The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [53]
Deciding that I was safer in a closed room than out in the open, I hurried through the doors, which rolled shut behind me. I jumped at the sound, but what was before me was mesmerizing. My lamp showed gold-stamped spines in jolting shadow, mellowed wood and well-used leather chairs. A closer inspection revealed I was in Graystone’s library, and my feet sank into rich carpet with a whisper of welcome.
It was truly a glorious library, twice the size of the Academy’s. Impressive, I’d wager, by even New Amsterdam’s standards. The shelves ascended to the ceiling, and the volumes went on for what looked like miles.
I spun in a slow circle, like another sort of girl might do in a dress shop full of the latest confections for the sort of girls who got asked on dates and to dances. The library was not dusty or dead like the rest of Graystone. It looked loved and lived-in and used. A writing desk sat shoved to one side near a pair of worn leather armchairs. There was nothing on the walls, none of the ornate accoutrements the rest of the house boasted. This was a library, and my father clearly wanted all of the attention on his books.
But, in the golden light of my lamp, I saw there was one object in the room besides the copious volumes.
On the opposite side of the long narrow room was a leviathan clock—a full-bodied, intricate machine, much different than a pocket chronometer. As I watched, the hands swung in a parabolic arc, their wicked spiked finials grinding to a halt at twelve midnight. The chimes let out a discordant, muffled bong.
The hands swung again, and I stepped closer, watching them trail across the clock face like compass needles that had lost north, the unearthly ticking echoing loud enough to vibrate my skull. Each numeral was actually a tiny painting, wrought in delicate ink. A naked girl lying sleeping on a stone. A great goat with the body of a man sitting on a throne. A circle of figures in a dark forest who wore the sign of Hastur, the heretical Yellow King, whom cultists worshipped before the necrovirus. According to Professor Swan, and who knew where he got his stories from?
Looking at the clock for too long, at the silver gears beneath the face that spun like saw blades in the bloodred cherrywood case, made me dizzy around the edges. The shoggoth’s bite began to throb, sending needles up and down my arm, and I put out a hand to steady myself against the shelves. Brushing the leather and the wood settled my head, but only a bit. Friendly as the library was, the clock was a monstrous thing, a machine of bloody teeth. It didn’t scare me—it was a clock, after all—but it transfixed me, started a tremor of unease. I felt the urge to bolt, clear back to my bedroom.
I had to stop thinking of it as my bedroom. My father had made it clear by his fifteen-year silence—Conrad and I were Nerissa’s children. We had only a mother.
The hands of the clock reached midnight again and another bong vibrated my skull. The chimes were dulled, as if stuffed with cotton wool.
As if something was inside the case, muffling them.
I hesitated a moment, the aura of the clock pulsating around me, and then decided I was being a silly child. I tugged at the case until it sprang open, varnish coming off sticky under my hand. Touching the clock made me dizzy again, but I peered into the whirling gears and swinging weights and caught the edge of a vellum scrap stuffed between the black glass chimes. Whoever had broken the clock had left a note.
My small hands, the bane of my mechanical engineering instructor, Professor Dubbins, fit neatly into the thin space. I touched the paper and pulled it free, but I was careless. A gear bit into my thumb and a fat blood droplet welled on the pad.
I hissed, and sucked at the digit. The bleeding didn’t stop—the puncture was deeper than I first thought—and when I examined the spot, my blood soaked the corner of the vellum. I let it drop by my feet and wrapped my thumb