The Boneshaker (10 page)

"Well," Tom said thoughtfully, "that's hard to say. Invisible doesn't always mean what you think it does."

"I know what it means," Natalie protested. "It means you can't see something."

"Sure, but there's what you
can't
see, and what you
don't
see. Sometimes there's a difference. I suspect there's more than one way to keep folks from seeing you if you don't want 'em to."

He slid the short-nailed hand that wore the brown glass bottleneck up the neck of the guitar, picking the strings with his long-nailed right hand, while Natalie gave his words a little thought.

"Now this fellow, the one I met here in town, he wasn't
the
Devil," Tom went on, "just a mid-grade demon sent to tie up loose ends, 'cause the Devil himself was so mad he'd just as soon have killed me as looked at me.

"'Tom Guyot, I presume,' he said, all prissy like some Philadelphia lawyer. I told him I was, and he said, 'I believe something is owed to you. Kindly tell me what it is and I will settle the debt.'

"Well, it took me a minute to figure out he was asking what I wanted from the Devil to pay off the bet. 'Don't know,' I said. 'I'll think on it.' And I went on my way.

"Next day, same corner, there he is again, glancing around this town like he'd had to track me down in a slum not once but twice. 'Have you thought of anything?'

"'Nope, can't say's I have,' I said. 'I'll think on it a little more.' And off I went again. It was kind of funny, telling a demon all duded up like a lawyer
I'll think on it.
'Spect I laughed.

"Next day after that. Same corner. Same suit, bigger scowl. Lookin' like he'd sat up all night waiting for a train. 'Have you thought of anything, Mr. Guyot?'

"I laughed again at the lawyer-demon calling me 'Mr.'

That must've stuck in his craw. 'No, sir,' says I, 'but I'll gladly tell you when I do.'

"This time when I walked away he followed me. 'What about money? Wouldn't you like to have a proper house instead of a cabin, or even a whole town to be mayor of? I can snap my fingers and make you rich.'" Tom paused and chuckled. "Why
money,
always?"

"Probably because you don't look like you have any," Natalie said reasonably.

"I suppose. I told him no, I didn't want money from snapping fingers. 'What about fame? I can make you the most famous guitar player in the world. Just like that.' And he made a puff of smoke rise out of his palm, like some sort of vaudeville magician. I probably laughed at that, too.

"Now he was frantic. 'Surely there must be something.' What didn't figure for me was, why'd he care if I collected now or in another year or six or twenty?

"Well, he kept stopping me in the street with suggestions, and they got pretty strange pretty quick. He thought I'd like a career on the stage. Would I like an ocean named after me? Perhaps to discover a silver mine, or marry the most beautiful girl there was, or be fifty years younger, or live forever, or be able to fly. Every day he was a little less polished. He didn't bother looking like he'd shaved anymore, and finally he stopped knotting his tie and even tucking in his shirt.

"Then days would go by before he could think of anything new to suggest. He wouldn't talk to me for a week, or a month, or finally, for a year at a time. Other times he'd walk along behind me for hours, chewing his fingernails and lookin' like he was trying to do higher math in his head. Then he stopped showing up altogether.

"That's when wheels started falling off wagons out there at the crossroads, and I put twos together and got a number that made sense.
That old demon couldn't leave.
He was stuck there until I chose my favor!" Old Tom paused for a long, hooting laugh.

"And he's still there?"

"He's still out there in the Old Village, just a prankster demon who pulls wheels off of carts and shoes off of horses for the lack of anything better to do with his time. 'Course, he used to play proper tricks, but now he don't seem to have the heart for it anymore. He does come back into town from time to time, but I think he's 'bout given up on me."

"Why can't he do anything else? He's a demon, after all."

"'Cause he was given a job by Old Scratch, and since that job's a matter of the Devil's debt, he's bound to that task till he completes it. That's what I think. So it's sort of my fault about the lost wheels, but I can't help it. And yes, I think it's funny, if you want to know."

After her mother's story about awful hands and tearing-sideways jaws, it was funny, terribly funny to think of some mid-level demon stuck at the crossroads forever, getting messier and crankier day by day and thinking of more and more elaborate and outlandish wishes to convince Tom to make. They laughed together for a while.

