The Silver Glove (5 page)

I woke up at about two in the morning. My fingers, where The Claw had touched me, were hot and blistered and made my whole hand ache. Maybe The Claw had given me blood poisoning or gangrene.

Mom was asleep. I could sort of feel that in the stillness of the apartment. She was sleeping, and I was sick, but I wouldn't wake her up and worry her with my crazy fantasies, not me. Let her find me raving in the morning, or unconscious, swooned out. Too bad tomorrow was Saturday, not a school day I could miss due to Claw-poisoning death.

Feeling very sorry for myself, I scrunched up on my bed in my clothes in the dark, longing for my Gran to come, call, do
something
about my hand and my mom and Brightner. I took out the silver glove and folded it under my cheek. It brought back very clearly the bristle-faced flea market vendor who had sold the glove to me, and the two women going through the box of shoes next to me and laughing about how out-of-style they were.

All of a sudden it hit me: tomorrow was
Saturday
. Flea Market Day. The glove had told me where to find my runaway Gran.

 

5
Bad Character

 

 

I
WOKE UP EARLY
with my wounded hand wrapped in the silver glove, and my fingers didn't hurt anymore. Nothing was left of the blisters but two faint red marks.

Mom was still asleep. I left a note on the kitchen table saying I had to go to the museum to check out something as part of my schoolwork, and that I would be back for lunch, just so she wouldn't get all worried if I was out for a while.

The flea market didn't open till ten. I strolled on Broadway, the glove rolled up and tucked securely into my pocket. At exactly five after ten, I cut over to Columbus and trotted up to the south gateway into the schoolyard.

The day was chilly and overcast, but the vendors' tables were set up in rows as usual. I bought hot apple fritters at the gate and ate them out of a napkin, scorching my teeth when I bit into them.

I wandered up and down the aisles between the rows of tables, looking at lamps made out of duck decoys and a whole array of chromium car-hood ornaments and old tin candy boxes selling for big bucks
without
any candy in them and tattered books and ashtrays in every possible shape and form including a Scotchman's head, in a green tam-o'-shanter, with the mouth open for ashes. Really gross and stupid, but some people will collect anything.

Gran was nowhere to be seen. There was no real crowd for her to get lost in, either. The vendors wandered around buying stuff from each other and chatting together. There was a comfortable confusion and a lot of bright color, and I felt terrible. Because of Mom, and Brightner, and most of all because of Gran. Where was she? She had to be there.

I stopped to look at some beautiful Oriental carpets that a young Arabic-looking guy had spread out on the cement. This was the exotic corner of the market, I thought, glancing at the African animals carved in ebony on the next table over.

On the other side of the rug display, a little woman with her face hidden in the upturned collar of her shapeless coat sat shuffling a deck of outsized cards.
Gypsy Fortune
read the cardboard sign propped on the wobbly card table in front of her.

The “gypsy” was talking to somebody while she shuffled her cards, and the somebody was a bum if ever I saw one: a bag lady, your typical street person with layers and layers of stained and ragged clothes, plastic rain boots with leg-warmers on over them, oily gray hair sticking out from under a navy watch cap, and an assortment of plastic shopping bags stuffed with unnameable objects.

What a pair. I quit my surreptitious staring at the gypsy and her weird client, if that was what the bag lady was, and I studied the carpets. I love those things. I sometimes think about being rich enough to buy dozens of them and hang them all over my room and roll them up for people to sit on, like inside a desert nomad's tent.

As I stood there dreaming luscious carpet dreams, a creaky voice said, “Tell your fortune, young lady? The gypsy knows all.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the hunched figure of the so-called gypsy. The bag lady had gone.

No harm in trying, I thought. I said, “Can you tell me where my grandmother is?”

“I should say so, lovie,” she said, turning her collar down so I could see her face.

I gaped like an idiot. She was wrapped in a huge tweed overcoat and she had cowboy boots on and she was, of course, my Gran.

