The Dragon Book (47 page)

That night, Lydia came out of her bedroom several times and implored JoBoy to stop pacing about the house. ‘Some of us have to work tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Around dawn, he thought that he understood what had happened to his father. Paul, like his son, had had two bodies, one of them a dragon. This must account for his fiery relish of curry. When the dragon flew, it left its drained and lifeless human body temporarily behind. Paul’s body had been found before the dragon could return to it. It followed then that JoBoy’s father was alive still, without a human shape to return to.

JoBoy slept exhaustedly most of the next day. At night, he set out to find his father. He left his fine, thin, new-made body asleep in its bed and went on four legs down the road to the wood. It had come to him that the wood’s energies might help him locate Paul.

The energies were tremendous that night. They poured through JoBoy, faintly illuminating his grey-blue dragon outline. He stood with his claws in moist twigs and his wings cocked and sent out great questing dragon calls. Around midnight, he caught a small, distant answer. It was definitely a dragon voice. It seemed to be asking, faintly, for help from somewhere a long way south and east of the wood.

JoBoy’s clawed feet scrambled as he galloped out into the road to find room to fly in. He spread the great webby wings. But it seemed they were not yet quite developed enough to get him airborne. He flapped hard and angrily, hearing the wind from the wings set the trees threshing, but he remained crouched in the road. His tail stabbed the tarmac in frustration.

Some of the noise he had thought was the trees turned out to be the sound of a neighbour’s car returning from a theatre. Before JoBoy could move, he was skewered, dazzled, in the headlights, and, as he tried to move, the car swept through him and on, to turn into a driveway further down the road.

Nobody shouted. Nobody came to look. JoBoy discovered that he himself was quite undamaged. And he had felt nothing as the car went through him. I’m invisible! he thought. Then, I’m made of fog!

He crawled back home thinking that invisibility was probably very useful indeed. He could hunt Paul by daylight. Since he was not in the least sleepy, he spent the hours until dawn strengthening his wings. It felt odd to work on a part of himself that did not seem to exist, but it seemed quite possible. He fell asleep on his sofa.

‘Well, really,’ Lydia said as she hurried past on her way to work. ‘Are you ill again or just lazy?’ She did not seem to expect an answer.

JoBoy made himself a leisurely breakfast and took his dragon form out of the house. He went warily at first, in case he proved to be visible after all. But no one seemed to notice, so he grew bold and rushed down the length of the road, flapping, flapping, until, to his great joy, he found himself in the air, planing above the springing green of the wood. He wheeled around above the trees and pointed himself in the direction the call for help had come from and flew there.

It was hard work at first, until he discovered how to catch breezes and thermals without needing to flap his wings, and he kept being distracted too by the increasingly rural land that passed underneath him. It was so green, so full of life. Before long, he saw what he took to be an oasthouse and decided that he must be in Kent. He sent out a long, cautious, dragon call.

The reply was instant. ‘Help! Oh, thank goodness! Help! Here!’ It sounded like a female. Puzzled, JoBoy came planing down onto deliciously fragrant new grass, into what felt like an old common. The oasthouse, plainly converted to living space, stood on one side. The rest was surrounded by hedges, fruit trees, and comely old cottages. ‘Where are you?’ JoBoy called.

The reply was piercingly from under his great clawed feet. ‘Here! Underneath! Let me out!’

JoBoy looked down. In the grass, almost between his talons, there was a small boulder embedded in the turf. He pawed at it dubiously. It felt queer, as if there was more to it than just a boulder—almost as if, he had to admit to himself, there was some kind of magic involved.

‘Just move the stone!’ the voice implored him from underground. ‘I’ve been here so long!’

JoBoy flexed his great claws, dug both feet under the sides of the boulder, and pulled. And heaved. He would never have shifted it, but for a high-speed train that went screaming past in the mid-distance, presumably on its way to France via the Channel tunnel. JoBoy thought, Ah! Energy source! and felt power surge into him. He saw his forelegs glow foggy white with it as he heaved at the stone again.

