “and you started ripping pages out, so I jumped on you. Right on your arm. I think I must have snapped your wrist. You let go of them, anyhow. And you were in pain and off balance for just a second. And I didn’t even think. I don’t remember deciding what I was going to do, I just did it.”

  “You pushed me off the tower.”

  “I pushed you into the clock face, and the glass cracked. And then it broke.” I looked up at him. “And then you fell.”

  Fell from the same spot where he sat now, staring at me with his face blank. The clearest I’d ever seen it.

  The strength went out of me then, like all my gears had run down, and I sank to my knees in front of Oliver so that our eyes were level. I waited for him to strike me or kill me or do whatever it was he was about to do to me now that he knew the truth.

  But all he said was, “I’m so tired, Ally.”

  I swallowed. “Me too.”

  “And I’m scared.” He pressed his mechanical hand to his forehead, leaving an imprint of the bars and cogs like a new set of scars when he moved it away. “I can’t remember the last time I was this afraid.”

  “I didn’t think you were ever afraid,” I said with a weak smile.

  “I think I was afraid when I fell. And when I woke again. When I was a boy, I remember reading books and thinking the monsters weren’t afraid, but they are. They’re more frightened than anyone.” He glanced up at me. “You’re bleeding.”

  I looked down. My front was speckled with Raif’s blood, but a thicker crimson stain was spreading into my shirt. The wound in my shoulder had opened back up and I hadn’t had time to feel the pain. “I’m all right.”

  “Did I do that?”

  “I think I deserved it.”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “You don’t. No one deserves anything I’ve set on them.” He closed his eyes, his jaw tightening like a fist. “You should have told me how I died.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I thought you already hated me for bringing you back and keeping you locked up. You’d have hated me more if you knew what I’d done.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  I held those words tight for a moment, pressed them deep and hard inside me until they left an imprint there, a brand to carry and run my fingers over when I didn’t believe it. “Do you think it would have changed anything?” I asked. “If I’d told you the truth from the start?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Probably not. I still would have been a monster.”

  “We’re all monsters,” I said. “We’re all careless and cruel in the end.”

  “I don’t want to be.”

  “Then don’t do
this. You can still surrender.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said, and it came out in the middle of a sob. “If I walk away, they’ll put me in prison and do experiments on me until they finally shut me down. Maybe it would be better if I just . . .” His voice hitched, and he ducked his head. “If I asked you . . . would you just end me now?”

  My heart splintered. “Oliver . . .”

  “You killed me once, so just do it again,” he said, and it sounded almost like he laughed. “Ally, please. Just shut me down. You can do it quicker and kinder than they would, I know you can.”

  For a long, tight moment, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. There hadn’t been a day since I’d brought Oliver back that I hadn’t wanted to be rid of him, and now here he was, asking to leave me. But instead of feeling relieved or free or any of that, I was hurtled back to the night I had stuck gears and cogs into his skeleton. I hadn’t done it to be clever, or right, or to see if I could—I wasn’t Geisler, and I wasn’t Victor Frankenstein. It was because a piece of me had gone into the coffin with Oliver, and there were bits of him I’d carried too, like shrapnel in my skin, and I couldn’t bury that. Not then. Not now. We were locked so tightly together, he and I. It would always be us—dead or alive or alive again—knit like gears so that neither could turn without moving the other as well.

  “I don’t think you want to die,” I said. “I think you want to live. Just not like this.”

  He took a deep breath. I heard it crackle through his paper lungs.

  I kept going. “It’s only you they want—the rest of your men can walk away if they’re quick and clever about it. If you dismantle the explosives, I think I can get you out of here.” The platform shifted underneath us as the hand of the clock moved another minute. My heart jumped. “You can start a new life, somewhere no one knows about Frankenstein.”

  “I’ll never be free of that.”

  “I can call off Mary. Get her to undo some of the damage. She’ll help, she owes us that much. And then . . . then you can go somewhere. Somewhere things are different.”

  “Don’t you have to come along and make sure I stay out of trouble?”

  “I think . . .” I faltered. I’d spent so long feeling certain my future was a prisoner of Oliver that I’d never realized he was chained just as tightly to me. “I think you need to be free of me. You need to be on your own. Make your own life.”

  He looked up. “You mean that?”

  “’Course I do. If we give the police something else, something to distract them, you can get away from here tonight. And you can have your life back. Properly this time. No more hiding. No more running. No more fear.”

  “No more fear,” he repeated. “That would be good.”

  He climbed to his feet and offered me his hand. I took it, and he pulled me up beside him. We stood like that for a moment, his mechanical hand clasped with my flesh-and-bone one, in the same place we had stood two years ago when I pushed him and he fell.

  “I know it’s too late,” I said, “but I’m sorry. For everything. Everything I’ve done since that day to today.”

  “Me too.” He looked down for a moment, then back up at me. “There were so many times since you brought me back that I just wanted to give up and rip myself apart. What kept me alive was knowing that once I was someone worth saving. Worth bringing back. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come back to who I was. But I’m trying, Ally. I really am.”

  The clock gave another shudder. Another tick of the minute hand.

  And together—locked gears that we were—we began our descent into the trembling belly of the clock tower.

  The square had been cleared when the clock began to strike the hour, but there was still a line of officers left standing behind their barricades, waiting for the gong. When it finally struck, they started, turned their eyes to the full-moon face as one, and waited for the bombs.

  But nothing happened.

