The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

  I could still make out enough to know that this was definitely not the Dairy I knew. We were barricaded in a long, low-ceilinged room. The stone-flagged floor was scattered with a jumble of upended furniture all roughly made of heavy, scarred wood.

  I kept seeing Sebbian’s pale face, and his hand with a twist of bone lashed to his thin wrist. “We’re just going to leave him out there? The Bone Men—”

  Kevin grabbed my arms and shook me once, hard, so that my teeth clicked together.

  “The Bone Men have already done all they can to poor Sebbian,” he said fiercely. “They’ll do worse to you if I let them. I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  Something hit one of the shutters a whack so sharp I thought the thick wood had split. I decided instantly that I agreed.

  Three

  Ash Wine

  KEVIN HUSTLED ME THROUGH a low doorway into an adjoining room. Over by the back wall, which was taken up completely by a huge arched fireplace black with soot, he let me go and concentrated on undoing a knot in the corner of a lace-trimmed rag he fished out from his sweatshirt pocket. The rag looked as if it might have been a handkerchief once.

  He spilled a tiny pebble into his palm and closed his fist on it. Rays of white light squeezed out between his fingers.

  “A seedstone,” he said to me in a low voice. “It will make way for you. Things weren’t supposed to be like this. I wanted to show you around a little, let you see what’s at stake—I didn’t know the Bone Men were waking here.”

  Somebody was, and more than waking. One wing of the shutters splintered under a shivering blow, and I got a look through the gap into the howling darkness outside. I could just make out a nightmare figure with tattered clothing whipping around the white rails of its arms and ribs.

  There was a voice, too, distant and crackling faintly like a very bad phone connection. Inside the static I could hear words: “Strangers, you knocked on our rooftops. We’ve come to invite you in.”

  I thought of my heels thudding on the mosaic stones of the Battle Path and my knees turned to jelly.

  Kevin shoved me inside the fireplace and reached past me with his glowing fist so that light fell on the sooty wall behind me. “There’s one of the Great Ways in here. It’ll take you to an arch and out.”

  “Then why didn’t Sebbian use it?” I couldn’t stop seeing the harper’s face in my mind’s eye.

  “The Great Ways don’t carry common folk,” Kevin said curtly. “But they’ll take you, with the rose pin to light your path.”

  In the other room, white stick fingers clicked on the bar he’d set across the window opening. The static voice spoke inside the wind: “If you won’t come visit us, then we’ll visit you. We’ll drink ash wine together.”

  Kevin rapped the hearth wall with the knuckles of his illuminated fist, scattering velvety soot from the bricks. A section of the wall swung away.

  “You wanted to go home—go! If the Bone Men get you, that’s the end. You have to be able to move back and forth, because I can’t anymore.”

  I gaped at him. Back and forth? I was supposed to come back here? In the other room, the door shuddered under a thunderous impact and another piece of planking clattered onto the floor.

  “It won’t be like this next time,” Kevin shouted. The rushing noise and static filled the air now. He grabbed my shoulders and turned me. “Now go, go on.”

  “Where?” I said, pulling back from the inky opening in the wall. It looked like the mouth of a bottomless pit.

  “Follow the passage,” he said in my ear, “to the Inscope Arch. You can go home through there. Then you’ll be able to use any arch but Willowdell to return to the Fayre Farre, so long as you have that little brooch with you. You’ll come back, Amy—the prophecy speaks of you. Sebbian said so. That’s why the pin sought you out for me today. You’ve a part to play here; you’re needed. Swear you’ll come back.”

  A racket of hammering broke out on the roof. “God,” I said, “are you crazy?”

  He said, “I gave you your brooch back, didn’t I?”

  “Who asked you to steal it in the first place?” I yelled.

  The whole building began to rattle like a giant snare drum played by a maniac.

  “Damn it, GO!” Kevin shoved me into the passage and the stone wall crashed shut behind me.

  The barrage of outside noise was cut off completely. Silence and darkness made my head spin. I have never seen blackness so black or heard silence so thick. I was buried alive and alone, except for the faint glow of the rhinestone brooch.

