A Box of Gargoyles

by Anne Nesbet

  “Have you noticed the strange things happening in the neighborhood, the last few weeks?” said Valko.

  Pauline frowned.

  “Non,” she said.

  “The explosion that took out a bit of the Bulgarian-embassy wall?”

  “Ah, well, then: oui.”

  “The changes in the trees and cars? The shift in the bakeries from croissants to vines and flowers? The remaking of the Eiffel Tower?”

  “What’s wrong with the Tour Eiffel?” said Pauline.

  “You can’t see how different it looks?” said Maya. “You really can’t see that?”

  “Different from what?” said Pauline.

  “From the little Towers they sell for key chains, for instance? Wait, I think James has one in his room somewhere—”

  Maya ducked for a moment into James’s room, which was basically a mound of clutter with a bed in the middle, and looked around with quick eyes until a glint of fake bronze found her, a little Eiffel Tower souvenir that had been buried for a few days under dust and dirty socks.

  “See?” she said as she came back into the living room. “Notice anything about this Eiffel Tower? It is not a tree. Right? It’s just a nice, geometrical tower, with no leaves or roots.”

  Pauline looked at her as if Maya were the sort of unbalanced person who needed careful handling.

  “The little toy Eiffels have never had leaves or roots,” she said, explaining the universe to someone with very little sense and less experience or knowledge. “Non! It is tradition that the toy souvenirs look quite unlike the actual Eiffel Tower.”

  “No,” said Maya. “Actually your brain is being fooled. See, this guy who was sort of related to me—”

  “Henri de Fourcroy,” said Valko. “He lived in the Salamander House, over near the elementary school.”

  “Anyway, he was close to dying, or actually dying, so he did this bad-magic stuff by the wall of the Bulgarian embassy—”

  “That was October twentieth,” said Valko. “The date becomes important later.”

  “And that caused the explosion, but what it really did was open this awful loophole in the laws of physics, so he could go on as a shadow until he could get his body back, which apparently he has forty days to do—”

  “That part really does seem dubious to me,” said Valko. “But we have evidence for the laws of physics being warped. It’s a pattern, you see.”

  “Because one hundred thirty-seven hours after he did his loophole magic, I touched the wall he had left his memory in, the strangeness happened again, and that started this chain, and every one hundred thirty-seven hours everything gets strange—”

  “We measured the radius of the affected area,” said Valko. “It’s doubling every time, so that’s really bad.”

  “And we have to stop this from happening, but that’s hard, especially since I’ve been sort of trapped into helping him, like Oedipus Rex bound by fate, but still we just have to defeat the shadow, somehow, of that Henri de Fourcroy. Before the forty days are up—”

  “Which is November twenty-ninth, at nine o’clock in the evening.”

  “Yes,” said Maya. “That’s it. We have to close his loophole. Even though we don’t quite know how. Or else the whole world eventually becomes deformed and wrong and strange. Which would be awful.”

  Pauline Vian looked with incredulous and frowning eyes into each of their faces, first Maya’s and then Valko’s, and then she turned her lips down and gave a very Gallic shrug.

  “But this is impossible,” she said. “In fact, it’s absurd.”

  “It does seem totally impossible,” said Valko, looking just slightly embarrassed. “But some of it keeps turning out to be true.”

  “Pay attention on Saturday morning,” said Maya. “The next round of strangeness happens at four in the morning. Saturday. Just see if anything looks changed to you, when you wake up. Try to pay attention.”

  “I am always paying attention,” said Pauline. You could see that she was intrigued and suspicious, both at once. But then, she had been made fun of at school more than most, being so small, so out-of-the-ordinary, and so dreadfully, awfully smart. “Well. I will take care to pay particular attention on Saturday. Au revoir, you two.” And she swung her violin case around and headed down the hall to the door.

  Maya and Valko looked at each other; Valko shrugged.

  “She’s kind of right, after all,” said Valko. “It’s absurd.”

