A Box of Gargoyles (5 page)

They both stared at the smudge. The more you looked at it, the less like a mere smudge it seemed to be. It had depth and detail and purpose, somehow, despite being nothing more than an inky blur.

“Wish I had my magnifying lens,” said Valko.

Then something hazy happened. Either Maya thought of her necklace, or Valko thought of her necklace, or they both did at the same time. It was hard, afterward, to figure out exactly whose fault it all was. That was also a kind of smudge, come to think of it.

The reason they thought of Maya's necklace was that it was a round puddle of glass, all that was left of the formerly beautiful and dangerous Cabinet of Earths. That Cabinet had held the secret of Henri de Fourcroy's long, long life, until Maya had taken a hammer to its beauty and destroyed it. Now she wore the Cabinet glass around her neck on a string, and there was a tiny magical salamander swimming in it, which was one reminder that this was not ordinary glass. Another reminder was the way it sometimes melted in Maya's palm, became liquid, and then hardened again. Ordinary glass stays glassy unless a furnace's worth of heat gets to it.

But that necklace did look a little like the lens of a magnifying glass. That is true. And so it ended up in Maya's hand, with the last feeble rays of October sun trickling through it and onto the mysterious page, the letter, the smudge.

“Aha!” said Valko, his head almost bumping into Maya's, he was so intent on getting a glimpse through that glass. “See that?”

Seen through Maya's necklace, the smudge was, indeed, not actually a smudge. The blur resolved itself into lines and loops and dots, into whole strings of writing.

The Reader of these words
, it read,
is absolutely and irrevocably bound to do all that is necessary, no matter what the risk or cost, to make me, myself, Henri de Fourcroy, once again WHOLE—

“Whatever that means,” said Valko.

“There's more,” said Maya.

And should the Reader doubt the binding nature of this message, would he please hold this paper up to the light
.

“Oh, don't!” said Maya, but Valko of course already had. The sun was weak, but in the face of that light a whole picture welled up from within (
deep within
, thought Maya, but that was illogical) the paper: a terrible face, scowling, with a bunch of writhing worms where most people have hair.

“Snakes,” said Valko. “I've heard of something like that before. Snakes for hair. Nice.”

“That was Medusa,” said Maya. “That was the one who was so terrible, just looking at her would turn you into stone.”

Valko gave her a little poke in the ribs.

“But hey, look at that: we're not stone,” he said. He was making a joke, but the heavy feeling in Maya's chest made her wonder,
Is it true? Stone?

“Shh, give that back,” she said. “There was more.”

The smudge went so deep: layer upon layer of smudge. Maybe (thought Maya half sensibly) that was why the paper seemed so heavy. A tremble had gotten into her fingers: she had to work extra hard, this time, to keep the necklace-glass steady.

That, Reader, is the international symbol of Absolutely Binding Documents. You thought you had triumphed over me, perhaps, little cousin-niece? But you are reading this, so now it is you who are bound. So then: your first task is to present yourself to the memory stone*—it will hold your instructions. It is waiting for you. It knows who you are
.

“Memory stone?” said Valko.

The smudge deepened again. There was an asterisk, but it wobbled terribly. Valko had to add a hand to the edges of the glass for the image to settle down.

*THAT IS, TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR: you will go put your hand on the stone wall of the embassy and wake up the mind I am about to leave there. THEN: you will make your way, without delay, to my writing desk—

“Seriously?” said Valko. “This is the bossiest letter I have ever read in my life. Are we done yet? What's that last bit there?”

The last bit there was

You may find its contents useful. Here's the key
.

And then a very tiny squiggle.

“Well,” said Valko, leaning back against the bench. “One thing's for sure: your old uncle Fourcroy was stark, raving bonkers. A lunatic. Mad.”

Maya still had her head bent over the image in the Cabinet glass. There was something about that squiggle. When you looked closely, it organized itself: round inky flourishes at one end, blocky inky shapes at the other. Of course! A key.

The ink lines of that key, moreover, were straining away from the paper it had been penned into. How could that be? Maya squinted. Yes, there was a gap between ink and paper—she was almost sure there was a gap.

When her own curious fingertip entered that magnified world under the glass, it looked so unexpectedly enormous that Maya trembled again, and all the writing became a tipsy blur for a moment. But she held her breath and steadied herself and the Cabinet glass, and soon her gigantic fingertip was inching toward that writhing, inky key again, worrying at the space between ink and paper. Could there even be such a space?

Really, now: could ink have a life of its own?

Could a great, big human fingertip really feel the thin edge of a scribbled key?

It could, it could. The key felt like an eyelash, like the thinnest thread. And then the inky key was no longer on Henri de Fourcroy's pale-green stationery at all: it was firmly attached to the tip of Maya's own finger. And it would not budge, even when she gave her hand a sharp shake, the way you do when an almost-invisible insect sinks its tiny, tiny, ink-black teeth into you.

“Hey!” she said, jumping up. “It bit me!”

At the same moment the Cabinet glass twitched in Maya's other hand, pulled itself away from the creamy-green menace of that paper, and softened and cowered in her palm.

“What?” said Valko. “What? What bit you?”

