The Boneshaker (35 page)

Something that had been fluttering in her chest grew strong, and something that had been very, very tight loosened just a little.

When I get home,
she decided,
I'll tell Mama what happened, and it will make a great story.

The man on the other side of the flames held up a hand as he waited for her answer. The Four stopped in their tracks, eyeing Natalie with loathing.

"It already flies," Natalie said, because when she got home and told her mother the story, she wanted to have said something brave. "I flew here, didn't you see?"

The creature across the fire didn't like being ignored, but he liked being talked back to by a thirteen-year-old girl even less. When he spoke again, the voice came from right beside her and bore a new, harsh tone.

"Do you know who I am?"

Gripping the spiky miniature Nervine and tiny sharp-eyed Vorticelt under one arm; the periwigged Acquetus and bald, tattooed Argonault under the other; and Old Tom's coin tight in one fist, Natalie looked up at last and felt her eyes glance off the figure in front of her like a
stone skipping over water. The fear was thick in her belly.
Look him in the face, like Tom,
she begged herself.
Be brave like Tom.

"I know who you are," she said.
Look up.

He came to stand between Natalie and the blue fire. "Who am 1, then?"

"You are the collector of hands," Natalie said, because it sounded like the kind of thing a brave girl in a good story would say, and because she didn't feel brave at all. "You are the gambler of souls. You are the gingerfoot, and you are evil. You can do anything at all, as long as it's wicked."
Look up....
Even the voice in her head sounded small and weak and afraid.

The Devil looked down at her, blue fire flickering behind him. The Four waited, just outside the circle of the flames. Natalie's heart beat slow and cold. The small voice in her head urging her to be brave was crying. In a moment she would be frozen, like Miss Tillerman, caught by the gingerfoot and powerless. Helplessly, still holding the coin tightly, and with the miniature Four clutched under her arms, Natalie put a hand up awkwardly to where the sprocket hung from the guitar string around her neck and twined it in her fingers.

Then, without a clue as to where it came from, she heard the music. It was Tom's music, music you would never have known could come from a guitar if you hadn't seen it for yourself.

Natalie raised her eyes to the Devil and met his stare.

Oh...

"I know who you are, and I know why you're here." The gaze was like Vorticelt's, only much, much worse. It was sick-making, dizzy, terrible. It hurt her head and her heart, and made her voice feel thick on her tongue, but she forced herself to go on. "You aren't here for me. You owe a favor to Tom Guyot, and I'm here to tell you what that favor is." She swallowed hard. "Undo the gingerfoot. All of it. Everything back the way it was."

A moment's still silence stretched between them.

"Everything?" the Devil asked quietly.

Suddenly, those eyes she had worked so hard to look into were her mother's eyes, and her peripheral vision swam so that for an instant the Devil was gone and Natalie saw her mama, thin and pale in her bed. The music so much like Tom's came to an end as if it had been nothing more than a recording, and Natalie heard that horrible skipping again...
snick-thump, snick-thump, snick-thump.

"Mama," she choked.

No one had told her what made her mother sick, or how serious it was. She didn't know what it would mean if she said yes now:
Yes, put everything back, even my mother, back the way she was, too.
She did know what it would mean if she backed down. She thought of Mrs. Byron in the road, dragging the weight of her useless body with her forearms until those became useless, too. Natalie couldn't let her mother be turned into a puppet. Even if she wasn't really sure what the alternative was.

But how could she stand up to this thing?

Mrs. Minks's voice spoke in Natalie's memory, telling
the story of Tom Guyot, his tin guitar, and the human hands he was born with.
If this was the last song they would all play together, they'd better make it a song worth dying for.

She frowned, forcing herself to stare until her mother's eyes dissolved back into the Devil's face.

I'll make this a story worth dying for,
she thought fervently.
If it's the last one Mama hears, I'll make it the best story there ever was. And I'll make it home to tell her, too.

Heart pounding in her chest, Natalie Minks stepped around the Devil to the blue flames and, one by one, tossed the automata in.

