The Silver Glove Page 9

  Barbara jumped up from a little desk wedged into a corner where she had her looseleaf notes open next to her math text. She is the only person I know who actually starts her homework when she gets in from school instead of waiting as long as possible.

  “What?” she yelped.

  I could only point behind me and shake my head frantically, having no breath to utter a single word.

  Barb yanked open the warped plywood door to the tiny bathroom just as the bell over the front door gave, if you can imagine it, a furious tinkle. I fell into the minuscule bathroom and slumped down on the toilet lid, trying to get some air into my lungs and not die of the cramp in my side.

  I was safe for the moment, assuming Ushah couldn’t just smash her way in, demolishing the flimsy bathroom door to get at me.

  Barb was somebody I used to play horsey with, running around on the roof of her little brownstone apartment building with one of us holding a length of clothesline in her mouth for bit and reins. When it came time for the other one to be the horse and do her paces and chase outlaws and all that, well, whichever one of us it was would chomp down on the same damp place in the rope without flinching. We were that close.

  I shook with relief. I may actually have passed out for a minute there. The next thing I knew, Barb was yelling in my ear.

  “Hey,” she said, “hey, Valentine, who is that crazy woman? What’s going on? You look wrecked, girl!”

  “Is she gone?” I gasped.

  “She’s backed off for now,” Barb said. “Come on out of here. This place was not designed for two.”

  I tiptoed fearfully out into the back room, peeking past the curtain into the shop. “Where is she? She didn’t just leave!”

  “She’s hanging around across the street,” Barb said. “Look from here, can you see her?”

  “I don’t want to see her,” I moaned.

  Barb gave me a critical look. "You better tell me what’s happening, quick, before my mom comes back.”

  “Got anything to eat?” I said, looking longingly at the little half-fridge next to the desk. “I’m dying of thirst, too.”

  She handed me a diet soda and a wilted ham sandwich, which I gobbled.

  “Okay,” she said. “Why is that lady so hot on your trail, anyway? One thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s just like they say: what goes around, comes around. So why is this person coming around after you?”

  “Honestly, Barb, it’s not my fault! I didn’t do anything to anybody!”

  “Okay,” she said. “So who did what to you, then?”

  Not really knowing how or where to begin, I blurted, “It’s Brightner. It’s all Brightner’s fault! He’s a creep, a creepy, lousy, dangerous creep!”

  “Yeah?” said Barb. “He make a move on you, or what?”

  I was about to say, a move on my mother, and me, and in a way even my Gran, but it sounded so gross. Also a certain amount of caution held me back. It was a lot of years since Barb and I had played horsey.

  So I temporized. “It’s a secret, Barb,” I said. “A super-saturated-seven-times-secret.”

  This was a formula we’d used as kids for our spy games. Barb grinned and said, “Double-defended and never revealed.” Our countersign!

  Well, after that, I had to tell her the whole thing. I mean all of it.

  Barb said, “Huh,” and, “Uh,” and other things like that, which ran a gamut of expression from total disbelief to thoughtful consideration by the time I got through.

  She looked me up and down and shook her head. “You don’t look any crazier than usual, but that is some story: Valentine and the Demon Shrink! Tell you one thing, though, from personal experience: that lady was all set to bite my face off.”

  “What did you say to her?” I said. Barb is so tall and so smooth- and self-possessed-looking that she can pull off a lot of things I wouldn’t dream of even trying.

  She said, “Well, she came running up after you and set to screaming at me through the door, which did not make a good impression. I screamed back that we’re closed, which we will be, at least until Mom gets back.”

  “She was running?” I said. “On her own two feet?”

  “Well, what else, cloven hooves?” Barb said.

  “Barb,” I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  11

  Dressed for Success

  I CLOSED MY EYES AND TRIED TO THINK. Where had Ushah stashed The Claw? Not far away, I was sure. I couldn’t stay here forever, certainly not until Barb’s mom came. She wouldn’t know that she shouldn’t let Ushah in, that the Pink-wrapped Predator wasn’t just another customer. But how could I leave without being caught?

