The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “Sweetie,” Mom said. “What’s wrong?”

  I said, “Something, Mom, but you can’t help.”

  Reaching across the tabletop she took my hand and stroked the back of my knuckles with her thumb. I let her. I even squeezed back a little.

  In a sheepish tone she said, “Am I smack in the middle of it acting like a damn fool, like last time? And not even knowing it?”

  So she did remember something about having been wooed and almost won by the horrible Dr. Brightner! She had never mentioned that episode since Gran and I had set Mom free from his enchantment.

  I said, “Not this time. This time it’s definitely me in the middle, and if anybody’s acting like a fool, that’s me too.”

  “You’d tell me if I could help, wouldn’t you?” she said.

  “Mom,” I said, “if there was anything you could do, believe me, I’d ask.”

  “You’re sure there’s nothing?”

  I shook my head and got up. “I better go wake Joel,” I said. “I’ll take him down to the coffee shop for breakfast.”

  I knew Mom would feel easier about leaving the two of us alone if we were up and on our way somewhere. My silver wish would keep her from interfering in any case, but I felt better behaving the way I knew she would have expected if there’d been no silver wish.

  I also wanted to be in a public place when I broached the subject of re-trashing the violin, so Joel would have less scope for dramatics. You don’t want to look like a spoiled baby in a coffee shop full of people on their way to attend to the business of the grown-up world.

  As it turned out, we all left the apartment together. Joel had the violin case with him because I’d asked him to bring it.

  Mom flagged a cab. She pulled my head down and gave me a quick kiss on top, the way she used to when I was a little kid. “If anything comes up,” she said, “leave me a message on the answering machine.”

  She ducked into the cab and zoomed off down West End Avenue.

  At the coffee shop I had juice and a chocolate éclair, for energy; too much energy, I guess, because after all my careful thinking about how to approach this, I just blurted it out to Joel that he would have to smash the violin and throw it back in the lake.

  His eyes got wide. “No,” he said, very loud.

  “Sshh,” I said. “People are staring.”

  He shoved away his plate of half-eaten omelet. His fork fell on the tile floor with a deafening jangle. Anybody who hadn’t been staring before was staring now.

  “You can’t ask me to do that,” he said. “You can’t! Look, I’m not an idiot, all right? I know why this Bosanka person is here. It’s because I played Paavo’s violin. No, don’t talk, I need to say this: he didn’t give me the violin, he gave it to the lake.

  “I wasn’t supposed to fix it up and play it. That was a mistake, a big mistake. And I paid for it right there, on the spot, because my hands froze up to stop me using an instrument that wasn’t mine to play. You get it? I’ve paid. And the damage is done. A lot of god damn damage, and I’m sorry, but you have to understand, Val. I’m obviously never going to do anything like that again, because my damn hands won’t play any more.

  “So what the hell is the point of destroying the instrument now?”

  I leaned across the table toward him. “Joel, think a minute! It’s our best chance, and if it works, you’ll probably be cured at the same time.” Two ladies near us had suspended their conversation to listen in, looking nervous.

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. “If we can throw this whole thing into reverse and sling Bosanka back wherever she came from, I bet we fix your hands at the same time. You didn’t mean to bring her here, with her threats and her spells and her whole horrible attitude. Put the violin back the way Paavo left it, and we un-make the music and un-call Bosanka! We do everything we need to in one fell swoop, without any of us getting hurt!”

  “I get hurt!” he answered. “What about me?”

  “I’m sorry about the violin,” I said. I knew what that violin meant to him, at least a little. It meant a lot to me, too, but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t a musician. I hadn’t lost my chance to study music with a great violinist whose music was also real, honest-to-god magic.

  Joel glared at me, holding on to both sides of the table as if that was all that kept him from exploding through the ceiling.

  “If Joel will only take it all back,” he snarled, “like a good little boy, a lot of bad things will just not have happened? How’s that supposed to work? You’re not even sure it can work. You’re just guessing!”

