Arachnodactyl (7 page)

As the chimes died out, Ikey’s heart climbed down from his throat.

“You must excuse him,” Rose said. “He’s being perfectly dreadful, I know, but it’s his way. Do not take it personally.”

Once the last of the chimes petered out, silence welled up around them, loud and overpowering with the absence of a fist punishing a wall, a foot kicked into a chair. Screaming. Crying. For all he could tell, Cross had simply ceased to exist once he slammed the door.

“He’s mad at me,” Ikey said. His words felt so much larger than intended. “I messed up. In the workshop. He wanted me to find some coils, but I found the arm and…”

“And?” Rose asked.

Ikey slurped at his stew. He wasn’t sure where to go with the statement. He wanted to ask about the nature of Rose, but the question sat lodged in the bottom of his belly. The thought of asking embarrassed him, like asking a woman he just met about her bathroom habits.

Ikey set the spoon aside. “I got distracted. I saw the arm and I forgot everything else because I had never seen anything like it. It was… beautiful.”

“Cross is clever, when he’s not being a jackass. But believe me, Ikey, what you saw this evening is a version of what passes for dinner around here every night. Cross has a lot riding on this project. It’s putting a strain on him. But that’s no reason for him to behave in such a boorish manner. Honestly, if he spent less time in the pub and more time in the hangar, he wouldn’t have these problems.”

Ikey took another spoonful of the stew.

Rose asked what he thought of it.

“It’s good.”

“You didn’t mention a mother. Who did the cooking for you, your dad, and your uncle?”

“Dad cooked.” Ikey looked back to the stew, his gaze weighted with overstatement.

“I don’t mean to pry, but is your mother deceased?”

Ikey nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that. How long ago did she pass?”

“A couple years.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. How dreadful,” Rose said. She extended her arm and her hand settled to the table not much farther than a foot away. Her fingers curled into a slight cup.

Ikey placed his hands in his lap to prevent himself from sliding a finger into one of the gaps formed by Rose’s fingers. He wanted to hook his finger around hers, squeeze, and feel the material of it under his touch. He wanted to run his fingers along her palm, take her wrist, gently turn it over and feel for the motion and machination in her wrist and arm.

“It’s all right,” Ikey said, his statement hardly more than a whisper. “They’re in a better place now.”

“Are you concerned about leaving your father and uncle at home?”

“No.”

“They’re in a position to take care of themselves, then, are they?”

“I suppose so.”

“Still, it’s a brave thing, what you did, to leave them behind when you have no one else in the world. But you must do what you must do. Many young men are leaving the farms. But those not sent to the Continent are leaving for Manchester in search of work, or so I hear.”

“Where are you from?” Ikey asked. The question leaped from his mouth before he realized he had asked it. He picked up his slice of bread and stuffed it into his mouth before anything else jumped out.

“I’ve been here my whole life.” Rose returned her hand to her lap, then took a bite of stew.

Ikey swallowed his bread and returned to the stew. His last question lodged itself in the air, like a stone that needed to be rolled aside before the conversation resumed flowing. He looked at the lantern. Its oily, hunchbacked flame writhed at the end of the wick. He wanted to blow it out, plunge the room back into darkness. It was Cross who had brought the lantern, the light.

The conversation remained moribund. Ikey watched Rose eat, content to sit in the silence until the awkwardness boiled away like water in a sauce pan.

Finally, she asked, “Are you finished?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rose stood and extended a hand toward Ikey. “Pass me your dishes, please.”

He set his utensils in his bowl, set the bowl on the plate, and handed it to Rose.

She carried them towards the scullery. The chimes stirred with her passage.

Ikey stood. “Can I help?” Without awaiting an answer, he moved towards the head of the table and picked up Cross’s dish and bowl.

Rose stopped at the door. “That’s awful sweet of you.”

Ikey wished to rush over, toss aside the plate and bowl she held, and swipe the veil aside to see Rose smile. If she smiled. But the warmth in her voice said she did. Her tone. Those words held a small slant like words he might imagine passing through the curve of smiling lips.

Ikey smiled himself as he followed her out to the scullery.

I
nside the scullery
, hardly enough light to see by leaked in from the dining room. Ikey stopped and listened. Water plunged into a tub as his eyes adjusted. From his left, hardly visible patches of Rose’s skin emerged. She took dishes off the drainboard and dunked them into the sink. As she leaned forward, the veil fell forward and revealed the curve of her delicate ear and the upper part of her jaw. Once the dishes rested in the tub, she turned to Ikey, held out her hands, and asked for the rest.

