The Cabinet of Earths (16 page)

It was! An utterly transfigured Cousin Louise! Not younger, no—but so glowing, alluring, enchanting! What had she done to herself? Then Maya remembered the honey jar and felt her stomach turn to ice.

But she had only a moment to gape at the newly splendid Louise before she had to hop to the side again as the man before her made another swipe at the bottle.

“I see you have some of my property,
mademoiselle
,” he said, while she recovered her balance. “Be a good girl, now, and return it. And then we'll go find your brother, shall we? Because remember how we spoke of ambrosia, Maya? I have something very delicious, you know, for you to try.”

“You mean this?” said Maya, bringing out the empty silk case from her pocket. “You mean this ‘gift'? You mean, so I could be hooked on
anbar
like all the rest of them? And be guilty all my sparkly, beautiful life because you had fed me my own
brother
? And be addicted, and pathetic, and totally under your thumb? Is that what you mean? Because if it is—”

But at that moment a voice broke into her tirade: a sweet, arresting, and melodious voice, with the hint of a laugh just under its surface.

“Now, now, now, now . . .” said that voice. And Maya stopped short, aghast.

Cousin Louise came across the stage; under those tremendous lights she was so radiant, she seemed to glow with some inner light. The eyes of the audience were fixed on her. Maya herself could hardly look away. There was nothing invisible about this Cousin Louise! No, she was downright
compelling
. Charming. Glorious. And now the beautiful, radiant woman came right up to the side of the purple-eyed Fourcroy and rested a delicate hand, for a moment, against his arm.

“Give me a minute,
mon ami
,” she said to him, in her low and newly thrilling voice. “She's a reasonable child. She'll listen to me.”

Maya looked at them both as if from a tremendous distance. Her mind could not grasp any of this, but she could not take her eyes off of them. The purple-eyed Fourcroy was staring at Cousin Louise in dazed admiration; you could tell he didn't recognize her in her new, glorious self. But then, again, who would?

Cousin Louise turned to face Maya now.

“This man is the creator of
anbar
, you know, my dear.”

“Yes,” said Maya, the word just managing to struggle out somehow through her tense lips.

“And, ah, Maya,
anbar
is a quite remarkable substance, wouldn't you say?”

And for a moment Cousin Louise actually
preened
! Maya could say nothing at all; she just stood there and gaped.

“And now he would like his bottle back,
ma fille
. What do you think, my dear, shall we give him back his earths?”

Her voice was so soft and convincing; it seemed to want to reel its hearers right in. Maya stared at her in horror, half-transfixed by that voice and those eyes. Cousin Louise, turned into one of the beautiful people! It was hard to fathom, really.

And then a thought came into her mind that was so terrible in every respect that Maya's heart quailed for a moment: Who was it, after all, who had put the
anbar
in that honey jar? No, there was no way around it, when you looked the thing squarely in the face: This disaster, too, was
all Maya's fault
.

Behind Cousin Louise she could just see the face of her cousin-uncle Fourcroy. He was beginning to smile. Cousin Louise smiled, too, brilliantly, entrancingly.

It was so hard to resist that voice, that musical, soothing voice. Maya shook herself a little, trying to recover some shred of stubbornness.

“You should know, though,” she said, trying not to let her voice wobble even a bit. “The Cabinet of Earths—it doesn't even exist anymore. Not as it was, anyway. Look!”

And she pulled out the iridescent disk that hung from her neck on its bit of string and flashed it in her cousin-uncle's face.

“Here it is, your Cabinet of Earths! That's all that's left of it now—right there, that pretty piece of glass! It didn't save anybody, not really; it ruined them. So I destroyed it.”

“Did you?” said the splendid Cousin Louise. (In the audience there were scattered exclamations, and out of the corner of her eye Maya saw a few people jump to their feet in alarm. But her attention was entirely on the radiant face before her.) “That was very hotheaded of you,
chérie
, wasn't it? But at least, as we can see, you saved this particular bottle. Good girl. It's the right thing to do—I know you know it. We must give your uncle back his earths. . . .”

And at that moment, as Maya searched in vain for some way to stand her ground against this beautiful, shining, corrupted version of Cousin Louise, the lid of one of those brilliant eyes made a sudden, lightning dip: a wink.

“Oh, but don't you do it,
ma fille
!” the old Fourcroy was shouting from his place at the foot of the stage. “They're no good, these people!”