The little group gasped as the tattered fair burst into flames behind Simon Coffrett. Simon turned slowly and watched as blue fire climbed the canvas. Overhead, the wires snapped, whipcracks lashing in anger at the night.

"Wait and see," he whispered. He turned to face the others. "Go. People will need help." He nodded to indicate the staggering figures in the town beyond.

Miranda would remember that sight for the rest of her life: the fair burning behind Simon Coffrett, his eyes invisible behind the blue-flame reflections in his spectacles ... even though the burning fair was at his back, and his glasses should have reflected the town instead.

The minute she realized that, she turned and ran.

"No!" snarled Alpheus Nervine as the last miniature Paragon disappeared into the flames. He leaped at Natalie, only to be caught like a bee in a jar as a pillar of indigo fire spat up
from beneath his feet, then the feet of each of his companions, encompassing them and cutting off their screeching voices so suddenly that Natalie shivered.

She put her fists on her hips so they would stop shaking and faced the Devil again. She knew he was angry; it made her bones ache to hold his stare, but she forced herself not to look away.

"Pay up," she said, and held the coin out.

The man-shaped creature by the fire clenched his fists. Natalie knew better than to look at them.

"That Tom," the Devil spat at last, his words coming out in a furious rush, "is a bigger botheration than any three Apostles put together. I had better never again encounter him in this world or any other, and for the record, I don't want to see you again, either. Ever!"

He pointed a long, spidery finger at the Four burning slowly in their flaming columns, then pointed another over Natalie's shoulder. She heard a rustle of bells and turned to see the harlequin freeze in midair not three feet from where she stood. Half of its ruined face was crazed into numberless cracks, but the other half was missing whole pieces; the eye on that side was smashed shut, and the gaps where the porcelain had fallen away emitted curls of steam. Its broken mouth howled. Tiny glass shards on its velvet suit sparkled blue in the firelight. Natalie had no idea where it had leaped from.

"My debt is clear," the Devil snarled.

He flung one hand into the air between them. The coin flared with a cold little flame in Natalie's hand. Without thinking she let go, and it spun out of her fingers and
into the Devil's. For a second Natalie saw a face, a real human face at the end of one of the fingers lit by the flame as he curled his awful fist around the burning coin. She thought she saw it wink at her.

Then it was all gone—the Devil, the Four, the harlequin, the coin, and the chamber—leaving Natalie Minks standing on one side of a perfectly normal, dying campfire. Side by side across the fire from where she stood sat Chester Teufels in his threadbare suit and Old Tom Guyot with his guitar on his knee. Tom picked out a tune with his crown cap pick. In the darkness beyond the flicker of the flames, the crickets began to chirp softly again.

"You told the Devil to pay up," Chester Teufels said, and burst into uncontrollable laughter. He wiped a tear out of his eye. "That's funny. Brave ... but funny."

"Yup," Tom said, slapping the strings with the flat of his hand—
one, two, three,four
—so that the guitar itself seemed to be applauding. "More than brave. Bravest thing I ever saw."

Chester Teufels scratched his scalp. "Suppose I can get on my way, now the matter of that debt's all taken care of," he said, glancing around in all directions, plainly without a clue as to where his way might have gotten to after all these years.

"You got four perfectly good roads right here," Tom said.

Chester nodded, then, "Tell you what. I'd sure like to hear you play one more time before I go."

"Got a particular tune in mind?"

Natalie came around the fire to sit down between them. Suddenly she was tired, so tired she had to concentrate hard on what they were saying.

"Let me think." Chester looked younger in the firelight. The deep-scored lines on his face seemed to smooth away as he gave Tom a wide grin and Natalie a conspiratorial elbow in the ribs. "The one you played last time you were here. One more time, I'd like to hear that, if I get to choose."

Natalie looked back and forth between them, running her fingers over the old E string around her neck as her eyelids started to droop. Why had she ever thought Chester Teufels looked like an old man? she wondered sleepily. Up close you could tell he was no older than her father. Or was it only the firelight?

Old Tom strummed a chord. "All right." He smiled, looking up at the sky as his fingers drummed on the guitar. "Let's see if I can recall how that song goes."

