The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (2 page)

There is a whole system of these bridges that arch over sunken pathways, so if you're on foot you can get across the roadways without being swept away by the tide of taxicabs surging through the park. Most of the bridges carry three traffic lanes, plus shoulders, on top. Underneath, where people walk through, they are deep, dark tunnels.

I poked my head inside again, squinting to screen out the bright light at the other end of the passage. The ceiling bulbs were out, but I could see two rows of fat brick pilasters, curving at their tops to make a series of round-topped niches along each side wall.

The niches were high enough and deep enough for a thin person to hide in, sort of. But there was nobody in any of them. Kevin had absolutely disappeared.

I wished Rachel had come with me.

A man came into the tunnel towing a little kid. “Shall we see if we can find echo here?” he said in a British accent. “Echo!” he called. “Echo!”

His accent struck me as so silly and prissy that my nervousness evaporated. I skated in, keeping well to the middle to avoid the slops of mud that early spring rainstorms had washed in at the sides.

“Echo!” sang the Englishman as I passed him.

Suddenly, at about the halfway point in the tunnel, a curtain of cold, blurry air closed around me and a hand grabbed mine and tugged me through the far end of the passage. I stumbled to a stop, dazzled by daylight on a grassy slope, holding hands with Kevin Malone.

“Yuchh!” I pulled free. “Kevin, you creep! What are you
doing?
”

Ignoring me, he shut his eyes and began singing, turning in place to face each of the four directions. “Welcome, traveler, and fare ye well to all the farthest bounds of the fair far.”
^*

While I stood there openmouthed, he bent down and began to search around in the grass.

“Kevin?” I said. He didn't respond, but on the other hand he didn't protest that he was somebody else, either. “What are you looking for?”

“Your pin,” he said. “You dropped it. Don't lose it, it's your passport. You have to have it to move between the worlds.”

“Then you better find it,” I said, “because I am sure not planning to be stuck in any world with
you
in it.”

Not brilliant, but I was so stunned that I could barely talk at all. My heart was booming around frantically in my chest, scaring me worse. Cousin Shelly had died at about my mom's age from something that wasn't supposed to kill you until your eighties or nineties. Could a fourteen-year-old person die of a heart attack brought on by sheer shock?

Luckily, there was lots to distract me from this line of terror.

We stood on top of a green hill among a whole herd of low hills. Ours was long and broad, knee-deep with tall grass, and dotted with trees. The summit where we stood was divided down the center by a wide strip of flat stone like a park pathway. But this surface was decorated with mosaics of snakes and dragons and birds, all worn-looking and drifted over with dirt. Ruins fanned out from the paving, what looked like the broken-down remains of old corridors and rooms. Grass grew everywhere. A damp, tangy wind blew.

I sure was not in Kansas anymore. Or Central Park. Or anywhere I knew!

Kevin handed me my pin without a word. I fastened the rhinestone rose through the underside of my shirt collar. It wasn't easy. My hands shook like crazy.

“Kevin,” I said, “what is this?
Where are we?
”

“In the hills of the fair far,” he said. “Take those skates off, they're no good on this path 'cause there's too much dirt. Hurry. The time changed while I was away looking for you. We haven't got much daylight left.”

I noticed that his skates were gone, replaced by Reeboks with green dayglo laces. I didn't bother to ask how he'd changed shoes so fast. I went for first things first, like any rational person in a totally impossible situation. “What's this ‘fair far'? ”

He said it again, stretching the vowel sounds. Then he spelled it out: “F-a-y-r-e F-a-r-r-e, the Fayre Farre. It's my place. I made it up. Hurry!”

Made it up?
Whoo. I sat down on a stone, harder than I'd meant to, and got my shivery fingers busy taking my skates off.
I am stuck in some kind of hallucination with a lunatic
, I thought,
and in my stocking feet.
But everything felt so bright, so chilly, and so spookily
real.

I said, calmly for a terrified person, “So what's the problem with being out in the dark around here?”

“I started the Fayre Farre when I was real little, okay?” he said. “Little kids are scared of the dark, so the dark I made here has some scary things in it.”

“Things,” I said. “Like what?”

“Don't worry, I can handle it. Let's go.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me up on my feet.

Kevin Malone had not put his grubby paws on me in years, and never with friendly intentions. I had always run when I'd seen him, but all that was years ago.

I settled for yanking my arm free. “Just hold it, okay? God, Kevin, I've got enough going on in my life as it is. What are you
doing
here? Why did you pick today to give me back my pin? How did you find me, anyway? And where's Central Park?”

“I've been tracking you for years,” he said. “That old pin of yours kept tabs on you for me, and today you came close enough to reach. And something's different: your guard was down, somehow. That means something.”

“What?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But it means something. Everything means something in the Fayre Farre.”

I was not at all delighted with the idea of Kevin spying on me
for years. “
Well, my guard is back up again, and I'm going home. Where's the park, Kevin?”

“What's your hurry?” He took off the dark leather cap he was wearing and shoved the hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Aren't you curious at all?”

“About a world you think you made up?” I said. “Even if you did create all this, which is impossible, I do know something about the imaginations of little boys”—I was thinking of Rachel's two younger brothers, the twins, who were deeply into computer-game violence—“and I do
not
want to wander around inside anything remotely related to that kind of mind. Least of all your mind, Kevin. You were a horrible little creep when I knew you, in case you've forgotten.”

I turned to go back through the arch. It was right there, odd-looking among the ruins: sturdy red brick with white salt deposits where decades of rain had soaked it, set in a standing fragment of gray stone wall. Rainwater dripped out of a little pipe set low on one wall near the entrance to drain the earth behind the brickwork. Wherever we were, the arch was still its plain, Central Park self, which I found very reassuring.

