The Last Witch of Manhattan
Published by Richard Lewis at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Richard Lewis
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Prologue
The man knelt on the Persian rug, his arm around a four-year-old girl in pajamas. Beyond the study’s tall windows a late November storm swirled through Central Park and hurled cold rain at the glass.
“Your Aunt Carmen tells me you have an invisible friend,” the man said to the girl. “You’re always talking to him, she says.”
The girl did not immediately reply. Then she nodded, once, a single dip of her delicate chin.
“What’s his name?” the man asked.
“Sam.”
“Sam. That’s a nice name. Short and sweet. You know,” the man said, his smile shadowed by pain, “when your mother was a girl she had an invisible friend, too.”
The girl’s eyes widened, dark irises sparkling with wonder. “She did?”
“Rizki. That’s what your mother called her. Your mother said Rizki was very naughty.”
“Really? Sam isn’t naughty at all.”
The man made a show of pursing his lips and blowing in relief. “So he’s one of the good ones, is he? Can you show him to me?”
The girl shook her head, once, her chin moving left and right and back to center. “Grown-ups can’t see him.”
“But he can hear me, right? It’s important he remembers what I’m going to tell you.” The measured words belied his urgency. He would be leaving within the hour—he was dressed in a comfortable khaki suit, custom made by an old Italian tailor in Brooklyn who specialized in fitting jackets and trousers to hide gun holsters and knife sheaths.
The girl looked at the fireplace mantle, as though her invisible friend were sitting upon it, dangling his feet before the fire, warming his toes. “Sam says he’ll remember.”
The man squeezed her shoulder. “Excellent. Now, you see that mask on that wall? The one that looks like a lion with a black beard?”
The girl regarded the mask for a moment before nodding that slow, single nod.
“That’s called a Barong,” the man said. “It’s from Bali. Your mother’s island. The Barong is a creature who protects and serves what is good.”
The girl pointed to the sole mask on the opposite wall, a mask of exceptional ugliness. Wild, matted hair framed its bulging eyes. Between sharp fangs panted a long red tongue. “And that’s a wicked witch,” she said.
“Rangda,” the man said. “The Queen of Witches.”
“Is she real?”
The man regarded the mask. He was a scientist, whose allegiance was to the rule of reason, and Satan was the most primitive of superstitions, yet his grim gaze did not mock. “I fear she could be just real enough,” he finally said. He looked at the girl and touched her cheek, calloused fingers resting on skin smooth as honey. “You must always try to know the difference between good and evil. You must always try to do what is good. Do you understand?”
The girl pulled her head back several inches to give the man an indignant glare. “Course I do. And I am a good girl. Even my Sunday School teacher says so.”
There was a sharp rapping on the door.
“That’s Aunt Carmen,” the girl announced.
“Damn the busybody woman,” the man muttered under his breath, and then said, very quickly, as the door began to open, “Remember. Always do, always choose, what is good. Your future may depend on it in a way you can’t yet imagine.”
The girl said, “Can you tell Aunt Carmen not to make me drink milk every night? I hate milk.”
A slender woman in a satin dressing gown bustled into the study with the air of someone with much to do before she could sleep. Cradled in the nook of a thin, pale arm was a silky-haired puppy.
“Come on, dear,” the woman said to the girl. “It’s past your bedtime.”
“We’re still saying goodbye,” the man said frostily. “I am her father.”
“Yes, Ladron, you are her father, but I’m the one who takes care of your daughter, and I’m the one who has to deal with her cranky temper if she doesn’t get enough sleep.”
“Then let her sleep in. Christ, this is her home, not a military school.”
“Home? How often have you been home in the last three years? You’re a stranger to your own child. Rani’s dead. You’ll never find her. It’s time you admit that.”
The man rose from his knees to his full and towering length and faced the woman in ominous silence. The puppy began yapping at him. The woman stroked its head, calming it into silence, before saying, “We haven’t even had a chance to go through everything. You should at least know I’ve set up an appointment next week with a child psychiatrist. About Eldie’s so-called invisible friend. I’m worried—”
“Cancel it.”
“Ladron—”
“Cancel it, I said.”
“It’s for her own good—”
“No psychiatrist. Do you hear me?” He did not raise his voice, but the flames in the fireplace spurted with a loud crackling of wood.
The puppy yipped in alarm. The woman’s cheeks grew pink. “Come along, dear,” she said to the girl, reaching out her hand. “You haven’t had your milk.”
The girl reluctantly obeyed. At the door, with her aunt’s hand on her shoulder, she paused to glance back at her father. He hadn’t moved and was watching her without expression, his eyes bleak as desert bone. That was the last time she saw him.
Chapter 1
Eldie and Sam squatted behind a boulder in the dense thicket. The sun hadn’t yet warmed up the spring morning, and goose bumps dotted Eldie’s skin, but she ignored the cold as she peered through a chink in the foliage at the three matrons on the path below. They wore jackets and sensible walking shoes and peered through binoculars at chirping birds flitting among the trees.
“Alonzo swore he heard it here yesterday,” one woman said.
“This is a wild goose chase,” another woman said. “It was spotted in Seneca. How could it have flown here?”
Eldie grinned. The other day, the papers had made such a fuss about the spotting of a rare Kirtland’s warbler in Seneca County that it had given her an idea. In her hand was her father’s old Dictaphone recorder. She punched the play button. The chip-chip-che-way-o of the warbler, which she had recorded from the Internet, twittered through the still air.
The matrons lowered their binoculars and looked at each other. “Did you hear that?” one said.
Eldie played it again.
“That’s it! That’s its call! Do you see it?”
“From up there somewhere,” another woman said, pointing.
Eldie ducked her head and again played the whistle.
“Oh my God! A Kirtland’s warbler! In Central Park!”
“It’s up there in the dogwood. Remember, the males have the black mask, the females don’t. Come, girls! Quietly!”
But there was no way for three stout women to quietly climb through the brush and trees. Eldie stifled a giggle and retreat further into the wood, leading the ladies on with further whistles. They crashed through the bushes, panting loudly. On the steepest part of the slope one of the women fell with an oomph onto her belly. Eldie pressed a hand to her mouth and laughed silently as tears rolled own her cheeks. Sam bent over with shoulder-shaking whoops.
