The Dragon in the Volcano (5 page)

“What’s that?” she said, pointing.

As they came closer, she saw that it was a rolled-up pair of clean white tube socks.

“Socks … from Emmy’s nest!” Jesse said. “Should we stop and pick them up?”

Daisy shook her head. “No, we’ll pick them up later. If we get down now, we’ll never be able to get back on again. Let’s just find out where he’s taking us.”

The horse plodded on down the barn road and crossed the street. His heavy hooves clip-clopped loudly on the pavement, then became muffled again as he entered the woods on the far side. The cousins had never been in these woods before. Tall pine trees grew so close together that they blocked out the sun, tinged the air deep green, and filled it with the smell of Christmas. It wasn’t long before they passed a ball of bright-red kneesocks.

Daisy said, “Wasn’t
Hansel and Gretel
one of Emmy’s favorite books when she was little?”

“Only after she got over being terrified of the witch in the woods and the kids in the cage, yeah,” Jesse said.

“So are you thinking what I’m thinking?” said Daisy.

Jesse was silent for a bit. “You think Emmy’s left a trail for us?” he asked.

“Socks instead of stones or bread crumbs,” Daisy said, her heart quickening. “Let’s hope.”

As if Old Bub sensed her excitement, he switched to a trot. Daisy gripped Jesse, and Jesse gripped the horse’s mane. Just as they were getting used to having their teeth rattling around in their heads, the horse lengthened his stride into a smooth canter.

“Woweeeee!” Jesse said.

Old Bub rolled up an old logging trail filled with ruts, which he rocked over with heart-stopping ease. The socks kept coming—dark blue, hot pink, Argyle, striped, polka-dotted—one after the other, as Old Bub flattened his gait into a gallop.

Daisy’s stomach lurched and her nose ran, but she didn’t dare let go of Jesse to wipe it. Daisy had been on a galloping horse for one or two breathtaking sprints, but this was a run that went on for so long that it wasn’t possible to keep holding her breath. She was soon exhausted and panting, as if it were she and not the horse who was doing the running. And all the while, there was the steady
creak-creak-creak
of the horseshoes, like rusty hinges opening the door to … 
who knew what
?

Suddenly, they plunged into deep shadow. Daisy looked up and gasped. Over the jagged tree-tops, the snowcapped mountain loomed, shockingly close and glowing pale pink in the rays of the lowering sun.

“Yep!” Jesse said, as if his suspicion was now confirmed. “That’s where we’re headed. High Peak!”

“Emmy’s first nest,” Daisy said, and a shiver of anticipation rippled through her.

The path grew steeper, and now the sock balls became single socks, stretched out like bright arrows pointing the way upward in the gathering gloom. The route they were on was familiar from hikes they had taken with Uncle Joe. Old Bub leaped up the steep paths with the nimbleness of a mountain goat.

Jesse lay along Old Bub’s neck, arms grimly tangled in the mane. Daisy clung to Jesse, her cheek pressed to his back. Beneath her interwoven fingers, she felt the wild beating of Jesse’s heart. Daisy was sure her own heart was beating just as rapidly. What had been exciting was now terrifying. What if the horse’s hooves slipped on the rocks?
What if the two of them slid off his back? Would they tumble backward off the side of the mountain?

After a long while, the terrain began to level off a bit and the horse slowed to a trot. The wind pounded Daisy’s back like icy fists and made her glad for her winter coat. She opened her eyes and looked around. The trees had dwindled to almost nothing. They were on the upper slopes of High Peak, above the timberline. It was a good twenty degrees colder up here. The wind whipped their hair every which way and worked its frigid fingers down the collars of their coats.

Jesse untangled his right hand from Old Bub’s mane long enough to point to a group of boulders lying up ahead. This was the spot where Jesse had found the geode from which Emmy had hatched. But Old Bub lurched right past the spot and crunched up the snowy hillside toward the summit.