Ikey stared at the outstretched hands a second. He stepped forward and held the dishes out to her. When she made no move to take them, he lowered them into her palms. Upon contact, she lifted, took the weight from him, and asked him to fetch the rest.

The experiment suggested that Rose was indeed blind. She moved around in the dark because light didn’t matter. So what was the point of the veil? What did it hide?

After Rose placed the remaining dishes in the tub, she picked up a bowl and rubbed a rag around and around the concave side, then swiped her fingers around the interior. Once finished, she scrubbed the convex side, dunked it in a pan of rinse water, and placed the bowl on the drainboard. After Rose washed a couple more dishes, uselessness settled over Ikey. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He should have joined Cross, but he didn’t feel compelled. Cross made no secret of his annoyance. Close to Rose was where he wanted to be. He wanted to study her, learn her secrets, divine how she functioned.

But as the music boxes defied Ikey’s ability to derive function from form, so did Rose. Just as the scroll work on Smith’s arm had been strictly decorative—all form and no function—what was the purpose of the black dress, the veil, the drapes and the dark?

“Are you in mourning?” Ikey asked, the words out of his mouth before he had finished thinking them.

“Why do you ask?” Rose set a plate on the drainboard with a clink.

Ikey flushed and looked into the shadows where the cupboard sat above the sink. It was a daft question. A private question. He had no right to ask. “When my brothers and sister died, Mum covered the mirror with a black shawl. And she wore her mourning dress for a week after each passed.”

Ikey swallowed and shifted his posture. The weight of the memory surprised him. It had gotten lighter over time, but when he dug it out from where it lay stashed deep inside, the burden of it compacted him, reduced him. His mum drifted around the house, her black skirt rustling a ghost’s whisper. Though she didn’t wear a veil, Ikey wished she had so that he didn’t have to see her swollen, red eyes avoid him.

“I didn’t lose anyone,” Rose said.

The admission blew away thoughts of his mum in mourning. He dropped the memory and it thudded to the floor of his brain as his mind raced in a new direction. What other function would explain this form? His brow dropped into heavy furrows.

He took a deep breath. Ridiculous. He was being ridiculous. He had grown up being told not to pry into the affairs of others or they might pry into his and his family’s. But he was far from home, and he was an adult. He shouldn’t pussy-foot around the issue like a shy boy in knee pants.

“Why do you wear the veil?” The pit dropped from Ikey’s stomach as he swung out into the silence behind the question.

Rose’s back straightened, though she continued to face the wall behind the sink. “What do you look like?”

Ikey rocked back on his heels. “I guess I’m five foot and six inches or so. I have brown hair. My eyes are brown.”

“What does that mean?”

“I…” Ikey shrugged. The room pressed in. Invisible shadows slithered across the dark walls and rippled over the floor. “I don’t know.”

Rose leaned back over the sink and plunged her hands into the water. “If I tell you my hair is black and my eyes are blue, does that tell you what I look like?”

“Are your eyes blue?”

“Answer my question, please.”

In his head, Ikey drew a picture of Rose’s face with a long, graceful jaw to match the neck. A thin wedge of a nose. High cheekbones and a high forehead anchored with brilliant blue eyes, the color of which he saw once in an icicle on a clear, brutal winter day.

“I can imagine,” Ikey said.

Rose scrubbed at the bottom of a pot. The water sloshed at the sides of the tub.

“I’ve never seen brown,” Rose said. “Or blue. I’ve been told that black is all I see, but I’m not sure how anyone can know what I see.”

“It’s what you know,” Ikey said. He nodded to himself.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The black,” Ikey said and swept his hand across the room. “It’s what you know. It’s familiar.” He held his tongue before he spoke of the safety of it, the security.

Rose gripped the edges of the sink. Her long fingers folded over the side. She looked like she might lift it up, tear it from its moorings. Could she? Ikey tried to imagine how much force Cross’s mechanical arm might generate.

“How old are you?” Rose asked.

Ikey told her. It seemed an inadequate answer.

“You don’t seem to be listening, Ikey. You’re just like Cross. Stop thinking for a moment and
listen
.”

Ikey nodded.

“No one can know what I see, because I see nothing. My world is not black. My world is not any color at all. And no one seems to understand that. Everyone wants to assume my experience is one they can understand, as if my world is equal to their own minus the ability to see. And it is a senseless way.”