Her eyes blinded with her tears, Eldie didn’t see the branch as she backed away to make another call. She tripped and rolled down a steep embankment, thudding against a leafy bush.
Sam ran down after her. He wasn’t made of solid stuff like people, but gravity still affected him, although he had no weight to break sticks underfoot or send stones and dirt tumbling. Being able to stand on a scale and weigh nothing was part of his strange reality. “Are you okay?” he asked, his broad face scrunched up with concern.
Eldie inspected herself. Her tough jeans had saved the skin on her legs, but there were minor scrapes on her elbows and a scratch on her face. In the adventures of her eleven years of life she’d suffered a lot worse. “I’m all right.” She picked up the tape recorder.
Above them one of the birders said, “Who’s down there?”
“Probably a ruffian,” another said. “Let’s get out of here, girls.”
The birdwatchers tromped away.
“You got leaves and twigs in your hair,” Sam said.
Eldie brushed them out with impatient fingers as she chuckled. “Did you see that belly flop that woman did?”
“Yeah, she left a crater—” Sam broke off and peered at the bush she’d rolled into. “Hey is that poison ivy?”
Eldie looked with instant alarm, for she’d had experience with poison ivy, and then relaxed. “Nah.” It was then that she noticed, on the other side of the bush, a crack in the tall rock face that lined one side of the narrow gulley she’d tumbled into. She pushed aside a branch to have a better look.
“You sure that’s not poison ivy?”
“Poison ivy’s got three leaves.”
“Maybe it’s poison oak.”
“Sam. Stop being such a hypochondriac.”
“I’m not a hypercondrack. And it could too be poison oak.”
“Hy-po-chon-driac,” Eldie said as she edged around the bush. Before her the rock face towered the height of a two-story building, with trees growing on top of it. The rock face had fractured into a bending crevasse wide enough for a person to step into.
Eldie knew every square inch of the Park, but this was new. “I don’t remember this. Do you?”
Sam shook his head. “Could have cracked during that big freeze.”
“It looks like it goes somewhere.”
“Maybe a monster’s cavern.”
“Yeah,” Eldie said. She stuck her head into the crack and took a careful sniff of the air, smelling only a natural mildew of dirt and leaves.
“Hey, you’re not going in there, are you?”
“Just a peek,” Eldie said. She had to be careful. Wild things nested in the Park.
“I don’t think you should,” Sam said “I’ve been having bad dreams about things chasing you.”
“You always have bad dreams about me. None of ‘em ever come true.” She craned her neck, peering. “Maybe there’s treasure down there.”
The word hung enticingly on the air. After a moment Sam said, “I’ll be right behind you.”
The crevasse widened and angled downward to a small cave the size of Eldie’s bedroom, but a lot darker and mustier, thick with shadows.
“Wow, this is cool,” Eldie said admiringly.
A diffuse light fell on one side of the cave. Eldie could make out the lines of brick and cement. A natural cave mouth, blocked up a long time ago. Opposite this, at the back the cave, the angular roof and uneven sides pinched into what looked like a narrow tunnel. The darkness beyond seemed both mysterious and menacing.
Eldie found a pebble on the cave’s dirty floor and tossed it down the dark tunnel. The pebble bounced along for a long way.
“You think it goes anywhere?” Eldie said.
They stood there, listening. For a moment the silence seemed absolute, and then Eldie could hear the faintest of noises that at one moment sounded like the clanging of the most distant of bells, the next the long drawn-out chugging of a steam engine on the other side of the world, which changed into the surging rapids of a far, faraway river.
Maybe it was just one of the subways.
Low in the darkness in front of them appeared a single glowing green eye. Whatever it was let out a low, unfriendly growl.
Eldie turned and bolted, Sam right behind her.
They didn’t stop until they were out in the sun-bright gully.
“Phew,” Sam said.
“Probably just a feral cat,” Eldie said.
“Looked bigger than a cat.”
“We’re gonna need a flashlight next time. And a big stick.”
Sam shook his head. “I’m not going down there again. And you’d better get home before Father Micah arrives.” He glanced at her arm. “Hey, you’re getting a rash on your elbow. I tell you, that’s poison oak.”
She twisted her arm to look. “It’s not poison oak and my elbow’s scraped, is all.”
They climbed the steep embankment to the path and ducked under the pipe rail. Eldie could barely make out the crack in the rock across the gully.
Sam said, “Is your elbow starting to itch? Man, remember last time, you itched so bad—”
“Sam! Stop it, would you?”
They ran down the path and out the wooded Ramble.
Beyond the trees of the park rose the glittering towers of New York.
There were times Eldie could sense her Balinese blood coursing in her, blood from an exotic land that cast an alluring cinnamon scent in her mind. But truth to tell, she was a city girl. She’d grown up here. This was her home. City and nature, right at her doorstep. What more could she want? This was the best place on Earth.
In the cave the cub inched forward. It had been deep in the bowels of the city for many hours, its instinct guiding it away from the den of its unnatural birth and toward safety. It paused and sniffed the ground the girl had walked upon. The girl’s scent still lingered, an alien smell yet different than the scent of other humans it had come across.
In its escape the cub had come across vicious rats and other dangerous creatures but had the size and strength to easily chase them away. So it padded warily but confidently across the cave to the crevasse. At the opening to the gully it hesitated again, taking in odors with its deeply cleft and curled nose, scanning the ground and bushes with its one eye. Hunger gripped its belly.
A bird with a yellow belly and black mask on its face flashed down to a branch a foot off the ground.
The cub stalked close with bent haunches and then sprung. The bird flapped into the air, but too late. The cub caught the bird in its misshapen jaws and bit hard. Blood squirted. The cub crouched down and devoured its prey on the spot.
Sated, it licked its fur clean and set about exploring its new home.
Chapter 2
Eldie and Sam sneaked into the spacious kitchen via the tradesmen’s side door.
Down the front hall Eldie could hear Aunt Carmen’s pet terrier, that awful Windsor, growling at somebody. Her aunt was saying, “I have no idea where that girl is. I swear, turn your back on her for one second and she’s off, getting into mischief.”
