The Golden Thread

  “We are,” Mimi said. “So is something going to happen now, or what?”

  Bosanka said, “There was more of you New Year’s.”

  I said, “We got everybody we could. Lennie’s sister goes to another school, so she couldn’t come. And there’s another girl, what’s her name—?”

  Lennie squirmed. “Uh, she’s not around. I mean, she’s out of town,”

  “And one more,” Bosanka said. “Has to be seven. It was a boy, comes with you, Balentena.”

  “He does?” Peter said, looking up from his project to leer at me. “Who is this lucky guy?”

  Lennie said, “Shut up, Peter. Joel isn’t one of us.”

  “Yes, Jawl, he was there, New Year’s,” Bosanka said. How did she know that?

  “Only by accident,” Lennie objected. “He crashed our party and left early.”

  Bosanka said, “Not by accident, and he didn’t go. He stayed, down in the street. He belongs.”

  I had a strong urge to protect Joel. “He doesn’t even live here,” I protested. “He’s in Boston.”

  “Then bring him.” Bosanka strafed us again with her eyes. “This is bad, only some of you here. Next time everybody better come. I only tell this once, now. So you tell the other ones what I said.”

  Peter said, “Talk’s cheap, you know? We want a demonstration. So who are you going to turn into a critter, your royal thingamajig? Val says you do a nifty kangaroo.”

  Mimi giggled uneasily. “Look out, Peter, you’ll get her mad and she’ll turn herself into a polar bear and chomp us up.”

  Lennie said gruffly, “Oh, be quiet for a minute and listen for a change! I’d like to hear what Bosanka has to say.”

  Peter shrugged. Mimi sighed and looked out of the window, the way she did in most of her classes most of the time.

  Bosanka started right in. “I don’t come from here. Where I lived, my people are lords of everything. They hunt over the whole world, the land and the sea. Even in the skies, the Lords of the Air have their ways to catch flying quarry.” Her eyelids fluttered and she looked nervous for a second. Then her expression closed down again and she went on.

  “I was one of the Lords of the Heights, hunter of the high forests and mountaintops. Came time for me to go on my dream-hunt. A—a great animal guides me, not like you have here. Except maybe a tiger, a little.” She sounded unsure, and it occurred to me that she was having some trouble with the details of her story, or at least with translating it for us.

  She scowled, which did make her look pretty sinister—Peter’s stupid comments didn’t seem so stupid at that moment.

  “It was treachery,” she said, “some snare set for me. I went in a trap, a dark place, very dark and still. But I got out. When I come home, everyone is gone, gone a long time already. All of them, lords of every domain, and most animals, too.”

  She paused a minute, daring us to interrupt or make a wisecrack. Nobody did, though Mimi was humming audibly to herself to show how lightly she took all this.

  I could hear kids playing ball outside against the wall in the school yard, and on the lab tabletop in front of me there was an old white stain in the shape of a bird or a butterfly in the air. Reality did not fade away. But Bosanka brought her own reality with her alienness, a hint of fog and distance.

  In fact there was an awful lot of reality stuffed into that smelly lab room just then. It felt heavy and crowded in there, and I wasn’t surprised that Mimi hummed and Lennie looked strained and anxious. Only Peter seemed completely unaffected, fiddling with his silly machine as if nothing else was going on.

  “So,” Bosanka went on, “I look for them. I made my own dream-hunt, to follow my people’s traces. A long time I followed, over very big spaces that can only be crossed with power and dreams. I was a long time alone in places where no one wants to be alone.”

  She stopped, her whole body cramped around hidden feelings. It was kind of awful. I had this urge to go and pat her on the shoulder or something, and I believed in the terribleness of the time she’d had right from the bottom of my heart. She reminded me of how I’d been feeling lately about my Gran.

  Then she cocked her head, as if listening, with an expression of fierce concentration.

  “One day, I hear something. A cry of power, a song to cross any distance, a call, it can only be from my people to me! I came to where it sounded, because right away the voice is still again, I don’t hear it anymore. But now I am here, on your world. And I go searching. But though I search hard, I find nothing. How can I find? Right from starting, this place makes me a headache. All noise, gray stone everyplace, machines shouting all over the air—no wonder your people have no powers, your animals run away!

