“Who is it?” It was Mr. O’Conner.
Bradley Wallace nearly cried out with relief. “It’s Bradley Wallace Murphy,” he croaked, his voice so faint he feared the old man wouldn’t hear him.
But the door instantly swung open, and Bradley Wallace toppled into Mr. O’Conner’s outstretched arms.
“Bradley Wallace!” the old man exclaimed in surprise. “What are you . . .? He stopped as the boy’s blood stained his baggy tunic. “What happened to you?” he demanded anxiously, his voice filled with anger.
But Bradley Wallace didn’t have time for explanations. They had to get to Whilly. “Been shot,” he mumbled, waving a hand weakly to forestall any more questions. “Explain later. Got to help my friend. Worse than me.” His head spun again, and he hoped he was making some kind of sense.
The old man was surprisingly strong, and he supported the tall boy with considerable ease. Bradley Wallace noticed the blood on Mr. O’Conner’s strange white tunic, and felt the need to apologize. But his strength was flagging too fast. Whilly!
Mr. O’Conner gently guided the boy to a straight back oaken chair near the door and helped him to sit. He hurried out of sight down the dark hallway and Bradley Wallace panicked, fearing the old man wouldn’t come back.
But he returned moments later slipping into a heavy coat and dangling his truck keys from one gnarled fist.
He was calm, but Bradley Wallace could sense the fear within. Mr. O’Conner didn’t want him to die, he could tell, and it was nice to
know someone cared. “I’m getting you to a doctor. Then I’ll help you’re friend.”
“No!” the boy bellowed, pain stabbing through his chest again. “My friend first. He’s worse.”
“He is? All right, let’s go,” the old man agreed at once, and he slipped one of the boy’s limp arms over his shoulders and helped him stand. Together they made their way past the staircase and down the long dark hall, through the pitch-black kitchen, and out into the garage. To Bradley Wallace’s frantic mind, even that walk seemed to take forever. He had to get back to Whilly! Mr. O’Conner helped him up into Shannon’s passenger side and quickly opened the garage door. Climbing behind the wheel, the old man started the engine and the ancient truck sputtered its way out to the road and started down the hill.
Bradley Wallace slipped in and out of semi-consciousness as he directed Mr. O’Conner to the haunted water tower. At least, he hoped he was directing the old man. He really couldn’t be certain exactly what he was doing. However it happened, Shannon did stop on the hill before the well-worn path through the knee-high grass to the tower.
Mr. O’Conner at first refused to allow the boy to walk any more, insisting he would go alone. But Bradley Wallace was adamant for someone so weak, and the old man reluctantly acquiesced. Fortunately, at least from what Bradley Wallace could remember of the drive here, Mr. O’Conner hadn’t asked him any questions about what happened. The boy was too delirious to make much sense, anyway. And Mr. O’Conner would see soon enough.
Half carrying the near-lifeless Bradley Wallace, Mr. O’Conner struggled through the overgrowth carefully to avoid stumbling in the pitch-blackness. The water tower loomed just ahead, appearing strangely eldritch under the pale light of the sickly crescent moon dangling overhead. Mr. O’Conner stopped at the foot of the steps, breathing heavily.
“You wait here,” the old man panted. “I’ll go up and check on him.”
“No!” the boy gasped feebly, shaking his head. “I want to see him. Please, Mr. O’Conner.”
“You have more strength of will than even I suspected,” the old man rasped, mustering his energy for the arduous climb ahead of him. “And more stubbornness, too.” He urged Bradley Wallace onto the first step, and they began their ascent.
Bradley Wallace’s mind was in a desperate state of panic. He hadn’t been able to contact Whilly all the way over here, and he still received no thought transmissions from the dragon. Even asleep, there had always been something the boy could latch onto. Now there was nothing. Just emptiness. And that terrified him.
