Bronze Pen (9781439156650) (6 page)

B
UT WHAT NOVEL SHOULD IT BE? THERE
still was the one about the girl detective, but Audrey had finished the chapter about the evil cat in the sinister alley, and after quite a bit of thought no other exciting possibilities had come to mind. And the earlier story about the magical transforming lily had bogged down where the main character, a stuck-up jerk, had managed to get himself turned into a wild boar.

However, she had been thinking about a slightly interesting idea she'd gotten from Mr. Baxter's list of extra-credit projects for English class. A list that had included such uninspiring suggestions as interviewing an important Greendale citizen and then writing their biography. An interview with Captain Banner, for instance? No thanks.

But there was one extra-credit project that had caught Audrey's attention. And that was writing and illustrating a picture book for beginning readers.

While she had never thought of herself as a really gifted artist, she was able to draw some things pretty well, and as for the story itself…Well, writing a picture-book story should be no problem for an experienced novelist, even one who was not exactly well known. At least, not yet.

So it was a little after eight o'clock on a moonlit night in May that Audrey sat down at her desk, opened her novel notebook, and got ready to write a very short story. But after half an hour or so she was still staring at the blank paper. It was beginning to seem that most of the good ideas that might appeal to little kids had already been done. But finally, after a lot of wasted time and paper, she began to get an interesting idea.

It was an idea that came out of her own life, when she was about as old as the readers of the book would be. She could write a story about a baby dragon who lived under the main character's bed. A character who would be a little girl who might be called…Let's see. Perhaps Debby? Then a nice alliterative title for the book could be
Debby's Dragon.

So she wrote
Debby's Dragon
at the top of one page of her secret notebook, and then, with her pencil poised, she stared at the two words and waited for a good beginning sentence to come to mind. But for quite a long time nothing did. After a while she decided the problem had something to do with the title. Somehow the look of the thin lead-gray letters scribbled across the top line of a sheet
of notebook paper wasn't all that inspiring, particularly when you compared it to the way her handwriting looked when she was using…Suddenly she put down the pencil, opened her top drawer, and got out the bronze pen and several sheets of white construction paper. She folded the paper so each sheet made four pages of a very small book, and using the bronze pen, she wrote across the top of the first page, in careful block printing:

And right away the ideas began to flow as smoothly and easily as the lines made by the bronze pen. On the first page she wrote:

“Nostrils” would sound more elegant, but since “nostrils” probably wouldn't be in a first grader's reading vocabulary, “noses” would have to do. The story went on:

Actually, the dragons in Audrey's collection, which she still kept on the top shelf of her bookcase, weren't the kind of things you'd call “toys.” More like figurines. Dragon figurines. But once again a simpler word would be better for a beginning reader. The next page read:

Since there couldn't be much writing on each page, in order to leave room for a picture, the written part of the book had to be very brief. And drawing the pictures should be quick and easy too. At one time Audrey had spent a lot of time drawing dragons. She remembered using crayons and colored pencils to sketch bulging eyes, long scaly bodies, and billowing clouds of smoke and flame. The pictures would be fun. But the writing began to get a little more complicated when she arrived at the next part of the story.

The problem was that Audrey wanted to describe the dragon as she used to imagine him when she was little,
but in words that an ordinary first grader could read and understand. That might not be so easy.

You might be able to say, for instance, that the dragon was mostly green, except for his purple face and feet, and most first graders would probably understand how a baby dragon who tried to breathe fire usually only managed a warm hiccup and a pale puff of smoke. But it wouldn't be so easy to explain that he only pretended to be dangerous and sinister. Although he was good at lying in wait and lunging out fiercely, you only had to shout or stamp your foot and he whimpered and crawled back under the bed.

Audrey thought of several different versions, but none of them were exactly right. It was hard to describe her imaginary dragon without using words like “anxious” and “insecure”—words that she herself wouldn't have been able to read when she was five years old. But in those days she hadn't needed words to understand her dragon, and when she'd told her father about him, he seemed to understand too. To understand that while having a live-in dragon might be a little bit weird, it really wasn't all that dangerous.

Translating a not-very-typical dragon into first-grade English turned out to be not that easy, but Audrey finally thought she'd gotten the idea across pretty well. She was running out of pages when she finally came up with a fairly good ending. The last page of the book read:

Audrey wasn't entirely satisfied with the ending, but she would wait until later to decide whether it needed to be rewritten. And then would come the drawing of the illustrations. Putting the unfinished book in her school binder, she got ready for bed.

I
T WAS VERY LATE, PERHAPS ONE OR TWO
o'clock in the morning, when, very suddenly, Audrey was awake. Wide awake and wondering what she had just heard—and felt. She was just beginning to relax, thinking that she probably had only been having a very vivid dream, when it happened again. This time her bed definitely went up and then down, as if it were being moved by a slight earthquake. Or else being shaken by somebody—or something. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she looked carefully from side to side.

The full moon sifting in through the window curtains produced enough light so that she was able to see that no one was standing by her bed, and propping herself up on her elbows, she was able to determine that there was no one anywhere else in the room. She was breathing a sigh of relief and starting to relax when the thumping came again—and then once more. Wide awake now,
Audrey began to realize exactly where it was coming from. Something was under the bed and bumping against the mattress. Something that must be rather large and strong. Much larger, at least, than a mouse or even a rat. No little rodent could shake the bed like that.
Beowulf?
she wondered hopefully. But, no. Beowulf could never squeeze his one hundred and fifty pounds under such a low bed.

