A Box of Gargoyles

by Anne Nesbet

  Valko grinned.

  “That’s it!” he said. “You’re brilliant. Only not chocolate chips, because the pigeons will get them.”

  That meant they had to pause to have a little argument about what objects (other than chocolate chips) were most likely to be changed by the strangeness, since it was so unpredictable: paper clips? pebbles? seeds?

  “We won’t make a mess, though, will we?” said Maya. “We’ll have to pick up everything afterward.”

  “Obviously!” said Valko. “You can’t leave data just lying around!”

  Now that they had a plan, they had to work fast. They found a spool of plain white thread and a couple of needles in the Davidsons’ cleaning closet and made a hundred tiny little loops, onto each of which they threaded a tiny piece of cabbage (this had been Valko’s idea: something living, but tough) and a paper clip. Over and over and over: thread cabbage, cut string, tie loop, add paper clip.

  It was very tedious work, which, said Valko, just made it all the more authentically scientific.

  But Maya preferred it to the next stage, when they walked the streets of the neighborhood, trying to stay very inconspicuous as they sprinkled the sidewalks with little test loops every few meters. It worried her to be doing something so similar to littering, even if it was really experimental research.

  The egg that night was more restless than usual. She sat with it a long, long time, watching the forest pictures give way to city streets, city buildings, all sketched in great haste and vanishing almost as soon as they had appeared. She caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, of her own neighborhood as seen from hundreds of feet up in that tower; for a moment the Salamander House itself winked into view and then vanished. Carriages. Horses. Crowds in the streets.

  “Go to sleep,” she said to it finally, and put it away in the Summer Box to rest.

  Then she couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time, either. She was bracing herself for that unpleasant feeling of magic washing over her, she realized, as silly as that was, so far from where the strangeness was centered.

  And to think that when she was little, she had spent every single possible wish (first stars, birthday candles, white horses, holding-breath-through-tunnels) on “please, oh please, let magic be real!” She had longed for there to be exceptions in the ordinary, boring old everyday rules. And now her long-ago wish was coming true, and here she was, all tense with worry and unable even to sleep!

  The thing she hadn’t realized, way back then, was that if the world is full of exceptions, then what can you depend on? We want to be able to fly, but we also really, really, really want to know that when we put our foot down on the ground, the ground will be there. Reliably. Boringly. Every single time. We don’t want gravity working only when it’s in the mood! And that made her smile, finally, because it was such a Valkoish way of thinking about things.

  In the end she got stubborn with herself: if the egg could go to sleep, then she could, too. She closed her eyes and toughed her way right into oblivion, so successfully that when the alarm rang the next morning, she felt, first surprised, and then smug.

  She had been dreaming about forests, spreading like green fire across a stone-gray world. The tingle of it still danced in her fingertips as she ate her breakfast. Funny how some dreams linger.

  Out on the streets it was cold and clear, the drizzle having moved on to bother somebody else’s day. Maya walked along her street, picking up unchanged loops of thread with specks of old cabbage on them and tossing them into a shopping bag. If she had been fifty years older, and a little more hunchbacked, she would probably have looked like a crazy old woman. But at the freshly minted age of thirteen, she was not very noticeable. And the few who did notice her gave approving little nods, thinking she was picking up litter for a youth-group project or something.

  She must have been on her fortieth loop of thread when she first saw a paper clip that had rolled itself into a little cone. And the miniature bit of cabbage had sprouted roots. She was just sticking the tape on to label it when Valko appeared at the end of the block, inching his way along.

  “So? What time was it?” she stage-whispered in his direction.

  Valko gave her a thumbs-up: one o’clock, just as they’d thought! (said his hands).

  “Let’s see what your loops look like,” he said aloud, as soon as he’d gotten closer.

  She opened her bag.

  “Normal, normal, normal, normal—except for this one right here.”

