The farm

It was Kathy who spotted the orchard. My wings were getting tired – it’s been too long since I flew any distance – so I’d dropped below the cloud cover. The apples blazed like tiny red stars against the deep green of the trees.

I swooped low, warning Kathy to hold tight. There are short spines on my back that she can hold on to, but dragons were never really built to carry passengers. I landed near the orchard, and we crossed a meadow to the first line of trees. The ground felt strange: the grass looked like grass but felt stiff and coarse. When I pulled some up, it splintered in my claws.

‘Even the fields are turning to wood,’ I said.

‘Those apples look real enough,’ said Kathy. And they were. In fact, they were delicious. We wolfed down as much fruit as we could – neither of us had eaten for days. When I couldn’t eat any more, I took a tour of the orchard, and found it was completely surrounded by water. An old mill stream split in two and ran past it on either side.

‘It’s an island,’ I said. ‘I wonder if that’s why it hasn’t been transformed yet.’

‘There’s a farm,’ said Kathy, pointing across the meadow. ‘Maybe there’s someone who can tell us.’

From a distance, the farm buildings looked normal – well, they were mostly made of wood after all. Up close, it was different.

In the farm entrance stood a vehicle with massive tyres and a digging arm on the front. Experience told me it would originally have been made from steel. Now its wheels were discs of oak, and the arms supporting the digging blades were willow poles. Where rubber hoses had once connected the machine’s working parts, thick vines now snaked.

‘There’s a dog,’ said Kathy. ‘Oh ...’

The beast looked as if it had been carved from a single block of ash. It was frozen in mid-stride, caught in the act of chasing chickens across the yard. The chickens were wooden too, with feathers like dry autumn leaves. Their eyes were dead acorns.

The whole farm had turned to wood.

‘It’s incredible,’ said Kathy. ‘Creepy but ... sort of beautiful.’

‘We should go,’ I said. A cold wind was blowing through the farmyard, and I was keen to reach London before nightfall. Then Kathy cried out.

‘There,’ she said, ‘in the upstairs window. Somebody’s watching us.’

It was a man, broad-shouldered and tall, standing at the window and staring down into the yard.

‘He’s wood too,’ I said. ‘Like everything else. Come on, Kathy – we should go.’

‘I suppose so.’

I turned to leave. It was then that Kathy cried out again. I looked at the wooden man in time to see him raise his arm. The arm moved in stiff little jerks, but there was no mistaking the gesture. He was beckoning us. He did this twice, then his arm juddered to a halt.

‘You don’t really want to go inside, do you?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kathy. ‘Let’s just wait, and see if he moves again.

I argued with her. Nothing about the farm felt right, and I was keen to get away. But she’s a stubborn woman. Eventually I decided staying around was preferable to losing my only companion. So that’s what we’re doing now: waiting in the wooden farmyard, while the sun rolls behind the orchard and the sky grows dark around us. We might as well resign ourselves to staying here for the night. Staying here and waiting.

Waiting to see what the wooden man wants.