The Iron Thorn

13 The Sinister Clock

MY MOTHER USED to help us find shapes in the clouds while we lay in Von Braun Park, pointing out unicorns and knights and the unfurling, scaly hides of dragons.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned you could be burned for suggesting such things existed, independent of their creation from steel, gear and steam in the laboratories of engineers. The Bureau of Heresy in Washington would accept no fantasy, no magic. Nothing that did not spring from viral infection or pure science.

I tried to find the same shapes in the stained plaster of my bedroom ceiling while dawn light spread fingers through the blood-colored velvet drapes.

“Coffee.” Dean kicked open my door and backed in, holding a tray made of silver and stamped in roses. In his big, rough hands it was rather ridiculous. “Found some hidden in that rat hole your pop calls a pantry. Old as the hills but brewed up strong.”

I pulled the duvet up to my chin, as I’d taken off my filthy, destroyed uniform and not-slept in my petticoat and brassiere. “This is my room, Dean.” I didn’t want him to see me disheveled and sleep-tossed. Cal seeing me wouldn’t matter, but I had a notion it would be different with Dean.

“And I do apologize for barging in, but I figured you’d forgive me.” He stepped over the threshold and kicked the door again to shut it.

I felt under my pillow for my jumper and slipped it back on even though it stank to high heaven, and then rolled the coverlet down. I fluttered my hands uselessly at the tray. “Why did you bring me this … stuff?”

Dean stared hard at me. “You skittish over something, Miss Aoife? Bad dreams? Starchy sheets?”

“I …” I forced myself to look at Dean and not blush. “I’m not usually alone with a boy. Besides Cal. And just when we’re cramming for exams.”

Dean spit out a laugh. “Relax, princess. It’s just coffee.”

“I’m quite relaxed,” I said in a tone that was anything but, glancing at the lamp on the nightstand. It was a heavy Tiffany number, all glass and iron. I could bean someone with it if I had to. I didn’t think Dean would try anything, but nothing in this world was certain, and the plain truth was I barely knew him and he was close enough to embrace. “I’d hate to have to scream when you acted improperly,” I added.

“You wouldn’t scream.” Dean poured the coffee out of the silver service into a china cup, a small and frilly porcelain bird in his hand. “You’re thinking you’d hit me with that lamp you were just eyeballing and make tracks, because you don’t need any kind of rescuing.”

“I need it more than you could ever know.” The words slipped out and I didn’t stop them, wasn’t even aware until Dean paused, a little coffee splashing onto the leg of his dungarees.

“Dammit.” He sat down on the foot of my bed, his bulk bowing the ancient mattress. “What’s that deep-down secret giving you sad eyes and sleepless nights, kid? You can say it’s nothing, and Cal will believe you, but not me.”

“I …” I wrapped my fingers around the cup he handed me, suddenly chilled with the knowledge I’d said too much. “That stays a secret.” I liked Dean, probably more than I should, but I was determined to have no one visit me in bleach-scrubbed halls that smelled of antiseptic, echoing with the screams of patients whose medication couldn’t stave off their nightmares. I’d rot my days away under the eye of no one but the shadow companions birthed from my viral mind. I wouldn’t ensnare sane victims, like Nerissa had. I’d decided it the day my mother was committed permanently.

“All right, it’s your secret. For now,” Dean said. “But we still need to settle up my payment.”

I huddled deeper under the blankets. “I probably can’t afford your payment, Dean. I barely have any money and certainly nothing else someone … like you … would want.”

“You’ve got that secret,” Dean said. “Someday, you’ll tell it to me. And when you do, I’ll take your secret and then it will be mine to keep instead of yours.”

Faintly, I remembered one of Nerissa’s stories, the poor weaver girl who makes straw into gold and trades with a witch for secrets.

“Miss Aoife?” Dean’s mouth turned down at the corners. “That secret’s my price. We got ourselves a bargain, sure and sealed?”

Nerissa wasn’t here, and if she were she’d say nothing to help me. I was just a girl who came and listened to her stories. She no more cared if I ended up indebted to a so-called witch than if I dropped out of the Lovecraft Academy and joined a troubadour caravan.

