She pulled out a thick hardback book covered in a worn blood-red cloth, its spine sharing English and Chinese characters in faded gold. Delia ran from the dining room, Harley hard on her heels.
Delia flicked on the overhead light in Harley’s bedroom and they both felt a chill when they saw that the room was now empty. The girl might have been a figment of their fevered imaginations – except for the pieces of broken pottery littering the scratched surface of the hardwood floor.
‘What—’ Harley began to say, but the air was suddenly rocked by the sound of a contained explosion. There was no other word for it. It had come from the front of the house.
Harley and his mum – still clutching the brick-like book – turned and sprinted back down the narrow hallway towards the front door. When they reached the sitting room and flicked on the light, they saw the girl standing a metre from the only TV they owned which now had a hole in it the size of a bowling ball, and was smoking gently. A horrible smell of burnt plastic wafted around the room.
Harley howled, ‘You killed it!’ Harley loved his TV almost as much as he loved his fossils and rocks.
The girl let her cupped hands fall easily to her sides, not looking in the least bit guilty or sheepish. She regarded the Sparks, peering at her through the open sitting room door, steadily.
Delia’s look of horror began to soften as she saw the girl’s eyes flick away from them to search the room intently – taking in the old electric sunburst clock on the wall, the calendar turned to the month of April, the chunky twenty-year-old stereo system on the sideboard, the magazine rack on the wall crammed with gossip magazines and old newspapers.
‘I think she might have been trying to turn it on,’ Delia murmured over Harley’s groans of sheer disbelief. ‘Here,’ she said quickly, holding the dictionary out to the girl in the beautiful tunic and floor-sweeping skirt. ‘Just point to what you want to say, all right?’
The girl did not recoil from the tome as Delia had half-expected her to, but considered it for a long moment before reaching out to take it. As she did so, a crack of static energy passed from the girl’s fingertips to Delia’s. Delia drew back, shocked, glancing at Harley, who’d seen it too: an instant of bright blue light.
Power, whispered the voice that lived in Harley’s head; the same voice that had convinced him that taking the vase from the footpath outside Hammonds would be a good idea.
The girl paged furiously through the battered dictionary, her frown deepening as she sped down the columns of words and characters with her eyes and fingers as if she were drinking them all in but not liking what she saw. She reached the midway point of the book – where Chinese characters were highlighted in bold with an English definition next to them, rather than the other way around – and started to shake her head violently in clear distress, her poker-straight black hair falling about her face.
‘It looks as if she’s searching for something she … recognises,’ Delia whispered.
‘But it’s all in Chinese. Isn’t she Chinese?’ Harley hissed back. ‘She looks Chinese. I mean, she’s dressed like a lady from an old kung fu movie. She’s just missing those bun and chopstick things on her head. Why wouldn’t she recognise any of the characters? Maybe she can’t – read?’
‘No,’ Delia said absently, watching as the girl’s finger stopped on a single character near the end of the old volume. ‘I think she can read – but the language … maybe it’s changed. A lot.’
In fact, Delia knew it had changed. Around 1949, to be precise – and maybe a thousand times before then. Something like awe was beginning to take hold of Delia, although she couldn’t begin to put words around what was dawning in her brain because it seemed too fantastic and ridiculous to utter out loud. This was just a kid in fancy dress, right?
The girl stepped towards them, holding out the book still open under her finger, and Delia and Harley retreated automatically, remembering the spark of intense blue light that had passed between her and Delia. The girl jabbed impatiently at the page and Delia leant forward cautiously to look at the character highlighted there.
Delia smiled. It was one of the few characters she remembered from her disastrous year of Chinese study, because it looked exactly like what it was supposed to mean.
‘It means people,’ Delia murmured to Harley. ‘See how those are supposed to be legs, walking?’
The girl made a circling gesture at Delia and Harley – as if she were throwing a lasso around them – then stamped the floor with a small, emphatic, slipper-shod foot. It was Harley’s turn to make a Wait here! gesture as he raced into his bedroom to grab the plastic world globe someone had given him for his twelfth birthday.
