The Schoolboy's Dragon

By Dig

The last two adult dragons on the planet live in seclusion as they wait for their only child to grow mature enough and strong enough to ride the solar winds out of this galaxy but for the young dragon it is a lonely existence. With none of his own kind to play with he can only look on longingly at the village children as they play in the fields below his refuge until one day fate takes a hand.
Companionship comes in the form of five scruffy schoolboys. Blessed with the combined intellect of a dead ant and as much sense of responsibility as a cloud the five boys take the young dragon on a hilarious series of misadventures as the six friends become inseparable.
When danger threatens it is the boys who mobilise to defend their new found friend and his parents and when forces of evil beyond their comprehension strike at their idyllic new life it is the boys, armed with nothing more than a sense of humour and a total belief in themselves and a few, new, magical acquaintances, which rise to the task of opposing the growing nightmare.
Would you walk into hell for a friend?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dig
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311897640

Dig

Dig was born in Trollheim in 1873, the unfortunate result of the unrequited love between a short sighted troll and a large boulder. After many years as an ‘uninspiring student’, during which many teachers mistook him for a fungal infection of the radiators he eventually left school in 1936. (If you ever find yourself described as an uninspiring student, please do not take it to heart. Einstein was described in the same manner by his university tutor and never forget William Shakespeare had appalling hand writing and its worth remembering that the majority of left handed Japanese jellyfish are blind. But I digress.)Following a lamentable season playing for Pressed-on-Bothends Football Club during which he demonstrated a truly breath-taking inability to control the ball linked to a match winning skill for falling on opposing players, he returned to education.He obtained a First Class Law Degree with Honours by the time honoured expedient of prevaricating over the answer to any question for so long that the examiner expired of old age (the so called Bleak House technique)and was consequently awarded a degree by default.Following the execution of his first client for riding a bicycle without a red light clearly displayed at the back, Dig decided that possibly Law was not his forte and has since made his living by begging in the street or hiring himself out as a garden ornament.He has three children, Pauliepolipulus, a successful banker and part time semi-conductor, Toe, an aspiring tourist attraction of no fixed abode, and his daughter Erin Lucy Binbag the first, and up to now, the only green skinned model to appear on the cover of vogue.His late wife, Odour Niff, passed away as the result of an ill-advised drunken brawl with a steam roller and her remains were scattered over the A1/M1 London to Newcastle road as chippings. He visits her frequently, usually when driving to Sunderland on business.Following the runaway success of The Schoolboys Dragon, which outsold such literary classic as “What’s on the top shelf? – A gnomes guide to supermarket shopping’, ‘I survived the Titanic – The thrill a minute memoirs of a rubber duck’ and ‘Karachi – Self-defence for the dyslexic’ Dig’s life has taken on totally new directions.It has been argued, that in part, the success of The Schoolboys Dragon was due to Dig having a larger circle of friends and family than the other authors which taken in conjunction with a world-wide shortage of toilet paper resulted in unexpectedly high sales but many leading academics have derided this claim as merely the ramblings of his competitors following their failure to take their medication. The vicious rumour that his mother bought a dozen copies of The Schoolboys Dragon should be treated with the contempt it deserves, not only can this fine woman not read but she can only count up to the number of toes she has on both feet (seven).Dig has now moved from under the foot bridge in a small municipal North Wales park where he was previously living to under a large luxury motorway bridge over the River Mersey. Although a far more spacious and up market address the move has not been without its own logistical problems. The volume of goats travelling over motorway bridges of their own volition is exceedingly small and Dig’s recent attempt to ensnare a goat whilst it was driving a four ton lorry left him hospitalised.Following his discharge from hospital Dig has become a regular sight on our televisions screens, he is in much demand as a character actor for such demanding parts as the bacteria in toilet cleanser advertisements or the irritating growths in weed killer advertisements. His heart wrenching portrayal of an infection of the gums in a recent dental appliance advertisement had him nominated for an Oscar.He continues to write and it is expected that he will do so for some time unless we can find someone to stop him.

