Copyright © 2021 by VL Burgess
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ISBN: 9798596010183
Chapter One
THE RULES
There were three rules the students at the Lost Preparatory Academy for Boys were expected to follow at all times. No fighting or rough play of any kind. No climbing buildings or trees. And lastly, no leaving the dormitory after lights out. In one single evening, Thomas Hawkins was about to break all three.
Tom poked his head outside his room. Gave a low whistle and stepped out. All along the darkened hallway, doors creaked open in response. He heard the soft padding of footsteps as his friends filed out and fell into step behind him. That was followed by the thud of boys deliberately slamming into one another. Horsing around. Giggles and excited whispers echoed through the hallway.
“Shhh! Knock it off!” he hissed.
The noise ceased as the boys following him straightened up. Careful now, they crept down the carpeted stairwell, making their way to the dormitory’s lower lobby. Tom eased the front door open and stuck his head out into the cool March night. A blast of blustery wind greeted him. A fat moon hung low in the sky. Not a soul in sight. Good enough. He flashed a grin over his shoulder, signaling that the coast was clear.
Now they could cut loose. Together they burst from the dormitory and raced down the steps to the school green, turning cartwheels in the soft grass, sending silent salutes to those who hadn’t the guts to come. Younger boys mostly, too afraid of the consequences of being caught to risk the thrill of taking part. They peered down from the safety of their dormitory windows, their cheeks pressed against the cool glass, their faces flushed with wistful envy.
To those not familiar with the school, the Lost Preparatory Academy for Boys might reasonably call to mind the Lost Boys, Peter Pan’s gang of youthful truants who spent their days on a make-believe island engaged in mock swordplay, treasure hunts, food fights, and the occasional taunting of bloodthirsty crocodiles. In other words, having a pretty good time. But anyone who believed that the school and the fictional island were related had never met Mortimer Lost, founder of the Lost Academy.
Mortimer Lost had never met a rule he didn’t like. Tall, thin as a matchstick, and rumored to be nearly a century old, he ran the school with sour-faced intensity, his affinity for structure and order matched only by his affinity for bells.
Bells rang promptly at six in the morning to rouse the students from their beds. Bells told them when it was time to shower. Bells called them to meals. Bells sent them to class and sent them out again when class was over. Bells told them when to study, when to clean their rooms, when to report for inspection, and when to go to bed at night. Nobody at the Lost Academy moved, spoke, or even thought, without first being prompted to do so by the ringing of a bell.
Tom Hawkins had entered the Academy at the tender age of five. Now, after nearly eight years of constant clanging and clamor, of reacting to stimulus and response like a circus poodle taught to leap through shiny plastic hoops, he had reached a decision.
It was time to silence the bells.
Tom and his buddies sprinted across the manicured lawns to the old chapel building where the bells were housed.
He reached a towering sugar maple that grew beside the chapel and stopped. A stiff breeze sent a volley of leaves skittering past him. Thunder boomed and a bolt of lightning slashed the sky. The storm promised to be an intense one. Tom turned, judging its distance to be maybe twenty miles away. He zipped up his hoodie and tightened his shoelaces.
“You sure you want to do this, Tom?” Matt Copley, one of his best friends, sidled up beside him. “I mean, nobody’s gonna blame you if you can’t make it all the way to the bell tower.”
Tom gave the roof, the steepest on campus, a cursory glance. “I’ll make it.”
“What if you don’t? What if you fall and break your neck?”
“I won’t.”
“But what if you do?”
“Look, don’t worry about it. Just keep everyone quiet. I’ll be right back.”
He grabbed a sturdy branch, swung himself up, then shimmied up the tree until he reached a limb that extended horizontally toward the chapel roof. He eased across it until it started to bend beneath his weight. With one quick jump he gained the base of the roof. His friends greeted the action with a whisper-soft roar of approval.