Though I had the sense that I was stepping over some threshold, and that by promising my secret to a boy like Dean Harrison I could never return, I stuck out my hand and pumped Dean’s once. “Yes. It’s a bargain.”

After Dean left, I ripped back my coverlet and went rooting in the wardrobe for something to wear that wasn’t mud-encrusted and days old.

The wardrobe stood taller than me by a head and a cloudy mirror reflected a stained and damaged Aoife back at me. Forget a new wardrobe—I needed new skin with the amount of dirt and blood I was wearing.

Poking behind the various narrow doors of the bedroom yielded me a wash closet with a steam hob circulating heated water in the corner. It hissed like an amiable snake when I spun the tap, and delivered a helping of rusty red water into the basin.

I found a washrag and scrubbed myself clean as I could while minding the bandage Dean had put on my shoggoth bite. He’d done a fair job, fair as I’d receive at the Academy’s infirmary, and the bite hardly hurt at all except when I pressed on it. The skin around the bandage carried a pallor, but there was no blue-veined, green-fleshed infection crawling its way through my system from the spot where the shoggoth’s kiss had landed. Dean’s skills as a field surgeon could have probably netted him legitimate work in Lovecraft, tending to victims of ghoul attacks and Proctors who fell to heretics during rioting. But imagining someone like Dean forced to march lockstep with the severe nurses and surgeons of the Black Cross, the Proctor’s medical arm, didn’t end well—he’d probably be expelled for his smoking alone before he was a week in.

The worst of the grime fell away with the washrag when I tossed it into the now-empty basin to dry out, and I padded back to the wardrobe. Most of the clothes were for a boy, old-fashioned short trousers, a waistcoat, shirts made for celluloid collars and high leather riding boots. However, at the rear of the cabinet I found a drop-waist silk dress, and a search of its cubbies yielded a comb to twist up my hair. It still looked like a nest for Graystone’s crows, but at least it was out of my eyes. The dress gleamed ruby-wet and the comb was mother-of-pearl, glistening bone against the dark of my hair. I tried on the riding boots and found that the long-ago boy who’d inhabited the room had exceedingly small feet. The boots hugged my calves like hands.

When the wardrobe swung shut and the mirror revealed me once again, I caught my breath.

I looked like my mother.

Turning from the mirror so quickly I almost fell over my own feet, I ventured into the hallway. Graystone was vast and deserted in the daylight, muted with emptiness. I wandered back along the route I’d taken to the library and the kitchen, though it was devoid of all its menace in the daytime. The sour portraits of Grayson patriarchs still glared at me from under their layer of finely aged dust in the rear parlor. I paused to read their nameplates, stern as their visages. HORNTON. BRUCE. EDMUND.

The newest portrait’s placard read ARCHIBALD GRAYSON. I stopped. I was finally going to get to see what my father looked like. If there was anything of him in me. I stepped close, eager to take in every last brushstroke in the light.

My father was dapper and besuited in the painting, streaks of white in otherwise dark hair at his temples and a piercing set of eyes bookended by lines the only hint he wasn’t still a young man. Spectacles on a chain marred an otherwise pristine green silk cravat and his angular cheekbones gave him a disapproving edge, rather like one of my professors. Though, unlike any of my professors, my father was handsome, albeit in a bookish way. Conrad favored him in feature if not in coloring, and after a bit looking at Archibald became too much like looking at the much older, sterner version of my brother. I moved away, back to Thornton, back down the line into the safety of the past.

I didn’t look anything like Archibald. Our eyes were the same, but there the resemblance ended. It put a weight on me, one that I felt like I couldn’t shake off. I wanted so badly to ask Archibald about Nerissa, and everything that had happened. I wanted him so badly to come back and answer me. But he wouldn’t, because wishes didn’t come true, because fairy godmothers weren’t real.

Hurrying toward the foyer, I nearly smacked into Bethina. She shied, and the tray she held spilled oatmeal and toast onto the worn carpet runner.

