A Box of Gargoyles (15 page)

Her mind got as far as this thought and froze a little.

She had another lemon drop.

Pauline Vian was tugging on her sleeve.

“Wherever did this compass toy come from?” she was asking.

An ebony bird gave it to me
.

Maya squidged the lemon drop over to the side of her mouth.

“It's complicated,” she said.

The car veered to the right.

“Wait,” said Valko. “I think—keep going a little—yes!”

He turned around to the backseat passengers and waved the compass in the air.

“Okay! We must be almost there!”

“How do you know?” said Maya, while James made the whole backseat bounce up and down to mark his impatience.

“The needle's not stuck pointing in any one direction now. It moves a little every time we move. Let's get out. I'll show you.”

Cousin Louise parked the car on the edge of the road and peered out through the glass. They were deep in the Fontainebleau woods: bare November trees as far as the eye could see and a low piney ridge dribbled with boulders.

“There should be good picnic places over that way, among the rocks,” said Cousin Louise. “
Bon!
Out you all get! Bring the food!”

“So it is no pole at all, but a particular place,” said Pauline Vian, as she scrambled out of the backseat and pulled her sweater closer around her. “From the perspective of magnetism, that makes no sense whatsoever. How can it possibly be working, this little mechanism? I don't understand it, not at all.”

“Neither do I,” said Valko with a grin. “This way!”

What Maya found herself understanding was that H de F's compass was like somebody running a large-scale game of hot-and-cold. The needle pointed, and they followed (hot!). When they swerved off course, the needle veered back in the other direction (cold!). It took them right up the piney hillside toward all those quite incredible clumps of boulder—toward one particular pile of boulders, in fact.

“You've been looking for a rock?” said Pauline. She put her hand on it, testingly. “But this is just sandstone. It couldn't be the least bit magnetic.”

They stood in a semicircle looking up at one of the strangest of the boulders, the long end of which stuck right out in the air like the head of a huge and ancient turtle.

“It's magic,” said James, who seemed quite satisfied. “It's a magic pole, and maybe before it was rock it used to be a dinosaur.”

Valko laughed, but James was already out of sight again, circumnavigating the huge stone dinosaur that the South-Southeast Pole had so surprisingly turned out to be.

Maya was thinking,
I've seen this rock before. Where have I seen this rock?

And Cousin Louise started looking through the bag of picnic provisions at her side.

“James—,” she said, with the tone of someone about to start assigning small helpful tasks.

“I'm WAY UP HERE!” said James, from somewhere up above them.

Well,
way up there
was pretty much right—James was shinnying up the lizard-like head of the thing, too many feet above the ground for Maya's comfort. Cousin Louise had already leaped to her feet again.

“James!” said Cousin Louise. “Descend from there! Immediately!”

“My dinosaur has a name,” said James as he scooted (reluctantly) back down. “Someone painted it right on his side.”

“You mean graffiti?” said Maya. Sometimes it was a good thing that James couldn't read very well. Valko caught her eye, grinned, and ducked behind the boulder to see what awful thing might be scrawled there. He was back in a second, with surprise scrawled all over his face.

“You look,” he said to Maya, so Maya and Pauline both followed him around the rock's corner, where in fairly neat lines of white paint someone had written
Rocher de la salamandre
.

“Ah,” said Pauline. “The rock climbers. They like to name their rocks.”

“So it's almost a dinosaur,” called Valko to James. “But not quite: it says this is the Rock of the Salamander.”

“Oh,” said James. He was trying to decide whether or not he was disappointed. Dinosaurs are pretty cool, being so large and so extinct. But those sneaky salamanders kept turning up everywhere. And sneakiness is pretty cool, too.

“Well! Time for lunch,” said Cousin Louise briskly. “Maya, you are looking rather perplexed.”

“I'll be okay in a minute,” said Maya. “Could I see that compass a moment? I'll catch up.”

Cousin Louise gave her a look, but moved everyone a little distance away along the hillside, to a place where the rocks looked better for sitting.

Maya hardly noticed them leaving. She was looking at the compass again, at the funny salamander molded into its cover, standing on its tiny little metal rock.
To the Origin Point
—that's what it said on the back.

“Here?” she said to herself. “Really? Here?”

Because she had finally remembered where she had seen the Rock of the Salamander before. It had only been pen-and-ink, of course, only the sketchiest of sketches, but a pen-and-ink little boy had been peeking into a hollow of it, with his pen-and-ink mother watching, in her long, old-fashioned skirts, at his side.

She walked around the boulder, looking.

There was maybe more earth around the base of it, more debris gathered over time, or something. But she finally found what might once have been the top of a hollow. With a little loose rock, she started working away at the earth there. The dirt was packed pretty tight, but to her relief, right underneath that thin-packed layer, the ground gave way, and her hand was reaching into a small cave tucked away under the rock itself.

“What are you doing? What's in that gap?” said Valko.

