Tanglefoot (The Clockwork Century 1.20)

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 sh

ins 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 haunted him down the hallway, past the nurse’s station where an elderly woman was asleep with the most recent issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine lying across her breasts.

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!”