Gauge
Authors: Chris D'Lacey
ORCHARD BOOKS
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH
Orchard Books Australia
Level 17/207 Kent Street, Sydney, NSW 2000
First published in 2009 by Orchard Books
This ebook edition published in 2011
ISBN 978 1 40831 538 5
Text © Chris d’Lacey 2009
Illustrations © Adam Stower 2009
The rights of Chris d’Lacey to be identified as the author and Adam Stower to be identified as the illustrator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Orchard Books is a division of Hachette Children’s Books, an Hachette UK company.
For Chloe and Freya
Burning. Lucy Pennykettle could definitely smell burning. This was not unusual in her house at Number 42 Wayward Crescent, Scrubbley. Lucy’s mother, Liz, made clay dragons for a living, and as anybody knows, dragons breathe fire – well, some of Liz’s special dragons did, anyway. The fires these dragons breathed were usually quite harmless. They took the form of smoke rings or breathy little
hrrrs
. But this form of burning, the one that was making Lucy’s nostrils twitch, seemed to be coming directly from the kitchen. It smelled very much like toast to her.
“Mum!” she shouted and came charging down the stairs in her pyjamas and hedgehog-shaped slippers.
Lucy’s mum was on the phone in the front room of the house. She was chattering away ‘nineteen to the dozen’ as people sometimes say, and clearly hadn’t heard Lucy or even smelt the burning. Still calling out to her, Lucy hurried on past and into the kitchen. Sure enough, there were two slices of bread toasting under the grill of the cooker. They were curling at the edges and turning black. Lucy balled her fists. Bravely, she ran to the cooker and turned off the gas. But as the jets of blue flame disappeared to nothing, there was a gentle
whumph
and the toast itself set alight.
Lucy gasped and jumped back. “Mum!” she cried again. “There’s a fire in the kitchen!” She glanced at the tall green dragon that always sat on top of the fridge. He was a listening dragon, with ears like rose petals. He put on a pair of small round spectacles and craned his neck towards the cooker.
“Do something!” said Lucy.
The listener sent out an urgent
hrrr
. Within seconds another dragon had zipped into the kitchen to land with a skid and a bump on the worktop. His name was Gruffen. He was a guard dragon.
Lucy sighed with relief. “Gruffen, put the fire out.”
Gruffen studied the flames. The scaly ridges above his eyes came together in a frown. Strange as it might seem, Gruffen had never actually seen a fire before. He was a young dragon, still learning how to puff smoke rings from the back of his throat. He could see there was a problem, but wasn’t really sure what the solution might be. The toast made a cracking noise. A tongue of flame crept over the grill pan.
Lucy gave a little squeal. “Do something!” she repeated.
Gruffen leapt into action: he tapped his claws and consulted his book.
When Liz made one of her special dragons, it was not unusual for them to come with some kind of ‘magical’ object. In Gruffen’s case this was a book. A sort of manual of dragon procedures. A directory of things to do in awkward situations. He quickly looked up ‘
fire
’. There were lots of interesting entries.
Dragon’s spark
, said one,
the spirit or life-force of the dragon, born from the eternal fire at the centre of the Earth
. That made his eye ridges lift.
Source of warming
, said another.
Used in cooking
, said a third. And then there was a rather large entry in red:
WARNING – fire can be dangerous to humans, but dragons may swallow it without fear (or hiccoughs)
. There was his answer. Gruffen slammed his book shut and flew to the grill.
With one enormous in-breath he sucked the fire towards him and swallowed it completely. The fire was immediately put out and the kitchen was saved. The only problem was Gruffen breathed in so hard that the toast came flying off the grill, smashed against his nose and exploded in a fine shower of brittle black crumbs. Liz arrived in the kitchen seconds later to find that her normally rosy-cheeked, straw-haired daughter was now the colour of charcoal.
“Oh dear,” said Liz, wafting a hand beneath her nose. “Perhaps we’d better have cereal for breakfast instead today.”
“That’s not funny,” Lucy said sourly. “I called you twice.”
“Henry Bacon rang,” Liz explained, taking a damp cloth to Lucy’s face. “I didn’t expect him to be on the phone so long, but you know what he’s like.”
Lucy grunted like a farmyard pig. Henry Bacon, the Pennykettles’ grumpy next-door neighbour, was always causing problems. “What did he want?”
“He called to say that the Town Council are planning to demolish the library clock.”
“What for?”
“Because it’s old and doesn’t work very well.”
“It tells the wrong time,” Lucy agreed. “And it clunks instead of chiming.”
“Then it should be fixed, not demolished,” Liz said airily. “That clock is part of Scrubbley’s history. People would miss it. It’s not right to take it down.”
Lucy gave a little shrug. “What about the ghost?”
Her mother laughed. “Ghost? What ghost?”
On the worktop, Gruffen looked up ‘ghost’.
Strange spectral creatures
, his book informed him.
Often found at a place of great unhappiness
.
“Miss Baxter says it’s haunted,” Lucy sniffed. Miss Baxter, Lucy’s teacher, knew about such things. She often went on visits to stately homes. She claimed she had once seen the ghost of Henry the Eighth eating a chicken drumstick in a cloakroom. Miss Baxter, it had to be said, was slightly strange.
Liz walked away, shaking her bright red hair. “The only thing that haunts that clock tower is pigeons.”
“Dead pigeons?” said Lucy, aghast, her mind dizzy with images of phantasmal birds going “coo” (or would it be “woo” if they were ghosts?) as they flew through walls.
“Just pigeons,” said her mum a little more soberly. She looked out of the window and became thoughtful for a second. “It would be such a shame to see that clock go. I feel as if I ought to be doing more to save it…”
Lucy glanced at the dragons and they at her. For they all knew what was in Liz’s mind. Whenever Lucy’s mum became concerned about something, she only ever followed one course of action. She made a new dragon.
A special one.
