didn’t have life or a mind of its own.
“You look a little pale, Aoife,” Cal said. “You feeling all right?”
“I … yes. Perfectly fine.” I went about returning all of the dials on the panel to their original positions. “Everything seems to be in order.”
“Not quite,” Cal said. “The Library dial is stuck.”
“I’m sure it just wants a little greasing,” I said. “I’ll see if Bethina knows where the autogarage is on the grounds.”
“Maybe if we tried turning it together,” Cal said. “I mean, who knows how long this thing has been shut away? It could have rusted.”
“All right.” I put my hand on the dial and tried to turn it, to no avail. It was, as Cal said, stuck fast.
Cal slid his hand over mine, his long fingers closing down. They were cold. “Together,” he said. “One, two …
We twisted, and Cal’s fingers grated against mine hard enough to force a cry from my lips. Just as quickly, the pressure eased and the dial snapped over hard, a clank of mechanisms speaking to the neglect that Graystone had suffered since my father had gone missing.
But nothing happened. No more miracles of engineering and clockwork revealed themselves. The library stayed stubbornly the same.
“Guess it’s busted,” Cal grumbled. Dean came tromping down the front stairs, his boots leaving scuffs on the white marble of the entry hall.
“You gotta peep the upstairs of this place when the clockwork’s turned on,” he said. “There’s a map of the world that moves and has a nautical compass, up there in the gentleman’s parlor, and a stenotype that types by itself when you say words into a phono-phone.” He caught sight of Cal’s and my hands, intertwined. “Somewhere else I should be, maybe?”
“It’s not that,” I said quickly. “We’re just trying to get this silly library control unstuck.” I twisted again and only succeeded in straining my wrist. It wasn’t much compared with Cal and Dean trading glares.
“Forget it, Aoife,” Cal said. “If I can’t get it working, then you certainly can’t. I’m much stronger.”
After the thick tension of the day so far, I balked. Of course I was used to being tolerated as an oddity in the School of Engines. Of course I bore it with good breeding and grace. In Lovecraft. But here, in my father’s house, a house built with the same vision that made gears dance behind my eyes and steam whisper in my dreams where other girls saw designer pumps and lanternreel stars, I was thrice-damned if I would bear it any longer.
I grabbed the dial with both hands and wrenched, putting my back into it and ignoring the pain. As before, a spark of static flew from the panel and shocked my fingers with enough voltage to make my small hairs stand on end. My forehead began to throb, and then the dial assembly gave, quickly as the clock had stopped for me before.
An abrupt grinding emanated from the ceiling, along with a long plume of dust. I jerked my head up, half expecting to see the cracked plaster ceiling caving in on us. Instead, a telescoping ladder of wood and brass unfolded, spider legs feeling delicately for purchase against the floor. A small trapdoor slid ajar in the smooth plaster of the library ceiling, nearly twenty feet above my head.
“Place has more holes than an anthill,” Cal said. “What do you suppose is up there?”
I was already on the third rung of the ladder, the hidden room a draw I couldn’t ignore. “I don’t know, but I aim to find out.”
“No …,” Cal started, but then he sighed and held up his hands. “Just don’t get yourself lost in some dark hole where we can’t find you again.”
“Don’t you worry.” I flashed him a smile from above. “Escaping from dark holes is my specialty of late.” I’d been everywhere else in the house, and while it was remarkable, it also told me nothing useful. This had to be the spot where I’d find a clue to Conrad’s whereabouts, and Archibald’s. Deep down, I somehow knew this hidden room would hold the solution to how I’d find and free my brother and my father. It came on me quick as fear, but it was certainty instead. I had to figure out a way to find them. Because otherwise, I was out of brilliant ideas.
“Aoife, wait.” Dean fumbled in his jacket.
“You’re not talking me out of this,” I told him.
Dean found his lighter and tossed it to me. “Not trying to. Just, I wouldn’t want you all alone in the dark up there.”
I thanked him by tucking the lighter into the top of my boot for easy reach when I needed it. Then I grabbed the slender ladder and climbed higher.
15
I CLIMBED INTO the dark, passing the trapdoor and feeling along on my hands and knees, across boards covered in a half-inch of dust and grime. This attic space was warm and close, cobwebbed by time and neglect, and I tried to touch as little as possible.
Fumbling the lighter from my boot, I clicked the spark wheel once, twice, and a flame shot into the shadow, warning the dark back with a hiss.
The hidden room at the top of the library was small and A-shaped, tucked where the gables of Graystone met the roof. A four-pane leaded window blacked out with oiled paper cast weak light into the space, which showed me the silhouette of an oil lamp. I removed the sooty globe and touched Dean’s lighter to the wick. The flame guttered for a moment and then caught, and I lifted the lamp to more carefully examine the room.
Books surrounded me, crowded in, piled on shelves, on the floor, on the single scarred table in the center of the space like miniature ruins. The volumes were nothing like the pristine texts in the library below—these were older, in disrepair, spines cracked where there were still spines to break, water stained and page-rumpled. Books with miles of use. Mrs. Fortune would call them “well loved.”
I’d completed one circular survey of the tiny room when the trapdoor snapped closed again and a pair of locks engaged.
“Aoife!” Cal’s shout penetrated the floor as I scrambled over to the door, nearly smashing the lamp and setting the entire room ablaze. I scrabbled at the edges of the door, but the seal was tight and the locks were brass, with only a smooth face on my side.
My heart started to pound, and the close warmth of the room became oppressive as I started throwing books onto the floor searching for a release amid the shelves and the thousands of battered tomes. Nothing. I was locked in. I stood and flashed the light frantically along the walls.
Finally the lamp’s flame caught a shine and I saw a dial set into the wall at chest height, behind a stack of almanacs from the previous century.
“Aoife!” The ladder clanked as someone heavy—Dean—mounted it and rattled the door. “Aoife, we can’t get it open!”
“It’s all right!” I shouted. “There’s a switch up here!” The switch was a simple two-position job, but to my immense relief, one of them was
Retrieving the lamp, I moved it away from the piles of books on the floor and set it back on the writing table. This surface was crackle-varnished and scarred, covered in ink stains and crumpled vellum scraps, as different from the ornate desk in the library as the School of Engines was from the Lovecraft Conservatory. It was clear to my eyes that my father—or some bygone Grayson—had spent hours here, high in the house’s aerie. And judging from the papered window and the frozen lock, they had spent their hours locked away in secrecy, with no one from the house or the outside world able to see in or gain entry.
They may have been content to stay in the dark, but I didn’t like the secrets that the long shadows implied. I tore down the oil paper from the window, letting in the weak autumn sunlight and illuminating decades of untidiness.
The eaves hung lower than I’d first imagined, and the space was so crammed with books and oddities I
