A Box of Gargoyles

by Anne Nesbet

  And now they were both using all of their incredible Not-Moving skills to gaze straight at Maya and at the stone egg (humming with warmth) in her hand. Valko was climbing to his feet again, over a little on Maya’s left—he was trying to say something, and mostly all he could do was cough. But the gargoyles had let him go.

  Good, thought Maya. But she didn’t move her head to look at Valko. She was staring down those stone gargoyles with all the force she could muster. She jogged the egg up and down in her hand a little, just to give them something to think about.

  “You listen to me,” she said to the gargoyles. “See this pretty egg? If you want it to stay safe, you know what? You have to LEAVE US ALONE. Go home to whatever stupid cathedral you came from. Go away. Go home. Good-bye. Valko, are you okay?”

  “It’s like something fell on me,” said Valko. Still stunned, it sounded like. “I think. Something heavy. Let’s get out of here.”

  Good idea. Maya took a step backward, but she kept her eyes on those gargoyles.

  “And don’t keep exploding like that,” Maya said to them. “You’ve got to slow down. Act normal. Okay. That’s it.”

  “Did you just tell a couple of statues to slow down?” said Valko. That was more like his ordinary self, so that was good.

  “When they move, they move too fast. Right? It’s like they’re movies playing themselves at the wrong speed. WHICH I DON’T LIKE.” (That was for the gargoyles again.) “Now we’re really leaving—come on, Valko. REMEMBER I HAVE THE EGG AND LEAVE US ALONE.”

  They had gotten almost as far as the staircase door when there was another, slightly slower, eruption of stone and noise.

  Valko gave a horrified yelp.

  This time Maya could make more sense of what she was seeing: Beak-Face and Bonnet-Head leaning close together, consulting, some waving around of claws, then Beak-Face coming forward—all that took place in a second or two, but suddenly, as the gargoyle walked toward Maya, it was like a film running out of power: the speed dropped, dropped, kept dropping, until he was hardly moving at all.

  “Mmmmmaaaaaaa—,” said the gargoyle, in the rumbling, ghastly tones of a tape being run at the slowest possible speed.

  Valko yanked on Maya’s arm.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He had a point, but Maya couldn’t help herself: she was fantastically, overwhelmingly curious. (And a stone wing had not just been wrapped around her throat, which she could see might make a difference in how a person felt about stone gargoyles moving toward her and making almost word-like noises—wait . . . word-like?)

  “Hang on a sec,” she said. “I think it’s trying to—”

  “—yaa,” said the gargoyle. Yes: it said. A stone gargoyle was speaking to them. “Maaayaa. Maya. Maya. Zdrasti. Bonsoir. Hello! Go away. Egg. Keep it safe. No. Aaaaah.”

  The creature turned his ugly face back to Bonnet-Head and made some clattering noises in its—no, her—direction. Bonnet-Head waddled forward a little, her wings sketching anxious little wringing gestures in the air.

  “Deeeearrr,” said Bonnet-Head. A sandy landslide of a word, all kind concern.

  Maya felt an instant and surprising burst of affection for Bonnet-Head.

  “But statues aren’t supposed to talk,” said Valko’s faint voice behind her. “They don’t move. They don’t talk. They don’t grab people and strangle them.”

  “He’s rrright,” said Beak-Face. “Sstone. Doesn’t sspeak. Doesn’t move. At all. No.”

  “Norrrrrrmally,” corrected the other one. Bonnet-Head. “But the bad man ruined us with his loophole. He did.”

  They seemed to be very quick learners, these gargoyles. Their words were already sounding much more like actual words (and much less like a mountain giving way under your feet).

  “Yess,” said Beak-Face. When he scowled, his whole cobbled-together body seemed to twist in on itself. It looked painful.

  “We need to get out of here,” said Valko from somewhere behind Maya. “We really need to get out of here. Now.”

  “What do you mean, ruined you with his loophole?” said Maya. She put her free hand on her hips, to keep herself feeling tough.

  Valko made a not-very-coherent protesting sound and tugged on her jacket.

  “Bad man,” said Beak-Face, still twisted into that whole-body scowl. “Digs into What Is and makes his big loophole so he can go on living.”

