“And we’re left with what?” I said. “Their own, real bodies? A whole bunch of people keeling over dead all of a sudden?”
He shrugged. “So what? Is Dirty Rose, for instance, happy in that lumpy old beat up carcass of hers? Think of it as a favor, and not only to her or the others. This planet is wildly overpopulated. A little culling of the least fit will be good for the rest.”
“You really stink, you know that?” I gasped.
He made a tsk-tsk sound. “Your mother said you read a lot. Do you always get so worked up over a mere story?”
“My mom’s no—no warrior,” I said. Against my wobbling will, my eyes filled with hot tears.
“Oh, there’ll be no zombie-battlefield for her, don’t worry about that.” He sipped smoke from the cigar and his expression became bland.
“You may find this hard to believe, Tina,” he purred, “but I’ve grown very fond of your mother, and she knows it.
“Or to put it another way, she’s something very special and I know it. She has great potential, which I can put to use, if she’ll let me; and she will. She’s smart enough to know what a terrific team we could make, the two of us . . . I don’t really need a fetch in her case. I only fashioned one, a very special one made of light instead of shadow, as a form of basic insurance. She’d come with me willingly without that.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said. ‘Even when she finds out about Ushah?”
“Ushah,” he said, taking another puff and waving smoke away, “gets wild ideas sometimes. She over-rates herself, don’t you think? It’s your mother I want for my wife.”
“You have a wife!” I yelled. “Lots of wives! Ushah told me! You’re some kind of lousy rotten Bluebeard!”
“Calm down,” he said. “You don’t really know what you’re getting all excited about. A girl like you, even a very bright girl with a very smart grandmother, shouldn’t mess around in things she doesn’t understand yet.”
I jumped up and stood there weaving and glaring, hanging onto the edge of Brightner’s desk, my throat all dry from blue cigar smoke.
“We’ll stop you,” I said. “Gran and me and—and Sorcery Hall!”
“Sorcery Hall?” He grinned. “No, Tina, not Sorcery Hall. This is their war we’ve been talking about, those know-it-alls! They’re much too busy defending themselves to even notice a little scuffle out here in the boondocks, let alone divert any of their own forces to try to influence its outcome. You’re on your own in this one, you and the old lady. Against me.”
He paused to let that sink in. Then be said, “It would be better, much better, for you to stop struggling and give in. You could start by bringing your grandmother to me tonight. I’m willing to take the three of you into my household. You could all be together. There would be great advantages.”
He leaned toward me, talking in a gruff, wheedling tone, smiling at me with his dark, hound-dog eyes.
“Do you want your mother to be happy? She would be, with me. Do you want your Gran’s mind cleared to its old sharpness? I could arrange it. Do you want to practice magic yourself? I could teach you.”
“Leave me alone,” I said, or anyway I tried to say it.
“I think we need to negotiate,” he said. “But to talk properly with a fellow like me, you have to descend to my level. I’m a plain man, from plain people, remember? You and I should start over, with the basics. Such as an old-fashioned handshake. With the left hand. I’m a lefty myself, didn’t you notice? But not with a glove on, that would be an insult.
“So you’ll have to take the glove off, won’t you.”
I actually took hold of one finger and began to pull off the glove. The cigar smoke had to be a drug, eating up my willpower and turning me all around.
I had to get out of there. I turned hazily and lurched in what I hoped frantically was the direction of the door.
He said, “Think about it. You have till closing time.”
I stopped, rocking on my feet. “What do you mean by that?” My voice sounded far away in my own ears.
He said, “Tonight I expect to fill out my initial draft of recruits. I’ll be leaving. With your mother, of course. Definitely with your mother.”
“Closing time,” I said. “What’s closing time?”
“Think about it a little. Clever kid like you, you’ll figure it out.”
As I stumbled out of his office, he called after me, “I’ll be watching for you. You’re a real scrapper, I can see that. We’ll take off the gloves, right? And really settle this, once and for all.”
13
In the Bag
NO WAY COULD I JUST WALTZ BACK into a classroom after that. I hid out for a little while in the girls’ room, slapping cold water on my face with my right hand—I didn’t plan to ever take the silver glove off again—and blinking at my reflection in the mirror.
To look at me, you would never guess what I had just been through. Just let me try and tell anybody about that crazy conversation, and see where it got me!
After a while I picked up my bookbag and walked out of the school building. Maybe I would never see it, or my friends, or anything of that whole life again. I had no idea what to do now. None. There’s a point, I guess, when you realize that what you’re up against is just too much for you; that you are done-for.
Done-for is how I felt, but how could that be, when I was only fighting for what was right? My mom, our lives, people’s souls, for cripes’ sake? We were right, and we were going to lose, because I was outclassed, outgunned, and stymied. It was just me and Brightner now, in a little peripheral squabble while Sorcery Hall was busy with the main show, the wizard war, somewhere else.
Brightner knew he was way too much for me. I believed it, too. Why not? Just because I had managed not to get snagged by The Claw—so far?
What a record!
With this bitter thought thudding around and around in my head I trudged home, not looking left or right for fear of seeing some poor jerk walk by without a shadow—some jerk I couldn’t do a thing to help.
