A Box of Gargoyles (29 page)

“I don't get it. If you think that's a place where he could come back to life,
why are you going anywhere near it?
You see how illogical that is, right? Plus I'm not a big fan of cemeteries,” he said. “Are you?”

“Doesn't matter whether we like them,” said Maya. “Listen. I
have
to find a Suitable Magical Place. I was bound, remember? I
have
to go near it.”

“That's silly. Just stay at home. I'll lock your door or something to keep you there.”

“Haven't you been paying attention? Every time I try to get rid of something I'm bound to keep or try not to go somewhere I'm bound to go, I end up doing
exactly
what that Fourcroy wanted anyway. I threw away the compass, and it came back. I dragged you away from the Salamander House, and then I went racing back to the writing desk myself! Because my brain came up with such wonderfully good reasons. If you locked my door, I'd probably find some really good reason to climb out the window. Seriously.”

It was just facing facts, that was what she was doing. Maya felt the tingle of it in her voice: it was all true. But she had figured out another true bit, too.

“So far the only time I've managed to wiggle out of doing something I'm bound to do is when I've
looked
like I'm doing what Fourcroy wanted and then kind of cheated right at the end—like when I went back to that writing desk and didn't take the letter. See? That's why the cemetery's so perfect.”

Valko made a half-doubting, half-intrigued sort of sound.

“Because the Fourcroy family tomb
is
an in-between sort of place—with Fourcroy's name on it! It's
suitable
. And what he really needs is a dose of Eternal Rest, right? It's the opposite of the rock where he was born, out at Fontainebleau.”

“Maybe shadows hate cemeteries, too,” said Valko. “So maybe it's going to be kind of hard to get him to visit his family tomb. Because other than that, it's perfect, sure: you jump out from behind a grave and tell him you left that bloodstain of his in the Salamander House, so ha-ha! Ingredients missing! No new body for him! And then he cries wicked shadowy tears and we stick him to the Fourcroy tomb with superglue.”

“Something like that, right,” said Maya, not taking the bait. “Now we just have to figure out how to get him there.”

Maya gave that question some serious thought, and then on Tuesday became anxious about the way time was passing and took a wild leap instead:

“Mom,” she said. “Could you teach me a little emergency violin? Like, right away?”

Her mother laughed out loud.

“Excuse me? Violin? You? But remember how you hid under the bed when you were six—”

“I know, I know,” said Maya. It was family legend. She had been under the bed for four hours. The police had almost been called. Maya's career as a musician had begun and ended, right there under that bed. “Because I didn't want you to show me how to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.' I know. But now it's kind of an emergency. That piece Pauline's always playing—I really need to learn to play some of it. By Thursday.”

“
Bonjour!
And what is this about the violin of Pauline?” said Pauline herself, in her very correct French. Pauline! Maya's father must have let her in just now. Maya's spirits sank another inch or so into the mire. “What is it you are saying about the violin?”

“You are an inspiration to Maya, apparently,” said Maya's mother. “She is suddenly asking for violin lessons. She wants to learn your Saint-Saëns piece, that
Danse macabre
.”

“Just a little of it,” said Maya, feeling that dizzy-headed weakness that is a side effect of watching one's plans step out onto a patch of quicksand and be sucked down to their doom. “By Thursday.”

Now both Pauline and her mother were looking at her with quizzical expressions.

“But Maya,” said Pauline. “It is not
possible
.”

“Even for you, my marvelous Maya!” said her mother.

And she went, laughing, to the kitchen to get some of those cookies she always brought out when Pauline came over to practice.

As soon as Maya's mother had left the room, Pauline whipped her head around and gave Maya a sharp-pointed, spear-shaped stare.

“What is this about you and the violin?” she said. “Why do you need the
Danse macabre
? Does this have to do with—with—the things changing? The shadow that climbed up my wall?”

That was part of the problem with Pauline, of course. She hadn't skipped two whole grades by being fuzzy headed or the slightest bit easy to mislead.

“Yes,” said Maya.

Pauline waited.

Maya opened her mouth to explain, and then decided it would be helpful to have some props and dragged Pauline into her room to show her the map.

“There's an old Fourcroy tomb in Père-Lachaise, see? For an Antoine François Fourcroy.”

“The scientist from the eighteenth century,” said Pauline with a prim pursing of her lips. “Whose betrayal, some have said, cost the great Antoine Lavoisier,
father of modern chemistry
, his head during the Revolution.”

Maya stared at her; Pauline surprised her by blushing.

“You mentioned the name Fourcroy the other day, you know,” she said with a modest frown. “So naturally I did some little researches. So that old Fourcroy was the ancestor of this other one, the shadow?”

“Who comes following you when you play the violin,” said Maya. “If I could just learn that piece, a little bit of it, maybe he would come following me. And I could lead him to his grave. And he could be finished. That's what I was thinking.”

“This Thursday evening,” said Pauline thoughtfully. “Because of the—the—”

She waved her hands about all loop-de-loop in the air. It was as good a way to describe the strangeness as any, thought Maya. There was a silence, while Pauline furrowed her brow.

“
Bon!
” said Pauline, and she nodded with such decision that her remarkable hair almost sizzled through the air. “It is clear. I will come with you to Père-Lachaise. I will play the
Danse macabre
, and you will lock the shadow away in his family tomb. Good! Done!”

“Girls! James! Cookies!” called Maya's mother from the other room.

Done?
thought Maya.
Done?

It seemed quite far from done, to Maya. It was a plan without a plan—go to this enormous, probably very creepy cemetery, have Pauline play a bit of scritchy violin, and then what? Hope for the best? That was not “done.” Come to think of it, that was perhaps even the opposite of done.