Eldie crept to the kitchen door. If she timed it right, she could get to her room and wash up without her aunt seeing.
“Eldie? Mischievous? I don’t believe it.” The man who spoke had a lightly accented voice that was deep and polished, like old oak.
“Uncle Leo!” Eldie cried in delight, rushing down the hall to the front foyer.
Windsor, squatted by Aunt Carmen’s feet, was growling at a tall gentleman with perfect silver hair to match his immaculate suit. Upon seeing Eldie, a smile burst on his lean face. She ran into his open arms, and he swept her off her feet. She kissed him, pressing her lips against the ragged scar on his left cheek.
“My, you’ve grown,” he exclaimed as he put her down. “Do you know you have leaves in your hair? And a scratch on your face?”
“I ran into a bush,” she said. Before her aunt could ask questions she said, “Nobody told me you were coming.” Uncle Leo wasn’t a real uncle but her godfather, and he was her most favorite person in the world. The only trouble was that he lived in Europe, where he was the director of some big laboratory. She hadn’t seen him since Christmas.
“I didn’t know I was coming either until yesterday,” Uncle Leo said. “Emergency business at the UN. On my way there from the airport. I’m playing hooky for a moment to see you. How are you, darling?”
“Fine.”
Uncle Leo cocked one of his white brows, his sharp blue eye boring right into her. Leo Lazzard was one of the world’s leading scientists, famous for both his brilliance and acid wit, and Eldie knew that he didn’t suffer fools or liars gladly.
“Actually, I got kicked out of school,” Eldie said. “But it wasn’t my fault, honest. It was Manny, he’s a bully who wouldn’t leave me alone, always teasing me and I got sick of it, so I got one of those toy handshake buzzers that give you an electric shock and juiced it up some, but I honestly didn’t think he’d go into a coma.” She added hastily, “He’s okay, he came out of it, but his mom and dad are real mad and filing a law suit.”
“Always one drama or another,” Aunt Carmen said with a nervous smile. Uncle Leo was one of the very few people who could intimidate her.
Uncle Leo leaned forward. “You juiced up the buzzer? How?”
Eldie glanced at Sam, for he had provided the technical expertise. He was standing in front of the closed door to the study, watching Uncle Leo with interest while absentmindedly picking his nose, digging deep. Since people never saw him, he was the most brazen nose-picker. Eldie’s glance turned into a glare, and he quickly lowered his hand.
“I got some stuff at an electronics store to amplify the voltage,” Eldie said.
Uncle Leo chuckled. “You might be a physicist yet.”
“Dr. Lazzard!” Aunt Carmen exclaimed.
Uncle Leo tipped his head in apology, although amusement lingered in his eyes. “If you’re not in school, what are you doing for your lessons?”
“A private tutor for the time being,” Aunt Carmen said quickly, giving Eldie a warning look to keep quiet. Uncle Leo was an outspoken atheist, whose book on the subject was atop the best-seller list. He who was always on television shows to debate and debunk Christians and astrologists and Californians. He was already sufficiently offended that Aunt Carmen insisted Eldie attend church, so it would not be a good idea to let Uncle Leo know her private tutor was a young priest. Eldie glanced at the hallway clock. Father Micah would be here in another hour.
“Darling, I have to go,” Uncle Leo said to Eldie. “I had to see you, if only for a moment.”
“Are you going to be here tonight for Aunt Carmen’s dinner party?”
Aunt Carmen colored slightly. Uncle Leo wasn’t the sort of guest she liked to entertain. He seemed entertained by her discomfiture, but he let her off the hook. “I’ve another engagement. But let’s have a date. Friday, after your lessons. One of the museums?”
“Oh, can we go to the zoo? They got a new Komodo dragon. It’s this biggest, grossest thing. It’s great.”
Sam rolled his eyes.
“The zoo it is,” Uncle Leo said. “Here, hold still.” He pulled out the handkerchief in his suit jacket and brushed dirt off the scrape on her face. “Put some lotion on it. And the cuts on your elbow.” He straightened and looked at her with a oddly grave expression, as though he was about to tell her bad news but the moment passed before Eldie could get worried, and a smile returned to his handsome, ruined face. “The best of life is always seeing you. Friday, then. You can tell me all about your latest adventures.”
Hair damp and combed from a shower, bandages plastered to the cuts on her elbow, Eldie waited for Father Micah in the study, and not the sunroom where she had her lessons.
Her mother, a Balinese princess, had been kidnapped right out of this study when she was a baby. Her father had been at a high energy physics conference. There’d been no ransom note, no clue to the kidnapper’s identity, nothing. For three fruitless years her father had crisscrossed the globe searching for her mother, and then he too had vanished.
On the carved coffee table was one of her father’s old picture books on Bali. She browsed through it, looking at the glossy photographs. Her mother’s land. If the circumstances of Eldie’s life had been different, if her mother hadn’t been stolen from her, perhaps she would be playing hopscotch with those kids under that banyan tree, chasing dragon flies in those rice fields. She’d be dressed in a sarong to go to a Hindu temple, not a dress to go to church. This made her feel funny, as if living in her skin was another Eldie-who-hadn’t-been.
One double page photo showed a village Barong lion and his followers in battle with the hideous Rangda witch. She was stomping her feet and shaking a handkerchief at several men attacking her with wavy-bladed knifes. The next photo showed the men trying to stab themselves with their own knives.
The text said that the masks had sacred power, and were kept in their own temples. Eldie put down the book and pondered the Barong and Rangda masks on the study walls. It was silly to think they had any special powers. They were just souvenirs, excellent for scaring other kids.
Beyond the window a movement caught her eye. Father Micah, right on time. He strode with an awkward galumphing waddle, hands thrust into his pockets, his fat shoulders hunched, his chubby black face further darkened with a scowl that did not match the serenity expected of a priest wearing a clerical collar. Even though he was the diocese’s youngest priest, he made no secret that he was not pleased by this tutoring task, a sentiment Eldie heartily returned.
Eldie stood on a chair and plucked the Rangda mask off the wall. Stray light from a gap in the drapes glinted off its red eyes and long fangs. She brushed her hair back and straightened out the mask’s elastic bands.
Sam shook his head. “One of these days that mask is gonna get stuck on and you won’t be able to get off. You’d be a real sight, walking around looking like a drooling demon.”
