We Sled With Dragons

by C. Alexander London

  At that point, the women selling vegetables decided to pack up and call it a day.

  “You can run but you can’t hide!” Bonnie shouted after the Navels, although she kept one of her goons in front of her in case one of the warriors threw his spear. “I’m your worst nightmare,” she taunted, unleashing a barrage of cheesy threats. Celia wondered if Bonnie knew she was acting like a second-rate TV villain. She really needed to get scarier lines.

  As they turned down a side street, the mob of goat herders blocked their path.

  “Raaarw!” the mob shouted, as mobs so often do. They charged forward.

  Oliver and Celia ran around the corner to the left while everyone else ran to the right. The twins ducked through the alleys as fast as they could, turning and weaving, before they noticed they were suddenly alone. They were about to turn back when they heard the roar of the mob nearby. They kept running and found themselves in front of a wide blue door.

  Celia pushed, but it didn’t open.

  “Let me do it,” said Oliver, taking a step back and throwing himself at the door with his shoulder. He bounced off.

  “Ow!” He slumped down, holding his shoulder. “That looks easier on TV.”

  “Oh. It’s a pull door, not a push,” said Celia and casually pulled the door open. She stepped over her brother. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll hide in here until the mob passes.”

  She gestured for Oliver to go first. He grunted and scampered inside and Celia shut the door behind him.

  They weren’t exactly inside. The room was large and had four thick stone walls but no ceiling. There were rows and rows of chairs spread out in front of them and there was a hole cut out of the wall above the chairs. Behind them was a narrow stage with a big white screen along the back. A big concrete tower rose from the side of the building, with rusty old letters wrapped around it.

  “ODEON,” Oliver read out loud. “I think this is some kind of movie theater.”

  “You should be a superhero,” said Celia. “Captain Obvious.”

  They heard police sirens wailing past them.

  “I think if this were TV we wouldn’t be superheroes,” said Oliver. “We’d be the bad guys.”

  “Our parents just stole a truck from some goat herders and burned down a hotel in the middle of a city, and we used a poisonous lizard and a monkey to threaten the police just before sneaking into a movie theater,” said Celia. “I think even in real life we’re the bad guys now.”

  “This is so Bizarro Bandits,” said Oliver. His sister did not disagree with him.

  “I can’t believe we thought we could help Mom and Dad find Atlantis,” Celia said. “We can’t even get out of this city. We are just not supposed to be explorers.”

  “But what about the prophecy?” Oliver wondered.

  “Maybe it was all a mistake. Like, it was given to the wrong kids.”

  “I don’t think prophecies work like that.”

  “I’m going to check if the coast is clear,” said Celia, cracking open the door they’d come through to peek out. Oliver looked around. There were mannequins all along the side wall, each dressed like a famous character from a classic movie. There were even a few from famous child actors back in the early black-and-white days of film. Oliver didn’t recognize any of them. He looked up at the hole in the wall.

  “That must be the projection booth,” he said out loud, and glanced away to make sure his sister hadn’t heard him. Maybe he really was Captain Obvious. When he looked back at the hole, a beam of light shot out toward the screen. He turned around. The picture was washed out in the sunlight, so it was hard to make out exactly what he was seeing. He figured that the movie theater must only get used at night. He squinted to study the picture.

  He saw a bearded old man on a ship, battling a giant squid with a large spear. The man’s hair hung down over one of his eyes and he was shouting to the sky, but the movie had no sound. Oliver didn’t recognize the actor. It couldn’t have been an American movie. He would have seen the ads for it before.

  “That looks just like the kraken we fought in the Pacific Ocean,” Oliver said, but Celia’s head was poking out into the alleyway and she couldn’t hear him.

  The scene changed suddenly to a picture of the same man with the white beard fighting pirates.

  “Must be a ‘coming soon’ kind of thing,” Oliver said.