  His lips were paler than the tablecloth. I’d never thought a person could look like that.

  “I know,” I said. “But that’s all I can think of, Joel. Look, we’re in charge here. There is nobody else. The others are only in this mess because between us, we sort of roped them in without meaning to. It’s up to us, and ‘us’ is me, you, and Paavo’s violin, before any of it has even a chance of being fixed.”

  He didn’t say anything, just went on looking desperate.

  I said, “Come to the lake with me, right now, and give the violin back to the lake. Bosanka wants magic when the moon is high, so we’ll do our thing first, in daylight, just the two of us with the sun right overhead, to make things as opposite as possible to whatever she has in mind. We’ll do it together.”

  “No,” he said, very low.

  “No?” I said. “Have you got a better idea?”

  He lowered his head and held it between his fists, not speaking.

  “Joel, what’s the difference?” I said. I was starting to lose it. “I know it sounds cold, but you said it yourself: you can’t play, so what good is that fiddle to you anyway? Our only chance is to put it back where Paavo left it. We have to undo what you did.”

  His chair flipped over with a crash. Joel snatched up the violin case and ran out of the restaurant.

  “The lake at noon, we’ve got to try!” I screamed. I would have run after him, but the waiter stopped me.

  Joel had left me with the check.

  By the time I’d paid, he was gone. Whether he would come to the park at noon or not was up to him. There was nothing more I could do. It seemed like I had done more than enough already, and nothing that I did worked out right.

  It was still early in the morning. I headed for the hospital, feeling as if I weighed a million tons. They let me in to see Gran even though it was before official visiting hours started. I must have looked totally desperate, which I was.

  Gran lay curled on her side with her mouth open and a damp patch on the pillowcase under her cheek. Nothing that I did got a reaction, not words, not tears, not patting her hand and kissing her cheek and trying to hug her, which was the point at which the nurses hustled me out of there.

  I walked around the city like a zombie. I couldn’t rest anywhere. Without planning to, I traced my past through the places where I’d learned what little I knew about the family talent and magic as Paavo and Gran had shown it to me. I guess I was looking for comfort, for courage. All I found was strangeness, questions, losses, and doubts.

  The Indian restaurant once run by Ushah had been turned into a doughnut shop. I went to the little midtown waterfall park where Paavo had gone to rev up for his final assault on the kraken. I walked to the sidewalk grating that had once let me conspire with Joel, the blind prisoner of a phantom subway station.

  At Rockefeller Center I watched a huge machine clean the ice. My fingers froze and my nose dripped and my head echoed with stupid thoughts leading nowhere. At least I had some breakfast in me to keep me physically alive.

  Finally I found myself drifting through the park to Castle Lake, hoping that somehow Joel would meet me there at noon after all, with the violin.

  People were gathered at the east end of the lake, on the grassy edge of Jagiello’s terrace: Lennie, and Tamsin wearing one of her artsy-fartsy outfits with tights showing off her legs. Barb was taking pictures with her Leica.

 
; “Where’s Joel?” she said when she saw me, and I almost crumpled up right there.

  “You look half dead,” Lennie said, grabbing me by the arms and peering into my face. “Where’ve you been?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said, glancing at Barb. Her face was hidden behind the camera. “What are you all doing here? The committee’s not supposed to meet until tonight. Full moon and everything, Bosanka’s orders.”

  They each said that I had phoned them and asked them to come to the lake at noon instead, and what was wrong with me, didn’t I remember? I began to wonder if I had called them, and had somehow forgotten that I did it. Should I tell them about Joel and the patchwork fiddle? I was confused and afraid to tell them anything.

  It was getting close to twelve.

  Tamsin said, “But we don’t have Peter and Mimi here. How can we be the Comet Committee? And I mean Peter and Mimi, not a couple of deer.”

  Tamsin was not sentimental about animals, only about herself. I found this one of her least endearing characteristics.