  She showed him the distorted loop in her hand, but at the same time Valko was holding up his formerly svelte scientific notebook, now as swollen as a python digesting its dinner. He had been more organized than Maya; he was taping each loop to a separate page (and probably keeping track of exactly where he’d found it, too). He flipped through those pages, and on every one was—well, now, how to describe that? That notebook would have felt right at home in an art gallery.

  Threads of all colors. Threads frayed into a silky splash. Cabbage exploded into bloom or turned crystalline.

  “So this is the edge right here,” said Valko. “Four hundred meters, this time. That’s my guess.”

  He took the loop in Maya’s hand to tape into his notebook, and Maya could see him thinking. His face, before her eyes, was changing from scientific triumph to Dark Worries.

  “You see what this means,” said Valko.

  “It’s getting bigger?” said Maya. “We kind of knew that already.”

  “But we didn’t know the rate,” said Valko. “Of course, any getting bigger is pretty bad, but this is doubling. And if you notice, the effects are staying around longer, too.”

  Right behind them, the whole sidewalk now kind of lunged to the left, right out into the street. To avoid a stone turtle, whose head came peeking out from a wall. And all the pedestrians were hurrying along that warped bit of sidewalk, as if it had always been that way. The cars made their way carefully around the curve, too, and some of the cars had rubber-and-metal shooting stars or cobras where their windshield wipers used to be. Even though it was hours and hours already since the strangeness had done these things to the city.

  When you bend a piece of plastic the first time, it usually bounces pretty much back. But after a few more bends, the crease will show—it won’t fade away. And eventually the plastic breaks.

  Then Maya did see what it all meant. After all, one of her favorite picture books when she was little had been about a brave girl who asks a king for a single grain of rice—merely doubled every day. She remembered those enormous, enormous mountains of rice. She stopped walking and looked at Valko, while inside she started doubling numbers and doubling numbers and doubling them again.

  “It would be all right for a while,” she said. “The first few weeks aren’t so bad: four hundred meters, eight hundred meters, sixteen hundred meters. . . .”

  “All of Paris in a month,” said Valko. He went to a blank page in his notebook and kept doubling. “All of France in three months. How far away is New York? Six thousand kilometers? Anyway, it reaches New York two weeks later. San Francisco the next week. What’s the farthest-away place from Paris, do you think? Australia?”

  He did one last bit of scribbling, and then put his pencil away.

  “Doesn’t even matter where the farthest place is,” he said. “The week after San Francisco, the strangeness covers the entire world.”

  “Unless it stops here,” said Maya. It seemed like what her mother called borrowing trouble, to be worrying already about Australia.

  “Unless we stop it here,” said Valko. “Look!”

  A column of dust and shadow had just turned the corner and was lurching along in their direction, larger and darker and more filled with purpose than it had ever been before. It could be heard faintly rasping something that sounded like her name.

  And her fingertips were still tingling.

  Already hours and hours after one a.m., and there was still enough hum left in the air for the shadow to be follow
ing them about like that!

  So that was that: it was getting worse. The world was being bent and bent and bent again, and eventually maybe it would bend too far and be broken, and what does life look like, in a broken world?

  They backed down the street to the place the strangeness could not yet reach.

  In a month there would be nowhere in Paris to hide.

  Valko and Maya looked at each other.

  So. They had to stop it, then.

  How?

  11

  NEVER TRUST GARGOYLES. REALLY. DON’T.

  Few things in life are as nerve-racking as heading off to meet (for the first time) the parents of someone who, although a boy, has become one of your best friends in the whole world. But the fates must have really had it in for Maya Davidson, because on top of the meeting-a-nice-boy’s-parents-for-the-first-time worries, they had decided to toss in the following further complications:

  His parents were Bulgarian.

  They ran an embassy in Paris.

  They had just announced they wanted to send Valko back to Bulgaria because he wasn’t Bulgarian enough, and being friends with Maya was certainly not helping him be more Bulgarian.

