by Anne Nesbet
“What do you mean, ‘can’t’?” said Maya as her bitter feet continued to slap, slap, slap at the sidewalk beneath them.
Cabinets can’t hold people’s mortalities in bottles, either, can they? Bronze salamanders can’t turn their heads and chat with you. Glass can’t melt in your hand and then unmelt again, just like that. The whole concept of “can’t” had taken some serious hits over the last month or so, as far as Maya could see.
One of Valko’s talents was patience, however. He just loped along, trying to wait out her anger and think things through.
“I mean, a piece of paper can’t make you do anything it says. That’s just craziness, to think it could. Where are we rushing off to right now, anyway?”
Maya stopped short. They were back in the street where the shadow had come creeping after them, but the whole place looked different now. That edge in the air had faded away. Things felt normal again. The wound-up spring in her chest relaxed a little.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Anywhere. I just don’t like being told I’m trapped, that’s all.”
Valko grinned.
“Listen to me, then: not trapped, not trapped, not trapped! There, better? Give that letter to me a second; I’ll fix it for you.”
It was unfairly difficult to stay glum around Valko. Maya fished the envelope back out of her pocket and handed it over. Valko already had his favorite black pen in his hand. He propped the letter against his backpack and made a preparatory flourish in the air.
“V-O-I-D,” he said. “That’s what we need!”
Ha! Why hadn’t she thought of that? If the paper’s super-powerful, just make it say something else!
But Valko was already staring, a bit puzzled, at the letter he had been scribbling on. He gave his pen a shake, and then rummaged through his backpack again, looking for another one.
“Won’t write,” he said. “Weird. I’m sure it’s got ink in it, too.”
The next pen wouldn’t leave a mark, either. It skittered right off the page. They tried out the pens on other scraps of paper, and they worked fine. They just couldn’t manage to leave a single trace on that inscrutable creamy-green letter. The paper wouldn’t let itself be torn up, either, even when Valko tried to be extra wolfish about it and use his teeth.
“Well, never mind,” said Valko, rubbing his jaw. “So it’s stronger than steel, and the ink he used is super special—who cares? You can still refuse. Just don’t do any of those things in the letter. Keep your hands off the embassy wall—”
“Oh,” said Maya. She had forgotten the wall. “Oh, no. That’s how this all started, remember? I already touched that awful wall. Just like the letter told me to. Do you think that’s what started all the weird stuff happening?”
“Excuse me,” said Valko. “But I’m pretty sure you hadn’t read that letter before you touched anything. Right? It’s hardly like you were following instructions. And so what, anyway? Touch any wall you want! Does this place look like anything awful happened? Look how normal everything is now.”
Everything did seem very normal. No shadows rustling after them. No more clusters of swaying, singing women. Sometimes you’ll be walking along a green ridge in the fog, and the air will catch its breath and the fog will lift, just like that. As if fog had never been invented. Maya and Valko were standing on the fogless corner of the avenue Rapp, the broken wall of the Bulgarian embassy off to the left and the intricate façade of bad old Fourcroy’s Salamander House to the right, and the air was its normal, unhummy self again. It was enough to make a person feel slightly embarrassed, if that person hated to think of herself as overreacting. Maya took a deep breath and walked ahead to take a closer look.
The hole in the wall was certainly still there. So (she checked) were the gargoyles. But the MAYA written in black sand on the pale cement of the sidewalk had faded to a thin, weathered, friendly gray. You could miss it entirely, if you were walking past at a brisk pace, with your eyes not glued to the ground. The mark left on the world by the strangeness was already fading. It was as if this whole part of Paris had been a lump of unbaked bread, and some ill-behaved magical giant had stuck a thumb into the dough. Marks don’t last long in bread dough, do they? The dough stretches itself and yawns, and soon enough the dings and dents have faded away. There, then: at this rate everything in the nieghborhood might be back to almost normal by evening.
