The Dragon in the Library

by Louie Stowell

  The dangerous animals book, Kit realised. She scanned the shelves for it. Where had she put it? She was definitely supposed to re-shelve it the other day.

  “What are we doing with these?” whispered Alita. “And when are we going to collect Dogon? We can’t leave him here. And what about the dragon?”

  “Shh!” said Faith. “Have we got all the books?”

  Kit was busy looking at Salt as he paced up and down. Her eyes followed Salt. “How are we going to beat him?” she murmured to herself.

  “Right!” Faith said loudly. “Let’s go and get my handbag. Then we can go.”

  She led them down to the stacks, where they picked up Dogon. He perched on Alita’s shoulder, looking worried and making a growling sound in the back of his throat.

  They could hear Salt barking orders above in the library. “It’s just rubbish. We don’t need any of it. Put it in the skip.”

  They shuddered. “He’s going to throw the books away!” said Josh.

  “We can rescue them out of the skip later,” said Faith.

  “What about the book trees?” asked Alita. “It’s Dogon’s home!”

  “I have to think,” said Faith. “First, let’s store these books.”

  She propped the garden book up on the branch of a tree and started to read it, holding the other books in her hand, then disappeared. When she reappeared, she wasn’t carrying anything. “Those books will be safe in the garden for now. Though we shouldn’t leave them for TOO long or they’ll get damp. Now we need to go and get help.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Alita.

  “Good question. I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” said Faith. “I have to admit, I didn’t think Salt would be the sort to get up so early in the morning. I thought we’d have more time.”

  “How about my house? There are always so many people there, I doubt my parents would mind a few more. Or even notice.”

  “Thanks, Kit, that would be great,” said Faith, giving her a little smile.

  “Dogon will need to hide,” said Alita.

  “Yeah, I don’t think even my parents would be very keen to have a magical fire-breathing dog as a house guest,” said Kit.

  So they traipsed to Kit’s house, with Dogon hidden in a cloth bag. Alita gave him strict instructions to be very, very quiet and not breathe fire.

  Kit put her key in the door and peered inside. The coast was clear. She could hear Baby crying upstairs. A second later, Toddler started yelling.

  “I think my parents will be busy for a while,” Kit said.

  “I think Dogon really wants to get out,” whispered Alita. The duffel bag was starting to float and flap around.

  They headed into the kitchen. Dogon popped out of the duffel bag and flew out on to Alita’s shoulder. He made a purring sound and nuzzled into her neck.

  Faith turned to them with a very serious expression. Kit didn’t like it one bit.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said. “I spoke to the Wizards’ Council earlier.”

  “Are they angry?” asked Kit. “That I wasted the spell?”

  Faith’s mouth set in a thin line. “You know how angry I was when I found out you’d stolen my spell book to use it on Salt?”

  Kit nodded.

  “Multiply that by ten and add the bad tempers of old men and women who think anyone under eighty is a whippersnapper. Then multiply that by the biggest number you can imagine. And that’s still only about half as angry as they are.”

  Kit gulped. This was her fault. “Can’t you blame it all on me? I was the one who wasted your big spell.”

  Faith shook her head firmly. “You’re my responsibility. I’m the grown-up here.” She smiled. “Even though I sometimes feel like I’m making it all up as I go along.”

  “Grown-ups feel that too?” said Alita in shock.

  “Grown-ups have feelings?” asked Josh. He looked at Faith, blinking.

  “Yes, grown-ups have feelings,” said Faith. “You don’t stop being human when you turn eighteen, you know. You still get scared and unsure. Quite often, actually.”

  “Well,” said Kit, who thought that was quite enough talking about feelings. “What did the Wizards’ Council say we should do?”

  “They said they would handle it. They’ve told me – very firmly – that they’ll take it from here.” She gave a heavy sigh. “I’m worried they might stop you from using magic entirely after this.”

  Kit wanted to cry. If she was banned from using magic, she’d just be the same, average, muddy, in-the-way Kit she’d always been.

