The Boneshaker (12 page)

Bang!
All five of them jumped. On the wide porch of a caved-in house, a door, miraculously still on its hinges, swung a little and snapped against its useless frame with a loud bark. Natalie grinned. You couldn't
pick
a better place for this story.

"So they rode into town with the lady," she continued, lowering her voice the way her mother always did when something was about to happen. "The whole village was very quiet. For a while he didn't see anyone. And then..."

She paused, partly for effect but also because ahead of them she could see where another road met theirs. The crossroads.

The boys were hanging on every word but trying to look nonchalant about it. "Then what?" Ryan asked at last.

"In the diary, the judge only said that the ones who could still move..." What words exactly had her mother used?

Suddenly, there it was again—a dizzy, vaguely sick feeling, like the one she'd had yesterday ... something in her throat felt like it was spinning the way you could start a globe spinning with a good smack of your palm. Natalie squeezed her eyes shut and hoped it looked as if she was just thinking hard, and abruptly remembered what the diary had said.

"The ones who could still move ...
flung themselves about like the clumsiest of machines.
" She opened her eyes carefully. The dizziness faded.

"What does that mean?"

Natalie shrugged. "That's why no one knows what happened. The judge didn't say anything else. He and the lady and the men who'd come with him rode as fast as they could out of town to find help. They rode straight through to Pinnacle without stopping even once, and the horses were half-dead by the time they got there."

"And then what?" Jason asked, wide-eyed.

"Well, then the doctor in Pinnacle rode back with the judge. By the time they got to Trader's Mill, days had gone by ... and the whole town was empty. Everyone was gone, without any clues. And you want to know the really creepy part?" The boys had the good grace to go bug-eyed in proper
It gets worse?
fashion. "The judge married the lady who came running out of the town, and until the day she died she refused to talk about what she'd seen ever again. Even the judge wouldn't talk about it, not even with his own children, because it upset her so much."

Natalie stopped twenty yards from the crossroads and looked around. She could almost taste the dust in the late afternoon haze. The cicadas buzzed to a rattling crescendo, then the sound dimmed to a low murmur. Beyond the ruins, tall grasses and old, overgrown hedges of Osage orange brambles hinted at buried gardens, lost yards, and vegetable patches gone feral and wild. Off to the southwest, the old forest crouched near the horizon.

"So they all left," Miranda said, as if it couldn't be more obvious. "Something ... something happened and they all left."

"Maybe. Except that what the judge wrote sounds like nobody in the town could walk anymore. And where could they have gone? The closest town is Pinnacle, and the judge would've met them on the way back. Anyhow ... here we are."

They stood at the crossroads. Four straight lanes stretched away in four different directions. Around them some of the ruins of the Old Village were still recognizable: the wide front and side of a livery stable, the eroding skeleton of a church, an overturned watering trough by an iron pump.

While the boys poked around and Miranda glanced about nervously, Natalie studied the crossroads and tried to guess where Old Tom would have built his fire.

This time, when the buzzing started, Natalie sat down just to be sure she wouldn't fall over in front of her friends the way she had fallen in the middle of Bard Street.
Again?
She drew her knees up against her chest as the sparks started flicking across her vision and waited for them to clear.

The image that began to form behind her closed eyes had the detail of a memory, and yet it came in pictures, like a dream. It had a
feeling,
too—in the way that remembering a moment of humiliation sometimes makes your stomach twist, even though the moment itself is long over.

Instead of early evening, it was early morning, and a man was walking toward the crossroads. Natalie's friends were nowhere to be seen; only the man coming toward the place where the two roads met. He stared ahead, not looking left or right, and Natalie understood without quite knowing how that the man on his way to the crossroads saw things that weren't there. More than that, he was
used
to it; it happened every moment of his life, waking and sleeping.

As Natalie waited for the odd string of what felt like memories—although they certainly weren't her memories—to unfold, the man drew close to the crossroads. Shimmering like mirages or trick photography, the tumbledown houses and disintegrating facades of the village around him painted themselves over with different buildings, whole buildings. The Old Village became Trader's Mill, as it had been decades before. And just as suddenly, the man wasn't alone.

