I stuck my finger in the east wind’s mouth, then yanked it back again like the thing might really bite me. I let out a nervous giggle.
Tick. Thock. The sound was louder, or perhaps I was just nervy from the dark house and the knowledge that even if my father had locked the place up and gone somewhere less dank and forbidding, I was trespassing here.
When I at last tugged on the handles, the doors were locked and I virtually collapsed from relief. I didn’t need to be the lone adventurer any longer. I could creep back upstairs and be in bed before Dean realized I’d ever been out of it.
Still, I wished I’d seen what kind of clock could reverberate its gears through brick and wood, to the ears of sleepers rooms away. I touched the doors once more and gave them a last, experimental tug.
To my surprise, a heavy clacking arose, and the locks opened. The doors themselves slid backward on some kind of self-propelled mechanism, and a puff of stale air kissed my face as they settled open with a clank.
Spinning, I looked behind me to see what might have triggered the doors. My thoughts didn’t jump to viral creatures, but rather to an angry Archibald Grayson discovering a thief or my mad brother playing one of his tricks. Shadows leaped with the jostling of my lamp, painting the shadow of man and phantom on the walls of the entryway.
I was alone, though, and when I realized the fact, a little fear got in with it. The walls of the Academy and of Lovecraft were behind me. Here, there was nothing between me and things lurking in the dark, feasting on blood and sanity.
Deciding that I was safer in a closed room than out in the open, I hurried through the doors, which rolled shut behind me. I jumped at the sound, but what was before me was mesmerizing. My lamp showed gold-stamped spines in jolting shadow, mellowed wood and well-used leather chairs. A closer inspection revealed I was in Graystone’s library, and my feet sank into rich carpet with a whisper of welcome.
It was truly a glorious library, twice the size of the Academy’s. Impressive, I’d wager, by even New Amsterdam’s standards. The shelves ascended to the ceiling, and the volumes went on for what looked like miles.
I spun in a slow circle, like another sort of girl might do in a dress shop full of the latest confections for the sort of girls who got asked on dates and to dances. The library was not dusty or dead like the rest of Graystone. It looked loved and lived-in and used. A writing desk sat shoved to one side near a pair of worn leather armchairs. There was nothing on the walls, none of the ornate accoutrements the rest of the house boasted. This was a library, and my father clearly wanted all of the attention on his books.
But, in the golden light of my lamp, I saw there was one object in the room besides the copious volumes.
On the opposite side of the long narrow room was a leviathan clock—a full-bodied, intricate machine, much different than a pocket chronometer. As I watched, the hands swung in a parabolic arc, their wicked spiked finials grinding to a halt at twelve midnight. The chimes let out a discordant, muffled bong.
The hands swung again, and I stepped closer, watching them trail across the clock face like compass needles that had lost north, the unearthly ticking echoing loud enough to vibrate my skull. Each numeral was actually a tiny painting, wrought in delicate ink. A naked girl lying sleeping on a stone. A great goat with the body of a man sitting on a throne. A circle of figures in a dark forest who wore the sign of Hastur, the heretical Yellow King, whom cultists worshipped before the necrovirus. According to Professor Swan, and who knew where he got his stories from?
Looking at the clock for too long, at the silver gears beneath the face that spun like saw blades in the bloodred cherrywood case, made me dizzy around the edges. The shoggoth’s bite began to throb, sending needles up and down my arm, and I put out a hand to steady myself against the shelves. Brushing the leather and the wood settled my head, but only a bit. Friendly as the library was, the clock was a monstrous thing, a machine of bloody teeth. It didn’t scare me—it was a clock, after all—but it transfixed me, started a tremor of unease. I felt the urge to bolt, clear back to my bedroom.
I had to stop thinking of it as my bedroom. My father had made it clear by his fifteen-year silence—Conrad and I were Nerissa’s children. We had only a mother.
The hands of the clock reached midnight again and another bong vibrated my skull. The chimes were dulled, as if stuffed with cotton wool.
As if something was inside the case, muffling them.
