Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

“The ones Mr. Crosley thinks are particularly special are bound up in that big blue book,” she said, shoving toward me a ledger that was almost too large for me to turn the pages of. It was full of blueprints, most of them for terrestrial inventions that I’d seen back in Lovecraft—the prototype steam jitney engine, a Tesla coil, an aether feeder that became the system everyone in the world whose home was piped with the stuff was familiar with.

I set the book aside. Crosley’s ego display didn’t interest me. I tried a few of Tesla’s personal journals, and then started looking through loose plans, some folded and faded so that the machines were almost unrecognizable. But the clock wasn’t among them. There were no notes to even indicate Tesla had entertained the idea of such a machine.

I had a terrible sensation in my stomach that I might have gone about this all wrong, but I persisted. The nightmare clock had to be here. For so many reasons.

Casey looked back at me, chewing on her lip. “I can hear people moving around out there. We should probably get going soon.”

“If we do get caught,” I said, opening another bound volume, the paper so decayed the corners turned to dust in my hands, “blame me. Crosley needs me—I’ll be punished less.”

Casey gave me a tentative smile. “Thanks. But I don’t want you punished either.”

I shrugged. “I’m not scared of Harold Crosley. You helped me, now I’ll help you. That’s how it works.”

Casey lowered her eyes. “Maybe in your world. I’m not used to it.”

“What do you …,” I started, but was distracted by the spidery handwriting at the top of the last blueprint in the bound journal. Arctic Gate—Transportive Device for Inter-dimensional Travel, commissioned by Raymond Crosley, 1899 .

I felt my mouth drop open in surprise, and I flipped the book around so Casey could see. “There’s a Gate? Here?”

Casey nodded, looking as if she’d done something wrong. “But it never worked right. Mr. Crosley won’t let anyone use it—there’ve been folks who’ve lost limbs and horrible stories about people who got shot out into the vacuum of space and whatnot.” She chewed her lip. “Said it was just a prototype Tesla fiddled with. He locked that whole wing. Nobody goes there.”

I heard Octavia’s whisper. The man who built the Gates. It started with him, and it will end with him .

I carefully tore the blueprint from the book, tucking it under my shirt. My heart was pounding again, but this time it was from excitement and urgency at finally being so close to what I needed. “We’re going there. Right now.”

THINGS WERE WAKING up in the Bone Sepulchre as the short day—only a few hours of light, this time of year—got under way. Casey took me to the blocked-off staircase that led to where she said the Gate rested.

This had to be it—not a Gate, but the clock Tesla had conceived. I couldn’t think of anywhere else Tesla could have hidden a doorway into the very dreams of the world. Faulty it might be, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

“Are you sure about this?” Casey whispered as I performed my lock-picking trick again. It hurt more this time. My Weird had been making me suffer more and more with even the smallest exercises. I didn’t know what that heralded—iron madness, fatigue, or something worse—but I had to sit down for a moment and catch my breath when the door sprang open.

“No,” I told Casey, swiping at my bloody nose. “I have no idea if this will work. But I have no other options.”

“I hear you there,” Casey murmured, and then whipped around at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Inside!” she hissed, the fear back in her face. Later, when this was over, when things were back to how they should be, if I still knew her, I needed to ask Casey exactly what the Brotherhood had done to her, why she feared them so much.

They wanted to keep me locked up and use my talents as a weapon, and had tried to do the same to my father, so I doubted her story would be pleasant.

We crouched inside the stairwell, which was icy cold compared to the rest of the Bone Sepulchre, shivering and watching our breath form thunderheads as it escaped our mouths. The footsteps approached, passed and retreated. Casey doubled over, gasping with relief. I looked up, cringing when I saw the broken steps in the ice-covered spiral staircase leading up into nothing. “At least we’re not afraid of heights,” I said.

Casey shoved her hands into her armpits, shivering. I already couldn’t feel my exposed skin. If Crosley didn’t catch us, the Arctic chill might. This wasn’t a cold you could shake off—it could stop your heart, freeze your skin and kill you between one breath and the next. We had to be quick and get back to where it was warm.

Casey and I climbed, clinging to the railing that remained in a few spots. Wood, like metal, would peel the skin off your palms at these temperatures. The steps groaned beneath our weight, the same bone-cracking sound the ice had made around the Oktobriana . It was almost a relief to have a tangible fear, something concrete I could concentrate on rather than Tremaine and Draven. Fear of plummeting to your death was a lot easier to cope with than fear of being exiled to the Thorn Land and having your boyfriend killed.

Casey’s foot slipped through one of the gaping holes in the ice, and she grabbed at me. I grabbed the railing in turn, but the bolts ripped free from the wall. I let out a scream that was choked off when I hit the floor. Casey clung to my leg, dangling in space through one of the concentric holes, as if the floor had been burned away. I felt myself sliding backward and grabbed for a ridge, which mercifully held. I tried to pull us up, gasping. It felt as if I were being ripped apart. My fingers slipped, slicking the ice with blood, and I knew I was going to lose my grip, and then we were going to fall. The thought didn’t make me particularly panicked—it was just a fact, a hard fact.

“Aoife,” Casey gasped. “Don’t let go!”

“You’re going to have to climb over me,” I gritted out. “Use me to get to the next step.”

To Casey’s credit, she didn’t argue. To mine, I didn’t scream when her weight increased exponentially and I felt a sick, wet popping in one of my elbow joints.

Her foot hooked in my belt, and then her weight was off me and her hands were around my tingling wrists, pulling me up by any bit of shirt or skin she could grasp. We both sprawled on the icy floor atop the spiral staircase.

I couldn’t remember when I’d been in more pain. Though, on the bright side, I wasn’t cold any longer.

Once I’d gathered my breath and my wits, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t stand just yet, and my arm was on fire, but I was alive, and I decided that for the time being, that was enough.

I saw we were at the top of the Bone Sepulchre, in a spire barely large enough for four people to stand shoulder to shoulder. I poked Casey with my good arm. “Are you all right?”

“More or less,” she panted. “Can’t stop shaking.”

“We’re lying on ice,” I said, and giggled. There was no rationality behind laughing—I was just glad to be alive, even with a busted arm, trapped at the top of a frozen spire. I tried sitting up and found it wasn’t an entirely impossible feat.

The spire room wasn’t polished like the rest of the Bone Sepulchre. The ice was rough here, icicles dripping from the ceiling, as if we were standing inside a pincushion. The walls were covered with black marks, and the floor, when I managed to clamber to my feet, was jagged and uneven.

“This is nuts,” Casey said. “We’re never going to get back down those stairs, and Mr. Crosley will skin me alive for sure.” She looked ready to cry. I held up a hand.