Читать книгу The Book of Dragons - Группа авторов - Страница 23

ZOE

[The camera is on her as she walks, keeping pace. From time to time we see tourists gathered around some empty lot, necks craning, phones ready. Uniformed officers stand behind police tape to keep the crowd at a distance.]

The tourists want to see it happen again, up close. Now that we have a bona fide attraction in town, the selectmen are terrified. They want the President to send in the minutemen. (Shakes head.)

No, I still don’t know why the dragons have come to Mannaport.

But, I think I’ve made a new friend, or maybe two.

It started before Independence Day. The town manager and the selectmen, still trying to figure out a way to make some profit from our “useless” dragon infestation, had settled on tourism. They sent a photographer around to take pictures and hired a consulting company to brand the town as the “Dragon Garden on the Bay.” Tour buses came to town twice a day from Boston and Portland, and there was talk of partnering with the cruise ship companies too.

I didn’t like the idea. I was afraid that the tourists would scare the dragons. Most had settled around abandoned lots and foreclosed houses, living off insects and vegetation. Some of them had even learned to leave their dung in one place, where the sanitation company could cart it off in weekly rounds. I thought the dragons and the people of the town were figuring out how to live together in peace. I didn’t want that process interrupted.

But there was an even bigger threat than tourists.

An anti-dragon group had been organizing: parents worried about dragons rotting their children’s minds, bored people looking for something to do, property owners fed up with the mess. They called themselves the Knights of Mannaport and shared ideas online about how to drive the dragons out.

I lurked in their forum under a made-up name. When they decided to use the Fourth of July celebration for “Operation St. George,” I made plans of my own.

Near sunset, while many families were heading to Skerry Field for the fireworks display, the Knights got into pickup trucks and minivans. From all around town, they drove toward the abandoned lot on Hancock, home to one of the largest flocks of little dragons.

I got there just before sundown. The yard was covered in thick, lush grass as tall as my chest, while the house, half of its roof gone and gaping holes in three walls, sat quietly in solitary decay. Dozens of little dragons were already roosting in the ruin or the yard. While a few flapped their wings and opened their eyes, cooing at my approach, most remained asleep.

I ducked down among the grass, out of sight. The soil gave off an acrid odor, not unlike feral cat colonies. As the dusk faded, more bird-sized dragons returned from foraging. They found places to perch, tucked their heads under a wing or a clump of grass, and went to sleep.

I could hear the snores of those nearest me, a faint, even wheezing. A cool breeze whisked away the sweat on my forehead and brought some relief from the stifling summer air. I shivered involuntarily, suddenly remembering this was the house where a man had been shot a couple years ago over an opioid deal gone wrong. The sirens and the flashing blue lights rushing down the street had woken me up.

Pain gripped my heart like a fist. I couldn’t breathe. I fought hard to keep the darkness that threatened to awaken in my mind, to burst through the locks on the mental vault I had sealed it in, the piles of psychic rubble I had piled on.

I couldn’t think about her couldn’t just couldn’t couldn’t.

Bright beams pierced the darkening evening, sweeping through the air above me like luminous lances. The humming of electric engines subsided; the lights went out. Slamming doors and footsteps. Urgent whispers. The Knights had arrived.

I heard the sounds of heavy objects being unloaded. The vehicles were filled with extra power cells, spools of wire, and home-defense electric prods. Their plan was to cover the lot with a net of charged wires and then wake the sleeping dragons with a few well-placed firecrackers.

The more of those nasty creatures electrocuted, the better, someone had posted in their forum.

Poetic justice to use dragon-generated electricity to kill dragons!

My cousin is a lawyer. He thinks that if we do it this way, we can argue to the judge that the dragons flew into the wires on their own, so it wouldn’t count as assault.

I got up from among the thick grass.

“You can’t do this,” I said. I was so scared and riled up that my body shook as much as my voice.

The startled Knights, lit only by the glow of a distant streetlight, stopped. After some confusion, a man stepped out from the crowd. I recognized him from his picture on the forum: Alexander.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Stopping a mistake,” I said.

“The dragons don’t belong here,” he said. He stepped closer so that I could see the grief and rage on his face. “They hurt people. You don’t know.”

“Not these,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm.

“Yes, these.” I heard the pain in his voice, the helplessness of loss and the inability to explain.

I felt equally helpless. I didn’t know how to describe seeing the dragons forage over a park in late afternoon. I didn’t know how to explain why I felt like smiling and crying when I heard the dragons chirp and cheep at night.

So I picked up the whistle hanging around my neck and blew into it, as hard as I could. It was so loud I thought I was never going to stop hearing it, like the sirens in my nightmares.

Around me, the yard and ruined house disintegrated into a maelstrom. The little dragons, awakened by my shrill whistling, bolted into the air. Wings darkened the stars; claws trampled the grass. A cacophonous chorus joined my whistle, and the pungent smell of wild urine saturated the air.

Moments later, the agitation subsided, almost as quickly as it had begun. The dragons were gone. I took the whistle out of my mouth, sucking in a deep breath. Alexander stood rooted to the spot, looking stunned.

A rustling at my feet. We both looked down.

