The Gate of Days - Book of Time 2

by Guillaume Prevost

  Sam took a spoon and stirred the cool milk, watching as a white sea swamped the golden flakes.

  “Maybe not,” he answered teasingly. “Maybe you want him to melt for you!”

  Lily looked appalled. “Thanks a lot! Nelson is a total idiot! He can’t say a sentence longer than four words, and his bedroom is covered with gun posters. Can you see me in love with a guy who decorates his room with guns? Besides, he’s ugly.”

  Sam smiled slightly. He’d been very careful not to broach the delicate question of romance with his twelve-year-old cousin; he knew she’d let him have it. Besides, when it came to matters of the heart, his own record was pretty pathetic. The proof: For three long years he hadn’t found the courage to go knock on the door of Alicia Todds, the only girl he’d ever loved. And when he’d finally seen her two days earlier, she’d been on the arm of a tall, arrogant blond boy. Smooth move, Sam!

  “But if you were at the museum,” Lily continued, “I guess you had something to do with this?”

  She held out the Sainte-Mary Tribune. The headline on the front page proclaimed: “Strange Burglary at S-M Museum.” Sam took the paper and read it as he ate his cornflakes. The article didn’t tell him anything that he didn’t already know, and to his great relief it didn’t mention his cell phone. Maybe it had fallen in a dark corner during the fight, and no one had picked it up. “The question of a motive remains open,” concluded the reporter. “The thief or thieves went to a lot of trouble, but in the end all they took were a few coins of no great value.” “No great value for a Tribune reporter, maybe,” he grumbled. “Okay, Sammy, can I have your version now?” Lily said.

  But before Sam could answer, they heard footsteps in the hall. “Meet me at the bookstore at eleven,” he whispered just before Lily’s mother, Evelyn, burst through the kitchen door, wearing a blindingly electric purple bathrobe.

  “What did I tell you, Lily?” she screamed. “Am I talking Chinese or something? You’re forbidden to be with your cousin till I say otherwise! He stole your phone three days ago, he wanders around God knows where with God knows who, and he won’t give us the slightest explanation of any of it! Do you want to do the same?”

  “I’m not doing anything!” protested Lily. “I’m eating my breakfast!”

  “So why the whispers? What’s he trying to put over on you now? You heard Rudolf’s warning, didn’t you? Sam is on a slippery slope, and for all we know, he’s doing drugs! I’m warning you, Lily, if I have to be after you all the time, I’ll send you to Camp Deadlake so fast it’ll make your head spin!”

  Aunt Evelyn seemed to be obsessed with lockups and discipline. Sam knew Deadlake was a summer camp famed for the strictness of its counselors — the female equivalent of the boot camp Evelyn had threatened him with recently. Now she turned and looked at him for the first time. “What happened to you?” she shrieked. “Did you get in a fight?”

  “Evelyn, for heaven’s sake! What are you talking about?”

  Alerted by the shouting, Grandpa had hurried downstairs. His hair was sticking up every which way, and in his hurry, he’d buttoned his pajamas wrong — at sixes and sevens, as Grandma might say.

  “What do you mean, what am I talking about?” said Evelyn, even louder. “Look at Sam! He has a black eye — probably because some drug deal went wrong!”

  “Sammy, what happened?” Grandpa asked with real concern. “How did you get that shiner? Weren’t you going to spend the night at Harold’s?”

  Sam had indeed told his grandparents that he was going to spend the night at his friend Harold’s, even going so far as to have Harold agree to lie for him. He was sorry to drag Harold into it, but there was nothing else to be done.

  “We went to the skateboarding park to do some aerials, and I went up for this really difficult jump. And then” — Sam tried to look embarrassed — “I guess I landed on my face. After that, I decided I wanted to come home to my own bed.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Aunt Evelyn declared.

  Grandpa turned back to her with an exasperated expression. “And why not?”

  “They were whispering when I came in. This damned boy is trying to suck Lily into more of his dirty tricks! He does nothing but plot behind my back!”

