A Box of Gargoyles Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Eric

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  0. This Story Starts with a . . .

  1. The Wall That Blinked

  2. Barking at Shadows

  3. Gargoyles Getting in the Way

  4. A Billion Little Dominoes

  5. Mischief Night

  6. The Happy Birthday Dance of Death

  7. The Rock of the Salamander

  8. The Summer Box

  9. Rosemary and Honey

  10. Things Bend—Until They Break

  11. Never Trust Gargoyles. Really. Don’t.

  12. Vampires and Other Cultural Misunderstandings

  13. Samodivi After Dinner

  14. Losers Weepers

  15. In the Spider’s Parlor

  16. Bad News About Dragons

  17. Bones and Shadows, Misbehaving

  18. An Imaginary Country

  19. In the City of the Dead

  20. Stone and Letter

  21. Heart of a Dragon

  22. Into the Regular Old Unknown

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Also by Anne Nesbet

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  0

  THIS STORY STARTS WITH A . . .

  BANG. No, louder than that! It was the loudest sound any of the stones in that wall had ever heard. They hadn’t been paying attention to the wrinkled man as he knelt on the ground fiddling with his parchments and beakers, despite the tang of magic all around him. People come and people go—that’s the way stones see it. When you’ve been around for eighty million years, human beings amount to a cloud of noisy mosquitoes. Not even worth swatting at—if limestone could swat.

  But this bent-over smoke streak of a man did something no mosquito ever does: he made the world explode. He put his wizened, tangy palm right up against the wall, he made clickety-breathy human sounds with his mouth, and the magic went BANG and blasted its way right into the heart of those poor stones.

  And in that one awful moment everything changed.

  Aeiiii! It hurt terribly.

  The limestone did its best to yelp and pull away, but stone isn’t good at either of those things.

  So the change raced through the wall like lightning, like lava, like all of time squished into a single dreadful moment, and the limestone, shrieking silently, found itself filling up with weird poisons: a million pointy-edged words, a gazillion chattering thoughts.

  I am no longer myself! thought the wall, and was horrified to find itself thinking. All of a sudden, for instance, it knew where it had been standing all this time: on an avenue in the city of Paris, a block away from the river Seine. On one side of itself was the avenue Rapp, a proud part of France, and on the other stood a couple of buildings, an embassy, which belonged, through the peculiar magic of diplomacy and treaties, to another country (with a long, pebbly name: Bulgaria) a thousand miles away. In two places at once! That was why this wall was such a good place for magic. It knew, furthermore, that its own stone had been quarried in faraway Bulgaria; it had traveled on barges and trucks and trains to get here; that travel had taken fifty-nine days, and at the end of the fifty-nine days, the squeaky, wispy human beings had slapped some mortar down in their hasty way and thrown the stone blocks on top of one another, and the wall had been standing here quietly, recovering from all that hullabaloo, all the forty-three years since. This very minute the air was dark and cold because the date was the twentieth of the month of October, and the hour was eleven p.m., and the day of the week was Saturday. . . . In short, it knew a thousand million things no wall should ever know.

  Those were facts, and it’s bad enough for a wall to know facts. Worse by far was the foul thing all those facts were dragging in with them: not just words all a-jumble, but a mind. That was what the smoke-streak man had been up to, the one who stank of magic. He was magicking up—rude man!—a hiding place for his mind. That mind spread now through the astonished stones like a miasma, like a sour mist hugging the face of a bog, a vile clot of purposes and intentions with a name tacked on top: Henri de Fourcroy.

  Forty days, said the mind as it gloated its way deeper into the stones. It was full of instructions. You will bring me the girl. She broke me; she will mend me. And you will keep me safe for forty days!

  That was the time it needed for the rest of the spell to work. The wall knew that now. The wall knew everything! The man’s magic had reached into the tiniest crevice of What Is and opened a loophole there, to buy him some time.

  He would be a shadow for a while. But he would mend. Once you have been immortal, you do not crush as easily as others do. No! Let others be crushed, yes. But not Henri de Fourcroy.

  It all happened in a millisecond or two: the bang, the awful change, the mind rushing in. A moment ago the wall had been plain, quiet stone, and now—

  Ptoooooie!

  That is the sound of limestone having had enough. In less time than it takes to notice that the tasty morsel in your mouth has gone bad, bad, bad, the stone wall raced ahead of that mind and its loophole magic and spat it out.

  And then the wall stood there, shaken to its very bones, and surveyed the damage. The wrinkled man was gone. There was smoke and shadow everywhere, and more of those mosquito-swarm people running up, waving their spindly little arms and squeaking the way humans do.

  But oh, grief: there was a hole now in its own stone self. I spat too hard, thought the wall.

  And was horrified to find itself still thinking.

  It goes to show how hard it can be to spit out a mind, especially as sticky a mind as that of Henri de Fourcroy.

  Everywhere faint tendrils of that mind still remained, and they whispered poison as they coiled and uncoiled:

  Maya Davidson. Find her. She broke me; she must mend me. She will pay.

