The dragon came at dusk. We watched from the deck, sails hanging limp in the breezeless tropics, escape useless.
The ship rose and fell on the idling swell. The crew stood their ground, weapons ready, cannon primed.
‘The cannon will get it?’ The sailor let hope into his voice.
‘Only if the bugger flies at ship level.’
The great membraned wings lifted, fell, in mocking tune with the waves. We could sense its black-souled eyes searching us, see the great tongue slide between shark-like teeth, anticipating our taste.
‘Below decks?’
‘If you want to drown, spend eternity as a barnacled skeleton, a playground for fish.’
We knew the old sailor was right. The choice was clear – be snapped up by those jaws, swallowed whole, or go down with a ship alight with dragon fire.
The dragon came at dusk. It breathed white smoke. Red-gold flames flared against the darkening sky.
***
The ship had gone down in a calm sea sometime in 1715. No survivors, no reports of how or why. She failed to return with her rich cargo of gold, jewellery and precious stones plundered from the Orient. Nicknamed ‘Dragon Hoard’ because of the cargo, the curious and the greedy had searched for her for 300 years. Every nautical mile of her expected journey had been scoured with the latest technology of the day.
Now we had found her. Divers donned deep sea gear, strapped fancy cameras to their fronts and oxygen to their backs and fell backwards from the search ship into the steady swell.
We paced the deck, anxious, waiting until they broke surface.
Two skeletons found below deck, they told us, barnacled playgrounds for fish.
As for the ship – broken masts strewn on the dark sandy bed, jagged edges smoothed with time and currents, made ragged again by flourishing hydrophytes. But charred beneath the plant life, sodden charcoal. The hull intact bar expected rotting, barely scorched.
It was as if fire had rained from above, burning sails, searing masts, and consuming any crew above decks.
The legendary treasure? we asked the divers. What signs? Our eyes lit with greedy need. This, after all, was what 300 years of exploration had sought.
The divers shook their heads. Not a pearl, not an ingot, not a golden chain to be found.
We eyed each other, fingered our beards. We whispered, Dragon Hoard, and stared into the dusking sky where clouds broiled on the horizon, shaped for all the world like giant dragon wings.
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SKELETON, SMOKE, USELESS
The skeleton poked his head out of the grave and looked around. Nothing moved – just the way he liked it, for he would not like to lose his head to some itinerant gardener responsible for mowing the grass in the lawn cemetery.
It had taken him years to reach skeleton status, waiting ever so patiently while the flesh slowly dissolved from his bones.
Now that he was clean skinned, so to speak, he felt it was time to make hay while the sun shone, or the moon glistened (you could take your pick) and perhaps scare a few gentlefolk out of their wits.
He crawled from the earth and did his best to stand erect, one bony arm hanging useless by his side. The skeleton tried to raise it before remembering that that was the arm which had sustained a bullet wound and had almost been severed while he was alive.
Ah, the life of a highwayman, he mused – never an easy one, as his teeth formed themselves into an eerie, evil grin.
Shuffling through the cemetery, bones clacking noisily as he walked in the darkness, the skeleton soon found himself in the centre of town.
Lights shone from the odd window but there were no people to be seen anywhere. Shame, he thought, I would love to be scaring the living daylights out of someone – if only for a laugh. And with that he emitted a chortling, bony cackle at his own clumsy attempts at humour.
Suddenly, he spotted smoke in the distance and picked up speed, bony mouth salivating at the prospect of human beings arriving to deal with what was no doubt a fire.
Sure enough, as he rounded the corner, the skeleton saw flames shooting high from a house, the occupants desperately trying to quell them with a garden hose.
Moving closer, he arrived just as several fire engines pulled up – firemen leaping from their cabins to quickly unravel hoses and pour gallons of water on the flames.
Sauntering up behind one of the home’s occupants, the skeleton emitted a bone clattering and ghostlike howl.
Surprised, the woman turned around to be confronted by a bony skull, its teeth chattering like a typewriter keyboard.
“Marvin, Marvin,” she screamed. “Look, look, a skeleton – and it’s alive and moving and frightening me!!”
Marvin stormed over to protect his wife, grabbing the first thing he could find as a weapon, which happened to be a spade that had been lying in the front garden from the day before.
He swung at the skeleton, who dodged and danced in the light of the flames, a ghastly grin on its face.
“I’ll get you, you bag of bones,” yelled Marvin. “Stand still, you miserable skinny runt, so I can send you back to your grave.”
The skeleton kept bobbing and hopping, the spade narrowly missing his head and legs, as Marvin laboured gamely to connect.
A protruding tree root was to be the skeleton’s undoing. One too many hops, and a bony foot was caught bringing him crashing to the ground.
Marvin and his wife couldn’t believe it. The bones, which had not seen the light of day for more than 300 years, splintered into a thousand pieces and the skull finally lay still.
“Get me a bag, would you love,” asked Marvin. “So I can just chuck this lot in the bin.”
Oh, poor skeleton, after all that time waiting!
What a fiery fate for the poor crew. Very scary. Do dragons steal treasure, I wonder.
Absolutely! How else do they get their dragon hoards??? Really!! LOL