The Dragon in the Volcano (3 page)

“Ah!” the professor said at last. “Now, what can I do for you two Dragon Keepers today?”

“Emmy ran off,” they both said at once, pressing close to the screen.

The professor’s bushy white eyebrows rose. “Is … that … so?” he said, sucking away at his pipe.

“And she took all the socks with her,” Daisy added.

“Hmmm,” said the professor, frowning. He pulled his pipe out of his mouth and poked a finger around in the bowl.

“He’s obviously more interested in his pipe than he is in our problem,” Jesse whispered to Daisy.

“Most baffling,” said the professor. “No matter how many flames I put to it, the fire in this perfectly well-packed pipe of mine keeps going out.”

“What about Emmy?” Daisy blurted out.

The professor leaned back and set down his pipe. “Oh, I shouldn’t worry overly much about Emerald. She’s older now. Dragons have their own
rites of passage, and she was bound to have one sooner or later. Perhaps if I were to try another pipe …” The professor got up from his desk chair and wandered out of their view.

The cousins waited a moment, and when he didn’t come back, Jesse jabbed his finger at the keyboard and exited the site. “That was not even a
little
bit helpful.”

Daisy nudged Jesse. “Look up ‘rites of passage,’ ” she said.

Jesse was already on it. He read aloud from the Wikipedia screen, “ ‘A phrase used to denote rituals marking the transitional phase between childhood and full inclusion into a tribe or social group. Initiation ceremonies range from baptism to bar or bat mitzvahs to tribal scarification.’ ”

“What’s scarification?” Daisy wanted to know.

Jesse, who had lived among African tribes, said, “It’s when you scar yourself up to show you’re brave and no longer a kid.”

Daisy shivered. “I hope she isn’t doing anything like that. Maybe her rite of passage is more like a bat mitzvah. You know, with a rented tent and a live band and presents. Do you think she’ll invite Dewey?”

“Um, Daisy?” Jesse said. “I’m pretty sure Emmy’s not Jewish.”

“Oh, right,” Daisy said, tearing at her cuticle with her teeth.

Friday morning, Aunt Maggie and Uncle Joe left for the airport just as Jesse and Daisy were setting out for school.

“We’ll be back on Tuesday evening,” Aunt Maggie said. “I know you’re both sad about Emmy, but cheer up. I’ve never seen a dog more capable of taking care of herself.”

At school, Daisy could not keep her mind on her work. She stared out the window and watched the orange and yellow leaves drift down from the maple trees. They gave her an idea.

When it was time to pass out science work sheets, Daisy volunteered to be paper monitor. When she came to Jesse’s desk, she leaned in and whispered, “Maybe we should ask the dryads?”

“Definitely!” said Jesse, looking relieved as he took the paper from her.

So after school, Jesse and Daisy ran home and into the backyard, crawled through the tunnel in the laurel bushes, and came out in the pasture by the old dairy barn. On the banks of the brook, there grew a majestic old weeping willow tree, its long fronds trailing in the water. Unlike the other trees, which had burst into rich displays of color, the
willow had taken on a sickly yellow cast. Jesse and Daisy stepped across the stones in the brook and ducked beneath the drooping canopy. There he was: his face plainly visible in the gnarled trunk, in the drooping knothole eyes, set just above the jagged line of his mouth.

“Hey, Willow!” Jesse said. “How’s it hanging?”

Visiting the willow was like dropping in on a hypochondriac friend. You stood there by his bed, pretending to be interested in his imaginary aches and pains, but all the while you were counting the seconds. They just had to find out what they needed to know and make a clean getaway.

“Don’t even ask!” Willow wailed with a rattle of his fronds. “I don’t know how I can bear it year after year. Everyone standing around in their autumnal finery and me looking like the wrath of Pan. Go on. Say it. I look like I have a raving case of arboreal jaundice, don’t I?”

“You look just fine to me,” Daisy said, baring her teeth in a false smile. “Listen, Willow, Jesse and I were wondering if you’ve seen Emmy lately.”

Willow’s leaves rustled thoughtfully. “Let me see. Oh, yes, I saw her a few days ago. Looking for someone to play with. Don’t ask why she came to me. No one ever asks me to play. Why should they? It’s not as if I’m any fun even on a bright summer’s
day, much less a cold gray one in autumn.”

“That’s not true,” Jesse said. “We used to play with you when we were little. Remember? You were the castle, we were the knights, and the brook was the moat. We had plenty of fun, didn’t we, Daze?”

