The Gate of Days - Book of Time 2

by Guillaume Prevost

  The tone was sarcastic, almost sadistic. Sam couldn’t see beyond the bottom few steps, but he knew right away that they’d come at a bad time.

  “Lookit what happened ta Wilson,” said another voice, sounding hoarse from years of cigarettes and alcohol. “You know Wilson, the newspaper seller on Milwaukee Avenue, doncha? Whaddya think happens ta him? A fire! Everything goes up in smoke —pfft! You shoulda seen him, luggin’ buckets a’ water, yelpin’ about freedom of the press! But freedom’s got a price, don’t it, Faulkner?”

  “You won’t get a red cent out of me,” said a third voice feverishly.

  Sam had no trouble identifying that one. It had Grandpa’s tone and a warmth that reminded him of his own father, but a different timbre. Wasn’t this the period when Al Capone and his gang terrorized the city — shaking down business owners, among other things? Sam had seen enough movies to know what was going on: James Faulkner was in trouble with the Chicago mob.

  “Faulkner, Faulkner — be reasonable. It’s just insurance, ya see. It’s important ta have insurance! The world’s a dangerous place, ya know? Anythin’ can happen!”

  Crash! Something, maybe a glass jar, shattered on the floor upstairs.

  “Sorry, Faulkner. I’m so clumsy!”

  This was followed immediately by the sound of a slap.

  “Oops! Beg your pardon, Faulkner. I didn’t mean ta do that!”

  Lily crept up behind Sam. “We can’t let them get away with this,” she whispered urgently. “We have to call the police.”

  “The police?” Sam whispered back. “I’m not sure they would help us.” He looked around for some sort of weapon, an axe handle or a stick. It would be pathetic, but just in case …

  “What’s twenty dollars a month, Faulkner?” the sadistic voice continued. “To have a store with real good insurance? Especially when you got a nice little family to take care of? You gotta think about their future!”

  “You have no right to — ow!” Someone had thrown a punch.

  Sam walked over to the shelves. One of the crates was labeled “Fireworks.”

  “Today is June thirtieth,” he said quietly. “Independence Day in the United States is July fourth.” He carefully lifted the lid, revealing supplies for the celebration: rockets of various sizes and bags of Firecrackers. “We need some matches! Quick!”

  As they rummaged around, an uneven battle broke out upstairs.

  “Here!” said Lily.

  She was shaking a paper bag whose contents made the unmistakable sound of matches rattling in their boxes.

  “Go stand in a corner,” urged Sam. “I’m going to try and make those slimeballs leave.”

  He grabbed two strips of firecrackers and went back out the basement window. The street wasn’t empty — in fact, several cars were driving along it — but Sam didn’t care; they might even help his plan. He walked around to the store, lit the first fuse, then yelled as loud as he could: “This is the police! Surrender! You’re surrounded!”

  It sounded more like a cartoon caption than a police raid, but so what? Sam ran back as the firecrackers began to pop:

  Bang-bang-bang-bang!

  “Come out with your hands up!” he shouted.

  Then he lit the second strip of firecrackers and heaved it as far as he could down the street. The cars driving up the street slammed on their brakes and honked their horns: Ahooga! Bang! Bang! Ahooga! Bang! It was a lively Fourth of July concert — a few days early!

  Sam dove back into the basement and hid.

  “Son of a gun!” shouted the man with the raspy voice. “What gives?”

  “Out the back way!” ordered the sadist. “We ain’t done with you yet, Faulkner!”

  Sam and Lily heard running in the hallway overhead, going toward the back of the store.

  “C’mon, step on it!”

  A bolt slammed, and the footsteps were now pounding down the sidewalk outside. Sam counted to five, then headed up the stairs. The gangsters had taken off, and the glass door leading to a courtyard behind the buildings was ajar. He closed and latched it. Shouts and swearing came from the street, and Sam and Lily went to look out the window. Somebody fired a shot — a real one this time — and a car roared away.

  Sam walked back into the store with Lily on his heels. The room had been turned upside down, with drawers opened, windows smashed, and damp flour and shards of glass everywhere. But there was no sign of James Faulkner. What had they done with him?

