The Boneshaker (6 page)

He unclenched his fists, and the sight of his hands uncurling made Tom sick to his stomach.

as though it had been forged for this very purpose only moments before. Smoke rose in little columns where his dreadful fingers touched it, as if it was blistering enough to burn even the Devil.

"Tom felt a change in the atmosphere. Spirits filled the air around them: an audience to decide the winner of the bet. He could hear their whispers, like he had heard the Devil's cold, deadly threats, in his own heart.

"The Devil strummed an experimental chord. The faces on his fingertips made a keening sound, a thin, weeping wail that raised goose flesh on Old Tom's back. He couldn't tell if they were singing ... or screaming. The Devil looked at Tom and smiled."

Natalie's mother hesitated just a bit longer than was necessary for dramatic effect.

"'Now we begin.'"

W
HILE ANNIE MINKS
did what she did best (talking while
not
cooking), night fell all around the town of Arcane. Inside the livery stable Tom Ogle's pack of horses and mules were tucked in for the night, and the forges were cooling at the blacksmith's behind it. All the kids had been chased home from the soda fountain at the general store, and the adults had retired to porches and parlors and kitchens for cups of coffee or pipes of tobacco.

The little procession out on the east-west road stopped so the drivers could light the oil lamps hanging from the front corners of each wagon and adjust the harnesses of the steaming mules. Then they lurched into motion again and continued on toward the Old Village and Arcane beyond.

Just as the first wagon reached the crossroads at the center of the deserted village, the front left wheel sprang off its shaft. The wagon lurched sideways with a clattering of glass from inside.

The wheel rolled out of the lantern light into the darkness by the side of the road. The man holding the reins of the front wagon raised an eyebrow in annoyance, hauled the mules to a standstill, and jumped lightly down to inspect the damage. There was none.

Now the other four drivers approached, lanterns in hand, to see what the holdup was. The man with the red and gray hair spoke softly.

"Find the wheel."

He watched grimly as the others plunged into the darkness with their lanterns, then turned slowly to examine the dead town around him.

"This place," he murmured, "is a little worse for the wear these days." He squatted to examine a fresh set of footprints and allowed himself the slightest twist of a smile. "But the traffic appears to be about the same."

At length the other four drifted back to the wagons, empty-handed.

"It's gone." The man who spoke had spiky gray hair. "Not going to find anything you lose in this spot, Jake."

"We've driven through this way before without trouble."

The spike-haired man looked around as if to say,
A lot has changed around here.

"So there should be even less trouble this time." The driver with the red and gray hair flexed his fingers on the handle of his whip. It was a gesture of annoyance, although none showed on his face. "It's a
wheel.
It moves, then it stops. Look again."

The spike-haired man looked at him for a moment, then turned wordlessly and was swallowed up by the darkness that lay beyond the road. "The man says it's here, lads."

Another of the four made a sound like a short laugh. They disappeared into the dark again.

Up in Natalie's bedroom, the battle between the Devil and Old Tom Guyot was about to begin.

"Now, when two people make a bet, they have to agree on the stakes," her mother explained, "and what they agreed on that night at the crossroads was that if the Devil won, Tom had to give up his soul when he died, and until then the Devil would get Tom's hands as a down payment."

"His
hands?
" Natalie squeaked.

"In place of his own, Tom would have to wear a pair of demon hands for the rest of his life, hands that answered to the Devil. If Tom won—and here the Devil actually laughed out loud, and you can imagine how awful a sound that was—the Devil would owe Tom a favor, with no strings attached."

It didn't sound like a very good deal, and Natalie said so.

"You forget," her mother reminded her, "that he would also get to keep his soul and his life."

Neither of which seemed like things he should have to fight the Devil for, Natalie thought.

"The air was heavy, thick with smoke from the fire and spirits from every realm of the cosmos. The terms were set. The contest began.

"The Devil went first, and he could indeed make a guitar sing in ways Tom had never imagined. But you couldn't really call it
music.
It was something between rhythm and misery, and it made Tom's bones scratch and scrape against each other as if his skeleton was fighting to crawl out of his skin and escape without the rest of him. There was no question, though: the Devil could play that guitar like no man on earth.

