Read by Gloria Sanders
He had no idea how long they’d kept him captive in the village.
From the great stone prison they’d built for him, high on an earthen mound overlooking the centre, he could sense the bustle all around him in the huts, latrines and cookhouses; the sounds and smells from the foodstores and the pens where they kept their animals. Dozens, maybe hundreds of animals – so many for a settlement of that size. At night, the silence was total. No feasting or music. No muted grunts of pleasure from human or beast. A deadness reigned over everything, as it had in the metamorphic womb of the mountain where they’d come upon him, resting.
Yes, they told themselves, something of a disappointment. But mostly they moved on because of fear. Fear of what they knew about him yet refused to know, a fear they were unwilling to acknowledge on top of all the other petty terrors their mortal existences heaped upon them. He received their fear, and, though it was alien to him, he understood it, accepting it for the gift it was.
No one had ever seen him move.
Through the lone window in the north wall of his cell, snow-capped peaks were visible, clouds writhing their last on the summits, cliffs bearded with pine. Some way off was the stockade that protected the village from outside: several thousand vertical wooden poles of uniform diameter, their surfaces smooth as sand and stained a warm honey-brown, tops trimmed in a curve to follow the undulating rampart beyond, swathed in pristine green turf. At the bottom of the mound was a stone enclosure with its own miniature lake, inhabited by two polar bears. Although he couldn’t read the inscription on the sign outside, he nonetheless knew their names were Brad and Angelina, and that they had been named by a competition among the local schoolchildren.
On the day they’d first installed him, Brad and Angelina had begun roaring and refused to stop. Gradually, the other animals had followed suit until the air was alive with chattering, howling, hissing, trilling, spitting, squeaking and croaking. For days afterwards many of the creatures refused to eat. The people struggled to keep their nerve. After a week or two the animals grew bored and got on with their lives. Later still some tiger cubs were born and even fewer visitors came to see him.
The window, which made up the entire north wall of his cell, was made of reinforced glass, a palladium alloy several inches thick with a blast resistance factor of 150. Beyond it was a terrace dotted with chairs, tables and parasols, as well as a kiosk selling beer, ice cream, fries in paper cones and a wide range of other mouth-watering treats and snacks.
Much of this he saw through the hairline crack beneath the lid of his right eye (sometimes visitors would catch a glow there, a vague impression of movement, before shoving the idea from their minds).
But most of it, he simply knew.
He knew about the vast bituminous rectangle outside the stockade, where the people alighted from their chariots and left them in geometric ranks, as if waiting for a battle that would never come. Chariots that were beast and conveyance all in one, demanding neither hay nor water, their battle-armour fused with their hide, as his was, their grilles and spoilers emblazoned with the shields of their respective tribes: diamonds and intersecting circles; griffons, lions and the occasional prancing horse. He knew that the blood in their veins was a distant cousin to the igneous rivers lying dormant in his own, and that they slept and awoke as the people decreed. He longed to set them free, just as he longed to set the people free.
Free of their fear.
Even if that meant freeing them of their lives.
Fear clung to them. He saw it in the furtive glances they shot at one another’s backs – even those whose car keys bore the same tribal emblem. He saw it in the compulsive, jittery way they checked their watches and wallets; heard it in the way they snapped at their children; sensed it from the way they prodded at their tiny black devices and swallowed their food without chewing. Whatever the nature of these fears, he knew they were useless, eating away at their innards and distracting them from the real monster in their midst.
Memories kept him amused. Dreamy memories from before his great sleep, of the miracles he’d seen fear accomplish: fathers running clean through the blast-furnace of his breath to rescue wives and children; the shield-maiden who kept on coming at him, even after his tail-blade had lopped off her arm at the shoulder.
These people were the same, but bewitched. Asleep. Buried alive in their own flesh.
Look at me, he urged them. Seeme. Say my name and free me.
He was wise enough to know there was no such thing as magic. Only what was known to work.
So far, not one of them had dared to name him. Certainly not the president of the coal conglomerate, who had looked upon the newly decapitated mountain and sensed his form deep within the rock, then abruptly resigned his post to live in a faraway land that derived its power solely from wind.
Not the chief geologist, who after extraction had noted the claw-like appendages on either side of this miraculous new rock, yet failed to explain its imperviousness to X-rays, dynamite or tungsten carbide.
Nor even the zoo director, who had rolled his eyes when trustees voted to accept the monster rock as a gift from their conservation partners, the coal conglomerate. He could never quite explain his decision to base the designs for the display cage on those of a nuclear bunker.
Every month, a dozen zookeepers would abseil down from the roof and scrub him with wire brushes, unaware of how much it tickled. They would shudder at his chilly exterior, trying to suppress the nagging suspicion that it was only skin-deep. Those who were most afraid would tap-dance on his back, or hammer out a chart-topping bassline on his tail-plates.
