I took a deep breath. “What do I have to do?”
Paavo sighed and brushed cigarette ash off his pants. Granny Gran sat staring off at the sky and picking at the blanket across her knees for a minute.
Then she said, “Ride the subway trains. In the tunnels between the real stations, look for the phantom station that the kraken has made and put there. No one will be able to see it but you. Then, Vee, you’re going to have to slip off the end of the nearest platform and walk down the tunnel to Joel and get the key from him. I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to do it that I can think of. Once you’ve got it, bring it to Paavo.”
After a minute—he still didn’t like the idea, I could see that—Paavo sighed again and said, “Come look for me at the Eighty-first Street station by the park.”
“But the kraken,” I croaked. “The Princes!”
“You leave them to us,” Granny Gran said. “Between us, Paavo and I will make sure the enemy are kept busy while you’re in their territory.”
She sounded strange—eager, even. It occurred to me that maybe she might not be so confident about all this if she'd actually caught the scent of the kraken, the way Paavo and I both had.
And the last time magic had been put out there to keep the Princes busy, it hadn't worked out all that well. I didn't want to embarrass Paavo by mentioning that, though.
“Oh boy,” I said, kind of wobbly. I was really scared.
“Listen, Vee,” Granny Gran said, “there’s one thing we can do to make your part easier. Come over here.”
She peeled back the blanket and started to get out of her chair, very shakily. Paavo jumped up and offered her his arm, and we went very slowly and unsteadily to the birdbath on the lawn, which was a stone basin on a post. Granny Gran nodded to Paavo, and he wrote on the water with his finger, and there was Joel, slumped against the wall with his arms folded and his head pillowed on them. I think maybe he was crying, because his shoulders were moving a little.
Granny Gran said, “Open your thoughts, Vee. Paavo and I have a message for Joel. Slacken your mind and let us use it, and when I tell you to, put your finger on the image in the water.”
I pulled back a little. I was nervous about touching the water after Paavo had put magic in it. I said, “I’m no magician.”
“Shaa,” Paavo said, and he reached out and slowly spread two fingertips from the center of my forehead above my eyebrows. All the tightness there went away. I felt my jaw go loose, which was a nice, sleepy feeling. Then Granny Gran nudged my elbow, and I let my hand glide over the surface of the water in the birdbath and then drop, like the arm of an old record player, so that I just touched the reflection of Joel in the shallow water.
A sort of current ran up my arm and made me jump, and the quietness was all gone out of me again.
But the circles in the water spread and the surface got still again, and I saw Joel straighten up and lean the back of his head against the wall behind him where it said in huge letters, SHAZAM KID. Then, while the three of us watched, he felt along the edges of his violin case, opened the catches, and took out the fiddle and the bow—Paavo’s bow. He began to tune the strings. Then he stood up and he played.
I couldn’t hear anything, but I saw him playing and I saw his face become calm and concentrated. Then a little breeze gusted by and dropped a leaf onto the surface, and the image was gone.
“Listen,” Granny Gran said to me. “Listen in the subway, and you’ll hear him.”
I said, “It sounds crazy to me, but I’ll try.”
“Right away,” Granny Gran said. “You only have tomorrow.”
So it was that close. I no more thought to doubt Granny Gran’s estimation of the time we had than to doubt the greenness of the grass around us. I couldn’t believe how serene she looked, how calm her creased little face was, saying such a thing: you only have tomorrow.
Paavo said, “Yah, we better get going. I’m sorry we had to bother you.”
“Oh, it’s no bother,” she said. “A person likes to think she can still do a little something, you know. But next time, Andy, please bring me some new pictures of the children. If you can’t get them to come with you to this glum old place, at least bring pictures.”
She thought he was my dead uncle Andy, and she turned to me and said, “I have something for you, Emma.” My cousin Emma who lived in Sweden.
“I’m Vee, Granny,” I said.
“Of course you are. No, I don’t want to sit—as long as you two have me on my feet, help me to my room, will you? No use wasting all that effort.”
I didn’t want Paavo to see her room, not because it was ugly or anything—she had a nice room, small but bright and neat—but because I always hated to go in there on account of the smell of the whole inside of the building. Not that it smelled bad, exactly, but there was this faint, dusty scent overlaid with perfume that I knew was the smell of being really old. I guess I wanted to avoid that for all of us.
Granny Gran insisted. So in we went, inching along at her pace, crowding into the little elevator, and shuffling down the hall to her room. People in the other rooms and along the hallways stared after us. I guess they had nothing live to look at most of the time that they hadn’t seen a million times before, and they liked to gossip. Granny Gran told me once: “Little else to do, lovie, in these places, pleasant as they may be.”
We sat her in the armchair by her window, at her direction, and then she took off a key she wore on a chain around her neck. “We do have our little security problems even here,” she sighed. She opened a drawer in the desk under the windowsill. “I have something here for you, Vee.”
She put into my hand one of those old change purses made of tiny steel links that you mainly see in antique clothing stores. It was bulging and heavy. I opened it and found it jammed full of silver dollars.