  “Where is your mom?” I said.

  Barb cut her eyes at me. “Taking care of things.”

  Which probably meant Mrs. Wilson was off arguing with some authority or other about something Barb’s brother got caught doing, which happened a lot. If you wanted to stay friends with Barb, you learned not to push the envelope here.

  “If she comes back and lets Ushah in, I’m a dead duck,” I said.

  Barb said, “Why not just sock Ushah with this magic glove of yours?”

  I could tell that Barb was dying to see the glove in action. Her idea had a certain amount of instant appeal, but only in the abstract. To tell the truth, I could not face the thought of getting within reach of Ushah again, glove or no glove.

  Luckily I had a perfectly rational objection. “Barb, I have no idea what might happen—maybe a nuclear meltdown! I just don’t know enough to risk it. I mean, how would your mom like to come back here and find nothing but a scorched crater where the shop used to be?”

  Barb gave up. “If you’re all that worried, there is a back door, remember? Opens into that hall by the hotel coffee shop.”

  Ahah! Maybe.

  I said, “Take a look out there first. Don’t let—don’t let anything in, okay? But tell me what you see.”

  She stepped around the rack of clothes her mother kept in back for models to use. I heard the door to the hall open and then shut again, quietly. Barb came back looking thoughtful.

  “There’s a bike out there,” she said. “Now, who would take the chance, leaving a bike like that alone in New York with no chain or anything?”

  And we both said together, “Who but the Bride of Brightner?”

  Barb went back to the possible powers of the silver glove, which had not made me invisible to Ushah when that was what I’d most dearly needed, nor turned into a magic carpet and flown me away. I found these failures disappointing when I thought about them. Barb found them provocative.

  She wanted to try the glove on, of course, to see if it would do anything special for her. I think she still suspected that I was crazy, but as a devoted science fiction and fantasy reader she hoped for the best.

  I wouldn’t let her try on the glove. Suppose it was tied to me alone by my Gran’s gift? Suppose the glove did funny things to my friend that I couldn’t fix afterward? I needed Barb in her present form, with all her wits about her, not Barb transformed into a light bulb or a bat.

  I felt bad enough to have brought the awful Ushah to her door as it was. Barb wasn’t taking that part nearly seriously enough, but I was. It wasn’t her that Ushah had come roaring after like a Fury.

  Barb sulked a little and muttered to herself about dumb messes that I wouldn’t even help her help me out of. Then she got this cunning look.

  “This claw thing: how does it follow you? I mean, it’s by sight, right? It doesn’t trail you like a hound, I mean.”

  “You mean like, sniffing?” I said. “How? A bicycle has no nose.”

  “Well, it’s got no eyes either, but it must have seen you to chase you like that.”

  “Unless Ushah was doing the seeing and she steers it somehow,” I said, shuddering. I could still hear Ushah’s outrageous shrieks of “Stop, thief!” in my head.

  “Well, I bet even Ushah the Terrible doesn’t have X-ray eyes,” Barb said triumphantly. �
�And there’s two ways out of here. Now, I’m not letting anybody in or out the front door till my mother gets here. But suppose somebody The Claw had never seen walked out the back way—out through the hotel lobby, where tons of people rush around all the time? Somebody Ushah the Ugly never saw before, either?”

  I stared at her. I started to grin.

  “An illusion,” I said. "You mean fake him out—him and Ushah the Awful—with an illusion!”

  Which meant, turn the tables on Brightner—play a trick on the magician, hoodwink the hoodwinker who had my mom hypnotized by an image of herself in the mirror! Deceive his horrible servants by pretending to be somebody else, the way he deceived everybody by pretending to be my school psychologist! What was that but poetic justice?

  Any kind of justice would do—I was dying for some—but could we pull it off? Could we fool Brightner’s accomplice and Brightner’s Claw in its bicycle form? Brightner was a rogue wizard who could go after you with coat hangers and kites, who could make ordinary things rise up against you in his service, until you were jellified with fear. Barb and I were just—well, us.

