“Gran,” I choked.
No. She was wearing cowboy boots—the boots that had changed into the skates I was wearing on my feet! That wasn’t Gran. It was one of Brightner’s phantoms.
“Come along,” he said. “We can’t wait forever. There are battles to be fought! Step forward. Just say, ‘I will,’ and my new recruits will release your other hand. You’ll see how good they are already at obeying orders.”
How else could I get to Mom? And that I had to do, at any price, even if—even if it meant being kidnapped by Brightner myself. I just couldn’t let Mom be whisked away, helpless and enchanted, to some strange and horrible place all alone. My mom who was afraid of magic, who didn’t have a clue about how to use her own abilities, who couldn’t even begin to defend herself!
“I will,” I whispered. My left hand came suddenly free. I stumbled between the orange cones into the magic circle, hugging my burning hand to my chest.
The glove was gone. My fingers were bare, red, and stinging, curled together without any strength in them at all. I tried to pull my right hand away from Brightner, but it was as if I had wedged it into a crack in a boulder.
“How would you like to make the journey?” he said in the smooth, juicy tone of somebody savoring some particularly delicious flavor. “Now that you’ve given up the pathetic ‘protection’ of the glove to my troops, there, everything becomes possible. Want to go in the form of a bad-mannered little cat shut up in a laundry bag? Or maybe as a fat, ragged bag lady, reduced to the size of a silver charm to hang on my watch chain?”
I was too scared to even wonder if he could really do those things to me. The bones in my right hand and arm felt as if they were melting and bending in his grip.
He twisted my hand and I slid to one side, squalling with pain. He turned gracefully on his skates, smiling into my face, twisting and crushing. I could no more resist than I could get an A in math. My feet, scrabbling for purchase on the ice, flew out in opposite directions. I was going to hit the ice hard because he wanted me to hit the ice hard, and he was strong enough to make it happen the way he wanted it to.
Turn his strength against him.
On a reckless impulse, I threw myself into the fall like a suicide leaping off a cliff. The back of my shoulders slammed into Brightner’s legs, which shot out from under him.
Staggering backwards with a shout, he let go of my hand.
I slid on my belly like a collapsed starfish—free. I felt the tremor in the ice when he landed, and I gasped with joy.
I knew I’d done something, though I didn’t dare to think what. I looked around, my eyes stretched wide like a scared animal’s.
I saw Brightner, yards away, sit up slowly, holding the back of his head. The false image of Gran was gone. All around us Brightner’s souls came pouring silently in toward the center of the ice, knocking the orange cones every which way. The only sound was the dry skittering of the cones on the ice.
I scrambled up and staggered toward my mom. I threw my arms around her—around nothing that I could hold.
I was stunned. He hadn’t fetched my mom yet—this was only the reflection of her, not even as she really was, scrubbed and sleeping at home, but as she had been when she went skating with Brightner—dressed for the outdoors and made up to slay.
Could I reverse the magic—fetch the “fetch” back to the real woman? How would you take a reflection from one place to another?
With shaking hands I fumbled out of my shirt pocket the little makeup mirror Barb had given me. I wobbled backward on my skates, holding up the little oval of glass. “Look!” I sobbed. “Mom, you have to see how you look—for him!”
That did it. The dreaming eyes opened and looked: at the glass, and then, bewildered, at me.
In the space of about a second and a half, the fetch faded and was gone—into the glass, where a reflection belonged? I didn’t dare look to see, for fear of canceling her reflection by laying my own over it. But my heart pounded with hope. He had saved the fetching of my mom till last, till Gran and I could be captured, too.
Maybe once the power at the heart of his whole scheme—my mom and her sleeping talents—actually stepped, as her real self, into his vortex-engine here at Wollman, that engine would take off, no longer in his complete control. He was greedy, just as Gran said—he wanted us, too, in the vortex. So he had waited.
And we had a chance. My mother was at home, and her fetch was caught in the little mirror, ready to be returned to her, by me.
