The Nightmare Garden

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Casey,” Crosley said, handing me off. “Help her to her room, please?”

  “Of course, sir,” Casey murmured, putting her arm around me. As we walked away she leaned in close and whispered, “What the hell is going on? Who was that?”

  I shook my throbbing head, acutely aware of Crosley watching us retreat down the hall. “Not here. In my room.”

  We stumbled in an awkward dance into the room Crosley had had prepared for me the previous evening, where I collapsed on my bunk. Someone had left a tea tray, and Casey poured me a cup. It warmed me up a little, but it couldn’t erase the memory of the cold, fathomless eyes of the Winter Queen boring into mine.

  “You look really terrible.” Casey sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hand to my forehead in a motherly manner. More motherly than Nerissa had ever been, for sure.

  Nerissa. I’d promised Octavia we’d both come back. Did Nerissa even remember she was from the Thorn Land? Did she even know her sister’s name?

  “Fae will do that to you,” I said. Casey’s face crinkled in alarm.

  “I knew I wasn’t imagining things,” she said. “Mr. Crosley said I was, but I knew something had happened to you—that a Fae was in the Bone Sepulchre.” She stood, her braids clanking, echoing her excitement. “Maybe we can still catch him!”

  “Casey,” I sighed, irritated at her innocence in matters of the Fae. “Forget it. He’s long gone.”

  “But Mr. Crosley will be furious with us if he doesn’t know the truth.…” She worried her lip and sat back down. “What did the Fae do to you? Are you hurt?”

  “Not physically,” I said, waving her off. I didn’t want Casey worried about me—I needed her, I realized, and I was going to have to tell her the truth.

  As briefly as I could, I outlined what had happened with Tremaine, why he’d come for me and how Octavia had revealed the location of the nightmare clock.

  “Tesla built this place,” I finished. “He built the Gates. I need to know what else he might have here—plans nobody ever saw, secret things like the clock he built for the Brotherhood. Then I think I can set everything right.”

  Casey stayed quiet, not looking at me, and I grew nervous. “Please don’t think I’m crazy,” I begged. “I’m not. All of this is true, and it’s the only way I know to stop what’s going to happen to the world.”

  Casey finally spoke, barely above a whisper. “I told Mr. Crosley when you came here what you’d been doing with your father—practicing your Weird, getting ready to take over as Gateminder. I told him I couldn’t be sure, but I had a feeling you’d run into Proctors in Innsmouth. And you know what he said?”

  “What?” I said. My stomach was knotting uncomfortably. Calm down, Aoife. I just had to act innocent of whatever Casey was going to reveal.

  “He said to leave you be,” Casey said. “He said that in time, you’d either serve one purpose or another for the Brotherhood. He told me that if you can’t fix what you’ve done, you’ll at least be incentive for Mr. Grayson to come back to the fold.” Casey wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry, I know I should have told you before, but if he ever found out we talked …” She began to shake.

  I felt bile creep up my throat, felt the thick, knobby hand of fear grasp my neck. I itched to run back out into the snow, anywhere but here, but I forced myself to remain perfectly still, my body’s only movement the beating of my heart. I would not panic. Would not crack. Everything depended on it.

  “Look,” Casey said, “I know what happened in Lovecraft wasn’t your fault. I know how tricky the Fae can be.” She lowered her voice. “I lied to you when I said I’d only seen two. They took my sister, when we were both tiny. They left a creature in her crib, this squalling thing with double rows of teeth and no eyes. I know Crosley and those men can’t possibly understand what they’re dealing with when they make those bargains.” Her mouth quirked. “Besides, I know you, and I know you’re not some simpering pushover. That act didn’t fool me.”

  “I’m actually a bit glad of that,” I said, managing a tiny smile. “It’s getting tiresome.”

  “So what now?” Casey sighed. “Seems as if we’re over a barrel.”

  I rubbed my temples. They ached, like everything else in me ached, including my thoughts. There were so many pieces, so many lies I’d stacked on top of lies, until they threatened to topple and crush me. Well, the lying was over, at least with Casey. I was sick of it anyway, sick nearly to death.

  “The nightmare clock,” I said. “My life and yours, and everyone’s, depends on us getting to it.”

  Casey nodded. “Okay,” she said. “You need Tesla’s notes and diaries, right?”

  “That would be a start,” I agreed. Despite Octavia’s orders, despite Draven’s encroachment and what was sure to be an ugly confrontation, I felt the tiniest grain of hope.

  “They don’t exactly trust orphaned errand girls with that kind of information,” Casey said, “but fortunately, I’m no dummy either.” She leaned in and whispered. “Tesla’s private papers are in the locked collection in the library.”

  My hope faded again. “I’m guessing that’s not easy to get into.”

  Casey shook her head. “Oh, no. Mr. Crosley keeps those books personally guarded by his handpicked men. The last person who tried was your father.”

  I sat up in shock. “Seriously? My father?”

  “It was awful,” Casey said. “I’ve never seen Mr. Crosley so angry. He threatened to throw Mr. Grayson in the brig, but Miss Crosley intervened, and then the two of them snuck out in the middle of the night. Mr. Crosley hates him,” she said. “Taking his daughter like that.”

  The story redoubled my determination. I could succeed where Crosley had foiled my father. Harold Crosley was right—I was going to fix things. But not for his sake. For mine, for my mother’s, for the entire world, innocent and caught in the path of what I’d started when I broke the Gates.

  “You get me into the library,” I said. “We can take care of the guards together.”

  “He’s got powerful locks on the room too,” Casey said nervously. “And alarms.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, laying my hand on her shoulder the way Archie had done to me. “I’ll take care of those.”

  After Casey left, I changed out of my bloody clothes, into a loose blouse and cigarette pants that had been left folded on my bed. I curled onto my side on the bed, and I opened my satchel. Draven’s compass was still blinking as implacably as ever.

  How close was he? Airships as large as the Dire Raven could only fly in the warmest part of the day this close to the North Pole, lest they risk ice building up on their iron parts and weighing them down.

  He was coming, though. If Harold Crosley had been the only one we were talking about, I would have been happy to leave him to Draven. Crosley was keeping me prisoner—there was no denying it now. And if I didn’t prove to be a useful weapon, then I’d be bait in a trap for my father. Again.

  But if Draven came after the Brotherhood, eventually he’d be led back to my family. He had a vendetta against the Graysons, that much was obvious. I had to find the clock—find it physically, not just in dreams—before he showed up so I wasn’t just a limp body for him to snatch.

  The day crept by with agonizing slowness, and I tried to sleep, tried pacing, tried staring at the shimmering ice walls, but nothing worked. I just kept thinking of Octavia and Nerissa. Sisters. I truly hoped my mother wanted to return to the Thorn Land when this was over. But if she had run away from it once, was I returning her to a worse fate than the one she faced now? If she was even alive. And if I could find the clock and make it work.

  After the aether lamps had dimmed for the night, Casey unlocked my door and came in. “Mr. Crosley is playing checkers with some of the other brothers. He’ll usually get into the gin and go to bed early.”

  I stopped her from turning on the lamp; we couldn’t alert anyone that we were wandering around together. It was cold and silent, j
ust us and the shadows dancing against the ice. “I know you’re scared of him, Casey,” I said. “I can’t thank you enough for trusting me.”

  “I’ve seen what you can do,” Casey murmured. “That kind of power shouldn’t be under anyone’s control but your own. And I wasn’t always an orphan. If it were my family, I’d do anything to help them. Anything.”

  We walked quickly through the halls, passing only a few other members of the Brotherhood, most of them in nightclothes or just starting their shifts in the mechanics’ bay. No one paid us the slightest bit of attention; we were two faceless girls meekly going on our way.

  The library wasn’t locked, although a sign on the door noted that it was closed and would reopen at eight a.m.

  We slipped in and Casey stopped me inside the main doors, pointing back through the stacks. The library was massive, shelves curving far over our heads, bolted to the ceiling and the floor, and reading tables every few feet. With the lights off, the library was eerie, shelves crouched like lines of sentinels waiting for the signal to come to life and march forward.

