Chapter Text
After approximately three weeks, Peter Alexander Walter finally concluded that his work was killing him.
It was only because he had woken up that morning in the exact same manner that he had for numerous days beforehand. The first thing he saw was a stream of obnoxious sunlight, blazing its way through the gaps in his curtains to fill the room with unnecessary brightness. The light burned his eyelids until he surfaced from sleep, only to be struck first thing by a feeling of overwhelming dizziness.
His head was swimming as if he hadn’t gotten any sleep at all. The sunlight that invaded his room made a point of proving him wrong, though, as the world outside his window had been pitch-black the last time he remembered seeing it. Peter squinted at the light and unearthed one arm from the covers to shield his eyes. He didn’t want any sort of motivation to get out of bed. The only way to keep the symptoms at bay, it seemed, was to move as little as possible. Just being awake, he was already starting to feel ill.
Peter rubbed at his bleary eyes with his fingertips and rolled onto his back. His gaze wandered around the room, trying to find the stout wooden clock that sat atop his bureau. He hoped it wasn’t too late. If the time was even a minute past nine, some maid of his or another would be knocking at his door at any moment.
The clock face told him it was 8:54 in the morning, give or take a minute. Peter sighed heavily. Six minutes would have to do. He hoped that the dissociation in his head would wear off by then. He didn’t have very much faith in the assumption, but he supposed that six minutes was better than nothing.
Some span of time that felt like less than six minutes later, there was a knock at the door accompanied by a chipper, lilting voice. “Mr. Walter? Are you awake, sir?”
Peter inhaled deeply and rubbed at his forehead. “Yes,” he croaked in reply. “I’m awake. I’ll be with you in a moment. Just... let me get dressed.”
“Alright,” the maid outside said. “I’m sorry to wake you, sir- um, I... I-I mean, I didn’t mean to disturb you. No need to rush, sir. Take your time.”
Judging by the stutter, it was definitely Iris who had come to wake him.
“It’s alright, Iris. Now run along. The other girls probably have work for you already.”
The hallway was silent for a second, then filled with the delicate tapping of scuffed shoes making their way back to the parlor by the entrance where they belonged. Peter stared at the door long after she had gone. It was strange, he thought. Iris seemed to be the only one of his maids who had been coming to his room to wake him, as of late.
He sighed and ran the fingers of his free hand through his rat’s nest of indigo hair. It pulled as his knuckles slipped past a knot, and he winced. He was halfway to sitting upright and felt almost nothing, so far. For a moment, he wondered if he would be able to get through the rest of the morning without incident.
As soon as he had gotten to his feet, he realized exactly how impossible that would be.
The feeling hit him suddenly with the force of a lead pipe. Peter swayed for a second, then sat back down on the edge of the mattress. Nausea stabbed at him like a knife in his flesh, twisting his insides into a painful knot. He doubled over, arms at his waist, and groaned in exasperation.
Yes, there it was. This was the exact same sensation he had been waking up to for nearly a month.
He sat for a minute, breathing deeply, waiting for the sickening waves to subside. It took longer than he would have liked for the edge to come off, and for him to regain the ability to stand. He gripped the bedpost beside him as he staggered to his feet and took slow, measured breaths, trying to stave off the dizziness in his skull and the unsettled feeling in his stomach. It did help a little bit, which was something. He made his way to the closet, took out a few random articles and threw them at the bed, approached them and collapsed facedown onto the mattress. His stomach was still churning. He swallowed convulsively to numb the feeling of bile burning in his throat, curled up on his side and promptly lost his will to move.
He wouldn’t mind lying in bed for the rest of the day. Maybe the rest of his life. But, eventually, his conscience got the better of him. It wouldn’t do for him to lay there until the feelings subsided. He wished he could, but there was work to be done. Miriam and her girls were waiting for him. The project he’d left out in the lab wouldn’t finish itself. He knew that much, but his head and body just weren’t having it today.
It took him far too long to get dressed. Once he had finished, the nausea had at least started to calm down. It usually did a few minutes after waking up. It never disappeared completely, though, and he had learned not to expect it to. He glanced at the clock again and wished he hadn’t slept so late. It was 9:12. He hoped the maids had found enough work on their own to keep themselves busy while he was absent.
