The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I didn’t argue. I had no idea what was coming, except that it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  Crow looked around at where we were, which was nowhere special. We stood on a brick sidewalk in front of a blue house, shutters sagging and paint a thing more of memory than of fact. “You know this place?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling a hard lump in my chest. I did know it, too well. Here, I was eight years old. Here, in our first care-home, Conrad and I were in a dark closet, sitting with our knees pulled to our chests, smelling musty winter coats. Here, we were locked in, because we’d been bad.

  Not bad. Evil. That was the word our care-mother had used. She thought it would be worse for Conrad to see me punished, because I cried all the time. Our care-mother thought I was a brat.

  But I knew the closet was worse for Conrad. He hated small spaces. He had gotten himself stuck in a dumbwaiter in our old flat once and nearly stopped breathing before the landlord fished him out and returned him to our garret. My mother had barely noticed he’d been gone at all, lost as she was in her fancies.

  That had been the beginning of the end. The landlord called the care-workers. The care-workers called the Proctors. The Proctors took her away.

  Conrad would shift next to me in the dark during those times, and I would hear choked breathing. I would pretend he wasn’t silently sobbing into his knees. I’d squeeze whatever part of his arm I could find in the dark and whisper it’d be okay.

  It wasn’t okay, for months. Finally our neighbor noticed we were rail thin and still wearing the same clothes we’d arrived in. We were rushed out, to another care-home, which I now knew was because Archie was trying to make sure we were all right while he was off with the Fae, chasing the specter of harmony of a world without Proctors. He’d greased the Lovecraft care-workers well enough that if we were being abused in any flagrant way, we got moved to a new care-home and never got separated.

  But for those months, there was the closet. I didn’t mind it after a while. At least we were out of our care-mother’s sight, and even if we had to sleep in there, she didn’t bother us.

  Conrad, though, stopped sleeping, stopped eating, jumped at every sound. He thinned out in more ways than physically, and spent long patches of time just staring at things like the aethervox or the hole in the front hall carpet, waiting. Waiting for the next time he’d go up into the hot darkness and be locked in.

  And in his nightmare, I was right there with him.

  Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t tell my sister it was going to be all right. I was weak. That horrible fat woman made me weak, no matter how hard I tried to stand and be the man of the family. I wanted to grab the scissors she used to chop off all of Aoife’s hair and jam them into her fat back so far they disappeared, up to their pearl-handled hilt.

  “No!” I screamed, Conrad’s anger feeling like acid in my guts and throat.

  His claustrophobic rage was like a tide, and I swam away from it, trying to define my own memories of that horrible house. It didn’t help much, but the thing did begin to crumble, collapsing on its foundation like I hoped it had years ago.

  Then it was over and we were gone, and in an entirely new kind of darkness. This one was alive, rustling, stinking of wet dog. Old sewer pipes dripped above me, water landing on the back of my hand, brackish and black like blood in a no-color lanternreel.

  This dream I didn’t recognize from my real life, but I knew who it had to be and I didn’t want to have to see it.

  Cal watched as light appeared, half in and half out of his ghoul shape.

  The light was carried by a girl, plump and buxom, with rosy cheeks and bouncing curls. Bethina stopped and looked at him, and her pretty face crinkled in disgust.

  “I…,” Cal rasped, but all that came out was the ghoul voice, his true voice, and Bethina screamed.

  As I occupied his view in the dream, I saw what he wanted to tell her, so badly it ached. He wanted to tell her, and knew he never could, that eventually he’d either break her heart or reveal himself as a monster, to her disgust and terror.

  “Bastard!” Bethina shrieked, and all around her Cal’s nest came to life, ghouls pawing and clawing at her, tearing her clothes. I choked, doubling over, but the air of the sewer wasn’t any better and I couldn’t breathe.

  “I want you …,” Cal croaked, and then he couldn’t speak. I want you to see me, he’d tried to say, but it was an obscene parody of that, and Bethina dropped her lantern, the aether globe shattering open.

  “Burn!” she screamed. “Right to cinders!”

