Dragon Sleeping (The Dragon Circle Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  DRAGON SLEEPING

  Book 1 of The Dragon Circle Trilogy

  By Craig Shaw Gardner

  A Mystique Press Production

  Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2015 Craig Shaw Gardner

  Copy-edited by: Tony Masia

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Craig Shaw Gardner is the author of more than thirty novels and fifty-odd short stories (some of them very odd.) His novelization of BATMAN was a New York Times bestseller, and he’s a past president of the Horror Writers Association. He’s written reviews and articles for numerous periodicals, ranging from THE WASHINGTON POST to RAMPAGE WRESTLING, and (far more importantly) he serves as the perennial co-host (with Eric Van) of the “Kirk Polland Memorial Bad Prose Competition” every July at Readercon. He lives just north of the Center of the Universe (a.k.a. Cambridge, MA) with his wife and their two cats, George and Gracie.

  Other Books by Craig Shaw Gardner

  The Ebenezum Books

  A Malady of Magicks

  A Multitude of Monsters

  A Night in the Netherhells

  A Difficulty with Dwarves

  An Excess of Enchantments

  A Disagreement with Death

  The Cineverse Cycle

  Slaves of the Volcano

  God Bride of the Slime Monster

  Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies

  The Further Arabian Nights

  The Other Sinbad

  A Bad Day for Ali Baba

  Scheherazade’s Night Out (The Last Arabian Night)

  The Dragon Circle

  Dragon Sleeping (aka Raven Walking)

  Dragon Waking

  Dragon Burning

  The Changeling War (as by Peter Garrison)

  The Changeling War

  The Sorcerer’s Gun

  The Magic Dead

  Temporary Magic

  Temporary Monsters (October 2013)

  Collections

  A Purple Book of Peculiar Stories

  A Cold Wind in July

  Other Books

  The Lost Boys

  Wishbringer

  Batman

  Back to the Future Part II

  Back to the Future Part III

  The Batman Murders

  Batman Returns

  The 7th Guest (with Matthew J. Costello)

  Spider-Man: Wanted Dead or Alive

  Leprechauns

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Return to Chaos

  Angel: Dark Mirror

  Dark Whispers (as by Chris Blaine)

  Battlestar Galactica: The Cylon’s Secret

  Craig Shaw Gardner’s Website

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  This one’s for Kelly

  DRAGON SLEEPING

  Prologue

  Deep beneath it all, the dragon slept.

  Its jet scales had not seen the sun in so many years that people discounted stories of the creature. Old wives’ tales, they’d say. Ancient myths. But others could feel the dragon’s breath rumbling in their hearts. When they felt the earth move beneath their feet, they knew it was the dragon shifting in its slumber, and when the ground spouted fire, they knew the dragon was near to taking flight.

  Still the dragon slept, within its home underground. The only light within that great cavern came when its eyes would flicker open, now and then, twin coals in the darkness that seemed to ask, “Is it time?”

  The eyes opened more often now. The time would be soon. The dragon would arise again, as it had six times past, to destroy all before it.

  And, as with every instance that the dragon slept, it grew, so it was always greater than the time before. Someday, on awaking, it would encompass all that is, and all that was, and all that might have been.

  Its wings would darken the sky. Its talons would brush aside their weapons and crush their buildings. Most certainly, it would drink their blood. But the dragon would not be truly nourished until it fed on their souls.

  The dragon slept, and the dragon dreamed. And in the dragon’s dream, where there once were earth and trees and homes and lives, there was nothing but fire.

  The dragon slept.

  But it would not sleep forever.

  PART ONE

  A Short Visit to the Islands

  One

  1967

  The lights had gone out. The needle on the record had stopped dead, before the Turtles could even claim they were “Happy Together.” Even the TV in the family room, his mother’s constant companion, was silent. It was the first waking moment since Nick could remember that wasn’t accompanied by the soft drone of news or comedies or quiz shows.

  But it was more than just the power. When Nick Blake looked out the window, he saw that the storm had changed everything.

  Not that it had been an ordinary storm. “A sudden summer hurricane,” the TV weatherman had called it, before the whole street had lost electricity. Eight hours of torrential rain and fantastic wind, and then it was over as quickly as it had begun, the last of the wind blowing the storm clouds out of the sky by the fading light of evening. He could see the first glimmering of stars overhead between leftover bits of puffy grey, and a band of brilliant crimson on the western horizon: a band so bright that it looked to Nick like the edge of the world was on fire.

