The Boneshaker (28 page)

Ping!

Natalie ignored Miranda's tugging fingers and looked at the hinged frame still clasped in her hands. Parents on one side, trying to hold the tears back until the image was fixed; children on the other, eyes closed as if they had fallen peacefully asleep in their best Sunday duds.

After a while, the young doctor began to think that if he could only catch up to the photographer, he would catch up to the illness. In one home, while staring numbly at a picture in which the only surviving child sat, haunted, beside his dead twin and holding his dead infant sister, it occurred to the exhausted Dr. Bellinspire that if he could
stop
the photographer, he might be able to stop the illness as well.

Autumn became winter. Bellinspire traced more inked roads on his map, limped into house after house to find death and its likeness waiting in the parlor. Twice he thought he saw the photographer's wagon on the long road ahead. On one occasion Bellinspire thought he saw the man carrying his boxy camera out of a house. He leaped down from the wagon and threw the stranger against the wall, but it was only a man with a crate of apples on his shoulder.

There were whispers from the old women that the sickness was the Devil's work for sure, and that it would take the Devil's work to put a stop to it. In one house, the doctor staggered into the kitchen, unable to take the silence and sadness that filled the spaces between the sounds of coffee cups on saucers in the parlor. "What do I do?" he whispered.

The cook looked up from the kettle on the stove. She took a battered tin off a high, dark shelf and came to sit beside him at the table. "I've been saving this, Doctor," she said, and opened the tin. Inside was a single white bone. "It's yours if you want it."

The doctor stared, uncomprehending, at the thing in the tin. "What is it?"

"It came from a black cat. It's the bone that floated upriver, and it's what you use to call the Devil. Take it to the crossroads and bury it."

Dr. Bellinspire didn't believe in the Devil, but when he undressed for bed in the wagon that night, he found the bone in his waistcoat pocket. He couldn't remember putting it there.

Ping!

Natalie opened her eyes and discovered that her own fingers were absently turning the bone as she imagined it in Bellinspire's hands. She closed her eyes, and the vision washed over her again.

At last, in December, the twin trails of the photographer and the choking illness went as cold as the bleak skies overhead. For two weeks, the young doctor treated living children and adults who still remembered how to smile. Christmas was coming.

Bellinspire drove home to Connecticut. In the back of his wagon was a brand-new velocipede, a boneshaker even older than Natalie's grandfather's, bought in Philadelphia for one of his sisters.

The young doctor was out of the wagon almost before
it had rolled to a stop. "I'm home," he called, stepping into the foyer and unwinding his scarf. Then his eyes fell on the sideboard in the hall.

Bellinspire didn't hear himself scream, nor did he hear the footsteps pounding down the stairs toward him, nor the voices that shouted his name. He didn't feel his father pick him up from where he had fallen, or his mother wrap her arms around him tight, so tight ... as if by force she could hold on to him, her only remaining child.

On the sideboard, surrounded by cut flowers like a relic in a shrine, was a hinged frame bound in red morocco leather. On one side, his mother and father, faces drawn tight. On the other side, his three sisters, the two eldest seated on either side of the baby in her cradle. Something wet trickled down Natalie's cheeks.

All three girls' eyes were closed.

The rest of it seemed inevitable: Jasper Bellinspire finding his way to a crossroads somewhere, burying the bone from the battered old tin, and waiting in the freezing midwinter night, arms wrapped around his stiffening legs, for someone to come. The sound of hooves on the ice-cold road. The creak of a wooden wagon as it rolled to a stop. Bellinspire looked up.

It was the photographer.

Ping,ping,ping,ping,ping,ping...

"Natalie,
come on!
"

"You," Bellinspire snarled. He threw himself at the other man, dragged him to the ground, and began to beat his head against the frostbitten earth. He screamed
horrible things, accused the photographer of bringing the sickness onto his sisters. He put his hands around the photographer's neck and squeezed, the way the sickness had squeezed the throats of the dead children.

No, no, no ...
Natalie shook her head, eyes closed tight. Miranda was pulling her by one arm now, but she barely felt it. She tried to make the vision stop, but the imagined Dr. Bellinspire's hands only tightened around the photographer's throat.

