The Boundless (23 page)

“Thank you,” he wheezes.

He's startled by how far they are from the train. He stamps his feet against the earth, trying to batter feeling into them. And then he sees three figures walking toward them.

*   *   *

“Hey!” Brogan shouts out. “What are you doing out here!”

“Who are they?” Mackie says.

“I can't see 'em,” Chisholm replies, squinting his buggy eyes at the two figures staggering out of the muskeg.

Brogan lifts his lantern, trying to catch them with his light. One of them is a girl, and the other one's leaning on her—a boy, he thinks, but can't be sure because his head is down. Who'd be stupid enough to wander out here . . . unless they were making a run for it? Brogan finds the knife in his pocket and grips it tight.

Suddenly the two figures start hobbling for the train, fast as they can.

“Get 'em!” Brogan barks, and they give chase. It's dark, his lantern light jangling around all over the mushy earth. The moon disappears behind cloud, and Brogan trips on something and goes down. The lantern is dashed from his hands and extinguished. Blind for a moment, he pushes himself up, and thinks he sees a woman's face, cheek pressed to the mud, smiling at him. Can't be right, just a shadow, and now the moon's back out and he's on his feet again and the boy is right in front of him. It's him—William Everett.

There he is. Couldn't have asked for more.

Brogan tackles him, and they both go down into two feet of muck and water.

You can drown him nice and quietly,
the voice says inside his head.

“Brogan!” the boy is shouting. “Brogan! Stop!”

He's thrashing hard, the boy, dragging both of them deeper into the bog. Brogan tries to stand, and feels his feet sink. He steadies himself, punches the boy in the face, gets his hands round his throat and pushes. The boy's head goes under, comes back up gasping, and Brogan pushes it down again, this time for good.

There you go,
she says inside his head.
Hold him down. . . .

“Brogan!” someone is shouting beside him. It's Mackie. “Brogan! Let him up! That's Chisholm!”

*   *   *

“Just run!” Maren hisses.

Will takes a last backward glance at Brogan, struggling with one of his own men in the bog. What happened? A third man—maybe Mackie?—is hollering from the shallows, trying to pull them both back to solid ground.

Then Will looks straight ahead and forces his numb legs to carry him as swiftly as possible toward the Boundless.

THE WORLD OF WONDERS

Mr. Dorian is waiting for them at the door to their carriage and hurriedly ushers them inside.

“Thank goodness,” he says with obvious relief. “I was just about to go looking.”

Will is sodden and shivering and covered in bog mud. There are a few other people in the corridor, and he hangs his head so they won't see his washed-away face.

“Just a little stroll in the muskeg,” Mr. Dorian says to the curious.

Inside their compartment the ringmaster locks the door. “What happened?”

“I can't believe I opened the curtains,” Will mutters.

“I woke up,” says Maren, “and you were gone, and I saw the handcuffs on the floor. When I looked out the window, you were there—and there was just something about the way you were walking, like sleepwalking. It wasn't normal. So I put on those glasses of yours and hurried out.”

“Well done, Maren,” the ringmaster says.

“You saw her, didn't you?” Will asks her.

“It's all shadow through the spectacles. But there was definitely someone with you. She moved around a lot. Sometimes it was like her feet weren't even touching the ground.”

“She came right inside,” Will says. He points to the handcuffs on the floor. “She took those off. What is she?”

Mr. Dorian takes a breath. “That, I don't know. What she does is quite beyond my understanding or abilities. The world is full of wonders. Especially along this road.”

“Brogan and some of his men were out there too,” Maren tells the ringmaster.

Mr. Dorian turns intently to Will. “Did they recognize you?”

“I don't know. He was shouting at us. We just started running.”

“I thought we were finished,” Maren says, “because you were really slow at first. But then suddenly Brogan tackled one of his own men. It looked like he was trying to drown him!”

“He must've seen the hag,” Will says. “She puts ideas into your head.”

“Maybe he thought it was you,” says Maren.

Will shivers at the thought.

“You'll want to get out of those wet clothes,” Mr. Dorian tells him.

“I'm sorry,” he mumbles, for the underclothes have a rich stink to them. He still feels dislocated from his body, like all the sensation hasn't quite returned to his limbs. He starts peeling off the soaking garments, then glances awkwardly over at Maren.

“I won't look,” she says, turning. “Here, I'll set out your dry clothes on the bunk.”

“I'll take these to the washroom to clean them,” says Mr. Dorian, pushing the filthy clothes into a burlap sack and leaving the room.

Gratefully Will dries himself with a small towel and pulls on clean trousers and a shirt.

Maren is going through her bag. “Madame Lamoine gave me some extra paint for touch-ups.” She produces several small jars and a brush.

Will sits on the bench, and Maren kneels before him.

“Can you fix it?” Will asks.

“It won't be nearly as good as what Madame Lamoine did, but I'll try.”

Staring at him intently, she brushes paint over his cheekbones. She bites her lower lip as she works. Will knows she's just concentrating, but he still feels embarrassed to be the subject of such attention from her. He gazes at the floor, though keeps sneaking small peeks at her face. Her eyes unexpectedly meet his.

“You handcuffed me to the bunk,” he says.

“I just saved your life!”

“You turned me into a prisoner!” He's still angry with her but can't quite muster the same outrage he felt earlier.

“I knew you'd run, so I manacled you.”

Mr. Dorian returns and locks the cabin door behind him. He's carrying two steaming mugs.

“Hot chocolate,” he says, handing them to Maren and Will. “Your clothes are hanging up to dry in the washroom.”

