This Monstrous Thing(29)

When I raised my face to hers, she looked so concerned that it made me want to scream. I didn’t deserve compassion or pity from her—from anyone—when it was my fault my brother was dead. I felt like screaming. I felt like swearing and shouting and ripping something apart.

I felt monstrous.

I shook Mary off and retrieved my file from where it had fallen. Three sharp clicks with it and the lock snapped open. Mary watched with her arms wrapped around herself, and I knew from the way she was looking at me that there was something wrong with what I was doing. I didn’t care.

I retrieved a spade from the shed, but Mary stepped in front of the doorway, blocking my way out. “Alasdair, don’t do this. You need to go home.”

I swallowed back the urge scream again and instead said as calmly as I could, “I shouldn’t have asked you to come. That was too much. You can go. You don’t have to help me.”

“I’m not leaving you alone,” she replied stoutly. “You’re out of your mind and you’re going to do something you’ll regret. You need to go home—”

I held out a spade. “If you won’t leave, then help me.”

I didn’t need her help, but the thought of being alone—truly alone for the first time in my life now that Oliver was gone—terrified me, and she must have seen that fear in my face, for after a long, still moment of staring at my hand, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the handle, on top of mine.

It took us hours to dig up Oliver’s coffin. The ground was soft and heavy after the rain, and we were both covered in it before long, mud and grime running in tracks down our skin. It was cold but I was sweating, and I kept stripping off layers until I was in just my undershirt and trousers. Mary had cast aside her bonnet and jacket, and her hair had fallen out of its arrangement and into a single plait that whipped about her face. We didn’t say a word to each other all the while we dug.

And then my spade hit wood with an empty thunk. The guilt sank its teeth in again, but this time I held myself together. The deeper we had dug, the more focused I had felt, and with the solid planks of the coffin under my feet, all the helplessness left me in a rush, and into its place funneled a cold and frightening calm.

Above me, I heard Mary murmur, “This is mad, Alasdair, this is absolutely mad.” She lowered herself from the lip of the trench into the grave so she was standing beside me. She was so spattered with mud I could hardly see her apart from the night. “No more secrets,” she said. “You have to tell me what we’re doing.”

I didn’t quite know myself. But I had Geisler’s journals, and I had read them, and I knew what had ruined his resurrections. I had Geisler’s journals and Oliver’s body and a snarled mess of grief and anger and guilt inside me, and I was going to do something about it.

“We’re going to the clock tower,” I said. “We’re going to bring Oliver back.”


The snow fell hard and heavy for three days. I hadn’t seen the sun since I arrived, and gusty winds made the windows clatter like something outside was trying to get in. Everything was wet and cold, and though the automatons kept the fires blazing, I never felt properly warm.

Geisler was adamant in his refusal to leave for Geneva until the snow settled and we had the promise of a safe journey. Waiting became a study in torture for me. I paced around the house, unable to sit still without my mind shuffling from images of my parents in prison, waiting to be executed, to my brother locked up in Chateau de Sang, probably ripping it apart brick by brick in an attempt to get out. I could already be too late, my new life tossed away before it had begun, yet here we sat, holed up in the ticking house, waiting for the snowstorm to pass.

And the only thing to do was read Frankenstein.

I pressed on with it, but it never got easier or better. Even when the story ceased to be ours, reading Victor and knowing he was me stung. Victor Frankenstein was a clever man, and it made me think of what Geisler had said—you were either good or clever, and Victor was clever. He’d made his clockwork monster because once he knew that it was possible, he had to try it for himself. He didn’t consider what he would do if it worked until the corpse was sitting up on his laboratory table. That wasn’t me, I told myself. I’d brought Oliver back because it was Oliver, and I’d missed him, and felt so damn guilty for what I’d done that I had to do something about it. I hadn’t done it to be clever.

But I’d spent two years lying to everyone about what had happened. Maybe this lie had snuck in too, and I’d spent all this time thinking that I’d brought Oliver back because I didn’t know how to live without him when really it was because I had to test myself, see if I truly could fill the holes Geisler had left in his journals and do the thing no one else had.

Maybe it had been about me and my own cleverness all along. Maybe I was just the same as Victor. And the Oliver I’d meant to bring back felt so far away that sometimes I forgot he’d ever existed to begin with. Maybe this book was precisely who we were: Frankenstein and his monster, neither of us as good as we once had been.

Like Geisler, I began keeping my own list of possibilities for who had written the novel, but mine was significant only for how short it was. There had occurred to me one true possibility: Oliver. He was the only person with any reason to tell this story. But even that was unlikely. I didn’t know how Oliver would have communicated with a printer and publisher without me knowing.