The Secret Dragon

by Ed Clarke

With the animal gently attached to her finger, Mari lifted it to her face for an even closer look. As she gazed on in wonder, the creature slowly unfolded its wings. Backlit by the twilight glow, they were almost translucent, stretching out on each side of its body, as wide as its tail was long. Mari thought she had never seen anything as beautiful before in her life. And then it opened its eyes.

  Mari gasped as two bright green pinheads blinked open on either side of the creature’s skull, vivid against its ruby skin. Their eyes instantly locked together: earth brown to emerald green.

  Suddenly the animal unfurled its tail and fell from Mari’s finger on to a large bare rock. Mari yelped, scrabbling to gather it back up. Then she let out another cry, her finger pricked by a sharp talon. Whatever it was, it seemed the beast didn’t want to be picked up again. It was dragging itself around on the rock, one wing flapping, the other tucked away at an awkward angle.

  ‘Please don’t be broken,’ pleaded Mari, glad that her mother hadn’t been here to see her drop the delicate creature. ‘Please …!’

  Gently, she tried to scoop it up again, but every time she thought she’d cornered it, it squirmed out of her grasp, whipping its tail to and fro and scurrying under rocks to escape.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ said Mari, tentatively rolling back stones. ‘I’ll be more careful, I promise.’

  Finally she found it again, cowering in a shadowy nook above a rock pool. Both wings were tucked away now, and it no longer seemed to be hurt. Mari sighed in relief, and peeled off the cardigan she was wearing.

  ‘This is just to keep you safe,’ she explained as she threw it over the animal, collecting it up in its makeshift woolly blanket and depositing it in her rucksack. That bag had held plenty of ancient and extraordinary creatures over the years, but this was the first that was in danger of escaping by itself. She pulled the drawstring tight and buckled the straps. With the pink blush of dusk now faded to grey, it was going to get cold and dark very soon. Mari gently swung the bag over her shoulders and set off up the beach for home.

  The walk back gave Mari time to think. What would she tell her mum? She ran through the likely consequences in her mind. Firstly, her mother wouldn’t trust her to keep the creature alive. Whether or not Rhian was right to think that, the last thing Mari wanted right now was to have it taken away. Secondly, her mother would want to tell someone else about her discovery, and Mari wasn’t sure she was ready for that just yet either. Not before she had worked out what it was, at least. Because she knew it was special. She had never heard of a creature that hatched out of stone. It was likely to be the most important thing she would ever find, and she wanted to know everything she could about it.

  By the time she’d reached the back door of the farmhouse, Mari knew she needed to keep the creature a secret. She turned the door handle as quietly as she possibly could, sneaked into the house, and scurried down the hall into the little room her mum used as an office. It was full to the brim with ring binders, piles of papers and books on farming. Mari scanned the shelves, her finger skimming the spines until she found what she was looking for:

  Natural History – A Field Guide.

  Perfect, she thought. She slipped it off the shelf and tiptoed quietly to the stairs – but evidently not quietly enough.

  ‘Mari?’ came her mother’s voice from the living room.

  Mari’s shoulders sagged. She quickly thrust the book behind her back as Rhian appeared at the living-room door, sporting a nervous smile.

  ‘Is this a good time to talk?’

  Something was most definitely up, but now was not the time to find out what. All Mari wanted was to get up to her bedroom, but Rhian was still talking.

  ‘So, the vet came out to see the calf this evening.’

  In all the excitement, Mari had forgotten about the calf’s broken leg. ‘Oh. It’s OK, isn’t it?’

  Rhian smiled again and nodded. In her rucksack, Mari felt the mystery creature wriggle. She hoped her mum hadn’t noticed.

  ‘It was a new vet,’ Rhian went on. ‘Just moved to the town. He was really gentle. With the calf, I mean.’

  ‘That’s, erm, good,’ said Mari. She pointed up the stairs. ‘I just need to, you know, go …’

  Rhian’s face fell. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Fine, you go.’

