The Boy Who Lived with Dragons

by Andy Shepherd

  I just hoped I wasn’t too late to save it. The thought of the tree dying made me feel as if someone had used the spoon I was holding to hollow out my insides.

  Later that afternoon I met up with the others in our den.

  ‘So do you think this woman, Elvi, knew about the dragons?’ Kat asked, after I told them all about the map and the tin of ash.

  I shrugged. ‘I haven’t found anything to say she knew dragons actually hatch, but the map did have a dragon drawn on it and she was definitely looking after the tree. Maybe she was the one that planted it in the first place – who knows?’

  ‘I kind of hope she did know,’ Kat said. ‘I mean, if your grandad’s right and she didn’t have any other family, it’d be nice to think that at least she had the dragons.’

  Her eyes fell on Crystal, who was frosting some cobwebs, leaving them sparkling in the sunlight.

  I smiled. Although it was strange thinking of someone else knowing the secret, I couldn’t help agreeing with Kat.

  ‘Let’s hope the ash does the trick and helps the tree,’ she said.

  ‘So what’s your news?’ I asked. ‘What’s Liam been up to?’

  Kat delved into her bag and pulled out a chart. She laid it in front of us, proudly. The twins had really gone to town on Liam Watch. The colour coding alone must have taken them hours. But although it was undoubtedly pretty, I wasn’t sure exactly how it showed Liam’s movements over the past couple of days.

  Ted leaned in, chewing the end of a felt-tip pen.

  ‘So basically he’s been in their shed apart from when he went to the park?’ he said.

  I stifled a laugh. Ted had a knack of getting to the heart of the matter.

  ‘Well … yeah … basically,’ said Kai.

  ‘And this black bit?’

  ‘Er … that’s when we followed him to the park but then we had to go for swimming lessons.’

  ‘And you were supposed to take over watching him,’ Kat added sternly, turning to Ted.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve already told you about that,’ said Ted.

  Ted had told us, at great length. He had been having a few problems with Sunny. The dragon was eating and growing so rapidly it was getting harder for Ted to hide him and the damage he was causing.

  ‘We think Liam must be keeping the dragon in their shed,’ Kai said.

  ‘Poor thing,’ Kat said. ‘Locked up in there.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Ted said reassuringly. ‘Now we know where he’s hiding it, we can figure out a plan to set it free.’

  ‘Yeah. Simple,’ Kai said dubiously.

  ‘It is,’ Ted said. ‘We just need a distraction.’

  Kai was right to be dubious. Every morning we passed Liam’s house and took a peek, hoping we might find a way to sneak in unseen. But Liam’s mum worked from home, so even when Liam had football after school we couldn’t get near the place.

  Luckily though, a few days later, I got my chance when Mum asked me for ‘a really big favour’. The ferrets had been partying in the kitchen cupboards and thanks to the mess – and trying to find the sneaky pair – she was late to pick Lolli up from a play date.

  ‘Could you pop and get her, love? I wouldn’t normally ask, but Finnegan is still hiding somewhere and I daren’t just leave. It’s only round the corner. She’s at Bea’s house.’

  Any other time I would have moaned, groaned and down right refused this request. Not because I minded fetching Lolli, but because of where she was. The one house I’d usually go out of my way to avoid. But not today. You see, Bea was Liam’s little sister.

  This was a brilliant chance to get a closer look at the shed. When I got to the house, instead of knocking on the front door I headed for the side gate. If anyone asked what I was doing I could just say I was coming round to the back door.

  When I popped my head round the wall and scanned the garden I saw Bea and Lolli playing in a big turtle-shaped sandpit. They had built a castle and were now decorating it with stones and sticks. A doll with no hair was propped up against one wall and Bea was holding a little pony, cantering it up to the drawbridge. Meanwhile, Lolli waggled a shark along the moat they had dug, making chomping noises as it chased the pony.

  Suddenly Liam came out of the shed. He laughed when he saw the girls’ castle and I thought for a second he was about to kick it to pieces. But then I realised he didn’t need to. Because he opened his jacket and the grey dragon flew out. It flapped round and round above Bea’s head. She sat there open-mouthed, while Lolli waved the shark at Liam and gave him her hardest stare.

  What was Liam thinking? Anyone could be watching from the house. But of course he was too busy showing off to care.

  ‘What this fairy story needs is a dragon,’ he said nastily. The dragon swooped lower and let out a blast of green. Bea twisted out of the way and fell backwards, landing on the castle and squashing it flat.

  Both girls immediately burst into tears. I raced over and glared at Liam, who was so surprised to see me materialising in his garden that he nearly fell in the sandpit too.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he spluttered.

  ‘Keeping an eye on you, that’s what!’ I snapped. ‘And just as well, by the looks of it. Why do you always have to cause trouble?’

  Liam scowled. ‘Listen up, ant-boy,’ he said, getting to his feet so he could properly tower over me. ‘I can do what I like.’ He brushed the sand off his trousers before squaring up to me. ‘In fact, I can do whatever I like. Whenever I like. Wherever I like. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  I felt myself bristling. ‘Oh yeah? You’d better watch out, we’re onto you. Whatever it is you’re planning.’

  ‘You think so, do you?’ Liam snorted. ‘It doesn’t matter what I’m planning. I can do anything I want now. You can’t tell on me ever again.’

  He leaned in close till I could smell his cheese-and-onion-crisp breath and said, ‘Because I know your secret.’

  Then he looked up at the sky as if searching for something. And I suddenly felt very glad I’d left Flicker at home.

  Liam lowered his voice, going for the full-on evil baddie hiss. ‘And I can tell everyone any time I want. So you’re the ones who’d better watch out.’

  Walking home with Lolli, I couldn’t help thinking how complicated life was since the arrival of the dragons. It was all getting rather difficult, what with making sure the dragons stayed out of sight, clearing up unexploded poo, hiding any claw marks and burn marks, oh and in my case keeping an eye on two sneaky ferrets.

  Then there was the very real worry of whether the dragon-fruit tree would even survive. And now there was Liam and whatever he might be planning and how we were going to distract him long enough to rescue his dragon. And of course, whether we could do it at all without him giving the whole secret away.

  That’s an awful lot to think about, I can tell you. Just something to bear in mind, if you’re someone who likes things simple. Because having a dragon isn’t all playing games and toasting marshmallows – there really is more to it than that!

  To deal with one of those worries – the state of the dragon-fruit tree – I made sure that every day I got over to Grandad’s to sprinkle the five spoonfuls of ash on it. I was tempted to chuck a whole load on at once, but I kept to the instructions Elvi had left. The last thing I wanted to do was make it worse. It was bad enough knowing I hadn’t managed to look after it properly – what if it actually died under my care?

  I thought it was making a difference. The leaves seemed to be getting greener and less limp, and even the shrivelled fruits looked as if they might be fleshing out. But it was hard to tell – it still didn’t look very healthy.

  But then Ted told me something that made me realise we were going to need more than ash to save the tree.

  ‘Well, Dad’s been asked to take photos of the County Flower and Veg Show, you know, for the paper. And while we were out he got talking to one of the old guys who was entering. And he said he didn’t know wh
y he was bothering really because he never won anything. Everything he tried to grow just shrivelled up. And it was always the same old story of this one guy winning. And here’s the interesting bit,’ and Ted leaned in ready to whisper, ‘he reckons this guy is using sprays and all that sort of stuff, which is dead illegal in these competitions. And he even said he wondered if someone hadn’t been tampering with his plants. And guess who he was talking about?’

  Ted gave me a meaningful stare. But I already knew.

  ‘Grim!’ I said.

  It had to be. Suddenly it all made sense. Hadn’t he been the one moaning about pesky bugs? Then there were those boxes he was hiding, his fortified shed and, most incriminating of all, the way he’d been creeping about in the middle of the night.

  ‘Grim’s cheating!’

  ‘More than that,’ Ted said. ‘He’s sabotaging the competition to make sure he can’t lose.’