Once out of his room, he noticed the distinct smell of baked goods drifting up from the ground floor. He followed it down the staircase and into the kitchen. Half of Miriam’s staff had gathered there, already working at dusting off shelves and sweeping the floor. The wood-burning stove had been lit, and Peter’s copper kettle sat atop the small flames that flickered through the top. The smell that had drawn him in was coming from a flat metal tray that had been balanced beside the kettle, holding a handful of cinnamon rolls. They had been iced, and the congealed frosting was beginning to melt, dripping and caramelizing on the tray.
“Linda,” he said to the maid nearest to him. She looked up from her task of cleaning the sink. “Do you know where Miriam is?”
Linda shook her head. “Not sure, Mr. Walter. Probably looking for you, or something else for herself to do.”
“Right, then I suppose I should find her and give her my instructions.” He glanced regretfully at the rolls on the stove and the kettle that was beginning to steam. Eating was the absolute last thing he wanted to do at the moment, and the sight of them made him feel guilty all over again. It was a small matter, though. He’d get over his sickness eventually, and once he did, they would still be there.
Before he could step out of the kitchen, he was intercepted by the imposing figure of a large, middle-aged Irish woman. Piercing blue eyes studied him from a ruddy, freckled face. “Ah. There y'are, Master Walter. Weren’t it for Iris, I’d’ve assumed you had already disappeared fer the day.”
“Good morning to you, too, Miriam,” Peter said. The head maid smiled cordially at him before brushing past into the kitchen. He followed her, planning to take a few rolls from the tray to eat whenever he felt up to it. Black tea would probably help, too.
Miriam cozied up beside Linda and lifted a tin pail up to the running tap of the sink. “What’s on the agenda fer today, sir? Anything particular we should take care of?”
“Just the usual routine, for the most part,” Peter instructed. He took a teacup and saucer from the cabinet. “There is one thing that needs addressing, though.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Do you have any girls who don’t mind spiders?”
Miriam placed her pail on the floor and crossed her arms over her ample chest. “We ain’t duchesses, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Well, I keep finding spiderwebs on the leftmost shelf in the library. I know the window next to it blows open from time to time, and something might have gotten in. Perhaps you could assign someone to clear the webs away, maybe examine the latch? I’ll fix it on my own time, if it’s broken. It’s been a while since they were last replaced.”
“Leave it to me, sir,” Miriam said with an affirmative nod. She gathered her supplies and started for the stairwell.
“One last thing, Miriam,” Peter called after her. The woman paused and glanced back at him. He gestured to the kettle and cinnamon rolls. “Was it you that set all of this out?”
“No,” she replied with a shake of her head. “M’afraid not. It’s another one of the girls again.”
“So it is,” Peter said absently. He heard Miriam’s heavy footsteps fade elsewhere in the house as he took out a tea strainer from a drawer and began spooning leaves into it from a ceramic jar in the pantry. The kettle whistled and he quickly lifted it from the flame. A warm amber color blossomed in the water as he poured it into the cup. He moved the tray of rolls from the stove and set it on the counter, then plucked two from the glaze of hot sugar that glued them down and placed them on the saucer. They were warm, the thin stripes of icing oozing over the edges of the pastry and onto his fingertips. He licked some of it away before setting out to his upstairs study. He had some documents to organize before he could start work in the lab.
The house was alive with activity as it never was at any other time of day. The maids had scattered, but Peter could still hear them. Somewhere in the echoing manor, two were chattering in what sounded like German. He heard Linda start to sing some Spanish folk song while she worked in the kitchen.
“E-excuse me, Mr. Walter?”
Peter stopped in his tracks. Just down the hall, a maid was kneeling on the floor beside a pail and a scouring brush. She looked even smaller like that, on her knees, one hand outstretched towards him.
“Yes, Iris?” he replied.
Iris got to her feet, moving gingerly, and scurried in his direction. She offered up her hands, looking at the saucer and teacup he held. “Let me carry those for you.”
