The Dragon in the Volcano (4 page)

“Not one bit,” said Mrs. Thackeray. “And lucky for you, present company excepted, there are no pesky grown-ups to get in the way of your browsing.”

It was true. What was more, there were no pesky kids, either. Daisy and Jesse were the only visitors in the library at the moment, which was a good thing, considering the nature of their real business here.

“You kids browse away. I’ll be in the back room unpacking a box of new books. Holler when you need me … 
in your library voices
, of course!” Mrs. Thackeray added with a wink.

Jesse and Daisy walked over to the grown-up section and headed down the last aisle in the nonfiction section, R to Z. There, at the very end of the aisle, on the floor near the wall, was the miniature manhole. Jesse let out a gasp when he saw that its cover was already open. Working quickly, he
unfastened the top of the pack on Daisy’s back and peered down into it. The Sorcerer’s Sphere lay at the bottom, beginning to glow.

“Okay,” said Daisy. “Let’s kneel down and lean over the manhole, like we did the last time.”

As they did this, Jesse glanced over at their backpack. It was wiggling, like there was something alive inside it trying to get out. The next moment, the Sorcerer’s Sphere rolled out of the top of the backpack and down Daisy’s arm and disappeared into the mini-manhole with a hollow pop.

The cousins pulled back and shielded their eyes from the blinding white light that came pouring out of the hole. The next minute, the stone floor beneath them gave way, like an elevator in free fall, taking them down with it. Faster and faster they fell, the cool air whistling past their ears. They squeezed their eyes shut and waited for a gentle landing.

Moments later, it came. Just as it had the last time they were here, the sphere stood before them in a holder like a giant golden golf tee. The rusty sphere was now a multifaceted ruby the size of an apple.

The air was foggy, amber-colored, and filled with the aroma of spicy incense. Aisle after aisle stretched out before them, lined with bookshelves
rising to dizzying heights and jam-packed with massive books bound in a rainbow of leathers.

“Back in Dragon Heaven,” Daisy said.

Overhead, creatures slid from shelf to shelf on a webwork of fine silken filaments, like mountaineers rappelling down a rock face. The shelf elves had unnaturally long arms and legs. Muttering and humming to themselves and to each other, they dusted, adjusted, and fussed over the hundreds upon thousands of dragon volumes.

One of the elves broke away and hurtled downward, landing before them with a crunching sound and a breathless little “Oof!” and a bow. “Oh, there go the knees again! My
word
!”

Willum Wink, Chief Steward of the Shelf Elves of the Scriptorium, stood before them, his brown-checked jacket cinched at the waist with a tool belt. Jesse had forgotten how sharp the shelf elf’s features were—the bones of his skull, the nose that hooked down and the chin that hooked up, the jutting cheekbones, the pointy ears, and the piercing eyes that turned up at the corners—topped off with a tuft of hair the color of dust bunnies.

Willum bowed low and said, “Welcome to the Scriptorium!” in a high-pitched warble that sounded like he had been sucking helium from a balloon. “Oh!” he said, with a blink of his eyes. “It’s
you: the Keepers of the extraordinary Emerald of Leandra. How may I be of service?”

“The extraordinary Emerald of Leandra is missing,” Daisy told him. “We’ve come to tell her mother.”

“Our precocious miss is missing, you say?” His eyes crossed over his beaky nose. “(These young people! Never give us a moment’s peace, do they now? They most assuredly do not!) You’ve done well to come here, Keepers. A mother is entitled to know matters of such grave import as this.”

Willum Wink gathered up a silken lasso from his tool belt and tossed it high into the foggy golden reaches of the library. The line went taut and then the elf began to pull something heavy, arm over arm. Soon a giant red book with a metal ring on the cover like a door knocker landed on the floor with a dusty
thump
.

Willum Wink cupped his hand over his mouth and called out: “Oh, Leandra! Leandra of Tourmaline! Company’s here!”

The heavy cover of the book lifted slowly, the pages fanning as red smoke poured forth, materializing into the giant, ghostly figure of a dragon. From a great height, she stared down with glowing red eyes, red steam pouring from her flared nostrils.