  The nerve of it! After all his accusations and wagging fingers, accusing us of doing things we shouldn’t.

  What’s more, with his garden so close to Grandad’s, the state of the tree made sense too. He was killing it with chemicals. Whether he actually meant to damage the tree or not, it didn’t matter. He was using them. It wasn’t my fault after all. It was Grim’s.

  No wonder the ash hadn’t been working! The poor tree didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘We need to get a closer look at what’s in Grim’s shed,’ I said. ‘We need proof.’

  Because I wasn’t about to let anything happen to the tree. It was up to me to protect it. And I intended to do just that.

  Just when we thought we’d never get close to Liam’s dragon, his shed went and blew up!

  Or that’s what it looked like had happened as we peered over the hedge on our way to school. Planks of wood littered the garden and flower beds. A giant – and I mean giant – beanstalk had burst through the shed, smashing the walls and lifting the roof clean off.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking – this is weird. Have we jumped into some kind of fairy story? Are you telling me Jack’s going to leap out with his fist full of magic beans and we’re all going to hear a mighty voice like thunder rumbling, ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum,’ and all that stuff?

  Well, no. This isn’t some fairy story and we weren’t immediately thinking we were going to be gobbled up by a giant. But sometimes real life can be stranger than stories. We knew that from the bizarre facts Ted regularly told us.

  ‘That thing is humongous,’ said Kai, looking up at the beanstalk.

  ‘I know. Those beans are as big as my arm!’ I replied.

  ‘What is going on?’ Kat said. ‘First colossal sunflowers and now beanstalks.’

  ‘I’ve heard of bamboo growing a metre in a day, but this is ridiculous,’ said Ted. He looked thoughtful. ‘There’s a redwood tree in America called Hyperion which is 115.92 metres tall. Maybe it’s a bamboo-bean-redwood hybrid.’

  ‘What it is, is weird,’ said Kai.

  ‘Watch out,’ Kat yelled. ‘Incoming pod.’

  And we all scattered as huge beans started raining from the sky and thumping onto the ground around us.

  ‘One thing’s for sure – Liam is going to have to find somewhere new to hide his dragon,’ Kat called.

  ‘Which means we need to keep a very close eye on him,’ I replied. ‘A very close eye indeed.’

  Since the art-cupboard episode we hadn’t dared take the dragons back into school, but now things were different. We didn’t want to be separated. Crystal and Flicker were small enough to hide in our rucksacks, and Ted and Kai decided Sunny and Dodger should stay in the trees that lined the playground. We knew by now they wouldn’t go far from the rest of us. Dodger was a master of staying out of sight. I just hoped Sunny wouldn’t smell Mrs Battenberg’s school dinners and go looking for a snack again.

  When Liam appeared in the cloakroom we all watched him like hawks. He scowled at us and threw his bag into a corner.

  ‘Well, at least we know he’s not keeping it in there,’ Kai whispered.

  ‘He’d better not be, after doing that,’ said Kat fiercely.

  Miss Logan appeared in the doorway and ushered us in. All morning Liam kept looking out the window, or rather trying to look out. It was a bit difficult these days with his enormous sunflower blocking most of our view.

  Even so we all managed to see Mr Peters, the reception teacher. He was coming down the playground from the school vegetable garden, followed by his class and struggling under the weight of a monstrous marrow. It was so big he could hardly see where he was going. Until it exploded and then he could see just fine. Standing there splattered in mushy marrow he got quite a cheer. He even took a bow – but then that’s the kind of teacher he is. Liam was the only one not focused on Mr Peters; he was staring off down the playground.

  ‘Something weird’s going on around here,’ Kai said. ‘And I bet I know who’s at the bottom of it all.’

  At lunchtime, rather than bombing off to play football, Liam loitered near Mrs Olive, the midday supervisor. Every time he thought no one was looking, he peered through the gate of the school vegetable garden.

  ‘You know, Liam’s taking a very keen interest in gardening all of a sudden,’ Kat hissed.

