A Crown of Dragons Read online

  “Hmm?” she queried.

  “The attic, did the TV man go in there?”

  “What? Oh … yes, I think so. Why?”

  “Who was he? What was his name?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Mom, pay attention! I’m talking to you.”

  “I’m recording something,” she said. “Just a minute.” She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, pointing a remote at the on-screen guide.

  I gave an impatient sigh. “Just find the program you want and press ‘OK.’” She wasn’t the best at this kind of thing.

  “I know how to work it, thank you. There’s a schedule clash. I’m trying to find an alternate listing. Oh, now look what you’ve made me do. I’ve gone back to the silly main menu.”

  “Oh, give it to me.” I took the remote from her. “What’s the program called?”

  “My Lives Remembered, on channel —”

  “I’ll find it,” I cut in. Which I did, straightaway. She was right; there was a conflict. “I’ll have to change one of your other recordings because this channel doesn’t have repeats.”

  “Oh, leave it,” she said, flapping a hand. “I’m not that bothered. It’s just something Harvey …”

  She trailed off.

  Too late. I’d gotten the scent. “Harvey?”

  She folded her arms. “The guy from work who’s asked me out.”

  “His name’s Harvey?”

  “Yes, his name’s Harvey.”

  “That’s a stupid name.”

  “Michael! All right. Go to bed.”

  “What? It’s early.”

  “Too bad. That’s what being rude gets you. You’ve never even met this man and already you’re against him. Well, I’m not having it. Bed.” She moved her gaze to the door and back. “Go on. I’m not joking.”

  I curled my fingers. I’d played this all wrong. If I was going to find out about the TV man, I needed Mom on my side. Time to use what Josie called drastic tactics. “Okay, I’m sorry.” I hung my head, made a big show of hugging her, then stood up and turned all sad-eyed toward the door.

  “Oh, Michael … come back here.”

  Yes!

  She took my hands and swung them gently. “I don’t want us to fight about this. I know how much you love your dad. This is not about replacing him. It’s … Well, I don’t know what it is, to be honest — a TV show. That’s what.”

  “He wants you to watch something?”

  She raised her shoulders. “Some of the girls at work were talking about hypnosis —”

  “Hypnosis?”

  “As a possible cure for smoking, and Harvey said there was an interesting thing on tonight about past-life regression.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, a silly idea about people who think they’ve lived before and remember their old lives under hypnosis.”

  Like Dad, perhaps? Was that what was happening to him on the film, when he was talking like a boy?

  “Are you okay?” Mom asked. “You look like you’ve swallowed an ice cube, whole.”

  “Can I watch it?”

  “No, it’s on late.”

  I picked up the remote. “Okay, I’ll record it. Don’t get rid of it.” I flicked a few buttons and made sure there was a little red clock next to the program title.

  “You really want to see this?”

  “Project — for school.”

  “Since when did you study hypnotic regression?”

  “It’s for … biology. Functions of the brain. Who was the TV antenna man?”

  “The —? Oh.” That threw her for a second. “Mr…. Hart or something.”

  “Hart? Hartland?”

  She looked confused. “No, that doesn’t sound right. I can’t remember. I got him from the phone book. Why?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. I am going to bed now, if that’s okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Shall I bring you a drink?”

  “No, thanks. Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “I really am sorry about … what I said.”

  “I know. Let’s put that behind us, okay?”

  Yes, but not completely. Hart something? That was worth checking out. In fact, much as I disliked the idea of another man in Mom’s life, I needed to cover all the angles. Chewing my lip, I said, “I’d like to meet him.”

  “Who, the TV man?”

  No. He was one for Freya and her crows. “Harvey. I want to meet Harvey.”

  I disobeyed Mom. Once again, I listened for her going to bed, gave it half an hour, then crept into the front room and turned on the TV. I knelt close to the screen and kept the sound low. My Lives Remembered had already started, but I found the recording and played it from the start, to get an idea of what it was about. It featured three people, two men and one woman, who all claimed to have memories of lives they’d lived before. The first man was a guy called Hank. He had what Mom would call a walrus mustache and hair tied back in a skinny braid. Hank lived in Boston and drove a school bus. He had never traveled farther north than Montreal, yet he had an irrational fear of polar bears. He told the story of how a kid had gotten onto his bus one morning carrying a stuffed white bear. The sight of the toy had made Hank panic. The fear was so bad he’d had to call the depot to ask them to send a replacement driver. Even photographs of polar bears made him sweat. The next shot showed him in a high-backed chair in a hypnotist’s study. He looked exactly like Dad on the DVD, eyes closed, head to one side, words coming out a little slower than normal. The hypnotist asked him who he was. It took a while, but Hank eventually said, “Tulugaq,” in a voice that sounded clogged with mud. His Boston accent had completely disappeared. The hypnotist asked him to describe his surroundings. Hank came out with one word, ice. The hypnotist said, “Why do you see ice?” After another pause, Hank said, “Hunting.”

  Then it cut to the woman, a nurse who believed she’d met one of her patients during the Crimean War. I skipped that and whizzed the program forward, looking for more about Hank. It turned out that in his “previous life,” he’d been an Inuit hunter called Tulugaq (meaning “raven,” weirdly). One day he’d been out hunting for seal when his sled had struck a thin patch of ice and he’d wrecked his knee and been unable to walk. He and most of his dogs were then attacked and killed by a polar bear. He became agitated as he told the story and needed to be calmed. “All you hear is my voice,” said the hypnotist. “I’m going to count from three to one and snap my fingers, then you will wake and be perfectly relaxed. Three … two … one …” Snap. Hank cried when he saw the tapes played back. It didn’t look to me as if he was faking it.

  I sank back and thought about what I’d seen. If this was real and Hank wasn’t just dreaming, did that mean we’d all lived lives in the past? Me, Mom, Josie, Dad? I turned my thoughts to the DVD, but it was the words of Mr. Greenway that kept playing in my head. How would you prove the authenticity of your evidence when there is nothing else to compare your dragon scale with? Answer: You’d run a series of experiments on anyone who had come into contact with the scale to record its effect on humans and see if it gave any clues to its origins — or its powers. Was that why Dad had not come home? UNICORNE had held him in quarantine, no doubt calling in Liam Nolan to first run a series of medical checks, before putting Dad through a battery of tests, regression hypnosis being one example. Just like Hank, Dad seemed to be remembering a previous life, in which he was some sort of mountain boy, reliving a time when dragons must have visited the earth. He’d seen them filling up the sky, had felt the air move to the power of their wingbeats, listened to the deafening roar of their cries, marveled at their breaths of rippling fire. Galan aug scieth. I closed my eyes and rocked to the rhythm of those mysterious words. Maybe he’d learned a snippet of their language. Galan aug scieth. But what did it mean? And why would he say it? Galan aug scieth. Galan aug scieth. Over and over I repeated the phrase, until I could feel my head turning light. My body swayed. There was heat in my hand, the hand that Klimt had ex
posed to the scale. My head was a field of expanding stars. I was on the brink of a reality shift unlike anything I’d experienced before. Galan aug scieth. My heart raced. I heard a growl and sensed the TV flickering.

  “GALAN AUG SCIETH!”

  My eyes flashed open.

  There was a dragon on the TV screen.

  And I was ready to go to it, to move through time and be someone else in a different era, a different world, a different life, when a voice cried, “MICHAEL!” and I became aware of hands on my shoulders, rocking me sideways, shaking me, shaking me, punching my arm.

  I snapped awake.

  And there was Josie in her nightdress, clutching a teddy bear to her chest.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed. “Mom’ll kill you if she sees you up this late with the TV on. It’s a good thing she doesn’t sleep in my room or she’d have heard you and you’d be grounded forEVER.” She hurried forward, grabbed the remote, and put the screen to sleep. “What was that stuff you were saying?”

  “I saw a dragon,” I muttered.

