This Monstrous Thing(5)

I counted backward from a hundred as I stared out at the view; then I turned. Across the craggy hilltop, a small dark-stone castle was perched, a feather of white smoke rising from one of its chimneys. Chateau de Sang, skeletal and dark, like a hole cut in the winter sky.

The cold was starting to get under my coat, but I didn’t move. Part of me wanted to stand there and let the time run down until I had to return home. The gut-twisting mix of dread and necessity was rising like bile inside me, and I knew I couldn’t swallow it. I’d just have to let it burn in my stomach until I could leave, but even then it never faded entirely.

I took a deep breath, braced myself, and started down the slope toward the gates.

I let myself into the castle through a service entrance in the back, the only way in that wasn’t boarded. I had picked the lock the city installed and replaced it with my own that locked from both the inside and outside when it was closed, same as the one in our shop. I stuck a rock into the frame to keep the door propped.

Inside, everything was smoky with shadows. Dust motes wafted across the thin bars of sunlight that filtered through the high windows, all boarded up, and cobwebs decorated the walls like spun tapestries. The air was thick with the smell of age and mold, underscored by the sharp sulfur of the gunpowder and explosives the city kept stored in the cellars.

I took the familiar path across the kitchen, making only a quick stop to check that the pantry was stocked, then climbed a long set of winding stairs, listening hard to the silence and trying to decide where he would be. When I reached the upstairs hall, I spotted the amber glow of firelight at the end and followed it.

The room looked like a heavy windstorm had swept through just before I arrived. Crumpled papers were scattered across the floor, and pens stuck out of the wall like darts in a pub board. A goose-down pillow I had stolen from my parents had been left lying in the center of the room, feathers blooming from a rip down its middle and carried by the wind slithering down the chimney. Plates festering with dried food were stacked in random spots, and most of the furniture left by the castle’s previous owners, already spindly with age, was battered and abused. It looked like the remnants of a battlefield, somewhere looted and then left behind.

And in the center of it all, like a king on his throne, was Oliver.




Before his resurrection, Oliver had been a good-looking lad, the sort girls would stare at as he walked by on the street. He was trim and athletic, not skinny like me, and he had a swagger that I was beginning to doubt I would ever grow into. He hadn’t lost the swagger in his second life, but it was different now, less confident and more menacing.

We shared most physical features—dark, curly hair and dark eyes, most notably—but we didn’t look alike anymore, not the way we once had. Oliver’s resurrection had added nearly a foot to his height, and now he was made mostly of sharp lines and strange angles. Clothes didn’t fit him properly, and he wore a loose-fitting linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, braces hanging down to his knees and trousers sagging in odd places. His dark hair had grown back as thick as before, but the strips of it atop his scars never would, leaving him with a bald stretches amid the curls.

The resurrection had robbed him too of the bone structure that had given him sharp cheekbones and a square jaw before. Now one eyelid sagged, and the skin of his face, like the rest of his body, was rippled and perpetually bruised from the machinery that pressed against it from inside.

Two years later and it was still hard not to look away from him. I forced myself to meet his gaze and hold it steady as I stood in the doorway. When he didn’t say anything, I dropped my bag on the floor beside the chaise and said, “Sorry I haven’t been by.” My chest was already feeling tight, and it was hard to get words out without sounding winded.

Oliver watched me from his perch atop the writing desk as I peeled off my coat and scarf, an unlit pipe jammed between his teeth. Smoking was hazardous now that his lungs were made of waxed paper and leather, but he still liked gnawing on his pipe as if it were lit. They were strange and unpredictable, the things like smoking that had carried over from before.

I kicked a balled-up bit of paper out from under the chaise. “What happened here?”

“I’m bored,” he replied, sliding down off the desk so that he was straddling the chair. His mechanical joints creaked when he moved. I had replaced one of his arms entirely with a clockwork one, and both knees as well, since that was easier than letting the bones grow back wrong.

“So clean this place up, that’ll keep you busy for a while. I mended your shirt,” I added as I pulled it out of my bag and threw it to him. He caught it with his mechanical hand. “Anything else you need?”

“Tobacco.”

“No.” I pushed a ragged copy of Paradise Lost to the other end of the chaise and sank down onto the cushion. “Why’d you shred all the paper I brought?”

“Because writing’s dull. Everything’s dull. I’m so bored.” Oliver tossed the shirt on top of the feather pillow. There was a metallic whine, shrill as a teakettle, and he winced.

I sat up. “Is it giving you problems?”

“Not the arm,” he said, and rapped his knuckles against his chest. It rang hollowly.

“I brought my tools.”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t be daft, let me look.” I pulled my work gloves out of my bag as Oliver raised the flame of the lamp balanced on the writing desk and pulled his shirt off over his head. The skin under it was so puckered and punctured that it hardly looked like skin at all. You could still see the stitches, the bolts, the blue patches where the needles had gone in. There were places in his side that bulged and rippled as the gears ticked beneath. My fingers stumbled as I wedged them under the seam in his chest and opened it.