The baku all looked at Wendell. Wendell gulped.
There was a splash, and one of the larger baku got out of the water. It was nearly the size of Wendell, and it looked only about one-quarter asleep. It had stubby hooves and a long tail with a soggy plume.
It bowed to Danny, then to Wendell, then Suki. Then it stood there.
“Err, right,” said Danny. “So . . . what’s your name?”
The baku shrugged.
“They don’t talk much,” said Suki.
“Um,” said Wendell. “So . . . you’ll come with us?”
The baku nodded.
“And eat the Dream Wasp?” asked Danny, who had some doubts about something as small and cute and weird as the baku being any use against something as big and scary-sounding as the Dream Wasp.
It considered this. It shrugged again. Then it leaned forward and peered deep into Wendell’s eyes.
“What’s it doing?” asked the iguana worriedly. “I don’t know what it’s doing!”
The baku reached out and patted Wendell’s hand. And smiled.
“Right,” said Danny. “I guess we’ve got a baku. Let’s see what Great-Granddad has to say.”
Getting the baku home was not as easy as Danny had hoped.
It wasn’t that it was unfriendly or tried to run away. It was very friendly. It waved to the other baku as they left the clearing, and then took Wendell’s hand and walked through the bamboo, making happy “mrrrp!” noises.
No, the problem was that the creature fell asleep constantly.
“I think it’s narcoleptic,” said Wendell, after the third time it suddenly dozed off in mid-stride.
“Narco-what?”
“It’s a disease,” said Suki. “Or a condition or something. You fall asleep in the middle of stuff. It’s a real problem if you’re driving.”
Danny had a vision of his school bus driver, Mr. Lyle the monitor lizard, suddenly falling asleep and driving the bus into a telephone pole.
Hmm. They might finally get to use the school-bus evacuation drill, which would be cool, but it probably wasn’t worth it.
“Okay, let’s both take an arm . . .” he said. The baku snored.
By positioning Wendell and Danny on either side of the dream-eater, they managed to haul it back to Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath’s house. The baku would fall asleep and dangle, its feet dragging, then wake up a minute later as if nothing had happened and waddle cheerfully down the path. It was very peculiar.
They reached the house and marched the baku up the stairs. It woke up, looked around happily, and was asleep by the time they reached the kitchen.
“Great-Granddaaaaaad!” yelled Danny, depositing the baku on the kitchen floor. “You didn’t tell us they couldn’t stay awake!”
“Oh, that. Yeah, they do that.” The elder Dragonbreath peered down at the baku, who had leaned against the kitchen door frame and was snoring softly. “I’ll get you some green tea for the trip . . .”
The baku let out a loud, warbling snore.
“. . . looks like you’ll need it.”
Wendell had previously thought that it was hard to fall asleep with Danny watching.
He had realized now that however hard it is to fall asleep when a small dragon is staring at you, it is much, much worse when there is a small dragon, an elderly and somewhat deaf dragon, a cute salamander that is absolutely positively not your girlfriend, nope, nuh-uh, no way, and a magical creature that looks something like a tapir.
“Right,” said Danny. “So Wendell falls asleep, and then Great-Granddad opens a door into the dreamworld, and Suki and I and the baku go through it to try to get to the Dream Wasp, which may or may not involve a terrible nightmarish journey through the dark horrors of Wendell’s subconscious.”
“There is a chance you’ll go barking mad,” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath. “With the gibbering and the foaming at the mouth. Did I mention that? I should probably mention that.”
Danny waved this off as unimportant. “That doesn’t matter! I have to save Wendell! It’s Wendell!”
“So now we just have to wait for Wendell to fall asleep. Again,” said Danny.
“Right,” said the elder Dragonbreath.
“Right,” said Suki.
“This is really hard with all of you watching me,” said the iguana.
They’d made him up a very nice little bed on the kitchen floor. The pillow was soft and the blankets were warm and the baku had immediately fallen asleep on his feet.
This did nothing to negate the fact that they were all staring at him.
“Now, there’s a few things to remember,” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath. “First of all, dreams can hurt you. Don’t think for a moment that they can’t.”
“Ooo! Ooo!” Danny bounced. “Is this like the movies where they go into a computer game and it’s like real and if they die in there, they die for real?”
“Corn-dog widdle!” roared Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath.
“Nobody really dies in dreams.”
“People die in dreams all the time!” said Danny. “It’s in all the movies!”
“Hollywood nonsense! You can die in your sleep of all sorts of things, but dreaming isn’t one of them, unless your heart’s so bad that you’ll keel over if somebody looks at you sideways.” He snorted smoke. “No, you’ll be fine. It just might hurt a lot. So don’t jump off any cliffs unless you absolutely have to.”
“I can’t imagine jumping off a cliff if I didn’t absolutely have to,” muttered Suki.
“I can!” said Danny.