  “Calm down, Evelyn,” Grandpa ordered. “They’re just children!”

  “That’s right, go on defending them! Just like Allan! You and Mom, you’ve always defended Allan! The poor little darling, right? He could do whatever he felt like! Come home at all hours, collect disgusting things, get bad grades — it didn’t matter! But me …”

  She heaved a sigh of rage.

  “Anyway, you see what indulging all his whims has led to: He’s vanished into thin air and left you to take care of his son! What you and Mom don’t seem to understand is that Sam is going down exactly the same road, and you just close your eyes to it!”

  Evelyn stormed our of the kitchen in a blur of purple sleeves, bumping past Grandpa as she headed for the hallway. Sam normally felt a pretty limited affection tor this irritable aunt, who seemed angry at the entire world except for Rudolf, her boyfriend of the moment. But this time she had really gone too far. If he had the power, he would cheerfully send her and her ludicrous bathrobe to the Bran Castle dungeons to take his father’s place. After all, maybe Dracula liked purple.

  3 Seven Coins

  Sam repressed a grimace as he pulled the bookstore curtains shut. Every time he lifted his arm, it felt as if a malevolent spirit were sinking an axe into his back. Luckily, his grandparents had believed his story about the skate park and had even offered to provide ice packs or heating pads for his bruises. But Sam had turned them down. Everything was fine now, he had said; everything was fine.

  As soon as he was able to get free, he ran over to his father’s antiquarian bookstore on Barenboim Street, more determined than ever to pursue his investigation. He especially wanted to discover the connection between last nights burglar, his mysterious tattoo, and the old coin he had overlooked. Sam took it from his pocket now. It was almost worn smooth, but you could make out a U with flared ends on either side of the central hole.

  Overall, it looked a lot like the tattoo on the man in blacks shoulder. A coincidence? Of course not.

  Sam had searched the Internet to find something matching the symbol, but hadn’t gotten a satisfactory answer because he wasn’t able to frame the question clearly. But the mark resembled a hieroglyph, so Sam suspected that ancient Egypt was the place to look. As it happened, Faulkner’s Antique Books was pretty well stocked in that area, so Sam planned to do a little browsing in the store, which he’d never bothered with before. As an extra advantage, he would be close to the stone statue for whatever might happen next.

  Once hidden from prying eyes by the curtains, Sam carefully examined the sections that the bookstore devoted to history. Three shelves were given over to Egypt, each with several thick dictionaries and art and history books. After some browsing, he found what he was looking for in a nineteenth-century Encyclopedia of the Pharaohs. The strange U with a circle appeared in a chapter called “The Egyptian Pantheon.” It was actually a pair of horns with a solar disk between them, and was an attribute of several gods and goddesses, among them Isis and Hathor, who wore a headdress resembling the symbol. The book didn’t give many more details, but it confirmed Sam’s hunch: ancient Egypt, the gods, the sun — all of these fit with the stone statue!

  As he put down the encyclopedia, Sam noticed a small volume with a black dust jacket that must have been shelved incorrectly. It was a novel by an author he knew well, and for good reason: William Faulkner, one of the greatest American writers of the previous century. Allan practically worshipped Faulkner and was sorry not to have a family connection with the man he called “one of the seven wonders of world literature.” The books title was appropriate: Intruder in the Dust. But how did this novel come to be in the history section?

  Sam opened the book at random and got a surprise. The dust jacket didn’t conta
in the Faulkner novel, but a small black notebook whose first pages had been torn out — at least fifty of them, to judge by the stubs still attached to the binding. His curiosity piqued, Sam inspected it more carefully. There were blank pages, more blank pages, and then a phone number. Sam thought for a moment and then went to the phone.

  A pleasant voice answered his call: “First Canadian Bank of Sainte-Mary.”

  “Oh — oh, yes,” Sam recovered, trying to make himself sound as adult as possible. “My name is Allan Faulkner, and I’m calling in regards to my account?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Faulkner,” the woman said. “What is your code word?”

