The Gate of Days - Book of Time 2

by Guillaume Prevost

  Table of Contents

  THE GATE OF DAYS 1 Burglary

  2 Bad News

  3 Seven Coins

  4 The Delphi Shepherd

  5 The Stranger

  6 The Oracle

  7 A Rabid Rabbit

  8 Alicia Todds

  9 Pursued by a Bear

  10 Slaves!

  11 August 4, 79 A.D. Ten A.M.

  12 Bulldozer

  13 Gangsters, Firecrackers, and Kidney Beans

  14 105 Degrees

  15 All Aboard

  16 Old Acquaintances

  17 Revelations

  18 A Matter of Trust

  19 Vacation Homework

  20 Bran Castle

  21 Conversation in a Cell

  22 Meriweserres Bracelet

  23 Sam the Magician

  24 The Truth About Allan Faulkner

  THE GATE OF DAYS

  THE BOOK OF TIME II

  Guillaume Prevost

  * * *

  Translated by WILLIAM RODARMOR

  ARTHUR A. LEVINE BOOKS

  An Imprint of Scholastic Inc

  Text copyright © 2007 by Gallimard Jeunesse

  English-language translation © 2008 by William Rodarmor

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with Gallimard Jeunesse.

  scholastic and the lantern logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  * * *

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Prevost, Guillaume.

  [Sept pieces. English]

  The gate of days : the Book of Time II / by Guillaume Prevost; translated by William Rodarmor. — 1st ed. p. cm.

  * * *

  Summary: While seeking the seven magical coins that will allow him to reach his father, who is trapped in the castle of Vlad Tepes, Sam Faulkner travels to such places as ancient Delphi, a Stone Age cave, and 1930s Chicago. ISBN 978-0-439-88376-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) [l.Time travel — Fiction. 2. Missing persons — Fiction.] I. Rodarmor, William. II.Title. PZ7.P9246Gat 2008 [Fic] — dc22 2007050263

  ISBN-13: 978-0-439-88376-4 ISBN-10: 0-439-88376-8

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 08 09 10 11 12

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  1 Burglary

  The inside of the dinosaur’s stomach reeked of epoxy and paint. Sam Faulkner crouched all the way in the back of the space, just where the body narrowed to a long fiberglass tail, and he was ready to move — to get out of not just the huge Baryonyx where he’d been hiding all evening, but out of the Sainte-Mary Museum. As soon as the guards completed their rounds, he would slip over to the coin room, take what he needed — Sam preferred to think of it as borrowing — and return to the dinosaur until the museum reopened in the morning. Then he would rescue his father.

  He had never wanted to spend his nights hiding in a dinosaurs butt, Sam thought wryly. Indeed, if someone had told him two weeks earlier that he was going to steal from the museum — or that he would travel to ancient Egypt or World War I, or that his father was stuck in the fifteenth century as a prisoner of Dracula — he never would have believed them. But once you knew time travel was possible, and that a squat little statue in your basement could send you hurtling into the past, all sorts of possibilities — even necessities — opened up as well.

  He tensed at the sound of footsteps in the hall. Two night watchmen switched on the light and walked by, a couple of feet from him, talking.

  “The Baryo there isn’t finished either. Seems the painter won’t come back till he’s paid what he’s owed.”

  “There’s no more money for it,” said the other man. “The curator says the city won’t increase the subsidy. We need some new exhibits to bring people in. Did you read in the paper about that Greek thing they auctioned in London? The Navel of the World or some such? An old stone, and it went for ten million dollars in less than ten minutes! Our little museum can’t afford that!”

  “No kidding! Won’t be long before they start firing people to cut costs!”

