The Bronze King (11 page)

This was the tough side, the smart, ambitious woman who held down the job that kept us both in spaghetti. What she always said was how she wanted to find some nice guy to look after both of us. What she
did
was run her life and mine, when I let her, with a hand of steel. Sometimes a very heavy hand of steel. I really hated her at this particular moment, the way you can only hate your mother.

“Yes, you certainly will fix it,” she said. “But first you are going to bring your schoolbooks into the kitchen, and you and I are going to sit down and waste more of my time—my most precious time, the kind I use to try to repair myself and stay sane through something I think they call relaxation. We are going to spend some of that time going over your situation in school and setting up a schedule, Tina, according to which you will get everything that's owing done. Late, but done. You understand?”

“I said I'll fix it!” I screamed. “I'll fix it, the room and the work and the whole damn thing if you'll just leave me alone and let me do it my own way!”

“Schoolbooks,” she said. “Now, Tina. In the kitchen. This shambles can wait.”

“Shambles means slaughterhouse,” I said. “I haven't killed anything in here.” Yet. “And don't call me Tina, it's babyish and stupid.
I
never asked to be called Tina. I hate my name.”

Which was news to me. I didn't know it until I said it.

“Really?” my mother said sweetly. “That was your own name for yourself before you could pronounce ‘Valentine,' so don't blame me. I'll be waiting for you in the kitchen.”

You can't win.

I needed a piece of paper and something to weight it with so I could drop a note down to Joel from the window. I emptied my bookbag out onto the bed.

But what was I going to write? Sorry, no key, can't come down, grounded by mother for messiness and stupidity which is really just not having enough time to manage Sorcery Hall and the kraken and my schoolwork all at once.

Groping around in the heap of books and papers and notebooks and school junk from my bookbag, I found something small and heavy to wrap my note around.

It was a key.

 

10
The Abandoned Station

 

 

A
PLAIN BRASS-COLORED KEY
with a jigsaw-jaggedy edge and a flowery design stamped on the round part that you hold. I had no more doubt of what it was than of my own, well, my name.

The thing had bounced off my cretinous, hard little head right into my open bookbag. I was so relieved I almost whooped out loud.

I sat down on the bed to write.

First I had to accept the fact that not only were Joel and Paavo going to go on without me, they were probably going to wind up the whole business without me, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Not unless I wanted to risk having the world gobbled up, starting with the West Side Highway or what was left of it.

So I wrote a note, gritting my teeth the whole time. I didn't care about Joel, but Paavo wasn't going to think much of me when he found out why I couldn't come down. Grounded, like a ten-year-old!

I know kids who would do whatever they wanted and ignore what their parents said, but I just couldn't do that. Not with my mom on her own the way she was, and the two of us running the household together. I know who gets the blame when a kid living with only her mother looks bad, and besides, I was kind of proud of how well I got along with her, considering. I didn't want to ruin it. We had a deal. She didn't go through my closets and things, and I didn't duck out on her rules, much. Mutual toleration.

I leaned out the window.

There was Joel, standing on the curb now and staring up. There was no way I could miss with that key. I am a champion thrower, thanks to having to throw stones to defend myself from country dogs around my uncle's place in Pennsylvania in the summers. I crumpled the piece of notebook paper around the key and leaned out.

“Tina,” he yelled, “what are you doing?”

From behind me I heard my mom coming, yelling, “Tina, what are you doing?”

I dropped the little package. It was lighter than I'd thought and veered on a breeze. Joel, loaded down with his books and the violin case, made a clumsy dive after it. My mother banged the window shut and grabbed my arm in her grip of steel, and the rest of the evening is not worth telling about.

Not that my mom is any kind of child abuser, but when she gets pushed over the edge into one of her strict fits, she becomes a kind of maximum-security warden, with my best interests at heart, of course.

She said, “Clean. Up. This. Room. Now.”

I was still putting my things away at about one 
A.M.
, in the dark, just stuffing them any old where. Mom had looked in once and told me to go to bed, but once I got started cleaning up I wasn't about to stop and leave more to do tomorrow. Tomorrow, which was Saturday at last, was reserved for hearing from Joel and Paavo all about how they saved the world—without me.

Only it didn't happen that way.

For one thing, I woke up that Saturday morning and found that my bookbag, which I had emptied out onto the bed the day before thank goodness, was gone. The kraken had finally gotten as close as it was going to get to the key.

But if Joel and Paavo had stopped the kraken, wouldn't the vanished things be coming back, not more things disappearing?

And the day looked funny. Although it was spring, the sky was cloudy and cold again, sullen-looking, broody, and mean.

I started to worry, but for the moment there was nothing I could do about it. I settled down to one of my neglected assignments. (“You can wait to see your friend Joel until you've caught up with your schoolwork.” “You told me that five times already.” “Well, I'm telling you again. How can I explain to you how distressing it is for me, Tina, to find that I can't seem to trust you anymore? You're not to sneak off to meet him, do you understand?” “If I want to meet Joel someplace I'm sure not going to sneak.” Etc. Our relationship was definitely on the downslope.)

I could afford to be patient. I knew Mom had a brunch date downtown with one of her authors, which was one reason she'd been able to come home early the day before—because she was set up for work on the weekend. She certainly was not going to take me along, and there was no way to lock me in.

I craned my neck looking out the window after she left to make sure she really did go. As soon as she'd turned the corner, I zipped downstairs and out through Fudge Tower, and I headed toward the Eighty-first Street station.

Paavo had parked himself against the wall of a building on the corner of Columbus and Eighty-third, drinking Coke from one of those wax cups. Mom had probably walked right past him. He looked gloomy and a little rumpled. He looked old.

“What happened?” I said. I had a horrible feeling the answer was going to be pretty bad.

