The Fire Chronicle Read online

  Kate shrugged. “Just asking how much longer we’ll be here.”

  “It’s been almost eight months.”

  “I know.”

  “Seven months and twenty-three days, to be precise.”

  Seven months and twenty-three days, Kate thought. And suddenly she remembered waking up on Christmas morning, having just returned to the present, and being told that Dr. Pym and Gabriel had left in the night, that Cambridge Falls was no longer safe, that the three of them were being sent back to Baltimore.

  On some level, Kate hadn’t been surprised. The night before, alone on the witch’s boat, she had learned enough to know that their adventure was far from over. She’d tried to explain the situation to Michael and Emma, gathering them in the mansion library, and reminding them how the Atlas, the emerald-green book that let them move through time, was only one of three legendary Books called the Books of Beginning.

  “It turns out there’s a prophecy. Three children are supposed to find the Books and bring them together. Everyone thinks we’re the children. They’ll be looking for us.”

  “Who will?” Emma had demanded, still upset that Gabriel, her friend, had left without telling her. “The stupid witch is dead! Her stupid boat went over the waterfall!”

  That was when Kate had told them about the Countess escaping from the boat at the last moment, how she’d lain in wait for fifteen years and had attacked Kate when they’d returned to the present, how Kate had used the Atlas to take the witch deep into the past and abandon her.

  “So I was right,” Emma had said. “She’s dead. Or as good as.”

  “Yes. But it’s not her we have to worry about.”

  And Kate had told them about the Countess’s master, the Dire Magnus. She’d described the violin that had heralded his arrival, how he’d taken over the Countess’s body, how even Dr. Pym had seemed in awe of his power. The Dire Magnus needed them, she’d explained, for only through the three of them could he find the Books.

  Snow had been falling past the library windows, the world outside silent and white. Kate had had to force herself to go on.

  “There’s one more thing. For the past ten years, all this time we’ve been going from orphanage to orphanage, the Dire Magnus has been holding Mom and Dad prisoner. It’s up to us to free them. But for that, we’ll need the Books.”

  The next day, the children had packed up their few possessions, Kate stuffing the Atlas deep inside her bag, and returned to Baltimore.

  Now, standing there on the hillside, with the late-summer air warm and heavy against her skin, Kate thought of the Atlas. By the end of their adventure in Cambridge Falls, she had learned to command its magic at will. She knew she could make it carry her and Michael and Emma through time and space.

  If Dr. Pym doesn’t come, she told herself, I can still save them.

  “Hey, I almost forgot. Did you hear what happened at St. Anselm’s?”

  Kate whipped her head around. “What?”

  “I heard some kids talking. Some sort of gang or something broke in last night. They’re saying Mr. Swattley—remember him?—they’re saying he was murdered. Hey—what’s wrong?”

  Kate was trembling. St. Anselm’s was the orphanage the three of them had lived at before first coming to Baltimore. It was also the orphanage from her dream.

  “Michael …” She tried to keep her voice steady. “… I can depend on you, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I weren’t here, I could depend on you to look after Emma. To be patient with her. To be a leader.”

  “Kate—”

  “Just promise me. Please.”

  There was a long pause, then he said, “Of course.”

  And she opened her mouth to tell him about her dream, about all her dreams, not just the one she’d been having that week, but she saw that Michael was looking past her, away through the trees. She followed his gaze.

  All summer long, it had scarcely rained, day after cloudless day. But there, massed along the horizon, was a range of thick black clouds. They were moving; they rolled toward the children, growing larger and darker with each passing second. It seemed to Kate that a great dark curtain was being drawn across the sky.

  She said, “We need to find Emma.”

  Michael and Kate came sprinting down out of the trees and onto the asphalt of the orphanage playground. To their left, beneath the yellow tent and a clear blue sky, Miss Crumley’s party continued undisturbed. To the children’s right, the black clouds were closing in fast.

  Michael stopped.

  “What’re you doing?” Kate demanded. “We have to—”

  “Emma! She’s locked in Miss Crumley’s office! For stealing the ice cream! We need the keys!”

