The Iron Thorn

14 The Iron Bones

DEAN JOINED ME at the panel, examining the controls. “Slick setup. Dare you to press one of those switches.” He reached for the closest lever, marked Kitchen.

“Don’t,” I said. For some reason I couldn’t define, I wanted to be first. It was my father’s house, my father’s device, and I wanted to be the one to discover how it worked.

Bethina peered around the library door. “Miss, what was that awful racket? Are we safe?”

“For the time being,” I murmured, touching each dial. Every facet of Graystone somehow connected to these antique controls.

“Awful shaking and shivering,” Bethina continued. “Like the Great Old Ones returned from the stars. My mum was raised in a Star Convent, and she told me—”

“That’s all mumbo jumbo,” Cal told her. “This is engineering.”

“Flash work, too,” Dean said. “I don’t think Bethina’s that far off, cowboy. This thing Miss Aoife woke up ain’t just cold metal and gears. Houses have blood and gristle and bone, just like a person. Houses have souls.”

Cal jerked a thumb at me, at Dean. “Aoife, are you going to let him just babble heresy all day long?”

I rather liked Dean’s heresy. Graystone was like a living thing, old and dessicated, but alive still.

“Give it up,” I told Cal. “Let’s see if we can piece these controls together.”

At the top of the row of knobs, there was a dial marked Front Hall. “For what it’s worth, Dean,” I continued, “I don’t think you’re just speaking heresy.” Because Graystone did talk. It had warned me away like a wounded animal; when I’d fixed the clock, it had come into the open and showed me its face. Graystone wasn’t like any house I’d ever stepped foot in, and I knew that it had more secrets to give up, secrets that would lead me to my brother.

I put my hand on the dial. “I’m just going to turn it on and see what happens. If anything harmful was in the workings, it would have gone off when I fixed the clock.” Giving what I hoped was a reassuring nod—because in reality, I had no idea what would happen—I ran my fingers over the row of knobs, then settled back on Front Hall. If something in Graystone’s bones was malicious, the front entry was far enough away that we’d probably be safe.

“So you said, miss. I’m having no business with that thing,” Bethina said, scuttling away. Cal backed off too. Dean stayed where he was, hands in his pockets. His pale storm-sky eyes were implacable as thunderheads.

The Front Hall dial was inlaid with tiny darts of onyx, pointing to the four stations of the compass, labeled in stamped brass with Open, Shut, Lock and Trap. Lock was engaged, and the dial was sticky when I tried to turn it. There was a squeak of rust as I put force behind the motion, and then the dial came free and flew all the way to the left, to Open.

A cool wind rushed over my cheek and blew back my hair, darting from the entry along with a flock of oak leaves. Cal hurried to the library door and peered into the front hall. “Door’s open,” he exclaimed. “I’ll be a shoggoth’s uncle.”

“Cal, please don’t talk about shoggoths,” I said. I read the rest of the dials. Master Bedchamber, Attic, Widow’s Walk, Crypts. Lastly, on its own at the bottom of the panel was a pure ivory dial with a large black spot of onyx in the center. Lockdown.

Lockdown sat bookended by two valve dials that connoted pressure of some kind. PSI, wrought in proper brass script under the glassed-in dials, most likely meant steam. It was, I thought, probably an elaborate setup for a simple water and boiler shutoff. Even the stately homes that made up Lovecraft Academy had two large valve wheels, deep underground in their basements where the boilers resided.

“I think it’s just a setup for the mains,” Cal said, voicing my thought. “And maybe a release for the doors. Kinda frilly for that sort of work. And why plunk it in the library where the Master Builder and everyone can see it?”

“It’s an old house,” I said. “I guess they built things differently in those days.” My disappointment at the ordinary nature of the hidden panel was vast, and I stroked the controls once more. It looked like it should be able to fly to the red planet and back, like the vessels the Crimson Guard were rumored to have.

“If it is only shutoffs,” I said, “why link it to the clock? Why hide it so you can only open it by turning the clock-hands to ten?”

“This place doesn’t make any sense,” Cal grumbled. “It’s all passages and shoddy layouts. It’d never pass muster with city architects.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” I whispered. The panel vibrated under my fingers, and a little static from the circuits pricked me. Graystone was still talking to me.