  The fire caught impossibly fast. Smoke filled the tunnel, obscuring Bethina, who sobbed, naked and covered in soot. Cal listened to the screams of his nest dying, Bethina crying, choking on smoke, and he couldn’t move.

  I couldn’t either, tied to his mind until the horrible recurring nightmare played itself out. I couldn’t push on from this. This wasn’t memory, this was pure overwhelming fear manifesting itself like poison in Cal’s subconscious. His senses made it visceral, until I was screaming too, and then choking, until I thought I was going to pass out.

  When the smoke cleared, Crow and I were someplace much worse.

  I recognized the flat where Conrad and I had last lived with Nerissa. It hadn’t been in a good part of town, sitting on the edge of the Rustworks near South Lovecraft Station. Conrad slept on the sofa, and I slept on a small Murphy bed that came out of the sitting room wall. It might once have been an ironing board, but it was just the right size for an eight-year-old girl.

  I wasn’t inside the flat, however, but rather was looking at it from the outside, up at the yellow glow of the window, since the building was so old that it didn’t have an aether feed, just oil lamps that coated everything we owned with a fine layer of soot.

  A shape passed in front of the glass, then another. Boy and girl, racing back and forth, yelling in some sort of made-up contest.

  “Archie.” The view rolled to the left, and I saw a younger Harold Crosley. Gray still shot through his white hair, and he carried considerably less weight in his jowls. “We need to keep moving,” Crosley said. “Patrols are tighter than ever.”

  Archie waved his hand, his breath steaming in the cold. “In a minute.”

  “Now,” Crosley insisted. “We can’t stand staring up at a window forever, Grayson.”

  Archie rounded on Crosley. “That’s my family in there, Harold.” He ignored Crosley’s huff of irritation and turned back to the window. He stared intently, all his attention on the children inside, hearing them laugh through the thin single-paned glass.

  The sense of loss as he stared at the window was so intense, so profound, that I felt myself starting to weep. It was the opposite of being full—when Archie looked up at our flat, he was totally empty. He felt so far from us he might as well have been on the opposite side of the globe.

  He knew he had to protect us from the silver-tongued, sharp-toothed Fae. Knew that for that reason, he could never be with us. Must never draw attention to his family. Never expose them to danger.

  Nerissa came to the window. She was too thin, her hair lank, her cheeks flushed and feverish. She wouldn’t last much longer here in Lovecraft, Archie knew. I could feel the bank book he carried with him everywhere, an account left over from when his father was alive, secret from the Brotherhood. It wasn’t much, in the scheme of the Grayson family’s formerly vast wealth, but it would be enough to pay off the right city officials to make sure his children were safe.

  Archie knew in that moment that he would have chucked his upbringing, his travels to the four corners of the globe, his massive house in Arkham and all the fine things within, to be able to go up the stairs, open the door and sweep Conrad and Aoife into his arms. To kiss Nerissa’s too-warm forehead and tell her it was all going to be all right.

  But he couldn’t, so he turned his back on the flat and followed Howard Crosley, pretending it was only the icy winter wind that had caused the moisture in his eyes.

>   19

  The Gears of All Things

  AND THEN I was back in my own head. I was on my knees in Crow’s space, at the heart of all things. I was sobbing, my face soaked, and I was trembling. I’d known the dreams would be bad, but I’d never expected the darkest hearts of everyone I cared about to be marched across my mind.

  Outside the dome, there was no sky around me now, none of the endless worlds. The places I’d seen, the nightmares of Conrad and Cal and Archie, whirled around me instead, and beyond them, I saw a thin pinpoint of yellow light, like a candle bobbing above the black waters of a river leading away into a secret place.

  I knew on some level that I wasn’t really hearing the voice that came out of the dark; rather, it had planted itself deep in my mind, where my Weird came from, where the memories of my oldest ancestors were stored.

  Did you dream the Old Ones whispered.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  We have dreamed. We have dreamed stars and suns. The before time and the after time. Dreamed your world into being.

  “I want you to turn it back,” I said. “Stop all this from ever having happened. Stop me from having met Tremaine, having destroyed the Engine, all of it.”

