A Box of Gargoyles (28 page)

“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
 

W
hat 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 door, 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.

After a short bout of misery, though, Maya's eyes started to wander around the room a bit, noticing the old letters everywhere and the general chaos, of course, but also, more and more, pulled in by that printed sheet of paper James had spread out across the floor as a world for his little people. It was indeed a map; she could see the roads and avenues wandering about across it, but what kind of town could that be? The artist had drawn in hundreds of little trees, cypresses for the most part, but also the wider, darker triangles of pine trees, and mixed into those trees were dozens and dozens of little houses, some with towers, some not. What was this place, and why did so many of the houses look like itty-bitty temples?

Maya moved the book aside that was holding the top of the map flat against the floor, and she couldn't help it—she gasped out loud.

Because under the book, it turned out, the map had been hiding a title:
Le Père-Lachaise
.

Of course! Those little temple-like houses weren't houses at all, but tombs.

Maya had never seen any map of any place quite like this one, but now her mind had come quite fully to life and was racing ahead at full speed. Père-Lachaise cemetery! What was that map doing in the Fourcroy family archives? It was very, very old, she could see that. In the bottom right corner, in very small type, was the printer's date: 1887.

And all along the edges there were long lists of names. The little hairs on the back of her neck were standing up now; they knew what was coming, just as a tree knows trouble's on its way a split second before the bolt of lightning strikes it. She ran her tingling, slightly electrified fingers down the right edge of the paper: Flourens, Foignet, Fontaine . . .
Antoine François Fourcroy
.

The lightning whipped through her.

How about that? The Fourcroy family had a tomb in Père-Lachaise! Yes!
There was a Fourcroy tomb at Père-Lachaise!
Maya worked quickly now, matching the number after Fourcroy's name with the little numbers by the gravestones on the map, and there it was indeed. A tiny picture of a tiny funerary column, tucked into a paisley-shaped part of the map that was quite heavily dotted with graves and trees. Not far from Chopin! Well, she had heard of Chopin.

She sat for quite a while, thinking this all over, and then she telephoned Valko.

“I think I've found the Suitable Magical Place,” she said, little invisible sparks of wild electricity scattering all over the curling vines of that phone. “And you know what? I'm even almost beginning to have a plan.”

Valko was not pleased, though, when she told him they would be spending Thursday night hiding out in a cemetery. In fact, he balked.