The Iron Thorn (18 page)

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
re
married,” 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.

We stood in the doorway, an invitation into yet another expanse of blackness. As before, I stepped forward into the dark, and someone screamed.

“Cal!” I thumped him on the arm in reflexive alarm. “Shine the lantern!”

“You’re trespassers!” the voice shrieked. A projectile from the darkness—a woman’s shoe—narrowly missed Cal’s head. “I’m not infected! Get out!”

“Whoa there, miss!” he shouted. “There’s no call to get violent!”

The other shoe flew and I ducked. “Hey!” I snapped at the voice. “Cut that out!”

Silence while the ghostly lantern beam swept the dark room beyond the door. The aether glow picked up stone floors, a vast porcelain sink and pump, an icebox of polished mahogany.

“What’s your name?” I said to the shadows. I felt confident doing so, sure that viral creatures most likely wouldn’t resort to throwing scuffed-up leather pumps at us.

“None of your beeswax!”

Considering it was my father’s house, I privately thought it
was
very much my beeswax, but I wasn’t about to argue with a stranger hiding in a kitchen, pelting me with footwear.

I gave the rest of the room a cursory glance while trying to discern the voice’s source. A dead fire gave its last gasp in the grate, shooting embers to leave black streaks on the hearth. A single chair sat before it, a book draped over the arm.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. A banned text. A text on the Bonfire List, the compilation of all books the Proctors thought rated burning. I’d choked on the smoke as a little girl, while Conrad held my hand to keep us well clear of the mob standing around the conflagration in Banishment Square.

“Is that your book?” I said. There was a shuffle and a sniffle. I fixed on the sound—beyond the sink and before the icebox.

“You can’t pin nothing on me. That there was in the library when I came. I never read a word of it. Just like the pictures.”

I picked up my first real live heretical book and turned it over. A crocheted bookmark, the kind of thing I’d had to waste hours on in Home Life classes, nestled thick in the pages.

The book looked very ordinary—it was a cheap edition, bound in scratchy paper, and a little ink came away on my fingers when I traced the first line of the page. “ ‘The Hatter
opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” ’ ”

“Why
is
a raven like a writing-desk?” I asked the shadow voice.

“It’s a mad tea party,” said the shadow. “Riddles without answer, ’less you’re a mad one too.” A pause, and the voice dipped, like it was shy of quoting the text. “The Cheshire Cat says it—‘We’re all mad here.’ ”

While she rambled, I let her voice guide me, and locked my fingers around the plump arm of the voice’s owner. The girl in my grip squealed. She didn’t sound a day over graduation age at the Academy, and terrified.

“Take your hands off! That ain’t ladylike!”

I gave her a shake. “That’s quite enough of that. Who are you?”

Copper-pot curls bounced and her chubby face flushed. “The nerve of you, playing handsy with me! Think you’d never had a lesson in manners in all your life!”

“Okay, okay,” Cal said, training the lantern on us. “Settle down, the both of you.”

“Who are you?” I ignored Cal. “Why are you in my father’s house?” My words came out with more ice coating them than I’d intended. Perhaps it was the shadows, or the book, or my throbbing shoulder. Perhaps I was simply wrung out of patience for foolish girls and their foolish games.