A Box of Gargoyles (30 page)

T
he main entrance to Père-Lachaise cemetery turned out to feature everything you might expect from a border between two worlds: a grand and arching semicircle of marble wall, ornamental black chains strung from stubby stone post to stubby stone post on either side of the entrance path, massive gates between a pair of slightly tombstone-shaped plinths decorated with carved torches and carved wreaths and carved hourglasses and carved quotations in languages Maya vaguely recognized but could not read.

Maya and Valko and Pauline stood there for a moment, shivering a little in the fading sunlight, even though they had made special efforts to dress in layer upon layer of their warmest clothes.

“
Spes illorum immortalitate plena est
,” said Pauline finally, with a frown. “Hmm.”

Maya and Valko turned to stare at her, but she had not just been possessed, slightly ahead of schedule, by demons. Pauline, of course, was in the track at school where the kids studied classical languages instead of “Trades and Technology”: she was quoting the Latin from the gates.

“‘Their hope is full of immortality,'” Pauline said again, in French, once she noticed the blank faces turned her way. “Well, our job is to dash those hopes,
non
? No immortality for your wicked and shadow-shaped Fourcroy, Maya. No! Ha-ha-
ha
!”

She could be a little frightening sometimes, that Pauline. She had her violin case strapped over her shoulder; her hair was squidging out fiercely from under her hood. Any person looking at her from afar would have thought this was a sweet little girl with an artistic soul, rather than the miniature Angel of Death she showed some signs of wanting to be.

“Only the kind of immortality you get from eating the hearts of my friends,” said Valko, squaring his shoulders. “That's the kind I'm totally against.”

“Let's go in,” said Maya. If they stood here waiting one more minute, the last drops of her courage were going to seep out through the soles of her feet and be gone.

“You will destroy him,” said Pauline cheerfully. “He will be squashed to smithereens by you. I look forward to it.”

Maya lowered her head against the cold and led them in through the gates.

They were three kids sent by their
professeur de musique
to look for Chopin's tomb—that was their line. But the man in the little office to the left of the gates didn't ask them what they were up to, just handed them a map and tucked his chin back into his woolen muffler. It was a cold afternoon, and atmospheric wisps of mist had begun to gather in the tree branches farther away.

“Straight ahead,” said Maya. She was checking the beautiful old map against the bright new one. “Along this main street here, and then there should be stairs, I think, up the hill on the right. . . .”

Her voice petered out, swallowed whole by the cold, still air. One of her mother's guidebooks had called Père-Lachaise cemetery a
necropolis
, which means a “city for the dead.” And the path they were on really did feel like a street—a broad, empty boulevard through some town in a universe far away. The tombs stood like elegant small houses on either side, with cold-looking trees in between them.

They even had sidewalks. Why did the dead need sidewalks?

Valko was walking close enough by her side that his jacket kept rustling against her arm; he didn't like cemeteries, Maya suddenly remembered. It was inconsistent with his basically scientific view of the world, but inconsistency is what makes people people, and not just clever machines soaked in salt water.

“Good news is, Part One was a snap,” he said to Maya under his breath.

Part One of Maya's plan was “get into Père-Lachaise before it closes.” That had actually involved a lot of running through métro stations, because school got out pretty late on Thursdays, and of course they had to drop their schoolbooks and pick up supplies at Maya's apartment on the way—so having made Part One work was an achievement.

“Hope this map is still right,” said Maya, wiggling her fingers in her gloves. “Hope he's still there.”

Part Two was “find tomb and hide.”

Once you left the main avenue, the topography of the place became more complicated. They kept stopping to look at the two maps, the bright and confident new one, and the lovely imaginary world of the old one. The paths up through the tombs on the old hillside were narrower and had more curves in them. Maya led them too far at first, to a grand circular intersection, the Rond-point Casimir Périer, where they turned their backs on the grand monument in the center and consulted the elegant metal street signs.

