Andy J Campbell THE DRAGON CALLER
On the night Chris summoned the dragon, a violet mist draped the fields like the tassels of a torn scarf, shrouding the gang from an audience of amber lights that lingered like glowing glass eyes behind the dark trees. The wind massaged their clothes with the delicacy of moist fingertips, curious but never probing, and formed icy phantoms which whistled around bark and stone as the young adventurers trampled through an ocean of fading leaves and weeping ground.
As they neared the remains of the stable, their hoods draped against the weather, they clung onto each other's glistening coats like ducks, beak-to-tail. The coppery door of the ageing building rattled; diamonds of dust fell from the roof as Chris elbowed his way inside, breathing in huge white gasps and dripping as though he'd climbed out of a river. The others scrambled in behind him, coughing, pushing and shaking themselves like wet dogs, until all four were inside and the door was kicked shut. "Oi, Chris, give us some light," Neil hissed. "Come on, man, it's pitch black in here."
"Who's got the matches?" Kelly's grainy voice drifted eerily from a bulky silhouette near the door. "Debs, have you?"
"Yes. Chris, here... Take them."
"Hang on."
Shoes crunched over gravel and smashed-glass; twigs snapped like bones breaking. "Here."
"Where? Hang on, hold them still. Ouch, shit."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, just a nettle."
Chris struck a match and held it up in front of his face. His eyes looked like black beads and his skin, coated in raindrops, appeared to be melting. He coughed and nearly blew out the flame. "You're pissed through," said Neil, shuffling backwards until he hit the wall. His coat brushed the brickwork and made a noise that reminded Debbie of her mum sweeping leaves out of the drive. "You're gonna be off sick tomorrow. All of us are, probably. This is stupid. "I say we go home." "What?" Kelly exhaled.
"For God's sake, Neil," Debbie chuckled, flicking water out of her hair. "You're always moaning, aren't you."
The two girls whispered and tittered to each other as Chris and Neil exchanged powerful stares. Neil wiped his lips on the back of his hand. "What? What're you looking at?" Ignorance was Chris's favourite and most effective weapon; "Every-body ready?" he said, and lit another match. He'd been secretly shuffling together a miniature bonfire of twigs and dead leaves and now he lowered the match towards it, using one hand as a shield. "You'll choke us in here," cautioned Neil. "Shurrup, will you?" Debbie hissed, now tying her hair back in a neat tail. "If you complain once more, I'll smack you." Kelly trickled laughter. Neil sighed, seconds before a crown of flames whooshed up in front of the crouched Chris, whose mouth creased with delight. He blew the match out, tossed it away and held his palms against the heat. "Alright!"
"Nice one, Chris."
The girls shuffled forwards and knelt down in front of the fire, cheerful and appreciative. Neil didn't budge; he thought Chris was being an ill-mannered show-off. "So how many dragons are you going to summon?" he said, overdoing the infantile sarcasm. The girls stopped chatting and turned and looked at him, plainly irritated. "Wish you'd hurry up about it," Neil added hesitantly, feeling uncomfortable under the scrutiny of a female audience. "I'm getting bored standing here." "Siddown, then," Chris shrugged, feeding a branch into the fire.
A whipcrack of thunder made the ground vibrate; tiny crystals of dust fell like magic from the roof. Kelly pointed at the patch of dry grass that lay between Debbie and Chris. Neil reluctantly strode away from the wall. He crouched beside the dancing flames and sighed again, producing a big orange cloud of air. "Happy now?"
He was answered by a deep rumble from the heavens, and then a slow crackling, which diverted the whole gang's attention towards the roof. Rain began to hammer against the door, like furious knocking. "You can imagine it, can't you?" Kelly whispered suddenly. She was watching the ocean of smoke that was gathering on the ceiling through eyes that glimmered like uncut rubies. "A dragon, soaring over the stable." She tilted her head towards the door. "Landing in the field and lashing it's tail." She looked at Debbie. Over to Neil. And then directly into the eyes of Chris, who nodded slowly, as though he'd shared and understood Kelly's vision.
"So where is it then?" Debbie said, making her hands disappear up her sleeves. Chris produced the Dragon Caller from his inside pocket and held it above his head like a footballer exhibiting his team's greatest trophy. Neil groaned with impatience. "God, we're not playing the Game now, are we?"
"We must all link hands, close our eyes and imagine," said Chris. "Then the dragon will come."
"Out of the storm?" Kelly sat up, excitedly. Debbie tried to make her relax again by whispering "only in the Game, Kelly, only in the Game", but Kelly wasn't having any of it. "Piss off, Debs, alright?" she barked. "I'm talking to Chris... You mean we can call a dragon with that? A real one?"
