The Vanishing Island

by Barry Wolverton

  He was halfway down a long alleyway when a man emerged ahead of him. He turned around, and a second man was coming up behind him.

  “Dangerous place for a walk, yeah?” said the first, coming closer. He was tall and obviously drunk, rocking slowly side to side, like a cobra. The sleeves of his dark overcoat covered half his hands, but Bren could still see the large knife in one.

  The other man was bearlike, big and thick with short black stubble all over his face. It was the two men who had just left the Duck. They must’ve seen him before he could hide the coin.

  “It’s not what you think,” said Bren.

  “Then whazzis?” said the bear, reaching for Bren’s throat. Bren drew back, but the man had his hand on the lanyard and pulled it from Bren’s shirt. He fingered the coin greedily for a moment before clamping his massive hand around the whole necklace, preparing to rip it from Bren’s neck.

  Suddenly he drew back, yelping in pain and grabbing his hand. “What the . . . ?”

  Bren looked at the man, who was rubbing his hand. Neither of them had any idea what had just happened.

  “What’s wrong?” said the cobra, but the bear just shook his head.

  “Nuffin. He ain’t got nuffin. Lezz go.”

  He started to back away, but the man with the knife moved closer to Bren.

  “We both seen he has somethin’, in the Duck. Besides, I haven’t sharpened my knife in a while.” And as he said this he swept behind Bren, hooking one arm around his chest and putting the knife to his throat. Bren felt the steel edge bite into his neck, and the wetness of fresh blood, and he shut his eyes, praying it would be quick.

  And then the pressure was gone, and he heard the knife clatter into the alley. Bren’s legs, weak with fear, gave way, and he stumbled against the wall and slid to the ground. He looked up to see the big man running the other way. Frantically he looked around for the man with the knife, but the alley was empty, the knife lying at Bren’s feet. He pushed himself up, kicked the knife into the pile of trash, and ran as fast as he could for Black’s.

  CHAPTER

  9

  THE MAGIC MIRROR

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Mr. Black.

  Bren tried to smile, without much success.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Bren had waited until he made sure he wasn’t bleeding before he came in. The cut was minor, but he was afraid Mr. Black would still be able to see it, so he kept looking down to hide his neck.

  “Nothing,” said Bren. “It’s just . . . the coin . . .” He took it off and laid it on the table. He didn’t want Mr. Black looking at him.

  “Ah yes, I’ve been doing my homework on that,” said Mr. Black.

  “Look . . .” Bren tried to say, reaching out for the coin, but Mr. Black set a large book on top of it, turning pages until he came to a chapter entitled “The Mongol Post System and Passports.” He ran a long, bony finger up and down the pages until he found “Yuan Dynasty.”

  “Yoo-an?” said Bren.

  “The dynasty established by Kublai Khan,” Mr. Black explained.

  “From the Marco Polo stories!”

  “You make him sound like he was a fictional character. He was very real. . . . I’m not as sure about Marco Polo’s stories.”

  “And this coin is from his realm?” said Bren, forgetting all about his near-death experience and reaching under the book.

  “That’s just it,” said Mr. Black. “I don’t think it’s a coin.”

  “Oh.”

  Mr. Black held up the larger drawing Bren had made of the object’s face. “Three columns of script—Persian, Mongolian, and Turkic—but they all say the same thing.”

  “You translated it?” said Bren.

  “Not exactly,” said Mr. Black. “Even with my books it might have taken me quite some time to translate three languages I am unfamiliar with. I probably would have taken it to a scholar at Jordan College.”

  “But?”

  “But someone already translated it for me.”

  Bren looked at Mr. Black expectantly, but he could tell something was bothering his friend.

  “I had a visitor yesterday after you went to work. He was interested in my books and artifacts from the Far East.”

  “What did he look like?” said Bren. When Mr. Black described him, he said, “That was Admiral Bowman! The admiral of the Albatross! Did he say what he wanted?”