“Oh, I see where we are now,” said Maya, turning the map around. “Come this way. Eleventh Division—we just zigzag a little, and it's over here.”

“Hiding's going to be easy,” said Valko, looking around. “I was worried, down there by the entrance, but this is like a jungle, practically.”

The graves in this section were old, their cupids and urns worn down by year after year of rain and snow and human neglect. And trees everywhere, a great tangle of plants and graves all up and down that hillside.

The whole cemetery had been so quiet, so hushed all this time, that when they turned a corner and saw a pair of flesh-and-blood old ladies gazing up reverently at the statue of a marble muse weeping into a lyre, Maya felt rather shocked.

She stopped in her tracks, but Pauline clapped her hands.

“And there it is!” said Pauline. “The resting place of the great Chopin!”

The old ladies turned around and smiled. Clearly they were mistaking Pauline for an angelic and sensitive child.

“Minus his heart,” Pauline added.

The old ladies looked just the teeniest bit less certain about the angelic child.

“Shipped to Poland on its own,” said Pauline. “I've always wondered exactly
how
. Ice? Or was it—”

The old ladies crossed themselves and moved farther away.

“Pauline!” said Maya, giving her sleeve a firm tug. “Come
on
!”

Sheesh! The whole point of Part Two of the plan was Not To Be Noticed, Not To Be Seen.

It was in this section somewhere, the tomb of Fourcroy. Maya took a deep breath. They would scour the crowded hillside and leave no little pathway untrodden—there was still time—surely they would find it eventually—

“Hey, Maya,” called Valko from not so very far away. “Here's your guy!”

And there he was.

Antoine François Fourcroy, his bust looking out with a little half smile from within a hollowed-out square pillar. His gaze went over Maya's head, above the patch of browning weeds that had taken over his plot. The weeds suggested he was no Chopin. No little old ladies ever brought this statue bouquets of roses. Why, probably they themselves were the first people in years and years to come looking for Antoine François Fourcroy, tucked away in his neglected corner of Père-Lachaise.

“Good,” said Maya. “We're here. Now we just need to find a place to hide.”

Valko looked around and shrugged. He had a point. They could basically walk a few feet in any direction and sit down, and who would ever find them?

So they did what heroes on a life-and-death adventure so frequently do: they sat down with their backs against the imposing block of the next tomb over and started rummaging through their backpacks for encouraging snacks. Pauline, for instance, had brought long sections of baguette with chocolate stuffed deep into its innards.

“It's very traditional,” she said. “For the children to nibble on after school.”

Valko was happy enough about the chocolate, but Maya could feel his eyes scouting out the tombs all around them.

“Six o'clock,” he said. “Cemetery's officially closed. Now we wait for three hours, right, General?”

“Right,” said Maya.

“Without freezing to death?” he said.

“That's the idea.”

Valko snorted quietly.

“What have you got in that backpack, anyway? Bricks?” he said. “It looks heavy. Is that a magazine?”

“Hey, excuse me, I was thinking ahead,” said Maya. “That's got the description in it of the movie we're all supposedly out seeing.”

“What else?”

Maya showed him: a big fleecy shawl borrowed from her mother, food, the Summer Box, the gargoyles' egg. . . .

It was dark already now, but she could feel Valko recoil.

“Are you
nuts
?” he said. “Are you
kidding
? Why'd you bring that box? And the
stone
? Isn't that supposed to be the thing his brain's hiding out in? Are you even
thinking
?”

He reached for the egg, but Maya's hand got there first.

“Leave it alone,” she said. “It wanted to come.”

Pauline and Valko were both silent now, staring at Maya in the darkness. She had
had
to bring the egg, just as she had
had
to bring the Summer Box. There had been no choice about it. That was true. She admitted it. But Maya still hoped against hope there was some angle to the problem she wasn't seeing. Something that went beyond Fourcroy's plans and his bossy letter, beyond fate, beyond the clockwork path, beyond the
clickety-clack
of tumbling dominoes.

