The Golden Thread (18 page)

“Not Mimi but Bambi?” Tamsin giggled in spite of herself.

“You got it. And Joel broke out of the Boston bin. He's with me.”

“Oh, really?” she said, distinctly interested.

I looked over at Joel, sprawled out on my quilted bedspread with his bare ankles gleaming palely between his sneakers and his jeans. I couldn't resist adding, “Well,
almost
with me. He's conked out.”

Tamsin sighed. “I think men look so romantic when they're asleep. Vulnerable, you know? How old is he?”

“Seventeen.”

“I thought he was older,” Tamsin said, “but of course artistic people are always more mature.”

In a pig's armpit. Who the heck did she think she was, talking about “artistic people,” her with her lumpy feet and her dippy “attitudes”? She certainly didn't know one single thing about Joel. Except of course that he could be incredibly rude, which some girls find attractive. I've never heard bad manners called “mature” before.

Probably she believed all that crap about how talented people are not only allowed to behave worse than chimpanzees, but are required to behave that way to prove their talent. One good thing, though: She wasn't likely to take off again. She'd stick around if only to see Joel.

“Here's the deal,” I said, amazed at the sparks of hope and excitement going off in my exhausted head. “We're all available now, assuming Bosanka can bring the two deer and assuming Barb will come. Bosanka says she'll send for us when she's ready. Well, now we're ready for her! We'll make a comet that will scorch her socks off.”

Tamsin said, “Lennie told me your new plan. I think it stinks. It's negative, like black magic, which is always bad, bad news for
everybody
involved.”

“Maybe you haven't noticed,” I said, “but Bosanka is a witch. We're fighting fire with fire, that's all.”

“My spiritual teacher told me,” she said, “before the immigration people harassed him out of the country, that black magic turns back against you.”

“Great,” I said. Who did Tamsin think she was, my Gran? “If you can find your teacher, bring him along tomorrow and he can fix things with Bosanka.”

“Don't do a trip on me, Valentine.”

“There's no time for a trip,” I said. “I've got to call Barbara Wilson. She's on the committee now, too.”

“Poor her,” she said.

We both hung up.

Joel, the faker, hiked up on one elbow and smiled. “Yes, I'm almost eighteen and I would like to kiss you,” he said. “I mean really, not like on New Year's Eve.”

Him, too? Was I putting out some kind of irresistible pheromones all of a sudden?

Was
he
? His clothes were rumpled, his hair was long and messy, his eyes were red, and he was handsomer than he'd been when we had lunch at the coffee shop at the beginning of all this.

Well, the beginning as far as
I
was concerned. Let's remember, this was the person who had resuscitated Paavo Latvela's magic violin months ago and not told me about it until tonight. He was handsome and he was a selfish sneak.

I said, “Forget it, Joel. I'm not exactly in the mood, you know? Where are you going to sleep tonight?”

Not the best question I could have asked at that moment. But out it popped, and I felt my face turn bright red.

“How about right here?” he said, pressing his slightly stubbly cheek down on the quilt and giving me a slow blink, mock sexy but not completely mock, if you know what I mean. “We'll put the violin between us to keep us chaste, like Tristan's sword between him and Isolde.”

“No thanks,” I said lamely, trying to remember the story of Tristan and Isolde from our mythology unit. Also, my confused feelings seemed to be interfering with my normal eloquence.

Daydreams are one thing. But when the boy is actually right there—I mean, what would it be like to lie down in the familiarity of my own bed, in my own room, with Joel? I did at that moment think fleetingly of Beth Stowers from eleventh grade. What she'd done was beginning to seem just as dumb but not quite so
weird
. I was getting an inkling.

To my huge relief, plus a twinge of disappointment, Joel changed the subject. “I like your room, but it is yours, I don't mean to just barge in and occupy it like an invading army. Can I sack out on that couch in the living room?”

“Fine,” I said promptly. “But let's give Manley a chance to leave first.”

Joel settled back with his hands behind his head. “So tomorrow is B day, right? And we're supposed to zap her with our mighty powers, whatever they may be and however we do that. Do you think that's what Paavo would do?”