I stuffed the mirror back into my shirt and got out of there—or tried to. The skates no longer carried me effortlessly along. I had to drive them with my bruised and wobbly legs, and keep my balance too.
The shadows, their inner gleams of light much brighter now so that “shadow” was not the word for them any more, drew aside for me and closed after me. There was a silvery shine to them, as if they had absorbed the glow of the glove they had taken from me, and suddenly I had no fear of them at all. I thought I felt them urging me on, toward the stark white path of Gran’s scarf, which rose at the edge of the ice only twenty feet away.
Behind me Brightner roared, “Tina! Damn you, kid, you get back here to me now!”
A frantic glance over my shoulder showed me only the silver skaters: hiding me, shielding me! Could that be?
Something enormous crashed down near me, sending great black cracks jagging through the ice, and then whipped away through the air again, leaving me staggered as if by the wind-wake of a passing semi. Stunned and dismayed—what now, with escape so close?—I looked up.
The huge iron hook at the end of the crane cable hurtled through the air and smashed down again, a foot from me.
Beyond the edge of the ice, the squat yellow cab of the crane strained backward off its tanklike treads, tilting its long black latticework arm. The hook was jerked out of the ice with a dry, groaning sound, and it swung back through the dark in a ponderous arc. Then cab and arm dropped heavily forward again, and the cable lashed from the end of the arm across the sky. The hook hurtled toward me like a bomb.
The Claw!
I threw myself aside and hugged the ice. Everything shook. Flying ice chips stung my cheek.
I scrambled up and skated like crazy for the path. Brightner’s ice was disintegrating under me, broken by a spreading web of inky cracks. Rough and soft, the ice gave under my blades so that I could hardly make headway.
Another jolting crash of the iron hook, and the whole ice-surface began to sink, but I was at the path—
There was no more path. Instead, the end of Gran’s long scarf dangled in the air in front of me, above the moving ice.
I made a wild leap and grabbed, clinging frantically as the scarf lifted me into the night as if it were being reeled up on a giant spool in the sky. I twisted my legs and feet into the fabric the way you do when you climb ropes in the gym at school. But this stuff was slicker than those rough old ropes, and my hands weren’t working too well in the holding-on department.
If I fell—well, it was a long way down, now, to Brightner’s ice.
The iron hook lanced upward, whooshing through the sky after me to the full stretch of the crane cable.
The glinting mass of metal sliced past an inch below the blades of my skates, and then it went down, and down, pulled by its own momentum. It slammed into the center of Brightner’s ice and shattered it into a slow fountain of big white slabs that leaped like angular dolphins.
From the center of the plunging ice shot Brightner’s souls, captive no longer. They streamed past me into the night sky, glittering in the moonlight like a meteor shower as they arced down again, hung briefly over the city, and vanished.
He had lost them, and all over the city their abandoned bodies would be stirring to consciousness again as the freed souls settled back into them.
Below me, the yellow crane, dragged forward by its own cable, sank down into the darkness that the chunks of ice seemed to float on. It all began to spin, oily blackness and bo
bbing ice, in a slow spiral around the place where the hook had gone in and pulled the crane down after it.
Brightner, alone now on the largest slab of ice, skated furiously in a tight circle.
Breathless, hanging onto my scarf-in-the-sky like a monkey on a rope, I stared down at him. You lose, I thought fiercely; you lose!
He hadn’t given up, though. He was trying to build enough momentum to leap to another chunk of ice farther away, and another, until he could reach the solid ground of the plain nighttime park and escape.
There! He sprang like a tiger—but the ice upended and sank under his foot as he took off. I saw him turn in the air, his arms upflung and his mouth open in a wild howl, and the blaze of his eyes stabbed at me.
Then he dropped like a black stone into the center of the vortex. The roaring, spinning wall of ice and darkness closed on him and plunged, drilling down into the heart of the world.
Nothing was left behind but the flat pale slab of the real Wollman rink, harmless and still.