Tom smiled to himself and crept upward. Matt Copley might be nervous, but he wasn’t. Though none of his friends knew it, there wasn’t a roof in all the Lost Academy he hadn’t scaled at least once. He’d scan the horizon for hours, desperate for a glimpse of life beyond the academy.
His favorite times were nights like this, when storms were sweeping in, the more violent and intense the better. If he was alone, he’d hunker down and watch the lightning flash and the clouds blot out the moon. Wait until the clouds split open and the rain broke loose. Then, when it was over, he’d slink back to his dorm room wet as a dog and oddly content. As though up there on the roof he’d been part of the storm. Part of something big and powerful and meant just for him. Connected to something he couldn’t see, couldn’t name, but he knew was out there.
Since that was impossible with his friends waiting below, he returned his attention to the task at hand.
The chapel roof was old, older even than Mortimer Lost himself. Slate pieces, affixed to the roof with tiny rusted hooks, rattled beneath his feet as he crept across them. A few brittle squares creaked beneath him, but that couldn’t be helped. Likely didn’t matter, either. Tom was a bit taller than average, but on the slim side. With his dark hair and eyes, and dressed as he was in jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, he imagined he looked like nothing more than a shadow drifting across the roof.
Just as he lifted his knee to climb again, a sound coming from a few yards away caught his attention. The sharp snap of a piece of slate. Over the last year or so of prowling the rooftops of the Lost Academy, Tom had learned a few things about slate. It was hideously slick in the rain, unbearably cold in the winter, and it didn’t break under the weight of a chipmunk, a squirrel, or even a cat. It took the force of an object his size or greater to snap a piece of slate. That could mean only one thing.
Someone was on the rooftop with him.
Tom whipped his head around. Nothing but shifting shadows and murky darkness surrounded him. Yet fear curled around the edges of his thoughts like wisps of smoke, carrying with it a faint awareness of being watched, of something dark and sinister just beyond his line of sight. An icy chill that had nothing to do with the coming storm swept down his spine.
Before he could decide what to do, he heard the shuffling of bodies below and felt his friends’ impatience. Mistaking his hesitation for fear, they stage-whispered shouts of encouragement.
“Do it! Don’t stop!”
“You’re almost there!”
“Get the bells, Tom!”
“Quiet!” he hissed back. He scouted the grounds for signs that a night watchman or staff member had been alerted by their noise. Then his gaze swept the roof again. Nothing. No sign of trouble. He shook off the unease that had stolen over him moments earlier.
Anxious now to reach the belfry, Tom crab-walked up the roof to the main joist. The bell tower sat at the roof’s apex, a structure twelve feet square and twice as tall, crowned by
an ornate copper cupola. Tom pulled himself through one of the arched recesses in the exterior wall and slipped inside.
A beam roughly eighteen inches deep ran around the interior of the tower. From that ledge were suspended a pair of wooden boards which crisscrossed from one side of the belfry to the other, pitched over a sheer drop of at least six stories.
Laid down for the workmen adjusting the bells, Tom supposed. It would be insane to try to cross them without a safety harness. Fortunately, he wasn’t even considering it. He had a better plan. He eased along the ledge and made his way around the interior walls until he reached his objective.
The main bell, an enormous cast iron thing, hung from an axle in the center of the tower. A set of four smaller bells flanked it from the east and west. Above them all were a series of gears which looked to Tom very much like the gears of a clock enlarged a hundredfold. His plan was simple: shove a discarded two-by-four into the central cog, jam the works, silence the bells. Quick, dramatic, and entirely anonymous—his favorite type of prank. The fact that they’d all get to sleep in tomorrow morning was an added bonus.
He reached for a length of board he’d noticed on an earlier foray to the tower, left behind after some previous refurbishment. But as he lifted the board, a high-pitched squeal of protest tore through the night air. Tom jerked around, scanning the space, his pulse racing. He clutched the board tightly and drew it closer, holding it defensively in front of him. Another high-pitched squeal—louder this time, angrier. From somewhere within the dark recesses of the cupola, a flutter of movement caught his eye. A flash of red. Tom’s breath caught as an enormous black shadow rose, hovered in the air, then exploded straight toward him.