It rolled away on its side. Blue mist instantly filled the earthy depression it had left, bulged, crested, and took form as a blue female dragon, slightly smaller than JoBoy. She put her jagged muzzle up and breathed in the power from the rapidly disappearing train. He saw her glow with it and enlarge slightly. ‘Oh good!’ she said. ‘I knew there was a lot of power around nowadays, but I never could use it to break that spell. Thank you.’ She rested, pulsing for a moment, and then asked, ‘Who are you? You’re new, aren’t you?’

‘I’m JoBoy,’ JoBoy said. ‘I—er—had to make myself, you know.’

‘Oh, we all had to,’ the blue dragon answered. ‘But not many people can. I was the only one in Kent who managed it, and that was so long ago that my human part is dead.’ She added, ‘People were terrified of me, of course. And I was a bit unwise, drawing power from cattle and so forth. They hired a wizard to put me underground.’ Her glistening blue eyes surveyed JoBoy thoughtfully. ‘Has anyone noticed you yet?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

She rattled her wings in a shrug. ‘Call me Kent.’

‘And,’ JoBoy asked eagerly, ‘do you know of any more dragons? I think my father—’

‘If he’s recent, like you,’ Kent said, ‘he isn’t a dragon.’ She looked at him searchingly. Forgive me, but something’s odd. What is that line of substance leading off you into the distance?’

JoBoy turned his head over his wing and shoulder to look where Kent nodded. There did indeed seem to be a misty line of, of
something
leading from the middle of his scaly chest into the far distance. ‘It must be my connection to my human body,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Kent said. ‘You
are
your human body. Forgive me again, but that looks uncommonly like something feeding off you.’

‘I think I may have got something wrong then,’ JoBoy suggested.

‘I don’t think so. It looks far more like what used to happen when I took power from a cow in the old days,’ Kent said. ‘Or are you taking power from something at the moment?’

‘Not that I know of,’ JoBoy said. ‘That train was plenty.’

‘Then,’ said Kent, ‘do you mind if we go and look? I don’t like the idea of a dragon being a victim, not after being locked up underground like that.’

She spread veiny blue wings and wafted up into the sky. JoBoy, after a few ungainly hops and some flapping, managed to get airborne too and soared off after her. She was dawdling in the air, waiting for him and laughing puffs of faint steam. ‘This is wonderful!’ she said, as JoBoy coasted up alongside. ‘You can’t guess how much I’ve longed to fly again. And there’s such a lot of power coming from everywhere! From that train-line, and those roads, and that building over there that seems to be making something. I can’t believe anyone would need to feed on anything alive these days.’

‘I think I just got it wrong,’ JoBoy said.

‘Let’s follow the line and see,’ Kent said.

They went onward. Wind poured over and under their wings and the line in JoBoy’s chest seemed to shorten like elastic as they went. They followed it almost to London and then to a house right underneath, and swooped after it. JoBoy was expecting to find the house where his body lay, but, to his surprise, they came down into the large house where he had been born, through its roof and its upper story, into a smell of new paint and disinfectant. I suppose that if a car can go through me, I can go through a house, JoBoy thought as they planed down into what had once been their dining room. A row of unhappy-looking people sat waiting there. None of them seemed to notice that there were now two dragons in the room. In front of them was a varnished desk labelled
RECEPTION
, where Lydia sat, telephoning impatiently. The line from JoBoy’s chest led straight into Lydia’s.

‘What did I tell you?’ Kent said, coiling herself to fit among the chairs. ‘Whoever she is, she’s feeding on you. Have you ever felt very weak at all?’

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘For the last eighteen months.’

Lydia said angrily to her telephone, ‘If the child really is having convulsions, take it to a hospital. You can’t bother the doctors with it now.’ And after a pause, ‘If your car’s broken, call an ambulance. We can’t deal with you here.’ She slammed the phone down. It rang again at once. ‘Dr. Grayling’s surgery,’ she said. JoBoy saw and felt the line from him to her pulse and bulge as she gathered herself to repel another patient. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you can’t see a doctor without an appointment.’

‘I don’t believe this,’ JoBoy said miserably.