  “Loophole?” said Maya. It seemed a strange word for a gargoyle to use. “Like a way of cheating?”

  “Cheating,” said Beak-Face. “Yess! Also: hole in a wall. It can mean that, too. Bad hole that opens in a good stone wall. Things climb through loopholes: magic things, that should not be. Not just What Is, but everything that could be.”

  “Like us,” said Bonnet-Head. “A block of stone, yess? May not just be a block of stone. May also possibly be a box of gargoyles. Ugh.”

  “Ugh is right,” said Valko, from behind Maya’s back. “Really, let’s go.”

  Maya said, “You were made from the wall?”

  “A trrrrranslation,” said Bonnet-Head, with gusto.

  Translation?

  Maya must have looked puzzled.

  “Nice sssilent sstone,” Bonnet-Head explained, “trrranslated into gargoyles! Is it a word you don’t know? It means changing things, yess? From one form to anotherr, you know. From sstone into gargoyles. And he got right into us, too, the bad man. Put his memories there and his sstrange words and his sspells—”

  “We trranslated those, too, of course. Into what’s-it-called. What you quick little people speak, back where we were quarried,” said Beak-Face.

  “Bulgarrrrian!” said Bonnet-Head, and she gave a great gargoylian shudder. “Maybe it changes his sspells somehow. Nothing stays exactly the same, when it’s trranslated. Have you noticed that, dearr? It is the same and also not the same. Au revoir is not quite exactly the same as your English good-bye. No. So the bad man binds us to do what he says. He binds us in French. We trranslate his bad magic into something same-but-different, into Bulgarrian. We hope it will help, the same-but-different.”

  “Wiggle room!” said Maya. All three sets of eyes stared at her then: two pairs in brooding stone, one pair a puzzled, human gray. “Like finding little loopholes in his big loophole.”

  “Like that,” said Bonnet-Head, rather fondly (it seemed to Maya). “For an example. He must consume someone to live again. He says! We trranslate into Bulgarian, and the magic shifts a little. Not just munch up some poor girl with magic in her blood! No, we trranslate that! To live he must feast on the heart of a—What do you call them in English? Magical beings, you know, like you and not like you. Powerful. Maybe wicked. Maybe good. Ah, it hurts, all this horrible thinking.”

  “Sstones should NEVER think,” said Beak-Face. It was a gravelly grumble. “Now we have to think ALL the time. Think HIS thoughts. Speak HIS words. Do HIS work.”

  Maya’s heart fell. This part sounded like very bad news.

  “His work?” said Maya. “Fourcroy’s? His work? So why should I trust you at all, then?”

  The gargoyles looked at each other, looked at Maya, frowning with every square inch of their monstrous stone heads.

  “You should NOT!” said Bonnet-Head.

  (“No kidding,” said Valko.)

  “No! Never trust us. We did sspit ourselves out of the wall, true—and sspit out the egg, the memory stone—always spitting out his memories, the poison of him. And trrrrranslating his rules and his magic wherever we can—putting the little loopholes in—but it is never enough. And you, too, dearr. You also cannot be trussted, can you?”

  Maya’s heart was pounding like a drum. She backed up a step, and then another step.

  “Believe us, quick-little warm-running child: he will eat you up, that bad man, for anotherr little blink of life. He alrready eats you up. Beware of him.”

  “Maya!” said Valko, interrupting. “Look!”

  The sky had deepened way beyond nectarine by now. The
sky was dark. But this being Paris, many other lights had come flickering on: lit windows in buildings across the way, the signs advertising cafés and restaurants along the street, the pulsating green neon sign of a pharmacy a block away. And above the crazy tumult of city life, the Eiffel Tower, which had been glowing all creamy and gold, had suddenly started to sparkle.

  “But that means—,” said Maya. She stretched her free hand out, out, out, toward the beauty of it. The Tower was programmed to sparkle every hour on the hour. Six o’clock already! She looked around. For less than a second she didn’t feel anything; she even thought, Maybe it has really just gone away. That, of course, was the moment the wave of strangeness sloshed right over her, the tingle of it racing up and down her outstretched arm and making her feel just the slightest bit sick—an itchy, electric sort of queasiness, as if she were about to outgrow her ordinary, everyday skin.

