Choke

by Obert Skye

  “That train’s never going to run,” Kate insisted.

  “I’m just suggesting we try,” I argued. “If we can’t . . .”

  I stopped talking because a loud screech shot through the cavern and echoed off the walls like a zillion fiery Ping-Pong balls. Both Kate and I jumped.

  “She doesn’t sound friendly,” Kate whispered as we hid behind the barrels.

  “What does friendly sound like?” I asked. “Did you expect her to giggle?”

  Kate elbowed me hard.

  “You know there’s that cereal stuff in those barrels,” I reminded her, pointing to the other side of the cavern. “That dog-food-looking junk. Maybe she’ll eat that.”

  “That’s not edible,” Kate said.

  “Wyatt tried some.”

  “I’ve got to start hanging out with other people,” Kate griped.

  “That’s probably good advice,” I agreed, followed by a big hiccup. “I hope you don’t follow it.”

  Kate actually smiled.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, pumped up by how pretty she was when she smiled. “I’ll run across the cave and get some.”

  “Great,” Kate said, no longer smiling. “But are you sure we actually want her to come down?”

  “I’m not that terribly sure of anything,” I reminded her.

  I jumped up and ran closer to the wall. Then I moved along the edge of the cavern and worked my way over to the far side. When I got to the barrels, I unlatched one of the large wooden lids and took out a handful of the stuff. I looked across the cavern at Kate. She was staring at the ceiling with her mouth agape. I glanced up to see what she was looking at.

  “Watch out, Beck!” she screamed.

  As I looked up, a huge white flash bowled me over backward. I fell on the dirt. The cereal stuff I had been holding flew all over, covering me with a torrent of grain.

  I looked up, and the dragon was perched on the edge of the barrel, eating straight from the barrel and taking bites bigger than anyone with good manners should.

  I crab-walked backward, staring at her. She was already about the size of a large dog—stark white with cobalt blue talons and eyes. Her scales wrapped around her body in a circular pattern and her folded wings looked wet and rubbery. She had two small horns on her head that angled back and in. When she turned to gaze at me her horns looked sort of like a half halo. Her tail was long and the end was so thin she could coil it, which she did repeatedly as she ate. Her teeth were already impressive, and she had round bumps on her back. All four of her legs were muscular, and there were feathers around her wrists and ankles. There was something about her that made her different from the other dragons I had raised. She looked confident and majestic, and she was probably the coolest thing I had ever laid eyes on.

  I hiccupped loudly.

  The dragon looked at me. Her nostrils flared, and I could see food sliding down her throat. She belched, and bits of dusty grain drifted down on me.

  “Kate!” I whispered loudly.

  “I’m right behind you,” she replied. She had moved across the room and was now standing next to me.

  The queen continued to stare at me. She then opened her wings as wide as she could and stood up on the rim of the barrel.

  “Should we run?” I asked.

  Kate was speechless.

  The dragon folded her wings back in and then jumped softly down to the dirt. She sniffed and blinked her blue eyes twice. The only thing I could think of was to talk to her.

  “Hello.”

  The dragon sniffed and shifted and then pawed at the ground gently.

  “I’m Beck and this is Kate,” I explained.

  “She doesn’t speak English,” Kate said.

  “Well, it’s not like I speak dragon,” I replied, turning my head to see Kate. “What else can I do? It’s not like I know . . .”

  I heard a snort and felt hot breath on the side of my face. I turned. The dragon was just inches away from me, standing on her two back legs. She sniffed the air directly beneath my chin and then dropped back down onto all fours.

  Her eyes were intoxicatingly blue, and the scales on her face sparkled like diamonds. I reached out and touched the top of her nose. She tipped her head up as if encouraging me to continue. I patted her head and ran my hand over her left ear. She sniffed again and moved closer. So I put my right arm around her neck and bent down.

  “Are you hugging her?” Kate asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said awkwardly.

  Kate stepped over to the barrel and got a big handful of the cereal. She came back and held the food out for the queen.

  “Here you go,” she offered.

  The dragon ate it while Kate petted her and I continued to awkwardly hug her.

  “She’s beautiful,” Kate said breathlessly.

  “Different than the others, isn’t she?”

  Kate nodded.

  “She kinda glows,” I added.

  “What about a name?” Kate questioned. “It has to be a nice one, seeing how that old guy told you she was a queen.”

  “Well, what’s that one famous queen’s name, Queen Ellen or something?”

  “Queen Ellen?” Kate laughed. “You mean Queen Elizabeth?”

  “Maybe,” I said with a hiccup.

  “You wanna name her Elizabeth?” Kate asked.

  “No, that’s too long,” I said, angry that my hiccups hadn’t ceased. “How about Lizzy? Like Lizzy Stephens.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She was a girl with big feet in my third grade class.”

  Kate tried it out. “What do you think, Lizzy?” she said kindly. “Are you okay with that name?”

  Lizzy tilted her head up as if she were beginning to nod but stopped in the middle of it.

  “Half a nod’s not bad,” I said.

  “I agree,” Kate smiled.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon petting and feeding Lizzy. We kept making up excuses to stay longer.