I hesitated a moment, the aura of the clock pulsating around me, and then decided I was being a silly child. I tugged at the case until it sprang open, varnish coming off sticky under my hand. Touching the clock made me dizzy again, but I peered into the whirling gears and swinging weights and caught the edge of a vellum scrap stuffed between the black glass chimes. Whoever had broken the clock had left a note.
My small hands, the bane of my mechanical engineering instructor, Professor Dubbins, fit neatly into the thin space. I touched the paper and pulled it free, but I was careless. A gear bit into my thumb and a fat blood droplet welled on the pad.
I hissed, and sucked at the digit. The bleeding didn’t stop—the puncture was deeper than I first thought—and when I examined the spot, my blood soaked the corner of the vellum. I let it drop by my feet and wrapped my thumb up in the tail of my ruined blouse, tightening the linen around it for pressure. A little more blood wouldn’t matter.
The clock whirred faster, the hands only a blur as they spun. A rattlebone chorus of ticking grew inside my skull, and I scrubbed at my forehead with my free hand. The shoggoth’s poison was undoubtedly still in me. I shouldn’t have slipped out of bed. It was the poison, I told myself, not anything else. Not what had been in my blood to start.
I grabbed up the vellum scrap and retreated to the far side of the library, hoping that distance would take away some of the looming malignancy that the clock had set in my mind.
Near the doors, I stopped and unfolded the scrap, holding it close to the lamp globe. What I expected, I can’t say. A coded message from a Crimson Guard spy, perhaps, or a warrant issued by the Proctors. A love letter from my mother.
Instead, Conrad’s handwriting grabbed me like fingers around the throat.
AOIFE
More ghost ink. More secrets for only my eyes. Conrad had put a note here. He’d made it to Arkham after all. Conrad might still be alive.
Conrad might still be sane.
My hand shaking so hard the paper looked like moth wings in the oily light, I held the vellum over the flame. It curled, crackled, and my fingers singed because the scrap was much, much smaller than my brother’s last letter, but I held on.
The ink burned, turned, twisted and, with a huff of smoke, gave up its secret.
Fix it.
“Fix what?” I demanded of the acrid cloud. “What, Conrad?”
Sharp needles of heat in my fingertips warned me, and I dropped the paper on the carpet just as it burst into flames and gave a whip-crack snap of yellow powder as the chemical of the ghost ink combusted. I stomped on the flames until they went out, leaving a burn hole in the carpet.
That was simply terrific. If my father did return to Graystone, he was going to tan my hide.
A floorboard croaked in the hallway and I froze, mind and muscle. I’d watched a lanternreel about feudal Japan in history during my first year. The emperors of centuries past had fabulous peak-roofed palaces, and in the palaces, nightingale floors. Wood that sang, and announced the presence of the enemy, that warned the feudal lords when assassins were close.
My heart became a stone. My hand itched for Dean’s switchblade.
A long thin shadow crawled through the open doors of the library, echoes of long thin footsteps following.
I blew out the lamp and inched back against the books, their soft spines flexing under my weight.
The figure in the door was long-legged and loping, and tangled its feet in the carpet. One pale hand with pale wormy fingers reached out and felt its way along the
books, coming close. The shoggoth’s bite throbbed in time with my heart, and I shrank back, but too slowly. The fingers brushed my hand, leaving contrails of cold.
Terror fired me, and I struck, balling up my fist with my thumb tucked outside and under like Conrad taught me and carrying my blow with the weight of my shoulder behind it. My knuckles glanced off jawbone and it felt like broken glass had buried itself in my hand. The long shadow and I both yelped.
“Cal?” My heart could have outpaced a jitney.
“Eyes of the Old Ones!” Gears chattered from an unseen device and then a thin, wavering line of blue lit up the space between me and Cal. Cal carried an aether lantern with a crank handle, the bubbly glass filmed over from age.
“I’m sorry …” I tried to touch the rising welt on his jaw, but he jerked his head away. “I thought you were something else.”
“What else would I be?” Cal cranked the lantern again, to little effect. The aether inside the globe was ancient and nearly white.
