The Fire Chronicle

by John Stephens

“Remember,” she said, “whatever happens, take care of Emma.”

  “But—”

  “Remember your promise.”

  And then she and the creature both vanished.

  “Kate!” Emma cried. “Where’d she go?”

  “She … she took it into the past,” Michael gasped. “Like she did with the Countess. She took it into the past to get rid of it.”

  His heart was hammering in his chest. He placed a hand on the desk to steady himself.

  “So why didn’t she come back?” Emma’s face was wet, whether from rain, or tears, or both, Michael didn’t know. “She should’ve come back right away!”

  Emma was right. If the Atlas had worked as it should have, and Kate had left the Screecher in the past, then she should’ve returned to the exact moment she’d left. So where was she?

  The cry of a Screecher echoed up the tower, and they heard boots pounding on the stairs, growing closer and louder. The children backed away from the door.

  Michael heard Emma shout his name.

  What was he supposed to do? What could he do?

  Then the door flew open, revealing the dark, ragged form of a Screecher, and at that same moment, a pair of hands seized the children from behind.

  “And here we are.”

  They stepped out into a narrow alley. Crumbling stone walls bounded them on either side and ran down to an empty square. Behind them, the alley ended in a high stone wall, in the middle of which was the wooden door they’d come through. Raising his eyes above the wall, Michael could see a grove of olive trees climbing up the hill. The sky was a perfect deep blue, and the air was hot and dry and silent. Michael glanced at his sister; Emma was taking in their new surroundings and appeared unhurt. That, at least, was something.

  Michael turned to the man beside them.

  He was tall and thin, with unruly white hair, a rather shabby tweed suit, and a dark green tie that looked as if it had recently escaped a fire. The stem of an old pipe poked from the pocket of his jacket, and he wore a pair of bent and patched tortoiseshell glasses. He was exactly as Michael remembered.

  Straightening his own glasses, Michael coughed and put out his hand.

  “Thank you, sir. You saved our lives.”

  Dr. Stanislaus Pym took the boy’s hand and shook it.

  “Of course,” said the wizard. “You’re most welcome.”

  As the Screecher had crashed through the door of Miss Crumley’s office, Michael had felt a hand on his shoulder and had whipped his head around, thinking that another of the morum cadi had snuck up behind them and the end had come. But the hand on his shoulder, like the hand on Emma’s shoulder, had not belonged to a Screecher. To his complete surprise, Michael had seen the wizard, Stanislaus Pym, leaning toward them out of the wardrobe, and before Michael could utter a word, he and his sister had been yanked inside and the door had slammed shut. Michael had found himself in darkness, crushed between the side of the wardrobe and the wizard’s elbow. His nostrils had been filled with the smell of Dr. Pym’s tobacco and the moist, cabbagey odor of Miss Crumley’s shoes. Out in the office, the Screecher was heard tossing aside chairs as it leapt toward them; then Dr. Pym had murmured, “One more turn,” there had been a sharp click, and just as Michael had been certain that a sword was going to come splintering through the wardrobe wall, Dr. Pym had pushed open the door and both the Screecher and Miss Crumley’s office had vanished, replaced by stone walls and blue sky and silence.

  “Would you two stop shaking hands?!” Emma shouted. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Michael released the wizard’s hand. “I was just being polite.”

  “Dr. Pym!” Emma’s voice was high and desperate. “You have to go back! You have to find Kate! She—”

  “Used the Atlas. I know. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  As quickly as they could, Michael and Emma told him about the storm, about being trapped in the tower, how the Screecher had grabbed Kate, how Kate and the creature had both disappeared.…

  “She must’ve tried to take it into the past,” Michael said, and he told the wizard—who, due to his abrupt departure from Cambridge Falls eight months earlier, was still in the dark regarding certain events—how the Countess had reappeared on Christmas Eve and how Kate had discovered that she could use the Atlas without a photograph, how she had taken the witch deep into the past and abandoned her.

  “I’m sure she did the same thing with the Screecher,” Michael said. “Only she didn’t come back.”

  “So you gotta find her!” Emma cried. “Hurry!”

  “Yes, of course,” said the wizard. “Now, if you go straight ahead, on the other side of the square is a café. Wait for me there.”

  “But, Dr. Pym,” Michael had to ask, “where are we?”

  “Italy,” came the answer.

  And with that, the wizard turned and stepped toward the wooden door through which they had come. Michael was confused. Where was Miss Crumley’s wardrobe? How were they suddenly in Italy? Where was Dr. Pym going? Then he saw the wizard take an ornate gold key from his pocket, slide it into the lock, step across to the other side of the wall, and shut the door behind him. There was the same distinct click as before. Curious, Michael walked over, listened for a moment, then opened the door.

  A goat stared back at him.

  “He’ll find her.” Emma hadn’t moved, but she was hugging herself as if she might fall apart at any moment. “Dr. Pym will find her.”

  Michael said nothing.

  Together, they walked silently down the alley. When they got to the square, Michael saw they were on the side of a hill and that the town was of no size whatsoever. A church loomed on their left. A white dog loped past. Across the square stood the café. It had a red awning and two empty tables out front.

  A curtain of colored beads hung over the door, and the children passed through them into a well-lit, tile-floored room, with rough rock walls like the inside of a cave. The café was half filled with older men and women, and there was a woman with gray-black hair pulled into a bun who wore a faded green dress under a white apron. She was shorter than either Michael or Emma, and she moved about like a gnat, buzzing here and there, depositing bottles of wine and water, picking up dishes. Spotting the children, she herded them to a table, speaking in rapid Italian, and, without being asked, brought over two glasses and a bottle of fizzy lemonade.

  “It’ll be okay,” Michael said. “It’s Kate, remember?”

  Emma didn’t respond. Her face was tense with worry. But she reached out and took hold of Michael’s hand.

  The children sat there for nearly an hour, their lemonade bubbling softly before them. Groups of men and women drifted into the café. The men were lean and hard-faced and wore ancient dark suits, white shirts, and old black hats; they looked like men who’d been outside their entire lives. The women were dark-haired and dark-eyed and had hands worn thick by work. The tiny woman in the apron bullied them all. Pushing them into chairs. Bringing them food and wine they hadn’t ordered. And Michael could see that the men and women loved it; the more the tiny woman bullied, the more laughter and conversation filled the restaurant.

  The place was a good place, Michael thought. A refuge. And he understood why the wizard had sent them here.

  Emma leapt to her feet, and Michael turned to see Dr. Pym stepping through the curtain of beads at the door.

  Michael felt his heart twist upon itself. The wizard was alone.

  Dr. Pym lowered himself into a chair.

  “Well, you’ll be relieved to know that the morum cadi have quit the orphanage, and neither your Miss Crumley nor the other children were harmed.”

  “And?” Emma cried. “Where’s Kate? You said you’d find her!”

  Conversation around them stopped; the old men and women looked over.

  The wizard sighed. “I did not find her. I am sorry.”

  Michael gripped the wooden leg of the table and took several slow, deep breaths.

  �
�So maybe you didn’t look hard enough!” Emma’s voice was now the only sound in the restaurant. “Maybe she’s not at the orphanage! You gotta keep looking! We’ll go with you! Come on!”

  She began to pull the wizard out of his chair.

  “Emma.” The old man’s voice was quiet and calm. “Katherine has not returned to the present. Not to Baltimore or anywhere else—”

  “You don’t know that—”

  “Yes, I do. Now please sit down. You’re attracting attention.”

  Emma grudgingly released his arm and threw herself into her chair. The talk at the other tables resumed. The tiny woman buzzed over, set a glass of red wine before the wizard, and darted away.

  “We must look at the situation logically.” Dr. Pym kept his voice low. “Let us say that Katherine did indeed use the Atlas to travel into the past and dispose of that foul creature. Why did she not return immediately? Perhaps something or someone prevented her—”

  Emma struck the table with her fist. “So we’ve gotta help her! That’s what I’m saying! We’ve gotta do something!”

  “She’s right,” Michael said. “We need to come up with a plan! We—”

  “But the point you must both understand”—the wizard leaned forward—“is that if your sister is trapped in the past, then there is absolutely nothing that you or I or anyone else can do about it. She is beyond our reach. That is a fact, and you must accept it.”

  Michael and Emma opened their mouths to argue, but nothing came out. The hard finality of the wizard’s statement, the cold, precise way it was delivered, had robbed them of speech.

  “However,” and with this Dr. Pym reassumed his normal, grandfatherly air, “I do not think that is what happened. Your sister is one of the most remarkable individuals I have ever met—which, considering how long I have been alive, is saying quite a bit. No matter the obstacles, if there is a way for her to return to you, she will find it.”

  “So …” Emma’s eyes were welling with tears, and she’d clasped her hands to keep them from shaking. “… Why didn’t she?”

  The wizard smiled. “My dear, who’s to say she hasn’t?”

  “You! You just said—”

  “Aha!” Michael exclaimed.

  Both Dr. Pym and Emma looked at him.

  “You know what I’m going to say?” the wizard asked.

  “Well … not exactly,” Michael admitted. “But it just felt like … Sorry.”

  “Allow me to explain about the nature of time.” The old man dipped his finger into his wineglass and dabbed a string of watery red spots across the tabletop. “You must not imagine that time is a road unspooling before us. Rather, all time—past, present, and future—already exists. Say we are here.” He pointed to a dot in the middle of the line. “And your sister was here in the past; then she chose to skip over us and land here, in the future.” He brought his finger down further along the line. “In that case, we just have to go forward, and we will eventually meet her.”

  “You mean,” Michael said, “tomorrow, she’ll just suddenly be there?”

  “Tomorrow, the next day, the week after that—there’s no telling when.”

  “But why would she do that?” Emma demanded. “Why wouldn’t she just come back right away?”

  The old man shrugged. “Who knows? We will have to ask her when we see her. Till then, we must continue with our own work. It is what she would want.”

  Michael saw Emma nodding. The wizard had held out a thread of hope, and she had grasped it with both hands. For his part, Michael tried hard to make himself believe that Kate was waiting somewhere in their future; he wanted to believe it, desperately. But what if Dr. Pym was wrong? What if they never saw Kate again? He saw life stretching ahead of them, a life without their sister, and the road was dark.

  He took a sip of his lemonade, then set down the glass. The drink had gone flat.

  Dr. Pym checked the time and suggested they order dinner. He spoke to the small woman—the signora, he called her—in Italian while Emma looked about the restaurant saying, “Get some a’ that! And what that bald guy’s got over there!”

  It was amazing, Michael thought, the change that had come over her. Emma had embraced the wizard’s theory wholeheartedly. She’d decided that Kate had jumped into the future, and they had only to keep pressing forward and they would join her. Any other possibility had been dismissed from her mind.

  Nice to be young, Michael thought, and gave a weary sigh.

  As the food began to arrive—pasta with sausage and peas, a salad of red and yellow tomatoes covered with hunks of soft white cheese and green strips of basil, a pizza heavy with garlic and onions and tiny fish that Emma picked off and put on her brother’s plate—Michael did his best to make a show of eating, but each bite was an effort.

  “Now,” the wizard said, rolling up his pizza like a taco, “I want to apologize that I was never able to answer your letters. Be assured, I did receive them. However, we are together now, and I want to hear every detail of your lives since Christmas, everything you didn’t tell me in your letters. I am all ears.”

  The children protested that he should answer their questions first, but the wizard insisted, and they finally gave in, telling him about the awfulness of the Edgar Allan Poe Home, about the awfulness of Miss Crumley, about the feral cat population that had dwindled all summer and the mystery stew the cook kept serving, about the week in July when the showers had broken and how people a block away had complained about the smell; one story led to another, and when they were finished, Michael found that his neck and shoulders were less tense and that he’d eaten two helpings of pasta and that things did not seem quite so black as before and he realized that this had been the wizard’s plan all along.