  The dinner was going to be a formal embassy banquet, probably involving hundreds of mysterious little forks and spoons that Maya would not know how to use.

  And, finally, it just so happened that another 137 hours would be elapsing at six p.m. this evening, and that meant the laws of physics would be slightly suspended, in highly unpredictable ways, at more or less the same time as Maya was about to start reaching for the mysterious little forks she didn’t know how to use.

  Maya’s mother didn’t know about the spreading strangeness, of course, but because she knew or guessed most of the other items on this list—and because she was on an intense and obvious campaign to keep Maya from worrying so much about everything—she had been trying for several days to be especially kind and reassuring, and that, for some reason, had made Maya feel even more anxious.

  Basically, thought Maya as she raced to get into her fancy clothes on Monday after school, no one in the long history of dinner invitations had ever been more full of twitchy, itchy nervousness than she was right now.

  She pulled the comb through her nondescript brown hair and put on her party shoes, but when she dropped a barrette on the floor, she caught a glimpse of the Summer Box under her bed, and before she knew it, the gargoyles’ egg was cradled in her hands. The warmth of it was so comforting.

  There was a new word inscribed on it, she noticed. Now what did that say?

  Valko would know.

  She emptied all her school books out of her backpack and popped the egg in instead, wrapped in an extra sweater just in case it got especially cold by the time they were walking back home.

  “You look lovely,” said her mother, as Maya spun around for a quick inspection in the living room. “Don’t forget your scarf and gloves; it’s cold tonight. Look, I’ve got some nice flowers right here, ready to go.”

  Somehow she made it out of that apartment. The sun was setting as she trotted across the avenue Bosquet, feeling foolish with the bouquet of flowers in her gloved hands. Flowers (odd number only)—shake hands firmly—eye contact! She was remembering all the rules for meeting parents from Bulgaria. Oh, and it was five p.m. already. One hundred and thirty-six hours gone; one to go. If the strangeness hadn’t evaporated into nothing and spontaneously gone away.

  The dinner invitation was for seven p.m., but Valko had said to come earlier, as early as she could manage, before anything odd had had time to happen. He was thinking of the shadow wandering the streets, Maya could tell. He didn’t want her out there alone with the shadowy Fourcroy, if another wave of strangeness struck the neighborhood.

  In fact, he was at the embassy entrance, waiting for her.

  “You’ll have to put those flowers through Ivan’s machine,” he said with a grin. “I hope they fit.”

  It was one of those conveyor-belt X-ray machines, just like the airport versions, only smaller.

  Ivan wasn’t quite as beefy as you’d think a security guy would have to be, but he still would have looked pretty intimidating if he hadn’t been joking the whole time with Valko in Bulgarian. Maya balanced on one foot and then another, waiting for the flowers and her backpack to emerge. The egg set off no alarms.

  “Your coat’s warm, right?” said Valko, and he swung a couple of sodas into sight, as temptation. “Want a nice view? Follow me!”

  There were a couple of very grand flights of stairs and then some more stairs, less grand, and then a stairwell that looked like it wouldn’t have been out of place in a tubing factory, and then Valko pushed open an old door, and they were on the roof.

  “Oh!” said Maya. It was so beautiful. The sunset was still just enough in progress that the sky was the color of a ripe nectarine, and the Eiffel Tower loomed up over the buildings on the other side of the street.

  The roof itself had a lot of wires and satellite dishes and who-knows-what sort of contraptions cluttering it up, but there was a low barrier around the edge, so it didn’t seem completely perilous. The trees in the Bulgarians’ private garden pushed up above the roofline of the building on their left. And there, across the roof, were a couple of figures too small and too still to be human. Maya gripped Valko’s arm.

  “They’re here!” she said, and her voice squeaked a little as she said it. “You didn’t tell me they were back. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The gargoyles stared stiffly ahead, right at them.