“That’s not necessary, Iris. It’s perfectly fine if-”
“I-I meant to tell you that I’ve been washing the tiles in here,” the maid stammered, cutting him off. “I started at the other end, but when I heard you coming I realized your study was this way, and I wouldn’t want you to slip...” She stopped abruptly, realizing her mistake, and turned her face up to him, her dark eyes wide open and ashamed. “I’m... I’m sorry, Mr. Walter, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“It’s alright, Iris,” Peter said calmly, and for what was probably the thousandth time he’d said it. Iris’s expression softened a little, as if he’d forgiven her for some serious offense. He glanced at the saucer in his hand. “You can carry this, if it would make you feel better.”
“Th-thank you, Mr. Walter.” She gently took the saucer from him and led him, stepping carefully, across the slick hallway floor. At the study door, she returned it to him with just as much care.
“I appreciate your consideration,” Peter said, doing his best to smile at Iris. “Now, as you were.”
“Yes, Mr. Walter,” Iris affirmed, nodding enthusiastically. She made her way back to her pail and brush, glanced at the faint footprints she had left in the sheen on the tiles, and immediately returned to her task. Peter watched her for a second before disappearing into his study and closing the door.
The study was, as usual, in a state of relative disarray. The maids were always instructed to touch it last out of all the rooms in the house, and with good reason. The room was a fine mess of blueprints, notes and sketches scattered over every surface possible, open half-read books left out of their shelves, random photographs, clippings and journals and other nameless paraphernalia. Peter placed the tea and saucer on the desk and went about attempting to organize the disaster area. As he did, he found himself thinking about Iris again.
She perplexed him. She always had, from the first day she arrived to perform her services for the manor. Iris was always obedient, always ready, willing and waiting to take commands from just about anyone, be it Peter, Miriam, or any of the other maids. It stood to reason, as that was the attitude most servants are expected to have. But Iris... Iris was different.
Peter thought back to the hallway. Without his even having to ask, Iris had been right there, ready to serve him, almost fawningly so. It wasn’t the first time she had acted that way. In fact, he’d almost come to think it was normal. But there was something inexplicably strange about how she had gone about it.
She had thanked him for giving her orders. Something about that just didn’t seem right.
While shuffling through the mountain of papers on his desk, he thought about Iris’s time serving at his manor. She’d always been a bit of a whipping girl. He tried to avoid taking advantage of her passivity, but Miriam and her other maids barely seemed to notice. Iris never failed to do whatever she was told, and as it was, she always seemed to be doing the dirty work; Iris was always the one who dealt with wasps’ nests and spiderwebs, the one who cleaned bathrooms and cleared out the rubbish bins. Most notably, she’d been the only one that Miriam would send to fetch him in the morning, as if waking him up were some great, perilous task. Perhaps it was because she was the newest employee of the housekeeping staff and still had to prove herself. Miriam and her company had been in the business for years, employing subordinate maids and keeping eccentrics like himself from living in total squalor. He was Iris’s first client working under Miriam. The woman had told him herself as soon as he hired her and her team. It had been nearly three years since Miriam’s staff had been helping him keep the old, nearly-crumbling mansion in a liveable condition. In all that time, Iris hadn’t changed in the slightest.
Such an odd bird , Peter thought to himself as he pushed books back onto shelves. Whatever could have happened to her to make her act like that?
A stack of papers was pushed from the desk’s surface to be placed in a drawer, and a small sheet of something-or-other that had been hiding underneath was suddenly exposed. It caught Peter’s eye, just for a second, before he forced himself to look away again. It was a sepia photograph, folded across the middle and dog-eared at the corners, but still holding an image that was all too clear. It was a young lady, bright-eyed and smiling, wrapped up in pale cotton and scads of buttons. A lab coat, the uniform issued by the old Cavalcadium before it had disappeared. She stood outside the huge, Roman-style building, leaned against a marble column with a set of lab goggles resting atop her head amidst waves of thick honey-brown hair.
Something in Peter’s chest cramped, and he glanced back at the table. He could have sworn that he’d put the rest of his photographs of Delilah away. Once he looked, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes away. He rested a hand on the table and stared down at the picture. Delilah stared back at him with lively eyes that had once been a beautiful foggy blue. He remembered it well. And the memory made him feel sick all over again.