“How should I know?” I said, “He's not around to ask, so we just have to do what we think might work, okay?”

He blinked. “I just wondered.”

I sat down on the end of the bed. “Joel,” I said, “I can't think of anything else.”

“You're doing fine,” he said seriously. “You know, now that I think of it, it was an honor to be rescued from the kraken by you. I was just too stupid to know it at the time.”

I said, “You sure were, but actually I didn't do it. Not by myself. Gran and Paavo did it, really.”

He yawned. “Don't put yourself down. The Comet Committee only amounts to anything at all because you're on it, and if those kids—if we all survive this Bosanka person, that'll be because of you, too.

“The thing is—” He looked troubled. “I'm not sure I belong. I want to, it's not that I'm trying to weasel out or anything. But I wasn't on the roof with you on New Year's, whatever anybody says. I wasn't part of whatever you did up there.”

“You would have been,” I said, “except that you walked out.”

He flung himself back against my pillows. “Sure I did! It looked like a séance with a bunch of flakes. How was I supposed to know that anything was really going to happen?”

“You could have stuck around to find out,” I said.

“Valentine, that's what I'm
saying
. My God, am I supposed to spend my entire life apologizing to you?”

It certainly wasn't the first time, he was right about that. But I restrained myself from pointing out that if he'd quit behaving like a spoiled brat, he would also stop providing the occasions for all those apologies.

“Bosanka says you're in the committee,” I said, “and I think she's right. You're involved, Joel. Magical stuff of mine has been connected to you from the beginning. You were there when Paavo did magic by the lake. You were part of it, with me. And you're here now, for this. Whatever it is. That's not an accident.”

He said wistfully, “Sometimes I catch myself wondering if it ever really happened: Paavo, the Princes of Darkness, the kraken.”

“Wait till you meet Bosanka,” I said. “If she can happen, anything can.”

“So,” he said with a big sigh, “should I bring this with me to the committee meeting tomorrow?” He patted the violin case.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Better not. I'd hate for
her
to get her hands on it.”

“Over my dead body,” Joel said.

The phone rang. I grabbed it. Barb's voice said, “Valentine? I got something to show you.”

Barb sounded excited, not mad. She sounded like her old self again. “Where are you?” I asked.

“In my darkroom.”

“I'm there,” I said and hung up. I grabbed my coat. “Come on, Joel. Got some money? We need a cab.”

As we dashed out I called to Mom from the front hall, “I'm just going downstairs with Joel, be right back.”

She yelled something after me, but we were already at the elevator.

“Where'd you leave the violin?” I said.

Joel grinned. “I stashed it under your bed.”

Barb lived with her mom and her juvenile delinquent brother in a brownstone on the edge of what I think they used to call Hell's Kitchen. This is probably the last ungentrified chunk of the West Side—below Fifty-ninth, around Eighth and Ninth avenues. I was not unhappy to have a male escort, going down there at night.

Barb generally extolled the area as having the only decent grocery stores and bakeries (mostly Italian, but lots of Asian places now too) in New York, and other accoutrements of a real neighborhood. Barb has always been gutsier than I am. She's pretty much fearless. I found the place scary.

Barb's apartment is a fourth-floor walk-up with halls the color of dried mucus and stairs that list heavily to starboard and squeal wildly underfoot.

Barb, having buzzed us in downstairs, shouted through the open apartment door, “In here!” We made our way back through the string of high-ceilinged, shadowy rooms, full of couches and chairs with cushions and rugs all over them. Barb's mom has a thing for textiles.

I hollered, “Where's your mom?”

“Cosmetics show,” Barb yelled back, “at the Coliseum. Come look at this, you're not going to believe it!”

We reached our goal, the tiny back-bathroom which is Barb's bathroom and also her darkroom. Barb stood in the glow of the red bulb she'd installed, washing prints in a yellow plastic tray in the sink. Water swished through some kind of siphon arrangement to run off into the topless toilet tank. She had a long apron on over a knee-length T-shirt and ragg wool socks.

“Who's that?” she said, spotting Joel over my shoulder.

