The Boneshaker (21 page)

Little by little, the nostrum fair came to life. Natalie picked out each of the four Paragons as they prepared to
open for business. But the one she really wanted to spot was Dr. Limberleg, and he was nowhere to be seen.

"
What are you doing?
"

Natalie jerked upright, smacking her head on a low branch so hard her eyes teared up. Miranda Porter's face swam into view.

Miranda crawled into the trough while Natalie blinked and rubbed her head. "Just having a look before it opens." Had she fallen asleep again? The street was full of people now, all headed for the fair. "Did anyone see you?"

"I don't think so," Miranda said. "Why are you hiding in here?"

Of all the people Natalie would've picked to help her with her mission today, Miranda was low on the list. Before she could decide how to answer, Vorticelt, Acquetus, Argonault, and Nervine filed up the stairs to the stage and took their places on either side of the painted curtain.

"I'll explain in a minute. Come on, and don't make a spectacle."

Natalie scrambled out of the trough and crept along the edge of the crowd with Miranda close on her heels, until they were only a few yards from the main path into the fair.

"My dear ladies and gentlemen!" came the sharp showman's cry. There was no time for hesitation.

"Come on." Natalie broke for the path as the curtain on the stage swept aside. She heard Dr. Limberleg's voice boom once more—"Welcome to your very good
health!"—as she and Miranda turned the first corner and the crowd disappeared from view behind the Dispensary.

Natalie paused to get her bearings. "What's going on?" Miranda demanded.

"Are you going to be a coward about this? Because if you are, you can go back right now. I don't need your help."

Miranda's habitual dubious look froze on its way across her face. "I'm not a coward." Then, before the new, wounded look could fully take shape, "Help with what?"

"Sneaking into Dr. Limberleg's wagon." She decided on the left fork and took a step.

"Natalie, no!"

She rounded on Miranda, mouth open and finger up in warning, but before the first word could escape, Miranda pointed to the right.

"It's this way, I'm sure of it."

A strange vibrating over their heads made both girls look up. "Get back," Natalie whispered. They flattened themselves against the nearest tent as the blurred shape of the Amazing Quinn passed overhead. "He's showing them where all the tents are. We have to hurry."

It was much harder to find the wagon today than it had been to stumble on it by accident yesterday. They took a wrong turn, then another, and had to hide behind a placard on an easel as the harlequin zipped overhead again. Finally, they turned a corner and there it was: Dr. Limberleg's wagon, tucked into a dead end near the middle of the fair, and not a minute too late. Voices began to drift toward them through the tents.

"Better hurry." Miranda glanced over her shoulder. "Can't be far behind us."

They ran the last few yards to the foot of the little staircase.

"I'll stand guard," Miranda offered. "No one'll see me if I squeeze behind the wagon. I'll knock once on the back wall if he shows up before you come out, so you can hide."

"Okay." Natalie took a deep breath, sprinted up to the door, turned the handle, and slipped inside. Then she turned to face the room she had entered and clapped a hand over her mouth to keep the screech in.

In the gaslight and what morning sun filtered through the heavy curtains, startling shapes began to resolve themselves into familiar objects. Seeing them clearly didn't make her like them any better. In fact, some she liked even less—the ceramic head on the carved table, for instance. The strange chair, like a dentist's, in the corner. The collection of skulls in the glass-fronted cabinet. The things in jars that lined the shelves. The hands.

Natalie let her arms fall to her sides and rotated slowly. The room looked like a museum, chock-full of ... of
things.

Some of it, like the skulls in neat lines in their cabinet, had tags or labels. The odd shapes of exotic plants hung from hooks. Collections of knickknacks she didn't even know how to describe clustered on every horizontal surface. A fat, stuffed bird with a toucan's beak and stubby legs stood half in shadow on the floor, peering out from under a table.

Some of it made sense. The ceramic head with its eerie half-formed face and bare scalp marked out in a grid like Argonault's tattooed bald pate, for instance; she had seen other heads like this in the phrenology pavilion. The skulls, too ... maybe they were like examples, something to make comparisons to. The half-reclined chair, with its elaborate, scoop-shaped headrest, would allow someone to relax his or her neck but still give a doctor access to the entire skull.

Perhaps the hands were phrenology things, too, since Dr. Limberleg had to touch a person's head to read it. The more Natalie looked around, however, the less that seemed to be the point.

The hands were everywhere. Wooden hands, marble and stone and crystal hands, many, many hands made of materials Natalie couldn't identify. They lurked. They crept out from behind jars. Some, palms-up, held bottles. They touched books, papers, oddities, as if they had been placed here and there to keep other things where they belonged. They held every conceivable posture and infested every surface, every cabinet, like mice in a pantry—except these were cold and dead and unmoving.

But even the hands weren't as unsettling as the automata.

She had expected to see more like the miniature harlequin and tiny One-Man Band, but the size of Limberleg's collection was unnerving. The clockwork things outnumbered even the hands: paired dancers and ugly-faced monkeys with fiddles or harps, finches in cages, a girl at a loom, a farmer with a pig on his knee, a spindly golden tree with a skeletal
bird poised above a beetle. They had nappy fur and elaborate costumes. Moth-eaten antiques stood beside bright new tin or aluminum relations. Their rigid limbs stood frozen in awkward, half-completed gestures.

None of them seemed to have keys.

