The Boneshaker (22 page)

The elongated fingers had too many joints, like spiders'
legs. They had no real skin, just a horny covering like a snail's shell. And in place of knuckles, little gears and cogs showed through as if their workings had, over long years—perhaps long centuries—worn painfully through to the surface.

Demon hands.

When she thought she could breathe again, Natalie put her eye back to the crack between the doors, hoping that she had seen only some medical oddity, some stretched specimen from his collection of hands or a pair of particularly horrible automata
shaped
like hands ... that she had made a simple, dreadful mistake.

She looked, saw the monstrous hands, then saw something even worse. Through the crack in the cabinet door, Dr. Limberleg's eyes met hers.

He knew she was there.

"Now..." he said quietly, eyes still on Natalie in her hiding place, "let us begin."

For a moment, Natalie had forgotten about Miss Tillerman in the chair. Dr. Limberleg lowered his hands to her head and put his spidery fingers on her scalp. He touched her head for a minute with those abnormally long fingers, pausing once to glance at the illustrated head for reference. Then he drew his fingers out of her hair and slipped the gloves back on, compressing his fingers down to normal length as he buttoned the leather over his wrists.

"My dear lady, how long have you been experiencing these fainting spells?"

"Why, since I was sixteen!"

He pointed at a square on the ceramic head. "Inflammation of a lobe in this quadrant. Lodestone therapy would give you relief. There will be no discomfort, I assure you."

There was some discussion of the treatment, and a referral to Paracelsus Vorticelt. Dr. Limberleg helped the teacher out of the chair and down the stairs, then faced the cabinet and spoke quietly from the doorway.

"I know where you are, and I think I know
who
you are. Just remember this about what you see in this room:
No one will believe you.
"

Yes, they will,
she thought fiercely.
My family will; I can always count on them.

The next patient stepped inside. It began all over again. And again, and again, and again.

A parade of people filed through the wagon, and each time one sat down, Dr. Limberleg peeled the gloves off his demon hands and put them to the patient's head. After a moment he named the malady that had tortured him or her for days or months or years, and pronounced a cure. Judging from the patients' responses, it seemed that some of them had never discussed these illnesses before, not even with Doc Fitzwater.

Trapped in her cabinet-prison, watching the unbearable ritual over and over, Natalie began to understand. He wasn't reading their heads. He was reading their
minds.

So at a crossroads somewhere who-knew-when, Jake Limberleg had met the Devil and made a trade ... and, just as her mother had told her, the Devil had taken a down payment on his soul. Natalie thought uncomfortably
about the collection of carved hands scattered throughout the room. Why had he surrounded himself with so many reminders of something so horrible?

Afternoon came. Patients continued to come and go. Natalie clutched the automaton like a doll and rocked in the cabinet.

"Aahh." Limberleg's little sigh was so faint, Natalie almost missed it. She pressed her eye back to the door.

The person who stepped into the wagon next was her father.

"My dear Mr. Minks. How is my wheel coming along?"

"Found one this morning that might fit. I'll bring it by later." Mr. Minks looked at the chair and laughed uncomfortably. "My son, Charlie..."

"Of course. The fellow with the tremors, wasn't he? How is he feeling today?"

"He thinks your tonic ... he suggested..."

"Sit, please. Imagine that I am something innocuous like a barber."

Natalie opened her mouth to yell, but Dr. Limberleg shot her a warning look that made her jaws snap shut again. She squeezed the automaton so tightly she felt the sawdust and gears in its little torso grind together.

Gloves ... stretching fingers ... she clenched her eyes closed, but the tears squeezed out anyway. Couldn't he tell, didn't he know those weren't human hands? Couldn't he feel the spiders' legs on his scalp and understand they were in the pay of the Devil?

Eyes still shut, Natalie didn't see Dr. Limberleg's smile widen. She didn't see him pull the gloves back on. What made her look again was his voice, all mock-sorrow and dripping with acid concern.

"My dear sir," he said. "My dear sir, I am so sorry."

This wasn't the voice he had used for Miss Tillerman, or even Mrs. Anderson, who had broken down in sobs when Dr. Limberleg had correctly guessed that she couldn't have children. This was a voice you used for something else entirely.

