The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [122]
“I think my life’s complicated enough,” I agreed. I investigated the curio cases and devices scattered about the perimeter of the room. A few I’d seen before, in lanternreels or in my textbooks. A bell-shaped diving helmet with a pair of air filters attached to the front; a hand telescope with a plethora of extra lenses, attached to a pair of goggles and a headband; and a gun-shaped device with a glass bulb soldered to the end. Aether swished back and forth gently inside the barrel, blossoming and folding within the glass.
I started for the cabinet, but Dean curled his fingers around my shoulder. “Could be dangerous.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. I picked up the goggles and slipped them over my eyes. The lens in place at the moment was blue, and the room jumped into sharp black-and-white relief. I rotated the brass dial on the rim of the hand telescope, and a wavering green-blue lens that picked up Dean as an outline of crimson body heat moved into place, followed by a lens that outlined all of the witchcraft paraphernalia in the workshop in bilious green, wavering like seaweed in a current. My vision bulged as if I were looking through a fish’s eye, throwing me off balance and roiling my stomach until I removed the set from my eyes. The effect wasn’t as bad as the one caused by the goggles Tremaine had given me, but these goggles were definitely something of my father’s design. I’d never seen anything like them.
I smoothed my hair. “These things are incredible,” I said, pulse quickening. Devices, machines—this sort of thing was familiar, and yet exciting, because I had never seen machines like these in Lovecraft. “Want to try?” I asked Dean.
He shook his head with a smile. “Not much scares you, does it, Aoife?”
“Plenty,” I said. “Plenty scares me. But not the dark and what might be in there. I’ve plenty of facts that frighten me more than shadows and spooks.”
“Spooks are spooks for a reason,” Dean said. “I’ve seen a few things that’d straighten your hair.”
I started to tell Dean that the specter of encroaching madness, the ever-present Proctors and knowing that your life had a chronometer attached to it was worse than any ghost tale, but before I could, the world fell away.
The twisting, churning, falling sensation was worse this time, my being stretched thin across too many universes. Dean’s hand slipped from mine, and I heard the flutter of a thousand wings before I landed, upright, in a room lit only by firelight.
“There, now,” Tremaine said. “I did tell you we’d speak again.”
“ ’S not been a week yet,” I panted. “I have more time.”
Dean, mercifully, was with me when I glanced over. He went down on a knee and clutched at his forehead. “What in the frozen starry hell is all this?”
“Dean,” I sighed, “this is Tremaine.”
Tremaine stepped forward and held out his hand to me. “My dear. You may leave the hexenring.” His cold pale eyes locked on Dean. “Your companion, however, stays where he is. He has the sheen of clever wickedness about him.”
“Get bent, paleface,” Dean gritted. His face was bereft of color except for two spots of flame in his cheeks, and sweat marked all the hollows of his face.
“Breathe,” I told him, trying to let him know with my eyes we’d be all right. “It gets better.”
“Hurry along, child,” Tremaine said. “Decades are running through the boy’s fingers while you dawdle. You don’t want to have an old, gray steed in place of a fine yearling when we’re through, do you?”
“I’m not ready to help you,” I insisted. “I’m still learning how to use the Weird.”
“Aoife, I did not bring you to chastise you.” Tremaine let go of my hand as soon as I’d crossed the hexenring. The floor of the room was earthen and white mushrooms sprouted in every corner, phosphorescent in the dim light. It was a haunted place, all shadow and glow. The walls were composed of rushes, sprouting moss that swayed overhead like the sighing of lost souls. The fire itself was purple-tinged and ghostly. The only solid, dead thing in the