  “Aaah…”

  The moan came from behind the counter, and they hurried over to it. Kneeling on the floor, his nose bloodied, was their great-grandfather, rubbing the back of his neck as he gradually gathered his wits.

  “Who … who are you?” he asked, trying to stand.

  “We were passing by the store,” Sam improvised. “There seemed to be some fighting inside, and we thought they might be robbers. We threw some firecrackers to scare them.”

  “Firecrackers?” James Faulkner grimaced as he felt his badly swollen upper lip. “You scared them with firecrackers? That’s a hoot! How did you get in?”

  “By the front door,” said Lily. “In fact, it might be a good idea to lower the shutters. It would be safer.”

  “No. My … my wife is at the movies. She’ll be back soon.” Then, as he surveyed the extent of the damage: “Those dirty rats! They smashed everything! I’m going to call the mayor! And the newspapers too! People have to know what’s going on in this city! And the police! They can’t act as if I don’t exist, can they? Owww…”

  He staggered and had to be content with sitting down on a stool near the cash register. To Sam and Lily, encountering James Faulkner was almost beyond belief. Sam had seen a black-and-white photograph of him a couple of times, when he’d tried to please Grandma by pretending to be interested in the family photo albums. The picture showed the grocer with his apron, standing a little stiffly in front of his store. He was of medium height, with a handlebar mustache — a total stranger. There were also a couple of stories told about him, which Sam only half remembered. One was about a dog that escaped from the trenches in World War I; the other had something to do with his not being at his best at his wedding, with a bottle in one hand and whipped cream smeared on his jacket. And here was James Faulkner himself in person!

  “We can help you straighten up if you like,” Sam offered. “Thanks. If Ketty sees this mess, she’ll go out of her mind with worry. There are mops in the closet in the back. I’ll give you a few coins for your trouble!”

  Sam and Lily exchanged a glance, but made no comment. Instead, they got busy with mop and broom — Sam seemed destined to do housework in every era! — while James Faulkner dabbed water on his face and swathed himself in bandages.

  Lily was gasping from her exertions when someone rapped on the metal shutter a quarter of an hour later.

  “Daddy, it’s us! Were back from the movies!”

  James Faulkner worked the shutter mechanism to pull it up, and a little boy jumped into his arms, laughing.

  “It was so funny, Daddy! You should’ve come! Charlie beat them all up!”

  Sam felt his heart tighten: This was Grandpa — their grandpa! — when he was still a little boy!

  “What happened to your nose, Daddy?”

  The emotion was too much for Lily. She took a step backward, sighed like a leaky balloon, and collapsed in a dead faint on a sack of kidney beans.

  14 105 Degrees

  The fever lasted two days and nights. Lily’s cheeks and forehead were sweaty, her teeth chattered, and she could hardly move. Responding to the family’s urgent call, a doctor examined her carefully, muttered a few perplexed “Hmms” and eventually admitted that he was stumped. There seemed to be nothing wrong with Lily’s throat, lungs, or lymph nodes, and no inflammation was visible. It was a medical mystery — except that Lily was burning up!

  “It’s out of my hands,” said the doctor with a fatalistic shrug.

  By the middle of the second night, it
didn’t look as if Lily was going to live. Despite damp towels and cold compresses, her temperature rose to 105 degrees, which seemed more than her small body could stand. Sam wondered whether the inexplicable fever was a result of time-traveling. Maybe Lily couldn’t endure it, being away from her original time for too long. Was her body rebelling against the wrenching leaps through the ages? If that was the case, then no cure existed. And if Lily died …

  Sam preferred not to think about that. He had dragged her into this whole business, and she had supported him from the very beginning, far beyond anything he could have hoped for. She’d scoured the library for information about Dracula, translated the excerpt from the Bruges alchemist’s book of spells, and been catapulted through time while trying to warn Sam about the police. And then there was the masterful way she had saved him from Death-eye and his clan. What would Sam have accomplished without her? If he were to lose Lily now, after losing his father and mother too …

  Best not to think about it.