  I whined a little about this, but Barb didn’t see it that way. She gave me this offended look and said, “Who said anything about illusion? When I get done with you, girl, you going to be somebody else!”

  So there I sat getting myself made up by my best friend so that I could walk out right past my worst enemy without being recognized.

  And did Barb do a job on me!

  I am tall and skinny and pale with what they call ash-blond hair; not bad, I guess, though I can always think of lots of improvements when I look in a mirror.

  Barb is taller and thinner than I am. Her skin is about the shade of my aunt’s teakwood dining table, so clothes of almost any cut or color look absolutely fabulous on her. In general, she looks elegant and fabulous without even trying. It’s disgusting.

  I once suggested that she should be a model. She laughed.

  She told me that a, most successful black models have narrow, hawky Arab-type faces, not her own broad-faced looks and b, because her mother ran a makeup business Barb knew the models who shopped there, and from what she could gather, even when you are successful, it’s a pretty pitsy life, and no thanks.

  What she wants to be is a big-cat biologist, with a sideline in animal art.

  On the other hand, what Barb doesn’t know about cosmetics hasn’t been dreamed up yet. When we were little we used to play in the back of her mother’s boutique by the hour, trying on the clothes and the accessories and the shoes and so on, and slathering all kinds of gunk on our faces.

  Now we did it in earnest, trying to get me transformed before Barb’s mom showed up and, mistaking her for a customer, let Awful Ushah in.

  First I had to take off my shirt, which frankly I was glad to get rid of. It was very grubby and permanently loaded with the smell of the spice room. You wouldn’t need a nose to track me in that shirt.

  Same with my jeans. I sat at the back-room makeup table in a borrowed slip while Barb cleaned me up with cold cream, right down to my shoulders and my collarbone.

  Well, she used everything—tissues and pads and pat-pat-pat, layers of liquid stuff brushed on and blotted dry, eyeliner and lip-liner and eyelashes glued onto my lids and new dimensions in eyebrows thanks to the eyebrow pencil. Her hands flew. I watched in the mirror and saw myself being turned into somebody else.

  Barb sang and talked to herself, “Go, go, you Samurai Jack!” and other stuff from the TV cartoons she watches (for the art work, she says).

  She darkened my skin about six shades and made my eyes huge and my cheekbones immense and my mouth luscious and my nose narrow and arched and aristocratic (at least to look at, thanks to the shadows she brushed in on the sides). I became—who?

  “How old you want to be?” she said, looking at my reflection with me.

  “Twenty,” I said.

  “Thirty,” Barb said firmly. So I got some bruisy-looking shadows under my eyes, little lines starting at the corners of my mouth, faint frown creases in my forehead and shadows on my neck. She overdid it, to tell the truth, but I was too fascinated by the changes to object.

  “I don’t believe this,” I said. “I look just like my aunt Grace!”

  Barb laughed. “You did look like Aunt Grace. Watch now. Hair,” she said, “transform!”

  Up went my long blond hair under a wig of black curls. I looked like a high-gloss portrait photo of a startled poodle, and that was just the beginning. We did things with fake tanning stuff on my legs, to match my darkened face.

  Not my hands, though. I wouldn’t take off the silver glove.

  Barb said, “Fine, be pigheaded. We’ll take care of it later. Now, a blouse and skirt for you; the serious look. You a lawyer, or a doctor?”

  “I am a fugitive,” I said. “From a crazed Indian witch.”

  “No you’re not,” Barb said. “You’re an investment counselor, that’s what you are. Give you some class and some brains. Oh-oh, who’s that—is that my mom?”

  The person looming momentarily outside the plate-glass window at the shop-front was not her mom, in fact, but a disappointed customer, willowy and pouty-mouthed. Still, for a second there the “investment counselor” almost lost it. I certainly gave up any inclination to argue the details or career plans of my new identity, which felt a lot safer than my old one.