  The scene changed again, now showing the man crossing mountains as shadowy snow creatures watched from caves, their eyes aglow.

  “Those are just like the yetis we met in Tibet . . .” Oliver stepped closer to the screen, trying to make out what sort of movie this might be an ad for. His heart was pounding against his rib cage.

  He saw the bearded man in a jungle somewhere, walking with a tribe of painted warriors toward a golden city, and the warriors looked a lot like they were from Qui’s tribe.

  “Bizarro,” Oliver whispered, looking around once more for a hidden camera crew playing a practical joke.

  Then the scene froze. It showed a snowy plain with a glowing city in the distance. The city had a large temple in the center surrounded by rings of walls stretching out across the snow. It looked just like the drawing of Atlantis in Percy Fawcett’s journal. Suddenly, the bearded man appeared on the screen, leaning against a large tree and looking down at the city. A rainbow came down from the sky and the man walked right onto it, strolling toward the city. The scene didn’t show his face, but he had a sack over his shoulder, and the sack was embroidered with the symbol of a key.

  Oliver felt his stomach drop into his toes. The key was the symbol of the Mnemones, the guardians of the Lost Library of Alexandria. His mother’s secret society.

  “No way!” said Oliver.

  “Come on!” Celia turned back around. “The coast is clear. Let’s go find Mom and Da— What are you doing?”

  Oliver stood in the center of the aisle, his head titled all the way back, looking up at the screen with his jaw hanging open. Celia worried that her brother had gone crazy. Maybe the strain of the day had been too much for him. Maybe he’d gotten toxic parasites. Celia shook her head. She hated how fragile little brothers’ brains could be.

  “It. Is. Time. To. Go,” she said very slowly, so he could understand even if he had a toxic parasite in his brain.

  Oliver pointed up.

  “What?” said Celia. “It’s just an ad for some foreign movie. It probably has subtitles. That’s how movies trick you into reading.”

  Oliver grabbed the backpack and pulled out the old explorer’s journal.

  “Just look closely,” he said as he flipped pages in the journal.

  “It looks like some Christmas movie,” said Celia. “Like Santa Claus has to save Christmas or somethi—oh.” Celia’s jaw dropped. She saw her mother’s symbol and then the film looped back to the beginning again. She saw the scenes of the bearded man battling the kraken and meeting the tribe in the jungle and being watched by the yetis. “Oh no.” Celia gulped.

  Oliver held up the page in the journal he was looking for. It was what he’d seen back in the hotel room, the drawings of the bearded man. They looked just like the man in the movie. And the rest of the pictures were there too, on the screen and in the journal.

  Celia looked at the page and started shaking her head slowly back and forth.

  “No way,” she said. “It can’t be.”

  “I think so,” said Oliver.

  He flipped through the pages and showed the giant tree drawings that filled the last pages of the journal. It was the same tree in the movie.

  “That’s why the catalog showed us that book by the saint.”

  “Saint Nicholas,” said Oliver. “I think we have to tell Mom and Dad.”

  “Tell them what?” his sister said, although she knew. It just sounded too crazy to actually say out loud.

  “We
have to tell them that we need to go to the North Pole,” Oliver said. “If we want to find Atlantis, we have to find Santa Claus.”

  It didn’t sound any less crazy when her brother said it out loud.

  9

  WE’RE NOT PROJECTING

  “OLIVER! CELIA!” THEY heard their parents voices on the street, whisper-shouting their names.

  “Let’s go,” sighed Celia, opening the door and gesturing for her brother to go first. “You do the talking,” she added.

  “Me?” Oliver stopped in the hallway. “Why me?”

  “Because you saw the movie first!”

  “But—” Oliver really didn’t want to have to explain this to his parents. If they were wrong, they would sound like lunatics, like they’d gone just as crazy as the contestants at the end of Bizarro Bandits. If they were right, they would be dragged off to the snowy reaches of the North Pole.

  Neither option was appealing.