  “We haven’t brushed her ankles yet.”

  “I think we need to count her scales.”

  Eventually Kate had to get home. I offered to stay with Lizzy, but Kate looked mad that I would stay when she had to leave. We said good-bye, closed and locked the rolling steel door, and left through the moss.

  It was really painful; neither of us had any desire to leave. We talked about nothing but Lizzy until we reached the garage house and had to split up.

  I said good-bye to Kate with a giant hiccup.

  Illustration from page 33 of The Grim Knot

  CHAPTER 16

  She Makes Me

  I couldn’t think about anything else besides Lizzy. It was like my brain had gone haywire. When I got back to the manor Millie made me a great dinner, but I couldn’t taste it. My senses were all focused on Lizzy. When Thomas sat me down for half an hour and gave me a lecture on how I needed to practice the violin more often, I couldn’t even hear him enough to be bothered. My brain was too preoccupied with Lizzy. And when Wane came up to my room and asked if I wanted to play a game of chess, my only reply was, “Lizzy.”

  Wane looked at me like I had gone insane and then shut my door and left. I don’t know what my problem was. It was as if the white dragon had cast a spell over me.

  I fell asleep mumbling her name and when I woke up it was the first word I said.

  “Lizzy.”

  I jumped out of bed looking for my clothes. Thunder cracked and rattled my window violently. I turned to witness the downpour outside.

  “No!” I moaned.

  My window looked like the backside of a waterfall.

  “Come on,” I complained. “Enough already with the rain.”

  When I got down to the kitchen, Millie was wearing galoshes and a rain bonnet. She was sitting on a stool wringing her hands and listening to the radio. The announcer was talking about more washed-out roads.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m worried,” she replied. “What if the roa
ds don’t get fixed? We need to get into town. I’m running low on essentials. I only have fifty more pounds of flour.”

  “Oh,” I shrugged. “I thought you were worried about my father.”

  “That too,” she admitted.

  “It’s raining harder than before,” I groused.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” Millie said. “Thomas said bits of our drive are beginning to wash away and part of the stone fence near the gate has collapsed. The soil is just so saturated.”

  Despite her condition, Millie made me some perfectly scrambled eggs with thick delicious gravy and pull-apart butter biscuits. There was also a plate full of thick maple bacon and crispy golden hash browns.

  “You’re going to make me fat,” I told her.

  “Thanks, Beck,” she said kindly.

  I finished my breakfast and then stood at the door watching the clouds vomit huge amounts of water down upon everything. The courtyard had at least a foot of standing water in it and the snake statue was overflowing. I could see scattered tree branches that had been knocked down by the wind and rain.

  Lightning flashed, temporarily blinding my eyes. Thunder followed right behind it, scorching my ears. Everything I could see shouted, “Don’t go out.” But I knew there was no way I was going to stay away from that cave.

  I went up to my room and changed into my boots and old jeans. I pulled out a plastic windbreaker that Thomas had purchased for me. I had made a personal decision never to wear it, but now things had changed.

  I threw the windbreaker on and zipped it up. I put on a ball cap and then put one on top of that, backwards so that I had a brim in front and in back. I thought it was such a great idea that I put two more on top of those so that I had a brim on all four sides. I looked in the mirror and shuttered—I looked beyond dorky. There was no way I would ever go out like this if I knew I would see people.

  I knew that Millie would be expecting me to come down for lunch, so I devised a plan to throw her off. I returned to the kitchen and began packing a lunch.

  “What are you doing?” Millie asked.

  “Packing a lunch. I’m going to pretend like I’m camping in the manor,” I lied.

  “Well, that sounds like fun,” she said. “What are you wearing though?”

  I looked down at my windbreaker. “It’s my safari outfit.”

  “What an imagination you have,” she said sweetly. I was a little offended that Millie thought I was the kind of teenager who would dress up and have pretend safaris. But she followed up her remarks by packing me two sandwiches, a container of potato salad, a banana, what looked like half a chocolate cake, and a thermos of hot apple cider. She wrapped everything up in butcher paper and put it in a big brown bag.

  I thanked her and left the kitchen. I walked to one of the back doors on the north wing, put my huge lunch bag beneath my arm, and moved out into the deluge.

  I was instantly soaked.

  By the time I made it over behind the garage, my lunch bag had completely dissolved as well as the paper covering my food. All I had was a big armful of mush and a wet banana. I dropped the food and watched it smoosh into the flood of water.

  The ground behind the garage was so soggy it was almost impossible to walk on. I could see the train tracks running right into the wall. The water had washed away most of the soil around it, exposing about ten feet of the track going into the woods. I walked along the track as much as I could. Some sections of the rails were still slightly buried, but there were also long stretches where the whole track, or at least the metal rails, were totally visible. I balanced myself on the rails, making better time than I thought I would.

  The rain was still coming down in pool-sized drops, but there was some protection from the trees. All over the forest I could see and hear rushing rainwater. I made the mistake of stepping off the track once, and my legs sunk about a foot into mud. It took me five minutes to pull myself out and another ten minutes to dig out my right shoe that had been sucked off.

