Free Gauge by Chris D'Lacey Page A

like.”
    Lucy grunted like a farmyard pig. Henry Bacon, the Pennykettles’ grumpy next-door neighbour, was always causing problems. “What did he want?”
    “He called to say that the Town Council are planning to demolish the library clock.”
    “What for?”
    “Because it’s old and doesn’t work very well.”
    “It tells the wrong time,” Lucy agreed. “And it clunks instead of chiming.”

    “Then it should be fixed, not demolished,” Liz said airily. “That clock is part of Scrubbley’s history. People would miss it. It’s not right to take it down.”
    Lucy gave a little shrug. “What about the ghost?”
    Her mother laughed. “Ghost? What ghost?”
    On the worktop, Gruffen looked up ‘ghost’. Strange spectral creatures , his book informed him. Often found at a place of great unhappiness .
    “Miss Baxter says it’s haunted,” Lucy sniffed. Miss Baxter, Lucy’s teacher, knew about such things. She often went on visits to stately homes. She claimed she had once seen the ghost of Henry the Eighth eating a chicken drumstick in a cloakroom. Miss Baxter, it had to be said, was slightly strange.
    Liz walked away, shaking her bright red hair. “The only thing that haunts that clock tower is pigeons.”
    “Dead pigeons?” said Lucy, aghast, her mind dizzy with images of phantasmal birds going “coo” (or would it be “woo” if they were ghosts?) as they flew through walls.

    “Just pigeons,” said her mum a little more soberly. She looked out of the window and became thoughtful for a second. “It would be such a shame to see that clock go. I feel as if I ought to be doing more to save it…”
    Lucy glanced at the dragons and they at her. For they all knew what was in Liz’s mind. Whenever Lucy’s mum became concerned about something, she only ever followed one course of action. She made a new dragon.
    A special one.

Chapter Two

    Sure enough, Liz started one later that night when Lucy had gone to bed.
    Along the landing next door to Lucy’s bedroom was a small rectangular room which Liz called her pottery ‘studio’, though its popular name was the Dragons’ Den. At the window end was a sturdy wooden bench, where Liz kept her paintbrushes and potters’ turntable and all the things she needed for making dragons. The two longer walls were taken up with shelving racks, upon which stood a large number of completed dragons. Most of these were in storage, waiting to be sold on the market in Scrubbley, though some were treasured ornaments and some…well, some, like Gruffen, could spread their wings and move around if they wanted to.
    In appearance, most of the Pennykettle dragons looked the same. Their glaze was a mid to bottle-green colour, with occasional streaks of blue or turquoise. And they all had spiky wings and curving tails and oval-shaped eyes and trumpet-like noses. Liz enjoyed sculpting them in different poses. She had dancing dragons, sporting dragons, baby dragons breaking out of their eggs – dragons in all sorts of appealing stances. But those dragons that were special appeared without conscious effort, as though they had simply popped out of Liz’s dreams. This is how it was with the dragon that came to be known as Gauge.
    Lucy Pennykettle, like her mum, had an unerring instinct for the birth of a special dragon. As Liz was twisting the turntable back and forth, carefully admiring her latest creation, Lucy slipped into the Den.
    “You’re supposed to be in bed,” her mother said.
    Lucy tactfully ignored her and came to stand by the bench. She peered at the dragon. “It’s a ‘he’,” she said, gently stroking his ‘top knot’ – the little spike that rose like a fin from the top of a dragon’s head. “What does he do?”
    “I don’t know,” Liz replied. “But he’s definitely special. I was just daydreaming and there he was.”
    “Why’s he got a paw missing?” Lucy pointed to the dragon’s left arm. The paw at the end of it seemed to be only half there.