The Boneshaker (11 page)

Not much of the One-Man Band's face had been visible behind his grid of wire and instruments, but Natalie would have sworn he and the piano player were twins.

The smallest member of the parade sat precariously

"
The Paragons of Science!
"

Dr. Limberleg announced with another flourish.

on top of the wobbling piano, legs dangling off the front as if he were riding between the handlebars of an ordinary bicycle: a small child dressed in a jester's costume. The balding velvet triangles of the costume ended in tarnished bells that jingled as the child wiggled in time to the music. After a few minutes' watching, Natalie still couldn't tell if it was a real kid or a wind-up doll.

The procession ground to a halt, and the four men Dr. Limberleg had called the Paragons of Science stepped down from their chariots. The child on the piano climbed off with the ease of a squirrel and somersaulted the last few feet to the surface of the dirt road. Each of them clutched a sheaf of handbills.

The doctor strode forward into the street, stepped up into the vacant Amber Therapy chariot as if it were a pulpit, and swept his tall hat from his head with a deep bow. His red hair swirled in the air as if caught in a current, and in the bright afternoon sun the gray streaks flashed like silver.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced grandly, "I invite each of you to tomorrow's official opening of Dr. Jake Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show! Yes, friends, tomorrow, thanks to the generosity of the good Mr. Simon Coffrett, who has graciously allowed us use of his lot"—here Dr. Limberleg bowed toward where Mr. Coffrett leaned against the porch of Mr. Maliverny's saloon, teacup in hand and looking mildly amused—"where we will open our doors and our cabinets to you!"

A fist ringed with bells shoved a creased handbill into Natalie's lap. Under the frayed hat she glimpsed a small face that wasn't like a child's at all. The sight of it close up was so unexpected that she actually recoiled before she realized it had to be a mask: the harlequin's face was the pale white of birch bark, but smooth as porcelain, with round, faded rosy spots high on its cheeks and glossy lips painted around a perfectly curved smile. It had glittering human eyes, but Natalie thought she heard something click as it blinked, its pale eyelids dropping and snapping open again like a fancy doll's. Then it was gone in a string of somersaults.

Natalie frowned at the handbill.

COMING!

JAKE EPIPHEMIUS LIMBERLEG,

DOCTOR OF MEDICAL SCIENCES, EMERITUS,
WELCOMES
YOU!

WONDERS
OF SCIENCE,

MIRACLES
OF MEDICINE!

ALL YOUR AILMENTS CURED WITH THE LATEST ADVANCES

ACCOMPANIED BY

CARNIVAL ENTERTAINMENT IN HIGH CLASS!

SPECIAL PROGRAMME OF
NEW AMUSEMENTS!

UNRIVALED EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY—A WINDOW
INTO THE MEDICINE OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM!
NO QUACKERY OR SPIELING—ONLY THE

NEWEST TREATMENTS AND PATENTED PANACEAS!

NOTHING LIKE IT EVER PRESENTED IN YOUR TOWN!

Welcome to your very good health!

"Simon rented 'em the lot?" Tom mumbled, reading over her shoulder. "Wonder what made him do that."

"Forget what you know about medicine! Forget what you think you know about the mysterious machine that is your own body! Forget what you thought you had to live with: the aches you could not cure, the hurts that would not fade! Forget what you know about medicine, and allow me to introduce you to new horizons, new hopes, new health!"

Old Tom looked up from the handbill and made that "huh" sound again.

"Come with your questions and doubts, friends," Dr. Limberleg continued, his lips stretching wide as the four Paragons and the child-sized harlequin passed among the townspeople handing out printed pages and tacking others to porches and pillars. "Come for news. Come for entertainment, if not for a cure. Moving pictures! Cabinets of curiosities! Exotic restoratives, including that time-honored and celebrated treatment for anxiety, the ducking booth!"

Dr. Limberleg pantomimed throwing a baseball across the street, and the harlequin fell neatly to its backside as if it had been dropped by the invisible ball.

The doctor waited for the laughter, still a little hesitant, to die down before adding, "And of course, complimentary trials for any soul bold enough to experiment with the marvels we will exhibit. All clinically verified, all guaranteed. Yes, friends,
guaranteed,
thanks to the wisdom of science and its miracles that my colleagues and I have brought to your front door!"

He hopped nimbly down from the chariot and turned to face Natalie and Tom, his smile diminishing to that narrow line again.

"Until tomorrow," he said.

"T
ELL ME AGAIN
why we're going all the way out there?" Miranda whined.

"So Natalie can tell the story right, Miranda," Ryan snapped, his voice so thick with irritation he didn't even have to add
geez.

"And
why
didn't we ride our bicycles and save some time?" She looked impishly at Natalie.

"I
told
you, anything that goes through the crossroads loses a wheel." Which was so perfect an excuse to have left the red bicycle at home that even Natalie's guilty conscience let her off the hook. "Everyone knows it. That's how the medicine show wound up here. They weren't even going to stop in Arcane, Dr. Limberleg said."

