I curled up in a ball, away from him. I wanted to be smaller and smaller, until I disappeared. Having a Weird that Draven and Tremaine would kill for was bad enough. If they, or the Brotherhood, knew what I could truly do, create Gates out of thin air, I’d never be safe again. They would all converge, fight over who got to use me or murder me. Depending on their outlook, I was a savior or a destroyer.
I would never be free, and neither would anyone I cared about.
“I have to …” I sat up, even though it hurt almost as much as trying to manipulate the nightmare clock. “I have to put things right.”
Crow worried his lip and looked at me. His teeth were small and square, not pointed like the ones I’d come to associate with most inhuman things. “I can’t let you,” he said. “The Old Ones—”
“I’ll put them back.” I grabbed his arm and made it fruitless for him to pull away. His forearms, on the insides, were snaked with black marks, ink tracing the scars to form words, though they were in a language I couldn’t decipher. I held on. “You told me I can do it. I can cross worlds. I can make them stop ever coming to you again. I can put them back where they belong, out in the cold, empty space where they can never escape.”
“Nobody knows what I go through, keeping them from the rest of the worlds,” Crow said, looking up. “When they talk, it’s in riddles. To hear their voices would melt your eyes out of their sockets.”
“Then you’ll have to tell me what to do,” I said, holding on to him as he stood up, falling against his hard chest. The warmth of his skin made my cheek flush.
“I don’t think you understand what you’re willing to do,” Crow said. “I don’t think you can.”
“I think you want things to be set right as badly as I do,” I said. “I think you’re scared of those things.”
“If you fail,” Crow said, “you’re going to set them loose. On everything. The Gates and what’s happening to the Iron Land will be a tiny dot of misery on history’s time line of pain if they’re allowed.”
“That’s a chance I’ll take,” I said. I could do it. I had to. In the back of my mind, I recognized the same sort of desperation that made people in Lovecraft do insane, suicidal things like hurl firebombs at Ravenhouse and attack Proctors in gangs, dragging them off to be hanged from old machine skeletons in the Rustworks.
And I didn’t care. I would get what I needed from Crow.
“Even if I have faith you can deliver on your promise,” Crow told me, “you would have to face the clock. And it’s not a clock, not really. It’s a vessel holding in the past and the future and the dreams that tie them together.” He held up his palm, bloody from where he’d touched me. “That’s what it is, when you look into the heart of it. The nightmares of everyone you love. A machine made of bad dreams that you must walk through to use the clock. Nobody can weather that storm, I don’t think. Not Tesla. Not even you.”
I pressed my palm against his, taking the blood back onto my own skin. “I can,” I said. I didn’t even bother to hope Crow couldn’t see the lie. He had known what I’d say before the words left my tongue. But at last, to the greatest relief I’d ever felt, he pretended to believe me, and folded his fingers over mine.
“Then so be it.”
18
The Nightmare Machine
TOUCHING THE NIGHTMARE clock didn’t hurt this time; it just took up residence in my mind as surely and swiftly as a thought. There was no sensation of falling, no pulling apart as vast mathematical distances compressed like accordioned paper to accommodate my body.
I was simply there, in another place, as if I’d fallen asleep and forgotten where I was.
Crow stood next to me, looking singularly unhappy. “How long this lasts is up to you,” he said. “The clock is a harsh master. I’ll be here, but I can’t interfere. If you can weather the machine grinding your mind, you may use it. But you won’t.”
I didn’t argue. I had no idea what was coming, except that it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Crow looked around at where we were, which was nowhere special. We stood on a brick sidewalk in front of a blue house, shutters sagging and paint a thing more of memory than of fact. “You know this place?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling a hard lump in my chest. I did know it, too well. Here, I was eight years old. Here, in our first care-home, Conrad and I were in a dark closet, sitting with our knees pulled to our chests, smelling musty winter coats. Here, we were locked in, because we’d been bad.
Not bad.
But I knew the closet was worse for Conrad. He hated small spaces. He had gotten himself stuck in a dumbwaiter in our old flat once and nearly stopped breathing before the landlord fished him out and returned him to our garret. My mother had barely noticed he’d been gone at all, lost as she was in her fancies.
That had been the beginning of the end. The landlord called the care-workers. The care-workers called the Proctors. The Proctors took her away.
Conrad would shift next to me in the dark during those times, and I would hear choked breathing. I would pretend he wasn’t silently sobbing into his knees. I’d squeeze whatever part of his arm I could find in the dark and whisper it’d be okay.
It wasn’t okay, for months. Finally our neighbor noticed we were rail thin and still wearing the same clothes we’d arrived in. We were rushed out, to another care-home, which I now knew was because Archie was trying to make sure we were all right while he was off with the Fae, chasing the specter of harmony of a world without Proctors. He’d greased the Lovecraft care-workers well enough that if we were being abused in any flagrant way, we got moved to a new care-home and never got separated.
But for those months, there was the closet. I didn’t mind it after a while. At least we were out of our care- mother’s sight, and even if we had to sleep in there, she didn’t bother us.
Conrad, though, stopped sleeping, stopped eating, jumped at every sound. He thinned out in more ways than physically, and spent long patches of time just staring at things like the aethervox or the hole in the front hall carpet, waiting. Waiting for the next time he’d go up into the hot darkness and be locked in.
And in his nightmare, I was right there with him.
Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t tell my sister it was going to be all right. I was weak. That horrible fat woman made me weak, no matter how hard I tried to stand and be the man of the family. I wanted to grab the scissors she used to chop off all of Aoife’s hair and jam them into her fat back so far they disappeared, up to their pearl-handled hilt.
“No!” I screamed, Conrad’s anger feeling like acid in my guts and throat.
His claustrophobic rage was like a tide, and I swam away from it, trying to define my own memories of that horrible house. It didn’t help much, but the thing did begin to crumble, collapsing on its foundation like I hoped it had years ago.
Then it was over and we were gone, and in an entirely new kind of darkness. This one was alive, rustling, stinking of wet dog. Old sewer pipes dripped above me, water landing on the back of my hand, brackish and black like blood in a no-color lanternreel.
This dream I didn’t recognize from my real life, but I knew who it had to be and I didn’t want to have to see it.
Cal watched as light appeared, half in and half out of his ghoul shape.
The light was carried by a girl, plump and buxom, with rosy cheeks and bouncing curls. Bethina stopped and looked at him, and her pretty face crinkled in disgust.
“
As I occupied his view in the dream, I saw what he wanted to tell her, so badly it ached. He wanted to tell her, and knew he never could, that eventually he’d either break her heart or reveal himself as a monster, to her disgust and terror.
“Bastard!” Bethina shrieked, and all around her Cal’s nest came to life, ghouls pawing and clawing at her, tearing her clothes. I choked, doubling over, but the air of the sewer wasn’t any better and I couldn’t breathe.
“
