The Golden Thread (20 page)

At Rockefeller Center I watched a huge machine clean the ice. My fingers froze and my nose dripped and my head echoed with stupid thoughts leading nowhere. At least I had some breakfast in me to keep me physically alive.

Finally I found myself drifting through the park to Castle Lake, hoping that somehow Joel would meet me there at noon after all, with the violin.

People were gathered at the east end of the lake, on the grassy edge of Jagiello's terrace: Lennie, and Tamsin wearing one of her artsy-fartsy outfits with tights showing off her legs. Barb was taking pictures with her Leica.

“Where's Joel?” she said when she saw me, and I almost crumpled up right there.

“You look half dead,” Lennie said, grabbing me by the arms and peering into my face. “Where've you been?”

“It's a long story,” I said, glancing at Barb. Her face was hidden behind the camera. “What are you all doing here? The committee's not supposed to meet until tonight. Full moon and everything, Bosanka's orders.”

They each said that I had phoned them and asked them to come to the lake at noon instead, and what was wrong with me, didn't I remember? I began to wonder if I had called them, and had somehow forgotten that I did it. Should I tell them about Joel and the patchwork fiddle? I was confused and afraid to tell them anything.

It was getting close to twelve.

Tamsin said, “But we don't have Peter and Mimi here. How can we be the Comet Committee? And I mean Peter and Mimi, not a couple of deer.”

Tamsin was not sentimental about animals, only about herself. I found this one of her least endearing characteristics.

“They'll turn up,” Lennie said uncertainly, looking around. He had on the same huge tweed coat he'd worn on New Year's Eve on the rooftop, and woolen gloves. It wasn't that cold with the sun shining, but Lennie has never really gotten used to North American winters.

“They'll show,” Barb agreed. “Animals are attracted to concentrations of psychic energy.”

“According to whom?” said Tamsin.

“According to people who know,” Barb said, and Tamsin sniffed but let it go.

Animals? I wondered if we were about to be overrun with squirrels, which the park is full of. What were we doing here? Everybody looked at me as if I should know, and I was totally at a loss.

Tamsin turned to me. “So where's Joel?”

Lennie came to my rescue. “We didn't need Joel on the spot when we first formed the Comet Committee,” he said. “Who says we need him here now?”

“Bosanka says,” Tamsin said, “or so everybody keeps telling me.”

“Hey,” Barb said. “There he is.” She made some quick camera adjustments and began clicking off pictures as Joel strode toward us carrying the violin case.

He walked up in grim silence and set the case down in front of me.

“Well,” he said, glaring at me, “go ahead. Jump on it, or whatever you have in mind.”

I didn't know what to say. I hadn't meant that he should destroy the magic fiddle in front of everybody like this! Just the two of us would have been bad enough.

“Why do you want to break your violin?” Tamsin asked. For the first time she sounded unsure.

Joel stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat and stared with bright, red-rimmed eyes around the little circle of us. “I don't want to. But Valentine says it has to be done, and she's the expert. So who's going to do it? Nobody? All right, then.”

He raised his foot over the old black case.

Lennie said, “Hey, wait a minute, is this the one Val told us about? The magic one?”

“It
was
the magic one,” Joel said bitterly, and he stomped down.

But he seemed to slip, and I saw his foot land not on the violin case but on a little tepee of gray sticks planted in the soft earth alongside the lake. There were small cracking sounds, and I saw other little stickpiles collapsing like dominoes, in a line that ran back the way Joel had come.

I saw the other lines, power lines Bosanka must have planted—pinecones behind Lennie, twists of grass behind Barb, stones winking with mica behind Tamsin—and I knew what had brought them all here; not phone calls from me!

Looking back, I spotted the markers that had led me here, too—oak leaves, brown and withered, each pinned to the ground with a thorn. I felt those thorns in my stupid, sinking heart.

Before I could say a word, we were all swallowed in a dense white wall of fog. Somewhere beyond the wall, I heard soccer players on the big field hollering in Spanish or Italian, but I could only see a few yards ahead.