I turned Front Hall to Shut. The door slammed with a whirr of gears. “Maybe these aren’t just shutoffs and door locks.” I turned the dial to Lock. The door locks snapped into place along with a pair of iron rods that extended on rotating arms to lock in an embrace, securing the doors.

I turned the dial to Trap. There was a shriek of little-used, rusted metal from outside and then a great clang, like someone had slammed a metal coffin lid into place over the whole of the house. The crows took flight outside the library windows with a chorus of caws, their black silk wings flickering in the pale sunlight.

“Eyes of the Old Ones,” Cal exclaimed, peering out the front library window. “Aoife, you have to see this.”

I joined him and saw that a pair of iron plates had slid into place over the front doors of the mansion, knitted together at the seam with a series of spikes like the jaws of a Venus flytrap that would imprison any intruder trying to break the locks.

“The whole house is alive,” I whispered. “Rods for nerves and gears for bones and an iron skin to hide it.”

I went to the panel and clicked the dial back to Lock. The metal plates retreated with irritable clanking and rumbling, opening Graystone to the world once again.

Cal whistled. “You could lock somebody up like Attica in this place.”

“Or lock something out,” Dean muttered. “I don’t much care for locks, tell you the truth. We in the Rustworks spend a lot of time thinking about cold iron on our legs and stripes on our shoulders in some Proctor work camp.”

Entranced as I was, I waved him off. “The whole house is clockwork. The whole house is knitted together with these gears, and this is where one can make Graystone do whatever it likes.” The feat of constructing a clockwork house was something that a student at the School of Clockworks could only dream about. The assembly to cobble an entire structure together, to calibrate and time it so that it ran smooth and soundlessly, and then to bring it all into the central mechanism of the clock and the controls … the amount of time and care the clockmaker who built the house must have invested boggled my conception of mechanics.

My father hadn’t built it—it was much older, Victorian in style—but he must have known about it. He lived in this clockwork marvel.

And it was mine to learn and to control, and only mine. My father had left and in doing so left me the iron bones of Graystone, sleeping and waiting for me to wake them. Until he came back. If he did.

“Well,” Cal said. “We should test it out. See what it can really do. I mean, for our own safety.” His eyes were bright and I could see that his fingers were twitching, itching to touch the controls of the clockwork as much as my own were.

“Sure,” I said, giving him a small smile. “How about you stay here and try out the dials? Dean and I can explore.” There would be no more talk of leaving once Cal got his hands on the panel. And I could show him I didn’t begrudge him wanting to go home by letting him play with the house’s mechanics.

Cal’s jaw jumped once at the mention of Dean, but only once. “Watch out for the traps,” he said. “All these switches have the setting.”

“She’s in good hands,” Dean told him, ushering me from the library.

I removed my elbow from his grasp. “I’m not in anyone’s hands at the moment.”

Dean’s back stiffened for a heartbeat, but then he gave me a nod. “My mistake.”

“It’s not a …” But I stopped myself before I became an even bigger fool. I wasn’t shying away from Dean because I wanted to. I was staying away from him because he was dangerous to me in the same way as an aether flame—bright, hypnotizing and hot enough to burn. I was here to find Conrad, get him out of danger and then go home. Not to let a boy fill my head with dreams and ideas that I could have if I didn’t go mad, if I had been born to a different family. No matter how much I wanted to see how he was different from the boys I knew. And I did want to, but I resigned myself to only wanting.

“Hey.” Dean called me into the back parlor. “Think now we can get the wireless working?” He pointed to the old-fashioned console, its tubes set into ruby and emerald glass, the gas inside them drifting lazily back and forth.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This thing is museum quality. Cal!” I shouted. “Turn the aether switch on!”

After a moment, the crystals that passed heat through the aether and made it active began to glow, and when I turned the glass needle along the spectrum dial, a voice scraped out of the ancient phono horn.

“You’re listening to WKPS, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and this is Dirk DeVille with the news. The President issued a statement today regarding the ongoing necrovirus research purportedly conducted in secret Crimson Guard laboratories, calling it blatant heretical aggression against the United States—”

Dean spun the needle along the spectrum. “Sorry. Listening to that guy’s voice is like putting a rivet into my own head.” The studio audience for The Larry Lovett Show laughed back at Dean.