The streets were thick with people—but there was something terribly, terribly wrong with them. They lurched like poorly handled puppets, pitching and reeling as they staggered through the town. Some fell and did not get up, pulling themselves along on stiff arms and legs until they could no longer even crawl.

Like the clumsiest of machines,
Natalie thought dimly, horror curling up from her stomach. Dimly she shoved herself to her feet, desperate to run, to hide somewhere from the terrifying scenes.

At the center of the town, the man who had walked to the crossroads took his spectacles from his eyes and wiped the dust from the lenses one by one. When he put them back on, the streets emptied. The awful figures winked out of existence, and the pristine facades of Trader's Mill shimmered away, leaving the dilapidated Old Village in its place. Nothing but abandoned, derelict wrecks: caved-in porches, crumbling brick walls, and collapsed roofs. Nothing in the streets but dust and raggedy weeds. No puppetlike people falling and creeping like mechanical toys winding down. No one at all but the man who saw things that weren't there: Simon Coffrett, who Natalie now somehow knew had walked with visions since he had first opened his eyes in this world.

"Hey, Natalie!" Ryan shouted. Natalie jerked out of her reverie to find that she had, in fact, climbed back to her feet and staggered several yards away from the crossroads. It was late afternoon again. Behind her, Ryan stood on tiptoe and peered through a broken window into what had probably been the general store, just on the other side of the crossroads. "Look at this!"

Natalie shuddered one last time at the memory of the grim figures she had seen flooding these streets and sprinted to where Ryan stood. She was not as tall and had to climb on a piece of broken stone before she could see over the windowsill.

"Oh," she breathed.

Inside, the general store was mostly intact. Wheels of every size and description hung on the walls and from the ceiling. They were propped up three and four deep on the floor, too; some new-looking and made of metal and rubber, and others ancient, made from wood. There wasn't a speck of dust to be seen on any of them. Between the wheels here and there hung horseshoes, which gleamed as if they had actually been polished.

The whole room looked oddly well kept for being in a town that had been abandoned for more than half a century. It looked, on the whole, as if someone was tending to it. Like, for instance, a very bored and frustrated demon who had nothing else to do but polish the wood and metal until an old guitar player finally decided on a wish. Natalie laughed.

"I know why those are there! Old Tom told me about them."

"Old Tom is weird," Miranda sniffed from where she stood in the shade a few yards away. "And why doesn't he cut his fingernails?"

"He is not weird." Natalie jammed her hands on her hips. "He's a lot more interesting than
some
people I can think of, but that's not the same. And since you asked, his fingernails are long on one hand so he can play his guitar without a pick if he wants to, which you could've figured out for yourself if you paid any attention. In
fact,
" she continued loudly as Miranda opened her mouth to make some retort, "if you weren't a coward, you could have asked him and I bet he would've told you this story himself!"

"So, tell," said Alfred, tossing aside a round green bottle from which he had been idly peeling a yellowed label. "We're supposed to be back before sundown," he added with a look at the sinking sun.

"All right." Natalie jumped down from the stone she stood on, nearly landing on her backside as her foot came down on another fat, round bottle. She kicked it aside and walked to where the roads converged. The sky was still a deep, bright blue, but the shadows were inching eastward.

"It starts with Old Tom, hiking home from the war."

She told the story about Old Tom and the Devil, and then went on to tell about the prankster demon and how he kept busy by pulling wheels off wagons until Tom decided on a favor. They were nervous at first, sitting right where the thing was supposed to have happened; fearful as Natalie described the Devil's horrible hands and deadly challenge; then riveted as the great contest took place and Tom was declared the winner by a ghost town full of the spirits of all the ages. The bit about the prankster demon made them laugh until Ryan remembered that there was a roomful of wheels only a few yards away from where they sat.

"It can't be true," he muttered, staring over his shoulder at the broken window.