“That stupid key,” she said. “I poked it, and it bit me. Look—”

On the very tip of her index finger, the smallest, smallest, smallest of black keys.

“You've got to be kidding,” said Valko. He took a long look at her finger and then tried to flick the key off the top of it with his free hand, but nothing happened.

Nothing happened when they blew fierce puffs of breath at the key on her finger or when Maya wiped her fingertip across the cold wood of the bench or when Valko took hold of her finger and rubbed it against the rough wool of his sleeve. The tiny key was there to stay.

“Like a tattoo, almost,” said Valko. “Well,
that
is definitely weird-and-a-half.”

For a breathless moment, the two of them just watched the wind play with the edges of the letter in Maya's lap, while their brains chased wild galloping thoughts down a thousand different endless corridors.

“And how does your necklace even do that melting and unmelting stuff?” said Valko finally. “Not to mention the magnifying thing. That is the strangest necklace I've ever seen.”

Maya hardly heard him. All of a sudden she was so eager to be gone. She leaped up off the bench, stuffed the necklace into one jacket pocket and all those letters into another. She wasn't just awake again: she was furious. She had one word to say, and that one word filled every nook and cranny of her, drowned out all the other thoughts and worries that might be there, pushed everything else aside as it exploded out into the world.

That word was “
No!
”

 
3
 

T
he more she thought about it, the angrier she got.

Henri de Fourcroy binding her, Maya, to bring him back to life! Sticking tiny keys on fingertips where they definitely didn't belong! When it was his own fault, everything that had happened to him! You don't just kidnap small children and drain them of their charm and then go around expecting those children's older sisters to
fix you right back up
! No!

“Slow down a bit,” said Valko, loping along to keep up with her angry feet. (One of the first things Valko had ever told Maya about himself was that his name came from the Bulgarian word for
wolf
. He wasn't, at first glance, much like a wolf—no big, sharp teeth; no beady yellow eyes—but he certainly could
lope
.) “You're not making sense, you know. There's no such thing as Medusan stationery—there can't be!”

“What do you mean, ‘can't'?” said Maya as her bitter feet continued to slap, slap, slap at the sidewalk beneath them.

Cabinets can't hold people's mortalities in bottles, either, can they? Bronze salamanders can't turn their heads and chat with you. Glass can't melt in your hand and then unmelt again, just like that. The whole concept of “can't” had taken some serious hits over the last month or so, as far as Maya could see.

One of Valko's talents was patience, however. He just loped along, trying to wait out her anger and think things through.

“I mean, a piece of paper can't
make
you do anything it says. That's just craziness, to think it could. Where are we rushing off to right now, anyway?”

Maya stopped short. They were back in the street where the shadow had come creeping after them, but the whole place looked different now. That edge in the air had faded away. Things felt normal again. The wound-up spring in her chest relaxed a little.

“I don't know,” she said. “Anywhere. I just don't like being told I'm trapped, that's all.”

Valko grinned.

“Listen to me, then:
not trapped, not trapped, not trapped
! There, better? Give that letter to me a second; I'll fix it for you.”

It was unfairly difficult to stay glum around Valko. Maya fished the envelope back out of her pocket and handed it over. Valko already had his favorite black pen in his hand. He propped the letter against his backpack and made a preparatory flourish in the air.

“V-O-I-D,” he said. “That's what we need!”

Ha! Why hadn't she thought of that? If the paper's super-powerful, just make it say something else!

But Valko was already staring, a bit puzzled, at the letter he had been scribbling on. He gave his pen a shake, and then rummaged through his backpack again, looking for another one.

“Won't write,” he said. “Weird. I'm sure it's got ink in it, too.”

The next pen wouldn't leave a mark, either. It skittered right off the page. They tried out the pens on other scraps of paper, and they worked fine. They just couldn't manage to leave a single trace on that inscrutable creamy-green letter. The paper wouldn't let itself be torn up, either, even when Valko tried to be extra wolfish about it and use his teeth.

“Well, never mind,” said Valko, rubbing his jaw. “So it's stronger than steel, and the ink he used is super special—who cares? You can still refuse. Just don't do any of those things in the letter. Keep your hands off the embassy wall—”

“Oh,” said Maya. She had forgotten the wall. “Oh, no. That's how this all started, remember? I already touched that awful wall. Just like the letter told me to. Do you think that's what started all the weird stuff happening?”

“Excuse me,” said Valko. “But I'm pretty sure you hadn't read that letter before you touched anything. Right? It's hardly like you were following instructions. And so what, anyway? Touch any wall you want! Does this place look like anything awful happened? Look how normal everything is now.”

Everything did seem very normal. No shadows rustling after them. No more clusters of swaying, singing women. Sometimes you'll be walking along a green ridge in the fog, and the air will catch its breath and the fog will lift, just like that. As if fog had never been invented. Maya and Valko were standing on the fogless corner of the avenue Rapp, the broken wall of the Bulgarian embassy off to the left and the intricate façade of bad old Fourcroy's Salamander House to the right, and the air was its normal, unhummy self again. It was enough to make a person feel slightly embarrassed, if that person hated to think of herself as
overreacting
. Maya took a deep breath and walked ahead to take a closer look.