  As to the street itself, the storm had left things rearranged. The rain had washed everything clean, leaving the houses almost glowing in the last light of dusk. Most of the damage seemed to have come from the wind. A couple of the trees had lost big branches, one right across Chestnut Circle up where it joined Oak Street, as if the storm had declared their particular cul-de-sac off limits. An old oak was leaning at a crazy angle against the top of the Smith house, its roots and a substantial piece of attached ground exposed at the edge of the street, obliterating that part of the sidewalk and gutter where the gale had tossed them aside.

  Tossed aside—like a giant pulling up a toothpick, Nick thought. A giant who came in the night, crying a hurricane’s wo
rth of tears and rearranging the neighborhood with a single scuff of one huge shoe.

  It was fantasies like that that made his father yell. “What are you going to do with your life?”

  Nick never had an answer; at least no answer that didn’t come from his dreams. And his father didn’t like to hear that kind of answer.

  “Nick! For Christ’s sake! You’ve got no plans for the real world.”

  He never replied. He couldn’t even find his own voice when his father lectured him like that; his father looming larger and larger before him and Nick shrinking until he was hardly there at all.

  “Your mother and I won’t be here forever. Why do I even bother talking to you? Are you ever going to amount to anything?”

  It was at times like that that Nick wished his father would just leave. And three years ago, his father did exactly that.

  He had divorced Nick’s mother a year later, and gone off to face the real world all by himself, leaving Nick and his mother and the house on Chestnut Circle behind.

  Sometimes Nick wondered if he’d driven his father away. His mother insisted it was something between her and his dad, that Nick had nothing to do with it. Nick supposed that made sense; he’d seen the same thing happen to the parents of other kids at school. But no matter how much sense it made, it didn’t make the voice in the back of his head shut up; the voice that said Nick hadn’t been good enough; hadn’t lived up to expectations.

  “You’ve let the team down.”

  That was the sort of thing his father would say.

  But his father, Nick thought, belonged to the time before the storm.

  The time before the storm. It might have been another of Nick’s flights of fancy, but somehow the words felt right. Looking over the five houses that made up Chestnut Circle, he could almost imagine them as part of some little village, miles away from the rest of the world.

  Nick stared past the dark houses to the even darker fields beyond: the surrounding farmland that hadn’t yet become part of the subdivision. The trees out there appeared awfully close in the evening light, their silhouettes even darker than those of the houses before them.

  The electricity seemed to be gone for miles. Nick couldn’t see another man-made light anywhere. But the brightness of the sky made up for any lack below. Instead of the usual dozen or so stars that might make their way past the streetlight glare, tonight Nick could see thousands of them, so that the darkness was almost overcome by these countless points of light, the stars clustered together like a great mass of wildflowers on the field of night.

  Nick had spent his last seven years on this street, ever since his parents had moved the family here, right after his tenth birthday. Never before had he heard this total quiet, seen this complete stillness. It was different after the storm. The rain-washed streets, the still houses, the incredible night sky, all made him feel that the world outside was something brand-new. And more than new. It seemed almost as if the whole street was waiting for something.

  The phone rang.

  Nick almost jumped out of his sneakers. Somehow their phone lines had survived the high winds.

  The phone rang again. Where was his mother?

  He ran from his bedroom and bounded down the stairs in the semi dark, guided by the sound of the still-ringing phone. He reached the front hallway and grabbed the receiver midway through the sixth ring.

  “Hello?”

  There didn’t seem to be anyone on the other end of the line. No one human anyway. All Nick could hear was a distant whistling, and a rustling like leaves disturbed by a breeze. Nick said hello a second time, but there was no change on the line. He reached across to the base of the phone and pressed down the cut-off switch, then lifted his finger again. The rustling was gone. He had cut the connection. But there was no dial tone in its place. The phone was dead.

  Nick replaced the receiver. Strange that the phone should ring like that, maybe it had something to do with the lines going down. He wished he knew more about the way phones worked. Nick thought again of the street, and how it seemed to be waiting. He felt as if he had just gotten a phone call from the wind.

  He heard another, distant sound in the evening quiet. It was bells again, but a different sort of bells than the phone this time, higher and fainter yet somehow more distinct, each bell tone separate from the next. It took him a moment to realize the bells were coming from outside the house, out on Chestnut Circle.

  A dog barked. It sounded like Charlie.

  “Nick?” It was his mother’s voice. “Where are you, honey?” He heard the kitchen door slam.

  “Here I am, Mom. I came down to answer the phone.”

  “The phone?” his mother called back in disbelief. He sensed more than saw her walking through the darkened kitchen toward the front hall.

  He quickly explained how there hadn’t been anyone on the line. He repeated his theory about there being some type of electrical disturbance.