So it struck Maya now as rather unreasonable, how upset she had felt earlier.
“Okay,” she said, letting herself relax into another notch’s worth of relief. “I won’t let a stupid letter boss me around.”
“That’s right,” said Valko. “You tell ’em!”
Once a person starts to stand tall and be brave about one thing, all that courage can slop over into other parts of her being, too. Maya stopped in her tracks and gave Valko the sort of look that someone who has learned how not to drown, even when dumped into very cold water, might give a person.
“And there’s no way we’re going to let you be sent back to Bulgaria,” said Maya, with more definiteness than was even remotely reasonable. “You’re staying. We’ll find a way. It’s a plan.”
“It’s clear you’ve never met my grandmother,” said Valko. “But thank you five million times over for wanting to rescue me. You are very brave.”
That was when one of his quick grins rose up and took over his whole face.
“And you know what else? It’s vacation! Liberty for all!”
Ten whole days without school! The wind was chilly as it curled around their liberated legs, but it was the brisk chill of freedom. They were strolling down the once-again ordinary street, and there were ten days of vacation stretching ahead of them, and the knot in Maya’s chest loosened a little more with every step.
Soon it would be her birthday, after all! Even far, far, far away from home, birthdays mean something, don’t they?
“Hey!” said Valko. “Look where we are! Your favorite old Salamander House!”
The cold air licked her neck when she raised her head—oh! How had they let their feet bring them here and not even notice?
Stone vines twined their way up and down the front of the building, and tangled up in those looping vines were the stone echoes of every kind of creature: broad ferns and docile cows, bold little people with their hands on jaunty sandstone hips, a woman’s sad-eyed face, looking down at Maya from above the door. That façade always came as a shock, no matter how many times you had seen it. It was the sort of enchanted cliff that might loom up in front of a person on a jungle path, all of life’s secrets crawling and twining and wriggling across it.
What was more, for all its stillness, the Salamander House had certainly noticed them. Stone eyes everywhere turned like mute spotlights on Maya herself, frozen on the sidewalk stage. Even the door had eyes to stare with—looping webs of iron and glass squinting past a pair of phoenixes at anyone bold enough to come close, reckless enough to let her fingertip drift across the cool bronze head of the salamander door handle.
The door clicked and opened.
Maya snatched her hand away. What was she doing?
“You want to go in?” said Valko. He sounded not shocked, but rather mildly curious, as if wandering into buildings where bad things had happened (and not that long ago) were a perfectly logical and normal thing to do.
“Of course not!” said Maya. She made her voice extra sharp, to get the point across. Her finger was still sort of itching to run itself across the salamander’s head again, however. The bronze was so smooth and cold, and she could feel the little patterned ridges above its inscrutable eyes.
“Lots of interesting stuff in there still, probably,” said Valko. It sounded very convincing, when Valko said it. “Some pretty cool items . . .”
“Valko!” said Maya sternly. “That’s where he lived. That’s Fourcroy’s own house. You know what’s in there!”
Valko more or less laughed, but Maya thought she saw the faintest trace of cloud in his eyes,
a few curling tendrils of fog.
“Oh, it’s so ridiculously obvious!” she said. It really was. She couldn’t believe they had been walking around a minute ago as if everything were completely normal. “The writing desk! His writing desk! Just the number-two thing the letter wanted us to go find, and here we were about to slide through the door and march right up to it. Sheesh.”
“We weren’t going in for any desk,” said Valko. “We were going to look at all the other neat stuff—”
“The letter thinks it’s got us,” said Maya. She had to give Valko an impatient tug, away from the iron eyes of that door, away from the watching, waiting head of the salamander, but when she stepped away, the itch in her fingertip flared up for a moment. She stuffed that hand deep into her pocket and frowned. “I mean, it almost did have us. And you said letters couldn’t boss us around. Ha!”
“All that weird laboratory equipment up there,” said Valko with longing.
“That’s it,” said Maya. “We’re leaving. Look at me, I’m leaving.”
