The Boneshaker (36 page)

The Winton chugged down the road toward Arcane. "Hang around the crossroads long enough, Miss Minks," said Doc Fitzwater after a while, with a look that was probably meant to be scary, "and they say you might get to meet Old Scratch."

Natalie smiled, flicking the string around her neck with a thumbnail so it made tiny twanging sounds that only she could hear.

"Really," she said.

Doc Fitzwater stopped the Winton in front of the Minkses' house so Natalie could hop out. Her feet stumbled on the running board, as if they wanted to climb back up into the car even as she was trying to climb down.

Together they lowered the Chesterfield to the street. Natalie glanced up to find Doc watching her with an expression too close to sympathy for her liking. He took
the monocle away from his eye and smiled. "Go on, Nattie. Say your good mornings and tell your mama and your dad I'll be along shortly. And remember, you're part of the good medicine."

Natalie stood at the front door until Doc's car had puttered on its way, then pushed it open as quietly as she could. Inside, the house was silent.

She sank onto the bottom stair, steeling herself for the climb upstairs. For the disappointment.

When Natalie had last seen her mother, she had been well, recovered from whatever awful thing had been making her so sick, planning some kind of elaborate frosting for that stupid cake. She would be sick again now, which was better than what Limberleg's medicine would've done in the end ... but still. She would be sick, and there was no getting around that.

Natalie rose and put a hand on the banister to steady herself. But before she could take her first step, a sound—the soft shifting of hesitant feet in the kitchen—made her turn.

"Natalie," her mother said.

A tide of strange emotions poured through her as she stared at her mother, pale and nervous in the doorway. Relief, anger, love, dread.... Natalie held tight to the banister and concentrated on the grain of the wood under her fingers. Whatever other malady she was suffering, Mrs. Minks clearly did not have the gingerfoot. It had worked, all Natalie had done.

Now what?

Natalie wanted to run into her arms and throw a tantrum at the same time, to demand to know why her mother hadn't told her she was sick, and to be told what was really going on. Unable to decide which to do first, she settled on walking to the kitchen table and sitting down while she thought it over. The kitchen smelled of coffee, and from the number of rings on the table, it looked like her mother had been awake for a while. Waiting for her.

Mrs. Minks stood in the doorway, eyeing Natalie warily. "Your dad and Charlie went out looking for you. Are you all right?"

"I'm okay," Natalie said, and then, as lightly as she could manage, "You?"

Her mother nodded with an expression of relief and made a beeline for the coffeepot to refill her cup.
No,
Natalie thought,
I didn't mean to pretend nothings wrong. That's not fair.
And yet she still couldn't bring herself to throw a tantrum. Where on earth would she start, anyway?
Maybe I could just ask another time,
she thought briefly. Just as quickly as she had the idea, though, she shook her head and dismissed it. The time for that kind of behavior was over.

Some questions cost things, and for sure the can of worms she was about to open was going to be a very costly one. On the other hand, after all she'd been through, Natalie decided she was done with being afraid to ask the questions she needed to know the answers to. She took a deep breath.

"Something happened to me at the fair." It was as good a place to begin as any. "It's happened to me a couple of times, actually, and nobody wants to tell me what it means.
I saw—I knew—things there was no way for me to know. Everyone said to ask you ... about it."

At the sink, Mrs. Minks paused in pouring coffee. Her shoulders did something shivery, and then she was still. She reached for another cup and poured coffee into that, and then she added a sugar cube, a slosh of cream, and a little jot of rum to each. At last, she carried both cups to the table, set one in front of Natalie, and sat down.

Natalie picked hers up in both palms, blew on the surface, and watched her mother through the steam as she took a sip.

"My grandmother called those moments the
phantasmata
," Mrs. Minks said at last. "Seeing—or at least knowing—a story there's no way you should know. That's how I know all the stories I've told you about Arcane. Someday you'll know them all, too. The phantasmata are a gift of memory. They're a way for a whole town to survive through just one person. One storyteller."

"How?" Natalie frowned. "Mama, why would one person have to know everything?"

Mrs. Minks looked out the window for a long moment. "There are some places in the world that are ... different ... from others. Where strange things happen. For reasons I don't even really understand, the crossroads outside of Arcane is a place of power, and thanks to that, all the towns built near it have always been in a kind of danger. Someone has to have the job of remembering the stories of the town, to keep them alive in memory, even if the town itself doesn't last."

For just a moment, Natalie felt the vertigo starting in her throat again. She swallowed it back. "Like the last time Dr. Limberleg was here?" Her mother nodded. "So, the woman who survived the last time," Natalie said slowly, "the one from Trader's Mill who married the judge in the diary...?"

"Yes. She was an ancestor of ours. She couldn't save the town, but because she survived, the stories survived. Arcane almost didn't make it this time. But you saved it. If you hadn't—and if I hadn't made it through..." Natalie's mother shook her head and rubbed a trembling hand over her pale face. "We can talk more about it another time. Right now ... I'm just ... I need to sleep."

Any other time, Natalie would've pestered and insisted on hearing more about this amazing, wild claim. How could it be true? How could anyone know the stories of an entire town? Inherit the knowledge just like that, the way you inherited blue eyes or freckles?

But her mother looked so tired. Deep, purple shadows rimmed her eyes. "There will be plenty of time to explain it all later," Mrs. Minks said quietly.

"Really?" Natalie asked in a very small voice.

Her mother looked up. Something in her expression made Natalie sadder than she'd ever felt before. A moment's silence stretched between them.

If she could face the Devil, she could ask her mother a question. Even if the idea of knowing the answer was a little scary. Natalie took another deep breath and said, voice shaking, "Mama, can you please tell me how sick you are, really?"

