A Box of Gargoyles (18 page)

Maya's mother didn't respond for a minute. She just smoothed Maya's hair against her head, again and again. It was calming, even though part of Maya was mad enough not to want to be calmed.

“You've been through too much,” said her mother finally. “That's the thing. I know it. And I'm so, so sorry about it. But I think this might end up all right. We have to let go. We can't control the future. Right? But sometimes things do go fine.”

Not nearly often enough, in Maya's experience. But what could she say?

“Can you let go of this a little bit?” said Maya's mother. “This is your vacation still. You enjoy these free days of yours. Don't let worries weigh you down. Hmm, Maya? In fact, I know what we could do right now, before Pauline comes over to frighten our poor ears. You could show me that box of old letters. . . .”

And she tipped her head toward the table, where there was indeed a nice, clear spot, all ready for papers.

When Maya, still a bit shattered around the edges, was pulling the box of letters from under the bed in her room, her fingers knocked against the other box, the Summer Box, and she drew it out, too, more slowly. The egg wanted her to peek in on it as it slumbered there in its silks. It was so beautiful! Something that beautiful should not be hidden away in a dark box—at least, not always. Not all the time. Not when someone like Maya's mother was around, who was so precious and fragile and who so loved beautiful things.

Before she had thought much further, the egg was in one hand, the box of letters in the other, and Maya was heading back out to the dining table, where her mother was waiting.

“Oh!” said her mother, when Maya set the gargoyles' egg down on the table in front of her. “What is that?”

“It came on my birthday,” said Maya. “It's so beautiful, I wanted to show you.”

“Your birthday?” said her mother, taking the egg very gently into her own hands. “But it's amazing, Maya. Look how there are trees painted on it. No, not painted. How's that done? And writing, too. How interesting! What does it say, do you know?”

“I think it says, ‘Keep me safe,'” said Maya. “‘Keep me secret and keep me safe.' I figure showing you is still pretty secret. And that's my name there; look. It's all in Bulgarian.”

“Oh!” said her mother again, and this time she really did seem startled. “Oh, Maya.
Valko
gave this to you?”

“It's a gargoyles' egg,” said Maya, seeing she was going to have to do some sidestepping.

“That's clever,” said her mother, with a smile that went very quickly from amusement to worry. “But it must be awfully valuable, don't you think? I just wonder whether Valko's parents—”

She must have caught a glimpse of Maya's face, because she brought herself up short.

“No, there I'm being silly. Just because it's so lovely and so different. It's a wonderful present, Maya, really. I've never seen anything like it. I can see why it says to keep it safe. You will, won't you? You'll keep it very safe?”

“Yes,” said Maya.

She wasn't sure about those gargoyles—they had had an agenda, sure, but then they had gone away.

And whatever the gargoyles were up to, their egg was beautiful, and it needed her help and her care.

Even her mother thought so, so that was that.

Maya Davidson made the promise deep in her heart: she would never let any kind of harm come to her mother, no matter what crazy thing her mother had fallen into. It was up to her to keep them all safe: her mother, the mysterious future new brother or sister (that her mind still rebelled against, to tell the truth), and the gargoyles' egg.

 
10
 

N
ow, how does a person get permission from his or her parents to wander the streets of Paris at one a.m., checking the latest warpings of the laws of physics? Well, clearly, one doesn't. Permission is not there for the getting.

That had Valko, in particular, scratching his head. As he explained to Maya (who tried very hard to see the whole matter from his perspective, since it clearly meant so much to him), this was the first chance in his whole life to test an important scientific hypothesis (the Strangeness-Repeats-Every-137-Hours-and-the-Radius-of-the-Strangeness-Grows-by-100-Meters-Each-Time Hypothesis) in a scientific way. It was better than all those years watching the barometer.

“Well, if you stay up until one, you'll still know the main thing,” said Maya. It was a drizzly, cold Tuesday, perfect for convincing you that winter was on its disheartening way. “You'll know the timing.”

“But there's just no way I'm going to be able to sneak out in the middle of the night to see how far it spreads this time,” said Valko. “There's
no way
. They've put in all this extra security at the embassy, since the wall exploded. Somebody probably thinks that was terrorism, right? Not that they tell me anything. So what do we do? I'm stuck.”

“We glue five thousand little cameras to walls everywhere?” said Maya.

“Right,” said Valko glumly. “Camera-equipped mini robots with night vision.”

They were hiding out under the awning of the impossibly fancy chocolate shop on the rue Saint-Dominique: little tiny Parisian monuments in chocolate, chocolate deer, chocolate bunnies, chocolate hearts. Why was it that you could not look at chocolate, even on a chilly day, without thinking of it melting?

That gave Maya an idea.

“The strangeness changes things, right?” she said. “What if we put out markers along the streets, like a trail of chocolate chips or something, and then the next day see which ones have become all crazy and weird?”

Valko grinned.

“That's it!” he said. “You're brilliant. Only not chocolate chips, because the pigeons will get them.”