  “Yes, fine,” said Maya. “Now focus. We have to figure out how to stop Henri de Fourcroy’s shadow from getting itself reborn.”

  “And how to get the laws of physics behaving themselves again,” said Valko. He smiled as he said it, though. “Don’t forget that. At least it’s good you don’t have the letter with the bloodstain on it, right? You left that behind. He can’t come back to life without a trace of himself, that’s what you said.”

  “That’s what that letter said. With the ‘recipe.’ Yeah. But what if sitting around and waiting is what the shadow wants me to do? What if anything I do or don’t do turns out to be what he planned all along? What if that’s what being bound means?”

  It made a person restless around the edges, not knowing what the rules were. And not knowing whether there was any way she, Maya, could break those rules. You could drive yourself crazy, trying to figure it all out. How could Maya fight against Fourcroy’s evil and shadowy plans if every step she took ended up being just the step he wanted her to take? That was awful. That was the clockwork path—and Maya absolutely hated it.

  At least she had rescued the egg. Neither the crazy singing ladies nor the shadowy Fourcroy had the memory stone. So that was one good thing. Probably.

  “Why’s it good that you have it?” asked Valko. He was still grumpy about that egg.

  “They wanted to use it to lure me to what they think is a Suitable Magical Place. Like where he was born! That was probably the best place for him to come back to life, right? But now we know he can’t get there in time, not in forty days, because the strangeness won’t reach that far by then, and the shadow can’t go past the edges of his loophole. So now it’s me luring them. We just have to find the right place. A sneaky place. Somewhere where we can bind him, you know—not that I’ve exactly figured out how—instead of him always binding me.”

  Where he won’t get to eat my heart, after all, Maya added silently. Even if the whole world thinks I’m actually a zmey.

  On Saturday morning Maya slept right through her alarm, she was so worn-out, and didn’t open her eyes until her father came knocking at her door.

  “There’s a call for you, Maya,” he said. “Pauline’s on the vine.”

  What?

  She opened the door more or less still in her sleep and took the phone from her father’s hands.

  The vine!

  The phone had sprouted during the night. Yes, and now she remembered: she had been dreaming of jungles. Long, dark tendrils hung down from every possible side, and it felt oddly squishy to Maya’s fingers.

  “Ugh,” she said. “This is disgusting.”

  Her father gave her a puzzled look.

  “Pardon? What is disgusting?” said Pauline, her voice managing somehow to claw its way through all that excessive vegetation.

  “This phone,” said Maya. “It wants to be a plant.”

  “Ah,” said Pauline. She sounded uncertain. “It . . . changed?”

  “Yes—oh, that’s right. Did you notice?”

  “I . . . I . . . but Maya, it is too bizarre, what has happened here. I woke up at four, to see. It was dark, of course. So I took out my violin and played, just to feel better, you see, about everything.”

  “Your neighbors!” said Maya, aghast. The Davidsons were regularly getting complaints from the people who lived below them in their building whenever James dropped a toy on the floor or Maya’s father forgot and flushed a toilet after ten p.m. Practicing violin at four in the morning? Hard to imagine what Parisian neighbors might do.
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  “The neighbors, they are far away,” said Pauline. “The appartement is not small, you know. And I have this thing, a sourdine, I put on the bridge of the violin, that makes it very quiet. But Maya, I saw . . . I saw strange things. Is this what you were meaning? I saw the back of the chair curl into a roll like a pastry. I saw the pictures change on my walls. It was horrible and bizarre. And I opened my window and played my violin, you know, to stay calm—”

  Oh, those poor neighbors! thought Maya again, but she tried not to let that thought show.

  “Quietly, I played. My Saint-Saëns, you know, not scales. And Maya—it was frightening, truly. A shadow came crawling up the wall toward my window.”

  “A shadow,” said Maya.

  “It was a shadow in the shape of a man. It climbed up as I played, and it was . . . talking to itself. That is not typical, Maya, for shadows, is it?”

  “No,” agreed Maya.

