The Boneshaker (30 page)

The blood drained out of Natalie's face. "Tom ... Charlie took that medicine ... and they did something to Mama, too...."

Tom's face went ashen. "
Your mama?
"

She swallowed. "I saw his hands, Tom. Dad wouldn't listen. Dr. Limberleg told me no one would believe me. What do 1 do?"

Down the street she saw Argonault, his bald head unmistakable even at a distance, even in the dark, knock on someone's door a few houses down from the Porters'. After
a moment, he lifted the box at his feet—shining bottles peeked out the top—and followed the woman inside.

"They're going door to door," Tom whispered. "They'll have the whole town in their bottles by nightfall."

"We've got to tell them! We have to tell them all!" She took a step, ready to start shouting to the entire street, and then remembered the way everyone in town had come to believe in the medicines. The looks of hope on Charlie's and her father's faces as they carried Natalie's mother into the Amber Therapy Tent. Her heart sank.

"They won't believe us, will they?"

Tom looked sadly at her. "Maybe not, if they want to believe Limberleg more." He lowered himself onto the step and closed his eyes for a minute. "You say you saw his hands? Do you know what that means?"

"Demon hands. It means he lost his soul." She looked up sharply. "How did you know?"

"Knew from the minute I saw him," Tom said quietly. "Those old gloves of his."

"Well, if the medicine's what makes people sick, there's got to be a cure," Natalie said desperately, twisting the guitar string at her neck nervously around one finger. "We'll find it. If we can't stop them from taking the medicine, we'll find the antidote."

"Darlin', do you really think what's in those bottles is some kind of
medicine?
This town's been drinking some kind of ... some kind of demon brew."

"So there's nothing?
Nothing
to stop it?"

"Only one man can tell us, and I guess we better ask him while his...
colleagues
are out and about on business." He got shakily to his feet and swung his guitar over his shoulder. "Let's go find us Dr. Limberleg."

T
HE VILLAGE OF TENTS
was silent. The strings of light bulbs cast long shadows across the lot as Natalie and Old Tom came to stand before the entrance to the deserted nostrum fair.

"I hope I remember how to get to Dr. Limberleg's wagon," Natalie whispered.

A quiet voice answered, but it wasn't Tom's. "I remember how." Natalie turned to find Miranda standing nearby. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying.

"She still won't stop?" Natalie asked quietly.

Miranda shook her head tightly and glanced from Natalie to Tom and back. "I know the way. I'll stand guard again."

"All right, then," Natalie said. They started into the maze, two thirteen-year-old girls and an immeasurably ancient man.

"Where is everybody?" Natalie asked. "The Paragons are in town going door to door, but what about all those folks who work here in the pavilions, the fellow in the Dispensary, the One-Man Band?"

"Dunno," Tom said. "Maybe they turned in early." He didn't sound like he thought that was likely.

True to her word, Miranda navigated the dark alleys between the tents and pavilions. She hesitated only once, when they reached the corridor where the sibyl stood guard in her glass case. As Miranda debated left, right, or center, Natalie fished in her pocket and fed a coin into the box. She turned the crank and leaned close to the brass grille over the trumpet's mouth.

"I know who Limberleg is," Natalie whispered, "but I don't know
what
he is. I don't know how to stand up to him. And you're probably on his side, but he told you to answer my question once, so maybe you'll do it again. What is Jake Limblerleg?"

She whispered a low chuckle into the trumpet. The sibyl inhaled, straightened, looked at Natalie with an unreadable expression. She tapped her wax fingers and selected a card.

Natalie plucked the card from behind the little brass door and held it up into the scant light of the old bulbs.
He is not spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as you understand it.

Miranda tapped her shoulder. "You ready, Natalie?"

Natalie shoved the card in her pocket. "I guess."

Two more turns and then there they were, somewhere
near the center of the maze of tents, facing the dead end and Limberleg's wagon.

"If I see anything I'll yell," Miranda said, looking nervously back the way they'd come.

"Ready?" Tom asked quietly. Natalie nodded and slipped her hand into his.

The door swung inward before they could touch it. Dr. Jake Limberleg stood on the threshold.

"Well," he said, eyeing the three of them, "come in."

"I can't ... I'll just..." Miranda stammered.

"Don't be silly. You can look out quite as well from inside," Limberleg said carelessly. "Sit there, pull aside the curtain."

Tom took off his battered hat and followed the doctor in as if he'd just received a social invitation. Miranda trailed in after Tom and climbed nervously onto a little stool by the window. She stood on tiptoe and peered around the curtain. Natalie entered last, and glanced at the four automata under the miniature Limberleg's outstretched hands.

"Yes," the doctor said, seating himself in the examination chair, "they will know you've come. I suggest you don't waste your time."

"Why did you invite us in?" Tom asked.

"Because you would've come in anyhow, and because my four will be back, and because Natalie's father is at this very moment replacing my missing wheel. He's a good man, your father," he said to Natalie, a horrible twist to his mouth. "Would've traded his soul to keep your family together."

How dare he!
Tom put a hand on Natalie's shoulder to stop her from lunging at him.

Dr. Limberleg smiled thinly. "Mind your task, young lady," he said mildly to Miranda, who had turned to see what the fuss was about.

"How long until the symptoms start?" Tom asked.

"Aahh. Your good doctor must've finally managed a wire from Pinnacle." He interlaced his gloved fingers and rolled his eyes upward. "By midnight, I should think, the gingerfoot will be showing."

"Gingerfoot?"

"Called after the first elixir I patented. Jake Limberleg's Ginger-Angelica Bitters!"

"That's what you sold to Charlie," Natalie hissed.

He laughed, a horrible, humorless laugh. "Yes, of course,
Charlie.
I've given it to hundreds of people, that and dozens of other panaceas. The gingerfoot doesn't come only from the ginger bitters. It doesn't matter what I sell. That's why your mother will get the gingerfoot, too, and everyone else, no matter what their treatment was. Young lady, keep your eyes out that window!"

Miranda glanced at her friend briefly before obeying. Tom squeezed Natalie's hand. She forced herself to stand still.

"It begins as a difficulty with balance, then hardship with walking." He ticked the symptoms off on his gloved fingers.
Those hands...
Natalie tried to find someplace else to look. "It becomes an inability to make one leg work separately from the other. Then a violent shaking, as if
from deep within the bones. A lack of sensation, an utter deadness, spreads upward from the toes. At the end, people drag themselves on their forearms, and then they lose use of those as well."

Dr. Limberleg leaned back in the chair, tapping his fingers on the armrests. "When the malady has run its course, it leaves the sufferer trapped, suspended in a shell of a body that does not recognize a controlling mind. It might or might not move, but if it does, it does not move on any command the soul inside it gives."

"Then what?" Natalie demanded. "You just leave them there to die wherever they fall?"

"
I
am long gone by then," Limberleg said. "But no, I do not imagine they simply lie there and die. The darker spirits of this world can always find uses for human puppets. I suspect only the stronger ones wind up dead—the ones who fight too much against the things that try to take them over when they have truly lost all control. If they cannot be manipulated, they are likely left to die. And I have run into some poor creatures in sanitariums that I suspect were too strong to give in totally but not quite strong enough to fight the demons off." His face became a mask of distaste. "They go mad with the struggle. They are never the same again."

"And the rest?" Tom asked.

Limberleg shrugged. "The struggles between the dark and the light have gone on since long before my time. The commanders change; the battle does not. I don't know what becomes of the weaker victims of the gingerfoot. But
I know they disappear, and I know the Devil and his like prefer not to kill. They do not waste materiel that might someday prove to be useful."

"Like your hands, you mean," Natalie said coldly.

He smiled that thin smile again, but his fingers stilled.

"Oh, no, Natalie, it's not like that at all." His lips twisted, revealing teeth. "I can do anything I want with these hands, so long as it's wicked." He looked at Tom. "I know what you are, old man. Want to see them?" He leaned forward in the chair, templing his fingers together on his knees. "Want to see what you almost won?"

"No, but I'm real curious about something else." Tom grinned back. "Why don't you tell me what you got out of the deal, Jake?"