I let myself into the apartment and checked on Mom. She was asleep on the living room rug with the shawl collar of her robe pulled up around her ears; hear no evil, I thought, and decided to let her be.
Then I went downstairs into the basement to do the laundry.
I suppose that sounds funny, but when you’re all used up and sort of drizzling drearily inside instead of thinking while your body is buzzing and twitching with the energy of fear, a mindless routine task is just right. The kind of thing that normally you try to get out of doing.
Mom and I always took turns doing the laundry. She actually liked it, because down in the basement with the machines grinding around and around she could sit and read manuscripts without being interrupted by the telephone.
I generally hated the basement because it was creepy. Today nothing could scare me, not after my session with the Demon Shrink.
So after I checked the phone messages—including three solicitations from computers trying to sell me insurance—I emptied the hamper. I sorted the stuff out (there wasn’t much; neither of us had been exactly going through our wardrobes lately) and lugged it all, with soap powder and some leftovers to nibble on while I waited and The Count of Monte Cristo to read, down in the elevator.
The basement is warm in cold weather, from the boilers. The walls are painted with green and yellow enamel to make the space cheerful, I guess, which it isn’t. You have to walk past the wire cages of the storage room to get to the machines, for one thing.
I have always thought the storage area was incredibly sinister. Who knew what might be lurking in there in all that piled-up junk, watching you through the wire mesh? Things strong enough to break any of the assortment of padlocks on the doors, you can bet. Going by there was always good for a thrill.
Not that afternoon. I plodded on into the wash room without a single prickle of apprehension. I guess I was all terrified out.
The wash room is like a laundromat, with one
row of washers down the middle, three dryers in a row at the end of the room, two tables for folding that people are always fighting over, and a set of molded plastic chairs in bright orange. Nests of pipes wind along the ceiling and the corners of the room, and huge black hoses snake into a row of sinks behind the washers, to drain the wash water. The floor is covered with dark brown linoleum tile.
The room was still and dim, the machines were silent. I switched on the fluorescent lights and got to work.
Most days people’s hired houseworkers come down with washes to do, which is okay, except that sometimes they bring noisy radios or they smoke up the place so you can hardly breathe. There are bright-colored tin ashtrays with scalloped edges all over the place. Whenever I’m down there I try to sneak a few of them out with me and throw them away, as a subtle form of discouragement.
So I was glad to have the place to myself. I couldn’t even get into Monte Cristo, though Edmund Dantes was just about to take his revenge on rotten Danglars, which is a part of the book I particularly like.
I had too much to think about for stories. Not all of it was terrible, though. In fact, I could see some ways in which the visit to Brightner hadn’t been a total loss. I knew now that the glove did protect me from Brightner himself, at least in some ways and in some circumstances—unless he had been only pretending, misleading me so that later on I would trust the powers of the glove when it couldn’t save me.
Not too likely. Why not nobble me right then and there while he had the chance, if he could? I didn’t think he was the kind to put off till tomorrow anything he could gulp down today.
And I knew that he still didn’t have any more idea where Gran was than I did.
If only I’d had the nerve—the presence of mind—whatever it took to just punch him in the middle of his smirking puss with the silver glove! Maybe that would have done some good, maybe he would have disappeared in a puff of smoke (so why hadn’t Gran done that? She was the one with the magic, not dumb old me).
But once I’d chewed all that over a few times, my mind just dragged me back to the broader situation, which was awful. There was no comfort in it whatever.
This was the last day of my normal life. That night, somehow, I would have to try to keep Mom from going with her reflection-fetch to join Brightner in leaving the planet, and I would probably lose that struggle. There was no telling what would happen to me, or to her, let alone my Gran.
Now I knew what Brightner was. All that talk about great wizards and necromancy—he was here to shanghai innocent people into somebody else’s horrible war. He was a slave dealer, and his victims were all doomed to die in some far-off battle.
They were cannon-fodder.
As for my mom’s “special” place in his schemes, the idea of Brightner taking her away forever where nobody would be able to help her made my whole mind fly apart.
I sat there in the hot wash room with the book open in my lap, holding down the same page with my gloved left hand, thinking very un-urgently about eating the stale end of salami I’d brought to nibble on. I stared at the machines in front of me—bright colors swirling around in the cold wash, pale ones in the hot—and my thoughts flopped around getting nowhere, just the same way.
Then William walked in.
“Hi,” he said. “Thought I heard somebody in here.”
I said, “Hi, William.”
William was the new handyman for the building. He could fix anything, which is why nobody wanted him fired even though it was rumored that he drank.
He was a tall, gloomy-looking man in khaki work clothes and big yellow boots. He talked slowly and not much, and had the dirtiest hands I have ever seen. The kids in the building had decided that he probably just gave up washing them, considering the number of greasy, grubby jobs he had to do every day, fixing pipes and wires and locks and stuck windows in people’s apartments.
He stood in the doorway gazing somberly at me. “Got something to show you, if you want to see. She come in this morning early, poor little thing.”
“She?” I said. “Who?”
“Come look.”
So I left the book and the laundry and followed William to one of the utility closets. He opened it cautiously, not very wide.