The toilsome journey up the rickety steps seemed to take forever, and Bradley Wallace nearly screamed in frustration. When they finally reached the top, Mr. O’Conner was breathing so heavily the boy’s mind conjured delirium-induced images of the old man having a heart attack and all three of them dying in this desolate spot, with no one but the ghost of Roger Wilkins for company. Propping Bradley Wallace up against him and telling the boy to hold on, Mr. O’Conner reached around to his back pocket for the flashlight he’d thought to bring from the truck. Bradley Wallace used what little strength he had left in his arms to grip the old man’s neck and strained to see into the black interior of the tank. Mr. O’Conner flicked on the flashlight and directed the beam down into the blackness, illuminating the inside. Bradley Wallace gasped.
The tank was empty.
“Whilly?” he managed to mutter before collapsing unconscious into Mr. O’Conner’s arms.
PART THREE
JOHN
CHAPTER 16
“I’m NOT Crazy . . . Am I?”
Bradley Wallace fought against delirium for three days, calling out repeatedly for Whilly and begging everyone who spoke to him not to shoot his friend. At least one of his parents remained in the Marin General waiting room every moment, usually his mother, and Mr. O’Conner hovered anxiously about, also, never letting the boy’s room out of his sight for an instant. His features were drawn with the harsh lines of guilt, and he constantly muttered imprecations to himself about how he’d failed the boy. Neither Marge nor Jack, caught up in their own private fears and doubts, paid the old man much heed.
A team of surgeons, led by Dan Cooke, had performed emergency surgery to repair the shattered arteries and damaged muscle tissue in Bradley Wallace’s chest and worked desperately to replace the massive amount of blood the boy had lost. The jagged path made by the bullet was sewn back together and the arterial damage corrected, but the wound had become infected during the boy’s frantic attempts to help Whilly, and the infection sent a life-threatening fever raging through his debilitated body. Everything possible was being done, Cooke repeatedly told Marge and Jack, and all they could do now was wait and hope.
Mr. O’Conner told the boy’s parents what little he could when they arrived at the hospital emergency room that night, but did not answer their slew of questions: how could Bradley Wallace have gotten shot? And why did he go to the old man instead of his parents? And who was the friend their son had spoken of?
The short, stocky plainclothes police lieutenant who appeared on the scene to investigate the shooting had no immediate answer to the latter two queries, but candidly suggested the reason behind the shooting could have been drugs.
Both Jack and Marge immediately protested such a preposterous notion, and the rather gruff lieutenant commented that all parents react that
way. The only way to find out what happened, the stocky man suggested bluntly, was to ask the boy when he regained consciousness, if he ever did.
That sent Marge off in a flood of tears, and an angry Jack was forced to attempt comfort, a task for which he had little ability.
Marge blamed herself for Bradley Wallace’s current predicament. “I should’ve been more alert,” she blubbered to Dr. Cooke, preferring the white-haired surgeon’s comfort to that of her husband. “He’d been acting strange for months, and I should’ve made him tell me what was wrong.”
Cooke smiled ruefully. “That’s one thing no parent can do, Marge, make a child trust you. And if you try to force them, they fight back that much harder.”
His words, however true they may have been, did little to ease her anguished soul, which repeatedly told her she’d failed as a mother, even though she didn’t see any viable way she could have prevented this occurrence. She roamed the stark white halls of Marin General like a tortured zombie, sleeping barely a few hours over those three terrible days.
Jack did not so much feel
that he’d failed as a parent but rather that fate had dealt him a cruel hand in a son with whom he couldn’t communicate. If Bradley Wallace had been more like him, for instance, Jack felt certain they would have a proper father-son rapport. They would have much more in common, Jack reasoned - common interests and feelings and goals that they could easily talk about.
But his son was different, not like those of his golfing buddies, and Jack felt left out of those harmless bragging sessions during which each man enumerated his boy’s accomplishments, usually sports-related.
But Bradley Wallace had never done anything worth bragging about, and Jack, asked repeatedly when “that husky son of his” was going to get into football, answered with extreme embarrassment that Bradley Wallace was just “a late starter.” Jack liked being liked, and resented the fact that his son set him apart from the other men.