  We crept through the stacks, toward a flare of light near the back wall. Every footstep seemed magnified, every breath Casey and I took echoingly loud. But the two guards watching the small iron cage didn’t seem to notice, and I breathed a little easier—that is to say, I breathed.

  The two men in white sat on hard metal stools on either side of the cage. One leafed through a magazine and the other dozed, his head tilted back.

  Casey looked at me and I examined our options. The men had weapons—short truncheons on their belts—and there could have been more hidden. Can you take one? I mouthed at Casey.

  She nodded, knotting her hands into tight, knobby fists. I sucked in a breath. I was shaking. Once I took this step, there was no turning back.

  Still, I didn’t hesitate before I called up my Weird and burst the bulb of the aether lamp on the wall next to the guards. A bit of smoke curled, and the scent of burnt paper permeated the air.

  I didn’t have any more time to worry. The guards were up, shouting, stumbling into one another, and I saw the flash of Casey’s metal hair decorations as she flew past me and laid the first guard out with a right cross. She fell on the man, kicking him and hitting him, letting out small huffs of rage.

  I grabbed my guard by the front of his tunic and used the one fighting move every girl knows: I drove my knee hard into the spot between his legs. The guard buckled and fell, and I hit him once more in the temple to make sure he was out.

  Casey was still punching her guard, atop him, her face gleaming with sweat. “Casey!” I hissed, horrified. These men had done nothing to us—they were just obstacles. “Casey, stop!”

  She blinked at me, as if she’d forgotten I was there. “Yeah. Sorry,” she said.

  I helped her up, watching her wipe blood off her knuckles onto the tail of her shirt. “What happened?” I said softly. The pain on her face echoed in me. “Not just now. I mean, why did you do that?”

  She shook her head, not looking at me. I brought a portable aether lamp from one of the tables and turned it on low so I could look into her eyes. Casey remained sullen. “It’s not easy being an orphan the Brotherhood plucks off the street,” she finally said with a sigh. “Any more than it is being a ward that the Lovecraft Proctors get their hands on.”

  She didn’t meet my eyes, and I didn’t push the issue. I knew the rage that could boil up when you least expected it. I knew it all too well. “Let’s take a look at these locks,” I suggested.

  Casey looked crestfallen. “Mr. Crosley has the only copy of the keys. There’s no way I’m getting my hands on them.”

  At least here, I was in my element. I could do something about Casey’s misery. “Good thing I don’t need his keys, then, eh?” I said, placing my hands on the door to the cage. Casey was right—the locks were strong, complicated, not the sort of kid stuff I could break open easily with my Weird.

  But it could be done. Was going to be done. I laid my forehead against the iron. I didn’t have much time, and the pressure didn’t help my concentration, but I let the locks speak to me, let my Weird speak to them, allow the meshing of two machines, one ethereal and one iron, to occur.

  After a moment, the locks popped open, and Casey gave a small squeak. “I’ll never get used to that,” she explained when I gave her a questioning look. “Closest thing to magic I’ll ever see.”

  I thought of my father trying to teach me control back on the beach and felt a small pang. I did want to see him again, to give us a chance to spend more than a few days together, to really be father and daughter.

  But for the sake of everything else, I shoved the tightness in my chest aside and pointed into the cage. “I probably shouldn’t spend too much time enclosed in all that iron,” I told Casey. “Can you get the Tesla stuff and bring it out here?”

  “Sure can,” she said, seeming relieved to have a task. I looked back at the guards, wondering how we were going to explain them. While Casey collected diaries, blueprints, journals and bound papers, I rooted through the librarian’s desk until I unearthed a flat bottle of whiskey.

  Perfect. I upended it over the unconscious guards’ clothes, then left the bottle lying near the outstretched hand of the one Casey had beaten up. Not that whiskey would explain the bruises, but it would at least cast doubt on the story that two grown men had been beaten by two teenage girls—if they admitted such a thing at all.