He ran back into the sitting room with it and spun it on its axis under the girl’s short, straight nose. Mirroring the encircling motion the girl had made, Harley pointed at the image of Australia at the base of the globe. When the girl tucked the dictionary under one arm and reached for it, Harley almost dropped the globe in alarm.
He made sure that their hands did not touch as the girl placed the stand in one palm and slowly rotated the globe with the other, pausing as her gaze fell on the large landmass at the top of the world with CHINA printed across it. Her face seemed to clear a little.
Delia nodded. ‘Yes?’ she said eagerly, putting her two thumbs up and grinning like a maniac.
The girl looked at Delia’s upraised thumbs blankly, then held out the globe to Harley, who shook his head and flapped his hands at her nervously, indicating she could keep it.
Giving him a faintly reproachful look, the girl put the globe on the floor at her feet and paged back through the dictionary until she stopped again and held it out to them.
‘Ooh,’ said Delia, perturbed. ‘I know that one, but I always mixed it up with the characters for eye and white because they all looked so similar. What is that? It’s one of the three hundred most common characters. You could say I wasn’t a natural at the Chinese language, Harls. Though Chinese food is a whole different story.’
‘May I?’ Harley said, indicating the dictionary in the girl’s hand.
She handed it over quickly, zapping him in the process so that he cried out. Glaring at the girl with a wounded expression – because he actually was wounded – Harley read the definition out loud. ‘It means day or sun.’
Delia stared at the girl for a moment. ‘She wants to know who we are,’ she whispered. ‘As in, what manner of people are we? And she wants to know what … day it is.’
‘When it is,’ Harley interjected in sudden understanding. ‘But I can’t believe in all that great big book of Chinese she’s only got two words she can use.’
He pointed at the calendar on the wall. ‘It’s April, and we’re in Australia,’ he said loudly. ‘AY-PRIL. ORS-TRAY-YAAAAH.’
In reply, the girl wrinkled her nose and frowned harder. Harley could tell from her expression that she thought he was making nonsense noises.
‘Harley, love, she doesn’t appear to be hard of hearing,’ his mum said gently. ‘She just doesn’t understand any of this.’ Delia flapped a hand at the room. ‘I think she’s got practically no frame of reference other than the words for people and day. I mean, look at her. She’s not from now, is she? She’s wearing some kind of full ceremonial costume and had something to do with that old vase that’s in pieces in your bedroom, hard as it is to believe.’
‘So?’ Harley said, bewildered.
‘So,’ Delia’s reply was patient, ‘she needs our help.’
Delia, understanding a thing or two about people in extreme distress, knew she was right. ‘We have to help her. Even if I am knackered, and none of us is eating anytime soon because someone forgot to turn the oven on.’
Harley’s stomach chose that moment to rumble loudly, as if in reproach.
Delia stepped further into the sitting room and, warily, the girl stepped back, her hands flying up into a defensive position, as if anticipating trouble. Delia paused with her own hands up in the air in a
gesture of peaceful surrender. Quietly and calmly, she told Harley to fetch her phone from her handbag in the hallway. ‘I need you to look something up for me, darl.’
He backed away, spotting the handbag wedged beside the umbrella stand next to the door. As he felt around inside for his mum’s phone, he could see the girl desperately paging through the old dictionary again, frustration etched all over her delicate features.
Still in the same calm low tone, Delia told Harley, ‘Look up where in Melbourne you can find old Chinese textbooks – you know, history and language books. It’s got to be old. Pre-twentieth century.’
Harley typed in a few search terms. ‘Like this one?’
Delia looked over her shoulder at the images Harley had pulled up: photographic reproductions of the pages of some old book. He scrolled through dozens of photos – someone had painstakingly photographed every pair of facing pages – with the heading Zhu, English through the Vernaculars of the Canton and Shiuhing Prefectures, c.1862.
