The Cabinet of Earths (8 page)

The door opened with a little click. James slipped under Maya's arm and into the hallway beyond, but Cousin Louise stayed still for a moment longer, looking up at the building and thinking something over. Her vague, inexpressive eyes seemed almost—but perhaps it was just a trick of the light—clouded with doubt.

“Are you coming in?” said Maya, as politely as she could manage. She could already hear James looking noisily for the right button on the intercom inside. “F!” James was saying. “F! Like Forest!”

“Caution,” said Cousin Louise under her breath. “Caution.”

But she came in all the same.

Chapter 9
Hot Chocolate and Anbar

T
hey tiptoed up the stairs to the fourth floor and right into an argument.

“Be reasonable,” a man was saying to the purple-eyed Fourcroy. “You know she can't go on without it. She feels like she's dying, she says. Only the
anbar
really perks her up anymore. It is the only miracle she has left, now that time looms so very large before her.”

Henri de Fourcroy looked slightly bored. His eyes wandered away from the man at his door and caught sight of James and Maya coming up the stairs, Cousin Louise trudging along behind them.

“Ah, but
monsieur!”
he said, his beautiful eyes brightening. “As you can see, my guests have arrived! Perhaps another day?”

And then he managed in one flowing gesture to usher James and Maya (and Cousin Louise behind them) into his entrance hall—and leave the complaining man outside on the landing behind the door.

“We brought you cookies,” said James, holding the tin out in front of him. “We baked them ourselves.”

“How kind of you,” said their cousin-uncle. “How unnecessarily thoughtful!”

Maya was feeling rather unsettled, for some reason, and Cousin Louise lowered herself into a chair by the door.

“That's our babysitter today,” said James, leaning toward the cousin-uncle in a confiding sort of way. “Our mother would have come, but she's sick.”

The purple-eyed Fourcroy clicked his tongue against his palate in a sympathetic way.

“Come on in, come on in,” he said, and he led them down the hall to the living room.

Cousin Louise just stayed where she was, a human-sized shadow in a chair, but the younger Fourcroy took no notice of her. He was quite engrossed in his conversation with James, and Maya walked down the hall silently behind the two of them, her eyes, for the most part, on the floor. If she looked left, she might see the study again, the one where her hand had snatched the small velvet case and made her a thief. She tried instead not to look in any particular direction at all. And then she heard James say, in his cheerful way—

“Hey, Uncle Fourcroy, what is
anbar
, anyway?”

“Shall we try these cookies of yours?” asked the cousin-uncle. “Should I pass around little plates? What do you think?”

“You don't need plates for chocolate chip cookies,” said James. “You just reach in and pick them up, like this.”

The carpet in this room was a deep red, with branches of green snaking through it and butterflies perched on
the fuzzy woven twigs. And here and there in the pattern and branches and leaves, just the slightest hint—glinty silk eyes or flickery tail—of a salamander. Maya worked away at the wings of one of the bright little knotted butterflies with the toe of her shoe. It was a way of not listening too hard to the conversation James and the younger Fourcroy were having, and she became so engrossed in that carpet and those butterflies that she didn't even notice, for some time, that the conversation in the room had lulled, and Henri de Fourcroy was now looking straight at her.

“Will you also have a cookie, Maya?” asked the cousin-uncle.

She jumped in her chair.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

“They are truly delicious,” said the elegant young man with warmth. “I seem most fortunate in my choice of cousins.”

“You were going to tell me what
anbar
is,” said James. Maya hushed him, but it made no difference. Henri de Fourcroy looked at James, and then (a moment later, perhaps?) relaxed into a broad smile.

“Have you heard of ‘ambrosia'?” he said. “The food of the gods. Perhaps like these sweet cookies you have been so kind to bring?”

“
Anbar
is chocolate chip cookies?” said James.

“Well,” said the purple-eyed Fourcroy. “A metaphysical substance, actually. Strange words, yes? But we use them to say that some things, dear James, cannot be made or explained by science alone. Many very useful and wonderful things! You could fill a whole pharmacy with them. That is, in fact, the chief work of our Society. Quite a noble and interesting work, too, if I do say so myself.”

“You mean it's a
medicine
?” said James, sounding very disappointed.