I spun the dial again. Music crackled faintly, a phonograph that was half static.

Dean’s mouth quirked. “Finally, something we can both agree on.”

“Aoife, are you going to hang around in there all day?” Cal called. “I want to see what this thing can do!”

“All right, Cal,” I shouted back, reaching to turn off the wireless. Dean stopped me.

“Leave it. I like a little music when I’m alone with a pretty girl.”

I’m sure the blush I felt showed in my face. Dean kept sending me hurtling off balance. I’d never met someone who spoke as freely as he did. Especially about me. “You’re not alone with me, Dean, and I’m hardly the sort of girl someone like you finds pretty.”

Dean pushed a piece of hair away from my eyes. “Why don’t you let me decide that?”

I ducked away from his touch. I knew damn well I was a smart girl, not a pretty one. Boys at home told Cecelia she was pretty constantly, and she let them take advantage constantly. Not me.

“I should go check the rest of the house,” I murmured. “Make sure there’s nothing dangerous in here.”

Getting to my feet, I stumbled over my own boots as I backed away from Dean, but he just smiled. “You check the upstairs,” I said. “I’ll go to the cellar and make sure the boiler isn’t … er …”

“Overheating?” Dean prompted.

Could I make this moment any worse?

“Yes,” I replied meekly.

“Sure thing,” Dean said, standing and brushing the dust from his dungarees. “I’ll call out if I see anything.”

His easy smile told me that he didn’t take offense at my awkwardness, but I felt restless as I walked from room to room. Windows and doors opened and shut by themselves at the merest touch of my foot on the threshold. Iron grates rolled over the windows to protect Graystone’s residents from the outside world, but at the flick of a switch, the ceiling of the front parlor rolled back to reveal a rotating display of the night sky, wrought in silver, brass and glass against deep blue velveteen clouds. There were spikes that rose out of the fence around the outer edge of the drive and front gardens, and a phonopiano in the conservatory that played itself while a pair of brass dancers turned atop its keys to a Brahms waltz.

Finally, Graystone had exhausted its wonders and all that remained was the mundane task of checking the newly reinstated boiler for leaks.

“Cal, I’m going to the cellar,” I shouted. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

“Be careful!” he shouted back. “The cellar is the last of the switches on the board, and then I’d say this place is ready for action!”

I found the cellar door off the kitchen and Bethina watched me skeptically when I grasped the handle to go down. “You be careful, miss. Those bootleggers left weak spots and covered holes all over the place down there.”

“Bethina, I’m not a child,” I told her. Cal had already fussed over me. One surrogate parent per day was my limit.

“All right, then,” she grumbled. “But if you fall down a hole and get devoured by a nightjar, it will be no fault of mine.”

“Thank you for that, Bethina,” I said, and descended the creaking, winding stairs. Graystone’s cellars were damp and shadowed, but a row of aether globes strung along the ceiling with wire lit a path to the ancient boiler. The foundations of the house were far older than the stately stone and brick above, rough-hewn rocks set into the bowl of the earth. The floor was dirt, packed by what had to be centuries of footsteps.

I checked the boiler, an ancient but sound Potsdam model, imported from Europe. The pressure was normal and hot water was flowing through a nest of pipes, hissing in the dark of the cellar. It sounded like the shoggoth’s voice in my mind, and I drew back quickly, knocking my head against one of the low-hanging aether globes.

In the swinging blue light, I saw the edge of a bricked-up hole in the foundation. Bethina hadn’t been telling tales about bootleggers, after all.

The hiss of the boiler grew louder, more insistent, and my shoulder began to throb as I stared at the dip in the wall. Conrad had read me a story once, from one of Nerissa’s few, dog-eared books. The story was called “The Cask of Amontillado.” A man was walled up in a cellar, lured with the promise of the sweetest wine he had ever tasted.

The boiler clanked and shuddered as Bethina opened the steam tap in the kitchen, and I retreated up the stairs, a bit quicker than my pride would have liked.

