The Silver Glove (18 page)

For an answer Ushah opened her mouth and screamed something in a voice that rattled the silver on the tables. I had to let go of the chair and cover my ears. I saw Ushah join her hands in front of her, surrounded by flares of dark energy.

“Then, foolish woman,” Gran cried fiercely, “follow your chosen path to its end!”

Ushah's black beam sizzled through the air again. Gran thrust out her hand, holding the eyeglasses in front of her like a shield—and the killer beam broke in blinding shards of darkness from one of the tilted lenses.

My head rang with a soundless explosion. I saw the darkness reunite and roll back the way it had come like a huge black wave. The wave dipped down as if bowing to Ushah. It slid under her scrambling feet and surged up again, lifting her on its smoking back. It threw her against the wall behind her.

And the four arms of the painted Kali reached out like spider legs and folded Ushah in.

The struggling witch, her whole face distorted by shrieks that I couldn't hear, simply faded into the painted image. Her flailing arms and legs became fixed, her awful face was just a painting of a fright mask. She went as flat and lifeless as the rest of the picture of Kali dancing and—now—clutching her prize.

A little sign flashed in my mind, “Do Not Feed The Kali,” and I giggled wildly. Actually, I felt like throwing up.

Then the paint curled, shriveled, and flaked silently off the wall in a drift of pastel powder. Nothing was left but a pale patch of bare plaster on the wall. The leatherette seats below were lightly coated with fine gray dust.

My legs gave out and I sat down with a gasp on the carpeted floor.

“Wow,” I said, hearing my own voice like something under water. But at least I heard it.

“Wow with knobs on,” Gran said a little shakily. She put down the twisted ruin of her reading glasses on the tabletop closest to her. “I wasn't really up for that, not right off the bat.”

“You got her,” I said. “You got her, Gran!” I would have danced, if I could have made my legs hold me up.

“She got herself,” Gran said grimly. “A fine young power in the world has been perverted till it had to be destroyed.”

“But how—?” I remembered what she had said to me about strafing Brightner from the flying carpet. “You turned her strength back on her,” I said. “You reflected it back with your glasses.”

“I did indeed,” she said. “I sent back what she sent me.”

“Wait till I tell Barb,” I babbled. “I've seen it with my own eyes, it's just like she says: what goes around, comes around!”

Gran said in a quiet, thoughtful voice, “Oh, yes, lovie, it does. That puts it very well.” She stretched. “Good, I'm feeling better. There's nothing like being forced to your uttermost to get the blood stirring again, is there? I feel almost ready for him!”

“What's that?” I said. Now that my hearing was back, I seemed to hear more sharply than before. And what I heard was a faint jangling noise from the back of the restaurant, and then a hollow boom that was alarmingly familiar. “That's the alley door banging against the wall outside!”

“Hurry!” Gran said.

I followed her through the swinging doors and the kitchen, and there was the alley door gaping wide, and out in the alley itself—

“Stay back,” Gran said, catching my wrist.

I did, but I leaned out and looked.

I saw Ushah's bicycle, The Great Galloping Claw, speeding toward the street. Scattering before it were half a dozen shadows like thin black gauze whipped along in a stiff wind.

As we watched, the bike turned onto the street and wheeled out of sight.

“The basement,” I said. “Maybe there are some left!”

But Gran's crooked fingers tightened on my wrist. “Don't waste your time,” she said. “The Claw will have rounded them all up for him, never fear, and we must hurry! I should have realized that he'd have a spy-hole here—the eye of Kali, like as not! He won't come against me here, not now, with victory fresh in my hands. It's too chancy. He'll want an edge, lovie, like any bully!”

She hurried me out of the restaurant's front door.

“But where are we going?” I said, catching something from her—excitement, even eagerness.

“Where he'll be waiting,” she said, “hoping to snare the pair of us—at Wollman rink, the root of your mother's dream. That's where he'll have done it—used her power to make a great vortex, a magical engine to launch himself and all his booty across time and space and into the heart of the wizard war!”

