The Cabinet of Earths

by Anne Nesbet

  The guardian’s whole face rearranged itself into a wrinkled smile. The young James! Quite a fellow! But mademoiselle must not worry, James was already gone.

  “On his own?” said Maya. Irritation washed through her, cold in her veins. How could they let him run off like that by himself! And with all the traffic on the avenues, between here and home. Oh, he should have known better—

  “But no, mademoiselle,” said the guardian, the dent in his smile becoming deeper and merrier. “Not alone, of course. An outing, yes? James went away with his uncle.”

  Chapter 14

  Time!

  Almost before she had fully absorbed that terrible, dreadful word—uncle—Maya had already started running. She ran so fast she could not even feel the pavement underfoot.

  When the really bad things happened to Maya—

  when her mother had said, all those years ago, “Okay, so it’s a tumor, but they’re going to do what they can”;

  when they called from the hospital to say her grandmother had died, and her mother just stood there, holding the phone, and couldn’t let go;

  or, for instance, now—

  she froze, yes, but not the way other people freeze, not by standing still, not by losing the ability to move or speak. Maya froze into a colder, faster version of herself. Her mind got smarter and colder. Her fingers got colder, too. Her toes got so cold they just vanished from her inner sense of herself. The world became very simple, in a chilly sort of way.

  She ran all that long block to the door of the Salamander House and hesitated only a moment under the sad stone eyes of the Lavirotte witch: calculating what she should do next; working out what she might say.

  Someone was calling her. Not by name. Someone was saying, “Hey, you there! You girl!”

  She spun around, her fingers itching to tap in the code and get on with it. It could only have been fifteen minutes, after all, since the purple-eyed Fourcroy had led James away from that school. Fifteen minutes. Or twenty, max.

  The old lady who had once been Amandine was rising up from her bench. Maya must have run right past her a second ago. She called out to Maya in her thin voice and stumbled forward, almost tripping over her own feet in her hurry to reach her.

  “What are you doing, ma fille? I told you! I told you! Don’t go in there—”

  “He’s taken my brother!” said Maya, a wild flow of words. “That Fourcroy in there with the purple eyes!”

  “Ah!”

  The bland old face stiffened slightly, as if rage might somehow break through the vagueness of her.

  “Ah, c’est terrible! she said. “My poor girl! But when?”

  “Right now!” said Maya. “Fifteen minutes ago! I’ll get him back! I’m going in!”

  And she was just turning back to the door when the bag lady grabbed her arm.

  “He’s not in there,” said the old woman. “I’ve been on my bench, two hours already, watching. Nobody’s gone in there, not the last half hour or more.”

  Maya stared at her for a moment, her quick, chilly mind spinning its many, many little wheels.

  “Then where is he?” she said. But even as she said that, she knew where James must surely be: “An outing,” the guardian at the school had said. An outing where? What kind of outing? A trip, perhaps, to the second courtyard off the rue du Four? To the place where the Cabinet lived?

  Because that was what that purple-eyed Fourcroy had actually wanted all along: a new Cabinet-Keeper, somebody younger and more flexible. Someone he thought he could keep under his thumb. And Lavirottes! He had wanted a Lavirotte! Yes, all the pieces were falling together now. He had arranged it all, the fellowship, the coming to France, all of it, just for that: to get a Lavirotte, but one he could control. Oh, James was too young—but the Old Man had been even younger, back when his grandmother had given him to the Cabinet.

  And this terrible knot of bad feelings tightened in her chest: How could James be made Cabinet-Keeper? He was so little! It was a terrible thing to do to someone as young as James. And besides, the Cabinet had chosen her, not her brother! Hadn’t it? And she had been going to save her mother! The thought of the Cabinet, the beautiful, shimmering glassy mystery of it, with its bottles and shifting, restless earths, was suddenly almost more than she could bear.

  The Cabinet would help her, she thought. Yes. The Cabinet wanted her to come. She had to get there now, right away, while the wild coldness still made her brave and fast. But first—

  “You have to do something for me,” she said to the old lady. “Please, will you do this?”