Maya's arms figured it all out before her brain even got to the question. Before she could even ask herself what that wink might mean, the bottle was in the hands of the charming, terrifying Cousin Louise.

“All right, then,” said Maya, her voice surprising her by sounding both quiet and calm. Inside her head, though, her thoughts were moving almost too quickly, jumping and shouting, tumbling all over the place. Somewhere, very far away, it seemed, there was a faint howl of frustration from someone, an old man's howl.

“Aha!” said Cousin Louise, whirling around to the purple-eyed Fourcroy. “Now you, my dear
monsieur
! Hold out your hands!”

And he did stretch out a hand, eagerness flickering in every corner of his beautiful face.

Everywhere in that room, people sucked in their breath and held it. Maya's heart beat very fast—and then seemed to pause, waiting—

Cousin Louise smiled for a moment, her warm, new, alluring smile—and then in one swift motion tipped the old green bottle over, so that the earth came pouring out into the man's smooth hand.

“I am Louise Lavirotte Aron Marmier,” she said, still smiling, but the smile was darker now, and terrifying. “One of the children,
monsieur
, whom you drained. But you see: We do not forget.”

He shouted in surprise when the first clumps touched him. Horror and disbelief contorted his face for a moment, and then he put out his other hand, too, cupping them to catch as much of the earth as possible. It was very dark stuff, darker than coffee grounds, and it hissed slightly as it fell, hissed, and sank into his skin, leaving angry black streaks wherever it landed.

There was nothing Maya could have done; hardly even time enough to realize what was happening. She saw his face crumple and fold, his eyes fade, his hair lose its color, and the earth began spilling out of his hands onto the floor, where it evaporated with sizzles and pops. He gazed with alarm at the earth in his hands and then looked around for something, anything, to put it in, but there was nothing but the bottle, and that was still firmly in Cousin Louise's possession. And then a few moments later he was just a little old hunched-over man, an ancient little man, glaring up at them and muttering rude words under his breath while he stuffed handfuls of earth into his pockets.

The hush in the room had collapsed as soon as the earth started pouring into the man's hands, and now all around them the noise grew and grew. All of a sudden a low buzzing had entered the hall, as if a swarm of particularly tiny insects had finally reached the doors and slipped through them. Maya saw one or two of the beautiful people swat at something in the air around them; then a few others begin twisting about in alarm, as the first grains of earth reached their hands and their faces and began to work all the changes time always brings.

Oh, everywhere she looked now the beautiful people were crying out or slapping at their skin and the air or talking in frantic tones among themselves or even, some of them (the Dolphin's parents!), beginning to approach the stage, their lovely eyes full of loathing and fear.
They are going to eat us up now
, thought Maya incoherently. A little figure in the second row was just flinging back the great veil that had been wrapped around her bland face, a shrunken shadow of an old woman, still mousey but proud: the bag lady! And other people were standing up and shouting in confusion because they had just seen that beautiful young man with the purple eyes melt into something ancient and hobbled. “The bottle!” they were saying to one another. “Acid! Caustic! Assassin!” Angry, frightened words.

“You!” said the ancient little man right to Maya, while the chaos drowned everything out but the hatred in his voice and his eyes. “You idiot! You fool!” And then he turned away and shambled off to the side somewhere.

By then it was so loud in that hall that an old man's ravings didn't amount to very much; in fact, it was so loud that when the alarms began to wail, at first Maya hardly noticed. It just seemed like more shouting and shrieking. But then someone small came bounding across the stage to her and pulled happily on her arm.

“Maya! Maya! Look! It's the
police
!”

Nothing made James happier than sirens and police cars.

“Is that really our lost James?” said the splendid Cousin Louise. Tears were actually springing into her beautiful, expressive eyes. “Maya! Can it be?
Mon dieu!
But he looks almost unharmed!”

For a second or two James looked at this fancier version of Cousin Louise with interest, but more and more police were pouring into the room, followed finally by someone else he recognized and could wave at.

“Hey, look! That's our friend Valko,” he said to Louise. “Now we're all going to be arrested. Cool.”

“I quite doubt anyone will arrest you,” said Cousin Louise, dabbing at her eyes.

“Arrest us and throw us right into jail!” said James, undaunted. “But then I'll tell them all about it, how the chair was making me sick, and in a year or two they'll take the handcuffs off, probably.”

