The Black Dragon

by Julian Sedgwick

  There’s an apple core half chewed amongst the clutter, browning in the fetid air.

  “Someone was here earlier today. Not long ago,” he says, shuffling on down through the papers, fingers working as quickly as they can. Must be something more there to show that their journey has not been a wild chase to nothing. A new clue to follow—

  His hands go still as soon as he sees the image, and he takes in a sharp breath. He grabs the crackling sheet of fax paper and holds it to the light. On it—grainy but reproduced clearly enough—is a very familiar face: his own. It’s the school photo from Ballstone. The one they took in the first week when he felt all at sea. His startled eyes popped wide in the photographer’s flashbulb. The mouth forcing a smile, but the whole face clouded with anxiety. Easy to read, he thinks. I look as though I’m frozen with fear. His hand is shaking less now, but still it sets the thermal paper whispering in the silence.

  “Come and look at this, Major.”

  Zamora has been keeping watch by the half-open door. He swears when he sees the photo.

  “They’ve got a picture of me!” Danny says. But it’s no surprise now. Just confirmation of the chain of events steadily winding around him, snaring him tighter and tighter. Everything and everyone pulling him in toward this moment.

  “What do they want with me?!” It’s more indignation than inquiry. He slaps the fax back on the desk.

  Zamora furrows his brow.

  “Let’s not rush to conclusions, OK?”

  Danny looks back at Zamora.

  “It’s me they’re after,” he says calmly. “You guessed as much, didn’t you? Some time ago? I knew there was something you weren’t telling me.”

  “Mister Danny. It was only a feeling. And I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “Claro! I know that, my friend.” Zamora pats him on the back. “I know that.”

  “Let’s search every inch of this place. And then get out of here.”

  At the back of the room a door stands agape. A black rectangle leading into deeper darkness beyond.

  There’s a flashlight hanging from a nail on the wall, a big chart pinned to the flaking plasterboard, wreathed in shadow. Danny flicks the flashlight’s switch and, in its hesitant yellow beam, picks across the now familiar shapes. There’s Kowloon, Hong Kong Island and the Peak, Cheung Chau. From this end of the island, presumably from the pier outside, red lines snake away across the South China Sea.

  He follows a couple. They run out past Lantau and Lamma to other islands not far from Hong Kong.

  Another track loops away into the emptier quarters of the map. Danny traces it with the torch as it curls toward a cluster of islands much farther out into the blankness of the sea. When it reaches the Wanshan Archipelago it starts zipping from one little island to another.

  A black cross has been penciled against a couple of islands that stand apart from the rest. There’s no charter service joining them to the others.

  “X marks the spot?” Zamora says. “There’s no sign of Miss Laura here. Maybe that’s where we have to look.”

  Danny nods, then peers into the second doorway. “Let’s check the rest of the sheds, and then get back and find Ricard. Tell him what we’ve got.”

  “And try and find Miss Sing Sing too.”

  The flashlight flickers uncertainly. Danny bangs the end of it on the doorframe, coaxing a bit more juice from the faltering batteries. In its feeble beam, the second room gives up a jumble of fishing nets, buoys, chairs, plastic crates, all covered with a thick rime of dust and mildew. The air is heavier still.

  There’s a path cleared through the junk, and on the objects lying close to it, you can see where fingers and hands have brushed against the grime. Danny lights the pathway with the flashlight. Two long, jagged trails scuffed on the ground. Parallel lines as if something’s been dragged in—or out. Zamora nods.

  Halfway across the room there’s a hand lying on the floor. A dull blood-red. For a moment Danny thinks all his worst fears have been realized—but coming closer he sees it’s just a rubber work glove, deflated and forgotten.

  Holding my breath, Danny thinks. Need to breathe. Next shed either gives us Laura or the Dragon . . . or failure. But if Laura’s there, surely she would have called out? If she CAN call out.

  The door at the back of the second room is shut fast. Three heavy bolts are slid across it on their side—the whole thing reinforced with metal shuttering. A cell. They listen at the door, but hear nothing save the blood chugging in their ears, the sea’s steady voice outside. A tiny window shows nothing but their own reflections, and when Danny tries to shine the flashlight through it, the faltering glow just bounces back off dirty glass.