She had to force the words out; it was as if they were stuck to the roof of her mouth and did not want to be spoken. But then the question was there, alive in the space between them, and nothing could take it back.

Her mother looked at the tabletop. "Natalie, we aren't sure what it is. That's—you have to believe me, that's the only reason we didn't tell you. Because ... because it's"—her mother's voice caught—"because it's very scary when you know something's wrong but you don't know what it is. When you don't have a name for it."

"I'm not a baby," Natalie whispered. "I'm not afraid of things just because I don't know what they're
called
." But a nagging little part of her knew that wasn't entirely true.

Across the table, Mrs. Minks nodded. "I know you're not, sweetheart. But I am. This time. I needed to be able to explain it to you, and to do that I would have to understand it myself."

"You told Charlie."

"No, I didn't," her mother said in a rush, "I didn't; I promise. Charlie's the first one who thought I should see Doc Fitzwater."

That made Natalie's face burn. "Charlie noticed
first?
" Mortifyingly, tears began to prickle in her eyes and she stood up to turn away so her mother wouldn't see. "Charlie doesn't notice
anything!
Why didn't I—why didn't—"

Mrs. Minks came around the table, and Natalie reached blindly into her arms. As if Natalie weighed nothing, her mother lifted her and held her close. "It isn't your fault. It isn't. You couldn't have known. Charlie saw me faint,
and the last time he saw me faint was when I was pregnant with you. He thought I was going to have another baby." She made a noise like a laugh and a sniffle all at once. "He was really excited, Natalie, because—because you turned out to be such a terrific kid."

Natalie hugged her mother as tightly as she could. "But, Mama, Doc Fitzwater said it might be okay, so maybe you just need to rest a little longer."

Mrs. Minks set her down and stooped beside Natalie, her face suddenly very, very serious.

"I promise I'll tell you if I find out anything different, Natalie. Okay? Can you trust me, even though I didn't tell you before?"

It wasn't the answer she wanted. Natalie rubbed the backs of her hands across her eyes until all the tears were gone. It took a long time, because as soon as she brushed some away, more kept on coming.

"Yes," she said when her eyes stopped blurring. Her mother looked at her carefully, closely, as if that one word might turn out to be a lie. "Yes, Mama," Natalie said again.

She climbed back into her chair and picked up her coffee cup. She took a long, shaky sip that emptied the mug, and held it out.

"Can I have more rum this time, please?"

For the first time in what seemed like weeks, Natalie's mother smiled. It was a real smile, at last. "Don't think for a minute this is going to be how you get your coffee from now on."

***

Two cups of coffee but very little conversation later, Natalie's mother went to bed and Natalie went to sit on the porch steps. It was too quiet in the house.

In the distance, a thin veil of smoke hung over what could only be Simon Coffrett's lot. Natalie shaded her eyes and gazed around the sunlit town so full of strange things and strange stories. It seemed as if the town she knew from her mother's stories and the town she had lived in all her life had finally fused into one Arcane: the real Arcane that had been waiting to come to life for Natalie all along.

As she sat there listening to her town stirring awake, the drifter with the pale green eyes strolled down the center of the street, carpetbag in one hand and faintly glowing lantern slung over his shoulder on its pole. He spotted her sitting on her porch and touched his knuckles to his forehead in a little salute.

The dizziness hit so abruptly, Natalie put a hand down on the porch floor to keep from reeling. In that moment, she knew why he seemed so familiar.

Remember,
her mother had said,
the one where Jack's so awful even the Devil's a little scared of him and won't let him into Hell? So he has to wander the earth with a coal of hellfire looking for his own place?

Clever Jack, the man who'd won three wishes from an angel and used them to foil the Devil so badly he wasn't allowed into Heaven or Hell, was strolling through Arcane before her eyes.

Jack was wandering in search of his place, an afterlife
of his own where he would rule. He had come to Arcane trying to recruit souls for whenever—wherever—he finally found it.
I can give you a haven,
he'd said to Limberleg. At long last, that strange, strange conversation overheard in Limberleg's wagon made perfect sense.

He stopped before the porch and reached up to adjust the wide felt hat shading his pale eyes. "Morning."

"Morning." Natalie made her mouth into the shape of a smile. "Your name's Jack, isn't it?"

His eyes narrowed for just a moment. Then he nodded and adjusted the bag in his hand again. His smile was curious. She wondered if maybe hers wasn't very convincing.

"You leaving town?" Natalie asked casually.

He looked over his shoulder, toward the crossroads he had passed through on his way to Arcane. "Just passing through. Lots of country out there."

For a moment, it was almost as if they were normal people having a normal conversation, and Natalie wondered if she was just tired and confused after all she'd seen and heard over the last few days. No one said
all
the stories her mother had told her had to be true.

Then Jack took the pole from his shoulder, opened the lantern that hung from it, and blew on whatever burned inside, making it glow a little brighter for a moment.

"It's pretty bright out today already," Natalie said, eyes on the lantern.

Jack's eyes glinted, surrounded by webs of crinkling lines in his otherwise smooth, youngish face. "Now, I think you know it ain't lit for light."

"Your name's Jack, isn't it?"

Natalie nodded. No point in lying.

"Anyhow," Jack said, "it's a nice town, this one. The kind of place a fellow could imagine making his own."

He tilted his head, and she could tell he was watching to see if she'd rise to the challenge he'd just flung in her face.

"I don't think you'd better plan on that, actually," she said at last.

His smile stretched even wider across his teeth. "Honey girl, if you know the stories, you know I don't lose."