Peter pushed the photograph aside and sank down into the overstuffed leather chair behind the desk. He wasn’t in the mood for this. It was far too early in the morning to be having yet another emotional crisis about the same thing he’d already been grieving over for far too long. He gazed at the picture for a while, now overturned and showing only the blank white back of the film and Delilah’s messy signature, along with a scribbled message that he didn’t care to read again. He already knew what it said.
For my dear friend, Peter. You will do great things!
Trying to focus on anything but the tightness in his throat, Peter remembered the tea and cinnamon rolls he’d left on the desk. He leaned over and pushed them towards himself, then lifted one roll from the saucer and took a savage bite out of the side. Food seemed to take away at least some of the sharp pains that stabbed at his core. The cinnamon roll had cooled quickly, no longer warm and soft as it had been, and the icing had begun to harden but still oozed over his fingers. He finished the first roll and chased it with tea, which had cooled to a tolerable temperature while he’d been clearing the study. The sick feelings in his stomach had subsided again once both rolls were gone, but something still unsettled him. Something still hurt, and it wasn’t something that pastries and tea could fix.
After licking the remaining glaze from his fingers and cleaning them on a piece of scrap paper, Peter reached for the photograph again. He flipped it over and gazed at Delilah’s sweet, smiling face. He could see it well in this one. The lighting was good, as was the film. He wouldn’t dare leave it lying around for one of the maids to discover. Might as well bring it with him to the lab. He could always use another reference.
Peter picked up a journal, carefully folded the photo into the pages, then picked up his used china and approached the door. He gave the study one last once-over. It seemed tidy enough. He left it at that and walked out. The hallway outside was empty, Iris gone, and the floor almost completely dry, except for a few spots where he vaguely remembered walking with her to the study door. He traveled to the landing, down to the ground floor and passed by the kitchen to leave his dishes in the freshly-cleaned sink, offering up a silent apology to Miriam’s staff for ruining their work so soon after it was finished. The house still buzzed as the maids went about their work. Peter passed by a few, who smiled and waved to him, on his way to the heavy oaken door at the back of the library. The spiderwebs on the leftmost shelf were gone, and the faulty window was shut. Iris had just been there, most likely.
The stairs to the basement were steep and cold, the bare stone surface an unwelcoming sight. Peter had grown used to it, though. He flicked a switch beside the doorframe and a row of electric lights flickered on, illuminating the staircase and rooms below in a soft yellowish glow. After passing through a storage space cluttered with boxes and defunct mechanical parts, there was another set of stairs with another switch, this one lighting up the staircase ahead in fluorescent white. Finally, Peter reached his workspace at the bottom.
Here it was even messier than the study. All manner of machinery lined the walls, not including the furnace and boilers that sat alone and ordinary in their respective corners. Wires crisscrossed the smooth floor, and at the very center was one of a few large, steel-topped tables. On it sat something that couldn’t quite be called a skeleton, but wasn’t very much more than that. Peter drew near and pulled a small metal cart along with him, toting even more sketches, notes and blueprints. In a metal lattice on one side, there were a handful of photographs held with clothespins amongst the rods. They were all of the same woman, the one who had been staring Peter down in his study only a few minutes before. Peter left the latest photograph on the table and went off to find a clean lab coat. He fastened it over his clothes and came back to the cart with a clothespin in his pocket. He pinned the photograph of Delilah to the lattice, leaving her among her identical sisters.
Peter stood back a moment to look at and appraise his work. She looked good so far. The iron in her “bones” had connected smoothly when Peter had spot-smelted them together. He tested a few of the joints. Over forty-eight hours, and they still held together and moved smoothly, not even squeaking. The cogs in her torso still sat dormant and untested, though. He had yet to add wires, connect everything together that would enable her to move on her own. Design was always a painstaking process, and it had taken him longer than expected to mold and cast the metal that would eventually give her a shape. The brass-copper pieces of her outer shell were still raw, wrapped in canvas and sitting in the crate where he’d carefully placed them as soon as they had cooled from the fires. He would sand and polish them into shape once he got around to it. But before his creation could be pretty, he had to make sure she worked.
