The Dragon Tree (9 page)

For a moment she stood quietly looking down at Professor Hall. Then she poked a finger through the barrier of chicken wire and ran it along the crack between the upper and lower sash. This time she found a flaw. The two halves of the window were not a close fit. Perhaps a scrap of paper could be pushed between them.

Emerald had no scrap of paper. But there were
peeling fragments of wallpaper around the window. She had no pen or pencil, but there was another kind of ink. Bravely she set to work.

Finished, her message was sloppy, but bright and clear. She flapped the scrap of wallpaper to dry the wet red word. Then she climbed on the chair and looked down.

Good. The professor was still there. Quickly Emerald folded the note and thrust it through the chicken wire. Then she worked it between the two parts of the window. To her delight it dropped between them, slipped neatly through the gap in the shutter, and fluttered down and out of sight.

But from the window of her Nature Center on the first floor, Margery Moon was also looking out, staring from behind her purple drapes at the man in the lawn chair under the tree, the stubborn neighbor who had caused them so much trouble. She watched him yawn and stretch. The fool had been guarding that dreadful tree all night.

His yawn was catching. Mrs. Moon yawned too, and began to turn away. But then out of the corner
of her eye she caught a glimpse of something drifting past the window, a scrap of paper.

At once she darted out-of-doors and peeked around the corner of the house. Professor Hall was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. On tiptoe she made her way to the bushes and groped among the twigs until her fingers closed on the scrap of wallpaper, the note that had been dropped by the crafty girl in the attic.

There was only a single word on the note—

HELP

—but it had been written in blood.

A
FTER THAT
M
RS
. M
OON
kept her eyes peeled. Often she bustled around under Emerald’s attic window with a trowel in her hand, pretending to be gardening. What if the girl were to write another note? What if it fell into the wrong hands?

Then there really
was
another note, but this time Mrs. Moon missed it. When Emerald dropped her second scrap of wallpaper through the broken slat of shutter, it was plucked out of the air by a robin, carried away to her nest high in the tree, and tucked among her greenish blue eggs. Before long
three infant birds were sitting on Emerald’s desperate call for help. Unfortunately none of them could read.

T
HE STORM CAME
without warning in the middle of the night. A wild wind began to blow, pelting the rain sideways, sucking the curtains in Eddy’s bedroom flat against the screen. When his alarm clock buzzed he got out of bed sleepily and banged down the sash.

From the rest of the house there were shouts of “Quick, quick,” and sharp crashes as Uncle Fred and Aunt Alex ran from room to room, slamming down windows on the west side of the house.

Then Georgie shouted, “It’s coming in here too,” because the wind was blowing from the north. Eddy
ran across the hall and helped her close her windows, and then he plunged downstairs to slam the window in the front hall and two more in the study.

When the whole house was safe from the downpour, there were puddles to be mopped up. Aunt Alex and Uncle Fred got down on their knees with sponges in the front hall. Then Aunt Alex looked up and saw Eddy reach into the closet for his parka. Stumbling to her feet, she said, “Oh, Eddy, it’s not your turn again? Surely no one’s going to chop down that tree in all this rain.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Uncle Fred grimly. He stood up and poked in the closet for an umbrella. “It’s just when he might decide to do it.”

“Sidney’s out there,” said Eddy, popping open the umbrella. “It’s my turn now. I’ll be okay, Aunt Alex. I’ll be nice and dry in the tree house.” He threw open the door, slammed it shut behind him, and plunged down the porch steps into the rain.

Now the wind was blustering from the east, sending a lawn chair tumbling along Walden Street and hurling a wall of water against the house next
door. A gust wrenched the umbrella out of Eddy’s hand and catapulted him across the sodden grass. In the dark he collided with the ladder at the foot of the tree, wrapped his arms around it, and slowly began to climb.

By now he knew the ascent by heart. From the top of the ladder his hands and feet felt their way from one thick branch to the next. The wind battered against him, but once again the broad spread of leaves over his head was like a giant umbrella.

Halfway up he met a drowned rat. “What’s it like up there?” shouted Eddy as Sidney scrambled down past him.

“Peachy keen,” bawled Sidney. For a moment Eddy watched Sidney’s huddled shape drop through the tossing leaves and disappear. Then he looked up and went on climbing, gripping one branch after another, while the tree wallowed and swayed around him. When he fumbled for the stepladder below the trapdoor, he had to hang on, because the tree was reeling and throwing him dizzily left and right. The branches plunged and
lifted and plunged again. Holding fast, Eddy looked up and saw the massive crown lash crazily back and forth. He caught his breath. Would the thousands of storytelling leaves be torn away and lost? Would the tree itself survive? Would it last the night?

Eddy hauled himself up the ladder from rung to rung, and crawled at last into the tree house. The floorboards rocked beneath him, but they were dry, undampened by the rain. Rachel’s pillows were dry too. Shoving them out of the way, Eddy crept to the opening in the wall and looked down at the window of Emerald’s room next door.

It was dark. All the windows of the house were dark. But then to his surprise he saw a spark of light, not from Emerald’s window on the second floor but from the shuttered window in the attic. It was only a flicker glimmering between the cracks and almost at once it went out, but soon another little flame appeared, and then a dozen all together, flaring up and shining brightly.

Emerald had struck all her matches alight, squandering them like the girl in the story who lit
all of hers at once to keep warm in the bitter cold. Here in Concord it was summertime. There was no bitter cold, only the wild wind and the sound of footsteps on the stairs below.