She hadn't heard Valko come up behind her. Maya was almost flat on the ground now, stretching her hand into the cool darkness of that hidden hollow place. It was like the entire universe had just turned itself into some immensely complex lens, and all the world's attention was focused exactly
here
. She was no longer just Maya, but a part of that intensely focused attention.

“It was in the book,” she said, while her fingers kept exploring the earth and rock of that hidden place, following the curves of the stone, the edge—the straight edge—cold and metallic—of a little box.

“It's really here,” she said, surprise shivering right back up her arm. “It's here!”

“What's here?” said Valko. “What book?”

She shifted around, scrabbled a little, and finally found a piece of something to grab on to.

“This,” she said, and out into the cold autumn air came her dusty, triumphant hand . . . and the hundred-year-old box of the Fourcroys.

 
8
 

“I
didn't think it really existed,” said Maya.

She was sitting up now, leaning against the boulder with the old metal box cradled in her lap. The stone was cold against her back, and the box was cold in her hands, and the November air was cold in her lungs, but all her blood was flush with success, and nothing else quite mattered.

“What's in it?” said Valko. “Why didn't you tell me we were looking for a box?”

“I didn't know that was what we were doing,” said Maya. “I didn't know until I recognized the rock, and I couldn't have told you any earlier, anyway, because I hadn't seen those letters until last night.”

She tried to explain to him how that handmade story had made her feel, the mother and little Henri on their adventure together in the woods, the love that had been inked into those pictures, but she knew she wasn't making very much sense. And Valko was a thousand percent not interested in mushy stories written a hundred years ago.

“So it's Fourcroy's own box?” he said. “Um. Do you have a flamethrower or something we could zap it with?”

“From when he was a little kid,” said Maya. “He came here with his mother. They used to put stuff in the box at the end of the summer.”

“I don't care who he came here with,” said Valko. “I'm just thinking
we
shouldn't have come here. You don't see that?”

“Oh,” said Maya.

She did see that, actually. It looked bad, following compasses given to you by carved ravens belonging to shadows who had very sneakily bound you to bring them back to life. It looked like following instructions. It
was
following instructions.

But she couldn't help feeling curious, too.

It had all been so long ago. The little boy and his mother had stopped coming, but no one had found the box, it was hidden so cleverly, and now climbers had been clambering on the boulders above it for a hundred years, not even guessing there was treasure under them. If it was treasure at all, of course.

“Don't touch it!” said Valko. This made very little sense, because Maya had had the box in her hands for minutes and minutes already.

She looked at him.

“No, really,” said Valko. “If it's part of his plan. I thought we were trying not to follow his plan. His stupid list from the stupid Salamander House.”

They had been over that list a million times: some kind of
physical remnant
(that blood splotch Maya had managed to leave behind in the writing desk—the only wiggle-roomish thing she had pulled off so far, really); his
memories
(left in the stone wall, said the letter: all right, leave walls alone); and
Maya, the willing, self-sacrificing apprentice
(Maya scowled all over again), all brought to a
Suitable Magical Place—

“And it said we would get there if we ‘follow the guide'!” said Maya. Of course! The compass was the guide. And they had followed it. (
Clickety-clickety-clickety
: billions of little dominoes, toppling in obedient rows.)

So this must be what old Fourcroy thought of as a Suitable Magical Place. Well, yes, that made sense. The place he used to come with his mother, all those long years ago.

“Then what should we do with the box?” said Valko. “I can't believe you let us just go dancing off after that compass.”

“Get it away from here,” said Maya. She did feel that, very urgently. “If this is the Suitable Place, then we should keep everything away, right? Anything he might need.”

Though she remembered the strange magic spilling through Paris that morning, the feeling in her outstretched hand as the croissants turned into Something Else, and for a sliver of a moment she felt all unsteady again.

“Or leave it alone,” said Valko. “Or—I'm not kidding—find that flamethrower and melt it down.”

That, however, was when Cousin Louise started calling Maya's name, and Cousin Louise, at that moment, sounded like someone whose nice picnic has been compromised by the rudeness of some young person who could not be bothered to sit down politely with her friends and family and spread some goat cheese on her baguette. She also sounded like she was coming their way, and at a clip.

“Quick,” said Maya. “Your backpack.”

She didn't give Valko time to protest. She stuffed the box into his bag, and they darted out from behind the Salamander Rock just in time to meet Cousin Louise and (in the case of Valko, who had particular talents of this sort) disarm her with extreme politeness before her full displeasure could be unleashed.

“We are all going to be icicles by the time you've finished your lunch” was all Cousin Louise had a chance to say before Valko's embassy manners had taken full effect. “And we've found some interesting things, too, so come along—with rapidity, please.”

The others had found pebbles, and beetles, and a kind of stone hut built into the hillside, where climbers and walkers could hide themselves from a sudden rainstorm.

“How old is this place, do you think?” asked Maya, as she stuck her head into its musty shadows.

It felt ancient. She was glad to duck back out again.

Cousin Louise looked up at the slightly graying sky.