“Sure we did,” said Daisy without enthusiasm.

“Did you really?” Willow said, hope boosting the canopy an inch or so. “Oh, that makes me feel so much better! In fact, I may break down and weep for joy.”

“Please don’t,” Daisy said quickly. “Why don’t you just tell us about Emmy?”

“Emmy, of course!” Willow said. “Emmy is the princess of the world and I, of course, am but a humble courtier. I told her I couldn’t play. Color change is hard work … for all of us. After that, we’re not good for much of anything but a long winter’s sleep.”

Jesse prodded the willow. “So, did you have any advice for Emmy?” he asked.

“I told her to run along and play with the hobgoblins. Everyone knows the hobgoblins have time to burn,” said the willow, twitching his fronds.

“That’s
exactly
what Jesse said about Emmy,” Daisy murmured with a thoughtful frown.

“Thanks, Willow!” Jesse said, starting to back away.

“Yeah,” Daisy said, “and have fun on your winter’s nap.”

Willow snorted. “There she goes again with that word.
Fun!
As if being a weeping willow were a romp in the glade!”

Leaving the willow muttering to himself, the cousins swatted their way through the curtain of sallow fronds and got away as fast as they could.

“At least now we’ve got some fresh clues,” Daisy said.

As they made their way down the path into the Deep Woods, all around them they heard the breeze sifting through the branches of the trees. The trees wished them well and confirmed Willow’s words. “Shhheee did, she did, she did pass this waaay!” they whispered.

The cousins came to a clearing in the woods and walked to the middle of it, where there was a deep hole with a wide wooden ramp leading to an underground cavern. Two hobgoblins met Jesse and Daisy at the bottom of the ramp, as if they had been expecting them. One held a torch and the other wore the faded purple bandanna Daisy had given him last summer. They stared at the cousins with eyes that were without pupils or irises, red-rimmed and milky white.

“Hello, Hub. Hey, Hermander,” Jesse said, no
longer intimidated by these fellows. They looked a little scary but he knew they were really very sweet. “We’d like an audience with Her Royal Lowness.”

The hobgoblins’ heads bobbed, and they made a dark, moist grunting and snuffling sound through their smashed snouts, a
very underground
sound that Jesse knew was typical of hobgoblins. Then Hub and Hermander turned and headed across the cavern, which rose above them like a vast and stately cathedral made of dirt and tree roots and rock. On the far side, seated upon a mossy throne decorated with tiny snail shells and black pearls, was Queen Hap of the Hobgoblin Hive of Hobhorn, Her Royal Lowness herself. Clad in the shimmering brown finery that flattered her dark-red hair and greenish skin, she was whittling a stick with a sharp, gem-studded knife.

The cousins did what they knew they had to do. They got down on their hands and knees and touched their foreheads to the earth. As they raised their heads, the queen regarded them with regal serenity through moss-green eyes that never blinked.

“Greetings, Keepers!” she boomed in her deep bullfrog voice.

“Greetings, Your Royal Lowness,” Daisy said. “We have come because we’ve lost our dragon.
Willow told us he sent Emmy down here to play with the hobgoblins. Is she still here, by any chance?”

The queen shook her head. “Your draggy-wagon isn’t underground with us at present,” she said. “But she was here, a day or two ago. She was lonesome and boredsome and wanted to play a game of horsieshoes, but the iron in the horsieshoes hurt her dragon tally-walons. So we took pity on her and made her a safe game to play. We carved the stake ourselves, and some of our loyal subjects wove her ringlets to toss from the bendy-wendy roots of the willow tree. Last we saw her, she was scampering up the ramping, eager to set up her new gamey-wamey and amuse herself with it.”

“Thank you, Your Royal Lowness,” the cousins said happily as they climbed to their feet.

“Be careful and wareful, Keepers,” she said to them, just as they were backing, ever so respectfully, out of her sight.

The cousins froze.

“How careful?” Jesse asked.

“Wareful of what?” Daisy added.

“We hear rumblings and tumblings here under the ground. If we’re not mistaken—and we rarely are—things may very well be heating up again,” she said, her voice dropping even deeper.

The cousins nodded uncertainly, thanked the queen, and walked back up the wooden ramp.

“What in Sam Hill was Her Lowness talking about?” Jesse asked Daisy as they made their way back through the Deep Woods toward the barn.

“No idea,” said Daisy. “St. George is still stuck in that block of amber, so what could she possibly mean by ‘heating up’?”