  “My people have great powers. They should be master in this foolish place! I call and call, but hear no answer. I don’t see them—this place hides them, hides me also from them, I think—but they are here. I heard them that one time when I came here first. So I stay, and I listen, I watch.”

  She slitted her eyes. “And on New Year’s, I see what I can use to find them. You made it, all of you in your ‘committee,’ and I see, I come, I fix to this power you made. You look surprise—well, I was also. Strange to find anybody here with power! I thought, never, must be a mistake.

  “But it is as I say it: one by one, you are nothing, but together that night only, you make a sending of spirit-light—oh, a silly thing, a weak thing. In my home, any highborn child could do more. But for here, for you, it’s big. Big enough. Lowborn and ignorant you are, like all your kind. But you can make light that will shine me to my people. They will see me, and come to me, so I join with my own.”

  She stopped talking.

  In the quiet, Mimi laughed brightly. “I get it! This is some kind of story you’re trying out on us, like for a performance or something!”

  “No,” Bosanka said. “I say only real things.”

  Lennie said slowly, “If you did all that—the tracking and everything—why would you need us?”

  He was testing her, trying to catch her out logically and make this whole thing go away.

  Bosanka studied him suspiciously. Finally she said, “My strength is less, and this place—I told you. My head is breaking from it all the time. But still I stay stronger than you. What you have, it’s not much.” She looked directly at me, with a cold, brooding look. “Enough, though, if you try.”

  This was worse, much worse, than anything I’d expected. I felt angry, stupid, and scared.

  Peter said loudly, “Well, what you have isn’t so hot, either, you know? I’ve got better things to do than listen to this crud.”

  “I didn’t finish,” Bosanka snapped.

  “Oh, right, sorry, your royalness,” Peter said. “I didn’t mean to break in, and I won’t do it again, no indeed. Not with you being this royal person and all.”

  She snorted. “Who but a highborn could be here and live? Anyone less would run crazy in this place.”

  “It’s not as bad as some schools,” Mimi said.

  “This place,” Bosanka said, and she stomped her heel on the tile floor of the lab. “Earth.”

  Peter said, “So why stick around? I’d climb on my broomstick and take off, if I were you.”

  “Of course,” she said contemptuously. “Where you go, it isn’t any matter.” She stomped on the floor again in sheer frustration. “It’s very ridiculous! But, here I am. So, I play being stupid child like you, I play to find my people.” She pointed, moving her finger from one of us to another. “And soon you bring them for me.”

  Mimi whispered to me, “I am not hearing this. I must have taken pills at lunch and forgotten about it, that’s all. Or I’m flashing.”

  Lennie frowned. “I still don’t understand exactly what you want us lowborns to do.”

  Bosanka fixed him with her pale gaze. “On New Year’s, you used power, you and these others. This weekend you will make the committee and use this power again, for me, to carry my answer to my people.” r />
  Peter began to clap his hands. “Great!” he said. “I’ve always wondered what kind of science fiction they did on planet Outer Looneytunes.”

  Mimi said, “Oh, Peter, what’s that science-fiction trash you read got to do with anything?”

  Peter grinned. “Didn’t you hear? Bosanka Low-Nuts isn’t just a foreigner. She thinks she’s an alien, man! From this other world, where she was a lord of the whatnot, remember? She must be a real SF freak.”

  “Peter,” I warned him. I tried to, anyway. “It’s no joke.”

  “No, it’s not funny enough,” Peter said. “Jeez, Bosanka, the least you could do is wear a Darth Vader helmet. I mean, we’re not exactly naive about this stuff in this country. SF has been around for a long time. Hell, we invented it!”

  Not true, but that’s Peter for you.

  Bosanka pointed at the remote unit. “You fool with junk, these wires and cells, and you think this makes smart? What’s funny is you.”

  Lennie shook his head, like he was shaking off all the argument and nonsense and trying to push through to the sense, if there was any. “Okay, but he’s right, isn’t he? You just told us that you come from another world, looking for these ‘people.’ ”

  “ ‘E.T. phone home,’ ” Peter said in a cartoon voice. “Only what we’ve got here isn’t an E.T., it’s an N.U.T.”

  Bosanka said, “You are the nut, junk-boy. This place makes you all nuts. You have ‘school’ to waste your days, machines telling dumb stories of dumb people to make you dumb from watching! You think I would be born on this silly, baby world?”

  “Hey, watch it,” Peter said, coming up with a Bogart voice I never knew he could do. “You may be a princess at home, kid, but around here, you’re just a tenth grader, got it?”

  Mimi rolled her eyes. “But aliens have claws, or scales, or wings or something, don’t they? And they’re dangerous.”

  “So’s this one,” Peter said. “Anything that can eat Jefferson cafeteria lasagna can eat you, too. And Val says she saw Low-nuts here turn some salesclerk into a kangaroo, only not permanently, so we can’t go and check, right? I think I’ll take off while I’m still human, just in case.”

  He pocketed the TV remote and started pulling his stuff together.

  Bosanka said, “I don’t dismiss you, junk-boy.”

  Peter laughed. “Ooh, gosh, I forgot—I can’t leave without permission from her royal nuttiness, can I?” His face was red. He was mad. He started to walk out.

  “Peter, don’t!” I said.

  Bosanka whipped some pebbles out of her pocket and clicked them together in a quick, odd rhythm. My sight went blurry, then cleared. The air tingled, like right before a thunderstorm.

  Mimi looked around blankly. “Where’s Peter?”

  “Peter left,” Bosanka said with a cold little smile.

  Lennie didn’t say anything. He looked sick.

  I felt terrified and reckless. I croaked, “Bosanka, what did you do?”

  “Maybe made him invisible?” Mimi trilled. She acted totally stoned, but the way I heard it, she had only dipped into drugs years ago and had quit real fast so she was doing it all on imagination now. She just didn’t know how else to handle this.

  I didn’t either, but I had to try.

  I said, “I don’t know what you did, Bosanka, but you’ve got to understand: it’s no use threatening us and—and punishing us. We truly don’t know how to do anything for you. You might as well bring Peter back.”

  The little stones were gone. Had I really seen them and heard them rattle? Bosanka didn’t look like a mighty witch. She looked tired and cranky.

  “He wants to go, he went,” she said shortly. “He comes back in time. On the weekend when your moon comes full this committee meets again, all of you, to make the sending I want. Saturday night. Go and find the other ones, tell them, bring them. I am telling you now, and no more.”

  The bell for the end of the period sounded. Everybody jumped except Bosanka, who turned and strode away, leaving the three of us staring at each other.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I muttered, pushing by Lennie and hurrying past the sinks and counters with their goose-necked faucets.

  We all pulled up sharply, piling into each other like a comedy schtick on TV, just inside the door. Something was moving in the hallway outside, crashing around and banging against the walls.

  I eased the door open. A big brown animal bolted past only a couple of feet from me. Foam flew and landed wetly on the back of my hand.

  “It’s only a deer,” Mimi cried at my shoulder. “A cute brown deer, running around in the halls of Thomas Jefferson School!”

  We ran after the deer as it floundered, in an obvious panic, down the staircase to the first floor. Another wild dash brought the animal to a clattering halt at the end of the hallway.

  Its coat glowed in a patch of light from the panes of the big double doors to the outside. It was a long-legged, shaggy-chinned stag with short gray horns, terrified eyes, and a wet, black, quivering nose.

  I whispered over the booming of my heart, “We’ve got to get it outside before it hurts itself in here.”

  “Easy,” Lennie said softly, moving toward the frightened creature.

  “But where did it come from?” Mimi gasped, squinting down the hall. She had a death grip on my arm, so I couldn’t follow Lennie.

  “From Bosanka,” I said. “This is her work. Where else could it have come from?”

  And it could have been me. No wonder my mouth was dry and my knees shook.