"So how did you beat him?" Natalie asked at last. "The real Devil, not the prankster demon."

Tom strummed the guitar with his eyes closed. The bottleneck on his left ring finger squeaked gently as it slid over the strings. "How do you think?"

"Because you're the best musician in the world?"

The guitar in his hands made a sound like laughter. "That's what everyone thinks."

Natalie frowned at the tin guitar with its round brass resonator in the middle shining in the sunlight. "Because your guitar was special."

"Nope."

"Because the Devil wasn't much good at music?" she hazarded. It would spoil the story if that was all there was to it.

But Tom shook his head again. "Devil's good at whatever he needs to be good at."

"Mama says it's because you have some kind of..." Natalie tried not to look at his crutch, propped against the stair beside him. Would he think she was making fun of him? "Some kind of
grace.
"

"Doesn't sound right, does it?"

"Not really," she said before she could stop herself, then turned a deep pink. "I didn't mean—"

Tom hooted again. "Not that kind of grace!" He laughed until he had to set the guitar down and wipe his eyes. "The other kind."

"I don't know any other kind," Natalie said a little defensively.

Tom didn't answer, but the guitar did something very graceful instead, and for a few minutes she just sat and listened.

"Weren't you very afraid?"

The music stopped. He looked up, and for a moment he looked just exactly as ancient as he must've been if he was already an old man fifty years ago. "I thought I would die of the fear."

"How did you survive?"

"I looked him in the face, the way you're looking me in the face this very minute. It was a very hard thing to do, but not doing it would've been worse."

How could looking at a terrifying thing be better than not looking at it? Natalie scratched her head. Looking straight at the Devil seemed like the kind of dangerous thing that would invite trouble no matter what.

Tom spoke as if he could read her mind. "When there's evil standing in your way, you got to get around it however you can, Natalie. You got to look it in the eye, let it know you see it and that it can't creep up on you. What's dangerous is pretending it isn't there at all and letting it get closer and closer while you're looking someplace else, until suddenly evil's walking alongside you like you were two friends out for a stroll on Sunday. So you
look it in the face.
You tell it with your eyes that you know what it is, that it don't have you fooled. You tell it you know what
good
looks like. That might be something like your ma's idea of grace. I don't know; I never got much Sunday school. I call it confidence, that's all."

"Like this?" Natalie gave Old Tom a severe, narrow-eyed stare.

"That looks like a pirate." She tried again, more fearsome and less squinty. "All right, well, that's better, only it's no good trying to be scary. You just want to look...
sure
...know how I mean?"

This time she succeeded in getting a mote of dust in her left eye. "I'll work on it." Natalie jammed a pair of knuckles in her eye to work the dust speck loose. When she looked up again, she and Tom were not alone on the steps.

Dr. Jake Limberleg stood before them in his frock coat and top hat, a sheaf of printed pages in one bone-pale gloved hand. He towered over them, his hair bright red in the sun.

Natalie scooted aside in case the doctor wanted to pass, but he didn't move, just stared down the bridge of his nose at Old Tom. Out in the heat somewhere the rising-falling rattle of a cicada song swelled and sank away. Still the two men regarded each other silently.

In the long, awkward quiet, nobody paid any attention to Natalie. Normally that would have infuriated her, but just now, caught between these two, she would happily have sunk straight through the steps.

"Those are mighty nice gloves," Tom said.

Dr. Limberleg smiled thinly. "I find them quite comfortable."

Natalie was just beginning to consider slinking off when she noticed the way Tom was looking at the snake oil salesman. Confident, fixed,
sure.

Dr. Limberleg's smile thinned even further. Another awkward moment passed ... then Limberleg turned away.

"It worked," Natalie whispered. "Even on a snake oil salesman!"

The doctor looked back and gave her a slit-eyed stare. Natalie squirmed and glanced about, desperate to look somewhere else, anyplace, across the street to where, suddenly, things were happening.

F
OLKS ON THEIR PORCHES
and in the street turned, carts and buggies lurched as horses shied in their traces. After a moment's confusion, the drivers in the street reined their carriages and wagons aside and turned to see what had startled all the animals.