  Mari gratefully rushed past and up the stairs into the bathroom, closing the door firmly behind her. She pulled the rucksack off her back, unfastened it and gently lifted out the cardigan ball. She unpeeled the layers and was relieved to find the creature still in one piece, though she couldn’t say the same for her cardigan. She was wondering how she was going to explain all the talon-picked holes when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t come in,’ said her mother from the other side of the door. ‘I just wanted to tell you that the vet asked me out to dinner.’ Mari tensed up immediately. Her mother had got her full attention now. ‘And I said yes.’

  ‘You did what?’ said Mari, racing to the door and pulling it open a crack.

  ‘He’s taking me to The Lighthouse tomorrow night.’

  ‘Tomorrow night?’

  ‘It’s been six years, Mari. Maybe it’s time.’

  ‘But – but …’

  Rhian sighed. ‘You know, most people wouldn’t leave it so long. But when you live in a small town, and you have a child –’

  Mari felt a wave of nausea crash over her. She slammed the door shut in a panic, and leaned her head against the door for support.

  ‘Are you OK, cariad?’ she heard her mother say.

  But Mari couldn’t reply. The idea of someone somehow stepping into her father’s shoes had hit her too hard. It wasn’t that her head hadn’t expected this moment. It was that her head had been frightened of telling her heart, so it wasn’t at all ready. She felt it aching in her chest now.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mari, I know it’s not easy,’ said Rhian from the other side of the door, more softly now. ‘But the past is gone. And if we don’t move on, we’re no different from those fossils you find on the beach. Just stuck in the same place for eternity.’

  Mari could feel a small tear make its way down her cheek.

  ‘It’s just dinner, love.’ Her mum was almost whispering now.

  Mari wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and heard her mother’s footsteps slowly receding down the stairs. She rocked gently on her forehead before rolling round and sliding down on to the hard linoleum floor. The tiny red creature was sitting on top of her cardigan, chewing on a frayed end of wool.

  ‘I prefer the past,’ said Mari quietly to the little reptilian thing.

  Immediately it stopped chewing and made its way over to where Mari’s hand was resting on the floor. Then it unfurled its tail and wound it around her little finger in a tiny embrace.

  Mari sat at her desk. If the beach was her hunting ground, her bedroom was the nest she brought all her treasures back to. Ammonites, brachiopods and trilobites lined the shelves, and fossil pictures messily papered every spare patch of wall. There were meticulous pencil drawings that Mari had sketched herself, a photograph from the Llanwerydd Post of Mari showing TV palaeontologist Dr ‘Griff’ Griffiths from Dinosaur Hunt the Anningella she had found with her dad, and, in pride of place on her bedside table, the Anningella itself. But nowhere was there a picture that remotely resembled the creature now warming its cold blood in the spotlight of her angle-poise lamp, like a lizard on a sun-drenched wall.

  Mari leafed through the pages of her mother’s natural history book. It showed 5,000 species, all beautifully illustrated. She had worked her way through the entire section on reptiles, but drawn a complete blank. Mari frowned. If this wasn’t a living creature that anyone knew of, could it be one that was believed to be extinct? It wouldn’t have been the first time that had happened. Back in the 1930s, a woman named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer had discovered a fish called a coelacanth, which had been thought extinct for 65 million years. They called that a �
��living fossil’.

  Mari reached for her glossy signed copy of Dr Griff’s The Dinosaur Hunter. It had a picture of him on the front, wearing a leather biker jacket and crouching next to a dusty fossilized skeleton. Inside it was bursting with full-colour diagrams and illustrations of dinosaurs and their remains. She held the book open next to the winged creature, and whipped through the pages, trying to find a match. The reptile looked on curiously until Mari finally ran out of pages, and let the book fall shut.

  ‘So, if you’re not an animal that’s alive today,’ she said to the quizzical lizard, ‘and you’re not an animal that’s extinct either, what on earth are you?’

