A Box of Gargoyles (4 page)

They turned their heads around, and sure enough: a dark column of leaf meal and dust was still picking its way along the street behind them.

The shadow lingered for a time in that cluster of singing women, threading itself through and around them almost as if it were whispering to them or longing to join in their dance, but now it was hunkering lower to the ground, the shadowy parody of an animal trying to catch a scent. It made the little hairs along Maya's shoulder blades prickle with fear.

“This way,” said Valko, pointing down one of the side streets there. It was more or less an ordinary-looking Parisian alleyway, if you ignored the fact that one of the vast iron feet of the Eiffel Tower was planted just behind a building at its end.

“Valko,” said Maya as they walked (pretty fast) down the next bit of sidewalk. “You know what I don't get? How could you not have noticed you had actual gargoyles perched outside your window?”

“Um,” said Valko. “I don't. I didn't. I mean, there aren't—no, what I really mean is, they weren't there before.”

Maya gave him a gentle punch in the arm, just to keep him from fading back into vagueness again.

He blinked. “What I'm saying is, I know they weren't there last Saturday, because that's the last day I put a barometer reading in my weather log—”

“
Weather log?
” said Maya politely.

Valko shook his fist at her, in a friendly way.

“Okay, some people keep diaries, right? Huh? Maybe you used to have a diary? Ha! Thought so! Anyway, so I have a weather log. I've had it since I was six, thank you very much—”

“Wait,” said Maya. “Did you just say that gargoyle wasn't even there before
Saturday
? You're sure?”

“I look out that window just about every single day. Like I said, to check my barometer. So yes, I'm sure. Nothing today makes the slightest bit of sense: those women singing, the cars going all confetti-like, that bizarro shadow thing following us—”

For a moment they had forgotten the shadow.

They spun around both at once, just to check, and there it was. Maybe thirty feet behind them, a vague pillar of dust and leaves and darkness, shuffling along the pavement. Valko's shoulder was so close to Maya's that she could feel his heart jump at the exact same moment as hers.

“Okay,” said Valko. “The barking thing. How do you do it?”

“What? Come
on
!”

It wasn't the shadow that bothered her. It was the way it kept
moving toward them
.

Valko nudged her.

“The barking thing. How do you do it?”

“Valko!” said Maya. He folded his arms and waited. “All right, then. It's easy. Say
ruff
really loud while sucking your breath in. Please let's hurry.”

“
Ruff
,” said Valko, experimenting. “
Ruff!
”

“Valko,
please
let's keep moving—”

“RRRRUFF!”

Everything happened at once: Valko jumping out at that column of shadow and barking as loud as he could (
pretty good
, thought Maya,
for his third bark ever
); the shadow almost losing its balance—if losing its balance is something a whirling column of dust can do—falling back, straightening up again, stretching tendrils of darkness—
arms
—out in front of itself, reaching, reaching past Valko, feeling for something else or someone else—

Then . . .

M a y a
, it said, in exactly the sort of ghastly dry whisper a column of leaves and dust would use if it was trying to learn to speak.

They turned and ran.

It wasn't far to the end of the street. At the corner Maya took a chance and looked back.

“Hey, wait,” she said, panting hard. “Look at that.”

The shadow seemed to be stuck a ways behind them. They could see it pushing against the air, almost as if it had hit a wall.

“Stay here,” said Valko, and he walked back a bit to look. He always had to investigate things properly. Maya shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her feet were eager to keep moving.

“The air's different here,” Valko called back over his shoulder. “Notice that?”

He was keeping his eyes glued to that shadow, though.

Maya took an exploratory breath. The air
was
different. It was like something chaotic in it had vanished. The hum was gone.

She saw Valko take another few steps and then pause. The sack's worth of shadow pressed against that invisible wall, but the wall didn't yield.

He went closer. The shadow just eddied there, waiting.

“Careful,” said Maya.