Dr. Limberleg spoke quietly. "Bring her here. There are treatments, we can help. Bring her now. Dr. Acquetus can drive you."

Her father nodded miserably and rose. He stumbled out the door and down the stairs. Natalie sat back numbly and tried to remember how to think.

What had Dr. Limberleg seen when he probed into her father's mind?

Bring her here
. Not Natalie, clearly. Dr. Limberleg knew right where Natalie was, after all.

It fell together with terrible precision, a series of images that made awful sense when she lined them up side by side. She had known it already, Natalie realized; she had just avoided thinking directly about it. She had avoided lining those clues up, because there was only one conclusion to draw from them.

Doc saying to her father:
Nothing to worry about.
Her father telling her mother at breakfast that Mr. Finch would
wire Doc Fitzwater at a moment's notice. Her mother being suddenly very, very tired. The near fall down the stairs and the ever-present
vitamins,
which must not have been vitamins at all but pills that weren't working. Charlie begging her father to come here in case there was ... what had he said?
What if there's an answer, and we don't find it because we don't try everything?

Her mother was sick. Terribly, horribly sick. Then she heard Dr. Limberleg's voice, that strange tone.
My dear sir, I am so sorry.

Not just sick.

Why hadn't they told Natalie?

She forgot about Dr. Limberleg, forgot about Nervine and his claw hammer, Argonault with his tattooed head, and all the rest of them, and plunged blindly, furiously out of the wagon after her father.

She shoved past Limberleg and the next patient, already on his way up the stairs, and sprawled headlong to the ground just in time to see her father turn the corner. Natalie shot to her feet and sprinted after him.

But the second she had rounded the corner out of view of the patients in line, the Amazing Quinn dropped from the overhead wires to land directly in her path. The harlequin tilted its head and stared at her through the white mask of its expressionless face. Natalie skidded to a halt—it was all she could do to keep from running headlong into the small figure. Its eyes blinked with a soft click. Natalie hesitated only a moment before coiling to sprint again, ready
to kick and flail to get past the harlequin if she had to. Then a hand grasped her elbow, arresting her flight before she could take a single step.

She looked down and saw a bone-pale glove. With his other hand, Dr. Limberleg plucked away the automaton she hadn't realized she was still holding, and tucked it under his arm. "Your father will be back shortly, my dear Miss Minks. Dr. Nervine will take you to the Amber Therapy Tent. You may wait there."

N
ATALIE
only half registered Alpheus Nervine's cold grip on her shoulder. A shaking hand took hers, and she dimly recognized the voice that said, "I'm going, too," as Miranda's.

"Don't look so grim," Nervine muttered, taking hold of the back of her overalls to keep her from running. "You're about to see a marvel of science."

He propelled them into the far deeps of the fair, farther than Natalie and her friends had explored. "Where are we going?" Miranda whispered.

"Don't you remember?" Natalie said dully. "Amber Therapy. AH the way at the back. The tallest tent."

The fair seemed to stretch and widen as they wound their way through it, or else Nervine was taking the most circuitous route among the pavilions. At last he pushed Natalie and Miranda through the flaps of the huge tent. He hustled
them past a front room full of placards and pamphlets and unidentifiable gadgets and flung open a curtain at the back. Natalie's jaw fell open. In the middle of the tent was the strangest, most amazing apparatus she had ever seen.

She had dragged Alfred around for more than an hour hoping to find this thing, the brass-wheeled vehicle that she had last seen peeking out from under dark oilcloth before Nervine had chased her away. Now that she stood before it, Natalie just wanted to run.

It was a giant, shining room of glass and brass, mounted on tires: two small and two taller than Natalie—a cross between Cinderella's pumpkin coach and a greenhouse on wheels. The whole contraption, roof, walls, floor, and all, appeared to have been pieced together from panes of glass in different sizes, the bulk of them shaped like the diamonds in a pack of cards. The glass panes had the thick, speckled look of old windows, most with air bubbles and some with a distinct bottle-green tint.