  Then the gong struck a final time, and this is what they saw:

  At the base of the tower a figure appeared, rising from the fog-fringed darkness like a ghost. A battered cornered hat was tipped over his dark, curly hair, casting his face in shadow, and his walk was stiff-legged and slow, the limp of a man with cogs for knees. The moonlight shivered along the silver mechanical hand trailing from his coat sleeve.

  The policemen’s guns all leveled on the man, who stopped and raised his hands to his head, then collapsed forward onto his knees as though too exhausted to stand any longer.

  “Oliver Finch!” one of the policemen called, his rifle steadier than his voice. “Oliver Finch, stay where you are!”

  The mechanical man didn’t move. He stayed on the ground, arms above his head, shoulders slumped.

  The police surrounded him, their rifles trained on his chest, but kept a skittish distance as though afraid he would attack. Then, in a fit of courage, one officer kicked him hard in the back and he fell face first onto the cobblestones. He didn’t fight, or try to stand. Just lay there, still and silent, while they put irons around his wrists and ankles, blindfolded and gagged him, knocked his hat into the snow and left it behind as they dragged him, blind, stumbling, and bleeding, to the waiting police wagon. They threw him in so that he landed hard on his side, unable to move for the journey across the city.

  They hauled him through the station, up the stairs, let him trip over his manacled feet, let the blood from the nose they had broken course down his face and splash onto the floor. If any of them thought it strange that this reportedly wild man didn’t fight, they didn’t say. Perhaps their triumph at catching Frankenstein’s monster made them forget everything else. They chained him to a chair and stood guard, eyes and guns fixed on him, until heavy footsteps signaled the approach of their commander.

  Jiroux strode through the door and stood still for a moment, staring at their prisoner with his face unreadable. Then he stormed across the room, tugged down the gag, and ripped off the blindfold with such force that the resurrected man’s head snapped backward, revealing his dark eyes.

  “Alasdair Finch,” Jiroux said.

  I looked back at him, bleeding and chained and certainly not Oliver. “Inspector Jiroux,” I replied.

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  Jiroux face contorted with rage, cheeks flushing fever red. I kept my expression as blank as I could, though my mind was buzzing, trying to work out whether I’d given Oliver enough time to take the ladder down to the river. There were no police at the checkpoints or patrolling the borders—they’d all been at the clock tower or trying to keep the city calm. If he had moved fast, there was a good chance he was already gone.

  “Where’s your brother?” Jiroux demanded. “Where’s Oliver?”

  I didn’t say anything. A trickle of blood ran from my nose and dropped onto the floor, just missing the toe of his boot.

  Jiroux struck me across the face. Starbursts erupted over my vision and I bit my tongue hard enough to taste it. “Where is he, Finch?” he bellowed, his spittle joining the grime on my cheeks.

  I looked up at him, struggling to focus, but still didn’t say anything.

  He struck me again, so hard I was certain the chair would have tipped if it hadn’t been bolted down. My consciousness stumbled, and for a moment I thought I was going to black out. Through the fog, I heard Jiroux slam his fist into the wall with a screech of frustration. “Get him up,” he barked, and someone grabbed me by the collar and hauled me to my feet. “Get his father, then take them out back and shoot them both.”

  My legs gave out at his words and I slumped against the officer holding me. He grabbed me before I fell, and the mechanical arm Oliver and I had stripped from a disabled Clock Breaker slid out of my coat sleeve and hit the ground with a clatter. I had no feeling left in either arm—one was numb from holding the metal arm in place, the other from the torn stitc
hes still bleeding into my collar.

  “Sir—” I heard the officer holding me up say, but Jiroux whirled in the doorway and cut him off.

  “I don’t care which of you does it, Krieg, but there’s to be no record they were here. I don’t want to see either of them again.” And then he spun on his heel and stomped out.

  Most of the officers followed. A few stayed behind, watching me warily and glancing at each other like they were silently arguing over who was going to pull the trigger. “What are we—” one began, but the officer holding me—Krieg—instructed, “Go down below and fetch Mr. Finch.” When none of them moved, he snapped, almost as fierce as Jiroux, “Do it now.” Two of the officers departed, leaving Krieg and one other. My legs were still shaking, and I felt myself start to tip over again. “Help him,” Krieg grunted, and the other officer came forward and pulled me back up by my injured arm. Another hot surge of blood slipped free.

  The officers unchained my ankles and led me down through the station and out into the alley behind it. They stopped in the splash of lamplight, each with a tight hold on me, and waited. The butts of their rifles knocked into the back of my legs as the officers shifted from foot to foot to keep warm.

  After a few minutes, the station door opened with a gust of hot air and two officers appeared with my father pinned between them. As they dragged him forward, his eyes met mine, and I knew no one had to explain to him what was happening.

  One of the officers reached for his rifle, but Krieg shook his head. “Not here.”

  And suddenly we were moving again, and I was counting down the seconds left in my life like the tower clock running backward.

  With Krieg half carrying me in the lead, the officers marched us through the network of connecting alleys behind the station, which were dark but for the moonlight and rank with piss and mud. I didn’t have a clue where they were taking us—I’d never seen this part of the city before. The only light came from the bare windows above us blazing with Christmas candles. Streets over, from what felt like worlds away, I could hear cheering, and the bells from Saint Pierre’s ringing like it was Sunday. People were singing. Carols and hymns rose above the wind in celebration that the city was still in one piece. Krieg had a tight hold on my arm, but he kept glancing in the direction of the noise, then down at the chains around my wrists. I stared at him, but he wouldn’t look me in the eyes.