A Box of Gargoyles Read Online Free Page A

help feeling flattered by the look on Valko’s face: he was plainly impressed.
    â€œYou did! You barked at a shadow !” he said. “You’re as crazy as those French ladies back there. I mean, the ones singing.”
    Ladies singing? Maya turned to look, and there they were, a small group of swaying, singing women farther down the sidewalk, their briefcases and shopping bags slumping carelessly to the ground. A wave of thin, nasal harmony was already rolling across the square. The words did not sound French.
    Maya and Valko looked at each other.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” said Valko. “I mean, really. I didn’t think so at first, but something really happened out here, didn’t it?”
    â€œAt four o’clock,” said Maya. “The bells were ringing when I touched the wall. I don’t know where that creepy shadow came from, though. Oh, no—”
    They turned their heads around, and sure enough: a dark column of leaf meal and dust was still picking its way along the street behind them.
    The shadow lingered for a time in that cluster of singing women, threading itself through and around them almost as if it were whispering to them or longing to join in their dance, but now it was hunkering lower to the ground, the shadowy parody of an animal trying to catch a scent. It made the little hairs along Maya’s shoulder blades prickle with fear.
    â€œThis way,” said Valko, pointing down one of the side streets there. It was more or less an ordinary-looking Parisian alleyway, if you ignored the fact that one of the vast iron feet of the Eiffel Tower was planted just behind a building at its end.
    â€œValko,” said Maya as they walked (pretty fast) down the next bit of sidewalk. “You know what I don’t get? How could you not have noticed you had actual gargoyles perched outside your window?”
    â€œUm,” said Valko. “I don’t. I didn’t. I mean, there aren’t—no, what I really mean is, they weren’t there before.”
    Maya gave him a gentle punch in the arm, just to keep him from fading back into vagueness again.
    He blinked. “What I’m saying is, I know they weren’t there last Saturday, because that’s the last day I put a barometer reading in my weather log—”
    â€œ Weather log? ” said Maya politely.
    Valko shook his fist at her, in a friendly way.
    â€œOkay, some people keep diaries, right? Huh? Maybe you used to have a diary? Ha! Thought so! Anyway, so I have a weather log. I’ve had it since I was six, thank you very much—”
    â€œWait,” said Maya. “Did you just say that gargoyle wasn’t even there before Saturday ? You’re sure?”
    â€œI look out that window just about every single day. Like I said, to check my barometer. So yes, I’m sure. Nothing today makes the slightest bit of sense: those women singing, the cars going all confetti-like, that bizarro shadow thing following us—”
    For a moment they had forgotten the shadow.
    They spun around both at once, just to check, and there it was. Maybe thirty feet behind them, a vague pillar of dust and leaves and darkness, shuffling along the pavement. Valko’s shoulder was so close to Maya’s that she could feel his heart jump at the exact same moment as hers.
    â€œOkay,” said Valko. “The barking thing. How do you do it?”
    â€œWhat? Come on !”
    It wasn’t the shadow that bothered her. It was the way it kept moving toward them .
    Valko nudged her.
    â€œThe barking thing. How do you do it?”
    â€œValko!” said Maya. He folded his arms and waited. “All right, then. It’s easy. Say ruff really loud while sucking your breath in. Please let’s hurry.”
    â€œ Ruff ,” said Valko, experimenting. “ Ruff! ”
    â€œValko, please let’s keep moving—”
    â€œRRRRUFF!”
    Everything happened at once: