A Box of Gargoyles

by Anne Nesbet

  “Tried to get a sample?” echoed Maya.

  “Yeah, like a little bit of an ear or a wing,” said Valko. “You know, with a hammer. But they were too far away from the window. So I just wrote down a really careful description. That’s all I could do. So now you describe yours, and we’ll find out if they match.”

  “But I can’t even see them,” said Maya. “It’s the kind of window you can’t look through. I didn’t see them until I opened it.”

  “Maybe you could even get that sample!” said Valko. Was he listening to her at all? “How close are they, exactly?”

  “What do you mean, how close are they? They’re on my fire escape. They’re right outside. They are way, way, way too close.”

  Valko cleared his throat.

  “But in centimeters,” he said. “How far—”

  “Valko!” said Maya. She kept her voice low, though, so as not to be worrying her mother, out in the hall. “I told you: the window is shut. And I’m inside.”

  Huddled on the floor by her bed, actually, but she didn’t add that information.

  “And if you want to go climbing around measuring those things with a ruler, you can come over here yourself,” she added.

  “I can’t,” said Valko. He sounded genuinely disappointed about that. “Today’s all math problems, apparently.”

  That was the backward way things worked in Valko’s family: if you were good at something, you ended up having to suffer through tons of extra lessons.

  “Open the window and look,” Valko was saying now. “Go ahead. They’re just statues. They can’t do anything to you.”

  He had a point, right? Gargoyles are carved from stone. Even if they appear out of the blue on your fire escape, even if there’s a whole crowd of them, that doesn’t mean they aren’t carved from stone. Maya stood up and opened the window and took a long, brave look.

  For one thing, there wasn’t actually a whole crowd of gargoyles waiting out there: only two. That was a little embarrassing, but two unexpected gargoyles surely equal a crowd of other more normal animals, like, you know, squirrels. Each of them looked like a half-dozen different creatures, somehow spliced together. The one closest to Maya (its stone gaze fixed on her in a most unsettling way) had an eagle’s beak, the horns and beard of a goat, feathers that turned to scales halfway down its stone belly, and a pair of carved wings curving back from its bony granite shoulders. The other one, over there blocking the ladder down, had the crumpled-up nose of a bat and little round ears poking out from an elaborately bumpy skull. And in its froggy front paws, it held something round and glinty—

  “Ah!” said Valko over the phone. “Glinty, like made of brass? Round like a clock, sort of? With numbers around the outside, you know, and a needle?”

  Yes, that pretty much described it. Only the whole thing was embedded thoroughly in the gargoyle’s stone paw. Clever work on the sculptor’s part: like a ship in a bottle, only stranger. Why did a gargoyle need to be hanging on to a clock, anyway?

  “Not a clock,” said Valko. “That sounds like my barometer.”

  “Oh,” said Maya. What even was a barometer?

  “And they are the same gargoyles we had. One all bumpy headed, right? So how did they get over there, anyway? And my barometer! Can you reach one of them?”

  “Um,” said Maya, eyeing the fierce frozen gaze of Gargoyle #1. “Sort of.”

  “What’s it made of? Can you pick it up, I mean? Is it secretly made of foam or something?”

  Maya thought about it for a moment and then stretched her non-telephone-holding hand right out the window toward the hunched gray shoulder of Gargoyle #1, keeping a cautious eye on his stony beak.

  “Okay now, okay, there you go,” she found herself murmuring, as if she were about to pat a strange dog. (“What?” said Valko’s voice, far away, from the phone in her other hand. “What do you mean? What’s okay?”)

  It was just stone, right? Her hand already knew before it got there what that stone shoulder would feel like: cold and grainy and maybe a little damp around the edges, just the way a stone gargoyle on a fire escape should feel, early in the morning in October.

  But instead: twannng! She had snatched her hand back before she realized what had just happened. No, not just snatched her hand back: she had pulled her arm inside, slammed the window shut, thrown the latch, and slipped, shaking, down to the floor.