  “I haven’t been up here in ages,” said Valko. “I wonder how those things got here.”

  “Flew, I guess,” said Maya.

  She did not like being stared at by stone creatures. Valko hesitated at her side. Neither of them seemed to know quite how frightened they should be, here under the gaze of those so-very-still eyes.

  Finally Valko squared his shoulders and flashed a half smile in Maya’s direction, his eyes catching fire just a little in the last remnants of the sunset. “They’re only statues. Someone must have lugged them up the stairs. Come on. It’s a chance to get a really good look, finally.”

  They picked their way across the rooftop, and the gargoyles stonily watched them come.

  “So the question is, How’d someone get these here, without anyone noticing?” said Valko.

  That wasn’t the question at all, from Maya’s perspective. What she wanted to know was what they were up to, and whether they were evil, and what the heck gargoyles had to do with Bulgaria, and why they seemed to do all their moving around in one high-speed burst in the middle of the night.

  No, none of that was the first thing she wanted to know. The first thing she wanted to know was why exactly they had given her the beautiful egg. She really wanted to know that. But it’s hard to get answers from a creature carved out of stone.

  “I’m still curious about what they’re made of, too,” said Valko, dropping the sodas to fumble around in his pockets for a moment. “I could try scraping a little sample off with my knife. See if it’s that fake plastery stuff they use for decorations sometimes—that would be easy to lug across Paris—”

  “Wait—what are you doing?” said Maya. It made her nervous, seeing Valko walk right up close to those staring, staring gargoyles with his Swiss Army knife in his hand. In fact, it made her nervous in two ways at once: for Valko, whose little knife was really very small, compared to the statues watching him approach, and for the gargoyles, because . . . um, knives? Knives are sharp. Nobody wants somebody poking at them with knives. Maybe even a gargoyle made of stone wouldn’t want knives coming his way.

  “Valko, don’t!” she said. Couldn’t he feel it? That crackle in the air around the gargoyles’ staring, monstrous, mishmashy heads? It was the smell of rocks beginning to lose their temper. It was the invisible sharpness in the air, right before a mountain gives way and becomes boulders and talus, screaming down the slope.

  She was just reaching
forward to haul him safely back when the world exploded. Din and dust! The harsh clatter of stone wings, rubble, pebbles, boulders, rocks! And there in the middle of all that noise, a human gasp—Valko. And then silence again. Instantly.

  The mountain had fallen, and everything was different. Valko was staring up at her from the rooftop with wide, horrified eyes, but he could not move, because around his neck was folded a stony and inflexible wing. And a stone talon gripped Valko’s right arm, and Valko’s fingers splayed out a little, under the pressure of all that stone, and on the ground beside him, looking very weak and small and ridiculous, was his red pocketknife.

  “Maya, go!” said Valko to Maya. He could only croak it, because the wing was too close around his throat. It was horrible, seeing that stone wing pinning him so tightly and so awkwardly to the ground and to the gargoyle behind him. The gargoyle was the one she had been calling Beak-Face; she could see that now. With its sharp, cruel stone nose. The other gargoyle was frozen just behind, a look of anger or horror or shock carved into the stone of its face.

  It all made Maya very, very mad. She was instantly almost drowning in fury, to tell the truth. She jumped forward and pounded on the gargoyle’s back (but being very careful not to pound on places that might jar Valko trapped beneath).

  “LET HIM GO,” she said, so mad that every word of hers was huge and wild and loud. “DON’T YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I AM? DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT I HAVE?”

  She leaped back a pace, opened her backpack, and pulled it out—the gargoyles’ beautiful, lovely, wonderful egg.

  Another explosion! Rocks and wings and motion and noise!

  And then that sudden stillness again. On the school playground, when Maya was very little, the kids used to play a game called red light/green light—run for green, freeze for red. This was a little like that. But no child on a playground ever froze as convincingly as these gargoyles froze. They were the world champion stars of Not Moving.