Dragon Sleeping (The Dragon Circle Trilogy Book 1) (2 page)

Nick had spent his last seven years on this street, ever since his parents had moved the family here, right after his tenth birthday. Never before had he heard this total quiet, seen this complete stillness. It was different after the storm. The rain-washed streets, the still houses, the incredible night sky, all made him feel that the world outside was something brand-new. And more than new. It seemed almost as if the whole street was waiting for something.

The phone rang.

Nick almost jumped out of his sneakers. Somehow their phone lines had survived the high winds.

The phone rang again. Where was his mother?

He ran from his bedroom and bounded down the stairs in the semi dark, guided by the sound of the still-ringing phone. He reached the front hallway and grabbed the receiver midway through the sixth ring.

“Hello?”

There didn’t seem to be anyone on the other end of the line. No one human anyway. All Nick could hear was a distant whistling, and a rustling like leaves disturbed by a breeze. Nick said hello a second time, but there was no change on the line. He reached across to the base of the phone and pressed down the cut-off switch, then lifted his finger again. The rustling was gone. He had cut the connection. But there was no dial tone in its place. The phone was dead.

Nick replaced the receiver. Strange that the phone should ring like that, maybe it had something to do with the lines going down. He wished he knew more about the way phones worked. Nick thought again of the street, and how it seemed to be waiting. He felt as if he had just gotten a phone call from the wind.

He heard another, distant sound in the evening quiet. It was bells again, but a different sort of bells than the phone this time, higher and fainter yet somehow more distinct, each bell tone separate from the next. It took him a moment to realize the bells were coming from outside the house, out on Chestnut Circle.

A dog barked. It sounded like Charlie.

“Nick?” It was his mother’s voice. “Where are you, honey?” He heard the kitchen door slam.

“Here I am, Mom. I came down to answer the phone.”

“The phone?” his mother called back in disbelief. He sensed more than saw her walking through the darkened kitchen toward the front hall.

He quickly explained how there hadn’t been anyone on the line. He repeated his theory about there being some type of electrical disturbance.

“Can that sort of thing happen?” his mother asked uncertainly. Even in the now-almost-dark, her short, stocky form was reassuring.

She explained that she had gone over to commiserate with Mrs. Smith on the new placement of their oak tree. Mrs. Smith had been over there all by herself when the oak had smashed into their attic. Mr. Smith had been trapped in the city by the suddenness of the storm. Nick’s mother imagined that a lot of people had been trapped by the storm in one way or another.

She went on to explain in some detail what the tree had done to the Smiths’ back bedroom. His mother always liked details.

The ringing outside had grown so soft for a moment that Nick had almost forgotten about it. Now it was back, suddenly sounding much closer, a delicately high-pitched jingling noise, too strident to be wind chimes, like a happy but very definite call to attention.

“What on earth?” his mother murmured as she stepped past him to look out the front door. “Oh, my God. I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

Nick turned around as his mother opened the front door. She pushed open the screen door and walked out onto the front steps.

“Mom?” Nick called out to her.

She didn’t seem to hear him. She kept on walking, down the steps and across the front walk. He pushed the screen door aside and followed her outside.

The last tinge of pink had left the sky. There was still no moon, but those stars were everywhere. The houses around them were nothing more than dark silhouettes against the brilliant sparkling white of the night sky. Nick looked down to his mother and saw a bright light beyond her on the street. It took him a second to make sense of that brilliant white box moving out there, like the time it takes your eyes to adjust from the shade to bright sunlight.

It was some kind of ice cream truck. No, not a truck; more like a wagon on the back of a three-wheeled bicycle. No, that would be tricycle, wouldn’t it? It was pedaled by a stocky, bald man with a mustache so shaggy that it looked like he was trying to make up for the lack of hair on the top of his head. He was dressed all in white, not just shirt and pants, but coat and tie as well. His mother had said she hadn’t seen one of these things in years. Nick hadn’t seen one of these things
ever.

As he walked down the steps after his mother, Nick was aware of other voices around him. He looked to see half a dozen adults and four other kids. The bells on this whatever-it-was had brought out the entire street.