  “What?” said an alarmed little voice from the phone. “What was that? You all right? Maya? Maya?”

  It was that feeling all over again. She couldn’t figure it out. It didn’t make sense.

  “Maya?”

  “They’ve come here for me,” said Maya. Maybe Valko could hear her, maybe he couldn’t—she didn’t really have the energy to lift the phone up to her ear. “They recognize me. They know who I am. And what if there’s a fire?”

  “Excuse me?” said the phone. “Fire?”

  There was a lovely thought for you: fire on one side, gargoyles on the other.

  “No escape!” said Maya. Even as she hung up the phone, though, something in her woke up, rebelled, and pulled her spine straight again. That was what that letter’s gloating smudge wanted her to think, wasn’t it? “No escape”!

  Well, she had news for all of them (smudge, strangeness, gargoyles): it was going to take more than gargoyles on her fire escape to squash the spirit of Maya Davidson.

  Maya’s mother had a saying she liked to use when life closed in on you and got a little frightening: Even when there’s no way out, there’s always a good way through.

  And now Maya knew where the path through was taking her. She had figured that out in the middle of the night. She would go through by being brave. She would go back to the Salamander House to find another sheet of that horrible, magical paper, and she would scrawl her own commands all over it, the perfect antidote letter, and that would be that.

  Just as well that Valko would be busy with his math. He had almost been sucked in by that doorway, hadn’t he? Apparently, if you don’t believe in magic, you are at extra-special risk of falling right into every one of its traps. Perhaps because if you don’t think it exists, your mind doesn’t work very hard to resist.

  It’ll have to be me, resisting for both of us, thought Maya. And then she went out into the hall to get her coat and sneak off, since she had such a very, very good reason, to the last place anyone would have thought she would ever, ever, ever have wanted to be.

  4

  A BILLION LITTLE DOMINOES

  Going back to the Salamander House was as easy as floating downstream. Too easy, probably, but sometimes floating downstream is such a comfortable thing to do that a person can’t bring herself to turn around, face the current, and swim. I’ll be very quick about it, thought Maya as she eyed the wild front of the Salamander House. It was such a clever idea she had had in the middle of the night. Pop in and pop out. Grab some of that magical paper and go.

  It still made all kinds of sense in her mind. As soon as her itchy finger touched the bronze head of the salamander, the front door clicked itself open, just as if it had been waiting for her for ages and ages. And maybe there was something strange going on with the atmospheric pressures in the neighborhood that day, but as the door opened, Maya felt the air around her grow tense, felt an odd suction going to work on her bones, pulling her through the door and into the shadowy lobby.

  The apartment where that horrible Fourcroy used to live was a few floors up. Some resident had helpfully propped the lobby door open with a catalog. Good! Maya was free to keep floating up those stairs, all the way to the landing in front of the apartment door. She was trembling a little by this point, but the one time she tried to turn around and go back downstairs, the weird suction of that house tightened its hold on her a notch or two, and she found she could not turn anymore, could not go in any direction but onward.

  That’s apparently what it feels like, to be doing what you are bound to do. To be behaving well, from a bossy letter’s poi
nt of view.

  At the door of Fourcroy’s apartment, still blocked off by a couple of neon strands of police tape, Maya tried to pause to catch her breath, but even pausing was a challenge, this close to the goal. If she could stay focused, it would all be all right. A blank sheet of stationery. That’s all. Grab it and go.

  The police must have struggled with that door. When she looked past the tape, she could see a blank gap where the door’s lock must once have been: they hadn’t been able to tease that lock open (guessed Maya), but had had to cut out the entire mechanism, lock, stock, and barrel. The weird feeling of being pulled forward, pulled forward, hadn’t let up for a second. And her finger was itching again. She gave the door a gentle push, and it swung right open. All she had to do was duck under the yellow tape, and she would be in the purple-eyed Fourcroy’s abandoned apartment. Where a week ago she had found her brother, slumped in a blurry puddle, all his charm gone.

