The Iron Thorn (17 page)

In the fever dream, Dean was a blur, like a smudge of soot against clean skin. Cal floated bloodred and gold around the edges of my sight. The house, Graystone, whispered to me with a voice made of dry rot and dust, in the language of houses, all pops and creaks.

At last, it lulled me into the sleep beyond dreaming, the sleep in a dead space where there’s nothing but weary emptiness. I anchored myself there and would have gladly stayed for centuries.

When I woke again, I was disoriented. Night had thrown a velvet mask over the windows of the bedroom. Dean dozed in an overstuffed chair next to the bed, a pinup magazine much worn at the edges folded open on his chest.

“Cal?” I whispered. He was nowhere to be seen. Dean’s breath hitched, but he didn’t wake.

I swung my feet over the edge of the high bed, carved with animal heads for each post. The heads had enormous ears, bulbous eyes, fangs. Nothing from a natural history book.

Setting my feet on the itchy Persian carpet, I tested my balance. Every bit of me ached, as if I’d turned all the gears of the Lovecraft Engine by hand, but I was solid as the rock we’d climbed to reach Graystone, no longer plagued by dizzying illusion.

“Dean?” He shifted in his sleep, laying his head against the chair. A lock of hair escaped its comb tracks and snaked into his eye. I reached out to brush it away, got close
enough to feel the warmth of his skin, and then pulled back. He’d just wake up, and I’d have to explain why I was out of bed. And thank him for saving my life, and admit that now I owed him something more than a fee. I hadn’t owed anyone except Conrad a thing in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

From below, a great ticking like a heartbeat echoed. I was thirsty and still half asleep, but I was sure the sound hadn’t been there a moment ago. My mind wasn’t playing tricks on me any longer—I was myself, clear and focused. The sound was real.

This was my father’s home, even if he hadn’t yet made an appearance. I was uninvited. Wandering about was for sneak-thieves and vagabonds, not respectable girls. Not for daughters.

I chewed on my lip, thinking, then picked up the oil lamp guttering by the bedside, its small flame throwing spook shadows across the velvet damask curtains and the water-spotted wall panels. At second glance, everything about the room was rotten at the edges, from the moth-chewed carpet to the notes uttered by the warped floorboards under my feet.

Glancing back once to make sure Dean hadn’t come awake after all to stop my exploration, I slipped out the high narrow door into a high narrow hall and followed the sonorous heartbeat of Graystone toward its source.

A Clockwork Heart

M
Y CREEPING FOOTSTEPS
kept time with the invisible pendulum. The lamp in my hand gave off a buttery glow, older and more secretive than the crisp blue of aether globes.

Graystone sprawled like a spiderweb, and the hallway twisted and turned back on itself. Soon enough, I was walking an unfamiliar hall and could only go forward until I reached a landing. The sound came from below me, in the empty space where the stairs and their threadbare carpet vanished into shadow.

Nobody showed themselves. The dust floated in the lamplight like ghostly fireflies, and my only companion was the sound.

I descended the stairs and found myself in a back hallway, which in turn lead to a back parlor. All of Graystone’s furniture sat swathed in dust catchers, lion feet peeking out
from under their white skirts. The only uncovered thing in the room was an old-style wireless box, its aether tubes cloudy and dim with disuse.

I left the parlor and found another faceless hallway, where portraits of Graysons past watched me with dour frowns, cobwebs trailing from their frames. I stopped and raised the lamp, gazing at each face in turn, trying to find some clue to myself. There were precious few who looked anything like me among the starched clothes and serious eyes. The mossy green color of those eyes, though, was the same as mine. I turned away and tried a few doors, iron handles cold to my touch. Each was locked, and I left them that way. I wasn’t a sneak, but my father didn’t know that. I could only imagine being caught breaking into Graystone and snooping around. I wanted him to meet me on good terms, and approve of me, and nod in acknowledgment that I was his daughter. My heart sank, though, as I wandered farther and farther afield, each turn of the hall yielding nothing but dust and desolation. And the sound, always. Graystone was dead, hollowed out like the carcass of a beast. My father—or anyone, for that matter—hadn’t been here in a long time.

I turned into what I recognized from my fevered state as the front entry hall, and the marble chilled my stockinged feet. I’d been re-dressed in my bloodied sweater and ripped blouse, but they weren’t much good for keeping out the cold.

Across from the grand staircase to the second floor, I confronted a pair of pocket doors carved with a peculiar forest scene. Creatures cavorted under fruit-heavy trees,
but they weren’t creatures I’d ever encountered. These were half men, half goat. I reached out a hand and touched them. They felt delicate under my fingers, wrought by an artist who had the finest touch with his chisel. They were beautiful. Strange. Certainly forbidden by the Proctors, I felt sure.

I pulled my hand away. From behind the doors, springs wound and weights swung.
Tick. Thock. Tick. Tick. Thock
. I hadn’t managed to find Conrad or my father, but at least I’d found the source of the sound.

I tugged at the brass pulls, made in the shapes of the north and east wind, great billowy brass clouds for hair and sharp lightning-bolt noses, rings caught in their teeth.

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.

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 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.