At the top of High Peak, there was a lake, no bigger than the pool of a large public fountain but much, much deeper. Uncle Joe always said that it was deeper than the highest skyscraper was high, because it was the water-filled crater of an extinct volcano whose core reached down to the magma layer beneath the earth’s crust.

Old Bub stopped on the banks of the lake and, reminding Jesse of a bus that had come to the end
of the line, released a long puff of steam and settled his body to say he was done.

The cousins gratefully slipped down from Old Bub’s back. The horse wandered off and dropped his head to nibble at the blades of dull-green dried grass poking up through the snow. Jesse and Daisy staggered around, catching their breath, shaking out their limbs, and checking themselves for bruises.

Jesse stopped suddenly and looked at the lake. It was a body of water so freezing cold that nobody ever swam in it, even after a vigorous climb on the hottest day of the summer. In the last rays of the setting sun, wisps of steam rose off its glassy surface.

Daisy knelt, dipped a hand in the water, and quickly pulled it out. “It’s boiling hot, Jess.”

The cousins stared down into the water’s crystalline depths.

“And look!” Daisy said, pointing. “See it? There’s another sock … under the water.” Shivering, Daisy straightened and stepped back.

Jesse went behind Daisy and unfastened the backpack. Daisy watched as he came around and unscrewed the top of the purple canteen. Throwing back his head, he took a healthy swig from it. At first, his face puckered up something fierce. Then
his eyes popped open, his mouth gaped, and he began to pant.

“Jesse Tiger, what in Sam Hill are you
doing
?” Daisy asked, worried. “Are you choking? Can you speak?”

“What Miss Alodie said to do,” he said between gasps. “This stuff is for when we run into hot water, which is exactly what we just did.” He gestured at the steaming lake.

“I get it!” Daisy grabbed the canteen. She closed her eyes and gulped. She shuddered from head to toe. It tasted minty cold. At first, it gave her such bad brain freeze she thought her eyes would pop out of her head, but then it rapidly turned piping hot. She opened her mouth to let the steam out. “What is in that stuff?” she said, wiping her mouth on her coat sleeve and handing the canteen back to Jesse.

Jesse shrugged. “With Miss Alodie, you never know,” he said. Screwing the cap back on, he returned the canteen to the backpack. “I only know that we have to keep following the path or we’ll never find our dragon.”

“You mean into the hot water?” Daisy said slowly, her blue eyes wide.

Jesse nodded. “If that’s what it takes.”

Jesse was always the last in the water when it
was cold, so it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise to Daisy that he would be the first into hot water. Still, she was astonished to see him step so casually into the lake and walk toward the submerged sock. The water came quickly up to his waist.

“Jesse Tiger …,” Daisy said in a warning voice.

“I see another sock after this one,” Jesse said. “I’m just going to try and get to it.”

She watched as the water came up to his neck and then as his shaggy head disappeared beneath the surface.

“Jesse!” she screamed.

The water felt as warm and soothing as bathwater. “Wait till you try this, Daze!” he said, but a trail of bubbles glugged lazily out of his mouth instead of his voice. This was like no water he had ever been in. For one thing, he could breathe in it! For another thing, his body didn’t bob up to the surface. His body felt heavy and comfortable. This was so much more enjoyable than getting jounced around in the freezing cold on the back of an old farm horse.

Moving slowly underwater, Jesse turned around and looked at Daisy. She was running back and forth on the shore and hollering. Her voice sounded far away. He raised his hand and beckoned to her.
She flung up her arms and waded in after him. Then he heard the first exclamation of wonder as her body met the water. By the time she was under the water with him, she wore a silly grin on her face.

Jesse turned and made his way toward the next sock … and the next. They were all white gym socks, lying on the ever steeper gradient of the lake bottom. He slid down, Daisy tumbling after him. Soon they were slipping and sliding down a soft muddy slope, one sock after another passing them, faster and faster, like a painted dotted line on a highway at night, until all Jesse saw as he fell was one long, continuous white line trailing past him as the lake got deeper and darker and steeper. He wondered how long it would take them to reach the pool of molten lava beneath the earth’s crust.