"Then the singing started, and Tom thought he would go mad with terror. Those tiny human faces at the end of the many-jointed fingers on the Devil's hands twisted in agony as they crooned and chanted to the sounds from the hellish guitar.

"It seemed to go on for a century, each measure more haunting and dreadful than the last, until even the spirits in the air wept in hopelessness. Tom looked at his hands, the hands he thought he would never see again. The Devil saw and laughed as he picked the strings on his smoldering, smoking guitar.

"Finally, with a last moan, the song came to a sudden end like death striking in the middle of a sentence, and then ... silence.

"Tom's heart shuddered against his ribs. It would be a blessing, he thought, to have already lost and not have to suffer through the act of failing. Still, he positioned his own guitar on his knees and whispered to his shaking hands that if this was the last song they would all play together, they'd better make it a song worth dying for."

In the little bedroom, the weight of an entire world holding its breath descended onto Natalie as she sat, still as a statue, and listened.

"And then," her mother said at last, "Tom began to play."

Out at the crossroads, the man with the red and gray hair smoked a thin cigarette and waited. One by one, the drivers trudged back to the road. The wheel, they insisted, had vanished. Just vanished, like ... magic.

The man rolled his eyes and crushed out his cigarette. "Magic has better things to do with itself than pop wheels off a wagon." He pulled the cloak around his body and exhaled one last mouthful of smoke up at the stars.

The drivers glanced sideways at one another.

"So we shall roll on like a bunch of half-shod idiots who can't find their wheels with four pairs of eyes," he said coldly. "Rig what you can. We'll have to stop in that town for repairs tomorrow."

"Only for repairs?" This from a man who wore mirrored spectacles, despite the dark.

"Less than two days out of that last village, what do you suggest?" He shook his head. "There are reasons we have rules."

"You said yourself there shouldn't be any trouble here. If we don't set up, it'll look strange."

The man in the cloak gave a harsh bark of a laugh. "Strange? I can't imagine how we could ever look
strange.
" But his hauteur diminished a little. "I'll give it some thought. See to the wagon."

Natalie's fingernails cut little moons into her palms as she sat without breathing.

"Tom couldn't remember afterward what song he thought he was playing, or what notes his fingers plucked out or what words he sang. He only knew he put his hands to the guitar and gave himself up to it. Perhaps he lost consciousness, or perhaps his hands were even more desperate to beat that Devil than Tom was, or perhaps the guitar itself came a little to life. All he knew was that when he became aware of what he was doing, it was because he sensed the atmosphere changing again.

"All around him, the spirits, dark ones and light, were moving like winds, and for a moment he thought he could actually see them, as if in order to glimpse Tom better they were venturing into his own world, poking their deathly faces through the fabric of Hell into the light of Tom's smoldering fire.

"They were whispering. It was like the chant of the Devil's fingers, just as haunting and fearsome, and Tom knew the spirits were passing their judgment.

"All the while he kept on playing, but to his horror, although he could feel the guitar vibrating against his palms and knees,
he couldn't hear the music.
He couldn't hear his own voice, although he could feel it resonating in his chest and thrumming in his vocal cords.

"If he had looked up, Tom would have seen the smile fading from the Devil's face. He would have noticed those spidery hands clenching and unclenching again. Tom might not have been able to hear the song, but the Devil could, and he wasn't happy about it.

"But Tom didn't look up. He kept on playing, and since he couldn't hear the music, he listened to the murmurs in the night and slowly realized what they were saying. It was one single word, chanted over and over. That one word echoing in the thickened air ... was
grace.

"The Devil knew before Tom did that the contest had been decided. He leaped to his feet and roared, his human disguise peeling away like the old skin of a snake so that his true shape, the shape that matched his hands, caught the last light of the fire.

"Tom saw none of this, nor did he hear it.