  She had had a very good reason to be here a week ago (rescuing her brother), and she had a very good reason to be here now (saving herself). Go on, she told herself, and she ducked under the police tape and went in.

  The place was dim and huge and quiet. One long hall stretched off to her right, the hall that led to Fourcroy’s laboratory rooms, his sinister tubes and flasks, the chair that had held poor James while his charm dripped out of all that hideous machinery into a simple beaker. It was too awful, remembering that afternoon. It made Maya’s heart pound in her chest simply to think about any of it. She turned and looked down the main hallway, the one that led to the large living room at the far end. Other rooms opened out of this hall, too. One, she remembered, was a kind of library or office. Where better to keep a writing desk? It felt right to start there.

  The fewer minutes she was in this place, the better. The quietness of it was giving her the creeps: side tables and old clocks and elaborately carved chairs, all completely still. As if frozen in place. Or waiting.

  She stepped as lightly as she could manage, took small, quiet breaths, and kept her sleeves well away from the furniture; some part of her was still hoping she could come and go before the apartment even noticed she was there. The boards of the floor whimpered a little underfoot, however, as old parquet floors will do.

  It was only a moment later that she slipped through the doorway of the room she thought of as the library and stood just inside the door, taking a quick inventory of the furniture: a desk, with a great big chair behind it. Another chair over on the right. The walls lined with bookcases. And a rather large statue of a big black bird in the corner, glowering down from its perch on an alabaster column.

  The desk’s larger drawers were open, probably because the police had forgotten to tidy up after doing their rummaging, but after a few minutes of careful searching, Maya took a step back in frustration. No pens, no paper, not a single sign that writing had ever happened here. Plus the itchy place on the tip of her index finger was getting impatient. It didn’t seem to think there was anything for her here.

  She straightened up and (feeling foolish) tried holding her itchy finger out in front of her, like a dousing wand.

  “Over here?” she said—right out loud, to encourage herself—and she pointed her finger at the desk. The words echoed a little in the empty room and then were soaked up by the books or the carpet and vanished utterly, leaving Maya feeling very alone again. Her finger seemed uninterested in that particular desk. It itched in a bored and impatient way. It wanted to go somewhere else.

  Not to mention that no matter where she moved in that room, the bright black eyes of that bird in the corner were fixed—like glue, like pins, like alien spaceship rays—right on her. It was completely unsettling. It was enough to send her back out into the dim entry hall, but as soon as she left the library, the nature of the itch in her fingertip changed (from bored to exasperated—it was amazing how many emotions a simple itch could convey), and that suctioning feeling pulled at her again. It had to be here, then.

  She tried running her itchy finger along the backs of the books on those huge shelves, and although no book stood out, as far as the itch was concerned, there was definitely a pull toward one end of the bookcase, the end closest to the corner where that bird perched looking at her. Maya didn’t like those glassy black eyes, so she whipped across to the shelves on the next stretch of wall and tried the finger trick on them, with similar results: the itch pointing toward the statue in the corner, even though nothing ever seemed less related to writing letters on fancy creamy-green letter paper than that beady-eyed bird staring her down from its column.

  All right, Maya told her itchy finger, just to shut it up. Let’s take a look at that thing. It was just a statue of a bird, after all, carved of a very dark wood. Perhaps ebony, like the black keys on a piano. (Although at least black keys on a piano didn’t stare at you.) Up this close, Maya could see how much time the artist had spent perfecting every little feather. And there, high on its ebony chest, was a very small, very circular bump with a wiggly indentation in its middle. Maya went up on her tiptoes, trying to see the thing clearly. Her fingertip was practically screaming with impatience, so she let it take a look.

  Not just a bump, said her eyes and her fingertip at about the same moment: a keyhole!

  And by the time her mind had registered that word, the tiny, inky key had already peeled itself off the tip of her finger (a very strange feeling, like the smallest but stickiest Band-Aid you ever saw being torn off too early) and flung itself into that smallest of locks. And from inside the ebony bird’s chest, there came a strange mechanical shudder, the surprised click-click-clicking of numberless little gears—and the bird’s wings began to move.