  Kate stared at him, her mind working feverishly. Their enemies had found them. She had no doubt about that. Only the Atlas could save them now. But it was hidden—

  “Can you get them? If I get the Atlas, can you get the keys?”

  Michael seemed frozen, his assurance of moments before now gone.

  “Michael!”

  “Y-yes,” he stammered. “I can get them!”

  “Then meet me at her office! Hurry!”

  And Kate turned and ran for the orphanage.

  When she crashed through the doors, Kate saw children clustered at the windows, oohing in amazement as the clouds rolled toward them. She didn’t bother telling them to get back. Once she and her brother and sister were gone, the other children would be safe. Kate raced along the hall to the basement stairs, leaping down the steps three at a time. On returning to the Edgar Allan Poe Home for Hopeless and Incorrigible Orphans, the first thing Kate had done was to wrap the Atlas in two heavy-duty plastic bags and, with Michael and Emma standing lookout, sneak down to the basement. Using a spoon from the cafeteria, she had pried out three loose bricks from the wall behind the furnace and placed the Atlas inside.

  The basement was empty, and Kate retrieved the scarred spoon from under the furnace and began to pry free the bricks. At first, Kate had come down regularly, in the middle of the night, to check that the Atlas hadn’t been disturbed. But she had not visited the basement in months. The truth was, no matter where she was, Kate could feel the presence of the Atlas. She was bound to the book; it was a part of her now. And as she dropped the last brick onto the floor and drew out the heavy, plastic-wrapped package, her hands trembled with excitement.

  There were perhaps forty men and women gathered beneath the tent, the sun shining through the yellow canvas giving them a distinctly malarial hue. The men wore blue blazers with gold buttons and had identical red turtles sewn onto their breast pockets. The women favored long, shapeless sundresses and broad-brimmed hats, all of which were in various states of floral explosion. There was a table set with plates of gelatinous yellow cake and bowls of liquefied ice cream. Another table offered pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. A string quartet, sweating through their tuxedos, played languidly in the corner.

  Michael immediately spotted Miss Crumley through the crowd. The orphanage director was wearing a dress the color of egg yolk and talking to a woman with the longest, thinnest neck Michael had ever seen—her head looked as if it were balanced atop a noodle—and a short, doughy sort of man. He had doughy hands, doughy cheeks; even the rolls of skin at the back of his neck had a white puffiness, as if he were only wanting another half hour in the oven and he would be cooked and ready to serve. The man was talking loudly and waving his fork, and from the way Miss Crumley hung on his every word, Michael guessed that this must be Mr. Hartwell Weeks, president of the historical society, in the doughy flesh.

  “Reenactments!” he announced, twirling his fork. “Reenactments, my dear Miss Crummy—”

  “Crumley,” the orphanage head corrected.

  “—that’s how you sell history to the masses! You want to join the bus tour, you need a high-class reenactment!”

  “Yes, quite,” cooed the noodle-necked woman as her head swayed this way
and that.

  “Re-what?” Miss Crumley leaned in. “I don’t understand.”

  Michael came up behind the group, nervously gripping and regripping the strap of his bag. How was he supposed to get her to give him the keys to her office? Should he say there’d been a fire? Or a flood? He had to think of something fast.

  “Reenactments! Pick a historical event and act it out! Put on a bit of a show! Now, your place here”—the man flicked his fork in the direction of the orphanage, accidentally tossing a bit of cake onto the hat of a nearby woman—“why is it historically significant? Hmm? What’s it got going?”

  “Well, it was built in 1845—”

  “Boring! I’m asleep already!”

  “Then it served as an armory during the Civil War—”

  “Better, better. Keep going, Crummy! This is the stuff!”

  “And it was attacked by Confederate forces!”

  “Ha! Jackpot!”

  “Oh yes!” Michael could see Miss Crumley warming to her subject, a mustache of sweat glistening on her upper lip. “And can you believe it, those beasts shot cannonballs at the north tower! That’s where I keep my office! Why, just imagine if I had been there!”

  She did not explain how this might have been possible.