“Not to mention rumblings and tumblings,” Jesse added.

When they got back to the barn, they walked around it once, very slowly. Sure enough, on the Deep Woods side of the barn, near an old tree stump, Emmy had driven a carved wooden stake into the ground and set herself up a ringtoss court. The rings woven from the “bendy-wendy” roots of willows were piled neatly at the base of the tree stump. Wrapped around the wooden stake was an old, rusty horseshoe.

Jesse held up the horseshoe. It wasn’t just any horseshoe. It was one of the horseshoes from his and Daisy’s Museum of Magic. There were three others just like it. They had always imagined that the four shoes had once shod a horse called Old Bub who belonged to the Magical Dairyman. (The Magical Dairyman was their name for the farmer who had once used the barn, a farmer who had
turned out to be the professor in a former life.)

“How did Old Bub’s horseshoe wind up out here?” Daisy asked. “Emmy can’t touch iron.”

“Good question,” Jesse asked. “But we’d better take it back to the collection. It doesn’t belong out here.”

Jesse picked up the heavy horseshoe and followed Daisy around to the front of the barn, where she put her back up against the sliding barn door and shoved it open. Inside, the barn was cold and dark and smelled of ancient hay. They made a beeline for the makeshift table—weathered planks laid across sawhorses—that held their Museum of Magic collection.

If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was just a bunch of old junk: an ancient three-legged milking stool, some rusty horseshoes, antique hinges, animal skulls, pressed flowers, pinecones, and an old metal ball the size of a peach that the cousins called the Sorcerer’s Sphere. The Sorcerer’s Sphere gave Jesse an idea.

“Maybe we should drop by the Scriptorium,” he suggested. The Scriptorium was a library magically hidden inside the Goldmine City Public Library. In the Scriptorium, each and every one of the books had been a full-fledged dragon at one time. When dragons died, that was where they
came to roost. Among the books in the Scriptorium was Emmy’s own mother, Leandra of Tourmaline.

“If Leandra doesn’t know where Emmy went,” Jesse said, “she at least deserves to know that her daughter’s gone missing. Plan?”

“Plan!” said Daisy. “Why didn’t I think of that? Don’t forget the sphere.”

Jesse snatched up the sphere, jostling the Toilet Glass, the most recent addition to their collection. It was a medieval compact that imprisoned Sadra the Witch of Uffington.

“Easy does it, J.T.,” Daisy said jokingly as Jesse dropped the sphere into the pack on her back. “You wouldn’t want to knock the nasty old witch out of her little jailey-wailey, now would you?”

Jesse chuckled because he knew it would take more than a little nudge to break the powerful spell holding the witch prisoner inside the compact.

Jesse and Daisy ran home and hopped on their bikes. They zoomed past Miss Alodie’s cottage, the chilly air making their cheeks sting. Miss Alodie was out in her garden wearing a green quilted jacket and a little beanie that looked like the top of a zucchini.

“Hail, cousins!” she called out to them. They slowed down and coasted up onto the sidewalk, bringing their bikes to a standstill. “My carpetbag is
all packed, and I’ll be over to your house as soon as I’ve finished mulching,” she said cheerily. “Where are you off to in such a tearing rush?”

“Emmy is missing,” Jesse said. “And we’re going down to the Scriptorium to see if Leandra knows where she might have gone.”

“A sensible course of action,” she said, bobbing her head. “I’d go with you myself—browsing the Scriptorium is my idea of heaven!—but my flowers need to be tucked in before the first frost nips at their toes. Good luck, cousins!” She picked up her pitchfork and dug into the wheelbarrow full of mulch.

“See you later, Miss Alodie!” Daisy called out as, with the Sorcerer’s Sphere bumping around inside the pack on her back, she followed Jesse down the street toward town.

Mrs. Thackeray was sitting at the front desk of the Goldmine City Public Library. She had a gray poodle haircut and was wearing a purple sweatshirt with the words “Library Goddess” spelled out in gold sequins.

The cousins stood before her desk, breathless and flushed from their ride.

“Hi, Library Goddess!” Jesse said with a wave of his hand and a shy grin.

“Hello, you two eager readers! What can I do
for you today?” Miss Thackeray asked.

Daisy was ready with their story, which, as it happened, was the best kind: the truth, in a manner of speaking. “We’re doing science projects. I’m doing precious gems, and, um, well, Jesse hasn’t figured his out yet, so we thought we’d do a little browsing in the grown-up nonfiction section, if you don’t mind.”