The rumble of that explosion was heard for miles. Mirrors cracked. Pictures fell from the walls. Dogs yelped and hid themselves away under furniture. In all the homes around the blast for sixteen miles, milk curdled into a disgusting cream.
At the centre of the blast, much of the house was left in rubble.
The lead horseman was the only one left.
The fire had risen high and spared him.
He woke up and nudged his horse. It was knocked out. Leaving it behind for the moment, the man got up and walked towards the destroyed front of the house.
What he saw outside shocked him.
The fire from the dying creature had lasted only a second, but it had demolished the huge stones that made up the front of the house, it had burned away the yellowed flowers in the garden, it had knocked down the iron fence. It had even burned foliage down the street.
In the scorched trees above him, his fellow horsemen were spread out, draped in the ugly branches. Their armour had been burned to black and still smouldered, sending smoke into the air. Their lances were twisted corkscrew-like, or splayed in two, and hung loosely in the bony trees. The horses were gone; they had no armour, so they had vanished instantly in the blast. The man took some comfort in knowing they had felt no pain.
It was the only comfort the man had left to him. The other knights were dead. His friends, the closest people to him in the world, were gone for ever. They had been through so much together. It would not be easy without them.
The man stepped through a trail of red ash to find the skull of the terrible beast. As its spirit died, he heard its insufferable voice.
“Ssshame the boy won’t carry on your work,” taunted the voice. Aldric was stunned and leaned closer. “Oh, we know about the boy … Sweet little child … not long for this world …”
And then it was dead.
At first, Aldric’s mind rejected what he’d heard. How could anyone know about his boy?
But he felt fear rising inside him, a growing sense that the serpent’s words were true.
Angrily, he lifted the skull. It broke apart in his hand, turning to crimson ash.
There was a sound behind him. The snort of an animal. He turned in alarm – only to find his horse in the smashed doorway.
The next moment, Aldric was riding away from the scene with all possible speed. Police would be coming soon, and emergency services. He couldn’t wait around answering questions.
How did the thing know he had a child?
The thought tore at him. Fighting emotion, he galloped through the quiet town in a rush, down an alley filled with old cars, avoiding the wailing sirens on the streets. Autumn leaves floated past him.
His mind was racing even faster than the horse.
The creature had outwitted them. Playing at being weaker than it was, it had fooled them into taking their time and it had let loose all of its powers as it died. The spell had indeed killed it; but the beast had a dangerous death-rattle. They should have let it weaken first, before getting closer. Always full of tricks, the things were. I must learn from this, the man thought. I must strike harder, move faster. I must bury my feelings. I must fight with all that’s in me. And have nothing left over.
It knew, he thought. The creature knew. Its spies had found his child. The thing had said, “We know about the boy.” We.
He tried not to think any more.
But in his heart, he knew three things to be true.
He was the last knight on Earth.
His son was in danger.
And he had one more dragon to face.
For Simon, the incident of the beetles swarming the streets had been a dream-like event and none of the other boys seemed to feel right talking about it either. Life slipped back to normal. No one ever listened to Simon much, anyway; his voice never seemed loud enough to get attention.
He was known for only one thing. It had long been a rumour that Simon was poor and that he was allowed to stay at school for free, out of charity to orphans. The rumour hurt him deeply, but everyone had come to believe it.
He had always been treated like a pauper. With no parents to pick him up on weekends or holidays, Simon had come under the care of the lighthouse keeper and his wife. The lighthouse keeper naturally ended up giving Simon all kinds of chores, so the boy came to be known as something of a junior janitor. To the rich snobs at the Lighthouse School, Simon seemed like a servant, a second-class citizen.
He didn’t even sleep in the regular rooms with everyone else. Simon lived in the lighthouse. He stayed in the little two-storey building next to the beacon lamp with the old lighthouse keeper and his wife. That’s the way it had always been.
It was another reason Simon didn’t grow close to the other boys: he lived apart from them.
His room in the lighthouse was plain and simple, often quite cold and drafty. The only thing notable about it was a fireplace, which he was never supposed to use without permission.
The other children were down the hill in dormitories that had once been used by Revolutionary War soldiers. So even the buildings had a past which Simon was left out of.
Simon did get some use out of the fireplace when he could get away with it. He loved the way the flames shivered and swayed, making little sculptures, how they created flickering shadow plays on the wall.
Recently, he had been caught several times and punished with cooking duty. He had started taking more chances in the things he did lately, that was certain. The principal had given him a stern talking-to. Old Denman the lighthouse keeper, who was Scottish, had tried to explain to Simon that fire was a terrible thing, the most awful, sickening thing imaginable to a wood and brick place like the school.
“You know how we feel about you, boy,” Denman had said, his wife looking on. “We’ve watched you since you were a little child. We’ve never tried to step in and replace your true parents. We’ve never looked at caring for you as anything but a job, to be done well and without complaint. And we’ve done it. But you listen to me: fire is nothing to play with. Don’t you ever harm this old lighthouse … it’s your sanctuary.”
These were more words than the lighthouse keeper had ever said to Simon at one time in his entire life. They didn’t talk much. They worked together tending the lighthouse and had the shared sense of accomplishment that came with it, but the old man was not a father figure. His wife was not motherly. Both of them had seemed old and tired since as far back as Simon could remember.
They were tired of Simon’s questions about his family.
Maybe the rumours were true: maybe he was a poor kid, an orphan, allowed to stay at school for free. Wouldn’t someone have told him if his parents were dead? Or was the school sparing him from the truth? For Simon, it was a depressing possibility. All he knew of his family came from the few things Denman had told him, that they were good people, that they cared about him, that they wanted the best for him. They felt he was better off here than living with them, for reasons Simon didn’t understand.
No one else at school knew much, either. The day after the beetles, at Halloween, Simon had sneaked into the school office to take a look at his file while everyone was out decorating for the masquerade.