Maya couldn't wait a moment longer; she grabbed at Cousin Louise's elbow. There was something she had to ask now, before the chaos rose and swallowed the stage they were standing on.

“Cousin Louise! How could you take that stuff?” she said. “You were behaving like one of them. I thought it had eaten
you
, the
anbar
!”

Cousin Louise looked at her with eyes that, despite being more beautiful than any ordinary eyes, were still full of all the most human sorts of things—sadness and affection and love.

“My dear Maya,” she said. “When I heard he had taken your brother, I knew it was time. And even then, I swore: only once, and only for revenge. Some child was drained of its joy and its luck for that
anbar
. Revenge! Oh, I swore that with every gram I ate.”

“But I had the bottle of earths,” said Maya. “You could have just let me throw it at him, or something.”

Cousin Louise shook her head so violently her hair almost crackled in the light.

“Never!” she said. “
Non!
What sort of cousin must you think I am? Revenge is another kind of poison,
ma fille
. And I am old, and I have a very tough stomach. So!”

But then Valko, a grin of relief spread very wide across his face, was already bounding up onto the stage.

“I called the police,” he said. “When I got your note. I called Cousin Louise, and then I worried about it for a while, and then I thought since it was kidnapping, really, I'd better call the police. Do you mind?”

James, more than anyone else, perhaps, did not mind. By the time they left that building, Maya's brother had gotten to tell his story a dozen times already:
Cocoa
,
chair
,
she rescued me!

Never in all their investigations, however, did the police find any trace of this mysterious uncle who had offered James hot cocoa: Henri de Fourcroy had shuffled away through the doors and passages he knew better than anyone else, and by the time they came looking for him, he was gone.

Chapter 17
Three Grains of Earth

I
magine that!” said Maya's father, rustling the newspaper a little in his hand. “They were running some sort of a kidnapping ring through that house near James's school—you know, the one where that fourth cousin seven times removed lives, or whatever he's supposed to be. And then there was a plague of bugs or something, too. They all came out of their theater looking like smallpox victims—that's what it says here, anyway.”

“Really?” said her mother. “Maya, did you hear that? You should probably stay away from there for a while.”

“He's gone now, anyway,” said Maya. “I told you that.”

“He had a scary chair,” said James, looking up from a croissant. “I'm glad he got old and went away.”

Their mother laughed.

“Over thirty, was he?” she said. “A real geezer. Too bad we can't all win makeovers or some such, like Cousin Louise.”

“No kidding!” said their father. “Nearly fell off my chair when I first saw
her
.”

Because it turns out that even when you try to tell your parents the truth, they hear what they want to hear, or what they're capable of hearing. Maya tried very hard with her own parents, but all the talk of
anbar
and Cabinets and mortalities kept in bottles just washed right over their heads and away.

Oh, well! Maya took a thoughtful bite of her croissant, just as the faint click of the dining room clock finally managed to catch her attention.

“Shoot!” she said, and jumped up. In five minutes the bell at the
collège
would ring and the gates swing shut. “I'm late
again
! Hey, did somebody do something with my schoolbag?”

“
I-do-on't-have-school, To-day-is-a-Wednes-day
,” sang James under his breath. There, what's more, was her bag: hanging smugly on the back of her chair. It wasn't even worth it, pausing to frown at her brother. She was too busy with her jacket just then, squeezing her arms into the sleeves while stumbling toward the hall.

“Oh, right, and I'm going to be home a little late afterward,” she said, remembering just in time. “I thought I might take Valko over to see the old Fourcroy today. The nice one. With the sets.”

“Seventh cousin four times removed?” said her father.

“He's moving to the coast,” said Maya. “He's going to find a little shop somewhere, he says, in plain sight of the sea, and he's going to live there and make dollhouses.”

“Lovely!” said Maya's mother. “Good for him!”

“Ooh, he's the one Maya broke the cabinet of,” said James. “I never get to break things. It's not fair.”

Their parents paid no attention to him. Only Maya shot him a sharp glance. She still wondered sometimes how many drops of charm had been left behind in the tubing in the Salamander House. Couldn't be very many. But now, it was true, James could walk through a crowded store and not every head would turn. “Doesn't James seem a little older, somehow?” Maya's mother had said just the other day, with a sigh. “Must be the French schools.”

It gave Maya's heart such a pang this morning that she ran all the way back to the table, bell or no bell, to give him a last-minute sisterly hug.