“Stone and star. Forgive me, miss.” She knelt and began to scrub up the oats and tea with her apron corner.

“My fault, really,” I said, crouching to pick up the toast. It was all heels and felt rough and stale. “You came out of the kitchen,” I observed.

“Can’t very well leave the young miss of the house without her breakfast, can I?” Bethina sniffed. “There’s still a few things in the icebox and the root cellar. ’Sides, it’s daylight and with you three here, I figger the shadows might not find a way in, to … well, you know what I’m saying, miss.”

She shuddered, and scrubbed harder at the rug.

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, standing and smoothing down my new dress. Silk felt like what I imagined wearing a nightjar’s skin would, slick and cold. “Do you think you could bring my breakfast to the library?”

Bethina wrinkled her nose. “I surely couldn’t, miss. That room gives me the creeping spooks, all up and down my back. I’ll leave it in the warming oven, should you take a notion to eat.” She pinched the back of my knee from her vantage. “And you should eat, miss. You haven’t got anything up top or on the stern for a future husband to admire. Like Mr. Harrison, for instance?”

I sputtered at how matter-of-fact she was about the whole thing, jerking from her reach. “I … my … That’s really none of your business, Bethina.”

“Just so, miss.”

In the entry, I found my schoolbag where Cal had flung it when we made our frantic entry into Graystone. I dug through my possessions—now largely mildewed and mud-spattered—and found my toolkit. Straightening my spine, I went to the library again and, just as before, the double doors slid open at my approach. Ice danced up my skin, into my blood like electricity and aether.

Hearing a curse from the rear parlor, I backed away gratefully and retraced my steps down the portrait hall. I wasn’t ready to brave the library again just yet.

In the parlor, Cal was poking a desultory fire. I watched him for a moment, his long limbs bunched up like a new foal’s, cursing and red-faced as the twists of paper under the worm-eaten wood sputtered and refused to light.

“Thought you’d be halfway home by now,” I said at last. Cal leaped up.

“Aoife.” He eyed the full length of my body, for a good few seconds, eyes darkening. “You look … different. Those aren’t your clothes.”

“My uniform is a lost cause,” I said. “This was in the wardrobe.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” Cal worried the poker. “I’ve heard it’s bad luck to wear other people’s clothes.”

I touched the comb in my hair. “What would your professors say, they heard you taking stock in superstition like that? Besides, I like these and that’s a stupid rumor.”

“It’s, well. The dress is very bright. Red, like a Crimson Guard flag.” Cal struck another match and cursed when the flame came too close to his fingers.

“I’ll be in the library,” I sighed. “And for future reference, girls might not be flattered to have you compare their attire to the symbol of a national enemy.”

“Aoife, I wanted to say I’m sorry …,” Cal rushed, and then sighed, composing his face and standing. “I’m sorry about what I said to you last night. I don’t believe that you’re naive.”

“But you do think I’m wrong about Conrad?” I should simply accept Cal’s apology and let things be right between us. The space where I’d kept Cal’s friendship was bruised and smarting this morning, after the shouting match we’d endured, but I wouldn’t abandon my brother either. Not even in words.

“I don’t want us to fight,” Cal said. “Can’t we just agree that we’ll go home tomorrow? He’s not here, Aoife.”

I drew myself up, the dress falling about my legs making me feel older, taller. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to find where he’s gone.”

“Aoife, be reasonable …,” Cal started, but I walked away from his words. Cal and I had been friends ever since we’d both been without a partner for our first tour of the School of Engines, but lately we sat at odds over everything, our conversations going in unfamiliar directions that twisted them into something angry with jagged edges.

Losing my only friend over my family sat poorly, like something rotten and too large in my gut. If I had no Cal, then right now I’d have no one.

To distract myself from my thoughts, which were swirling off in a black direction indeed, I went back to the library, brushing past the doors like I had nothing to worry over.

Conrad had told me to fix the clock, and I would use machines and math to soothe my troubles.

The clock waited at the far end of the long high room, pendulum twitching at random like a rat’s tail. I knelt before it and opened the case, staring into the wicked, sharpened gears.

