The Bronze King (12 page)

I went, bent almost double to get through the opening, into the cold, nasty smell of the place. He didn't follow me. I was supposed to do this alone? Looked like I was. I crouched on the steps, underneath the sidewalk, and I breathed that ugly cold stink and looked into the dimness of the few faint bulbs always left on down here, shining coldly off the scribbled walls. I wished I was someplace else.

Above me the wind whined and whined and papers scraped on the concrete. I went down a few more steps and called, “Joel!”

No answer. Far away I heard a train rumbling in the tunnel.

I went down into the eerie stillness of the station. Every square inch of space was written on in huge, colorful letters, layer on top of layer, which should have looked cheerful. Instead it was menacing somehow, like a silent mob hanging there on the walls, waiting to jump out and get me. There were no benches or garbage cans or anything at all, just the closed-down token booth with its grilled window and the tiled walls, all scribbled over with spray paint.

I was shaking, literally shaking, but I made myself walk along the platform, looking for some sign of Joel. There was nothing.

A train was coming. They pass through this station, they just don't stop anymore. When I was little I used to think it was a ghost station because it's so faintly lit. From the train it's just a glimpse, gone in an instant.

I ducked behind the curve in the wall by the stairs so I wouldn't be seen. The train roared by, the air pushed at me. Then it got quiet again.

“Joel!” I yelled.

Somewhere down in the tunnels something answered. I heard a faint sound, a greedy, gabbling, chuckling noise, snarling and gnashing and coming closer. The lights started to go very dim. Wrapped in darkness, I thought, in a panic.
Bound
in darkness. Already I could barely see.

I turned and ran up the steps mostly by feel, my fingers scrabbling at the dirty concrete. In my head I was screaming, I'm lost, I'm lost, though I had no breath to say anything out loud.

I was grabbed by the arms and pulled up onto the sidewalk, and the grate banged shut. Paavo walked me away down Broadway with his arm around my shoulders, holding me steady, keeping me on my feet. Behind us papers scuttered aimlessly to a halt as the little wind died down.

Nobody even looked at us. New York.

I staggered along next to Paavo, still shaking. “Joel's gone,” I said. “We're too late. The kraken must have eaten him and now it's going to eat everything. What'll we do?”

“Got a little money?” he said.

I had the new week's allowance. Of course with his fiddle broken and the replacement with Joel, Paavo had no way to make any money for himself. Some magician. “What do we need money for?” I said crankily.

“We're going to go see your Granny Gran.”

 

11
Water Magic

 

 

W
E CAUGHT A BUS
down to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and we went into the rest rooms there and got cleaned up a little. We were both pretty grubby from the Ninety-first Street station.

I bought us tickets to New Jersey. While we waited for the bus, I phoned the nursing home and asked if I could drop in on Granny Gran, and they said sure. When I went back to wait for the bus with Paavo, he had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

He offered me the pack again.

I said, “No, thanks.”

“Good,” he said. “It's a lousy habit.”

“Why don't you just magic it away?” I said.

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it. “I like it,” he said. “Anyhow, it doesn't hurt to keep in mind what it feels like to have a lousy habit that you enjoy too much to change.”

“Are you okay?” I asked him. He looked dead tired.

“What about you?” he countered, and I realized that
I
was dead tired, too. “One thing about magic, it takes it out of you, you know? It doesn't come for free. I'm all in right now, I can't do anymore. So we'll go see what your granny can suggest. I didn't want to bother her, but I got no choice left.”

“You know her from Sorcery Hall?” I said.

He just nodded and puffed on his smoke. I got the feeling that he really didn't want to talk about that, so I didn't push it. We didn't talk about anything. I snoozed most of the way on the bus, I was so dead.

From the bus stop, it was a short walk to the home. We found Granny Gran sitting out on the back lawn. The place was a big old rambling mansion, rickety but clean, and very quiet. A couple of staff people were on the porch, supervising a crewel class or something. Granny Gran was by herself, waiting for us.