Book preview

Prologue

In the beginning there were the dragons. Forget the Big Bang, that implies there was something to bang and there was nothing. Dark, silent, empty nothingness stretching nowhere because there was nowhere to stretch too, just nothing.

From an infinitely small speck in the middle of nowhere out of nothing poured everything.

And the first sound? Not a bang, not a hiss, not a thousand massed trumpets to herald the birth of creation not even a little hello whispered to the cosmos.

In the instance that the universe burst into existence and the matter that formed the building blocks of everything we know and understand rushed to fill the void there came their laughter.

Wild and unrestrained laughter as they tumbled into reality like children spilling into the school yard at the end of a far too long and boring day of study. The dragons are as much a part of the original plan as oxygen and hydrogen. The guardians.

If you look into a dragon’s eye, and very few have, you will not see an iris and pupil like every other eye you have ever looked into. What you will see is a map of the cosmos, every star and planet in its place, not the way they are today but the way they will be when creation is complete. In a dragons eye you will see the final plan of the universe. When they tumbled into creation the dragons and only the dragons had the final plan inlaid into their eyes.

Their wings spread wide they looped and dived, twirled in the solar winds that gushed from that pinprick of nothingness into that endless ocean of creation.

Whatever you think you know about dragons let me relate a few facts that I'm certain you don’t know. Dragons don’t breathe, they may look like they do but if they breathed they couldn’t bellow fire as they do, they couldn’t roam the cosmos will its endless variety of gases or even total absence of gases. The guardians of creation have no need of breath.

Neither do they speak or listen. In a universe with more languages than there are excuses for not going to bed on time speaking is not an advantage. Dragons perceive what you want to say and what you take to be them talking is just their thoughts being transferred straight into your brain. It avoids a lot of misunderstanding. Mind you misunderstanding can be fun.

Before there was mankind, before there was planets and stars, before there was any form of recognisable direction in creation there was chaos and laughter. I don’t know if that means anything but I hope it does.

Chapter 1

Saturday and no school, thick snow smothering the countryside like custard on Christmas pud, if you lived in a little village, lost in the rolling hills, far from the distractions of city and suburbia, if you were young even and dumb enough, there was only one place to be. On the slopes of the snow covered hills. Cold, damp and ousing excitement and fun out of every visible pour of their bright pink flesh.

Snow balls arching through the blue sky like an invasion of flying fish as they headed towards their targets. The expectant boys leaping from side to side dodging the flying mass of frozen snow as they returned fire at their laughing and howling friends. The more adventurous boys diving headlong sideways as they launched their sodden missiles at their targets only to land in the thick snow throwing up clouds of fine snowflakes and rising covered in more snow than a firing squad of snow ballers could have showered them within an hour. Howling with laughter they rise to continue this war of fun.

The smaller, less athletic, boys exchanged highly inaccurate snow balls with the girls who giggled loudly at their prowess at managing to throw the snow ball and then stood rigid with shock and remorse on those rare occasions that they hit anybody, whether they aimed at them or not.

Occasionally a lovelorn lothario would deliver the world’s worst chat up line slap into the back of the head of his would be Juliet and look on mortified as she shuffled off down the hill with melting snow slowly drifting down her back and a face like thunder.

Sledges, wooden and plastic, dustbin lids and the occasional surf board filched from an unaware older brother raced down the hill side, swerving left and right, toppling over and frequently stopping abruptly against a tree or more entertainingly against a hidden rock in which case the daredevil rider would continue airborne and helpless until he fell headlong into the snow accompanied by the triumphant cheers and jeers of all the on lookers.

Eyes as bright as Christmas tree baubles flashed everywhere as they tried to take in the excitement of unrestrained freedom and chaos. Kids rule yeah!

Somewhere higher up the hill where nobody played and nobody ever visited there were two pair of eyes that did not flash with excitement. A young boy gazed longingly at children he couldn’t play with whilst a loving mother felt the pain of her son's loneliness. She remembered how she'd played with her friends whilst a young girl and the joy it had brought to her young heart but those days were long ago and far away. Her son had no friends around. They were the last of their kind, all the others had moved on. When her son matured they would move on too but at the moment he was still too small to undertake such a journey. This planet had no need of dragons anymore and as much fun as it had been new worlds were calling her and her husband and son.

