A Box of Gargoyles

by Anne Nesbet

  The shadow seemed to be stuck a ways behind them. They could see it pushing against the air, almost as if it had hit a wall.

  “Stay here,” said Valko, and he walked back a bit to look. He always had to investigate things properly. Maya shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her feet were eager to keep moving.

  “The air’s different here,” Valko called back over his shoulder. “Notice that?”

  He was keeping his eyes glued to that shadow, though.

  Maya took an exploratory breath. The air was different. It was like something chaotic in it had vanished. The hum was gone.

  She saw Valko take another few steps and then pause. The sack’s worth of shadow pressed against that invisible wall, but the wall didn’t yield.

  He went closer. The shadow just eddied there, waiting.

  “Careful,” said Maya.

  “Don’t worry,” said Valko. He crossed over to the other side of the street. The shadow stayed where it was. It didn’t seem to notice Valko coming closer from the side; Maya could have sworn it had its nonexistent eyes fixed entirely on her. Not such a good feeling.

  “It’s like there’s a shimmer in the air here,” said Valko. “Like an edge in the air. Or a wall. Do you see it? Look, I can just slip my hand right through—”

  “Eep!” said Maya. It came out more as a sound than a word.

  “I know,” said Valko, without turning around. “I saw that, too.”

  When Valko’s hand had gone past that edge, the shadow thing had moved a little (turned its head, suggested Maya’s mind, ignoring for a moment the point that columns of shadowy dust don’t actually have heads). That was creepy.

  A biologist who has just run into a grizzly bear will move with great caution; so did Valko. He seemed to be carefully fishing something out of his pockets. Maya squinted: oh, a pencil. Was he going to stop to take notes? How completely crazy could one person even be? She walked a few paces in his direction, just in case she needed to grab him by the sleeve and haul him away.

  But now Valko was running his hand across the wall, right to the very place where the shimmer started.

  “Um, what are you doing?” said Maya, trying not to catch the shadow’s attention. “Seems like we should just leave, doesn’t it?”

  Valko was making a careful line of Xs right there.

  “Marking the edge,” he said. “Got to be dark enough to find later, but not so big the graffiti police come and wipe it off.”

  M a y a, said the shadow thing.

  “Enough,” said Maya, shuddering slightly.

  “Definitely enough,” said Valko, stuffing the pencil into his pocket. Maya and Valko trotted back to the far end of the alleyway, and then one block farther from the river, because Valko wanted to see if they could see a boundary there, too.

  They could. Valko ran down that street to the very edge of the shimmering air and left some more Xs on that wall, too.

  It was five long minutes before the shadow appeared in that street, so at least (said Valko to Maya) it was dumb and slow.

  “Dumb, slow dust that’s walking and talking is still way smarter than it should be,” said Maya.

  It came out a little sharper than she meant it to, but having your name wheezed into the air by columns of leaf meal and shadow can give a person the grumps.

  They left Xs on other walls in other streets, until Maya lost patience with the process and pointed out that they hadn’t seen the shadow for a while, so maybe it was time to walk away somewhere where they could breathe a little.

  “It’s a circle,” said Valko. “I’m pretty sure it’s a circle, the strangeness. See how the marks are moving toward the embassy end of the street each time? So that’s good.”

  “Good?”

  “To be outside of it is good,” said Valko. “I didn’t realize it, at first, but it was making my head ache in there. Until you did whatever you did. Pinched me awake. We’ve got to figure this out, Maya. This is too weird.”

  They were trotting through the park now, with the enormous leg of the Eiffel Tower pushing its way into the clouds behind them. Even in October, it managed to feel like a park: bare-limbed trees and still-leafy bushes and elegant benches dotting the gravel paths.

  “I forgot about the croissants!” said Maya, looking down almost in surprise at the crumpled paper sack she had just found in her jacket pocket. “Want a kind-of-squashed pastry? They were warm when I got them.”

  “Whoops! You’re losing things,” said Valko, and he raced ahead of her on the path to gather up papers there. Her letters! They had come out of her pocket with the pastry bag and gone flying.

