The Gate of Days - Book of Time 2

by Guillaume Prevost

  This burning cloud came out of the mountain, and they were all mummified by the ash. People were found centuries later in the exact position they were in at the moment they died!” “You have any other good news?”

  “We have to get out of here, Sammy, and fast!”

  Sam quickly scanned the interior of the warm room. It had some high windows, but he couldn’t reach them, even standing on Diomedes’s shoulders. Nor was there much else of use: amphoras of oil, scrapers for bathers’ skin, two discarded towels, a poker to stir the fire, and a few oil lamps burning by the pool. Colored frescoes illustrating the pleasures of the baths decorated the walls, but there was no emergency exit to be seen.

  “A plague on that Corvus,” raged Diomedes, turning toward them. “May his teeth fall out into his mouth and choke him! My daughter is too weak to walk, and my wife will never be able to carry her. And it’s all his fault!”

  “Did he hurt your daughter?” asked Lily.

  “He made her go up on a balcony to hang flowers, and she fell. She was much too young for the job! Since then, her legs won’t hold her anymore. And if what you say is true, if the mountain is spitting fire …” He took Lily’s hands in his and squatted down to her level. “You’re almost the same age as my daughter, yet you seem so sure of yourself Do you really think we’re going to die?”

  “Well, there’s always hope, isn’t there?” Lily murmured, gently freeing herself. “But Vesuvius seems to have come to life, and —”

  A brutal tremor rocked the walls then, and the floor heaved. The three prisoners staggered for a moment as the building groaned. A frightening creaking could be heard outside, as if the structure next door had fallen.

  “What was that?” asked Lily.

  “It came from the south corner,” said Diomedes. “I hope the big water tower didn’t collapse.”

  “Is there a way to get out of here?” Sam asked insistently.

  “Besides this door, no. Unless …” The furnace stoker stepped back a few feet and pointed at the floor. “Look, the tiles cracked. With a little bit of luck … Bring me that poker, quick!”

  Sam ran to get the iron rod near the fire. “You have an idea?”

  “If we re able to widen this crack …”

  He broke a few more tiles, then began enlarging the crack with the point of the poker. Outside, the shower of pumice stones fell heavier than ever. The light was fading, as if night were coming on.

  “Grab the scrapers,” said Diomedes, “and help me!”

  Sam and Lily went to work with a will, scratching at the grainy cement that formed the room’s foundation.

  “Are you planning to dig a tunnel out?” asked Sam after a quarter hour of silent effort.

  “You’re close! The tepidarium and caldarium are raised above ground level. They rest on little columns, and hot air from the furnace circulates between them. That’s how the rooms are kept at the right temperature. If we can get into the space between those columns … There! We’ve reached the brick layer. We’re almost through!”

  He made them stand back, gave a couple of mighty whacks with the poker, and broke through the final layer. Warm steam that smelled of dirt rose through the opening and made them cough.

  “Isn’t it dangerous down there?”

  “The fire in the furnace is out. You two won’t be in much danger.”

  “We two?”

  “Yes, you. You’re thin, and you should be able to squeeze through. I’m too big, and I’d get stuck. Come on, the hole isn’t nearly big enough. Let’s get to work!”

  It took them another ten minutes to widen the crack enough for Sam and Lily to have a chance of squeezing into it.

  “I’ll give you a lamp,” said Diomedes. “Get down there now! Hurry!”

  “What about you, Diomedes?” Lily protested. “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. They’re sure to let me out sooner or later.” He tried to smile, but Lily and Sam weren’t fooled. Corvus had no intention of freeing him.

  “Get going!” he encouraged them. “If you follow the wall on the left toward the door, you’ll reach a cleaning hatch. It has a wooden cover over it — a good kick should do the trick. And if… if you happen to meet my wife and my daughter, tell them I love them.”

  “I’m … I’m sure they love you too,” stammered Sam, touched by his sacrifice.

  After a final good-bye, Sam stretched out next to the hole, slid his arms, head, and chest into it, and almost immediately felt hard earth under his fingernails. If he kept his head low, he could just move ahead on his elbows and knees.