  ‘We need to get in there before he does and have a proper look,’ I said.

  Our chance came at PE. While the rest of the class jogged down to the far end of the field, we hung back and then ducked into the vegetable garden.

  You know when you were little and you wondered what it would be like to shrink really small? To be like Tom Thumb or Mrs Pepperpot or Alice in Wonderland when she’s tiny. Well, when we swung open the gate we knew how it felt. Because we were surrounded by giant-sized super-veg. The tomatoes were as big as our heads, the beans as long as our arms and you could have made a hammock out of the rhubarb leaves. Mr Peters hadn’t even chosen the biggest marrow, because Ted was able to climb onto that and sit on it like he was riding a horse.

  ‘Good grief, look at this place!’ Kat exclaimed, while Ted galloped his way to victory in a race against a giant turnip.

  And then we saw the grey shape emerging from behind some bonkersly big broccoli. Liam’s dragon had grown even more since I’d last seen it and, as we stood there, it let out a green jet at a row of lettuces. Incredulous, we watched the frilly green leaves stretching until they had more than doubled in size.

  We all looked at each other, mouths gaping.

  ‘Well, at least now we know for sure who’s behind Liam’s super-sunflower and Mr Peter’s exploding marrow,’ Kai said. ‘And that giant beanstalk!’

  ‘And remember Mrs Battenberg’s herbs in the school canteen. No wonder you couldn’t get them back in their pots, Kat!’ said Ted.

  ‘Imagine getting served one of those vegetables,’ Kai said. ‘I have enough trouble with a few carrots.’

  ‘Your Lolli would think those really were trees if she saw that broccoli,’ Kat laughed.

  ‘Well, whatever that dragon is doing to them, our tree could do with a bit of it. Shame it can’t make that grow,’ I said sadly. ‘It was looking even worse this morning.’

  Kat held up the withered remains of one of the bean plants. ‘I don’t know about that. Doesn’t look like this super-sizing is doing much for the plants.’

  ‘Watch your heads,’ Kai said. And we all ducked as another green jet shot over us. The dragon flapped past us and settled on a bucket of compost. It eyed us warily.

  ‘Come on, now’s our chance,’ said Ted. ‘Let’s grab it.’

  ‘Slowly,’ Kat said, reaching out to hold Ted back. ‘We don’t want to scare it.’

  But Ted had already lunged out. Alarmed, the dragon puffed up, its scales and spines sticking out, the lime now showing beneath the grey. It flapped up into the air and another green jet shot out. This one was coming straight for Ted. He dived behind the enormous marrow just as the jet hit it. We watched as the marrow grew … and grew … and then burst spectacularly.

 
The dragon disappeared over the hedge into the park beyond and we all scrambled towards Ted. He was scraping marrow mush from his hair, his face screwed up in disgust.

  ‘This stuff reeks,’ he moaned.

  I grinned, relieved that it was only the marrow that had been turned to mush.

  ‘So now we know where it is,’ Kai said, ‘how are we planning on catching it?’

  It was a good question. It didn’t look like this dragon was going to come quietly.

  After school we all followed Liam, keeping well back so he didn’t spot us. He wasn’t going his usual way home; instead he’d turned into the park and was scurrying along the outer fence where he was hidden by the trees.

  ‘Where’s he heading?’ Kai hissed.

  There was nothing but fields down this side of the park, unless he was going all the way across, to the lane where Nana and Grandad lived. I suddenly pictured Grandad’s gargantuan beans and Grim’s humongous onions. And my stomach did a monumental backflip.

  ‘Oh no!’ I cried. ‘He’s been in Grandad’s garden. That’s why all the vegetables have grown huge – that dragon’s been breathing on them.’

  ‘What?’ said Ted. ‘Why?’

  And then a truly terrible thought hit me.

  ‘What if Liam’s been sneaking in to try and steal another dragon fruit?’

  Before Ted could answer that, Kat grabbed my arm.

  ‘I think he’s calling it,’ Kat said. ‘Look, he keeps blowing on his hands.’