A strange device sat in the half-empty cavity of what the automaton’s chest would be. Inside it, there was a drop of some faintly blue substance. It glowed dully in its small plexiglass enclosure, paralyzed into a swirled, slimy-looking shape like blown glass. It seemed to melt as Peter picked the device up, reshaping to the side of the device. “Hm. Weaker than usual today,” he mumbled to himself.
If his research told him anything, it was that blue matter was a fickle substance. It held great power, he knew, unspeakably great power that he could feel was just waiting for him to tap into it. And he would be able to harness it, if only it would stay together. Many times he’d been able to summon it from other materials and tried to capture it. The small, unimpressive blob in the automaton’s core was all that he had managed to keep. The rest had all dissipated somehow. Sometimes it vaporized seconds after appearing, sometimes it stayed for several minutes and allowed him to touch it, even try to manipulate it. Sometimes it had even stayed long enough for him to seal it into the core, only to dissolve into its surroundings hours later. He would keep trying, though. Peter Alexander Walter wasn’t known to give up on these things easily.
The concept of time seemed to slip from Peter’s mind as he sat on the rolling stool beside the worktable, tinkering with the mechanics that would someday let his creation’s face move. Once his hands had been thoroughly blackened with oil, he wiped them off on a rag hanging from the nearby cart. He’d spent long enough on something he knew he could do. It was high time he made an attempt that was a little less sure.
There was no way to tell exactly how long he spent trying to gain more blue matter, but it definitely felt longer than he’d spent working on the robot’s facial mechanisms. His first attempt went slowly, and the matter disappeared again with a puff of phosphorescent smoke only a few seconds after he drew it out. The second lasted longer, but only by a little. Still, Peter felt he was getting closer, and kept trying. At least, he kept trying until the sickness came back again.
The matter had stayed in his hands for over a minute that time. He had held it, pliable and solid one second, and the next, there was a knife in his guts and his fingers had faltered. The blue matter slipped from his grasp, hurtled to the floor and evaporated as it struck the cold linoleum.
Peter stepped back from the would-be mess, cursing under his breath. The nausea had struck him more suddenly than ever. He staggered over to the worktable, leaned back against it and sank down to the floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest, doubled over and trying to restrain his painfully lurching stomach. It didn’t do a single thing to help. He felt his mouth starting to water and bile crawling up his throat, leaving him barely enough time to lunge for the wastebasket in the corner. He dragged it towards himself only a second before his body arched over and his breakfast made a fast and very unpleasant reappearance.
He stayed on his knees, heaving for a few moments, before he spit out the last of the acid on his tongue and sat back against the table. He wiped his mouth with the edge of his sleeve, glanced at the odd-colored stain it left and grimaced. He would clean this himself. No maid deserved being told to pick up after a mess this nasty.
Peter didn’t get up for a while. This time, he would stay on the floor for as long as the uneasiness stayed in his stomach. Moving would only make it worse, and worse was the absolute last thing he needed at the moment. He noticed the cart nearby. The lattice of Delilah was staring at him. His face burned. She wasn’t even really there, and yet he still felt humiliated. He leaned over and nudged the cart away so she couldn’t see him.
It was the radiation. It had to be the radiation. He’d been working with it so long, but he had never bothered to find out exactly what it was doing to him. He looked at his hands resting on his forearms, compressed between his legs and his body. Pale, paper-white skin gazed back at him, with faint blue tint along the edges of his nails, almost like stained glass. The blue matter had changed him somehow, though he couldn’t say exactly what it had done. It had seemingly sucked the pigment from his skin, then turned his hair blue, his blood blue, and... other things. All blue. He’d been blue for a long time, and it had never seemed to be doing him any harm.
He had already entertained the thought that he had been wrong all this time. Delilah had been wrong, and it was that wrongness that had taken her life.
Peter should have known better than to work uninformed with a strange substance, unprotected, sometimes not even wearing gloves. Radioactivity was no laughing matter. He knew of people who had died for their work before. There were studies running at the Cavalcadium before it had been swept from the surface of the Earth, and sadly none of them had lasted long enough for completion. First the building was gone, then Delilah. And now... Now Peter had the ominous feeling hanging over his head that he would be next.