  “Samus, the lamp!” Diomedes handed the oil lamp down into the hole. Sam nearly knocked it over when he reached for it.

  “Your turn, girl! Don’t be afraid, it wont take long. Just follow the left-hand wall!”

  Sam squeezed down as best he could to make room for Lily. They ignored the shards of brick and cement tearing at their skin as they slowly inched forward.

  “You okay?” whispered Sam.

  “Yeah, except for the heat and the dark,” said Lily.

  “Its like a snail race inside a radiator!”

  After a laborious progression, they finally spotted the little cleaning hatch. Sam turned his body around — bruising both his shoulder and his hip in the process — so his feet rested against the hatch cover. Hunching down even farther to get momentum, he kicked at it with his heels. Something on the other side yielded and the hatch swung open with a bang.

  “Good job, Sam!”

  He let his cousin have the honor of getting out first, then she helped him up.

  “Whew! Feels a lot better here!”

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sam, lifting his lamp. “But this hallway must lead somewhere.”

  They stumbled on a door to a narrow staircase that led outside.

  “Look at that stuff falling! Its incredible!”

  A veritable rain of gray stones was falling on the baths, making a dense layer some four to six inches thick on the ground. The dark plume from Vesuvius now covered the city, so it looked like the middle of winter. Rumbling and occasional flashes of glowing orange light came from the volcano. The sound of shouts reached Sam and Lily from the distance, including Corvus’s dulcet tones: “Faster! Lazy bunch of…”

  “The trick is not to be spotted,” muttered Sam. “Hide your face if you can!”

  At the top of the stairs they stepped out into the palaestra near the portico. There wasn’t much chance of Corvus noticing them; he was busy at the other end of the field, yelling at his men to clean the outdoor swimming pool. In the half-light, it wouldn’t be hard to get to the stone statue. And maybe even …

  “Wait, this way!” said Sam as he grabbed Lily and dragged her back toward the women’s baths.

  “What are you —”

  “Diomedes!”

  They crossed the empty vestibule and ran toward the tepi-darium, whose door now rang with the slave’s pounding.

  “Let me out! Let me out!”

  “Diomedes, we’re here!”

  “Samus, you did it!”

  Sam shoved at the door with all his might, but it barely budged: The hinges and bolt were too strong. He took three steps back and launched himself against it even harder, but the only resulting crack came from his shoulder.

  “Sammy, stop!”

  Lily was pointing at something on the opposite wall: a key hanging from a large nail. Here was the history of the world, summed up in the blink of an eye: Men use their muscles, women use their brains!

  Sam grabbed the key and turned it in the lock. Soon they were all hugging each other.

  “Thank you, children, thank you! As soon as I get my wife and my daughter, I’ll take you to safety!”

  “That’s impossible. We have to get something over by the old waterwheel. We’ll join you later.”

  “The old waterwheel? I wouldn’t go there if I were you. That’s the weakest part of t
he complex, and with all these tremors …”

  “We know what we have to do,” said Lily. “Go on, and don’t bother about us. Your wife and your daughter must be very worried.”

  Diomedes seemed about to object, but chose instead to hug them one last time. “Thank you again. And good luck!”

  They parted under the portico, and Sam handed Lily one of the towels he had picked up in the tepidarium. “Put this on your head, it’ll protect you from the stones.”

  They hugged the walls, praying that some huge block of pumice wouldn’t come crashing down and flatten them. The palaestra now looked like a pebble beach. Over by the pool, Corvus was still barking at his servants, but their ranks had thinned considerably. The air smelled unpleasantly of something like natural gas or chemicals, and Lily began to cough. “Sulfur,” she spat. “We have to hurry!”

  “It isn’t very far now!”

  But an unpleasant surprise awaited them. The building in whose cellar they’d appeared that morning was now half collapsed, with the great wooden wheel partly buried, sunk in bricks and debris. Water had flooded everything, including the stairway leading underground. The place looked as if a paddle wheel steamboat had smashed into the north wing of the baths. “The water tank must have burst,” Sam groaned.