 

16
On Brightner's Ice

 

 

T
HERE WAS ALWAYS THE CHANCE,
of course, that Brightner would get impatient and take off with what he already had, never mind Gran and me.

After what had happened to Ushah, the possibility of him chickening out rather than squaring off with my Gran didn't seem so crazy. My mood swung wildly between terror that we would get to Wollman and find that he'd gone, and a sniveling, craven hope that that was how it
would
be—so that we wouldn't have to face him, fight him, win back my mother and the harvest of captive souls, which I saw now as one giant task: the task of beating Brightner.

Not that Gran and I could discuss this openly in the cab on our way uptown to the park, which was a kind of a relief to me, actually. I was scared enough as it was.

The cabbie thought we were crazy, anyway. All the way up Sixth Avenue, he gave us an argument about driving into the park at that hour, let alone letting us off in the middle of it. He steered with one hand and turned to squint back at the two of us as if we were Martians.

“I don't get it,” he said. “I thought even out-of-towners knew better. You're talking about
Central Park
, lady. Ever heard of muggers?”

“Muggers,” Gran said, “are by and large lazy, self-indulgent folk. They will have all made their hauls by now or given up because of the night chill. Hurry, please.”

“Hurry, she says,” he said, shaking his head wonderingly. “You know those hansom cabs that take tourists for rides in there at night? Why do you think they clop along in caravans, one after the other like a goddamn camel train, eh? Why do they do that? Worried about crime, that's why.”

“Yes or no?” Gran said crisply.

The cabbie scowled. “Maybe you should get out of my cab. I don't want to be the one who let the two of you off alone in the middle of the park at this hour!”

He was already slowing down to stop outside the park wall when I had my inspiration. “We won't be alone,” I said. “We're meeting someone.”

“Who, King Kong?” the driver said.

“As a matter of fact he's an ex-cop and he's over six feet tall and weighs maybe two hundred pounds. He's lethal.
Nobody
messes with him,” I said. (Except us, of course. The cabbie was right: we were crazy.)

He sighed. “Okay, all right. I'll take you in.”

He swung the cab in at the entrance where Sixth Avenue dead-ends on the southern border of the park. The dark gap in the black stone boundary wall swallowed us up, and we tore along through the dark, empty park, past islands of yellow light from the cast-iron lampposts lining the cement pathways as they wound into the blackness of the trees and bushes.

I sat nervously smoothing the soft leather of the glove over my left hand.

We stopped, at Gran's instructions, where the drive passes between the carousel building, invisible at night in its little tree-shaded hollow, and the chess-and-checkers hill.

No sign of Brightner; was he here? My heart hammered and my eyes felt as if they would pop out of my head, I was staring so hard into the shadows.

Gran fished a bill out of her coat pocket.

“So where is he, this giant ex-cop you're meeting?” the driver said, looking at the money.

“Up there,” I said, pointing up the steps to the chess pavilion. “With his telescope.”

“Stargazing,” the cabbie snorted, “at three in the morning in the middle of Central Park! Now I've heard everything.”

He took Gran's bill and gave it a squinty look, as if he thought we might be trying to palm off some Martian money on him. You could tell he wouldn't put anything past us—people who wanted to be dropped in the park at night!

“Keep the change,” Gran said.

He shook his head again and drove away fast.

I couldn't help wondering if I would live to ride in a New York taxi again.

The pitch-blackness between the lights was thick with quiet, and in the quiet came sounds so small and quick that you couldn't even guess what had made them. The shadows around us seemed to shift and stir, even though there wasn't a single breath of wind. It was one of those nights when the lights of the nighttime city were diffused and reflected back from a low layer of clouds, throwing a murky pallor over everything. The air smelled of damp earth and dead autumn leaves, and the actual sky was completely hidden.

I felt as if my ears were standing out a foot from my head on either side, I was listening so hard for a whisper, a sound of footsteps besides our own.

“Up the hill, hurry,” Gran said.

