The Bronze King

  The original blue wall was there, with the identical names scratched into the blue paint, the identical scratches on the lock plate, and the identical answers from the guy in the token booth: no, he didn’t have a key, and he didn’t know who did or what they kept in there except that it was some kind of maintenance equipment, and no, he didn’t know anything about another place just like it down at the Eighty-first Street station.

  I went home and started making spaghetti for dinner.

  Mom came in singing. She had a date with Mr. Editor, thank goodness. We fenced around about my having gone out in defiance of her orders, but she was so pleased about her date and about nothing more being missing, in spite of my desertion of my post, that it was all okay.

  Next morning I found my bookshelves completely empty. My whole collection was gone, including a hardcover copy of The Secret Garden from the secondhand bookstore on Fourteenth Street and a book of old maps from Uncle Tim. (Our Manhattan telephone directories were gone too.)

  I was furious. There was nothing I could do. I shut my door and didn’t say anything to Mom. She would just tell me that Sam or some nameless thug hired by the landlord had sneaked in during the night and stolen my books while I slept, and frankly, there was no alternative explanation I could offer. Not without blowing everything completely.

  That day in French class I sort of woke up. That is, I was cringing in my seat, listening to Froggy Fergusson reading with his awful, awful accent, when all of a sudden I heard the booming sound that the hall doors make in that particular hallway if you push through them fast, and I remembered: the explosion, the hard thing whacking me over my eye—

  At lunch period I called Joel’s school with an emergency message for him. Using my mom’s telephone voice, which I had recently perfected, I told them I was his new shrink. They got him on the phone.

  I told him to meet me at the Eighty-first Street station right away and then I hung up, bam, like Granny Gran.

  He met me, which means he climbed out of a taxi lugging the loaner-violin case and looking furious. He showed the cab driver some money and told him to wait.

  “What is this?” he said to me. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “When the subway exploded, or whatever happened, something flew out and smacked me over the eyebrow, right here.”

  “Where that mark is?” he said.

  “What mark?” I said, a little shaken up by this. I hadn’t noticed any mark.

  “Well, you have a red spot there.”

  “Listen, Joel,” I said, “I know what happened. The key, the key to that lock on the blue door downstairs in this station is what came flying out of there. It hit me, it bounced right off me and landed someplace around here. Help me look for it.”

  “Now?” he said.

  “Of course now! Have you been watching the papers? I don’t think we have a lot of time. Some creepy things have been happening, and it’s getting worse.”

  “The awning was missing from the front of my building this morning,” he said. “Because you were there, right? You’re what they call a vector, at least for some of these weird things that are going on.”

  “Joel, I am not carrying a disease!”

  “Not exactly, but you are a little dangerous to be around, aren’t you?” God, was he going to walk away from all this because the kraken, looking for the key, kept making these blind grabs in my direction? Could I blame him if he did?

  He scratched his neck under the scarf he wore. “Do you remember a key, an actual key?”

  “No,” I said, very relieved that he was sticking around. “But I remember what it felt like when it hit me, and it could have been a key. It was small and hard. And I think it marked me like this to show, to—to claim me. That’s why I’ve been involved from the beginning: because the key happened to hit me.” And the key hit me, I didn’t tell Joel, because of my connection to Sorcery Hall through my Granny Gran.

  “That was days ago,” Joel said. “You won’t find it. If it’s been lying on the sidewalk all this time, it could have been kicked anyplace by now, or picked up by anyone.”

  “No,” I said, though so far I hadn’t had any luck and I was pretty worried. “It’s waiting for us to find it.”

  “What about the Princes?” he said, glancing around. “Any sign of them?”

  I lost my patience. “Look, if you’re scared, go back to school. If not, help me look. I want to bring the key to Paavo today.”

  Joel paid the cab driver, and we looked. There wasn’t anything: just squares of concrete, and the curb and the gutter, and the metal skirting around the subway entrance. We wandered around glaring at the ground. Somehow a lot of time went by, and pretty soon, Joel reminded me, we should be heading uptown to meet Paavo at Grant’s Tomb,

  I didn’t want to go empty-handed, not when I knew what I was looking for and where to look for it.

  “Maybe Paavo has some way of locating it right away,” Joel said, “or maybe he could pick up the trail of whoever’s got it.”

  “Nobody’s got it,” I growled. My eyes were tearing with frustration. “It’s got to be here! It hit me and bounced off—”

  I stood there thinking. I thought about how when Barbara first started wearing contact lenses, the hard kind, the left one used to pop out a lot because she blinked too hard when it was bothering her. We did a lot of patting the ground in some pretty strange places. You haven’t been in the pits until you’ve groped the floor of a movie theater in the dark among the gum wads and sticky soda spills, looking for a lost lens.

  We both got very good at hearing where the lens landed. That tiny click is all you need to get a good idea, more or less, of where to start patting.

  So when the key had hit my forehead, where had it landed afterward?

  I turned around and stood as close to where I’d been standing that day as I could remember.

  “What are you doing?” Joel said. “You look weird.”

  I told him to shush.