Music, odd and clanking and full of strange syncopation, erupted from a little line of figures and vehicles that seemed to have come from somewhere in the direction of the water tower. Natalie moved to the edge of the step and looked around the wide skirt of Dr. Limberleg's frock coat and saw—she squinted and rubbed her eyes. Maybe it was the dust.

The thing at the front of the procession in the street looked mechanical, with shining edges and bright moving parts that caught the light in time with the bizarre tune it was clinking out. All its parts moved in opposition like Natalie's little flyer in the workshop ... but it was far too big to be made of clockwork.

Then: "
Ladies and gentlemen!
" Faces turned. The doctor whirled to address the citizens of Arcane, making the bottom of his coat billow out and forcing Natalie to duck to avoid being hit in the face with it. He flung an arm toward the clunking musical thing. "May I introduce
the One-Man Band!
"

The One-Man Band bowed, grinding out its song without cease. At last it drew close enough for Natalie to see that it was nothing more exotic than a man packed into an armorlike apparatus hung with instruments, some of which Natalie recognized and others she did not. With each step a pair of cymbals like brass wings on his back clashed together. His left fingers depressed valves that must've connected to some of the horns seeming to protrude straight out of his chest; his right hand worked buttons that might've had something to do with the accordion-thing that bellowed from under one arm. His face was mostly covered by various harmonicas and mouthpieces.

"The One-Man Band!" Limberleg announced again. More people were emerging now, and scattered applause peppered the street. Beside Natalie, Old Tom made a noise that sounded like "huh." His fingers made vague drumming sounds on his guitar.

It wasn't much of a parade, really. Just a shabby, strange sort of procession: after the One-Man Band came a string of four little chariots. Rather than being drawn by gleaming stallions the way chariots ought, these were pulled by the same piebald mules that had pulled the big wagons through town.

"
The Paragons of Science!
" Dr. Limberleg announced with another flourish.

She had seen two of the men at the reins before: the spiky gray-haired man, dressed not in work chambray anymore but in a costume with big floppy boots and a velvet cape stitched all over with dull gold embroidery. In the hand that wasn't clutching reins he held a huge hat with an even bigger feather curling off the brim. Faded bunting on the side of the chariot proclaimed
AMBER THERAPY
in old-fashioned script.

The other three were dressed just as oddly: the one whose chariot read
PHRENOLOGY
wore an outfit that looked like something made for Aladdin. A turban hung with dark gems swaddled his head. Next was
HYDROTHERAPY
. The driver of that chariot wore a dusty toga and a green wreath on his brow. Last of all came
MAGNETISM
. Natalie didn't notice what the driver wore because he turned his head, took off his silvery spectacles, and caught her in his gaze, and when that happened Natalie couldn't look away.

It was as if someone had tied strings around her eyeballs and now the man in the Magnetism chariot had both strings in his hand. She leaned forward, drawn by the pull on the invisible strings around her eyes. She tried to haul herself back to the step she sat on, but the pull, the
pull
...

Tom's fingers drummed just a bit louder on the guitar. Natalie shook her head and squeezed her eyes closed. When she opened them, the Magnetism chariot had moved on and a contraption even more outlandish than the One-Man Band was passing in its place.

Tunes vaguely reminiscent of ragtime music tinkled from an upright piano weaving back and forth across the street. The piano tilted crazily from side to side thanks to its being mounted on, of all things, a
bicycle
—and not just any bicycle, but a high-wheeler with one giant, spindly wheel as tall as a man in front and a tiny one in back. A couple of folks in Arcane still rode high-wheelers, even though they were very old-fashioned. Her father had worked on a few of them ... all without pianos, of course.

How on earth a piano had managed to get stuck somewhere in the middle and how the spindly high-wheeler could support it was anybody's guess. But the cyclist's seat over the front wheel put him at just the right level both to play and to be able to see over the top. In place of proper pedals going around in circles, the high-wheeler's went up and down like a pair of bellows, changing the timbre and the resonance of the piano. The rider played with frantic, alien motions of his arms that made absolutely no sense until Natalie spotted the leather belts wrapped around his elbows. The belts were looped at their other ends through a pair of brass rings in the wooden panel just below the keyboard, which seemed to be the closest thing to handlebars the contraption had.