  So in an hour and a half, there I was, bending in knots to be able to see myself in the full-length mirrors without letting Ushah have a glimpse too. We’d left the curtain partly open to keep an eye on her, actually, and so that we could keep watch for Barb’s mom.

  I wore the most beautiful tailored gray skirt ever seen, panty hose, and a silky white blouse with full sleeves under a blue velvet vest, and a blue velvet jacket.

  “You’re tall,” Barb said, “so she’ll be looking for tall, or somebody trying to look short. So let’s make you really tall.”

  She found me some dark blue pumps with three-inch heels. I had to practice for ten minutes to make sure I wouldn’t fall over. The last thing I needed now was a twisted ankle!

  A short gray glove was found to match, more or less, the long one on my left hand. The sleeves of the blue jacket hid the difference in cuff lengths. Gold-plated chains looped down from my neck. We added a dark blue shoulder bag, a light raincoat, and a silvery scarf. Barb stood back and judged me ready.

  “Your own shadow wouldn’t know you,” she said with satisfaction (which was not the best way of putting it just then).

  In fact, I was pretty knocked out by the person I had become on the outside: capable, proud, even attractive! Could I ever look like that, really? Be like that? I was fascinated by what felt like a weird glimpse of my future—one possible future, anyway.

  If this worked and I had a future.

  “Listen,” Barb said, “you’re on your way to have drinks with six economic advisors to the President, all right? You got lots on your mind and no time to waste, which is how you walk and talk.”

  “Who’s talking?” I said. “Nobody’s getting close enough for long enough to talk to.”

  “Yeah, well, just don’t let anybody get close enough to smell you, because you still stink of curry.”

  “God,” I groaned. “This isn’t going to work, I know it isn’t!”

  Barb sniffed. “That’s right,” she said, “spoil it all by being a scaredy-cat.”

  “I’m not a scaredy-cat,” I said. “I’m just scared. I’ll mess up, I’ll make a mistake and give myself away.”

  Barb rolled her eyes to heaven. “After all this fine work I just did on you? Here,” she said, suddenly serious as she dug something out of her bag and held it out to me. It was a little round hand-mirror in a smooth brass frame that her mother sold in the shop, the kind for checking your makeup discreetly.

  “You’re looking at the first thing out of the first carton of goods that my mom got when she started this place," Barb said firmly. "She put this little
mirror aside for me, and she gave it to me when she started teaching me about makeup so I could help her in the store.

  "The first time I ever saw myself looking all grown up, like you look now, it was in this mirror. That time my mom made me up like an Egyptian princess, she said, so I would never forget it, and I never have. Made me feel like I could, you know? Whatever needed doing, I could do it, ’cause I wasn’t just some dumb-ass kid with a flat nose and not enough chin.”

  “Hey," I said, "don’t talk about my best friend like that!"

  Barb said, “Take the mirror with you. You can give it back to me later, but for now, you keep it. If you get shaky, look in there and be what you see, you hear? You’ve got it in you or I couldn’t bring it out like this, no matter how good I was. Go on, take the mirror. For luck.”

  I took it. I needed all the luck I could get.

  The front door opened and closed. We went still as stone.

  “Barbara! Are you back there?”

  Barb’s mom.

  “Just a minute!” Barb hollered. She grabbed the paper bag the ham sandwich had come in and shoved it into my hand. Then she opened the back door and hustled me out. The door shut behind me.

  I was in a short hallway that dead-ended here at the shop and opened, on the other side, into the carpeted lobby of the hotel and the entrance to the coffee shop. Between that lobby and me, though, something lurked. I knew it lurked, though to anyone else the word “lurk” just would not occur—in connection with a bike.

  Against the wall, its front wheel crooked to hold it upright, leaned Ushah’s bicycle. This was my first close look at it in good light. The seat was covered with what looked like tiger-hide, which made perfect sense to me. Twists of what seemed suspiciously like long black human hair hung from the handlebars.

  Not exactly the mount of a Hell’s Angel—worse!

  I felt my face begin to steam slightly with quivering dread. If I waited another second, I would melt all of Barb’s work off.