This Monstrous Thing(20)
Geisler walked past it as he stripped off his coat, and Clémence followed. I edged in after them, keeping my eyes on the clockwork thing, not certain exactly what it was or what it was about to do.
The mechanical man pushed the door closed, then made a sharp turn and held out its arm. Geisler draped his fur-trimmed cloak over it. “Give it your coat,” he instructed me, nodding at something over my shoulder. I jumped as another metal man, identical to the first, rattled out of a doorway off the entrance hall carrying a dressing gown.
Clémence smirked as I dodged out of its way. “Don’t fret, they don’t bite.” She pushed me forward into its path. “It’s just an automaton.”
I looked from her to Geisler. “An automaton?” I repeated. “But it’s . . .”
“Sentient?” Geisler offered. “Not to the capacity I would like.” He fed his arms through the sleeves of the dressing gown the automaton extended for him. “They have the mental faculties of a dull dog, and the ocular function as well. Only basic sight and auditory cues, but, like a dog, they can be trained, and they do learn over time. Not as fast as I’d like, but they do learn. By now they seem to know what I’m asking, though it took a hell of a long time to get them to this level.”
“You made them?” I asked as the first automaton shuffled toward me, its arms outstretched. I thrust my coat forward, which satisfied the metal man into retreat.
“Of course,” Geisler replied. “Though they are hardly the masterpiece I envisioned when I first considered giving life to clockwork. They have no capacity for original or independent thought, no personality, and they couldn’t function without specific direction. Nothing compared to my original designs for the resurrected man.” He looked over at me, so quickly I almost thought I imagined it. When I didn’t say anything, he smiled. “Well then. Let me show you the house.”
Geisler gave me a brief tour, poking his head into each room just long enough to allow me a quick glimpse. Somewhere on the first floor we lost Clémence, and I assumed she had chosen sleep over seeing a home she already knew. The rooms were as tidy as his office had been, and everything was lit with Carcel burners—lamps with clockwork pumps in the base to circulate the oil and keep the flames burning longer, far too expensive for my family to afford. There were clocks everywhere—each room had at least one. Between the clocks, the mechanical lamps, and the automatons, which seemed reluctant to let Geisler out of sight, the whole house buzzed like a hive.
At the end of the second-floor corridor, Geisler led me into a small room with an iron-framed bed and, wedged into one corner beside a leaping fire, a writing desk. There were three clocks on the mantelpiece, pendulums swinging out of sync with each other and clicking loudly. “This can be yours,” he said, stepping back to let me in. “I had fresh linens put down, but it hasn’t been used in a while, so it may be dusty.”
“That’s all right.” I crossed the room to the window. The first flakes of snow were starting to brush ghostlike against the rippled glass. The room looked out across the back garden, where fingers of sharp brown grass stabbed upward through the snow. I could see a coach house and a squat stone building nearly as wide as the main house, though single storied and with a thatched roof. “What’s that?” I asked Geisler, and he stepped to my side.
“My workshop. Though I hardly use it now. I do most of my work at the university.”
“Do you think you could show it to me?” I asked. “I’d love to see—”
Geisler cut me off with a laugh. “You certainly are eager. I’ll show you if you like, but there’s hardly anything out there.” He put a firm hand on my elbow and turned me away from the window. One of the automatons had come in behind us and was standing so close that I started. “I’ve left some spare uniforms from the university in the dresser—why don’t you change, we’ll take a quick look at the workshop, then have some super and a good talk?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean I wanted to see the workshop now,” I said, prying my arm from his grip. “Just . . . while I’m here.”
“Supper, then?”
“I’d rather go to bed. If that’s all right.”
He squinted at me over the top of his spectacles, and for a moment he looked like he was going to argue. Then he nodded. “Of course it’s all right. Completely sensible. I don’t know what I was thinking, of course it can all wait until tomorrow, of course. Out!” he barked at the automaton that had followed us. It took several arthritic steps into the hallway. Geisler followed, but turned back to me in the doorway. “If you need anything at all, call out and one of them”—he nodded toward the automaton—“will come.”
“All right,” I said, though there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be calling the metal men into my bedroom.
“I’ve instructed them to make you comfortable. I do hope you’re comfortable here.” He smiled at me with such a sincere affection it felt foreign.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Sleep well, then,” he said, his face golden and warm in the firelight. Then he shut the door with a soft snap.
As soon as Geisler was gone, I stripped down to almost nothing and fell on top of the bed, which, I discovered with a stab of delight, was stuffed with feathers—I hadn’t had a feather mattress since we’d lived in Scotland. The house around me was quiet but not silent, with the three clocks ticking out of sync on my mantelpiece and drumming into my thoughts like dissonant heartbeats, joining the clamor already ringing around my head when I wondered again what I was doing here instead of back in Geneva with Oliver and my parents. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to quiet my brain enough to sleep, but everything inside me felt riotous.