It was. “Joel tried to use the key. It was a bad mistake. The kraken has him.”

I almost sat down on the sidewalk, but managed instead to swivel around and plump myself against the wall next to Paavo. For a minute I couldn't say anything. I was full of this big, blaring feeling of
UNFAIR
. It wasn't supposed to be like this. You don't get involved in magical adventures to lose. Not in books, anyway.

“I didn't mean to scare you,” Paavo said. He put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a quick little hug. “Joel isn't dead. But the kraken is holding him.”

“He was supposed to take the key to you at Grant's Tomb!” I could feel my chin start to wobble the way it does before I'm going to cry, and I was desperate not to cry in front of Paavo.

Paavo shook his head. “He came looking, but I was late. I got held up. I don't have all my strength here; this place slows me down. Anyhow, he didn't wait. He went to the station alone and tried to use the key. He's not the right one to do that, so the kraken grabbed him. The only reason it couldn't take the key from him then and there was, he's got my bow in his violin case. The kraken can only move him around, it can't really touch him, so long as he hangs onto that.”

“He was supposed to come and get you, the stupid
bastard!
” I yelled. “Who does he think he is, Jagiello on his bronze horse? He was supposed to give the key to you.”

“Listen, Valentine,” Paavo said, “you got to understand, for a kid like Joel—in this world a boy who studies classical music, right away he's got a strike against him. He's not allowed to fight because he has to take care of his hands, right? He spends a lot of time doing something most kids his age think is stupid and boring. So some people call him a chicken, and other things, you know? He gets pushy about it, he takes chances to prove he's tough, he's regular.”

“But he's not studying,” I blubbered. “He told me! He used to, but he quit.”

“He's been practicing on the sly,” Paavo said. “Even if he really wants to quit, he hasn't been able to.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“He wears a scarf all the time, doesn't he? Pulled up high on the sides of his neck? It's to hide this.” He showed me the place on the left side of his own neck, under his jaw, where his creased, leathery skin had that dark mark on it, like a large irritated callus. “The fiddler's brand,” he said. “All fiddle players have one, from holding the instrument there. He hides his brand because he's addicted to the fiddle and he's angry and ashamed about it.”

“What are we wasting sympathy on him for?” I bawled. “I don't care if he fiddles a hole in his neck from one side to the other. He'd deserve it! If he'd only waited! What are we supposed to do now? If he'd used his brains and been a little more patient, it might all be over by now, and the kraken would be gone!”

Paavo, completely ignoring my gulps and snuffles, said reasonably, “Okay, you're right. The reasons he did what he did don't matter right now. The damage is done. Let's think if we can fix it.”

He was so calm and deliberate, I felt worse than before.

“What are we going to do?” I wailed.

“Find him and get the key,” Paavo said. “That's what we got to do.”

That stopped the tears right there. I said, “Are you certain the kraken's got him? How do you know for sure?” I think what I meant was, How do you know he's really still alive?

“I'll show you. Look.” Paavo emptied what was left of his Coke onto the sidewalk and took me over to a fire hydrant that was leaking water from one of its spouts or whatever they are. He rinsed his cup and filled it about halfway with water from the hydrant, and then he whistled a little tune and stirred the water with his finger.

The surface cleared and I could see Joel. It was just like looking at a reflection. He was sitting on the ground in some enclosed place with weird, dim light and a jumbled-up confusion of color behind him—graffiti!

“He's in a subway station,” I said. “That's graffiti all over the walls of a station. Why doesn't he just walk out?”

“He can't see,” Paavo said very softly. “The kraken has him bound with darkness. He doesn't know where he is, except that he's down in the subway.”

“You mean he's blind?” I was really horrified. I mean, Joel was just a kid still!

“That's how it seems to him,” Paavo nodded. “He feels bad, you can see that.”

I sure could. Joel was sitting all bent over, with his violin case across his knees and his face hidden, and I was just as glad I couldn't see his expression.

“But he'll be all right, I mean he'll be able to see if we get him out of there, right?” I said.

“I think so,” Paavo said. “But we got to find him first; him, and the key.”

“That's easy!” I said. “He's in the old IRT station at Ninety-first and Broadway, the one they closed up ages ago! There's still a way into it from the street, my friend Barbara and I discovered it years ago. That's how come the graffiti writers can get in there and write on the walls. All we have to do is get over there and go down into the station and bring Joel out!”

Paavo looked at me for a minute. “That simple?” he said.

“Well, I don't know,” I had to admit. “I've never gone down there in daylight, and also you get pretty dirty.”

I was looking at his rust brown suit that was a little grubby from being worn every day.

“We'll try,” he said.

So we went over to Ninety-first Street and Broadway, and I didn't see any way that Paavo and I were going to be able to sneak down into that station in broad daylight. You can't just walk over to the grating in the sidewalk, yank it up, and skip down the steps into the station without somebody noticing. The time Barbara and I did it, we'd waited until about two in the morning. Even then a couple of people saw us but I guess they didn't say anything.

“It's that grating,” I said, pointing. You can see the steps dropping away underneath into the gloom, covered with trash and butts and whatnot that people drop and kick through the grating. The opening is so small and square that I wondered if Paavo could get his shoulders through it. Altogether I was amazed that Barbara and I had actually had the nerve to go down there at all, especially in the middle of the night.

“Okay,” Paavo said, “go in when I tell you.” He started humming through his nose, this high, soft sound that made my skin prickle, and he turned quickly in a circle all in one place. A little wind came up and began to whip around us, around and around, closer and closer and louder and louder. Old papers and fast-food wrappers and butts and rags zipped by us in a tight little whirlwind. I couldn't see through it anymore, and I was getting scared.

Paavo, still humming, leaned down and got hold of the rim of the grate and heaved it up and open: “Go!” he said.