T
HE TREE HOUSE
was a refuge from the rain, but not from the howling wind. The lofty shanty in the sky that had been built so securely by the nine hardworking Knights of the Fellowship was pitching and yawing like a ship on a tumultuous sea. The floor tipped under Eddy and threw him sideways. Struggling to his knees, he floundered back to the window—just in time to see the tiny fires flicker behind the shutters of the window across the way, then flare up and go out.

Then above the roar of the wind there was a clattering crash. The shutters rattled off their
hinges and blew away. For an instant Eddy saw the dark window, but then a tree limb thrashed against the rain-streaked glass—and the stories on the scribbled leaves began to come alive.

From Noah’s ark the trunk of an elephant reached out and buffeted the window. The rusty lance of a knight in dented armor missed its aim and punctured a drainpipe, but Hector launched his Trojan spear and shattered the upper sash, Aladdin hurled his magic lamp and the Mad Hatter his teapot, Pilgrim pitched his staff across the gulf, and Arthur hurled the sword he had plucked from the stone. Then Dorothy heaved a brick from the Yellow Brick Road (throwing underhanded like a girl), and at last the colossal head of the White Whale rose on a hill of water and battered an opening in the wall.

The towering wave deluged Eddy and threw him flat on his back. For a moment the tree house rocked like a cradle, but then, very slowly, it came to rest. Now the shattering winds and driving rain of the mighty storm were racing northwest over the Green Mountains to toss the dark waters of Lake
Champlain and rouse the people of Montreal out of their beds to slam their windows down.

Eddy sat up and tried to get his breath. But then the quaking began again. The floor dipped under him, the board walls creaked. Eddy crawled to the window and saw someone moving slowly toward him on hands and knees. The branch that had shattered the window next door had become a bridge for an escaping prisoner, the green-eyed girl called Emerald, the maid-of-all-work for Mortimer and Margery Moon, the storybook girl with a broom, the sweeper of cinders from the hearth. But as Eddy reached out to lift her over the sill, a stuttering noise broke out below, and then a grinding roar.

The chain saw belonging to Mortimer Moon was reaching up and ripping through the supporting struts of the house like a knife through butter, severing the planks that Eddy himself had hammered into place with six-inch nails and splitting the braces he had anchored with heavy nuts and bolts. The ruptured braces broke apart, and the house began to droop and sag. The walls tore asunder and
the floor slumped and tipped with a shrieking of loosened nails and a bursting of snapped bolts.

Emerald gave a cry. Eddy held her and they fell together, while above them the scream of the chain saw died away. Softly Mortimer Moon closed the window of his bedroom and vanished in the dark.

W
ITH THE END
of the storm, the clouds parted and a lopsided moon rose from a bank of cloud. As if a drop cloth were lifted from the town of Concord, three church steeples appeared among the silvery rooftops. Patches of moonlight filtered through the leaves and shone on the broken boards littering the ground and on the girl and the boy who had fallen through the tree.

Afterwards Eddy remembered what had flashed through his mind. Were they falling at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, the way they should be? No, he decided, they weren’t, because
the tree kept catching them in shaggy forks and billowing clouds of leaves. Even so, they dropped violently from the lowest branch and landed with a sickening double thud.

Eddy’s face was cushioned in a mossy hollow. For a moment he groaned and lay still. Then he pulled himself up on his bloody knees and crawled to the place where Emerald lay on her back in a pool of moonlight, her scratched face bleeding, her green eyes closed.

Was she alive? To his relief, Eddy saw the front of her shirt—it was green like a knightly tunic—lift and fall. She was breathing, she was alive, she was only sleeping. But perhaps it was the kind of sleep from which she might never wake up.

Then Eddy remembered another of the fairy tales about miscellaneous princesses in various kinds of trouble. Perhaps he had been thinking of the wrong one all this time. What if Emerald were not Cinderella after all? What if she were the princess who fell asleep for a hundred years?

If so, then the story had a simple cure, an easy way to wake her up.

Eddy knelt and tried it, and it worked. Emerald’s eyes opened wide. They were green, just the way Georgie had said. She blinked, and said, “Oh,” and sat up.

Eddy sat back on his heels, feeling a blush spread over his face from ear to ear. What was the right thing to say to a storybook princess? Should he try his wake-up system a second time? But then before Eddy could decide what to do, a racket broke out next door. There were shouts and curses and scufflings. Doors slammed. Something thundered down the stairs. Then the door for No. 38 Walden Street burst open.

“Mortimer, I have to go back,” whimpered Margery. “I forgot my bears.” A porcelain chipmunk slipped from her fingers and smashed on the porch floor. Her windup bird came apart in an explosion of clockwork springs. When she stepped on the hem of her flouncy nightgown, she sat down with a thump.

“Never mind your damn bears,” snarled Mortimer. His arms were full of coats and pants, but he had to dump them on the grass because his
wife refused to budge. Emerald and Eddy watched Mortimer drag Margery to the car, shove her in the backseat, and wedge himself behind the wheel.

As the car zoomed away in the direction of Route 2, one of Mortimer’s neckties frisked into the air and draped itself over a telephone wire, a ladybug pillow flew across the road into the Mill Brook, and a shiny black shoe bounced into Aunt Alex’s chicken yard, where the little rooster squawked in outrage, demanding to know what in tarnation was going on.

T
HE KITCHEN WAS
slatted with dawn light. It bounced off the toaster and danced on Georgie’s unicorn pajamas, and glowed on Uncle Freddy’s scarlet bathrobe, and quivered on the green doublet that Emerald had cut from a curtain, and sparkled on the dot of gold in Eddy’s left ear. When the toaster clanged and popped up two slices of bread, Aunt Alex jumped up and cried, “Emerald, more toast? More jam, dear Emerald?”