The Bronze King (10 page)

 

T
HERE WAS LOTS AND LOTS
of homework to do. I hadn't exactly been keeping up with my assignments. The weekend was only one day away, finally, so I hoped I'd have time to get to everything then.

If there was a weekend. If the kraken didn't gobble everything up first.

Mom called from her office downtown, checking up on me: where had I been, when she'd expressly told me to come home and stay there? Fight, yell, hang up, trouble later, but she didn't know anything new. There was no way she could find out I'd been with Joel and Paavo unless her spy network caught me again. I figured the odds on that one were in my favor for a change.

I sat home and read the paper (we got our deliveries again after that disastrous
Times-
less Sunday). It had stories about a subway train that had derailed itself somehow and injured a lot of passengers, and about the collapse of a new section of the West Side Highway. Could these things be due to the kraken flexing its muscles? I sat and shivered with the paper jiggling in my hands, because I knew they were. The kraken was getting ready to come out. In the meantime it was making these forays in the subway and the sewer passages and the conduits for power and water and all that stuff.

This was my first experience with a secret so huge and incredible that it was hardly a secret at all. I mean, you could scream it from the housetops and it wouldn't make any difference because nobody would believe you. They'd only lock you up for observation.

I couldn't watch TV. I couldn't read. Finally, I called up Granny Gran in New Jersey.

She recognized my voice—that was a good start—and started complaining to me about the new person next door to her who played the radio too loud.

“Granny Gran,” I said, “somebody's here from Sorcery Hall. He says we've got real trouble. He says there's a kraken.”

She said, “What did you say, Vee?” She always called me that, Vee for Valentine. “I don't understand you.”

Well, it went on like that for a while: “Is this one of those books you read all the time, about talking unicorns and so on? Are you telling me a story? You're not getting all involved in those Dungeons and Dragons games, are you?” She sounded very
compos mentis
, but just out of it.

I had this sinking feeling that Paavo was right about not bothering her, that it had been a mistake. Before I talked to her I could always tell myself that she might be able to help. But now I couldn't kid myself about that anymore. She didn't have a clue, and that was that.

“When are you coming to visit me, Vee?” she said.

“Soon as I can, Gran,” I said, feeling very depressed.

“You could take the subway,” she said.

I sat up straight. You couldn't, actually, take the subway out there or anywhere near there. “Gran,” I said, “what about the subway?”

“Even underground,” she said, “the way you open a door is with a key.”

“What?” I said.

“A key,” she said. “You use a key. Good night now, lovie, come and see me soon.”

And she hung up,
bam
.

I sat there on the bed itching to call her back. But this was the thing about Granny Gran: when she said goodbye and hung up, bam like that, that was it. It always meant she was unplugging the phone and wouldn't be answering for a while because she had other things to do.

A key? You open a door with a key? Even in the subway. Well, we'd asked about the key to the blue door. No dice. The token lady didn't even know who might have a key, or if she did know she wouldn't say.

I lay back on my bed, thinking about the blue door and the scars in the paint and the brass plate over the keyhole, and how the wall clanged after Paavo tapped it with his bow . . .

Then I figured that since Mom was after me anyway about having gone out today when she'd told me not to, I might as well finish the job. I went downstairs and walked out of my lobby past the afternoon doorman—who'd already done his informing for the day—and up to the Ninety-sixth Street and Central Park West subway station.

The original blue wall was there, with the identical names scratched into the blue paint, the identical scratches on the lock plate, and the identical answers from the guy in the token booth: no, he didn't have a key, and he didn't know who did or what they kept in there except that it was some kind of maintenance equipment, and no, he didn't know anything about another place just like it down at the Eighty-first Street station.

I went home and started making spaghetti for dinner.

Mom came in singing. She had a date with Mr. Editor, thank goodness. We fenced around about my having gone out in defiance of her orders, but she was so pleased about her date and about nothing more being missing, in spite of my desertion of my post, that it was all okay.