  Luckily, their Faulkner great-grandparents turned out to be wonderful, especially Ketty. When she learned of the attack on her husband and the role Sam and Lily had played in his rescue, she immediately offered to take them in. She was the one who insisted on calling the doctor; then she installed Lily and Sam in the guest room, and didn’t let two hours pass without bringing the patient a glass of orange juice, a treat, a picture book, or at least some words of comfort. Ketty looked severe and subdued in the album photos, but in person she was as nurturing as a mother hen, loving and attentive. Besides, she cooked hamburger steak with fried onions better than anyone!

  James was harder to fathom. After the episode with the mob, he bought a black Browning pistol and two boxes of bullets and stored them under the cash register. From time to time, when the grocery store was empty, he would pull the gun out and aim at a bottle of oil or a jar of stewed fruit. Despite his wife’s urging, he decided not to go to the mayor’s office or the police, saying this would only attract reprisals.

  Sam suspected he was just waiting for the gangsters to come back so he could take justice into his own hands.

  He also had some peculiar habits. When Ketty was minding the store, James would sometimes head down to the basement without a word! Sam was intrigued — was there a connection with the stone statue? — and on the second afternoon he followed him. Surprise: His great-grandfather was sneaking out through the basement window! He was the one who had rigged the frame! When James came back half an hour later, he smelled faintly of liquor. Sam kept quiet about it, of course, but he wondered: Was this why Ketty always looked so melancholy in the family photos?

  And then there was Grandpa — or as they called him, Donovan. Sam still couldn’t get used to the idea. Nothing in life prepares you for playing tag with your grandfather when he’s six and a half! Donovan was a sweet, helpful boy who spent most of his time playing in the courtyard with his wooden train, building level crossings and tunnels out of leftover crates, cans, and empty bottles.

  “Choo-choo! All aboard! All aboard! Train leaving the Chicago station! Sam, you wanna be the conductor?”

  Torn between incredulity and tenderness, Sam looked at his diminutive grandfather. He would have loved to take Donovan onto his lap and whisper a few scraps of his history in his ear. But he knew very well that any carelessness in the past was likely to change the future, and Grandpas future was — Sam himself! So he kept quiet, content to watch the train as it raced between the cans.

  “Choo-choo! Look out for the tunnel!”

  Donovan was also very interested in Lily. He wasn’t allowed to enter her room — she might be contagious — but he picked her flowers morning and night and made drawings for her.

  “You’ll give this one to Lily, won’t you?” he said, holding out a sheet with a big multicolored sun. “Is she going to get better? Will we play trains together?”

  The first signs of improvement appeared on the third day, when the fever began to break. Lily was able to sit propped up with pillows to eat some bread and jam and drink a glass of milk. But she was still very pale, and every sentence she spoke seemed to exhaust her meager strength.

  “I’ll… I’ll pull through, Sammy. Don’t look like that! You have to go see about the stone statue at the construction site.”

  The construction site … Sam had put off going there, partly because he didn’t want to leave his cousin, partly for fear of what he would find. But it was indeed high time. So early that afternoon he screwed up his courage, left Lily in Ketty’s competent hands, and headed up Cicero Avenue toward the black neighborhood. First he swung by Mama Lucy’s to thank her for her generosity and tell her about Lily. But the old lady wasn’t there — the house was closed — so he had no reason to postpone his visit to the site.

  Alas, the situation was even worse than he imagined. In the space of two days, workmen had poured a flat cement slab exactly where the house once stood — probably a parking lot for the tenants of the future building. Sam spent a long time with his face pressed to the fence, praying for a miracle: that the earth would open up, say, and the stone statue would shoot out of the ground like a rocket and gently land next to him. But the only things flying around were the clouds of dust raised by the steam shovels and the orders the foremen shouted to their workers.

  Figuring he had nothing to lose, Sam went to the entrance to look around, but was quickly sent packing by one of the cement workers: “Hey, you! The Yellow Kid! You got no business around here, so scram!”

