A Box of Gargoyles by Anne Nesbet Read Free Book Online Page A

her mouth the whole rest of that day. The first afternoon of fall vacation, ruined by a shadow, a snake-haired watermark, and a smudge! Really, life was not very fair.
    That night Maya lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling and worrying away at the itchy spot on her fingertip. There was something she was supposed to be figuring out, but she was too tired to remember what that was.
    The letter. The writing desk .
    The wind had kicked up that evening, and there was enough faint clattering outside her bedroom to make it hard to fall asleep, what with the leftover adrenaline and worry wandering her veins.
    The writing desk. The letter . There would have to be a really good reason. . . .
    But sleep she did, because suddenly it was midnight and she was awake again, sitting straight up in her bed, her heart pounding in her chest and her ears assaulted by a crashing, grinding, gritty sound—not “faint clattering,” no, nothing faint about it: What was that?
    It was all over so fast: by the time she reached for her lamp, the world had fallen quiet again. Still, it was a while before she could relax enough to think about sleeping. She thought maybe she had been dreaming about a writing desk with an old-fashioned sphinx statue perched on it, and the writing desk had fallen over with a bang. Pens everywhere! What else was in a writing desk? Pens and stamps and envelopes—
    She sat back up again.
    Special ink! And writing paper!
    It had shown all sorts of signs of working, hadn’t it, that letter? It had made her want desperately to go into the Salamander House, even though she knew that might be, from all sorts of perspectives, a bad idea. And Valko had been pretty much acting like a person under a spell, too, come to think of it, when they were standing in front of that door.
    So that was what her brain had been trying to tell her all night: Medusan stationery was actually extremely effective stuff. All right. But poisons often had antidotes, right? So—what if a person who had been trapped by magical stationery into doing all sorts of things found more of that stationery and wrote herself an antidote letter ?
    Oh, she was feeling clever now! She even had a pretty clear idea of how that letter should look:
    Dear Maya ,
    No, you will NOT do anything to bring that horrible old Fourcroy back to life. You may IGNORE all the commands in the previous letter, no matter what kind of magical paper it was written on. Please have a great vacation and a very happy birthday, and I guarantee that everything from now on will be absolutely A-OK .
    Love, your friend and self, Maya
    It was amazing how much better she felt, right away: worry just up and left her, looking for another home. The sheer and obvious rightness of this plan, of this antidote letter she had just composed so carefully in her head—it was as comforting as the warmest, thickest quilt she’d ever snuggled under, on an otherwise cold and windy night.
    And when she woke up in the morning, she found she was still feeling oddly at peace. The wind had quieted, too. She remembered the dreadful crashing that had startled her in the middle of the night, and smiled to herself.
    Something must have fallen outside, or been blown over by the wind. A flower pot on the fire escape, probably. She opened the window to take a look.
    Old French apartment houses often have quite grand fronts, all carved stone and elaborate window decorations. Maya’s building was like that: the Davidsons’ living room, which was on the front corner of the building, looked across proudly at an equally grand apartment where a famous writer had once had an even more famous film director over for tea in November 1929 (there was a little metal plaque on the wall saying so). But all the building’s grandness was saved for the front. The back of the apartment, where the bathrooms and the kitchen and Maya’s bedroom were hidden, had windows with the kind of textured, ugly