Lair of the Bat Monster Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  STRANGE DISCOVERY

  A BATTY COUSIN

  INTO THE JUNGLE

  MEET THE BATS!

  CREEPY AND CRAWLY

  THE DRAGON-NAPPING

  BAT MONSTER MAMA

  THE ROOST

  LAIR TREASURES

  WAITING AND WAITING

  A CRY FOR HELP

  DRAGONBAT

  A WORD ABOUT BATS. . .

  This one’s for all the friends and readers working in animal rescue whose stories have kept me entertained and given me hope over the years. From homicidal eagles to surly wombats and spiky puggles—I’m so glad you’re out there.

  DIAL BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by The Penguin Group • Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Ursula Vernon

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  Dragonbreath: lair of the bat monster / by Ursula Vernon p. cm.

  Summary: When Danny and Wendell find an injured bat at the neighborhood pool, they take it to Mexico, where Danny’s cousin, a bat specialist, lives, but once there Danny is snatched up by a giant bat monster, and it is up to Wendell to save him.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47605-5

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Dragons—Fiction. 3. Iguanas—Fiction. 4. Bats—Fiction. 5. Mexico—Fiction.]

  PZ7.V5985 Lai 2011 [Fic]—dc22

  2010012143

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  THE DEEPEST JUNGLE. THE DARK HEART OF THE RAIN FOREST. THE BRAVE EXPLORER FIGHTS HIS WAY THROUGH THE UNDERGROWTH.

  HE HAS LOST MOST OF HIS TEAM TO MALARIA, HOSTILE NATIVES, AND WILD BEASTS. ONLY HIS FAITHFUL PORTER, BWANA WENDELL, REMAINS.

  BUT AT LAST, HIS GOAL IS IN SIGHT!

  STRANGE DISCOVERY

  “It’s really hot,” said Wendell. “I want to get in the pool. Is there some reason you’re standing there mumbling?”

  Danny Dragonbreath started. “Oh! Uh. No, I was just . . .” He waved a hand vaguely. “You know. Uh.”

  Wendell sighed. He did indeed know. The iguana had been Danny’s best friend through several grades, multiple emergency room visits, and countless daydreams.

  “The jungle is really cool,” Danny announced.

  Wendell looked around. They were standing on the edge of the neighborhood pool. There were a few potted plants around the pool, and a hedge on the other side of the chain-link fence, but nothing that could really be called a jungle.

  “I think the heat has addled your brain.”

  Danny scoffed. “Heat doesn’t bother me. I’m a dragon.”

  “I have this vague memory of going to the beach with you last summer . . .”

  “Um.”

  “You sunburned so badly you couldn’t sleep on your back for a week.”

  Danny sighed with relief. He’d promised his mom he’d wear sunscreen—she hadn’t forgotten the Beach Incident either—but he never remembered to bring it. There were so many things to think about, and so many things to remember. He was usually lucky if he remembered a towel.

  “Say, Wendell . . .”

  “I brought a towel for you too.”

  It was a warm day. Several families were out swimming. Big Eddy the Komodo dragon, the neighborhood bully, was lurking in the deep end of the pool.

  Wendell sat down on the edge and put a toe gingerly into the water. “Brrrrr . . .” He began inching down the steps.

  Danny, being Danny, got a running start and cannonballed into the pool.

  “GERONIMO!”

  “NOOOOO!”

  “It’s faster this way,” said Danny, treading water with his tail. “Besides, it’s like a hundred degrees out. Doesn’t that feel great?”

  Wendell muttered something unkind. An older gecko who had been sunbathing sat up and glared at Danny.

  “Um. Sorry,” said Danny. “Didn’t see you there.”

  She grumbled, and lay back down.

  “What I don’t get,” Danny said to Wendell, “is why people come to the pool if they don’t want to get wet!”

  Wendell might have had an excellent explanation, but he was too busy staring at something rising out of the water behind Danny.

  “Oh, well, if you’re getting out, don’t let us stop you,” said Danny, stepping aside.

  Big Eddy looked baffled, then enraged. He loomed over the much smaller dragon.

  Danny glanced around the pool. There were three adults, not including the sunbathing gecko. Big Eddy wasn’t going to pound him flat in front of grown-ups, no matter how much he might want to. At the moment, Danny was safe, and he knew it.

  Big Eddy knew it too. The Komodo dragon shoved by him, “accidentally” pushing his elbow into Danny’s side, and stomped away.

  An hour or two later, exhausted from swimming and splashing and playing Marco Polo, Wendell and Danny floated lazily in the pool. The families had left, the sunbathing gecko had rolled up her towel, and it was just the two boys and the sparkling blue water.

  Danny rolled over to float on his back. It would be months until school started again. The pool was open every day. Could life get any better?