Her feet didn’t very much want to go, but she kicked a leg forward and made herself take a step. Away. And then the left leg. Away. The hand pulling Valko along behind her felt strange, too, for that matter. Was he really that heavy? And the finger on her other hand sat there deep in her pocket and itched and itched.
“We would need,” said Maya, and then stopped to catch her breath and force her leg forward again, “a really good reason”—take a breath/move a leg—“to go anywhere near”—breath/leg/tug on Valko—“that desk!”
They were ten feet away from the door. It was getting easier to move again.
“A really, really, really good reason,” she said. She was exhausted.
Valko blinked and shook his head, his smile slowly coming back as he did so.
“You know what, Maya?” he said. “It’s too much. You totally need a vacation. I can tell.”
Twenty feet away, maybe more. They were walking like human beings again, not like underwater divers or people stuck in nightmares where the air has turned to sludge.
“Yes, I do,” said Maya. “Without shadows, please. And no more letters making me do stuff.”
“So far, nothing’s actually made you do anything,” said Valko. “Just pointing that out.”
Maya looked at him.
“You were ready to close your eyes and dive in through that door,” she said. “Still feel not trapped, not trapped, not trapped?”
“Just because I wanted to do some intelligent exploring—”
“You saw the shadow following us. You felt how weird everything got.”
“But we didn’t go in, did we? We walked right on by. We did. All the rest is just—I don’t know—us getting sort of hysterical, maybe. Like kids telling each other spooky ghost stories.”
So there it was. It turns out that there is something quite maddening about the very person who has just been at your side while you were chased through Parisian streets by a shadow and then hypnotized into potentially dangerous behavior by a letter on snakes-for-hair stationery then insisting that . . . nothing much had happened. That it was all in your mind.
It put a bad taste in her mouth the whole rest of that day. The first afternoon of fall vacation, ruined by a shadow, a snake-haired watermark, and a smudge! Really, life was not very fair.
That night Maya lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling and worrying away at the itchy spot on her fingertip. There was something she was supposed to be figuring out, but she was too tired to remember what that was.
The letter. The writing desk.
The wind had kicked up that evening, and there was enough faint clattering outside her bedroom to make it hard to fall asleep, what with the leftover adrenaline and worry wandering her veins.
The writing desk. The letter. There would have to be a really good reason. . . .
But sleep she did, because suddenly it was midnight and she was awake again, sitting straight up in her bed, her heart pounding in her chest and her ears assaulted by a crashing, grinding, gritty sound—not “faint clattering,” no, nothing faint about it: What was that?
It was all over so fast: by the time she reached for her lamp, the world had fallen quiet again. Still, it was a while before she could relax enough to think about sleeping. She thought maybe she had been dreaming about a writing desk with an old-fashioned sphinx statue perched on it, and the writing desk had fallen over with a bang. Pens everywhere! What else was in a writing desk? Pens and stamps and envelopes—
She sat back up again.
Special ink! And writing paper!
It had shown all sorts of signs of working, hadn’t it, that letter? It had made her want desperately to go into the Salamander House, even though she knew that might be, from all sorts of perspectives, a bad idea. And Valko had been pretty much acting like a person under a spell, too, come to think of it, when they were standing in front of that door.
So that was what her brain had been trying to tell her all night: Medusan stationery was actually extremely effective stuff. All right. But poisons often had antidotes, right? So—what if a person who had been trapped by magical stationery into doing all sorts of things found more of that stationery and wrote herself an antidote letter?
Oh, she was feeling clever now! She even had a pretty clear idea of how that letter should look:
Dear Maya,
No, you will NOT do anything to bring that horrible old Fourcroy back to life. You may IGNORE all the commands in the previous letter, no matter what kind of magical paper it was written on. Please have a great vacation and a very happy birthday, and I guarantee that everything from now on will be absolutely A-OK.