  Growing. Things growing.

  Something was beginning to happen to the flowers in the bouquet. The gargoyles were clattering at each other. Valko had his hand clamped tight on her arm; the egg was huddled safely in that hand. The egg! She didn’t want magic messing with that egg. It was strange enough on its own.

  “Don’t you change,” she told it firmly. And she tried to hold on to her own self, too, so restless and twitchy inside her skin.

  “Oh, no,” said Valko, looking up over her head at the Eiffel Tower. Maya looked, too. The sparkles had started in the usual way, bright popping flashes, like manic fireflies or paparazzi. But something was happening now to the Tower itself. Dark blotches spread out from its usually crisp sides. The sparkling lights faltered, flickered, and then everything—neighborhood, embassy, neon signs, and Tower—went completely dark.

  Maya could feel the ground trembling faintly, far below.

  What did I just do? she thought. It was a peculiar sort of thought. She tried to shake it right back out of her head.

  “Big loophole, getting bigger. Bad man,” said a gargoyle sadly in the dark.

  “You okay?” said Valko, not very far from Maya’s ear. “They’ll have the generator going in a second.”

  “The Tower,” she said. “The poor Tower. What’s happening to it, do you think?”

  (Forest. Trees. What was her mind doing, anyway? It was as bad as the gargoyles’ egg, feeding her pictures like that.)

  “Don’t know,” said Valko. “Look what I found in your backpack, though. Coming in handy already, huh?”

  He had dug out that flashlight he’d given her. It had remained its old cobalt self, thank goodness. The little circle of brightness was ordinary and comforting.

  Valko sent the patch of light flicking all around them: the flowers, the satellite dishes, the waiting gargoyles. Everything was there. Everything was still there. The flowers looked different, though. More complicated than they had been.

  Maya shifted her outstretched arm around until she felt a gargoyle’s stony shoulder—or wing?—under her fingers.

  “Tell me, how can we stop this?” she said. They had called it a loophole. That was a funny way to describe a spreading tide of magic, wasn’t it? But Fourcroy had needed a loophole to keep on living. That’s what they had said. Maybe he hadn’t known how awful that loophole would be, how it would grow and grow and grow.

  The gargoyles sighed raspily and shifted from claw to claw.

  “Harrd,” said Beak-Face.

  “Sstop the one who sstarted it,” added Bonnet-Head, a bit farther away in the dark. “What more can you do?”

  Valko made a very impatient noise. “Well, for starters,” he said, “seems to me pretty obvious: you take the stupid egg, which is full of evil Fourcroy’s evil downloaded memories, if I’m understanding what these walking, talking statues are saying—and I still don’t see how they’re doing it, the walking and talking, it doesn’t make any sense at all—and you tumble that stupid egg over the edge of the roof here, and you let it go smash. That’s the sensible thing to do.”

  There was some gravelly clamor from the gargoyles. “She HAS to keep it safe!” and “She MUST take care of it!”

  Maya turned to look at Valko. “You don’t understand,” said Maya. He really didn’t. “I can’t do that. I have to keep it safe—I do.”

  “Because keeping a stone egg full of some bad guy’s mind is a Good Idea? Or just because that’s Fourcroy’s master plan and he’s got you totally trapped?”

  Don’t you see? Yes . . . and yes. She took a deep breath and said it aloud: “I’m pretty sure it’s both.”

  “Yesss,” said the gargoyles, off there in the gloom.

  “Are you kidding me?” said Valko.

  “It’s not just his egg,” said Maya. “It’s theirs.”

  “Yesss,” murmured the gargoyles.

  “And that makes things better how?” said Valko. “They’re monsters. They’re working for him. They nearly strangled me. Oh, I know, don’t tell me: they were scared of my very scary knife. Even though it’s teeny-tiny, and they’re made of stone.”

  There was a pause while Maya just stood there being stubborn and wishing she could find the words to describe how she felt about stone eggs and gargoyles. It was hard to explain to Valko because it wasn’t totally logical. It was a feeling. It was a hunch. It was complicated. Maybe it was even another illusion, and the dominoes were still tumbling in their neat little clockwork rows, clickety clickety click.