"Sure you can," Chester said. "Those old hands of yours'll remember for sure."

"You know," Tom said, "I just bet they will."

S
TRANGE THINGS CAN HAPPEN
at a crossroads; this much surely we have come to expect.

Doc Fitzwater had lived in Arcane since he'd come into the world, and he also knew to expect oddities where the roads outside of town came together. Sometimes, though, the specifics still surprised him, even after all the long decades of his life. Like finding Natalie Minks curled up by the burned-out, years-old circle of an old campfire in the middle of the Old Village before the sun had even come up.

On the other hand, given the wire he'd gotten late the evening before, maybe it wasn't so strange after all.

He stopped the Winton and climbed out, leaning on his alligator cane. "Natalie? What are you doing out here, all by yourself?"

"Dr. Fitzwater?" Natalie rubbed her eyes and squinted through the gray dawn at Doc, the dusty motorcar, and the
cold ash on her fingers. There was no sign of Tom Guyot or Chester Teufels. "What are
you
doing here?" she mumbled. Then she sat bolt upright.
Mama. Charlie.

The car was pointing toward Arcane, so Doc was probably just passing through the Old Village on his way back home. He wouldn't know yet whether her mother and brother had recovered, but if the sick people in the other town had gotten better..."Is everyone all right?" Natalie demanded. "What happened in Pinnacle?"

"Well, it's the funniest thing," Doc muttered, helping her lift the bicycle into the back of the motorcar. "Last night, it..." He paused and gave Natalie a shrewd look as she hopped into the seat beside him. "Things got strange, Natalie. Not to scare you, but things got strange over there. Then last night it all just—"

"Went back to normal? Did everything go back to normal?" She sounded desperate even to her own ears, but she didn't care.

"Well, for lack of a better way to put it, yes. The strangeness sort of ... stopped. That, and Mr. Tilden sent me a wire about some shenanigans going on over here, in some of which your name figured quite prominently. So I decided to head right back home. Don't know how I managed to stay awake. Suffice to say, it was a long night."

Natalie's breath came out in a rush as the Winton chugged into motion, and she nearly stood up and started dancing on the burgundy leather seat. Instead, she twined the guitar-string necklace through her fingers and, for a moment, thought she heard the sounds of music from somewhere far, far away.

As they drove toward Arcane, the crumbling houses dwindled and were replaced by open fields of wildflowers and brambly hedges, vague twisty shapes that took form slowly as the sky warmed.

"Doc," Natalie said after a long silence, "is my mother going to ... is she ... is she going to be okay?"

Doc Fitzwater shot her a glance that, three days ago, would've made her sink through the seat. Today, however, she just looked back at him and waited for his answer. He sighed.

"Your mother's very sick, Natalie. If I tried to deny it, I'd have to lie. But your mother's very strong, too. Furthermore, if
I
had to be very sick,
I'd
want me for my doctor, not to sound my own trumpet. So that's two things in her favor. And then she's got your dad, and you, and Charlie to care for her while she needs it, so there's three more good things to help her on her way back to health. But Natalie, your mama's health aside, it's time you and she sat down and had a very serious talk."

No fooling. First Mr. Swifte, then Simon Coffrett, now Doc.... Clearly, Natalie was owed some explanations about something, and ordinarily she would have put all her energy into pestering answers out of her traveling companion. But she couldn't worry about that yet, not while the most important question in the world still hadn't been answered.

"Is she going to get better, then?"

Instead of answering, Doc Fitzwater gave her a searching look, one that seemed to read on her face all of the
events of the last days. "Only magic illnesses have magic cures, Natalie. Only hucksters make promises nature can't be made to keep. But I have every hope."

Natalie thought about that for a moment. She nodded.

"Drive faster, Doc. I know for a fact this old motorcar can make thirty-five miles an hour, and I gotta get home and tell my mother a story."

"Thirty-five? That a fact?"

"That's a fact. My dad said so."

Doc smiled sideways at her, one eyebrow raised over the monocle glinting in the sun as the motorcar accelerated. "Well, then."