Bronze Pen (9781439156650)

by Snyder, Zilpha Keatley

  By the time the meal was over, Audrey was feeling much less worried. In fact, she was beginning to think that it had been pretty ridiculous for her to think that Beowulf might have understood. After all, he’d never shown any signs of understanding what was being said before, unless one of his favorite words—words such as “good dog” or “walk”—happened to crop up. So what she’d heard last night was either some sort of hallucination or a temporary kind of magic that quickly came and went. And now it was gone.

  That was the way she was feeling, anyway, until she took Beowulf on his morning outing. But after the back door had closed behind them and Beowulf had sniffed and piddled his way around the fence, like always, he came back, turned his big brown eyes in her direction, and said, “I knew it. That raccoon was here again last night.”

  Audrey stared. Stared, gulped, and said, “You can. You can talk.”

  “I can talk to you.” Beowulf sat down in front of Audrey. “Sometimes I can.” He held up a big front paw. “Shake,” he said.

  Audrey shook his paw. “But in there, in the kitchen just now…when my parents were talking. Did you understand what they were saying?”

  Beowulf tipped his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “No. Not them.”

  “And how come you didn’t talk to me when we were in there, but now you are? Why is that?”

  Beowulf sighed thoughtfully and lifted his other front paw. “Mostly I want to talk, but I don’t know how. Maybe I only can when something tells me how.”

  As she shook Beowulf ’s other paw, she said, “I guess you’re right. I don’t understand it either, but I think you’re right.”

  So that was the way things stood all through Thursday. Audrey went to school and then came home, and the only conversation that went on was between Audrey and her father, except for an occasional parrot-type comment from Sputnik. There was one big difference there, however. Sputnik seemed to have stopped swearing.

  His other familiar comments were the same as ever. He still squawked “Hello, hello” and “Shut up” and “Polly want a martini” and some other stuff that Mr. Anderson had taught him. But no more long strings of cuss words. And nothing at all in the more human-sounding voice that he’d used the night before.

  And nothing more that evening, either, while Dr. Richards was there. Dr. Rob Richards, who was an old friend and neighbor as well as the Abbotts’ family doctor, often stopped by in the evening. And on that particular night he stayed quite late, sitting at the kitchen table with all of the Abbotts and talking about politics, Greendale gossip, and John Abbott’s heart. And all that time Sputnik made only parrot-type comments and Beowulf said nothing at all.

  But only a little while later, when John and Hannah were seeing Dr. Richards to the door and Audrey came through the kitchen on her way to take Beowulf out, Sputnik once again reminded her not to leave the door open. And a few minutes after that, when she came back in, he stopped scattering birdseed long enough to say, “How about some more of the good stuff?”

  But that was it. By Friday it all seemed to have ended. After that when Audrey managed to be alone with one or both of them from time to time, neither Beowulf nor Sputnik had anything to say.

  For a while Audrey thought about it constantly and wondered why it had happened—and then had stopped happening. But as the days passed, she began to have other things to worry about. Like, for instance, what her next report card was going to look like. It wasn’t until she’d been called in to talk to the student adviser that she realized how careless she’d been lately about doing some assignments and studying for a couple of tests.

  “Your teachers tell me this isn’t like you,” Mrs. Bishop, the adviser, said. “Your grades have always been excellent, and now they seem to be going down quite rapidly.” After straightening up her notes, she leaned forward and put her hand on Audrey’s shoulder and asked, “Is there anything on your mind that you’d like to talk about, dear?”

  There wasn’t. Not a chance. No chance that she was going to start explaining how what had been on her mind was a strange creature she’d seen in a cave on Wild Oaks Hill or how Beowulf and Sputnik had suddenly turned into conversationalists.

  But when Audrey assured Mrs. Bishop that she was all right and that she was sure she could bring her grades back up very quickly, she really meant it. After all, right then, when her parents were already pretty sure she was either telling lies or having hallucinations—or both—it would be a bad time for them to get a report card that showed that she was falling apart in English and math, too.

  So for the rest of that week and the one that followed, Audrey was so busy working on her math and writing overdue essays that she had very little time to worry about anything else. It wasn’t until the essays were completed and she had done well on one or two math assignments that she once again had time to worry about some of the weird things that had happened, or seemed to have happened, in the recent past. Not that she wanted to go back to lying awake nights thinking about what the strange creature in the cave had told her or what Beowulf and Sputnik had said in perfect English. Two subjects that were going to be hard to avoid unless…unless she could get her mind completely focused on something else, like a new novel, for instance.

  CHAPTER 11

  BUT WHAT NOVEL SHOULD IT BE? THERE still was the one about the girl detective, but Audrey had finished the chapter about the evil cat in the sinister alley, and after quite a bit of thought no other exciting possibilities had come to mind. And the earlier story about the magical transforming lily had bogged down where the main character, a stuck-up jerk, had managed to get himself turned into a wild boar.

  However, she had been thinking about a slightly interesting idea she’d gotten from Mr. Baxter’s list of extra-credit projects for English class. A list that had included such uninspiring suggestions as interviewing an important Greendale citizen and then writing their biography. An interview with Captain Banner, for instance? No thanks.

