Art, The Most Usual Boy in the World

[Please mind the gap.]

Art stepped across the yellow line and onto the Tube. He followed the twenty other year seven students onto the subway car. Miss Chatsworth, his teacher, stepped aboard behind him. They had just road the train in from Hemel Hempstead to Euston station and now were boarding the Northern Line to Tottenham Court. He quietly took the last remaining seat available and stared out the window into the darkness of the tunnel.

It was mostly like every other Thursday for Art, with the exception of the school trip to the British Museum. He woke up in the same bed and stared at the same ceiling he had for the last 18 months. He listened as his half-brother, Jaimie, cried from his nursery down the hall in their little three bedroom flat. He could hear his mum’s boyfriend, Gerald, cooking breakfast in the kitchen while humming “Glory, Glory, Man United” while the Sky Sports anchor rambled on about last night’s match on the tele.

He didn’t hate their flat. But he didn’t love it either. He much preferred the Terrace house they used to have in London. When his parent’s split, he had to move out of the city with his mum to live with their Gran. A few months later, she had started dating Gerald and they all moved into a new flat together. His dad still lived in the city, but only had a small studio space where he both worked and slept. He was an artist and didn’t make a lot of money. Art guessed it was a big reason for why his parents split. That, and probably because his dad was a “rotten, cheating, floozy-loving bum” as Gran liked to say.

His mum popped her head in a few minutes later and hurried Art out of bed. He ate his normal eggy toast and listened to the football updates with Gerald. He preferred Liverpool rather than Man U, like his dad, but Gerald was slowly winning him over to also cheer for the red and black. His mum came out with Jamie a few minutes later, gave him a quick kiss, and pushed him out the door with a few quid for a takeaway lunch.

He meandered through the small streets of Hemel and met up with a few school mates outside of the building gates. They kicked a raggedy old ball around for a while before the bell rang. Art took his regular seat in his normal desk in the middle of Miss Chatsworth’s classroom. They quietly did some morning work until it was time to head out to the Museum. Art rode the train next to Liam and Henry, who were both quite athletic and very into football. Art wasn’t the most athletic boy in class, but he was a decent keeper and held his own when playing defense afterschool on the pitch. They absent mindedly discussed who they would pick for their own Premier League all star team all the way into London.

Art didn’t have any significant feelings or thoughts as he rode the Tube. He just sat and stared out the window, watching the occasional light flicker past the railcar windows. Some kids were quite excited for to spend the day in the city and out of school. Others were eager to take advantage of the freedom to pull pranks and goof off. Art didn’t have a strong feeling about any of it. He was, as Gran often said, “such a nice, usual lad”. He didn’t know what she meant by usual or if it was a compliment or insult, but he didn’t dwell on it much. He was curious what the options would be for lunch at the food stalls.

The class spent the rest of the morning exploring the British Museum with an ornery old tour guide named Horace. Horace was hard of hearing and talked quite loudly while ingnoring or not hearing any questions that came his way. Art assumed he was a pensioner who volunteered a few days a week and didn’t pay much attention to what Horace was saying anyways. He quietly followed behind the other students, drifting through the exhibits on Ancient Egypt and then China. The pieces they looked at were nice, but nothing too exciting or anything attention catching.

Liam made the usual jokes about some of the artwork they passed and asked if they could hang Art on the wall. It got a few laughs from the other students, and Art himself gave Liam a smile. He didn’t mind being poked fun at and just shrugged it off. Plus, it wasn’t Liam’s fault that his name was Art. His mum had loved the legend of Camelot and his dad was obviously a fan of art, being a painter and all, so they easily settled on the name Arthur when he was born. Gran was the only one who ever called him Arthur, with everyone else just sticking to Art.

Around 11:30 a.m. the class entered their last exhibit before lunch— the Legends of the Round Table. Art had seen this room before, back when they lived in London and his mom would take him to see her favorite paintings on the weekends. Horace started in on a rehearsed speech about Lancelot and Guinevere. He walked over to a display that featured medieval weaponry while Horace droned on. The swords and flails were interesting, but overall it wasn’t anything special. It was just another Thursday and another normal school trip.

