A Box of Gargoyles (27 page)

“H
onestly, though,” said Valko. “If anyone's actually a dragon, it's my grandmother, not you.”

They were sitting at Maya's dining-room table, which was covered at the moment with maps, pencils, and Valko's geometry paraphernalia (rulers, compasses). Dreadful, dreadful noises floated in from the other room: Pauline Vian had come over to practice her scales.

“No clenching!” Maya's mother called from the kitchen. “Gently, gently, Pauline! Big, lovely tone!”

Valko had put a red dot on the map of Paris, right where the awful Fourcroy had made the embassy wall explode, and now he was using the compass to draw a series of circles expanding outward from that center, each circle labeled neatly with date and time.

“You know what?” said Maya. “She's not actually as terrifying as I thought she was going to be, your Baba Silva.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Valko. “If you think she's not terrifying, you just weren't paying attention. Look, that's the 3200-meter radius, coming up on Saturday.”

It was a pretty big circle he had just drawn: it stretched halfway across Paris. Maya and Valko stared at it for a while, feeling grim.

“The next one's worse,” said Maya, since stating the obvious can be satisfying when disaster confronts you. “Wait, let me look at my chart—November twenty-ninth at nine p.m. Draw that one.”

Valko measured out a pretty impressive distance with the ruler and reached for the compass.

November 29
.

There was something she should be noticing about that date. Maya was sure there was something about dates, about time. But what? The scritchy scales in the other room were making it hard for her to think.

Valko was tracing out a vast, vast circle now.

“And there goes Paris,” he said, as his compass pencil made its enormous circle on the map. “Everything from the Bois de Boulogne to the Père-Lachaise cemetery.”

“A cemetery,” said Maya. “Ugh. How weird will that be?”

“Stay far away, that's my advice,” said Valko. He put the compass down and stood up to get a better view of the map as a whole. “But you know what? We'll find out about cemeteries days before that. There are some other ones in the previous circle—see that there? That's the cimetière du Montparnasse. And hospitals and stuff. It's all bad.”

Maya looked at those expanding circles, spreading like ripples across the Paris pond, and the thought she had been missing came zipping back into her mind so quickly she slapped the table with the palm of her hand.

“But it won't reach the Forest of Fontainebleau!” she said. It felt like a discovery.

“Will so,” said Valko. “You know it will, eventually. Not for a few weeks, though. That's fifty kilometers away, at least.”

Maya was shaking her head. She was feeling something she was hardly used to these days: a surge of real, actual hope.

“No, look! The strangeness won't get there in time,” said Maya. “See? That shadow has
forty days
to get itself a body again. Think about it: if the strangeness reached the Salamander Rock, where Fourcroy was
born
, where the Summer Box was hidden—well, then I bet the shadow would be able to magick itself back to life, no problem. That's the Suitable Magical Place. But the shadow can't go outside the strangeness, can it? You know, like a fish needing water to swim in. And the strangeness isn't going to get there, not by November twenty-ninth! And November twenty-ninth is
the fortieth day
.”

Maya looked up at Valko.

“I wonder what happens after that, if we keep him from getting what he wants. You know, like the memory stone and that splotch of blood he left on the paper. Which is pretty gross. And me. If he can't get me to sacrifice myself for him and we can just keep the things he needs out of his reach and somehow slow him down . . .”

Valko wiggled the compass back and forth, back and forth, as he considered the question.

“Well,” he said, “if the forty-days thing is true, then getting safely to November thirtieth is, like, one of our goals, right? But then even if the shadow guy doesn't get his body, what about the strangeness spreading over the whole world? That's still very bad—”

Pauline Vian's head (that amazing hair!) poked through the doorway between the two rooms.

“Excuse me,” she said. “But you are talking about what, in here? Why the maps, and what is ‘strangeness'?”

Maya and Valko looked at each other. In fact, they had one of those rare mind-reading moments that happen from time to time. Each of them thought, at the very same time,
Could she understand? Why not? Let's try!

“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.

“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!”