This Monstrous Thing(79)
He looked up. “You mean that?”
“’Course I do. If we give the police something else, something to distract them, you can get away from here tonight. And you can have your life back. Properly this time. No more hiding. No more running. No more fear.”
“No more fear,” he repeated. “That would be good.”
He climbed to his feet and offered me his hand. I took it, and he pulled me up beside him. We stood like that for a moment, his mechanical hand clasped with my flesh-and-bone one, in the same place we had stood two years ago when I pushed him and he fell.
“I know it’s too late,” I said, “but I’m sorry. For everything. Everything I’ve done since that day to today.”
“Me too.” He looked down for a moment, then back up at me. “There were so many times since you brought me back that I just wanted to give up and rip myself apart. What kept me alive was knowing that once I was someone worth saving. Worth bringing back. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come back to who I was. But I’m trying, Ally. I really am.”
The clock gave another shudder. Another tick of the minute hand.
And together—locked gears that we were—we began our descent into the trembling belly of the clock tower.
The square had been cleared when the clock began to strike the hour, but there was still a line of officers left standing behind their barricades, waiting for the gong. When it finally struck, they started, turned their eyes to the full-moon face as one, and waited for the bombs.
But nothing happened.
Then the gong struck a final time, and this is what they saw:
At the base of the tower a figure appeared, rising from the fog-fringed darkness like a ghost. A battered cornered hat was tipped over his dark, curly hair, casting his face in shadow, and his walk was stiff-legged and slow, the limp of a man with cogs for knees. The moonlight shivered along the silver mechanical hand trailing from his coat sleeve.
The policemen’s guns all leveled on the man, who stopped and raised his hands to his head, then collapsed forward onto his knees as though too exhausted to stand any longer.
“Oliver Finch!” one of the policemen called, his rifle steadier than his voice. “Oliver Finch, stay where you are!”
The mechanical man didn’t move. He stayed on the ground, arms above his head, shoulders slumped.
The police surrounded him, their rifles trained on his chest, but kept a skittish distance as though afraid he would attack. Then, in a fit of courage, one officer kicked him hard in the back and he fell face first onto the cobblestones. He didn’t fight, or try to stand. Just lay there, still and silent, while they put irons around his wrists and ankles, blindfolded and gagged him, knocked his hat into the snow and left it behind as they dragged him, blind, stumbling, and bleeding, to the waiting police wagon. They threw him in so that he landed hard on his side, unable to move for the journey across the city.
They hauled him through the station, up the stairs, let him trip over his manacled feet, let the blood from the nose they had broken course down his face and splash onto the floor. If any of them thought it strange that this reportedly wild man didn’t fight, they didn’t say. Perhaps their triumph at catching Frankenstein’s monster made them forget everything else. They chained him to a chair and stood guard, eyes and guns fixed on him, until heavy footsteps signaled the approach of their commander.
Jiroux strode through the door and stood still for a moment, staring at their prisoner with his face unreadable. Then he stormed across the room, tugged down the gag, and ripped off the blindfold with such force that the resurrected man’s head snapped backward, revealing his dark eyes.
“Alasdair Finch,” Jiroux said.
I looked back at him, bleeding and chained and certainly not Oliver. “Inspector Jiroux,” I replied.
Jiroux face contorted with rage, cheeks flushing fever red. I kept my expression as blank as I could, though my mind was buzzing, trying to work out whether I’d given Oliver enough time to take the ladder down to the river. There were no police at the checkpoints or patrolling the borders—they’d all been at the clock tower or trying to keep the city calm. If he had moved fast, there was a good chance he was already gone.
“Where’s your brother?” Jiroux demanded. “Where’s Oliver?”
I didn’t say anything. A trickle of blood ran from my nose and dropped onto the floor, just missing the toe of his boot.
Jiroux struck me across the face. Starbursts erupted over my vision and I bit my tongue hard enough to taste it. “Where is he, Finch?” he bellowed, his spittle joining the grime on my cheeks.
I looked up at him, struggling to focus, but still didn’t say anything.
He struck me again, so hard I was certain the chair would have tipped if it hadn’t been bolted down. My consciousness stumbled, and for a moment I thought I was going to black out. Through the fog, I heard Jiroux slam his fist into the wall with a screech of frustration. “Get him up,” he barked, and someone grabbed me by the collar and hauled me to my feet. “Get his father, then take them out back and shoot them both.”
My legs gave out at his words and I slumped against the officer holding me. He grabbed me before I fell, and the mechanical arm Oliver and I had stripped from a disabled Clock Breaker slid out of my coat sleeve and hit the ground with a clatter. I had no feeling left in either arm—one was numb from holding the metal arm in place, the other from the torn stitches still bleeding into my collar.