Bradley Wallace was different, and Jack had just never been able to become part of that difference and celebrate it, probably because he’d have had to give up too much of himself and reveal more of his soul than
he cared to. Still, he told himself repeatedly during those anxiety-ridden three days, he loved his son as much as he was able, and paced the halls distractedly waiting for news of the boy’s condition.
He realized that he really knew very little about Bradley Wallace, and vowed to get to know his son . . . if the boy survived.
In his fever-inflamed brain, Bradley Wallace saw myriad images flash before his eyes, some mere glimpses, others projected in agonizing slow motion, like the blast of that horrible gun. He felt as though he was watching Ralph Edwards proclaiming, “This is your life, Bradley Wallace Murphy!” in filmed flashbacks. Mauna Kea, the tidal wave, John Wagner, Mr. Baldie, his parents, the Golden Gate Bridge, his Captain Courageous adventures, Josette, the two faceless attackers, the gun, and the blast. That image recurred most frequently. But never did he see Whilly, actually see him. Their adventures together played back in his mind like television reruns, but the dragon was never actually visible. The absence of Whilly from his feverish nightmares terrified Bradley Wallace, and he called out repeatedly for his missing friend, thrashing about in his bed so violently that he had to be sedated several times.
He knew deep down that he was sick, and he fought against the raging fires of infection for three days before finally quenching them. The fever died, and Bradley Wallace weakly opened his eyes, staring uncertainly around the unfamiliar, stark white surroundings.
He blinked a few times to clear his fuzzy vision, and a face suddenly loomed above him. It was a pretty female face and she wore some kind of funny white hat. I must still be dreaming, he decided, because she looked just like the Flying Nun from that goofy TV show. He blinked again, and the face smiled.
“Welcome back,” it said in a silvery, soothing voice. “You had a lot of people worried, including me.”
His throat felt parched. “Water,” he croaked hoarsely, and the Flying Nun instantly placed a straw between his dry lips. He sucked hesitantly, and the cool water cascaded down his stale throat in a heavenly stream. He thought that water never tasted so good. He began sucking faster, wanting nothing more than gallons of that wonderful water pouring
into his shriveled stomach, but the Flying Nun yanked the straw away with a tiny, lilting laugh.
“Not so fast,” she said pleasantly, “You’ll drown.” She laughed again, and Bradley Wallace liked that laugh. He liked her, even though he still could not focus his eyes clearly to see what she looked like. She was wearing white, though. Maybe she really was the Flying Nun. “I’ll tell the doctor you’re awake,” the enchanting voice announced, and the face vanished from his limited range of vision.
After that, Bradley Wallace seemed to be surrounded by a sea of staring, anxious faces. First, his parents burst into the room, and his mother descended on him with a smattering of embarrassing kisses and fawning. He hoped the Flying Nun wasn’t watching.
He remembered seeing his father standing off to one side, smiling down at him and looking strangely relieved. But he was still so weak, and it seemed like such an onslaught. Even Mr. O’Conner was there, joking to the others about having to work by himself until Bradley Wallace recovered. But the boy cared about none of this, or any of them. All he cared about was Whilly.
He knew the dragon had to be far away, or else very weak, because the familiar stirring in his mind was completely gone. It was as though the dragon had ceased to exist, or had never existed at all. Had anyone found Whilly, he demanded of those clustered about his bed, fighting to clear his mind so he could make some sense. “Who is this Willie?” his father asked.
It was then that Bradley Wallace realized he had to tell everything. He’d known it the second those guns blasted and Whilly had fallen to the ground. He had to tell because the dragon’s life depended on it. He insisted firmly, if still a trifle weakly, on being helped to something of a sitting position, and Dr. Cooke (had he been there all the time?) and someone else, a nurse, he thought, carefully eased him up against his pillow.
Cooke told him with some concern that he should rest awhile and could talk about what happened later. But he waved away the doctor’s objections. He felt his strength returning, very rapidly, in fact, as though he’d been plugged into a light socket and was recharging, and was determined to tell the whole story right away, so everyone could get out
and find Whilly.