“Just take a quick look,” he said. “She’s real shy, real wild.”
From the deepest, darkest corner of the utility closet, wide yellow eyes glared out at us. I heard a faint, dry hiss that ended in a string of minute coughs, like miniature explosions.
“What is it,” I said dully, not caring, really, “a cat?”
William nodded and shut the door again.
“Stray,” he said. “Found her in the boiler room this morning, sleeping near the warmth. Cold night last night.”
A cat. Something stirred in my mind, a breath of something: thought, hope, a rising edge of eager curiosity. A cat! Ushah, swinging a mop at a gray streak in Kali’s Kitchen—
“I couldn’t see too well in there,” I said. “What’s she look like?”
He shrugged. “Not much. Little gray cat, kinda old I think, little bit old and slow or I couldn’t of caught her.”
“What are you going to do with her?”
“Feed her up, maybe take her home when she calms down,” he said slowly. He looked consideringly at me. “ ’Less you’d like to take her. Don’t think your mom would like it, though. A stray and all.”
Right at that time my mom wouldn’t have minded if I’d brought home a nine-hundred-pound yak, but I wasn’t going to go into that. So I thanked him for showing me the cat, and I watched him lope off to the elevators with his toolbox.
Then I opened the utility closet, and the cat shot out past my ankles and disappeared into the storage area.
Great. Good work, Val.
I don’t have much experience with pets. Don’t get me wrong: I like cats. I love cats. But I am a city kid, and pets are a little complicated for me.
I once convinced my mom to let me have a kitten from a litter in an apartment upstairs, on trial. So far, so good. Then I blew the whole thing. The same night that I brought the kitten into our apartment, my mom found me in the bathroom at eleven o’clock, bright red in the face, coughing and wheezing and throwing up.
Obviously, she deduced, I was allergic to cats. The kitten would have to go back.
I screamed and I cried and I denied over and over that I was allergic, making myself even sicker and more miserable. Mom, very sensibly, locked the kitten in the pantry and next morning she gave it back to the people upstairs. And that was the end of my pet-owning days.
What had actually happened—and you’ll see why I couldn’t tell my mom this—was that when I’d taken the kitten to bed with me that night, it had begun crying for its mother and its sibling kittens.
Logically, to make it feel at home I figured I should treat it as its cat mother would.
So I’d been licking the kitten’s fur, and of course I’d swallowed some. I defy you to show me any kid who won’t have an allergic reaction to actually eating a cat’s fur.
I went back into the wash room and sat down again, wondering how to recapture William’s gray cat. How could I lure her back?
With salami, of course! Cats love salty meats, everybody knows that!
Having no knife with me, I bit the salami end into little pieces and put them down on the floor, making a salami trail from the doorway. Then I opened my book and pretended to read.
What with the machines churning along and Danglars getting the comeuppance that he so richly deserved, I didn’t know the cat was there until it sneezed a small, neat cat-sneeze from somewhere close by.
I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, holding very still.
The cat crouched by the wall only a few yards from me. All but the last two bits of salami were gone. She was watching me and licking her chops with her narrow pink tongue.
This was my first real look at her, and she was just what William had said, small and bony, the color of the dust th
at gathers underneath furniture, with a torn ear, a bald spot over one hip, and a kink in the end of her tail as if somebody had slammed a door on it once.
She darted forward, grabbed a morsel of salami with a lightning right hook, and retreated again.
I sat like a statue, hardly breathing, and when the cat came for the last and nearest salami-bite, I made a grab for her, leading with the gloved hand, which at least had some protection.
As soon as I touched her—I am pretty fast—she let out a yowl in the midst of which I heard, with heart-stopping clarity, words, words uttered in a thin, distorted version of my grandmother’s voice!
“Hang on, Valentine, don’t let go!”
A wild, brief struggle followed. Somehow I stuffed the poor cat, kicking and writhing, into the smallest of the laundry bags, the white cotton one, and I yanked the drawstring tight.
The bag leaped and lumped around on the floor while I sort of danced around it, sucking my finger where one flailing set of claws had connected, and yelling, “Gran! Gran! Is that you?” like a lunatic.
As I said, it was very lucky that nobody else was washing clothes in the basement that afternoon.
Finally the bag got quiet and the small voice panted, “Heavens, what a dustup! Thank goodness I’ve finally found you, Val! Are you all right? Not scratched to pieces, I hope?”
I crouched down to talk to the bag, not daring to touch it. “I’m fine, I’m fine! Gran! That was you at Kali’s Kitchen, wasn’t it? What happened?”
“I went there with Rose, as planned,” said the breathless voice of Gran-the-cat, “disguised as the street person I might well be, in other circumstances. Seeing Ushah there threw me off balance, so to speak—”
“Ushah!” I said. “You talk as if you know her!”
“I do,” said the voice in the bag. “Or I did. She was a wild talent, like me, but she dropped out of Sorcery Hall. Didn’t care for the discipline, charged off on her own, and now look at her! She didn’t recognize me, of course. She doesn’t pay attention to other women at all unless they’re potential rivals. But I was so surprised that I did something very foolish: I ate some of the enchanted food she serves the poor there.”