  The guards were still grumbling as they crossed the hall to the far door and went out, leaving Sam alone again. He wolfed down two chocolate-nut bars he’d thought to buy from the vending machine and waited for the next round. The guards passed through again an hour and a quarter later, arguing about the merits of their favorite hockey teams. One was a staunch supporter of the Canadiens; the other swore by the Maple Leafs. Even though Sam felt that no one could match the Senators when they were on a roll, he was careful not to speak up. If the dinosaur suddenly gave its opinion on the Stanley Cup, the two men would surely have heart attacks.

  Sam looked at his watch. It was past ten o’clock, and he had about fifty minutes to carry out his plan. In order to operate the stone statue that allowed him to time-travel, he needed a coin with a hole in it, one that could date from any period of history. Once the coin was set onto the sun carved in the center of the stone, the statue would shoot him through time to some period of its own mysterious choosing; there was no way to know where he might end up. But on one of his adventures, Sam had learned he might be able to choose his destination if he had seven of these magic coins. And as his father was in the clutches of Vlad Tepes — a bloody tyrant of medieval Romania, the man who had served as a model for Dracula — there wasn’t a moment to be lost.

  The problem was, Sam had only three coins. His cousin Lily had suggested that he try the Sainte-Mary Museum, which held a number of bequests from Garry Barenboim, the strange old man who once owned the house that contained the stone statue. On a reconnaissance trip earlier that day, Sam learned that Barenboim had left the museum gold knives and forks, eighteenth-century hats, a mammoth tooth, a crystal goblet said to have belonged to the explorer Jacques Cartier, and an Aztec necklace — all things Sam suspected the man had gathered via time travel. He had also left five coins with holes in their centers, coins of just the right size.

  And that was how Sam came to be crouching in a dinosaur’s rear end at ten o’clock at night.

  When he was sure the guards couldn’t hear him, he left his hiding place and switched on his cell phone, finding his way by the screen’s bluish light. Velociraptor to the right, triceratops to the left: All he had to do was head straight toward the front desk, going as far as the local history hall. The coin case was at the far end of the room.

  Shrouded in darkness, the museum was as unnerving as a haunted house, with dozens of threatening shadows that seemed about to bite. Come on, Sam told himself, there’s nothing alive in here, just dusty old stuff.

  And yet…

  When Sam opened the door to the hallway, he thought he heard something like a key clinking against metal. He hid behind a statue of the sea god Neptune holding his pointed trident. Maybe one of the night watchmen had forgotten something. Going back was too risky, so Sam hunkered down, making himself as small as possible, and held his breath. There was a rustling noise on the floor, a flashlight beam in the next room, then nothing. Sam counted to a hundred before standing up. The coast was clear.

  Hugging the walls, he reached the local history hall without any problem. There the entire story of Sainte-Mary was told in large dioramas. Costumed mannequins illustrating the town’s different historical periods stood
between each display. As Sam walked toward a milkmaid emptying her pail, he saw a shadow moving about ten yards away, by the coin room. A dark shape was leaning over a display case and fiddling with something that made a slight squeaking. Sam slapped his cell phone against his thigh to hide the light, but it chose just that moment to ring — or rather to vibrate, because Sam had wisely switched off the guitar riff he used as a ringtone. Except that in the heavy silence of the local history room, it sounded as if one of the wax figures had switched on its electric razor!

  The shadow whirled around, the beam from its flashlight catching the milkmaids plump cheeks. Sam crouched behind her pail as best he could, but it was too late. The burglar — the other burglar! — was already rushing at him. The man raised his flashlight to hit Sam, who was just able to dodge the blow by rolling to the foot of a mannequin of Gordon Swift, Sainte-Mary’s first and most venerable mayor.

  Sam barely had time to stand up before the man was after him again, and a furious scuffle followed: He punched, Sam ducked, he tried to knee Sam, Sam twisted away, Sam kicked out, the man parried the blow easily. All this was done in total silence, so as not to alert the guards. The man was powerful and apparently trained in this kind of hand-to-hand combat. He looked like a professional thief in a skintight black tracksuit, and he had taken the precaution of wearing a hood and gloves to hide his face and hands.