And that night, restlessness made her very uneasy in her skin, so she took the gargoyles' egg out from its hiding place in the Summer Box and watched the images ripple across its surface: fields of wildflowers playing in an invisible breeze, horses pulling old-fashioned carriages along a Paris street, a tangle of pine branches as if from the point of view of someone climbing a tree. A woman sitting in a park, turning her head, smiling with eyes full of love. Maya's heart did a little dance: she knew that face. She had seen it carved in stone above the door of the Salamander House. She saw an echo of it every day in the mirror, too, because the look of the Lavirottes had welled up all over again in her, along, apparently, with the Lavirotte magic, all these generations later. Light and dark rearranged themselves on the surface of the gargoyles' egg, and the woman, Henri's mother, raised a thin, nimble hand to brush the hair out of her eyes, and Maya saw the bracelet around that wrist, the delicate chain with the water stone embedded in it.

Oh! It was her own bracelet, or the shadow of it, preserved forever in the shifting pigments of the memory stone.

It comes with a choice
—that was what her mother had said.

But what did that even mean? Really, what did that
mean
? Maya peered at the tiny image in the gargoyles' egg, but it was too small and too indistinct. No clues there, as far as she could see.

A
choice
would be an improvement over a world made up of billions of little dominoes. That much Maya knew. The problem with her life at the moment was the business of having no choice at all: of being on the clockwork path.

After all, what had she done so far that was what you might call anticlockwork? Not much. She had left the letter with the helpful bloodstain back in the Salamander House. That was good. So maybe the shadow could not get himself a body, exactly, if there was no physical trace of him mixed up in the spell. And she had taken the Summer Box away from the probably very suitable magical spot out in the woods where Fourcroy had been born. But whether what she was planning to do now was clockwork or anticlockwork, that was hard to say.

As she settled the gargoyles' egg back into the Summer Box, she found herself letting her fingers wander a bit through the little treasures there: the ribbons that had once been the tail of a kite, the envelope holding that lock of baby hair—

It was like being zapped by the most miniature bolt of lightning: a tiny shock that sprinted right through her, from fingertip to foot bones.

She had forgotten all about that lock of hair.

(So had Valko, by the way. He would not have been as excited about her leaving the bloodstained letter behind, if he had remembered the twist of silver-blond hair, tucked away in the Summer Box. A physical trace!)

Maya jumped up. How did you get rid of hair? She had tried throwing the compass-button out the window, and it had pretty much bounced right back into her hands. So this was a test. Was she still free enough to be able to destroy a lock of hair tied up in a narrow, old-fashioned ribbon?

I'll burn it
, she thought, and she was already on her feet and heading to the apartment's little kitchen.
Burned things can't come back
.

There was a flaw in this plan, however. As Maya pounded into the kitchen, she practically ran down her mother, who was putting a carton of milk back into the miniature French refrigerator.

“Can't sleep?” said her mother. “Neither can I. Here, I'll heat up some milk for you, too.”

Maya stared at the ring of blue flame on the stove, and her grip on the envelope from the Summer Box became instantly several notches more desperate.

“I'll watch the milk,” she said with her newly tight-wound and desperate voice. “You go sit down.”

And she clenched the envelope in her hand.

“Maya?” said her mother.

Could she do it? That was the clockwork question. Her muscles imagined flinging the little envelope onto the bright blue flames. She could imagine it. She could imagine it very clearly! But whether her hand could actually
move
—

“Maya!” said her mother. “What on earth are you doing?”

And she reached right over and plucked the envelope out of Maya's frozen and shuddering hand.

It was like being released from a trap made of a million rubber bands, all at once. Maya nearly lost her balance and fell over, the unpressure was such a sudden surprise.

“Oh!” said her mother, in a different sort of voice entirely—a delighted, wondering voice. “Look at this! That old lock of James's hair!”

“
James?
” said Maya.

“You brought this to Paris with you, Maya? But how sweet you are!”

“James?” said Maya.

“His first haircut! You had been reading some old-fashioned book, remember? And you said, ‘I want a lock of his hair to keep forever and ever!' We laughed! But it was very adorable of you, actually. So I tied it up in a little bit of ribbon, and—”

“James?” said Maya a third time. Her mind had gotten itself completely stuck. This was not James's hair. This envelope had been in the Summer Box. Look at the name scrawled on it! The name was not James Davidson's name. The little ribbon actually had an
H de F
embroidered into it, with the tiniest of silk stitches. But her mother's eyes were soft and shining, caught up in that memory of young Maya, and baby James, and other locks of hair, and other ribbons. . . .

“You'll keep it very safe, won't you?” said her mother, and she tucked the loop of fine baby hair back into the little envelope and then tucked the envelope back into Maya's hand. “Babies are such temporary things! They grow up so fast, and there's so little to remember the babyness of them by. Promise me you'll take care of this.”

“Even if it isn't from James at all?” said Maya.
Even if it's from somebody much, much less lovable than our James?
“I think it's actually from someone who lived a long time ago.”

Her mother laughed.

“No, sorry,” she said. “Only our family's babies ever had hair quite that color. Moonlit babies, that's what my mother used to say. And only just at the start—look how lovely and brown you are now! Keep it safe, sweetheart. And now here's our milk, all steaming and ready. . . .”

So that was that, unfortunately. Maya could feel the little jolt and tug as the universe popped her right back onto the clockwork path. It is one thing to be bossed around by shadows and gargoyles, but once your mother has added her voice to theirs—especially if your mother is a Lavirotte, you understand, with just the faintest haze of magic still lingering about her, even if she doesn't quite know it herself—well, then you are well and truly bound. Stuck. And perhaps, in this case, doomed.

 
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