Read Online The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Menace by Bec McMaster - Free Book Online

it was afraid
of her .
    Perry licked
dry lips. “Stay right where you are. What’s your name? What’s your
purpose here?”
    Thick fingers
flexed behind the creature’s leather half-glove, revealing four
thick fingers. She could just make the tiny clockwork whirring in
the joints as they flexed. Not mech-made, but clock-mech, which was
an older form of mechanism the blacksmiths had been able to devise.
True mech work often joined seamlessly with flesh, but this was a
stop-gap measure.
    Clothes hung
from its figure and someone, not too long ago, had cut the man’s
hair neatly, though lack of attention made it stick out beneath the
cap he wore. His cheeks bore the burr of gingery fluff, though
nothing grew on the scarred section of his upper lip. Brass
earmuffs covered its ears, and she could almost hear the tinny
vibration of her own words echoing within the contraption, with her
superior blue blood senses.
    “ Lovecraft?” Hobbs’ diary had said his lip was cleft, and he
suffered from deafness, after all. Could this creature be the
orphaned child he’d spoken of? “Can you hear me?”
    The behemoth
didn’t move. One eye rolled, as though he was trying to see what
she’d been doing below stairs. Nervous sweat trickled down his
temples. Perry made a decision.
    “ I’m going to put my gun away,” she told him, holding it up.
“Please don’t make any sudden moves. I just wish to speak to
you.”
    The man backed
up a step as she moved, his eyes trained on her pistol like an
animal that knew when something could hurt it.
    Perry slid it
into her holster, and held her hands up in a placating gesture. “My
name is Perry. I’m a Nighthawk, here to discover what happened to
Hobbs. He was your... your friend, wasn’t he?”
    Wary blue eyes
met hers. The man nodded, and made a sound that showed where his
lip had been sewn together over what looked like a pair of fused
metal teeth.
    So, Lovecraft
could hear her - or understand some of what she spoke of. Another
glance at those clockwork hands promised that he’d had nothing to
do with Hobbs’ murder. He wouldn’t be able to grip a pistol.
    “ Did you know Nelly Tate, the actress? Did she come here at
all, to get her leg seen to?”
    “ Nerly,” Lovecraft growled, but she couldn’t be certain if he
was repeating her, or answering her question. He circled her
warily, then disappeared down the ladder.
    Perry
hesitated. Returning to the dark made her feel somewhat less safe,
but she didn’t gain the feeling that man-child would hurt her, so
she followed.
    The behemoth
limped across the floor, then lifted the mattress in the corner,
and slid out a thin lacquered box. “Nerly,” he said again, lifting
the lid to show her.
    There were photographs inside it; a seated man and a woman
who stared unsmiling at the camera, with her hand resting on his
shoulder. Scrawled across it were the words: ‘To James, With Love, Nelly .’ There
were also a whole string of playbills advertizing her in various
theatre productions going back almost six years.
    More
photographs revealed the young actress, both at another theatre and
smiling shyly in a park. One of them featured a young boy in short
strings, with his hand clasped through a much-younger Nelly’s, and
a frozen look on his deformed face as he stared at the
photographer.
    Lovecraft. Perry looked up over the
edge of the photographs, and put them gently back into the box.
“Nelly and James were friends, weren’t they? They’ve known each
other a long time.” Since Nelly was a young girl, judging by that
last photograph.
    He made a
muffled sound, fingering the last photograph with a child-like
wistfulness.
    “ Perhaps it would be best if you come with me,” Perry
suggested, setting a hand on his sleeve. From the smell of him,
he’d been sleeping in alleys the last few nights. “I’ll take you to
the Guild. We can get you something to eat and drink, and perhaps a
bath? Would you like that? Would you–”
    He yanked