  Valko broke the silence with a laugh. He could do that: turn some easy corner and go from worry to laughter. Dark thoughts just couldn’t stick to him.

  “Oh, forget it. Let’s go. We’ll be late for dinner, and then my mother will be mad, and things will get really scary.”

  Maya had already rolled the egg up safe in her extra sweater and stuffed the thing back into her backpack. She was ready to follow the flashlight’s nice ordinary light back toward the stairway door.

  But first she did whisper good-bye in the direction of the gargoyles. Maybe they heard it, and maybe they didn’t. They were being very still again, in the darkness. They were back to behaving like stone. They made no sound.

  Maya was thinking about gargoyles, and thinking about Valko.

  Valko didn’t understand about the egg, but that wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t used to things depending so much on him, probably.

  But the way he glared at those gargoyles: it was the way other people sometimes glared into the mirror on a bad morning. Yes, thought Maya. Into the mirror!

  Because think about it, right? Quarried in one place and hauled off to another! Part this, part that, part something else, always translating, always out of place! Maybe being a Valko—or, for that matter, even being a Maya—was not so entirely different, after all (thought Maya as she followed the flashlight’s beam down the embassy stairs), from being a gargoyle.

  12

  VAMPIRES AND OTHER CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS

  By the time Valko and Maya made their way down the stairs, the generator was rumbling away in the background, and the lights were back on. There were candlesticks set out hastily on all the surfaces, as well, just to be safe. Some of the mirrors above some of the chimneys had been warped by the strangeness into abstract whorls of glass, and at certain places in the paneling, bunches of wires had broken through the surface of the wall as they blossomed into wild designs. But in the grand drawing room of the embassy, the two Dr. Nikolovs—Valko’s mother and father—were calmly waiting to greet their earliest guests. Had they even noticed the strangeness rolling through? The Nikolovs were diplomats, and thus by training unflappable, no matter what was going on at the time with the laws of physics.

  Maya tightened her grip on her bouquet, which—after the excitement on the roof and a certain amount of molecular rearrangement—was somewhat the worse for wear, and surreptitiously wiped her nervous right hand on her skirt.

  The lights were very bright. There were old paintings in frames on the walls, and the furniture was dark and elaborate, and there were flowers everywhere, as wel
l as people standing by with trays in their hands, waiting for the real guests to arrive.

  “Here we go, Maya,” said Valko, with an encouraging smile. “Time to meet my absolutely terrifying parents. Mama! This is Maya.”

  Maya handed over the bouquet, shook Dr. Nikolova’s hand firmly, said, “Zdravejte” with conviction, which was the proper Bulgarian way of saying hello, and looked straight into Valko’s mother’s brilliant dark eyes.

  (“Chessboard eyes,” Valko had told her on the roof. “You’ll see what I mean when you meet her. She was a chess champion when she was a girl, you know. Milena Todorova, queen of the checkered board. Her eyes are always at least seven moves ahead.”)

  “Lovely flowers, thank you,” said Valko’s mother. “I’m glad to meet you, at long last. Georgi, this is Valko’s young friend from school, Maya Davidson. The scientist’s child.”

  Valko’s father shook her hand, too, and said something kind. His hair was gray at the temples, and he was in a suit that made him look like a movie star. Maya ran through all the polite phrases she could think of and tried very hard to keep smiling, but those sixty seconds before Valko rescued her by dragging her off to the drinks table made for a long, long minute indeed. The other guests had begun to arrive.

  “Fine so far,” said Valko. He seemed relieved, Maya thought, just to be off the embassy roof and away from the impossible talking statues. But a glittering dinner party with grown-ups you didn’t even know had to be a thousand—a million—times worse than gargoyles! No, it wasn’t fair: Maya was practically sweating bullets, and here was Valko sailing through the evening as if it were the most fun he’d had in ages. That was what being a diplomat’s kid meant, Maya guessed. He hadn’t even seemed all that nervous back when he first met Maya’s parents, had he? Maya tried to remember. No, it seemed to her that even then, Valko had remained unreasonably cheerful and calm.

  “So, this is the Bulgarian Cultural Foundation’s annual award dinner,” said Valko. “As you know. If you read the invitation all the way through. That means a lot of artists and doddering profs around the table tonight. Get ready!”