"Wheels come off for lots of reasons," Natalie said reasonably, "but nobody's lived here for ... well, since before the war. Don't you think they'd at least be a little dusty?"

"Um—"

Then they nearly jumped out of their skins.

A long shadow fell across the crossroads, and not a shadow that belonged to any of them. Five kids prepared to scream. Someone, not a child, cleared his throat only a few feet away.

"Excuse me," said tiny old Chester Teufels.

Five screams fizzled out in relief.

"We didn't see you," Natalie managed when her heart started beating again.

"I know," Mr. Teufels said in his weak, tired voice. He looked even more shabby and threadbare than usual. "And I didn't mean to scare you. I was taking my evening constitutional and I saw you heading this way. I didn't see you at the end of my walk, so I came to see you got safely on your way home."

The kids nodded a little frantically and half walked, half sprinted down the road back to Arcane.

"Thanks," Natalie called over her shoulder. "We'll go straight home!"

"It's just that you never know," Mr. Teufels's weak voice called after them, "whether these old places are safe or not."

By the time Natalie had trudged back to Arcane, parted ways with Miranda, Ryan, Jason, and Alfred, and ran through town to her house at the far end of Bard Street, she figured she had to be very, very late for supper. She ran around the side of the porch and got the old iron pump working long enough to wash her hands and face, then raced inside.

Instead of walking in to the stern looks that she was accustomed to getting when she scrambled in late for a meal, Natalie found Charlie alone in the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove.

She stopped on the kitchen threshold. "What's that?"

"Tomato soup."

Natalie looked around suspiciously. "Tomato soup?"

Charlie looked at the contents of the pot and then back at Natalie. "Yeah, tomato soup!" He lifted the spoon he was stirring with and examined the orange liquid dripping from it before plunking it back into the pot. "Supper, Nattie," he said defensively. "What do you think?"

"Okay, but why are
you
cooking it?"

"What's wrong with me cooking?" Charlie demanded.

"You burn things worse than Mama does!"

"I do not," he snapped. He yanked the pot off the burner, completely forgetting to use a potholder. "
Ow!
"

"
And
you're supposed to make cheese sandwiches when you make tomato soup! Everybody knows that." Natalie folded her arms and looked around. "Where's Mama, anyway?

"I'm here," came a voice from the top of the stairs. "I'm right here."

Natalie peeked out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Mrs. Minks yawned and rubbed her eyes as she made her way down.

"Mama," Charlie said, peering over Natalie's shoulder and hiding his burned hand behind his back, "go back to bed. I can handle supper."

"Where's your father?" Mrs. Minks asked peevishly. "Whose brilliant plan was this? Not waking me up to fix supper. Honestly."

"Mama, I'm sixteen. I can open a can of soup without—"

"He forgot the sandwiches, Mama. You can't have tomato soup unless—"

Abruptly, they both stopped talking as Mrs. Minks swayed on the stairs and stumbled down the last five steps. Natalie and her brother leaped forward, catching their mother just in time to keep her from sprawling headlong into the kitchen.

"Nattie, get Dad," Charlie said quickly. "He's in the shop."

"I'm fine, Charlie," Mrs. Minks snapped, leaning on his shoulder as she flexed the foot she'd twisted on the way down. "I just lost my balance. Nothing a little tomato soup won't fix."

Natalie hesitated in the doorway while Charlie helped Mrs. Minks to a chair at the table. She glanced from her mother to her older brother, frowning.

"Mama, maybe Dad'll want some soup, too," Charlie said. "Don't you think we ought to call him?"

Mrs. Minks laughed tiredly and coughed into a handkerchief. "All right, all right. Natalie, go call your father and tell him supper's ready, will you? And if your brother has no objections, I'll see about some sandwiches."

Over their mother's bent head, Charlie shot Natalie a sharp look, its meaning perfectly clear. "Um. I'm not really that hungry, actually," Natalie said, staring back at her glaring brother. Then she slipped out the door.

On her way across the porch, Natalie turned to peer back in through the kitchen window. Charlie was pacing. Her mother was resting at the table, head in her arms.