  “If you hadn’t turned on Celebrity Fashion Crimes I never would have seen all those drawings in the journal.”

  “Well, that just shows you that you should pay more attention to fashion.”

  Oliver knew he’d never win the argument with his sister.

  “Over here!” Celia whisper-shouted back into the street.

  “Oh, thank goodness!” Their mother rushed inside the movie theater, hugging the children tightly. “We thought you’d been captured.”

  “No,” said Oliver. “We actually found—”

  “Why did you wander off?” Sam asked Oliver, as the rest of the rescue party streamed inside. “It is not safe.”

  “I know that,” Oliver said. “But we found this thing and we—”

  “Come on,” said Dr. Navel. “Corey’s already arranged for a private jet to get us out of here!”

  “This is a pretty cool old movie theater,” said Corey. “I wonder if they’d want to do a Corey Brandt film festival.”

  “You’d want to come back to Djibouti?” Celia was shocked.

  Corey giggled at the word Djibouti. Celia rolled her eyes.

  “We should go before the police or the pirates or the goat herders find us here,” said Dr. Navel.

  “Yeah, but we saw this thing and it means we—” Oliver was still trying to tell everyone what they’d seen.

  “Come on,” said Qui, peeking out at the street again. “The coast is clear.”

  “We have to find Santa Claus!” Oliver declared.

  Everyone turned to stare at him. The hot sun over Djibouti blazed down. Sam closed the door again. A bead of sweat drizzled down Oliver’s forehead. “I mean, er, to find Atlantis . . . um, see, uh . . . there’s a movie.” He pointed at the screen behind him but it was blank. No light shined from the projection booth. “Well, there was a movie,” said Oliver.

  Dr. Navel squinted at Oliver and Celia with a look that said “I wonder if both of my children have toxic parasites?”

  “There really was a movie!” Celia said. “We’re not crazy.”

  “Of course you’re not crazy, honey.” Their mother nodded. “But if you saw a movie here, someone must have been showing it, right? Which means we’re not alone here.”

  All eyes turned to the dark projection booth above the seats. All ears listened carefully for any sounds of movement. Oliver and Celia felt knots tying in their stomachs. Had someone been watching them the whole time?

  Their mother ran to the back of the theater and climbed onto the chairs, hoisting herself into the dark booth.

  “Be careful!” Dr. Navel warned, long after it would have been helpful advice.

  The twins watched the opening in the wall, too nervous to breathe.

  “It’s okay!” their mother called. “There’s no one here.” She climbed out and trotted back down the aisle to her family.

  “If there is no one there,” wondered Professor Rasmali-Greenberg, “then who showed the children a film?”

  “No one,” said their mother. “There’s no film in the projector.”

  “Maybe they ran away?” suggested Celia.

  “There’s no bulb in the projector either,” said their mother. “Nor is there electricity running to it. It could not have been turned on.”

  “C-r-e-e-p-y,” Corey spelled.

  “So . . . um.” Qui scratched the back of her neck. “Who is Santa Claus?”

  “You don’t know who Santa is?” Oliver asked. “Old Saint Nick? Like, uh, Father Christmas?”

  “Is Santa Claus an ancestor of yours?” Qui wondered. “Do you pray to him?”

  Oliver looked to Celia. She crossed her arms. She wasn’t going to explain it.

  “Uh, I guess, sort of.” Oliver shrugged. He didn’t really want to explain about Christmas and stockings and presents and Santa’s lists of who’d been naughty and who’d been nice. Somehow, it felt really embarrassing to talk about, even though he knew that everyone had their beliefs and his were no better or worse than anyone else’s. They all sounded strange to outsiders.

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” said their mother. The kids looked at her with puzzled expressions.

  “William Shakespeare?” she said. “Hamlet? What do you all learn in school these days?”

  “We’re in sixth grade, Mom,” said Celia. “We don’t read Hamlet.”

