Rose folded her hands behind her back and turned toward Ikey. Once she faced him, she disappeared in the dim light; she became a shadow save for the faint sliver of reflection that caressed the edge of her jet brooch.
“Thank you for your help, Ikey. I don’t believe you ought to keep Cross waiting any longer than necessary.”
Ikey stood in the ruin of his words. He straightened his back, tightened his jaw, and arranged his well-practiced mask of a blunt, stoic stare. The effort of it struck him as silly. Pointless and useless. His jaw slacked and his eyes drifted shut as Rose’s dismissal burrowed through him.
“Yes, ma’am.” He reached for the backdoor, but then thought better of leaving the lantern burning unattended on the dining table. He fetched it. As he crossed to the backdoor, he took another look at Rose. She stood motionless as the long shadow of her shifted across the back wall of the room. She had become inanimate, as if Ikey had inadvertently muttered a mystical incantation that rendered her as lifeless as a dress dummy.
Ikey stepped through the backdoor, and Rose was a shadow again.
Chapter Eight
After he shut the backdoor, Ikey took a deep breath. Before he could think of how to make up for whatever misstep he had committed, Ikey noticed that the workshop windows stood black against the dark gray of the shack’s weathered wood.
Cross wouldn’t work in the dark, would he? He couldn’t. Not like Rose. Ikey stepped off the path and approached a window. Rain-spattered dirt crusted the glass. The lantern’s light struggled to wriggle inside, and it returned no indication of Cross’s presence. Ikey pushed the shack’s door. It creaked, and the hinges squealed until the edge of it became lodged in the scoring along the dirt floor.
“Cross?” Ikey called out.
The lantern guttered under a soft breeze. Shadows undulated everywhere across the workshop.
“Cross? You in here?”
The tank remained on the table, but it no longer sat in pieces. The white film that lined it obscured Ikey’s ability to see whether or not the new coils had been installed. He stepped inside. In the middle of the table sat the lantern Cross had used earlier. It had burned bright and hot over a long wick. Ikey considered lighting it, but recalled Cross’s instruction that he wasn’t to be in the workshop without him.
He crossed the room on tentative steps until he stood before the door at the back of the workshop.
“Cross?” he said into the wood. “It’s Ikey. I came out to help.”
The flame in his lantern let out a slight hiss. He raised his fist and rapped on the door. “Cross?”
Nothing. Ikey wrapped his hand around the tarnished and dented doorknob. The coolness of the brass pressed into his palm. He twisted the knob. Locked. Crouching, he examined the knob plate. A dark keyhole stared back at him.
Ikey stood and turned around. He placed the tips of his fingers against the dark lamp. Cold. If Cross had returned to the workshop after leaving the dining room, he hadn’t lit the lantern.
He set his lantern beside the other, then plucked up one of the numerous charred ends of matchsticks littering the ground. With it, he transferred a bit of flame from one lantern to the other. Ikey flicked the match to the floor as warm light pulsed through the workshop. He then stepped up to the shelves and surveyed the rows of music boxes. He rattled the shelf with his hand and listened. A few music boxes tinkled or plinked. A couple even blossomed with a few melodious notes before falling silent again like old men who had forgotten the tune. Ikey rattled the shelf again, cocked his ear, and traced down the one that sang the fullest song. He transferred it from the shelf to the table. He thumped his hand down beside the music box.
“Bugger,” he hissed at himself. His satchel remained in the scullery, forgotten beside the sink.
What the hell. Rose had told him to go out to the workshop, and if Cross caught him out here, he’d be in trouble anyway. Ikey went through the drawers in a tool chest beneath the table until he found a small screwdriver. Armed with something he could understand, he leaned over the music box and set to work.
