The Boneshaker (27 page)

The tiny room had one window at the end, covered with stiff curtains. Natalie waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness in between the strange flashes in her head that were coming faster and faster now. A camp bed sat in one corner, made up with a thin pillow and a threadbare blanket. A lantern hung on a hook over a table next to the bed. Something small and rectangular sat on the table. A little book, maybe.

There was nothing else in the room.

Natalie frowned and peered under the table, under the bed, but nothing crouched in wait in any of the dark corners. With all the grim things in the outer room, why did this one look like a prison cell?

"Anything?" Miranda whispered from the next room. Natalie shook her head, swallowed queasily, and reached for the thing on the table. Before she could touch it,
though, Miranda sprinted past her through the door and slammed it shut.

In the next room, a pair of miniature cymbals came together with a tinny
ping!

Not again.

Miranda shoved the curtain over the window aside and peered out. "Someone's coming," she hissed. "We have to hide!"

"No, no...." Natalie shook her head frantically. "He'll find us. He found me before. Can we get out the window?"

"There's no time to leave, he'll see us!" Miranda glanced around the room, looking for a hiding place.

"He'll know," Natalie whispered. "The automata will—" A sound in the next room made her bite down on her tongue. The outer door was opening. While Miranda examined the lock on the window, Natalie pressed her eye to the keyhole of the inner door and peered into the main room.

The figure creeping in wasn't Limberleg. The coat was longer, heavier. And the man wasn't wearing Limberleg's tall, old-fashioned hat, but a battered felt one. The real giveaway, though, was the soft rattling sound that Natalie heard just a moment before she saw the old punched-tin lantern the man carried on a pole over his shoulder.

"It's that fellow," she whispered. "That one with the lantern. What's he doing here?"

Through the keyhole, Natalie watched as the green-eyed drifter strolled around the wagon, examining Dr. Limberleg's freakish collections. He squatted beside the setup with the miniature Paragons under their pots as the cymbal player continued its hollow clashing.

How long until his curiosity made him open the inner door?

Tap, tap, tap.
The next pot must've tilted back.

Behind her, Miranda fumbled with the latch. "Almost got it."

The thin tooting of a flute joined the cymbal and the drums. The drifter sat back and chuckled as next the cello began to whine. Then, as the rest of the room burst into cacophony, he rose, set his lantern aside, and settled himself in Limberleg's examination chair, as calmly as if he were waiting in someone's parlor for coffee after dinner.

"Miranda," Natalie whispered, "get down. I think someone else is coming!"

In the other room the noise of the automata died suddenly as the door opened and Jake Limberleg stepped into the wagon. "Hmm," he said softly, as if it didn't surprise him at all to find a stranger waiting for him.

"You don't know who I am," the drifter said.

Limberleg raised an eyebrow. "I believe you introduced yourself as Jack."

"You know my name," the drifter replied, crossing his feet comfortably, "but do you know who you're talking to?"

"I do, actually." Limberleg cast an offhand look at the lantern where it leaned against the wall, glowing faintly. "Yes, of course I know who you are. It wasn't that complex a puzzle."

Eye to the keyhole, Natalie felt the dizzy oddness for just a moment. The lantern? How could that be significant?

"Then you know why I'm here," the drifter said.

The doctor lowered himself into an armchair. "Actually,
Jack,
I haven't got a clue. Except that you seem to enjoy poking your way into business you have no part of."

Jack grinned widely. "I came to make you an offer."

"I cannot imagine," Limberleg retorted, "what you think you could possibly have to offer me."

"Well, I can see how a distinguished fellow like yourself might think he had everything." Even Natalie could hear the sarcasm in the drifter's words, but Limberleg ignored it. He adjusted his blue-lensed spectacles expressionlessly. "For a start," the drifter continued, "how 'bout an end to the wandering?"

"Actually, as far as I can see, that's the
only
thing you've got to offer," Limberleg said, "and from the look of that"—he jerked his chin at the lantern—"I'd say you haven't even got that chip to bargain with. At least not yet."

