The Bronze King

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Every clock I saw, in a store window or outside a bank, was stopped at a different time.

  My legs were aching from pounding along on concrete, even in my new running shoes. But with things the way they were, nothing was going to be able to carry me uptown faster than my own feet.

  I ran.

  At Forty-second Street I got a stitch in my side and I had to walk for a while. Then I ran again.

  At Fifty-third the stitch came back but this time I did what they say you can do if you try: I ran through it.

  At Fifty-ninth dirty gray steam billowed out of a grating two blocks away in a mean, hot cloud. I made a detour of an extra block.

  The sky was dark and sort of streaming the way it looks before a hurricane. I kept thinking, the clouds are coming from down here, from underground. The kraken is trying to bring on night early so it can gush up into the streets and take over.

  What was “sunset,” after all? The actual time the sun dropped down past the horizon, or when it got dark out? The kraken was trying to cheat.

  I didn’t think at all about Joel, not rationally. I only hoped. Maybe now that I had the key the kraken would be so busy coming after me, it would forget about him. Joel would get away somehow, or maybe Paavo would go get him out. I didn’t believe any of this for a minute, but I hoped.

  The key was clutched in my fist. I pumped along, soaking with sweat and with my lungs hurting. The few people out on Central Park West under that sky turned to stare after me. I must have looked like the person carrying the news that World War Three was starting, which maybe in some weird way was going to be true if I didn’t get to Paavo in time.

  Up here I could try to get a cab, but I knew that something would happen if one did stop for me. A manhole lid would fly off under us and smash the cab’s axle, a hunk of street would cave in and strand us, anything to keep me from getting to where I was going. If the kraken could tie up the traffic lights, it could surely do that.

  So I just stumped along, walking mostly because I could only run a few steps at a time now, I was so tired and achy.

  I passed a couple of cops at Seventy-second Street. They were talking to each other and they didn’t even see me shuffling along. What could I have told them if they’d noticed me?

  Past the museum, past the steep little park going down to the planetarium. There was the Eighty-first Street station.

  It was dark and windy, after sunset by that standard anyway, and Paavo wasn’t there.

  15

  The Kraken

  NOBODY WAS THERE. Not a soul, not a car moving in the street. Nothing.

  So it was up to me to go down into the subway and unlock the door in the blue wall and let Jagiello out.

  And I couldn’t do it.

  I tried. I went partway down the steps.

  I smelled the kraken stink, and I could hear the kraken moving deep in the tunnels. Its quarreling voices screamed and snarled among themselves as it heaved itself through the passages among the stopped trains. I stood there on the steps, hanging on to the wooden handrail with the key biting into my other palm, and I could not do it.

  I started walking, not thinking where I was going, pushed along by a mean, blustery wind under that black sky. Next thing I knew I was outside my own apartment building, looking up at the window to my room. Miles and a short elevator ride away.

  A woman in a bathrobe with her hair all wild was standing out in front staring down the street, her back to me. I walked softly, trying not to attract her attention—all I needed now was some street-crazy glomming on to me—but she must have heard something. She turned.

  “Tina? Is that you?”

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Don’t be mad, Mom,” I said, backing up. “Everything’s—” I was going to say, “okay,” but that would have been such an outrageous lie that I couldn’t get the word out.

  “Everything’s what?” she said. “And why should I be mad? Just because you’ve been missing for two days and a night? Not a word to me or anyone, just gone? Driving me entirely frantic and sending me blubbering to the police like a crazy woman? Mrs. Dermott called me. Who is this man you went to see Granny Gran with? My God, it was bad enough when I thought you’d run away with that Wechsler boy! I phoned his parents when I realized you were gone, and they really loved telling me that their precious Joel was gone too, believe me. They’ve never heard of this so-called musician, this old bum that the two of you have been hanging out with, getting into God knows what kind of trouble. So help me, I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this!

