“Stay back,” Gran said, catching my wrist.
I did, but I leaned out and looked.
I saw Ushah’s bicycle, The Great Galloping Claw, speeding toward the street. Scattering before it were half a dozen shadows like thin black gauze whipped along in a stiff wind.
As we watched, the bike turned onto the street and wheeled out of sight.
“The basement,” I said. “Maybe there are some left!”
But Gran’s crooked fingers tightened on my wrist. “Don’t waste your time,” she said. “The Claw will have rounded them all up for him, never fear, and we must hurry! I should have realized that he’d have a spy-hole here—the eye of Kali, like as not! He won’t come against me here, not now, with victory fresh in my hands. It’s too chancy. He’ll want an edge, lovie, like any bully!”
She hurried me out of the restaurant’s front door.
“But where are we going?” I said, catching something from her—excitement, even eagerness.
“Where he’ll be waiting,” she said, “hoping to snare the pair of us—at Wollman rink, the root of your mother’s dream. That’s where he’ll have done it—used her power to make a great vortex, a magical engine to launch himself and all his booty across time and space and into the heart of the wizard war!”
16
On Brightner’s Ice
THERE WAS ALWAYS THE CHANCE, of course, that Brightner would get impatient and take off with what he already had, never mind Gran and me.
After what had happened to Ushah, the possibility of him chickening out rather than squaring off with my Gran didn’t seem so crazy. My mood swung wildly between terror that we would get to Wollman and find that he’d gone, and a sniveling, craven hope that that was how it would be—so that we wouldn’t have to face him, fight him, win back my mother and the harvest of captive souls, which I saw now as one giant task: the task of beating Brightner.
Not that Gran and I could discuss this openly in the cab on our way uptown to the park, which was a kind of a relief to me, actually. I was scared enough as it was.
The cabbie thought we were crazy, anyway. All the way up Sixth Avenue, he gave us an argument about driving into the park at that hour, let alone letting us off in the middle of it. He steered with one hand and turned to squint back at the two of us as if we were Martians.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I thought even out-of-towners knew better. You’re talking about Central Park, lady. Ever heard of muggers?”
“Muggers,” Gran said, “are by and large lazy, self-indulgent folk. They will have all made their hauls by now or given up because of the night chill. Hurry, please.”
“Hurry, she says,” he said, shaking his head wonderingly. “You know those hansom cabs that take tourists for rides in there at night? Why do you think they clop along in caravans, one after the other like a goddamn camel train, eh? Why do they do that? Worried about crime, that’s why.”
“Yes or no?” Gran said crisply.
The cabbie scowled. “Maybe you should get out of my cab. I don’t want to be the one who let the two of you off alone in the middle of the park at this hour!”
He was already slowing down to stop outside the park wall when I had my inspiration. “We won’t be alone,” I said. “We’re meeting someone.”
“Who, King Kong?” the driver said.
“As a matter of fact he’s an ex-cop and he’s over six feet tall and weighs maybe two hundred pounds. He’s lethal. Nobody messes with him,” I said. (Except us, of course. The cabbie was right: we were crazy.)
He sighed. “Okay, all right. I’ll take you in.”
He swung the cab in at the entrance where Sixth Avenue dead-ends on the southern border of the park. The dark gap in the black stone boundary wall swallowed us up, and we tore along through the dark, empty park, past islands of yellow light from the cast-iron lampposts lining the cement pathways as they wound into the blackness of the trees and bushes.
I sat nervously smoothing the soft leather of the glove over my left hand.
We stopped, at Gran’s instructions, where the drive passes between the carousel building, invisible at night in its little tree-shaded hollow, and the chess-and-checkers hill.
No sign of Brightner; was he here? My heart hammered and my eyes felt as if they would pop out of my head, I was staring so hard into the shadows.
Gran fished a bill out of her coat pocket.
“So where is he, this giant ex-cop you’re meeting?” the driver said, looking at the money.
“Up there,” I said, pointing up the steps to the chess pavilion. “With his telescope.”