  Michael felt a cool breeze brush the back of his neck. The storm was coming. By now Kate would have the Atlas. He was running out of time.…

  “Perfect!” Mr. Hartwell Weeks squatted down, his doughy palms held out before him. “I see it now! The battle for the orphanage! The heartless rebel forces! The roar of cannon fire! Boom! Boom! Dead orphans litter the ground like confetti! You stage it, Crummy—”

  “Crumley, please. And it wasn’t an orphanage then—”

  “Don’t let details ruin a good show! You stage the battle and we’ll put you on the tour! I’ve got the Confederate uniforms. I can get you a deal on the cannons. You’d only have to provide the dead orphans!”

  “Yes, quite,” clucked Noodle Neck.

  “Not real dead orphans, of course. We’re not savages.”

  “Miss Crumley,” Michael said.

  The orphanage director didn’t hear him. Her mind was lost amid visions of mock carnage and the busloads of dollars that would soon be arriving at her door.

  “Mr. Weeks”—she rubbed her hands together greedily—“doesn’t ten dollars a visitor seem a bit cheap? Isn’t twelve more appropriate—”

  “Twelve? Ha!” The doughy man prodded her stomach with his fork, forcing out a giggle. “You’re a hungry one, aren’t you? All right then—”

  “Miss Crumley!”

  Conversation around them stopped. Michael saw Miss Crumley stiffen. The spaghetti-necked woman peered down at him, the curve of her neck forming an upside-down U.

  “Crummy,” drawled Mr. Hartwell Weeks, “I think you’ve got a dead-orphan volunteer.”

  Miss Crumley turned slowly about. Her smile had remained frozen, but her eyes betrayed the fury that was coursing through her. She said, in an only moderately strangled voice, “Yes, my dear?”

  “I need the keys to your office,” Michael said, nervously adjusting his glasses. “Something … very bad is about to happen.”

  In the end, that was the best he could think of.

  “Did you hear?” Mr. Weeks bellowed to the party. “Something very bad! Like what, boy? You think Johnny Reb is going to attack again? By gum, I wish he would! I’d show those rebel dogs a thing or two! Ha! Like that!” He jabbed his fork at an ancient man who was supporting himself on a pair of canes, shouting, “Go back to Dixie!” as the old man tried to hobble away.

  Miss Crumley brought her face down to Michael’s, lowering her voice so that only he could hear.

  “Listen to me, you little fiend, you turn around right this instant and go back inside. You hear me?”

  “No, you don’t understand—”

  “I said turn around!” She was hissing, showering Michael with spittle. “Unless you want the same treatment as your hoodlum of a sister—”

  Suddenly, a woman’s hat blew off her head and cartwheeled across the lawn. Then a pile of napkins, stacked neatly on a table, blew away, first one by one, then in twos and threes, and, finally, in a great fluttering mass, like a flock of birds taking flight.

  “I say, Crummy”—Mr. Hartwell Weeks was pointing with one doughy finger—“those are some nasty-looking clouds.”

  And the entire party turned to look just as the tide of black clouds blotted out the sun. It was as if night had fallen in an instant. There was a collective gasp, and Michael’s heart sank as he saw the clouds swelling higher and higher, like the gathering of some great dark wave. Then he smelled the tang of ozone and looked to see a gray wall of rain sweeping toward them from across the playground, swallowing up everything in its path, and Mr. Hartwell Weeks, scourge of the Confederate army, shrieked, “Run for your lives!” and the party exploded into chaos. Rain pummeled the tent. Michael was knocked to the ground, and, as he struggled to rise, he could hear the orphanage director screaming, “It’s just a shower! It will blow over! I have gelato!” But the guests were running across a swampy lawn already littered with dozens of trampled sun hats, and no one paid her any mind.

  Michael had just gotten to his feet when he was seized by the arm and wrenched around.

  “This is all your fault!” Miss Crumley’s hair was a sodden wreck. Lines of green mascara streamed down her cheeks. Her guests were gone. Even the musicians had run away, clutching their instruments. “I don’t know how, but I know this is your fault!”

