The Boneshaker (16 page)

"Try me."

Natalie recognized that voice. So, somehow, did the hucksters. Argonault's eyes narrowed. The harlequin, having launched into motion in a symphony of bells, stopped dead on the last step, its painted smile looking oddly false as it blinked twice, turned, and cocked its head as if awaiting instructions from Dr. Limberleg.

The doctor stood frozen on the platform staring coldly through his blue-lensed spectacles at Old Tom Guyot.

"Old man," Dr. Limberleg said quietly, "you want us to put pins where your joints ache?"

Tom laughed and, since no one seemed inclined to invite him up on the stage, hiked himself up the stairs past the harlequin all on his own. "And don't say gout, or arthritis," Tom ordered, lowering himself into the chair. "Tell you right now I can't nearly ever get the stiff out of my left knee, so don't bother telling me nothin' about that." He leaned back, interlaced his knobby old hands over his belly, and waited.

Argonault looked steadily at Dr. Limberleg for a long minute. The snake oil salesman's pale-gloved hands hung at his sides, fingers moving absently. Finally he raised them up in the bright sun as if to show there was nothing hidden in his grip and strode forward with a flourish of his coat. Slowly, slowly, Limberleg brought his hands down on Tom's head. He touched it once, twice, three times with quick, light fingers as if he wanted the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.

"Well?" Tom said, swiveling awkwardly to look up at him.

"Besides gout."

"Sure, I know all 'bout that and so does everybody else in town. Tell 'em something else."

Limberleg gave him a thin-lipped scowl. "Well, all right. This man"—he flourished a hand at Old Tom—"this man who has such dreadful arthritis that to play a chord on that tin kettle of his makes him want to weep—"

"I said no arthritis," Tom reminded him pleasantly.

"This man has a bullet still floating about with the bits of the kneecap it shattered half a century ago—"

"And I already told about that knee."

"But other than that," Limberleg continued, speaking right over Tom's objections, his voice rising as if coming to the climax of a joke, "he's in such
perfect
physical condition that the poor bastard might just live forever!"

Old Tom let out a whooping laugh, slapping a palm on the knee that, according to Dr. Limberleg, had been smashed for fifty years. The townspeople in the audience burst into laughter and applause. Limberleg smiled coolly, clapped along as Tom ambled off the stage, and called for a final volunteer. This time, the harlequin descended in a whirl of bells and returned with Simon Coffrett, adjusting his glasses and smiling his mild smile.

He sat with the air of a man settling into a leather armchair. "Try not to muss the hair up too badly, will you?"

If it was a joke, the bald Paragon of Phrenology didn't laugh as he stepped forward again. Expressionless, he flexed his big hands over Mr. Coffrett's head, spread his fingers, and brought them down onto the rich man's scalp. After a moment he shifted them slightly, and again; then Argonault lifted his hands away.

His eyes narrowed a fraction. He flexed his hands and dropped them onto Mr. Coffrett's scalp once more. This time Mr. Coffrett winced a little.

"Everything all right, there?" he asked mildly.

Argonault smiled without any humor. "You have strange things going on in your head, Mr. Coffrett."

"Is that your expert opinion?"

Another slight narrowing of the eyes from Argonault, then: "Based on the particular pressure here"—he pointed at the diagram behind him carelessly, so that it was difficult for Natalie to tell what spot he meant—"you suffer from a sleep disorder. One that makes you act out the things you dream." Argonault shoved his hands in his pockets and considered the head before him. "I imagine your doctor has tried several drugs on you, chloral and so forth, but if I had to guess, the one thing that helps you get through the night is to sleep in a very small enclosure ... or perhaps in restraints."

Natalie stared.
Restraints?
To sleep in?

"Well guessed," Mr. Coffrett said, smiling mildly. He rose, and the audience applauded, if a little awkwardly.

Argonault smiled back, a completely unfunny smile. "And something you didn't tell the good Dr. Fitzwater?" he said conversationally. Natalie edged closer to hear over the clapping.

"You think you're dead, Mr. Coffrett," the phrenologist said. The applause on all sides stopped cold, but Natalie didn't notice.

The strange, thick buzzing rose suddenly in the back of her throat again. She swayed on her feet as dull sparks flickered across her eyes, the way they do if you look too long at the sun. Dizziness fought with mortification at the thought of falling down or worse,
fainting
in front of her whole town and (worse still) these two weird doctors.

She squeezed her eyes closed, willed the dizziness away, and waited for the sparks to stop so that she could open her eyes. Instead of dissipating they merged into larger shapes, brighter colors. Natalie felt herself pitch backward and prepared herself for the inevitable collapse onto the dirt under her feet.

It didn't happen.

The image that painted itself across Natalie's senses in the moment she felt herself tumble off-balance was the same odd blend of dream and memory as the vision of Trader's Mill she'd had the day before. But instead of the dusty tents of the medicine show, Natalie saw only the wide-open vastness of the heavens. The world sprawled far, far beneath—so far away that overhead, almost without transition, the blue day-sky became night, spattered with stars closer and larger than any Natalie had ever seen.

