This Monstrous Thing(28)
That was how it had felt—wanting Oliver back so badly, knowing I could bring him back, and then as soon as I had, wishing I could undo it. Mary had told me once that we saw ourselves in books because humans, being creatures of vanity, look for their own reflection everywhere, but I didn’t think even she could have disputed that this was a thinly veiled version of my life.
I knew it deep in my bones, in a way I couldn’t explain.
It was Oliver, and it was me.
It took everything in me not to hurl the book into the fire. The story deviated from mine and Oliver’s after the resurrection—Victor fled Ingolstadt with his friend Henry and left his mechanical creation to navigate the world alone, which seemed the most cowardly thing he could have done until I thought of Oliver, locked up in Chateau de Sang. Had I run from him in just the same way?
I couldn’t stomach it any longer. I set the book spine-up on the floor and flung myself into bed, hoping desperately for sleep. But I lay awake for a long time, the memories of Oliver’s resurrection night flitting like moths through my mind.
After Oliver died, my father had wanted everything taken care of quick and clean, like it might somehow hurt less that way. There was no church funeral, no flowers or mourning clothes. Just four of us at the graveside—Father, Mother, and me with a priest—two days after Oliver’s fall. The sky was salt gray, the ground soft and black after a night of rain. It was the first week of November. The first proper cold day we’d had since spring.
My parents stayed to make arrangements for the headstone, so I returned to the flat alone and lay on my pallet in the colorless afternoon light. Oliver’s mattress was still unrolled beside mine, and I reached out and rested my hand on the bare ticking. It felt like keeping his memory in place, like there was still some shadow of him in the room and it was my responsibility to hold on to it. I didn’t move, even when I heard my parents come in. I just lay there, thinking, with the sharp corners of Geisler’s journals digging into my back from where I’d hidden them under my mattress.
Mary came that evening and threw stones at my window until I met her on the stairs to the flat. She was wearing a white cotton gown, too summery for the cold, and she looked so pale and bright against the overcast sunset. I stopped a few steps above her and looked down.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to the cemetery,” she said.
“I didn’t want you to.” I’d hardly spoken in two days, and my voice came out coarser than I expected.
She nodded, looked down for a moment, then back at me, her eyes squinting up against the reflection of the sun on the shop windows. “Are you all right?”
“No.” The question was so daft, I didn’t even try to make my tone cordial. “Of course I’m not all right.”
She licked her lips. “What can I do?”
Nothing, I thought. You can’t do a bleeding thing. You can’t make me love you less. You can’t change what I did or loosen the knot inside me or fill the hole that Oliver left. You can’t bring my brother back.
But I could.
I’d read the journals. I’d gone to the trial, heard all the details the police had scrounged up about the work Geisler was doing in the clock tower. And I knew what was wrong with it. On the first day Oliver and I sat up in the gallery, the barrister was describing the dissection Geisler had been caught in the middle of, an attempt to bond clockwork parts to the inside of a corpse, and I knew instinctively why it had gone wrong. Without ever seeing his laboratory or watching him work—I just knew it.
The possibility of trying it for myself had seemed mad when I’d first considered it, but the last two days without Oliver—of living with myself and knowing what I’d done—had been so painful that when held up against them, the idea seemed strangely sane. The memory of Oliver falling from the top of the clock tower was clawing at my insides, begging to be written over, and even if everything went wrong, it couldn’t be worse than what I’d done already.
“You can come with me,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”
Mary followed me all the way to the cemetery without a question. She must have thought I wanted to go to the graveside, show her where we’d buried him, and have my own funerary rites, but instead I led her along the fence to the shed where the gravediggers kept their spades and handcart. I had my hand around the lock and was fishing a needle file out my pocket before she finally asked, “What are you doing?”
My fist closed around the file, so tight I felt it break my skin. “I need . . . ,” I started, but my throat closed up around the words and instead I tried, “I want . . .” When I looked up at her, she had taken a few steps backward, away from me. “I know I can do it,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Geisler’s journals. I’ve got them. I know . . . I can do something. I can fix this.”
Her eyes widened with understanding, and she shook her head so hard a strand of her hair tumbled from its pins. “No, Alasdair, stop. You can’t use Geisler’s research. It’s just theories—it’s fiction!”
“I can do it, I know I can, I can do it better than Geisler. I can do it.”
“Oliver’s dead—that isn’t something you can fix.”
She reached out, and all at once something inside me broke like a snapped wishbone. The world tipped, the file slid out of my hand, and I had to crouch down so I didn’t fall over. That raw, bleeding mess inside me that had been curled up for days had detonated suddenly, and the pieces embedded in me were so sharp that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I had never felt worse than I did right then, crouched in the graveyard dark, with everything building on my back, bile rising in my throat and my insides twisted up and pulled tight. I thought I might be sick, but I wasn’t. I just crouched there, head in my hands, and let myself shake until Mary’s fingers slid along the back of my neck.