“Emmy is missing,” Daisy reported in a voice that trembled only slightly.

“Misssing?” the red dragon hissed. “Misssing
what
? An eye, an ear, a tail, a ssscale, a tongue? Sssurely sshe is perfectly capable of partial sspontaneous regeneration, any daughter of mine!”

Jesse and Daisy exchanged a look. Emmy’s mother sounded exceptionally hissy today.

“She’s missing
from the garage
,” Jesse said. “
All
of her.”

The dragon blinked her glowing red eyes.

“Along with all the socks from her nest,” Daisy added.

“Ah, yessssss!” said Leandra, her head weaving on her long, sinuous neck. “Ssockss misssing, you sssay? Her current nessst mussst no longer be adequate for her needsss.”

Jesse said in a humble voice, “We were going to fix it up and make it bigger this weekend.”

Daisy nodded. “We really were going to make improvements. Do you know where she might have gone?”

“Isssn’t it obviousss? She hasss gone in sssearch of a new nessst. Her Keepersss, it ssseemsss, have been sssadly remissssssss!” the dragon hissed as she dissolved into a cloud of red smoke. The smoke pulled back into the pages, and the book slammed shut in their faces.

Jesse, swatting at the smoke, said, “I get the feeling she isn’t too happy with us.”

Daisy wiped her watering eyes on her sleeve.

“Come on,” said Jesse, looking warily about at the hundreds of thousands of volumes of retired
dragons sitting on the shelves. “Time to go.”

Willum Wink seemed to have returned to his duties, so they went back to where the ruby sphere sat on its giant golf tee. Daisy reached up and grabbed the orb.

Jesse craned his neck and stared upward. The center of the dome, where the Scriptorium exit was, was lost in the swirling mists above them. “How are we supposed to get out of here?” he wondered aloud, feeling a little dizzy. The last time, Emmy had flown them out.

Just then, Jesse felt a breeze riffle the hair on his forehead. The big red book came scooting down the aisle toward them like a magic carpet.

“Don’t look now, Jess, but I think our ride is here,” said Daisy.

“I guess she couldn’t be
too
mad at us, after all,” said Jesse.

The cousins scrambled on top of the book and held on tight to the ring as Leandra, in book form, whisked them up through the layers of golden fog, to the tippy-top of the dome. There Daisy popped the sphere into the exit hole. After a few uncomfortable moments of feeling as if they were being squeezed out of a toothpaste tube, they arrived back in the last aisle of the nonfiction section of the Goldmine City Public Library. They
clambered quickly to their feet and dusted themselves off.

Daisy found herself nose to nose with a book on crystals and gems. “Well, what do you know?” She took the book down from the shelf and paged through it. “And it has awesome color plates.”

They took Daisy’s book to the front desk, where Mrs. Thackeray was still on duty. When she saw them, her eyes popped behind her rhinestone spectacles. “My goodness! The two of you look as if you’ve been dunked in glitter!”

Daisy laughed uneasily and handed her book to the librarian. She stole a glance at Jesse. He did, now that she took the trouble to notice, look as if he were glowing all over. She checked out her own hands and saw that they, too, shimmered as if she had dunked them into a bucket of mica.

They said so long and thanks to Mrs. Thackeray, and then they rode back home. After parking their bikes in the garage—cold and dank and dragonless as it was—they trooped up the back steps, through the mudroom, and into the kitchen. The sight of Miss Alodie standing at the stove, in place of Aunt Maggie or Uncle Joe, caught them both off guard.

In a long, flowered apron, Miss Alodie turned and lifted a wooden spoon in salute. “Heigh-ho, cousins!”

Jesse wrinkled his nose. The kitchen smelled highly unusual, which, he supposed, was to be expected.

“You’re just in time for dinner!” Miss Alodie said. Then she got a good look at them and set her wooden spoon down on the stove with a
thunk
. “Land sakes, cousins! You’ve been
dipped
!”

“In
what
, is the question,” said Daisy uneasily.