“Joel Wechsler,” I said.

Barb whispered, “You could have warned me, Valentine!”

She was very sensitive about her legs being skinny, which they were. But right now she was too intent to make more than a token fuss over being caught in a state of undress.

“Look at that!” She pointed with yellow plastic tongs at the print she was rinsing in the tray jammed into the little sink.

There stood Bosanka, holding the wooden dowel like a sword. The oak chair was actually bent, cringing away from her on curving legs. Odd shadowy patterns centering on Bosanka entangled the feet of the chair—curves and lines like faults in the film or the camera lens. Looking closely, I could see actual designs on the stage, around Bosanka and behind her. They showed right through her as if she were transparent.

Stones in a little heap. A row of pennies. A circle of what looked like moulted pigeon feathers. Pieces of glass curved into a spiral. Leaves.

I said, “Barb, what
is
this?”

“Power,” Barb said. “Or an attempt at power, anyway. Look, she's from someplace where they ran things with magic, not fancy technology like ours. She's trying to get a handle on us the way she knows best, with the power patterns she remembers from her home place.”

“You're kidding,” I said. “I didn't see anything like that in the auditorium this afternoon!”

“Neither did I,” Barb said, “but my camera saw it. And that's not all. This is one I took later on. I snuck back in and there was nothing to see, but I snapped a few frames anyway to get evidence, you know, of the broken chair. But look what shows up in the picture!”

She rinsed off a print in which Bosanka didn't appear at all. There was the auditorium stage, and laid out flat on it was a wide triangle of sticks with mismatched ashtrays at the points (I recognized a glazed green one in the shape of a frog from the principal's office). In each ashtray a little flame burned. Stage left, near the curtain, newspapers had been stacked in overlapping piles to make a kind of platform inside lines of acorns and dark twisty things—roots, maybe.

“You didn't actually see this stuff there?” I said.

“Nope.” Barb nudged me. “The camera's showing us the tracks of rituals Bosanka must have done in there earlier. I put that splinter of my hand-mirror inside the Leica. This camera takes pictures of magic now!”

“Bosanka's magic,” I said. “God, Barb, this is wonderful! You're—you're the world's first psychic spy!” I squinted at the second picture. “That's a bed on the stage, isn't it? Made of newspapers?”

Barb nodded eagerly. “It's like the auditorium is her cave, see? Her lair. She lays out this stuff at night and then she takes it all up again in the morning, before anybody comes. She's been living in the school, Valentine. Sleeping there, raiding the kitchen for food—why not?”

My scalp crept. “But what are the designs for?”

“Power patterns, to protect her while she sleeps,” Barb said in a hushed tone.

Bosanka had tried to make herself a guarded place, a place where she felt secure, wound around with scraps of magic from her old world that she hoped would keep our world at bay while she was off her guard, resting. The idea of Bosanka feeling vulnerable enough to need something like that made me feel vaguely ashamed of myself. She was a person, after all, who was good and scared in a strange place, just as Lennie had said.

“Last one,” Barb said, fishing the next print out of the smelly developer with her tongs and putting it in to rinse. “Whew. Look at that.”

An off-center shot showed a parade of human-size animals drawn in chalk, marching down one wall of the auditorium: leaf-takers. The scene in the jeans store came rushing back to me—drippy fog and the big, doggy-smelling animal whickering anxiously to itself while it patted and turned the wad of purple leaves between its paws.

There in the auditorium Bosanka had drawn more of these creatures, images from home. Maybe she'd hoped to lure her people to her by picturing plentiful game for them.

If she weren't so dangerous, it would have been pathetic. Heck. It was pathetic anyway.

Barb turned in the cramped space to take down some smaller prints from where they were clothespinned to a wire to dry. “These are some shots I took in the park yesterday on the beginning of the roll. Couldn't figure out what any of it was, but I think now I know.”

One picture showed a row of pine twigs planted neatly in the ground like small green plumes, with white pebbles placed carefully between them. In the next shot, a parade of gray sticks had been jammed into some cracks in a low, rounded outcrop of rock. Tied to each stick by a tight binding of colored thread was a feather.