Rozella Starfire was beautiful by any body’s standards, 30 foot long from snout to the tip of her tail, one of the rare white dragons, slim and so agile in flight that the eagles looked on in awe. The Starfire clan were famed across creation for their aerobatic prowess and Rozella out shone them all. When she met her husband Stomfast he was not long back from the Troll wars where his clan the Arno's had driven all the trolls out of the north lands and back into that dimension where such foul and loveless creatures belong. Stomfast Arno, 35 feet of pure power, hero, a brown bull of a dragon, loved, feared and struck dumb by the mere sight of Rozella.

Unfortunately his inability to speak did not last nearly long enough for there was nothing Stomfast loved more than to tell a good tale. Rozella quickly realised that the truth was not as important as the effect of the story on his audience. It was not that Stomfast was a liar just that he loved to entertain and his embellishments were not the vain glory of a braggart but rather the hooks and punch lines of a skilled comedian. Before she knew it Rozella had giggled herself into love with the reprobate and Stomfast was the happiest and most talkative dragon on the planet.

And so Rozella and Stomfast became one and after years of travels and adventure and much fun the one became three with the birth of their son Pongo.

Now if you’re wondering why they had such fine names and christened their son Pongo it’s because that’s the dragon way. A young dragon or a draglet is not just much smaller than its parents it is in many ways a beast of a different colour. A much shorter tail, smaller wings that are unable to sustain long flight and tend to be used more for gliding, no fire breathing, a tendency to stand on its back legs instead of all four and the dragon equivalent of puppy fat.

As they reach maturity first comes the fire breathing and then the body and wings grow very rapidly and the puppy fat disappears and the dragon takes on the shape of one of its parents. So at some point Pongo would become a Starfire or an Arno, and then his parents would choose a first name, a name descriptive of his character.

Like all young children a major force in shaping a draglets character and developing his skills, social and hunting, has to be his playmates. Here Pongo was robbed. As the humans became more and more sophisticated the planets need for the dragons diminished and slowly but surely they began to leave. Searching for new planets where their skills were needed.

If there were any other dragons left on our planet then Pongo had never seen them. Pongo had never had a playmate to call his own and now he watched from his vantage place as the human children below him screamed and laughed as they enjoyed the pandemonium of play that he was forever denied.

And Rozella watched him watching as her heart broke for him.

Pongo loved to watch the children play and dream that he was one of them running and hiding and jumping and sliding and laughing. Oh how he wanted to laugh.

Amongst the children he had one favourite. A boy who never walked if he could run, who laughed louder that all the rest, who was the centre of all the games, of all the trouble. A boy who seemed to always be the first with new ideas, no matter how crazy. Billy. Billy new no danger, he knew no fear. His teacher would tell you it was amazing how much Billy didn’t know.

Today Billy was sledging down the hill on an old wooden sledge that had been in the family longer than Billy. Down he raced screaming, shouting then up the hill he'd run to let his younger brother David try the slope. Then their friends Steve and Sid and Isaac. Billy would crowd two or three of them on to the sledge and race down again usually losing at least one of his companions into the fine snow.

Pongo watched in amazement as Billy lay down on his stomach on the sledge and then Steve lay on his back and then Sid lay on top of Steve's back and the David lay on top of Sid's back and finally little Isaac climbed on top. Billy shuffled his feet and arms in a vain attempt to start the sledge on its way only for Isaac and Sid to fall off into the snow. Back on top they scrambled and clamping themselves on to the body below them they joined Billy in his shouts to the children around them to launch them down the slope.

With the assistance of a small horde of children all pushing a different foot the five boys began to slide slowly down the hill midst wild cheering the tobogganing sandwich of five boys picked up speed. About a third of the way down the hill Isaac and Sid tumbled from the sledge disappearing in a cloud of white snow. Soon after David slipped from the back of the sledge burying his face in the cold mist of the snow. Billy and David ploughed on racing faster and faster until just as they neared the bottom the sledge swerved violently to the right and Billy and David were thrown off rolling through the snow screaming with pleasure as they went.