  Is that what you truly wish? the voices hissed, like the burn of steam against my mind. The before time of blood and entrapment? We are trapped. We are trapped so long, dreaming.

  Crow stood next to me, staring at the pinpoint as it grew larger and larger, and I saw all at once that it wasn’t a light but an eye, nearly as large as the dome itself, staring down at us from a fathomless distance. The Old Ones, linked inexorably with the nightmare clock. Now that I’d found its heart, they were speaking to me, letting me know what would happen if I turned the thing keeping them prisoner to my own use.

  “I want what I did to have never happened,” I repeated.

  But the world is bleeding, the voice replied. And the flow can never be stanched. You are a destroyer, and even the great gear of the worlds cannot turn back what has already been done.

  My mouth dropped open in shock and anger. “No. I stood up to those horrible things I had to see. Now I get to use the clock.”

  Who are you to change the course of history? the Old Ones whispered. You have torn the world. For that there is no cure. Not in your lands, and not in this device. Some things cannot be unmade, Aoife Grayson. Some things simply are.

  I snapped my gaze to Crow, furious and unbelieving. “You lied to me,” I snarled.

  Crow spread his hands, helpless. “I told you the clock can’t simply turn time around. I thought maybe it would work for you, but there are some things nothing on earth or in the heavens can move, Aoife. The clock can’t undo time and knit the past back together—not like Tesla thought, like he told others it could. But maybe it can set things differently, allow you to see things in a new light.” He took my hand, even though I fought him. My skin was ice. I could feel the clock as a part of me, and saw that Crow and I were both limbs of a greater organism, while below us the Great Old Ones churned, a sea of things so ancient they didn’t even feel alive, only constant and cold, like the stars they traveled.

  “Your life before,” Crow whispered. “Was that really a life you wanted? The world was sick long before the Gates shattered, Aoife.” He ran his free thumb down my cheek. “You can’t go back. You can go forward, though.”

  Ever onward through the cold of space, the voices agreed, tickling my mind.

  I realized that ever since I’d learned about the nightmare clock, I hadn’t really been meaning to reset the world. I’d really just wanted to make things with my mother okay. Crow was right—the Proctors, the Brotherhood and their war had broken it long before I’d ever been born. Tremaine and his trick of forcing me to open the Gates were merely symptoms, not problems. And as long as the worlds sat side by side, bleeding into one another, the boundaries slowly fracturing, no mere mortal was going to be able to change a damn thing.

  There would always be Fae to entice mortals; there would always be mortals to protect those who couldn’t resist the temptation, mortals like my father.

  There was only one mistake I was directly responsible for, and only one I could set right, because of that.

  You know your heart’s blood and your heart’s desire, the Great Old Ones intoned. You know what you have allowed to slip through your fingers.

  “My mother,” I whispered.

  Lost little lamb, the Old Ones hissed. Changeling child, fragile as glass.

  “I want my mother back,” I said to Crow. “I left her behind,” I said. “I should have made sure she was all right.”

  Then the great gear is yours, said the voices. Let us go. Let us free, let us roam and devour the four corners of the universe, and all you desire can be yours, not just your mother.

  When I reached out to touch the nightmare clock, it didn’t hurt at all. I felt the gears turn smoothly, erasing something from one world while they drew something from another.

  The pressure in my mind finally eased and the voices disappeared.

  I had gotten my wish.

  And in the process, I had set the Old Ones free.

  When I came back to myself in the spire of the Bone Sepulchre, Casey was shaking me frantically. The Gate had shut off, leaving just a hum to indicate it had ever been alive. From far below, sirens whooped.

  I couldn’t process anything beyond blinding pain, so I rolled onto my side and vomited. Casey pointed out the window and shouted something I couldn’t hear over the roaring in my head.

  Had I really seen any of what I thought I’d seen in Crow’s realm? Had I done anything at all besides pass out and throw up?

  “I said, we gotta run!” Casey shouted. I managed to pull myself together and follow her gaze, and when I saw what had her in such a panic I was truly back in reality, cold and hard as the ice around me.