‘It’s like an old guidebook that’s filled with English phrases, with loads of Chinese written around the bits in English. That’s gotta be helpful, right? Maybe she can borrow it and learn how to say some stuff so that we can figure out what she wants.’
‘I’m not sure that phrasebook’s quite old enough, actually,’ Delia murmured, squinting at the photographs of the rough-looking sewn-together volume with Chinese and English words wood-blocked onto the pages. ‘That tunic she has on looks, ah, pre-nineteenth century if my knowledge of kung fu soap operas is anything to go by.’ She shook her head in disbelief at the words coming out of her mouth. ‘Where’s the book?’
‘At the State Library,’ Harley said, scrolling through more pages of the book before zooming in on a section headed by the phrase Can you help me? in a flowing cursive script with Chinese characters around it. ‘The library has tonnes of other Chinese and English phrasebooks, maps and images of Chinese people from the nineteenth century, and even before that. But it’s closed now, Mum, isn’t it?’
Harley handed the phone to his mum, who in turn held it out to the girl, indicating frantically that she not take it, only look at it. Under the girl’s nose, Delia navigated to the photographed page with Can you help me? written on it, before zooming back out and showing the girl the other photographed pages of the old book. The girl’s eyes seemed to light up, or more accurately, glow with excitement.
And the whites of her eyes really were the faintest bit gold, Harley thought to himself, astonished.
The girl did the stamping thing with her foot again, then jabbed at the screen before turning her hand palm up.
‘I think she’s asking Where?’ Harley murmured, standing at a safe distance behind his mum as the girl stamped her foot once more and made the same gesture with her hand.
Delia showed the girl a picture of the State Library – a grand, classical Victorian building of stone with a central peaked portico supported by eight massive carved pillars, huge wings running either side, a sweeping set of stairs leading up to the vast front entrance and a great domed reading room that rose from the centre of it all, at least five storeys high. ‘It’s a public library, love,’ Delia added in what she hoped was a helpful tone. ‘I can take you there tomorrow, first thing, to look at the book. I’m on late shift. But Harley’s right, it’s probably closed now.’
The word floated up out of Delia’s memory from a murky, long ago somewhere. ‘Guān,’ she said in Chinese. ‘You know, closed.’
The girl cocked her head and opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something at last, but she shut it again, dropping the heavy dictionary. It fell to the ground with a thud. The girl made a rapid writing motion with her hand instead.
‘She wants to write something, Mum,’ Harley said.
‘I can see that,’ his mum said, looking around the room for a piece of paper or a pen. ‘But, as usual, there isn’t a bit of stationery in the entire wretched place.’
Harley took the phone out of his mum’s hand and turned it to the landscape position.
He opened a drawing application before Delia could react, showing the girl how to draw on it with a finger by doing a smiley face. He erased the smiley face and the girl reached for the phone eagerly. But before she could take it from him, Harley pointed at the conspicuously dead TV behind her and waggled his free hand. ‘Less power,’ he said in a more normal speaking voice, hoping she understood the tone, if not the words. ‘Don’t make it die.’
‘I need that phone, Harls,’ his mum wailed under her breath as the girl took it from him without touching him this time, turning the phone over in her hand and feeling its weight before orienting it to landscape again and studying the screen. ‘It’s got my entire life in it, Harley – my shifts for the next three months, all your parent–teacher interviews, you shouldn’t have …’
Delia fell silent. The girl had placed the index finger of her right hand against the right of the screen and was drawing in quick, contained strokes. When she held the image out to Harley and Delia they each got goosebumps.
The girl pointed at the silken creatures twining across her tunic, and Delia said, ‘Okay, dragon. Got it.’
The girl hesitated for a moment before inscribing a simple character to the left of the dragon image.
Lastly, she drew one box inside another beside that:
Then the girl handed the phone back to Harley with exaggerated care, not touching his hand.
