This Monstrous Thing(70)

I jogged back to the edge of the market and looked up at the clock face. The minute hand, poised to strike when the clock was started, had moved one step backward instead.

Then the doors to the glockenspiel under the face opened, and the platform began to roll out. The clockwork figures that were meant to be there had gone, and in their place was a single crouching form. I knew him before he stood, but stand he did. Stood and looked out across the city like a grotesque gargoyle from a cathedral buttress.

It was Oliver.

He was wearing nothing but trousers, and it seemed a miracle that his metal joints hadn’t frozen at that height in this cold. He raised his chin as the wind teased his dark hair, the light from the clock face shafting through it like veins of gold in obsidian. He had his shoulders thrust back, his twisted clockwork body on display.

For a moment, the crowd didn’t seem to realize that the strange brass form gleaming above them was not a clockwork figure from the glockenspiel but a living man made of stitches and metal. Then people began pointing and shouting. Someone screamed, high and shrill.

“Geneva!” Oliver cried, his voice carrying over the wind and the river and the crowd. “You have tried to silence us, but we cannot be silenced.”

A man in front of me bolted, knocking into my shoulder as he ran. My stitches flared. “What’s going on?” a woman nearby whimpered.

“Your monsters are unleashed,” Oliver cried, raising his arms before him as though in presentation. “And they come for the men who beat them and broke them.”

He looked down, and the crowd followed his gaze to the archways at the base of the clock tower. Shadows were breaking from the darkness, joining the cobblestone square and taking the shape of people. Clockwork people, I realized, with their mechanical limbs on display. Men and women with brass legs and iron fists and silver shoulders and kneecaps, trousers and skirts and coat sleeves rolled up so their limbs could be seen. They walked toward the crowd, with Oliver shouting above them, reciting:

“Thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; my agony was still superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever.”

Frankenstein, I realized. He was quoting Frankenstein in the cawing oratory voice he used to adopt when he and Mary read Milton aloud on the shores of Lake Geneva, and birds scattered from the grass before him.

Now it was the crowd scattering before him as his army advanced. A woman stepped backward on top of me and I almost lost my footing. Someone shoved me from behind. People were starting to run.

The first explosion went off then. Somewhere in the back of the crowd there was a bang and a flash, and the screams multiplied. One of the market stalls had caught fire, sending a tongue of flame blazing into the air. Then there was a second bang from close behind me, and a gust of hot, sulfurous air hit me so hard I stumbled.

And then everyone was running and coughing and shouting. It was hard to make out anything amid the noise, though I swore I could still hear Oliver reciting Frankenstein, like a scripture, at the top of his voice. The clockworks were shoving back at the crowd, pikes and hammers and fists ready for a fight.

Though the haze, I could see blue-uniformed police officers streaming into the crowd. They had their rifles raised and were making for the tower, but the ring of clockworks held them off. Shots were fired. More people screamed. I saw a splash of blood in the river— washed away so fast it was like blinking away sunspots.

My eyes were burning from the smoke and it was hard to keep them open. Ahead of me, amber flames were clawing at the air, jumping from one stall to the next along the garlands. I staggered forward and tripped over something. A body was sprawled at my feet, and blood was trickling into the cracks between the cobblestones. I stopped dead for a moment, too shocked to move, but I knew I didn’t have time to waste being afraid. Mary was somewhere in the crush. My brother was swearing vengeance against her book in her own words, and I had to find her.

“Mary!” I called, not certain if anyone but myself could hear. I started to shove my way back, against the crowd and toward the clock tower base. It was a fight to not get sucked under and stepped on. The crowd was funneling toward the mouths of the streets and across the bridge, which was jammed up too tight for anyone to move.

“Mary!” I shouted again, so loud I felt something tear in my throat. “MARY!”

And, miraculously, I heard someone shout back, “Alasdair!” I turned. Mary was struggling toward me, scarf pulled up over her nose and tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached out. I snatched at her hand, just the tips of our fingers brushing, but the second time, I caught her and pulled her against me. Our arms tangled, and I held as tight as I could to her as we started fighting our way out.

We were shoved sideways, away from the square and toward the clock tower. A line of policemen had formed a perimeter around one of the arches at the base; they stood shoulder to shoulder with their rifles trained forward, but they weren’t firing.

“Out of the way!” someone bellowed from behind us, and Mary dragged me to the side as another battalion of officers pushed through the crowd, Jiroux in the lead. He threw up his hand and his men stopped, rifles raised, but silent.

“Stay back or it goes up!” I heard someone shout, and it sounded like Clémence. In spite of everything, I stopped and turned back to look.