I could hear dogs, too. They barked, they howled, and they were coming closer.

A pack. Bosanka the hunter had assembled a pack.

Joel, kneeling by the violin case, looked up at me, questioning.

I nodded, my mouth almost too dry to speak. “She sent for the committee, just like she told us she would—but
her
way, with magic! She's spelled us to meet here twelve hours early, to spoil any plans me might have come up with to
stop
her.

“We've got to get out of here right now, but first—Joel, we can't let Bosanka get her crazy hands on Paavo's violin! None of us can play it, but I'll bet she can!”

Joel groaned. Then he grabbed the violin case, turned, and slung it into the fog, in the direction of the lake. There was a splash, and a sob from Joel, and then two deer hurtled into our midst, fleeing from the yelling of the dogs we couldn't yet see.

I caught panic from the deer. I plunged into the dense white fog and ran from the First Hunter. I ran for my life.

 

16
All the Day They Hunted

 

 

I
RAN LIKE WATER RUNS DOWN A CLIFF,
throwing myself madly over or around anything in my way—a scarred park bench, a tree, a low red picket fence around an eroded slope. A long-legged stag caromed off my side as we sped through an echoing cave, one of the stone tunnels of the park.

I heard others, their steps, their hard breathing, as we raced through the park, skittering over pavement and dry winter grass in perfect, mindless, animal terror.

With the tiny part of my mind that stayed helplessly human, I understood that Peter and Mimi had joined us—we were a whole little herd of running deer. The Comet Committee was meeting, all right, in headlong flight.

We ran deeper into the chilly mist that hung everywhere like soggy laundry stuffed down among the trees. At times I seemed to run all alone, and then I would hear distant barking, or the breathing of another runner somewhere near me in the dimness.

After what felt like a year, the fog began to tear and trail away. Seams of bleak light opened that might have been night or day, I couldn't tell with my black-and-white deer vision. When I stared back over my shoulder (where my own hide was dark with sweat), I saw dogs pouring after me, red tongues lolling gleefully from fanged jaws.

Behind them or among them, Bosanka was like some tireless, horrible monster in a nightmare that you can't shake off your trail. She ran with a steady, easy stride and her face, when I could see it in the gloom, was merciless.

The sight of her filled my animal heart with a pounding terror that drove me to run even faster.

The fog vanished, the air was dry and still. I longed for the fog again, to dampen my parched throat. We ran through woodland, hilly and rough. Dead tree branches reached up to catch our legs as we leaped over them. The soil made little dry crunching noises at each step, and plumes of ash were kicked up by our hooves. We crossed wide patches of bare, bruising, rock-hard earth.

Central Park was gone. We were somewhere else, running over an alien land.

Once we split up, not by plan—we weren't capable of planning—but because the level forest floor broke into spreading hills, like the fingers of a withered hand.

It made no difference. Powerful, unstoppable, Bosanka somehow harried us one by one.

I hid, gasping for breath, in a gloomy tangle where fallen trees crisscrossed and held each other up. My legs shook, my heaving sides steamed. I strained to track the dogs by sound as they thrashed along somewhere near.

Through my human mind ran the refrain of one of my favorite nursery rhymes from my old Mother Goose book, about three jolly Welshmen who go hunting and don't bag anything but have a dandy time. It went something like this, “And all the day they hunted, and nothing could they find, but a ship a-sailing, a-sailing with the wind, they found a ship a-sailing, but that they left behind.”

“All the day” was turning out to be a long, long time, and we had no chance of being left behind.

Something came snuffling toward my hiding place, and panic sent me crashing onward again. I nearly fell over the ribs of a dried-up carcass, a thing like a kangaroo with its jaws open in the dirt—the remains of a leaf-taker. The faint, musty stink of it sent me bounding frantically on.

My lungs were going to explode, my heart would split open and drown me in my own blood. But I ran, and the others ran with me: down through a forest of blackened toothpick-trees and out across an endless marshy flat crusted with dried salt and dotted with jumbled ruins.