  A black blot appeared against the white of the horizon as I watched from the tower window, wobbling and wavering against the last of the light, dipping dangerously close to the white wasteland below as it struggled against the extra weight of ice.

  Reflected light from the glacier caught the blob, and it grew a shape: the slim, sharp hull of a dirigible. I stared, hoping that I was wrong.

  The dying sun illuminated the black wings on the balloon, and my heart sank through the floor.

  The Dire Raven had found me.

  I watched them land from the tower. Draven’s shock troops were well outfitted for winter, and they didn’t meet much resistance from the Brotherhood. I heard them yelling, the Brotherhood screaming, the sizzle of Draven’s guns. I waited. He’d find me soon enough. I didn’t want to put up any overt resistance. Not until I knew Dean was all right.

  “What are we going to do?” Casey whispered, crouched next to me at the window.

  I sat, wrapping my arms around my knees to keep warm. “Wait,” I said. “Trust me, Draven wants me alive.”

  While we listened to the Proctors make their inexorable way toward us, I thought about what I’d seen inside the nightmare clock. Could Crow have been right? Could Tesla and I have shared a gift, to bend reality rather than machines? Could he have gone through the same trials I had, when he made the Storm in the first place?

  Had anything I’d done actually helped Nerissa?

  Casey looked up, alarmed, as footsteps crunched toward us, spiked boots eating chunks out of the ice steps, grappling hooks that they’d no doubt used to mount the tower hanging from their belts. The half-dozen Proctors who appeared in the tower entrance covered us with their guns. They were coated in snow.

  “Hands up!” one barked.

  I didn’t move. Just waited. I was so numb and exhausted that I wasn’t scared.

  “Hands up!” the Proctor screamed. “Or we shoot!”

  “Knock it off.” Draven’s voice was muffled by the wool mask over his face. It hid everything but his eyes, turning him into the dark figure of nightmares that so many people in Lovecraft thought he was. “She�
��s no threat to you,” he told the Proctors. “Not while I’ve got her precious Dean.”

  He snapped his fingers and the Proctors lowered their guns. “Go help with prisoner counting and transport,” he said. “Anyone puts up a fight, shoot them.”

  “We can’t take off until it warms up again, sir,” said the lead Proctor. “The Raven will freeze up and we’ll crash from the extra weight.”

  “Thank you so, so much for educating me on the laws of physics, Agent McGuire,” said Draven. “Now get the hell out.”

  The Proctors filed out, using their hooks one by one to rappel past the gaps in the stairs. Draven glanced around the tower, then lifted his mask up and grinned at me. “You’re such a good spy, Aoife. That guileless little face and those big green eyes of yours. I bet I could send you into the headquarters of the Crimson Guard in Moscow and you’d have them eating out of your hands.”

  “Where’s Dean?” I snapped.

  “Now, that’s not very civil,” Draven said. “I’m trying to pay you a compliment and all you care about is your little greaser friend.”

  I clenched my jaw, fighting not to scream. “I did everything you said. To the letter. You found the Brotherhood. Now tell me where Dean is, and let him go.”

  Draven gestured to the ice where the Dire Raven sat. “He’s on board. I haven’t harmed one Brylcreemed hair on his precious little head.” He took off his gloves and smacked them together. “But by all means, say the word and I’ll throw him out onto the ice. It’s only about thirty-five below out there. He’ll have a good ten minutes before he starts to lose fingers and toes.”

  “You’re a bastard,” I told him.

  Draven smiled at me. “I’d be careful how you toss that term around. I both knew my father and know that I come from a wedlock. Can’t really say the same for you.”

  He looked at the Gate, kicked at the iron arch. “One of Tesla’s science projects? Pathetic.” He edged closer, his boots treading on the copper and crushing the outer border of the Gate. “You know what you and that rabble-rouser Tesla will be remembered as? When the Brotherhood of Iron works for me? The name Aoife Grayson will be a new fairy tale, one parents tell their daughters when they stray off the path and think that they can change the world.”