The Black Dragon (2 page)

But there's more to cope with than that. The acrid smell of the explosion, the cold weather, the arrival of the emergency services are all conspiring to remind him of that terrible day twenty long months ago: snow falling steadily from the Berlin sky, shock tearing his insides as the policeman pulled him away from the charred, broken remains of their circus trailer. The ambulance unloading stretchers for Mum and Dad. Or what was left of them.

He shudders. Tries to push the thoughts back down and lock them away again. Like normal.

But this time it's different.

The memories refuse to lie down again. And vaguely he's aware that the blast has shaken something loose. Agitation rises up in waves—as if waking him from a long but fitful night's sleep. The feeling keeps growing: an impulse to get moving, to be
doing
something. Unable to rest, he starts to pace the room like Dad used to do when struggling to perfect an escape, eager to eat his dinner and get back to the practice ring.

“Woo!” Jamie breezes in without knocking, throwing himself down in an armchair. The knowing smirk has been temporarily knocked from the corners of his mouth.

“Did you hear? It was a gas leak, and now there's no heating. Old Kircher's shutting down early for the half-term break!”

“What are you doing in my room? What do you want?”

Jamie ignores the question. “If I hadn't chucked your stupid cards . . .” He lets the thought hang for a moment. “I saved your life, Woo! You could thank me.”

“Yep. Thanks.”

“Were you scared?”

“Not really.” And strangely enough that's the truth, Danny thinks.

“I nearly crapped myself !”

The smirk's coming back as Jamie's eyes rove the room. They latch onto a framed photo on Danny's desk. It shows a powerfully built dwarf standing beside an oversized cannon. He's dressed in an astronaut outfit, his head shaved close and muscles bulging through his silver spacesuit. Tucked under his arm is a helmet marked with a big red Z.

Danny follows Jamie's gaze and sees his eleven- year-old self standing in the picture beside the dwarf—smiling, looking relaxed. Only a year and a half ago, but it seems like a hundred. Even the little quiff in his short dark hair looks perkier there.

“And who's this little freak you're with?”

“Major Zamora. Our strongman,” Danny says, biting back anger. “That's his old human cannonball act—Captain Solaris.”

“Bet they fired him,” Jamie says, laughing at his own joke.

As if no one's ever told that one before! How to explain to an idiot like Jamie Gunn? How to say just how important Zamora has been: lifelong friend, confidant, godfather . . . all rolled into one. Danny has missed Zamora almost as much as Mum and Dad. And it's been ages. The one chance he had to see the major again had been on a tour of Zamora's latest outfit—Circo Micro—but being up close to the circus world again had felt too raw.

“He's what? A midget?” Jamie says.

“A dwarf. Midget's rude.”

“So your circus was all freak shows, animal cruelty?”

“No! Never heard of Archaos? Cirque du Soleil?”

“Nah.”

“That's ‘new circus.' Just like us. Scary, arty. Edgy stuff. No animals—”

“Circus is just for kids,” Jamie says with a snort.

“And what did your folks do, then?”

“Amazing things . . .”

Danny's still lost in the photo. You can just see part of his old trailer home in the background, and the memories come bubbling up—both good and bad. How to describe the wild beauty of the Mysterium and its band of misfits, loners, dreamers? Jamie Gunn won't understand, so no point trying to explain. You had to see it to believe it.

“Gotta go, Freaky,” Gunn says, getting up to leave. “What're you going to do with the extra holiday then?”

“Just going to be at Aunt Laura's, I guess.”

“Well, have fun, woncha?”

Jamie being nice? Just another bit of weirdness to add to the day.

Phone calls are made to announce the closure, and Danny goes to wait for Aunt Laura in the common room. For some reason he can't fathom, the windows there are barred. Keeping people out—or in? Through them he can see the mud-locked games pitches, and, beyond them, the high wall that circles the school cutting into the mist.

Still he can't settle, and impatiently he goes to stand on the front steps. Maybe it's just the adrenalin rush from the explosion punching through his system. Maybe. But there's something deeper there now, pushing him toward action, movement.
Come on, Laura. Get a move on.

And then suddenly she's powering up the driveway, her old car chewing up the gravel. He watches as Laura brakes hard, sliding the car between an ambulance and a smart Jag, missing both by a whisker.

She jumps out, takes in the column of smoke drifting heavenward from the back of the school, and, mouth dropping open in concern, comes striding across the fire hoses. Without thought for any embarrassment she might cause, she throws her arms hard around him. She takes her role as guardian seriously, and puts every ounce of strength into the hug.

“Danny! Are you OK?”

“I'm fine,” he says, wriggling free.

“So what's this bandage?”

She breaks off, holding his shoulders, appraising him at arm's length. For an investigative journalist—a fearless one at that, who takes everything in her stride—she suddenly seems knocked off balance. Even the short stint in prison didn't do that to her.

“God! A minute earlier and—”

“I'm OK,” he says. “I just want to get going.”

“Well, I've got a thing or two to say to your blasted headmaster first. What's his name again?”

“Mr. Kircher.”

“Kircher. Right! You go and pack your stuff.”

“Aunt Laura—” he calls after her, but it's no use. She's marching through the front doors to tackle the headmaster.

“Kircher, a word or two, if you please. No, I haven't got time to wait! You're lucky we don't pursue a negligence claim. How'd you like that in the papers to make you choke on your bleeding cornflakes!”

