A Box of Gargoyles (31 page)

Maya opened the Summer Box, slipped some small thing from that box into her pocket, and stood up.

“No,” she said. “He hasn't got me. I mean, I hope not. I mean, sort of he does, I know, all right, yes, but not all the way. I am doing my best. Help me find that egg, will you? I really did promise them I'd take care of it.”

“Them?” said Pauline, from back in the shadows.

“The gargoyles,” said Maya. “What time is it now?”

“Seven o'clock,” said Pauline. “How often do you two talk to gargoyles? Because honestly, if you had told me these things a week ago, I don't think I would be here right now—”

“It's too dark, Maya. Listen, I promise: I'll come back tomorrow and find your egg. I promise I will. I just don't want it controlling you.”

“Because honestly, the things you are saying now sound to me like the thoughts of lunatics—”

“All right,” said Maya suddenly, and she plopped back down on the ground. “All right. It's too dark to go looking for it now. You're right. We'll have to come back.”

The poor egg, alone in this cold cemetery! She had to push that thought out of her way in order to stay focused. She was in danger of losing her focus. She was forgetting the next steps in the Plan.

“So we wait a little while longer,” said Maya, pulling herself together. “And then, around eight thirty or so, maybe a little after, you start to play that piece, right, Pauline? If your fingers can still move at all.”

Pauline made a cold, but willing, sound.

“And here's the important thing,” Maya went on. “As soon as the shadow appears, I want you over here behind this big tomb. You stay hidden, both of you. Got that? You guys stay safe. The Fourcroy business is up to me.”

“Hm,” said Valko.

“I'm serious,” said Maya. “I'm the one he wants—that means I'm the one he'll have to listen to. Don't distract him. And Pauline's younger than we are—”

“Chronological age,” said Pauline with a sniff.

“Exactly,” said Maya, paying no attention whatsoever to the sniff. “We're responsible for keeping you safe, that's all. As much as possible, anyway.”

It grew colder. The mist thickened. They huddled behind the tomb and regretted everything that had brought them to Père-Lachaise, at night at the end of November. When their misery became very large indeed, Valko checked his watch again and said it was well after eight.

Pauline popped the latches of her violin case.

“It's not going to sound very nice,” she said, her voice a little doubtful in the cold dark. “My fingers are stiff like icicles.”

“It will be fine,” said Maya.

Pauline was attaching the shoulder rest and fixing her bow.

“Too, too cold,” she said. “Do you think it will still work if I do the playing with my gloves on?”

“Brr,” said Valko. “I say go ahead and give it a try.”

“And the
gardien
, will he come back?”

“He's hiding away in his warm office,” said Maya. “Drinking cocoa, probably.”

Pauline shot one of her spear-like gazes in Maya's direction.

“You know this is
folie
, what we are doing,” she said. “Madness, and all that.”

“I hope it's not,” said Maya. “Let's see.”

Pauline put the bow on the string to tune, but the violin was so cold it didn't want her messing around with its pegs.

“I can't tune it properly,” said Pauline. “Impossible.”

“Doesn't matter!” said Maya. She did not actually say aloud that Pauline was not likely to play in tune even on a well-tuned violin, but that thought did go through her mind.

Pauline narrowed her eyes and clenched her bow too tightly in her gloved right hand, and the bow went scraping across the strings.
A cry like a dying cat
, thought Maya. Not that she had ever heard a dying cat, and in any case, perhaps dying cats would find it insulting to be compared to Pauline Vian.

Maya had been worried about guards hearing the music and coming in droves to yell at them and snap handcuffs around their wrists, but the trees and the fog soaked up the sound of the violin like a chilly gray sponge.

If anything, the world around them became quieter as Pauline played.

It became more attentive.

Valko had come up and put his jacketed arms right around Maya, a friendly, comforting, comfortable hug that drowned out, for a long minute, all the cold and dark. Somewhere out there, beyond the tombs and the mist and the city of Paris, was a sky full of stars. Down here, where you could see no stars, Pauline's violin was trying its best, all the same, to dance: one small, brave, out-of-tune voice against the enormous silence of Père-Lachaise.

“If that shadow gives you any trouble,” said Valko to Maya, “I'm jumping out and tackling him. Just so you know. And I'm sorry about your rock.”

He said it quietly, so as not to interfere with the music, or maybe just so that the looming trees and stone tombs could not hear.

Maya was not sure shadows were things that could be
tackled
, exactly, but she felt a little better, all the same. Though on the other hand, Valko had thrown the gargoyles' egg into the darkness somewhere. He had wanted it broken.

Really, she didn't know how she felt, just at that moment.

“I'll be careful,” she said. “You be careful, too. And we both have to make sure Pauline's okay.”

Rum tumty-tumty! Rum tumty-tumty!
That was Pauline's violin, sending its awkward signal out into the fog.

Valko was listening to it, too. He shook his head and smiled.

“That's not really going to lure anyone anywhere, you know? I think we're—”

And his mouth was just forming the word
safe
when the tide of strangeness came rolling over them, this time almost like a blow to the stomach, the sick-making tingle of magic was so strong—and the world around them folded itself away and began to change.