  And she was scrambling around in her jacket pockets for a scrap of paper, for a pen.

  “You know where the Bulgarian embassy is?” she asked the old woman. “Right there at the corner. You can just about see it from here. I need you to leave this note there for Valko. He lives there. Valko Nikolov.”

  He’s taken James—please call Cousin Louise—she’ll know what to do— parents don’t know.

  She copied out Cousin Louise’s phone number from the emergency info page of her calendar and stuffed the paper into the old woman’s splotchy hands and said “Merci, merci” and turned and ran again, to the métro this time, and then past turnstiles and through tunnels and in and out of trains and up a long flight of stairs into the daylight again, all the way to the round green door on the rue du Four in the center of Paris, to the rickety grounded tree house at the back of the second courtyard, where the wispy, worried face of the old Fourcroy rose up behind the window glass when she pounded on his door.

  “But, my dear child!” he was already saying as he let her into the vestibule, and his hand was trembling as it brushed her cold, desperate cheek.

  “Are they here yet?” she said. “Where is he? I have to stop him!”

  “Stop him? Stop whom, ma fille?”

  “That other Fourcroy! That Henri with the beautiful eyes! He’s taken my brother.”

  The old man looked appalled.

  “Your brother?” he said. “What do you mean, he has taken your brother?”

  “I thought he would bring him here. He wants a new Cabinet-Keeper, you said that yourself. Someone young, someone he can boss around. I know he wants you gone. I thought—”

  But already she was looking around and seeing such an absence of five-year-old brothers, such a gaping lack of evil, purple-eyed uncles that it took her breath away all over again.

  “Oh, no,” she said simply. “He’s not here, is he?”

  “No, my dear,” said the old man. “He’s not. He doesn’t care to come here, so close to the earth that still dreams of him in its bottle. He stays away, as much as he can.”

  “But then where’s my brother?” said Maya.

  “I’m so sorry,” said the old man. “I don’t know. In that house of theirs, probably? Oh, Maya, c’est terrible.”

  Terrible seemed like an understatement to Maya, just at that moment.

  “But no one had gone inside! The lady said so. The lady on the bench. They can’t be there. No one even went inside.”

  Though some other part of her was listening to all of this and already knew she had gotten it all wrong again. Not just wrong, but terribly wrong. As wrong as that awful, beautiful, horrible chair, as wrong as what had been done to Cousin Louise, to the poor old lady on her bench. As wrong as anbar.

  “Through the Alchemical Theater, probably,” the old man was saying. “There are so many passageways, you know, from one building to the next, so many hiding places. . . .”

  And Maya had only been five minutes late!

  She pounded her fist down on a worktable so hard that the little figures in their boxes gave tiny jumps of surprise. Then her hand hurt, and her mind cleared, and she grabbed the old man’s thin arm.

  “We can’t waste any time,” she said. “That’s why I came here so fast. We have to stop him.”

  “Yes,” said the old man. “It is time. It must stop. But my poor girl, you’ve hurt your hand.”

 
He was right; she had. Was she supposed to start caring about a splinter now, with her brother missing and the world all askew? Maya yanked it out of her hand so roughly it began to bleed. Oh, what did any of this matter? They had to hurry now, that was the thing.

  But the bead of blood on the side of her hand glittered a little in the light and stopped her: How perfectly round it was, bright red and beautiful, and even the windows all around were caught in it now—tiny perfect reflections of themselves.

  “Maya,” said the old man, his voice quite soft and far away. “What can I do to help you?”

  “You’re their Cabinet-Keeper. They have to listen to you. Tell him they have to let my brother go, or else.”

  “But I can’t do that,” said the old man. “I’m sorry, dear girl, but it’s too far. When I was younger—yes, then, whole blocks at once! But the Cabinet binds you tighter and tighter with time. I can’t go any distance at all, I’m afraid.”