The bald fellow in white used the handlebar brakes to come to a halt directly in front of Nick’s house. The white box on the back of the bike sported large red and blue letters that announced:

MR. SERENDIPITY:

PURVEYOR OF TASTY TREATS AND SMOOTH SURPRISES

The bald man swung his leg over the seat and smiled at the gathered neighborhood. “And what exactly can I get for you?”

Everyone started to talk at once.

“Where’d you come from?” Mr. Mills asked. You could tell he was the high school vice-principal. He always wanted to know everybody’s business.

“Well,” Mr. Serendipity replied. “I was hoping we’d all get introduced a bit more gradually.”

“You got any ice cream sandwiches?” Mary Lou Dafoe asked. God, but she looked gorgeous in the starlight. Her long, dark hair framed her oval face, casting shadows that made her look older than her sixteen years; older and more mysterious, too. Nick sometimes wished the two of them didn’t know each other so well. It was tough to ask out a girl who thought of you like a brother.

Todd Jackson sidled up to her. The starlight didn’t make him look any different at all. He was still an overgrown, overmuscled lout.

“Hey, Mary Lou,” he said in a voice just too loud for a whisper, “why don’t you come over to my place? I’ve got tasty treats to spare.” He leered in his usual offensive way, in case somebody thought he might actually be talking about ice cream.

God, Nick thought, how could Todd believe anybody would fall for that? But then, Todd was Mr. Attitude. Around school, he’d break your arm if you smiled at him the wrong way. He was big enough to be a football player, too, although for some reason he never tried out for the team. Back on Chestnut Circle, without his goons at his side, he stopped being a bully and started being just a jerk. Did he expect the adults to stand around quietly while he made a crude pass at Mary Lou?

But the adults seemed too preoccupied by the ice cream truck to pay any attention to Todd.

“Do you have Nutty Buddies?” old Mr. Furlong asked, his bald head gleaming underneath the stars. His wife hung behind him, probably waiting for her husband to say the wrong thing. There was one thing the Furlongs knew how to do, and that was fight. Some nights their arguments were so loud that the entire street could hear them.

“How about Super Sundaes?” Mrs. Smith asked. She huddled under a white cardigan that she had thrown over her shoulders, despite the warmth of the evening. She was the oldest woman on Chestnut Circle—somewhere in her sixties. Nick’s mother always referred to Mrs. Smith as “painfully thin.” Somehow her tall, skinny form made Mrs. Smith look even older.

Mrs. Smith glanced back at the other neighbors with a smile. “I haven’t had one of those in years.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have any Butter Crunch Bars?” Nick’s mother chimed in. “They don’t seem to carry those down at the market anymore.”

Nick thought this was getting stranger by the minute. Now would the bald man open up his freezer box and pull out anything anybody wanted? Ice cream treats that hadn’t been made for twenty years? Nick had seen this story before on
The Twilight Zone
.

The man in white pulled open the freezer compartment and looked inside. Bright light poured from within. Steam formed where the cold hit the humid summer air.

“Sorry,” he said as he turned back to the neighbors. “All I’ve got is vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate. Well, I might have a couple of orange Popsicles in here somewhere.” He shrugged apologetically. “There wasn’t much time, I’m afraid.”

“What kind of ice cream truck is this?” Mr. Furlong complained. “Well, actually, this isn’t a truck—” the man in white began.

“Hey!” Furlong’s son, Bobby, yelled as his friend Jason Dafoe pushed him. “Get back in line, you scuz!” Bobby punched Jason’s arm. Jason giggled as Bobby grabbed for his glasses. Bobby took a step forward, Jason a step back, as if they might chase each other around the circle. The two of them were only three or four years younger than Nick, but they both acted like little kids.

“Look,” Mr. Furlong insisted, “we’ll take whatever you’ve got.”

“That’s just like you, Leo,” Mrs. Furlong called out from where she stood behind him, ready at last to begin the battle. “You never think for a minute about what I really want.”

Nick’s mother had told him the Furlongs had been married for twenty-seven years. Nick sometimes wondered how they could have stayed married for twenty-seven minutes.