  “The point is,” their mother said, “the world has no end of wonders. Think of everything you’ve seen and done. You’ve climbed mountains in Tibet. You’ve explored jungles and oceans, met witches and monsters and villains.”

  “And a talking yak,” said Oliver.

  “And a talking yak,” agreed his mother. “So you see . . . why shouldn’t Santa Claus lead the way to Atlantis?”

  “Because he’s not real,” said Celia.

  “How do you know?” Oliver objected.

  “I just do.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do too.”

  “Do not.”

  “We must go.” One of the warriors came over to the interrupt them.

  “Agreed.” Dr. Navel peered outside again. “Everyone on the streets is looking for us, though. How will we make it to the airfield?”

  “I have an idea.” Sam smiled and spoke to his elders in their language. He pointed to the mannequins along the wall. The elders had a brief discussion and then Sam turned to Ernest, the celebrity impersonator. He borrowed a pen from Dr. Navel and approached Ernest, holding the pen like a spear.

  “One more show,” said Sam, as Ernest groaned his objections through the gag in his mouth, backing away from the young Dinka warrior, his eyes wide with fear.

  10

  WE GO AHEAD

  “YOU AREN’T LYING to me, are you?” Bonnie demanded.

  The market woman shook her head inside her colorful scarf. Bonnie’s knife tapped against the fabric while the other pirates held the woman’s arms behind her back.

  “Why would they go into a movie theater?” Bonnie asked.

  The woman started speaking frantically, but Bonnie didn’t understand a word of her language. She spat on the ground at the woman’s feet. “It was a rhetorical question,” she said. She nodded at her men and they let the woman go. Bonnie grabbed a mango from one of the woman’s baskets and took a bite out of it, skin and all.

  “Bleck.” She spat. “This isn’t even ripe.” She tossed the mango to the ground in front of the woman, walking away without paying for it. Pirates, as we all know, do not like to pay for anything they can simply steal.

  As they walked away the woman muttered oaths under her breath and pulled her cell phone from her robe. She sent a quick text message and looked to the alley by her market stall, where a Dinka warrior received the message. He looked up from his phone and nodded a thank-you to the woman. Then he waved behind him.

&nb
sp; The market woman watched as an odd assemblage of foreigners followed the warrior from the alley. Among them were a lizard, a monkey, a chicken, two adults, and two children, all dressed like characters from classic movies; a girl wearing a colorful wool hat despite the desert heat and a teenager who looked a lot like the famous Corey Brandt.

  Bonnie and her goons approached the Odeon Cinema. It was easy enough to find, with its large rusted sign. It was the only movie theater in Djibouti. It did seem fitting that the couch potatoes and the celebrity would hide out there. Bonnie studied the posters by the front door advertising that evening’s showing. Some mindless action movie. Bonnie did not like action movies. She found the life of a pirate active enough. She enjoyed romantic comedies, although she could never admit that in front of her pirate crew. They’d laugh at her and then they’d try to do to her what she’d done to the previous captain. She did not care to become shark bait just because she enjoyed a big-screen kiss from time to time.

  “All right, boys,” she said. “The Navels have escaped too many times. I don’t want to take any chances this time. Don’t ask questions and don’t talk to them. No clever lines. This isn’t some movie and we aren’t some movie villains. The only one of them who’s worth anything is Corey Brandt. Capture him. The rest you can gut like fish for all I care. We leave no other survivors.”

  “What about the warriors?” asked one of the pirates, who did not care to go into hand-to-hand combat with a seven-foot-tall champion of desert warfare. He’d gone into piracy because he liked the loot, not because he liked taking a spear to the head.

  “And what about the lizard?” asked another, who had seen what Beverly had done to his shipmates.

  Bonnie didn’t answer. She steadied the grip on her knife and charged the front entrance to the cinema. With a few quick kicks, the doors burst open against their hinges and the pirates streamed through the small lobby and into the open-air auditorium.