The domed roof was faceted like the top of a jewel, with a spire where all the brass fittings between the panes came together like the filaments of a tarnished gold spider web. Along the edges of the convex roof, curlicues of brass like vines or serpents were cast in slithering designs. The pattern was repeated in the door, which had only tiny panes of glass embedded in intricate, endlessly repeating whorls of metal.

The thick glass and the small panes that made up the walls fractured everything inside the chamber so that Natalie had to concentrate to figure out what she was looking at. The first object she could make sense of was a table upholstered in leather with brass rivets. Leather straps finished with big heavy buckles hung from the sides.

She bit her lip. Was that where they would put her mother?

There were other things in the glass room as well: a cabinet like a bookcase with windows enclosing each shelf held a battery of switches and huge bulbs shaped like sideways tears. A black, barrel-shaped machine with a hand crank sat on a tall, narrow table. Over all of these, cords and wires draped like creepers, linking one awful piece to the next and all coming together up inside the roof under the spire. At the center of the room, another collection of wires and belts came up through a hole in the floor, some connecting to the cabinet, others to the thing with the crank, and some rising straight up to join the wires under the spire.

"What is it?" Miranda whispered.

"The Amber Therapy Chamber," Nervine said.

Natalie's eyes flicked back to the table with its ominous straps. "You're going to put my
mother
in there?"

"It's a very advanced treatment," Nervine said carelessly. He hauled Natalie along as he strode up to the giant thing and whipped an oilcloth cover off of a bulky apparatus attached to one side between the wheels. There a pale man in a brown suit sat on the seat of a frame connecting the smaller rear wheel and the larger front one, hunched over a pair of handlebars as if he was asleep. His feet rested on pedals connected to the front wheel.

"Wake up," Nervine said, whacking him on the back with his free fist. The pale man coughed hollowly and straightened. All in all, it looked like he was sitting on a strangely oversize, stretched-out, high-wheeler bicycle. Then Natalie spotted the braces holding the wheels off the ground, and the collection of belts and pistons half-hidden underneath the chamber, which presumably hooked up to the cables coming up through the floor: it was some kind of generator, just like the one that ran the electric lights outside.

Nervine yanked Natalie around the other side of the giant chamber and uncovered a second, nearly identical man snoozing on another high-wheeler mechanism. The Paragon of Amber Therapy thumped him as well. "You, too. Wake up."

Now Nervine tilted his head to listen: the sound of approaching voices from outside the tent drifted in. "All right, come on. Back here." He yanked Natalie and Miranda behind a folding screen that partitioned off a little consultation area with a desk and chair from the rest of the tent.

The voices grew louder and became recognizable: Natalie's father, asking questions about the treatment, Limberleg giving clipped answers. Natalie heard the curtain swish and squirmed in Nervine's grip until she could just barely see around the edge of the screen that hid them. Four figures followed Limberleg in: Ted Minks and Charlie, with Natalie's mother between them, and Paracelsus Vorticelt bringing up the rear.

"Dad, no!" Nervine, still holding tight to her overalls, clapped a hand over her mouth before she could get the words out. "Dad! Charlie!
Mama!
" But no one could hear her muffled shouts. Miranda tried to bolt and ran straight into Paracelsus Vorticelt as he came around the screen.

Now Nervine handed Natalie off to Vorticelt. The Paragon of Magnetism held the girls, one under each arm and with his cold palms clamped over their mouths, as Nervine strode to where Natalie's family waited. The Paragon of Amber Therapy lifted Mrs. Minks as though she were a child and carried her up the tarnished stairs into the Amber Therapy Chamber, where, distorted almost beyond recognition by the thick old glass, he laid her on the leather table. Splintered into a sharp-edged monster by the green diamond-shaped panes, Nervine secured those thick straps around her; he placed a leather cap on her head, and suddenly the overhanging wires were connected to her as well.

Vorticelt let go of Natalie and Miranda now, and both girls sprinted out from behind the screen. "A mild electric current, very gentle," Dr. Limberleg was saying to Mr. Minks and Charlie. "Nothing to be concerned about, although I can see that Natalie there is very upset."