  1

  THE WALL THAT BLINKED

  Trouble doesn’t always start with a sudden sense of well-being and the smell of warm chocolate croissants—but then again, sometimes it does.

  Maya Davidson, almost thirteen, was walking along the avenue Rapp under leafless Parisian late-October trees, and the croissants sang out in small sugary, buttery voices from within their twists of white paper, and with every step she took, those letters in her pocket that had just come today reminded her of their presence by crinkling a little. And Maya herself felt—

  Well, how exactly did she feel?

  She wrapped her arms around her wool-jacketed self and considered the question for a moment, smiling, while her breath made thin clouds in the air.

  One thing was clear: she was not the same girl she had been three months ago. No. Things had happened. She had changed. In fact, so many things had happened that if an old, out-of-date version of Maya, the Maya from way back in June, were to show up suddenly, on this very sidewalk (probably looking pretty freaked out, thought Maya, to find herself suddenly whooshed all the way from California to this big French city), it would be pretty hard to explain any of it without sounding, to be honest, kind of loopy.

  Dad took that laboratory job in Paris. . . .

  That much would make sense to the old, out-of-date Maya. That was the kind of thing that happens sometimes to people, when their wonderful, beloved, misguided mothers (who have always wanted to live in France, who have always, always, so very much dreamed of spending time in that magical old city—what an opportunity for the children!) are finally getting better after having been so sick for way too long. Maya’s father did take the job in Paris. It really happened. Paris, by the way, is very far from California, and when you are dragged six thousand miles from home and plonked into the local school, you notice
pretty fast that in Paris, everyone in school speaks French.

  So that was hard. But not as hard as you think it’s going to be, said Maya-in-October to old-Maya-from-June. You’ll do okay. It’s the other things that happen—

  Because it turns out that Paris really is an old and magical city, and sometimes the magic sneaks up and holds you tight and will not let you go.

  Sometimes an evil, beautiful uncle will show up out of nowhere and try to trap you in some terrible spell, just so that he can go on in his wicked ways forever and ever.

  Uncle? said old-Maya-from-June. What uncle? And did you just say “spell,” like in old fairy tales about princesses and frogs and stuff? Are you nuts?

  I know it sounds weird, said new-Maya-from-Now. But listen—

  So this Henri de Fourcroy, who was sort of their uncle, had even had the gall to kidnap Maya’s impossibly likable baby brother, James, so that he could drain him of his charm.

  KIDNAP? said Maya-from-Then to Maya-from-Now. JAMES? You let that happen? You’re the one who’s supposed to TAKE CARE of James—

  That made Maya stop in her tracks for a moment, remembering how it had felt that horrible, awful, terrible day, which wasn’t, when you thought about it, very many days ago. Last Saturday! It took her smile right away, remembering that. Because Maya-from-Then was right: it was always Maya who was supposed to take care of James—

  And I did take care of him, said Maya to herself, finding her footing again. I found him. I rescued him. I saved him. I did. But of course it got pretty strange—

  It was the fairy-tale stuff again, only for real: she, Maya, had had to foil the plans of that wicked old Henri de Fourcroy.

  She herself had reached through the glass into the Cabinet of Earths and pulled out that bottle of his, where everything that had been mortal in him had been hidden so safely for so many long years, and time had caught up with him again and made him old. So now he was withered away and gone.

  The Cabinet of WHATS? Maya-from-Then was saying, somewhere in the background now. What was that you just said?

  Maya-from-Now waved her earlier self away, though she tried to be nice about it.

  Don’t worry, she said. The point is, it all worked out. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay! Really!

  Because she knew, better than anyone else could ever possibly know, about the knot of worry that Maya-from-Then was carrying around in her, always. How much it ached, that worry. How hard it was, sometimes, to be that Maya. But finally it was October, and life was back to normal, if you could ever call living half the world away from your home “normal.” At least the French schools believed in a lot of vacation. Maya’s school had just let out for ten full days—yes! It was true! She had survived the whole first quarter of the school year.

  What’s more, she had made a real, actual friend here in Paris, a dark-haired, quick-smiling boy named Valko Nikolov, who had lived for years in New York—

  —and when she had just run up to her apartment for a moment after school to drop off her books, she had found a small stack of letters for her on the table in the dining room, so her friends in California had not forgotten her, after all—

  —and then when she had stopped at the bakery to get something to share with Valko as they went walking across the bridge or along the Seine, the chocolate croissants had been warm.

  All in all, what Maya, the former champion worrier of the world, was feeling at the moment was something she hadn’t felt much of in the last few weeks (or months, or years): the tingling, hopeful feeling that is the opposite of worry.

  Was there a single, perfect word to describe this particular feeling? She wasn’t sure. If there were, it might have to be spelled like this:

  (!!!)

  Maya had to put a hand to her mouth to keep her smile from breaking loose as she crossed the last little street before the block where Valko lived.

  At that point she paused for a moment to admire the interesting new hole, outlined in jagged scorch marks, that had appeared in the high garden wall of the Bulgarian embassy last Saturday night. A transformer must have blown, Valko had said with some relish as he showed off the flashlight he now carried everywhere. Medium-sized chaos! Embassies apparently didn’t like their walls exploding, even if only partially, and they didn’t much care for power outages, either.