Pongo shared their pleasure from his distant vantage place but longed in his heart to be a part of it close up.

At the top of the hill ‘the boys’ had a summit meeting and despite Billy's objections it was decided that the smaller boys were now too damp and cold to play any longer and home and a roaring fire were calling.

The path leading down from the hill was a narrow root lined track through a heavily wooded area. On the left hand side the hill dropped away steeply, almost a precipice, down to the river.

I'm going to sledge down the path, said Billy and launched himself on to the sledge and away down the path.

Don’t be stupid, shouted David. It’s too steep!

But it was too late now. Billy having launched himself stomach first on to the sledge was picking up more and more speed and his attempts to dig the toes of his shoes into the ground were becoming more and more futile. The roots bruised his ankles and threw the sledge violently from one direction to another. Suddenly Billy realised he was no longer in control of the sledge and it was going too fast to roll off onto the roots and stones. The sledge followed the path around the corner and out of sight of Billy's rapidly pursuing friends and then catching its runner against a tree root took flight out into mid-air. Billy slammed his eyes shut and clung to the sledge. ‘I hope I die,’ he thought. ‘If I get my pants ripped my Mam will kill me. I'd rather be dead that have my Mam kill me. Any second now I'll hit a tree or crash into the river’.

Billy held his breath and held his breath and held his breath, his eyes shut tight. For a split second he opened his right eye only and glimpsed the rivuleted bark of a large pine rushing towards him. He slammed his eye shut again and felt a small branch or twig scratch his right cheek. The seconds before his terrible crash seemed to take an eternity, time dragged on and on. Eventually Billy got bored with waiting to die and opened his eyes. He found himself still lay upon his sledge but his sledge was lay in the thick snow at the bottom of the precipice pointing in towards the bank with his feet towards the river.

He looked up amazed at his flight; he must have missed all the trees and then circled back across the river to land on the same side he started from. Amazing! He looked again. Amazing! Impossible. He slid slowly off the back of the sledge onto his knees and stood up. His eyes scanned the hillside again and then the river and then the hillside again. He could hear ‘the boys’ crashing down the hillside on their way to find their stricken friend.

Billy! Billy! Billy! was ringing through the woods as he looked down at the sledge for the first time. On either side of the sledge pointing forward in the same direction as the sledge deeply imprinted in the snow were two foot prints. No footprints leading to them or away from them. Just two foot prints. Foot prints of two large webbed feet like a very large duck.

Chapter 2

That night Billy didn't sleep well. Instead of his deep slumber with dreams of his light sabre striking down the evil emperor or his right foot launching a cannon like shot past the Spanish goalkeeper in the last second to win the world cup for England or his personal favourite where he drags the stool into the middle of the boxing ring and punches David Haye square on his chin and watches as the champion crumbles to the floor and sleeps through the count. Billy Pearson, Champion of the world!

That night Billy slept fitfully, the few occasions he did sleep his dreams were full of large duck feet, very large duck feet in deep snow all around his sleeping body. Once he dreamed he was flying through the night sky which was fun until he realised he had large duck feet and large duck wings and a very large duck beak. He woke suddenly thinking to himself 'please don’t make me eat worms'.

When he was awake his mind turned over again and again and again how he left the path and the certain fall that came with it, the certain pain and injury that had to come from such a stupid stunt. He shivered at the thought of how close to death or serious injury he had come. Mostly he thought about how the sledge could have landed where it did without hitting a tree or landing in the river. How could it have landed so gently that he didn’t even know he was down? Above all he thought about those large duck like footprints in the snow.

Not long after the sun rose, so did Billy.

Have you poo'd the bed son? his father asked.

Billy ignored his Dad's whimsical enquiry.

Do you not feel well Darling? enquired his mother, concern etched on her face.

No Mam I’m fine, I just want to get out and play

Rubbish! exclaimed his father excitedly. Nothing gets you out of bed on a weekend before lunchtime. As your Gran says, you don’t go out until the streets are well aired. You've poo'ed the bed haven’t you?

Billy smiled at his grinning father and then stuck out his tongue.

Oooooh you’re not going to put that back in your mouth are you? laughed his dad.

Well if you are going out you need to wrap up well and you'll need a good warming breakfast inside you

A few minutes later Billy was digging into a steaming bowl of porridge, digging being the operative word. He went through it like a JCB through mud. Then looking at his empty bowl he thought, 'I could be out for a while I'd better fill up’.

Can I have some more please Mum? he asked.

Mum filled his bowl again and once again he fell upon the hot porridge like a plague of locusts on a field of wheat.

As his well wrapped and muffled body stepped out into the empty Sunday morning street, his mother turned to his father and with concern in her voice said, Dad, I'm worried. Billy's not well.

Not well! grinned his father. There's not much wrong with a boy who can eat that much porridge.

That's what I mean, said his mother. He hates porridge!

Out in the street Billy trudged through the empty village. The good kids and the goody goody kids were in church or getting ready for church and the rest were snuggled up in bed snoring like demented walrus's. Except for Roger Bateman who had been gifted with the ability to snore and fart at the same time. If it had been possible to put a pin through the top of his hips without hurting him you could have attached him to a wall and he would be a human Catherine wheel. Snore, fart, snore, fart, whiz, whiz, whiz.

Up in her pink bedroom, Della Gyeskie snuggled under her pink bedspread and clutched her favourite photograph in its pink photo frame to her heart. Every now and then she would pull the photograph away from her fluttering heart and gaze lovingly at the rather bland picture of her class mates. Her eyes fixed on her hearts delight, her hero, the rather grubby, scruffy urchin pulling a strange face in the back line. Then with a sound approximating that of a plumbers plunger clearing a blocked drain her pink lips kissed Billy's unsuspecting features.

There could be little doubt that had Billy been aware of this touching display of romantic devotion he would have been noisily and violently sick but at this moment in time Billy was trudging up the gentle incline of the road out of the village. Past the last few houses and past the little school where Mr Spellman their teacher kept them gloriously entertained as he tried in vain to instil some semnants of knowledge into their already overcrowded brains. His beady eyes always seemed full of humour and gentleness even though they were magnified a thousand times by the thickness of Mr Spellman's glasses .Billy laughed to himself as he thought about Mr Spell man’s glasses, they looked like the bottom of drinking tumblers, like some unscrupulous optician had cut them from some old broken tumblers and duped the wise but naive Mr Spellman into buying them at some exorbitant price.

Billy thought for a moment if Mr Spellman took off his glasses would his eyes be really really small like say a mole. Billy giggled to himself, Mr Spellman, the mole. Super Mole, flying around the classroom!

Billy suddenly realised he was he was passing over the steep little hump back bridge that crossed the river. He looked down at the clear bubbling water as it danced around the snow crowned stones dotted in the flow. The odd small fish could be seen darting hither and thither, further up the river where the water was wider and deeper there was some much larger fish but Billy had never seen the point of sitting by a river all day with a fishing rod waiting for some incredibly stupid fish to impale itself on your hook. Then the fishermen proved themselves even more stupid than the fish by unhooking the fish and putting it back in the water. Having spent all day trying to catch it they let it go. Boy is that dumb.

Billy thought his way of fishing was much more fun. Wait until you see a big fish then jump into the river and chase it around and around. You never caught it but it was fun even if you fell over and you always did fall over but that was a sport for warmer days. Any way it made more sense than sitting there all day like a scarecrow and then having bored the fish into surrendering throw it back in.

Billy turned right off the road onto the little track that doubled back on itself along the side of the river as the river began to meander its way through the valley and away from the village. He walked up to the old grey youth hostel, now closed until spring when all the ruddy faced lunatics would return to wander the hills in colourful tank tops and shorts and boots with foul smelling pipes and hairy muscular legs, and the men were even worse.