“Why, in dragon dust!” Miss Alodie said. “What else?”

“I guess you could say that Leandra smoked us by accident,” Jesse explained.

Miss Alodie shook her head slowly and firmly. “Keepers, I know accidents when I see them, and this was no accident.”

“Anyway,” Daisy said, “we’re going up to the barn to return the Sorcerer’s Sphere to the collection. Then we’ll be right back to discuss our findings over dinner.”

“Do we have to?” Jesse whispered to her on their way out the door. “Eat dinner, I mean.”

“One moment, cousins!” Miss Alodie said. She was rummaging around in a floral-patterned carpetbag. “I have something in here for you.” She emerged with a flat, round canteen and handed it to Jesse. It was covered in what looked like purple dragon skin.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Keepers, it’s clear to me you’re headed for hot water,” Miss Alodie said, her blue eyes steely. “This will come in handy.”

“Thanks, Miss Alodie,” said Jesse doubtfully.

Daisy turned around so that Jesse could slip the canteen into the backpack. The weird things Miss Alodie gave them always wound up being very useful.

“We’ll be back soon,” Daisy said to Miss Alodie as they headed for the back steps.

“Oh, I doubt that very much!” the little old woman called after them. “But don’t worry. I’ll see you when I see you.”

When they got to the barn, Jesse took the sphere out of the backpack. It was once more a crusty old orb. Daisy watched to make sure he returned it to its place on top of the Toilet Glass. That was when she realized that something was again amiss.

“Hey, Jess,” she said. “What’s wrong with this table?”

Jesse stood back and scanned the objects on the table. His voice rose in alarm. “The horseshoes!
Where are the horseshoes
?”

Not just one but all four of the rusty horseshoes were now missing.

“Let’s check outside,” Daisy suggested.

They ran outside to where Emmy had set up the ringtoss game behind the barn. Sure enough, the four horseshoes were lying on the ground, two of them near the stake and the other two near the throwing line, all neatly arranged and facing in an easterly direction, as if they were on the feet of a giant, invisible horse.

Jesse knelt to pick up the nearest horseshoe, and when he did, a long brown hind leg appeared, then a switching tail, followed by a sleek, chestnut-colored haunch. Jesse straightened and stepped back. Soon the rest of the animal was visible: a big brown farm horse stood before them with its feet firmly planted in the horseshoes.

“It’s Old Bub!” Daisy said, enchanted. “Just how I always imagined him, Jess!”

Old Bub flicked his long tail and plodded over to the tree stump. He stood there for a few moments, his tail swishing back and forth. Then he snorted and scraped the ground with his front hoof, twisting his head around and looking at them with one wise brown eye.

“Um, Daisy?” Jesse said. “I think he wants us to mount and ride.”

Jesse boosted himself up onto the tree stump. The horse had no saddle, no stirrups, no halter,
and no reins. Jesse grabbed a fistful of wiry mane and hoisted himself up onto Old Bub’s swayback. Once settled, with one hand still twisted in the mane, he lowered an arm for Daisy, who had scrambled up onto the tree stump after him. She grabbed hold of his hand, swung herself up behind her cousin, and locked her hands around his middle.

The horse lurched forward, joints creaking and head bobbing.

“Whoa!” said Jesse.

The horse shuddered to a halt.

“What’s happening?” Jesse said.

“You just said, ‘Whoa,’ Jess,” Daisy pointed out, with a nervous giggle.

“I didn’t mean it
that
way,” Jesse said. “I meant it like ‘Woweee!’ ”

“Yeah, well, Old Bub doesn’t know the difference, do you, old feller? Let’s try this.” Daisy squeezed Old Bub’s rib cage with her legs and said, “Giddyup!”

Old Bub started up again. Daisy let out a sigh of relief. Considering that the horse was so huge, it was nice to know they had a
little
control over him. Daisy had ridden horses before, but not many as large as this one, and none, of course, that were magical!

The horse was heading in an easterly direction down the winding barn road. Daisy, peering out from behind Jesse, saw something lying ahead of them on the road. It was a small, white object.