  “Now you show up looking like a refugee in the middle of the night—”

  “Mom, it’s only dinnertime.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s zero hour.”

  She started toward me. If I let her get hold of me, that would be that. It wouldn’t be my fault that I couldn’t go down into the subway with the key. It would be my mom’s decision; I was only a kid, after all, and she was my mother.

  But I backed away from her. My feet seemed to move on their own.

  She stopped. She stood up tall, which isn’t easy when you’re only an inch over five feet and getting a little round besides, and she said with this shaky calm that made me really nervous, “Well, are you coming upstairs with me? Or did you only come back here to see how crazy you’ve driven me?”

  She’d been crying a lot. Her eyes were all swollen and red, without any mascara or anything for once. I felt bad for her.

  “Listen, Mom,” I said, “I’ll come upstairs, in a minute. But there’s something I have to do first.”

  That was the first I knew that I was going back down into that station, which was maybe why I was whimpering with fear while I said this.

  “No, there isn’t,” she said in the same grim voice, only a little higher now. “All you have to do, young lady, is march yourself over here to me and into the elevator and into our apartment and into your room, where you will explain yourself to me with such conviction and burning truth that I may, I just may, at some point far in the future of your career as my child—for whom I am responsible—” (she screamed that part) “someday I may let you out again by yourself.”

  I backed up some more, feeling the key digging into my palm. I felt so awful for her—and for me—because there was nothing she could do and she didn’t even know it. I was the one who knew how things stood, and there was nobody who could do anything except me at this point.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Mom, I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?” she said. “You come here to me this minute!”

  I shook my head, my sight all blurry with tears. “I can’t, Mom. Going home won’t help, it isn’t safe. No place is safe. If I don’t finish what I have to do, terrible things are going to happen to the whole world.”

  Mom stood there with her hands in fists and she opened her mouth and shrieked at me, “What the hell are you talking about? You are a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl! You get over here this minute!”

  She lunged at me.

  I ran. I could hear her coming after me in her slippers, swearing, and crying. She yelled my name, she yelled “Fire” and “Police,” anything that might bring somebody out to help her stop me. She’s no dope, my mom.

  I cut down an alleyway and through a passage to the courtyards in the middle of the block, which I ran like a maze. Somehow I shinnied up the iron gate to the alley on the next street over and I raced for the Eighty-first Street station.

  Mom would have to go around half the block to intercept me, even if she knew where I was headed. She didn’t stand a chance.

  I dove down the steps of the Eighty-first Street station. The lady in the token booth yelled as I ducked under the turnstile. I skinned down the final steps onto the lower platform and into the hot, billowing stink of the kraken.

  The whole uptown station was boiling black, the lights glimmering dimly through. It was only a few yards to the
blue door on my left. I hesitated, trying to see, trying not to breathe, praying that somehow the kraken—it must be there, in the heart of that gritty, coiling heat—would not notice me, praying that I would find Paavo waiting here for me, ready to take over.

  I could just see, through the dirty air, the door to Jagiello’s prison. As I started toward it, out of the corner where the smoke had hidden them strolled the three Princes of Darkness.

  My own momentum carried me right into Tattoo’s chest. He grabbed me and laughed in my face—I smelled breath spray, can you believe that?—and the other two closed in.

  I could either freeze like a rabbit and lose everything, or I could move.

  I jerked my knee up as hard as I could, the way they tell you to in self-defense manuals. Tattoo went “Whuff!” and jackknifed so hard his chin collided painfully with my collarbone. He dropped. The other two were right behind him, laughing and jeering at him and at me, and there was no way I could get past them. None.

  I saw shimmering movement at the blue door. I saw a figure take form in front of it, someone shadowy and barely visible like a person standing behind a sheet of water—or a waterfall in a vestpocket park in midtown.

  Paavo—in some form, by some magic, it was Paavo. He reached upward with both hands, palms turned toward me, inviting.

