The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Him, too? Was I putting out some kind of irresistible pheromones all of a sudden?

  Was he? His clothes were rumpled, his hair was long and messy, his eyes were red, and he was handsomer than he’d been when we had lunch at the coffee shop at the beginning of all this.

  Well, the beginning as far as I was concerned. Let’s remember, this was the person who had resuscitated Paavo Latvela’s magic violin months ago and not told me about it until tonight. He was handsome and he was a selfish sneak.

  I said, “Forget it, Joel. I’m not exactly in the mood, you know? Where are you going to sleep tonight?”

  Not the best question I could have asked at that moment. But out it popped, and I felt my face turn bright red.

  “How about right here?” he said, pressing his slightly stubbly cheek down on the quilt and giving me a slow blink, mock sexy but not completely mock, if you know what I mean. “We’ll put the violin between us to keep us chaste, like Tristan’s sword between him and Isolde.”

  “No thanks,” I said lamely, trying to remember the story of Tristan and Isolde from our mythology unit. Also, my confused feelings seemed to be interfering with my normal eloquence.

  Daydreams are one thing. But when the boy is actually right there—I mean, what would it be like to lie down in the familiarity of my own bed, in my own room, with Joel? I did at that moment think fleetingly of Beth Stowers from eleventh grade. What she’d done was beginning to seem just as dumb but not quite so weird. I was getting an inkling.

  To my huge relief, plus a twinge of disappointment, Joel changed the subject. “I like your room, but it is yours, I don’t mean to just barge in and occupy it like an invading army. Can I sack out on that couch in the living room?”

  “Fine,” I said promptly. “But let’s give Manley a chance to leave first.”

  Joel settled back with his hands behind his head. “So tomorrow is B day, right? And we’re supposed to zap her with our mighty powers, whatever they may be and however we do that. Do you think that’s what Paavo would do?”

  “How should I know?” I said, “He’s not around to ask, so we just have to do what we think might work, okay?”

  He blinked. “I just wondered.”

  I sat down on the end of the bed. “Joel,” I said, “I can’t think of anything else.”

  “You’re doing fine,” he said seriously. “You know, now that I think of it, it was an honor to be rescued from the kraken by you. I was just too stupid to know it at the time.”

  I said, “You sure were, but actually I didn’t do it. Not by myself. Gran and Paavo did it, really.”

  He yawned. “Don’t put yourself down. The Comet Committee only amounts to anything at all because you’re on it, and if those kids—if we all survive this Bosanka person, that’ll be because of you, too.

  “The thing is—” He looked troubled. “I’m not sure I belong. I want to, it’s not that I’m trying to weasel out or anything. But I wasn’t on the roof with you on New Year’s, whatever anybody says. I wasn’t part of whatever you did up there.”

  “You would have been,” I said, “except that you walked out.”

  He flung himself back against my pillows. “Sure I did! It looked like a séance with a bunch of flakes. How was I supposed to know that anything was really going to happen?”

  “You could have stuck around to find out,” I said.

  “Valentine, that’s what I’m saying. My God, am I supposed to spend my entire life apologizing to you?”

  It certainly wasn’t the first time, he was right about that. But I restrained myself from pointing out that if he’d quit behaving like a spoiled brat, he would also stop providing the occasions for all those apologies.

  “Bosanka says you’re in the committee,” I said, “and I think she’s right. You’re involved, Joel. Magical stuff of mine has been connected to you from the beginning. You were there when Paavo did magic by the lake. You were part of it, with me. And you’re here now, for this. Whatever it is. That’s not an accident.”

  He said wistfully, “Sometimes I catch myself wondering if it ever really happened: Paavo, the Princes of Darkness, the kraken.”

  “Wait till you meet Bosanka,” I said. “If she can happen, anything can.”

  “So,” he said with a big sigh, “should I bring this with me to the committee meeting tomorrow?” He patted the violin case.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Better not. I’d hate for her to get her hands on it.”

  “Over my dead body,” Joel said.

