Mary Drytt was not poor by any stretch of the imagination, but she was a single mother, and that made life hard!
Actually…
She liked to think she was single, and she told all the bar’s customers she was, but it wasn’t true. Unfortunately, to her mind anyway, she was married to Jo. And that really made life hard.
Her husband, according to Mary, was nothing more than a dreamer who spent his life tinkering away in his back shed.
Well, since the dragons came and the original shed had burned down, it was now more of a sandbag bunker than a shed, but he was still there at all hours of the day and night.
…Yes, yes… Mary would begrudgingly agree; he had his degrees, and yes, he worked up at the university… or what was now left of it. But he was just a professor of building stuff, nothing important… nothing like the Arts of Drama.
Sometimes, the only way she knew her husband was alive was when Jo would get his fingers caught in his latest invention, causing him to yell, scream or swear loud enough to wake her and the neighbourhood up.
His family’s abandonment wasn’t the worst of it. Jo was completely and utterly obsessed with dragons.
Dragons were not of this world, and as a non-practising ‘Whispering Monk’ devotee, Mary knew the magical reptiles were sinful and wicked and, therefore, should be shunned.
Look at all the damage the big dragons had done to Bone Valley! Burnt the once-thriving city to a cinder, ate its poor citizens and stole anything shiny.
Evil, pure and utter evil, and just her bad luck to be married to Jo, who had recently joined a club where every time a big dragon was spotted over the city, the members would run after it, drawing pictures as fast as they could, taking measurements or making plaster casts of claw marks. She’d told Jo he was stupid and nothing more than a wagon train spotter. He had made some excuse as to why their scientific stuff was so important. Mary didn’t care because even against her better judgement and a whole lot of silent treatment, Jo had gone ahead and bought four little dragons for their home!
The latest one was for the kitchen; apparently, it would make her life easier. How that was supposed to work, she didn’t know; it kept eating the kitchen sponges and burped at the cat, so often poor Mr Whiskers was now partially bald on his hind quarters.
The other three dragons worked with Jo as a team of furnaces. Big, Middle and Little, ‘The Flame Brothers’. That’s what he called them. Only the best for those three monsters. They all cost an arm and a leg. Money Mary could have spent ten times over on something she wanted. But they had come to an agreement after one particularly nasty fight. Mary would begin to build her singing career, and as long as Jo kept the money coming in, she would ignore the dragons.
He had to provide enough for food and rent, a holiday once a year to the Big Ocean, Mary’s spending money and enough to send Conny to daycare three days a week. That mattered because when Conny was being cared for, and Jo was in his bunker, Mary worked at Mr Cantante’s public hotel and sang to her adoring fans.
Well, fan.
Actually, a customer who was too drunk to leave.
And hotel was pushing the description a bit too far. It was more of a dug-out hole in the ground with a bar made from wooden boxes, carpet-covered crates for a stage and barrelled beer served at tables made from cardboard tubes and old street signs.
But none of that mattered; Mary knew she’d make it big one day.
“Conny, I don’t hear you getting ready. Get ya bag out here; I’ve packed your pail; it’s time for daycare; Mummy’s got to go to work!”
Mary checked her new lipstick safely kept in her new pretty pink bag. The one she’d matched with her costume at ‘work’.
“Conny, I swear, child, if you’re not in front of me in 5 seconds with ya clothes on and ya bag on ya back, you’re gonna feel my hand!”
Halfway through applying the new shade, Mary paused and stared at her reflection in the little mirror hung on the back of the kitchen door. A tendril of her fine bleached blonde hair wafted across her face under the control of a breeze that shouldn’t exist inside the house.
It was quiet… too quiet.
She might not have been ‘Mother of the Year’ material, but Mary certainly wasn’t ‘Worst Mother of the Year’ either.
“Conny?”
Nothing but Smeg, the oven dragon’s breathing filled the house, rasping in, whistling out. His blue-green scaled chest rose and fell in a deep, slumbered rhythm.
Children are not quiet creatures; they are loud and noisy and fill the available space. When they’re up to something, they become discreet and secretive, which creates its own type of sound. What Mary found herself hearing was the terrifying noise of …nothing! She bent to the side to look up the passageway; her daughter’s doorway curtain billowed in and out from an out-of-place breeze.
Dread wrapped its anxious wings around Mary’s hammering heart.
Softly, “Conny?” was hesitantly whispered as the treasured purse dropped to the floor in front of Smeg, making one of his red eyes open.
“Conny, baby. I’m not cross, promise.”
Walking up the narrow passageway that led past her and Jo’s room and towards Conny’s felt like Mary’s own personal walk to the gallows. She watched as the pretty little rose curtain strung across Conny’s door frame billowed in an intransitive breeze. The curtain's movement taunted Mary’s tear-filled eyes, a scream boiling in her throat built up in moans and denials, waiting for its inevitable release. Everyone in Bone Valley had heard the stories. Every parent dreaded the narrative to be replayed in their home.
Like everyone else in Bone Valley, Mary and Jo’s house had burnt down when the first big dragon crawled through the witch’s portal. It was then that Jo developed his sandbag method of building, so at least they were better than those who lived in underground holes. Mary’s was one of the few families in their neighbourhood to live above ground. She had taken great pride in her home having three windows. But now, her pride had fallen away; now, she would have given anything to live covered and protected underground with everyone else.
The pink sheet with the little red printed roses resisted Mary’s first attempt to catch it.
*
Jo had finally finished. It had been tricky, fiddly, and annoying. But the Dragon Alumni needed a machine to tether a big dragon to the earth, and he had finally perfected the device. It meant they now would have the upper hand, whether Mother Harper liked it or not! She’d been warned. Either fix the dragon problem, or we will! Anna Harper had smiled her smile then the Alumni had left feeling under threat.
He sat back and admired the mechanics. It took a moment or two and a raised eyebrow for his brain to register a sound that crept, muffled and disturbingly into his bunker.
“Mary?”
The sand bunker’s self-made wooden door slammed and ricocheted silently onto its wooden frame. Barrelling his way up the garden path, Jo ducked under the empty washing line and hurtled into the open kitchen.
“Mary?” echoed around the deserted hearth; the loud, panicked mewing of Smeg, the once-slumbering dragon, was drowned out by the sound of broken heartache filling the house with its dreadful wails.
Jo, a big man, took three stretched strides up the narrow passageway.
The rose sheet tore too easily in his hand.
“Mary, what’s….” Before the question had time to breathe, it died upon the inventor's lips.
His little girl’s room held only splintered wooden furniture, a crumpled iron-framed bed and three walls.
Jo looked out onto their neighbour’s earthen roof. Everywhere amongst the strewn sandbags and mud, large reptile footprints abounded. Deep talon scratches were still evident in the sliced-open earth. Conny’s fourth bedroom wall was nothing more than a gaping wound.
“JO! JO!” Mary's shrieked wide-mouthed. “A dragon, Jo. It was a dragon.”
Many things can be said about Bone Valley.
It smelt.
It was burnt.
It had an oversupply of charcoal.
Furthermore, if you asked the neighbours of Bone Valley to describe its inhabitants, they simply would have said, “They’re a bit… well, you know, nice but strange! And wouldn’t you be if your city burnt down around you, and then you were all forced to live in underground holes to survive?”
Apart from all these truths, one of the most important things said about the small rural city was, ‘News travels fast!’ (You find that lines of communication tend to be very strong and open once big dragons turn up.)
It took less than half an hour for the Drytt’s surrounding neighbourhoods to spread the word that a dragon had taken a child; then, by 8:35 am, not only had every business in the city shut up shop, but every school had closed its doors; then the whole populace including the cities cat’s dogs horses and cows had gone underground. Under the fireproof rooves of their earthen-covered homes.
Anyone above ground was not in the “loop” and was at severe risk of being BBQed.
Unsurprisingly to some, Mother Harper knew the news well before most!
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And the previous chapters are as follows:
Chapter 1