  “Actually,” said Faith, “they might not stop you from doing magic. They might stop me instead. This happened on my watch. They told me to handle things and I let this happen.”

  “No!” said Kit. “That’s not fair.”

  “Fair isn’t really how secret magical organisations roll,” said Faith glumly.

  “So we’re just going to sit here and wait for the council to handle things? And, even if they beat Salt, they’ll probably stop us doing magic?” asked Kit in horror.

  “No,” said Faith. “We’re not going to wait. We’re going to disobey them and take matters into our own hands.”

  “Isn’t that the exact same thing you got angry at me for doing?” asked Kit.

  “Yes. But now I’m doing it. I’ve been rebelling against the council FAR longer than you.” Faith gave her a grin.

  “Well, if we’re going to break the rules, we should at least be logical about it,” said Josh. “What’s our problem? That Salt is going to wake up the dragon, right? So we need to find a way to stop him waking the dragon. Is there some kind of … anti-waking up-spell?” suggested Josh.

  “Nothing that we could use without harming the dragon,” said Faith. “We could end up putting the poor beast in a coma!”

  “Wait,” said Alita. “Could we persuade Salt that he doesn’t want to do it in the first place? What makes people not want to do things?”

  “When things are rubbish,” said Kit. “No one wants to do rubbish things. We could tell him the dragon doesn’t work. Say it’s broken.”

  “He wouldn’t fall for that,” said Josh.

  “We could say it’s dead?” said Kit.

  “What, and put a fake dead dragon there?” said Josh. “Where are we going to get a fake dead dragon?”

  “Magic, obviously,” said Kit. She looked at Faith. “Can we?”

  Faith was looking thoughtful. “Yes. I mean, you could, but he might get too close to a dead dragon and it would break the illusion. Knowing Salt, he’d probably go and kick the thing to check it was dead. He’s not too bright.”

  “How about the illusion of a live dragon then?” asked Kit. “That might scare him off. Is there a fake dragon spell I could do?”

  “Hmm, well. Yes,” said Faith. “But we’d need something to build the spell around. Just like a convincing lie has a bit of truth at the middle to make it convincing, we’d need something to use as the basis of the dragon.”

  “Dogon!” said Alita. Dogon fluttered up into the air in surprise at hearing his name, letting out a snort of smoke. She gave him a reassuring pat, then he took off and flew around the kitchen.

  “Dogon’s part dragon,” Alita went on. “So you’re part way there already, even before the illusion!”

  “Excellent,” said Faith. Her face fell. “Except he’ll need to stay still. Dogon NEVER stays still.”

  “He will if I tell him to,” said Alita. “We understand each other.”

  Dogon peeked his head out of the biscuit cupboard. He had crumbs all around his muzzle.

  “BAD Dogon. Down!” said Alita.

  Dogon fluttered down to the floor and sat obediently at her feet.

  Faith frowned. “He’s never that good for me. You’ve got something there, Alita. A career in dragon-taming?”

  Alita’s eyes lit up. “Is that a real job?”

  “It is. Although you might need to keep your hair a bit shorter,” said F
aith, gesturing at Alita’s two long dark plaits. “The smell of burning hair is really not very nice.”

  “How good is the illusion going to be though?” said Josh. He looked doubtfully at Dogon’s furry, crumb-covered face.

  “Very,” said Faith. “But it won’t work to the touch. Salt mustn’t come too close.”

  “Can’t you add fire? Then he won’t WANT to come too close,” suggested Kit. “How about an elemental fire spell? I can do that! Watch!”

  Kit muttered her fire spell and a huge fireball emerged from her fingers. Everyone threw themselves to the ground. Thankfully the kitchen window was open and the fireball sailed out into the garden instead of burning the house down.

  Kit’s mum called downstairs from the baby’s room, “You’re not breaking things down there, are you, Kit?”

  “No, Mum!” she called back.

  When they’d got up and dusted themselves down again, Faith cleared her throat.

