Jack looked, seeing the crablike shadow that clung to the underside of the bridge, flattened almost out of sight against the stone.
“That’s Wartag the Troll!” Pick announced. “Every bridge seems to have at least one Troll in these parts, but Wartag is more trouble than most. If there’s a way to unbalance the magic, Wartag will find it. Much of my own work is spent in undoing his!”
Daniel took them down close to the bridgehead, and Jack saw Wartag inch farther back into the shadows in an effort to hide. He was not entirely successful. Jack could still see the crooked body covered with patches of black hair and the mean-looking red eyes that glittered like bicycle reflectors.
Daniel screamed and Wartag shrank away.
“Wartag doesn’t care much for owls!” Pick said to Jack, then shouted something spiteful at the Troll before Daniel wheeled them away.
They flew on to a part of the park they had not visited yet, a deep woods far back in the east central section where the sunlight seemed unable to penetrate and all was cloaked in shadow. Daniel took them down into the darkness, a sort of gray mistiness that was filled with silence and the smell of rotting wood. Pick pointed ahead, and Jack followed the line of his finger warily. There stood the biggest, shaggiest tree that he had ever seen, a monster with crooked limbs, splitting bark, and craggy bolls that seemed waiting to snare whatever came into its path. Nothing grew about it. All the other trees, all the brush and the grasses were cleared away.
“What is it?” he asked Pick.
Pick gave him a secretive look. “That, young Jack Andrew, is the prison, now and forever more, of the Dragon Desperado. What do you think of it?”
Jack stared. “A real Dragon?”
“As real as you and I. And very dangerous, I might add. Too dangerous to be let loose, but at the same time too powerful to destroy. Can’t be rid of everything that frightens or troubles us in this world. Some things we simply have to put up with—Dragons and Trolls among them. Trolls aren’t half as bad as Dragons, of course. Trolls cause mischief when they’re on the loose, but Dragons really upset the apple cart. They are a powerful force, Jack Andrew. Why just their breath alone can foul the air for miles! And the imprint of a Dragon’s paw will poison whole fields! Some Dragons are worse than others, of course. Desperado is one of them.”
He paused and his eyes twinkled as they found Jack’s. “All Dragons are bothersome, but Desperado is the worst. Now and again he breaks free, and then there’s the very Devil to pay. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often. When it does, someone simply has to lock Desperado away again.” He winked enigmatically. “And that takes a very special kind of magic.”
Daniel lifted suddenly and bore them away, skying out of the shadows and the gray mistiness, breaking free of the gloom. The sun caught Jack in the eyes with a burst of light that momentarily blinded him.
“Jackie!”
He thought he heard his mother calling. He blinked.
“Jackie, where are you?”
It was his mother. He blinked again and found himself sitting alone beneath the pine, one hand held out before him, palm up. The hand was empty. Pick had disappeared.
He hesitated, heard his mother call again, then climbed hurriedly to his feet and scurried for the bushes at the end of his yard. He was too late getting there to avoid being caught. His mother was alarmed at first when she saw the knot on his forehead, then angry when she realized how it had happened. She bandaged him up, then sent him to his room.
He told his parents about Pick during dinner. They listened politely, glancing at each other from time to time, then told him everything was fine, it was a wonderful story, but that sometimes bumps on the head made us think things had happened that really hadn’t. When he insisted that he had not made the story up, that it had really happened, they smiled some more and told him that they thought it was nice he had such a good imagination. Try as he might, he couldn’t convince them that he was serious and finally, after a week of listening patiently to him, his mother sat down in the kitchen with cookies and milk one morning and told him she had heard enough.