The Dragon Book (48 page)

Enough of the spine was in place now so that the arch showed up. It seemed a more aggressive pose than the picture on the box. Almost as if the picture on the box had been an artist’s rendition, but the actual dragon had kept moving in the same direction after the sketch had been completed. Its front left leg farther forward, its head, if this was its eye, and it was—it looked up unblinking at her—cocked more perpendicularly to the ground. As if the sharp ears had heard the sound of the artist’s pencil on paper, and the head had swiveled so the eyes could pin the voyeur in its sights.

What a canny eye, what a bitter bejeweled thing it was! The black of the aperture was neither round nor slit, but triangulated, like a chevron, imitating the shape of the skull itself. And the iris was an icy violet.

“What
you
lookin’ at?” said Eleni. She felt stupidly brave until she had found and secured the second eye, and then the look of the dragon seemed to pin her with its binocular vision. “It’s not
me
standing eight feet off with my Faber & Faber number two pencil,” she told it. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Then, because she was creeping herself out some, talking to a puzzle, she tried to concentrate on the background for a while. But if the dragon looked subtly different from its representation on the cover of the puzzle box, the background was even more imprecise. On the box, you could see whorls of mist, curls and shavings of dragon smoke entwining with the rising mist from the rustic setting. In actuality, the background was indistinct and even, she realized, contradictory. She would pick up a piece with two curves of smoke, like nesting parentheses, ( (, and by the time she had moved the piece to the left edge where she thought it would fit, one curve had reversed itself and the second one disappeared. ). It was as if the smoke was still rising and floating, insubstantial as actual mist.

Though maybe it was just her eyes that were tired. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her left hand and jabbed down the piece where she had originally intended it to go. It fit, too. And now the single curve of smoke made sense, though it seemed slowly to be lifting out of the margin of the original piece and into the margin of the piece above it.

She thought perhaps she would stop for supper. But her mother was busy loading things into the car, despite the rain, getting ready for the Brister Fair. To have something to do, to feel less ineffectual, probably. Eleni knew how she felt.

Two more pieces, she told herself. Then two more. Then she got caught in the mystery of how to make all these flashing bits of talon fit in—you’d think there were a dozen dragons in this picture—or that the artist had shown the dragon in time-lapse photography, and the same bared claw was caught in a time-motion exercise. Somehow, the claws all fit, and once the legs were finished, there didn’t seem to be quite as many knuckled ivory scythes as had seemed earlier.

“Maybe I’ll stop for now,” said Eleni, sounding stagy to herself. Sounding falsely brave. Putting it on. As if the dragon were waiting to pounce and she could evade it by the cheap trick of pretending to have to go the bathroom.

There wasn’t very much left to do, though. Only twenty more pieces, best case. How keen the temptation to finish so that she could have the satisfaction of breaking the frame up and dumping the whole puzzle back in the box.

A highlight above the tip of the tail. A moon that showed through the cloud, though by the time she got the piece in place, the moon had disappeared, and so, looking back, had that highlight.

“You are one mean old tease-cat, you are,” she told the dragon.

It didn’t care. It batted its eyelashes, which came in and out from the sides like elevator doors, and regarded her with interest.

“You think you can scare me with those cheap theatrics?” she asked it.

A little hiss of smoke escaped its nostrils and filtered up, disappearing into the fog. So this is why the mist kept rolling. The dragon’s furnace was stoked up good.

“As if I care,” she said to it.

Fourteen pieces left, nine, six.

A ping as of talon on stone, or several talons, ping ping ping.

Five pieces, then three came all together.

The last piece was in her hand, and she bent to put it down—a little knob of a knee on a rear leg. But the last piece wasn’t the last piece, actually, because now she could see that the very tip of the tail, which was to have curled right up beneath the monster’s closed mouth, was missing.

“No wonder someone was giving this away,” she said. “Not all there, are we, dragon?”

Yet the box had been shrink-wrapped, after a fashion. So how could a piece have gotten lost?

She looked on the floor, and shook the box again, and even went so far as to kneel and check under her bed and dresser in case it had fallen and she had kicked it away without noticing. But she couldn’t find it anywhere.

Was it her imagination? The dragon looked as if was sneering.

“What a cunning little trick,” she said. “Until you are finished, though, you don’t have any power. How could you?”

A scritch, a scratch, as of a mouse running along a baseboard, or a talon itching against a stone.

“You are hiding that piece somewhere, aren’t you?”

The dragon made no comment. Its nostrils flexed and the small stream of white plume lifted its head, curling at the top, looking like nothing so much as a question mark.

“You are curious to see if I can find it? I can find it. I
will
find it.”

She looked again at the floor, the box, even feeling the inside in case somehow the piece were there, but invisible. Then she ran both hands over the surface of the nearly completed puzzle, thinking perhaps she had built up a section of the picture right over a hidden piece without noticing it. The dragon was warmer near the nose, and rippled along its spine; she could faintly feel the waves of its muscle groups. She thought she felt it stifle a breath, or even a purr, when she came near to the part of the nose between the nostrils.

“Where could it be? That little tippy tip tip of a tail?”

Maybe the puzzle maker was a trickster. Maybe the missing piece was the same size exactly as one of the other interior pieces. Maybe one piece alone in the whole puzzle had been printed on both sides. When she had turned the cardboard sides up to reveal the colored sides, she hadn’t, of course, turned over those pieces that had already landed with their colored sides faceup. So she would never have noticed a piece printed on both sides.

“I have more patience than you do,” she said. “Besides, what are you going to do to me?”