  It occurred to Michael that for once the woman was absolutely correct. But before either could say another word, a gust of wind whipped across the lawn, and the tent, which had broken free of its anchors, rose into the air like a giant yellow sail. In a panic, Miss Crumley released Michael and grabbed at one of the loose ropes. She was lifted off her feet and carried along, with a hard bounce here and there, till she finally let go and dropped, face-first, into a puddle.

  Michael immediately ran to her side.

  “Help me up!” the woman commanded. She was covered in mud, she’d lost both shoes, and her dress was ripped. “Help me up, you villain!”

  “I’m sorry about this,” Michael said. “Honestly.” And he reached into her pocket and pulled out her keys.

  Miss Crumley’s cries of “Thief!” followed him to the door of the orphanage.

  Inside, it was pandemonium. Children ran about in the darkness, shrieking with delight at the wildness of the weather.

  “Michael!” Kate appeared out of the crowd, breathless, her eyes wide with alarm; she was holding the Atlas tight against her chest, not caring who saw it.

  “Did you get—”

  “Yes!”

  And it was then, as Michael held up the ring of keys, that they heard the first scream. It came from outside, still some distance away; but it cut through the rain and the wind and froze every child in the hall. Michael looked at his sister; they both knew what had made the sound: a morum cadi—a Screecher—one of the reeking, half-alive monsters they had fought in Cambridge Falls. And now, as the cry tore through the orphanage, Michael felt the familiar suffocating panic.

  It’s really happening, he thought. They’ve found us.

  The scream died away. The children in the hall came back to life; but the fear was on them, and they clung to one another and cried. Kate snatched the keys from Michael’s hand and took off running down the hall, shouting for him to follow.

  Miss Crumley’s office was in the north tower, atop a steep corkscrew of stairs. Michael and Kate raced upward in darkness. Soon, they could hear Emma above them, hammering at the office door, crying, “Let me out! Let me out! Someone help!”

  “Emma!” Kate shouted. “It’s us! We’re here!”

  She found the keyhole by touch, and a moment later, the door was open and Emma, the youngest of the family, their little sister, was in her arms.

  “You’re okay?” Kate asked. “You’re not h
urt?”

  “I’m fine! But did you hear the scream?”

  “I know.” And Kate stepped into the office, motioning for Michael to follow her and shut the door.

  Miss Crumley’s office was a small, round room with four windows spread out evenly from the door. There was a desk, two chairs, a steel filing cabinet, and, propped against the wall, a chipped wooden wardrobe.

  “Kate!”

  Emma was at one of the windows; Michael and Kate rushed over as lightning shuddered across the sky. Far below them, three figures had emerged from the woods and were moving across the asphalt yard toward the orphanage. The children recognized the Screechers’ jerky gait. All three of the creatures held naked swords.

  Kate quickly told them her plan. She would have the Atlas take them to Cambridge Falls. If they left, the other children at the orphanage would be safe.

  “Hurry,” Kate said. “Take—”

  Just then the window shattered, and a half-decayed gray-green hand reached in and seized Kate by the arm. Emma screamed and grabbed Kate’s other arm, the one that was holding the Atlas. Through the broken window, Michael could see the black shape of the Screecher as it clung to the wall of the tower.

  “Michael!” Emma shouted. “Help me!”

  Michael jumped forward, hugged Kate around the waist, and began pulling her away from the window. Gusts of rain blew into the office. For a moment, Michael thought they were gaining ground; then he looked and saw that the creature was still gripping Kate’s arm and had actually begun to crawl into the room.

  “Stop!” Kate said. “You’re just pulling it in! Let me go!”

  “What?” Michael’s face was still buried in her side. “No! You—”

  “Let go! I know what I’m doing! Now! Do it!”

  There was such command in her voice that Michael and Emma both released her. The Screecher had half its body inside the room, its fingers digging into the flesh of Kate’s forearm. A deep hiss gurgled from its throat. Michael saw his sister work several fingers between the pages of the Atlas, and he realized what she was going to do.

  Kate looked at Michael and their eyes met.