  As Sam tried to grab him, he ripped the soft fabric of the burglar’s tracksuit. The jerky light of the flashlight revealed a strange tattoo on his shoulder: a kind of U with flared ends and a big circle between them. The man must not have liked having his clothes torn, because he began hitting harder. He even managed to slip his hands around Sam’s neck and gave a grunt of triumph as his thumbs started to crush his victim’s Adam’s apple.

  With a sudden hip thrust he’d learned in judo, Sam knocked the man off balance, and the two of them tumbled into the legs of His Excellency Mayor Swift, who promptly toppled backward with a crash of shattered glass. The museum alarm system started to howl and the hallway lights came on. The burglar scrambled to his feet, releasing Sam. Blinded and choking, Sam glimpsed the hooded figure pause briefly at the coin case before racing out the door beside it. Over the howling of the siren, he heard shouts.

  “He’s headed for the front desk! Hurry!”

  The guards raced past the local history room without stopping, and Sam forced himself to stand up. There might be a chance to turn the situation to his advantage. He rushed to the coin collection. The display case housing the Barenboim bequest was wide open, its lock forced, but he swore as he took in the situation. All the coins with holes in them had disappeared, except one that the thief in black must have missed. There were two burglars after the same treasure!

  “He’s going for the service entrance!” cried a night watchman.

  They’ll be coming back, Sam told himself. They’re sure to come back. They would search every nook and cranny of the museum, and the Baryonyx’s belly wouldn’t be much help to him. He had to leave now. But the only possible way out…

  Sam glanced down the hall. Empty. He pocketed the remaining coin, crouched down, and ran in the opposite direction from the fugitive, keeping his ears cocked. The alarm had fallen silent, and he could hear muffled voices. When he reached the front desk, he looked in every direction. The service entrance was over by the locker rooms. It opened onto a dark hallway, and he could feel a breeze: the exit!

  Outside, the guards were yelling, “Stop, thief! The museums been robbed!”

  As Sam felt his way down the hall, he bumped against a door handle on the right-hand wall and turned it. From the smell, it was a room where garbage cans were stored. He leaped inside, knocking over a broom cart, and yanked the door shut. His heart was pounding and the rest of his body felt as if a train had run over him.

  After a few minutes, the guards came back. They hadn’t been able to catch the man in black.

  I’ll… I’ll call the police,” gasped one, out of breath. “You try to see what he stole.”

  They walked down the hall without showing any interest in the brooms. Sam slipped silently out of his hiding place and quickly covered the last yards separating him from freedom. Fresh air! He ran down the steps, raced across a grassy rise, and sprinted to the corner without turning around. Taking streets at random, he didn’t stop running until he’d put several blocks between himself and the museum.

  It was only then that he realized he no longer had his cell phone.

  2 Bad News

  The next morning Sam pushed back his sheets and jumped out of bed — and immediately winced. His body was a mass of pain. Making his way slowly to the mirror, he saw that by luck his face had mostly been spared, except for a large bruise around his right eye. His alarm clock blinked 6:42, and he was tempted to go back to bed and rest.

  Under the circumstances, however, he felt his bruises hardly mattered. From experience and calculation, Sam had determined that time passed seven times faster in the past than in the present, so a day here was the equivalent of a week when he was time-traveling. His father had been imprisoned for the last twenty of Sam’s days, which meant he had spent almost five months languishing in some vermin-infested cell. Sam could imagine him frighteningly thin, huddled on a pile of sodden straw, licking water oozing down the walls or using his last strength to drive away hordes of hungry rats. How long could he hold out under those conditions?

