Tanglefoot_ A Story of the Clockwork Century - Cherie Priest [11]
“What is it, son?”
The doctor’s voice came from miles away, at the bottom of a well–or that’s how it sounded to Edwin, who untangled himself from the sheets and toppled to the floor. He stopped his fall with his hands, and stood, but then could scarcely walk.
As a matter of necessity he dropped his bottom on the edge of the cot and felt for his feet, where something tight was cinched around his ankles.
There, he found a length of wire bent into a loop and secured.
It hobbled his legs together, cutting his stride in half.
“Parker?” the doctor asked, awakening further but confused. “Boy?”
Edwin forced his voice to project a calm he wasn’t feeling. “Sir, stay where you are, unless you have a light. My friend, Ted. He’s gotten loose again. I don’t want…I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
“I can’t find my candle.”
“I can’t find mine either,” Edwin admitted. “You stay there. I’ll come to you.”
But across the floor the marching feet were treading steadily, and the boy had no idea where his automaton had gone. Every sound bounced off glass or wood, or banged around the room from wall to wall; and even the blue-gold shadows cast by the shimmering solutions could not reveal the clockwork boy.
Edwin struggled with the bizarre bind on his legs and stumbled forward regardless of it. No matter how hard his fingers twisted and pulled the wires only dug into his skin and cut it when he yanked too sharply. He gave up and stepped as wide as he could and found that, if he was careful, he could still walk and even, in half-hops and uneven staggers, he could run.
His light was nowhere to be found, and he gave up on that, too.
“Sir, I’m coming!” he cried out again, since the doctor was awake already and he wanted Ted to think he was aware, and acting. But what could Ted think? Ted was only a collection of cogs and springs.
Edwin remembered the red-haired Madeline with the strap-marks on her wrists. She’d said Ted had no soul, but she’d implied that one might come along.
The darkness baffled him, even in the laboratory he knew by heart. Hobbled as he was, and terrified by the pattering of unnatural feet, the basement’s windowless night worked against him and he panicked.
He needed help, but where could it come from?
The orderlies upstairs frightened him in a vague way, as harbingers of physical authority; and the doctors and nurses might think he was as crazy as the other children, wild and loud–or as mad as his mother.
Like Madeline.
Her name tinkled at the edge of his ears, or through the nightmare confusion that moved him in jilting circles. Maybe Madeline knew something he didn’t–maybe she could help. She wouldn’t make fun of him, at any rate. She wouldn’t tell him he was frightened for nothing, and to go back to sleep.
He knew where her room was located; at least he knew of its wing, and he could gather its direction.
The stairs jabbed up sharp and hard against his exploring fingers, and his hands were more free than his feet so he used them to climb–knocking his knees against each angle and bruising his shins with every yard. Along the wall above him there was a handrail someplace, but he couldn’t find it so he made do without it.
He crawled so fast that his ascent might have been called a scramble.
He hated to leave the doctor alone down there with Ted, but then again, the doctor had taken up the screwdriver and the scissors once before. Perhaps he could be trusted to defend himself again.
At the top of the stairs Edwin found more light and his eyes were relieved. He stood up, seized the handrail, and fell forward because he’d already forgotten about the wire wrapped around his ankles. His hands stung from the landing, slapping hard against the tile floor, but he picked himself up and began a shuffling run, in tiny skips and dragging leaps down the corridor.
A gurney loomed skeletal and shining in the ambient light from the windows and the moon outside. Edwin fell past it and clipped it with his shoulder. The rattling of its wheels