The Boneshaker (23 page)

"Natalie?" Her father looked over, surprised.

She stopped a few feet away and looked from him to her brother to her mother, strapped into the giant glass chamber, and back to her father again. She didn't know whether she wanted to kick him for not telling her or hit him for putting her mother in that horrid box. In the end she flung herself into his arms.

"Dad, don't let them! Something horrible ... I don't know what, but I saw—I saw—"

But Dr. Limberleg sprang up the stairs to close the door, and then it was too late. "All in readiness," he called, and inside the box Nervine rolled up his sleeves and took hold of the hand crank.

"I'm so sorry I didn't tell you, Nattie. It wasn't fair; I should have—"

"No, Daddy, listen—listen, please,
listen—
"

"Natalie," Charlie interrupted, "calm down—" She whirled on her brother. "You can shut up. Why didn't you tell me?" Then to her father again: "Daddy, his hands!
Look at his hands!
"

Dr. Limberleg's voice cut through her pleas. "Start it up, Dr. Nervine. Dr. Vorticelt, kindly power up the generators." Unable to stop herself, Natalie turned to look.

It took mere moments. At a tap from Paracelsus Vorticelt's stick, the two men on the bicycles began to pedal. Inside, with Nervine's hand rotating the crank, the black barrel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the gray-haired doctor's arm whirled, reaching speeds Natalie couldn't believe. On the bookcase, the bulbs began to glow with light that splintered and broke as it tried to escape through the chamber's hundreds of little glass panes. Weird greenish shadows emerged. And somewhere in the middle of it all, completing the circuit, was Natalie's mother, strapped to the table.

Natalie looked up at her father. His face was drawn tight, as though he was trying to force it not to show
whatever he was feeling. He noticed Natalie's stare and put a quaking hand on her shoulder.

A live spark jumped off the black-barreled dynamo, then another. Suddenly the glass compartment was full of light, dozens,
hundreds
of live sparks leaping from the bulbs or coursing along the wires. Outside the chamber, the nearer of the two brown-suited men began to shake in his seat, feet still driving away at the high-wheeler's pedals. The low, chattering sound Natalie could just make out under the sizzle of the sparks might have been his teeth rattling.

Alpheus Nervine's arm kept going. His lips peeled back from his teeth in a grimace of exertion that stretched wider and wider, made horrifying by the jagged panes. Strange, irregular patches of darkness bloomed in the wake of the chaotic sparks. Tiny fizzes like bolts of lightning leaped from the spire on the roof and skated across the canvas above. Miranda hissed something about the tent catching fire. In a sudden burst of electricity, Natalie saw Nervine's skull through his skin, clear as day despite the warped glass.

Then she saw her mother's.

Charlie put his hand over his mouth and fled the tent, stumbling over his own feet. Miranda stepped a little closer to Natalie and clutched her hand. Mr. Minks's hand tightened on her shoulder. On the stairs of the Amber Therapy Chamber, Jake Limberleg watched them move closer together, then turned back to watch the patient inside.

It was awful. It wouldn't stop. It looked as though Nervine himself would have to keel over before the ordeal
could end, and his arm moved as if powered by an engine of its own. Just when Natalie thought he must collapse, Nervine shouted from inside, "Vorticelt!" His voice was a distorted echo.

The Paragon of Magnetism strode forward, yanked the closest brown-suited man off his seat, and climbed up onto the high-wheeler himself. Vorticelt began pedaling feverishly, much faster than the thin man had managed, spinning the wheels at inconceivable speeds as the previous rider slouched into the shadows at the periphery of the tent, jaw still chattering as if he, too, was in the grip of the terrible current.

Natalie's mother seemed trapped inside a light bulb; her thin body was like the little wire inside the glass that glowed when you turned on a lamp and burned until it broke.

How long could she withstand this much electricity?

The fragmented light pouring from the chamber grew brighter and brighter as Vorticelt and Nervine forced the dynamo to greater and greater output. Natalie fought to keep her eyes open, but in the end she had to squeeze them shut and could only watch the sparks dance from behind her closed eyelids.

Finally, finally the light in the tent began to flicker and dim. She opened her eyes and saw her mother's body shake once, violently. Then it was over.