Don't think about it. Get out of this room, out of this 'wagon, don't think about it, go home!
Natalie tried to stand up, tried to focus on Miranda's terrified face, tried to listen to what she was saying.
Think about bicycles. Think about something,
anything
else.
She slipped back to her knees, hands over her eyes. Miranda wailed. In the next room, the sounds of a miniature drum joined the tiny clashing cymbals.

After a while, the photographer stopped fighting back. Bellinspire's screams died in his throat. He staggered upright and looked down, sick horror rising in his throat—and in Natalie's, too.

The photographer lay dead at Dr. Bellinspire's feet.

Suddenly, a dark shadow flung itself onto the ground before him: Bellinspire's own shadow, cast as a blaze of blue flame spiraled into the air at his back. A voice spoke, low and grim. "This is how you attempt to save lives?"

Hot red shame rising on his face and in his heart, Bellinspire turned toward the voice. The shame turned to icy fear. The man standing silhouetted in the flames looked exactly like the man the doctor had just murdered.

Bellinspire spun to look at the place where the photographer's body had been only seconds before. It was gone, with no traces of a struggle in the frost to mark what had happened. He turned back to the man before the fire. "Who are you?"

Short, high bursts from a little flute only dimly registered in Natalie's consciousness.

The man with the photographer's face curled his lips into a grin. "I'm the one who can give you the means to make the difference you really want to make." His mouth formed a dreadful smile. "I'm the one you called."

"Did I—is the photographer dead?"

The horrible smile flickered in the freezing light. "You murdered a phantom. An illusion, nothing more. But that doesn't make the murder you committed any less real to me."

The miniature Argonault's cello began to wail. A cold, cold sadness crawled up Natalie's insides as the two men made their terrible bargain to the awful music of the four automata. A shaking Miranda grabbed Natalie by the straps of her overalls, but she didn't feel it.

It took so much effort to try to block out Bellinspire's misery, to try not to feel his terror and sorrow—but it was too strong. It was sick-making, violent ... and then the deal was done, and the doctor held out his hands.

Natalie scrambled to her feet and felt blindly for the doorway, still unaware that Miranda was trying to drag her from the room, too.
I don't want to see this, I know what's coming....

But the man at the fire merely held out a pair of gloves
the color of the frostbitten earth. Bellinspire pulled them on and flexed his fingers.

A cacophony of sound vaulted Natalie abruptly out of the trance to find herself being hauled through the wagon. The entire army of automata had burst into frenzied alarm again.

"
Move!
" Miranda screamed.

They plunged through the door, then half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs to the ground. Miranda yanked Natalie sideways and shoved her into a tiny passage between the wagon and the tent beside it only moments before Thaddeus Argonault sprinted past.

Natalie tried to pay attention as they zigzagged through the meandering crowds of people now fanning out from the Amber Therapy demonstration. Miranda was shouting something at her again, but even as they ran, the real world around her faded once more into that frozen crossroads of so long ago.

From thin air, the devil with the photographer's face conjured a crate the size of a doghouse. Whatever was inside, Natalie couldn't see it, not even as the story shifted forward and Bellinspire, alone on another road in bleak daylight, pried it open with a crowbar.

"
Move your feet, Natalie!
"

The story flashed forward again and the doctor sat in his wagon, the leg that made him limp propped up on the edge of the open crate. Whatever had been inside it was gone, and now the doctor's gloved hands clasped a tiny vial of ordinary-looking liquid. Bellinspire lifted the vial to his mouth and drank.

He swung his leg down and, using both hands, forced it to bend at the knee. Then he bent it again, back and forth, back and forth, without using his hands. It bent as normally and naturally as Natalie's own undamaged knees did. Bellinspire leaped to his feet, and Natalie felt fear turn to joy as something loosened in the young doctor's chest. He strode to the wagon's door, stronger than he had ever felt in his life. Whatever had been in the vial, whatever had been in the crate that he had used to make it, worked.

"Here. Sit."

Natalie dropped to the ground hard, her shoulders banging against a wall with a thud.