  The clouds were all kinds of interesting shapes. Danny could see a rocket and a gun and something that might be a giant squid. He squinted. Definitely a giant squid. And the wind was moving, so the giant squid was reaching for the gun and that cloud over there could be a cowboy, and they could have an epic shootout—

  “What’s that?” asked Wendell.

  “It’s a giant squid with a—”

  “Don’t mention giant squid,” said Wendell, and shuddered. He’d come entirely too close to one last year, courtesy of one of Danny’s crazy schemes. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m talking about that.”

  The iguana pointed. Danny paddled over to see what he was looking at.

  There was something in the pool filter, in the little alcove where water flowed in and out. It looked like a black clump of leaves.

  “Is it leaves?” Danny peered closer.

  “I don’t think leaves try to climb things.”

  As they watched, the black lump hitched itself against the wall and scrabbled faintly, then dropped back into the water.

  “I think it’s a bat!” said Danny, astonished.

  Wendell fumbled for one of the towels by the edge of the pool and wiped the water off his glasses. “Huh. I think you’re right.”

  Wendell screwed his face up in thought. Danny waited. Wendell was a nerd down to his toenails, and every bit of information he learned stayed stuck in his brain, like lint stuck to a lump of clay after you rolled it a
cross the carpet.1

  “We’re not supposed to touch it,” said Wendell finally. “We need gloves or something.”

  “But it’s tiny,” said Danny. “What’s it going to do to us?”

  “I don’t think there’s another kind of rabies,” said Wendell. “If you get one of the towels, we can catch it in that.”

  Danny grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his hand. He reached into the alcove.

  “Be careful,” said Wendell, hovering nervously behind him. “I think they’re really fragile. But don’t let it bite you. Remember the were-wieners . . .”

  “Aw, c’mon. That was cool.” Danny couldn’t fit his whole body into the alcove, so he put his cheek against the pool’s edge and groped around blind.

  “You’re nearly there,” said Wendell, looking over his shoulder.

  Danny’s towel-covered fingers closed over something that was only a little more solid than air. “Got it!”

  He pulled out the black lump.

  “It’s so light!” said Danny.

  “They have to be, to fly,” said Wendell, shoving his glasses up on his nose.

  They looked at the bat. It had a short, dog-like muzzle and gigantic ears with big flaps of skin in them. Its mouth was slightly open, revealing a fine fringe of teeth.

  “It’s . . . kinda . . . cute. In a hideous sort of way.”

  “Yeah,” said Wendell. “Kinda . . . ugly cute . . . ish . . .”

  “So what kind of bat is it?”

  “It was a two-page report,” said Wendell. “I didn’t get into advanced bat taxonomy.”

  “Well, why doesn’t it fly away, then?” asked Danny. “You! Bat! Go on!”

  The bat sat there.

  “I don’t think it can,” said Wendell. “It looks pretty waterlogged. And is that a hole in its wing?”

  The iguana poked gingerly at the bat’s wing. It pulled the wing back and made a noise.

  “Yeeeek!” Wendell fell over backward, and even Danny jumped.

  It wasn’t a noise that an animal would make. It was an angry staticky chatter, like a furious radio. Danny had never heard anything like it.

  “What’s it saying?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t speak bat!” Wendell picked himself up. “Maybe we should leave it somewhere, let it dry out . . .”

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  Danny, moving very slowly, flipped the towel over the top of the bat. It didn’t react. “I don’t know . . . but I know who will.”

  He made a small, awkward bundle of bat and towel. The bat wasn’t moving around. He hoped it could breathe.

  “Let’s take it to Mom.”

  A BATTY COUSIN

  There is a particular tone of voice that strikes fear and terror into the hearts of parents everywhere, a kind of studied nonchalance that means something has gone horribly, horribly wrong, and Danny was using it.

  “Saaaaaaaaay, Mom?”

  Mrs. Dragonbreath froze. She turned slowly in her office chair, sniffing the air. She couldn’t smell smoke. At least, not a lot of smoke. The house usually smelled faintly smoky—dragons lived there, after all—but there wasn’t the smell she’d expect if, say, the house was on fire. That was something, at least.

  “Yeeeeeeessssssss? ” she said.

  Danny stood in the doorway. Wendell was behind him, apparently walking under his own power, so that ruled out “severely injured Wendell,” which had been the source of that tone several times in the past. (“Saaaaaaay, Mom ... if ... y’know, just hypothetically . . . somebody had dislocated their arm, what exactly would it look like?”)

  “You remember that bird we found last spring? ” asked Danny.

  “The robin? Yes . . .”

  Danny held out a towel-wrapped bundle. “We found a bat in the swimming pool. We think it’s hurt. Can you help it? ”

  “Um,” said Danny’s mother. She took the towel gingerly. “A bat? Don’t they carry rabies?”

  “We were very careful,” said Wendell. “We only handled it through the towel.”

  “Um.”

  “You were really good with the bird!” said Danny eagerly. “I’m sure you can help this bat!”

