A Box of Gargoyles (12 page)

“The adults, they want us to be friends,” she said finally, in her blunt stare of a voice. “Papi is full of great enthusiasm about it.”

“He is?” said Maya, figuring out only at the very last second that “Papi” must mean that well-dressed grandfather of hers.

“It's all
arrangé
,” said Pauline with a shrug. “Because you do not have friends speaking French with you—”

“You apparently forget Maya's charming, loyal friend Valko,” said Valko, leaning around Maya from the other side. He did not seem flustered by the astonishing Pauline at all, but that must be because he had gotten more or less used to her during all those advanced math and science classes they had together.

“But no,” said Pauline. “I am not forgetting you, Valko, but you speak English to Maya all the time, and so her French cannot improve, can it? Whereas I will not speak English to her at all, because for one thing, I know only ‘
one, two, sree
' in English.”

“You'll have to know more than that by the end of the year,” said Valko. English was part of the big final exam.

“
Exactement
,” said Pauline. “For preparing for the exams, Maya's mother will teach me English; and in exchange I make Maya speak French. That is Papi's plan.”

She set down her fork.

“But my plan is different!” she said, and for the first time a glint of something less frowny came into her eyes. “It is about the
violin
!”

For some reason—perhaps the remarkable shininess with which that one word,
violin
, stood out from everything else Pauline had said since entering the Davidsons' apartment—everyone in that whole room fell silent all at once and looked at her.

“Do you play the violin, dear?” said Maya's mother kindly.

“Yes,
madame
!” said Pauline Vian. She stood up when she said it, too, as if the very thought of the violin was something too elevating to discuss while seated at a table. “I play the violin! It is my true passion. And I know—I've heard—your cousin told me earlier—that you are an excellent violinist and could help me with my practice. Oh,
madame
, I hope you will.”

Maya's mother's pale face looked quite taken aback.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “It has been such a long time, Pauline. I'm afraid I hardly have the strength for it, these days. You must have a real teacher, don't you?”

“I've done a great deal of research online,” said Pauline, her chin somewhat higher in the air. “I have read a number of books.”

“She is so busy, with her math and her science and her history,” said Pauline's grandfather. For the first time, he looked distinctly uncomfortable. “And you know,
madame
, how children have these ideas, these passing enthusiasms.”

“Papi is unhappy because I will be a violinist, and not a physicist,” said Pauline. “Or even a historian. The talents of four continents, wasted. That's what he always says.”

There was a slightly too loud whispering from the corner, while James asked his mother whether continents really have talents.

“No, they do not,” said Pauline, not pretending not to have overheard. She gave James a long, serious stare. “Papi means my various grandparents come from many different places in the world, and that that must be better than having grandparents who come from one single place in the world, but of course that is not necessarily true. Perhaps I myself will marry a penguin from Antarctica and have little chick-children with
five
continents in their background, but that will not make them better or worse than anyone else.”

Even when telling a joke (surely this was a joke?), Pauline did not crack a smile. Maya could not help being rather impressed.

But Pauline's grandfather looked, if that was possible, even more uncomfortable than he had looked ten seconds before.

“They might be really good swimmers,” said James, filled with sudden enthusiasm for penguin/human offspring. “But they wouldn't be able to fly. What's in that black suitcase thing?”

Maya's mother followed James's pointing finger, and her face lit up.

“You brought your violin, Pauline. How thoughtful of you.”

“So play us something, please!” said Maya's father in his cheerful, funny-sounding French. “A party like this should have lots of music!”

Pauline apparently did not require a lot of encouragement when it came to performing on the violin. She was already across the room, taking the instrument out of its case and tightening the bow, while her grandfather took a few tight-lipped sips from his wineglass.

“There is something I have just started,” said Pauline, as she stood back up and tested the tuning of the strings. “It is not very like birthday music, I'm afraid. It is the beginning of a piece by the great French composer Saint-Saëns. His macabre dance.”