  By the time they had chased down the last of the unruly envelopes, Maya and Valko were truly ready for croissants, squashed or no.

  “Mm,” said Valko, licking a stray fleck of chocolate off his finger. “I’m tasting mint. Minty croissants! Bizarre. Good, though. So, who still writes letters? I mean, apart from my grandmothers, of course.”

  “Yes, well,” said Maya (a cold shiver going through her as she remembered all over again about dreadful Bulgaria). In fact, it felt a little embarrassing, to be brushing the dust off her cards. She hadn’t meant to share them. Just to carry them around for a while. Just to have them close by. “Mostly they’re cards, not letters. The thing is, it’s my—”

  “Birthday!” said Valko, who was extremely good at filling in gaps. “No, really! You weren’t going to tell me?”

  “It’s not today,” said Maya. “It’s Wednesday. Halloween. I guess my friends were just being cautious.”

  It was so nice, that word: friends. Plural! Jenna, of course, but not just Jenna: there was a card from Eleanor Markowitz, who had been her best friend in third grade and then moved to Montana, and one from Ada Kwan, who had drawn the cutest little smiling people up and down the edges of the envelope, and then—

  “What’s that one?” said Valko.

  Heavy, creamy-green paper, the sort of stationery you might see lying about on desks in a palace. And her name scrawled in elegant but hasty loops.

  “That’s real ink, not ballpoint,” said Valko. “That’s like calligraphy, almost. Who’s it from?”

  Maya turned the envelope over—no name on the back.

  Something about it made her uneasy. It was so much weightier in her hands than the cards from her friends in California; that was one thing. It seemed to get heavier the more she stared at it, the more she turned it over and over in her hands.

  “And look at the stamp,” said Valko. “It’s French. It’s from here. Open it, Maya.”

  “I wasn’t going to open any of them until my actual birthday,” said Maya.

  A bit of Valko’s croissant apparently went down the wrong pipe: he had to pause for a moment to cough into his sleeve.

  “You mean, your plan was to carry all these letters around in your pocket for days and days?”

  Yes. That was her plan, exactly. Some people might call that savoring things. She was just about to say something sarcastic about people who keep weather logs not having legs to stand on when she looked over and saw that Valko wasn’t smirking at her at all: no, he was smiling the nicest possible smile.

  “Open just this one, then,” he said, all sweetness. “Aren’t you curious? I’m curious.”

  When he put it that way: yes, she was curious. But it was a curiosity that was sprinkled with dread. Unreasonable dread, of course. Nothing that made any sense.

  Her fingers, however, were already loosening the fancy flap of that envelope, already pulling out that gorgeous piece of thick, regal paper and unfolding it, while Valko angled his head closer for a better look.

  “Well, that’s odd,” he said.

  And Maya’s heart was going tippetty tippetty, as if she’d turned right into a rabbit. Still for next to no reason, because her eyes had hardly seen anything yet. And in any case, there wasn’t all that much to see:

  a monogram engraved at the top of the sheet (H de F),

  a let
ter that apart from the salutation—For Maya, my dear niece (or cousin)—and the closing—Fondly, your affectionate cousin (or uncle)—consisted of exactly one word: Félicitations!

  and under that strangest of one-word letters, an elegant scribble of a signature,

  and under the signature, a smudge.

  For a moment neither Maya nor Valko could find anything to say.

  Then Valko said, quietly, “Wow. H de F. Wow. But I thought you said that Henri de Fourcroy was dead.”

  “Almost dead,” said Maya. “Shriveled up. Gone. I said he was gone.”

  “I thought gone meant ‘dead,’” said Valko.

  “I guess it just meant gone,” said Maya. Inside, she herself felt what you might call a little bit gone. Cold and alone. Not here, not there, not anywhere. None of this was supposed to be happening, not in real life.

  “Not nearly gone enough,” said Valko. “If he’s sending you letters.”

  And then his hand shot out like lightning and he grabbed back the envelope to take another look.

  “Postmarked this Monday,” he said.