‘She seems a very negative person,’ Kent observed. ‘Let’s see why.’ She put her long blue face forward, through the telephone flex, and gently touched Lydia’s chest. It went transparent. JoBoy stared incredulously into the inner parts of Lydia and at the black, writhing, stunted dragon that lived inside there. It was twisting about, sucking sustenance from JoBoy’s pulsing line.

‘Ah,’ Kent said sadly. ‘This happens to a lot of people when they can’t admit to their dragons. Dragons can’t live on their own, you see. She must have been doing this since before you were born.’

JoBoy knew nothing except that he was suddenly and enormously angry. He knew now exactly what had happened to his father. He had simply been sucked dry. He knew he had to destroy that stunted inner dragon. He surged himself forward in a slither of scales, through the desk, through Lydia—

‘No, wait!’ said Kent.

JoBoy was too angry to listen. He wrapped his huge jaws around the writhing creature and breathed fire. He flamed and he roared and he seethed heat into Lydia, until he was quite sure that the stunted dragon was burned up entirely.

He hadn’t expected it to kill Lydia.

THE one thing more dangerous than an angry dragon is a dragon full of grief. We have Kent to thank that the destruction in that neighbourhood was no worse.

Here’s a vivid little puzzler that shows us just how dangerous rainy afternoons can be …

Bestselling author Gregory Maguire is the author of the international sensation
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,
which was later adapted into the blockbuster Broadway musical
Wicked.
His other books include
Mirror Mirror, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,
and
Son of a Witch,
a sequel to
Wicked.
His most recent book is another visit to Oz territory,
A Lion Among Men.
He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

“DON’T look at me like that. I didn’t write this obvious little script,” said her mother. When once she might have taken a long drag on a cigarette, and then for emphasis have released through a thin-slitted smile a hostile plume of hot roasted carbon dioxide, now she merely bounced her shoulder on the doorframe of Eleni’s room. Bounced twice, rested, bounced again. Her arms were bolted tight across her bosom. “Save your resentment for the weatherman. Or the weather. Or your father and his
brave little experiment
.”

By which Martha Lester meant her former husband’s new family. The fun wife. The readymade son.

“I didn’t say a word,” said Eleni. “Did I say a word?”

The thunder said a word for both of them. Martha Lester waited for it to be done, and added, “You can’t blame me for five days of rain. If you must blame someone, you can blame Mr. Spontaneous for planning poorly. They got a late start, he said—who knows why, some novel scrap of life happened to them last night and they tumbled into bed at all hours, the dears. By the time they got going at
quarter-past-late
, the interstate north was constipated with traffic. The bypass had been closed due to an accident, he guesses, and all that overspill funneled onto the main road. They were
crawling
, he complained, crawling at best, when they weren’t actually standing still. It would be close to dark by the time they got here, and anyway, the rain is supposed to hold on through the whole weekend. So he sends his regrets.”

“I’ve never known what to do with the regrets he sends.”

“You might have come to the phone and told him that yourself. You
should
have come to the phone.”

“I didn’t have anything to say,” said Eleni. “I could tell by the way the phone rang that it was Daddy bailing. Who could blame him?”

“Why not blame him? Give me a little rest for once. I didn’t order up this storm for our week at the lake, Eleni. I know you were looking forward to seeing your new …” She bit her lip, thinking of a word other than
brother
or
stepbrother
. “Your new relative. What’s his name—Tyler?”

“Taylor. And I hardly know him. I was just looking forward to. You know.”

“A little change from Mamma Mia. I know. Well, in my own sick way, I was anticipating a little diversion myself.”

The rain pummeled the small windows with such ferocity that Eleni imagined the putty on the old weather-beaten sash would just give way, and the squares of glass fall in upon the painted floorboards. At this hour, there wasn’t much to see; the falling dusk and the rising mist and the rainstung surface of the lake made of the view a kind of undifferentiated gray.

“If they’re not coming,” said Eleni hopefully, “is there any good reason we have to stay?”