"The Devil leaped at him, baring his fangs in jaws that opened sideways, and just a second before those jaws tore into Old Tom Guyot, the spirits rushed into the space between them. They spun into a whirling gust around the furious Devil and picked him up as easily as a twister takes a house into the air. Then spirits, Devil, and all spun together faster and faster into a tighter and tighter spiral, until only a thin bright line remained, stretching from the sky to the earth and beyond into the deeps. Then it blinked out.

"That's when Tom suddenly heard the music he was playing. It was as if someone's hands had covered his ears and then had uncovered them again, and as soon as he heard the song, he knew he had beaten the Devil. He raised his head slowly.

"The Devil was gone. Only Tom and his guitar and the dying fire remained." Natalie's mother paused, as if there might be more ... and then: "That's the story of Tom Guyot at the crossroads."

Slowly Natalie uncurled her stiff fingers. "That's not ... true, is it?"

Her mother shrugged. "It's a story that's been part of this town since before I was born. I don't know if it's true or not. Maybe it's a little bit true and a little bit false."

"It has to be one or the other." Natalie did some calculations in her head. "Anyway, if Tom was old fifty years ago, how could he possibly still be alive today?"

"There are a lot of things I don't know how to explain." It was an odd thing for Natalie's mother, who loved to explain things, to say. "All I know is that it takes some kind of grace to beat the Devil at anything."

Which made even less sense than Tom Guyot's age—Tom walked with a crutch, and badly. If there was anything he
wasn't,
it was graceful.

"It has to be one or the other," Natalie insisted.

"The only person who knows for sure is Old Tom." Again that hesitation, so unlike her mother. "You could ask him what happened that night at the crossroads."

Outside the window beside the bed, Bard Street stretched away into the dark straight through Arcane and all the way to that very spot. Natalie knew exactly where the two roads intersected amid the ruins of the Old Village. She imagined Old Tom's campfire on that night long ago, and for a moment she thought she could even see lights out there in the distance—tiny sparks like the pinprick lights of fireflies, or stars.

"I
SEE YOU DIDN'T BRING
your bicycle out today."

Natalie rolled her eyes and kept walking. "We have other things to do today."

"And what, exactly, are you planning to do with
that?
"

Miranda, pink and prissy, jabbed a finger at the jar Natalie held. Natalie sighed. Barely lunchtime, and already Miranda was getting on her nerves. On the other hand, Natalie had two more friends along today. There were great benefits to these particular friends. One: Miranda was sweet on Alfred Tate, so she tended to tone down her more annoying qualities if he was there, and two: when she didn't tone down far enough, Ryan Wilder was even quicker to point out when she was being annoying than Natalie was.

"It's a
bee.
You can
plenty
with it," Ryan said, without bothering to look at Miranda.

"Like what." She didn't even bother to make it sound like a question.

Natalie handed the jar to Alfred and held up a hand, ticking off answers on her fingers. "Bees make honey. Bees make wax. Bees sting people who annoy them."

Ryan snorted and Alfred bit his lips to keep from grinning. Natalie took back the jar and started walking again.

"You can't do any of that with only one bee!"

It just went to show how little regard Miranda had for accuracy. At least one of those things you could do with one bee—and very effectively, if you took off the punctured lid and upended the jar on Miranda's head.

But that would be a waste of a perfectly good bee.

"We're going to sell it."

"
Sell it?
"

Natalie ignored the dripping disbelief in Miranda's voice and marched up the stairs of the general store with Ryan and Alfred in tow.

The key to this sort of thing was to look businesslike. Back straight, shoulders squared, Natalie strolled past the bigger kids at the soda fountain with the jar in both hands and the boys following like lieutenants. Miranda trailed along behind them.

Arcane's general store had always felt a little bit like the center of the town to Natalie. At the front on the left when you walked in there was the soda fountain, where you could sit on a high leather stool and have ice cream or root beer, or Mr. Tilden, who ran the store, could mix you up something made of soda and syrup (Mr. Tilden was an artist with flavored syrups). On the right-hand side, across from the fountain with its high stools, sat two wrought iron tables, each with four little chairs. The space in between the tables and the fountain formed a sort of aisle you could follow all the way through the store.