Rose let go of the sink and put her hands back in the tub. “I cannot know what you look like. But I can know you down to your very heart. Frankly, for all the more depth of thought people seem to give, I’m glad to not be one of them—burdened with sight if it means I can never understand anything deeper than the surface of it.”

Rose yanked the pot up and tipped it over the tub. The water gushed out loud and hurried. The scent of strong soap flowered up, sharp and slick, but it never completely obscured the musty odor of mildew.

“Deeper,” Ikey whispered with a nod. His throat clenched at the notion of the question working its way down from his mind. He shoved the question past his throat.

“What’s at the heart of you?”

Rose placed the pot on the drain board, then tipped the tub into the sink. Again, the wave of soap swirled around them pleasant and clean, yet it highlighted the cedar-like scent of the mildew. Rose left the tub upset in the sink. She plucked the towel from the rod and drew her long hands through the cotton folds. None of the failing light glinted off rings. How had he not noticed that before?

Rose arranged the towel back over the rod. “Why do you ask? Are you out to prove something?”

Ikey shook his head. “No… It’s just that I’ve never seen anything like you. Your hands… They’re incredible. Beautiful. I only wanted to know…” His words stumbled from his mouth malformed and hideous; nothing like what he had imagined saying.

Rose folded her hands behind her back and turned toward Ikey. Once she faced him, she disappeared in the dim light; she became a shadow save for the faint sliver of reflection that caressed the edge of her jet brooch.

“Thank you for your help, Ikey. I don’t believe you ought to keep Cross waiting any longer than necessary.”

Ikey stood in the ruin of his words. He straightened his back, tightened his jaw, and arranged his well-practiced mask of a blunt, stoic stare. The effort of it struck him as silly. Pointless and useless. His jaw slacked and his eyes drifted shut as Rose’s dismissal burrowed through him.

“Yes, ma’am.” He reached for the backdoor, but then thought better of leaving the lantern burning unattended on the dining table. He fetched it. As he crossed to the backdoor, he took another look at Rose. She stood motionless as the long shadow of her shifted across the back wall of the room. She had become inanimate, as if Ikey had inadvertently muttered a mystical incantation that rendered her as lifeless as a dress dummy.

Ikey stepped through the backdoor, and Rose was a shadow again.

A
fter he shut the backdoor
, Ikey took a deep breath. Before he could think of how to make up for whatever misstep he had committed, Ikey noticed that the workshop windows stood black against the dark gray of the shack’s weathered wood.

Cross wouldn’t work in the dark, would he? He couldn’t. Not like Rose. Ikey stepped off the path and approached a window. Rain-spattered dirt crusted the glass. The lantern’s light struggled to wriggle inside, and it returned no indication of Cross’s presence. Ikey pushed the shack’s door. It creaked, and the hinges squealed until the edge of it became lodged in the scoring along the dirt floor.

“Cross?” Ikey called out.

The lantern guttered under a soft breeze. Shadows undulated everywhere across the workshop.

“Cross? You in here?”

The tank remained on the table, but it no longer sat in pieces. The white film that lined it obscured Ikey’s ability to see whether or not the new coils had been installed. He stepped inside. In the middle of the table sat the lantern Cross had used earlier. It had burned bright and hot over a long wick. Ikey considered lighting it, but recalled Cross’s instruction that he wasn’t to be in the workshop without him.

He crossed the room on tentative steps until he stood before the door at the back of the workshop.

“Cross?” he said into the wood. “It’s Ikey. I came out to help.”

The flame in his lantern let out a slight hiss. He raised his fist and rapped on the door. “Cross?”

Nothing. Ikey wrapped his hand around the tarnished and dented doorknob. The coolness of the brass pressed into his palm. He twisted the knob. Locked. Crouching, he examined the knob plate. A dark keyhole stared back at him.

Ikey stood and turned around. He placed the tips of his fingers against the dark lamp. Cold. If Cross had returned to the workshop after leaving the dining room, he hadn’t lit the lantern.

He set his lantern beside the other, then plucked up one of the numerous charred ends of matchsticks littering the ground. With it, he transferred a bit of flame from one lantern to the other. Ikey flicked the match to the floor as warm light pulsed through the workshop. He then stepped up to the shelves and surveyed the rows of music boxes. He rattled the shelf with his hand and listened. A few music boxes tinkled or plinked. A couple even blossomed with a few melodious notes before falling silent again like old men who had forgotten the tune. Ikey rattled the shelf again, cocked his ear, and traced down the one that sang the fullest song. He transferred it from the shelf to the table. He thumped his hand down beside the music box.