“Thank you,” Will says. “Is the train all right?”

“Quite all right. I made inquiries. A sinkhole opened up beneath the tracks, but they're working hard to fill it up with sand and gravel.”

“Will we be able to get through?”

“The Boundless carries extra steel for just such eventualities.”

“No one was hurt up front?” he asks, thinking of his father.

Mr. Dorian shakes his head. Will takes a sip of his hot chocolate. It's just the right sweetness and very creamy. He still isn't sure how to speak to Mr. Dorian. Is he a friend, or a prison warden?

“Are you going to handcuff me again?”

“That depends. Can we trust you?”

“Trust
me
? I'm not the thief.”

“I have my reasons for being one,” says the ringmaster.

“What's so special about this painting?”

“Quite simply, I can't live without it.”

Will gives a sniff of laughter, but then sees the serious expression on Mr. Dorian's face.

The ringmaster looks from Will to Maren. “You have a right to know. You especially, Maren, since you're helping me. I am the inheritor of a family curse—medical in nature, not magical. My great-grandfather, a man of immense strength and vigor, died at the age of thirty-nine. My grandfather died at the same age. As did my own father. All three were felled by a sudden and massive seizure of the heart. I am two weeks away from my thirty-ninth birthday.”

Looking at Mr. Dorian, Will finds it almost impossible to believe that he could suffer from any illness.

“Have you seen a doctor?” he asks.

“Many. And all say the same thing. I have some tragic flaw in my heart. There is nothing to be done about it. It is a clock that will eventually trip over itself and stop.”

Will isn't sure what any of this has to do with stealing a painting.

“Given my parentage, carving out a life for myself was no easy thing,” Mr. Dorian says. “But I did it. I built my circus into one of the finest in the world. But there is still too much I want to do. Too much left to achieve. I will not be snuffed out in my prime.”

“But you can't know it'll happen to you, too,” Maren says.

Mr. Dorian gives a dry chuckle. “The history is not promising. But I mean to thwart it.”

“How?” Will asks, glancing at Maren. She looks just as confused as he feels.

“You've heard the legend of the fountain of youth, yes?”

Will nods. “But—”

“Listen a moment. The Arawak people of the West Indies told the first Spanish settlers about it. There are many accounts of a natural spring in Florida that bestowed permanent youth. A Spaniard called Juan Ponce de León found it. But he left no written record. I spent years searching for that fountain.”

“But I thought you didn't believe in magic,” Will says.

“I don't. Why is it any more magical than the sasquatch or the muskeg hag? You've beheld both with your own eyes. There's no magic about these things. We may not understand them yet, but they're part of our world, and anything that exists in the world is real.”

“Did you find it?” Maren asks.

“The site only. The pool had long ago dried up. But I did learn that an enterprising fellow had devised a way of secretly transporting the water. He soaked up the last of it with fabric, and divided that fabric into a number of canvases. And it turned out that if you painted someone's portrait upon the canvas, that person remained young, and only his picture aged.”

Will says, “This . . . it can't be true.”

“Time is a mysterious thing. You've seen how it can falter when we cross a time zone. This water simply helps time forget itself. Beyond that, I have no understanding of the water's properties. Apparently one of the canvases made its way to England, where it's been keeping a very unpleasant fellow young for many years; another went to Persia, another still to a Russian prince. One found its way to our shores and fell into the hands of a painter, one Cornelius Krieghoff. He painted a blacksmith shop on it. Clearly he had no idea. Nor did Van Horne.”

There have been moments—and Will remembers each one—when he has sensed his life shift. He felt it that day in the mountains when he met Maren for the first time. And he feels it again now. The entire world seems much larger and stranger than he could ever have imagined. It now contains not only sasquatch but a muskeg hag—and canvases that can trick time itself. He certainly doesn't understand it, and he's not even sure he believes it.

“I need that painting,” says Mr. Dorian, “and I happen to know it's inside Van Horne's funeral car. It's just hanging unseen, like a relic in an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb. I want my portrait painted on the back. From that moment on my body will not age. My heart's clock will not snap its spring. And that, William Everett, is my story. What do you say? Am I a villain?”

Will thinks carefully. It's still stealing, but it's hard to care very much, when it's something that otherwise is just going to hang in the darkness forever. Why leave it there when it could save a man's life? And yet . . .

“Getting Maren to crawl underneath . . . ,” he says hesitantly. “You shouldn't. It's not right to ask her to do something so dangerous.”

Mr. Dorian smiles. “Your chivalry is a credit to you, William. But I think Maren has made her own decision.”

“Yes,” she says, surprising Will with the annoyance in her voice. “And please don't bring it up again.”

He frowns. “All right. . . .”

“It's bad luck having someone around who doesn't think you can do something,” she says. “Hands.”

He stretches out his hands so she can reapply more skin paint. “I think you can do it,” he says as she roughly brushes makeup on. “But that just turns the power off. Do you even know where the door is?”

“Of course,” says Dorian. “It's in the right side, ten feet back from the front of the car.”

Will tries to conjure it before his mind's eye. He saw it only briefly that day in the Junction—he was in such a hurry to find Maren. He remembers his eyes getting lost in the complicated contours of the decorations. All those sculpted metal wreaths and garlands and ivy and blossoms and fruit. He supposes the door must be hidden there.

“And if you get the painting, who'll do your portrait?”

“Madame Lamoine,” says Mr. Dorian. “She's got quite a fine hand.”

“Ah,” says Will, disappointed somehow.

The car gives a little forward jerk, and then another longer pull.