“Second, don’t get lost. Follow the buzzing and the Wasp signs. It’ll leave signs of its existence around—just keep following those until you find the Wasp.”
“Got it,” said Suki, who was taking notes.
“Lastly, the Dream Wasp is a nasty customer. If it’s already laid eggs, you’ll have to deal with those. Don’t let it grab your head, or it’ll try to suck your dreams out. You don’t want that.”
“I’ll burn it up if it tries!” said Danny confidently. His fire breathing had gotten a lot better. He could almost do it on command now, although he hadn’t figured out how to do it without burning his tongue.
“No breathing fire,” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath.
“Aww . . .”
“You could fry Wanda’s brain with that! You’re inside his dreams, remember? A careless blast of fire, and you could fry some part of what makes him him! He could wake up mean or stupid or really interested in professional wrestling.”
“Professional wrestling is cool,” said Danny, injured.
“Is Wanda interested in it?”
“Well . . .” Danny had to admit that the iguana wasn’t. He kept pointing out that it was all fake and what kind of sport left stacks of folding chairs just lying around the ring to break over people’s heads?
“Exactly.” Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath waved a claw at him. “You have to be careful in there. You can defend yourselves, but no collateral damage*.”
“Right!” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath. “If that’s settled, it’s time to go!”
“What?” Suki looked up. “Shouldn’t we meditate or prepare or—”
“You should have meditated before we left,” said Great-Grandfather, pointing. “No time now.”
A second snore had joined the baku’s. Wendell was fast asleep.
“So, about this door . . .” said Danny. He was really interested in this part. Portals to the dreamworld! How cool was that? What if you could take one and get into the dreams where you could fly? “Is it a dark and mystical ritual? Do we need lots of po
tions and candles and stuff?”
“Do we have to center our minds and clear our consciousness?” asked Suki eagerly.
“Well, if you want to,” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath. He stood in front of the refrigerator and fiddled with the ice maker. “Cubes . . . extra ice . . . coldest setting . . . got it!”
He opened the refrigerator door.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath. He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go on, go save Wanda’s sanity. Poor boy needs all the help he can get. Imagine naming a boy Wanda . . .”
They got the baku on its feet. It yawned and stretched and accepted the mug of green tea from Danny’s great-grandfather. The smell coming out of the mug was somewhere between tea and really angry alfalfa. Danny wondered what it could possibly taste like and then decided he didn’t really want to know. The baku drank it down in three and a half gulps and sighed happily.
On the kitchen floor, Wendell mumbled in his sleep.
“Right!” said Danny. “Let’s get moving!” He glanced back to make sure that Suki and the baku were following, and stepped bravely toward the portal in the fridge.
It was purple and swirly and looked like a special effect from a movie. Danny was thrilled. Here was magic that looked like magic was supposed to look!
“Don’t do anything stupid,” said Great-Grandfather Dragonbreath cheerfully. “Suki, try to keep track of him. And be nice to the baku. They’re good luck.”
Danny nodded, lifted his foot, and stepped through the portal into the dreamworld.
The dreamworld, as it turned out, looked an awful lot like Wendell’s bedroom.
There was the bed and the window and the painfully neat bookcase and Mr. Fins in his bowl and the poster of . . .
“Hang on,” said Danny out loud. “That’s not right.”
Above Wendell’s bookcase hung a poster of Super Skink. And indeed, a poster of Super Skink had hung there until two months ago, when there had been a minor mishap with a bottle-rocket-propelled balsa-wood helicopter, and the resulting
smoking crater had been in the middle of Super Skink’s chest.
“What is it?” asked Suki, holding the baku’s hand. “Is something wrong?” She looked around. “Is this Wendell’s room?”
“I think it’s a dream about his room,” said Danny. “It doesn’t quite look like this anymore.”
“Oh.” Suki considered this. “Well, that makes sense. You know, you have those dreams about your house, but it’s not quite your house, and your bedroom is grafted onto the school or your grandmother’s house or whatever . . .”
Danny nodded. “Right. So now we have to follow the Wasp signs. . . .”
They went over the room carefully, but there was nothing in it that looked like a trail a Wasp would leave. Danny couldn’t hear any buzzing.
He opened the door to check the rest of the house.
It wasn’t there.
“What is it?” asked Suki, peering over his shoulder.
“Doors,” said Danny. “A whole lot of doors . . .”
The baku yawned and leaned against the door frame. Danny stepped cautiously out into the hall and looked in both directions.
Nothing. Just doors, and a rather ratty carpet that looked like Wendell’s brain had bought it from a motel. He couldn’t even see the ends of the hallway.
There was also a decided lack of signs saying “This Way to the Dream Wasp’s Lair.”
Suki tried the door opposite them and said, “It’s locked.”
They went down the hall, rattling each door, but all of them were locked.