“But Granny,” I said, hot-faced with greed and embarrassment at the same time, “I can’t take your money!”
“Better now when you can use it than later when it doesn’t matter, if there is a later,” she said, and she dug a small roll of bills out of the back of the drawer and made me take that, too, which was a very good thing: I'd been wondering how the heck Paavo and I were going to get back to the city on our empty pockets. “What are the fares these days, anyway—is it a dollar yet to ride the subway?”
So I gave her a big but careful hug, and Paavo took her bony little shoulders in his big hands and rested his cheek on hers for a minute, and we left. Mrs. Dermott met us at the door and thanked me again, and told me to tell my mom how well Granny Gran was doing. She kept looking at Paavo, though, with this bright, curious look.
We got out of there and caught a bus back to the city, not talking much. We were tired.
At the Port Authority, Paavo said, “You better not go home alone, Val.”
“Why not?” I said belligerently. Frankly, I’d had about enough of being scared out of my wits for a while.
He shrugged. “That’s how it feels to me,” he said. He came with me.
It was a good thing. The three Princes of Darkness were playing stoopball across the street from my building.
12
Hiding Out
WE HEARD THEM BEFORE WE SAW THEM whooping and howling and jumping around like little kids. It’s even possible that to Alec, the afternoon doorman, they actually did look like little kids, rowdy maybe, but harmless.
I couldn’t guess how it would look to Alec when they grabbed me and Paavo to drag us off to the kraken.
We peeked at them from around the corner of my block.
“They think they’re so smart,” I whispered. “I can slip in through the Fudge.”
Paavo growled back, “No. They know about that. It’s underground, remember? A basement passage. The kraken knows, and what the kraken knows, they know. Go in now and you don’t come out again. They’ll trap you like a fly in a bottle.”
And leave him alone out here without anyone to help him at all.
We got out of there as fast as we could. It was already late on that Saturday afternoon, and the chill in the air really cut.
“Where can I go?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you can’t ride the subways alone at night to look for Joel, it’s too dangerous. You got to wait and start tomorrow. Meantime, I know some places where we can rest.”
We went to the library on Forty-second Street and took turns snoozing at the big tables in there, one of us reading and waking the other if a guard came by. It’s a big, airy place full of quiet and dim light. You can sleep pretty soundly there if the guards let you alone.
Also this gave us a chance to do some research on the subways. I looked at plans and drawings and photographs until I was dizzy. Of course, some of the most important stuff listed in the catalogue was missing. It always is. People steal from that place all the time. But we found enough for me to get a pretty good idea of the ground I was going to have to cover to locate the phantom station, and how a person is supposed to walk in the tunnels avoiding the third rail and using the recesses in the walls to stand in when a train goes by—for when I would have to go in and get the key.
All the time I was doing this I had an unreal feeling. Me, go ride the trains down where the Princes hung out, by myself, with the kraken on watch for me in the noisy dark? And then I was going to actually walk into the tunnels?
Worst of all, I could see that no way in the world was I going to be able to get myself and a blind person back out of there. Supposing I could find Joel, and supposing next that I could get to him, Granny Gran was still right: I would have to take the key and leave him.
I concentrated on learning about the subway lines, especially the ones I wasn’t familiar with. One thing I did not want to do was to get myself lost down there.
At six o’clock they closed the library.
I got us some dinner at some grubby little Greek place, and then we went to Grand Central and slept there for a while. We didn’t look real ratty, like most of the derelicts.
But I can tell you, I felt terrible. I mean, Paavo knew about these places because he’d had to use them, like any poor old bum, when he should have been treated like a terrific hero who had come to help us against a terrible threat. He had gray stubble on his cheeks now, but I knew that by nature he was neat as a cat—he didn’t get a spot on him until he had to lift that grate at Ninety-first Street—and he shouldn’t have had to sit around in the same clothes all the time and sleep in public places.
Well, nobody should, I guess.
It was embarrassing, having him find my gran tucked away in even a nice old folks home, and now to see the benches at the Port Authority Bus Terminal (where we spent that evening) loaded for the night with poor old men and women with no place else to go.
There were bag ladies washing themselves when I went into the rest room. I mean bathing piece by piece and changing their clothes. We have two bathrooms in our apartment, one for Mom and one for me.
Paavo and I sat and watched the pimps waiting around to see if any kids came off the buses, brand new to New York and easy prey. I had to explain that to Paavo. He didn’t say anything. I had the feeling he’d seen that and worse in his life.
We only got really hassled once, but it was a sort of double whammy and it shook me up.
A guy in cowboy boots and a fringed leather vest fell into step with me on my way back from the ladies room. He had a really suave line: “Hey, bitch,” he said, in this conversational tone, “you need a ride someplace?”
“No,” I said, walking faster, but he kind of leaned toward me as we walked—he was telling me he thought I sure did need a ride and he had this car outside that I wouldn’t believe—and I found myself herded into a corner.
I couldn’t yell for help, not if it might lead to questions being asked about Paavo and me. I knew I was in trouble.
“Uh, listen,” I said, “I have to get back to my uncle over there. He’s waiting for me. He’s a cop,” I added in desperation. Dumb.