Art’s normal school abruptly changed when the floor of the museum hall began to violently rumble. Josie and Louisa from his class began to scream as everything in the exhibit hall shook. Paintings fell off the wall. Artifacts in display cases fell off their stands and some even crashed through their glass encasing.

Horace the Pensioner tour guide let out a wail and grabbed at his heart. Miss Chatsworth yelled for help while a few other students knelt down to help the old man. Liam and some other boys ran towards the doorways and tried to find cover, as they were taught to do in the emergency drills. However most kids, like Art, just stood about, unsure what was happening or what to do as the tremors grew in intensity.

Glass could be heard shattering throughout the building. The electricity went out rather abruptly, which lead to more screaming by Art’s classmates. Emergency lights came on along with an emergency siren that urged everyone to exit the building.

The earthquake stopped after two minutes, leaving the museum room completely destroyed. Art followed some of the students and other patrons out of the building, avoiding the fallen debris and museum display cases that littered the floor. As they exited the building, he noticed one boy from class, Neil, had picked up one of the swords that had been on display and was conspicuously trying to hide it under his school jumper. He also saw two girls that were looking at a necklace that they had picked up on their way out of the building. Everything was in chaos, though Art knew that wasn’t a good excuse to loot something from the museum. It was no matter, as he felt sure that some guard or museum worker would make them put it back once Kiss Chatsworth collected them.

Art changed his mind quite quickly as he surveyed the scene outside the steps of the museum. The museum workers would probably have bigger issues to deal with than kids knicking a sword or jewelry today. The earthquake was much more devastating that he had imagined. Multiple old buildings nearby were in the process of falling down or had already been crashed into by their neighbors. Behind them, the roof of the museum gave a loud crack as it began to collapse and fall apart into the old historic building.

Sirens and screams could be heard in all directions. Art wasn’t sure what usually happened during earthquakes, though they had watched one video last year in class about the earthquakes in Haiti. He assumed this was pretty normal for the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Art also guessed that when the ground shook and trembled as roughly as it had that it probably would cause some major damage to the ground itself. So he wasn’t too startled when he noticed huge trenches in the street that carved up the ground with cracks and breaks. He didn’t like it when the ground began to shake a second time, either enormous caverns and chasms opening up into the ground. He liked it even less when he heard the sound of rushing water making its way up the road from the Seven Dials. His class had learned about the flooding of the River Thames a hundred years ago during their British History class, and he ventured a guess that the earthquakes caused it to happen again. Again, Art wasn’t an expert on earthquakes, but it seemed reasonable that they would cause floods to happen. He wasn’t thrilled with any of it, to be quite clear, but it did seem like normal behavior for an earthquake.

Pretty soon the water met the cracked ground around the museum. A new type of rumbling started to happen as the rushing river forced itself into each crevice, splitting the ground further and altering the landscape quite severely. The unusual confluence of water and chasms split the streets of London into millions of tiny islands. Art wasn’t sure if it was due to all the underground tunnels from the Underground or maybe more significant happenings below the museum, but the entire city block began to move. It almost felt like they were floating away. Across the street, the buildings were a lot less fortunate as they were slowly sinking into the Thames that seemed driven to invade the paved streets of London and reclaim the urban area for Mother Nature.

Art stared out at the scene with minimal emotion, simply observing the destruction and transformation just like he had the lights outside the Tube earlier in the morning. His fellow classmates were growing more panicked, with some trying to escape the Museum steps and more than one haphazardly falling into the raging river below them. Art just shook his head at their foolishness and instead found a bench that seemed safe enough to sit down on. It was clear to Art that there wasn’t much they could do. It did seem like a typical earthquake after all, and the government would probably send some type of rescue for them soon.

Liam came over and urged Art to help them find Miss Chatsworth. He and a few other boys wanted to head for higher ground and find a safer space to be rescued. It seemed reasonable to Art, but as he stood up to join his classmates the big building gave one final lurch as the now Museum Island moved with the water, causing the last remnants of roof to collapse entirely and demolish the rest of the building into a giant pile of rubble. Assuming Miss Chatsworth was still inside, it didn’t seem likely that she or any other patrons would be getting out any time soon.

