Thunder Night

The first roll of thunder came just after nine. With it, the lid of the hatbox lifted a finger's width, and dropped again.

Josie saw it. Toby saw it. Grandpa, who was in his chair by the range with the newspaper, did not look up, but he stopped turning the page.

The thunder came again, nearer. The lid lifted. The lid dropped.

"Grandpa," said Josie.

"I know," said Grandpa.

He folded the newspaper and put it on the floor. Then he got up, slowly, with a hand on the back of the chair for his knee, and he went to the kitchen door. It was the old kind of farmhouse door that opened in two halves, a top and a bottom. Grandpa left the bottom half bolted. He drew back the bolt on the top half and swung it wide open to the storm.

Cold air came into the kitchen, and the smell of rain, and the noise. The lamp flame ducked and steadied. Outside in the dark, Gertrude honked once and fell silent.

"Grandpa, it's pouring," said Josie.

"Let the thunder in," said Grandpa. "She needs to hear it."

Toby turned round on the floor, where he had been lying on his stomach next to the dresser. "She?"

Grandpa did not answer that. He lifted the hatbox down from the dresser, carefully, with both hands, and set it on the rag rug in front of the range. He took off the lid and folded back Grandma's cardigan and the grey blanket, and there was the stone, sitting in its nest, steaming a little in the lamplight.

"Sit down, the pair of you," said Grandpa. "Not too close."

They sat down on the rug. Grandpa lowered himself onto the floor beside them, which Josie had never seen him do, and stretched his bad leg out in front of him.

"It's an egg," said Grandpa. "You'd guessed that. And eggs like this one hatch in thunder. That's the one thing I know for certain. So we're going to sit here, and be quiet, and let it."

Lightning lit up the whole yard. Josie counted. One. Two. Three. Then the thunder came, so loud that the plates jumped on the dresser.

There was a sound like someone cracking a walnut.

A line had appeared on the top of the egg. It was thin and dark and as long as Josie's finger.

Nobody said anything. The rain came down outside. The next flash came and the next roll of thunder, and the egg cracked again, a second line branching off the first. The egg rocked in its nest. Something inside it was pushing.

"Can we help it?" whispered Toby.

"No," said Grandpa. "It has to do it itself."

Toby put his hands under his legs and sat on them.

It took a long time. The storm moved over the farm and stayed there, and every time the thunder came the egg cracked a little more. The lines joined up. A piece of shell the size of a saucer lifted at one edge, like a trapdoor. Something pushed against it from underneath. The piece fell off and rolled onto the rug.

A snout came out of the hole.

It was short and blunt and wet, and it was the colour of a biscuit that has been left in the oven a minute too long. Two round nostrils opened and closed. The snout sniffed the air of the kitchen, turned to the left, turned to the right, and sneezed.

The sneeze came out in sparks.

They flew across the rug in a little orange shower, like the sparks from a poked fire. Most of them went out on the flagstones. Three of them landed on the hem of the curtain by the dresser.

The curtain caught.

For a second it was only a small yellow tongue of flame. Then it was a sheet of fire running up the cloth towards the ceiling, and the kitchen was full of smoke and orange light, and Grandpa was trying to get up off the floor and his knee would not let him.

Josie grabbed the washing-up bowl out of the sink, full of grey water and two teaspoons, and threw the whole lot at the curtain.

There was a great hiss and a cloud of steam. The fire went out. The curtain hung there, black and dripping. One teaspoon clattered onto the floor.

Josie stood holding the empty bowl, breathing hard.

"Good girl," said Grandpa from the floor.

Toby was not looking at the curtain. Toby was looking at the egg.

The egg was not an egg any more. It was two halves of a shell on a cardigan, and between them, blinking in the steam, was a creature about the size of a cat.

It was damp all over and covered in small soft scales, like the skin on a new potato. It had four short legs with four claws on each, and a long tail with a little flat spade at the end. On its back, where a cat would have shoulder blades, there were two wet stubs, folded tight. Its eyes were very round and the colour of honey held up to a lamp. It looked at each of them in turn.

"It's a dragon," said Toby.

Nobody told him it wasn't.

The dragon opened its mouth and yawned. It had a great many small white teeth. When it shut its mouth again, the teeth came together with a click. Then another click, and another, fast, like knitting needles.

"That'll be hungry," said Grandpa.

"What do dragons eat?" said Josie.

Grandpa opened his mouth to answer. Before he could, the dragon climbed out of the shell, wobbled across the rug on its four new legs, went straight past the bread bin and the milk jug and the cold stew on the side, and stopped in front of the bottom shelf of the dresser.

On the bottom shelf stood Grandma's biscuit tin. It was round and painted cream, with red roses all round the sides and more roses on the lid.

The dragon put its front feet on the shelf. It got its teeth under the edge of the lid and pulled. The lid came off with a pop. The dragon put its snout into the tin and very neatly, one at a time, lifted out every biscuit inside and put it on the floor, until there was a little pile of shortbread on the flagstones.

Then it ate the tin.

It ate the lid first, in four crunching bites. Then it ate the tin itself, starting at the rim and working round, like someone eating the crust off a pie. It made a noise like a coal scuttle being stepped on. When it was finished there was nothing left on the shelf except a ring of crumbs.

