The Waggledancing Dragon

By Andy McIntosh

This is the tale of a twelve-year-old pie maker called Alex who lives in a town where nothing much happens.

One day, Alex is sent by the corrupt mayor of the town to kill a large green dragon who threatens to destroy their town. If he doesn’t kill the dragon, Alex will be ‘dealt’ with by The Bruise Brothers!

Alex duly makes his way to the top of Ice Cream Disaster Peak wearing a baking tray and armed with only a ladle. Here he meets the fearsome sneezing dragon called Janice who is suffering terribly from hay fever. Janice explains that she has come to the town for the annual Festival of the Bees. She wants to join in with The Waggledance and give the bees a Golden Sunflower she pinched from the garage.
Janice shows Alex her ‘moves’ and he agrees to help her... Somehow Alex is going to have to convince the mayor that Janice is dead ... but how will he do that?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grimlock Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781909587335

Andy McIntosh

Andy is from Southbourne in West Sussex, where he lives with his wife, two children and a cat called Neebs. The idea for his first novel, The Waggledancing Dragon, came about more out of necessity than anything else, as he failed to bring any books to read to his kids at bedtime on holiday in Scotland, and the distillery tour leaflet only entertained them so far. So, he decided to make up a story for them about a dragon who was fed up with being a dragon, due to people's tendency to run screaming at the sight of them, or worse, chop bits off them and poke them with sharp objects. As well as being heavily influenced by his own weird brain and a love of alternative comedy, there are also snippets of his early teenage years of watching endless repeats of Blackadder, taking po-faced roleplaying games not entirely seriously and bad VHS copies of terrible fantasy films.

Book preview

The Waggledancing Dragon

Andy McIntosh

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author and publisher.

First published in Great Britain in October 2017 by

Grimlock Press

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Text Copyright © 2017 Andy McIntosh

Cover Art by Jess Gilbert

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-909587-33-5

GrimlockPress.com

For Fin and Eva

THE WAGGLEDANCING DRAGON

An Over-Dramatic Prologue

(With added urgent orchestral music)

Silhouetted by the full moon, it emerged one summer night in the darkening blue sky to the west. Two enormous wings powered the huge body through the air with great stealth and speed. The creature spied its destination in the distance and swooped down over the fields, scattering terrified livestock in every direction. The lights of a small town emerged over the horizon. The beast narrowed its eyes, beat its wings several times to gather height, and made its approach.

It circled slowly, as if looking for something. The townsfolk below knew this creature from ancient stories: Stories of the bravest, or more often, the unluckiest of people.

But any bravery the townsfolk may have possessed deserted them in the darkness of that fearful shadow. Suddenly, with the flick of a wingtip, the dreadful shape banked sharply towards the mountains south of the town. The creature spiralled down, then at the last moment, splayed its wings like giant sails and slammed to a stop by the shore of a glassy black lake.

Clutched in its front claws was a magnificent golden flower. It shimmered with a magical light which caught the creature’s eyes in the darkness. Carefully it was placed on the stony shore. The creature looked around. Near the top of the large cone-shaped mountain above him was the mouth of a cave. Here, it would hide its treasure until the time was right. The creature lifted the shimmering flower to its snout and sniffed, then threw back its head, and opened its terrible jaws as wide as they would go, as if to issue a deafening roar, as if to announce its arrival, as if to stake its claim on the land and defy anyone to challenge it...then it pulled out a hanky and did a big sneeze into it –

AAAAACHHHHOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

The hanky burst into flames, the creature shrieked, flicking it frantically off its claws into the lake, where it landed with a sizzle. The creature wiped its nose on its arm, picked up the plant and stomped off up to the cave.

Chapter 1

Tortoisetown: Population, 207.

First question you might ask is, was it populated by 207 tortoises? That would make sense, but no. Was it shaped like a tortoise? No. Was it made entirely out of tortoise shells and dead tortoises? No! How could you think such a thing? You horrid monster! Get out! Ok, come back. It had nothing to do with tortoises whatsoever. Oh no, actually it had one thing in common with tortoises. It was slow. Goodness me, it was slow. Tortoisetown was a place you went through on the way to somewhere else more interesting and would say Are we nearly there yet? or Let’s not stop here. A place slowly tick-tocking away, where nothing at all ever really happened. Take these headlines from the Tortoisetown Gazette for example:

MAN SHOWS ARMPIT TO DOCTOR

Then the next day, the top story in town was:

ARMPIT PERFECTLY NORMAL, SAY DOCTORS

The day after that literally NOTHING happened at all, and the headline was simply:

___________________

As a result of all this, no one was really ready for the headline:

FIRE-BREATHING MESSENGER OF DEATH TO DESTROY TOWN AND KILL EVERYONE

Because, suddenly, Tortoisetown was a town on the edge of panic. In fact, it was so close to the edge of panic, that its heels were already over and it was wind-milling its arms and going ‘whoa!’ It had been slowly trudging down the gloomy corridor of boredom for years, but now, it had accidentally stepped on the skateboard of alarm and was hurtling towards the fire exit marked ‘UNKNOWN HORRORS!’ But what was the reason for all this?

Well, everyone had seen the suspiciously dragon-shaped flying thing arrive on Tuesday night. It had landed near the mountain a few miles out of town - the one some called ‘The Magic Mountain’, but which most people called ‘That mountain shaped like an upturned ice cream cone with the bottom bitten off’ or the more exciting sounding ‘Ice Cream Disaster Peak’. Except now the ice cream inside was dragon-flavoured, and it tasted terrifying.

One of these worried locals was Alex, who owned the Tortoisetown pie shop. At twelve he was still quite young to have such an important job, but the original owners (his Mum and Dad) had decided to give it all up and dedicate their lives to the art of teleportation. They’d travelled to the other side of the world and vowed not to return until they could do so in less than a nanosecond. And so, the pie shop had passed to young Alex. And actually, he was fine with that.

Most boys in the town had dreams of being a knight, or a king, or of winning ‘Tortoisetown's Got Talent’ but this was not for Alex. He spent the day making pies and he loved it: big pies, small pies, every shaped and flavoured pie imaginable. What doesn’t taste better encased in a pie? Well, quite a few things: Alex’s ‘Pie pie’ for instance (a pie made of solid pastry) and his gunpowder and rum pie (made especially for National Pirate Day) were complete disasters. The second one, a complete disaster that meant a wall of the town pub had to be rebuilt. And the less said about the mackerel and daffodil one the better. But these were minor, experimental blips, and they didn’t put him off. He read book after book, making notes and comments and improvements on his favourite recipes along the way.

He planned on becoming an expert in pieology,