The tip of Ikey’s tongue worked itself into the corner of his lips. It felt good to put his hands to work, his mind to humming. He set the head of the screwdriver to a screw and turned counter-clockwise until the screw wriggled up out of the music box and fell to the table with a click. He pinched it in his fingers and placed it in the upper-left corner of his workspace, forming left-to-right rows of screws and thin plates of copper and unpolished slivers of steel like ranks of soldiers at attention. These were the things he understood. Seeing below the surface presented him with no problem at all when he held the right tool, the right metric. The music box was half the size of a man’s head, and within minutes, its interior mechanisms sat exposed to the light.
Ikey thumped the table with his fist. The lantern light guttered, and inside the music box, a tiny mallet of tin on a wound spring flicked a sliver of glass suspended from a loop of wire. It let out a small chink like the back of a knife blade tapped against a glass.
Deeper inside, behind rods and springs and stacks of gears, glints of brass chimes trembled. Somewhere further inside, other small hammers struck oblique notes.
The music in the working boxes tumbled out like this; tiny incidents of percussion going on in the hearts of these contraptions. Their movements were timed by a mechanism that arranged their order like a conductor who built small, haunting songs from pebbles of noise. Brilliant.
Ikey rifled through the tool chest again. The tools returned large, ugly noises as he shifted them aside in search of a pair of needle-nose pliers. Once he found those, he pulled a tiny hammer and spring from the rod they perched on. A piece of metal clinked behind the box. Ikey set the hammer in its place in his rows of parts, then glanced behind the box.
Nothing appeared amiss.
Ikey turned the box around and looked for the other end of the rod that had held the hammer. It wasn’t visible. But neither was it apparent what had fallen over when he pulled the hammer off the rod.
Ikey thumped the table with his fist again. The box let out a few notes like sparks, and a slight ticking noise faded away quickly. He snatched up the box and gave it a gentle shake. Again, a few asynchronous notes and a tick-tick tick-tick faded to nothing within a few seconds.
Ikey put the music box down and sat back on his stool. He rubbed his hand across his chin. Stubble had formed over the course of the day, and it scratched at his palm, grounding him to the moment. He stood and paced around the table to gain different perspectives on the box. No more screws presented themselves. No latches. No hooks. No bolts. Nothing to indicate what the next step might be in disassembling the device.
After a circuit of the table, he settled on the stool again and picked up the pliers. He gripped the rod in the pincer and gave a slight tug. It budged a fraction of an inch. Something inside the device shifted. He set the pliers down and thumped the table again.
Tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick tick.
Ikey ran his hands across his face, up into his hair where he grabbed fistfuls and pulled. He picked up the pliers once again. With the pincers, he attempted to twist and pull and push everything he could pinch inside them. A rod came loose with no apparent consequence. A gear slipped out of a crevice when he gripped it by a cog and pulled, but upon closer inspection, the gear appeared to have no function at all; simply a random piece that had fallen into the works.
Once he had tugged at everything, he picked the box up and looked underneath. It sat on a disk of wood. Twisting it offered nothing. He turned the thing in his hands and peered at it from every angle, rotating it slowly and imagining all of the pieces as individual components and how they fit together and came into a single mechanism with a function dictated by its form. But none of it worked as it was supposed to. Most of it hardly worked at all. Rods with no obvious point or use. Gears the size of shirt buttons gripped others and formed chains of whirling cogs that appeared utterly superfluous and could have been re
placed by a single, larger gear. He found springs buried deep inside and visible when the box was tilted a certain way against the light, but he couldn’t tell what they were connected to. The whole contraption appeared bound together without screws or bolts or latches or any discernible means of fastening. The music box was a giant mess that defied everything sensible about mechanics. The goddamned device had to have been assembled at some point. It had to be put together. And anything put together could be taken apart. It was the way of things.
Ikey tilted the music box on its side and tapped it against the table. In addition to the ticking, something cracked. As he righted the music box, a shard of broken glass dropped to the table.
Ikey lifted the music box over his head. With a grunt, he whipped it to the ground.
Hardware sprayed across the floor. Bits and pieces of it fanned out from the divot in the earth where it struck.
