The Extincts Page 7

  “Good catch!” approved Lo. “You don’t see many ichthyosaurs around. Not for the last ninety million years or so.”

  I turned my head the other way. Donald and Jemima were happily ripping bits of cow apart.

  “Ducks,” I said bitterly. “Ducks, you said.”

  Lo grinned. “Bullockornis. Demon Ducks of Doom. Fifteen million years out of date, but they don’t care! After you’d gone, Mrs. L. remembered she’d left two buckets out—the one you took was for the pig. We thought you might be having a spot of bother. They’re not very keen on bread. Wrong sort of duck.”

  My legs felt like jelly. When I stood up, I found I was limping. Jemima’s attack on my boot had bruised my ankle. One good thing about thinking you’re about to die: you don’t care about little things like a sore foot.

  Donald and Jemima, to my relief, had disappeared back into the trees. All that was left of their Meat Feast was a patch of bloodstained grass.

  “You’ll know next time,” said Lo, picking up crusts of bread and dropping them back into the bucket.

  “I’m not likely to forget,” I agreed. “Demon Ducks of Doom don’t eat bread.”

  * * *

  As we crossed the yard, the television blared out from the stables.

  “Grissel’s been chewing the remote again,” said Lo. “She keeps turning up the volume.”

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Lind was asleep in the rocking chair with her arm in a sling made out of a towel. The Early Mammal was eating sweet corn on her hat and the Ping Feng piglet was curled up in her lap.

  “Mandrake and lettuce juice,” said Lo, pointing at an empty glass on the table. “It knocks you right out. She won’t wake up for hours.” He looked me up and down. “You’ve got pondweed in your hair. I suppose you’d better have some dry clothes.”

  He took me upstairs to a room with splintery floorboards and a bare mattress. Rummaging in a wooden chest, he threw me a T-shirt with a flaming motorbike and the words LIVE FAST on it. When I held it up, several black feathers floated to the floor.

  “It’s ripped,” I said. It had a long tear in each shoulder.

  “Take it or leave it,” said Lo.

  “Is this your bedroom?” I asked. My bedroom’s painted blue, with Batman curtains and posters of soccer players on the walls.

  “What would I do with a bedroom?” He tossed me a pair of black jeans. “I’ll leave you to change. Come down when you’re ready.”

  There was something uncomfortable about that room, with its drifting feathers and spidery corners. The jeans were too long. I stayed just long enough to roll them up, then hurried downstairs.

  EIGHT

  THERE WAS NO sign of Lo in the kitchen. Mrs. Lind was still asleep. I didn’t want to wake her, and I wasn’t keen on being left alone with Dido, who was back on her eggs, fluffing up her feathers and clicking her beak at me, so I took my wet clothes outside to dry in the sun. If it hadn’t been for Grissel turning up the TV, I would have heard the sound of the engine sooner.

  I was draping my All-Star Zombie Smackdown T-shirt over the open door to Mortifer’s stable when the van came around the corner of the house and bumped to a stop on the cobblestones. The same black van that had been following me earlier. My skin began prickling, the way it does when you know something’s wrong but you’re not sure what.

  The passenger door opened and a man got out. The first thing I noticed about him was how tidy he was. He was wearing a lilac waistcoat and a lilac-spotted bow tie. His black hair was so neat, it looked as if it had been painted onto his head, and he had one of those pointy little beards that look better on a goat. The next thing I noticed was that one of his hands wasn’t there. Instead, he had a hook, like a pirate.

  The driver had a bit of trouble squeezing himself out of his seat. He was more of a giant baby than a man, with a bald head and rolls of fat where his neck should have been. His face was shiny with sweat, and he looked as if he might burst out of his suit at any minute.

  The neat little man stared very hard at me, then gave me a neat little smile.

  “Good afternoon, young man. We’re from the town council. We just need to take a quick look around.” His eyes were on the stables. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head. “Not really, no,” I said. “You’ll have to talk to Mrs. Lind, and you can’t because she’s asl—because you can’t.”

  “Actually, we can do what we like.” He flashed a small square of plastic at me, too quickly for me to read what was written on it.