“Um, Maya,” said Valko, frowning at the egg. “This is a problem.”

“It's what, that thing?” said Pauline, from the deep shadows on the other side of Maya. “A rock? How can a rock want something or not want something?”

“It's not a rock,” said Maya, and she could feel the stiffness in her own voice as she said it. “It's an egg. Actually, a gargoyles' egg.”

“Look, Maya,” said Valko. “It is so a rock. Even if it's a totally strange rock. Still.”

“
Mon Dieu
, but this is bizarre. Gargoyles don't lay eggs,” said Pauline Vian.

“Ordinarily they don't,” said Maya. “But this time they did. They wanted a safe place for his old memories, see? So they made the egg. I promised I'd take care of it.”

“And who is this ‘they'?” said Pauline. “The gargoyles again?”

Valko and Maya were too busy glaring at each other in the dark to try to explain.

“They wanted the memories
kept away from the shadow guy
. And you are practically planning to
hand the memory stone right back over to him
!”

“No, I'm not,” said Maya. “I promised I'd take care of it. It wanted to come along. You keep thinking of it as entirely, totally evil—that's unfair.”

“You're bewitched,” said Valko. “You are. You're under a spell, like the letter said. Whose side are you even on? Oh, gash, listen to me! We're all crazy.
Give me that rock!
”

And this time his hand got there before Maya's hand could intervene. He grabbed the egg right out of her backpack, put his arm back over his head, and, before Maya could move or squeak, he lobbed the egg right away from them, into the shadowy darkness of the cemetery.

Maya couldn't help it. She gasped aloud in horror, a gasp that was very close to being a shriek. And then clamped her hand over her mouth, because there was a bright light swinging along, suddenly, not that far away. And the sound of someone humming.

She was so full of mad there was hardly room in her for fear, but the mad shoved over a little to make room, and her arms began to shiver.

The watchman had stopped, somewhere on the other side of the tomb. Had he heard the poor egg go flying through the air?

He would find them for sure. Oh, he would find them, right this minute, any second now, for absolute certain. He would shine that bright flashlight right into their faces, and shout at them and drag them away, and it would be awful. And then there would be no one left to stop the shadowy Fourcroy, or the strangeness he had let loose into the world. Everything would become stranger and stranger, and nobody would be safe anywhere anymore, nobody's mother or brother or tiny still-completely-unknown
little bean
—

The watchman started up his hum again; the light began moving farther away.

“
Bon
,” said Pauline, very quietly. “He is going.”

That was when the enormous awful thought hit Maya all over again:

Valko Nikolov—her friend Valko, the person she had thought of as her
true
friend Valko—had just gone and thrown her gargoyles' egg away.

The breath caught in her throat.

“How could you?” she said. The fury in her voice was startling. She had never heard herself sound like this, not in real life. And she was still trying to whisper, too. “I promised them I'd keep it safe. And you go and
smash
it!”

“Really,” said Pauline. “I am confused. Who is this ‘they' and ‘them'? And Valko did not smash your rock, Maya.”

“You saw him yourself!”

“But there was no sound of smashing, Maya.
Non
. Hard to believe, in this so-stony place, but it must have landed on grass somewhere. The rock must be all right.”

It was true, Maya realized: there had been no great smithereening smack. If there had been, what's more, the watchman would surely have heard it.

Valko had meant to smash it, though. It was still a betrayal. It was still absolutely awful in every way.

“But Maya,” said Valko, from quite close to her ear. His voice was miserable and loving and impatient—all those things at once. “You know I can't let the stupid shadow have you. What kind of friend would I be? I'm telling you: no way.”

Maya was already crawling forward, however, feeling the ground with her hands. The egg had
trusted
her. And he had flung it off into the darkness.

“Bringing his memory here with you has got to be what he
wants
,” said Valko, still not very far away in the dark. “He thinks he's got you, Maya. He hasn't got you, has he?”