Bats. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Ugly, hairy, fluttery, shrieking bats. Woken from their slumber when he’d moved the board, they now darted all around him. Flying to and fro, they lapped the bell in a chaotic mass, emitting high-pitched squeals of protest at having been disturbed. Tom dove for the floor, covered his head, and waited for the mad swarming and flapping and screeching to stop. Finally, it did. The bats flocked out of the tower and disappeared into the night.
Tom released a shaky laugh and stood. Bats in the belfry. How pathetic. He’d been frightened by a stupid cliché.
At least his friends hadn’t been there to witness his panic. He brushed himself off and reached for the two-by-four he’d dropped when he’d been swarmed. Just as his fingers grazed the board he froze, his attention caught by an object lingering in the darkness.
The flash of red he’d seen seconds earlier was still there. Only now it was closer. More distinct. More real, even though it couldn’t be. Yet it was.
A single red eye, floating in the shadows.
The scrape of a boot sounded against the rough wooden ledge. Tom squinted into the inky depths of the bell tower and was able to make out more. It wasn’t a floating eye at all, but a tall, muscular man dressed in black boots and a flowing black cape that was held in place at the man’s left shoulder by a metal clasp in the shape of a glowing red eye.
A second boot scrape sounded behind him. Tom sensed even before he turned, that the man had a partner. A quick glance confirmed it. Shock and denial coursed through him as his mind fought against what he was seeing. The sheer impossibility of it froze him in place for wasted seconds.
“We’ve spent two years looking for you.”
Tom’s mouth went dry. His stomach clenched. Natural questions—who were they, how they got there, why were they looking for him—seemed somehow irrelevant in the face of the overwhelming threat of their presence. Self-preservation took over. His gaze darted to the two-by-four he’d dropped.
The man didn’t miss it. A thin smile flickered across his face. “Try it and things will go very bad for you. Worse than you can ever imagine.”
However badly Tom wanted to reject what he was seeing, there was no denying that the danger was real. Instinctively he edged away, inching backward along the ledge of the bell tower, knowing even as he did that he was headed straight for the man positioned behind him. His mind whirled, calculating options, searching desperately for a way out.
There wasn’t one.
A sharp gust of wind tore through the tower as a clap of thunder boomed around them. The split-second distraction was all Tom needed. He twisted to the right, vaulting away from both men, and launched himself onto one of the narrow planks that traversed the bell tower.
The force of his jump caused the board, already unstable, to skid beneath him. His arms swinging wildly, Tom shot across the sheer six-story drop like a surfer riding a rogue wave, barely managing to stay upright.
The ride abruptly ended as the board tipped, teetering on the narrow ledge. Tom pitched forward into the abyss, groping blindly for anything to stop his fall.
A brush of something soft and feather-like swept across his hand: a badly frayed length of rope tied to the bell’s clapper. Fueled by equal parts adrenaline and desperation, he grabbed it. He hung on with all his strength as the board he’d been riding careened off the ledge and plummeted into the gaping chasm beneath his feet, splintering with a loud crash on the stone surface below.
Tom shot straight down, jerking to a shoulder-wrenching stop ten feet beneath the base of the bell. But he didn’t stop there. The momentum of his fall carried him forward, sending him swaying across the dark, gaping void like an over-sized pendulum. He hit the opposite wall. The huge iron clapper slammed against the inside of the bell.
The resulting noise was so intense that the vibration echoed through Tom like an electric shock. It was all he could do to keep his grip on the rope. All around him, the night came alive. As the ear splitting echo of the bell faded, he heard the shrieks of his friends as they sprinted across the green to the safety of the dorm.