“This is New York. Nobody would notice.” She slipped the elastic bands over her head and pulled the thick wooden mask down over her face, wrinkling her nose against the wood’s musty smell. She adjusted the bands to maximize her vision out of the two small holes. “How do I look?”
“Like you’re ready for the school dance.”
Father Micah entered the foyer and closed the door behind him. Eldie heard him mutter in English accented by the hot tropical sun that had warmed his childhood somewhere, “Deliver me from mine enemies, Oh God, and save me from the pestilent child.” She waited until his heavy footsteps had passed the study door before she silently slipped out into the hallway behind him.
The heavy mask now seemed to settle close and weightless onto her face, heightening her senses. He smelled of dawn prayers and breakfast coffee. In the side curve of his short, baby-skinned neck a vein pulsed. She squeezed her throat to make her voice low and hoarse and said, “Father.”
He whirled around. Shock rose in his dark eyes and he lunged forward, throwing out a hand as he cried something in strange language. His hand must have hit her, for the mask jarred loose from her head, and tumbled to the hallway’s tile.
Father Micah breathed harshly through his nose as he stared down at her. The blood vessel in his neck pulsed rapidly. He had hardened, as though another, far more threatening person inside him had pushed up against his jelly skin.
“Sorry,” Eldie said, a bit scared by his reaction. “It was just a joke.”
He took several slower breaths. “Some things you don’t joke about.” He nodded at the mask on the floor. “Put that back and don’t touch it again.”
“It’s just a mask.”
Father Micah’s eyes narrowed. He said, in a soft voice that for once didn’t sound so boyish, “There are things in this world, full of rebellion and darkness, you know nothing about.” He was silent for a moment, and then added: “Yet.”
The grim way he said that one word made Eldie shiver.
Chapter 3
Eldie scowled at the glass of milk on top of her bedroom dresser. She was almost twelve, and she still had to drink a glass of the chalky stuff every evening. One of her aunt’s rules. Guardian aunts were supposed to be cheerful and benevolent, but Aunt Carmen was as efficient as an atomic clock and as comforting as a bed of nails.
She was busy with the dinner party down in the grand salon, but she hadn’t forgotten, sending up the latest live-in maid with the glass.
“I wish I could drink milk,” Sam said. He was standing on the terrarium that housed her pet leopard gecko, Drago, using its glass top for home plate as he practiced his baseball swings. He was crazy about baseball. The only trouble was that he couldn’t actually play. “Maybe if I could drink milk I’d get real bones to swing a real bat. And real teeth to chew tobacco.”
“Oh, gross.” Eldie took the glass and headed to the bathroom.
Sam jumped down and blocked Eldie’s way. “You promised the maid you’d drink it.”
“Who say’s I’m not?”
“You’re going to pour it down the sink, is what you’re going to do.”
“Sam, get out of my way.”
He stubbornly remained in front of the door. “You promised.”
“Well, I’m going to break it, okay? And not the sink, the toilet.”
“You can’t break it.”
“Why not?”
“If you break your promise, then you gonna grow up breaking more promises, and one day you’re gonna lie to the police, and the judge will throw you in jail, where your shining knight in white armor won’t ever find you, and you’ll end up an old hag who lost your one true love.”
“White knight in shining armor.”
“Both of them won’t ever find you.”
“An old hag, hunh?”
“Thirty years old. At least. Ancient.”
“Look, Sam, how many times do we have to go over this? You’re not my conscience and you’re not my guardian angel.”
“But dark things are sniffing around for you. I can feel it. You break promises and lie and stuff, and they get closer.”
“You’re psychic now?”
“I’m no more sicker than you are.”
“I said psychic—”
The sharp rapping of Aunt Carmen’s bony knuckles sounded on the door.
Eldie quickly put the glass of milk back on the dresser.
Aunt Carmen opened the door, her high heels making her inches taller. She held Windsor in her arms, the white terrier fluffy from the dog salon.
With her was a woman in black trousers and jacket, an American flag pinned to the lapel. Eldie stared curiously at her as she dipped a square chin in greeting. “I’m sorry to intrude, Eldie, but I insisted on meeting you. I’m Maria Lovejoy. I knew your father. We were in the same Harvard class. He was quite a man.”
Eldie’s interest sharpened.
“Doctor Lovejoy is a very important person in the government,” Aunt Carmen said.
“Now, Carmen. I’m just a scientist, happy to serve our country in my own small way.”
“Did you know my mom, too?”
“I met her briefly. A lovely woman.”
Aunt Carmen said, “Eldie, would you please drink your milk before it goes sour?”
With a glower that could have curdled the milk, Eldie gulped it down. There,” she said to her aunt. “You happy?”
Windsor bared his tiny teeth at Eldie and growled while Aunt Carmen sighed. “I try to be, Eldie, although you make it very hard sometimes.”
“You’re just like your father,” Doctor Lovejoy said as she left, with a twinkling smile that pleased Eldie.
After the door closed, Eldie noticed that Drago, a nocturnal creature, had come out of its small rock cave bedroom. The spotted lizard cocked its head to stare at her out of one eye, a signal it was hungry. Usually Eldie fed Drago worms from the pet shop, but today she’d captured a live cricket in the Park, which she had put in a plastic pencil case.
“How come you’re not a hundred times bigger?” she said, picking up the case. “Then you could eat that awful Windsor.”
The cricket jumped against the plastic, still lively as ever. There came to Eldie’s mind the time a grasshopper had sailed through the sunroom’s open window to land on Aunt Carmen’s lap, causing general hysteria.
“Hunh,” Eldie said.
“Hunh what?” Sam asked.
Eldie got up and cracked open the door.
“I don’t like it when you go ‘hunh’ like that,” Sam said. “It means trouble. Like with Manny and that buzzer.”
Eldie ignored him and peered down the carpeted hall toward the grand stairway, from which rose a soft murmur of conversation and tinkle of cutlery. She crept in the other direction, Sam following. She passed the door to what used to be her parents’ bedroom, with a sweeping view of Central Park across Fifth Avenue. Last year, on the same day a judge declared Ladron Veldhuizen legally dead, Eldie had furiously told Aunt Carmen that she’d better leave the bedroom alone. It wasn’t hers to move into. Aunt Carmen had gotten as mad as Eldie had ever seen her, but she had remained in her old small bedroom at the back of the hall.