They were halfway to the Old Village, kicking stones through the dust as they hiked toward the ruins. Alfred had saved Natalie the trouble of trying to convince her gang to make the hike; after the procession he and Ryan had descended on Natalie, wanting to know what on earth she and Old Tom were talking about for so long.

"I'll tell you, but you have to swear to the secret," she had said. "And we have to go out to the Old Village so I can tell the story properly." That was all it took. Five of them set out late that afternoon: Natalie, Alfred, Ryan, Ryan's brother Jason, who had been allowed to come on condition that he brought his Scout knife with all the attachments (just in case), and, of course, Miranda, who was beginning to have second thoughts.

It wasn't hard to get to the Old Village; you just walked east out of Arcane on Bard Street until you got there. It was the fact that none of them had ever gone there just for the sake of going that made it such an adventure. Now, loaded up with a canteen borrowed from Mr. Tilden and a bag of cookies donated by Alfred's mother in exchange for a promise to be back before sundown, they were three-quarters of a mile from the crumbling center of the Old Village and beginning to pass the remains of the outlying houses.

"I don't know why you couldn't just tell the story where we were," Miranda huffed, looking uncomfortably at a pile of crumbled stone steps leading up to a collapsed porch with no house attached. From hidden, shady nooks the cicadas chattered, tides of sound swelling and receding. Everything shimmered, hazy in the heat.

"Anyone know what this town was called, anyway?" Ryan asked, stopping to lift a battered sign with ancient, flaking paint that had nothing coherent to say.

"Old Village," Jason said.

"That's what we call it," Ryan said patiently. "What did it
used
to be called? Was it called Arcane, too, before it ... before it ... got deserted?"

"I know," Natalie said from the front of the caravan, walking between the parallel tracks from Doc Fitzwater's Winton. "Mama told me all about it once. Want me to tell you?" she asked innocently, glancing over her shoulder.

Of course they did. Annie Minks's stories were legend, and Natalie loved telling them.

"It was a French trading post at first. I forget what they called it, or maybe Mama didn't know. Then later the Americans built a mill on the river"—Natalie nodded at a mass of stone bricks a short distance away on what must once have been a riverbed but had long since gone dry—"and it grew up into a town: Trader's Mill, after the old trading post and the new mill."

They stopped amid the wrecked foundations and half-fallen porches on either side of the road to rest in the shade of a slender maple tree that had climbed over long years through a little stretch of stone wall. A quiet wind rustled past, turning the leaves belly-up and silver. Natalie and her friends listened to the noises of bugs and breeze as they passed around the canteen and ate a handful of broken cookies each.

"So what happened to it?" Alfred asked, passing Natalie the cookie bag.

"Mama said it was sometime before the War Between the States." Tall things, parts of old buildings, cast lengthening shadows up ahead. "She said it's an old mystery that was never solved. Nobody really knows exactly what happened."

"What do you mean, nobody knows?" Miranda demanded, swatting at a pair of big buffalo gnats buzzing around her head.

"I mean, nobody knows," Natalie snapped. "Do
you
know? Go ask your dad if you don't believe me; see what he says. Ask Mr. Tilden. Ask anybody."

"So how does your mother know?"

This won some raised eyebrows and glancing back and forth from Ryan and Alfred and Jason. Natalie's mother's knowledge of Arcane and the strange things that went on in it was not to be questioned, least of all by Miranda Porter.

"A diary," Natalie retorted. "The man who wrote it was my mother's great-grandfather or something. She still has it. He was a judge."

The boys sat back on their heels with looks of awe. It even shut Miranda up, but only for a minute out of respect for the undeniable niftiness of an ancient diary. "It's a whole town," she argued after a decent pause. "Whole towns don't just go empty and fall off the map!"

"Sure they do," said Natalie. "Didn't you ever hear about Roanoke?"

"Yes, in school, just like you did," Miranda replied, swatting spastically at the flies again, "but that was hundreds of years ago. Who cares?"

"It doesn't matter how long ago. That's not the point," Natalie said patiently as she rolled the cookie bag closed and dusted off her hands. "An entire
settlement
disappeared in Roanoke, and all they left was one word carved on a tree, so I guess you're wrong and sometimes towns do fall off the map. Now do you want to hear the rest or not?"

Miranda sighed and rolled her eyes as the group started moving again.

"Anyhow, it was back before the war, and there were no telephones and not many telegraphs either, and the only people who really traveled much were doctors and judges and folks like that. My great-great-whatever was a traveling judge, and he was the one who came into Trader's Mill and found out that something was wrong."

They passed a little strip of storefronts with nothing behind them but vacant land. Through the empty doorways, they could see a stand of Cottonwood trees and sassafras overhanging the dry riverbed.

"The judge and his assistant were on the road outside Trader's Mill, and they saw someone running toward them out of the town. It was a lady, and she was crying, and she would only say over and over, 'They're falling, they're falling.'"