Monstrous Devices Read online

  With a whirrrrr, the head turned, until the face seemed to be looking at him.

  VIKING

  Penguin Young Readers

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Damien Love

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780451478603

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Love, Damien, author.

  Title: Monstrous devices / by Damien Love.

  Description: New York : Viking, [2018] | Summary: Alex, nearly thirteen, flees with his grandfather across snowy Europe to escape the human and mechanical assassins that pursue them, trying to retrieve a powerful object.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017053893 | ISBN 9780451478580 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Assassins—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Robots—Fiction. | Grandfathers—Fiction. | Golem—Fiction. | Supernatural—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L7293 Mon 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053893

  Version_1

  TO ALISON

  FOR NORAH

  AND IN MEMORY OF DREW

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedcation

  A PROLOGUE IN PRAGUE

  I. THE GIFT

  II. THE UNEXPECTED GUEST

  III. A RUDE AWAKENING

  IV. STATION TO STATION

  V. THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY

  VI. A SCENE BY THE SEINE

  VII. A MUCH OLDER STORY

  VIII. A MODEST PROPOSAL

  IX. THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS

  X. A FISHY ESCAPE

  XI. GOING UNDERGROUND

  XII. SOUTH, THEN NORTH BY NORTHWEST

  XIII. DUNROAMIN’

  XIV. SOMETHING IN THE DARK

  XV. A CATCH-UP AND SCRAMBLED EGGS

  XVI. WHAT’S INSIDE A ROBOT

  XVII. A VIEW FROM A HILL

  XVIII. THE GODDESS AND THE MACHINE

  XIX. A PROWL THROUGH PRAGUE

  XX. THE OLD SCHOOL IN THE DARK

  XXI. SEVEN TIMES AROUND

  XXII. WHITE LIGHT

  XXIII. TO CATCH A MONSTER

  XXIV. RIOT, SPIRE, VISION, MOON

  XXV. THE RIVER

  AFTER THE END

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A PROLOGUE IN PRAGUE

  SNOW IS FALLING on the city of Prague.

  Soft white against a sharp black skyline, it dances around the castle spires and wisps past the patient statues of the church of St. Nicholas. It flurries over fast-food restaurants’ glowing signs, drifts down on cobblestones, tarmac, and tramlines. Old women in headscarves shiver, and street vendors selling hot sausages stamp their feet in Wenceslas Square. Bleary young tourists’ teeth chatter outside bars in the Old Town.

  A tall man and a small girl stalk through the snow. The man wears a long black coat and a homburg hat. He clutches a cane. The girl’s black coat reaches her ankles, where purple-and-black-striped socks disappear inside heavy black boots. She looks nine or ten, with a pale, round face framed by long black hair.

  They cut briskly across the Old Town Square: past grumbling workmen struggling to erect a huge eighty-foot Christmas tree; past the house where a famous writer lived an unhappy life long ago; past an ancient cemetery crammed with graves like a smashed mouth filled with broken teeth.

  For each of the man’s long strides, the girl must take three, yet she easily matches his angry pace. The city grows older around them as they walk. The light is fading, the day turning blue beneath a heavy slate sky. The snow is beginning to lie. It crumps under their feet. It frosts her hair like icing sugar. It gathers in the nooks and crannies of the strange metal straps that encase each of his boot-heels like heavy surgical supports.

  They come eventually to a narrow street, barely more than an alley between aging buildings, dark, save for a single yellowy light burning in a shop window bearing a sign painted in cheerful red:

  BECKMAN’S TOYS

  Behind the words, heavy red curtains frame a dusty display. Monkeys wearing fez hats brandish cymbals. Ventriloquists’ dummies leer secret smiles at blushing Victorian dolls. Black bats hang from black threads alongside ducks with propellers on their heads and wooden policemen with bright red noses. Machine guns and ray guns, farting cushions, furry spiders, and fake bloody fingers.

  A line of robots marches through this chaos. Tiny cowboys and cavalrymen battle rubber dinosaurs at the feet of fat tin spaceships.

  The man in the long black coat pushes open the door, ushering the girl in ahead. A bell actually rings, a pleasing old sound of polished brass in the musty dim as they step inside. Around them, the little shop is a cluttered cosmos of toys. Squadrons of fighter planes and hot air balloons swarm the ceiling. Sailboats and rocket ships patrol shelves. Teddy bears are crammed into corners with rocking horses and dogs on wheels. Bright things new and old, of plastic, lead, and wood, fake fur and cheap metal.

  When they are certain there is no one else in the shop, the girl flips the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. Snapping the lock, she stands with her back to the door and folds her arms.

  The man strides to the counter, heading on toward the back room, when a figure emerges from in there, pushing through the rattling hanging beads holding scissors and a roll of brown tape. A small man with severely cropped gray hair and big, round glasses, thick lenses reflecting the light, shabbily dressed but for an incongruously bright-yellow-with-black-polka-dots silk scarf knotted at his throat. A torn-off strip of brown tape hangs from the end of his nose.