At the top of the chess-and-checkers hill, all we found was just what's supposed to be up there: a brick pavilion with eight sides sitting in the middle of a paved terrace of concrete game-tables and benches. The pavilion was locked up tight (I could make out some chairs and tables inside, behind the grimy windows). The weathercock on the roof stood in silent silhouette against the glowing clouds.

The south side of the hill overlooks the sunken site of the Wollman Memorial Skating Rink.

We stood at an angle of the railing of metal pipe that skirts the terrace, looking over a shoulder of rough black granite sticking out of the hilltop just below where we stood. Trees reached up at us from the shadowed slope below. Farther down came the darkness of the little valley, and enclosed by chain link in the middle of that darkness—Wollman, thrown into sharp relief by floodlights mounted high on metal poles around its edge.

I shivered and shivered, though there was no wind. I turned up the collar of my jacket and stuffed my hands deep into my pockets, and I still shivered.

It seemed to me that I was looking down at a dead, ugly animal lying in a cage. The animal was the skaters' building, now a deserted hulk alongside the concrete pad of the rink itself. A big yellow crane, with its arm sticking up into the sky like the antenna of a giant insect, stood to one side like the winner of one of those tremendous battles of monsters in Japanese horror flicks:
Wollzilla Meets Cranera
.

Gran said, “This is the place of your mother's dream, the dream she's trapped in.”

“But where is she?” I said, whispering in spite of myself. “And where's the phantom rink that I saw at Rockefeller Plaza? And the thing, what did you call it? The vortex?”

“They are one and the same,” Gran said grimly, “and it's all here, with its master. He's hiding in shadow, waiting for me to make the first move. Well, so I shall. Do you know chess?” She turned and tapped the top of the nearest chess table with her crooked fingers.

“Um, no,” I said. “I know some card games.”

Gran shook her head. “What other games do you play with your friends?”

“Monopoly,” I said. “Battleship.” I have seldom felt myself to be such a totally inadequate baby as at that moment.

“All right, we'll use a computer model instead.” Gran began sort of typing on the squares of the chessboard, the way you type on a computer keyboard.

Instantly, the entire cloud-cover vanished. We stood under a clean black arch of night, with the few stars that can be seen over a big city. The moon was large and bright.

But there was still no Brightner, no phantom rink.

“Bloody
Hell
,” Gran swore. “He's resisting, trying to wear me down right at the beginning! And I'm already tired, lovie, more tired than I thought. I was mad to waste my strength struggling with Ushah. Oh, I'm an old show-off, I'm an old fool!”

“Gran,” I said, “stop blaming yourself and fight!”

“Because I knew her,” Gran groaned, “I took the time to try to win her back. Heavens, the arrogance—I should have just flattened the creature straightaway—”

“Gran!” I pulled her arm hard. “Please!”

She turned away from me and didn't answer.

In that moment the heart sort of fell out of me. I thought I would die where I stood—of helplessness and of defeat, I guess. Gran's and mine.

“Coward!” I screamed down at the little valley. “Come out and fight!”

I heard laughter, spattering on the terrace around us like fat drops of rain.

He shouldn't have laughed.

Gran turned and faced me again. “I only have so much left in me,” she said slowly, “but it might do. If you'll be the bait, lovie. Will you?”

“Sure! What do I do?” I said. Bait! This didn't sound so great, but anything was better than giving up.

Gran sat down on one of the benches. “Help me off with these boots,” she said.

I knelt and tugged them off her tiny, lumpy feet.

She nodded. “Now, you put them on.”

I looked at Gran's cowboy boots. They were too big for her—she wore two pairs of thick socks underneath—but still way too small for me. I said so.

“Put them on, lovie,” Gran said. “They'll fit.”

They did. But when I stood up, I staggered: the boots had blades under them. They weren't scraped and battered cowboy boots anymore, but scraped and battered white figure skates. I stared down at them.

“Going skating?” Brightner's voice said out of the sky in a husky, smiling tone. “Come on down. The ice is nice and fresh.”

“Weaver of lies!” Gran shouted suddenly. “If it's so nice, then show it!”