Wild-eyed, Ikey glanced to the doorway. He hoped to see Rose, but expected Cross, ropy arms over his chest, face impassive and enigmatic as his music boxes. Only the night regarded him from the open door. Crickets churred. Somewhere far off, a dog barked its complaint.
Ikey rubbed his face, then slammed a fist onto the table. The rows of parts jostled and tinkled. Their neat rows shifted into a scatter.
In the mess at his feet, the music box’s base sat next to the divot. Several rods stood at attention from holes drilled into the wooden disc. A small screw held a shilling-sized, brass plate to the center. A tiny hook stuck out from the edge of the disk. Otherwise, the device had disintegrated and offered no hints or clues as to how it came apart or ever went together.
Ikey glanced to the open door again. Cross would appear at any moment, dip his head as he passed under the doorway, then stand with his hands on his hips as he took in the wreckage and Ikey’s blunt ignorance.
The doorway remained empty as Ikey slipped from the stool. He sank to his knees at the thought of Cross’s fists flying. The long arms. The incredible reach that would bloody him to a pulp before he could think to cover his head.
Ikey gritted his teeth as his fingertips brushed over the parts and spread the damage out so he could get a good look at the sum of the parts. He found bits of tin and copper and brass rolled into thin chimes. Little bells appeared sporadically through the mess like tiny, metallic flowers poking out of mechanical loam. Slivers of broken glass hid among the wreckage, tethered by wire to rods or gears or other bits of glass. Small hammers of wood and metal and rubber lay in the debris. Everywhere sat gears and rods that offered no hints of how it all worked together.
Heat flooded his cheeks and leaked out with his breath. There was no hope of reassembling the thing. A scrap of paper caught his eye. He plucked it from underneath a thin plate of copper. The paper was yellowed, folded into a cube, and judging by the lines printed on it, torn from a ledger book. Ikey flicked the edge of his fingernail against the cube.
Tick.
He unfolded the cube of paper. Rows of penciled numbers stared back.
Ikey sat on his heels. His shoulders drooped while he surveyed the fifty or sixty music boxes sitting on the shelves in various states of disrepair or abandon. Inside? He shook his head at the thought of the numbers in the front parlor and the dining parlor alone. A hundred? More. Two hundred?
How long might it take to assemble one working music box? They were fussy beyond belief. Unfathomable and intricate. And where did Cross get the money? The miniature mallets and chimes were delicate pieces. The gears were tiny, thin pieces manufactured with a precision usually reserved for watches and small clocks.
Surely Cross sold the music boxes. They were amazing. Who wouldn’t want one? Who wouldn’t marvel at the craftsmanship, the novelty of a music box powered by the slightest vibrations? And the money Cross could demand for one would stagger most. The parts were costly. And how to replicate one eluded Ikey, so how could anyone figure out a process to churn them out in a Manchester factory? They were jewels. Mechanical jewels of noise and song.
If Ikey could figure out how to make one, then he could command a fortune for them as well.
He looked out the door. The dirt path disappeared into the night on its way to Cross’s dark house and Rose, the most amazing thing he’d seen. If Ikey learned how to replicate Rose…
His heart quickened at the thought. His own Rose. A creature incapable of experiencing pain or facing a harm that could not be mended. One designed to understand all there was to know of him and accept him regardless. His fingers traced through the shrapnel.
A creature that could forgive him.
In the pile of junk in the corner of the workshop, Ikey found an empty can into which he deposited the shattered music box. He returned the can to the junk pile and concealed it under a few random pieces of detritus. He then arranged the music boxes on the shelf to hide the gap where he had removed one. With the toe of his boot, he rubbed the divot in the floor. His efforts smoothed it out some, but a crescent-shaped indentation remained. Hardly noticeable. Almost anything could have made the mark. Finally, Ikey returned the borrowed tools, blew out the bright lantern, picked up the other one, and passed over to the exit. He gave the room another examination, and seeing no obvious sign of his intrusion, he closed the door behind himself.
