Also . . . this is another of those things I don't know how to explain, even in hindsight, although I have a much better idea what was going on now than I did then . . . my stupid permanent headache was sort of better when I was thinking about stuff: I've said it was easier to live with if I was doing something, but that's not quite right. It's like it liked certain kinds of brainwork. It liked educational stuff, not worry stuff. It didn't exactly hurt less, but it hurt better. Remember I said, about when I first had it, that it sometimes seemed like it was trying to fit inside my head and couldn't figure out why it couldn't make itself comfortable? Well now it was like something in my head that was interested in some of the same things I was interested in. Headline in the National Stupid People Press: Boy Believes He Was Kidnapped by Aliens and Has an Alien Spy Thingy Implanted in His Brain. Photos on page seven. I didn't — didn't think I'd been kidnapped by aliens, I mean — but I did start to sort of half think of my headache as almost another thing — like me, Lois, Billy, Grace, the Smell, and the Headache — but without finishing the other half of thinking about it, because it was too weird.
Anyway. So Headache and I were deep in this afternoon when I heard the door bang and I had about five seconds to jerk myself out of whatever I was doing and think that the bang didn't sound right and that neither Billy nor Grace was due back till later, and then a voice I knew only too well said, "What is that smell?" and I was on my feet and would have been out of my bedroom door and closing it behind me in another five seconds but Eleanor was too fast for me.
"Oh, shit," I said. If Dad had been there that would have been my allowance for that week. (Sure I have an allowance, even in Smokehill. How do you think I paid for all those on-line hours of Annihilate?) But if he'd been there he'd've stopped it from happening somehow, I don't know how, put a bag over Eleanor's head and said three magic words or something. Dad copes. It hasn't been good for his temper but he copes.
Lois poked her nose around the desk leg, not happy at the abrupt removal of my feet, but generally speaking always ready to be thrilled at meeting someone else so long as I was there too. She did one of her peeps. Not that I could ever say for sure what happy was in Lois terms, but her spine plates, now that they were big enough to do anything, tended to erect themselves when she was what I would call happy and interested. They stiffened now. And her nostrils flared, and she did a kind of ooonnngg-peeEEEeep-oooonnngggg. I told you about my dad suddenly believing Billy's story was real when he heard the weird noises coming from under his son's shirt. Sound and smell are very convincing. Just seeing something that looks like a low-level goblin out of a bad computer game isn't so convincing.
"What is that?" Eleanor said, in that way you do when you're really surprised: Whaaaaat is thaaaaaat? It takes a lot to surprise Eleanor. By this time Martha had joined Eleanor in the doorway, except by then Eleanor was out of the doorway and going toward Lois. I grabbed her arm. "Leave her alone," I said.
"Her?" said Eleanor. "Ow. You're hurting me."
"Tough eggs," I said. I was so shocked it was taking me a little while to get angry but I was going to be spectacularly angry when I got there. "What are you doing here?" I looked at Martha, but she wouldn't meet my eyes. Eleanor wouldn't meet them either, but that was because she was staring at Lois. Eleanor has no conscience. And Martha was pretty fascinated too. Who wouldn't be?
"What is that — she?" said Eleanor. "How do you know it's a she?"
"She's a dragon, isn't she," said Martha in this spaced-out voice. She was as shocked as I was, sort of from the opposite direction. We were both seeing the last thing we expected to see.
"No, she's an aardvark," I said. I couldn't quite come out and say, yes, that's right, this is my baby dragon, Lois. This is the big secret no one has been telling you. "What are you doing here?"
Eleanor finally turned away from Lois long enough to look up at me. I still had her by the arm. "I wanted to know what was going on," she said in her shoot-from-the-hip way. She might lie, cheat and steal to get where she wanted to go, but she'd tell you she'd done it once she got there.
"But — " I said. I didn't know where to begin.
"They're all in some meeting about something," she said. "The grown-ups. So there wasn't anyone watching us — for a change," she said with scorn, although at eight years old and living in the biggest and wildest wild animal park in the country it was hardly surprising she wasn't allowed to wander around by herself — and Katie did know that Martha couldn't be expected to keep Eleanor from doing something she was determined to do. Where was Katie when I needed her?
"Meeting," I said blankly. I was trying to remember if Billy and Grace had said anything about where they were going. Billy usually didn't. Grace usually did. But Grace wasn't a Smokehill employee; she just sold the admin some of her drawings. She wouldn't be going to a Smokehill meeting. Would she? All the grown-ups. And she loved Smokehill as passionately as any of us. "It can't be all the grown-ups," I said.
"It is though," said Eleanor. "They've closed the park for the day and everything. For this big special meeting. We're not supposed to know about it. They close the park and the grown-ups all disappear but we're not supposed to notice."
"Mom said she'd only be gone a couple of hours and everyone was busy," said Martha mildly.
"Busy going to the meeting," muttered Eleanor.
"We're short staffed," Martha continued as if Eleanor hadn't said anything.
"We're always short staffed," said Eleanor. "But there's never been a meeting for all the grown-ups before."
"About the caves?" I said, completely at a loss. I remembered Dad yesterday saying, really casually, that I could have the day off, stay home, away from the Institute. At the time I thought he just meant, and give Lois a break, because I'd been so long we knew she'd be in a state when I got back. He probably did mean that — but had he arranged for me to be delayed yesterday, to give himself the excuse to tell me not to come up today? What damned meeting? But suddenly I knew. And I didn't want to know.
Eleanor gave me one of her famous you-don't-know-anything-you-pathetic-schmuck looks. "No, stupid. About the dead guy. Oh!" She looked back at Lois. "You're right, Martha. It's a dragon." That's another thing about Eleanor. She never believes anything anyone tells her until she works it out for herself and it suits her to believe it. "The dragon the dead guy killed was a mom dragon, and this is her baby."
I decided without any difficulty not to say that this was her fifth and only living baby, and how I knew this, but I didn't deny that Eleanor was right. Pretty good thinking for eight. . .
"She doesn't look like a dragon," Eleanor continued. "She looks like. . ."
Eleanor actually paused. I'll tell you for free that most people's imaginations aren't up to describing what a dragonlet looks like, and Eleanor was always so busy trying to figure out how to get in the way out here in the real world she hadn't worked on her imagination much. I was allowed to describe Lois to myself as looking like roadkill or one of the monsters out of the first series of Star Trek, but I didn't want anyone else doing it. So I managed to interrupt. "Just stop there. I don't want to hear."
Martha knelt down, the way you do with small children and animals to get them to come to you. This works too well with Lois — she peeped delightedly and shot out from under the desk where she'd been keeping the backs of my legs hot. I dropped Eleanor's arm just in time to fend Lois off. "Don't — she'll burn you." Too late, of course — Martha might have listened but Eleanor instantly reached out to pat her. "Ow," she said, like Lois had hurt her deliberately.