The Dragon's Eye

by Dugald A. Steer

  I’ll “Shop” you! I thought. As I turned the handle, the bird — or whatever it was — grew perfectly quiet. So I was very, very careful indeed as I edged the door open little by little.

  BOOM! Something smashed into the door with such force that it knocked me over backwards. Something that I still could hardly make out was flying round and round the room. I could see wings, scales, and a wisp of smoke rising from its nostrils. I saw it fly over to the other side of the room, positioning itself directly opposite me. With wings outspread and claws at the ready, it fixed me with its beady eyes and began to fly straight at me.

  BANG! Someone came up behind me and slammed the door shut. I looked up to see an old gentleman with a large moustache, leaning over me in a very disapproving manner, holding the door shut with one hand, and wagging his finger at me with the other.

  “Daniel Cook, I presume?” he said.

  “Do you make a habit of spying through keyholes, Daniel?” asked Dr. Drake, after he had introduced himself.

  “No, sir,” I said. “I was looking for you and I heard shouting and a lot of banging about. I only looked through the keyhole to see what was making the commotion.”

  “And after you’d looked through the keyhole, you decided to open the door and have a better look, did you?”

  “Er, yes, sir,” I stammered.

  “Did your sister, Beatrice, have a look, too?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “She waited upstairs.”

  “Good,” said Dr. Drake.

  Just then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and a short man with a red face and a dark suit emerged. He took out his watch and pointed to it meaningfully.

  Dr. Drake leaned towards me and said, “Then you may wait upstairs, Daniel. You may look at the things in my shop, but don’t touch them. And remember, not a word of what you have seen — or think you have seen — to anyone. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  When I was halfway up the stairs, I turned back to look at Dr. Drake. He put a finger to his lips and said sternly, “Not . . . a . . . word!”

  “What happened?” asked Beatrice when I had arrived back at the counter. “He caught you snooping and gave you a good telling off, by the sounds of it!”

  “Nothing happened,” I replied. “But he doesn’t seem as nice as I thought he was going to be. I think he’s going to turn out to be one of those cross people. He says we are to wait for him.”

  Downstairs, the shouting had started again. Then I heard two loud bangs as if the creature — whatever it was — was trying to smash the door down.

  “What on earth is that?” said Beatrice.

  I didn’t speak for a moment. Dr. Drake had told me not to say anything, but Beatrice was my sister. Didn’t I have a duty to warn her?

  I summoned up my courage and said, “Don’t tell Dr. Drake I told you this, but there’s something you should know. He’s got a dragon down there.”

  “A dragon, Daniel?” scoffed Beatrice in the patronising I’m-a-year-older-than-you voice that I always hated. “Don’t be silly. There are no such things as dragons.”

  “And I’m telling you it was a dragon!” I said. “It had scales and claws and everything. The room was full of smoke!”

  Beatrice thought for a moment. There were three more loud bangs. Then she grinned.

  “Ugh,” she said. “I’ve just had a horrible idea.”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “What if Dr. Drake is a mad scientist? What if he collects lizards and birds and then . . . cuts them up . . . and does horrible things to them?”

  “Like Dr. Frankenstein?” I said, laughing.

  “Yes, but with lizards and birds,” she said.

  “That doesn’t seem very likely,” I said, shuddering despite myself.

  “Well, excuse me, Daniel, but the idea that he has a real dragon down there doesn’t seem very likely to me, either.”

  I didn’t have much to say to that. Beatrice was obviously going to have to see the dragon before she believed in it, so I went back to looking round the shop. Behind the counter, there were some old paintings and a couple of drawings leaning against the wall. As I flicked through them, I could see that they were mostly of dragons, as I had expected. Beatrice came and looked at them over my shoulder.

  “They’re pastiches,” she said.

  “What’s a pastiche?” I asked.

  “When we were at Uncle Algernon’s, Cousin Jocasta and I managed to borrow a book on the history of art. It had a lot of colour plates in it. This one looks like one of those Italian painters — Leonardo da something,” she said. “And this one looks like a German artist who did a famous drawing of a rabbit, only this is a dragon in the same pose. And this one looks like Turner, who liked to do stormy skies.”

  “It looks like a mess,” I said.

  “But can’t you see?” said Beatrice. “Instead of the original paintings, these ones are all copies, only they have pictures of dragons in them.”

  Then she let out a gasp. For the next picture didn’t have any dragons in it. Instead, it was a simple watercolour of a group of people standing in front of a small hill. And there, standing right next to Dr. Drake, were two people who could only have been our mother and father.

  “I knew it,” said Beatrice bitterly. “He sent them away. I hate him.”

  But then I pointed out someone else in the picture, over on the other side. It was a younger version of the same man who had been watching us from the doorway of the pub that very morning. Even in the picture, there was something creepy about him. I turned the picture over and looked at the back of it, to see if it said anything about where it had been painted. In faint red pencil, I could just make out the words:

  I quickly started flicking through the stack of paintings to see if there were any more like that. Then a door slammed in the corridor, and I heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs.