  “We’re from DAD,” he said.

  “Whose dad?” I didn’t trust him. “Not mine. He’s in Australia.”

  “D-A-D.” Goatbeard made it sound very important. “Dangerous Animals Department. There have been reports of an unexplained large reptile. In the interests of public health and safety, it is our duty to check all outbuildings.”

  “Do you have a search warrant?” I asked. They ask that a lot on TV.

  “Oh, it’s hardly a matter for the police,” said Goatbeard, running his fingers along his hook. “As long as people cooperate. Have you seen any dangerous animals recently, young man?”

  I shook my head. Goatbeard raised his eyebrows, as if he didn’t believe me.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said. “The last I heard, the Squermington Wyrm was all the way over on the other side of town.”

  That bit was true. After our assembly, Mortifer had disappeared from the school grounds without anyone spotting him. There had been another sighting of him reported in the news this morning. Somebody driving home very late at night had had to brake and wait while something “as thick as a tree trunk” crossed the road in front of him.

  “We know about that,” said Goatbeard. “We’re searching everywhere. But we’re starting here. Stand aside. I want to see what’s in that stable.”

  I shrugged and moved out of the way. There was nothing to interest them in Mortifer’s empty stable, and I needed time to work out how to keep them away from Grissel. She might have swapped eating people for cupcakes and the Cooking Channel, but I was pretty sure she still counted as a dangerous animal.

  “Nothing there,” said Goatbeard after a quick look inside. He stopped to admire his reflection, smoothing his hair and tweaking his bow tie. “Peculiar place to hang a lot of mirrors, isn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Lind likes to know her hat’s on straight,” I told him.

  Goatbeard gave me a suspicious look. “Open the next one!” he ordered Giant Baby.

  “Nnnghh,” said Giant Baby obediently.

  I had the beginnings of a plan. Whether it worked depended on what was in that stable. I didn’t know any more than they did. This was Wormestall, so it could be anything—from Bigfoot to a saber-toothed tiger.

  “What the blazes…?” Whatever Goatbeard had been expecting, it wasn’t this.

  Stone animals, piled up on top of each other, all with labels around their necks. Rabbits, squirrels, dogs, cats. There was Charlie the champion Chihuahua, and the Vietnamese potbellied pig, right at the back. Two of the statues puzzled me a bit. Each the size of a large dog, they looked like eagles from the front and lions from the back. Then I remembered the newspaper report about the missing gryphons, stolen from outside the Squermington Towers.

  “What’s all this about?” Goatbeard was inside the stable, poking around among the animals.

  “Nnnghh.” Giant Baby lumbered in after him, bending down to stroke a stone cat.

  They were both in my trap. I slammed the doors shut behind them, dragging the bolts across as quickly as I could.

  “You little toad!” snarled Goatbeard’s voice. “You wait until I get out of here! I’ll skin you alive!”

  My heart beating hard and fast, I listened to the curses coming from inside.

  “You’ll be sorry when she hears about this!” spat Goatbeard.

  I was wondering who “she” was when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something.

  The door to Grissel’s s
table was swinging open—and something was on its way out.

  Something with two legs and a lot of red hair.

  “You!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  Putting her finger to her lips, Prudence grabbed me by the arm and dragged me away from the stable door, out of earshot.

  “You have to get rid of them,” she hissed.

  “I’m trying!” I hissed back. “It’s not as easy as all that. They’re from the town council. From the Dangerous Animals Department.”

  Prudence shook her head violently. “No, they’re not. They’re not from the department of anything. They’re Mr. Mintzer and Mr. Mump, and they work for my stepmother. They’ve been following you ever since you opened your big mouth in the assembly and told everyone you’d seen the Squer-mington Wyrm!”

  “I did see it! It was there, outside the window. And I said that to stop everybody turning around and seeing it for themselves. It only got away because of me!”

  “Whatever,” said Prudence. “The point is—now they’re after you. I came to warn you.”

  I looked toward Grissel’s stable.

  “How long have you been in there?”