Weak-kneed with relief, I sat down on the folding chair across the table from her.

The smaller writing on the cardboard sign, which leaned precariously against a red glass with a candle in it, read,
pay me what you think it's worth
. The flame of the candle wobbled in the chilly breeze that blew through the chain-link fence around the schoolyard.

I said, “Gran! What are you doing here?”

“Reading fortunes, lovie. Want to try the cards?”

I whispered (by now business had picked up, and there were people all over the place), “Who was that?”

“Dirty Rose?” said Gran. “She's mad as a hatter, but she's not a bad person, and she does notice things.”

“But where've you been?” I said, “you and—and Dirty Rose? Mom and I have been worried to death about you!”

She gave me a sly little grin. “I don't doubt it, but the free life agrees with me, don't you think?”

She did look better than the last time I'd seen her at the home. Her eyes were sharp, with none of that awful vagueness that meant she was about to say something about shortcake.

I leaned closer. “It's Brightner, isn't it? Him and this crap about Alzheimer's and Buffalo! You had to get away from him.”

“In a way,” she said, neatly shuffling her deck of fortune-telling cards. The cards were big and had complicated, faded pictures on their faces. She
did
look like a gypsy, or somebody's idea of a gypsy anyway. She even had a bunch of gold chains and beads hanging around her neck. Bracelets rattled on her wrists as she worked the cards.

She handed me the deck. “Shuffle,” she said, “and cut until they feel well mixed.”

“My fingers are greasy from eating fritters,” I said.

“The cards won't mind,” Gran said.

I am a lousy shuffler even with ordinary-sized cards. Barbara and I used to play go fish and steal the old man's bundle. I never really got the hang of shuffling. These big cards were harder to handle than regular ones.

Gran patiently watched me struggling with them. “You're not concentrating,” she said. “Valentine, what's really on your mind?”

“What's on my mind?” I yelped. “The Claw and the silver glove, and you're wandering around with some wild-eyed street person, and
Dr. Brightner is dating Mom
!”

“Better tell me the whole tale, then,” Gran said briskly.

So out it all came at a gallop while I struggled with the cards. Granny Gran sat bent over her clasped hands, her pointy little chin on her knuckles, and studied me while I elaborated excitedly on all of the above.

When I finished she said, “That's our man, all right. A bad one, Val, as bad as they come. That's what I've been checking up on, at Sorcery Hall.”

So that was where she'd been!

I knew a little about Sorcery Hall, from Gran and a friend of hers I'd met once. It was a combination club, college, and professional organization for sorcerers, and its members kept an eye on worlds like ours to try to help keep us out of magical-type trouble. When promising magical talent was spotted in people, a sort of scholarship was offered, very privately, so that they could be trained at Sorcery Hall to use their gifts.

Like Gran.

“They know who he is?” I said, elated. Now we were getting somewhere!

“They certainly do,” she said. “He's a rogue wizard who was denied membership on grounds of bad character.”

“What kind of bad character?” I said.

“Mainly necromancy, which means interfering with the dead for one's own purposes and profit. From what I can discover, Brightner has been out in the dark parts of the universe ever since, studying and practicing on his own. He's become quite a wicked and powerful black magician.”

“Ugh,” I said, not wanting to find out exactly how he could “interfere” with dead people.

Gran said, “Ready? Cut the pack into three piles. Then number the piles, one, two, and three.”

I did what Gran said. She picked up pile number one and dealt out a row of cards, faces down, five across in front of her

I said, “What does a—a necromancer want with us?”

“Well, it's my fault, in a way,” Gran said regretfully. She pulled out the reading glasses she wore tucked into her clothes, suspended on a cord around her neck, and set them on her nose so she could peer through them at the cards. “Dr. Brightner has been shipping people from the home to his so-called clinic upstate. One old gentleman's daughter changed her mind about keeping him there and had him brought back to the home, just until she could make other arrangements. I noticed something about him.