The décor was stern black-and-white with a stainless steel bed that looked as though the mattress was indeed made of nails.
Eldie flipped back the bedcover. Sam coughed. She shot him a glare and said, “Don’t say it. I drank my milk like I promised, so if I’m being naughty, it cancels out.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Sam muttered.
Eldie shook the cricket onto the top sheet between the pillows, and straightened the bedcover over the insect.
Her father was not dead. What did the judge know?
No, her father and mother were still alive. Trapped somewhere, or maybe held captive.
One day Eldie was going to go find them. This she kept hidden deep in her heart, like treasure.
Two hours later, all of Carmen Veldhuizen’s dinner guests had left except for a stocky man with a pleasant round face and a bald brown head. His name was Ida Bagus Oka. He was a banker and one of Eldie’s trustees, the other two being Aunt Carmen and Leo Lazzard. Like Eldie, he was half-Balinese and half-American, and had known her parents.
Carmen Veldhuizen had asked him to stay. Now, with the guests departed and Windsor snoozing in his fleece-lined basket in the kitchen, she offered him a night-cap in the informal sitting room.
“What did you think of Maria Lovejoy?”
“Excellent conversationalist. Where did you meet her?”
“She met me. At church the other week. A visitor. She didn’t mention this, and I didn’t want to raise it in company, but she’s on the board of the Lakeview Academy. Do you know of it?”
“Isn’t that an institution out West for troubled children?”
Carmen nodded. “Psychiatric evaluations are required for admission.”
Oka absently twirled the glass, swirling the scotch. “I see. You are thinking of Eldie?”
Carmen slipped off one of her high heels and propped her foot on her knee to rub her sole. “They should be called high-hells,” she said. “I don’t know why I wear them.”
“Because they look lovely on you.”
“Thank you, but I’m unflatterable.”
“Eldie at Lakeview Academy. Does Leo know you’re thinking of this?”
Carmen pressed her lips together before speaking. “No. He’s very fond of her and protective. But he doesn’t have to live with her. Oka, I’ve done my best for that girl, but I’m coming to my wits end. Such a strange and prickly child. An eleven-year-old vegetarian who’s convinced I’m the wicked aunt who’s worming her way into this mansion and the Veldhuizen fortune, when believe me I’d be much happier with my pension and a cottage in the Catskills. I didn’t ask for this responsibility, but in his damn foolishness Ladron didn’t give me any choice.”
“I admire you greatly. You’ve shouldered a heavy burden without complaint.”
“I can understand Ladron getting a pretty Balinese maiden pregnant, but why on earth would he have brought her to New York? For all Eldie believes her mother was a princess, she was just a simple village girl, and she was miserable here.”
“Love makes molehills out of mountains.”
“There’s still consequences that Ladron should thought of. In any case, Eldie…for example, she has no friends. When I bring children over for her to play with she takes them into the study and scares the living daylights out of them with those hideous masks. And you know about that boy she seriously injured. And her invisible friend, Sam. Last month in school she got angry at him for not helping her on a math test. Threw her pencil and paper and shouted at him. At empty air. By all accounts it was quite spectacular. I had a long talk with the nurse. This thing with Sam, I’m afraid it’s …well, you know what it is.” Carmen reached out and took the glass of scotch from Oka’s hand to slug the contents, wincing as she swallowed. She refilled the tumbler with another measure of scotch and handed it to Oka. “You knew Rani better than I did. Did she have any history of mental disturbances?”
Oka swirled the glass again, studying the golden liquid. “Which hat do you want me to wear? The Western banker hat, or the Balinese Hindu hat?”
“Try the Hindu one.”
“For that, let’s go see those hideous masks.”
“I’d rather not.”
“It’ll help explain Rani and perhaps Eldie.”
Carmen took off her other shoe and padded with Oka to the front study. She turned on all the lights before she looked at the masks on the walls. “I’d like to get rid of them, to be honest. Maria Lovejoy said she’d be happy to take them, as keepsakes. Apparently she and Ladron were great friends in their youth. I think they may have been lovers. But this is all Eldie has left of her father.”
“And mother, too,” Oka said. He lifted his glass of whisky at one of the masks, with ferocious fangs but also with a friendly pug nose and alert eyes. “That’s the Barong. Each village has a sacred Barong mask. It represents the lion creature who protects them from harm. And that,” he said, turning on his heels to face the other mask, “is Rangda, Queen of Witches. Each village has one as well, to symbolize the dark forces that need to be appeased. She isn’t thoroughly evil, though, just the Barong isn’t completely virtuous.”
Carmen stared at the Rangda mask. “She looks evil enough to me.” She grabbed the glass from Oka’s hand again for another swig. “Alcoholic courage is better than no courage at all. I know it’s all superstition, but there’s something about that mask that absolutely frightens me.”
Oka nodded thoughtfully. “Rani’s clan has always been famous for their shamans. Who serve the Barong, in essence. But the clan is also famous their witches and warlocks too. Leyaks, they’re called, the Balinese equivalent of vampires, servants of Rangda.”
“Georges, our top floor tenant, said Rani had idols and shrines throughout the house. Once she even made an offering with a headless chicken out on the sidewalk.”
“It’s called a caru. It’s meant to divert evil intentions.”
“It didn’t stop her being kidnapped. Do you believe in such, well, how do I put it in politically correct terms?”
“Do I believe in such nonsense? Only when I’m making a caru offering myself.”
Carmen laughed.
Oka smiled and continued, “The Balinese believe each child is born with attendant sibling spirits. Guardian angels, one might say. Four of them, to be precise, but I suppose one can think of them as a single entity. Perhaps for some children, this spirit can more strongly manifest than usual. Perhaps this is the case with Eldie.”
“To be perfectly frank, Oka –”
“It’s nonsense. But institutionalizing a child is a very serious step. A last resort.”
“Lakeview is progressive. More like boarding school. In any case, I’m just exploring options. Eldie has an enrollment spot at Mountbatten Prep. Six years on the waiting list, despite Ladron’s generous donation. That school’s harder than heaven to get into.”