  The phone rang. I grabbed it. Barb’s voice said, “Valentine? I got something to show you.”

  Barb sounded excited, not mad. She sounded like her old self again. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In my darkroom.”

  “I’m there,” I said and hung up. I grabbed my coat. “Come on, Joel. Got some money? We need a cab.”

  As we dashed out I called to Mom from the front hall, “I’m just going downstairs with Joel, be right back.”

  She yelled something after me, but we were already at the elevator.

  “Where’d you leave the violin?” I said.

  Joel grinned. “I stashed it under your bed.”

  Barb lived with her mom and her juvenile delinquent brother in a brownstone on the edge of what I think they used to call Hell’s Kitchen. This is probably the last ungentrified chunk of the West Side—below Fifty-ninth, around Eighth and Ninth avenues. I was not unhappy to have a male escort, going down there at night.

  Barb generally extolled the area as having the only decent grocery stores and bakeries (mostly Italian, but lots of Asian places now too) in New York, and other accoutrements of a real neighborhood. Barb has always been gutsier than I am. She’s pretty much fearless. I found the place scary.

  Barb’s apartment is a fourth-floor walk-up with halls the color of dried mucus and stairs that list heavily to starboard and squeal wildly underfoot.

  Barb, having buzzed us in downstairs, shouted through the open apartment door, “In here!” We made our way back through the string of high-ceilinged, shadowy rooms, full of couches and chairs with cushions and rugs all over them. Barb’s mom has a thing for textiles.

  I hollered, “Where’s your mom?”

  “Cosmetics show,” Barb yelled back, “at the Coliseum. Come look at this, you’re not going to believe it!”

  We reached our goal, the tiny back-bathroom which is Barb’s bathroom and also her darkroom. Barb stood in the glow of the red bulb she’d installed, washing prints in a yellow plastic tray in the sink. Water swished through some kind of siphon arrangement to run off into the topless toilet tank. She had a long apron on over a knee-length T-shirt and ragg wool socks.

  “Who’s that?” she said, spotting Joel over my shoulder.

  “Joel Wechsler,” I said.

  Barb whispered, “You could have warned me, Valentine!”

  She was very sensitive about her legs being skinny, which they were. But right now she was too intent to make more than a token fuss over being caught in a state of undress.

  “Look at that!” She pointed with yellow plastic tongs at the print she was rinsing in the tray jammed into the little sink.

  There stood Bosanka, holding the wooden dowel like a sword. The oak chair was actually bent, cringing away from her on curving legs. Odd shadowy patterns centering on Bosanka entangled the feet of the chair—curves and lines like faults in the film or the camera lens. Looking closely, I could see actual designs on the stage, around Bosanka and behind her. They showed right through her as if she were transparent.

  Stones in a little heap. A row of pennies. A circle of what looked like moulted pigeon feathers. Pieces of glass curved into a spiral. Leaves.

  I said, “Barb, what is this?”

  “Power,” Barb said. “Or an attempt at power, anyway. Look, she’s from someplace where they ran things with magic, not fancy technology like ours. She’s trying to get a handle on us the way she knows best, with the powe
r patterns she remembers from her home place.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “I didn’t see anything like that in the auditorium this afternoon!”

  “Neither did I,” Barb said, “but my camera saw it. And that’s not all. This is one I took later on. I snuck back in and there was nothing to see, but I snapped a few frames anyway to get evidence, you know, of the broken chair. But look what shows up in the picture!”

  She rinsed off a print in which Bosanka didn’t appear at all. There was the auditorium stage, and laid out flat on it was a wide triangle of sticks with mismatched ashtrays at the points (I recognized a glazed green one in the shape of a frog from the principal’s office). In each ashtray a little flame burned. Stage left, near the curtain, newspapers had been stacked in overlapping piles to make a kind of platform inside lines of acorns and dark twisty things—roots, maybe.

  “You didn’t actually see this stuff there?” I said.