That meant they had to pause to have a little argument about what objects (other than chocolate chips) were most likely to be changed by the strangeness, since it was so unpredictable: paper clips? pebbles? seeds?

“We won't make a mess, though, will we?” said Maya. “We'll have to pick up everything afterward.”

“Obviously!” said Valko. “You can't leave data just lying around!”

Now that they had a plan, they had to work fast. They found a spool of plain white thread and a couple of needles in the Davidsons' cleaning closet and made a hundred tiny little loops, onto each of which they threaded a tiny piece of cabbage (this had been Valko's idea: something living, but tough) and a paper clip. Over and over and over: thread cabbage, cut string, tie loop, add paper clip.

It was very tedious work, which, said Valko, just made it all the more authentically scientific.

But Maya preferred it to the next stage, when they walked the streets of the neighborhood, trying to stay very inconspicuous as they sprinkled the sidewalks with little test loops every few meters. It worried her to be doing something so similar to littering, even if it was really experimental research.

The egg that night was more restless than usual. She sat with it a long, long time, watching the forest pictures give way to city streets, city buildings, all sketched in great haste and vanishing almost as soon as they had appeared. She caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, of her own neighborhood as seen from hundreds of feet up in that tower; for a moment the Salamander House itself winked into view and then vanished. Carriages. Horses. Crowds in the streets.

“Go to sleep,” she said to it finally, and put it away in the Summer Box to rest.

Then she couldn't get to sleep for the longest time, either. She was bracing herself for that unpleasant feeling of magic washing over her, she realized, as silly as that was, so far from where the strangeness was centered.

And to think that when she was little, she had spent every single possible wish (first stars, birthday candles, white horses, holding-breath-through-tunnels) on “please, oh please, let magic be real!” She had longed for there to be exceptions in the ordinary, boring old everyday rules. And now her long-ago wish was coming true, and here she was, all tense with worry and unable even to sleep!

The thing she hadn't realized, way back then, was that if the world is full of exceptions, then what can you depend on? We want to be able to fly, but we also really, really, really want to know that when we put our foot down on the ground, the ground will be there. Reliably. Boringly. Every single time. We don't want gravity working only when it's in the mood! And that made her smile, finally, because it was such a Valkoish way of thinking about things.

In the end she got stubborn with herself: if the egg could go to sleep, then she could, too. She closed her eyes and toughed her way right into oblivion, so successfully that when the alarm rang the next morning, she felt, first surprised, and then smug.

She had been dreaming about forests, spreading like green fire across a stone-gray world. The tingle of it still danced in her fingertips as she ate her breakfast. Funny how some dreams linger.

Out on the streets it was cold and clear, the drizzle having moved on to bother somebody else's day. Maya walked along her street, picking up unchanged loops of thread with specks of old cabbage on them and tossing them into a shopping bag. If she had been fifty years older, and a little more hunchbacked, she would probably have looked like a crazy old woman. But at the freshly minted age of thirteen, she was not very noticeable. And the few who did notice her gave approving little nods, thinking she was picking up litter for a youth-group project or something.

She must have been on her fortieth loop of thread when she first saw a paper clip that had rolled itself into a little cone. And the miniature bit of cabbage had sprouted roots. She was just sticking the tape on to label it when Valko appeared at the end of the block, inching his way along.

“So? What time was it?” she stage-whispered in his direction.

Valko gave her a thumbs-up: one o'clock, just as they'd thought! (said his hands).

“Let's see what your loops look like,” he said aloud, as soon as he'd gotten closer.

She opened her bag.

“Normal, normal, normal, normal—except for this one right here.”

She showed him the distorted loop in her hand, but at the same time Valko was holding up his formerly svelte scientific notebook, now as swollen as a python digesting its dinner. He had been more organized than Maya; he was taping each loop to a separate page (and probably keeping track of exactly where he'd found it, too). He flipped through those pages, and on every one was—well, now, how to describe
that
? That notebook would have felt right at home in an art gallery.

Threads of all colors. Threads frayed into a silky splash. Cabbage exploded into bloom or turned crystalline.

“So this is the edge right here,” said Valko. “Four hundred meters, this time. That's my guess.”

He took the loop in Maya's hand to tape into his notebook, and Maya could see him thinking. His face, before her eyes, was changing from scientific triumph to Dark Worries.

“You see what this means,” said Valko.

“It's getting bigger?” said Maya. “We kind of knew that already.”

“But we didn't know the rate,” said Valko. “Of course, any getting bigger is pretty bad, but this is
doubling
. And if you notice, the effects are staying around longer, too.”

Right behind them, the whole sidewalk now kind of lunged to the left, right out into the street. To avoid a stone turtle, whose head came peeking out from a wall. And all the pedestrians were hurrying along that warped bit of sidewalk, as if it had always been that way. The cars made their way carefully around the curve, too, and some of the cars had rubber-and-metal shooting stars or cobras where their windshield wipers used to be. Even though it was hours and hours already since the strangeness had done these things to the city.

When you bend a piece of plastic the first time, it usually bounces pretty much back. But after a few more bends, the crease will show—it won't fade away. And eventually the plastic breaks.