“Don't worry,” said Valko. He crossed over to the other side of the street. The shadow stayed where it was. It didn't seem to notice Valko coming closer from the side; Maya could have sworn it had its nonexistent eyes fixed entirely on her. Not such a good feeling.

“It's like there's a shimmer in the air here,” said Valko. “Like an edge in the air. Or a wall. Do you see it? Look, I can just slip my hand right through—”

“Eep!” said Maya. It came out more as a sound than a word.

“I know,” said Valko, without turning around. “I saw that, too.”

When Valko's hand had gone past that edge, the shadow thing had moved a little (
turned its head
, suggested Maya's mind, ignoring for a moment the point that columns of shadowy dust don't actually
have
heads). That was creepy.

A biologist who has just run into a grizzly bear will move with great caution; so did Valko. He seemed to be carefully fishing something out of his pockets. Maya squinted: oh, a pencil. Was he going to stop to take
notes
? How completely crazy could one person even be? She walked a few paces in his direction, just in case she needed to grab him by the sleeve and haul him away.

But now Valko was running his hand across the wall, right to the very place where the shimmer started.

“Um, what are you doing?” said Maya, trying not to catch the shadow's attention. “Seems like we should just leave, doesn't it?”

Valko was making a careful line of
X
s right there.

“Marking the edge,” he said. “Got to be dark enough to find later, but not so big the graffiti police come and wipe it off.”

M a y a
, said the shadow thing.

“Enough,” said Maya, shuddering slightly.

“Definitely enough,” said Valko, stuffing the pencil into his pocket. Maya and Valko trotted back to the far end of the alleyway, and then one block farther from the river, because Valko wanted to see if they could see a boundary there, too.

They could. Valko ran down that street to the very edge of the shimmering air and left some more
X
s on that wall, too.

It was five long minutes before the shadow appeared in that street, so at least (said Valko to Maya) it was
dumb and slow
.

“Dumb, slow dust that's walking and talking is still way smarter than it should be,” said Maya.

It came out a little sharper than she meant it to, but having your name wheezed into the air by columns of leaf meal and shadow can give a person the grumps.

They left
X
s on other walls in other streets, until Maya lost patience with the process and pointed out that they hadn't seen the shadow for a while, so maybe it was time to walk away somewhere where they could breathe a little.

“It's a circle,” said Valko. “I'm pretty sure it's a circle, the strangeness. See how the marks are moving toward the embassy end of the street each time? So that's good.”

“Good?”

“To be outside of it is good,” said Valko. “I didn't realize it, at first, but it was making my head ache in there. Until you did whatever you did. Pinched me awake. We've got to figure this out, Maya. This is too weird.”

They were trotting through the park now, with the enormous leg of the Eiffel Tower pushing its way into the clouds behind them. Even in October, it managed to feel like a park: bare-limbed trees and still-leafy bushes and elegant benches dotting the gravel paths.

“I forgot about the croissants!” said Maya, looking down almost in surprise at the crumpled paper sack she had just found in her jacket pocket. “Want a kind-of-squashed pastry? They were warm when I got them.”

“Whoops! You're losing things,” said Valko, and he raced ahead of her on the path to gather up papers there. Her letters! They had come out of her pocket with the pastry bag and gone flying.

By the time they had chased down the last of the unruly envelopes, Maya and Valko were truly ready for croissants, squashed or no.

“Mm,” said Valko, licking a stray fleck of chocolate off his finger. “I'm tasting mint. Minty croissants! Bizarre. Good, though. So, who still writes letters? I mean, apart from my grandmothers, of course.”

“Yes, well,” said Maya (a cold shiver going through her as she remembered all over again about dreadful Bulgaria). In fact, it felt a little embarrassing, to be brushing the dust off her cards. She hadn't meant to share them. Just to carry them around for a while. Just to have them close by. “Mostly they're cards, not letters. The thing is, it's my—”

“Birthday!” said Valko, who was extremely good at filling in gaps. “No, really! You weren't going to tell me?”