  The rain wasn’t too cold, but the wind blowing on my wet body made me shiver violently. I pushed on, feeling like a postman in a storm. Normally I would have given up, but I kept thinking about Lizzy—she was like a magnet pulling me toward her.

  When I reached the side of the mountain, water was flowing rapidly down the stone stairs, and the bush near the entrance had been washed away.

  I traveled on.

  My clothes were so wet it felt like I was lifting an extra hundred pounds with each step. My dorky-looking hats did a pretty good job of keeping the rain out of my eyes, but did nothing for all the water that was flowing down the front and back of my neck. Once it flowed down into my shirt and jacket, there was no stopping it from running down into my pants.

  I could feel a great chafing coming on.

  I didn’t have a watch, and of course there was no sun to help me gauge the time. But it felt like forever before I reached the moss wall. Water ran down from above and then diverged when it reached the thick moss and flowed past each side. I expected the cave to be really wet, but there were only some small puddles right by the entrance.

  I stepped in further and looked at the massive train. I wished so badly it worked so I could drive it back to the manor.

  When I rolled open the large steel door, Lizzy was hanging from the ceiling by her back legs and her wings were wrapped around her like a cocoon. She looked considerably bigger than yesterday, but I figured my eyes were just playing tricks.

  She screeched and dropped from the ceiling, landing on all fours. She walked majestically toward me. I could feel my chest pounding and my limbs were buzzing. Her blue eyes looked directly at me as she swaggered.

  She stopped right in front of me and snorted.

  It wasn’t hard to notice that her head was now higher than mine. She had gone from the size of a large dog to the size of a large horse. She lowered her noggin and nudged my right hand. I scratched her behind the ear.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She raised her tail and swatted it down against the ground.

  “You’re huge,” I said. “No offense, but, I mean, look at you!”

  Lizzy grumbled, and I scratched harder. I looked around the cavern and saw that three of the barrels had been knocked over and were broken open.

  “So, you just ate the whole time I was gone?”

  She opened her mouth, and I could see her long purple tongue. It flicked out and then curled back in. Like the rest of her, her teeth had increased in size. I made a mental note never to stick my hand in her mouth.

  Lizzy lifted her head and nudged me under the chin.

  “You’re like a big dog,” I told her while patting her on the side of her long neck. “Making me pet you—the other dragons never did that. Of course, they didn’t grow as fast either.”

  Lizzy strode over to the spring and took a long drink. I walked to the center of the cavern and looked at her split-open pod. I could see that she had made some sort of nest in the dirt next to the cocoon. I sat down cross-legged and watched her drink. She was mesmerizing to observe. Everything about her was breathtaking.

  Lizzy finished drinking and turned around. She stepped closer and then stopped. I patted the ground thinking it might make her come.

  “Come,” I called.

  Lizzy looked at me and then suddenly sprang up toward the ceiling. Her body twisted, and she was lost in the dark shadows of the pockmarked ceiling.

  “Wow,” I whispered.

  I moved over so that I was directly under her and lay down on the dirt. I put my arms behind my head and gazed up. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there. She opened her eyes and blinked.

  “Yeah, I see you.”

  I could hear her breathing. The only other sound was coming from the spring as it gurgled. Lizzy snorted and spit dropped down on my face.

  “Thanks,” I said, scooting over a bit.

  It was sort of pleasant lying there—the sound of Lizzy breathing up above and the
cool dirt against my wet back. Sure I had mud all over me and two of my hats had been knocked off. And yes, my legs burned and my teeth were chattering, but for some reason as I lay there I couldn’t remember ever feeling more at peace.

  “What’s the deal with you?” I asked Lizzy as I stared up into the dark.

  I closed my eyes and wished my lunch hadn’t been destroyed by the rain. Luckily I was so relaxed it didn’t really bother me. I was completely at ease until I heard a knock.

  My eyes sprang open.

  I wanted to pretend the noise away, but I heard it again. It was a hollow rapping sound and it was coming from the direction of the tunnel door.

  “Can moths knock?” I asked Lizzy.

  She didn’t reply.

  There was another knock, followed by the muffled sound of someone shouting. My cold body shivered and shook. I looked toward the steel door on the other side of the cavern. Most of me wanted to just get up and run out of it and out of the cave. But a tiny bit of me was worried that whatever was knocking was in trouble and needed help. Maybe moths were attacking it–them–whatever.

  The knocking grew louder and more urgent.

  I wish I had been a Boy Scout longer. I might have learned how to deal with these kinds of things. After all, it had all the classic Boy Scout elements: a cave, someone yelling for help, my stomach was tied in a square knot, plus I was a boy.

  I stood up not sure which direction to go.

  Illustration from page 38 of The Grim Knot

  CHAPTER 17

  Liar

  I was thinking I had picked the wrong direction as I ran toward the tunnel door. I couldn’t help it; what if it were Kate or my dad knocking?

  The pounding was loud and frantic. I stood in front of the tunnel door and listened. I could hear hollering, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

  “Who’s there?” I yelled back.

  The pounding and the hollering continued.

  “Who is it?” I yelled louder.

  The pounding stopped for a moment and then started up again. The volume of the hollering increased. I could barely make out one of the words being screamed: