The Dragon's Eye (3 page)

I'll “Shop” you!
I thought. As I turned the handle, the bird — or whatever it was — grew perfectly quiet. So I was very, very careful indeed as I edged the door open little by little.

BOOM! Something smashed into the door with such force that it knocked me over backwards. Something that I still could hardly make out was flying round and round the room. I could see wings, scales, and a wisp of smoke rising from its nostrils. I saw it fly over to the other side of the room, positioning itself directly opposite me. With wings outspread and claws at the ready, it fixed me with its beady eyes and began to fly straight at me.

BANG! Someone came up behind me and slammed the door shut. I looked up to see an old gentleman with a large moustache, leaning over me in a very disapproving manner, holding the door shut with one hand, and wagging his finger at me with the other.

“Daniel Cook, I presume?” he said.

 

“Do you make a habit of spying through keyholes, Daniel?” asked Dr. Drake, after he had introduced himself.

“No, sir,” I said. “I was looking for you and I heard shouting and a lot of banging about. I only looked through the keyhole to see what was making the commotion.”

“And after you'd looked through the keyhole, you decided to open the door and have a better look, did you?”

“Er, yes, sir,” I stammered.

“Did your sister, Beatrice, have a look, too?”

“No, sir,” I said. “She waited upstairs.”

“Good,” said Dr. Drake.

Just then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and a short man with a red face and a dark suit emerged. He took out his watch and pointed to it meaningfully.

Dr. Drake leaned towards me and said, “Then you may wait upstairs, Daniel. You may look at the things in my shop, but don't touch them. And remember, not a word of what you have seen — or
think
you have seen — to anyone. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

When I was halfway up the stairs, I turned back to look at Dr. Drake. He put a finger to his lips and said sternly, “Not . . . a . . . word!”

“What happened?” asked Beatrice when I had arrived back at the counter. “He caught you snooping and gave you a good telling off, by the sounds of it!”

“Nothing happened,” I replied. “But he doesn't seem as nice as I thought he was going to be. I think he's going to turn out to be one of those cross people. He says we are to wait for him.”

Downstairs, the shouting had started again. Then I heard two loud bangs as if the creature — whatever it was — was trying to smash the door down.

“What on earth
is
that?” said Beatrice.

I didn't speak for a moment. Dr. Drake had told me not to say anything, but Beatrice
was
my sister. Didn't I have a duty to warn her?

I summoned up my courage and said, “Don't tell Dr. Drake I told you this, but there's something you should know. He's got a dragon down there.”

“A dragon, Daniel?” scoffed Beatrice in the patronising I'm-a-year-older-than-you voice that I always hated. “Don't be silly. There are no such things as dragons.”

“And I'm telling you it
was
a dragon!” I said. “It had scales and claws and everything. The room was full of smoke!”

Beatrice thought for a moment. There were three more loud bangs. Then she grinned.

“Ugh,” she said. “I've just had a horrible idea.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“What if Dr. Drake is a mad scientist? What if he collects lizards and birds and then . . . cuts them up . . . and does horrible things to them?”

“Like Dr. Frankenstein?” I said, laughing.

“Yes, but with lizards and birds,” she said.

“That doesn't seem very likely,” I said, shuddering despite myself.

“Well, excuse me, Daniel, but the idea that he has a real dragon down there doesn't seem very likely to me, either.”

I didn't have much to say to that. Beatrice was obviously going to have to see the dragon before she believed in it, so I went back to looking round the shop. Behind the counter, there were some old paintings and a couple of drawings leaning against the wall. As I flicked through them, I could see that they were mostly of dragons, as I had expected. Beatrice came and looked at them over my shoulder.

“They're pastiches,” she said.

“What's a pastiche?” I asked.

“When we were at Uncle Algernon's, Cousin Jocasta and I managed to borrow a book on the history of art. It had a lot of colour plates in it. This one looks like one of those Italian painters — Leonardo da something,” she said. “And this one looks like a German artist who did a famous drawing of a rabbit, only this is a dragon in the same pose. And this one looks like Turner, who liked to do stormy skies.”

“It looks like a mess,” I said.

“But can't you see?” said Beatrice. “Instead of the original paintings, these ones are all copies, only they have pictures of dragons in them.”