  “No,” said Mr. Black, “but of course I had been preoccupied all day with our drawing, which I had left sitting out on my counter. He saw it and was immediately interested.”

  “Really? And he knew what it said?”

  Mr. Black nodded. “He said the rough translation was, ‘Beware evil-doers! By order of the Emperor!’”

  Bren’s jaw dropped. It still works.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing,” said Bren. “What else?”

  “Well, I remarked that it was a funny sort of inscription for a coin, which is when this admiral of yours explained that it wasn’t a coin. It’s a paiza.”

  “Pie—za?”

  “Here,” said Mr. Black, pointing to the book again. “The Mongols created these medallions as official symbols of authority, so that their ambassadors or guests could travel the empire safely, on official business. A passport.”

  “And the admiral was sure it was from the empire of Kublai Khan?”

  “He seemed sure,” said Mr. Black, looking over at his chessboard. “He also suggested a rather brilliant move in my chess game. Pointed out a mate in six moves. Unfortunately, it was for my opponent.”

  “How did he know?” said Bren.

  “I suppose he’s good at chess,” said Mr. Black.

  “No!” said Bren, practically leaping from his chair. “How did he know the coin, or whatever it is, goes back to Kublai Khan?”

  “For one thing, he rather astutely pointed out that only during Kublai Khan’s reign would peoples speaking all three of these languages have been unified,” said Mr. Black. “But I was unable to learn more; he kept pressing me about where I had gotten the drawing, and whether I had the original.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No, I merely told him a professor friend of mine had copied it from a book and brought it to me for more information. He was cagey; I didn’t trust him.”

  “Why not?”

  Mr. Black shook his head. “I don’t know precisely. I asked him if he was a collector, and offered to try and find out more about this paiza, but suddenly he became quite dismissive. Said even if it was from the empire of Kublai Khan, there were thousands of paizas issued during his reign, and that it was nothing more than a bauble.”

  Bren was barely listening. Here was an artifact from the Far East, and not just the Far East—China! And not just China, but from the greatest empire in history! And what about his close call in the alley? His mind was racing ahead of him . . . there was no way the sailor in McNally’s vomitorium would have been clinging to a mere bauble in his dying moments. Whatever a “bauble” was.

  “Mr. Black, did he say anything else about the paiza?”

  “Like what?”

  Bren turned it over to the blank side. Or at least, the side he had thought was blank until an hour ago. “Can we get out your magic lantern again?”

  They went to the back, and Bren had Mr. Black hold the candle inside the lantern, while Bren held the blank side of the paiza up to the projected beam of light.

  “Look,” said Bren, pointing to the white wall behind them, where the hidden symbols Bren had seen before were faintly reflected. Unlike the image on the front of the paiza, they appeared to have been hand-drawn, or etched, into the back. Except Bren could see no scratches on the back.

  “Where on earth did that come from?” said Mr. Black, whose normally rigid jaw had gone slack.

  “I don’t know,” said Bren. “I saw it by accident at the Duck, when sunlight reflected off it.”

  “A magic mirror!”
said Mr. Black, growing excited. He pulled Bren by the arm to his Oriental room, where he dug through a small box of coins, pins, and other objects he had collected. He found what he was looking for—a brass disk perhaps twice the size of Bren’s coin, but blank on both sides. They went back to the lantern, and when Mr. Black held it up, the image of a cross was reflected on the wall.

  “An ancient technique,” said Mr. Black, “used by secret societies to conceal their identity or pass messages. See, the disk, or the coin, has a false back. . . .”

  Mr. Black used some of his small jeweler’s tools to pry the metal disk apart. There was the cross, engraved on the actual back of the disk. “And then this false back is applied, hiding the image,” he explained. “But there was a technique of polishing the back so that it became transparent in direct light, reflecting the hidden image.”

  Secret societies, ancient treasure, Marco Polo . . . Bren began to feel dizzy.

  “Yours looks much cruder, though,” said Mr. Black, picking up the paiza and rubbing both sides with his thumb. “Ah yes, see? There’s a seam here around the edge. . . .”