  They slide back the bolts—greased and smooth in their channels—and push the door open, the hair riffling up on the back of Danny’s neck. It’s all coming down to this door, this moment. So let’s confront it.

  The air inside smells worse yet—something he can’t place, but which arouses a kind of animal instinct deep down, to be cautious, to keep clear. But, on top of that, there’s a telltale note, which Danny recognizes as soon as it hits his nose.

  Laura’s perfume.

  He’s never been so glad to smell it. It’s as if she’s standing there, just out of the flashlight’s reach . . . He almost expects to hear her voice call out to him.

  “Laura?” He flicks the beam around in a circle.

  But the flashlight just shows bare walls, an empty room with a barred window that leads onto the blackened hillside behind.

  “She was here, Major,” Danny says, excitement and disappointment mixing in his voice. “She was here.”

  He scans the wall for any sign of a message or further clues. Laura would let me know, she’d leave me a sign like before . . .

  But there’s nothing.

  The flashlight stutters out. He bangs it again frantically, and—as he does so—it gives one last burst of light, shining on the bare concrete floor.

  And there in its beam is the body of Charlie Chow.

  He’s lying in the dust, arms and legs bound with wire, head turned at an unnatural angle. Congealing blood soaks his shirt and there’s a horrible mess of a gunshot wound to the side of his skull. His eyes are open in surprise, but glazed and empty. He can see nothing now.

  “Major!” Danny gasps, his knees sagging under him. “Major!”

  A noise behind him, a kind of snuffled sigh. He spins around, flailing the light to see what’s there. But then the battery dies and the beam gutters out, darkness enfolding him.

  A shadow flits through the door. Someone behind him.

  “Major?”

  No. There, to the right.

  “Major . . .?”

  And then his head feels very wrong.

  There’s no pain, just a heaviness—and it feels like he’s falling again: in the laundry chute, down the hillside, somewhere far away.

  I’ve messed up, he thinks. Got it all wrong at the vital moment and let everyone down again. Maybe I should ask Dad. No, that’s wrong. My fault . . .

  He hears Sing Sing’s voice in his head. “Used to call it Death Island.” And then, “Pleased to meet you, Danny Wooooooo . . .”

  He gropes for understanding—his mind trying to summon images, thoughts, struggling to keep consciousness. But it’s all muddling together: he sees the golden Buddha serene in his darkened temple, skyscrapers and trams and battered taxis, tumbling cards, the blitz of the firecrackers on the stairs, multi-hued fish—now in an aquarium, now swimming around his father’s head in the water torture cell.

  He sees white sheets falling like distressed ghosts, then a keyboard, each key bearing the seven by seven dotted pattern, and the dots merge into squiggles and shapes inked on the pages of his father’s secret notebook, which turn into flapping crows. And then there are Mum and Dad moving toward each other on the highwire across the deep blue of the Mysterium hemisphere, and the snow is falling hea
vily from its ceiling, drifting thickly across his vision and . . .

  . . . and that red fish on the restaurant floor, and the lipstick gouge, and the red glove bleeding on the shed floor . . .

  . . . and he’s on the floor of a deserted shed on a small island thousands of miles from home and everything has gone utterly . . .

  . . . BLACK.

  31

  HOW TO PUT YOUR CARDS ON THE TABLE

  Pugga pugga pugga . . .

  An engine is rocking Danny slowly awake.

  This one is solid, steady, in no rush. It fills his ears, slowly drowning the sounds of his fathomless sleep.

  His head feels heavy and it throbs in time with the engine.

  But he’s not quite ready to surface yet. His memory is spooling, looping . . .

  . . . pulling him back to that last week in the Mysterium. There was already a tumble of emotions pulling at him then. Things he’s tried to forget. A bad atmosphere around the encampment all that week. The cold weather blowing in and tightening muscles, hardening faces against the wind and snow. Mum and Dad arguing again, sharply, on the trailer steps, for all to hear.