Nervine let go of the crank, clutching what must've been an aching arm, and the dynamo whirled to a stop. On the high-wheeler, Vorticelt slumped, propping his legs up on a
pair of hooks above the pedals while the bicycle's wheels spun to stillness. On the other side, the remaining brown-suited man tumbled right off of his cycle, teeth clicking maniacally, and fell out of view behind the chamber.

When the sparks along the wires died, Dr. Limberleg himself opened the door, wincing for a moment as if the handle was scorching to the touch. He stepped in and unbuckled the straps. He put a hand to his patient's cheek. He slid an arm under her thin shoulders.

Mrs. Minks sat up.

In a quick motion altogether unlike the weak manner in which she'd moved for the last two days, she swung her legs off the table, looked down at her family, and gave them a confused smile, twisted by the glass.

Dr. Limberleg escorted her down the stairs and stepped aside.

"Mama?" Natalie asked in a shaking voice. "Are you all right?" And without waiting for an answer she flung herself into her mother's arms only a second before her father did the same. Charlie, who had been lurking at the entrance to the tent, came running to join them. Miranda fidgeted a few paces away, looking relieved and concerned at the same time.

"Well, what on earth is all this?" Annie asked, looking around. "I must've been out cold." Her voice was strong, bright as a bell.

Dr. Limberleg observed their reunion with clinical detachment until Mr. Minks disengaged himself. "What can I do to thank you, Doctor?"

Dr. Limberleg shook his hand. "Just find me a wheel, my dear fellow."

Natalie's father nodded weakly. "You'll have it before midnight, I promise."

"That would be a great relief," Limberleg said.

Strange things can happen at a crossroads, and if the crossroads is just outside of a town, sometimes strange things will happen in the town, too.

An itinerant medicine show, for instance, might change someone's life with a roomful of sparks, as it did for Natalie's mother. But celebration had to wait; Dr. Limberleg had been promised a wheel by midnight.

Natalie could not share in her family's joy. Her mother would understand what those awful hands meant ... but Natalie couldn't bring herself to tell her. She sat at the kitchen table watching her mother sail around the kitchen with her much-abused
Boston Cook Book
open under one arm, measuring flour from a tin, taking eggs from the bowl in the icebox. As if she weren't just going to burn the cake in the end. As if nothing had happened. Certainly as if she hadn't been all but electrocuted less than two hours ago. As if it were just any other Sunday afternoon.

"Natalie?"

She flinched and looked guiltily up at her mother. "Yes?"

"What kind shall we have? Neapolitan? Sponge Cake? Orange Cake?" Mrs. Minks's smile faltered a little as she waited for the answer. "I think I have cocoa if you'd like chocolate."

"Oh. Chocolate." Natalie tried to look cheerful. It was hard, so very hard to do.

Her family, the family she'd thought she could always count on, had failed her. Her brilliant father had not been able to see evil when it had been right in front of him. Her mother had gotten sick and hadn't trusted Natalie enough to tell her. And Charlie, who ought to have told her even if no one else had, because what else did you have big brothers for ... well, she just wanted to thrash him on principle.

So instead of staying in the kitchen stealing sips of coffee while Mrs. Minks baked a cake she was destined to burn, Natalie mumbled something and slipped out onto the front porch. The red Chesterlane leaned against the steps. She frowned, considering her choices: sit in the kitchen wondering how to talk to her mother about Dr. Limberleg's demon hands, or try and fail yet again to ride that stupid bicycle?

In the end, she chose the bicycle. Even making another failed attempt at riding it seemed easier than sticking around here trying to make sense of what had happened.

She headed toward her usual practicing spot, but when she got to Smith Lane Natalie found she didn't want to stop. She kept on walking, meandering aimlessly through town wishing she were riding, until she found herself turning off of Bard Street and onto Heartwood at the corner where the old water tower stood. Instead of following the road all the way back to the medicine show, however, she turned onto a much older lane that broke away from it
and headed out of Arcane and toward the old forest to the southwest.

Cobblestones older than the town itself rounded up out of the dust under her tires. A faded street sign hung on a splintered post at the junction. Natalie squinted up at it. She'd passed this sign a hundred times, but it hung at an angle that made it impossible to read unless you were actually on the cobbled lane, headed for the huge house at the end.
COFFRETFONCE
, it said: the name of Simon Coffrett's family estate.