Whenever I go to see her, I always worry that she'll look at me with that bright, desperate, friendly look that means she
wants
to recognize me, but she doesn't. I didn't want her to be, well, senile in front of Paavo, especially when he seemed to be counting on her to help us find Joel and the key.

She didn't even look at me. She looked at Paavo and she put her hand out to him. He took it in both of his and just held it for a minute.

I cleared my throat. “Gran, this is—”

“I know who it is, Vee,” she said. “It's good to see you,” she said to him.

“Yah, Sarah Elizabeth,” he said, “it's good.”

God. He really knew her name, her whole name, which made her suddenly seem like somebody else, not just my Granny Gran.

“Sit down,” she said.

I ran and got him a chair from the porch. I sat on the grass myself. It made me feel less like an intruder.

You know how you get twitchy when grown-ups are being moony about each other, because it's so gross? Even in the movies, the love stuff makes me squirm.

Well, this was different. I knew they were, well, attracted. There it was between them, left over from a time when they'd been more than attracted, I don't know. There I could see it like a quiet glow between them, without anybody making a big thing of it, and it was—not gross but awesome: for them to be so old and so still and so completely concentrated on each other like that, without having to say or do a single thing about it, except holding hands. Awesome.

Then Granny Gran said, “So, Paavo, what have you been doing to get all wrung out like this?”

“You know something about it already, don't you?” Paavo said. “You got a kraken here. You got guardian trouble.”

They started talking about markers and guardians—the pyramids, some weird stone up in Iceland someplace, the chiming clock at the Central Park Zoo—

I laughed. “That's just a toy,” I said.

Paavo shook his head. “That's what people think. And that's how you get in this kind of trouble. You lost a powerful control point when your people ripped down the old, what was it you called it? Penn Station, that was it.”

“But you can't just keep all old things around forever!”

“No,” he said, “but if people paid attention to something besides quick bucks, they'd have a sense of how to put up some
new
things to balance the loss of something old and strong like that. Even half-asleep, your people sometimes do good, protective things. As a rule, there's always power in anything that's been made with enough love to put beauty in it. New or old, that's the same.”

“Boy,” I said, “my art teacher would love to hear that!”

“Isn't that what he tries to teach you?” he said.

“Speaking of art and love, did you bring any shortcake?” Granny Gran said, and my heart sank. Whenever she lost the thread of the conversation she'd ask about shortcake, which I sometimes remembered to bring but not often, because she'd just taste it and tell me in triumph that it wasn't any good, nobody made decent shortcake these days.

“No shortcake till later,” Paavo said, with a smile. He didn't smile often, I realized then. It was a pretty terrific smile, crinkly and warm. “We got work to do, Sarah Elizabeth, you know that. Can you help us find Joel and the key to the blue wall?”

Granny Gran said, “Did you know, Vee, that most true musicians would be candidates for some level or other of Sorcery Hall if they knew about it? Joel will be all right, if he survives the kraken.”

“Where is he?” I said. “I looked in the Ninety-first Street station, but he was already gone!”

“He was never there,” she said. “The kraken has made a make-believe station, designed after that abandoned one, and put it someplace else in the system. You'll have to find it and then get the key from the boy. You'll have to leave him there, though.”

“Ah,” Paavo said. “I was afraid of that. We can't get him out?”

“No, I don't think you can. But his chances of getting out on his own, once the kraken is defeated, are good—as long as he's got your bow, Paavo. He has some talent, he'll find a way to use it. Your job is to get the key. But not you, Paavo. You have to conserve your strength for the end. You hear me, Paavo Latvela? I'm looking at you, and I'm seeing a worn-out old man. You
must
rest. Vee will have to find Joel, get the key from him, and bring it to you.”

Paavo shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

“What choice do you have?” Granny Gran said.

“Find him how?” I said, my mouth all dry.

“Go into the subway and look for him,” she said. “I'm sorry, Vee. It is dangerous. But I can't go, and Paavo mustn't. That leaves you.”