The baku wandered after them, rubbing its eyes. Danny was just about to start on the seventeenth door when there was a loud thud at the other end of the hallway.
He and Suki spun around. The distant end of the hallway had gone dark.
There was another, louder thud, then another, and then the whole hallway was pounding as if someone at the end was using a jackhammer.
The darkness was coming closer, as if somebody was turning out the lights, one at a time, in sequence.
“I don’t like this,” said Suki.
“Yeah,” said Danny. “This is not cool.” He’d been in creepy hallways with bad doors before, but at least the haunted house had been traditional. You knew what to expect.
Something roared. The pounding was definitely closer.
“Yeah . . .” said Danny. “Yeah, I’m gonna say that we should probably run now.”
Suki grabbed the baku’s arm and tore off down the hall. Danny followed, grabbing the occasional door handle. They continued to be locked.
The roaring came again, and this time Danny could make out words in it.
“DO YOU WANT SOME BREWER’S YEAST!?”
It took a moment for that to sink in, and then Danny started running even faster, and actually passed Suki and the baku.
Lovely. Danny had always known that Wendell had issues with his mother—Wendell’s mother lived on her issues the way that Danny’s mom lived on coffee—but he’d never given it much thought. Sure, he’d once overheard his father saying something about how you’d be able to wallpaper a battleship with Wendell’s therapy bills someday, but his dad refused to explain and told him never to repeat it. (He had, immediately, to Wendell, who had sighed heavily, but hadn’t argued.)
Never in a million years, however, had he expected the iguana’s mommy issues to try and kill him.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
“We can’t keep this up!” shouted Suki. “We have to get out of this hall!”
“Grrrrp!” agreed the baku.
“The doors are locked!” said Danny, rattling another one as he passed.
“They can’t all be locked!”
“Why not?”
The baku was running with its ears flat and its mane streaming. It didn’t look sleepy at all now.
There was another roar, but Danny couldn’t make out most of it—something about kelp, maybe—and when he risked a glance over his shoulder, the darkness was closing in.
Then he saw it.
There was a door on their left, but unlike all the others, it had something on it.
Danny skidded to a halt in front of it and grabbed the knob in both hands. The darkness was practically at their heels now, and the pounding sounded like bombs going off.
The knob turned. Danny wrenched the door open and Suki and the baku jumped inside. He leaped after them, slamming the door just as the wave of darkness crashed against it and trapped them inside.
It was dark inside the room.
“I’m touching something sticky,” said Suki grimly. “It feels like old gym mats. But sticky.”
“Old gym mats are sticky,” said Danny.
“Maybe at your school.”
Danny had a sneaking suspicion that gym mats were sticky the world over, but there were more important matters at stake. The surface he was touching felt weird. It was firm but yielding, almost rubbery, but it wasn’t smooth. It had a kind of rough, grainy texture, and there were deep square divots in it. The bottom of the divots was really sticky.
Danny was starting to get an idea.
Almost immediately, something began to glow.
“What’s that?” asked Suki.
“I think it’s the baku!” said Danny. “His tail glows! That’s so cool!”
It was indeed the baku. The plume on the end of its tail was glowing as brightly as a lantern.
“Thank you!” said Suki to the baku. It looked pleased with itself and smiled until its eyes squinched up.
Danny turned his attention back to their surroundings, and realized that he’d been right.
“Those aren’t gym mats,” said Suki.
“Nope,” said Danny. “They’re . . . giant bran waffles.”
It was true. They stood in an enormous cavern, the walls lost in shadow, and in front of them was a mountain of bran waffles the size of gym mats. Wendell’s mom’s trademark low-fat syrup glittered down the sides and congealed in the hollows near the floor.
“Well,” said Danny. “That’s . . . something.” He wished Wendell were here. Wendell would have something clever and snarky to say, and then Danny could give him a hard time about having gigantic waffle dreams.
“I don’t want to alarm you,” said Suki, in a tone that indicated she was somewhat alarmed, “but the door’s gone.”
Danny looked. The wall was a smooth expanse of gray stone with no door anywhere.
“Hmm. Well, we didn’t want to go back there anyway.”
“There’s some different stuff over there,” said Suki, pointing. The baku moved its tail, throwing wild shadows across the room.
The light fell on slices of pickled beets the size of truck tires and Brussels sprouts as large as boulders.
“It looks like all that health food is getting to him,” said Danny.
“Really? I would never have guessed . . .”
Danny had forgotten that Suki could be really sarcastic when she put her mind to it.
“Do you see anything that looks like a wasp?” asked Danny.
“No . . .”
“I guess we should start walking, then.” Danny took a deep breath and prepared to ascend Mt. Waffle.
The syrup made it an unpleasant climb, but there were plenty of handholds.
When they reached the top, there was still nothing obviously wasp-like. Quivering towers of tofu loomed out of the darkness around them.
Dragonbreath #8 Page 3