Tanglefoot_ A Story of the Clockwork Century - Cherie Priest [12]
She didn’t budge, not even when the gurney rolled creakily into the center of the hallway, following in Edwin’s wake.
When he reached the right wing, he whispered, “Madeline? Madeline, can you hear me?”
All the windows in the doors to the inmate rooms were well off the ground and Edwin wasn’t tall enough to reach, so he couldn’t see inside. He hissed her name from door to door, and eventually she came forward. Her hands wrapped around the bars at the top, coiling around them like small white snakes. She held her face up to the small window and said, “Boy?”
He dashed to the door and pushed himself against it. “Madeline? It’s me.”
“The boy.” Her mouth was held up to the window; she must have been standing on her tip-toes to reach it.
Edwin stood on his tip-toes also, but he couldn’t touch the window, high above his head. He said, “I need your help. Something’s wrong with Ted.”
For a moment he heard only her breathing, rushed and hot above him. Then she said, “Not your Ted any longer. I warned you.”
“I know you did!” he said, almost crying. “I need your help! He tied my feet together, all tangled up–and I think he’s trying to hurt Dr. Smeeks!”
“Tangled, did he? Oh, that vicious little changeling,” she said, almost wheezing with exertion. She let go of whatever was holding her up, and Edwin heard her feet land back on the floor with a thump. She said through the door’s frame, beside its hinges, “You must let me out, little boy. If you let me out, I’ll come and help your doctor. I know what to do with changelings.”
It was a bad thought, and a bad plan. It was a bad thing to consider and Edwin knew it all too well; but when he looked back over his shoulder at the nurse’s station with the old lady snoring within, and when he thought of the clattering automaton roaming the laboratory darkness with his dear Dr. Smeeks, he leaped at the prospect of aid.
He reached for the lever to open the door and hung from it, letting it hold his full weight while he reached up to undo the lock.
Edwin no sooner heard the click of the fastener unlatching then the door burst open in a quick swing that knocked him off his hobbled feet. With a smarting head and bruised elbow he fought to stand again but Madeline grabbed him by the shoulder. She lifted him up as if he were as light as a doll, and she lugged him down the hallway. Her cotton shift billowed dirtily behind her, and her hair slapped Edwin in the eyes as she ran.
Edwin squeezed at her arm, trying to hold himself out of the way of the displaced gurneys and medical trays that clogged the hall; but his airborne feet smacked the window of the nurse’s station as Madeline swiftly hauled him past it, awakening the nurse and startling her into motion.
If Madeline noticed, she did not stop to comment.
She reached the top of the stairs and flung herself down them, her feet battering an alternating time so fast that her descent sounded like firecrackers. Edwin banged along behind her, twisted in her grip and unable to move quickly even if she were to set him down.
He wondered if he hadn’t made an awful mistake when she all but cast him aside. His body flopped gracelessly against a wall. But he was back on his feet in a moment and there was light in the laboratory–a flickering, uncertain light that was moving like mad.
Dr. Smeeks was holding it; he’d found his light after all, and he’d raised the wick on the hurricane lamp. The glass-jarred lantern gleamed and flashed as he swung it back and forth, sweeping the floor for something Edwin couldn’t see.
The doctor cried out, “Parker? Parker? Something’s here, something’s in the laboratory!”
And Edwin answered, “I know, sir! But I’ve brought help!”
The light shifted, the hurricane lamp swung, and Madeline was standing in front of the doctor–a blazing figure doused in gold and red, and black-edged shadows. She said nothing, but held out her hand and took the doctor