  “They’ll turn up,” Lennie said uncertainly, looking around. He had on the same huge tweed coat he’d worn on New Year’s Eve on the rooftop, and woolen gloves. It wasn’t that cold with the sun shining, but Lennie has never really gotten used to North American winters.

  “They’ll show,” Barb agreed. “Animals are attracted to concentrations of psychic energy.”

  “According to whom?” said Tamsin.

  “According to people who know,” Barb said, and Tamsin sniffed but let it go.

  Animals? I wondered if we were about to be overrun with squirrels, which the park is full of. What were we doing here? Everybody looked at me as if I should know, and I was totally at a loss.

  Tamsin turned to me. “So where’s Joel?”

  Lennie came to my rescue. “We didn’t need Joel on the spot when we first formed the Comet Committee,” he said. “Who says we need him here now?”

  “Bosanka says,” Tamsin said, “or so everybody keeps telling me.”

  “Hey,” Barb said. “There he is.” She made some quick camera adjustments and began clicking off pictures as Joel strode toward us carrying the violin case.

  He walked up in grim silence and set the case down in front of me.

  “Well,” he said, glaring at me, “go ahead. Jump on it, or whatever you have in mind.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t meant that he should destroy the magic fiddle in front of everybody like this! Just the two of us would have been bad enough.

  “Why do you want to break your violin?” Tamsin asked. For the first time she sounded unsure.

  Joel stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat and stared with bright, red-rimmed eyes around the little circle of us. “I don’t want to. But Valentine says it has to be done, and she’s the expert. So who’s going to do it? Nobody? All right, then.”

  He raised his foot over the old black case.

  Lennie said, “Hey, wait a minute, is this the one Val told us about? The magic one?”

  “It was the magic one,” Joel said bitterly, and he stomped down.

  But he seemed to slip, and I saw his foot land not on the violin case but on a little tepee of gray sticks planted in the soft earth alongside the lake. There were small cracking sounds, and I saw other little stickpiles collapsing like dominoes, in a line that ran back the way Joel had come.

  I saw the other lines, power lines Bosanka must have planted—pinecones behind Lennie, twists of grass behind Barb, stones winking with mica behind Tamsin—and I knew what had brought them all here; not phone calls from me!

  Looking back, I spotted the markers that had led me here, too—oak leaves, brown and withered, each pinned to the ground with a thorn. I felt those thorns in my stupid, sinking heart.

  Before I could say a word, we were all swallowed in a dense white wall of fog. Somewhere beyond the wall, I heard soccer players on the big field hollering in Spanish or Italian, but I could only see a few yards ahead.

  I could hear dogs, too. They barked, they howled, and they were coming closer.

  A pack. Bosanka the hunter had assembled a pack.

  Joel, kneeling by the violin case, looked up at me, questioning.

  I nodded, my mouth almost too dry to speak. “She sent for the committee, just like she told us she would—but her way, with magic! She’s spelled us to meet here twelve hours early, to spoil any plans me might have come up with to stop her.

  “We’ve got to get out of here right now, but first—Joel, we can’t let Bosanka get her crazy hands on Paavo’s violin! None of us can play it, but I’ll bet she can!”

  Joel groaned. Then he grabbed the violin case, turned, and slung it into the fog, in the direction of the lake. There was a splash, and a sob from Joel, and then two deer hurtled into our midst, fleeing from the yelling of the dogs we couldn’t yet see.

  I caught panic from the deer. I plunged into the dense white fog and ran from the First Hunter. I ran for my life.

  16

  All the Day They Hunted

  I RAN LIKE WATER RUNS DOWN A CLIFF, throwing myself madly over or around anything in my way—a scarred park bench, a tree, a low red picket fence around an eroded slope. A long-legged stag caromed off my side as we sped through an echoing cave, one of the stone tunnels of the park.

  I heard others, their steps, their hard breathing, as we raced through the park, skittering over pavement and dry winter grass in perfect, mindless, animal terror.

  With the tiny part of my mind that stayed helplessly human, I understood that Peter and Mimi had joined us—we were a whole little herd of running deer. The Comet Committee was meeting, all right, in headlong flight.