The ice cream man quickly distributed the bars to anyone who held out his hand. Even Mary Lou’s parents came forward from where they had hung back silently.

“How much are these?” Mr. Mills asked.

“Oh,” the bald man said with a start, “you mean money. Oh, dear, no, I couldn’t. This isn’t about money. I’m more of a—” He paused and frowned. “Oh, yes,” he added as he smiled again. “That’s what I am. A welcome wagon.”

“What?” Nick’s mother asked as she took a bite into her bar. “What do you mean? This is our street, we live here already. You must have that wrong.” She paused to look at the ice cream. “You know, this tastes a little bit like that Butter Crunch Bar.”

“Sort of like a Nutty Buddy, too,” Furlong agreed as he chewed.

“Well, it is your street,” the ice cream man said. He took a deep breath before he continued. “But something—well—I’m afraid that’s what I’ve come to tell you about. When it gets light out here again, you’ll see that things have changed.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Mills asked. “Because of the storm?”

“The storm? Oh, goodness, no. That was only a distraction, you see.” The ice cream man grimaced. “I’m afraid I’m not explaining this very well.”

Lightning streaked across the sky. Oddly enough, no thunder followed.

“Oh, no.” The ice cream man studied the sky. “I had expected more time—you’ll have to forgive me, but I can be found much too easily. That wouldn’t be good, just yet. You’ll be safer if I leave now, at least for tonight. I’ll talk to you as soon as I can. Until then, well—remember, I was here first. And try to stay together. Whatever happens, please be ready.”

He held up his hand, perhaps to wave to all the residents of Chestnut Circle, or maybe to stop all the questions that were pouring out of the adults. What Nick saw certainly stopped him, for, in the shadowed part of the ice cream man’s hand, he could see the stars.

“Believe it or not,” he called as if he was already very far away, “we’re all in this together!”

The man in white was gone. No, he hadn’t pedaled away, or even turned. He had simply vanished.

Mr. Furlong dropped his half-eaten ice cream bar on the street. “I’m going home!” he announced.

Somehow, Nick thought, home wasn’t the safe place it had been a few hours before.

A Visit with Nunn

N
unn didn’t trust a soul. Those without souls, however, were a different matter.

The flash of crimson light seemed to agree.

It was there, waiting for him, when he opened the door to this, the most inner room of the place that he had built with his magic, half castle and half maze. But then the light faded, and all went back to darkness, as it was meant to be, safe from sunlight, and from spells other than his own.

The magician moved quickly into the lightless room. Nunn did not need to see his surroundings, at least in any ordinary way. Everything was stored quite carefully here, and anything that moved knew enough to stay out of his path. He paused at the room’s center and clapped once, then twice more. A single point of light spread before him, and an image coalesced within: an elderly man in white giving handouts to the newcomers.

Nunn made a noise deep in his throat. “So quick,” he whispered as he turned away from the image of his brother wizard. “How do you suppose he might have gotten warning?”

The air flashed red for an instant by his right shoulder.

Nunn rubbed at the single, deep furrow that ran across his forehead. “What do you mean? How could he have found out about the calling before I did?”

Another, longer flash of red lit the crowded workroom, a flash long enough to see the shape of the thing that made it, a shape that was almost human.

“Enough!” Nunn announced, his words increasingly angry. “This is no time for amusement.”

The red light shifted to blue and then to green, as if it might entertain itself despite the wizard. Nunn reached out quickly with the flat of his hand, slashing across the illumination.

The green light screamed.

The magician withdrew his hand. His fingers tingled where he had made contact.

“Much better,” the wizard added. “It pleases me so much when you choose to verbalize.”

The green light shifted again and gained substance, defining itself into a small creature covered by fine hair. The light faded further as the hair turned brown, so that the creature might be mistaken for a large monkey or a small chimpanzee, unless one looked at the eyes. They still glowed with the same unnatural light.

The creature managed a ragged breath. “When you call me so abruptly,” it spoke in a thin, high, and quite unpleasant voice, “it tears me up inside.”

“So I’ll put you back together,” Nunn remarked dismissively. “It’s not as if you could exist without me.”