He’d thought of it before. In fact, he had considered it many times since he first started having trouble keeping food down. There was no other feasible explanation. He had never cared, though. The world he lived in didn’t interest him very much anymore. After all, what did it have to offer him? A lot of strangers to feign a smile for? A few drinks in a darkened room, or a meaningless name and face to spend a night with? An old, empty mansion that echoed his own loneliness back at him? A best friend who had turned against him, then abandoned him in his time of need to pursue his own endeavors?
He’d tried to find something. There had been moments when he was gripped with fear that it was true, that the glowing blue substance that he had worked so hard to harness would put an end to him and he would follow the same path that Delilah had, so quickly and unexpectedly. In those moments, he had searched for something to hang onto. Some motivation to stay alive, something worth putting his life’s work aside and letting his appearance turn back to what it once was. And just like summoning the blue matter, never once had he been met with sufficient success.
His work was the only thing that was still there for him. And if it was his work that killed him, then so be it.
Peter crept back upstairs once the nausea spell began to fade. Two flights of stairs put him back in the library. The manor was quiet again. The maids must have finished their work and moved on. His footsteps echoed in from room to room as he returned to the kitchen. The fire in the stove had been hushed down to a few glowing embers. The cinnamon rolls had been taken from their tray, packaged neatly into a glass container from his cabinet and sealed with a strip of linen between the dish and lid. He took another one out and stuffed half of it into his mouth. He didn’t know how long it would stay with him, in his condition, but he had to at least try.
He wouldn’t have objected to a drink, if he’d had anything available. Even so long after his last nauseous episode, he was still reeling, and not just from the vomit. He would have jumped at the chance to get anything to numb the nagging, subtle pangs that clawed at his heart as well as his other organs. But everything alcoholic that he’d had stored up in his pantry had been drained already, and there was no way in hell that he would go out for the sole purpose of obtaining more. He was past that, he’d convinced himself. He didn’t cope with his grief that way anymore. Besides, drinking would only serve to make his problem worse.
The class container short of one more cinnamon roll, he started back toward the lab. In the silence, he heard a clattering coming from somewhere ahead of him. His pace quickened, and when he entered the library, he saw that Iris was standing at the window. There was a small toolbox at her feet that he hadn’t noticed before. He opened his mouth to call out to her, but before had even inhaled to speak, she turned toward him, a startled look in her eyes. “M-Mr. Walter!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “I-I didn’t see you leave the lab. I thought...”
“It’s no matter, Iris,” Peter said. He approached, trying to seem unthreatening. “Working on the window, I see?”
Iris smiled shyly and nodded. “Y-yes. Miriam and the other girls left, but she told me that if I ran out to the hardware store to get a new hinge and stayed late to repair it, I could have the rest of the day off.” She picked up a defective hinge from the floor and pointed out the thick black gouges in the brass. “See, these old ones were stripped, and so was the latch. I managed to get some new ones that wouldn’t swing so easy with the money that Miriam gave me. I couldn’t pay for a whole new latch, though.”
“So that was the problem. Whatever will keep the spiders out.” Peter leaned in and examined her handiwork. Two of the hinges had been replaced, and Iris was in the process of adding the third. The new hinges had been put into place with almost excessive caution, the screws lining up at a perfect angle with the holes, falling directly in line with the wainscotting. “You’ve done a very good job.”
Iris gasped. “Really?”
“Yes. Of course,” Peter replied, offering her a smile. “I didn’t know you work with hardware.”
“Well, I don’t. Not on a regular basis. But I know a few simple repairs, and I can do just about anything when I have to.”
“Still, these are impressively precise. I probably should be doing this myself. I’d only asked for an evaluation.”
“Well, Miriam figured that, since you’re such a busy man, you could use a little help.”
“That is why I hired you girls, I suppose,” Peter admitted. “I can take care of the rest of this, if you’d like. You may as well enjoy the rest of your day.”
Iris’s ashy brown face seemed to turn a few shades paler. If her eyes could have widened any more, they definitely did right then. “M-Mr. Walter, I... I told Miriam I would finish, I couldn’t...”
“Miriam doesn’t have to know,” Peter flippantly cut in. “And to be honest, I should have been paying better attention to the state of my home. This window’s been broken a long time, and I probably should have fixed it much sooner. Besides, Iris, you seem tired. You could probably use a rest.”
