The Silver Glove (20 page)

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 bobbing 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

 

 

C
ROWS 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 for 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!”

She turned hurriedly and went to her bedroom.

Gran and I looked at each other.

“I tried,” I said.

“You did fine,” Gran said gently. “It's not so easy when you know that, much as you love your mother, and much as she loves you, you're braver than she is.”

That stuff again! Could it be that Gran didn't know how scared I was most of the time we were fighting Brightner?

Anyway, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that nobody can be brave all the time, certainly not me. And Mom can't be a weakling and still do her job for her authors and keep going in publishing, which is a business that looks like it's dying out half the time and turning into something completely different the other half.

But Gran was generally right, so I wasn't going to argue. Besides, I had something else on my mind.

“Listen,” I said, “you know what she said that night, about how she hated you being a witch? And you said you wished you'd known. If you had known how she felt while she was a little kid, would you have quit?”

Gran took a paper napkin and carefully dabbed at the corners of her mouth, which had a tendency to leak slightly when she was eating. She stared at the TV screen for a second.

Then she said, “No. The gift was mine, and I chose to use it. But I might have found ways to try to make it all easier on poor Laura. Why do you ask? Are you thinking about resigning your own capacities to ease your mother's mind?”

I considered this while Gran demolished another puff of thin, fried bread loaded with chutney.

“What if I do resign?”

“That's up to you,” she said. “But I can tell you, lovie, that deciding for someone else's sake not to use your own strength is usually a poor choice, with sad lessons in it and precious little joy.”