Extract from the book.

Jem Scott and the Stone Dragons

Introduction

Jem Scott was an unusual boy. He had blond hair which is not particularly unusual in itself but he had it a bit longer than most eleven year old kids. He loved drawing and drew intuitively with natural ease. He would spend most of his spare time sketching and he took his little black leather bound sketch book with him where ever he went. Jem would use this as a place to escape to,
a place where he could invent and develop his ideas for things he wanted to make. He would also draw objects and animals just for the shear pleasure of doing so. A lot of Jems school friends thought him rather odd because of this, although some envied him this talent and secretly wished they too could draw like him.
Unlike many boys he was not really interested in computer games, he always felt that he never had anything to show for the time spent playing them. With drawing he could explore his own creative imagination which was great fun with the added bonus that he had something to show at afterwards.
The other thing that made Jem different from other kids was his eyes. They were different colours, he had one blue eye and one green. Just why his eyes were like this he didn’t know and his parents were unable to shed any light on this question either. They just said that it runs in the family.
This unusual appearance set Jem apart from other kids and some of them picked on him at school and called him freaky. This bothered him sometimes and it had a tendancy to make him retreat into his own imaginary world which he would often express through drawing imaginary creatures and strange machines. He was not a loner, he had good friends and amongst those who appreciated his character and talents, he was popular. Every summer he went with his parents to stay with his grandad who lived in a big rambling old house in the mountains of North Wales.








Chapter 1
‘The collection’

It was the end of a great day. Jem Scott was relaxing in his grand parent’s garden after a long day playing in the stream that flowed through the garden. ‘This has been a really good day’ thought Jem. He was feeling very pleased with himself as he had found no less than seven dragon eggs amongst the pebbles in the stream. ‘They must get washed down from the mountains’ thought Jem. He was sure there were dragons up in the mountains because he had heard them howling and whistling. What was to be done with the eggs, Jem wasn’t sure, but he was certain of one thing, and that was that they were eggs and not just stones. He was, after all even at the age of eleven, very experienced and skilful at identifying dragon eggs, he was, in his own head, a world authority on the subject of dragons. These were no ordinary stones, you could tell from the shape of them, how heavy they were, and the thin lines that went around them.
He had gathered them in a small wooden basket that he had found in grandads shed. Grandads shed was a magical place with a special smell of wood, tools, machine oil and the faint aroma of pipe tobacco. Grandad had been an engineer before he had retired and had always been clever with machines. His shed was a wonderful place where he stored tools and other strange bits of machinery.
Jem had snuck into the shed and borrowed the basket to take on his mission to search and gather dragon eggs. He spent most of the day by the stream scrabbling about searching and sorting stones, testing and closely examining ones that he thought were likely to be eggs. He was, in his own mind, an expert at this and had devised his own method for identifying dragon eggs. The main problem is that dragon eggs are made of stone just like stones are. Like ordinary stones they can be quite worn just like pebbles in a river because unlike the eggs of other animals, dragon eggs can be many hundreds, even thousands of years old before they hatch. Jem had often wondered how dragons made their eggs from stone and how they hatched. He had not yet managed to work that one out.
He lay on the lawn resting while the eggs dried out in the hot afternoon sunshine. He had laid them out very carefully in a row on some newspaper on the grass. ‘I wonder,’ he thought, ‘how do you get them to hatch?’
As he lay there admiring his collection and doing little drawings of the eggs, he noticed something rather odd. There was a little noise coming from the eggs.
He crouched down to get nearer and sure enough, coming from three of the eggs was a strange hissing sound. Jem looked at the eggs very carefully and observed that the three that were hissing had little wisps of steam jetting out of tiny little holes which were arranged in rows along what appeared to be tiny cracks in the stone surface.
‘Tea is ready’, he heard his mum call from the house. This brought him back down to earth with a bump.
He left the eggs where they were and walked up to the house. He was hungry, having worked so hard with his searching. As he walked he thought about the steaming eggs. They were hot from the sun and there must be some water that had soaked into the stones and now, as they were getting hot in the sunshine, the water was coming out under pressure as steam. Jem knew from science lessons at school that water becomes steam when you heat it up and when that happens it expands and the pressure created will make it squirt out. That must be what is happening with these eggs, he thought. The steam was hissing as it came out of the tiny holes.
‘Stones don’t hiss’ said mum. ‘Well, they might’, said grandad. ‘I’ve known stones hiss, sometimes when they are wet and they are near a fire. Fire gives a powerful heat and stones can crack sometimes if they are left in a fire. But the sun isn’t hot enough to crack your stones, Jem’ said grandad reassuringly. ‘It will just be the water steaming out because they are getting warm in the sun. I’m sure they’ll be okay when you get back after you’ve had your tea…. Although…. you never know’ he said, after a brief pause. ‘Stones can be strange sometimes’. He looked at Jem with a smile and a glint in his eye.
Jem loved his grandad very much. He was always cheerful, and had a mischievous toothy grin that came from within a snow white whiskery beard. Grandad Alf, as he was known as, had smoked a pipe for over fifty years and it had worn a notch in his teeth that you could see when he smiled. Grandma would never let him smoke his pipe in the house, so he would retire to the small secluded world of his shed to enjoy a smoke. His blue eyes, were framed by sun tanned wrinkles. Always alert and full of enthusiasm for Jems ideas and projects. His silver hair formed bushy chaotic surf around a dessert island of smooth tanned baldness.
Grandad was hundreds of years old!
Jem was keen to finish his meal as quickly as he could so he could get back to his dragon eggs. He was sure they would be completely dry by now. As soon as he could he left the big oak kitchen table and the discussions about things that didn’t really interest him much. Things to do with work and politicians doing things they shouldn’t do and stuff. Jem made his escape and went quickly out to return to the more pressing matter of his dragon eggs.
The eggs were various colours and they all had lines on, most of which went all the way around the stones. Three were black, two were a speckled pink with white and black bits and there were two white ones. They were various sizes too. The black stones being slightly larger than the rest, the largest of all being about the size of a large apple.
Jem walked down the little winding brick pathway that he and grandad had made last summer, lost in his dragon egg thoughts, as was often the case with Jem, he was lost in his own world. He was an imaginative boy who loved inventing things and making whacky contraptions from bits of this and that. He walked across the lawn to where he had left his eggs. But he was not prepared for the surprise that awaited him on the lawn.