“Bugger,” he hissed at himself. His satchel remained in the scullery, forgotten beside the sink.

What the hell. Rose had told him to go out to the workshop, and if Cross caught him out here, he’d be in trouble anyway. Ikey went through the drawers in a tool chest beneath the table until he found a small screwdriver. Armed with something he could understand, he leaned over the music box and set to work.

The tip of Ikey’s tongue worked itself into the corner of his lips. It felt good to put his hands to work, his mind to humming. He set the head of the screwdriver to a screw and turned counter-clockwise until the screw wriggled up out of the music box and fell to the table with a click. He pinched it in his fingers and placed it in the upper-left corner of his workspace, forming left-to-right rows of screws and thin plates of copper and unpolished slivers of steel like ranks of soldiers at attention. These were the things he understood. Seeing below the surface presented him with no problem at all when he held the right tool, the right metric. The music box was half the size of a man’s head, and within minutes, its interior mechanisms sat exposed to the light.

Ikey thumped the table with his fist. The lantern light guttered, and inside the music box, a tiny mallet of tin on a wound spring flicked a sliver of glass suspended from a loop of wire. It let out a small chink like the back of a knife blade tapped against a glass.

Deeper inside, behind rods and springs and stacks of gears, glints of brass chimes trembled. Somewhere further inside, other small hammers struck oblique notes.

The music in the working boxes tumbled out like this; tiny incidents of percussion going on in the hearts of these contraptions. Their movements were timed by a mechanism that arranged their order like a conductor who built small, haunting songs from pebbles of noise. Brilliant.

Ikey rifled through the tool chest again. The tools returned large, ugly noises as he shifted them aside in search of a pair of needle-nose pliers. Once he found those, he pulled a tiny hammer and spring from the rod they perched on. A piece of metal clinked behind the box. Ikey set the hammer in its place in his rows of parts, then glanced behind the box.

Nothing appeared amiss.

Ikey turned the box around and looked for the other end of the rod that had held the hammer. It wasn’t visible. But neither was it apparent what had fallen over when he pulled the hammer off the rod.

Ikey thumped the table with his fist again. The box let out a few notes like sparks, and a slight ticking noise faded away quickly. He snatched up the box and gave it a gentle shake. Again, a few asynchronous notes and a
tick-tick tick-tick
faded to nothing within a few seconds.

Ikey put the music box down and sat back on his stool. He rubbed his hand across his chin. Stubble had formed over the course of the day, and it scratched at his palm, grounding him to the moment. He stood and paced around the table to gain different perspectives on the box. No more screws presented themselves. No latches. No hooks. No bolts. Nothing to indicate what the next step might be in disassembling the device.

After a circuit of the table, he settled on the stool again and picked up the pliers. He gripped the rod in the pincer and gave a slight tug. It budged a fraction of an inch. Something inside the device shifted. He set the pliers down and thumped the table again.

Tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick tick.

Ikey ran his hands across his face, up into his hair where he grabbed fistfuls and pulled. He picked up the pliers once again. With the pincers, he attempted to twist and pull and push everything he could pinch inside them. A rod came loose with no apparent consequence. A gear slipped out of a crevice when he gripped it by a cog and pulled, but upon closer inspection, the gear appeared to have no function at all; simply a random piece that had fallen into the works.

Once he had tugged at everything, he picked the box up and looked underneath. It sat on a disk of wood. Twisting it offered nothing. He turned the thing in his hands and peered at it from every angle, rotating it slowly and imagining all of the pieces as individual components and how they fit together and came into a single mechanism with a function dictated by its form. But none of it worked as it was supposed to. Most of it hardly worked at all. Rods with no obvious point or use. Gears the size of shirt buttons gripped others and formed chains of whirling cogs that appeared utterly superfluous and could have been replaced by a single, larger gear. He found springs buried deep inside and visible when the box was tilted a certain way against the light, but he couldn’t tell what they were connected to. The whole contraption appeared bound together without screws or bolts or latches or any discernible means of fastening. The music box was a giant mess that defied everything sensible about mechanics. The goddamned device had to have been assembled at some point. It had to be put together. And anything put together could be taken apart. It was the way of things.

Ikey tilted the music box on its side and tapped it against the table. In addition to the ticking, something cracked. As he righted the music box, a shard of broken glass dropped to the table.

Ikey lifted the music box over his head. With a grunt, he whipped it to the ground.

Hardware sprayed across the floor. Bits and pieces of it fanned out from the divot in the earth where it struck.