The most elaborate automaton was tucked into a corner half hidden by the examination chair: it was a clockwork man nearly two feet tall standing in a booth on a platform under a finely crafted little tree. He wore an old-fashioned frock coat and blue-lensed glasses. Strands of red and gray hair stuck out from under his top hat. It was a perfect replica of Dr. Limberleg, down to the long-fingered hands in ivory-colored gloves that he held out over four large flowerpots. One of the pots canted backwards, as if the toy had wound down in the act of raising or lowering it, and underneath it a smaller clockwork figure in floppy boots and a velvet musketeer doublet sat cross-legged. Gray, spiky hair stood up all over its little head: a tiny, miniature Chevalier Alpheus Nervine. It grinned ghoulishly over a pair of brass cymbals.

It was that particular automaton that started moving first.

She thought her nerves were playing tricks on her when the cymbals began slowly inching together until they connected and the first tinny
ping
sounded. The automaton's arms parted again, little by little, until they stretched as wide as they could go, and then began swinging back in, just a bit quicker this time.

Impossible. Natalie's heart began to pound.

The room looked like a museum, chock-full of ... of
things.

Ping.

It sped up a bit more, as if the motion had warmed its gears.
Ping... ping ... ping, ping, ping...

The second pot tilted slowly back, revealing another cross-legged automaton underneath. This one wore a long black robe like a judge's and a tiny white periwig on its head. It brought a mechanical arm down on the drum in its lap.

Tap ... tap ... tap, tap, tap, tap...

She backed away as the next pot lifted. The third automaton's glass eyes were covered by tiny silver lenses, but it seemed to stare nonetheless as it played short little whistles on a thin white flute. By the time the fourth pot lifted, the automaton under it was already moving. The cello in its lap emitted an otherworldly whine.

Its head was bald, with a dark grid drawn on the scalp, just like that of Thaddeus Argonault, the Paragon of Phrenology.

Natalie screamed.

As if cued by her voice, the rest of the automata in the wagon lurched into gear-grinding motion. Dancers whirled. The pig on the farmer's lap began to squeal. The gold beetle waved its little legs in the air with an ugly clicking noise, trying in vain to escape the skeletal bird before its beak descended.

She grabbed the closest one, a little barking dog with a wagging tail, in a half-formed attempt to silence it.
Find the key, turn it faster,
she thought.
Make it run down quick.

There was no key.

She turned it over frantically as bristles rose on its back
{How on earth does that work?
) until she realized that while she was trying to stop one machine among dozens, she was losing precious seconds. She sprang for the door and touched the handle at the same moment Miranda's frantic knocking on the back wall began.

Natalie pressed her eye to the keyhole just in time to see Dr. Jake Limberleg, leading a column of patients, turn the corner into view. Too late.

She had to find a place to hide.

A table with a low-hanging brocade cloth covering it? Too obvious. There was one other door in the wagon, but given the uncanny collection in the main room, what awful things might be hidden out of view behind a closed door? Plus, to get to it she'd have to pass the tableau of miniature Paragons, and nothing was going to make her go any closer to those things.

Natalie's hands began to shake.

There.

The cabinet was low and looked deep enough for a small girl. She flung one door open, shoved its contents out of the way, and crawled inside. In the act of pulling the door shut, she froze.

One of the cross-legged automata from under the pots was on the floor in front of the platform.

It was still moving.

The little clockwork image of Nervine dragged itself across the wagon on the arms that had been clapping cymbals a moment before, its legs stretched out uselessly
behind it. Of course, Natalie thought absurdly. Why would its lower half be mechanized? It only needed its upper body to play its instrument. She laughed crazily for just a second, then choked as she realized what the little Nervine was doing.

It was coming toward her.

She heard footsteps on the wagon stairs.
The automaton would show Dr. Limberleg where she was.

There was no time for panic. Natalie sprang out of the cabinet, grabbed the thing from the floor, and dived back inside just in time to swing the door shut, leaving a tiny crack to peer through. The wagon door opened, and Alpheus Nervine, the full-size one, stepped inside.

He winced at the cacophony. Instantly, the automata, including the one in her arms, stopped moving and fell silent.

She saw his eyes dart around, and held her breath. In a moment they would fall on her hiding place.

But they didn't. Nervine disappeared, and ten horrible seconds passed—she counted each one—before Dr. Limberleg entered with a dramatic sweep of his arm, followed by his first patient: Miss Tillerman, Natalie's schoolteacher.

"Have a seat, dear lady." Dr. Limberleg cast his eyes about the wagon as Miss Tillerman eyed the odd chair. They swept over the cabinet ... hesitated...

"Makes me think of having teeth pulled."

His eyes snapped back to his patient as she settled into the chair. "What a dreadful thought, madam! Put it out of your head immediately. If you don't, I shall know."

He positioned the ceramic head on a table beside the chair, then put his pale-gloved fingers on her temples and drew her head back so that the very base of her skull rested on the scoop. "AH ready, then? You may close your eyes if you like. It will only take a moment." Dr. Limberleg waited until her eyes drifted shut, then unbuttoned the closures at the wrists of his gloves and began to peel one of them off.

Natalie's heart beat out of rhythm once, then again. She squinted. It had to be her eyes.

He tugged the leather fingers one by one and pulled the glove inch by inch off his hand.

It wasn't her eyes. It had to be a trick of the light.

The glove took too long to slide off his fingers; they seemed to stretch as it came off, as if the pale ivory leather had been holding them in.

It wasn't a trick of the light. Something was very, very wrong.

Dr. Limberleg finished with the first glove and began on the second. Natalie jammed her knuckles into her mouth and bit down hard. Slow horror began at her toes and slid up inside the bones of her legs, making them ache to kick out of the cabinet and flee into the safety of the world outside this wagon.

The second glove dropped on the table beside the first. Limberleg flexed his hands in the open air with a little sigh of pleasure. Natalie had never seen anything like them before, but she knew what they were. She closed her eyes and gasped silently for air in the musty cabinet.