  “Elisa,” Sam said, and spelled it out. It was his mothers first name, and a complete guess, but he heard keys clicking on the other end of the line.

  “Well, you know, sir, that you have a significant mortgage payment due to us on your house.”

  “A mortgage payment?” said Sam blankly.

  “Yes, Mr. Faulkner. The monthly repayment of your loan?” she said coldly. “Your payments are five months overdue. You have one more month. If you can’t pay us the full amount then, we’ll be forced to foreclose.”

  Sam sat stunned. From what he’d heard, foreclosure meant the bank would take over the house — and he couldn’t let them have the stone statue!

  “How much does my — how much do I owe?” he asked.

  The woman named a sum that Sam was sure was far beyond anything in his father’s bank account.

  “I’ll — I’ll take care of that as soon as possible,” he gasped and hung up the phone.

  Sam would need to talk to his grandparents. Though he knew his father had been borrowing money from them for some time, they must have no idea of the extent of Allan’s troubles — and he had no idea how they would cover this. But they had a whole month, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it right now.

  Sam pushed the matter firmly from his mind and went back to the little black notebook. There was nothing more written in it until the very last page, where Sam found a few words scribbled by his father, like a memo or a shopping list:

  And at the very bottom, underlined twice:

  BRAN

  Bran, Vlad Tepes’s castle! Where his father had gone! And quite deliberately, since he had taken the trouble to write his destination in the notebook!

  Feverish with excitement, Sam read and reread the few lines, struggling to guess their hidden meaning. His father loved puzzles — everything from trivia quizzes to Rubiks Cubes to Sudoku — and it was possible he had left this as a coded message for Sam, but it was equally possible the list was just the jottings from some obscure piece of research. Dates, exotic names, figures … Sam racked his brain but couldn’t come up with anything.

  “Good grief, Dad,” he cried in exasperation, “couldn’t you have been a little clearer for once?”

  “Talking to yourself?” asked a familiar voice behind him.

  Sam jumped. “Lily! What are you doing here?”

  “We had a date, didn’t we? It’s eleven o’clock, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Eleven o’clock, right! I was thinking and … Are you sure nobody followed you?”

  “I came in through the garden window, like you e-mailed me. Does this have to do with what happened at the museum?”

  They sat down on one of the sofas that were supposed to make the Faulkner bookstore’s clients — when by some miracle there were any — feel at home, and Sam described his adventures of the last eighteen hours in detail. His cousin listened carefully, nodding when he finished.

  “Do you know who it could have been?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I have an idea.”

  “An idea?”

  “Well, you remember what we found out about that archeology trip to Egypt twenty years ago, when my father found a stone statue in Setni’s tomb? There was another intern the same age as him who was also involved in the excavation. And from what I understand, just like my dad, this intern would sometimes disappear for a couple of days.”

  “So what?”

  “I’m convinced that the guy and my father discovered the stone statue together and they both used it.”

  “That was twenty years ago.”

  “Yes, except that when my father disappeared three weeks ago, someone left a weird message on the bookstore answering machine. It was a strange metallic voice, like it was disguised. It said something like Allan, can you hear me? Stop being a jerk, Allan, pick up!’ Then when nobody answered, All right, I’ve warned you.’ It was definitely threatening.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “This guy was looking for Dad, and I’ll bet he wasn’t trying to sell him life insurance. He seemed to know him pretty well.”

  “So you think it was this mystery intern from Egypt, and he’s coming back now?” Lily sounded skeptical.

  “It’s just a guess, but I don’t have any better ideas. The guy knows the whole story from the beginning, and he’s already used the statue. Don’t you think he could’ve gotten the bookstore address and tried to reach my father? Or heard about Barenboim and paid a visit to the Sainte-Mary Museum?” Sam paused. “Or worse, he could’ve spied on me.”

  “Spied on you?”

  “I’ve been coming here every day for almost two weeks. It would be easy to see me and follow me!”