What on earth made me come this way?
she wondered. After all she'd seen and heard in the last couple of days, it was hard to say whether it seemed a good idea to keep walking toward Mr. Coffrett's house or not.

The only mansion in Arcane sat at the top of the town's only hill. Even considering its size, it didn't look like any other house she had ever seen. It was built of stone and was surrounded by oak trees gnarled into odd shapes by unimaginable age. Tall, thin dormer windows and leaning chimneys of crumbling brick broke through the leaves here and there in unexpected places, so that it was difficult to see exactly where the huge house ended and the trees began.

The cobbled road led her patiently out of town and up the hill, lined on both sides by low stone walls and twisted black bushes with red flowers like twists of crepe paper. The bushes coiled along the walls like ivy, even working their way through holes between the rocks in some places. The mansion in its grove loomed ahead. She bent to smell
one of the delicate red flowers, and tried to remember what it was Tom and Mr. Finch had said about Mr. Coffrett. He had rented the empty lot to the hucksters. They had wanted to ask him something about that.

The flower smelled like perfume and paper. Natalie remembered that the question they wanted to ask had carried some risk. It had to be more than a simple
why.

A breeze pushed at her back. Underneath her nose, the flower rustled and fluttered upward into her face. Natalie stumbled away and watched as first one, then four small red butterflies lifted from the branch and circled her head, sending off whiffs of sweetness and dust with each swipe of their wings, a faded-sunshine smell a little like her mother's cosmetics. She stared in wonder as more and more of them rose into flight, a red cloud that left nothing but a bare skeleton of dead bramble below it.

The little wind reached the oaks, sending up a rustle that didn't sound like moving leaves, and Natalie thought,
This place is a dream.
The butterflies that smelled like flowers flitted around her, and she remembered Thaddeus Argonault at the fair, talking about how Mr. Coffrett couldn't distinguish dreams from reality.

She also remembered that the last time she'd thought about Mr. Coffrett and what the phrenologist had said about him, back when she'd been listening to the whispered conference at the general store, she had been afraid.

The butterflies resettled on the branches creeping along beside the road. They were once again indistinguishable from papery flowers, and Natalie was back on a perfectly
normal road to a house she'd walked
past
if not
to
every other day of her life.

She leaned her bicycle against the first of the ancient oak trees and looked up as another breeze set them in motion. A collection of wind chimes on the lower branches clacked and clinked. Not one appeared to match another. Farther up, in among the leaves, larger shapes with wide, white wings moved: huge birds that shuffled and settled and looked down at her as if she were a trespasser. Natalie followed a slate path through the oaks to the front porch and found Simon Coffrett standing in the open doorway. Waiting, just as Tom said he would be, for someone to come by.

"H
ELLO, NATALIE
," Mr. Coffrett said, swinging his spectacles by one earpiece in his hand. He looked different in the shadows of the oaks. How old was he, anyway? She didn't even know what he did for a living. Maybe, since he lived in that enormous house, he had money hidden away and didn't need to work.

"Hi, Mr. Coffrett." She stopped at the bottom of the porch stairs. It was much cooler in the shade of the giant trees. "Sorry to bother you."

"I was just having tea." He nodded to where a ceramic tea service sat on a wrought-iron table a little ways down the porch. "You can join me if you like." There were already two thin china cups beside the teapot, and a little sugar bowl and pitcher. Simon Coffrett walked over, lifted the pot, and poured one cup, then the other. "I don't get many visitors. It helps to be optimistic."

She climbed the steps and crossed hesitantly to the table. "I don't know if I should. Have tea." Natalie sat and looked at the teacup. "You're sort of strange." The second it was out of her mouth she felt her face go red. "I mean ... 1 meant..."

Simon Coffrett burst into laughter. "From the mouths of babes..." He laughed so hard, Natalie couldn't stay embarrassed. "I know what you meant," he said finally. "You meant to say that I'm sort of a stranger, but I think in the end you spoke just exactly the truth, neither more nor less." He pushed the sugar bowl across the table. "Go ahead. I am strange, but my tea is safe. Try two lumps."