  But there was one extra-credit project that had caught Audrey’s attention. And that was writing and illustrating a picture book for beginning readers.

  While she had never thought of herself as a really gifted artist, she was able to draw some things pretty well, and as for the story itself…Well, writing a picture-book story should be no problem for an experienced novelist, even one who was not exactly well known. At least, not yet.

  So it was a little after eight o’clock on a moonlit night in May that Audrey sat down at her desk, opened her novel notebook, and got ready to write a very short story. But after half an hour or so she was still staring at the blank paper. It was beginning to seem that most of the good ideas that might appeal to little kids had already been done. But finally, after a lot of wasted time and paper, she began to get an interesting idea.

  It was an idea that came out of her own life, when she was about as old as the readers of the book would be. She could write a story about a baby dragon who lived under the main character’s bed. A character who would be a little girl who might be called…Let’s see. Perhaps Debby? Then a nice alliterative title for the book could be Debby’s Dragon.

  So she wrote Debby’s Dragon at the top of one page of her secret notebook, and then, with her pencil poised, she stared at the two words and waited for a good beginning sentence to come to mind. But for quite a long time nothing did. After a while she decided the problem had something to do with the title. Somehow the look of the thin lead-gray letters scribbled across the top line of a sheet of notebook paper wasn’t all that inspiring, particularly when you compared it to the way her handwriting looked when she was using…Suddenly she put down the pencil, opened her top drawer, and got out the bronze pen and several sheets of white construction paper. She folded the paper so each sheet made four pages of a very small book, and using the bronze pen, she wrote across the top of the first page, in careful block printing:

  DEBBY’S DRAGON

  By Audrey Abbott

  And right away the ideas bega
n to flow as smoothly and easily as the lines made by the bronze pen. On the first page she wrote:

  Debby liked to think about dragons and play that she could see them. Beautiful dragons who could fly and shoot fire out of their noses.

  “Nostrils” would sound more elegant, but since “nostrils” probably wouldn’t be in a first grader’s reading vocabulary, “noses” would have to do. The story went on:

  In her room Debby had lots of dragon pictures and toy dragons, too.

  Actually, the dragons in Audrey’s collection, which she still kept on the top shelf of her bookcase, weren’t the kind of things you’d call “toys.” More like figurines. Dragon figurines. But once again a simpler word would be better for a beginning reader. The next page read:

  She had silver dragons and wooden dragons and dragons made out of glass.

  Since there couldn’t be much writing on each page, in order to leave room for a picture, the written part of the book had to be very brief. And drawing the pictures should be quick and easy too. At one time Audrey had spent a lot of time drawing dragons. She remembered using crayons and colored pencils to sketch bulging eyes, long scaly bodies, and billowing clouds of smoke and flame. The pictures would be fun. But the writing began to get a little more complicated when she arrived at the next part of the story.

  But Debby had a secret. In her room, along with the toy dragons, there was one real live dragon. A very young dragon who sometimes hid under her bed.

  The problem was that Audrey wanted to describe the dragon as she used to imagine him when she was little, but in words that an ordinary first grader could read and understand. That might not be so easy.

  You might be able to say, for instance, that the dragon was mostly green, except for his purple face and feet, and most first graders would probably understand how a baby dragon who tried to breathe fire usually only managed a warm hiccup and a pale puff of smoke. But it wouldn’t be so easy to explain that he only pretended to be dangerous and sinister. Although he was good at lying in wait and lunging out fiercely, you only had to shout or stamp your foot and he whimpered and crawled back under the bed.

  Audrey thought of several different versions, but none of them were exactly right. It was hard to describe her imaginary dragon without using words like “anxious” and “insecure”—words that she herself wouldn’t have been able to read when she was five years old. But in those days she hadn’t needed words to understand her dragon, and when she’d told her father about him, he seemed to understand too. To understand that while having a live-in dragon might be a little bit weird, it really wasn’t all that dangerous.

  Translating a not-very-typical dragon into first-grade English turned out to be not that easy, but Audrey finally thought she’d gotten the idea across pretty well. She was running out of pages when she finally came up with a fairly good ending. The last page of the book read:

  Debby and her baby dragon went on being almost friendly for a long time. Until the dragon got too big to hide under the bed and Debby got too old to imagine him so well. Then he went away.

  Audrey wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ending, but she would wait until later to decide whether it needed to be rewritten. And then would come the drawing of the illustrations. Putting the unfinished book in her school binder, she got ready for bed.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT WAS VERY LATE, PERHAPS ONE OR TWO o’clock in the morning, when, very suddenly, Audrey was awake. Wide awake and wondering what she had just heard—and felt. She was just beginning to relax, thinking that she probably had only been having a very vivid dream, when it happened again. This time her bed definitely went up and then down, as if it were being moved by a slight earthquake. Or else being shaken by somebody—or something. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she looked carefully from side to side.

  The full moon sifting in through the window curtains produced enough light so that she was able to see that no one was standing by her bed, and propping herself up on her elbows, she was able to determine that there was no one anywhere else in the room. She was breathing a sigh of relief and starting to relax when the thumping came again—and then once more. Wide awake now, Audrey began to realize exactly where it was coming from. Something was under the bed and bumping against the mattress. Something that must be rather large and strong. Much larger, at least, than a mouse or even a rat. No little rodent could shake the bed like that. Beowulf? she wondered hopefully. But, no. Beowulf could never squeeze his one hundred and fifty pounds under such a low bed.

  Another thump and, at the same time, a scuffling, scratching noise. A noise that seemed to be moving toward the left side of the bed. Scooting to the right as far as she could, Audrey sat bolt upright, staring in the direction of the sound and seeing nothing but the edge of the bed and, beyond that, only moonlit curtains. And then…And then, slowly stretching up into sight, two long, slightly curved plumes came into view, distinctly silhouetted against the moonlit windows. Feathery plumes that looked like the feelers of a moth or a butterfly, only much larger and longer. The limber feelers bent and turned and then raised up higher as something else came into view. Just below the feelers two other objects appeared. The wings of a very large bat? No. More like dark, spiky ears. The ears twitched back and forth and moved higher, and then, just below them, Audrey was able to make out a rounded dome, down the middle of which ran a row of sharp-looking spines. The dome turned, raised up higher, and she was staring into two round, glowing holes at the end of a long snout and, just above them, two bulging golden eyes.

  She gasped. Pulling the covers up almost to her own eyes, she cowered back against the head of the bed and watched as the dragon’s head—it was now obvious that’s what it had to be—raised up higher, and higher still, on a long, limber neck. A very long neck that kept stretching up higher and higher until two skinny legs appeared. Legs that ended in large claws that curled down to sharply pointed talons.

  Audrey gasped again, and the dragon suddenly noticed her. It jerked back, and the glowing holes at the end of its long, thin muzzle released, not a rush of flame so much as a brief fiery flicker, followed by a small puff of white smoke.

  In spite of the fact that she kept trying to tell herself that it was only a dream, Audrey was frightened. A dream she told herself firmly. I must be dreaming about my old pretend dragon. But there was a part of her mind that wasn’t accepting that explanation. A part that kept bringing up the fact that this creature was a lot more explicitly dragonlike than anything her five-year-old mind had ever been able to produce. Her preschool imagination had been pretty creative, but it had never conjured up such details as the glaring golden eyes and spiky ears that Audrey was now able to see so clearly, or the way the claws curled down to end in such long, sharp spikes. A dragon who probably wouldn’t be so easily discouraged as the one created by a five-year-old’s imagination. But then again, perhaps it would be worth a try.

  Suddenly dropping the sheet she’d been clutching, Audrey leaned forward, clapped her hands sharply, and said, “Shoo!”

  It worked. Jerking its head up and back, the dragon made a startled-sounding “Oooff,” and ducked down to disappear from sight. And a moment later Audrey felt, once again, the scratching and thumping that had awakened her. The thumps continued for several seconds, became less noticeable, and stopped. Stopped altogether—for a minute, and then for several more.

  Do dragons sleep? Perhaps not, but then again…Audrey went on straining her ears to listen. Nothing. No sound at all, but no sleep for Audrey, either. Lying wide awake, she listened and waited, wondering what had really happened and what she ought to do about it.

  She thought briefly of getting out of the bed and looking under it. Very briefly. The dragon had been too real, too distinctly seen. But at last she did do something. Clutching a blanket, she stood up, breathlessly gathered her courage, and jumped. Jumped toward the door, snatched it open, and kept going. Out the door and down the hall to wind up on the couch in the living room next to where
Beowulf was sprawled out on his baby crib mattress. He woke up only long enough to watch Audrey arrange the couch’s pillows and her one skimpy blanket into a more or less comfortable bed, and went back to sleep without commenting beyond a sleepy grunt.

  By the time she woke up the next morning, feeling a bit cramped and chilly, Audrey could look back at what had happened in a more realistic way. It obviously had been a dream. An extremely realistic and vivid dream that perhaps had been brought about by the fact that, in writing Debby’s Dragon, she had spent so much time and effort trying to remember the imaginary dragon of her childhood. And perhaps succeeding in remembering it in such great detail only because, as a little kid, she really had possessed a hyperactive imagination.

  Back then she had made up all sorts of particulars about the baby dragon, and all sorts of other things, too, including many extra facts about the Mayberry twins’ pirates. Besides what James had told her, Audrey had added such details as hooked noses, evil squinty eyes, and black jagged teeth. Enough scary details so that, back then in the days of the pirate game, she often had half-asleep dreams that were pretty nightmarish. So it was no wonder that her dream about a dragon could be full of more convincing details than the average person might experience. It was a somewhat comforting thought.

  Comforting enough, at least, to make it possible for her to scoot back into and out of her room that morning to get her clothes and the books she would need for school. After dressing quickly in the bathroom, she arrived in the kitchen in time to set the table for breakfast.

  By the time school was over that day, and an afternoon spent, as usual, with her father, Audrey was no longer worrying about the dragon under her bed. Not much, anyway. But enough so that when dinner was over, she told her parents that she had finished her homework, which was true, and since she was only planning to read, she might just as well do it right there, with them, in the living room.