Every time we stopped for breath—and she let us do that purposely, I think, to prolong the hunt—we would see her trotting toward us with dogs around her, tracking us at her command but never closing in.

And we would run again.

It was during one of these brief rests that I realized I was not just running
away
. There was a scent in the air that I followed, a moist tang that had to be the smell of water. “Nothing could they find, but a ship a-sailing.” It was toward the water-trace in the hot, dead air that I ran. The others followed me.

At last we moved at a stumbling trot out onto a windy, steep-sided headland. Dead-ended, we stopped, milling sluggishly at the edge of the bluff. There was a gray beach below, littered with bones and seaweed. The sea beyond looked like black glass.

Water—a dead end.

A young stag banged into me, smearing my neck with foam. My long deer-tongue hung out of my mouth and my throat was cracking with dryness. If I could have reached it, I would have plunged my long face into that dark sea down there and drunk it up.

Bosanka laughed. We shambled around to face her, a trembling group under a high, bright sun.

She stood a little way off in her jeans and sweater and boots, with her arms crossed—First Hunter, boss of the forest. I couldn't take my eyes off the dogs, which sat at her feet panting and looking at us. They weren't the red-eyed hellhounds I had imagined chasing us over Bosanka's ruined world, but a bunch of grubby Manhattan strays, lop-eared and tangle-coated. One of them was a Pekingese.

My human mind jeered incredulously, she's got me terrified of a
Peke
?

This made a little bubble of laughter deep in my mind somewhere. Right away I felt my deer shape drifting and leaning, as if it were coming loose from an outline that had been drawn to hold it in. I felt shaky and feverish.

If only I could unhitch the last little hooks of my consciousness and float away from the staggering deer-Val before Bosanka set her dogs on us!

Not yet, apparently: first, she had a speech to make.

“Now,” she said, “you do what I say. You make your committee, you send your signal of light. Then, if we wish it, my people and me, we will hunt you together, to the kill.”

We all crowded close, leaning on each other—oh, the sound of our lungs laboring, the sharp tang of our terror, the flash of our despairing eyes!

I was the one with the magic grandmother. I was the one the others had followed here. And I was the one who was not going to be chased any more by Bosanka, a bunch of panting mutts, and a snuffly little Pekingese.

I turned and made a last-ditch, galumphing dash for the end of the bluff. There I dug in my hooves and more or less threw myself out over the sea. Falling, I heard the hoofbeats of the others running to leap after me, and—so gratifying—Bosanka's startled yell.

We're dead, I thought as I smashed down through a great weight of icy, inky water. I saw stars and thought,
I'm drowning
, as my chest began to strain and my sight grew prickly and dim.

And then something big surged up from below and booted me rudely to the surface.

I broke through the water gasping and choking, a human being again. Hands grabbed at me, people pulled me bruisingly over the side into a boat. “A ship a-sailing, a-sailing with the wind”—good old Mother Goose!

These people who were tugging at me and manhandling me up out of the water swore and gasped and urged each other on in voices that I knew: Peter. Joel. Tamsin.

I flopped down on the wet, chilly bottom of the boat. Nobody paid me any further attention. They were busy hauling somebody else in from the water. I stared at the sky. What I had thought with my deer vision to be the sun was in fact the full moon. Bosanka had hunted us through the day to the moonlit Saturday night that she herself had appointed for her personal meeting of the Comet Committee.

They put the next rescuee further up front in the boat, and then Lennie hove up over the side and nearly fell on me, dripping and blowing and burbling exultantly, “Did you see them? It's dolphins, I can't believe it, they held Barb and me up in the water until you came! God!”

He hugged me hard and I hugged him squelchily back. He was sleek and soaking, like a dolphin himself. “Are you okay, Valentine? You're all right, aren't you?”

I was. It was as if the icy plunge had washed all through me and flooded out all the panic and exhaustion of the hunt in one shocking rush. My hair and clothes were already drying in a warm breeze that blew out of the clear night sky. I sat up and looked around.

We were in an old wooden boat coated with layers and layers of scarred paint, like the boats you rent at the rowboat lake in Central Park. But we were not in Central Park.