“They don’t know about her expulsion from the public school?”
“The Archbishop does, and he’s on their board, so I’m sure they do. He was the one who suggested Father Micah for a temporary tutor. I nearly fainted when he summoned me for an audience. The Archbishop! I had no idea he even knew Eldie existed. It’s all very…extraordinary.”
“Eldie’s an extraordinary girl.”
“Yes,” Carmen said and finished the whiskey. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it?”
Eldie lay awake on her bed. It seemed lately that she didn’t need much sleep. Sam, though, slept like a log. A floating log. He could curl himself up, which was how he described the process that could make him transparent to the point of invisibility even to Eldie. When he did so, he escaped the claw of gravity and could float about. Sometimes he would become part of her shadow, and “hitch a ride,” as he said. She didn’t like it when he did that. Even though she couldn’t sense any difference, it still felt as though as thought she had to work harder to haul him around. “Get off me, you lazy sack of bones,” she’d say.
At the moment, as she waited for sleep, he was a vague form drifting up by the ceiling. You would have thought somebody like him wouldn’t need any sleep at all, but if he didn’t get his eight hours, he’d be grumpy as an old man in the morning.
Eldie and Sam had long ago exhausted the topic of who he was. He wasn’t her guardian angel, because he didn’t have any angelic powers. Nor was he a figment of her imagination. After all, if he really concentrated, he could touch and move small objects like chess pieces, but it not only drained him so of energy but also made her faint-headed.
What Sam was exactly, they didn’t know.
“But we’ll find out one day who I am,” Sam always said.
She’d been five or six when she realized that other kids didn’t have real invisible friends like Sam. She could recall telling Aunt Carmen with incredulous astonishment that Caitlyn Young didn’t have an invisible friend. She also told Aunt Carmen how Caitlyn and other girls had teased her, and Aunt Carmen suggested that Eldie start outgrowing Sam if she wanted to make and keep friends.
Outgrow Sam? That was like trying to outgrow your right arm. More than that, he was her best friend. They fought battles against those snooty Mountbatten kids. They’d sneaked into back museum hallways and darkened storerooms to play among the mummies. They rode subways and buses at random, and released pet-shop mice in steak houses, and waited in various police stations for Aunt Carmen to come get them yet again. The policemen liked Eldie. They would always tell her, “You’re either gonna be a cop or a criminal.”
And like best friends, she and Sam also argued and fought. For example, that time Sam had refused to help her on a math quiz—she’d only wanted a hint, not the answer, but he primly shook his head and she’d gotten so angry. She yelled at him, throwing her pencil and eraser and crumpled quiz sheet at his head, not caring about the other kids’ flabbergasted stares. The teacher sent her to the nurse’s office, who delicately probed Eldie’s state of mind, circling around the disappearance of her parents. Eldie saw right through that. Sam was not a compensation for her parents’ absence. She bluffed her way through the nurse’s interrogation. After the visit, Sam, who’d been looking over the nurse’s shoulder at the notes she was taking, told Eldie that the nurse had underlined a reminder to self to schedule a conference with Carmen Veldhuizen. SERIOUS!!! the nurse had written.
Silence filled the house, drifting into corners.
Then, like glass shattering, there came a shriek from Aunt Carmen’s bedroom. “Get away getawaygetaway!” Her voice rose until it was squeak.
Eldie grinned. Above her Sam made a choking, snorting sound, as though trying to hold his laughter in, but it burst anyways, and Eldie joined in.
There came the thwack-thwack-thwack of a broom hitting the floor and then the crash of bed side lamp.
Sam roared helplessly, accidentally uncurling himself and thudding to the floor, and Eldie was laughing so hard she thought she might pee her pajamas.
They finally calmed down. “Phew,” Sam said, with residual little chortles. “Laughing’s hard work. I’m pooped. Night.” He curled up and faded out, drifting up to the ceiling again.
Eldie lay on her back, her hands behind her head, watching Sam’s vague shadowy form, the pleasure of a good laugh still with her.
“Hey, Sam?”
“What?” he said sleepily.
“Did you have parents? A mom and a dad?”
He was silent for long enough she thought he’d dozed off. Then he said, “I guess I did.”
“I wonder what it would be like to have parents.”
“Me too.”
“That Doctor Lovejoy remembers my mom but I don’t. That’s not fair.”
“Maybe you’ll dream about her.”
But what Eldie wanted was her mom right in this room right now, kissing her good night. This yearning came from nowhere and pulled her heart apart. It took her a long time to fall asleep, and when she did, she did not dream.
Chapter 4
Somebody else had found the cave. Dirty blankets were crumpled in one corner, and several medical syringes littered the ground. A skinny man with tattooed arms lay curled on one corner of the blankets.
“He looks deader than a nailed door,” Sam whispered.
Eldie shifted the day pack on her shoulder, and stole over to the man, her golf club at the ready. She bent over him and heard his quiet, regular breathing. He’s okay, she mouthed to Sam. Let’s go.
She flicked on the flashlight she carried and probed the rocky tunnel at the rear of the cave.
Something scurried in front of the flashlight’s beam. Eldie gripped her club tighter. The putter from her father’s set, kept in the big storage closet.
“What was it?” Sam said.
“A rat, I think.”
“Rats are bad. They cause plaque and you die all black and swollen.”
“Plague, Sam. Plaque is the gunk you get on your teeth. Look, they can’t hurt you. So don’t worry. Come on.”
Eldie was scared herself. But thrilled, too. This was real exploration.
The crimped tunnel dead-ended. Eldie was about ready to sigh with disappointment when she noticed an oblong crack high on the back wall of rock. “Looks big enough to wiggle through,” she said.
“What if you get stuck?”
“That’s why you go have a look first.”
Sam shook his head.
“Don’t be such a coward, Sam.”
“I’m a not coward. It’s called common sense.” Eldie gave him her sly, beseeching look. “Oh, all right,” he said in disgust. He climbed up using several knobs of rock for footholds and wriggled into the opening. The bottom of his shoes soon disappeared. His muffled voice said, “I guess it’s big enough.”