Arms outstretched as if reaching for something in the rushing air, knees drawn up in what Natalie recognized immediately as a
jump,
a tall figure plummeted through the sky. As the wind rushed past and it fell faster and faster, the figure curled into what was unmistakably a posture of pain ... or maybe sadness so deep it was almost the same thing. Then, after long seconds, the figure uncurled and straightened to plunge head-downward, watching the earth rush upward with an expression Natalie didn't quite have a word for.

Even without the spectacles, it was unmistakably Simon Coffrett.

"
Jumper
," Natalie whispered, without knowing why she said it.

Unseen beside her, the drifter in his unseasonable leather coat, the one she'd almost hidden behind only moments ago, looked at Natalie sharply, green eyes glittering. Then he glanced up at Simon Coffrett sitting on the stage and gave a short chuckle. "Well, I'll be damned," he murmured.

Then, just as quickly as it had arisen, the apparition of wide sky and plummeting space dissolved into dull sparks that flickered and died, and Natalie opened her eyes to find herself exactly where she'd been all along. She was even—thank goodness—still on her feet.

The drifter glanced down at her, half a grin curling over his teeth. "Y'all right there, honey girl?"

"Fine, thanks," Natalie muttered. Everyone else was staring up at the stage, where Mr. Coffrett and Argonault still stood facing each other with humorless smiles on their faces. She shook her head to clear it of the last lingering cobwebs of dizziness. What had Argonault said before she'd blacked out?

You think you're dead, Mr. Coffrett.

"Good one," Simon Coffrett said at last.

"Who knew scientists had senses of humor, ladies and gentlemen?" Dr. Limberleg swept forward, white teeth agleam, to shake Mr. Coffrett's hand. "I myself once saw Dr. Argonault laugh, but it wasn't until three days later that I finally convinced myself I wasn't hallucinating."

Argonault, looking almost bored, turned to glance sharply at the curtain behind the platform, and a second later the frantic drums and horns of the One-Man Band burst into life. This seemed to signal the end of the demonstration.

"Questions are welcome at the Phrenology Pavilion," Dr. Limberleg shouted. "Join us at two sharp for our next presentation: the intricate Art and Science of Hydrotherapy in Medicine!" He strode off the stage and disappeared into the tent behind it. Thaddeus Argonault followed, his lips stretched into a shape that, on anyone else, might have passed for a smile.

Slowly the crowd around the stage began to disperse. Natalie watched them dissipate among the pavilions of the fair, trying to decide what to do next. She sat on the bottom step of the short staircase leading up to the platform and put her hands in her pockets. Her fingers immediately found the paper corners of the sibyl's cards. She took them out and flipped through them one by one until she got to the card that read:
You must begin at the beginning.
It was right after dispensing that card that the sibyl had pointed one of her wax hands toward the front of the fair.

"Well, I'm at the beginning." There were two things she most wanted to find, of course: the giant contraption Alpheus Nervine had chased her away from, and the fair's power generators, so that she could examine Limberleg's blue Chesterlane. Natalie glanced around. The big-wheeled object was still nowhere to be found but maybe this was as good a place as any to look for the generators.

They were used to produce electricity, so Natalie turned a circle, eyes peeled for anything that might be electrified. High above the medicine show, Arcane's power lines ran between giant wooden poles much taller than the posts that held up the fair's overhead wires. Dr. Limberleg wasn't using Arcane's electricity, though; if he had used the town's power, he wouldn't need to generate his own.

It was far too early for the fair to have turned on any lights, but there were strings of dusty bulbs outlining the edges of the stage like footlights. Natalie followed them around to the side of the platform, where the bulbs ended and a twisted cord ran up to twine along the overhead wire.

The wire, in turn, led her off through the concessions to the left of the stage, between racks of candy-floss, past the ducking booth and past the zoetrope, until the rustling green of the cornfield on the eastern side of the fair showed through between the tents.

Natalie stopped at the edge of the lot and surveyed the waving stalks of corn gleaming in the noonday sun. From here the noises of the medicine show were mere murmurs drifting to her through flapping canvas. To the left, Natalie could see the water tower looming over the roofs of Arcane less than a half mile away. It was a little jarring, somehow; inside the maze of the fair, it was almost possible to forget that she was still in her own hometown.

To the right, the wire she'd followed twisted down at an angle, joined by other wires from other parts of the fair. They all met up at an apparatus that could only be a generator. It stood at about the height of a tall man, and most of that height came from a huge iron loop that sat on a short bank of machinery. A metal bar passed through the lower part of the loop, with a giant brass wheel attached to one side and a bicycle attached to the other: the blue Chesterlane Eidolon.

It stood up off the ground on a pair of brackets so that someone could pedal, rotating the big brass wheel to power the generator while the bicycle stayed still. More importantly, the bicycle would stay
upright.
It couldn't possibly fall over.

It was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Natalie looked around, but there was no one in view. Heart pounding in her chest, she tiptoed along the narrow strip of hay-strewn ground between the tents and the cornfield to where the blue Chesterlane stood. She reached out cautiously and ran her fingers along the enamel. Dr. Limberleg would be
furious
if he caught her touching it.

Which was reason enough to do it. Natalie grinned, grabbed the handlebars, put a foot on one pedal, and swung herself up onto the seat.

The Chesterlane stayed upright. Experimentally, she put both feet on the pedals—another thing she hadn't yet managed on hers. She pushed them around once, and immediately saw one reason for the trouble she'd been