  The perfect round pearl of blood was balanced on the side of her hand, waiting for something, and the Cabinet was waiting for her, too, just a few feet away.

  “All right,” said Maya. “Then we’ll unbind you, right? Go! Tell him you are not Cabinet-Keeper anymore. Tell him Maya Davidson is Cabinet-Keeper now, and she wants her brother back right away. Tell him that. How do I do it, though?”

  “It was very long ago,” said the old man, a little shy. “But I think it’s the blood. The blood, you know, and the glass.”

  He put his hand on her head a moment, a slightly trembly hand.

  “I think maybe you will be stronger than I have been,” he said in his rough whisper. “I hope you will.”

  My brother is only five years old, she told herself firmly. We are not like the Fourcroys. We do not betray our brothers.

  She shut her mind to everything else. That was what she had to do. So Maya went through the doorway into the room where the Cabinet was waiting.

  No time to waste. The air in that room was thick with urgency, with the pull of the Cabinet on her, with the hands of the clock in the corner straining forward, and, somewhere, her baby brother in the balance.

  The Cabinet was so bright. The glass was shining; the shelves were shining; each bottle ablaze with its own particular color, its own unique brown or red or russety-amber, the earth within. Maya held up her hand in front of her eyes, just to block a part of that light, and the little bead of blood still clinging to her hand caught the Cabinet’s reflected light and played with it, began to swirl and pulse. Everything liquid.

  When she looked up, she saw that the glass was rippling, too, a vertical pool of light shimmering there before her. The illusion was so strong that she felt for a moment as if she were floating above a tidal pool, looking not forward but down, at shining bottles resting a few inches below the sea’s clear, swirling surface. She put her hand out just like that, simply reaching out for one of the bottles, the ancient green one there in the middle, with the dark, dark earth in its belly, and at the moment her hand touched the surface of the glassy pool, a shock went through her. Because it wasn’t water, after all. It was warm and slightly sticky; it flowed over Maya’s hand, yes, but not the way water flows, or even something much thicker than water, like glue. It flowed with warmth and intention. Not just that: It welcomed her; it came seeking the bright spherelet of blood and the core of her, the blood melting into the pool of glass, the liquid glass beginning to make its way into Maya’s veins.

  There was a whispering in her ears. A whispering of shadows in the glass. They came flowing into her, too, their images, their voices: the Cabinet’s keepers, now shadows woven into the glass itself. There was a frightened wisp of a boy cowering there, and another shadow, very strong, that came close to the surface and stared out at her, its glass shadow of a hand wrapping itself firmly around Maya’s own. At last, said that shadow’s face, old and beautiful both at once, and Maya knew it then: She had seen the same sad face carved into the stone above the door of the Salamander House. At last, a true Lavirotte, said the shadow. A brave one, I think. At last.

  “I am letting him go,” said Maya to the shadow in the glass. Maya meant the little wraith of a boy whose shadow was hiding now behind the brass phoenix in the Cabinet’s lower front corner. Younger even than James when his grandmother had bound him to the Cabinet, very young to be caught in the glass that way, just flitting from one corner of the Cabinet to the next, peering out at her with his wide shadowy eyes. Something familiar about him, all the same.

  “I know who you are,” said Maya to the little one hiding there. “Come on out.”

  She reached for him (like reaching for a reflection in a pond), and then somehow he was there, a hint of surprised laughter running like a spark along her arms and leaping away. She turned fast enough to see the laughter still lighting up the old Fourcroy’s face like a lamp. Laughter and surprise. He put his hands to his face, and for another second or two he still looked very young, for all that his face was covered with wrinkles and his hair was so wispy and gray.

  “Now you run and tell him,” said Maya to the old Fourcroy. “You’re free now, aren’t you? Tell him he must give back my brother. Or else!”

  “Ah, yes, ma fille!” said the old man, his face still folded into that surprisingly youthful grin. He patted his legs as if they were gifts he had not seen before.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “Just go fast. Go fast and tell him. I’m the new Cabinet-Keeper, and I say he must leave my brother alone. Go quick.”