  “You can do the illusion spell, Kit. I’ll handle the fire spell. I like my face and I don’t want it melted off.”

  Kit grumbled. “That was bad luck, that fireball. I bet I could do it next time.” But she did see Faith’s point. Maybe she needed slightly more practice on the fire spells before going into battle with them.

  “But there’s another thing. We need to get into the library unnoticed,” said Faith. “We’ll need time to set all this up without Salt knowing about it. Perhaps I could create a distraction. Although that could attract public attention that we don’t want, of course.”

  “Couldn’t we use a portal book to get into the library?” asked Josh.

  Faith shook her head. “We took all the portal books out of the library,” said Faith. “You gathered them all up.”

  Kit blushed. “Actually, I think I forgot one.”

  “Kit!” said Josh.

  “No, this could be a good thing,” said Faith. “Which one?”

  “Dangerous Animals,” said Kit. “I was looking for it – oh, I’ve just remembered where it was! I left it down in the stacks. I was supposed to re-shelve it… Anyway, I was looking for it when we were leaving but I got distracted and, well, it’s still in the stacks.”

  Kit braced herself, but Faith laughed. “Oh, Kit! I’m not angry. You’ve left us a door!” She gave Kit a long, measured look. “I think wild magic chose well when it picked you. Sometimes a little chaos, a little wildness, can be an advantage.”

  Kit felt a smile spreading across her face.

  Josh, however, was frowning. “But how does it help us if Kit left the book behind? That’s not a door on its own. We need a second copy of Dangerous Animals that’s outside the library to use as a portal, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Faith. “Clever boy. And I know someone who does have one.” She gestured to the garden book. “We can use this to get to their library, then use their copy of Dangerous Animals to get us into our library. Now, Kit, do you think your parents might have some meat in the fridge?”

  *

  Before they left, they had to make sure they had every detail of their plan worked out. Everyone had a part to play, and everyone had to play it well, or Salt might guess he was being fooled.

  Once they’d decided exactly who was doing what, and how, Faith opened the garden book. “Link hands, everyone.”

  “Dogon, on my shoulder!” instructed Alita. The little creature flapped its way up and perched, nuzzling into Alita’s neck.

  Faith began to read.

  A moment later, they appeared inside the garden book.

  “I’ve only ever popped out the other side of a book by accident,” said Kit. “How do we get to the other library?”

  “For a start, we walk,” said Faith. “Then there’s another spell at the other end.”

  So they walked through the first garden. It looked a little different to the last time Kit had visited. Smaller, somehow.

  “It’s not how I remember,” said Kit.

  “It never quite is. Each time a person steps into one of these books, the world is different. Especially because this time I read the book out loud,” said Faith. “So this is my reading. I always remember the rose bushes.”

  They came close to a cluster of rose bushes and turned a corner. There was a brick wall and, in it, a door. Walking through it, they came into a new garden – Kit recognised it. It was the picture on the second page.

  “So each garden is a page?”

  “Two pages,” said Faith. “Each garden is two pages in the book.”

  They walked through thirty or forty more gardens – Kit lost count – of all kinds.

  “I’m glad this book isn’t any longer,” said Kit. “I’m exhausted!

  “Yes, that’s why people hardly ever use portal books over fifty pages. You can enter on a later page, but that can have unfortunate side effects.”

  “Like what?” asked Josh.

  “Sometimes the pages you skipped get annoyed and bleed through into the real world. Which is fine if it means a bit of moss growing in the library but you wouldn’t want a black mamba loose in nonfiction, would you?”

  Kit, remembering the creature’s beady eyes and angry hiss, shook her head very firmly.

  Eventually they reached a tall, thick hedge, wound all through with flowers and thorns.

  “This is the final page,” said Faith.

  “How do we get out?” asked Alita.

  “You need to cast a spell to go to the library you want. You say the library’s name, then the same spell you used to leave the book before. Morningside, hus!” said Faith.