No contest.

Danny watches her go as Kircher takes a defensive step backward. This is more like the usual Aunt Laura—a box of fireworks, ready to take on anyone, anything.

He heads to pack, mulling things over as he goes.
Maybe I should get out the posters of Mum and Dad from under the bed when I come back
, he thinks.
Put them up.
Maybe it would help. But then people like Jamie would just mock them. And maybe it's still too painful.

They can stay where they are, rolled up—protected and safe—in their cardboard tubes: Mum strolling on the wire, under the very highest point of the Mysterium's midnight-blue “hemisphere,” tossing firecrackers to the ground far below, the poster emblazoned with the words:

LILY WOO
IN THE
WONDER CHAMBER

And the beautiful painted one of Dad at the end of his burning rope, bound in the straitjacket, flames chewing his ankles as he turns to smile at the audience, oblivious of the danger. It says:

THE GREAT
HARRY WHITE
HE CAN
ESCAPE
FROM
ANYTHING!

Except it wasn't true, was it?

Danny sets about putting cards, magic books, home clothes into his old circus trunk. It's the same dark blue as their old big top, and proudly carries the single word MYSTERIUM.

Underneath that is the logo: a pure-white skull gazing out of the darkness, surrounded by pale-blue and red butterflies. Dad had said it was a kind of vanitas—an image that contained at once both death and fragile life, to remind you how everything changes, is transient. And one day gone forever.

“A whisker away from nothingness, Danny.”

“So why do we have it on our logo?”

“Because that's what it's all about. Being fully alive! By not forgetting that we're lucky to be here at all!”

Danny runs his finger over the golden letters now. Everything is changing. All the time. Maybe it would have been better to have parents who commuted to work and nagged you about homework and did normal things and expected you to do the same.

He sighs. Maybe.

From the bottom drawer of his desk, he takes Dad's thick notebook and lays it on the clothes. It's just smaller than a regular sheet of paper in size, and stuffed with working notes, drawings, newspaper clippings, photos, diagrams, and lists. On the cover, in strong capitals:

THE MYSTERIUM
ESCAPE BOOK SECRETS

Danny shuts the lid and snaps the padlock shut. The sides of the trunk are covered in stickers, listing the places he's seen: Rome, Athens, Budapest, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Paris, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Munich, and on and on—one tour after another. There, tucked among them, the last one he stuck to the side: Berlin.

No more stickers after that.

“Ready then, Danny boy?” Laura says brightly, popping her head in the door. “Let's move it! And I've got a surprise for you.”

3

HOW TO GET AN UPGRADE FOR FREE

But on the drive back to Cambridge, Laura falls silent. Danny knows she's thinking something through by the way she tilts her head slightly one way, then another—clearly weighing up options. She accelerates to overtake a string of trucks and glances back at him.

“So, what's this surprise?” he asks.

“Well. I was thinking. How about a change of scene? Take your mind off things? I'm up to here with research for my Hong Kong story.” She forces a smile, and sweeps the blonde hair from her eyes. “Thought I might fly out earlier than I meant to and . . . And, well, perhaps take you with me? God knows if school will reopen on time. I doubt it very much.”

“Hong Kong?!”

“Why not? You've always wanted to go, haven't you? See where Lily came from—bless her soul. It might help.”

“I don't know.”

On the one hand he just wants to stay put. Enjoy that quiet, cozy half-term break as usual, surrounded by the salvaged stuff from the Mysterium. Tuck up in his attic room with the Houdini biography and watch YouTube clips of David Blaine and people like that. Afternoons poring over the Escape Book maybe, trying to crack the many coded entries.

On the other hand—Hong Kong, Mum's birthplace? Actually doing something rather than holing up, nursing his wounds.

“Thought you'd jump at it,” Laura says.

The thought of travel
does
chime with that urge for action and movement . . .

“And I'd appreciate the company, Danny boy! Some of these gangs I'm investigating are scary as anything.”

“So would I be helping?”

“God no. You'll be sightseeing. Having a good time.”

“On my own?”

“You'll need a companion,” Laura says, playing her trump card. “A minder, if you like. Someone trustworthy. Someone whose shoulders we can rely on?” A smile flickers on her lips. “Someone like . . . Major Zamora, for example?”

He has guessed as much before she says it. After all, a dwarf who can lift a motorbike over his head? Now,
those
are reliable shoulders. Pinned to Danny's bedroom wall are the postcards Zamora has sent as he drifts from one contract to another. Pictures of Paris, the Acropolis in Athens, the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

And now? Somewhere new and unrelated to the Mysterium? Danny feels his face lifting. And to see Hong Kong at last . . .

Laura glances at him again. “I'll take that smile as a yes, then.”

She pushes hard on the accelerator and the Citroën leaps into the fading light.

“Yes.”

From around his neck, hung on a bootlace, Danny takes his talisman: Dad's lockpick set—one of the few items that survived the fire. Five slender picks and a detachable tension tool folded into a stainless-steel handle. Goodness only knows how many locks Dad picked with the thing. Danny looks at it for a moment as it turns slowly on the bootlace, rolling the names of the tools in his head: snake rake, half diamond, hook pick, double round. It's like a prayer, saying those words. A prayer of escape. And maybe it's being answered.