Months went by, then years. No-one dared to name him, in word or in thought.
No-one, until the boy.
It was mid-summer. The crowds outside the hilltop prison were thicker than usual, emboldened by sunshine and beer. The boy was eleven, his matchstick limbs sprouting from Converse sneakers into knee-length shorts, black hair long enough to graze the Ramones t-shirt his grandfather had given him. He stood a little way back from the crush, between the tables. His parents and siblings had disappeared in search of lemurs, but the boy’s eyes never strayed from the great ridged back just visible above the gawpers’ heads.
In the prisoner, something stirred. The crack beneath his eyelid widened a fraction. A small girl gasped and tugged at her mother’s sleeve. None of the adults noticed.
He knew the time had come, and he was grateful.
The boy’s lips barely moved as he whispered the word, but the thought from which it sprang echoed through the cell.
“Drake.”
The dragon’s skin cracked as he smiled. A few of the onlookers thought they heard thunder and stepped back, eyes searching the heavens. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the boy before a tall fat man passed between them, licking an ice-cream.
He gave a small cough. The window of his cell blew out in a supersonic puff of reinforced nano-splinters that dissolved the people directly in front of the building and ripped great chunks from anyone walking behind. A silent shockwave travelled down the hill, overturning prams and hurling day-trippers into walls. The tanks in the reptile house exploded, vomiting cottonmouths and anacondas. A family of leopards toppled from their tree. Outside the compound, three hundred car alarms went off in unison.
For a while, a dazed stillness.
Up on the hill, the dragon yawned. His erstwhile observers were raining down around him in a sleet of blood, bone and excrement. He pushed himself upright, shrugging off the roof of his cell.
Everything below him was a fog of red. He blew, gently and without fire, until the mist parted and the boy stared back at him, ankle-deep in a crimson sludge. He wore the remains of the fat man’s body like a damp mantle, his eyes gleaming bone-shards peering through gore. A bloody spit-bubble fattened and burst in his gaping mouth.
From down the hill, a single low wail was swiftly joined by stricken laments of every pitch and timbre. The screams of men and of panicked animals. From deep within the dragon’s body, great wings burst, shattering the walls and sending blocks of concrete high into the air, over the boy’s head and down the hill in all directions, crushing those too slow or stunned to run away.
He looked to one side. More enclosures. More animals huddled in corners, climbing the walls or throwing their bodies against the bars in a vain attempt to escape. The dragon closed his eyes and laughed a great laugh, and when he looked again, everything he had laughed at was blackened and gone, the air laden with the stench of burned fur. The sun and sky had vanished.
He flapped his wings, lifting his body clear of the rubble. As he did so, the boy threw off the fat man’s skin and began staggering away. The dragon spoke to him, not in words but in the form of a thought-bomb that hit the boy with such force that it lifted him clear off the ground.
RUN.
The boy landed. His ankles held, and he ran.
The dragon turned in the air, his tail shearing the roof off the Tropical Pavilion. A thousand exquisitely coloured butterflies rose, withered and tore in the poisonous breeze. Through the smoke, he saw Brad and Angelina making a dash across their lake for the safety of their cave.
He blew them a kiss and watched them boil.
He beat his wings, flying higher, through the roof of his own desolation until he saw the sky and sun once again, the peaks and the lowlands dropping away towards the coast. In the distance, the skyline of a city, its windows glinting in the fire.
Blue lights on the fringes of the smoke. Sirens gaining in volume.
Thirty-five miles away, an offshore wind farm winked its impotent fins.
He soared beyond the tips of the mountains, gathering speed. Looking back, he saw the wind ripping holes in the smoke, the boy running as bidden across the grassy picnic area towards the exit, dodging the dead and the dying.
The dragon jack-knifed in mid-air, boomeranged back on himself and began to dive, eyes fixed on his quarry. Millennia of experience told him the boy had a one in seven chance of surviving his attack. Good odds. And if he should indeed survive, the rewards of his fear – this acute, extreme and nourishing fear – would be incalculable.
The dragon smiled, and let gravity take him.
(c) Jim Cogan, 2015
As a freelance copywriter and corporate filmmaker, Jim Cogan grapples on a daily basis with the big themes: global skincare trends, potato cultivation in Essex, mailroom technology and risk mitigation policy in local government. He is also the go-to guy for making asset management software sound sexy.
Gloria Sanders's work includes audio-book narration for the RNIB and frequent collaborations with Cabinets of Curiosity. She has performed her devised one-woman show with Hide and Seek Theatre, The Clock, at the Brighton Fringe, the Pleasance, Islington, and the Artscene Festival in Ghent. She is fluent in Spanish.
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