“Mr. Walter...”
“I’ll tell her that I found you just as you were finishing. And don’t worry about the latch. I can take care of that myself. Now go on home. I’m sure you’ve done more than enough to earn your wages today.”
Iris was almost trembling. She nodded her head, the dark curls that slipped from her bun bouncing with the motion. “Yes, Mr. Walter. Of course.” She began backing toward the doorway. “Thank you. Th-thank you so much. I... I can’t thank you enough. I’ll make this up to you somehow. I promise I will, Mr. Walter.”
“Iris, please, that’s not necessary,” Peter said, and a laugh bubbled out of his mouth. “You don’t owe me a single thing. Now go.”
“I will, Mr. Walter. And thank you. Thank you so much.” Iris’s smile was bright enough to challenge the sun as she slipped through the door and disappeared around the corner.
Peter spent the remainder of the day working on the window. He finished the hinges first, then removed the latch to examine its structure. A new one was fashioned out of some spare parts he kept in storage, and when it was finished, it held well enough. He thought back to Iris’s orders from Miriam, and briefly wondered if she would have been willing to go out and get him a bottle of something intoxicating to bring back, but he dismissed the idea as soon as it appeared in his head. He couldn’t put her up to so selfish a task.
Peter went back to his lab shortly after to properly dispose of the mess that his breakfast had turned into, as well as wash out the stain it had left on his sleeve. That went quickly, and afterwards it was back to work putting together the mechanics of his automaton. She looked no prettier by the time he had finished teasing together the moving parts in her head, but where her metal skull was once hollow, it was now at least beginning to take on a slight resemblance to the internal workings of a human face.
The sun had set by the time Peter returned to the upper levels of the manor. The towering grandfather clock in the library chimed seven. Night had been coming later and later, which Peter figured made sense, as the summer was fast approaching. He went to the kitchen, fixed himself something to eat and carried it to the library, where he pored over a few works of fiction to keep his mind occupied. He’d become quite fond of Poe lately, probably because of his moods. The stories he read were engaging enough to keep him thinking about matters of tone and nuance, and more importantly, disturbing enough to keep him distracted and stop his mind from drifting to even darker subjects.
He’d never been squeamish when it came to stories. Tonight, however, his stomach seemed to have plans of its own. Not half an hour after he’d left his empty plate on the coffee table beside him, he began to feel nauseous again. He quickly put down the Poe anthology and sat deathly still, taking slow, measured breaths. He was not going to be throwing up twice in one day. Fighting the urge to retch the contents of his stomach out onto the floor, he calmly picked up his plate, returned it to the kitchen, and went upstairs to the bathroom beside his room. He was covered in oil, rust and cobwebs from the day’s work, and he couldn’t fall asleep with those smells lingering in his nose.
Peter managed to keep his composure until he closed the door. Not a second later, a powerful twist in his core sent him staggering toward the water closet. Once again, he was forced to purge out the little food he’d been able to make himself eat. This time the nausea was fast and violent, fading from his system almost as soon as he’d given in to it. He knelt on the floor a moment, shivering, before angrily swiping away the remains from his mouth and disposing of the whole acrid-smelling mess.
It was getting worse. Peter could feel it. He’d never been so weak in the face of this sickness before.
He might have gone to a doctor about it, had he not already seen every one that the city of San Diego had to offer. None of them had seemed to be able to help him. He’d tried all of their remedies, and none had helped. There was the brief reprieve sometimes, the placebo effect of some pill or another that fooled him into thinking he’d been cured, but not a single thing had stayed. He was tired of hearing their routine explanations of influenza, a short-lived stomach bug, and numerous other things that he hadn’t bothered to remember.
It had to be the exposure that was doing this to him. He couldn’t find it in him to try and stop it, though. There didn’t seem to be any healing for him, regardless of what he did. There was only illness, and more illness. It didn’t matter to him anymore. He was already miserable, and if that heralded the end of his life approaching, he didn’t care, as long as it ended soon.
Peter stood up, moved to the sink and ran cold water through his mouth in an attempt to erase the taste of his own vomit. It was slow going. He straightened his posture and stared at himself in the mirror. Pale. He was so pale. Even more so than before, if he was seeing correctly. It highlighted the dark circles under his eyes perfectly. Now everyone who looked at him could see how much sleep he’d been losing over something that had happened so far in the past.