  “And you—don’t be too long,” whispered the old man. “Wait too long, ma fille, and you’ll never, ever leave.”

  It was a relief when he was gone. She could turn her head back to the Cabinet, where her hand still rested in the pool of glass and the bottles waited, glowing. When you looked at them closely this way, you could see: The earths were beautiful. Not just the bottles and jars that held them, but the earths themselves. They had streaks of darkness in them; they were not any one pure color, but many things all at once, shifting and changing. She watched them for a moment, feeling thoughtful. So that was what you gave away, when you decided to become immortal.

  Her eyes were sharper now than they had been before; perhaps they were adjusting to the light. But she saw now that the bottles had patterns in their glass, pictures and shapes that shifted themselves into something coherent as she looked. If she squinted a little and relaxed some corner of her brain, the patterns became as legible as names. She could see, for instance, that the bright jar on the second shelf belonged to a woman; when she moved her hand closer to it, the picture became clearer in her mind: not just any woman, but the one who had come stumbling out of the Salamander House, all those weeks ago. Eugène’s mother. In her jar was a small amount of what looked like golden sand, shifting about restlessly within its glass walls.

  That sand looked nothing, for instance, like the dark, complicated earth in the green bottle next to it. She knew before even passing her hand over the bottle whose earth that must be: Nothing else in the Cabinet was as old or as secret as this. That’s where it rested, then, the mortal part of the purple-eyed Henri de Fourcroy, put into the Cabinet of Earths when he was still young and beautiful. How many decades ago must that be? Eighty years? Ninety?

  The room became very quiet, just waiting for Maya, waiting for some great thing to happen. Even the sad, old shadow of the Lavirotte witch came rippling around to the front of the Cabinet, watching her and waiting, too.

  Enough. Maya put her fingers firmly around the neck of the bottle, and pulled, but at first it would not budge, a bottle-shaped limpet clinging to its part of the pool.

  Stupid bottle! But it had to come out: It was the one thing Maya could think of that could give her power over the purple-eyed Fourcroy. The one thing he might be willing to trade James for. She pulled and pulled, but the Cabinet clearly did not like to let things go.

  “Oh, you should have done this yourself!” she said aloud to the shadow-witch watching. “He’s bad. Why d
id you let him go on and on and on?”

  He was still my own son, said the shadow.

  (It didn’t need words to say these things, of course. The glass flowing through Maya now carried shadow in it, too.)

  I could not, it said. I could not. And the Cabinet had bound me, though I was its Maker. I waited too long, and it bound me. You must work fast, Maya. Fast!

  The bottle came free then, and in one smooth motion Maya pulled it up to the surface of the Cabinet’s glass pool and brought it out into the air and the world with the tiniest of little popping sounds, as if a bubble had been broken. Maya gasped as if she herself were just coming up for air, and at that moment the shadow-witch swam up to the very surface of the glass and looked out at Maya with something so like Maya’s own face that it was hard to sort out what was shadow and what was reflection. Especially since the shadow then said what Maya had been thinking herself:

  Quick now! Before the Cabinet has time to bind you. A Lavirotte made it—a Lavirotte can end it!

  “But my mother,” said Maya, and she hesitated for a moment, worrying.

  Of course it was evil, the Cabinet, for all that it was the loveliest thing Maya had ever seen. But Maya thought of her mother, and her heart was torn right in two.

  On the one hand, her mother, well and beautiful—always well and beautiful, placed right out of reach of time and decay. That was what the Cabinet could do. Her mother, safe for ever and ever, exactly as she was now, always Maya’s own mother, even decades and decades from now, when Maya herself might be old and gray.

  Her mother—like the purple-eyed Fourcroy.

  And that right there was what you might call “the other hand.” Because her mother, her lovable, creative, ever-so-slightly extravagant mother, was nothing at all—thank goodness!—like the beautiful, unchanging Fourcroy in the Salamander House. What’s more, she would not want to be like him. Never in a million years. So there.