  I fumbled it free and held it up, swinging my skates by their laces in my other hand as a sort of weapon, I guess. The gleam of the pin lit up a squarish passage with walls of rough-cut black rock running straight away in front of me. Better that than a toast with the Bone Men in ash wine, whatever that was.

  I padded down the stone passage a little way, hearing only the whisper of my own breathing and the soft brush of my matted socks on the hard floor. What was lurking just past the faint beam of the rose pin, what was listening to my trembling breathing?

  It was too much, I couldn’t stand it. I sat down and pulled on the skates, after brushing the dirt and crud off my sock-bottoms. Then I pushed off down that passage in a fine, heart-thundering whine of skate wheels on stone. If there was something after me down here, it was going to have to move fast.

  I swooped along with the glowing pin held out in front of me in case of a bend in the passage. There were dark gaps in the walls here and there—openings to other passageways—which I ignored as best I could as I skated on, nerves stretched to breaking. Moss and water stains glowed and glistened on the walls. Maybe Kevin’s secret passage had started out in the real Central Park as one of the sunken transverse roads that takes cars east and west across the park. The transverses are open to the sky, not closed tunnels, but they’re lined with walls of this same black rock, with grass and roots sticking out of the cracks.

  In the real world, the Sixty-sixth Street transverse could no more end at the Inscope Arch than it could deliver me to the moon. As nearly as I could tell, I was heading east, toward Fifth Avenue. Here, Fifth Avenue was ocean. What if this tunnel spat me into the sea?

  I thought of Sebbian’s ruined feet and dying eyes, and kept going—a long time. If I’d had to do any fancy footwork in a hurry I’d have been sunk, my legs were so tired.

  Then the walls pulled back and the floor sloped upward and shot me out, before I could think to stop, into late afternoon light between high green banks on a paved path. There was no mistaking the smell of New York air. I was home.

  I made a raggedy turn and threw my arms around a lamppost to stop myself.

  I had come out under a low, pink and gray stone bridge trimmed with a band of staggered brick-ends, like the rickrack on a child’s pinafore. The mouth of the arch was small, almost prim, outlined in gray and black stone blocks. The whole thing was incredibly cozy and coy looking.

  But if you go through to the other end of the Inscope Arch (as I’ve done since, without the rhinestone rose) you see that it’s very deep and so dark that besides installing lights, the Parks Department people have whitewashed the walls to reflect as much light as possible.

  And if you look back, from east to west, you see the trimstones of the opening at the far end sticking slightly into the silhouetted arch, like a curved row of huge, blunt teeth seen from the inside of a monster’s mouth. I thought of Sebbian, and maybe Kevin too, chomped to shreds in that terrible mouth.

  I started skating again, it didn’t matter where. I just wanted to put some distance between me and all that.

  It seemed as though not much time had gone by in the real world. The light was afternoonish, dulled by those rushing fat clouds you get sometimes in April, nothing like the gray evening that had been falling on the Fayre Farre when I’d left it. Time must go faster there.

  Space was also stretched on the Farre side of the arches. The Inscope, which I had just come throug
h, was only a five minute walk past the zoo from the double Denesmouth Arch (not hours of hard skating away) and less than ten minutes from the Willowdell. Fifth Avenue—Kevin’s sea—was closer than that.

  It was as if Kevin had created a mirror image of the real park, but packed it with extra time and spread it over extra space. All the buildings and things had been pulled loose to wander around like buffalo on a prairie; and this shifting, expanded territory was populated with minstrels like Sebbian and ash-drinking skeletons.

  Now I saw everything in the real park as shadowed by Kevin’s dark imaginings. Rotten Kevin had returned my pin but stolen something else precious from me: my domestic, friendly park. Give with one hand, take with the other—that was just like him, except for the “give" part.

  * * *

  When I got home, my aunts were cleaning up in the kitchen. The food was all put away, and there were a million dishes to be washed. The aunts were arguing in low voices about whether cremation was okay for Jews no matter how irreligious they were. They shut up when they saw me.