Quickly and roughly, Peter began shelling his clothes off to take a bath. Once he had gotten rid of the dusty, metallic smell that permeated his skin, he could retreat to his room and read more horrific poetry until he passed into oblivion and forgot that this excruciating day had happened. It wasn’t until then that he noticed the marks left on his skin.
His clothes were in a pile on the floor, and he was running a hand under the stream from the tap, waiting for the old, faulty boiler to heat it up. He saw the first ones on his legs. They were smooth, straight lines indented into the sides of his thighs. Peter removed his hand from the tap and ran his fingertips over them. He felt the small dip in his skin on both the inner and outer edges, running from his knees up to his hips. Strange , he thought. That’s the same place as the seams in my pants.
Then his fingers crossed over new lines. They ran across his hips in a similar fashion, where the waistband rested. There were marks on his sides as well, where the seams of his vest fell, along with some odd wrinkles where his shirt had been held tight underneath. The marks were all faintly blue, seemingly pressed into his skin. It was odd. He’d never noticed them before. It was as if his clothing had become tighter, ever so slightly. It hadn’t been enough for him to feel it when he dressed, but it had apparently been enough to make the folds and seams leave dents in his skin.
As he stepped into the bath and shut the tap off, the marks began to fade. He ran his fingertips over them until they disappeared, deep in thought. Tight clothing had never been something that he had worried about before. In comparison to most men his height, Peter was a skeleton. Fitting into clothing was something of an issue for him. He often needed to alter garments to keep them from slipping off of his skinny frame. He hadn’t bought anything new for his wardrobe in several years for that very reason. As far as he knew, everything still fit him perfectly fine. The marks were a bit concerning for him, though. He’d never seen them before. As far as he knew, there was no reason for the seams of his clothes to be leaving pressure marks on him, unless...
Unless they weren’t fitting him the same way anymore.
Peter abruptly sat up, sending a small wave over the side of the bath. He hurriedly washed his hair and scrubbed the oil stains out of his skin. Confusion sank its teeth into his thoughts as he finished bathing. He couldn’t be gaining weight. It just wasn’t possible. He’d been ill for weeks; vomiting on an almost daily basis, barely able to make himself eat, struck at almost all times with an unfounded aversion to food. He was surprised he hadn’t become malnourished already. Staying the same weight; that was at least feasible. But gaining it? It just didn’t make any sense.
He dried himself off and returned to his room to put on a set of pajamas, then rushed back into the lab. He didn’t have a scale that he frequently used. The closest he could come to that was the one he used for the weights and measures of material shipments and those of his completed creations. The contraption was built to measure up to 500 pounds. Peter wasn’t all that sure of his own weight, but he knew it wouldn’t come even close to the scale’s limits.
He flicked the lights on at the top of the stairs and rushed into the lab, past his half-finished project and to the platform and gauge in the back. He stepped onto it, then stepped off to grab a pencil and blank paper and returned to the platform. He glanced at the reading of the gauge, tried to figure out where the needle hovered between tiny tic marks, and began scribbling notes down on the paper, starting with the day’s date.
May 4, 1896- 151.4 lbs
Peter stared at the measurement for a moment. What am I doing? he found himself questioning in his head. This just doesn’t seem right. I don’t look or feel any different. I can’t be gaining weight.
It may not be right, but it’s worth an investigation, he contested in his own voice. And if it isn’t true, then at least I’ll have an answer.
He stepped off the scale, folded the paper in half and left it on the metal cart. He glanced back at the lab one last time before shutting off the light and leaving. He was out of energy for the day. He’d barely been able to keep up any at all, even while the sun was out, and at that point in the evening, he was completely spent.
The thought of his discovery still bothered him as he tried to push it away with words on a page. It still seemed so ludicrous. Those marks. Maybe he’d always had them, and he had simply never noticed before. That could always be the case, couldn’t it?
It’s too late to think about this now , he told himself. He folded the corner of his current page and put out the lamp on the nightstand beside his bed. From then on, whatever was happening to him, only time would be able to tell.