On the left side of Cross’s house, a lantern or a sconce glowed and exposed a neighbor’s room through windows cast open to the settling coolness of the spring night. On the right side, the harsher glow of electric light lit the rooms. Though the neighbors weren’t visible, their homes smoldered with signs of life. Between them, Cross’s house sat black and impenetrable. A hole in the row of lit houses. Rose sat inside, isolated from the petty needs of people.
Ikey crossed the yard. A lot of time and patience would be required to fathom how Rose operated.
Chapter Nine
No signs of life made themselves evident when Ikey entered the house. Often, before his mum and sister died, Ikey would work alone in the barn in the evening, tending to a trifle that needed or held his attention. As the hours slipped past and the sun settled into the ground, he found it easy to believe a great, horrendous occurrence had left him alone now—the last person in the world, and from that point on, he would be safe. But a cold filled him after such a thought. It was one hard life traded for another. After he put aside his tools, extinguished his lantern, and left the barn, the soft glow from the house’s windows trickled hope into him as he followed the trail of light. When he opened the door, and his sister and mum saw it was only him, they resumed their chatter as Ikey took a seat between his uncle and the fire, and he shut his eyes and listened to their voices, the clicking of knitting needles, the turning of pages in Uncle Michael’s lap, and the pops of stove wood. Underneath it all, however, lay the silence in which they waited for the thunk-shhwip, thunk-shhwip of his dad’s boots scraped clean on the edge of the porch.
Inside Cross’s house, no chatter peppered the air. No light shone beyond the small shell cast by his lantern. He picked up his satchel from beside the sink and slung it over his shoulder. In the cupboard beside the sink, he found a box of matches as promised. He slipped a few of them into the pocket of his trousers before he resumed his course through the house.
The double doors at the back of the dining parlor sat open to more darkness. Ikey circled the table. With each step, the shadows in the room shifted around, studying him for weakness before pouncing. Only the lightest steps on the hardwood floor kept the music boxes silent, but the floor itself let out a plaintive creak every time he shifted his weight. Stealth inside the house was impossible. And what sounds did stalk through the dark rooms came back echoed and magnified, grown large off the meat of something fed upon in the dark.
A clicking and scraping noise trickled through the room. Ikey stopped. It was a small noise, light, but it scurried through the room at a steady rate. A click followed by a slight, metallic scrape. Familiar. But off. Like a favorite song played on a different instrument, a different pace.
Knitting. It was the sound of knitting needles rubbing together. As Ikey approached the open door, the lantern’s light fell inside and illuminated a small, oval-shaped table sitting low to the floor. Music boxes covered its surface. Behind it sat a sofa with threadbare patches reflecting more light.
At the doorway, Ikey leaned forward and peered into the room. Rose sat to his left in a high-backed chair. Each hand clutched a silvery knitting needle. A mass of dark wool spilled from her needles and into a pool in her lap. Ikey watched her work. Her right hand held its needle stiffly while the left hand wrapped the yarn around the needle and pulled the new stitch onto the left needle. It was different than how his mum and sister had knitted.
Rose asked, “Are you and Cross done for the night?”
Ikey looked to the floor, then glanced around the room quickly. A sparse gathering of furniture sat under another shelf that brimmed with music boxes and circled the room. A pair of windows swaddled tightly in heavy curtains interrupted the shelf along the far wall.
“I don’t know where Cross is,” Ikey said. “He wasn’t in the workshop when I went out there.”
“So what have you been doing out there all this time?”
Ikey shifted his weight. The floor creaked. It felt like the house tsked at him. He wanted to take a seat on the sofa and watch Rose’s fingers work the wool.
“If you’re done working, are you ready for bed, then?” Rose asked.
At the mention of bed, weariness settled on him. Ikey nodded, then grinned at his own foolishness. “Yes. I suppose I am.”
Rose grasped her needles in one hand and pushed the stitches down the shafts, then scooped the project up and dropped it into a basket at her side. She placed her hands on the arms of the chair and pushed herself to her height and folded her hands behind her back. Lord, was she tall.
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