Love, your friend and self, Maya
It was amazing how much better she felt, right away: worry just up and left her, looking for another home. The sheer and obvious rightness of this plan, of this antidote letter she had just composed so carefully in her head—it was as comforting as the warmest, thickest quilt she’d ever snuggled under, on an otherwise cold and windy night.
And when she woke up in the morning, she found she was still feeling oddly at peace. The wind had quieted, too. She remembered the dreadful crashing that had startled her in the middle of the night, and smiled to herself.
Something must have fallen outside, or been blown over by the wind. A flower pot on the fire escape, probably. She opened the window to take a look.
Old French apartment houses often have quite grand fronts, all carved stone and elaborate window decorations. Maya’s building was like that: the Davidsons’ living room, which was on the front corner of the building, looked across proudly at an equally grand apartment where a famous writer had once had an even more famous film director over for tea in November 1929 (there was a little metal plaque on the wall saying so). But all the building’s grandness was saved for the front. The back of the apartment, where the bathrooms and the kitchen and Maya’s bedroom were hidden, had windows with the kind of textured, ugly glass that is supposed to let in light while keeping your life private, and those dull-eyed windows looked out at a little courtyard. Not the romantic kind of courtyard with a secret garden and a lovely old hidden tree, either. Nope, this courtyard was all hardworking concrete slabs and trash bins.
Usually, then, there was not much to see out of Maya’s window, and, to be honest, she hadn’t opened it very often to look.
But now—
Urk!
A shock can knock a person right off her feet, it turns out. Before her mind had even gotten as far as words (beaks, claws, wings), Maya’s arms had slammed the window shut again. And then her legs gave way under her, and she found herself sitting down very hard on her floor, her mind scrambling about like a crazy thing, trying to put itself together properly.
Gargoyles!
Somewhere far away the phone was ringing. Feet were hurrying along the hall.
Her mother stuck her head in through the doorway.
“What was all that racket?” she said. She lo
oked worried. “Maya, are you all right?”
Maya tried to make a reassuring noise and more or less failed, but fortunately her mother had a phone in her hand, and was distracted.
“It’s for you, dear,” she said, and put the phone into Maya’s still shaky hand.
“Um,” said Maya.
“Hello?” said the phone, while Maya’s mother, who believed everyone deserved a little privacy, backed tactfully out of the room. “Maya, you there? Hey, guess what?”
“What?” said Maya. That was progress: a whole entire coherent word.
“No more gargoyles!” said Valko’s voice, all delighted. “Of course, my barometer’s gone, too. But I really think—”
“Escape,” said Maya, sounding hollower than she meant to.
“Excuse me, what?”
“Fire escape,” she said, putting some extra effort into it.
“Did I just wake you up or something?”
“There are gargoyles on the fire escape,” she said. “Right now. Outside my window. Gargoyles.”
“No way,” said Valko. “Really? Wait—”
There was a rustling sound on the other end of the line.
“Okay, got my notebook,” he said. “Go ahead, tell me. What do you see? They appeared when?”
“What I see is my door,” said Maya. “I told you, they’re outside, on the fire escape. I just saw them right now.”
“And they weren’t there before that.”
“Oh, come on,” said Maya. “You know they weren’t.”
“Well, I haven’t ever actually seen your fire escape,” said Valko. “But that’s all right. I’ve got my pencil. Just describe them as carefully as you can.”
“They’re gargoyles. A whole crowd of gargoyles.”
“I mean, what do they look like?”
“They look like GARGOYLES.”
The voice on the phone sighed, and then became very, very patient.
“See, the reason I’m asking,” said Valko’s patient voice, “is that I wonder whether these are the same gargoyles or different ones. Maybe somebody—all right, it’s hard to imagine how, but never mind—picked the gargoyles off my window ledge and carried them over to your house. I mean, who knows, right? Maybe they’re really made out of some kind of plaster that just looks like stone—I tried to get a sample last night, but I couldn’t reach.”