“I’ll fix you,” I said. “If you’ll let me.”

For a moment, nothing happened and then the gears turned faster, pendulum lashing like the shoggoth’s tentacles.

“I’m not going to break anything,” I promised the clock. “Please. I have to fix you.” Was this the first sign of madness? Talking to inanimate machines? Perhaps I was only mad if I got a reply.

I reached slowly toward the clock’s case, even though sticking my hand inside the whirl of gears with the way they spun would result in me losing a crop of fingers. “Conrad told me,” I whispered. “I have to fix it. I have to fix you.”

My fingertips tingled, and my head echoed as the clock began to chime; I felt as if a pipe fire had sparked to life in my chest. My entire body ran fever-hot, and dampness broke out under the silk of my dress. The dancing snare of static spread up my arm, all through me, and the tolling of the clock became a single reverberation, splitting my skull in half.

I shrieked. “Stop!”

Quickly as it had ramped up at my appearance, every gear within the clockwork ground to a halt, fine metal shavings raining to the bottom of the case as gears fouled themselves against one another’s filed teeth.

I waited for a moment, the idea that the clock had stopped on my command ludicrous even to my mind, but the mechanism was still. As if it were waiting.

I reached into the case, mindful of my cut thumb and bruised knuckles. Every sharp edge of the clock’s innards was hungry, and I exhaled shakily as I felt edges and ridges catch on my skin. If the clock started again it would take my fingers off, but Conrad had told me to fix it, and I didn’t see another way to do it.

Trying to recall what I knew about clockwork from our basic class in gearworking the previous year, I loosened and reset each gear that had slipped out of sync, and tugged on the clock’s weight to start it ticking again. It groaned in protest and still ticked out of time.

Dean stopped in the double doorway, shrugging into his leather jacket. “I’m going out for a smoke, miss. You want to tag along, or …” He came closer, crouching to unzip my toolkit and examine it. “Looks like you’re busy.”

“The ticking,” I lied. “It keeps me awake at night.”

“I dunno, princess,” Dean said as I tugged at a stuck gear. “Can you really fix this old thing?”

“The timing is fouled,” I said, finding a useless lump where the master gears should be. “It looks like I need to strip and recalibrate the entire assembly to get it working properly.”

Dean grinned. “Need any help?”

I laid out the first gear and its bolt on the carpet, and noted its position in the clock case. “What happened to your smoke?”

Dean handed me a wrench as I fumbled for it, body half in the clock case. “Smoke’ll keep.”

The job of recalibrating a large and complex assembly like the one in the library would be a thing even for a skilled clockmaker, and Dean and I were both cursing and grease-covered by the time we’d emptied the case of gears, bolts and rods. Gutless and silent, the clock appeared as a skeleton rather than a beast, and I felt a flush of shame that I’d ever been afraid of it.

Cleaning and reassembling the clock took a bit less time than getting it apart, though only a bit, and Dean and I were tired enough to work in silence. It was companionable in its own way, he carefully cleaning the gears and handing them to me, me placing them back into the clock. The clock itself was far more complex than any I’d encountered, even the scientific chronometer in the School of Engines that had six faces and kept times for the whole of the world at once. This had any number of gear parings that attached to rods planted far back in the wall, which were attached to other assemblies that I couldn’t see. This had to be why doors opened by themselves and why I could hear the clock ticking even on the other side of the house.

“You and your brother,” Dean said at length, breaking the silence. “Thick as thieves, I take it.”

“We took care of each other,” I allowed. “He’s … he was my only family.” Lying on my side and tilting my head backward into the case to reach the last gear, I put it in place and twisted the bolt to hold it steady, before gently pressing it into place with its companions. “There,” I said. “Let’s wind it and see what we’ve got.”

“Pretty boss scar you got there.” I jumped when Dean’s fingers brushed my neck. “Didn’t see it till now. You’re always looking at your feet.”

I jerked away from Dean’s touch and stood to open the glass door of the clock face. “We have to wind it,” I repeated, resolute that I wasn’t going to blush, cry or show any reaction whatsoever to Dean seeing my scar. It wasn’t any of his concern. It wasn’t any of my concern what he thought of it.