  When Casey had finished stacking a table high with archived documents, I took a seat before them, pulling the aether lamp close while she kept a lookout. I figured I had a few hours at most—the Brotherhood never truly slept, and sooner or later somebody would notice that I wasn’t in my room, nor was Casey in hers. I had to be fast, to focus, even though my mind was still spinning from Tremaine’s visit and felt like it might never stop.

  Just think, I cajoled myself. You’re holding the same plans in your hand that were once in Nikola Tesla’s. How many Academy students would crawl over broken glass to do the same? Then again, I doubted most students of engineering realized that when he wasn’t building coils and finding the alternating current, Tesla was building magical devices to keep a race of predatory Fae at bay.

  His plans weren’t anything special to look at—his handwriting was precise, his drawings meticulous, but they didn’t glow or catch fire beneath my fingers, as would seem to fit such a portentous occasion. And there were lots of plans and diaries—hundreds at least. Tesla was prolific, and I’d heard that, unlike his competitor Edison, he recorded most ideas, even the wholly impractical ones. “This is going to take forever,” I muttered. Casey shrugged.

  “The ones Mr. Crosley thinks are particularly special are bound up in that big blue book,” she said, shoving toward me a ledger that was almost too large for me to turn the pages of. It was full of blueprints, most of them for terrestrial inventions that I’d seen back in Lovecraft—the prototype steam jitney engine, a Tesla coil, an aether feeder that became the system everyone in the world whose home was piped with the stuff was familiar with.

  I set the book aside. Crosley’s ego display didn’t interest me. I tried a few of Tesla’s personal journals, and then started looking through loose plans, some folded and faded so that the machines were almost unrecognizable. But the clock wasn’t among them. There were no notes to even indicate Tesla had entertained the idea of such a machine.

  I had a terrible sensation in my stomach that I might have gone about this all wrong, but I persisted. The nightmare clock had to be here. For so many reasons.

  Casey looked back at me, chewing on her lip. “I can hear people moving around out there. We should probably get going soon.”

  “If we do get caught,” I said, opening another bound volume, the paper so decayed the corners turned to dust in my hands, “blame me. Crosley needs me—I’ll be punished less.”

  Casey gave me a tentative smile. “Thanks. But I don’t want you punished either.”

&nbs
p; I shrugged. “I’m not scared of Harold Crosley. You helped me, now I’ll help you. That’s how it works.”

  Casey lowered her eyes. “Maybe in your world. I’m not used to it.”

  “What do you …,” I started, but was distracted by the spidery handwriting at the top of the last blueprint in the bound journal. Arctic Gate—Transportive Device for Inter-dimensional Travel, commissioned by Raymond Crosley, 1899.

  I felt my mouth drop open in surprise, and I flipped the book around so Casey could see. “There’s a Gate? Here?”

  Casey nodded, looking as if she’d done something wrong. “But it never worked right. Mr. Crosley won’t let anyone use it—there’ve been folks who’ve lost limbs and horrible stories about people who got shot out into the vacuum of space and whatnot.” She chewed her lip. “Said it was just a prototype Tesla fiddled with. He locked that whole wing. Nobody goes there.”

  I heard Octavia’s whisper. The man who built the Gates. It started with him, and it will end with him.

  I carefully tore the blueprint from the book, tucking it under my shirt. My heart was pounding again, but this time it was from excitement and urgency at finally being so close to what I needed. “We’re going there. Right now.”

  Tesla’s Lost Gate

  THINGS WERE WAKING up in the Bone Sepulchre as the short day—only a few hours of light, this time of year—got under way. Casey took me to the blocked-off staircase that led to where she said the Gate rested.

  This had to be it—not a Gate, but the clock Tesla had conceived. I couldn’t think of anywhere else Tesla could have hidden a doorway into the very dreams of the world. Faulty it might be, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

  “Are you sure about this?” Casey whispered as I performed my lock-picking trick again. It hurt more this time. My Weird had been making me suffer more and more with even the smallest exercises. I didn’t know what that heralded—iron madness, fatigue, or something worse—but I had to sit down for a moment and catch my breath when the door sprang open.