  “Nope.” Barb nudged me. “The camera’s showing us the tracks of rituals Bosanka must have done in there earlier. I put that splinter of my hand-mirror inside the Leica. This camera takes pictures of magic now!”

  “Bosanka’s magic,” I said. “God, Barb, this is wonderful! You’re—you’re the world’s first psychic spy!” I squinted at the second picture. “That’s a bed on the stage, isn’t it? Made of newspapers?”

  Barb nodded eagerly. “It’s like the auditorium is her cave, see? Her lair. She lays out this stuff at night and then she takes it all up again in the morning, before anybody comes. She’s been living in the school, Valentine. Sleeping there, raiding the kitchen for food—why not?”

  My scalp crept. “But what are the designs for?”

  “Power patterns, to protect her while she sleeps,” Barb said in a hushed tone.

  Bosanka had tried to make herself a guarded place, a place where she felt secure, wound around with scraps of magic from her old world that she hoped would keep our world at bay while she was off her guard, resting. The idea of Bosanka feeling vulnerable enough to need something like that made me feel vaguely ashamed of myself. She was a person, after all, who was good and scared in a strange place, just as Lennie had said.

  “Last one,” Barb said, fishing the next print out of the smelly developer with her tongs and putting it in to rinse. “Whew. Look at that.”

  An off-center shot showed a parade of human-size animals drawn in chalk, marching down one wall of the auditorium: leaf-takers. The scene in the jeans store came rushing back to me—drippy fog and the big, doggy-smelling animal whickering anxiously to itself while it patted and turned the wad of purple leaves between its paws.

  There in the auditorium Bosanka had drawn more of these creatures, images from home. Maybe she’d hoped to lure her people to her by picturing plentiful game for them.

  If she weren’t so dangerous, it would have been pathetic. Heck. It was pathetic anyway.

  Barb turned in the cramped space to take down some smaller prints from where they were clothespinned to a wire to dry. “These are some shots I took in the park yesterday on the beginning of the roll. Couldn’t figure out what any of it was, but I think now I know.”

  One picture showed a row of pine twigs planted neatly in the ground like small green plumes, with white pebbles placed carefully between them. In the next shot, a parade of gray sticks had been jammed into some cracks in a low, rounded outcrop of rock. Tied to each stick by a tight binding of colored thread was a feather.

  “Barb,” I said, “I don’t get it.”

  She held up the first little picture next to one of the auditorium. “Same patterns, see it? Force lines, like iron filings aligned by a magnet, but this time set up in the park.”

  “Where’d you take that?” I said, pointing at the little print of the sticks in the rock.

  “Castle Lake. It’s a magic place, right? Bosanka has a nose for magic, so she knows that. She’s trying to tap into the local current, put it to work for her.”

  I handed the pictures out to Joel (the bathroom was just about big enough to hold Barb and me, squashed) and took another look at the enlargements Barb had tacked up under the smaller prints. I was shivering despite the warmth of the overheated apartment.

  “What do they do when they find stuff like this in Barbados, Barb? Break it up?”

  “Somebody else’s spell-work? You don’t touch it, not unless you know exactly what you’re doing.”

  “Hey, I know that girl,” Joel said, holding the pictures under Barb’s bedside lamp. He pointed at the image of Bosanka. “When I played Paavo’s violin on Boston Common that morning, that’s the girl who ran away!”

  15

  Left With the Check

  I FELT INVADED BY THIS SLOW EXPLOSION of understanding—which, for the moment, I managed to keep to myself. Barb showed Joel more of her pictures. I collapsed on my back on her bed to think.

  This had to have been the “call” Bosanka said she’d heard, the signal that she’d chased back here to our world: Joel’s try at making music, or magic, or both, by playing Paavo’s patched-up violin. It was Joel, stupidly messing around with stuff he didn’t understand. He’d probably been hoping to call Paavo back with the violin, but what he got—what we all got—was Bosanka Lonatz!

  I wanted to strangle him.

  “You okay?” Barb asked me after a little while.

