This Monstrous Thing(40)

I unlocked the workshop door and peered around the frame to be certain I was alone before I went in. The room was as bare and chilly as before. I retrieved the Carcel burner from the workbench and fished a match from the box, but my hands were so shaky from the cold it was tricky to strike. When it finally caught, I tipped it against the burner wick, not realizing how close to my fingers it had burned until it singed me.

“Dammit.” I dropped the match onto the floor and stuck my smarting finger in my mouth. The wick’s flame wavered but stood tall as I replaced the shade one-handed and moved it to get a better look at the tools. There weren’t as many out as there had been before; they’d all vanished except for two clunky spanners with bright rust creeping across their edges. I did a quick lap of the room, opening drawers and searching for more, but everything except the broken clocks had been cleared out.

I cursed under my breath, then retrieved one of the clocks and moved it to the table nearer the window, into the moonlight. I didn’t have tools, but, at the risk of pinched fingers, I could still mess about. I pulled back the chair and sat down.

Next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back on the floor. I blinked, shaking stars from my eyes, and realized the chair had tipped backward when I sat and sent me flying. I pulled myself up and examined the chair, which was now sprawled on the ground beside me. It only had three legs; the fourth, which was still sticking straight up from the floor, wasn’t a leg at all. It was a lever.

I crawled forward for a better look. There was a thin seam between the base of the lever and the floorboards, but when I pressed my eye to the gap, it was too dark to see what was below. I ran my knuckles along the wooden floor and rapped hard. The sound that returned was hollow. There was some empty space underneath the floor, tucked away and hidden.

I didn’t stop to think what I was doing. I just I seized the lever and pulled.

Immediately the floor beneath me began to tremble, accompanied by the low rasp of gears interlocking. Then a trapdoor began to sink into the floor, leaving a half-meter square of pure darkness beneath the worktable. The pale beam of my burner illuminated a set of rungs, but I couldn’t see a thing beyond the pale splash of lamplight. Not how far it went, or what waited at the end.

I backed away from the trapdoor, my eyes still on it like something was about to leap out at me, then retrieved the smaller of the two spanners from where it lay on the workbench and tucked it into my braces. I didn’t know what was beneath the floorboards, but my mind kept drifting to the automatons, and I felt a spanner might be a better weapon against them than anything else. I wished I’d brought the pulse gloves, but they were still stashed up in my bedroom.

I returned to the trapdoor and peered down again. The light from the burner seemed somehow fainter, though that may have been just a trick of my waning courage. Before I lost my nerve, I picked up the burner and placed my foot gingerly a few rungs down, easing myself into the hole. My head was beneath the floorboards when I heard a creaking above me. The gears were lurching forward again, the trapdoor moving back into place. For a moment, everything inside me screamed to scrambled back out to safety, but I banished that swell of panic with the knowledge that the gears were on my side, under the floor, and I could get them moving again if I needed to. I wouldn’t be trapped.

It was a short descent, probably half as long as the stairs in Geisler’s house, but the smell assaulted me immediately. It was rotten and metallic, heavy with dead flesh—I knew it from our workshop back in Geneva, but this was sharper. Fresher. I edged down, letting my feet explore the darkness for a moment before they found the next rung.

I finally reached a dirt floor, and straightened. My head brushed a beam. I held up my burner, trying to see what lay ahead, but its light barely stretched beyond the base of the ladder. Not far enough to see the room or its contents properly.

“Hello?” I called. My voice echoed faintly, but there was no reply, just the steady slither of water running down the walls.

I reached out behind me until I found damp stone and walked along it until my fingers knocked into what felt like a cold, smooth tube. I raised my lamp. A transparent half cylinder of glass about the width of my fist protruded from the wall with what looked like a thick candlewick inside of it. The tube ran parallel with the floor just below my eye level and disappeared ahead of me into the darkness.

I set my lamp on the ground and fished for the matches in my pocket. I lit one and held it experimentally against the end of the wick. It caught just like a candle and smoldered, still too faint to see into the room. But its light illuminated a knob, at one end of the tube, that connected to a rusted pipe just above it. I twisted it. There was a click like gears, followed by a slow drip, then suddenly, with a whoosh, the flame began to spread along the wick, stretching the perimeter of the room and bathing it all in a bloody light.

The room was clearly Geisler’s laboratory, but it wasn’t the workshop full of cogs and gears I had expected. This was less a workshop and more a morgue, or a scene from some medieval dungeon. There were human limbs—fresh human limbs, I realized with a jolt—wilting on a gouged, bloody bench. Some were split down the middle, with gears spilling out between the seams as though they had been stuffed in rather than lined up to actually operate. Unmistakably human organs were stacked in pickling jars on a shelf above them, floating in a frothy yellow liquid, and skin was stretched and pinned against one wall like tanning leather. In the center was a heavy metal table, blood and rust on its bolts glinting the same flaky orange.