  “Um, yeah, a trailer for a movie, hello?”

  “Trailer?” I panted. “No, it was real. They were calling me, Jose. I could feel their power.”

  “You’re weird,” she tutted. “You stay and get caught if you want to. I only came down for Button. At least I’ve got an excuse if Mom shows.” She hugged her teddy bear and made for the door.

  “Josie, wait.”

  “What?” She banged a fist through the air.

  It was time. This was it. It was time for her to know. I couldn’t stand it any longer — the secrets, the lies, the loneliness. Stuff UNICORNE and all it stood for. Stuff the Bulldog and his threats. “I’m close to learning the truth about Dad.”

  Her shoulders sagged. Her eyes closed.

  Quickly, I said, “Think hard. You must remember something about last week? The big office. The soldiers. The paper streamers! A woman called Chantelle changed your memories. She’s French. You know her. She was my nurse when you came to visit me in the hospital, after my accident. She was our au pair once … in a different reality.”

  She looked at me with eyes as small as the teddy’s.

  “It’s true! I’m not lying. Dad worked for a secret organization. I’ve got a file on him. I can show you what happened when he went to New Mexico.”

  She took a step toward me. “You’re horrible,” she said, her nostrils flaring. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

  I opened my hands. “What am I doing?”

  “You’re trying to get me on your side so that Mom will never meet another man. It won’t work. And if you make her unhappy by telling her any more of your stupid stories or lies about Dad, I promise I will never speak to you again. NEVER.”

  “Jose —?”

  But she was gone and I was alone again, questions and theories my only companions.

  I met Freya on the playing fields at break the next day.

  “You should be careful,” she raked. “The others will start calling you a loner soon.”

  And she, more than anyone, knew what that was like. When she was a girl, she had been the regular outcast at school. “I don’t care what they think. Who needs a dunce like Garvey in their life? I found out about the TV people. It’s a company called Hart & Sons. They’re in the industrial park near Holton Woods. I don’t know which Hart came to the house. Can’t push it with Mom or she’ll get suspicious.”

  Ark! Hart & Sons. That was all she needed.

  “Freya, I saw this TV show last night about people who think they remember lives they’ve lived before. I’m sure that’s what’s happening to Dad on the film. Liam was using hypnosis to regress him.”

  Ark? Why?

  I flicked away a blade of grass. “I don’t know. But something strange happened while I was watching.” I told her about the experience I’d had and how Josie had shaken me out of it. “It wasn’t like the reality shifts I’ve felt before. I’ve always been at the center of them and everything around me has changed the way I imagined it —”

  Ark!

  She rustled her feathers.

  “Sorry.” I pulled in my collar. She knew all about the shifts, of course. In her case, I’d spun the tracks of the universe and now here she was, strutting around in black feathers by my feet.

  She sharpened her beak on a stone.

  “This was different, this shift. I didn’t feel in control. Maybe that explains why Dad’s mind is separated from his body? Maybe they pushed too hard with him when they didn’t understand what the scale could do?”

  The first bell rang.

  I grabbed my bag and stood up. I didn’t want to be late again. “Let me know what you find about the Harts.”

  She gave me that moody look again.

  “What?”

  Arrr-aak! Don’t trust UNICORNE.

  And away she flew.

  The rest of the school day passed without incident. I narrowly escaped yet another detention for turning up in French without my notebook. Mr. Besson, my teacher, let me off with a warning: Get these verbs copied into your workbook tonight or you’ll be writing an essay for me using every one of them. (I made a mental note to find my workbook.)

  It was after school that things took an unexpected turn. While Josie and I were waiting for Mom to collect us, a smart black sedan oozed into our regular spot. Mom climbed out of the passenger seat.

  “Michael. Josie.” She beckoned us to her.

  “What’s going on?” Josie asked.

  I glanced at the driver, a middle-aged man in glasses.

  Mom opened a rear door. “I had to leave my car at work. The battery’s dead or something. Harvey offered to help. Come on, it’s cold. Get in.”