  It was the young man who I’d seen fleeing across the corridor earlier. He was carrying a brown paper bag in one hand and, in the other, a jug and two glasses.

  “Hey!” he said, giving us an enormous smile. He spoke with an American accent. “Would I be having the pleasure of addressing Master Daniel and Miss Beatrice Cook?” he asked.

  Beatrice, who never trusts anyone until she knows something about him or her, did not smile back.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “And who are you?”

  “You can call me Emery,” he said. “Emery Cloth. Dr. Drake said you might be hungry, so I’ve brought you a little something to eat.”

  He offered the paper bag to us and placed the jug down on the counter with the glasses.

  “We’re not hungry,” said Beatrice.

  “Then that’s too bad,” said Emery, giving me a wink. “But I’ll leave these here anyway.”

  Emery went back downstairs.

  I looked in the paper bag, which contained cucumber sandwiches, and looked in the jug, which contained water.

  “What do you mean, ‘We’re not hungry’?” I said.

  “Daniel, I don’t know if we can trust Dr. Drake,” she said. “I don’t know if we should stay here.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Look what happened to our parents,” she said.

  “As far as we know, nothing has happened to them,” I said.

  “All right,” said Beatrice. “Then since our parents wrote to us about him, I’ll trust him until I find out — one way or the other.”

  And she grabbed a sandwich and began to devour it ravenously.

  Waiting for three hours in Dr. Drake’s Dragonalia while trying not to touch anything was like being a starving man in a roomful of food he was not allowed to eat. I was desperate to ask someone about the dragon I had seen, and I was in a shop full of some of the most interesting objects I had ever come across. Finally, at five o’clock, the short red-faced man who I had seen earlier came thumping up the stairs, looking even more red-faced than before, and dashed out of the
shop. Then, Dr. Drake emerged. As he stood before us, his eyes caught sight of the stack of paintings and his face broke into a wide smile.

  “Good afternoon, Beatrice,” he said. And then, turning to me, he continued, “And Daniel. I see that you have been admiring my paintings. I am collecting them for a book. I have many artist friends who are very helpful to me at times. I’m sorry that I couldn’t come to meet you both, but as you see, something important has come up and I have had to attend to it.”

  Beatrice glanced at me. I knew that she was thinking that our parents had said more or less exactly the same thing.

  “But never mind,” said Dr. Drake. “I was sure that such clever children as yourselves would have no problems finding my little shop. When I sent Emery to make sure that you were safe, I asked him to watch you closely and see how you did. You both handled yourselves excellently. I don’t think Daniel would have looked quite so handsome with a black eye.”

  “Who was that other man?” I asked.

  “What other man?” said Dr. Drake.

  “There was a man standing over there,” I said, gesturing out of the window at the pub doorway on the other side of the street. “He had a strangely carved cane and he looked creepy. He’s in that picture along with you and our parents.”

  Dr. Drake looked at the picture. Although he did his best to hide it, I could see him give a slight shudder.

  “Ah!” he exclaimed. “That is Ignatius Crook. I have not seen him for a long time. Perhaps he wanted to visit me but changed his mind when he saw that I already had visitors.”

  “And what about the drag —” I began, but Dr. Drake interrupted me.

  “Now, Daniel,” he said, “since you are both coming to stay with me in St. Leonard’s Forest and I am to find lovely things for you to do, we had better set off right away. We have a long journey ahead of us tonight.”

  Many hours later, I awoke with a jolt when the carriage hit a small pothole. The rain that had been falling all day in London had given way to a clear, moonlit sky in Sussex, and I could see that we were passing through a dense forest full of many different kinds of trees.

  “Nearly there!” cried Dr. Drake cheerfully, pointing out of the window to the pale circle of light cast by the dull beam of the carriage’s lanterns. “Can you see them?”

  I moved over to the window and peered out with great interest. I had fallen asleep thinking about dragons and dragon-hunting expeditions and deciding that I couldn’t really see how they could be mythological at all. Was Dr. Drake actually pointing out a dragon to me now? As I peered out of the window, I spotted several small shapes moving — or rather, hopping and scampering — along the road before us and in the grass verge that ran along the side. The carriage veered slightly to avoid one of them, and suddenly I realised what they were.

  “Rabbits!” I said. There were hundreds of them.

  “Indeed,” said Dr. Drake. “St. Leonard’s Forest is home to one of the largest warrens in England. They make quite a mess of my garden, as you will see, but in the forest I always feel that it is I who am the interloper, and so I do little about it. But we are arriving at my home. Welcome to Castle Drake!”

  As the carriage turned off the main road and began going down a long drive, I saw that we had reached a rather ramshackle old house, surrounded by an old, crumbling wall and a number of outbuildings. I could see what Dr. Drake meant about the rabbits. His lawn was quite pockmarked. Several rabbits hopped away among the trees as we stepped, yawning sleepily, from the carriage.

  The coachman brought down our luggage.

