I jerked away from Dean’s touch and stood to open the glass door of the clock face. “We have to wind it,” I repeated, resolute that I wasn’t going to blush, cry or show any reaction whatsoever to Dean seeing my scar. It wasn’t any of his concern. It wasn’t any of my concern what he thought of it.
“So you’re not going to spill how it got there?” Dean pulled a mock pout. “Hardly seems fair. You know everything about me.”
“I find that hard to believe, Dean.” I wound the clock key. It was stiff but turned smoothly, with none of the hitches in the gears that I’d first encountered.
“You know plenty,” Dean said. “You know that my name’s Dean Harrison, that I’m a heretic but a hell of a charming guy, I smoke Luckies and I don’t much care for onion rings.”
I laughed, hoping Dean had let the scar go at mild curiosity. “That last part, I didn’t know.” The key wound tight, and I stepped back, shutting the glass over the sinister paintings on the clock face.
“Now you,” Dean coaxed. “Come on. What’s your favorite lantern flick? Favorite record? Preferred flavor for a milk shake?”
I watched the gears of the clock whirr to life. “You don’t get my secrets that easily, remember?”
Dean shrugged. “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Secrets are my stock-in-trade.”
I gave Dean a small smile, a genuine one. I hadn’t felt much like smiling since I’d gotten Conrad’s letter, but Dean made it a little easier. “Maybe you should try a bit harder.”
The clock hands flipped over on ten o’clock, and the chime drowned out any secret I might have been tempted to slip into Dean’s grasp.
“That’s something,” Dean said when the sonorous tolling had ended. At least it didn’t make my head spin anymore. “I know my way around a jitney engine, but this …” He smiled. “You’re a bright penny, kid.”
I wiped the grease from my hands with my toolkit’s supply of rags, watching in satisfaction as the clock spun on with nary a hitch. “You can call me Aoife, you know.” Not that I minded very much being called princess.
Before Dean replied, a great rumbling like a waking beast began under our feet. Dean’s eyes snapped wide. “What on scorched earth is that?”
The books on the shelves vibrated, as if they were itching to shed their covers and fly away. I grabbed hold of a shelf to keep my footing, and Dean reached for me as well. “I don’t know,” I shouted over the rumbling. From far off, I heard crockery falling and Bethina give a scream. What had I done now?
“Aoife?” Cal stumbled into the library on the bucking floorboards. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know!” I didn’t, truly, and my panic rose along with the rumbling from under the floor, as if we were standing in the bowels of the Lovecraft Engine, chambers turning at full capacity and pressure building without a relief valve.
Then, abruptly as it had come upon us, the rumbling ceased and a section of wall above my father’s writing desk rolled back, soundless as the servant’s passage to the kitchen. But this was smaller and older, clearly built into the house at conception. It hid a brass panel, half as tall as I was and twice as wide. Dials and switches, valves and an antique static board using glass breakers filled the tiny recess in the library wall.
I approached it, wondering at the artfulness of the construction even as I felt trepidation build. Hidden rooms and hidden panels that controlled hidden things never boded well.
Dean let out a breath, his fists uncurling. “That’s a new one. What d’you suppose it’s for?”
“I have no idea,” I said. The panel reminded me of the controls on the Berkshire Belle, except these were older, more archaic, and there were a lot more switches and keys than a simple airship flight board.
“Don’t touch it!” Cal cried when I took a step toward it. I cast a glare back at him.
“Cal, it’s brass and wood. It’s not going to grow teeth.” I was cautious, but not scared. Machines were what I was good at.
I approached the hidden panel with its rows of switches labeled with painfully neat, handwritten placards: Library, Front Hall and Cellar Traps among at least a dozen others, all in an orderly, masculine hand on yellowed vellum squares.
Conrad had told me to fix the clock and in doing so I’d revealed Graystone’s secret heart. Conrad had vanished before he could perform whatever task he needed this panel for himself. But he’d had the forethought to send me the letter, to hide the note. He knew I’d come if he asked.
What I knew ever since that awful day in my dormitory room a year ago came true when I realized that Conrad had been planning for me to come here, to carry on where he couldn’t.
My brother wasn’t mad.
And if he wasn’t mad, then he was in a world of trouble.
14
The Iron Bones
DEAN JOINED ME at the panel, examining the controls. “Slick setup. Dare you to press one of those switches.” He reached for the closest lever, marked Kitchen.
“Don’t,” I said. For some reason I couldn’t define, I wanted to be first. It was my father’s house, my father’s device, and I wanted to be the one to discover how it worked.
Bethina peered around the library door. “Miss, what was that awful racket? Are we safe?”
“For the time being,” I murmured, touching each dial. Every facet of Graystone somehow connected to these antique controls.
“Awful shaking and shivering,” Bethina continued. “Like the Great Old Ones returned from the stars. My mum was raised in a Star Convent, and she told me—”
“That’s all mumbo jumbo,” Cal told her. “This is engineering.”
“Flash work, too,” Dean said. “I don’t think Bethina’s that far off, cowboy. This thing Miss Aoife woke up ain’t just cold metal and gears. Houses have blood and gristle and bone, just like a person. Houses have souls.”
Cal jerked a thumb at me, at Dean. “Aoife, are you going to let him just babble heresy all day long?”
I rather liked Dean’s heresy. Graystone was like a living thing, old and dessicated, but alive still.
“Give it up,” I told Cal. “Let’s see if we can piece these controls together.”
At the top of the row of knobs, there was a dial marked Front Hall. “For what it’s worth, Dean,” I continued, “I don’t think you’re just speaking heresy.” Because Graystone did talk. It had warned me away like a wounded animal; when I’d fixed the clock, it had come into the open and showed me its face. Graystone wasn’t like any house I’d ever stepped foot in, and I knew that it had more secrets to give up, secrets that would lead me to my brother.
I put my hand on the dial. “I’m just going to turn it on and see what happens. If anything harmful was in the workings, it would have gone off when I fixed the clock.” Giving what I hoped was a reassuring nod—because in reality, I had no idea what would happen—I ran my fingers over the row of knobs, then settled back on Front Hall. If something in Graystone’s bones was malicious, the front entry was far enough away that we’d probably be safe.
“So you said, miss. I’m having no business with that thing,” Bethina said, scuttling away. Cal backed off too. Dean stayed where he was, hands in his pockets. His pale storm-sky eyes were implacable as thunderheads.
The Front Hall dial was inlaid with tiny darts of onyx, pointing to the four stations of the compass, labeled in stamped brass with Open, Shut, Lock and Trap. Lock was engaged, and the dial was sticky when I tried to turn it. There was a squeak of rust as I put force behind the motion, and then the dial came free and flew all the way to the left, to Open.
A cool wind rushed over my cheek and blew back my hair, darting from the entry along with a flock of oak leaves. Cal hurried to the library door and peered into the front hall. “Door’s open,” he exclaimed. “I’ll be a shoggoth’s uncle.”