  They appeared in the corner of a library in front of a row of books. A small, curly-haired girl was staring at them. Her mouth dropped open.

  “Ah,” said Faith. “This is awkward.”

  The girl was still staring. Faith knelt down. “Would you like to see a puppy?”

  The little girl nodded.

  Faith made a gesture and said, “Chien see, chien be!”

  At once, the little girl’s face lost its look of terror and she beamed, then trotted away.

  “Where are we?” asked Alita. She peered after the child. “Are there puppies here?”

  “No puppies,” Faith whispered, in case the girl was still in earshot. “That was just an illusion spell to make that child think she SAW a puppy, instead of a gang of strangers appearing from a book. Illusion spells work very well on young children, as their sense of what’s real and what isn’t is blurry at the best of times.”

  “Now, what we came for.” Faith strode over to a wooden cabinet on one wall of the library, looked around her, gestured a spell to open it and rifled through the shelves inside until she found the dangerous animals book.

  “I’m going to have to apologise profusely to Gerald later,” she said. “He’s the librarian here – we’re not supposed to turn up and use the portal books without asking. He’ll understand though. It’s an apocalypse. Apocalypse rules are different. Are you ready, Kit? We’ll need a cold spell for the first page. Cold makes reptiles sleepy.”

  “Ready,” said Kit.

  Josh propped the dangerous animals book up on a shelf, and they checked that there was no one around.

  Faith began to read from the book.

  When they appeared in the desert, they were ready. Kit and Faith chanted an elemental spell together.

  Dylai fod yn oer

  The cold is in your bones

  Tu kulir irukka ventum

  Einfrieren!

  Instead of striking, the snake curled up, looking sleepy. It was almost cute, curled into a coil like that.

  “One down,” said Faith. “Come on.”

  They had been walking for nearly ten minutes when the desert began to turn into a jungle.

  “It’s a tiger next,” said Faith. “But it’s OK. The page starts by talking about tiger cubs so just throw this at them and we’ll be fine … if we run.”

  She handed out raw meat from a plastic bag in her pocket. The pocket that never
seemed to be full but always had so many objects in it. Kit made a mental note to ask her about that some time.

  GROWWWWWWWL.

  Tiger cubs came tumbling out from among the trees. Their claws and teeth looked very sharp but they were still adorable. One of them tripped over its big furry paws as it stalked towards them.

  “Throw the meat now!” said Faith.

  They chucked the pieces of meat at the cubs, who fell on the food hungrily, growling and purring with pleasure.

  They ran through the trees.

  It was hot. The air felt like a soup. But Kit ran like her life depended on it.

  Next came a herd of charging rhinos. With a bark and a roar, Dogon dive-bombed the lead rhino and the herd changed course.

  After that, by a river, where flies buzzed and bothered them as they walked, they came across a snapping crocodile. It ran towards them, belly low to the ground, and Kit let out a little squeak of fear. But before the crocodile was within ten feet of them, Faith produced some chewing gum from her pocket and, with a muttered spell, grew it into a sticky net and bound the beast’s jaws shut.

  “Shame,” said Faith. “That was my last piece of gum. It was cinnamon flavour too!”

  They walked on and on, facing poisonous frogs and a river full of razor-toothed piranhas. To get past the frogs, Faith cast a protection spell that created a thin coating of an invisible rubber-like substance all over their bodies, repelling the frog poison. The piranhas turned out to be the easiest creatures to get past – Faith simply created a glowing magical bridge across their river, and the children walked safely over, far above the snapping jaws of the hungry fish.

  And at last they came to the end of the book. A thick wall of jungle stretched from the ground right up into the sky and across their path, as far as they could see.

  “Right,” said Faith. “Let’s go.”

  But Kit heard a noise behind them. A horrible noise, like the hooting of a monstrous owl. She whipped round.

  “Faith, look.”

  The others all turned to face what Kit was seeing.

  “I can’t be totally sure,” said Josh in a terrified whisper. “But I think we might be being attacked by aliens.”