Next morning I found my bookshelves completely empty. My whole collection was gone, including a hardcover copy of
The Secret Garden
from the secondhand bookstore on Fourteenth Street and a book of old maps from Uncle Tim. (Our Manhattan telephone directories were gone too.)

I was furious. There was nothing I could do. I shut my door and didn't say anything to Mom. She would just tell me that Sam or some nameless thug hired by the landlord had sneaked in during the night and stolen my books while I slept, and frankly, there was no alternative explanation I could offer. Not without blowing everything completely.

That day in French class I sort of woke up. That is, I was cringing in my seat, listening to Froggy Fergusson reading with his awful, awful accent, when all of a sudden I heard the booming sound that the hall doors make in that particular hallway if you push through them fast, and I remembered: the explosion, the hard thing whacking me over my eye—

At lunch period I called Joel's school with an emergency message for him. Using my mom's telephone voice, which I had recently perfected, I told them I was his new shrink. They got him on the phone.

I told him to meet me at the Eighty-first Street station right away and then I hung up,
bam
, like Granny Gran.

He met me, which means he climbed out of a taxi lugging the loaner-violin case and looking furious. He showed the cab driver some money and told him to wait.

“What is this?” he said to me. “What do you think you're doing?”

“When the subway exploded, or whatever happened, something flew out and smacked me over the eyebrow, right here.”

“Where that mark is?” he said.

“What mark?” I said, a little shaken up by this. I hadn't noticed any mark.

“Well, you have a red spot there.”

“Listen, Joel,” I said, “I know what happened. The key, the key to that lock on the blue door downstairs in this station is what came flying out of there. It hit me, it bounced right off me and landed someplace around here. Help me look for it.”

“Now?” he said.

“Of course now! Have you been watching the papers? I don't think we have a lot of time. Some creepy things have been happening, and it's getting worse.”

“The awning was missing from the front of my building this morning,” he said. “Because you were there, right? You're what they call a vector, at least for some of these weird things that are going on.”

“Joel, I am not carrying a disease!”

“Not exactly, but you are a little dangerous to be around, aren't you?” God, was he going to walk away from all this because the kraken, looking for the key, kept making these blind grabs in my direction? Could I blame him if he did?

He scratched his neck under the scarf he wore. “Do you remember a key, an actual key?”

“No,” I said, very relieved that he was sticking around. “But I remember what it felt like when it hit me, and it could have been a key. It was small and hard. And I think it marked me like this to show, to—to claim me. That's why I've been involved from the beginning: because the key happened to hit me.” And the key hit me, I didn't tell Joel, because of my connection to Sorcery Hall through my Granny Gran.

“That was days ago,” Joel said. “You won't find it. If it's been lying on the sidewalk all this time, it could have been kicked anyplace by now, or picked up by anyone.”

“No,” I said, though so far I hadn't had any luck and I was pretty worried. “It's waiting for us to find it.”

“What about the Princes?” he said, glancing around. “Any sign of them?”

I lost my patience. “Look, if you're scared, go back to school. If not, help me look. I want to bring the key to Paavo today.”

Joel paid the cab driver, and we looked. There wasn't anything: just squares of concrete, and the curb and the gutter, and the metal skirting around the subway entrance. We wandered around glaring at the ground. Somehow a lot of time went by, and pretty soon, Joel reminded me, we should be heading uptown to meet Paavo at Grant's Tomb,

I didn't want to go empty-handed, not when I knew what I was looking for and where to look for it.

“Maybe Paavo has some way of locating it right away,” Joel said, “or maybe he could pick up the trail of whoever's got it.”

“Nobody's got it,” I growled. My eyes were tearing with frustration. “It's got to be here! It hit me and bounced off—”

I stood there thinking. I thought about how when Barbara first started wearing contact lenses, the hard kind, the left one used to pop out a lot because she blinked too hard when it was bothering her. We did a lot of patting the ground in some pretty strange places. You haven't been in the pits until you've groped the floor of a movie theater in the dark among the gum wads and sticky soda spills, looking for a lost lens.

We both got very good at hearing where the lens landed. That tiny click is all you need to get a good idea, more or less, of where to start patting.

So when the key had hit my forehead, where had it landed afterward?

I turned around and stood as close to where I'd been standing that day as I could remember.

“What are you doing?” Joel said. “You look weird.”

I told him to shush.

I had been standing here, by the subway entrance, fishing around in my bookbag for my math assignment, and muttering. The ground shook, and something tapped me hard over the eye, and then—

“There was no sound,” I said. “It didn't make any sound!”

“You mean it disappeared, like all those other things?” Joel said. “Come on, Tina—”

“No, no,” I said, “that happens with a contact lens, too. If there's no sound, you know it never reached the floor. It's hung up somewhere on your clothes, or it landed in the book you were reading, something like that.”

“What were you wearing?”

“I don't know, exactly, but if I look in my closet, I'll remember. The key must be caught in a pocket or a cuff!”

“Where're you going?” he said.

“Home! To look through my clothes!”

At the door to my building, I told him to wait downstairs for me. I wasn't about to have Joel come look over everything I owned.

I went ripping through my closet, my dresser, my laundry hamper, looking for what I'd been wearing that day—the cuffless jeans with pockets too tight to jam anything into, let alone for something to fall in, the boots, the yellow shirt, my fuzzy jacket.

There was nothing in any of them, not even in the pockets of the fuzzy jacket.

I stood there feeling sick with failure. What was I going to tell Paavo?

Then Mom came in. “Tina? Are you home?” I could tell by her voice that something was wrong and going to get wronger.

“I forgot my English paper and Mr. Chernick told me to go home and get it. I'm just leaving.”

“Is that so?” she said. She was in the living room, looking through the mail, I think. “I had a call from school a little while ago. I hear that you not only flunked a math test, you're behind with two book reports and three weeks late with a presentation for social studies class. On top of which, they told me you'd vanished from school today.”

There wasn't a lot to say to this, so I didn't say anything. I looked out my bedroom window. Joel was hanging around across the street. I made go-away signs. He didn't see or didn't mean to go away, because he didn't budge. Well, if Mom hadn't spotted him on her way in, maybe we were okay.

She came and stood in the doorway to my room, probably expecting to find Joel in there with me. Even though I was alone as requested, I saw her get that bland, above-it-all look that meant real trouble. “And here you've been neatening up your room. What a beautiful job. I'm really impressed.”

The room did look as if it had been burgled by a troop of rhinoceroses. “I'm looking for something,” I said.

“Oh?” she said. “What? China?” She waited for me to admire that and then she really let loose: “I'm looking for something, too. I'm looking for my kitchen linoleum, and I'm looking for some galley proofs that have gone walkabout all on their own, and I'm looking for the phone call I should have had by now from my nice but very, very busy lawyer. Most of all, I'm looking for a little quiet in that madhouse I call my office, not nagging phone calls from school telling me that my daughter is turning into a cretinous delinquent. I'm looking for a house I can step into without wondering how I got into a pigpen by mistake. You know Mrs. Sanchez comes tomorrow. You know she isn't going to clean up any of this incredible decor you've designed for yourself—”

“I wasn't going to ask her—”

“What will happen will be a phone call to me from Mrs. Sanchez, complaining about the state of your room and how she can't clean in here when it's like this. She'll take up my time with a detailed list of grievances going back three and a half years and wind up by threatening to quit.”

“I'll fix it,” I mumbled.

It was amazing to me, how my soft, sweet, flirtatious mother, who had often told me to try to soften my own attitude and to hide my brains so as not to scare away the boys that she was also so worried about, had this other side to her that I don't think she realized existed.