Then she let out a gasp. For the next picture didn't have any dragons in it. Instead, it was a simple watercolour of a group of people standing in front of a small hill. And there, standing right next to Dr. Drake, were two people who could only have been our mother and father.

“I knew it,” said Beatrice bitterly. “He sent them away. I hate him.”

But then I pointed out someone else in the picture, over on the other side. It was a younger version of the same man who had been watching us from the doorway of the pub that very morning. Even in the picture, there was something creepy about him. I turned the picture over and looked at the back of it, to see if it said anything about where it had been painted. In faint red pencil, I could just make out the words:

I quickly started flicking through the stack of paintings to see if there were any more like that. Then a door slammed in the corridor, and I heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs.

It was the young man who I'd seen fleeing across the corridor earlier. He was carrying a brown paper bag in one hand and, in the other, a jug and two glasses.

“Hey!” he said, giving us an enormous smile. He spoke with an American accent. “Would I be having the pleasure of addressing Master Daniel and Miss Beatrice Cook?” he asked.

Beatrice, who never trusts anyone until she knows something about him or her, did not smile back.

“Yes, that's right,” she said. “And who are you?”

“You can call me Emery,” he said. “Emery Cloth. Dr. Drake said you might be hungry, so I've brought you a little something to eat.”

He offered the paper bag to us and placed the jug down on the counter with the glasses.

“We're not hungry,” said Beatrice.

“Then that's too bad,” said Emery, giving me a wink. “But I'll leave these here anyway.”

Emery went back downstairs.

I looked in the paper bag, which contained cucumber sandwiches, and looked in the jug, which contained water.

“What do you mean, ‘We're not hungry'?” I said.

“Daniel, I don't know if we can trust Dr. Drake,” she said. “I don't know if we should stay here.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Look what happened to our parents,” she said.

“As far as we know, nothing has happened to them,” I said.

“All right,” said Beatrice. “Then since our parents wrote to us about him, I'll trust him until I find out — one way or the other.”

And she grabbed a sandwich and began to devour it ravenously.

Waiting for three hours in Dr. Drake's Dragonalia while trying not to touch anything was like being a starving man in a roomful of food he was not allowed to eat. I was desperate to ask someone about the dragon I had seen, and I was in a shop full of some of the most interesting objects I had ever come across. Finally, at five o'clock, the short red-faced man who I had seen earlier came thumping up the stairs, looking even more red-faced than before, and dashed out of the shop. Then, Dr. Drake emerged. As he stood before us, his eyes caught sight of the stack of paintings and his face broke into a wide smile.

“Good afternoon, Beatrice,” he said. And then, turning to me, he continued, “And Daniel. I see that you have been admiring my paintings. I am collecting them for a book. I have many artist friends who are very helpful to me at times. I'm sorry that I couldn't come to meet you both, but as you see, something important has come up and I have had to attend to it.”

Beatrice glanced at me. I knew that she was thinking that our parents had said more or less exactly the same thing.

“But never mind,” said Dr. Drake. “I was sure that such clever children as yourselves would have no problems finding my little shop. When I sent Emery to make sure that you were safe, I asked him to watch you closely and see how you did. You both handled yourselves excellently. I don't think Daniel would have looked quite so handsome with a black eye.”

“Who was that other man?” I asked.

“What other man?” said Dr. Drake.

“There was a man standing over there,” I said, gesturing out of the window at the pub doorway on the other side of the street. “He had a strangely carved cane and he looked creepy. He's in that picture along with you and our parents.”

Dr. Drake looked at the picture. Although he did his best to hide it, I could see him give a slight shudder.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “That is Ignatius Crook. I have not seen him for a long time. Perhaps he wanted to visit me but changed his mind when he saw that I already had visitors.”

“And what about the drag —” I began, but Dr. Drake interrupted me.

“Now, Daniel,” he said, “since you are both coming to stay with me in St. Leonard's Forest and I am to find lovely things for you to do, we had better set off right away. We have a long journey ahead of us tonight.”

Many hours later, I awoke with a jolt when the carriage hit a small pothole. The rain that had been falling all day in London had given way to a clear, moonlit sky in Sussex, and I could see that we were passing through a dense forest full of many different kinds of trees.