The sound of magic, it turned out, was a roaring sort of rumble: things growing and stretching under the ground, the sap running through surprised trees above the ground, the stone of all those cherubs and wreaths and weeping nymphs reshaping itself into shapes it wasn't used to. The ground beneath their feet rippled. The violin behind them faltered, but only for a moment, and then Pauline launched into her
Danse macabre
all over again, with extra gusto. Maya stole a look at Pauline's face in the misty gray light and was shaken to her core: nothing the strangeness was likely to do could be stranger than Pauline Vian,
smiling
.

“Are you all right?”

That was Valko, whose hand, Maya noticed now, was firmly on her arm, keeping her steady (or keeping himself steady—hard to say).

“It's happening again,” Valko said. “Right? I can tell.”

Maya forcibly restrained the part of herself that wanted to shriek or roll her eyes or both and nodded instead.
He
has
to state the obvious
, she reminded herself. Valko had to state the obvious for the simple reason that none of this, even after all this time, was all that obvious to
him
.

But there, the quality of the sound around them was already shifting again. Something new joined the rumbling, quake-like roar of change: a clattering sound, as if the universe had decided to roll a hundred thousand dice, just to see what numbers might come up.

“What's that?” she said. “Pauline?”

Pauline was playing and smiling, smiling and playing. Her smile was quite visible through the mist and the gloom.

“
Pauline?
” said Maya.

“I think it works!” cried the indeed quite scary, wildly smiling Pauline, while her gloved fingers flew up and down the neck of her instrument and her bow scraped tunelessly away. “Aha! Look: do you see? It's my
grand début
!”

The dice, or whatever they were, rattled. Valko made a distressed sound in the back of his throat. Up until now, Maya realized, he had been doing all right because the town of overgrown tombs had been, until this minute, so much like a town that the whole purpose of a cemetery had probably slipped to the side of his mind.

But here's the thing: a cemetery is a place full of people who once were alive, and now are not. There's another word for most of them, and that word is
bones
.

Suddenly they were gathering all around, the bones, gathering in little clattery heaps. They were swaying a little, those heaps, in rhythm with Pauline's vigorous, out-of-tune violin. You could hear them, in the dark and the gloom, more than you could see them, but you could tell they were there. And that was enough. That was enough to make even Maya feel colder than cold.

Until that moment, it had been dark, but not exceedingly so, because when mist settles in a place, the last of the daylight wanders around in the fog for a while and gets itself lost, and that makes everything dim without being pitch-black. A misty night is not dark the way a moonless night can be.

But true darkness was beginning to come seeping into the mist. It puddled at the feet of nearby monuments and thickened menacingly in the middle of those twitching, dancing bones. The little hairs on the back of Maya's neck told her first, and then her ears, picking up a still-faint leafy rustle, confirmed it.

“Quick,” said Maya to Valko. “Back behind that tomb. We don't want him to know you're here.”

Valko hesitated, but Maya was ready to be tough.

“Go, go, go!”

She gave him an urgent little push, just to get him moving.

“And you have to yank Pauline out of sight, as soon as the shadow's really here. Valko, go! You can't leap out and tackle him, can you, if he
already knows you're here
.”

Even if he had thrown the gargoyles' egg away, Valko was still one of the people in the world Maya most wanted kept safe. Oh, that was still true.

The cemetery felt larger and darker and colder, once Valko had crept back to the hiding spot behind Fourcroy's odd telephone booth of a tomb. The twitchy, clattering bones seemed to have found the pulse of the music now; they had leaped into the air; they were truly dancing. Pauline and her wild smile were obscured a little by the dancing bones, as if she'd been hidden in a cloud of chattering, clattering bees.

The air was full of the roar of the world being twisted, warped, remade, undone. And the roar wouldn't go away. It just got louder and deeper and more terrifying. Something very bad was happening down the slope from Fourcroy's tomb: there was an awful cracking, slurping sound, as if the earth had started swallowing up whole trees. And the ground was shaking under Maya's feet, shaking harder and harder and harder.

Something was coming, and as it came, the world fell into chaos all around it. Valko said something, but his voice was very, very far away.

Yes, there it was: shade and leaf meal picking its way up the hill. A more human shape to the shadow now, and two gleams of purple where his eyes should have been.

In fact, it could almost be said to be walking, that shadow. It was striding along the little path that wandered up from Chopin's weeping muse, and its footsteps were jerking along almost in rhythm, Maya noticed now, with the violin's untamed, rough-edged dance.

But with every step it took, the path behind it fell into darkness that was darker than any night had any right to be. And the earth around it bubbled and boiled, tombstones and all. Churned and boiled and gave itself over to darkness.

It was maybe the end of the world. That was one thing that Maya was thinking, as she stood tall (in the face of all that boiling, heaving dark) to meet the shadow approaching. The other thought, however, was
It actually worked!

They had really managed to lure him here, to the family tomb of the Fourcroys. It had really, truly worked.

And then the shadow opened its own mouth, a small puddle of darker darkness in its shadowy face, and it said, in a raspy, shadowy, triumphant sort of voice,
“W e l l d o n e.”

 
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