“You
know
that Saturday is the Brister County Fair, darling. I do better business there every summer than I do at any other venue. You may
think
I enjoy leaving the cottage every day, trawling through people’s disgusting garages and basements and attics. It’s a wonder I haven’t died of asphyxiation years ago. But it’s my work. And someone has to put food on the table.”

The angle of her mother’s pouting lower lip made Eleni unclear who was more at fault: Eleni herself, for having a bothersome appetite for food, or her father, for leaving both the marriage and the kitchen.

“But there’s nothing to do in all this rain. I’m sick of neatening up this little prison cell.” Eleni looked around her attic room. It was tent-shaped, windows at both ends, no dormers. “This is supposed to be a vacation.”

“This is supposed to be a family,” countered her mother. “Amputated though we are. You have got to do your part, Missy Sweet-pea.” She turned and stopped at the top of the steps. “Now I shall go try to throw some supper together. I had been counting on them arriving from the city with something edible. The trials, Eleni. Someday you’ll understand.”

“There isn’t even anything to read. I’ve already gone through all the library books I brought.”

“You know what I say to that.” And Eleni
did
know. Try the growing stack of mildewing children’s books. The ones accumulating at the dryer end of the porch, stored under the blue rain tarp with the rest of the tchotchkes that Martha Lester was going to do her best to unload on the unwitting public at the Brister Country Fair.

Descending, her mother called over her shoulder, “You may have gone through them once or twice, but I’ve added a few new things from that church rummage sale I picked over yesterday. Have a look.”

At first Eleni just sat and thought about Taylor. She had no intention of liking him, particularly, but at the very least it would have been fun to have someone new to irritate. And who knows—companionship with an accidental stepbrother wasn’t the least likely thing ever to happen to a human soul.

Downstairs, her mother began to bang cupboards and curse in dramatically inappropriate language. Didn’t she realize that there was no insulation between the floors? The wood of the kitchen ceiling was the floor of Eleni’s bedroom; the cottage was that old and decrepit. Eleni could picture her mother lunging about the kitchen, trying to light the burner, cutting her hand while opening a tin of tomatoes.

As much to escape envisioning that little kitchen drama as anything else, Eleni crept down the steps and wandered out onto the front porch. She peeled back one corner of the tarp with pinched fingers, her nose wrinkling. A reek of compressed, moldy air escaped.

She had looked at the old books before. They had barely survived hearty readings from children who themselves were now probably surviving on social security. The books were almost Harry Potter thick, but had creamier thicker pages and darker, more insistent type. Usually there were black-and-white chapter drawings, and sometimes color plates protected by onionskin guard sheets. But all the hype was rarely worth it. Even when there was something interesting, a marauding army or a sea serpent or a towering genie, the four (inevitably four) children brave enough to take on the enemy were too pretty to be true. The girls wore pinafores and ribbons. The boys all looked as if their names must be Cedric or Cecil or Cyril or maybe Cynthia. The only solo child in any such adventure that ever showed up in these old books was stolid aproned Alice, who wandered through Wonderland more or less alone, with only her own hydro-encephalitic head to keep her company. That is: Alice slowly going mad. Who could blame her?

Eleni pawed through the pile as quietly as she could. Her mother heard the noise of stealthy movement, though. “You might find some puzzles in one of the piles of books,” she said. “I haven’t finished organizing everything from yesterday’s haul. I don’t mind if you play with one. Just don’t lose any of the pieces.”

Grunting, Eleni kept looking. She located the three or four boxes of puzzles, all in the same-size box, all from the same manufacturer, presumably. The cellophane sleeve, once a tight-fitting shrink-wrap, had aged poorly. It came apart in brittle chalky strips as she handled the top box. She rubbed the dust off and looked at the picture. All she could see was a kind of dragon head, brow down, eyes up. It appeared to be looking out at the viewer, as a dog who has fouled the carpet might. But a dog would cower, and the dragon wasn’t cowering, but waiting.

“Supper in half an hour or when it burns, whichever comes first,” called her mother. Eleni heard the liquid gulp a bottle makes when it is turned upside down and its contents are emptied greedily into a glass. She didn’t reply but darted back up the steps to her dusty, ill-lit aerie, the dragon puzzle under her arm.