  We ran deeper into the chilly mist that hung everywhere like soggy laundry stuffed down among the trees. At times I seemed to run all alone, and then I would hear distant barking, or the breathing of another runner somewhere near me in the dimness.

  After what felt like a year, the fog began to tear and trail away. Seams of bleak light opened that might have been night or day, I couldn’t tell with my black-and-white deer vision. When I stared back over my shoulder (where my own hide was dark with sweat), I saw dogs pouring after me, red tongues lolling gleefully from fanged jaws.

  Behind them or among them, Bosanka was like some tireless, horrible monster in a nightmare that you can’t shake off your trail. She ran with a steady, easy stride and her face, when I could see it in the gloom, was merciless.

  The sight of her filled my animal heart with a pounding terror that drove me to run even faster.

  The fog vanished, the air was dry and still. I longed for the fog again, to dampen my parched throat. We ran through woodland, hilly and rough. Dead tree branches reached up to catch our legs as we leaped over them. The soil made little dry crunching noises at each step, and plumes of ash were kicked up by our hooves. We crossed wide patches of bare, bruising, rock-hard earth.

  Central Park was gone. We were somewhere else, running over an alien land.

  Once we split up, not by plan—we weren’t capable of planning—but because the level forest floor broke into spreading hills, like the fingers of a withered hand.

  It made no difference. Powerful, unstoppable, Bosanka somehow harried us one by one.

  I hid, gasping for breath, in a gloomy tangle where fallen trees crisscrossed and held each other up. My legs shook, my heaving sides steamed. I strained to track the dogs by sound as they thrashed along somewhere near.

  Through my human mind ran the refrain of one of my favorite nursery rhymes from my old Mother Goose book, about three jolly Welshmen who go hunting and don’t bag anything but have a dandy time. It went something like this, “And all the day they hunted, and nothing could they find, but a ship a-sailing, a-sailing with the wind, they found a ship a-sailing, but that they left behind.”

  “All the day” was turning out to be a long, long time, and we had no chance of being left behind.

  Something came snuffling toward
my hiding place, and panic sent me crashing onward again. I nearly fell over the ribs of a dried-up carcass, a thing like a kangaroo with its jaws open in the dirt—the remains of a leaf-taker. The faint, musty stink of it sent me bounding frantically on.

  My lungs were going to explode, my heart would split open and drown me in my own blood. But I ran, and the others ran with me: down through a forest of blackened toothpick-trees and out across an endless marshy flat crusted with dried salt and dotted with jumbled ruins.

  Every time we stopped for breath—and she let us do that purposely, I think, to prolong the hunt—we would see her trotting toward us with dogs around her, tracking us at her command but never closing in.

  And we would run again.

  It was during one of these brief rests that I realized I was not just running away. There was a scent in the air that I followed, a moist tang that had to be the smell of water. “Nothing could they find, but a ship a-sailing.” It was toward the water-trace in the hot, dead air that I ran. The others followed me.

  At last we moved at a stumbling trot out onto a windy, steep-sided headland. Dead-ended, we stopped, milling sluggishly at the edge of the bluff. There was a gray beach below, littered with bones and seaweed. The sea beyond looked like black glass.

  Water—a dead end.

  A young stag banged into me, smearing my neck with foam. My long deer-tongue hung out of my mouth and my throat was cracking with dryness. If I could have reached it, I would have plunged my long face into that dark sea down there and drunk it up.

  Bosanka laughed. We shambled around to face her, a trembling group under a high, bright sun.

  She stood a little way off in her jeans and sweater and boots, with her arms crossed—First Hunter, boss of the forest. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dogs, which sat at her feet panting and looking at us. They weren’t the red-eyed hellhounds I had imagined chasing us over Bosanka’s ruined world, but a bunch of grubby Manhattan strays, lop-eared and tangle-coated. One of them was a Pekingese.

  My human mind jeered incredulously, she’s got me terrified of a Peke?