It had all worked out all right in the end, right? Her brother was safe and mostly fine, the purple-eyed Fourcroy was gone, the Cabinet no longer holding anyone under its spell. One day this week she had even seen Eugène de Raousset-Boulbon sitting at an ordinary, everyday restaurant table with his no-longer-so-young parents, so that was all right. But still she felt a little restless inside, just the slightest bit sad and loose-endish.

There had been that evening when Maya's mother had come in to kiss her good night, and Maya had suddenly found it hard, hard, hard to let her go.

“Do you
really
not mind, not living forever and ever?” she had said into her mother's ear. “I could have saved you, putting a bottle for you in the Cabinet of Earths. Do you really not mind?”

“Oh, Maya, what is it with you and those bottles?” her mother had said, but she had hugged Maya very tightly all the same. “People can't be saved in jars! Think how boring! Never changing!”

But sometimes that's exactly what a person wants, isn't it? A world with
no change
.

She hadn't meant to say anything about it to Valko, but he took a sideways look at her after school and suggested they take their out to their favorite bench in the park (past the Fountain of Lost Children, where the sad cherubs were pondering the mound of bouquets left at their feet by sentimental people after the events of the weekend:
Stéphane
, 1961;
Juliette
, 1962—all of them “lost,” after all, as it turned out, since how could anyone really find you again, once you had been drained of your charm, your appeal, your
anbar
?). And then somehow after the sandwiches were gone, they ended up doing a long lap around the park while the late October sun got thinner and thinner. Just talking it all over one more time.

And by the time they came to the end of the story and looked up from the sidewalk, there they were again, at the door of the Salamander House.

“He's gone now,” said Valko, misreading Maya's shiver, which was really at least 60 percent due to the wind. “Can't cause you any more trouble.”

“The way he withered up when the earth touched him,” said Maya, and she hugged her jacket close to her sides. “All his beautifulness just withered right away.”

“Caustic stuff,” said Valko. “Wonder what it really was, in that bottle. Not ordinary earth, obviously. I used to have this huge chemistry set, years ago: holes in the carpet and puffs of smoke. My mom threw it out one day when I was at school.”

But he stopped and gave Maya another look, a quieter, warmer look than you might have expected from all those words, so she decided not to be too discouraged by the chemistry set.

“Earth,” she said again firmly. “It's what mortality looks like, extracted.”

“Well,” said Valko, in his diplomatic way, “
something
happened to that awful man. That's for sure.”

The wind picked up just then; even the brass salamander on the door looked like it wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere warmer, a place where it could curl up like a cat on a hearth. Maya wrapped her arms more tightly around herself and shivered again.

“They still had the Alchemical Theater all blocked off the last time I was here,” said Valko. “Not to mention crawling with police.”

But when they moved down the sidewalk to take a look, there was no one there at all, just long strands of police tape fluttering in the wind.

“Bet they're off having lunch,” said Valko. “Or carting more evidence away.”

They stood there for a moment, just looking at the dead leaves eddying on the theater steps. Then Valko made a tiny motion with his feet, a well-maybe-we-should-keep-moving-on sort of gesture. Which made perfect sense, considering the temperature of the air.

“Wait a sec,” said Maya. She was trying to figure something out. Namely: Why did she suddenly need to duck under that police tape and climb up to the theater's door?

“What are you doing?” said Valko.

But he followed her, all the same. Ducking under police tape was really much more Valko's cup of tea than Maya's, under most circumstances.

“I think I must have left something in there,” said Maya as she put her hand on the door. “Why can't I remember what?”

And the door wasn't even locked.

Inside the hall the air was very dim. Oval glints of glass from the doors leading into the theater proper. And through those doors, a cave of darkness where that bright, bright theater had been.

“Hm,” said Valko, and she heard him rustling through the pockets of his backpack. But she was trying very hard to put her finger—to put her mind's finger—on that missing thing, whatever it was, that had been haunting her all day. All week. In fact, since that terrible Saturday—

And then she knew what it was she was looking for, stumbling all zombie-like down the dark aisles of the Alchemical Theater.

The
hourglass
.

“There!” said Valko, some steps behind her, and a little puddle of yellow light started wobbling along the floor in front of her feet. He had found his flashlight. “Ever since the power went out at the embassy that night, I've kept a—”

“Hurry,” said Maya, interrupting. “There's a door at the back of the stage.”

The flashlight made the rest of the dark even darker. Shadows everywhere.