  He got as close as he could to the rubble, a soupy mass of debris and pumice. The stone statue was somewhere down below all that, ten or twelve feet under water.

  “We don’t have any choice,” he said. “I’m going down.”

  He walked over to a beam that was still upright, held on to the buckets of the wheel, and slowly let himself sink.

  “Be careful,” said Lily. “It doesn’t look very sturdy.”

  Taking a deep breath, Sam lowered himself into the cold, dark water until he reached the debris covering the bottom. He groped his way toward where he thought the stone should be, but soon ran into a tangle of planks. He was able to move only a couple aside before he had to go back up for air. It took several round-trips before Sam was able to reach the stone statue itself, and when he touched it, his heart sank: The top of the stone was broken off and jagged, probably shattered by a falling beam.

  “Well?” asked Lily when he surfaced again.

  She had taken shelter behind what was left of the overhang, and was using one hand to filter the increasingly noxious vapors. The rain of pumice stones had eased, but the smoke plume now displayed worrisome purple streaks.

  “The stone’s damaged, Lily. The whole top is gone.”

  “The whole top? The sun too?”

  “No, the sun’s intact, except maybe for a ray or two.”

  “Do you think it’ll still work?”

  “It has to work! Hurry!”

  As his cousin joined him in the water, Sam took the museum coin from the corner of his pocket. Would the stone really work underwater, especially with part of it gone? Sam didn’t have the slightest idea, but he didn’t intend to end up mummified in Pompeii, a morbid attraction for twenty-first-century tourists.

  “Hold my hand and don’t let go. It’s not very deep. You just have to take a big breath. Ready?”

  Lily filled her lungs and nodded. Sam put the coin in his mouth. Together they dove and reached the bottom without difficulty. But once they had gone under the wheel, the water began to bubble furiously, and the planks that Sam had shoved aside began to tumble onto them. The earth was shaking again, and now their retreat was cut off!

  In the dark, with the water churning all around, Lily started to panic. Sam had to grab her as he fumbled along the wall for the stone statue. When his fingers found its jagged top, he located the sun and clapped the coin onto it. Lily was now struggling to get free — a small, frightened animal desperate for light and air. But that wasn’t an option anymore.

  Sam tightened his grip on her and put his hand on the rough stone surface. He was beginning to run out of breath too, especially because Lily was kicking him in the stomach, but he had to hold on. After what seemed like forever — yellow butterflies were starting to dance in front of his eyes t— something under his hand finally began to stir. Was it the stone or a last, deadly tremor?

  12 Bulldozer

  The whole world was shaking and full of incredible noise: Ka-blam! Ka-blam! Sam staggered to his feet, spitting out the dust that filled his mouth. Instead of water, he and Lily were submerged in a cloud of flying dirt that was only slightly easier to breathe.

  “Lily?”

  Sam’s eyes stung, and he was having trouble keeping them open. It was almost completely dark, anyway.

  “Lily?”

  Ka-blam! Ka-blam! Were they still in Pompeii? Had they fallen into an air pocket somewhere while ashes blanketed the city above them?

  “Here, Sammy,” answered a faint, choked voice. “I’m over here.”

  “You’re speaking English, Lily. Maybe —”

  Ka-blam! Ka-blam!

  “Are we in our basement?” Lily asked as she groped her way over to him. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, everything’s shaking. Let’s try and get out of here.”

  They heard something like the roar of an engine, and a section of ceiling came crashing down a few yards away.

  “Excava —” Lily began.

  Light streamed down through the opening, revealing iron steps leading upward on their left. The stairs ended a few feet from the ground. Sam lifted his cousin so she could climb out before the rest of the ceiling collapsed. Rrrrmmm! Ka-blam! Ka-blam!

  Once upstairs, they hurried through a darkened room and emerged blinking in the open air. Around them were sections of ruined wall, a dangling broken window frame, smashed tiles, and —

  “Look out!”