"You bet your life," Chris assured her, gently rocking himself back and forth. He was sitting cross-legged with his hands resting on his knees, as though about to meditate, and his face was a stained glass window of amber and black shards. "Oh shut your mouth," Neil stood up, quickly, nearly losing his balance. "It's just some crap piece of metal, Kelly." "No it isn't," Kelly protested firmly, almost angrily. She then seemed to lose her confidence and turned to Chris for support. "It's not is it Chris? Tell him."
They'd found the Dragon Caller amist other junk piled on a scrapheap by the lake several hours before the storm. It was a rusty, horseshoe- shaped chunk of iron that in reality none of the gang could identify. To be precise Chris had found it, but then it was his Game, and he knew exactly what was going to happen. The others had simply nodded in fake amazement and gone along with him, like they always did. Still, Neil could not deny Chris's unrivalled imaginative powers. Chris could make even the most material of minds believe it was being pursued by cannibalistic wolf-men, or that the lake was full of frozen corpses, or that he had a real baby stegasaurus hiding away in his locker. Chris was a magician, and his illusions worked, so much so that his friends had often found themselves still living in his fantasies long after they'd been called in for their suppers.
A flash of lightening cast a halo around the door. Neil staggered away from it. "Look at him, he's shitting himself!" Debbie laughed. "It made me jump, that's all."
"Liar." "You're a wimp, aren't you Neil," said Kelly, examining her nails.
She paused to glance up at him. "Aren't you?"
"No."
"Yes you are."
"I'm not."
"Yes you bloody are."
Debbie shuffled up beside Chris and put an arm around him. Kelly made a girlish squeal and promptly did the same, cuddling up to Chris from the other side.
Framed by female flesh, Chris lifted his head and stared coldly at Neil, his eyes now almost entirely black, his lips a sluggish purple. Outside the sky itself sounded to be breaking into pieces like a sheet of ice; the door flung open and closed, squashing the fire flat for a moment, as though it had been trodden on by an invisible foot. Neil whipped his hood up. "I'm going home." "You'll never make it," said Chris. A cold pain began to descend Neil's spine. "I'm not playing out with any of you lot ever again!" he declared, very loudly. The girls "oooh"ed and cackled in chorus. Chris hushed them. "Leave us, Neil, "he said, pointing at the hooded boy. "and that will be true."
Neil battled with the door, and won, and staggered out into eyes of the swirling storm. The rain was coming down ferociously in thick grey blankets, and as he trundled away from the stable, now on the verge of tears, it actually began to hurt him, like small stones. With his eyes barely open, he risked a quick glance straight ahead, and saw that the field he was crossing had become one enormous sea of silvery mud. More frightening still, it was reflecting the blowing ash that was the clouds, and dragging plastic bags and torn tree branches down towards the stable, like luggage from a wrecked ship.
A short time later, his shoes consumed by deep mud, Neil turned and squinted back at the building. It was beginning to disappear behind the arms of the fog but he could just make out that the door was closed - nobody was coming. Not even Debbie. Four flashes came in one group, as though God were talking pictures, and Neil, crying now, the wind and rain ploughing into his back, screamed that he hated the whole world. He took shelter behind a wall, in a place where the stones were piled dangerously high, and allowed the pain of being rejected to take its miserable toll. He wanted to collapse onto the ground and curl up into a tight little bauble and forget about being alive but he couldn't, for the storm had flooded the field right up to the very edges. Instead, he plunged his hands into his pockets, leaned back against the bricks and watched the weather cruelly punish the land. Dark shapes began to appear in the sky. Huge, bluish-black blades, cutting gracefully through the smoky horizon. Neil, although intrigued, assumed that they belonged quite naturally to the storm; mutant clouds, perhaps or secret lightening generators that hovered, unknown, above all the drenching, deafening chaos... `Or an aeroplane,' he thought, as the shapes began to transmogrify and billow. `An aeroplane of unimaginable dimensions... Or a hot air balloon... An alien ship...'
Neil pulled back his hood, letting the cold chew on his ears, and watched the awesome object pass gracefully over the stable, fragments of its mystifying form reflecting in the sea of the field like a whale swimming close to the surface. With its enclosing presence came the sound of beating wings - a flock of a thousand birds escaping a premature winter - and a warm wind that carried a faint smell of burning.
When the presence passed through the air high above him, Neil froze, and looked not into the sky but into the shimmering swamp that rippled beneath his drowning shins. There, beyond the dead leaves and vibrating grass, he saw the mud-soaked stomach of a giant lizard, scales gleaming where the sun could penetrate, and rolling through the froth of the clouds.
Emergency Escape