Eldie followed him, pushing her pack in front of her. The stone dug into elbows. She grunted and wriggled for about twenty feet. “Here’s the end,” Sam called out in front of her. “Shine that flashlight past me. Looks like another tunnel. Okay, I’ll go down…I’m going down, I’m letting go…okay, I’m down. Pretty dusty.”
It was another tunnel, a proper one, hewn out of the rock a long, long time ago. The tunnel was twice as wide as Eldie’s outstretched arms, with a roof just beyond her reach. A half inch of dust layered the uneven floor. Sam stood on top of the dust, not making a mark in it. But there paw prints that looked like those of a large cat. They led to the left.
“Let’s follow them,” Eldie said.
The tunnel had a slight slope that, a hundred yards on, turned into several flights of stairs. Eldie made her way down the narrow steps. The air grew cold and clammy. The last step opened onto another, more ancient-looking looking tunnel extending left and right. No dust here. The grimy stone gave an oily reflection to the flashlight’s beam. Eldie ripped up pieces of paper to mark their trail and, after a moment’s hesitation, turned right. The faintest stink of sewage drifted in the air, and water gurgled as though from behind thick walls. From somewhere high above them came distant thuds and clangs. Workmen in another tunnel.
Did they know of this deeper maze of tunnels? Did anybody?
As they walked on, Eldie shone the flashlight all around, not wanting to be surprised by anything. The bright beam lit up Sam’s jeans and T-shirt, which was what she wore, but unlike her clothes, his was fashioned out of the same stuff that he was. He pretty much stuck to jeans and T-shirts, but sometimes he’d fashion himself a suit (despite Eldie’s cajoling he flatly refused to design himself a dress). The beam didn’t go through him, but yet didn’t throw a shadow behind him either. Eldie had long given up puzzling over this and other weird Sam phenomena.
This tunnel led on for a long ways, not quite bending but never quite straight, either. Eldie had the sense of doing deeper and deeper underground. Her footfalls echoed dully, as though the air was pressurized. She swung her arms periodically to keep warm. She came to another intersection, and another. As well as the careful trail of paper, she also left smudge marks on the walls.
“You get lost down here you could wander around forever,” Sam said.
Eldie pictured herself as a pile of cobwebbed bones and stopped. “Maybe we should go back.”
Sam looked behind them and then down the length of tunnel before them. “Let’s keep going.” Typical Sam—whenever Eldie’s courage started to falter, his would at last kick in.
They came to the end of the tunnel, which terminated at a canal of sludgy water. Rafts of rotting, bubbling algae-like substances drifted sluggishly along. A stench rose from the canal—part sewage, part decay, but also something more, as if raw despair and hopelessness and fear had been turned into smell. A draft of flowing down the canal kept the air breathable.
She peered over the edge and noticed iron rungs set into the stonework.
And six feet below, tied off to one of the rungs was a battered canoe, with a paddle in it.
Eldie and Sam looked at each other.
“Why not?” Sam said. He jumped down into the canoe. Eldie clambered down the rungs, careful not to drop the golf club or the flashlight. She untied the rope and awkwardly paddled in the direction that the canal was flowing. Things slithered and popped into the water. Eldie would stop paddling and aim the flashlight, but always missing whatever it was that had made the noises.
The canal’s thick water seemed to pick up speed. Ahead, it veered in a sharp curve to the left. Now there were other sounds, all faint, all jumbled up and twisted together, one fading out as one strengthened to just within hearing. A discordant clanging of bells. A runaway train. A howling wind. And then faint whispers and growls, and voices articulating without words, crying out, pleading, arguing, cursing, praying, begging, laughing.
“Stay away from the left,” Sam said with sudden urgency. “Go right, go right, there’s a stream or something off to the right. Don’t go to the left whatever you do.”
Eldie struggled against the strengthening current, which sucked the canoe to the left. Her heart sizzled with fear, galvanizing her muscles. She broke free of the current and the canoe glided into the listless waters of a feeder canal. Water and sludge dribbled from ancient pipes along one side.
The hull of the canoe suddenly scraped on the bottom. The waterway had ended at a brick ramp. Eldie jumped off the front of the canoe to keep her feet dry, and tugged the canoe higher on the brick. She had no desire to paddle back up the canal, but on other hand, that was the only sure way out of here.
She and Sam walked cautiously up the ramp. There was a furtive scraping sound and the gurgling of swirling water. Eldie spun around and shone her flashlight at the waterway. The light caught the end of the canoe and the bent shadow of a figure dipping the paddle as the canoe vanished into the darkness beyond.
“Who was that?” Sam whispered.
Eldie’s skin puckered. She had no idea. Now there was no way back. For a moment fright threatened to swamp her. She pushed it away with all her willpower. If she panicked, then she and Sam would never get out of here. She took a deep breath and started walking.
She had no watch on her. She had a good sense of time, but as she tried to guess how long they’d been down here, she realized she had no idea. It had seemed easy getting this far, one straightforward step after another, but now the way out seemed hazy and elastic. Her only preoccupation was to follow her intuition of what led upwards, and only upwards. As she and Sam meandered along one cramped, musty tunnel and another, following the flashlight’s beam of light, it seemed to her that she’d slipped into some sunless existence separate from her life. The cave at Central Park, from where they had started, seemed more than just far way. Not only that, but this odd, dreamlike state kept fear at bay even as it seemed increasingly possible they were forever lost.
Then the flashlight died. The darkness leaped upon them. Eldie’s heart lurched. She banged the bottom of the flashlight, and a weak beam glowed for a second before fading again.
“Put in the spare batteries,” Sam Said.
“I didn’t bring any,” Eldie said, her voice quavering.
“You didn’t bring any spares?”
“How was I to know we’d be down here so long?”
With this the spell of this netherworld was broken. Just before Eldie’s panic overwhelmed her, she noticed in the far distance a dim glow.
Sam noticed it as well. “Hey, see that light down there?”
Keeping her unblinking eyes focused on the light, Eldie made her way by feel, trailing the fingers of one hand on the grimy wall, the other hand swinging the golf club in front of her.
