This Monstrous Thing(37)
The night before Geisler left the city. The night before Oliver died.
I was sitting on the steps to the flat in the dying light, reassembling a pocket watch I’d found smashed to bits in the street. With my head against the wall to the flat, I could hear muffled voices from the other side: Father, Mum, and Oliver, joined by Geisler. It was two days since he’d escaped prison and he had been hiding with us while the police turned over the countryside, thinking he’d fled Geneva. Tomorrow night, when their search moved back inside the city, he would make his dash for the border and return to Ingolstadt.
Oliver was meant to have some part in the escape, though I wasn’t sure what. He’d been reading out on the stairs with me when Father called him in to discuss it. I kept waiting for them to start shouting, because one of them was bound to be upset over something sooner or later, but it all stayed quiet. That was somehow more alarming.
As the sun began to drop below the skyline, I heard the flat door open, and before I could turn, Oliver flopped down on the step beside me and pulled his knees up to his chest. “I’m being sent away.”
My finger caught under the ratio wheel and it pinched. “What?”
He was staring straight ahead, down at the street, with his mouth set in a hard line. The sunlight splintered through his dark hair. “Once Geisler’s settled in Ingolstadt, he’s going to send for me so I can keep studying with him at the university there. He and Father still seem convinced they can make a Shadow Boy out of me.” He said it all so quiet and calm. He didn’t even look angry, though he’d spent so long being angry at Father and Geisler for nearly everything. He just looked empty.
I let go a breath, so heavy and disbelieving it sounded like a laugh. He looked over at me. “What was that for?”
“Oliver, that’s . . .” He had to know. He had just been handed what I’d been wanting and working toward my whole bleeding life and nobody had ever noticed. “Studying with Geisler at Ingolstadt is what I want to do,” I said softly. “That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
“No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t want to join the mad doctor in his devil work.”
“He isn’t mad—”
“And how would you know? You haven’t seen what he’s doing. It’s not you cutting up bodies for him in the clock tower.”
“It’s science!”
“No, it’s insane. And I don’t want you telling me I should be grateful for this. I’ve heard enough of that already. Hell’s teeth, Ally, I thought you’d be on my side.”
“I am,” I replied. “I don’t want you to go!”
“But you’d go, wouldn’t you? If he asked you instead.”
“Oliver—”
“Don’t be an idiot, Ally.” He stood up and stomped down the stairs, skipping the last one so he landed hard on the cobbles, then glared backward at me. “God’s wounds, I thought I could count on you.” Then he disappeared around the front of the shop, and a moment later I heard the bell over the door sing.
I sat there for a moment with my eyes on the spot where he’d been. I felt clenched up and boiling and just a smidge panicked, because I’d never been apart from Oliver for longer than a night before and here he was leaving me for Germany. On the other side of the wall, I heard Father’s voice, then Geisler’s, and the shuffle of footsteps toward the door. I didn’t want to talk to either of them, and I sure as hell didn’t want to stew down in the shop with Oliver. There was only one person I could stand the thought of right then.
I stood up so fast the pieces of the pocket watch spilled off my lap, then I jogged down to the street and turned away from where Oliver had gone—across the square and toward the lake.
Mary was smiling when she came to the villa door, but I must have looked wretched, because it faded fast. “What’s the matter?”
“Oliver’s leaving,” I said. “He’s going to Ingolstadt with Geisler.”
A shout went up in the house behind her, a raucous and ravaged sound. A woman shrieked. Something crashed. Mary glanced over her shoulder, then put her hand on my arm, like she was holding me back. “Let’s walk down to the shore. Stay here, I’ll get my coat.”
We took the path through the vineyards and down to the lake, where we sat, with our shoes off, on the trunk of a bare cedar that had toppled into the water. Our feet made ripples in the dark water as I told her what had happened. “You shouldn’t be angry at Oliver,” she said when I was finished. “He didn’t ask for it.”
“But he says it’s wicked work, and that I shouldn’t be interested in it.”
“But you are, and he can’t change that. Neither can you.” She dragged her toes across the top of the water, leaving a pattern like skipped stones. The cattails on the shore whispered as the wind snaked through them. “What is Dr. Geisler’s work, precisely?”
“Reanimating the dead with clockwork.”
“God’s wounds. That isn’t . . . real, is it? I mean, it can’t be done.”
“Not yet.” She sounded so horrified I didn’t dare tell her the fiery fascination the idea lit inside me—the chance it might be possible—in case she too thought I was mad and wicked for it. I pushed my hands through my hair and shivered. Now that the sun was gone, it felt like autumn again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”