“I thought …” A living shadow, a cold thing from the primordial pool of the necrovirus, something from under the ground looking for a feast. “I guess I don’t know,” I finished, looking at my hands—anywhere but Cal’s face.
Cal put a finger under my chin and lifted my gaze to his own. “Are you seeing things, Aoife? We can go home right now, petition the city for quarantine. You’re a girl. They won’t send you to the Catacombs. Probably won’t,” he amended. “You are a runaway.”
“I saw something in the dark and I didn’t want to get digested by a nasty, slobbering viral creature for the second time today.” The knuckles on my left hand were skinned and turning purple. Cal always assumed the worst. He didn’t realize that sometimes a girl just got irritable.
“We could still go back, you know,” Cal said, taking my injured hand in his and producing his handkerchief. He wrapped my hand once, twice. My blood made small blooms on the snowy fabric and he stared at them, his throat working. “You’d have to be in quarantine for six months, but there’s always a chance they’d let you out if you didn’t … you know.”
I yanked my hand out of his. The handkerchief fluttered to the ground and he snatched it up. “You’re so sure I’m going mad, Cal, then why are you still here? I’m sure if you ran home now and licked the headmaster’s boots he’d be overjoyed to readmit you.” It was bad enough thinking that madness was encroaching. I didn’t need my best friend accusing me as well.
Cal’s lips disappeared into a thin line. “That was cruel, Aoife.”
“Well,” I blustered, “you want me in quarantine.” Quarantine meant a hospital on the river, outside the city limits. A place full of sterile white halls and sterile aether lamps burning night and day. Far from the madhouse, where the doctors had given up on the patients. In quarantine, the doctors tried to beat the advance of the necrovirus. To shock, burn and drown the heresy out of a human body.
When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man’s pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song.
They decided to skip quarantine after that.
“Sometimes, madness isn’t the worst of life,” Conrad told me afterward. We sat on the steps even though it was raining, looking down from the courthouse at the dense brick-lined veins of Lovecraft, where normal, usual, uninfected people lived. “Sometimes, it’s the belief that madness has a cure.”
Every time I passed the Danvers State Viral Hospital after Nerissa’s commitment hearing, fingers of ice played notes up and down my spine.
“I’m just trying to help you,” Cal said. “Cram it, Aoife, can’t you see that?”
I held out my hand again, offering it to his ministrations. “I suppose. I’m sorry.”
Cal rewrapped my hand. “Me too.” He looked gamely at the books. “This isn’t so bad. Kind of stuffy. You know, I hear that you can still go to school in quarantine … maybe not to be an engineer, but a teacher or a personal secretary for sure. You’re bright enough—”
“Cal. Don’t try to help me, like I’m some dame in one of your dumb aether plays,” I said. “Don’t try to be my hero. Just be Cal.” I stood on tiptoe so I could move the straw stalks of hair away from his eyes. “I like just Cal.”
Cal shuffled his feet in the dust coating the broad boards of the library floor, but at least he’d stopped talking about quarantine for the time being. I looked at my feet, too. The spectral glow of the lantern made everything sharp, the tear in my stocking and my footprints in the dust. Beneath them, I discerned an older set, smaller than my feet, heel and toe, period and question mark.
“Look.” The footprints crossed the library in a careful, unhurried line and disappeared at the bookshelves on the far wall. I grabbed Cal’s arm. “Somebody else was here.”
Cal’s arm went rigid under my grip, and I watched his throat twitch painfully as he swallowed. “Your father must have had a lady visitor.”
“A lady visitor who can evaporate through the walls?” I started for the spot and Cal attempted to pull me back.
“Aoife, you don’t know what’s going on here.”
I shrugged free of his bony grip. “The dust is settled over her prints. She’s long gone. And since my father never married, I’m doubting she has any business in this house.”
“Never remarried,” Cal corrected me, holding up the lantern for a pale imitation of light as I ran my fingers over the shelf. A hidden door would be simple enough, and a fine carpenter could make a hinge invisible with ease.