  I jumped back and swung my arm and I threw the key with all my strength.

  As it spun through the air the Chewer made a grab for it. He missed. I saw the water shadow’s hand snatch the key from the air, and then the blue door opened a crack and the wavering figure vanished inside. The door shut again in the blink of an eye, as if it had never opened.

  I was left there alone in the station with the Princes and the screeching, snarling voices of the kraken.

  “You think that’s gonna change anything?” Pins-and-Grins said softly. “Now we’re going to take care of you.”

  The Chewer took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on the wall and moved toward me. Tattoo was kneeling on the platform, groaning, with his hands jammed between his legs. We all ignored him.

  There was no place left for me to back to.

  I was outraged. I could not believe it: I’d done it, I’d delivered the key, I’d done my part in saving the world, and I was about to be massacred anyway.

  The Chewer held a knife in his hand, the bright, sharp edge turned upward, toward me. Magic or no magic, I was going to get sliced up by a thug, me, Valentine Marsh. Unbelievable. I couldn’t breathe at all because if I did, I would start to scream.

  From behind the blue steel wall came a clanging like hammers on anvils. As we all turned to stare, the whole front of the wall groaned and screeched and tore away from its moorings. It fell slowly, with a long, thundering crash, on the platform.

  Out of the dark behind it a horse and rider charged. It was Jagiello.

  Pins grabbed for me—to use me as a shield, I think—but I twisted away and jumped behind a stanchion. He dodged the big bronze shoulder of the horse, but the horse curvetted sideways right into him. Too quickly for him to yell, Pins fell off the edge of the platform into the smoke.

  Tattoo, crouching near the horse’s feet, had yanked a length of chain from inside his jacket. He lashed out with it—I heard the chain rattle against the horse’s foreleg—and then the horse reared back and stomped down with both front hooves. Tattoo fell with a squawk like a squashed parrot and lay there curled over with his mouth wide open, trying to get some air.

  The Chewer grabbed hold of the drapery hanging over the horse’s rump and scrambled up behind Jagiello. He flung one arm around the king’s neck and jabbed wildly at the bronze face with his knife. The blade made a horrible screeching sound of metal on metal.

  Jagiello bent forward and heaved upward out of the saddle, and the Chewer was smacked hard against the ceiling of the station. His knife clattered down and bounced off Jagiello’s knee. The king shook himself hard and the Chewer slid off him like a sack of mud. Jagiello’s horse stamped and skittered, throwing its head and snorting like a kettledrum.

  There was a sound like something bigger than the world hissing its breath in. I saw Tattoo, still squirming, dragged toward the edge of the platform by a hazy loop of black, pulsing air. The limp body of the Chewer slid across the platform too, toward the tracks.

  The kraken was retreating, pulling the Princes with it. Tattoo stared at me as he was dragged past. His lips made the word help, and blood leaked out of his mouth.

  I reached toward him, I think.

  Jagiello’s crossed swords came down between Tattoo and me.

  One after the other, the two remaining Princes dropped off the platform, and there was this sudden silence. I thought I’d gone deaf. The light glinted on Jagiello’s swords, still lowered in front of me. The darkness was gone from the air.

  “Climb up,” the statue said, or anyway I heard the words “climb up.”

  I was scared to look at him. Even looming low over me like that, bent from the saddle, he was too big for the station.

  Climb up? Where in Shakespeare does anybody say that?

  But when a king tells you to do something, you know what? You do it. I put my foot on the crossing of the broad blades, grabbed his striped metal sleeve, and scrambled madly up onto his horse’s rump. With both arms stretched as far as they would go, I could hang on by hugging Jagiello and a lot of crumpled bronze drapery, his cloak. The metal of him was warm.

  The horse’s hooves rang like bells as it turned and galloped up the steps with me and the king stretched low on its neck to avoid the ceiling. We veered toward the turnstile, the bronze feet slipping a little on the concrete of the upper platform. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t: we had no clearance for a jump.