As a rule, Eleni found puzzles idiotic. What was the point? The picture on the cover told you what to work for, so the act of fitting the pieces together was only a way to waste time. You might as well peel a strip of wallpaper off the side wall (it was coming off anyway), rip it up, then fit it back together. You knew no more at the end of finishing a puzzle than you did before starting it. You had only yourself to blame.

Still—the chink of ice in the glass below, the clatter of a wooden spoon dropped on the floor and not, Eleni winced to admit, rinsed off—well, Eleni had heard that people in prison take up crocheting to pass the time, and when they’re done with a piece, they pull it all out and start again. Same principle.

There was a card table and a floor lamp, and she moved the table closer to the wall so she could lean the cover of the box against the wall. Then she proceeded like any mathematician or scientist trying to solve a problem efficiently. She turned over all the pieces so their colored sides were up—coppery oranges and purpley grays, the amber of teeth and talons, little else—and then sorted the edges and found the four corners.

The picture on the box top showed a fairly well articulated background, some sort of a woodsy hill and a lake, and ominous clouds, and, mercifully, no priggish schoolboy with a sword or lisping schoolgirl with a fistful of flowers or a whip. But perhaps this particular puzzle had been printed late in the run, as the color of the pieces themselves seemed less distinctive than the cover art. That would make finding the image harder. For this, Eleni was grateful.

“She-vipers from Missoula, Montana,” seethed Martha Lester. The pan clattered in the sink. Only then did Eleni smell the scorch. She rolled her eyes.

“I’m okay with peanut butter,” Eleni called in a snarkily cheery voice, adding, sotto voce, “
again
.”

“You’ll eat what I make and be glad of it,” snapped her mother.

Eleni bent her head down toward the puzzle.

Sheer unhappiness. Was that like sheer curtains?—unhappiness you could see through?

I’m not unhappy, she said to herself. I just love making puzzles night and day. Don’t I?

The easiest bit, the edge, came together almost at once. No surprises there. The border was almost all dark, though, so on the card table, when you stood back, it resembled a rectangular window, oozing oil from the outside in. Pooling and pocketing in those little teeth and sockets that individualize each puzzle piece.

She went to work on the dragon form next. The spine was the most obvious place to start, as Eleni could tell from the picture that the spine took up the largest part of the picture. The creature arched taller than it did wide, like a cat spiking its back almost into a point. And the scales on the back of the dragon all flowed in the same direction, a kind of ceaseless pattern of coppery waves frilling toward the tail. She could fit them in fairly easily, and the dragon took shape in its frame, though as yet unconnected by even a single umbilical isthmus to the dark border.

She paused once, her hand suspended over the table, and was studying the region near where the rear leg came up into a kind of haunch and hip, and was about to pull the next piece from the bank of golden choices, when a slam of the screen door startled her. Martha Lester was striding out in the rain to try to keep from lighting up an emergency cigarette that Eleni knew she kept in reserve in her purse. Smoke yourself to death, thought Eleni, shrugging theatrically, as if someone could see her. She returned her hand to its level position, floating eight inches above the tabletop in a holding pattern until her eyes had quite carefully taken in the clues that would identify the next bit, when she noticed that her hand went warm and cold as it moved back and forth in suspension.

What was this all about?

Maybe the light on the table reflected more easily, more warmly, from bright pieces of paper than from dark ones?

She tested her thesis and picked at random a piece near where the warmth was greatest. Sure enough, the piece was nearly white-gold. It wasn’t the piece she wanted, though, not the hip: it was a bit of the long, ridged snout, nearly to the flared nostrils where a curl of smoke was emerging.

“Bizarre,” she said aloud. She knew her mother couldn’t hear her, not in the rain, not in the noise she was making striding back and forth on the porch. Who was she talking to, then?

“Myself,” she replied, “I’m going bonkers due to living a week in my total-isolation cell.”

Again, she tried to pick a puzzle piece based on the warmth it emanated, without looking down; again, she found an orangey bit, which turned out to be the hip joint she was looking for.