“This is a little bit nuts,” said Valko. He sounded quite cheerful about it, though. “Where are we going?”

“Back here,” said Maya. “Oh, watch out, there's more of that tape. Wait.”

She wriggled her way past the tape and through that other door. And in this part of the theater, the darkness became something almost solid. Valko's flashlight couldn't do much against it, just flicked to the right and left. More doors. Except for their breathing and the soft scuffing noises their careful feet made against the floorboards, there was no sound in this part of the theater. None whatsoever.

“It's that one,” said Maya in a whisper, waving her arm toward the left end of the hall. “I remember now. Quick!”

She practically ran to that door, pushed it open even ahead of Valko's dim light, and then stood there, looking from one sort of darkness into another. The round room. The tree. She just felt it all there in the dark, as if it had been waiting a very long time for them to arrive.

“Whoa,” said Valko, turning his flashlight this way and that. A glimpse of carved branches, the glint of amber eyes, the backs of those benches, more police tape—she couldn't see properly from here.

“Watch out, there are steps,” said Maya as she felt her way down toward the center, where the trunk was. It was hard to see, because of the tape.

It was hard to see—because behind the tape, nothing was there.

“Turn that light off!” said Maya in distress. The light must be tricking her eyes.

“Really?” said Valko, but there was a click, and the room tumbled into blackness.

Maya felt forward with her hands, found the stump of the tree, yes, but where the hourglass had been—nothing. Her hands were as blind as her eyes.

The hourglass was gone.

And all that vague sense of loss that had been sloshing around inside her since that Saturday coalesced around this one plain fact: The hourglass was no longer there.

“It's gone,” she said helplessly into the empty dark. “Where'd it go?”

“Hey, Maya,” said Valko. “Look up.”

It wasn't so completely dark, after all. There were tiny stars above their heads, peeking through the branches of the wooden tree. Pointless, glittering stars.

“Valko,
listen
. There was an hourglass here, before,” said Maya. “I've got to get it back. It stole my earth.”

Valko flicked the flashlight back on, and the darkness instantly rearranged itself yet again: shadows everywhere.

“You want some old hourglass that's been carted off by the evidence guys?”

“I want my earth back,” said Maya. “It has three grains of my earth. That's what I want back.”

There was a pause.

“Explain how you're figuring this,” said Valko.

“I was in this room, that Saturday! I was tricked somehow. I put my hands on the hourglass, and it sucked the earth right out of me. Not a lot of it. But still. I want it back.”

“Because—?”

Because it was supposed to be for her mother, if anybody, that hourglass. So her mother could have been safe and well, not just for now, but forever and ever. It was like an ache that wouldn't let up, having to let go of that dream. And it was awful to think that the only mortality salted away, after all of that, was just some tiny part of Maya's own.

And those weren't even the only reasons. She gritted her teeth.

“Those awful people!” she said. “The Dolphin's awful parents! You may not care, but I do. I don't want to turn into
that
, with all the earth sucked out of me. I mean, I didn't lose much of it, really. Three grains! Nothing! But what those people were willing to do to James! What they did to Cousin Louise! That terrible Uncle Fourcroy with his terrible eyes—”

—What was it that happened then?

Almost nothing.

The tiniest of rustles, off in a corner. The shadows shifting ever so slightly. Or maybe it was just Valko's flashlight, flickering for a moment because the battery was not really very new. But whatever it was, the whole world changed.

In that instant they both became very aware of certain things, like the fact they were in a dark, dark room in a building filled with shadows. They weren't supposed to be there, nobody knew they were in there, they were completely alone, and something was rustling in the corner.

They looked at each other, turned, and skedaddled, not even caring anymore about the noise their feet made against the floor, or the way their elbows and shins kept banging into walls, doors, the backs of chairs. They didn't stop until they were out again on the sidewalk in front of the theater, their lungs sobbing for air and their hearts thumping like crazy.

“And
oops
,” said Valko, raising his head just for a millisecond. “Here comes the police.”

Indeed, a
gendarme
was just at that very moment wheeling around the corner, coming back to his post from wherever he'd been. He took one frowning look at Valko and Maya and warned them away from the steps with a crisp wave of his hands.

“A
llez-vous en
,”
said the policeman. “Off you go. Nothing to see here.”

As soon as they were out of the policeman's sight, Maya and Valko had to lean against the wall for a moment, caught somewhere between gasping for breath and laughter.