Tom flew back in the opposite direction, swinging to and fro, clanging the bell over and over. The clamor was so loud, he was convinced he’d never hear again. If he lived to hear anything. The two men in capes, furious he’d managed to evade them, set up a plank to cross the tower chasm and grab his rope. Tom swung wildly, hoping to deter them until help arrived or he could figure a way out, when he felt a quick jerk and shot downward again. He swallowed hard and looked up. His rope was fraying, the hemp unraveling under the combined stress of his weight and the constant swaying.
Tom felt another jerk and looked up to see that one of the caped men had succeeded in grabbing his rope and was tugging him upward. As Tom hit the wall again, he frantically searched it for some kind of purchase. Something that would allow him to release the rope and scale down to safety. Nothing. Nothing but a sheer stone wall, worn slick by a century of rain and wind, surrounded him.
Suddenly his rope went slack. The man was gone. The sound of fighting—of grunts and groans, of fists meeting flesh, and bodies slamming against walls—reached his ears. Tom peered up into the darkness above him. A third man was now there, the three brawling figures randomly silhouetted by flashes of lightning. They lurched back and forth over the gaping pit, locked in brutal hand-to-hand combat.
Then, abruptly, the clash ended. Stillness fell over the tower. Tom caught his breath and peered upward. A solitary figure stood on the tower ledge.
Pirate.
That was the only word Tom could think of to describe him. A rough, sturdy man dressed in a ruffled shirt, knee breeches, and buckled shoes. Or buckled shoe, rather, for below his right knee, the man sported an old-fashioned wooden peg leg.
A hallucination brought on by stress and terror—that was the only reasonable explanation Tom could summon for the man’s presence. He blinked, fully expecting the pirate to be gone the moment he opened his eyes. But he wasn’t. Instead, the man strode out onto the plank from which he’d single-handedly bested the two caped men and stared down.
“Looks like you’re in a bit of a spot there, lad.”
Tom stared up at him wordlessly. Then his gaze darted around the cupola for the other men.
“It’s all right.
They’re gone—for now.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
The pirate gestured vaguely into the night. “If they survived the fall—and their ugly skulls were thick enough that they just might have—I’ve two of my men stationed below to make certain they won’t bother you again.”
“Then, they’re . . . Then, you . . .” Tom stammered, unable to order his thoughts. “You mean, you’re not with them?”
“With them?!” Disgust washed across the man’s face. “I’d rather be boiled alive in a spit of a thousand plague rats.” Grunting, the man lowered himself onto the plank on his belly. He extended his arm into the pit.
Tom stared at the pirate’s offered hand, his mind whirling in uncertainty. The hemp rope to which he clung cracked, fraying a bit more. He dropped another two inches.
“I’m here to help you, Tom, but that’s hard to do if you’re dead. Trust me. I know a thing or two about death. That’s a ship that only sails in one direction.”
Astonishment that the pirate knew his name, coupled with the fact that the rope was failing, decided for him. Tom reached up and grabbed the man’s hand. The pirate tugged him up, pulling him onto the relative safety of the tower ledge. He beamed at Tom in approval.
“There’s a good lad, now. Well done.”
“How’d you get up here?” It wasn’t the most important question, of course, just the first one that tumbled from Tom’s lips.
The man lifted a rope of his own, from the end of which dangled a heavy, spear-tipped grappling hook. “Useful for climbing and whaling. I’ve also just discovered it’s not a bad weapon if you find yourself in a bit of a pinch.” His gaze traveled over Tom. “You’re not hurt, then?”
Tom performed a quick physical assessment. He was rattled and shaken, scraped and bruised. But hurt? “Uh, no.”
“Good. At least there’s that.” He brought his hands together in a sharp clap, rubbing them back and forth as though to warm himself. “Well,” he said. “We don’t have much time. Might as well finish what you came here to do, eh?” Without another word, he picked up a two-by-four and with a quick thrust, shoved it in the central cog. Letting out a satisfied sigh, he turned back to Tom and winked. “Between you and me, lad, I always hated Mortimer’s bells, too.”
Racing With Dragons: The Mapmaker's Sons, Book 1 Page 1