Wild-eyed, Ikey glanced to the doorway. He hoped to see Rose, but expected Cross, ropy arms over his chest, face impassive and enigmatic as his music boxes. Only the night regarded him from the open door. Crickets churred. Somewhere far off, a dog barked its complaint.

Ikey rubbed his face, then slammed a fist onto the table. The rows of parts jostled and tinkled. Their neat rows shifted into a scatter.

In the mess at his feet, the music box’s base sat next to the divot. Several rods stood at attention from holes drilled into the wooden disc. A small screw held a shilling-sized, brass plate to the center. A tiny hook stuck out from the edge of the disk. Otherwise, the device had disintegrated and offered no hints or clues as to how it came apart or ever went together.

Ikey glanced to the open door again. Cross would appear at any moment, dip his head as he passed under the doorway, then stand with his hands on his hips as he took in the wreckage and Ikey’s blunt ignorance.

The doorway remained empty as Ikey slipped from the stool. He sank to his knees at the thought of Cross’s fists flying. The long arms. The incredible reach that would bloody him to a pulp before he could think to cover his head.

Ikey gritted his teeth as his fingertips brushed over the parts and spread the damage out so he could get a good look at the sum of the parts. He found bits of tin and copper and brass rolled into thin chimes. Little bells appeared sporadically through the mess like tiny, metallic flowers poking out of mechanical loam. Slivers of broken glass hid among the wreckage, tethered by wire to rods or gears or other bits of glass. Small hammers of wood and metal and rubber lay in the debris. Everywhere sat gears and rods that offered no hints of how it all worked together.

Heat flooded his cheeks and leaked out with his breath. There was no hope of reassembling the thing. A scrap of paper caught his eye. He plucked it from underneath a thin plate of copper. The paper was yellowed, folded into a cube, and judging by the lines printed on it, torn from a ledger book. Ikey flicked the edge of his fingernail against the cube.

Tick.

He unfolded the cube of paper. Rows of penciled numbers stared back.

Ikey sat on his heels. His shoulders drooped while he surveyed the fifty or sixty music boxes sitting on the shelves in various states of disrepair or abandon. Inside? He shook his head at the thought of the numbers in the front parlor and the dining parlor alone. A hundred? More. Two hundred?

How long might it take to assemble one working music box? They were fussy beyond belief. Unfathomable and intricate. And where did Cross get the money? The miniature mallets and chimes were delicate pieces. The gears were tiny, thin pieces manufactured with a precision usually reserved for watches and small clocks.

Surely Cross sold the music boxes. They were amazing. Who wouldn’t want one? Who wouldn’t marvel at the craftsmanship, the novelty of a music box powered by the slightest vibrations? And the money Cross could demand for one would stagger most. The parts were costly. And how to replicate one eluded Ikey, so how could anyone figure out a process to churn them out in a Manchester factory? They were jewels. Mechanical jewels of noise and song.

If Ikey could figure out how to make one, then he could command a fortune for them as well.

He looked out the door. The dirt path disappeared into the night on its way to Cross’s dark house and Rose, the most amazing thing he’d seen. If Ikey learned how to replicate Rose…

His heart quickened at the thought. His own Rose. A creature incapable of experiencing pain or facing a harm that could not be mended. One designed to understand all there was to know of him and accept him regardless. His fingers traced through the shrapnel.

A creature that could forgive him.

In the pile of junk in the corner of the workshop, Ikey found an empty can into which he deposited the shattered music box. He returned the can to the junk pile and concealed it under a few random pieces of detritus. He then arranged the music boxes on the shelf to hide the gap where he had removed one. With the toe of his boot, he rubbed the divot in the floor. His efforts smoothed it out some, but a crescent-shaped indentation remained. Hardly noticeable. Almost anything could have made the mark. Finally, Ikey returned the borrowed tools, blew out the bright lantern, picked up the other one, and passed over to the exit. He gave the room another examination, and seeing no obvious sign of his intrusion, he closed the door behind himself.

On the left side of Cross’s house, a lantern or a sconce glowed and exposed a neighbor’s room through windows cast open to the settling coolness of the spring night. On the right side, the harsher glow of electric light lit the rooms. Though the neighbors weren’t visible, their homes smoldered with signs of life. Between them, Cross’s house sat black and impenetrable. A hole in the row of lit houses. Rose sat inside, isolated from the petty needs of people.

Ikey crossed the yard. A lot of time and patience would be required to fathom how Rose operated.