  She wished she could have asked her dad about it. There’s no way he wouldn’t have known …

  ‘Of course!’ she said out loud, immediately jumping out of her chair. She pulled open her wardrobe and reached into the darkest recesses at the back. She hauled out a battered cardboard box barely held together with brown packing tape, and spread the contents around on the floor. They were her dad’s old geology books and magazines, which she’d managed to stop her mum taking to the charity shop.

  First she worked her way through a pile of books – Principles of Geology, The Ancient Changes of the Earth, Rock Trails of South Wales. Nothing there. Mari next rifled through a pile of his dog-eared International Journal of Science magazines. ‘The Molecular Tuning of Electroreception in Sharks’? She didn’t even know what that meant. ‘Dark Days of the Triassic: The Lost World’. Maybe … It was about an asteroid that might have wiped out whole species in South Wales 200 million years ago. It talked about lizards that looked like monkeys, and crocodiles that walked upright like dogs. But there was no reference to two-legged reptiles with wings. She slumped to the carpet in despair.

  But then she noticed an old hardback book, hidden beneath the magazines. She pushed back the journals and held the book up to the light. At one time it would have been a deep wine colour all over, but decades of exposure to sunlight had faded the spine to pink. A dragon was embossed on the cover.

  Mari turned the book over in her hands to read the gold print on the spine: Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales by Marie Trevelyan. This wasn’t a book about natural history, or a scientific magazine; it was a book about legends. What was it even doing in her dad’s box? She opened the cover and, in a child’s handwriting, saw an inscription.

  It was her father’s book – but from when he was a boy, the same age as Mari was now.

  Her finger slid across the chapter headings: ‘Water-horses and spirits of the mists’, ‘Corpse-candles and phantom funerals’, ‘Weird ladies and their work’.

  Mari snorted. It was all ridiculous. Made-up creatures to scare little children. But then her finger came to rest on Chapter XIII ‘Dragons, serpents and snakes’ and curiosity got the better of her. She flipped to the relevant section, the unmistakable stale scent of old paper wafting up to her nose. And there, on the first page of the chapter, she found it – not a photograph or a painting, but an intricate drawing of a winged dragon with a long tail and two clawed legs. Underneath was written the caption: Gwiber, or Wyvern. Mari hungrily scanned the text that followed.

  An aged inhabitant of Penllyne, who died a few years ago, said that in his boyhood the winged serpents were described as very beautiful. They were coiled when in repose, and ‘looked as though they were covered with jewels of all sorts. Some of them had crests sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow.’

  Mari stopped reading and looked across at the creature. She angled the lamp to shine on its crest. Just as it had on the beach, the crest sparkled with colour. It looked exactly like the picture in the book. The creature opened one eye, as if it knew it had been found out.

  ‘Gwee-ber,’ Mari said quietly to herself with her best Welsh pronunciation. ‘You’re a gwiber.’

  She turned back to the book.

  He said it was ‘no old story, invented to frighten children’, but a real fact. His father and uncles had killed some of them, for they were ‘as bad as foxes for poultry’.

  The gwiber stretched out its claws, opened its jaws wide and yawned.

  ‘You’re not an old story either,’ Mari whispered to the serpent, reaching out to let it curl its tail around her finger again. ‘You’re very real.’

  But how could a creature thought fictional actually be fact? How could science not know about it? Questions led to more questions and made her head spin. How had it survived encased in rock? Was it some kind of epic hibernation? How was it possible that this creature was still alive?

  Then, slowly, a new realization began to seep into her brain. This animal would cause a sensation. This was no dinosaur skeleton, or even a ‘living fossil’. This was a mythical creature. A living, breathing dragon lying beneath the desk lamp in her bedroom on Dimland Cross Farm.

  Mari’s mind really began to whir now. This wouldn’t just make the front page of a science journal, it would hit news headlines around the world. Maybe the reptile would even get named after her, like the Anningella was for Mary Anning. Probably something in Latin like … Pterodraco mari! This was her chance to be a real scientist. To be who she wanted to be.

  A lump rose in Mari’s throat as she remembered her father’s words to her. She instinctively reached out for his name, embossed in biro at the front of the book. She ran her fingertip across it, imagining his eleven-year-old self carefully crafting the letters, tongue pushing against the inside of his cheek in concentration. She wished more than anything that he could be here to share this moment with her.