  There were lines of police tape marking off the part of the sidewalk directly under the hole, and an exceedingly bored policeman, whose job was to stand there all day in case some acrobat decided to spider-walk up the wall to the hole and then scramble through into the Bulgarians’ private garden. Through the hole you could see bits of branches and greenery, and embassy windows that would ordinarily have been invisible. And what was that? Craning her neck to get a better look, Maya put her hand on the wall to steady herself—

  and the wall JUMPED.

  Well, not jumped, exactly: twitched; flinched; blinked. It was Maya who did the actual jumping, as she snatched her hand away from the stone.

  Could a stone wall have some kind of electricity coiled up in it? A secret internal alarm system trained to yell when fingers touched it? Sensitive stone nerves?

  None of that seemed remotely likely, but then her head was still ringing from the silent twangggg that had come shooting up through her fingers. It wasn’t exactly like getting a shock from a doorknob after you’ve shuffled around a bit on the living-room carpet. No. That kind of jolt is, at least, impersonal. The thing about this one was—the wall had—okay, it was crazy to think like this, but this was what it felt like: the wall had recognized her.

  Her, Maya.

  Her heart began to skitter under her ribs.

  Slow down, she told herself. Slow way, way down.

  She surveyed the scene. The policeman was still poking away at a rough spot on his fingernail. The wall—she moved another inch away, just to be safe—was pretending to be a normal wall, if she ignored that sooty hole looking down at her from up there.

  Really looking at her.

  Not just looking, in fact, but staring at her.

  The little hairs on the back of Maya’s neck were prickling in alarm long before she realized what had caught her attention—caught it the way a hook might catch a fish.

  An eye was gazing at her from that wall. The strangest eye in the world, an eye made up of gaps and stone and other even more peculiar things, all falling together into eyeness if you stood just where Maya was standing and looked up just so.

  All right, all right, it was an illusion: the hole in the wall was a sooty-edged oval turned on its side; an eye-shaped gap where stone wall used to be.

  But then it got stranger, because framed by that gap the way a person’s brown-green-blue-or-sometimes-purple iris is framed by eyelid and eyelash was a stone figure. It was far off and high up, hunched over itself in a round-iris way as it perched on its narrow, high embassy ledge, centered (if you were standing just where Maya happened at that moment to be standing) within the eye-shaped hole in the wall.

  Maya squinted. Could that really be what she thought it was? Yes. The iris of the wall’s impossible eye was a gargoyle. You didn’t expect to see a stone gargoyle clinging to the side of the Bulgarian embassy, but there it was.

  The gargoyle-iris looked directly down at Maya through the eye-shaped hole of the garden wall. The gargoyle’s own eyes were piercing, shadow-black dots, and they were the pupil of the wall’s eye, and it was all like one of those sets of Russian nesting dolls (eyes within eyes within eyes), only worse, because this eye was also a trap, and Maya was caught in it.

  “Oh!” she said aloud, startled all over again.

  She really must have touched a nerve or something in that wall. The gargoyle was staring at her as if it had been doing nothing since the day it was carved but waiting for her, Maya Davidson, to walk by. The air was still twanging in silent alarm all around her. In fact, a wave of strangeness was now—how to describe this?—rippling out from the eye in the wall, just as the church bells a f
ew blocks away tolled four.

  Maya had grown up in California, where there are earthquakes from time to time, so she automatically scanned the sidewalk for a nice solid table to hide under, but the sidewalk had no tables. And in any case, although her stomach pitched about a little as the wave of strangeness rolled through her, the ground was not actually moving, so this was weirder than an earthquake, whatever was going on now.

  Something was ever so slightly wrong. But at first she could not see anything out of place. People were still walking along, still laughing and chatting or hurrying by in silence, as if nothing at all were the matter. It was like the sidewalk had turned into the deck of a very large ship, and a wave had just pitched that ship over onto its side, almost, and nobody but Maya even felt the slightest bit out of kilter.

  And no railing to hang on to, not anywhere.

  “Help,” she said, in the tiniest of voices, because it is disconcerting to feel like the universe has just bent a little out of its ordinary shape when nobody else seems to notice. She was actually putting her hand against her forehead to see if maybe she might be out-of-the-blue feverish or something, when right in the sidewalk in front of her there appeared the slenderest vein of sand, a twisting miniature wriggle of sand, meandering out from the wall in a lazy curlicue.

  She tested it with her toe, and it was really truly sand—dark sand, like lava ground down into grains of black salt. Not just a curlicue. No. It was zigzags and circles now, opening up in the pavement; she had to hop out of its way, it was scrawling about so fast, and when she hopped she collided with something that made a very displeased sound: the French policeman.

  “Attention!” he said, his lips curled into a frown, but Maya was distracted by his pillbox hat, which was sprouting a small pair of blue canvas wings.

  They were the tiniest of wings. The policeman didn’t seem bothered by them at all. His hat lurched upward, almost free from his head, and he gave it a smart tap to settle it back down again, as if he had been having to deal firmly with this particular hat for years and years.