‘Read it from right to left,’ Delia said. ‘I don’t remember much, but I do remember that.’
Harley sat down on the edge of the couch and flicked out of the drawing application, plugging a round of new search terms into his mum’s phone as he compared lists of common Chinese characters against the simple hand-drawn characters that had followed the symbol of the dragon.
When he glanced up at his mother at last, Harley looked shaky.
‘What?’ Delia said. ‘What does it say? Is it a name? A place?’
Harley shook his head, flicking back to the screen of words and images the girl had drawn. He gave a little shiver as he peered down at them.
‘It’s a message. She’s written: Dragon. King. Returns.’
Delia’s blood ran cold, but before she could pepper Harley with questions – questions that she knew he wouldn’t have answers to – the girl slipped right past them, out of the room. They turned to stare at each other, shocked, before following the fleeing figure back down the hallway to Harley’s bedroom, watching as she bent and sifted through the pieces of broken pottery on the floor as if she were looking for something specific.
She was. Holding the thicker jagged base piece up to the light, the girl turned it over and cried out – the first sound the Sparks had heard her make.
On the base, Harley and his mum saw a small red square with some white Chinese script on it like a potter’s mark. Beneath the mark, like an afterthought, ran three horizontal lines that grew bigger as they went down, executed by hand in the same red glaze.
‘That’s the character for three,’ Delia breathed. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Wish I could get a closer look at that other mark,’ Harley whispered back.
The girl closed her hand around the broken base of the vase – which was only slightly smaller than her palm – and bowed her head over it, as if in grief. It was as though she’d forgotten that Harley and his mum were standing there.
When she looked up again, Delia and Harley both gasped in shock. The irises of the girl’s eyes were almost completely black now, the thin ring of azure swallowed almost to the edges by a hue like midnight, the whites glowing a darker gold.
The girl began to chant: short, sharp syllables, slippery as beads strung together without pause, that Harley couldn’t catch and keep in his brain. The room grew colder and colder as the chanting increased in volume and the Sparks’ exhalations began to stain the air in little puffs of arctic white.
Without warning, the girl opened her hands at waist level, pushing the
m outwards with great force as she roared a word that sounded like long. At that moment, all the lights went out in the house, and through his bedroom window Harley saw the world outside go dark too.
It seemed like just a few seconds later that the lights came back on, but the girl was gone, and a heavy rain had begun to fall.
Instinct made Harley sprint down the hall and throw open the front door. He scanned the night sky outside and caught it – just a flash of azure blue through the leaves of the plane trees that lined his street on either side. Like blue lightning, but climbing upwards.
Harley scrambled for the bike and helmet he kept on the front veranda for emergencies just like this one.
‘Where are you going, Harls?’ his mum yelled behind him. ‘It’s pouring!’
‘The State Library!’ Harley shouted before he jammed his helmet on his head, kicked the brakes off, and rode straight down the front steps through the open gate and out into the street.
‘You know I’ll be all right, Mum!’ Harley yelled back as his mother shrieked, ‘Haar-leeey Spaaark!’
Delia had a loud voice – just about everybody they knew agreed on that – and it followed Harley down the road like a banshee until he turned the corner into High Street and started pumping his legs furiously in the direction of the city, where the library was. His mum would stop being mad at him soon, he figured, because she trusted him to do the right thing. She always said so.
Harley couldn’t be absolutely sure that the State Library was where the girl was headed, but when a sizzle of lightning lit up the sky for miles around, he knew he was right as he spotted a streak of brilliant blue high up, like a faint, sinuous ribbon of colour, heading across town. Harley turned in the same direction, the lightning followed by a boom of thunder so loud he almost fell off his bicycle as he ducked into a side street. But he rode on, grimly, through puddles of water on the road and dirty great waves which passing cars splashed up into his face. He cut through the green leafy parkland around the Shrine and the Domain before hitting the edge of the city and pedalling straight up Swanston Street, zipping and weaving through a clog of trams and crisscrossing pedestrians.