Another thump and, at the same time, a scuffling, scratching noise. A noise that seemed to be moving toward the left side of the bed. Scooting to the right as far as she could, Audrey sat bolt upright, staring in the direction of the sound and seeing nothing but the edge of the bed and, beyond that, only moonlit curtains. And then…And then, slowly stretching up into sight, two long, slightly curved plumes came into view, distinctly silhouetted against the moonlit windows. Feathery plumes that looked like the feelers of a moth or a butterfly, only much larger and longer. The limber feelers bent and turned and then raised up higher as something else came into view. Just below the feelers two other objects appeared. The wings of a very large bat? No. More like dark, spiky ears. The ears twitched back and forth and moved higher, and then, just below them, Audrey was able to make out a rounded dome, down the middle of which ran a row of sharp-looking spines. The dome turned, raised up higher, and she was staring into two round, glowing holes at the end of a long snout and, just above them, two bulging golden eyes.

She gasped. Pulling the covers up almost to her own eyes, she cowered back against the head of the bed and watched as the dragon's head—it was now obvious that's what it had to be—raised up higher, and higher still, on a long, limber neck. A very long neck that kept stretching up higher and higher until two skinny legs appeared. Legs that ended in large claws that curled down to sharply pointed talons.

Audrey gasped again, and the dragon suddenly noticed her. It jerked back, and the glowing holes at the end of its long, thin muzzle released, not a rush of flame so much as a brief fiery flicker, followed by a small puff of white smoke.

In spite of the fact that she kept trying to tell herself that it was only a dream, Audrey was frightened.
A dream
she told herself firmly.
I must be dreaming about my old pretend dragon.
But there was a part of her mind that wasn't accepting that explanation. A part that kept bringing up the fact that this creature was a lot more explicitly dragonlike than anything her five-year-old mind had ever been able to produce. Her preschool imagination had been pretty creative, but it had never conjured up such details as the glaring golden eyes and spiky ears that Audrey was now able to see so clearly, or the way the claws curled down to end in such long, sharp spikes. A dragon who probably wouldn't be so easily discouraged as the one created by a five-year-old's imagination. But then again, perhaps it would be worth a try.

Suddenly dropping the sheet she'd been clutching, Audrey leaned forward, clapped her hands sharply, and said, “Shoo!”

It worked. Jerking its head up and back, the dragon made a startled-sounding “Oooff,” and ducked down to disappear from sight. And a moment later Audrey felt, once again, the scratching and thumping that had awakened her. The thumps continued for several seconds, became less noticeable, and stopped. Stopped altogether—for a minute, and then for several more.

Do dragons sleep? Perhaps not, but then again…Audrey went on straining her ears to listen. Nothing. No sound at all, but no sleep for Audrey, either. Lying wide awake, she listened and waited, wondering what had really happened and what she ought to do about it.

She thought briefly of getting out of the bed and looking under it.
Very
briefly. The dragon had been too real, too distinctly seen. But at last she did do something. Clutching a blanket, she stood up, breathlessly gathered her courage, and jumped. Jumped toward the door, snatched it open, and kept going. Out the door and down the hall to wind up on the couch in the living room next to where Beowulf was sprawled out on his baby crib mattress. He woke up only long enough to watch Audrey arrange the couch's pillows and her one skimpy blanket into a more or less comfortable bed, and went back to sleep without commenting beyond a sleepy grunt.

By the time she woke up the next morning, feeling a bit cramped and chilly, Audrey could look back at what had happened in a more realistic way. It obviously had been a dream. An extremely realistic and vivid dream that perhaps had been brought about by the fact that, in writing
Debby's Dragon,
she had spent so much time and effort trying to remember the imaginary dragon of her childhood. And perhaps succeeding in remembering it in such great detail only because, as a little kid, she really had possessed a hyperactive imagination.

Back then she had made up all sorts of particulars about the baby dragon, and all sorts of other things, too, including many extra facts about the Mayberry twins' pirates. Besides what James had told her, Audrey had added such details as hooked noses, evil squinty eyes, and black jagged teeth. Enough scary details so that, back then in the days of the pirate game, she often had half-asleep dreams that were pretty nightmarish. So it was no wonder that her dream about a dragon could be full of more convincing details than the average person might experience. It was a somewhat comforting thought.

Comforting enough, at least, to make it possible for her to scoot back into and out of her room that morning to get her clothes and the books she would need for school. After dressing quickly in the bathroom, she arrived in the kitchen in time to set the table for breakfast.

By the time school was over that day, and an afternoon
spent, as usual, with her father, Audrey was no longer worrying about the dragon under her bed. Not much, anyway. But enough so that when dinner was over, she told her parents that she had finished her homework, which was true, and since she was only planning to read, she might just as well do it right there, with them, in the living room.

When her parents looked a little surprised, she explained by blaming it on the full moon. “Yeah,” she said, grinning, “I guess I just don't like being alone when the moon is full.”

As usual, her father made it into a joke. “I see,” he said. “In case you start turning into a werewolf? Thanks for the warning.” He rolled his eyes from side to side as if frantically looking for something. “Where did I put that gun with the silver bullets?”

So that took care of the evening, and when it was bedtime, Audrey waited until she was sure her parents were in bed before she tiptoed into her room, grabbed a blanket—a warmer one this time—and headed for the living room couch.