  A mass of gleaming blue metal hurtled toward them. Rrrrmmmm! Ka-blam! Ka-blam/ They threw themselves to one side as the blue monster jerked to a stop a yard away. It was a Caterpillar tractor with a huge metal blade in front.

  “Good God almighty!” A man in a cap with a cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth leaped down from the cab. “Good lord, kids! Where the heck do you think you are? This is a construction site! I could’ve crushed you!”

  A couple of workers ran over to see what was happening.

  “What’s up, Ron?” shouted one. “Did you hit something?”

  “It’s these two kids, Jed. They just popped up in front of me. It was a near thing, I swear!”

  Lily straightened up, brushed off her filthy, bloodstained tunic, and fixed her hair, as if she’d just stepped out of the bathroom. The man called Jed looked at the intruders with annoyance.

  “This place is off-limits!” he shouted. “Didn’t you see the signs? You’re gonna get fined for this!”

  Sam looked around. They were in an empty lot surrounded by fences and barbed wire. Old-fashioned earth-moving machines stood amid demolished houses and huge mounds of rubble. Beyond them rose dilapidated gray buildings, not the familiar hills of Sainte-Mary. They obviously weren’t back on Barenboim Street! Yet there was a stone statue in the basement of the house, and these construction workers were about to destroy it.

  “This belongs to us,” said Sam angrily. “You don’t have the right to tear it down!”

  “We have every right, kid,” answered Jed. “City permits and everything. If you lived here and your parents had to get out, that’s not my fault. This is the Depression! So fork over the five-dollar fine or I’m handing you to the cops.”

  Five dollars, thought Sam, but what kind of dollars? Canadian dollars, American dollars, Australian dollars?

  The bulldozer operator spoke up. “Don’t be too hard on ’em, Jed. They’re just kids. And you see what kind of shape they’re in?”

  “Listen, Ron, if hoboes start campin’ in the work site, we’ll be the ones that get fired, believe you me. That what you want?”

  “Yeah, but we’ve got kids, right? What if it was them coming out of that hole?”

  Jed shrugged. He didn’t seem like a bad guy, just a foreman anxi
ous to finish a job on time and avoid trouble. “Okay, Ron, but get them the heck out of here. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “You can’t tear down that house!” protested Sam. “Its very valuable! There’s something unique inside and …”

  Ron grabbed Sam by the arm and yanked him close. “You listen to what we just told you, or you’ll be hauled in for vagrancy on top of the fine. Your house is busted, can’t ya see? Go try your luck somewheres else. You got your whole life ahead of you!”

  Sam tried to resist, but the workmen were now in a hurry. They collared the children, frog-marched them to the exit, and sent them on their way. Jed kicked Sam in the rear for good measure.

  “And if I catch you hangin’ around here, I’m callin’ the cops!”

  Sam and Lily pretended to leave, but then they circled back to the fence, trying to find a way over it. Through a crack between two boards, they watched the bulldozer finish knocking down the remaining walls of the house, burying the stone under tons of debris.

  “How are we ever going to get home?” asked Lily.

  “I don’t know,” said Sam, a lump in his throat. “There must be some way.” He swallowed. “It’s not like we have any coins left anyway.”

  That realization made him feel worse than ever. Not only had he brought Lily with him into Time and nearly gotten her killed in three different eras, he now had no means of getting her home. They sat down on the ground, their backs against the fence, and he put his arm around his cousin. When he did, he realized that she was trembling despite the warm weather.

  “Aren’t you feeling well, Lily?” He rubbed her back and tickled her to cheer her up, but all he got was a weak smile.

  “I’m scared, Sam.”

  He couldn’t show her his own fear. “We’ll pull through, Lily. We’ve always pulled through, haven’t we? Look at the cave — the skull-and-furs trick was pure genius! And you were wonderful in Pompeii too, holding out underwater. You’re a great time traveler and we’re a terrific team, so we can’t get discouraged now, okay? We’ll find a way to get back home, I promise. First we’ve got to find some decent clothes. Then we’ll wait for night and come back here, in case some piece of the statue survived. All right?”