  I had been standing here, by the subway entrance, fishing around in my bookbag for my math assignment, and muttering. The ground shook, and something tapped me hard over the eye, and then—

  “There was no sound,” I said. “It didn’t make any sound!”

  “You mean it disappeared, like all those other things?” Joel said. “Come on, Tina—”

  “No, no,” I said, “that happens with a contact lens, too. If there’s no sound, you know it never reached the floor. It’s hung up somewhere on your clothes, or it landed in the book you were reading, something like that.”

  “What were you wearing?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, but if I look in my closet, I’ll remember. The key must be caught in a pocket or a cuff!”

  “Where’re you going?” he said.

  “Home! To look through my clothes!”

  At the door to my building, I told him to wait downstairs for me. I wasn’t about to have Joel come look over everything I owned.

  I went ripping through my closet, my dresser, my laundry hamper, looking for what I’d been wearing that day—the cuffless jeans with pockets too tight to jam anything into, let alone for something to fall in, the boots, the yellow shirt, my fuzzy jacket.

  There was nothing in any of them, not even in the pockets of the fuzzy jacket.

  I stood there feeling sick with failure. What was I going to tell Paavo?

  Then Mom came in. “Tina? Are you home?” I could tell by her voice that something was wrong and going to get wronger.

  “I forgot my English paper and Mr. Chernick told me to go home and get it. I’m just leaving.”

  “Is that so?” she said. She was in the living room, looking through the mail, I think. “I had a call from school a little while ago. I hear that you not only flunked a math test, you’re behind with two book reports and three weeks late with a presentation for social studies class. On top of which, they told me you’d vanished from school today.”

  There wasn’t a lot to
say to this, so I didn’t say anything. I looked out my bedroom window. Joel was hanging around across the street. I made go-away signs. He didn’t see or didn’t mean to go away, because he didn’t budge. Well, if Mom hadn’t spotted him on her way in, maybe we were okay.

  She came and stood in the doorway to my room, probably expecting to find Joel in there with me. Even though I was alone as requested, I saw her get that bland, above-it-all look that meant real trouble. “And here you’ve been neatening up your room. What a beautiful job. I’m really impressed.”

  The room did look as if it had been burgled by a troop of rhinoceroses. “I’m looking for something,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said. “What? China?” She waited for me to admire that and then she really let loose: “I’m looking for something, too. I’m looking for my kitchen linoleum, and I’m looking for some galley proofs that have gone walkabout all on their own, and I’m looking for the phone call I should have had by now from my nice but very, very busy lawyer. Most of all, I’m looking for a little quiet in that madhouse I call my office, not nagging phone calls from school telling me that my daughter is turning into a cretinous delinquent. I’m looking for a house I can step into without wondering how I got into a pigpen by mistake. You know Mrs. Sanchez comes tomorrow. You know she isn’t going to clean up any of this incredible decor you’ve designed for yourself—”

  “I wasn’t going to ask her—”

  “What will happen will be a phone call to me from Mrs. Sanchez, complaining about the state of your room and how she can’t clean in here when it’s like this. She’ll take up my time with a detailed list of grievances going back three and a half years and wind up by threatening to quit.”

  “I’ll fix it,” I mumbled.

  It was amazing to me, how my soft, sweet, flirtatious mother, who had often told me to try to soften my own attitude and to hide my brains so as not to scare away the boys that she was also so worried about, had this other side to her that I don’t think she realized existed.

  This was the tough side, the smart, ambitious woman who held down the job that kept us both in spaghetti. What she always said was how she wanted to find some nice guy to look after both of us. What she did was run her life and mine, when I let her, with a hand of steel. Sometimes a very heavy hand of steel. I really hated her at this particular moment, the way you can only hate your mother.

  “Yes, you certainly will fix it,” she said. “But first you are going to bring your schoolbooks into the kitchen, and you and I are going to sit down and waste more of my time—my most precious time, the kind I use to try to repair myself and stay sane through something I think they call relaxation. We are going to spend some of that time going over your situation in school and setting up a schedule, Tina, according to which you will get everything that’s owing done. Late, but done. You understand?”

  “I said I’ll fix it!” I screamed. “I’ll fix it, the room and the work and the whole damn thing if you’ll just leave me alone and let me do it my own way!”

  “Schoolbooks,” she said. “Now, Tina. In the kitchen. This shambles can wait.”

  “Shambles means slaughterhouse,” I said. “I haven’t killed anything in here.” Yet. “And don’t call me Tina, it’s babyish and stupid. I never asked to be called Tina. I hate my name.”

  Which was news to me. I didn’t know it until I said it.

  “Really?” my mother said sweetly. “That was your own name for yourself before you could pronounce ‘Valentine,’ so don’t blame me. I’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.”

  You can’t win.

  I needed a piece of paper and something to weight it with so I could drop a note down to Joel from the window. I emptied my bookbag out onto the bed.

  But what was I going to write? Sorry, no key, can’t come down, grounded by mother for messiness and stupidity which is really just not having enough time to manage Sorcery Hall and the kraken and my schoolwork all at once.

  Groping around in the heap of books and papers and notebooks and school junk from my bookbag, I found something small and heavy to wrap my note around.

  It was a key.

  10

  The Abandoned Station

  A PLAIN BRASS-COLORED KEY with a jigsaw-jaggedy edge and a flowery design stamped on the round part that you hold. I had no more doubt of what it was than of my own, well, my name.

  The thing had bounced off my cretinous, hard little head right into my open bookbag. I was so relieved I almost whooped out loud.

  I sat down on the bed to write.

  First I had to accept the fact that not only were Joel and Paavo going to go on without me, they were probably going to wind up the whole business without me, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Not unless I wanted to risk having the world gobbled up, starting with the West Side Highway or what was left of it.

  So I wrote a note, gritting my teeth the whole time. I didn’t care about Joel, but Paavo wasn’t going to think much of me when he found out why I couldn’t come down. Grounded, like a ten-year-old!

  I know kids who would do whatever they wanted and ignore what their parents said, but I just couldn’t do that. Not with my mom on her own the way she was, and the two of us running the household together. I know who gets the blame when a kid living with only her mother looks bad, and besides, I was kind of proud of how well I got along with her, considering. I didn’t want to ruin it. We had a deal. She didn’t go through my closets and things, and I didn’t duck out on her rules, much. Mutual toleration.

  I leaned out the window.

  There was Joel, standing on the curb now and staring up. There was no way I could miss with that key. I am a champion thrower, thanks to having to throw stones to defend myself from country dogs around my uncle’s place in Pennsylvania in the summers. I crumpled the piece of notebook paper around the key and leaned out.

  “Tina,” he yelled, “what are you doing?”

  From behind me I heard my mom coming, yelling, “Tina, what are you doing?”

  I dropped the little package. It was lighter than I’d thought and veered on a breeze. Joel, loaded down with his books and the violin case, made a clumsy dive after it. My mother banged the window shut and grabbed my arm in her grip of steel, and the rest of the evening is not worth telling about.

  Not that my mom is any kind of child abuser, but when she gets pushed over the edge into one of her strict fits, she becomes a kind of maximum-security warden, with my best interests at heart, of course.

  She said, “Clean. Up. This. Room. Now.”

  I was still putting my things away at about one A.M., in the dark, just stuffing them any old where. Mom had looked in once and told me to go to bed, but once I got started cleaning up I wasn’t about to stop and leave more to do tomorrow. Tomorrow, which was Saturday at last, was reserved for hearing from Joel and Paavo all about how they saved the world—without me.

  Only it didn’t happen that way.

  For one thing, I woke up that Saturday morning and found that my bookbag, which I had emptied out onto the bed the day before thank goodness, was gone. The kraken had finally gotten as close as it was going to get to the key.

  But if Joel and Paavo had stopped the kraken, wouldn’t the vanished things be coming back, not more things disappearing?

  And the day looked funny. Although it was spring, the sky was cloudy and cold again, sullen-looking, broody, and mean.

  I started to worry, but for the moment there was nothing I could do about it. I settled down to one of my neglected assignments. (“You can wait to see your friend Joel until you’ve caught up with your schoolwork.” “You told me that five times already.” “Well, I’m telling you again. How can I explain to you how distressing it is for me, Tina, to find that I can’t seem to trust you anymore? You’re not to sneak off to meet him, do you understand?” “If I want to meet Joel someplace I’m sure not going to sneak.” Etc. Our relationship was definitely on the downslope.)

  I could afford t
o be patient. I knew Mom had a brunch date downtown with one of her authors, which was one reason she’d been able to come home early the day before—because she was set up for work on the weekend. She certainly was not going to take me along, and there was no way to lock me in.

  I craned my neck looking out the window after she left to make sure she really did go. As soon as she’d turned the corner, I zipped downstairs and out through Fudge Tower, and I headed toward the Eighty-first Street station.

  Paavo had parked himself against the wall of a building on the corner of Columbus and Eighty-third, drinking Coke from one of those wax cups. Mom had probably walked right past him. He looked gloomy and a little rumpled. He looked old.

  “What happened?” I said. I had a horrible feeling the answer was going to be pretty bad.

  It was. “Joel tried to use the key. It was a bad mistake. The kraken has him.”

  I almost sat down on the sidewalk, but managed instead to swivel around and plump myself against the wall next to Paavo. For a minute I couldn’t say anything. I was full of this big, blaring feeling of UNFAIR. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You don’t get involved in magical adventures to lose. Not in books, anyway.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Paavo said. He put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a quick little hug. “Joel isn’t dead. But the kraken is holding him.”

  “He was supposed to take the key to you at Grant’s Tomb!” I could feel my chin start to wobble the way it does before I’m going to cry, and I was desperate not to cry in front of Paavo.

  Paavo shook his head. “He came looking, but I was late. I got held up. I don’t have all my strength here; this place slows me down. Anyhow, he didn’t wait. He went to the station alone and tried to use the key. He’s not the right one to do that, so the kraken grabbed him. The only reason it couldn’t take the key from him then and there was, he’s got my bow in his violin case. The kraken can only move him around, it can’t really touch him, so long as he hangs onto that.”