A creature was struggling among the grass. I knelt down: it was about the size of a puppy, though slenderer and a little longer. A calf-shaped head; a pair of tiny, curved horns; whiskers like those on a Maine lobster; a collar of bright, colorful feathers; silver scales over the back; leathery belly; four clawed, birdlike feet; a long, serpentine tail—it was a mutt, descended from the many dragon species that had followed the people here and adapted to life on this continent.

The batlike wings, however, were torn. It couldn’t take off. Gently, I picked it up and cradled it in my arms like a kitten. It trembled against my skin, a little whirling dynamo.

It opened its eyes hesitantly. They were a bright, shining blue. I shuddered, almost dropping the dragon. That was the last color I wanted to see.

“Drop it!” Alexander shouted. I looked up and saw that he was holding an electric prod, the kind that would kill a home invader in one wallop.

I turned to shield the dragon from him with my back. “Shhhh. It’s okay. I won’t abandon you.”

The little dragon keened like an injured rabbit, a sharp, almost unbearably painful scream. It trembled even harder against my arms. I tried to stroke its back the way I’d pet a cat, the way my mother used to stroke my hair when I was little to get me to sleep. The scales felt warm and soft to the touch, not at all what I expected.

“Listen to that!” said Alexander. He sounded horrified as he raised the prod. “It’s going to breathe fire! You’ve got to drop it now or you’ll die!”

“No! It’s screaming only because you are frightening it.” No one had ever seen the little dragons in our town breathe fire—I was sure they couldn’t. I tried to cover the dragon’s eyes with one hand, hoping to keep it from seeing the approaching Alexander, hoping I wouldn’t lose my courage from that piercing, bright blue.

He stumbled another few steps, looming over me. “You killed Joey! You killed Joey!”

I looked up into his eyes. They were wild, unreasoning, unseeing. Was that how I looked when I woke up from my nightmares and Grandmother had to hold me down?

“No! It didn’t do anything!” I shouted with all my strength. “You got the wrong dragon! The wrong—”

Alexander raised his prod. I had no doubt he was ready to plunge it into me if that was what it took to slay the dragon in his mind.

The dragon lurched in my arms. I strained to hold it down. But the diminutive dragon was too strong for me. With a quick flick of its head, it threw off my covering hand. I felt a sudden wave of heat as I instinctively leaned back. Time seemed to slow down. My vision grew hazy, indistinct.

I saw the dragon’s jaws open. I saw the prod’s tip suspended, barely inches away. I saw the dragon lock eyes with Alexander. Could I interpret what I saw in those bright blue, inhuman orbs?

Then it looked away, as though the threat of imminent death was of no more consequence than the trail of a distant shooting star. The little dragon, moving as ponderously as though it were the Three Gorges, the largest dragon ever verified, gazed up at the stars, and a blinding plume of light and fire shot up and out of the wide-open maw.

It was like watching a flowing river of liquid gold and silver, a kaleidoscope of migrating butterflies, a galaxy of dew-dappled gossamer and pearl-studded tulle unfurling across the heavens. At the apex of the superheated plasmic stream, the cooling flames ramified, arced, took on new colors: September indigo, blood-of-martyrs red, marigold yellow, dragon-whisper blue …

My mouth was agape, an unconscious imitation of the dragon’s jaw. It was the greatest fireworks display I had ever seen.

I was again in the aisles of the art supply store, a girl of six. My mother and I were racing around, laughing, throwing tubes of paint and watercolors into the shopping cart. We didn’t like the names the manufacturer gave to the colors, so we came up with our own. We were going to spend all day doing nothing but painting and being together. We were going to paint the dragon that Grandmother had seen.

“You’ll always be with me, right, Mama?”

“Of course. You’ll never be rid of me, baby drake.”

Tears drowned my eyes; everything was a blur. I had not dared to recall this memory in years.

Next to me, Alexander’s upturned face was bathed in the shifting liquid light of the magnificent display overhead. The prod lay on the ground. “I never imagined …” I heard him mutter. “So this was what you saw …”

The dragon keened again and let forth a new eruption of sparkling, fiery wonder.

Heat passed over my face—or rather, into my face. I don’t know how to describe it, really, except it felt like a hand stroking my mind, soothing away something painful, something obstructing, like a rock just beneath the surface of the water. For a moment, something dark and hard and full of jagged edges, an underwater shoal, threatened to thrust through the placid surface, but then, as the invisible hand caressed my mind again, the shoal dissipated and dissolved, carried away by the stream of light and heat.

[We are at the abandoned lot. Zoe holds up a hand to indicate that the camera crew shouldn’t disturb the roosting dragons camouflaged in the grass. She pulls out her phone to show us a picture.]

I’ve been trying to paint what I saw. Not very successfully.

Follow my finger. Just by that broken slat in the fence, do you see it? Yes, that green hump in the grass. That’s Yegong. I don’t think it’s going to come out, though, not with so many people around.

I named it after a man in an old fairy tale my mother told me. It’s a bit of a joke, see, because in the story, the man thought he liked dragons and painted dragons all the time, but then, when a real dragon showed up one day, he was terrified. Do you see—never mind.

It’s recovering well. A dragon doctor from Wellesley—well, that’s what I call her; her real title is Endowment Maintenance Specialist or something like that—told me that the tears in Yegong’s wings will heal on their own in another week. I bring it raspberries; Yegong really likes them.

The Knights still post in their forum, complaining about the dragons. But I haven’t seen Alexander post there.