"Matter of time. Only waiting till I find just the right place, that's all."

"There's nothing in it for me." Limberleg leaned back, fingers templed under his chin. "Absolutely nothing."

In the room behind her, a soft scrape told Natalie that Miranda had the window latch unfastened. She flinched. In the next room the two men stared silently at each other. Neither appeared to have heard the noise.

When the drifter called Jack spoke again, his voice was cold and quiet. "There's no other way out for you."

"Out?" Limberleg repeated. "There'd be a tremendously simple way out, actually, if I wanted it. When it's time, I have plenty of choices."

Natalie frowned. What on earth were they talking about?

"Plenty of choices you'll never make," the drifter scoffed. "You have too much conscience."

Sitting regally in his chair, Limberleg stiffened.

"Let me guess. You can control this lot"—Jack waved a hand around the room—"the fair, your medicines, maybe the Paragons—but just barely, only because they're bound to you. Now, if it was me, the thing I'd be worried about—if I had ever been a man of conscience, which I seem to recall you were, once upon a time—is this: what happens to them when ... if ... something happens to you? Will they keep going?"

The drifter kept on smiling, but his grin took on an unpleasant quality. Limberleg sat as still as one of his sculpted hands, his fingers clutching the arms of his chair.

"And, since I think we both know the answer to that," Jack continued, "what kind of damage will they do when there's nothing keeping them in line? Nothing, no one, holding them back?"

He nodded toward the door Natalie crouched behind. She tensed, ready to spring for Miranda and the window, but Jack wasn't looking at her, and as far as Natalie could remember, there was only one other thing he could be looking at by the door: the set of miniature clockwork Paragons under their tilted-back pots.

Across the room, Limberleg sat as if turned to stone. "Won't be my concern."

"You'll never take the easy way out, Limberleg." The drifter jiggled his foot, as if the conversation was beginning
to annoy him. "You know it. But I can give you a haven. If there's no more wandering through towns full of innocent people, think how much less you'll have to worry about."

"What makes you think you have any way of countering the Devil's claim?" Limberleg said after a long moment.

"Simple matter of defection. The rules of the road allow for that," Jack replied breezily. "Only, when those rules were written, there were just two sides to choose from, and defecting to Saint Peter's side ain't some simple matter any old conjurer can manage; comes with too many strings attached for Beelzebub to have to worry about losing anybody thataway." He shrugged and pointed at the lantern. "But there's three choices now. That coal says I'm a force of my own, and I don't require a lily-white soul from my compadres, just a willing spirit. I invite you, Jake Limberleg, to come join me under my banner."

"If all I wanted was another kind of hell, I have my own direct line." Limberleg rose stiffly and opened the door. "I have a demonstration to finish. Good evening."

The drifter sat for a moment, considering Limberleg from the examination chair. "All right, then." He got to his feet, collected his lantern and carpetbag, and strolled to the door. Limberleg watched him from the doorway for a moment, then disappeared down the steps himself.

The door slammed shut, and Natalie and Miranda were alone in the wagon again.

Natalie sat back from the keyhole. "Huh." Then, "They're gone."

"Did you find anything?" Miranda asked. "Before that man came in?"

"No," Natalie muttered. She reached for the rectangle on the bedside table. It was the only thing she hadn't had a chance to look at, but it didn't seem like anything special. The second her fingers touched it, however, she felt a jolt like an electrical shock.

It was red, leatherbound, and hinged at one side, with a little brass hook holding the other side shut. She knelt on the floor, just in case she fainted again, and lifted the hook. The two halves fell open in her palm to reveal two picture frames.

"Um, Natalie?" Miranda said. Natalie ignored her.

The images inside were grainy and faded, daguerro-types older than any pictures Natalie had ever seen. As she tilted the frame into the scant light for a better look at the five faces staring out, a pale little thing the size of her index finger tumbled to the floor. She groped absently for it as she examined the images.

On one side were a man and a woman in old-fashioned styles, probably from all the way back before the War Between the States. They stood arm in arm, unsmiling. On the other side, two girls, maybe six and twelve, sat in wooden armchairs on either side of a baby in a cradle.

There was something about those faces ... it was odd to see people looking out so stiffly, but Natalie knew that people back then had to stand still a long time for the camera. On the floor, Natalie's roaming fingers connected with a narrow, brittle object. She grabbed the fallen thing and
held it up to the shaft of dusty light from the window. It was a bone, the size of a large toothpick with one knobby end. She set it quickly back on the table.

The feeling came on suddenly, piercing the wave of dizziness and settling in its place ... like something forgotten but just on the tip of the tongue ... something just out of reach...

A letter, a map, a cane, a bag ... a frame and a bone...

Natalie lifted the frame again, positioning it under the window so that the light fell on the faces of the man and woman on the left. There was something important here, something other than the rigid faces composed for the camera—what was it?

"Natalie!" Miranda said, louder.

Tilting the frame for a closer look at the three children, Natalie noticed a detail she had missed before. That feeling of
something
just out of reach hit her even harder, driving away the last of the vertigo and nausea so suddenly, it was as if it had never happened. Natalie lurched to her feet, shoved aside the curtain, and held the frame up into the light.

The children's eyes were closed.

A letter, a map, a bag, a cane ... a daguerrotype of three children, their eyes closed in a picture you had to hold so still to take ... a bone...

It happened so quickly, so completely. It was like looking at the works of a machine, following one piece to the next, and seeing it all come together. Like the way a chaos of puzzle pieces finally reveal a picture that makes sense.

As if recalling a memory of her own, she knew who Jasper E. Bellinspire was. And she knew the children's eyes were closed because they were dead when the picture was taken.

Natalie sat down hard against the wall, clutching the frame in her shaking fingers as she ignored Miranda's insistent voice.

The sensation was like standing at the place where waking becomes sleep. She closed her eyes, and the tale unfolded, dreamlike but as familiar as any bedtime story, as if she were remembering rather than piecing it together from the clues in the room. She knew with complete and utter conviction—although she had no idea how she knew, except for the clues like street signs pointing the way—that it was true.

In the next room, a pair of tiny cymbals came together with a metallic
ping!

He had been a young doctor, just finished with his studies at Oxford. But when he came back, there was no place for him in the small New England town where his family lived, so he bought a horse and a wagon, kissed his mother goodbye, shook hands with his father, hugged his little sisters. He drove through the country, setting bones and delivering babies, treating people outside cities and towns with no doctor of their own.

The lines on the map crawled like dead branches, crossing and re-crossing one another to form that grid-like route. Natalie leaned her head against the wall of the wagon as an image of the young Dr. Bellinspire strode through her mind, favoring one knee and leaning heavily
on the cane that now stood among the wands in Vorticelt's tent. She saw him as clearly as she'd seen Simon Coffrett walk into the Old Village.

Ping.

The Dr. Bellinspire in her vision stopped his wagon at a farm. As he limped toward the door, another man left the farmhouse with an old-fashioned box camera on a wooden tripod slung over one shoulder. The photographer tipped his hat and climbed into his own wagon.

Inside the house, people were crying. The doctor was too late. Illness had taken the family's youngest child. After he had seen the red in her eyes that told him her throat had closed up and choked her to death, Dr. Bellinspire noticed the girl wore her finest little frock. They had dressed her for the photographer, even though she had been dead for a whole day, because it would be the only picture of the child they would ever have.

That had been the beginning.

In the months that followed, Dr. Bellinspire chased the illness around the countryside in his one-horse wagon. It moved from farm to farm, town to one-horse town ahead of him, as if the sickness itself knew it was being hunted. It took children without mercy, choking them with invisible fingers. Bellinspire drove his horse until froth flecked its hide and its eyes were almost as red as the dead children's eyes, but still he could not catch up.

In every household he found children dressed in their finest clothes. In every home he found photographs. The photographer was chasing the illness, too.