Just as he opened his mouth to begin, the room door pushed open and a short, stocky man who looked like a rumpled troll entered. When he saw the conscious boy, a satisfied smile cracked his swarthy face and he whipped the Giants baseball cap off his head with a fluid sweep of one large arm. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by to check on the boy,” he announced to the group, eyeing Bradley Wallace carefully. “I see I’m just in time.”
“As a matter of fact, lieutenant, Bradley Wallace was about to tell us what happened to him,” Cooke commented drily. It was obvious he didn’t think much of the trollish man.
Lieutenant? The word echoed through the boy’s convoluted mind. As in police?
“Good,” the lieutenant replied, casting a quick glance over at Marge and Jack. “Maybe now we can get to the bottom of all this, eh?”
When all eyes settled questioningly on him, Bradley Wallace knew the time for secrecy had come to an end. He took a deep breath, and started talking.
He told of the egg, of finding the dragon, of how Whilly had attached himself to him symbiotically, of the cats, the cows, “Dark Shadows,” flying, Hawaii, the monster in the forest and again on Halloween night, Captain Courageous, and the discovery of his powers at the Golden Gate Bridge. He told everything, the words pouring rapidly out of his mouth like the desperate onrushing waters of a flash flood. All the secrets he’d kept bottled up within him for the past year burst forth like a cork from a particularly stubborn champagne bottle. And his tale so astonished his listeners that not even the swarthy lieutenant interrupted him with questions. He concluded with the night of the shooting, and Whilly’s subsequent disappearance. Fear and self-loathing caused him to omit his animalistic incineration of his attackers. He finally finished, tired, but strangely relieved to finally get it all out into the open. A stunned silence hung over the room like venomous insecticide, and Bradley Wallace looked uncertainly from one disbelieving face to another. Tears streamed down his mother’s face. Why was she crying? He was all right.
Finally, the stocky lieutenant cleared his throat awkwardly and glanced over at the boy’s parents before directing his first question to Bradley Wallace. “You say you went out to the school that night because of a dream?” he asked, as though trying to sort out all the tangible parts of the boy’s story in his investigative mind.
Bradley Wallace nodded. “I thought Josette was in trouble and I wanted to help her. Whilly knew something was wrong, but I didn’t pay attention. And now he’s gone.” He looked down at the rumpled sheets of his bed, ashamed and guilty.
&nbs
p; “The dragon suspected something was wrong, but you wanted to go anyway, right?” The lieutenant repeated carefully, enunciating each word as though trying to teach pronunciation to first graders. Bradley Wallace nodded without looking up. Marge stifled a sob, and Dan Cooke placed a comforting arm around her shoulders. Jack stood impassively to one side. “And did you find this Josette anywhere?” the policeman asked.
“No,” the boy answered irritably, focusing his troubled eyes on the inquisitive, troll-like man. “I already told you, we got shot first. Look, we can go into all the details you want later. Right now Whilly’s hurt, and he needs help. You’ve got to find him!”
His voice took on a strident, hysterical quality, and Dr. Cooke rushed to one side of his bed and gently took hold of the boy to prevent the agitated squirming from reopening the bullet wounds. “Calm down, Bradey,” he said cautiously, “We’re just trying to find out everything that happened. Now lie still.”
Bradley Wallace stopped moving, and the doctor took his big hands away. The boy had to bite back his frustration. How could he make them understand that time was essential? He could detect no mental stirrings from Whilly at all, which meant the dragon must be so weak as to be almost dead. But if that were true, wouldn’t he, Bradley Wallace, also be near death? Like the time in Hawaii? It was all so confusing.
“What happened to the men who shot you?” the police lieutenant asked sharply.
Bradley Wallace flinched, and fought to keep his eyes on the short man’s face. “They’re dead,” he practically whispered. “I killed them.”
Marge gasped aloud and nearly fainted. Jack caught her as she swooned, and shook her a trifle harshly to snap her out of it. Mr. O’Conner watched the boy silently from across the room, so quietly, in fact, that everyone forgot he was even there.
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