  In the living room Uncle Saul sat slumped on the couch, frowning at his shoes. He saw me and said, “Your mom’s asleep, Amy. I had to give her a sedative.”

  I felt weird—relieved and angry at the same time. My mom hates any kind of drugs or medicines, Uncle Saul knows that. I also felt out of phase with what he was saying because I was still thinking about Kevin and his Fayre Farre.

  Uncle Saul looked at me with a concerned expression and asked if I’d heard what he’d said. I guess he was trying not to react to the fact that I was filthy with soot and shoeless. He told me in a super-kindly voice that my Aunt Jennie would be staying over with me and Mom again, and that my dad would be back from Los Angeles very late tonight.

  That was good news, anyway.

  I went to my own room to get cleaned up, which was not as easy as it sounds. Soot feels soft and velvety, but it’s greasy and it sticks. I was a mess. No wonder people had given me funny looks all the way home from the park.

  Now what? I absolutely did not want to go back out there with my relatives. It was sickening, somehow, that Uncle Saul was sitting alive in our living room, and Cousin Shelly was dead. My strongest memories of Uncle Saul were from all the times he gave horrible, burning flu shots at Thanksgiving and tetanus shots at Passover to me and my cousins. Of course he didn’t mean to be a bad guy, but how do you think it seemed to us?

  But Cousin Shelly, who laughed so much and doodled endless curly plants and vines all over the paper placemats at Cannibal’s, her favorite restaurant, was just ashes scattered over the Hudson River from a ferryboat.

  Ash wine, I thought. Shelly was ash wine now.

  My room felt cold and strange. Probably my little cousins Fran and Kimmie had been in there, snooping through my stuff. I wandered out in my bathrobe and listened at the kitchen doorway to the aunts talking about how Uncle Irv was still complaining that the funeral service had not been traditional enough for him.

  Never mind that Shelly wouldn’t have had a service at all. Mom had always called her, admiringly, a “free spirit,” which sounded great to me. It was disgusting that Mom had given in to Uncle Irv even as far as she had. I certainly couldn’t stay in the apartment, not with Mom knocked out in her bedroom and the rest of them whispering and muttering and sighing. Nobody needed me anyway.

  I put on a clean shirt and jeans and used the phone in my room to call Rachel.

  “Hey,” she said, “what happened to you? I’ve heard of boy-chasing but I’ve never seen a girl run so fast that she left her shoes behind. You want them back, or should I give them to Goodwill?”

  I told Uncle Saul I was going down to the corner store for a burger and a malt. He didn’t object, or ask why I was carrying Rachel’s skates with me. He also didn’t mention the fact that I had ducked out of sitting shiva; but he gave me one of those looks they give you, sad and mad and disappointed all at the same time. I was very glad to get out of there.

  Rachel met me as arranged, though she was late as usual. I was almost through with my malt when she arrived, bringing Claudia with her.

  There was thin, blonde Rachel in a moss-green jumpsuit and her gorgeous, fairy-tale princess hair, and there was—well, Claudia, also from school. Claudia Falcone was a ditz. But not just ditzy. I mean there was method to her madness, sort of. Her mom had a drinking problem. Claudia talked about it with her friends as if she didn’t care, but she did. Her mother went into a drying-out hospital now and then and came out again and went back in and so it went. You could always tell what stage things were at. When her mom was home, Claudia got skinny and hyper and completely scatterbrained from trying to take care of everything and make her mom happy.

  When her mom was away, Claudia spent all her time in front of the TV, eating. She got fat and slow and sort of regressed.

  Now here she was walking into the drugstore wearing those Indian pants with the dropped seat and a huge droopy sweater; so her mom was in the dryer, and Claudia was out to lunch. Why had Rachel brought her?

  “Here’s your shoes,” Rachel said, clunking them down on the table. She slung herself into the booth across from me, and Claudia shoved in beside her.

  Claudia looked sort of witchy-white, and her black hair was wisping out of its barrettes as usual. Her eyes had that heavy-lidded, TVed-out look, and she was carrying—I could barely believe this—a purse made of black-and-white plush in the shape of a dog, which she put on the table so that nobody could possibly miss it.