Past the youth hostel he walked across the field past the river and the bemused cows until he entered the wood and began the steep ascent up Friar Tuck Hill. The path stretched up through the wood a sheer wall on one side going up to the tops of the peaks and as he progressed up a sheer wall dropping down to the river. A sheer wall densely populated with trees. Trees old and young.

As he reached the turn in the path where he'd gone from sleigher to astronaut he looked again the trees. He was right there was no way even with his luck that he could have missed all those trees. Al right where he left the path he could have travelled a reasonable distance without hitting anything but lower down it was impossible.

Then there was the fall, at some point the sledge would have dived nose first into the ground or more to the point Billy’s head first into the ground but it didn’t. It landed gently on its runners pointing in the wrong direction.

Perhaps it was a modern day magic carpet, a magic flying sledge, 'Oh I wish' thought Billy but no that was silly. And of course there were the foot prints.

Billy continued up to the top of the hill where the path levelled out and the trees thinned down until the slopes were clear of obstructions and they ran down towards the river in a long gentle incline that whispered to you ‘There is a God and he wants you to toboggan’.

Billy stood for a long time surveying the scene, first the slopes in front of him and then the path down through the wood. He stood and wondered and gazed and wondered some more. The little hamster in his head that made his brain work was running at full speed on it little tread mill. He looked at the slope and the path and back at the slope. The hamster ran faster and faster, it gasped and sweated. Billy looked at the path and the slope. Then he turned and looked behind him. Up towards the top of Friar Tuck Hill. The hamster thought 'sod this' and grabbed its little bicycle and began to peddle through the tread mill like a wheel of death rider. Billy looked at the path through the woods down which he'd so foolishly sledged and then back to the top of Friar Tuck Hill.

The hamster strapped his crash helmet securely on its little head and kick started its motor bike. Billy's gaze was now fixed on the top of Friar Tuck Hill, the thick rhododendron hedge that surrounded its lower section interspersed with the occasional birch or oak tree and above it the outcrops of rock and the grassy slopes. Billy thought, 'I've never played up there, nobody I know has ever played up there’ He looked again at how the out crops of rock over looked the whole area. The hamster, now wearing a white suit and expensive French aftershave and a grin that was actually bigger than his own face, slipped the Ferrari into 5th gear.

Billy suddenly knew what he had to do next.

Bugger, said the hamster, suddenly bereft of his playboy life style and once again lolling in his wood shavings.

Billy approached the Rhododendron and tried to look through. It was thick and impenetrable. He walked along it, feeling testing looking for an entrance. Looking for a weak point where a way in could be forced. Round and round he walked but the hedge was solid at all points along its length and it was a long length.

After about an hour Billy sat down on a rock looking at the hedge staring intently at its construction. The hamster smiled as he slipped his soft leather driving gloves on to his little hands. Suddenly Billy saw it.

Bugger, bugger, bugger! shouted the hamster, kicking his water bowl so hard he sent water splashing everywhere and severely bruised his toes.

Billy ran to a big oak tree that formed part of the hedge and began to climb it. It wasn't easy because of the thick rhododendrons but years of manly pursuits as he put it and harum scarum hair brained ideas as his mother put it, and given his skills in this field he eventually managed the sixteen to twenty feet that allowed him to rise above the hedge.

He looked into the enclave and nothing was to be seen out of the ordinary. Thick snow lay undisturbed beneath him, no signs of any activity here. Billy scuttled around the tree and descended down the other side. This was easier than the climb as gravity is a godsend. When he got low enough to be sure he would not feel too much pain Billy jumped out of the branches into the thick snow.

Billy was surprised by how much land was in there hidden from view. Maybe this was his own private oasis or maybe not. He couldn’t help but feel there was more to this secluded spot, this hidden garden, than just a thick hedge.

Above him was the outcrop that had so intrigued him but to access it he would have to walk either left or right and approach it from the gentler snowy slopes. Eenie, meanie, minie, left and off he goes struggling through the deep snow. Around the base of the rock face he trudges and then he begins the slippery struggle up the slopes. On hands and knees he eventually manages to