The leather creep laughed. “Oh yeah? Direct wheelchair traffic in the old folks homes, or what? What you hanging out with a old jerk like that for anyways? Bet he don’t got a car, not even a scooter, not even a pair of skates.”
A hoarse, husky voice behind him grumbled, “Where’s my soda? You said you’d bring me a soda. I’m still waiting.”
It was Paavo, blinking and complaining like a crochety old grampa.
The leather creep glared at him over his shoulder. “Beat it, zombie,” he said.
Paavo suddenly started to sing in this awful, quavery voice: “Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde, and the band played on!” Heads turned. He was singing pretty loudly. “He held his girl in a strawberry whirl, and the band played on!”
The leather creep swore furiously under his breath and snarled at me, “Shit, if he wants you that bad, the senile old drooler can have you!” and he stomped away.
I think people like that really can’t stand to feel ridiculous. I was red in the face myself.
Paavo and I went back to our seats, which luckily had not been taken by anybody else. We sat down.
“God,” I said. I was sweating.
But we weren’t in the clear yet.
A policewoman sat down on the other side of me. “You folks all right?” she said to me.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “We’re fine.”
“Waiting for somebody?” she said, looking past me at Paavo. He had his eyes shut. This one was up to me. “Um, yes, ma’am.”
“Is your friend all right?”
I said, “He’s my great-uncle Mike. I’m kind of staying with him to help out while Great-aunt Jill’s in the hospital. But he misplaced his keys and we’re locked out. My cousin Rita’s coming with a spare set of keys as soon as she gets off her shift, out in Jersey.”
Wow. Don’t ask where in Jersey or a shift as what, please.
“Couldn’t you get the neighbors to help out?” the lady cop said, still watching Paavo.
I leaned nearer to her to block her view of him, because I thought she might notice something if she looked long enough, something about him that would tell her he was special.
I lowered my voice. “The neighbors are a little annoyed with him, actually, because he sings like that a lot. I think maybe a lady down the hall from him helped his keys disappear, you know what I mean? Revenge.”
She looked at me now, and I thought, oh boy, you’ve gone too far. I sat there trying to look one hundred percent innocent. If she asked me for some ID—if my mom had reported me missing—
The cop stood up. “If you need anything, I’m around,” she said, and she walked away.
I just sat there, contemplating the edge we somehow had not dropped over. If she’d asked him for some ID—!
Without opening his eyes, Paavo said, “Valentine, you’re sure a slick liar. I hope you never get carried away by your talent. A talent like that can run off with you if you get too comfortable with it. But you know that, right?”
“You’re a terrible singer,” I hissed. “Where did you get that song? ‘Strawberry whirl’ sounds like an ice-cream flavor!”
“I forgot that part so I had to make it up,” he said. “Is she gone?” He peered after the policewoman. “Good. Come on.”
We walked eastward, away from dirty old Eighth Avenue.
I said, “I guess she was just trying to protect me, you know? She thought you were—” Now how was I going to tell him she probably had figured I might be in the clutches of a mole-ster or worse? A little late, if you ask me, considering the guy with the cowboy outfit and the wonderful car waiting right outside.
“I know what she thought,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he said firmly. “I’m glad she took an interest. Maybe sometime she’ll help some other kid that needs it. You got a mean world here, Valentine, that devours its stray children.”
“What would we have done if she hadn’t believed me?” I s
aid. You know how when the danger’s more or less past, you like to wallow in how bad it might have been.
“Whatever we could,” Paavo said. He was not a wallower.
“Was that a magic song? ‘Strawberry Whirl’?”
“I learned it a long time ago from your Granny Gran. That’s the only magic in it.”
I looked up at the sky. You can’t see the stars well at night in New York because there’s so much light from the city, but you can make some of them out if you let your eyes get adjusted.
Not that night. It was cloudy.
I said, “Paavo, what star do you come from? What planet?”
“This planet,” he said, sounding surprised. “But long ago. I forgot how long. I forgot how it is here. Money, for one thing. And I forgot how I would have to be, coming back here now.”
Old, he meant. So in Sorcery Hall he looked different: younger. I didn’t pursue that. I liked the way he was now, I liked him as I knew him.
We strolled back over toward the Library and sat down on the steps outside the entrance to Bryant Park. The park was locked, so nobody could come up behind us. Outside we could see anyone coming toward us, cops or whoever.
“Paavo,” I said, “what is Sorcery Hall, exactly?”
“Oh, it’s like a club,” he said, “a professional association. The members come from all over, you know, to learn from each other and work together on projects.”
“What kind of projects?”
“Keeping worlds like yours out of trouble, for one thing. You had some knowledgeable people here in some earlier cycles of your history.” Like himself, I guessed. Maybe he’d been a Druid, or something even earlier that nobody knows about anymore. I was shy about asking, so I didn’t.
He went on, “Some of them are still keeping an eye on you now that it’s all youngsters here. I mean young spirits. Mostly we try not to interfere because you only learn by taking care of your own problems, but a kraken—well, that’s a little more than you can handle without help.”