Jack went a little bit crazy then. He cried out, overwhelmed by a rush of emotions he could not begin to define. He shed his fear as he would a burdensome coat and charged Desperado, heedless now of any danger to himself, blind to the Dragon’s monstrous size. To his astonishment, the walking stick and the garbage can lid flared white with fire and turned into the sword and shield he had been promised. He could feel the fire spread from them into him, and it felt as if he had been turned to iron as well. He flung himself at Desperado, hammering into the Dragon with his weapons. Push him back! Lock him away!
The great gnarled shapes of the Dragon and tree seemed to join. Night and mist closed about. Jack was swimming through a fog of jagged images. He heard sounds that might have come from anywhere, and there was within him a sense of something yielding. He thrust out, feeling Desperado give way before his attack. The feeling of heat, the smell of burning rubber, the scrape of scales and armor plates intensified and filled his senses.
Then Desperado simply disappeared. The sword and shield turned back into the walking stick and garbage can lid, the greenish mist dissipated into night, and Jack found himself clinging to the shaggy, bent trunk of the massive old tree that was the Dragon’s prison.
He stumbled back, dumbstruck.
“Pick!” he shouted one final time, but there was no answer.
Then everything went black and he was falling.
Jack was in the hospital when he came awake. His head was wrapped with bandages and throbbed painfully. When he asked, one of the nurses on duty told him it was Saturday. He had suffered a bad fall off his back porch in the middle of the night, she said, and his parents hadn’t found him until early this morning when they had brought him in. She added rather cryptically that he was a lucky boy.
His parents appeared shortly after, both of them visibly upset, alternately hugging him and scolding him for being so stupid. He was still rather groggy, and not much of what they said registered. They left when the nurse interceded, and he went back to sleep.
The next day, Dr. Muller appeared. He examined Jack, grunted and muttered as he did so, drew blood, sent him down for X-rays, brought him back up, grunted and muttered some more, and left. Jack’s parents came by to visit and told him they would be keeping him in the hospital for a few more days, just in case. Jack told them he didn’t want any therapy while he was there, and they promised there wouldn’t be.
On Monday morning, his parents and Dr. Muller came to see him together. His mother cried and called him “Jackie” and his father grinned like the Cheshire Cat. Dr. Muller told him that the additional tests had been completed while he was asleep. The results were very encouraging. His blood disorder did not appear to be life-threatening. They had caught it early enough that it could be treated.
“You understand, Jack, you’ll have to undergo some mild therapy,” Dr. Muller cautioned. “But we can take care of that right here. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Jack smiled. He wasn’t worried. He knew he was okay. He’d known it from the moment he’d pushed Desperado back into that tree. That was what the fight to lock away the Dragon had been all about. It had been to lock away Jack’s sickness. Jack wasn’t sure whether or not Pick had really lost his magic that night or simply let Jack think so. But he was sure about one thing—Pick had deliberately brought him back into the park and made him face the Dragon on his own. That was the special magic that his friend had once told him would be needed. It was the magic that had allowed him to live.
He went home at the end of the week and returned to school the next. When he informed Waddy Wadsworth that he wasn’t dying after all, his friend just shrugged and said he’d told him so. Dr. Muller advised him to take it easy and brought him in for the promised therapy throughout the summer months. But his hair didn’t fall out, he didn’t lose weight, and the headaches and vision loss disappeared. Eventually Dr. Muller declared him cured, and the treatments came to an end.
He never saw Pick again. Once or twice he thought he saw Daniel, but he wasn’t certain. He looked for the tree that imprisoned Desperado, but he couldn’t find it. He didn’t look for Wartag at all. When he was a few years older, he went to work for the park service during the summers. It made him feel that he was giving something back to Pick. Sometimes when he was in the park, he could sense the other’s presence. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see his friend; it was enough just to know that he was there.
He never said anything to anyone about the Elf, of course. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
It was like his mother had told him when he was little. A friend like Pick belonged only to him, and that was the way he should keep it.
This story is something of an exception for me.
Actually, that’s a vast understatement. The truth is, there’s nothing about this story that’s normal for me.
Normally I write multilayered epic-meta-fantastical thingers that clock in at a quarter million words or more.
This story has a single plot, and it’s only about seventeen hundred words.
Normally it takes me a long time to finish something—months if not years.
I wrote this story in a single day.
Normally I miss deadlines like a storm trooper misses Jedi.