  “It seemed so angry, if shadows can be angry. It did not want to come, but it kept coming. It was following the musique—it said something like that. Angrily. And that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is, it was whispering your name, Maya. I became disconcerted, to be honest. I closed the window, and I put the violin away. There were other shadows out there, too. Dead things. Skeletons, even. I could feel them. Wanting to come climb up my wall. It was hideous!”

  “So what happened?”

  “The shadows went away, you see. When I stopped playing.”

  “Oh,” said Maya. She was remembering the way the darkness had come seeping out of the walls on her birthday, when Pauline started playing. “Because you were playing that piece. The one about death.”

  “But yes, of course,” said Pauline. She sounded a little defensive. “I like it. It’s my best, most difficult piece.”

  The funny thing was, she played it so badly! When musicians in myths played their lyres or their pipes and made the wild beasts dance, wasn’t it always because the music was so lovely, so exquisite, that not even a tiger could hear it without shedding a tear? Maya smiled into the tangled vinery of the telephone: the dead, it seemed, were not so picky. Or maybe they were picky, very picky, but what they picked, of all music, was the stiff scratchy wail produced by Pauline.

  So apparently Pauline Vian did have a musical talent after all: unlike most people, even those with otherwise impressive musical skills, she could really, actually, raise the dead.

  Because here is what happened next in Maya’s apartment:

  “You know what they said in the bakery this morning, Maya?” said her father when she brought out the dreadfully changed telephone a couple of minutes later. “They said there’s been some trouble with the old bones of the Montparnasse cemetery.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I guess they usually keep to themselves, pretty much. Quiet people, bones. But this morning they had some wild celebration and went rioting after. Madame Lasalle had it from her cousin, who’s a baker over that way. Gang of bones broke right into his shop and made off with all his pastries, his vines and flowers. And then headed off this way, or so it seemed to him.”

  “Can bones eat?” puzzled James. “They don’t have any tummies.”

  “No, they can’t,” said his mother. “So it was very rude and greedy for them to go troubling the poor baker.”

  Maya had listened to this much with distress growing like a weed (a vine?) in her.

  “Excuse me,” she said finally, losing some of her cool. “But it’s not just that bones can’t eat! Bones can’t walk, bones can’t celebrate, bones can’t break into shops—they can’t do anything, because bones are not alive.”

  Silence.

  “Maya,” said her mother. “Really, sweetie! That seems very harsh.”

  Maya hardly knew how to respond to that. “Harsh!”

  “Yes, actually. This isn’t California. It’s not nice to come into a different culture and be so critical. It’s intolerant, and I won’t have it.”

  That in itself was more than surprising, the heat with which Maya’s mother spoke. (She was so reliably calm and unflustered!) But to be reprimanded for not having paid enough attention to the feelings of bones—this was a bitter pill. It stuck in Maya’s throat, that pill, and made it hard for her to say anything at all.

  “Oh, dear,” said Maya’s mother, putting a hand to her brow. “I just snapped at you, Maya, didn’t I? I’m so sorry. I’m not myself these days.”

  “All perfectly natural,” said Maya’s father. “We can handle worse snapping than that, can’t we, Maya?”

  Maya nodded, but her mind was tackling a new and even more dreadful thought: if her mother wasn’t herself—how much of that was due to being pregnant, and how much, perhaps, to the waves of strangeness washing over their household every 137 hours? You weren’t supposed to be exposed to chemicals when you were pregnant, were you? Or radiation or very high altitudes or kitty litter or even some kinds of cheese?

  But what about being exposed to high doses of magic?

  Maya shivered with worry.

  It was another reason, on top of a whole mountain’s worth of reasons, why she had to make sure that strangeness went away. To make the world safe for her mother (and the—what had she called it?—little bean), Maya absolutely had to slam all loopholes shut and seal the cracks and crevices and make the world leak-free and safe again. She had to. What’s more, she vowed grimly, she would.

  18

  AN IMAGINARY COUNTRY

  What happened on Monday afternoon was not entirely Maya’s fault.