  “I stopped to talk to the unicorn—I brought him some carrots. I’d just come up to the house when I heard the van turn onto the track. I knew it was them. I had to hide.”

  The left side of her face, now that I looked at her properly, was bright pink, and she smelled quite strongly of singed hair. Her bangs had gone frizzy.

  “Are you all right…?”

  “It got quite hot in there,” admitted Prudence. “She set fire to my hair, actually, but there was a bucket of water, so I just stuck my head in it. It sizzled a bit. Then we both had a doughnut and it was okay after that. We watched Will You Win a Million?”

  I stared at her. “You shut yourself in with a dragon, and you ate doughnuts and watched a game show with her?”

  Prudence was licking sugar off her fingers. “She likes doughnuts. I brought a bag with me—it’s a long walk. I was going to give you one, but I’m afraid they’re all gone. Don’t look at me like that. There are some things much scarier than dragons, you know. Some people—”

  She broke off as something crashed against the inside of the stable door.

  Prudence flinched. “They’re getting out! George—you have to make them go away. Tell Mr. Mintzer—he’s the one with the hook—that you know who he is. If that doesn’t work, tell him you know what he did.”

  “What did he do?”

  Another crash, then another, shook the door on its hinges.

  Prudence was trembling. “I’ll explain later. Tell him you know what happened at the zoo—that you know about Long Sally.”

  “Long who?”

  Crash! Goatbeard’s metal hook flashed, slashing at the timber. Prudence gave a squeak of fear, and disappeared back in with Grissel.

  Goatbeard and Giant Baby came bursting out. Goatbeard was frothing at the mouth with fury. He shook his hook at me, ready to lunge.

  “Do you know what this is, boy? It’s a snake hook. Do you know what it’s for? Dealing with poisonous wigglers—like you!”

  I took a deep breath and hoped very much that Prudence knew what she was talking about.

  “You’re not from the town council,” I told him. “Your name is Mr. Mintzer, and I know what happened at the zoo.”

  It worked. Mr. Mintzer lowered his hook.

  “I don’t believe you,” he growled. “What do you know?”

  “I know about Long Sally,” I said. “And if you don’t leave—right now—I’ll tell the police.”

  He glared at me. He had the sort of small eyes that look quite nice on a pig. On him, they just looked mean.

  “A clever little know-it-all, aren’t you?” he sneered. “Very well, we’re leaving. And you’re coming with us!”

  “No!” I took a step backward, but the silver hook flashed out and caught me by the elbow.

  “You can tell Mrs. Pye everything you know. And when you’ve finished,” said Mr. Mintzer, “we’ll feed you to the Squermington Wyrm. Just as soon as we’ve found it—and that won’t take us long. Open up the van, Mr. Mump. We’ll put him in the back. He’ll be less trouble.”

  But Mr. Mump’s baby face had suddenly frozen, his eyes bulging.

  “Nnnghh!” he said. “Moo!”

  “What are you mooing about, you great loaf?” snapped Mintzer.

  “Nnnghh!” said Mr. Mump again, pointing at something behind us.

  Oh no! I thought, feeling suddenly icy cold. Not Grissel! Surely Prudence hadn’t let her out? I looked down at Mintzer’s gleaming hook, and my fingers curled into fists. I wasn’t going to let that hook anywhere near Grissel, or Mortifer, or any of the other animals at Wormestall—not if I could help it.

  Mintzer had let go of my arm and was staring in the same direction as Mump. I turned around.

  It wasn’t Grissel. It was Lo—and Mrs. Wednesday.

  “People,” said Lo. His eyes had narrowed to turquoise slits, and his black hair seemed spikier than usual. “We don’t like people much.” He looked at me. “Why are they here?”

  “They’re impostors,” I told him. “They said they were from the Dangerous Animals Department, but they’re not. They lied.”

  “That’s a pity,” said Lo. “We especially don’t like liars.”

  He led Mrs. Wednesday forward by her rope halter, until her long, sharp-tipped horns scratched the paint on the side of the van. Mr. Mintzer was caught between them. I saw him gulp.

  “Stay away from me, boy!” His voice came out a bit higher than usual. “Or you’ll be sorry!”