  And that’s when she thought of it. An idea so perfect and fitting, it chased away her sadness. She would name this new species after her dad. Pterodraco jonathani. Jonathan’s Dragon. That way he would share in this moment with her. They would go down in scientific history together. And, in some way, maybe this little creature might bring a part of him back to life.

  But just as her heart warmed to this feeling, worries started creeping into her head. The second she showed the dragon to anyone, it would be taken away and she would never see it again. She knew what had happened to Mary Anning. No one had believed her when she first discovered an ichthyosaur skeleton, because she was a woman. And then, after she convinced them, male scientists had taken all the credit! Mari’s heart sank at the thought. She couldn’t let that happen to her. It had to be the name she had chosen. The name that would commemorate her father and no one else. Pterodraco jonathani.

  Still, she knew she couldn’t do this alone. She needed an adult to help her. And that definitely wasn’t her mum. She’d never believe Mari could be trusted to look after a living creature. And, anyway, she was more interested in this new vet than in remembering Mari’s dad. Mari glanced over at her Dinosaur Hunter book and pulled it down from her desk. Inside was another inscription – a dedication that read:

  Yes, Dr Griff would understand. He was a scientist too, after all. And one who worked with young people, listened to their opinions and took them seriously. She would take the dragon to him, and together they would march up the steps of the Natural History Museum in London and tell those experts that everything they thought they knew was wrong! Her dad would be so proud of her …

  But how would she find Dr Griff? It wasn’t going to be easy. Then she looked back at the newspaper cutting of them together. It was at a book signing at her school last year. He must visit schools all the time, and do talks for the public too. Maybe the fact that he was famous would actually make it easier to track him down …

  ‘Stay there, Pterodraco jonathani,’ she ordered with a finger point. ‘Not that you can understand a word I’m saying.’

  The dragon looked back up innocently as Mari slipped sideways out of the door before tiptoeing quickly down the stairs.

  Fortunately, Rhian was watching Countryfile in the living room. For once, Mari was glad. For the next hour her mum would sit there, riveted by tales of poorly pigs, beetroot blight, or the latest advances in llama farming. Still, Mar
i was as quiet as possible as she slid a dusty old computer bag out of the cupboard by the door before creeping up the stairs two at a time and back through her bedroom door.

  Where was the dragon? It was no longer basking under the lamp on her desk. She scanned the room, but it was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes flicked to the window, and her stomach lurched. The top part was slightly open. How could she have been so stupid? She rushed over and searched the sky for any signs of the missing creature. Nothing.

  Then Mari heard a tap, and then another. She looked down at the window sill and saw the dragon behind the curtain. It was hopping and flapping its wings in a vain attempt to fly out through the glass. She breathed out in relief, and slowly pulled the window above her shut. Not that there was any danger of the dragon reaching up that high. Clearly flying was not a skill it had yet mastered. As she watched, it bounced off the windowpane again and fell back on the sill, looking dazed. Mari knocked on the glass with her knuckle to demonstrate that it was completely solid.

  ‘You can’t get out that way,’ she said. ‘Best stay inside where it’s warm.’

  Delicately, she cupped her hands around the dragon and placed it back beneath her lamp, where it curled up, seemingly contented enough to stay put – for the moment at least. Mari slid a battered old laptop out of the computer bag. It buzzed and whirred like it had cogs inside instead of circuit boards, before finally sparking unwillingly into life.

  Mari googled dr griff griffiths. It took forever, but a list of results finally pinged on to the screen. She scrolled down until one in particular caught her eye. She clicked on the link.

  It was almost too good to be true. On the screen was a web page advertising a conference on ‘Progressive Palaeontology’ at a Cardiff hotel. Dr Griff was due to address the conference at 2 p.m. the very next day.

  Mari grinned. ‘Perfect.’

  Mari woke with a start, quickly muffling an instinctive cry as she realized that something was tickling her eyebrow.