  This was Harvey? I looked at him again, but he was leaning away from me, fiddling with the radio.

  Get in, Mom mouthed, in that be grateful to your grandma for buying you that pair of pink socks you’ve always wanted kind of way.

  I dropped into the seat. Beige leather. Comfortable. The car was immaculate. It had that just-off-the-production-line smell about it.

  “Hello, Michael,” said Harvey. His voice was quiet but confident. A slight American Midwest accent.

  “Hi,” I grunted, unhappy about being surprised like this. This wasn’t the kind of meeting I’d planned for. His eyes appeared in the rearview mirror, dark brown, no alarming flecks. I found something interesting to look at out the window.

  “Michael, put your seat belt on,” said Mom, helping Josie to fasten hers.

  She clunked Josie’s door and got into the front passenger seat. The first time that had happened since the weekend before Dad disappeared.

  “What kind of car is this?” asked Josie.

  “A BMW,” Harvey replied without any hint of smugness.

  “It’s cool,” Josie said.

  It moved liked molten chocolate.

  “Do you like cars?” he asked.

  “Not really. Michael does.”

  Thank you, sister, for that knife in the side.

  Mom said, “He’s got a poster of a supercar in his room. Not that you can see it through the plaster dust. A Lamborghini, isn’t it?”

  I said nothing.

  Harvey filled the silence. “I drove a Lambo once.”

  Mom gasped. “Goodness, you owned a Lamborghini?”

  Easily swayed or what?

  Harvey laughed. “Not on a professor’s wages. I had a drive-day experience at Silverstone racetrack. I took one for a spin around there.”

  And broke the track record, no doubt.

  “Scared me half to death. They’re fast, those things. My foot was more on the brake than the gas.”

  I felt Mom’s gaze on me briefly. “Well, you won’t be going fast around our narrow lanes. Do you need me to tell you the way?”

  “GPS has it,” he said.

  GPS. That made me think about Dad in the desert, and Mogollon monsters, and encounters with dragons. I happened to glance
at Harvey’s mirror and saw that he was watching me. I lowered my head and picked at a buckle on my schoolbag. Mom reached back and tapped my knee. “So how was school today, you two?”

  Josie piped up. “Mrs. McNiece says I’m ready for my next evaluation.”

  “Josie’s learning the flute,” Mom explained.

  Harvey gave an admiring nod. “I always struggled with wind instruments. Too many fiddly holes.”

  “It’s not that hard,” said Josie.

  “It is with fingers like mine,” he said. He took a hand off the wheel and wiggled a set. He had slightly rough hands, as if he did a lot of gardening or something.

  “Continue forward,” the GPS said.

  “Well, that’s excellent, Josie,” Mom said proudly. “How was your day, Michael? Anything exciting happen?”

  Well, I thought about punching Ryan Garvey and had a quick chat with a crow. This was SO fake. Mom never asked about school anymore; it was only because her “friend” was in the car.

  “Michael’s doing well in religious studies,” said Josie.

  “He is?” said Mom.

  “Yeah, can’t you tell? He’s training to be a monk.”

  “Get lost!” I snapped, turning on her.

  She stuck out her tongue. “You can still talk, then?”

  “All right,” Mom said, her voice up a gear. “Remember where you are, please.” She flashed me a warning glare. “Moody one, mouthy one,” she said to Harvey. “I have to live with this daily.”

  He smiled, but didn’t comment.

  “At the junction, turn right,” the GPS said.

  Harvey turned the corner. “I can’t imagine a life of monastic silence.”

  “Certainly not in your profession,” Mom agreed.

  “What do you do?” asked Josie.

  Like anyone cared.

  “I study languages,” he said.

  “French?”

  He shook his head. “Bit farther east. More ancient Greek.”

  Josie wasn’t going to miss a chance to show off. “Je m’appelle Josie.”

  “Enchanté, Josie,” he replied.

  “What does that mean?” Josie whispered close to Mom’s ear.