  “Your confidence is touching,” said his mother dryly. She picked the knotted towel apart with her claws and folded it back. The bat looked up at her with small, bright eyes.

  “You can do something, right?” said Danny, leaning forward.

  “I don’t know . . . All I did was put the bird in a dark box and take it to the wildlife rescue people. And birds don’t get rabies.”

  “But Mom . . .”

  She looked at him. Danny tried to look sad and earnest and hopeful, an expression that occasionally worked on his mother.

  She snorted once, loudly, steam rising from her nostrils. “Don’t give me that look.”

  His mother gazed into the small, scrunched-up face of the bat, like a mouse-sized gargoyle—a face that only a mother could love.

  She sighed. Danny knew from long experience that that particular sigh indicated surrender. “Fine. I don’t know much about bats myself, but I know who does.”

  “Who?” asked Danny.

  “Your cousin Steve. He’s some kind of bat researcher down in Mexico. If you can find a cardboard box to keep your little friend in, I’ll give your cousin a call.”

  “Thanks, Mom!” Danny turned to bolt out of the room, paused, made sure Wendell wasn’t looking, and gave his mom a quick hug. “You’re the best!”

  “I’m a sucker is what I am,” muttered his mother, but she smiled anyway.

  By the time Danny and Wendell had located a cardboard box, Danny’s mother was on the phone, and the conversation was one of those one-sided grown-up ones that are frustrating to try to listen to.

  “Uh-huh. . . . Uh-huh. . . . Got it.... You’re sure it’s no trouble? . . . Uh-huh. . . .”

  Danny and Wendell waited impatiently while Mrs. Dragonbreath wrote on a notepad. Danny poked his head over the counter to see what she was writing. It said “Pillowcase” and “East Whitton Station, Mexico,” and then she’d apparently run out of things to write and was doodling flowers and cartoon chickens all over the pad.

  “Thanks, Steve,” said Mrs. Dragonbreath finally. “I know it’ll mean a lot to them. Talk to you later.”

  She hung up the phone. “Okay. Steve says to bring your bat down to him and he’ll see what he can do.” She frowned at the towel-wrapped bat. “And we’re supposed to put him in a pillowcase, not a box, so he has something to cling to.”

  Danny ran for a pillowcase. By the time he came back, his mother was counting out change on the counter.

  “It’s a long bus ride. Nearly two hours. Steve says it’s okay if you stay overnight, so make sure you pack a toothbrush.”

  Danny’s mom waved. “Now, don’t make any trouble for your cousin Steve. He’s very busy with his research.”

  “Yes, Mom . . .”

  “And don’t get bitten by any bats!”

  INTO THE JUNGLE

  It was a long bus ride. Wendell knew that Mexico was a long ways off, and even Danny’s bizarre bus-ride-bending field—or whatever it was that allowed him to take buses to places like mythical Japan and the Sargasso Sea—seemed to have trouble with it.

  They changed buses twice, once at the mall terminal, and once in a place Wendell had never seen, which was very dusty and full of chickens. Somebody came out and played mariachi music at them, but went away after Danny started to sing along.

  They passed the time reading comic books. Wendell had brought the latest issue of Empire of Feathers, and Danny was reading Single-Cell Samurai, about a heroic blood cell bitten by radioactive bacteria, which traveled the land fighting monsters and Righting Wrongs.

  At last the bus pulled off the dusty highway onto a very dusty gravel road, and then onto a road that was nothing but dust, surrounded on all sides by dense vegetation. It looked like a jungle, and it was a much greener green than the parks near Wendell’s
house.

  The bus stopped. “East Whitton Station,” said the bus driver.

  Danny stuffed his comic back in his backpack, picked up the pillowcase with the bat in it, and hopped off the bus. Wendell followed.

  The humidity hit them like a wall. It was hot and wet, in ways that redefined “hot” and “wet.” Wendell felt like he was standing in a shower with his clothes on.

  Once the bus had rumbled away, the buzz of insects grew louder and louder. A cicada the size of Wendell’s arm peered down at them from a high twig and clattered its wings.

  “Cousin Steve’s supposed to meet us here . . .” said Danny, turning in a circle. “Wow, can you imagine working out here? It’s so cool!”

  “It’s awfully . . . buggy . . .” said Wendell. He swatted at a bug on his arm. “Oh god! It bit me!”

  “It might have malaria,” said a voice behind them, “but sleeping sickness is African. And how did you even hear about Buruli ulcer?”

  “I read a lot,” said Wendell defensively. “And it’s a horrible disease! You get a sore on your shoulder and then your arm falls off!”

  Danny had to admit that this was pretty neat. Well, probably not the bit where your arm actually fell off, but still . . .

  “And if you get the sore on your neck, your head falls off!”

  “Cool!” said Danny.

  “It’s really not likely . . .” said the newcomer.

  Another mosquito buzzed by Wendell. The iguana yelped and flung his arms over his head.