  She had come home that day in a grisly mood because during her French class, the teacher had called on her (as he almost never did) just five minutes after it had started to rain so hard the water went streaking diagonally across the huge windows that looked out from the classroom into the bleakness of the courtyard. The rain had made her think dark thoughts about time passing and how the fateful fortieth day was now already this Thursday, and that had reminded her of how she still had no clue where in Paris might count as a Suitable Magical Place for summoning shadowy Fourcroys and defeating them, and that had made her wonder all over again how an ordinary human, even if very motivated and trying hard to be brave, actually goes about defeating a death-cheating shadow. And all of those thoughts (together with the grim, slanting rain) had distracted her enough that even though she had studied very hard the night before and had memorized the poem in question (which was by someone called Arthur Rimbaud, and as far as she could tell compared all the vowels in the alphabet to various colors, and had been quite difficult to understand)—anyway, even though she had studied and memorized and prepared, when the teacher asked her to explain to the class lines three and four, in which the letter A is likened to the black of “velvet-suited flies buzzing around cruel stenches”—which is, let’s be honest, a peculiar turn of phrase—her mind and her French had failed her, and she had not been able to say anything that made the slightest bit of sense. So she would not be called on again for a month, probably. If ever. So much for hard work and fitting in!

  Then when she came into the apartment after school, she found her mother sick in bed with a headache and nausea, and that made Maya herself feel sick inside with worry, and all those angry, anxious thoughts about how fragile and recently ill mothers should not be put through (or put themselves through) dangerous adventures like being pregnant battered against the glassy, brittle sides of her brain and were hard to keep hidden. She bottled her worries up and kissed her mother and promised to check on James, who, said her mother, had been “playing so quietly all afternoon.”

  And that was the third thing: James wasn’t in his room. For a moment Maya panicked, remembering other awful times when she had looked for her baby brother and he hadn’t been there, but that lasted only a moment. Because then she caught the sound of James humming, which meant he was busy with something fun and complicated and entrancing, and that sound was coming from behind her own bedroom door. And when she flung open that d
oor, she found her little brother on the floor of her room, an old box open beside him, the box’s ancient papers and letters strewn all around him, and several of his little toy people having battles on top of some very old and intricate illustrated sheet, which James had apparently dug out of the family-archive box and unfolded flat on the floor.

  “James!” said Maya. (Said is kind: she actually shouted.) “What are you doing in here with my things?”

  James went from prone to sitting up in less time than you would think possible. He didn’t look guilty, but he did look very surprised.

  “My little truck rolled in here by accident and got under your bed. Did you know there are boxes hiding under there? This box is mostly boring stuff, but I found this imaginary country in there, so my people needed to do some karate on it right away. It’s a map.”

  “James!” said Maya. She could feel herself beginning to seethe, and that in itself was unsettling. All these years since James was a teeny baby, she had never felt as annoyed with him as she did now. He had always been so incredibly charming—he smiled at you with those soft brown eyes, and how could you be mad, really? But now she seethed. And maybe that was because she was especially stressed out and impatient, and maybe it was because James had fewer drops of charm running through his veins these days than he used to have: hard to say.

  “You cannot come into my room and go through my stuff,” said Maya. “That is one hundred percent NOT OKAY. Get up, take your people, and go back to your own room. Now I have to clean up this whole mess.”

  James gulped and looked around, as if he thought the nice sister he had known all these years must be hiding somewhere nearby. That just made Maya feel even grumpier, of course. She picked up his toys and stomped back across the hall to his room with them and left them in a topsy-turvy pile on his bed, while James trailed along sadly, and then she went back into her room and shut the door firmly and sat down on her bed and put her face in her hands.

  That was a bad moment indeed.

  So: on top of her mother feeling sick and the world-as-we-know-it maybe being about to end, she was having to look the possibility in the eye that she, Maya Davidson, was not always a very nice person. In fact, she, Maya, seemed to be turning out to be the sort of person who snaps at her beloved baby brother for almost no reason. It was discouraging and a disappointment.