  “Is that why you closed the curtains? And suggested I come in through the garden?”

  “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “But if somebody’s watching the bookstore, why meet here?” Sam smiled grimly. “Because I’ve decided to make another trip, of course.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding? I have to go, Lily, and I need your help.”

  “But I thought that without the seven coins you didn’t have any chance of finding your father! And you only have four, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, four counting the one from the museum. But think about the guy who used to live here, Barenboim. When he died, he left half a dozen coins to the city. And then there was the high priest Setni — I met his son Ahmosis in Egypt, remember?” Lily nodded. “When the archeologists searched around his sarcophagus at Thebes, they found coins made two or three thousand years after the tomb was sealed. How could medieval coins show up in an ancient tomb? Setni must have gotten those coins from different periods in time! And if I go traveling again, I’ll be able to get some too.”

  “Wait a minute!” said Lily. “You told me you needed a coin to come back. Suppose you can’t find one when you’re there? Think about it! How would you get back? Isn’t that what almost happened in Bruges?”

  “This time I’ll take care of that. I’ll put a spare coin in the statue’s cavity — the part that lets you transport objects. That way, no matter what happens, I’ll always have a coin with me and be able to come back. That is, if you keep the Book of Time safe and you concentrate a little, of course.”

  Lily nodded slowly. During Sam’s previous adventures, they had discovered that Lily could bring Sam back to the present if she happened to be thinking about him at the moment he touched the stone statue. She reached for the Book of Time in her cousin’s backpack and opened it at random. Each page displayed the same engraving of the walls and steeples of the city of Bruges in 1430 — the time to which Sam had ventured last. “But if you use your emergency coin there, you’ll lose it, won’t you?”

  “Yes, but if I just keep sitting around here, my father will die sooner or later. I need those seven coins, no matter what.”

  “All right,” Lily said. “Go get your things and we’ll meet in the basement.”

  Sam went upstairs to change. When he joined his cousin a few minutes later, he was wearing a shapeless cream-colored linen shirt and pants. It wasn’t a very fashionable outfit, but unlike modern fabrics, the ancient material let Sam travel through time without losing his clothes.

  Lily had already entered the secret basement storeroom that Al
lan Faulkner had created to hide the stone statue. She was perched on a yellow stool next to the cot, the only cheerful bit of color in the gloomy room, which was lit by an old-fashioned night-light.

  “If Alicia Todds sees you in your new pajamas,” she said, laughing, “she’ll never look at you again!”

  “Go ahead, laugh! Here, I’m leaving you these two coins.” He handed her the plastic chip and the coin with the black snake. “When I’m gone, you’ll find a third one next to the statue. Put all three in a safe place with the book and the notebook until I come back .”

  “Don’t worry, I’m starting to get used to this,” Lily said reassuringly. “But you’ve got to promise to be careful, okay? Avoid battlefields and crazy alchemists, especially. It wont do your father any good to have you stuck in the past.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” said Sam firmly. “First Viking I see, I’ll run as fast as I can.”

  He was overdoing the self-confidence a bit, but there was no point in worrying his cousin.

  “Well, when its time to go …” he said to buck himself up. He walked over to the statue, which was in the darkest part of the room. He could just barely make it out in the dim light, a vaguely oval stone about twenty inches high, completely ordinary-looking. As he knelt beside it, Sam felt a complicated mix of apprehension and eagerness, with the second overcoming the first. He also noticed that the two coins in his palm were getting warmer, as if heated by some invisible current. The process was beginning.

  He decided to put the museum coin in the transport cavity and the one with Arabic writing in the center of the sun. It snapped into place perfectly, with a faint click: The stone must have some sort of powerful magnet built into it. A dull humming rose from the center of the statue, and the basement floor vibrated slightly. Sam turned toward Lily, but his eyes were already veiled with a kind of fog, and he could make out only her shape. He put his hand on top of the stone, and a wave of fire shot up his arm into his whole body.