“Much better than medicine,” said the elegant young man. “Ambrosia from
a-mbrotos
, you know. A food for immortals. That's Greek, my young cousin. An old, old language. Could you stay a bit longer, so that I could prepare for you a little drink of
chocolat chaud
? Because that also, to be honest, may be a bit like ambrosia.”

“Cocoa?” said James. “Maya, can we stay for cocoa? I really, really want to.”

“And a little something special, perhaps,” added the purple-eyed Fourcroy, with a smile, “for your sister, who seems like someone who might already appreciate the charms, as it were, of a thing like ambrosia. . . .”

“Let me go ask,” said Maya, standing up right away. How eager she was to get out of this room and away from the discussion of
anbar
,
anbar
,
anbar
! Was that what he was getting at, with those hints and wise smiles? Had he guessed? Did he know? Oh, she hadn't meant to steal that little case; it had just happened. But here, in this place, she found herself feeling more and more uncomfortable.

The purple-eyed Fourcroy hardly noticed her; he was intent instead (as people usually were) on James, who was really on a roll today, all sweetness and charm. “Never much need to worry about James,” her mother had said with a laugh once, when he had wandered off in the supermarket for a moment, only to reappear in the midst of a small crowd of doting clerks and checkers. “Everyone will always want to see him safely home!”

Oh, but thinking of her mother made Maya's stomach hurt. Was she all right? Were they back from the hospital, perhaps, by now?

In her worry she didn't even notice for a second or two that Cousin Louise's chair in the entry hall was empty. But she would never have just left them there! No, there she was, a shadowy figure signaling to Maya from the shadowy corridor that ran back into the darkness to the left.

Maya went down that other hall to the doorway where Cousin Louise now stood.

“Do you see this?” asked Cousin Louise, in a voice so quiet it was almost drowned out by the ticking of a clock farther down the hall.

Maya looked through the door. It was a room that looked out on the inner courtyard. The walls were green. And in that room was (Maya's mind faltered for a moment, trying to find a word that described what she was seeing) a chair.

A dentist's chair. No. A dentist's chair if that dentist lived in some other, more ancient universe than ours. Everywhere vines and branches of metal twining about. A bright phoenix with amber eyes flying up one of the sides. Were those candlesticks along the top?

And arranged in neat rows on the old-fashioned counter on the left side of the room: tongs and test tubes, spoons and funnels, odd twisting devices she had never even imagined in her strangest nightmares, all embellished and bright, all alive with patterns, all beautiful, all full of loveliness and menace.

“Oh!” said Maya, and the dry weight of Cousin Louise's hand settled in warning on her arm.

That was not all: from the ceiling hung a long loop of string. And from the loop dangled (like a small, square sheet hung up to dry) a photograph. Not an ordinary photograph, but something all shivering with light and depth. She shook off Cousin Louise's arm and went forward a couple of steps, just to see (but some part of her seemed already to know what she would find, and that part trembled and shrank back).

A shining, luminous boy. And next to him two shadowy figures, the outline of one of them slightly marred, in the place where that person's coat pocket must have been, by one pinprick of white light, as though something had pierced the picture at some point and flawed it, when it was being developed.

“Time for us to go,” said Cousin Louise. “Quiet, quiet. Go back to fetch your brother, please, and we will leave.”

James! But that's who it was, the luminous boy. It was James.

And there was writing along the bottom edge of the photograph, she saw that now: “
Charismatograph reading: 326.8
_X
. A record!—and they are Lavirottes.”

And in smaller letters still:
“Perfect arrangement. The Cab. needs its new Keeper.
”

“Maya,” said Cousin Louise from the doorway. “Touch nothing. We must immediately leave.”

Maya jumped a little in her skin. Then she turned around and walked back to the entry hall, back down the other corridor to the comfortable room where she could hear the clear voice of her brother, laughing.

“There you are! Can we?” he said as soon as he saw her. “Can we stay for cocoa?”

Henri de Fourcroy looked up at Maya, his purple-blue eyes again seeming to take the measure of something in her.

“We have to go now,” said Maya, keeping her voice as steady as possible. She could not quite bring herself to look into those lovely, unsettling eyes, so she directed everything she said to James alone. “Mom might be waiting for us, you know. She might be home already.”