  “Can that sort of thing happen?” his mother asked uncertainly. Even in the now-almost-dark, her short, stocky form was reassuring.

  She explained that she had gone over to commiserate with Mrs. Smith on the new placement of their oak tree. Mrs. Smith had been over there all by herself when the oak had smashed into their attic. Mr. Smith had been trapped in the city by the suddenness of the storm. Nick’s mother imagined that a lot of people had been trapped by the storm in one way or another.

  She went on to explain in some detail what the tree had done to the Smiths’ back bedroom. His mother always liked details.

  The ringing outside had grown so soft for a moment that Nick had almost forgotten about it. Now it was back, suddenly sounding much closer, a delicately high-pitched jingling noise, too strident to be wind chimes, like a happy but very definite call to attention.

  “What on earth?” his mother murmured as she stepped past him to look out the front door. “Oh, my God. I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

  Nick turned around as his mother opened the front door. She pushed open the screen door and walked out onto the front steps.

  “Mom?” Nick called out to her.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. She kept on walking, down the steps and across the front walk. He pushed the screen door aside and followed her outside.

  The last tinge of pink had left the sky. There was still no moon, but those stars were everywhere. The houses around them were nothing more than dark silhouettes against the brilliant sparkling white of the night sky. Nick looked down to his mother and saw a bright light beyond her on the street. It took him a second to make sense of that brilliant white box moving out there, like the time it takes your eyes to adjust from the shade to bright sunlight.

  It was some kind of ice cream truck. No, not a truck; more like a wagon on the back of a three-wheeled bicycle. No, that would be tricycle, wouldn’t it? It was pedaled by a stocky, bald man with a mustache so shaggy that it looked like he was trying to make up for the lack of hair on the top of his head. He was dressed all in white, not just shirt and pants, but coat and tie as well. His mother had said she hadn’t seen one of these things in years. Nick hadn’t seen one of these things ever.

  As he walked down the steps after his mother, Nick was aware of other voices around him. He looked to see half a dozen adults and four other kids. The bells on this whatever-it-was had brought out the entire street.

  The bald fellow in white used the handlebar brakes to come to a halt directly in front of Nick’s house. The white box on the back of the bike sported large red and blue letters that announced:

  MR. SERENDIPITY:

  PURVEYOR OF TASTY TREATS AND SMOOTH SURPRISES

  The bald man swung his leg over the seat and smiled at the gathered neighborhood. “And what exactly can I get for you?”

  Everyone started to talk at once.

  “Where’d you come from?” Mr. Mills asked. You could tell he was the high school vice-principal. He always wanted to know everybody’s business.

  “W
ell,” Mr. Serendipity replied. “I was hoping we’d all get introduced a bit more gradually.”

  “You got any ice cream sandwiches?” Mary Lou Dafoe asked. God, but she looked gorgeous in the starlight. Her long, dark hair framed her oval face, casting shadows that made her look older than her sixteen years; older and more mysterious, too. Nick sometimes wished the two of them didn’t know each other so well. It was tough to ask out a girl who thought of you like a brother.

  Todd Jackson sidled up to her. The starlight didn’t make him look any different at all. He was still an overgrown, overmuscled lout.

  “Hey, Mary Lou,” he said in a voice just too loud for a whisper, “why don’t you come over to my place? I’ve got tasty treats to spare.” He leered in his usual offensive way, in case somebody thought he might actually be talking about ice cream.

  God, Nick thought, how could Todd believe anybody would fall for that? But then, Todd was Mr. Attitude. Around school, he’d break your arm if you smiled at him the wrong way. He was big enough to be a football player, too, although for some reason he never tried out for the team. Back on Chestnut Circle, without his goons at his side, he stopped being a bully and started being just a jerk. Did he expect the adults to stand around quietly while he made a crude pass at Mary Lou?

  But the adults seemed too preoccupied by the ice cream truck to pay any attention to Todd.

  “Do you have Nutty Buddies?” old Mr. Furlong asked, his bald head gleaming underneath the stars. His wife hung behind him, probably waiting for her husband to say the wrong thing. There was one thing the Furlongs knew how to do, and that was fight. Some nights their arguments were so loud that the entire street could hear them.

  “How about Super Sundaes?” Mrs. Smith asked. She huddled under a white cardigan that she had thrown over her shoulders, despite the warmth of the evening. She was the oldest woman on Chestnut Circle—somewhere in her sixties. Nick’s mother always referred to Mrs. Smith as “painfully thin.” Somehow her tall, skinny form made Mrs. Smith look even older.