“The
Danse macabre
,” whispered Maya's mother. She seemed to recognize the title.

“What's a makabber?” asked James.

“Shh,” said Maya. “It means something good for Halloween.”

Then they really could not say anything at all, because Pauline had stopped messing with the violin pegs and was bringing her bow crashing down on the strings.

Makabber indeed! This had to be the most makabber thing Maya had ever heard.

She knew something was wrong even before the first notes came screeching out into the air. She had watched her mother play violin for many years, and she knew that your hand wasn't supposed to look stiff like that and that the violin shouldn't come shooting out from under your chin at that awkward angle. And then the sounds that Pauline's poor violin was producing! Her amazing face got all scrunched up with concentration, and the noises emerging from that violin were as scrunched up as her face. For the first two or three seconds, Maya felt the horrible sensation of laughter bubbling in her chest, but then she looked again at the girl's concentrated, passionate face, and that danger passed. You simply could not laugh at Pauline Vian.

But then Maya noticed something else: as the violin wailed and wobbled, the shadows were deepening in the corners of the room. She checked by looking away and looking back again, and it was really truly happening. Darkness was seeping out of the walls and puddling at the edges of the room. There was something dreadful about it, too, as if a tide were rising, a tide of bleakness, and they might just all drown in it eventually. A moment ago she had been about to laugh, and now fear was rising up in her instead. She looked around quickly, trying to judge from everyone else's faces whether she was alone in losing her mind, but they all seemed to be feeling exactly what might be expected, under the circumstances: Pauline's grandfather looking uncomfortable and discontented, Maya's father politely amused, Cousin Louise sharp-eyed and inscrutable. Only Maya's mother put a thin hand to her mouth and widened her eyes in what might be alarm or distress or something even worse than that.

That was enough to make Maya jump to her feet (not that she had much of a plan, just that awful, quick-rising alarm, and wanting to make the darkness back away).

But it was at that very moment that the dreadful makabber music broke off in the middle of a jangling run.

“I don't yet know it all,” said Pauline into the flabbergasted silence that followed. “I just started.”

The silence might have snowballed unpleasantly, if it hadn't been for James.

“Wow!” he said, plainly impressed. “That was SUPER Halloweeny!”

“Well, it does represent the Dance of the Dead,” said Pauline. “Death comes and plays his wild song, and leads them all dancing away.”

Maya shivered and stole another glance at her mother, from whose face the terrible sick-looking green was only just beginning to fade. The shadows had evaporated or soaked their way back into the walls or whatever shadows do when they fade, but Maya felt like someone who had swallowed an ice cube's worth of worry, whole.

“Physics!” said Pauline's grandfather sadly into his glass. “She is so brilliant with equations. And her textual analysis—so profound.”

“
Papi!
” said Pauline, frowning again. “I started not so long ago, playing the violin. I
can't
be any good, not yet. How could I possibly yet be any good?”

All the grown-ups relaxed right away. At least she knew she was awful—that was what Maya could see them thinking. Adults (the reasonably nice ones anyway) do hate having to say discouraging things to visiting children. It looked like in this case they might not have to.

“It takes ten thousand hours to be really, really good,” insisted Pauline. “They have done studies. Ten thousand hours to become an expert, a genius, a virtuoso. It cannot be done
overnight
.”

Maya's mother gave Maya's father the tiniest little nod, and as he began collecting plates in a cheerful, noisy way, the party's attention flowed a little away from Pauline Vian and her violin. A few minutes later the enthusiastic, slightly plaintive voice of James rose up over the general hubbub:

“What I want to go see is a CASTLE!”

He was at the dining-room table, with Cousin Louise and Valko, all confabulating busily about something or other.

“Thoroughly possible,” Cousin Louise was assuring him. “Why not? Your father will find the map for us now—”

“Found!” said Maya's father, coming in through the doorway with an armful of maps and guidebooks.