I found Cal at the switch panel and smoothed my hands down my dress to stop their quivering. My momentary scare in the cellar had retreated, and now I just felt silly. Graystone wasn’t my house, but I felt at home here, more than I had anywhere else so far in my life. Graystone wasn’t going to hurt me. Gears and clockwork didn’t have life or a mind of its own.

“You look a little pale, Aoife,” Cal said. “You feeling all right?”

“I … yes. Perfectly fine.” I went about returning all of the dials on the panel to their original positions. “Everything seems to be in order.”

“Not quite,” Cal said. “The Library dial is stuck.”

“I’m sure it just wants a little greasing,” I said. “I’ll see if Bethina knows where the autogarage is on the grounds.”

“Maybe if we tried turning it together,” Cal said. “I mean, who knows how long this thing has been shut away? It could have rusted.”

“All right.” I put my hand on the dial and tried to turn it, to no avail. It was, as Cal said, stuck fast.

Cal slid his hand over mine, his long fingers closing down. They were cold. “Together,” he said. “One, two … three.”

We twisted, and Cal’s fingers grated against mine hard enough to force a cry from my lips. Just as quickly, the pressure eased and the dial snapped over hard, a clank of mechanisms speaking to the neglect that Graystone had suffered since my father had gone missing.

But nothing happened. No more miracles of engineering and clockwork revealed themselves. The library stayed stubbornly the same.

“Guess it’s busted,” Cal grumbled. Dean came tromping down the front stairs, his boots leaving scuffs on the white marble of the entry hall.

“You gotta peep the upstairs of this place when the clockwork’s turned on,” he said. “There’s a map of the world that moves and has a nautical compass, up there in the gentleman’s parlor, and a stenotype that types by itself when you say words into a phono-phone.” He caught sight of Cal’s and my hands, intertwined. “Somewhere else I should be, maybe?”

“It’s not that,” I said quickly. “We’re just trying to get this silly library control unstuck.” I twisted again and only succeeded in straining my wrist. It wasn’t much compared with Cal and Dean trading glares.

“Forget it, Aoife,” Cal said. “If I can’t get it working, then you certainly can’t. I’m much stronger.”

After the thick tension of the day so far, I balked. Of course I was used to being tolerated as an oddity in the School of Engines. Of course I bore it with good breeding and grace. In Lovecraft. But here, in my father’s house, a house built with the same vision that made gears dance behind my eyes and steam whisper in my dreams where other girls saw designer pumps and lanternreel stars, I was thrice-damned if I would bear it any longer.

I grabbed the dial with both hands and wrenched, putting my back into it and ignoring the pain. As before, a spark of static flew from the panel and shocked my fingers with enough voltage to make my small hairs stand on end. My forehead began to throb, and then the dial assembly gave, quickly as the clock had stopped for me before.

An abrupt grinding emanated from the ceiling, along with a long plume of dust. I jerked my head up, half expecting to see the cracked plaster ceiling caving in on us. Instead, a telescoping ladder of wood and brass unfolded, spider legs feeling delicately for purchase against the floor. A small trapdoor slid ajar in the smooth plaster of the library ceiling, nearly twenty feet above my head.

“Place has more holes than an anthill,” Cal said. “What do you suppose is up there?”

I was already on the third rung of the ladder, the hidden room a draw I couldn’t ignore. “I don’t know, but I aim to find out.”

“No …,” Cal started, but then he sighed and held up his hands. “Just don’t get yourself lost in some dark hole where we can’t find you again.”

“Don’t you worry.” I flashed him a smile from above. “Escaping from dark holes is my specialty of late.” I’d been everywhere else in the house, and while it was remarkable, it also told me nothing useful. This had to be the spot where I’d find a clue to Conrad’s whereabouts, and Archibald’s. Deep down, I somehow knew this hidden room would hold the solution to how I’d find and free my brother and my father. It came on me quick as fear, but it was certainty instead. I had to figure out a way to find them. Because otherwise, I was out of brilliant ideas.

“Aoife, wait.” Dean fumbled in his jacket.

“You’re not talking me out of this,” I told him.

Dean found his lighter and tossed it to me. “Not trying to. Just, I wouldn’t want you all alone in the dark up there.”

I thanked him by tucking the lighter into the top of my boot for easy reach when I needed it. Then I grabbed the slender ladder and climbed higher.