Paavo started digging in his pockets for his cigarettes, still frowning. “Hell,” he said.

I remembered what I'd heard in the abandoned station, that awful bubbling, jittering sound, flooding nearer and nearer with the speed of something in a nightmare.

I said, “Maybe the kraken will just go away by itself and let Joel go, if we wait. Maybe it'll get bored or find out it doesn't like it here as much as it thought.”

Granny Gran said, “Haven't you been reading the papers, Vee?” She recited, in this calm voice, the things that had been happening. “Yesterday some workmen in a subway tunnel between Forty-second and Thirty-fourth streets were attacked by something they couldn't see. They were nearly driven into the path of an oncoming express. A woman had her legs scalded by a jet of steam from one of the gratings over some subway tracks. Another grating collapsed and dropped a couple of young men through the sidewalk. They haven't been found and won't be found. Motion like an earthquake has been felt in the basement of Bloomingdale's, opening cracks in some of the bearing walls.”

“It tried to get me,” I said. “At Ninety-first Street.”

“It did,” Paavo agreed grimly. “I smelled it.”

Granny Gran said, “It's already got Joel and Joel's got the key. It's a dangerous and difficult situation, but not a complicated one.”

“How am I supposed to find him?” I said. “There are miles and miles of subways!”

Granny Gran said, “Hush now, here comes Mrs. Dermott.”

Mrs. Dermott was one of the staff people. She came over smiling and said how nice it was of me to come to see Granny Gran and to bring an old friend of hers, too, which Paavo was, of course, but not in the way she thought. If she said anything to my mom about my showing up here with some old guy . . . funny thing to be thinking about, when I was supposed to be thinking about whether or not I would help save the world from the kraken! I was going to come out of this with some kind of weird permanent double vision. If I came out of it. If any of us did.

Mrs. Dermott seemed about to settle down and talk with us—I think she was curious about Paavo—but Granny Gran said to her, “Would you go and see if you can find us some shortcake, dear? I have nothing on hand to offer my guests, and it isn't nice.”

Mrs. Dermott winked at me and said she would. She left us alone.

“So, Valentine?” Paavo said. “What do you think?”

I looked at them: my white-haired old granny who in fact had hair so thin you could see her pink scalp through it, and Paavo with his face stamped full of lines and his wilted shirt collar open at his leathery throat and the cigarette hanging out of his mouth as if he were a gangster in a foreign movie.

Where were the crystal castles and flying dragons and crumbly old maps and terrific feasts and war horns whooping? No golden goblets of magical wine, no prophetic legends, no princesses in gorgeous embroidered cloaks. No stalwart prince to be our champion, victorious as foretold ages before.

Just me in my jeans with the black smears all over from being in the abandoned station; and Paavo with his violin smashed; and Granny Gran telling us what to do in one breath and asking for shortcake in the next; and my mom fluctuating like the tides with the fortunes of her love life; and Mrs. Dermott up on the porch, stopping to chat with some little old ladies who were playing cards and quarreling in high, birdie voices.

I took a deep breath. “What do I have to do?”

Paavo sighed and brushed cigarette ash off his pants. Granny Gran sat staring off at the sky and picking at the blanket across her knees for a minute.

Then she said, “Ride the subway trains. In the tunnels between the real stations, look for the phantom station that the kraken has made and put there. No one will be able to see it but you. Then, Vee, you're going to have to slip off the end of the nearest platform and walk down the tunnel to Joel and get the key from him. I'm sorry, there's just no other way to do it that I can think of. Once you've got it, bring it to Paavo.”

After a minute—he still didn't like the idea, I could see that—Paavo sighed again and said, “Come look for me at the Eighty-first Street station by the park.”

“But the kraken,” I croaked. “The Princes!”

“You leave them to us,” Granny Gran said. “Between us, Paavo and I will make sure the enemy are kept busy while you're in their territory.”