The dragon sat down next to the pile of shortbread. It did not touch it. It licked its lips and hiccupped, and a small puff of smoke came out of its nose.

Grandpa laughed.

He laughed out loud, sitting on the floor of his own kitchen with his bad leg stuck out in front of him, until he had to wipe his eyes. Josie had been reaching for a piece of the shell. She stopped with her hand in the air and stayed like that, watching him.

"Your grandmother," said Grandpa, wiping his eyes, "kept that tin for forty years."

They ate the biscuits. They sat on the rug in the smoke and the steam, with the thunder going away over the hill, and ate shortbread, while the dragon walked round and round the hatbox and then lay down in the blanket and put its chin on its front feet.

"She'll need calling something," said Grandpa.

"Aurelia," said Josie at once. "It means golden. It's in a book."

Toby had a whole biscuit in his mouth. He said something round it.

"What?" said Josie.

Toby swallowed. "Biscuit," he said.

The dragon lifted her head and looked at Toby. Then she hummed. It was the same sound they had heard from the hatbox, a low steady note, like a kettle just before it sings.

"You can't call a dragon Biscuit," said Josie.

"She seems to think you can," said Grandpa.

Josie looked at the dragon. The dragon looked at Toby and went on humming.

"Fine," said Josie.

Within the hour, something odd happened. Josie noticed it first, when she bent down to put the shell pieces in the coal bucket. On Biscuit's pale belly, where the scales were softest, there were faint red marks. They were very small, and they were in a pattern, and the pattern was roses.

"Toby," she said. "Look."

Toby got down on the floor with his nose almost touching the dragon. Biscuit let him. He looked at the roses on her belly, and then up at the empty shelf where the tin had been.

"She's got the tin on her," said Toby. "On her skin. The roses off the tin."

Grandpa leaned over to see. He kept quiet, but he did not look surprised either.

Toby went and fetched the blue exercise book from the table. On the cover, after THE BOOK OF, he wrote BISCUIT in big letters. Then he opened it to the first page, under the line about knocking, and wrote, saying it aloud as he went.

"Fact. She wears her dinner."

"That's not a fact," said Josie. "That's one time."

"It's a fact if it happens again," said Toby, and underlined it twice.

Later, when Toby had gone to wash the soot off his face and Grandpa was out bolting the hens in, Josie knelt by the hatbox on her own. Biscuit opened one eye. Josie held out a finger. The dragon sniffed it, and then wound the end of her tail once round Josie's wrist, and hummed. Through the thin scales of her chest Josie could see a faint glow, like a coal under ash, coming and going as she breathed.

"Stay like this," Josie whispered. "Just stay little, and stay here."

It was nearly midnight before anybody thought about bed. The storm had gone. The top half of the door was shut again. Grandpa had whistled the marching tune once, quietly, and Biscuit had lifted her head out of the blanket and hummed along with him, not quite in tune.

"So it was you she was humming to," said Josie. "All along. In the hatbox."

"Bed," said Grandpa.

Josie tried to put Biscuit back in the hatbox for the night. She held the lid ready.

"One," said Josie. "Two. Three. In you go."

On three, Biscuit sat down on the rug.

"In," said Josie. "One, two, three."

Biscuit sat down harder.

Toby picked her up under her front legs, like a puppy, and put her into the hatbox, and she curled up in Grandma's cardigan and closed her eyes. Josie put the lid on with the finger's-width gap. They put the hatbox in front of the range, where the floor was warm. Grandpa banked the fire, and went out with the lantern to drop the great iron bar across the barn doors, as he did every night. They went out of the kitchen and Josie shut the door behind them and dropped the iron latch, so that Biscuit could not go wandering about the house in the night.

Josie lay awake for a while. She took the notebook from under her pillow and looked at the list in the dark. Mum. Dad. Baby. Grandpa. Toby. All ticked. She held the pencil over the empty line at the bottom of the page.

"Not yet," she whispered, and put it away.

In the morning Grandpa was up first.

Josie heard him on the stairs, and then she heard him stop in the hall. She heard him say something to himself. Then she heard the front door, and then nothing for a long while.

She got up and went down in her nightdress.

The kitchen door stood open. Its iron latch had not been broken. It had gone, and there were two neat bite-marks in the wood where it used to be. The hatbox was empty.

The front door was open too, and its latch had gone the same way. Grandpa was standing in the little stone porch, looking down the front garden towards the lane.

Josie went to stand next to him.

The garden gate was gone. It had been a small iron gate with curly bars, and it had stood at the end of the front path, where the garden wall met the lane, for as long as anyone could remember. Now there were two stone posts and nothing between them. The hinges were gone. The catch was gone. There was a scattering of rust on the path.

Biscuit was asleep on the doormat in the porch, at Grandpa's feet. She was lying on her back with her four legs in the air and her stomach as round as a pudding. Down her tail ran a pattern of iron curls, faint and grey, exactly like the bars of the gate. Halfway down her stomach, showing dark through the thin pale scales, was the shape of the gate latch, like a sixpence in a pudding.

Round the corner of the house, from the farmyard, came Gertrude. She stopped on the garden path. She had seen the dragon.

Gertrude lowered her head, spread her wings, and began to walk towards the porch.