“But I'm glad you liked the cookies!” said James to the purple-eyed Fourcroy as Maya propelled him down the hall toward the door.

“Oh, very much!” said the cousin-uncle, and for a moment he looked as if he were remembering the flavor of something, and wanting more of it. Hungry. That was how he looked.

Cousin Louise stood up from her chair by the front door with all the convincing dullness of someone who had been sitting there for an hour without moving. You would really never guess, to look at her, that she was capable of poking about in an apartment's dark corners.

“Come, children,” she said, and so they left, James waving good-bye as they started down the stairs.

Until they were back on the street and walking away from the salamander, neither Maya nor Cousin Louise said a word. James chattered on undaunted, and when they came to the next long block, Maya let go of his hand so he could skip ahead. She had been holding on to him too tightly: she had to shake her fingers to loosen them up again. But James bounced in zigzags along the broad sidewalk before them as if he hadn't noticed a thing.

“I was in that chair,” said Cousin Louise out of the blue. “I remember that now. I was a tiny child in that chair. Only that. And his eyes.”

“Not
his
eyes,” said Maya. “He's too young.”

“No, I am sure he is the one,” said Cousin Louise in her flat voice. “Oh, what an unlucky family we are! He took me in. He's the one, without a doubt.”

That couldn't be, of course. The purple-eyed Fourcroy was much younger than Cousin Louise, for one thing. But it seemed useless to point that out. Cousin Louise marched along the sidewalk, and Maya walked beside her, not daring to interrupt.

“And then I was different,” said Cousin Louise. “After that, I was changed. It was him, I am completely certain. Ah, here we are.”

James still had enough energy to run up the stairs, but nobody came striding to the apartment door when he rang and rang the bell. Maya, fifteen steps behind him, listened with every fiber of her being for her mother's footsteps, and heard nothing. No one was home, after all. The apartment seemed very dark and cold and strange, even after Cousin Louise had made her methodical way from room to room, turning on lights and taking eggs out of the refrigerator for an omelette.

They were eating that omelette (and listening to James talk about his plans for some game he was going to play with the other boys during tomorrow's morning recess), when there was finally the sound of a key in the door. Maya bolted into the hall: Her father was there, alone, pulling his jacket off, looking tired. She had gotten to him so quickly that she had caught a glimpse of his face before he had had time to put the proper parental expression on it (calm, comforting, confident). She had seen the familiar wear and worry there, the shadows under his cheekbones, before he brushed those shadows away and turned to greet her and James with a hug and a smile.

“She'll be fine,” he said. “They're just keeping her over-night for observation.”

“Observation?” said Maya.

“Oh, you know, running a few tests.”

Tests. Maya was still digesting that word when Cousin Louise came rustling up behind them, reaching for her coat.

“And so I depart,” she said. “Sylvie will be home tomorrow, I hope?”

Maya's father nodded. He was never quite comfortable around Cousin Louise. He became stiff, somehow, and he was not usually a stiff person.

But as Cousin Louise slipped out through the door, she put one cool hand on Maya's cheek and said, “Be careful, Maya. Be
prudente
.”

Once Cousin Louise had gone, it turned out their father was too distracted to ask them anything about their afternoon. He just listened to James ramble on about the chocolate chip cookies and let the rest of it drop, to Maya's relief. They were all tired.

Before going to sleep that night, however, she brought out the envelope of old photographs again, all those shining children smiling up at her from under their long-ago caps and berets. They were special, she could see that. Special, like James was special. The camera had figured that out somehow; it had known enough to make Maya a dull shadow, too. But what they meant, those pictures, what they were
for
, exactly—that she couldn't understand.

(
The Cab. needs its new Keeper.
That's what the terrible photograph had said.)

Her fingers ran over the numbers on the back of the photographs, and the worry grew in her until she had to put the pictures away and instead bring out the little cabinet from its hiding spot. Just seeing it again made a difference, and then the simple work of touching up the miniature cabinet's salamander and phoenix with the bronze paint she had found in a shop around the corner settled her down and dulled the edges of her troubles: the shimmering photographs, the hospital room too far away where her mother was sleeping. The little cabinet glittered in the light of her bedroom lamp; it alone, of everything and everybody in Maya's world (with the usual exception of James), seemed content with the way things were going in the universe at the moment.