“An instructive outing,” Cousin Louise explained, having caught Maya's eye. “With that nice young Pauline, whose French is so
correcte
. I have arranged it all with her grandfather.”

A map was being spread across the table.

“So how does a compass even work?” James asked, leaning over the map. There was a little metallic jangle as Maya's button (or compass) slipped loose from his hands and hit the table. “Oops.”

“Wait, pick that thing up a moment,” said Valko. “I'll fix the map so north is more or less north. Okay, there. Now we'll see what it's up to.”

Which was a good way of phrasing it, thought Maya, still rattled after the way that music had started summoning dark shadows and making her mother turn so green. She scowled down at the slightly trembling needle of the whatever-it-was. Valko turned it around, and the needle stayed put, pointing stubbornly in some nonnorthern direction.

“Huh!” said Valko, his interest piqued. “So it
is
acting like a compass, isn't it? But since when is there a South-Southeast Pole?”

James looked down at the possible compass and then up through the living-room windows with their slightly wavy glass.

“It's pointing at the Laundromat!” he said.

“Or past the Laundromat,” said Valko. “Look at the map. It could be pointing at a suburb, like Créteil. Or Fontainebleau, farther out. Or, I don't know, Lyon or Tunisia or somewhere else in Africa.”

“I want to go to the one with a CASTLE,” said James.

“That would be Fontainebleau, then,” said Cousin Louise. “And why not? Tomorrow even, since it is vacation. I will take all of you young people: you, James, and Maya and Pauline and even Valko, too, if he wishes.”

“There are very beautiful rocks in those woods,” said Pauline, who had put her violin away and wandered over to the table. She was in a distinctly better mood, Maya noticed, after that long discussion with Maya's mother about how you should really hold a violin bow. “My class went on excursion there, last year. It will be very cold, I think, in October.”

“
November
,” said James. “It'll be November already, tomorrow. Halloween is the last day of the whole month.”

“Even colder then,” said Pauline Vian. “Makes no difference: I don't mind. Will we take the train?”

“No, no train,” said Cousin Louise, and she lit up the room with her radiant, mysterious smile. “I will collect you. I have embraced mobility! That is, I have just recently bought myself a car.”

That was when Pauline's grandfather came over to say it was time for him to take Pauline away.

“I'm afraid we have tired out your mother,” he said, very politely, to Maya, who immediately craned her neck to see for herself: the chair her mother had been sitting in was empty. How had she not noticed? “She has been so very kind today, to Pauline. Give her our very, very best regards. And
joyeux anniversaire
.”

“Yes,” said Maya, distracted. “I mean, thank you.”

Valko stayed long enough to fish a small, thin box and an envelope out of his backpack. The envelope was quite elegant, and had a great big shield embossed on it, a shield held up by lions.

“Coat of arms of the Republic of Bulgaria,” said Valko. “Don't be too frightened: it's from my mother.”

“Your mother!”

“No, no, don't look like that. She's inviting you to dinner at the embassy, some sort of cultural awards thingy, the week after next. Here, open the box.”

It was a flashlight, little and sleek and cobalt blue.

“I figured you have enough shadows around you,” said Valko, and his smile (since he of all people knew how much Maya worried about her mother) was kindness and sympathy, all the way down. “This is for scaring them off.”

There was probably something eloquent a girl should say when a friend has just given her something as surprisingly perfect as that flashlight, but Maya just stood there and was happy. You could bask in that sort of happiness for quite a long time, before you'd want to turn the page and move on.

Then she noticed that Valko was letting the toe of his shoe trace out a little circle or two in the hallway floor, like someone with something else to say.

Her heart did a little tippety-tip.

“You know—,” he said, and then stopped, and laughed at himself.

“What?” said Maya, though she jumped all over herself immediately for saying it. What kind of foolish person says “what?” like that? Really. You would not think she was someone who had just turned thirteen.