The Kingdom of Kevin Malone Read Online Free PDF Page A

the rose pin, what was listening to my trembling breathing?
    It was too much, I couldn’t stand it. I sat down and pulled on the skates, after brushing the dirt and crud off my sock-bottoms. Then I pushed off down that passage in a fine, heart-thundering whine of skate wheels on stone. If there was something after me down here, it was going to have to move fast.
    I swooped along with the glowing pin held out in front of me in case of a bend in the passage. There were dark gaps in the walls here and there—openings to other passageways—which I ignored as best I could as I skated on, nerves stretched to breaking. Moss and water stains glowed and glistened on the walls. Maybe Kevin’s secret passage had started out in the real Central Park as one of the sunken transverse roads that takes cars east and west across the park. The transverses are open to the sky, not closed tunnels, but they’re lined with walls of this same black rock, with grass and roots sticking out of the cracks.
    In the real world, the Sixty-sixth Street transverse could no more end at the Inscope Arch than it could deliver me to the moon. As nearly as I could tell, I was heading east, toward Fifth Avenue. Here, Fifth Avenue was ocean. What if this tunnel spat me into the sea?
    I thought of Sebbian’s ruined feet and dying eyes, and kept going—a long time. If I’d had to do any fancy footwork in a hurry I’d have been sunk, my legs were so tired.
    Then the walls pulled back and the floor sloped upward and shot me out, before I could think to stop, into late afternoon light between high green banks on a paved path. There was no mistaking the smell of New York air. I was home.
    I made a raggedy turn and threw my arms around a lamppost to stop myself.
    I had come out under a low, pink and gray stone bridge trimmed with a band of staggered brick-ends, like the rickrack on a child’s pinafore. The mouth of the arch was small, almost prim, outlined in gray and black stone blocks. The whole thing was incredibly cozy and coy looking.
    But if you go through to the other end of the Inscope Arch (as I’ve done since, without the rhinestone rose) you see that it’s very deep and so dark that besides installing lights, the Parks Department people have whitewashed the walls to reflect as much light as possible.
    And if you look back, from east to west, you see the trimstones of the opening at the far end sticking slightly into the silhouetted arch, like a curved row of huge, blunt teeth seen from the inside of a monster’s mouth. I thought of Sebbian, and maybe Kevin too, chomped to shreds in that terrible mouth.
    I started skating again, it didn’t matter where. I just wanted to put some distance between me and all that.
    It seemed as though not much time had gone by in the real world. The light was afternoonish, dulled by those rushing fat clouds you get sometimes in April, nothing like the gray evening that had been falling on the Fayre Farre when I’d left it. Time must go faster there.
    Space was also stretched on the Farre side of the arches. The Inscope, which I had just come through, was only a five minute walk past the zoo from the double Denesmouth Arch (not hours of hard skating away) and less than ten minutes from the Willowdell. Fifth Avenue—Kevin’s sea—was closer than that.
    It was as if Kevin had created a mirror image of the real park, but packed it with extra time and spread it over extra space. All the buildings and things had been pulled loose to wander around like buffalo on a prairie; and this shifting, expanded territory was populated with minstrels like Sebbian and ash-drinking skeletons.
    Now I saw everything in the real park as shadowed by Kevin’s dark imaginings. Rotten Kevin had returned my pin but stolen something else precious from me: my domestic, friendly park. Give with one hand, take with the other—that was just like him, except for the “give"