  “Snow is falling,” this little Beckman sings in a high burble, still frowning down at the tape in his hands. “Christmas is coming—”

  Looking up to blink happily at his visitors, he stops abruptly. The roll of tape drops from his hands. He swallows with difficulty.

  “Eh . . .” He licks his lips. “Did you get him?”

  The girl solemnly shakes her head. Pouting a frown that mockingly mirrors Beckman’s own, she twists her knuckles at the corners of her eyes in a boo-hoo pantomime, before refolding her arms.

  Beckman swallows again as the tall man leans across the counter.

  “You had it.”

  “No. Please. I—I can explain,” Beckman begins, backing away.

  The man looms farther over him, reaching out a sharp, pale hand. Beckman flinches, grabs protectively at the scarf around his neck, and lets out a girlish shriek—it could be the word no—as the man rips the tape from his nose. Beckman laughs, a nervous and treacly too-loud giggle. He pretends to relax as the tall man rubs the tape into a ball between his slender gray fingers and lets it drop.

  “Tape,” Beckman babbles. “On my nose. Always I’m putting it there. Forgetting. Packaging up a gift. A horse.
Going to a little girl in Germany. Near my old hometown. A lovely little horsey. For a lovely little girl.”

  He tries a grin on the girl. It curdles and dies as she glares back. She picks a toy revolver from a shelf. Still unsmiling, she aims at him, pulls the trigger. Without a sound, a tiny flag unfurls from the snout bearing a single word: BANG.

  “Now,” Beckman stumbles on, faster. “Please. I can explain. Yes, you just have to believe me . . .” He trails off. In the toy shop silence, he has heard a small, distinct click.

  Now the girl starts smiling.

  “You had it,” the tall man in black says once more. “And you let it go.” He raises his arm again, and there is something small and sharp, silvery and slivery in his hand, arcing down through the warm reddish air as all the monkeys and cowboys and ducks and dogs and dolls look on with their glass and painted eyes.

  For the next few seconds, the sounds inside this toy shop are muffled and breathy, desperate, wet, and horrid.

  Outside, snow is falling on the city of Prague.

  Lights are flickering on in the streets and squares and up in the mysterious windows of the high castle. White globe lamps glow along black bridges over the river, reflections restless in the cold, dark water.

  The snow falls.

  People hurry through the streets, and it covers all their tracks.

  I.

  THE GIFT

  “THIS ONE IS special,” his grandfather had told him. And it was.

  Alex sat at his desk, alone in his bedroom, gazing at the old toy robot that stood beside his laptop, when he should have been looking at the screen.

  The cursor blinked impatiently at him from his unfinished composition on the symbolism of the novel they were reading in English. He had started to write about decaying teeth, then given up. He didn’t know what decaying teeth were supposed to symbolize, except maybe decay. He couldn’t stretch that to eight hundred words.

  The computer’s clock showed 11:34 p.m. He leaned and pulled back the curtain. Outside, snow fell from a low and heavy British sky, gray clouds stained orange by drab suburban streetlights. A thin, gray-looking fox ran into the small back garden, something white in its mouth. The animal stopped, dropped whatever it was carrying, then lifted its head and barked out its harsh and awful cry.

  As always, whenever he heard that shriek, Alex felt a chill crawl up his spine, over his scalp. The loneliest sound in the world.

  The fox stood, head cocked. It screeched again. Faintly, Alex heard another, higher, answering bark. The fox picked up its food and trotted off. The friendless sound was not so friendless after all.

  His computer chimed and his phone vibrated. On each, eight new messages. From eight different people. All saying the same thing:

  YOUR GETTING IT PATHETIC FREAK

  He deleted them, looked at his essay, typed some words, deleted them. He leaned back heavily in his chair.

  His eyes settled on the photograph of his father on the wall above his desk. The only photograph he had ever seen of him. “Never liked anyone taking his picture,” his mum always said when she looked at it, in the same sad, apologetic tone.

  It showed the two of them, his dad and mum, caught in a red-black party haze. His mum young and happy, with bad hair. His dad behind, half turned away, blurring in the shadows. A vague, tall man, black hair pushed back from a high forehead. For the millionth time, Alex found himself squinting at the picture, trying almost to will it into focus. For the millionth time, the man refused to become any clearer.

  His gaze returned to the robot. A small, bright army of these things lined three shelves above his desk, tin and plastic toy robots of all shapes and sizes, from all corners of the world. Battery-operated and clockwork, some new, the majority decades old. Many still in their deliriously illustrated boxes, or standing proudly beside them.

  A few he had found himself, in thrift stores and online auctions. Most, though, the oldest and strangest, the most fantastic, had come from his grandfather, his father’s father, who had started his collection, and his fascination.

  The old man picked up these toys on his travels around the globe, and this newest robot—or rather, this oldest, for Alex sensed it was very old indeed—had just arrived out of the blue a few days earlier: a brick-shaped package in the post, brown paper tied with string, his grandfather’s spidery scribble across the front. The parcel bore stamps and postmarks Alex didn’t recognize at first—Praha, Česká Republika—and when he tore it open, he discovered newspaper scrunched up as wrapping inside, printed in a language that made no sense to him.

  There was a plain white postcard, too, with his grandfather’s scrawl, elegant yet somehow hasty:

  Greetings from sunny Prague!

  What do you say to this ugly little brute?

  This one is special. Take good care!

  See you soon.

  I hope.

  The toy stood about five inches tall and was wonderfully grotesque. Angry and pathetic-looking, it was made from a cheap, thin gray-green tin, with a bulky torso resembling an ancient boiler, held together with tiny rivets. Little dials were painted on its chest, as if it ran on steam. It grimaced with a mouth like a tiny letterbox, filled with a jagged nightmare of ferocious metal teeth. Its eyes were two holes, framing a hollow interior blackness.

  Alex picked it up and brought it into the light from his desk lamp. Angling the lamp, he turned the robot, carefully.

  Not carefully enough.

  “Ow.”

  In places, the rough edges of old tin were sharp enough to draw blood. Dark red pulsed in a sticky stream from a scratch in his thumb.

  Setting down the toy, he hissed and sucked at the cut while he hunted for tissues, wrapping one around the bleeding finger. He noticed he had left a thick red smear on the robot. Blood formed a bubble-like skin over one of its eyes. He poked another tissue in there, hoping not too much had leaked inside.

  “If you only had a key,” he murmured, rubbing more blood away from the hole where the key to wind the clockwork mechanism would go. Often, keys from one old toy would fit another, but none in his collection had worked. He squinted into the inky eyeholes. In the space where the robot’s head was welded to its hollow body, the tiniest dark edge of something was just visible. Part of the clockworks, he guessed, but when he tried to look directly at it, it faded from his sight.

  Looking deeper, he was seized by something like the same icy, tingling sensation he had felt when he heard the fox crying. The room got heavy and cold. The robot’s empty eyes stared up. At the periphery of his vision, Alex sensed the room beginning to dim, beginning to flicker, beginning to change, becoming like a room in some old, scratched sepia film.

  Frozen, eyes wide, he saw himself now as if from above, saw himself sitting in this strange, changed room, saw things moving in the shadows. The world grew woozy. A dim figure, enormous and misshapen, stepped from a dark corner down there, stood hulking, unmoving, right behind him.

  A cold white glow shone now from the toy robot’s eyeholes, growing starker as the light around began to fade, until blackness and the glowing white eyeholes were all there was.

  And then, there was only black.

  II.

  THE UNEXPECTED GUEST

  “ALEX.”

  A voice, gentle.

  Then not so gentle: “Alex!”

  He woke with a start, lifted his head too fast, sat dazed, surprised to find himself still at his desk, stiff from a night spent sleeping slumped over the computer keyboard. A small puddle of drool shone by the space bar.

  His mother stood over him, trying to smooth down the strange quiff of hair that stuck up where he had been sleeping on it. In the other hand, she held a bowl of cereal.

  “I’ve been shouting at you for half an hour. I keep telling you: get your homework done when you get in, then you won’t have to stay up all nig
ht. Here.” She handed him the bowl. “That, then shower. You’ve got about ten minutes before the bus.”

  After she left, Alex sat blinking, still stunned by sleep. He began to spoon cereal automatically into his mouth, then stopped, frowning, as half-caught memories started playing at the edges of his mind. His mother’s voice from downstairs brought him back.

  “Nine minutes!”

  He shook his head, spooned faster.

  His mother’s shout halted him again as he was halfway down the street. Looking back, he could see her in her bathrobe, leaning over the gate, waving sheets of paper at him.

  “You stay up half the night writing it,” she said as he ran back, “then you leave it lying in the printer.”

  “What?” Alex puffed, reaching to take the pages. “What’s this?”

  “Honestly.” She shivered, pulling her robe together at the neck. “About to turn thirteen, you’d think you’d be able to pack your own schoolbag. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back in before I catch my death.”

  “But . . .” Alex stood staring at the pages. “But, I didn’t,” he tried again as the front door closed. He started reading. His English composition. Completed and spell-checked.

  “But I didn’t write this. At least, I don’t think . . .”

  A sharp rapping made him look up. His mother stood at the living room window, sipping tea from her Johnny Cash mug. She raised her eyebrows and made a shooing motion with her hand, turning it into a smile and a wave as he set off at a trot.

  Slipping through snow, Alex reached the corner in time to see his bus signaling to pull away.

  “No!”

  He sprinted to the stop, where his right foot hit a patch of ice and skidded from under him. Going into a tumble, he landed hard in a sitting position, kept moving, sliding, watching in interested horror as his legs, splayed before him, headed directly into the path of the bus’s very large back wheel as it started rolling forward.