  We crashed straight through the exit gates and lunged up the steep stairs to the street. I heard this wild scream from the token booth behind us.

  Outside, it was full, black night. We took off across the avenue. I heard brakes and a man’s shout, and the horse leaped over a white van and then over the low stone wall bordering the park.

  I couldn’t breathe, the wind whipped my hair into my eyes, and I was going to be too sore to walk tomorrow if there was a tomorrow. I didn’t care.

  Jagiello aimed the crossed swords above the horse’s outstretched neck as if he steered with them instead of the reins. We raced downhill, across the bridle path, and up the long slope past the Shakespeare Gardens. Sparks flew up around the driving legs of the horse. We galloped in our own thunder, and overhead the clouds swung away from the face of a bright, full moon.

  I hung on for dear life, yelling the way you do on a roller coaster, to let the terror and the joy out of you and to feel brave. Up the hill to the top, and there was the big playing field opening out on our left, the Delacorte Theatre wall like a huge wooden barrel curving on our right, and the lake—

  The lake, silver gray in the moonlight, was boiling and seething.

  The king pulled the horse up.

  “Get down,” he said. He stuck one leg out. I held onto his bronze belt with both hands, put my foot on his instep, and swung down.

  My legs wouldn’t hold me. I landed on my butt on the pavement, feeling like a fool.

  But nothing could spoil that moment, nothing.

  The bronze horse shook its mane and flared its nostrils and sprang away down the strip of grass alongside the lake, heading for Jagiello’s empty plinth all the way at the other end. The horse would leap up into its place, the raised swords would do their magic and quiet the frothing water of the lake, and the kraken would be banished from my world. We had won.

  Something reared up out of the water, up and up and up.

  It was huge and glistery wet in the moonlight, black as ink, and roaring. Water streamed off it, and its eyes were hot red sparks set high in its towering shape. Everything shimmered behind the steam that flowed off the creature’s black-bright hide. The kraken had come.

  I covered my ears, not to hear the chittering-snarling,
which was now a roaring, but I couldn’t stop looking, I couldn’t close my eyes.

  The thick neck of Jagiello’s horse doubled and its feet skidded on the turf. The centaur-king turned to face the kraken with his crossed blades raised. He shouted in a voice like the bells of a hundred steeples. If there were words, I didn’t hear them.

  Then he lowered the swords and uncrossed them so that the points were aimed straight over the horse’s bent neck and at the kraken. He charged into the lake.

  Sheets of water shot up from the plunging bronze hooves—and the horse stopped, swayed, almost fell. It dragged one hoof free with a fat, sucking sound, and I realized that its great heavy feet must be caught in the mucky lake bottom.

  I saw the kraken arch over them both. The horse threw its metal head and strained its huge shoulders. Jagiello stood high in his stirrups, his body curved taut like the horse’s body, because of course they were one being, one great, mired, doomed figure.

  I found something heavy in my pocket. It was Granny Gran’s chain-link purse still heavy with silver dollars. It hefted beautifully. I hauled back and fired it off as hard as I could, and it smacked that coiling mass somewhere high up and stuck there.

  The kraken voices shrieked, the sparky little eyes turned and glittered in my direction.

  It breathed at me.

  Not fire, just an incredible hot stench rolling over me that could have suffocated a dinosaur. I wanted to throw up and my eyes streamed tears.

  I grabbed what I thought was a rock lying at the base of a tree—I think it was a little kid’s shoe, actually—and I threw that too. I yelled, “Kraken, kraken, dirty, lousy, rotten kraken, stinking kraken, come and get me!”

  It came. I caught a glimpse of the bronze horse-and-rider struggling back toward shore, and then the kraken’s bulk blotted out the sight. It blotted out the little castle, and the southern skyline of tall light-spangled buildings outside the park, and the skyful of shifting clouds and washed-out stars, and everything.