Imaginary Friends Page 3

  “We are too late, Jack Andrew,” he heard Pick say softly. “That bubble-headed Troll has done his work! Desperado’s free!”

  Jack scrambled up quickly. “What do I do now, Pick?”

  Pick’s voice was calm. “Do, Jack? Why, you do what you must. You lock the Dragon away again!”

  “Me?” Jack was aghast. “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know anything about Dragons!”

  “Stuff and nonsense! It’s never too late to learn and there’s not much to learn in any case. Let’s have a look, Boy. Go on! Now!”

  Jack moved ahead, his feet operating independently of his brain, which was screaming at him to get the heck out of there. The misted green light began to close about him, enveloping him, filling the whole of the woods about him with a pungent smell like burning rubber. There was a deadness to the night air, and the whisper of something old and evil that echoed from far back in the woods. Jack swallowed hard against his fear.

  Then he pushed through a mass of brush into a clearing ringed with pine and stopped. There was something moving aimlessly on the ground a dozen yards ahead, something small and black and hairy, something that steamed like breath exhaled on a winter’s morning.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” murmured an invisible Pick.

  “What is it?” Jack demanded anxiously.

  Pick clucked his tongue. “It would appear that Wartag has learned the hard way what happens when you fool around with Dragons.”

  “That’s Wartag?”

  “More or less. Keep moving, Jack. Don’t worry about the Troll.”

  But Jack’s brain had finally regained control of his feet. “Pick, I don’t want anything more to do with this. I can’t fight a Dragon! I only came because I…because I found out that…”

  “You were dying.”

  Jack stared. “Yes, but how…?”

  “Did I know?” Pick finished. “Tut and posh, boy! Why do you think you’re here? Now listen up. Time to face a rather unpleasant truth. You have to fight the Dragon whether you want to or not. He knows that you’re here now, and he will come for you if you try to run. He needs to be locked away, Jack. You can do it. Believe me, you can.”

  Jack’s heart was pounding. “How?”

  “Oh, it’s simple enough. You just push him from sight, back him into his cage, and that’s that! Now, let’s see. There! To your left!”

  Jack moved over a few steps and reached down. It was a battered old metal garbage can lid. “A shield!” declared Pick’s voice in his ear. “And there!” Jack moved to his right and reached down again. It was a heavy stick that some hiker had discarded. “A sword!” Pick announced.

  Jack stared at the garbage can lid and the stick in turn and then shook his head hopelessly. “This is ridiculous! I’m supposed to fight a Dragon with these?”

  “These and what’s inside you,” Pick replied softly.

  “But I can’t…”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “But…”

  “Jack! You have to! You must!” Pick’s words were harsh and clipped, the tiny voice insistent. “Don’t you understand? Haven’t you been listening to me? This fight isn’t simply to save me or this park! This fight is to save you!”

  Jack was confused. Why was this a fight to save him? It didn’t make any sense. But something deep inside him whispered that the Elf was telling him the truth. He swallowed his fear, choked down his self-doubt, hefted his makeshift sword and shield, and started forward. He went quickly, afraid that if he slowed he would give it up altogether. He knew somehow that he couldn’t do that. He eased his way warily ahead through the trees, searching the greenish mist. Maybe the Dragon wasn’t as scary as he imagined. Maybe it wasn’t like the Dragons in the fairy tales. After all, would Pick send him into battle against something like that, something he wouldn’t have a chance against?

  There was movement ahead.

  “Pick?” he whispered anxiously.

  A shadow heaved upward suddenly out of the mist, huge and baleful, blocking out the light. Jack whirled and stumbled back.

  There was Desperado. The Dragon rose against the night like a wall, weaving and swaying, a thing of scales and armor plates, a creature of limbs and claws, a being that was born of Jack’s foulest nightmare. It had shape and no shape, formed of bits and pieces of fears and doubts that were drawn from a dozen memories best forgotten. It filled the pathway ahead with its bulk, as massive as the crooked, shaggy tree from which it had been freed.

  Jack lurched to an unsteady halt, gasping. Eyes as hard as polished stone pinned him where he stood. He could feel the heat of the Dragon against his skin and at the same time an intense cold in the pit of his stomach. He was sweating and shivering all at once, and his breath threatened to seize up within his chest. He was no longer thinking; he was only reacting. Desperado’s hiss sounded in the pit of his stomach. It told him he carried no shield, no sword. It told him he had no one to help him. It told him that he was going to die.

  Fear spread quickly through Jack, filling him with its vile taste, leaving him momentarily helpless. He heard Pick’s voice shriek wildly within his ear, “Quick, Jack, quick! Push the Dragon away!”

  But Jack was already running. He bolted through the mist and trees as if catapulted, fleeing from Desperado. He was unable to help himself. He could no longer hear Pick; he could no longer reason. All he could think to do was to run as fast and as far from what confronted him as he could manage. He was only thirteen! He was only a boy! He didn’t want to die!