  Maya shivered. Gone!

  “So he could have shoved it in a box on Sunday,” said Valko, making a kind of calendar out of his fingers. “Or even Saturday night, right after he shriveled up or went away or whatever. Nothing gets postmarked on Sundays, you know.”

  There was a pause.

  “So he gets caustic powder thrown at him—”

  “Earth,” said Maya. She always had to correct this part of the story, when Valko told it. “His own earth, coming back to him.”

  “And he creeps away, in really bad shape, and he sends you a birthday card? Am I missing something here?”

  “I don’t think it’s a birthday card,” said Maya. “It’s a—I don’t know what it is. Nothing good. The paper’s very heavy, did you notice? And that smudge!”

  “Yes,” said Valko. “The smudge.”

  They both stared at the smudge. The more you looked at it, the less like a mere smudge it seemed to be. It had depth and detail and purpose, somehow, despite being nothing more than an inky blur.

  “Wish I had my magnifying lens,” said Valko.

  Then something hazy happened. Either Maya thought of her necklace, or Valko thought of her necklace, or they both did at the same time. It was hard, afterward, to figure out exactly whose fault it all was. That was also a kind of smudge, come to think of it.

  The reason they thought of Maya’s necklace was that it was a round puddle of glass, all that was left of the formerly beautiful and dangerous Cabinet of Earths. That Cabinet had held the secret of Henri de Fourcroy’s long, long life, until Maya had taken a hammer to its beauty and destroyed it. Now she wore the Cabinet glass around her neck on a string, and there was a tiny magical salamander swimming in it, which was one reminder that this was not ordinary glass. Another reminder was the way it sometimes melted in Maya’s palm, became liquid, and then hardened again. Ordinary glass stays glassy unless a furnace’s worth of heat gets to it.

  But that necklace did look a little like the lens of a magnifying glass. That is true. And so it ended up in Maya’s hand, with the last feeble rays of October sun trickling through it and onto the mysterious page, the letter, the smudge.

  “Aha!” said Valko, his head almost bumping into Maya’s, he was so intent on getting a glimpse through that glass. “See that?”

  Seen through Maya’s necklace, the smudge was, indeed, not actually a smudge. The blur resolved itself into lines and loops and dots, into whole strings of writing.

  The Reader of these words, it read, is absolutely and irrevocably bound to do all that is necessary, no matter what the risk or cost, to make me, myself, Henri de Fourcroy, once again WHOLE—

  “Whatever that means,” said Valko.

  “There’s more,” said Maya.

  And should the Reader doubt the binding nature of this message, would he please hold this paper up to the light.

  “Oh, don’t!” said Maya, but Valko of course already had. The sun was weak, but in the face of that light a whole picture welled up from within (deep within, thought Maya, but that was illogical) the paper: a terrible face, scowling, with a bunch of writhing worms where most people have hair.

  “Snakes,” said Valko. “I’ve heard of something like that before. Snakes for hair. Nice.”

  “That was Medusa,” said Maya. “That was the one who was so terrible, just looking at her would turn you into stone.”

  Valko gave her a little poke in the ribs.

  “But hey, look at that: we’re not stone,” he said. He was making a joke, but the heavy feeling in Maya’s chest made her wonder, Is it true? Stone?

  “Shh, give that back,” she said. “There was more.”

  The smudge went so deep: layer upon layer of smudge. Maybe (thought Maya half sensibly) that was why the paper seemed so heavy. A tremble had gotten into her fingers: she had to work extra hard, this time, to keep the necklace-glass steady.

  That, Reader, is the international symbol of Absolutely Binding Documents. You thought you had triumphed over me, perhaps, little cousin-niece? But you are reading this, so now it is you who are bound. So then: your first task is to present yourself to the memory stone*—it will hold your instructions. It is waiting for you. It knows who you are.

  “Memory stone?” said Valko.

  The smudge deepened again. There was an asterisk, but it wobbled terribly. Valko had to add a hand to the edges of the glass for the image to settle down.