“Stargazing,” the cabbie snorted, “at three in the morning in the middle of Central Park! Now I’ve heard everything.”
He took Gran’s bill and gave it a squinty look, as if he thought we might be trying to palm off some Martian money on him. You could tell he wouldn’t put anything past us—people who wanted to be dropped in the park at night!
“Keep the change,” Gran said.
He shook his head again and drove away fast.
I couldn’t help wondering if I would live to ride in a New York taxi again.
The pitch-blackness between the lights was thick with quiet, and in the quiet came sounds so small and quick that you couldn’t even guess what had made them. The shadows around us seemed to shift and stir, even though there wasn’t a single breath of wind. It was one of those nights when the lights of the nighttime city were diffused and reflected back from a low layer of clouds, throwing a murky pallor over everything. The air smelled of damp earth and dead autumn leaves, and the actual sky was completely hidden.
I felt as if my ears were standing out a foot from my head on either side, I was listening so hard for a whisper, a sound of footsteps besides our own.
“Up the hill, hurry,” Gran said.
At the top of the chess-and-checkers hill, all we found was just what’s supposed to be up there: a brick pavilion with eight sides sitting in the middle of a paved terrace of concrete game-tables and benches. The pavilion was locked up tight (I could make out some chairs and tables inside, behind the grimy windows). The weathercock on the roof stood in silent silhouette against the glowing clouds.
The south side of the hill overlooks the sunken site of the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink.
We stood at an angle of the railing of metal pipe that skirts the terrace, looking over a shoulder of rough black granite sticking out of the hilltop just below where we stood. Trees reached up at us from the shadowed slope below. Farther down came the darkness of the little valley, and enclosed by chain link in the middle of that darkness—Wollman, thrown into sharp relief by floodlights mounted high on metal poles around its edge.
I shivered and shivered, though there was no wind. I turned up the collar of my jacket and stuffed my hands deep into my pockets, and I still shivered.
It seemed to me that I was looking down at a dead, ugly animal lying in a cage. The animal was the skaters’ building, now a deserted hulk alongside the concrete pad of the rink itself. A big yellow crane, with its arm sticking up into the sky like the antenna of a giant insect, stood to one side like the winner of one of those tremendous battles of monsters in Japanese horror flicks: Wollzilla Meets Cranera.
Gran said, “This is the place of your mother’s dream, the dream she’s trapped in.”
“But where is she?” I said, whispering in spite of myself. “And where’s the phantom rink that I saw at Rockefeller Plaza? And the thing, what did you call it? The vortex?”
“They are one and the same,” Gran said grimly, “and it’s all here, with its master. He’s hiding in shadow, waiting for me to make the first move. Well, so I shall. Do you know chess?” She turned and tapped the top of the nearest chess table with her crooked fingers.
“Um, no,” I said. “I know some card games.”
Gran shook her head. “What other games do you play with your friends?”
“Monopoly,” I said. “Battleship.” I
have seldom felt myself to be such a totally inadequate baby as at that moment.
“All right, we’ll use a computer model instead.” Gran began sort of typing on the squares of the chessboard, the way you type on a computer keyboard.
Instantly, the entire cloud-cover vanished. We stood under a clean black arch of night, with the few stars that can be seen over a big city. The moon was large and bright.
But there was still no Brightner, no phantom rink.
“Bloody Hell,” Gran swore. “He’s resisting, trying to wear me down right at the beginning! And I’m already tired, lovie, more tired than I thought. I was mad to waste my strength struggling with Ushah. Oh, I’m an old show-off, I’m an old fool!”
“Gran,” I said, “stop blaming yourself and fight!”
“Because I knew her,” Gran groaned, “I took the time to try to win her back. Heavens, the arrogance—I should have just flattened the creature straightaway—”
“Gran!” I pulled her arm hard. “Please!”
She turned away from me and didn’t answer.
In that moment the heart sort of fell out of me. I thought I would die where I stood—of helplessness and of defeat, I guess. Gran’s and mine.