The light was seeping from a rusty metal grating in the tunnel’s roof. There was a hole in the grating, the sundered metal looking recently scratched and pulled apart, as though by powerful claws. The hole was just big enough for Eldie. It opened onto the cement floor of a cavernous room filled with bulky shapes of abandoned machinery. Well, not entirely abandoned. At one end, a man big as a grizzly and smoking a foot-long cigar was working on a machine under the light of a flood lamp. This was the light that had guided Eldie and Sam. The machine, shaped like a steam-engine with round body and a funnel, had an engraved plate on it, the black letters faded but still clearly legible under the lamp’s harsh brilliance. The plate announced the machine to be a “cyclotron,” which to Eldie sounded like the name of a cavern monster, and in fact there was something menacing about this hulk of metal. And the man, too. She gestured to Sam, and they crept to the open door at the opposite side of the enormous room.
The hallway beyond led to a narrow stairs. To the side of the bottom landing was another door, this one closed, its upper half of brightly lit, frosted glass. Eldie had every intention of scuttling up the stairs as quick as she could, but even before she could take her first step she was stopped by a powerful impulse to find out what was on the other side of the frosted-glass door. It had no handle, only a computerized lock. She put a hand to the glass anyways and pushed. As she did so, the man in the big room called out, “Who is that there?”
Eldie fled up the stairs. Four flights of them. The last was hidden by a cleverly camouflaged door in the back of a large janitorial closet. Stepping out of the closet, Eldie found herself in a maze of yet more tunnels, but these were well-lit corridors, with painted pipes bolted onto the walls. She heard voices and peered around a corner. Two men in blue overalls were working on one of the pipes. The kneeling man said to his standing companion, “I swear, it looked just like a mutant cub lion. Had one eye. Was skulking along right over there.”
“You was drinkin.”
“Hadn’t a drop. I swear. They got all these labs above us, don’t they? Who knows what they makin’ up there, right?”
Just normal workmen. Reassured, Eldie stepped out into view. “How do you get out of here?” she asked.
The kneeling man jerked and bumped his head on the pipe. “Goddam, where’d you come from?”
“I’m lost.”
“You shouldn’t be down here,” the second man said. “How’d you get down here?”
“I didn’t mean to get down here. I want to get up.”
“You damn street kids are like lice. Go that way and out the door that says EXIT. If you don’t know how to read, it’s the word with the big X in it.”
A short while later Eldie and Sam were standing on one of the University’s parking lots, full of pickups and work vans. It was late afternoon, almost dusk.
Eldie closed her eyes and breathed in the blessed city air. “Let’s not do that again any time soon,” she said.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Like for the next million years.”
Eldie and Sam had walked the equivalent of dozens of blocks, although in the back of Eldie’s mind was the odd sensation that they had walked an awful lot further than that. Everything after squirming through that hole in the Central Park cave seemed hazy to her.
Had they really paddled a canoe on some deep underground river?
She checked her pocket. Just enough money for a bus ride home.
They walked out to the street. A passing car braked to a stop and a window rolled down. The driver stuck out her head. It was the woman who’d been at Aunt Carmen’s party. Somebody with an emotional name—Lovejoy, that was it. Maria Lovejoy.
“Eldie?” she said. “Is that you? What on earth are you doing here?”
The question annoyed Eldie. Why shouldn’t she be here? She didn’t reply.
“You want a ride?”
“It’s okay,” Eldie said. “I’ll take the bus.”
Maria Lovejoy hesitated and then nodded. She drove off with a wave of her hand.
Eldie waved back. There was no point in not being polite.
Chapter 5
“Homework?” Father Micah asked as Eldie settled at the credenza in the sunroom that served as her desk. She handed him her math workbook. He studied the pages, a muscle in his chubby jowls twitching.
Father Micah, Eldie knew, was one of the church’s most brilliant young priests. He came from one of those obscure countries in Africa somewhere. Apart from things theological, he was also an egg-head mathematician who had published several articles in august journals read by only the elect few.
He sighed deeply, shaking his head. “You know what you are, Eldie? You are my discipline in humility. God grant me grace. These are all wrong.”
“I don’t understand negative numbers.”
“You don’t have to understand them, you only have to get used to them.”
Eldie glanced out the window at the blue sky and the tops of the trees in Central Park. It was May, and the world was alive. “Who cares about negative numbers? What good are they?”
“I could show you Heaven,” Father Micah said, “and you would whine, what good is it?”
Eldie thought about that as she corrected her homework. She wasn’t a whiner, but Father Micah was right. Heaven, with all that praying and singing, sounded just as boring as negative numbers. What good was heaven except for staying alive forever?
She drifted away to thinking about the underground trek she and Sam had made yesterday. The memory seemed surreal, as though she’d dreamed it. Maybe she should go check and see whether there really was that hole in the back of the cave—
Father Micah rapped her desk. “Stop daydreaming.”
When she was done with her corrections, Father Micah gave her three more exercise sets. As she plodded through the problems, he did his own math, scrawling with black marker upon a whiteboard, filling it with strange symbols. Sam watched on with reverent awe. Sam was good with math, but this was way beyond him. Occasionally Father Micah would step back and ponder what he had written, hand to chin, his eyes narrowed. Eldie could almost see heat rising from his head from all that concentrated thinking. She wished some of it could spill into her brain.
With a flourish Father Micah dashed off several numbers at the bottom of the whiteboard. “Thereby trivially deriving the governing constants of the Universe,” he announced to no one. He seemed quite pleased with himself, so much so that Eldie asked, “What’s that you’re working on?”
“My toe,” he said. His toes were enclosed in thick black shoes.
“Ha-ha,” Eldie said.
Father Micah pointed to the globe on top of the credenza. “Geography. Let’s see if you can find the South and North Poles, and for added difficulty bonus points, the equator.”
After geography came history and lunch. Father Micah didn’t eat. It was his prayer time, he said, although more than once Eldie had caught him stretched out in the wicker sofa, snoring his hallelujahs.
English followed lunch. This was Eldie’s favorite subject. Father Micah let her do what she wished, which was writing stories. She worked on a tale about a princess who kissed a frog, and got such ugly warts on her lips no man in the kingdom wanted to marry her. As Eldie wrote the ending, involving a plastic surgeon who botched the job, Aunt Carmen stuck her head into the sunroom. “Two o’clock. Father, I know you’re anxious to get going today.”