  He broke free of the dark woods and tore across the ball diamonds toward the bridge where Pick was caged. The sky was all funny, filled with swirling clouds and glints of greenish light. Everything was a mass of shadows and mist. He screamed for Pick to help him. But as he neared the bridge, its stone span seemed to yawn open like some giant’s mouth, and the Dragon rose up before him, blocking his way. He turned and ran toward the Indian burial mounds, where the ghosts of the Sinnissippi danced through the shadows to a drumbeat only they could hear. But again the Dragon was waiting. It was waiting as well at the cemetery, slithering through the even rows of tombstones and markers like a snake. It was waiting amid the shrub-lined houses of Woodlawn, wherever Jack turned, wherever he fled. Jack ran from one end of the park to the other, and everywhere, the Dragon Desperado was waiting.

  “Pick!” he screamed over and over, but there was no answer. When he finally thought to look down for the silver pin, he discovered that he had lost it.

  “Oh, Pick!” he sobbed.

  Finally he quit running, too exhausted to go on. He found himself back within the deep woods, right where he had started. He had been running, yet he hadn’t moved at all. Desperado was before him still, a monstrous, shapeless terror that he could not escape. He could feel the Dragon all around him, above and below, and even within. The Dragon was inside his head, crushing him, blinding him, stealing away his life…

  Like a sickness.

  He gasped in sudden recognition.

  Like the sickness that was killing him.

  This fight is to save you, Pick had told him. The Elf’s words came back to him, their purpose and meaning revealed with a clarity that was unmistakable.

  Jack went a little bit crazy then. He cried out, overwhelmed by a rush of emotions he could not begin to define. He shed his fear as he would a burdensome coat and charged Desperado, heedless now of any danger to himself, blind to the Dragon’s monstrous size. To his astonishment, the walking stick and the garbage can lid flared white with fire and turned into the sword and shield he had been promised. He could feel the fire spread from them into him, and it felt as if he had been turned to iron as well. He flung himself at Desperado, hammering into the Dragon with his weapons. Push him back! Lock him away!

  The great gnarled shapes of the Dragon and tree seemed to join. Night and mist closed about. Jack was swimming through a fog of jagged images. He heard sounds that might have come from anywhere, and th
ere was within him a sense of something yielding. He thrust out, feeling Desperado give way before his attack. The feeling of heat, the smell of burning rubber, the scrape of scales and armor plates intensified and filled his senses.

  Then Desperado simply disappeared. The sword and shield turned back into the walking stick and garbage can lid, the greenish mist dissipated into night, and Jack found himself clinging to the shaggy, bent trunk of the massive old tree that was the Dragon’s prison.

  He stumbled back, dumbstruck.

  “Pick!” he shouted one final time, but there was no answer.

  Then everything went black and he was falling.

  Jack was in the hospital when he came awake. His head was wrapped with bandages and throbbed painfully. When he asked, one of the nurses on duty told him it was Saturday. He had suffered a bad fall off his back porch in the middle of the night, she said, and his parents hadn’t found him until early this morning when they had brought him in. She added rather cryptically that he was a lucky boy.

  His parents appeared shortly after, both of them visibly upset, alternately hugging him and scolding him for being so stupid. He was still rather groggy, and not much of what they said registered. They left when the nurse interceded, and he went back to sleep.

  The next day, Dr. Muller appeared. He examined Jack, grunted and muttered as he did so, drew blood, sent him down for X-rays, brought him back up, grunted and muttered some more, and left. Jack’s parents came by to visit and told him they would be keeping him in the hospital for a few more days, just in case. Jack told them he didn’t want any therapy while he was there, and they promised there wouldn’t be.

  On Monday morning, his parents and Dr. Muller came to see him together. His mother cried and called him “Jackie” and his father grinned like the Cheshire Cat. Dr. Muller told him that the additional tests had been completed while he was asleep. The results were very encouraging. His blood disorder did not appear to be life-threatening. They had caught it early enough that it could be treated.

  “You understand, Jack, you’ll have to undergo some mild therapy,” Dr. Muller cautioned. “But we can take care of that right here. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Jack smiled. He wasn’t worried. He knew he was okay. He’d known it from the moment he’d pushed Desperado back into that tree. That was what the fight to lock away the Dragon had been all about. It had been to lock away Jack’s sickness. Jack wasn’t sure whether or not Pick had really lost his magic that night or simply let Jack think so. But he was sure about one thing—Pick had deliberately brought him back into the park and made him face the Dragon on his own. That was the special magic that his friend had once told him would be needed. It was the magic that had allowed him to live.

  He went home at the end of the week and returned to school the next. When he informed Waddy Wadsworth that he wasn’t dying after all, his friend just shrugged and said he’d told him so. Dr. Muller advised him to take it easy and brought him in for the promised therapy throughout the summer months. But his hair didn’t fall out, he didn’t lose weight, and the headaches and vision loss disappeared. Eventually Dr. Muller declared him cured, and the treatments came to an end.

  He never saw Pick again. Once or twice he thought he saw Daniel, but he wasn’t certain. He looked for the tree that imprisoned Desperado, but he couldn’t find it. He didn’t look for Wartag at all. When he was a few years older, he went to work for the park service during the summers. It made him feel that he was giving something back to Pick. Sometimes when he was in the park, he could sense the other’s presence. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see his friend; it was enough just to know that he was there.

  He never said anything to anyone about the Elf, of course. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

  It was like his mother had told him when he was little. A friend like Pick belonged only to him, and that was the way he should keep it.