“He was much vaguer than when he left, for one thing, but more importantly, he had no shadow.”

“What!” I gaped at the cards she was turning up: the first one showed a man looking at a table-load of odd objects. The card was labeled “The Magician” and it was upside down. “How could anybody go around without a shadow? I mean, when light hits you, you have to have a shadow, it's the laws of physics.”

“Which is exactly how I began to suspect,” Gran said grimly, “that this old gentleman had been got at by a rogue wizard; someone who could suspend or interrupt the ordinary laws of physics, and what's more, cast a glamour on the victims so that no one, themselves least of all, even notices! That didn't work on me, naturally. I can generally see what there is to see—or not to see, in this case—glamour or no glamour. Dr. Brightner hadn't planned on running up against someone like me. When he tried to scoop me up in his ‘Alzheimer's' net, I slipped away to do some investigating.

“The worst is, I've seen others in the same plight since I've left the home—strangers, people on the street, shadow-less and unfocused in mind, lost to some wicked spell!”

She turned up another row of cards: people with swords, all upside down, and a monster card labeled The Devil. I didn't like to look at them, but Gran studied them closely, frowning, as she went on.

“He's a very busy fellow, our Dr. Brightner. He has a whole network of clinics, and other operations too, designed to bring people to him. Especially discarded people that nobody would miss much, you see. Dirty Rose was just telling me about a certain shelter that's been started for the homeless here in the city. It's operated out of a restaurant, of all things; Brightner has a sense of humor, it seems. This is not always a recommendation. At any rate, street people who get fed there come back without their shadows.”

“I thought you said nobody notices,” I said, “because of the spell—the glamour.”

“Most don't. Rose sees because she's got a touch of true sight, mad as she may be. And what she sees frightens her, as well it might! This man Brightner is the worst sort of black magician. He's raiding our ignorant and unsuspecting world for purposes of his own.”

“But what good is taking people's shadows?” I said, trying to remember if I'd seen anybody without a shadow lately. Nobody came to mind.

Gran turned over another card and said angrily, half to herself, I think, “It will turn out to be some sort of slavery, you can count on it. He takes their shadows to serve as fetches when he wants them.”

“What's a ‘fetch'?”

“The shadows will be sent to fetch him the souls of the original owners, and the poor souls will have to come! What for, exactly, I can't tell yet, but the signs are clear: it's nothing good.”

I was appalled and fascinated at the same time. “I thought only the Devil did that: souls, you know? He's
not
—”

“Oh, fiddle, of course not,” Gran said irritably. “He's a thoroughly bad man, and a clever one.”

“Then what does he want—well, souls for?”

“That's part of what I must find out,” Gran said. “The sort of folk he's after—old people, street people—suggests that he's not interested in their bodies. Which might mean he has other bodies he means to lock their poor captive souls up in.”

“Ugh,” I said. “What kind of bodies?”

Gran grimaced. “Giant lobsters on Ganymede, for all I know. Where's your imagination?”

“Yuck,” I said. “How could anybody do that, even to people he barely knows?”

Gran made an impatient sound. “I told you, he's a necromancer. That's the kind of thing they
do
.”

“Well, somebody should stop him,” I said.

“We'd better,” Gran said, moving the cards around. “We must.”

“We?” I sat back from the rows of colorful cards. “Wait a minute. You found out about all this in Sorcery Hall, right? Aren't all those wizards there going to do something about it?”

Gran sighed. “They're very busy at the moment, lovie, with something else: a war, a wizard war in another place and on a scale that simply dwarfs us and our concerns. Their resources are already stretched very thin. I'm afraid they have no time for a little skirmish here.”

“Skirmish!” I objected. “But this is a terrible problem, you just said so. How can they ignore us because of some dumb war someplace? That's not fair!”

“No, but it's the way things are, so we'd best not sit here wringing our hands. We have our work cut out for us, that's the truth.” She sighed again. “I wish I were younger. So much for the golden years.”

I was too scared to protest anymore.