  He pried off the false back, and sure enough, on the actual back someone had scratched the three symbols they had seen projected on the wall.

  “You see?” said Black. “There’s adventure enough for us in Map, if we keep our eyes open!” He turned the paiza over again. “I know you don’t want to part with this, but if you could let me hold on to it, I can investigate more tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” said Bren, who was actually a bit relieved to hand the mysterious object off, at least for a little while. He didn’t understand what had happened in the alleyway, and it made him fearful. “I just wish the dead sailor could have told us more.”

  “Perhaps he can,” said Mr. Black. “Remember the autopsy? I think we should see if Dr. Hendrick has learned something that might shed more light on our mystery.”

  When they reached the top of the stairs to the doctor’s office, someone was blocking the door . . . a thickset man with a grey-flecked bristle of hair, wearing a tweed overcoat. It was the constable, and when he heard the visitors he turned around.

  “Archibald,” he said. “You heard?”

  “Heard what?” said Mr. Black, pushing past the constable. Bren followed him. Dr. Hendrick was slumped against the far wall, lifeless in a chair, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his hands and forearms covered in blood. Sticking out of his chest was a dagger handle, and his shirt was soaked with blood. One of the constable’s assistants was kneeling next to him. On the examining table was a naked corpse, its chest split open from the top of his breastbone to the navel. Liters of blood had pooled beneath the table, now dried into irregular, blackened circles. Ropes of intestines hung out of the body, dangling to the floor.

  Bren’s head swam. It wasn’t just the gore; a few days ago he’d never seen a dead body, and now he was surrounded by them, including poor Dr. Hendrick. And then he noticed the crescent-shaped scar across the neck of the disemboweled corpse—it was the dead sailor.

  “What on earth . . . ,” said Mr. Black, who started to walk over to the dead doctor before the constable stopped him.

  “Stay where you are, Archibald. Unless you want blood on your shoes.”

  The constable walked over to the examining table, carefully stepping over the blood on the floor. “Used to have a problem with grave robbers,” he said. “Then the rogues figured out they could save themselves the trouble of digging by robbing the morgues. My guess is, Doc surprised one or more rufflers and got himself stabbed trying to stop ’em.”

  “Why aren’t any of the other bodies disturbed?” said Mr. Black.

  The constable shrugged. “Doc came upon the thieves before they’d had time to work the whole room? And then a man’s not going to stick around after he’s killed another man.”

  Bren barely heard him. He was staring around the room, thinking about his attack and escape. The cut on his neck began to tingle.

  “Who reported this?” said Mr. Black.

  “One of the, er, women of easy virtue, who came regularly to the doc for medicine—she was the one who found him.” He took a closer look at the gutted corpse of the sailor on the table. “What in heaven’s name was the doc up to in here, anyway?”

  “An autopsy.”

  “Doesn’t look very scientific to me,” the constable huffed, but glancing around at the crude instruments in the office—saws and chisels and hammers—he seemed to conclude that the corpse’s mutilated state was no surprise. “I am sorry, Archibald. I know you two were friends.”

  “I’ll arrange for the burial,” said Mr. Black. “Bill didn’t have any family.”

  The constable nodded. “Now, not to be rude, but we’ve work to do. Off you go.”

  Bren tried to collect himself as he walked with Mr. Black to the bookstore. He knew he should be thinking about the murdered doctor, but he couldn’t stop picturing the gutted corpse of his dead sailor, seeing the gruesome scar on his neck and thinking of his own close call.

  “Mr. Black, do you buy the constable’s explanation that it was just robbers?”

  “I don’t know, Bren. It’s possible, but I don’t know many grave robbers who go looking for valuables inside the bodies.”

  “It was like the thief knew what he was looking for, and which one of those dead men might have it.”

  Mr. Black grunted. “Did you notice something else?”

  “What?”