  Mum snapping, “It’s going to catch up with you, Harry.”

  And Dad, his voice ragged, “Lily. We all have our pasts to deal with! You should know that!”

  And she slammed the door on him.

  When he had nagged Dad again about having a look through the Escape Book, he had picked the wrong moment and been told so in no uncertain terms. Very unusual in itself—and it sent him to bed upset, confused, a sense of injustice nagging away. A feeling that the world was out of balance, and that they were poised above a great drop.

  Later, he saw the two of them sitting at the big table, silhouetted against the brightly lit big top, holding hands quietly. Reconnecting, repairing. The bulbs over the entrance to the tent still pulsing out WONDER CHAMBER into the lengthening night.

  That was good. But why would nobody tell him what the trouble was? It was as if he was incidental to the story developing around him—whatever that story was—and surely he was a part of it, even if no one would explain what was going on.

  The next night Danny put his plan into action. In the dead hours, long after midnight, he dressed quickly, grabbed his pocket torch, sprang the Escape Book from its hidden recess in the cupboard, and stole out into the night.

  On the far side of the encampment was the prop store. Always a favorite hideaway for Danny, sitting up amidst the stacked flight cases and trunks, making a comfortable den from the crashmats, surrounded by walking globes, silks and coiled ropes, cyr wheels, and the rest of the Mysterium’s paraphernalia. Blanco’s scruffy dog, Herzog, would often come and find him there and snuggle next to him, snoring rhythmically, reassuring him. The hum of the generators nearby masking any other sounds.

  But that night it was hard to get comfortable in the cold. And no sign of Herzog to keep him company. He was trying to keep warm and focus on the pages of code near the back of the Escape Book—hoping to gain some kind of enlightenment but unable to make head or tail of the squiggles there—when Rosa came bowling in, switching on the light, startling him.

  She raised her eyebrows in two peaked arches, just like she always did when introducing the next act of the Wonder Chamber show.

  “Ciao, Danny. What are you doing here?”

  “Just having a rest.”

  “Does your papa know where you are?” She turned and hurriedly put whatever it was she was carrying to the back of the store, out of sight.

  “Yes.”

  “I bet.” She looked him in the eye. “Tell you what—I’ve got some ribollita stew on the stove. How about some to warm you up, bello? Then I’ll take you back over to Harry and Lily.” An offer too good to refuse—he was addicted to Rosa’s Italian home cooking. He followed her back to her trailer, watching the tattooed roses on her calves peeping over her boot-tops, incongruous against the snow.

  He was halfway through the warming, satisfying soup, ladling up beans and carrot, when the alarm was raised.

  Fire! Fire!

  They both jumped from Rosa’s trailer, feet crunching the frozen ground, racing toward the flames curling upward in ragged question marks, discharging into the sky. Herzog came bounding over, barking furiously. And some of the Klowns following him. And Blanco too. And then Zamora and more of the company—until all of them were gathered together, staring in horror.

  The trailer burning fiercely. Fresh snow falling through the long February night, the flakes sizzling, evaporating.

  And eventually fire hoses dousing the pillar of flame.

  But too late.

  He was too late . . .

  Danny swims up to consciousness—to brightness—from out of the depths.

  Figures blur in his eyes. The engine chugging away . . .

  He blinks hard and takes a deep breath, realizing that he is alive, that the flurry of images that came with the blow to the head wasn’t his life flashing before his eyes . . .

  Where am I? Not the Mysterium. That was all memory. Dimly, he’s aware that what he’s just recalled is the most sustained burst of memory about the night of the fire he’s ever had. Things are loosening in his mind.

  “Danny? Mister Danny?” Zamora is bending over him. His powerful short figure rising and falling, rising and falling.

  A quick burst of Cantonese cuts across the engine, the slap of waves.

  “Back off,” Zamora snaps. “I just want to see if he’s OK. Make sure you haven’t done any permanent damage, knucklehead.”

  “I’m OK,” Danny says slowly. He sits up, looking around, letting his focus sharpen.