I laughed; at least, I think that’s what I was doing. These high, silly sounds kept shaking out of me, and then the sky-scarf cracked itself like a whip, flicking me off. My mouth was full of the wind of falling.
I landed with a jolt that knocked a yelp out of me. There was cold stone under my forearms and stone under my butt.
Across the small table from me sat two people, clearly visible in the glow of the rising sun: my Gran, her face pillowed on her folded arms, snoring gently; and my mom, who blinked at me in bewilderment.
“Valli?” she said. “What on earth am I doing out here at dawn in my old bathrobe and these awful carpet slippers?”
On the checkered tabletop between us were bits of glass, shards of the mirror that must have been jarred out of my pocket when I landed. The scattered slivers reflected the bright, clean light of the rising sun.
17
Slime-coated Men
CROWS CAWED, A TRAFFIC HELICOPTER RATTLED BY overhead. Day, I thought. Imagine that. Morning in Central Park. And the fetch, let loose from the smashed mirror, had gone and fetched my mom—to me.
I said, “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, yourself,” she said, squinting a bit blearily at me. She shook Gran gently by the shoulder to rouse her, and then she stood up, not very steadily, and reached across the chess table toward me.
“Let’s go home. We’ll talk about this later.”
But you know, we didn’t; not then, anyway.
Afterward, when I heard her telling people that she’d had to go away for a few days to identify an old lady who might be my missing Gran, I didn’t say anything. And when Mom told close friends that Gran had lived as a homeless person, in shelters and churches and so on, for a few days until I had somehow tracked her down to Central Park, well, I let that go by, too.
I had about three days out of school—which I spent in bed, resting—while my hands healed.
Not that you could see anything wrong with them. I just couldn’t hold a pencil or a pen for a while. They got better gradually, and steadily enough so that the doctor didn’t mind so much not having a clue to what was wrong with them in the first place.
Then I discovered that while I had always been definitely right-handed, I was now totally ambidextrous, which was fun (amaze your friends) but confusing, until I began to get used to it.
One night while I was still in bed Gran brought me some take-out food for dinner.
Not Chinese. Indian.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “There’s nothing inherently sinister about Indian food, or Indian anything else for that matter.”
I pulled back from the steaming cartons on the tray. “I’m allergic,” I said, remembering a certain betraying sneeze.
“Nonsense, lovie,” Gran said. “You’re not sensitive to black spices but to the black magic that was mixed in with them. Try some of this.”
She insisted that I eat some kind of pureed eggplant dish, which looked like mud and tasted wonderful.
“Gran,” I said around a luscious mouthful, “how come Kali worked for Brightner?”
“He chose an ancient image of evil and infused it with his own will,” Gran said. “As I might have allied my strengths to an Indian concept of good, like Ganesh, the elephant. Ushah gave Brightner easy access to the darker elements of her native religion, which was one reason she was so useful to him. Poor Ushah.”
“Phooey,” I said, without a whole lot of conviction though. I will never forget the sight of Ushah caught in the arms of the painted Kali, going flat and dead and two-dimensional in that terrible embrace.
We ate and watched TV for a while. (The pickled onions were also terrific.)
We had had a number of meals together like this since that night in the park, with Gran perched on my bed eating from the other side of the tray. Gran was staying with us while looking, with Mom, for another retirement place to move into.
This made things crowded for a while (especially in the mornings when everybody needed the bathroom at once), but wonderful. Gran and I had a lot to talk over.
This particular night, the night of the Indian take-out dinner, Gran said that the captured souls had been able to escape the collapse of the ice because of strength they had drawn from the silver glove, which they had more or less eaten off my hand. Talk about magical food!
“What a beautiful meteor shower that was,” Gran said, “when everyone who had been under Brightner’s power broke free! A good night’s work, lovie.”
This kind of talk made me uncomfortable, I guess because I didn’t see myself as a heroic doer of great deeds. I mean, that’s something out of a book or a movie, not a person’s life.