  “When the constable told me not to get blood on my shoes, I looked down of course. All that blood everywhere, and yet there wasn’t a single footprint leading out of the room.”

  Bren felt a centipede crawl up his spine. He thought back to the dying man’s last words in the vomitorium, the ones Bren hadn’t understood. But of course, the man’s native tongue would have been Dutch. And then Bren heard them, clear as day: “Pas op de nacht demon.”

  “Beware the Night Demon.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER DORY

  Bren didn’t tell Mr. Black what he’d remembered. It would only have worried him. After all, the sailor did have the look of a ruffian, like the constable said. He also could have been delusional in his dying state. And Bren had never seen an autopsy—for all he knew, it was supposed to look like a hog-butchering.

  Besides, he had bigger worries. He knew the Netherlanders were in Map to play politics with Rand McNally, but he still didn’t know how long they would be here, and how much time he had to figure out a way to get on that ship.

  Bren hurried to the Emporium the next morning, anxious to finish his work so he could get back to Black’s. It was feast night and there would be a full house later. Bren washed, mopped, scrubbed, and hauled, and was almost done, but on his last trip to the river, he came upon a familiar sight: Duke Swyers and his gang, surrounding some unfortunate orphan from the West Anglia Home for Wayward Children.

  At least, Bren assumed he was an orphan; he had never seen the child before. Tormenting these kids was one of Duke’s favorite sports, since orphans had no one to stick up for them.

  Bren had managed to avoid Duke since the haircut incident, but he was tired of being scared. And he was armed—with two buckets of puke. He advanced.

  “I guess it takes four beef-heads to beat up one small orphan.”

  The circle parted, and Bren could see the boy they were picking on. He was small, maybe eight years old, with vaguely Eastern features and black hair cropped even worse than Bren’s.

  “Well, this is even better,” said Duke, and he and his friends slowly began to surround Bren.

  Bren didn’t really have a plan. He just figured he’d get one good lick in on Duke with a bucket, and with any luck Duke’s friends would show their true colors and run away.

  “Nice hair, Owen,” said one of the boys.

  Bren self-consciously touched the top of his head. It had been a month since Duke assaulted him, but his hair had grown back in odd t
ufts.

  “Yeah,” said Duke. “If I were you, I’d get a wig.”

  “Why don’t you fetch me one,” said Bren. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

  He could tell by the bright red blotches on Duke’s face that his Sunday morning valet job was a secret from his friends. Or at least, they knew better than to speak of it. Bren was prepared to go on at some length when he felt the blow to the back of his head, and then the ground took the air out of his lungs. One of the boys had sneaked up behind him.

  From the ground he could hear people talking. It was like his head was underwater—all the sounds were muffled. His vision was blurry but his sense of smell was apparently just fine, as a rotting odor filled his nostrils. That’s when he realized the ground was slimy, and as he tried to push himself up his hands slipped on a pond of undigested food. He was lying in his own vomit, so to speak. Bren could feel the rubbery lumps of oysters and mussels under his palms, and it was all he could do not to be sick himself.

  His hearing was fine too; he could hear boys laughing at him. He felt an egg-shaped knot growing on the back of his head.

  “You fell in something,” said Duke.

  It was four against one, and Bren was already down, but he couldn’t help himself. He figured his best chance was to just make Duke’s head explode from anger.

  “I still smell better than you,” he said.

  That did it. Duke raised his fists, his feet pawing the ground like a charging bull. Bren flinched, and in the split second that he shut his eyes, he heard a loud thud, followed by a cry of pain. He grabbed his head, before realizing he wasn’t the one hit or the one who had cried out. When he opened his eyes, the small orphan was standing there, holding the other waste bucket. It was empty, and Duke was standing there in shock, vomit dripping from his massive head and shoulders.

  He turned on the orphan. “You little freak!” His friends surrounded the boy again, prepared to attack.

  “No!” said Bren, scrambling to his feet but feeling queasy as he did so. Everything went blurry again.

  “No what?” Duke sneered at him.