  “How perfectly terrible,” Dr. Pym said. “Now, I’m guessing you must have a few questions for me.”

  “Yeah,” Emma said through a mouthful of sausage. “Where’ve you been all this time? Where’s Gabriel? Why’d you leave all of a sudden on Christmas? Who’s this stupid Dire Magnus guy? And where’s he keeping our parents?”

  “And what’re we doing here?” Michael added.

  “My goodness, what a deluge. But I will answer the last question first. Oh dear.” The wizard had been biting into a thickly ribbed pastry, and a large gob of cream had landed on his tie. He looked about for his napkin—it was right in front of him—and, not seeing it, wiped the cream off with his finger, and then plopped it in his mouth. “So, we are here, in the charming village of Castel del Monte, to see a man. As it happens, I was on my way here when I received a letter from your sister—”

  “The one she sent today!” Michael said. “What did it say?”

  “I will get to that later. But I immediately diverted my course to Baltimore and then, once I had you in hand, it just seemed easier to bring you along. As to Gabriel’s whereabouts, he is on a mission for me, the same mission, one might say, that drew the two of us away so abruptly last Christmas. I prefer not to go into more detail at the moment.”

  “What a surprise,” Emma said. “Hey, can we get another of those cream donut things? ’Cause you kinda hogged that one.”

  Before Dr. Pym could ask, the signora placed one in front of Emma.

  “What about our parents?” Michael said. “Have you found out where they’re being held?”

  “No,” the wizard said. “No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  The mood once again became somber. None of them spoke. The silence was finally broken when a bell began tolling in the square. Dr. Pym clapped his hands.

  “And that is our cue. Your other questions will have to keep.”

  He summoned over the small signora and spoke to her in Italian. Michael took a moment to look through his bag. There was The Dwarf Omnibus, King Robbie’s medal proclaiming him Royal Guardian of All Dwarfish Traditions and History, his journal, pens and pencils, a pocketknife, a compass, a camera, and gum. He’d always made a point of keeping his bag fully packed for just such an
emergency, and he felt a warm throb of satisfaction at seeing everything in its place.

  Suddenly, there was a shattering crash, and Michael looked up and saw that the woman had dropped a large dish, spraying noodles and tomato sauce all over the tile floor. She gestured to Michael and Emma and let out a burst of Italian. She seemed to be imploring the wizard. Dr. Pym responded, and the woman crossed herself several times quickly. The entire restaurant had fallen silent.

  “What’s going on?” Emma whispered.

  Michael shook his head; he had no idea.

  “Children,” Dr. Pym said, laying several bills upon the table, “we should leave.”

  Every eye followed them out of the restaurant. In the square, they were alone, save for the white dog from before, and even it seemed to regard them warily. The setting sun cast the world in a soft amber glow. “This way,” Dr. Pym said, and he headed down the main street at a rapid pace. The village ended after only a hundred yards, and Dr. Pym turned up the hill, leading the children through a gate and into a grove of olive trees. The ground was dry and rocky and steep.

  “Dr. Pym,” Emma huffed, “what happened back there? What’s going on?”

  “I told you that we are here to see a man. What I did not say was that I have been searching for this individual for nearly a decade. Only recently did I finally track him to this village. You heard me asking the signora how to find his house.”

  “That’s it? That’s what made her drop the plate?”

  “Yes, it appears that he is regarded by the locals as something of a devil. Or perhaps the Devil. The signora was a bit flustered.”

  “Is he dangerous?” Michael asked. Then he added, “Because I’m the oldest now, and I’m responsible for Emma’s safety.”

  “Oh, please,” Emma groaned.

  “I wouldn’t say he’s dangerous,” the wizard said. “At least, not very.”

  They hiked on, following a narrow, twisting trail. They could hear goats bleating in the distance, the bells around their necks clanking dully in the still air. Stalks of dry grass scratched at the children’s ankles. The light was dying, and soon Michael could no longer see the town behind them. The trail ended at a badly maintained rock wall. Affixed to the wall was a piece of wood bearing a message scrawled in black paint.