  “Many thanks,” said Dr. Drake. “If you follow the road round and take the first lane on the left, you will find the inn I spoke about. The landlord will be expecting you.”

  “What is the name of the inn?” asked the coachman.

  “Why,” said Dr. Drake with a grin, “it is called the Dragon.” And so saying, he turned, drew out a large key, and unlocked his front door. Once inside, he lit a candle for each of us and led us upstairs, where he showed us into two rooms that lay at the end of a long corridor. My own room, which seemed quite a little dormitory, had four beds in it, but I did not see how many were in Beatrice’s.

  “It is lucky that I am in the habit of keeping rooms for strangers,” said Dr. Drake. “Although I do not think we will be strangers for long! Good night!” And with that he left us.

  I put down my small suitcase and sat down on one of the beds. I thought about the strange experience I had had in Dr. Drake’s shop. I also realised that, whoever he was, Dr. Drake was certainly not one of those adults who are cross all the time.

  My first night at Castle Drake was a restless one. I dreamt that I rode in a carriage, driven, I supposed in my dream, by Dr. Drake. It hurtled down dark, starlit lanes through an inky-black forest where dragons lurked. Whenever I went to look outside to see if I could find out what had happened to Beatrice, a large leathery creature with piercing eyes and sharp claws bashed into the carriage windows with such force that I was sure they were going to break.

  When I woke, I got up at once, dressed hurriedly, and went downstairs into the hall. I was disappointed that the house showed no signs of belonging to the owner of the magnificent Dr. Drake’s Dragonalia. It seemed like a very ordinary house indeed. Smells of bacon led me to the kitchen, where I was surprised to find Beatrice already tucking in to a large breakfast. A short lady in a brown dress and spectacles was bending over to stir some mushrooms on the stove.

  The woman smiled when she saw me.

  “Bonjour,” she said. “I am Dr. Drake’s housekeeper. My name is Mademoiselle Gamay. I am pleased to meet you. I hope you slept well?”

  I glanced over at Beatrice. I didn’t think that either of us had slept particularly well, but I looked at Mademoiselle Gamay and said, “Very well, thank you.”

  “S’il vous plaît! Sit down and have a cup of tea and some breakfast,” said Mademoiselle Gamay. “It is doctor’s orders, you know.”

  And so I sat down. But as soon as Mademoiselle Gamay had put a cup of tea and a plate of food in front of me, she looked at me over the top of her spectacles, laughed, and said, “Do you know? Your sister told me she slept well, too. You will be the first children I have known that slept well on their first night in this house!”

  Beatrice and I looked at each other. Whatever could she mean? There was silence for a moment, and then Beatrice looked up and asked, “Do lots of children come here, then?”

  “Only a few lucky ones,” said Mademoiselle Gamay with a smile. “But surely you know why you’re here?”

  “We were supposed to meet our parents, but they couldn’t come, so they sent us to stay with Dr. Drake,” said Beatrice.

  “Did you visit Dr. Drake’s shop?” asked Mademoiselle Gamay.

  “Yes,” answered Beatrice.

  “Did you see downstairs?”

  “Ye —” I began.

  “No,” answered Beatrice.

  “Not really,” I agreed.

  “Did you meet Emery?”

  “Yes,” said Beatrice.

  “And you don’t know why you’re here?”

  “To learn all about drag —?” I began.

  “To stay with Dr. Drake,” said Beatrice, interrupting me.

  “Well,” said Mademoiselle Gamay, “I won’t tell you any more. I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Have some more tea, eat your breakfast, and then wait for Dr. Drake in the drawing room. I am sure that he will explain everything.”

  The drawing room was small and neat, with a window that faced the front lawn. Three rabbits were hopping about lazily down at the far end. The only interesting thing in the room was a small bookshelf in the corner, and I went straight over to it. But instead of the fascinating volumes about dragons, wizards, pirates, or ancient Egypt that I had hoped to find, there was a series of dull-looking tomes about geography, politics, natural history, economic theory, and one particularly uninviting-looking volume entitled The History of Benzene in the Man
ufacturing Industries.

  “Good morning,” said Dr. Drake when he arrived. “Mademoiselle Gamay tells me that you hardly got a wink of sleep last night. Well, well. I am sorry, but I am not surprised. Now as I have told you, something important has come up, and I will be very busy. But it will not be long before the other children arrive and our summer school begins.”

  “Summer school?” said Beatrice. She sounded as though it was almost too good to be true. If only she knew what real learning was like, I thought.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Drake, smiling. “That is one of the reasons your parents sent you to me.”

  “But what will we learn?” I asked.

  “What would you like to learn?” he said.

  “About drag —” I began. But Beatrice interrupted me again.

  “About science and literature and art and languages and chemistry and mathematics,” she said.

  “Excellent!” said Dr. Drake. “Then it looks as though we will have our work cut out for us. But I’m afraid school does not start for a week. Until then, you must sometimes amuse yourselves. Without looking into any places that you shouldn’t, please,” he added, looking at me.