“It's not today,” said Maya. “It's Wednesday. Halloween. I guess my friends were just being cautious.”

It was so nice, that word:
friends
. Plural! Jenna, of course, but not just Jenna: there was a card from Eleanor Markowitz, who had been her best friend in third grade and then moved to Montana, and one from Ada Kwan, who had drawn the cutest little smiling people up and down the edges of the envelope, and then—

“What's that one?” said Valko.

Heavy, creamy-green paper, the sort of stationery you might see lying about on desks in a palace. And her name scrawled in elegant but hasty loops.

“That's real ink, not ballpoint,” said Valko. “That's like calligraphy, almost. Who's it from?”

Maya turned the envelope over—no name on the back.

Something about it made her uneasy. It was so much weightier in her hands than the cards from her friends in California; that was one thing. It seemed to get heavier the more she stared at it, the more she turned it over and over in her hands.

“And look at the stamp,” said Valko. “It's French. It's from here. Open it, Maya.”

“I wasn't going to open any of them until my actual birthday,” said Maya.

A bit of Valko's croissant apparently went down the wrong pipe: he had to pause for a moment to cough into his sleeve.

“You mean, your plan was to carry all these letters around in your pocket for days and days?”

Yes. That was her plan, exactly. Some people might call that
savoring
things. She was just about to say something sarcastic about people who keep weather logs not having legs to stand on when she looked over and saw that Valko wasn't smirking at her at all: no, he was smiling the nicest possible smile.

“Open just this one, then,” he said, all sweetness. “Aren't you curious?
I'm
curious.”

When he put it that way: yes, she was curious. But it was a curiosity that was sprinkled with dread. Unreasonable dread, of course. Nothing that made any sense.

Her fingers, however, were already loosening the fancy flap of that envelope, already pulling out that gorgeous piece of thick, regal paper and unfolding it, while Valko angled his head closer for a better look.

“Well, that's odd,” he said.

And Maya's heart was going
tippetty tippetty
, as if she'd turned right into a rabbit. Still for next to no reason, because her eyes had hardly seen anything yet. And in any case, there wasn't all that much to see:

a monogram engraved at the top of the sheet (
H de F
),

a letter that apart from the salutation—
For Maya, my dear niece (or cousin)
—and the closing—
Fondly, your affectionate cousin (or uncle)
—consisted of exactly one word:
Félicitations!

and under that strangest of one-word letters, an elegant scribble of a signature,

and under the signature, a smudge.

For a moment neither Maya nor Valko could find anything to say.

Then Valko said, quietly, “Wow. H de F. Wow. But I thought you said that Henri de Fourcroy was dead.”

“Almost dead,” said Maya. “Shriveled up. Gone. I said he was gone.”

“I thought
gone
meant ‘dead,'” said Valko.

“I guess it just meant gone,” said Maya. Inside, she herself felt what you might call a little bit
gone
. Cold and alone. Not here, not there, not anywhere. None of this was supposed to be happening, not in real life.

“Not nearly gone enough,” said Valko. “If he's sending you letters.”

And then his hand shot out like lightning and he grabbed back the envelope to take another look.

“Postmarked this Monday,” he said.

Maya shivered.
Gone!

“So he could have shoved it in a box on Sunday,” said Valko, making a kind of calendar out of his fingers. “Or even Saturday night, right after he shriveled up or went away or whatever. Nothing gets postmarked on Sundays, you know.”

There was a pause.

“So he gets caustic powder thrown at him—”

“Earth,” said Maya. She always had to correct this part of the story, when Valko told it. “His own earth, coming back to him.”

“And he creeps away, in really bad shape, and he sends you a
birthday card
? Am I missing something here?”

“I don't think it's a birthday card,” said Maya. “It's a—I don't know what it is. Nothing good. The paper's very heavy, did you notice? And that smudge!”

“Yes,” said Valko. “The smudge.”