Eleni was nothing if not systematic. And anyway, where else was she going in this rain? She had all the time in the world. She began to unlock pieces in an orderly fashion, from upper left to bottom right. One row at a time. Unlock, look, and replace. One two three. Fifteen eighteen twenty-one. Thirty forty fifty. Ninety-nine.

It wasn’t there. Though when she had taken the final piece of the nose, that steaming fissure, it was almost too hot to handle.

“Pretty tricky,” she said.

The dragon purred a little, sounding not unlike a distant roil of boiling water.

“You like being flattered?” she asked it. “I suppose you do. Who doesn’t? Well, you are a pretty creature.”

Its eyes narrowed. Wrong approach. “Pretty amazing,” amended Eleni. “Pretty awesome.”

The dragon liked that better. A small exhaust of steam rolled forth, not unlike like the starch released when pasta has been dropped in hot, salted water.

“If I found that last piece, would you do my bidding, I wonder?” asked Eleni.

The dragon flared its nostrils and the steam from its nose thickened, whitened. Eleni watched it curl in an arabesque, and it formed a sort of a hook, as if to reach out and drag someone down. (Where did the word
dragon
come from, anyway?) In the twilight, the dragon’s eyes twitched and glittered.

She saw what the problem was. The dragon wanted to move, but was pinned into place by dint of the missing tip of its tail. Eleni could see how its shoulder muscles shrugged and flexed in frustration, and the effort moved along the articulation of the spinal column, shimmering scales like the ripples on the surface of a pond moving outward from where a stone has plunked in. But the ripples faded out, and the rear legs and far end of the tail were frozen in place.

“I rather know how you feel,” said Eleni. She put her hand on the nose of the dragon. “With just a little more effort you could break out.”

It looked at her. She felt something more was needed. Maybe—the question mark—maybe it just needed to be asked the right question.

“Do you know where the missing puzzle piece is?” she asked.

The dragon looked as if it knew, though it didn’t do anything so obvious as nod in assent.

“Is it my job to find it?” she asked, but hardly dared continue “and what will you give me if I do?”

Again, the dragon did not seem to reply, though it was clearly attending to her questions.

Then, suddenly, she had it. She knew what to ask. Maybe she only had three questions, but this next one was the right one. “Will you show me where it is?”

The dragon breathed some more white splendor, and its eyes sharpened with canniness and glee. Then it opened its mouth.

There was no golden flame, no guttural torchlight. Just a long slick tongue undulating forward. On the slick nubble of the tongue lay the final puzzle piece.

“Oh,” said Eleni, “so it looks as if you bit your own tail off. Well, not to worry.” She rubbed her fingers together, and, with the delicacy of a surgeon, leaned forward and grasped the near edge of the missing piece.

She held it up to the light to see if it had changed any by being swallowed by a dragon, but it hadn’t, or not so she could tell. It looked like an ordinary, slightly cheap cardboard puzzle piece, the usual sockets and prongs in the usual arrangement.

Eleni leaned down to slip the last piece in place. The dragon held its breath and looked up at her with a sharp expression. Maybe adoration. Maybe skepticism. She couldn’t tell.

“
You
should be skeptical of
me
?” she asked.

She rotated the puzzle piece in her hand so that it was oriented correctly.

“Has all this rain made you
deaf
? I’ve been hollering from downstairs for fifteen minutes.”

Eleni turned. Her mother stood in the doorway. “I’m down there busting my butt to put a meal on the table, and you can’t tear yourself away …”

She looked at Eleni and said, “What. What.
What?
”

“I just have one more piece to put in place …”

Martha Lester’s gaze fell on the puzzle. In one step, she had crossed the room and snatched the last puzzle piece out of Eleni’s hand. You would have thought she was handling dynamite, or a poisonous snake. She spun wildly about as if looking for a fireplace that she hadn’t noticed before, one suitable to receive a pitched cardboard puzzle piece.

Eleni leaped up from the card cable, astonished, unmoored, as if she’d just been awakened from a dream. Her mother’s eyes narrowed. She popped the last puzzle piece in her own mouth and swallowed.

“Mom!” said Eleni. “What is
going on
?”

Her mother shrugged and ran her fingers through her hair, and straightened up. “Oooh, honey,” she said. “I had hoped you would grow up and go off to college before any of this came out.”

“Any of what?”

“Oh, the back and forth of it. The great battle of wrong and right, evil and good. Rather tedious to talk about it, a bit overearnest for my taste, but you know, we avatars of justice have to do what we can.”

“Have you been hitting the gin harder than usual?”

“A nasty thing to say, and anyway, gin is not recommended for those on duty. It can muddle the thinking and seriously compromise response time. You should count your lucky stars I wasn’t drinking gin.”

“I don’t get this,” said Eleni. “I don’t understand. There are too many pieces not in place. Are you a … a whatever?”

“A witch?” Her mother raised an eyebrow expertly. “Well, that’s what your father used to call me. Who cares what the term is?”

“Mom,” said Eleni. “I need a little more information here. A few more pieces of the puzzle.”

“Well, then,” said her mother. She picked up the cover of the puzzle and looked at the dragon. “If they’re going to try to use you to get to me, I guess you do need to hear a little more. Why don’t you come down for supper? I made spaghetti. We’re going to have to have a little chat. A bit sooner than I’d expected, alas. But I suppose it doesn’t matter. We don’t have anything else to do. And I see it’s going to be stormy, stormy weather for quite a while. Quite a long while longer than anyone yet realizes.”