I was still Valentine Marsh, and I had to go back to school in a few days. So I tried to stay casual about this other stuff.
“All that, with one little glove?” I said, trying for a light touch. “I should go look around for the matching one!”
“Oh, you have it,” Gran said. “That sort of magic is never used up, you know, only changed. Brightner underestimated its power, or he would never have let his phantoms near the glove. He probably thought they would destroy it! But all they wanted was to draw strength from it so they could pull free of him. They knew what it was: a form of love. Which is what all good magic boils down to, anyway, just as all bad magic boils down to fear, and force, and lies.”
I chewed, thinking about this and what it naturally brought to mind.
“What about The Claw?” I said. I still dreamed about that thing.
“His own malice, embodied,” Gran said. “And it pulled him down in the end.”
While we sat thinking solemn thoughts about this (mine were mostly along the lines of “Good, good, good!”), Mom came in, carrying packages.
She glanced at the open food cartons and sniffed the air. “Indian food?” she said. “I hate the stuff. Good thing there’s some leftover chicken, unless somebody gobbled it up for lunch today?”
She had been leaving us alone together a lot, almost as if she wanted to give us room to talk about things that she didn’t want any part of, herself. This time was different. We finally had our only conversation together about what had happened with Dr. Brightner, and it went more or less as follows.
“I want you both to know,” Mom said, reappearing in the doorway with a half-stripped chicken carcass, “that I’m very grateful. I also feel like an idiot.”
Nobody objected to this.
Mom went on, “I’m not even really sure of what happened—” She held up fingers shiny with chicken grease to stop us from telling her. “And I don’t want to know, all right? I don’t want to know any more than I think I remember, which is hair-raising and embarrassing enough.”
Gran sighed. “Good heavens, Laura, didn’t you learn anything? All this only happened because you’ve refused to learn about things that are crucial to our family—”
“That’s right,” Mom interrupted. “I refused, and I still refuse. But I do want to know what it means fo
r Val, having had this kind of experience. It’s not the first time, as we all know. Is it, finally, going to be the last?”
She looked at me so anxiously that I squirmed.
Gran scooped up mango chutney in a pocket of fried bread. “That depends on Val,” she said. “It’s all a matter of choice, Laura.”
“Val?” Mom said.
I shrugged and looked at my plate. “I don’t know, Mom. I guess if magic runs in the family, I’ll have to decide for myself what to do about it. Not yet, though. I think I’m burned out for the time being.”
“For the time being.” Mom aimed a chicken wing accusingly at Gran. “You’re encouraging her! I told you after the last time, when it was statues and sea-monsters and God knows what! I thought you understood me, I thought we had agreed that that was it. And now this—! Once and for all, I don’t want Val involved in any more weirdness!”
“She is involved,” Gran said patiently. “Because of who she is.”
“Oh, who she is!” Mom said. “In my opinion, Val hasn’t been herself for some time now. Did you know that she’s been taking money from my purse for months?”
Well, my face felt on fire.
Gran looked at me. “Val, I’m surprised at you.”
I tried to say something but nothing came. I am talking terminal embarrassment here.
Gran said, “I’m sure it’s just a phase, Laura. It won’t go on, particularly now that you’ve brought the matter out into the open. And I never said the child is perfect, only that she is gifted.”
“I don’t want her to be ‘gifted,’ ” Mom protested. “Not that way!”
“Mom,” I said, “come on. If I didn’t have something, I couldn’t have helped Gran make things come out all right that night at Wollman.” I could see by Mom’s expression that if I went on about that, I’d lose her. So I shifted course. “Anyway, it’s not as if I’m packing tonight to go study at Sorcery Hall. I won’t even consider anything like that yet.”
At the mention of Sorcery Hall, Mom’s face sort of crumpled as if she was holding back tears. “This isn’t some silly game, Valentine! It’s dangerous! And you two do nothing but back each other up against me!”