  He was about to head for home when he noticed a shiny black van parked a little way down the road between two earth-moving machines. The van bore a large white sign on its side: “The Collectors Paradise, Antiques, East 63rd Street Sc Cottage Grove Ave., Chicago.” Below this was the store logo: a pair of Egyptian horns encircling a solar disk.

  “Unbelievable!” he muttered.

  He walked around the van. The back was closed, and he couldn’t see much of anything through the drivers window. He tried the door handle, but the vehicle was locked.

  “Hey, Yellow Kid!” somebody shouted behind him. “What’re you up to now? Didn’t I tell you to clear out?” It was the cement worker from the site.

  “You mean this isn’t my car?” exclaimed Sam. “Oh, right! That’s why the key doesn’t fit.”

  “I’ll fit my fist to your nose, you see if I don’t!”

  Now the man was striding toward him: The two of them clearly didn’t share the same sense of humor. Sam decided against a second joke and opted for a sprint instead, running to a busy street where he was able to lose his pursuer.

  As he caught his breath, Sam thought about the sudden profusion of strange Us: the Sainte-Mary burglar, the Mother-stone cave, the Pompeii pool, and now an antique shop in Chicago. Was the store a forerunner of Arkeos? Perhaps the answer was waiting for him at the intersection of 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

  After asking for directions, Sam took the trolley, paying with some of the change James Faulkner had given him. Thirty minutes and two transfers later, he got off in front of the Tivoli Theatre in a street full of businesses and restaurants, with double-parked cars and people crossing every which way. The Collector’s Paradise was on the ground floor of a big hotel; the shop window was crammed with knickknacks, clocks, gold watches, and Greek and Roman statuettes identified by little tags. The company logo was painted across the window. Less stylized than Arkeos’s, it had little flourishes at the ends of the horns and some discreet shading on the sun. Sam pushed open the door, which set off a rather sinister ringing of bells.

  The store was a strange jumble of objects set down here and there, on the floor and on shelves, in no discernible order. An older woman with an oddly round face and sharp eyes stood peering at him from behind a counter. To Sam, she looked just like an owl.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked stiffly, no doubt figuring that a boy dressed with so little care — or taste — wasn’t likely to add much to her bottom line.


  “I’m looking for a present for my father.”

  “A present for your father?” she repeated. “You’re sure you’re in the right place? There’s a Salvation Army thrift store right next door. Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”

  Go ahead and call my father a hobo, you old biddy.

  “Actually, he collects coins,” said Sam smoothly.

  “Collects coins? Is that so?” she said. “Don’t you think he ought to use some of them to buy you a decent shirt?”

  Don’t get angry, Sam reminded himself. Instead, he tried to remember some of the terms he learned on the money changers’ benches in Bruges. “He especially likes Venetian ducats, florins, and Strasbourg gros.”

  “Strasbourg gros, eh?” said the antique seller, sounding half convinced. “Well, I suppose so … I’ll show you what I have.” Without taking her eyes off him, she went over to a glass-fronted cabinet displaying medals and ceramics. The woman pulled out a drawer with several rows of ancient coins in more or less good shape, but unfortunately, none of them had holes. Even if Sam managed to find another stone statue, how could he and Lily get home without the coins they needed? He made a show of examining a few of the coins before putting them back on the red velvet.

  “These aren’t exactly the kind of coins my father collects,” he declared. “But you have a very attractive logo on the window. Can you tell me what it stands for?”

  “An attractive what?” asked the woman, rolling her owl eyes.

  “The symbol under the store’s name. It’s a kind of headpiece that Egyptian gods wore, isn’t it?”

  If Sam hoped to impress her with his knowledge, he failed miserably. “If you know the answer, what’s the point of asking the question?”

  “I would’ve liked to know why you chose that symbol instead of something else,” he insisted. “That’s all.”

  “I wasn’t the one who chose it,” she snapped irritably. “Besides, what business is it of yours?”

  The woman slammed the coin drawer shut and retreated behind her counter, brushing past a stand bearing a crystal goblet that reminded Sam of something.