  They’re in a small fishing boat, under a dirty brown awning, the sea surrounding them on every side, brimful of light, dazzling.

  The ever-present stench of fish comes from a tangle of nets near them. Zamora is sitting next to him, his wrists bound with yards of gaffer tape, his face expectant, eyes bright with emotion.

  Danny looks up. Jug Ears sits there, leaning against the side of the boat, keeping Zamora covered with a pistol.

  “Old Ugly there thumped you with that fist of his,” Zamora says. “Seems Miss Sing Sing didn’t lay him out for long. Blast it, Mister Danny, I’m glad to see you open your eyes.”

  “Where are we?”

  “All at sea. No idea.”

  “How long have we been going?”

  “Hours and hours. And we were hours in that stinking shed before that. Couple of old friends with us.”

  “Shut your mouth!” Jug Ears gets up, levelling the pistol at Zamora’s head.

  “You shut yours,” Zamora says. “If you were going to kill us you’d have done it by now.” He turns to Danny again. “Old Ugly Chops and his pals crept up on us, Danny. At the warehouse. I’m sorry. I was trying to keep watch.”

  “That was Chow, wasn’t it? The body in the shed, I mean.”

  “Yes. Sorry to say it was. But they obviously want us alive—for some reason.”

  That fires Danny’s heart. A flicker of strength kindling again. So the Sai Wan Pier wasn’t the moment of destiny after all. Just another step along the way. But it’s coming now, for sure. Man, he thinks, does my head hurt, though. He goes to reach up to feel it and realizes that his hands are bound too. He glares at Jug Ears.

  “Where’s Sing Sing?”

  The man ignores him, just rolls the lollipop along between his teeth.

  “Where’s my aunt? Where are we going?”

  No answer but a shrug of the muscular shoulders.

  Danny assesses the situation. There are other men sitting on the deck forward. Ponytail among them. All have pistols tucked in their belts. No idea where they are even if—somehow—they manage to free themselves and overpower their captors. Ponytail catches his eye for a moment, then looks away quickly. Was that a moment of connection of sorts?

  “We’re in hot mustard, don’t you think?” Zamora says, following Danny’s gaze.

  “Very hot, Major.
” But we’re not beaten yet, he adds to himself.

  The boat rides the waves, trying to lull Danny back into a concussed sleep. He fights it each time. Need to keep clear about where we are, what the situation is . . . He thinks of the Mysterium logo, the fragile butterflies fluttering around the bleached skull. Black eye sockets. He thinks of his own skull on the seabed—Laura’s, Zamora’s. Sing Sing’s too maybe? If we keep sharp maybe we can still get through this.

  The sun climbs higher, casting strong shadow under the awning, and the engine keeps chugging away, moving them out across the South China Sea at what feels like the pace of an exhausted snail.

  He feels thirsty and looks around to see if there’s anything to drink.

  Zamora is wriggling beside him. “Can’t get enough play in this tape to break free.”

  “Not sure that’s a good strategy anyway, Major. Maybe they’re just adding us to their kidnapping plans.”

  “Caramba,” the major sighs. “I’m just not sure that’s their game anymore.”

  “But they’re ransoming Laura.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Zamora sits back hard against the side of the fishing boat.

  “But what?”

  “Cards on the table, Mister Danny?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, it’s just this blasted business of the explosion at your school. Laura was really upset about it. I mean, really upset. She phoned me that night. The thing is, she wasn’t convinced it was a gas leak, Danny. She thinks it was a bomb. That it was aimed at you.”

  At last the truth is coming out! At last he can place some of the pieces.

  “Which is why they had my photo, why the forty-nine dots were there—”

  “And why she was so keen to bring you here. Have me ride shotgun. But it hasn’t really worked out, has it? Out of the frying pan and all that.”

  “What about Ricard? The photo on his desk. This is all coming back to Mum and Dad, isn’t it? Not just me. Something they did. Something in their past.”

  “To be honest, I don’t know for sure.”

  “But you think so?”

  “Maybe. Your papa had more than one string to his bow, you know. Think about all the time he spent away from the Mysterium . . .”