“No,” I said, brushing over the spines. Emerson, Thoreau, Kant. Not heretical texts, but not the sort of thing upstanding rational folk read on Sunday afternoon, certainly. The old ways of superstition and belief, the search for a human soul, were like Nancy Granger. Nancy Granger snuck off to the Rustworks and met a boy at the jitney track. Nancy Granger had gotten in the family way. No one at the Academy talked about Nancy Granger after she went back to Minnesota.
“No?” Cal frowned. “What d’you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean he never married,” I said. “Not my mother or anyone else.”
Cal’s mouth opened, and then he shut it again. I knew his thoughts by heart even though he avoided my eyes. Nice girls aren’t bastards. Nice girls have fathers who come home and take off their ties and have a cocktail with the evening paper.
At least Cal knew me well enough to keep his thoughts as thoughts. The only fight I’d ever seen Conrad lose was to a bully over nearly the same words.
It mattered very little. I was already an orphan, a potential madwoman and possibly a heretic. What difference would Archibald and Nerissa having rings on their fingers when I was born really make?
It had bothered Conrad more. He felt like Archibald had denied him and set him up to fail. Without a recommendation from his father, a boy couldn’t hope to pluck a prime job as a Maintainer in the Engineworks. He might as well be stuck in the pit next to the steam ventors or doing menial tasks like sweeping or greasing.
Had Conrad and Archibald finally spoken? Or had Conrad found the same deserted corpse of a house I had? For that matter, where was he if not at Graystone?
Too many problems. My mind was starting to become disorderly again, like during the one memorable and horrific occasion when I’d tried to take Fanciful Maths. Numbers outside of engineering work were messy, imprecise, theoretical as fairy stories. Only mechanics made sense.
I turned to the single problem I could solve—the footprints. The shelves were solid, and the books were books, not disguised springs and levers that would show me Graystone’s secret places.
I chewed on my lip. “There’s got to be something behind this wall. People don’t just disappear.”
“People,” Cal agreed. I quirked an eyebrow.
“Surely Cal Daulton, most rational of all the Master Builder’s faithful, doesn’t cotton with spirits and vapors.”
Cal huffed
through his nose. “Yeah. Rational as the day is long, me.”
I got down on my knees, dust tickling my nostrils, and ran my hands over the aged, rippled boards. The floor was solid and heavy with wax, but my fingers picked out an impression the size of my foot.
I put my hand over the spot and pressed down.
The door in the wall opened bereft of any trappings. No shrieking hinges, no breath of tombstone air chill on my face, not even a solitary cobweb. The section of the bookshelves rolled back on soundless hinges, a brass wheel-and-arm assembly pulling the philosopher’s books into a hidden pocket of wall. I nudged Cal until he raised the lamp, and peered cautiously into the space.
Within sat a passage made of raw boards and beams, and a warped staircase leading down. I beckoned to Cal. “Come on.”
“Are you nuts?” He backed up. “You don’t know what’s down there. This whole gear-forsaken mountain is overrun with viral critters and you want to go down some hidey-hole?”
With two years of our friendship at my back, I knew how to work on Cal. I put my hands on my hips. “Why, I’d say you’re scared.”
His forehead furrowed. “I’m not.”
“Fearless adventurer Cal, scared of a little dark and dank. What will the guys at the School ever say about this?” Without another word, I turned and walked ahead, leaving him to follow or be left alone in the library, with the eerie, intermittent heartbeat of that awful clock.
After three steps, Cal rushed after me, sticking to my shoulder like a burr. “And who would be there to look after you if I stayed behind?”
“Dean?” I suggested. Cal made a rude noise.
“The less said about that greaser, the better. He’s no kind of gentleman.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m no kind of lady.” We came to the bottom of the stairs and another inconspicuous door. This door wasn’t hidden or locked, and opened at my approach, like the doors of the library. I theorized about the mechanism that allowed such a slick illusion—some kind of weight-sensitive plate, rigged to a pulley system, or a motion-sensing system that triggered when our shadows passed in front of the pinhole in the wall.
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