  “Fine,” I croaked.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  She got some cans of soda from the kitchen. I sipped mine, watching Barb trying not to be too interested in Joel (Joel was handsome, but her boyfriend, Rodney, was the jealous type). I watched Joel trying to work out the implications of the fact that that the girl on Boston Common was also the person we knew as Bosanka Lonatz.

  As for me, I did something new. I kept quiet.

  Barb’s whole attitude had changed. She sparkled like fireworks. She informed me that she was now looking forward to helping turn the tables on the Grand Wazoo of the KKK when the committee met tomorrow at Bosanka’s bidding. In fact, she wouldn’t miss that meeting for anything.

  “Great,” I lied. “You are true blue,” which was what we had decided we were years ago when some jerk at school had objected that we couldn’t be best friends because one of us was black and one of us was white.

  For me there was no more Comet Committee, with Barb or without her. There was just what I’d started out with in Ninth Grade: Joel and me, magic, and a monster. But without Paavo, and without Gran.

  So it was up to Joel and me to handle it, so I’d better come up with some terrific ideas about how to do that.

  Well, good. I was fed up with the stupid committee. I was worn out with negotiations, flare-ups, arguments, and all of it.

  The rest of that evening is a blur, though I remember taking a cab home with Joel and using the last of his cash to pay the driver. Joel didn’t say much. Neither did I. He hadn’t heard Bosanka tell us her story. He probably hadn’t put it together yet: so how was I going to tell him that Bosanka being here and making all this trouble was all his fault? And what good would that do anyway?

  I just wasn’t up to it; so I didn’t.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Staring at the ceiling, I rambled around in my memories and my fears.

  I thought about Paavo and the remains of the fiddle that he had loaded with so much love and care and power that it did all kinds of sorcery for him. I saw him sadly sinking the broken violin in the lake, and I thought about Joel fishing it out, probably in the middle of the night so nobody would see, and then waiting, dreaming and waiting, to try its magic that he hoped would answer to him now.

  It had answered, all right, but not to Joel.

  Bosanka had used that sound as her lifeline out of limbo. Rushing to find the source, she must have come skidding to a halt on Boston Common on that summer morning.

  But then the violin had balked in the hands of a kid who was not its master, and the music had quit, leaving Bosanka with nothing to hang onto. Overwhe
lmed by the strangeness of an alien world, Bosanka had panicked and bolted, like a scared animal.

  Lennie was right, he was always right about stuff like this. She was not invincible, a girl of ice. She’d run away, losing the connection she might have made with Joel and the magic “voice” she’d heard: the voice of the violin. Until our Comet Committee connected her up with me, and through me, of course, with Joel.

  But everything had begun with Paavo’s fiddle. Which meant there was a way out. Maybe. An easy but terrible way out.

  Joel had, as it were, reconstituted the fiddle from concentrate, and it had called Bosanka. What if we reversed the process? If he broke the instrument down again, if we returned the fragments to their watery grave, maybe that would un-call her, and she would vanish back where she’d come from!

  Assuming I could convince Joel, or get the violin away from him (he had insisted on sleeping with it next to him on the couch) and smash it myself.

  Suppose I was wrong? Suppose it didn’t work?

  It was so unfair—Paavo gone, Gran comatose, and just us, stuck with all this.

  Saturday morning came, gray and chilly. I got up and had a tall glass of coffee-milk, loaded with sugar, while Mom buzzed around getting ready for work. One of her authors was in town for a weekend writers’ conference and they were going to have a business lunch together.

  Joel was just a lump wrapped in a quilt on the living room couch. Fine with me. I wasn’t ready yet to take him on.

  Mom, quiet and worried-looking, hunched over her coffee cup and watched me. She wore her faded velour bathrobe that I hoped to inherit someday, it was so soft and drapey and rich-looking. She was like a picture, my mom, slightly removed from the events at hand. Our lives, lived close together in mutual support for so long, had really taken two different paths, back when the family talent that she rejected had first tapped me on the shoulder, and I had gone with it into my first magical adventure.

  Now maybe I was launched on my last one.