“You can't go back that way,” Kevin said, not deigning to acknowledge my judgment of his character. “It's one time through each gateway for everybody, only one time between worlds. You just used the Willowdell. We need another arch to get you home.”

Getting wobbly again with panic, I squinted through the arch. On the other side I saw not Central Park but more ruins, convincing ruins. I believed him.

“Willowdell,” I said, stalling. I did not want to leave that familiar arch. “It has a name?”

“Most of them have names,” Kevin said. “It was the names that grabbed me first, on a map of the park that I saw one time: Willowdell, Greyshot, Riftstone—”

The scowl that had seemed to be his main expression relaxed as he said the names. His whole face changed, taking on an open, far-off look that made me think:
Amy, you do not know this person. Maybe you did once, a little, but he's a stranger now.

This was unnerving, but intriguing, too. What kind of stranger? Still, it would be insane to stick around any longer than I had to to find out.

“What's the closest arch besides this one?” I asked, playing along.

He looked around nervously. “We'll walk over to the Denesmouth Arch. It's not far.”

I started to object, but gave it up. I didn't seem to have a lot of options.

 

                
^*
What I
heard
was “fair far,” but I learned later that Kevin used his version of ancient-type spelling for the name of his magic kingdom, the Fayre Farre.—Amy

 

Two

Corner Kid

 

 

 

T
HE MOSAIC SLABS OF THE PATHWAY
looked manageable even in socks. I tied the laces together, slung the skates around my neck and followed Kevin. Once we got started walking, I felt sort of relieved. I didn't really want to go right back to listening to my mother saying over and over that she couldn't believe it about Shelly, who was
her
cousin really and only second cousin to me, and my aunts grabbing me in these tearful hugs all the time as if that could change anything.

Soon would be soon enough. Meanwhile maybe I was ready for all hell to break loose, which could happen, in Kevin's company. He had never been dull to be around. And I realized I was very curious, even excited, about the Fayre Farre itself; I was glad I hadn't tried to go back through the Willowdell Arch, but had trusted Kevin's word that it wouldn't take me home. Home could wait.

“What is this place, Kevin?” I asked.

He said expansively, “I told you—my country. It's a real place, Amy. It's got history and everything, just like America or England or any place on the other side of the arches. Take these ruins, here—that's what's left of a great castle. There was a lot of battles and things fought here in the time of the First Kings.”

As we hurried along, he talked. I do not remember a word. It was all fake history anyway, the kind you can find by the yard in any sword-and-sorcery novel, especially along about Volume Two or Three: kings, nobles, great warriors or adventurers messing around with magic, princes squabbling over this or that kingdom or girl or spell or enchanted weapon.

I began to expect a gaggle of wizards to shuffle by spouting spells and smoke through their beards. They always have beards and they all smoke pipes, ever since Tolkien's Gandalf set the style.

But how would Kevin even know about things like that? He was not the kind of person I associated with reading literature. Kevin had been one of about ten kids in a family down at the end of the block where I'd lived then, in the West Eighties. We'd had a cramped but sunny apartment in a fourteen-floor building halfway between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Kevin had lived in one of a row of what were then brownstone tenements down near Columbus.

Every time Mom or Dad sent me to a store on Columbus to get something, inevitably there would be a gang of what all the children in my building used to call “Corner Kids” hanging out on the brownstone stoops. They mugged us, for fun and profit.

Kevin, their ringleader, was skinny and fast and loud, with the dirtiest neck you ever saw. He had specialized in ambushing me in particular, and taking my stuff—money, bubble gum, my rhinestone pin.

Finally my mom had gone to have a talk with his mother, which had left me absolutely terrified that the whole Malone family would come wreak terrible vengeance on me. But I didn't see Kevin at all after that. The next thing I heard was that he had run away from home.

Then my father got his first screenwriting job in California, and though we stayed in New York—Mom didn't want to leave her job in the textile business—we did change neighborhoods. Living on the East Side, going to a new school, I forgot all about Kevin Malone.

This
was
really Kevin, wasn't it? Who else would have my old pin? On the other hand, for the old Kevin to give something back instead of taking something away was a reversal of the laws of nature on the order of dirt raining up into the sky. So maybe he had changed.

Everything else sure had. People had bought the West Side brownstones and fixed them up. Burglar bars leaking philodendron stems guarded all the windows of Kevin's building now. Last time I'd walked by there, I'd seen a huge Akita looking out of one of the bow windows. I think they're ugly dogs, but buying an Akita costs about as much as adopting a baby. The people living in Kevin's building now were definitely not Corner-Kid types.

But what type was it, exactly, who could drag me into a made-up place where I walked on real stone slabs with real grass between, among real ruins?

Take it easy, Amy,
I told myself.
Just because you are having a psychotic episode brought on by the shock of Cousin Shell's completely unexpected and unfair death, that doesn't mean you are crazy forever. It will pass.
That's what Shelly used to say, shaking her head and making her earrings jingle: “Whatever it is, Amy, it will pass.”

What would Shelly have thought of Kevin, I wondered. She'd been a social worker; she must have known a lot of Corner Kids.

I studied Kevin covertly as we hurried along, which was a lot more interesting than listening to what he was saying. The last time I'd seen him he'd been about three inches shorter than me, with dirty black hair chopped off at ear-level, missing front teeth, and a piercing voice.

His voice was broken now, his teeth white and even, and he had filled out with muscle. He was taller than I was, and looked especially big, because he stuck his elbows out to take up extra room when he walked with the swagger that I remembered, not fondly, from our shared youth.

He also had a shadow of a mustache, dark like his hair, and frowning eyebrows over light gray eyes. His skin was very white and clear, with what looked like a permanent flush in the form of a red strip down each cheek.

Talk about unfair; bad Kevin had become good-looking.