“Coward!” I screamed down at the little valley. “Come out and fight!”
I heard laughter, spattering on the terrace around us like fat drops of rain.
He shouldn’t have laughed.
Gran turned and faced me again. “I only have so much left in me,” she said slowly, “but it might do. If you’ll be the bait, lovie. Will you?”
“Sure! What do I do?” I said. Bait! This didn’t sound so great, but anything was better than giving up.
Gran sat down on one of the benches. “Help me off with these boots,” she said.
I knelt and tugged them off her tiny, lumpy feet.
She nodded. “Now, you put them on.”
I looked at Gran’s cowboy boots. They were too big for her—she wore two pairs of thick socks underneath—but still way too small for me. I said so.
“Put them on, lovie,” Gran said. “They’ll fit.”
They did. But when I stood up, I staggered: the boots had blades under them. They weren’t scraped and battered cowboy boots anymore, but scraped and battered white figure skates. I stared down at them.
“Going skating?” Brightner’s voice said out of the sky in a husky, smiling tone. “Come on down. The ice is nice and fresh.”
“Weaver of lies!” Gran shouted suddenly. “If it’s so nice, then show it!”
Down below, like a ghostly overlay across the stillness of the closed-down rink, I saw movement: darkness turning, a crowd of figures that were shadows still but each lit faintly from inside by imprisoned light. Brightner’s captured souls skated in the phantom rink where Wollman should have been.
And at the center of their slow, gloomy wheeling, Brightner, his fists akimbo, looked up at us. Behind him I saw flashes of my mother’s blue ski jacket, of her auburn hair. He hid her from us with his own bulk, except these glimpses as he took small, curving steps from side to side on his skates. Taunting, teasing.
His voice rang through the air: “How do you like it? Hey, old woman? Can you do as much?”
“I can do better!” Gran flung back, grabbing my arm and pulling herself to her feet. I tottered in the skates, but kept my balance. “Any wholesome living spirit could do better than a follower of the left-hand path, the path of fear and force and lies!”
“You told the kid you could beat me,” he shouted. “Isn’t that a lie?”
“I told her we would try,” Gran retorted. “And that’s true!”
“Come down and let’s talk about it,” he answered in an oily tone. “The kid can use the skates. You don’t need them. There are plenty of branches up there—make yourself a broom and fly down!”
“I’ll fly a flag, not a broom,” Gran shouted, and her hand tightened on my arm. “A banner! A bridge! Look!”
She untied the kerchief from her neck and shook it out, a rectangle of cloth—the handkerchief that had been our flying carpet, its pattern all black and gray and white in the moonlight. From her upflung hand it unrolled in a changed shape, long and narrow, light enough to float on the air.
It had become a silky scarf.
Gran held the scarf high by both corners and snapped it above her head. The pattern vanished as if her motion had flicked it off. The shining white cloth soared, light as a leaf on the wind, arching away from us and down the side of the hill, holding its curved and graceful shape in the empty air. It made a pale, thin path that swooped past the dark rock and the tree branches—all the way to the edge of the phantom rink far below.
Holding her end of the scarf delicately in both hands, Gran said to me from between clenched teeth, “He’s waiting, and it’s all I can do to tend your path for you, lovie. You must do the rest.”
I couldn’t see Brightner anymore. The swirling crowd of silent skaters had thickened and darkened, hiding him.
“But I don’t know what to do,” I protested weakly. What could I do, standing there chilled through and shaking? How could I save my mom and the poor doomed phantoms? How could I stop Brightner, the necromancer, the slaver, the rogue?
“You must skate this path to Brightner’s ice,” Gran said, “and bring your mother back. He’s made her the keystone of this theft of souls, and we must hope that without her, what he’s built will collapse around him. All—the theft of souls, the theft of your mother and her unused power! Otherwise—he’ll take you, lovie, and reel me in at the end of this bit of magic of mine. It’s not just your mother but you and me too that will go trailing off in Brightner’s chains!”