  Even as caught by surprise as she was, Maya managed to jump back, well out of the way. Something very old and deep in the human brain knows that when statues of black, black birds begin to click and tick and move, it is time to pick up your club (or equivalent) and back away carefully.

  It was like nothing she had ever seen, what was happening to that statue. It had seemed so immutably, perfectly still! But now the wings were spreading—out, out, out to the sides—and the chest of the bird opened forward, fanning out as it went, revealing little cubbyholes and thin drawers—and then she could see how it all fit together, the gently tilted surface that had once been a chest and the angled insides of the wings and the intricate array of small shelves and drawers and sorting slots within and the piercing gaze of those glassy eyes still looking down from above—

  because the ebony bird was a writing desk.

  And resting on its gracefully angled surface (held fast by a delicate sliver of tape) was a letter.

  As her mother used to say (her mother collected old sayings the way other people’s mothers collected ceramic puppies), “Once bitten, twice shy!” Maya certainly felt bitten—by the letter she and Valko had read in the park, by the inky key, by the way the whole universe had conspired to make her come back here this morning, when any unbewitched person would have known it was Not A Good Idea.

  Quick as quick, Maya put a hand out, making a slightly trembly wall between her eyes and the words of that letter. She would not look down. She would look quickly, quickly for stationery and pens in the drawers and cubbyholes, and she would not give this new letter the slightest chance to grab her.

  But a minute later the drawers had proved themselves empty, except for a few very ordinary-looking paper clips and an exceptionally ordinary matchbox, and the cubby-holes had no stationery in them at all. Nothing. Just a soft, dusty heap at the bottom of the largest slot. She craned her neck forward to see better, and a ray of weak autumn sunlight sprang through the room’s windows to help: a blue-green heap of— What was that, anyway? Her no-longer-itchy finger poked again at the pile, and she knew: ashes. Creamy-green magical ashes.

  She imagined the ancient, crumbling Fourcroy standing in this very spot, a week ago, writing all his demands into that awful letter, folding it carefully and addressing the envelope—and then stri
king one of those ordinary matches and burning the rest of the stationery to ashes. Was he just being extraordinarily extra-careful? Or had he known somehow that Maya would come to this very place, looking for her antidote, for her piece of blank magical paper, and find only those creamy-green ashes laughing up at her?

  Ugh! Maya scowled at the desk, but of course she was really scowling at herself. All of the beautiful logic that had brought her here this morning looked a lot less beautiful now. Like the fancy stationery with its gloating, snake-haired watermark, her plans had pretty much all caught fire and burned away to an ashy heap of nothing. She had been a fool all along, thinking she was being clever even as she walked right back into the patient maw of the trap.

  “Stupid bird!” said Maya, glaring back at the raven’s glassy, triumphant eyes, and she must have clenched her fist or fallen forward against the writing desk or something, because the whole thing trembled a little, the motors click-click-clicked again, and the ebony bird looked down at her and said—

  No, of course, it couldn’t speak—

  But it was almost speaking, it was; it was trying to open that awful wooden beak—

  A choking, metallic gurgle came from the bird’s throat, as if something had gotten caught up in its mechanism, and there was another sound, of some crucial little gear cracking under the strain, and the whole lower section of the bird’s glossy beak broke loose and dangled there on its broken hinge.

  At which point something round and shiny (a button?) came spitting out from that breaking beak so quickly that Maya’s hand couldn’t help itself; it caught that button right in midair.

  So what happened next was the button’s fault, really. Of course, Maya’s hand had to grab it, and of course, Maya’s eyes had to look to see what kind of thing this was, that she had all of a sudden caught in her hand, and so of course what she saw instead were the words of the letter, so patiently waiting for her on the desk all this time, and even as her brain was shouting, Don’t look, it was already too late: she had looked.