For a moment the pearly smile flickered. "What I got." His hands moved back to the arms of the chair and flexed, sending two little hairline cracks along the grain in the wood. "What 1
got?
"

The corners of Dr. Limberleg's mouth inched upward toward his ears as his smile transformed bit by bit into something wider, crueler. "I
found
the crossroads. I
offered
my soul, I offered it up on a big silver plate, and I asked for the ability to cure
any disease on earth!
" The last four words came out like projectiles, lifting Jake Limberleg half out of his chair as they burst forth.

"So sit there and judge me for it, but that was my evil, selfish wish," Limberleg spat. "I wanted to be a healer! I thought the knowledge was worth one man's soul. I
thought that was a fair trade, a sacrifice worth making. My soul, to save other people's lives!"

Limberleg paused and took a ragged breath. When he spoke again, his voice was even, deadly.

"So he took my hands and gave me new ones that had the capability mine lacked, the capability to make cures out of whatever they touched. He gave me four mechanical demons, the Paragons. All I had to do was start up those bloody miserable little effigies"—he pointed to the automata under the flowerpots—"then give each of the Four a possession of mine to bind them to me, and they would serve me, build my traveling fair, do my 'good work' forever. Perfect perpetual motion machines, all of them. And then, to fill the void I would make by curing every earthly disease I encountered, he cursed me with a malady from Hell! I can heal anything, treat anything, but with every remedy comes a new disease: the gingerfoot, the one thing that cannot be cured."

"But your leg, Natalie protested. "You tested it!

If it surprised Limberleg to find that Natalie knew that, he didn't show it. "Would've spoiled things if I'd gotten sick from one of my own cures, you see. I might not have gone through with it." His hands twitched and balled into fists on the arms of his chair. "It's possible I wasn't always a monster."

Natalie shook her head, unable to take her eyes from the little cymbal player. The setup, four small figures under flowerpots, Limberleg under a tree ... one of those unbidden images appeared in her head, and she saw the doctor
taking them, one by one, from the crate she'd seen before and dusting away a film of sawdust before arranging them in their little tableau.

Lights flickered behind her eyes, white flashes like fluffs of popping corn in a skillet. She shook her head and forced herself to focus on what was happening now. "Perpetual motion isn't real," she said with effort.

"Machines require force, is that what your
daddy
says, Natalie?" Limberleg snarled. "Did he talk to you about physics? All things come to rest? Well, it happens that there are forces in the world that don't answer to physics, just like there are sicknesses that don't answer to science."

Behind him, the Alpheus Nervine automaton began to move, its arms swinging slowly toward one another. Natalie flinched, but Tom squeezed her hand again.

"I've tried to control them! I've tried to find a way!" Limberleg raised his bone-colored gloves and flexed his fingers angrily. "The gears in my hands, the gears in all those things out in the nostrum fair—oh, there's a force working on them, sure enough, but after all these years it still doesn't answer to me!"

Ping.

Natalie glanced sideways at Tom, then at Miranda, who wasn't even pretending to look out the window anymore.

"
I tried!
" He flung one hand out, gesturing around at the collection of automata in the wagon. "I obtained all these, took them apart and put them together, tried to figure out the clockwork, to find something, anything that would help me control the others...."
Ping.
"And each
time I did, each time I rebuilt one of the perfectly normal automata in my collection, when I wound it again the key would fall out but they would keep on moving, just like the Four and Dalliot and Quinn and the rest. All out of my control and under the power of something else!"
Ping!

Limberleg reached with a shaking hand into his pocket for a cigarette. "I couldn't stop what I'd set in motion, but I tried to set rules. No visiting towns within two hundred miles of each other, for at least a hundred years. I convinced the Four we'd be found out if we weren't careful, but really it was to stop them from tearing up every single village we passed through, every farmhouse, every home. I thought it was possible we'd hurt fewer people."

He fumbled with a match, but it refused to catch on the matchbox. "You don't understand how they are. You don't know what they're capable of."
Ping!
"Young lady, if you are going to be a lookout, for goodness' sake, will you
pay attention to what you are doing!
"