“Bring Mom back how?” I quavered.
“Not my way,” Gran said. “Your way, which you must find for yourself. To start, step forward.”
She bent and held the scarf-end low off the pavement, and somehow or other, fighting the resistance of my terrified body, I put one foot on the gossamer surface, thinking shakily, if it’s too hard, I can always change my mind.
The skates whipped me away down the silken path with my arms flailing and a scream trailing behind me.
I flew out beyond the hilltop, crouching over blades that carried me with soundless speed on the scarf-path—an icily glittering ribbon arched through thin air. Then down went the path and down I went, swooping at an impossible angle into the valley under the hill and up again, sickeningly, toward the jagged top of the chain-link fence, toward the phantom skaters massed beyond it.
I couldn’t see my mom, but I knew where she was: at the center.
With him.
The wind of my speed tore water from the corners of my eyes as I flew up and over the high metal fence, and then down again, toward the wheel of shadows. I could have turned aside, I think; sheer speed would have carried me somewhere, anywhere, besides onto Brightner’s ice.
But I no longer wanted to turn. I held my breath, lowered my head, and hit the wall of whirling shadow-figures like a human battering ram.
And shot right through. They flowed over my back like streamers. Their voices sighed in my ears. I felt faint, cold pluckings and tuggings at my hair and my sleeves. Shreds of darkness caught and clung to me, plastered to my face like black scarves. With my gloved hand, I tore at the silky layers that bound my eyes like the webs of giant spiders.
The darkness peeled away, and on my hand the glove blazed with a silver light as blinding as a star. I tucked my hand behind me, but my eyes were still dazzled. Terrified of rushing headlong to a crash, I flung my bare right hand out in front of me.
It was grabbed. I was checked and swung in a dizzying circle to a hard, stumbling stop.
“What about that!” Brightner said in that smug, plummy voice. “Here you are, as ordered! Well, don’t just stand there—you’re not to sleep in steerage, like these others. You travel first class, with your mother. Step into the magic circle, we have to go.”
I tried to pull away from
him, but I was stuck—my left hand was caught, too, drawing my arm awkwardly out behind me. Heart pounding, I looked back.
The brilliance of the glove was completely quenched, hidden by a thick wad of hot, heavy shadow stuff that encased my forearm like a blob of black cotton candy spun out of lead.
Brightner’s hold on my other hand was very light but it might as well have been a grip of steel. I sort of hung there off the tips of his fingers, just outside the ring of orange cones that marked off the center of the ice. I was trapped, pulled taut between him and his shadow-caught, captive souls.
He wore his gray suit and black skating boots with thin blue lines like lightning running up the sides. I looked up at his moist-lipped, twinkle-eyed smile. He was so big and solid and packed with a kind of darkly shining strength that I quaked. How had we ever thought to challenge him, Gran and me?
My ankles felt like caving in; my left hand was dragged down by dark, heavy weight while my right lay cool and boneless in his. My shoulders were killing me.
“That hurts,” I said, and it came out a sob.
“Not here in the magic circle,” he said. “I can heal pain, here. What’s holding you back?” he mocked, “You should have listened to me and taken off that grimy old glove.”
“I want my mom,” I whimpered.
“Here she is, inside the magic circle,” Brightner said lightly. “Waiting for you.”
Behind him at the exact center of the circle, my mom turned slowly, eyes closed, arms lifted and floating like a bird’s wings.
“Mom!” I wailed.
She didn’t even open her eyes.
I twisted to look back up at the chess-and-checkers hill. My glittering path shot up into nothingness. A vast darkness shut me in on every side. With Brightner.
“Gran, help!” I cried.
“But she’s with me,” he said. “Your Gran. Here in the magic circle. She gave in before you did. She tricked you into my hands as part of the price for the youthful mind that I can give her. Don’t you see her?”
I did. I saw Gran in her tweed coat and cowboy boots, standing on the ice with her face turned away from me.
The Silver Glove Page 14