“So you’re not going to spill how it got there?” Dean pulled a mock pout. “Hardly seems fair. You know everything about me.”

“I find that hard to believe, Dean.” I wound the clock key. It was stiff but turned smoothly, with none of the hitches in the gears that I’d first encountered.

“You know plenty,” Dean said. “You know that my name’s Dean Harrison, that I’m a heretic but a hell of a charming guy, I smoke Luckies and I don’t much care for onion rings.”

I laughed, hoping Dean had let the scar go at mild curiosity. “That last part, I didn’t know.” The key wound tight, and I stepped back, shutting the glass over the sinister paintings on the clock face.

“Now you,” Dean coaxed. “Come on. What’s your favorite lantern flick? Favorite record? Preferred flavor for a milk shake?”

I watched the gears of the clock whirr to life. “You don’t get my secrets that easily, remember?”

Dean shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Secrets are my stock-in-trade.”

I gave Dean a small smile, a genuine one. I hadn’t felt much like smiling since I’d gotten Conrad’s letter, but Dean made it a little easier. “Maybe you should try a bit harder.”

The clock hands flipped over on ten o’clock, and the chime drowned out any secret I might have been tempted to slip into Dean’s grasp.

“That’s something,” Dean said when the sonorous tolling had ended. At least it didn’t make my head spin anymore. “I know my way around a jitney engine, but this …” He smiled. “You’re a bright penny, kid.”

I wiped the grease from my hands with my toolkit’s supply of rags, watching in satisfaction as the clock spun on with nary a hitch. “You can call me Aoife, you know.” Not that I minded very much being called princess.

Before Dean replied, a great rumbling like a waking beast began under our feet. Dean’s eyes snapped wide. “What on scorched earth is that?”

The books on the shelves vibrated, as if they were itching to shed their covers and fly away. I grabbed hold of a shelf to keep my footing, and Dean reached for me as well. “I don’t know,” I shouted over the rumbling. From far off, I heard crockery falling and Bethina give a scream. What had I done now?

“Aoife?” Cal stumbled into the library on the bucking floorboards. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know!” I didn’t, truly, and my panic rose along with the rumbling from under the floor, as if we were standing in the bowels of the Lovecraft Engine, chambers turning at full capacity and pressure building without a relief valve.

Then, abruptly as it had come upon us, the rumbling ceased and a section of wall above my father’s writing desk rolled back, soundless as the servant’s passage to the kitchen. But this was smaller and older, clearly built into the house at conception. It hid a brass panel, half as tall as I was and twice as wide. Dials and switches, valves and an antique static board using glass breakers filled the tiny recess in the library wall.

I approached it, wondering at the artfulness of the construction even as I felt trepidation build. Hidden rooms and hidden panels that controlled hidden things never boded well.

Dean let out a breath, his fists uncurling. “That’s a new one. What d’you suppose it’s for?”

“I have no idea,” I said. The panel reminded me of the controls on the Berkshire Belle, except these were older, more archaic, and there were a lot more switches and keys than a simple airship flight board.

“Don’t touch it!” Cal cried when I took a step toward it. I cast a glare back at him.

“Cal, it’s brass and wood. It’s not going to grow teeth.” I was cautious, but not scared. Machines were what I was good at.

I approached the hidden panel with its rows of switches labeled with painfully neat, handwritten placards: Library, Front Hall and Cellar Traps among at least a dozen others, all in an orderly, masculine hand on yellowed vellum squares.

Conrad had told me to fix the clock and in doing so I’d revealed Graystone’s secret heart. Conrad had vanished before he could perform whatever task he needed this panel for himself. But he’d had the forethought to send me the letter, to hide the note. He knew I’d come if he asked.

What I knew ever since that awful day in my dormitory room a year ago came true when I realized that Conrad had been planning for me to come here, to carry on where he couldn’t.

My brother wasn’t mad.

And if he wasn’t mad, then he was in a world of trouble.