Jesse figured that he must have fallen asleep, because he woke up with a start, his body smooshed up against a warm stone wall. Daisy gently collided into his back. He pushed himself away from the wall. Tapping his shoulder, Daisy pointed to a long jagged crack running down the face of the rock wall. A rich red light shone through a wide spot in it. Into this crack Jesse fitted the fingers of both hands and pulled, as if he were opening a stubborn set of elevator doors.

The crack gradually widened, letting in more of the rich red light. Jesse squinted into it. Eventually, the crack was wide enough to fit his body. He squeezed through, blinking, scarcely able to believe his eyes. He let out a whoop of astonishment, which was when he realized that he could hear his own voice again and was no longer immersed in the warm water.

“What is it?” Daisy poked her head around him to see for herself. “Holy cow!”

“It looks like the Emerald City of Oz!” Jesse said.

“Made of rubies instead of emeralds!” Daisy said. “A Ruby City!”

Before them stood a dazzling scarlet cluster of arches, atriums, and domes, as delicate as blown glass, dominated by a single elegant spire that rose up into a pomegranate red sky and pierced a layer of clouds resembling pink cotton. Red crystal vehicles that looked like giant sleighs, pulled by teams of fire-breathing animals, shuttled up and down wide boulevards lined with trees. The trees had ebony braided trunks, leaves of topaz and emerald, and fruits of garnet and sapphire.

“What
is
this place?” Jesse said as he took a step forward.

Daisy hauled him back by the belt. When he
looked down, his stomach lurched. It was at least a hundred-foot drop to another lake, larger than the one they had just fallen through and holding in its limpid surface the reflection of the magnificent city on its far shore. Daisy squeezed in beside him just as the crack in the rock closed behind them, leaving them stranded on a ledge not much wider than a balance beam.

“What now?” Jesse asked, his voice shrinking. Flying around on Emmy’s back had gone a long way toward curing his fear of heights, but he wasn’t on Emmy’s back now, and he was scared.

Daisy groped around for his hand and said,
“What else can we do? We go jump in the lake.”

“No way,” said Jesse, shutting his eyes and grinding his back into the stone wall, hoping it would open up and let him back inside.

“Look down, Jess,” Daisy said.

“I don’t want to look down,” Jesse said, squeezing his eyes shut all the more tightly.

“Just
do
it,” she prompted him gently. “Trust me.”

He opened one eye and looked down.

“What do you see?” Daisy asked softly.

“I see a gym sock floating on the lake,” Jesse said, opening the other eye and starting to breathe normally again.

“And that’s exactly why,” Daisy said, seizing his hand and pulling him with her as she leaped into the air, “we j-u-u-u-u-u-m-p!”

Feet kicking and arms flailing, Jesse screamed all the way down. His scream was cut short as they sank into the soft surface of the lake. They floated up and then came down and bounced on top several times before they finally sank into the warm and oozy mire.

If the crater lake had been warm maple syrup, this stuff was like hot toffee—or, Jesse thought,
molten lava
. But how could it be? The temperature of hot lava was something like two thousand
degrees Fahrenheit. If this were lava, wouldn’t they be burned to a crisp? Then he thought he had an answer.

“The dragon dust and the stuff in Miss Alodie’s canteen are protecting us,” Jesse said, but Daisy was out of earshot. She was swimming, or rather wallowing, across the lake, toward the shore.

“Wait up!” he called out to her.

By the time he joined her, she was running up and down the beach scooping up handfuls of pebbles. Jesse noticed that neither of them was wet, and that their clothing was steaming like a bunch of laundry pulled out of a hot dryer. And yet, in spite of the heat of the place, he didn’t feel overheated in his winter clothing. It was very strange.

“Gemstones, Jess!” Daisy held out her hands and showed him rubies, sapphires, topazes, emeralds, as worn and translucent as beach glass, ranging in size from peppercorn to lima bean. She filled her coat pockets with them.