  “Thanks,” I told Rachel, handing over her skates and putting my shoes down where they wouldn’t be sharing the plastic surface with that purse. Suddenly Kevin and Sebbian and the Bone Men all seemed very far away.

  Claudia scoped out my plate. “Are you gonna eat all those fries, Amy?” she said.

  “You can take what you want,” I said, “as long as you don’t try to feed them to your purse.”

  “It’s a PursePet,” Claudia said, snagging herself a couple of greasy potato wedges. “From the Plush Jungle. They’ve got neat stuff there.”

  “So what’s up?” Rachel said, tossing her hair impatiently. I took a deep breath and I told them what was up. Claudia said, “God, it sounds like The Night of the Living Dead!” She hugged her purse anxiously.

  Rachel whistled. “That’s whack! Are you getting ready for a career in Hollywood?”

  The way she said it, it dawned on me that Rachel was jealous. She had the looks for TV, but I was moving to Los Angeles. She’d been getting weird with me ever since I’d told her about the move. Now I wished I’d never said anything, about that or about the Fayre Farre. Nobody knows how to cut you down like your own best friend.

  Claudia asked, “Is Kevin cute?”

  “Very,” I said. “You’d love him, Claudia.”

  Rachel leaned over the table toward me. “So your old rose pin is the key to this magic land? Let’s see it.”

  I put the rhinestone rose on the table between us. We looked at it. Rachel poked it with one gnawed-nail fingertip and sat back with a sigh. “It must be really tough, having your cousin die and all.”

  So she thought I was crazy, that I had cracked under the strain. No telling what Claudia thought. She rested her chin on her folded arms, practically lying on the tabletop, and stared at the pin.

  “What are you going to do, Claudia,” I said. “Eat it?”

  “Of course not,” she answered in a wounded tone. “Don’t be cranky, Amy. It’s bad for your digestion to be in a crummy mood while you’re eating.”

  I didn’t feel crummy, I felt sullen and tired and let down. “I’m not eating,” I said. “I’m finished.”

  Claudia said sympathetically, “So you never got to hear the prophecy because the guy died. But the prophecy is key. I mean, there’s always a prophecy in those books. You’ll have to go back to the Fayre Farre to find out what it says about you.”

  Rachel glanced up from gnawing the cuticle of her thumbnail. “You know, there is always
a prophecy, usually in the form of awful poetry. Did this boy say any poetry to you?”

  The idea of Kevin speaking poetry even by accident made me laugh until I hiccuped. I even forgot to wonder what was going on here, that Rachel and Claudia were sort of on the same wavelength all of a sudden, and reading the same books that Rachel and I had read together.

  Claudia licked ketchup off her thumb. “So when are you going to go back, Amy?”

  That was too much for Rachel. “Don’t encourage her,” she said. “She’s half out of her tree as it is, can’t you tell? Amy’s going to California, that’s where she’s going, but she’s panicking about it. So she’s made up this detour into some kind of dreamworld.”

  “Kevin is a prince,” Claudia said, “and Amy’s in the prophecy. She has some absolutely crucial task to do so Kevin can win back his kingdom. She’s going away, like you say, Rachel, so this was his last chance to get to her. Her cousin dying made that possible, don’t you see? Broke her concentration or something. Because it’s all fated.”

  Claudia was a sucker for anything about royalty. She would have sat there and listened to me babble about Kevin and his Fayre Farre all night and believed every word.

  I suddenly realized that the person I really wanted to talk to about all this, the person who would have had something enlightening to say, was Cousin Shelly. I got a flash of her standing on the tiny terrace of her apartment, watering her potted plants with a long-nosed green plastic watering can.

  And then I thought of her looking little and pale and scared in that stupid hospital bed, blinking unhappily at the cut flowers people had sent.

  I guess my feelings showed. Rachel got this smirk of make-believe sympathy on her face that made me want to smack her. The idea of her really understanding what I was talking about seemed stupid. What had I expected? I was in this alone.

  “Let’s go,” I said, getting up. “They’re glaring at us for taking up their precious table.”

  * * *