Dragon Island

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Shane
Berryhill
is one of
Mashable.com's
100+ Best Authors on Twitter. He is the author of CHANCE FORTUNE AND THE OUTLAWS (an official selection of the NY Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age and the Texas Lone Star Reading List) and CHANCE FORTUNE IN THE SHADOW ZONE. Look for the third book in the series, CHANCE FORTUNE OUT OF TIME, as well as his fantasy thriller, THE LONG SILENT NIGHT, to release soon from Crossroad Press. Shane loves to interact with friends and fans through social media.

Book List

Chance Fortune and the Outlaws

Chance Fortune in the Shadow Zone

Chance Fortune Out of Time

Dragon Island

Learn more about Shane and his work at:

http://www.shaneberryhill.com/

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For the brave people of Japan

In the gap, half-concealed by a confused tangle of creepers, leaves and broken flowers, appeared a figure of terror, monstrous beyond the nature of even that dark, savage place.

—Richard Adams,
Shardik

Let the wild rumpus start!

—Maurice Sendak,
Where the Wild Things Are

The Dragon’s Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Sea or the Pacific Bermuda Triangle, is an area in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan infamous for the disappearances of ships, planes, and other maritime vessels. While some of the more recent explanations for these vanishings involve sensationalisms like UFOs and undersea kingdoms, the original explanation is the most bizarre of all. According to ancient myth, gigantic dragons inhabit this area, often creating sudden storms with the thrashing about of their massive bodies...

—Excerpt from
The Dragon’s Triangle
, by James Clayton (2009)

M
y name is Raymond Nakajima and sleeping like a rock is my second greatest talent. My first is my ability to sing. But that aside, Mom says I could sleep through the end of the world, if it came to it.

But she’s wrong.

I know because the world is ending right here and now.

I’m shaken awake to hear the sound of Roger Daltrey shouting in my ears. My iPod has been on auto shuffle since I nodded off during my flight to
Tokyo
. The passenger cabin I’m seated in shudders in time with the music as gale-force winds buffet the plane. All around me, fasten-your-seatbelt signs blink in rhythm with the riffs of Pete Townsend’s guitar.

The track on my iPod changes to Aretha Franklin and I watch in terror as oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartments to swing back and forth to the beat of Respect.

The cabin’s lights extinguish and I jerk out my ear-buds. The noises of the cabin come alive in brilliant, high definition surround sound. Everyone is crying and wailing. I hear people frantically dialing their loved ones on their cellular phones. I hear these same people curse as they realize their phones have no signal.

I wish my dog Bear was here. He always makes me feel safe. He has guarded me from danger since I was just knee-high. I might be the wimpiest kid in Bradbury High School, but when Bear is around, not even the upperclassmen dare to mess with me!

I fumble around in my chair and find the ends of my seatbelt. I fasten them together and look through the dark to where the passenger window should be. Thunder echoes as streaks of lightning flash in the distance, illuminating the airplane wing and the gray-black thunderhead it’s slicing through.

Then it sounds.

The roar.

A sound so loud and so deep I feel it as much as hear it. It reverberates through my chair into my chest, rattling my teeth. The noise is completely alien. If it sounded close to anything it would be thunder against a backdrop of garbled Japanese noise music. But louder!

And if it comes from an animal, it’s no animal I’ve ever heard. It’s certainly not a sound any passing bird could make.

Frightened more than ever, I turn and look at the man sitting across the aisle, wanting to know if he heard the roar, too. I’ve avoided making eye contact since we first bumped into each other at LAX. His features are Asian, just like mine, but everything about him creeps me out.

From his gray suit and black turtleneck to his dark sunglasses and pale, pock-marked face, he is one nasty looking dude.

But the thing most unsettling about him is his smile. Even now, I get the willies thinking about the first time I saw it.

I, of course, was on my PS handheld, wailing on some Call of Duty as I walked through the airport, when suddenly I crashed into this tall, beanpole of a dude.

I’m what my gym teacher Mrs. Fuqua likes to call vertically challenged, so when I raised my head to look him in the eye, it felt like it took forever for my gaze to reach his. When it finally did, and I peered into the dark shades covering his eyes, I was barely able to suppress a shudder.

“Uh, sorry, dude.”

The man gave no response. He simply stared at me. I imagined that those were not sunglasses on his face, but twin bottomless pits.

That’s when he smiled.

At first, I thought there was something wrong with him. The muscles around his mouth and pock-marked cheeks began to twitch and writhe as though they’d never seen use. I was about to ask him if he was all right when a small, horizontal split opened beneath his nose to reveal a tiny gleam of white. Then his pin cushion-cheeks lifted and the split began to grow.

It’s only then that I realized he was smiling. Or at least he was trying to, for his grin was nothing like the grins worn by most people. Rather than a natural, automatic response, his smile crept across his face, moving slowly and deliberately, as though orchestrated by some tiny worker operating a crank on the other side of his teeth.

And what teeth they were! White. Immaculate. Perfect. Too perfect in fact, like the earliest versions of dental veneers.

Lightning flashes and I see that the same creepy smile is spread across his face right now. It manages to disturb me even here in the plane with the storm and the potential death it heralds blowing all around us.

“Did you hear—?”

Before the man can answer, the roar sounds again.

Much louder.

And much closer.

I whip my head around and peer out the window. I stare into the pitch, straining my eyes, trying to push back the darkness through sheer force of will.

Lightning flashes and I see dark, indiscernible shapes moving through the clouds just beyond the wing.

They are everywhere!

I whirl to look at the pale man. “Did you see—?” But he’s gone. Nowhere to be seen. His chair empty. His seatbelt fastened around nothing but air.

I turn back and peer out the window. I can’t see a thing. Taking a risk, I unfasten my seatbelt and slip over into the chair beside the window to get a better view. I fasten the seatbelt and press my face up against the glass, cupping my hands around my eyes so that I may better see.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Then the roar sounds again, reverberating through my entire body, frightening me so badly I scream.

I’m shocked into silence as a huge red sun appears in the dark sky before me. It’s like a circle of crimson flame divided by a single vertical line of pitch that thickens at its middle.

The sun blinks and I realize I’m not looking at a sun at all.

It is an eye—a giant red eye!

The eye grows even larger as it closes the distance to the plane, swallowing up the view beyond. I hear the roar and then the plane bucks harder than ever. It’s as though something enormous has crashed into us. The overhead compartments burst open, spilling our luggage. I see the forest-green case that houses my laptop falling toward me and then everything goes black.

Dream Interpretation is the practice of assigning meaning to dreams. The origin of dream interpretation dates back to ancient civilizations where this process was considered to be a form of communication with the supernatural. In modern times, various branches of psychology have submitted theories about the meaning of dreams...