  *THAT IS, TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR: you will go put your hand on the stone wall of the embassy and wake up the mind I am about to leave there. THEN: you will make your way, without delay, to my writing desk—

  “Seriously?” said Valko. “This is the bossiest letter I have ever read in my life. Are we done yet? What’s that last bit there?”

  The last bit there was

  You may find its contents useful. Here’s the key.

  And then a very tiny squiggle.

  “Well,” said Valko, leaning back against the bench. “One thing’s for sure: your old uncle Fourcroy was stark, raving bonkers. A lunatic. Mad.”

  Maya still had her head bent over the image in the Cabinet glass. There was something about that squiggle. When you looked closely, it organized itself: round inky flourishes at one end, blocky inky shapes at the other. Of course! A key.

  The ink lines of that key, moreover, were straining away from the paper it had been penned into. How could that be? Maya squinted. Yes, there was a gap between ink and paper—she was almost sure there was a gap.

  When her own curious fingertip entered that magnified world under the glass, it looked so unexpectedly enormous that Maya trembled again, and all the writing became a tipsy blur for a moment. But she held her breath and steadied herself and the Cabinet glass, and soon her gigantic fingertip was inching toward that writhing, inky key again, worrying at the space between ink and paper. Could there even be such a space?

  Really, now: could ink have a life of its own?

  Could a great, big human fingertip really feel the thin edge of a scribbled key?

  It could, it could. The key felt like an eyelash, like the thinnest thread. And then the inky key was no longer on Henri de Fourcroy’s pale-green stationery at all: it was firmly attached to the tip of Maya’s own finger. And it would not budge, even when she gave her hand a sharp shake, the way you do when an almost-invisible insect sinks its tiny, tiny, ink-black teeth into you.

  “Hey!” she said, jumping up. “It bit me!”

  At the same moment the Cabinet glass twitched in Maya’s other hand, pulled itself away from the creamy-green menace of that paper, and softened and cowered in her palm.

  “What?” said Valko. “What? What bit you?”

  “That stupid key,” she said. “I poked it, and it bit me. Look—”

  On the very tip of her index finger, the smallest, smallest, smallest of black keys.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,”
said Valko. He took a long look at her finger and then tried to flick the key off the top of it with his free hand, but nothing happened.

  Nothing happened when they blew fierce puffs of breath at the key on her finger or when Maya wiped her fingertip across the cold wood of the bench or when Valko took hold of her finger and rubbed it against the rough wool of his sleeve. The tiny key was there to stay.

  “Like a tattoo, almost,” said Valko. “Well, that is definitely weird-and-a-half.”

  For a breathless moment, the two of them just watched the wind play with the edges of the letter in Maya’s lap, while their brains chased wild galloping thoughts down a thousand different endless corridors.

  “And how does your necklace even do that melting and unmelting stuff?” said Valko finally. “Not to mention the magnifying thing. That is the strangest necklace I’ve ever seen.”

  Maya hardly heard him. All of a sudden she was so eager to be gone. She leaped up off the bench, stuffed the necklace into one jacket pocket and all those letters into another. She wasn’t just awake again: she was furious. She had one word to say, and that one word filled every nook and cranny of her, drowned out all the other thoughts and worries that might be there, pushed everything else aside as it exploded out into the world.

  That word was “No!”

  3

  GARGOYLES GETTING IN THE WAY

  The more she thought about it, the angrier she got.

  Henri de Fourcroy binding her, Maya, to bring him back to life! Sticking tiny keys on fingertips where they definitely didn’t belong! When it was his own fault, everything that had happened to him! You don’t just kidnap small children and drain them of their charm and then go around expecting those children’s older sisters to fix you right back up! No!

  “Slow down a bit,” said Valko, loping along to keep up with her angry feet. (One of the first things Valko had ever told Maya about himself was that his name came from the Bulgarian word for wolf. He wasn’t, at first glance, much like a wolf—no big, sharp teeth; no beady yellow eyes—but he certainly could lope.) “You’re not making sense, you know. There’s no such thing as Medusan stationery—there can’t be!”