  “Will I? Are you sure?” asked Lo. “One of us is holding a very large animal. And it isn’t you. We’re late with the milking today. That always puts her in a bad mood. Did you know, you are twenty-seven times more likely to get killed by a cow than you are by a shark? Right now, in your case, I would say it’s more like a hundred and twenty-seven times.…”

  Mr. Mintzer gave him a nasty look. “Start the van, Mump,” he said, ducking under Mrs. Wednesday’s horns. “We’re leaving.”

  * * *

  “What did they want?” Lo demanded, when the sound of the van’s engine had faded away. “Who were they?”

  “You’d better ask Prudence,” I told him. “She’s in the stables. With Grissel.”

  Lo frowned. “What?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t bring her here. She came by herself. She found Grissel and they’ve been eating doughnuts and watching TV together. If you don’t believe me, go and see.”

  Lo shut Mrs. Wednesday in an empty stable, then took me by the arm. His grip was as fierce as Mr. Mintzer’s hook.

  “You can come with me,” he said grimly. “And if your friend’s really in there, you had better hope Grissel hasn’t cooked her to a crisp.”

  I started to say that Prudence was not my friend, then I stopped. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that, at last, I was going to meet Grissel.

  * * *

  The closest thing to meeting your first full-grown dragon is that feeling you get when you’re waiting to dive off something really high, or ride on the biggest roller coaster ever. A sort of knot inside your stomach that leaves you part-scared, part-excited, part-happy, and part-a-tiny-bit-sick.

  Several stables had been knocked into one to make room for Grissel, the walls charred and blackened with soot. From nose to tail tip, she would have stretched the length of a train carriage, with a bit left over. Now she lay curled on a pile of smooth stones, with the end of her tail draped over her nose, her eyes fixed on an old portable TV.

  You could tell she was ancient. Her coppery scales were tarnished and dull, as if she had been left out in the rain for about a hundred years. One wing stuck out at an angle, like a broken umbrella spoke, and there was a dent in her side where the scales grew all crooked. Her one eye was clouded, milky with cataract. Where the other eye should have been, there was a puckered nothing. Sh
e was old and battered, but you could still sense her power. A smoky haze of danger hung in the air, smelling faintly of barbecue. I stood in the doorway, in no great hurry to go farther in.

  “What happened to her eye?” I whispered to Lo.

  “Your Saint George. He stuck a spear in it, didn’t he? He left her for dead. But he wasn’t quite as clever as he thought he was. She dragged herself into hiding before the villagers arrived with their pitchforks to finish her off.”

  I thought of the iron point piercing the jelly of the eyeball. And twisting. I winced.

  “He’s not my Saint George. He’s nothing to do with me.” Then I frowned. “You don’t mean she’s Saint George’s actual dragon? But all that—that was ages ago.”

  “Seventeen hundred years, give or take a few. Nothing special, for a dragon.”

  Awed, I gazed at Grissel. She paid no attention. She was concentrating on a show about cheesecake.

  “What happened to her wing? Was that Saint George, too?”

  “No. That was broken much later. In World War Two.”

  “What was she doing in World War Two?”

  “Minding her own business,” snapped Lo. “Like most people who get hurt in your stupid wars. She was flying at night; somebody thought she was an enemy plane and an anti-aircraft gun ripped right through her wing. She’s been through a lot of history. Enough to put her off humans.”

  All except Prudence, apparently.

  Prudence was sitting near the pile of stones, hugging her knees.

  “She saw the advertisement for the job,” I told Lo. “And she knows about the unicorn.”

  Lo raised his eyebrows. “In that case,” he said, “Mrs. Lind will want to meet her. She had better come in.”

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Lind was just waking up.

  “Today is full of surprises,” she said, blinking at Prudence. “First an ichthyosaur, now a girl…”

  You could see Prudence was nervous, but her eyes lit up as she took in Dido in the dog basket and the two-headed piglet on Mrs. Lind’s lap. Mrs. Lind’s hat lay on the kitchen table, covered in its usual litter of half-eaten fruit.