  Sam energetically rubbed his eyes and went to his closet to inspect the box with the few things he hoped might help him reach his father. One was the Book of Time, a handsome old volume with a cracked red cover whose pages, which were all identical, revealed the time-location of the last time traveler to use the stone statue. The book had shown Sam that his father was in medieval Wallachia, a prisoner of the murderous tyrant Vlad Tepes. Next to the book was a small plastic bag containing three examples of coins with holes that made the stone statue operate. One of them was clearly very old, with a writhing black snake embossed on the metal. As his father had left it for him before he disappeared, Sam thought the coin might have come from Vlad Tepes’s time. The second was more recent and bore Arabic inscriptions. The third looked like a plastic poker chip with a hole. From under the bag, Sam took a sheet of paper with the text from an old book of spells he’d found during a “field trip” to Bruges, Belgium. The book had belonged to Klugg, an alchemist and all-around despicable human being. Its original text was in Latin, but his cousin Lily — with whom he was getting along better and better — had been good enough to translate it for him:

  HE WHO GATHERS THE SEVEN TOKENS WILL BE THE MASTER OF THE SUN. IF HE CAN MAKE THE SIX RAYS SHINE, ITS HEART WILL BE THE KEY TO TIME. HE WILL THEN KNOW THE IMMORTAL HEAT.

  The words didn’t mean much at first glance, but for Sam the text was full of promise. His biggest problem was his inability to control his leaps through time. The jumps could be fifty years ago or five thousand — anything was possible. How could he ever reach his father under those conditions?

  The Latin suggested that in order to get the key to time — and thereby choose the era you wanted to travel to — you had to get seven coins and arrange them properly on the stone statue, with the coin in the center of the carved sun indicating where you wanted to go, and the others placed in the six slits or rays that radiated out from it. Counting the coin Sam had picked up at the museum, he now had four.

  The final item in the box was a bound book of photographs that Lily had borrowed from the Sainte-Mary Library. It was about Bran, one of many castles Vlad Tepes had frequented, and an illustration in it had caught her eye. It showed graffiti crudely scratched onto one of the dungeon walls: HELP ME SAM. The books author had admitted to being perplexed. The photograph’s caption read: “This graffiti was uncovered during the restoration of the Bran dungeon. According to some analyses, it is several centuries old. The fact that it is written in English adds to the mystery: Had Vlad Tepes captured one of the King of England’s subjects during a mil
itary campaign? And who was this Sam the message was addressed to? Whatever the case, it provides further proof that it was not good to be a prisoner of the Prince of Wallachia.”

  When he thought about it, though, the graffiti actually made Sam feel hopeful. For some unknown reason, Vlad Tepes had decided not to execute his father immediately. Instead, he had sent him to cool his heels in one of his cells, which gave Sam some chance of finding Allan Faulkner alive. Moreover, if he had written those few words, it was because he saw Sam as the only person in the world able to get him out of there. He trusted his son, with a faith so exclusive and poignant that it put a huge responsibility on a fourteen-year-olds shoulders.

  In a way, their roles had suddenly reversed: It was up to the son to look after the father. And despite the infinite sweep of time that separated them, Sam renewed his promise to Allan every morning: He would save him, whatever the cost.

  Sam carefully returned his treasures to the back of his closet, then pulled on a shirt and some pants and went down to breakfast, moving slowly because of his bruises. He expected everyone to still be asleep, but Lily was already in the kitchen, hunched over a bowl of cereal.

  “Lily, you’re awake!”

  “Since five a.m.,” she whispered as she chewed. “I had a nightmare.” She caught sight of his face. “Sammy, what happened?”

  Sam grimaced. “I went to the museum last night to get the coins — only someone else got there first.”

  “You did? What? Who?”

  “Let me get some breakfast,” he said, pouring himself a big bowl of cornflakes. “What was your nightmare about?”

  “Stupid stuff…You know Nelson, Jennifer’s brother? I dreamed we were next to the swimming pool at their place, and he started to melt, like ice cream! First his feet got all soft, then his hands, and then his head started to drip. Jennifer was running around looking for ice cubes and yelling for her mom, but he kept on melting. In the end, all that was left was a little blue puddle, the color of his swimsuit. Stupid, isn’t it?”