  Mimi let go of my arm and flattened herself against the wall with her mouth open wide and no sound coming out, which I guess was about as good as I could have hoped for.

  I heard the soothing murmur of Lennie’s voice. The deer, which stood about chest high to Lennie, lowered its head. If Peter was conscious in there, he must be half out of his mind with terror.

  The stag pawed the tiles with one forehoof and tossed its head as if Lennie’s body was already pinned on those horns. Its breathing was heavy and loud. The whole school building seemed to hold its breath around us, silent except for the grating sound of the creature’s hoof on the floor and its trembling, snorting breath.

  Lennie took another soft step.

  The stag reared and flung itself backward. The double doors opened and spilled the scrambling animal down the steps onto the sidewalk. Lennie and I ran out after it, way too late. We watched the stag gallop down the avenue and veer westward, toward the park.

  Lennie panted, “It’s Peter, isn’t it?”

  “Got to be,” I said. “She turned Peter into a deer, Lennie. Right in front of our eyes. Now you have to believe me, about the Leaf-Taker.”

  He said, “I do believe you.”

  8

  Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  MIMI STARTED TO QUAKE AND GROAN. “I want to go home, I just want to be in my own room until I can come back down, okay?”

  Lennie and I put her on an uptown bus. Then we headed for the park, after Peter.

  Poor Peter. The woman in the jeans store had been turned into some animal from another world—Bosanka’s world—for about half a minute. But Peter—that deer was of our own world. It looked like a change that could stick because it belonged here. It fit. I still had the dried spit thrown from the deer’s panting mouth on my hand.

  Lennie walked alongside me. “Hey, Val. Say something.”

  “In a minute,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “then I will. I didn’t really believe that stuff you told me last fall about messing around with magic and your Gran being a—a bruja, a good witch, and all. But I do now. I also believe we’re in trouble.”

  We walked across the park toward the north side of the rowboat lake. Nobody was out there, of course; the lake was mostly iced over.

  “It’s all my fault.” I groaned out loud. I felt a wave of dismal anger: I needed Gran’s help! How could she leave me on my own like this?

  There’s a little
wooden gazebo on the west shore of the lake. I stumped inside and sat down, hunching deep into my coat.

  Lennie put his books down on the bench next to me and stood looking out at the ice on the lake. There wasn’t much to see, just the sawhorses lined up crookedly about fifteen feet out on the ice, with cardboard signs in red lettering hung on them that said Danger plus a lot of smaller print. I wondered who had walked out on the ice to set them there, and how come whoever it was hadn’t fallen through because of the Danger.

  “It’s my fault,” I muttered.

  Lennie sighed patiently. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “You didn’t turn Peter into a deer, Bosanka did. I keep wanting not to believe it, but I saw those horns.” He let out a whistle. “They were sharp. And where did that thing come from, if it wasn’t Peter?”

  I said miserably, “I never should have called the meeting. I thought everybody would just naturally listen to me and act sensible because I told them to, right? And look what happened! Suppose a taxi hits him? I mean, he’s such a jerk as a person, imagine how he’s going to be as a deer!”

  Hot tears began to run down my face. I didn’t even try to hide them.

  Lennie, who wasn’t easily ruffled even by somebody crying, gave me a friendly bop on the shoulder. “Hey, come on. We’ll work out something with the Brass Breastplate of Jefferson High. We’ll be okay.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, sniffling. “The family talent has always been dangerous, but it was also always sort of—I don’t know, an adventure. Now it looks like my mom is right. It looks more like the family curse.”

  He flopped down on the bench opposite, legs sprawled out. “Listen, mothers get nervous. They can’t help it, it’s programmed into them by Nature, you know?”

  “No, really,” I said, calming down now and starting to think about what I was saying. “It’s always been me and—well, somebody older, with magic of their own. Now it’s just me, and other kids are involved, and I’m really worried, and I don’t know what to do. I mean, look what just happened!”

  Lennie waggled his high-tops, frowning in concentration. After awhile he said, “Another kid was involved once. That first time you told me about: the monster in Castle Lake, and the fighting statue. Joel was part of that, wasn’t he?”