The last things she saw before the story-memory faded away completely were the four men standing in the sunlight when Bellinspire opened the wagon's door.

"Well?" said Paracelsus Vorticelt.

Bellinspire smiled his first genuine smile in a year and tossed the cane he no longer needed to Vorticelt. "You're right. I shan't require this any longer." He trotted easily down the stairs. "Very well, fellows. I'm ready to do something good at last."

All that joy—Natalie could feel it bursting the seams of Bellinspire's heart as he began making silent plans to heal the world, practically dancing as he walked around to the front of the wagon on his wonderfully agile knee.

She could also see what Jasper Bellinspire could not: the little smile that curled the mouth of the man with the spiky gray hair, a smile that would take the cheer off a
bluebird. There was something going on that the four men knew about and the doctor did not.

"Well, let's get a move on, limber leg," said Alpheus Nervine.

Then everything went black.

"We warned you she was there the first time. You could've dealt with her then. Why did you let her stay?"

On the other side of the heavy curtain, people were still applauding the Amber Therapy demonstration. Faced with Paracelsus Vorticelt, Willoughby Acquetus, and the just-returned Thaddeus Argonault standing in various poses of anger inside the tent that made up the backstage area, Dr. Limberleg halted so abruptly that the curtain swished closed on his coattails, only to have Alpheus Nervine shove past him a bit more roughly than was probably necessary on his way off the stage.

He opened his mouth to reply just as the One-Man Band, standing in a corner of the tent, burst into a violent fanfare.

Limberleg turned to shoot the Band a scathing look. Behind the metal mouthpieces that hung in its face, the One-Man Band gave him an innocent smile.

"There was no alternative," Limberleg said when the cacophony ended. He shouldered between Acquetus and Vorticelt to a little table where a pitcher stood with a few tin cups, and poured himself some water. "She would have made a scene."

"Well, that's easy. Should have killed her."

Limberleg turned to find the leather-clad drifter called Jack silhouetted in the door of the tent. His pale eyes, rimmed by webworks of lines, glowed like a cat's.

"What are
you
doing here?" Limberleg demanded.

"He's right, Jake."

Now Limberleg set his cup down hard on the table and spun to glare at Alpheus Nervine. "What?"

"The man's right," Nervine repeated calmly.

Limberleg jabbed a gloved finger at Jack. "Get out of here, you crazy bastard!"

"
I'm
crazy?" Jack chuckled and lit a cigarette. "Damn, they don't make jokes with that kind of funny where I come from."

"Why didn't you just kill her?" Nervine asked, enunciating crisply.

"We'll discuss my decisions once someone gets that raggedy malingerer out of here!" Limberleg took a step toward the drifter, gesturing with the tin cup, so that drops flew out of it like flecks of spit. "I've heard your offer and declined. You have no right to involve yourself in my affairs.
Get out!
"

"What offer?" Paracelsus Vorticelt asked, adjusting his mirrored spectacles.

Jack and Limberleg looked at each other. The drifter gave a twitch of a smile. Limberleg's eyes narrowed behind his blue lenses. "I've declined," Limberleg said again, deadly quiet.

"Seems like this fellow might want to hear about it, though," Jack said casually.

A silence stretched over the tent. It was not a friendly silence.

"It doesn't matter." Limberleg's fingers clutched the handle of the tin cup so hard that it bent, taking the shape of his knuckles. "They are bound to my decision."

The silence, swept aside for a moment, flowed back in to fill the spaces between Jake Limberleg, the Paragons, and the drifter called Jack.

"'Course, you're right," Jack said at last. "As I understand it, they're bound to you—and your decisions—as long as you live."

The drifter took a deep pull on his cigarette and picked up the lantern at his feet. "So long, gentlemen." The canvas swished closed behind him.

Jake Limberleg exhaled a deep breath and poured himself another cup of water. His gloved hand shook.

"Interesting," Paracelsus Vorticelt said.

"Jake," Nervine said, "I would like to know why you didn't just kill the girl."

Limberleg stared at him for a moment, then muttered something that made the spike-haired Paragon put a hand to his ear sarcastically. "
What
was that, Jake?"