Art let out a sigh. This is what happens when you go on school trips during natural disasters, he supposed. Not much he could do about it now, but maybe next time he’d ask his mum or Gerald to let him stay behind at home instead. He didn’t much care for this kind of excitement and preferred things to just be normal and simple.

Art’s longing for normal and simple were threatened further as he heard an unfortunate noise rumble in the air from a few island blocks away. It was an odd sound, like a deep growl of a bear mixed with grinding metal machinery or shrieking brakes of an abruptly stopped railway car. He had absolutely never heard anything quite so awful and at the same time mysterious and intriguing in his whole life. Not that he had lived a very adventurous life. He has visited the zoo to see big animals on two separate occasions, but couldn’t recall anything making a noise quite like this. Then again, he hadn’t ever left the greater London area before and perhaps there were new animals brought into the zoo from somewhere like India or Africa that were unhappy about the after affects of the earthquake. To be frank, he didn’t blame them. But he didn’t blame the earthquake either. As he thought earlier, it was just behaving as earthquakes normally did.

Screams erupting from more class mates did make Art question if this was just a normal world-ending disaster or if something more sinister was happening. He felt fairly confident that what was happening around them was maybe a step outside of normal earthquake shenanigans when a bloody sea snake emerged from the growing river that now surrounded them.

The neon blue and turquoise water dragon proved to be the owner of the hideous shrieking roar from earlier, which made quite a bit of reasonable sense to Art. It was completely sensible for the strange roar to be from an equally strange monster. However finding a sea dragon in the River Thames wasn’t too far fetched. His Gran had regularly warned him of such a creature ever since he was a tot, though his Mum always dismissed it as rubbish. Clearly Mum had been wrong, as the 30 foot tall dragon was quite plainly swimming in front of him at the British Museum right now. It was hard to argue when presented with such physical evidence.

The dragon had a myriad of shimmering scalloped scales up and down its torso. Its long body met its head with a flared neck frill that had multiple layers of blue and green tones. Two large curved horns petruded from the side of its forehead as many small horn bumps ringed its head like a bony crown. It released another shriek into the air, which was met by more shrill screams from the dozen or so school kids that were on the Museum steps with Art.

Neil, the boy with the sword, stood out amongst the screamers, as he wailed and yelled with particular fervor. Art wasn’t sure what he hoped to accomplish with such an obnoxious yell, but since everyone else was also screaming like banshees, he chalked it up to just how some people reacted in this type of situation. Once again, Art found himself thinking of how strange this all was but at the same time guessed it was just a normal encounter when living through a transformational natural disaster and encountering a mythical legend.

Art let out another sigh as Neil’s scream came to an unexpected stop. The sea dragon seemed to dislike the screaming as much as Art, or so he assumed as he watched the beast shoot toward with amazing speed from up in the air above the Thames and gobbled up Neil in a single bite. The rapid attack and converse retreat of the sea dragon startled some of the screamers to stop and others to yell even more loudly. They almost all began to flee and run for cover, in which Art only assumed was due to a normal fear of also being eaten alive. To be clear, he also didn’t care to be eaten alive.

However what happened next may have seemed the most unusual thing of all to happen that day, or at least it did to everyone but Art. In his mind, all of this was just what you would expect to happen if an ancient mythological urban legend emerged from the depths of the Thames during an unexpected earthquake and subsequential island creating flooding of London. He’d probably be quite hungry too if he had to deal with all of this on an empty stomach. The thought of which made Art realize his own stomach was growling and could really use some lunch, or at least a bag of crisps. It appeared that this sea dragon was the main obstacle standing between Art and finding lunch, so he did what any sensible and usual young lad would do. He walked across the steps to where Neil had dropped the sword. He casually bent down to pick it up, turned around as he grasped the hilt in his hand, and levied the blade towards the monster as his body began to grow and enlarge into a bulky, 15 foot tall giant. The sword seemed to magically grow right along side him, as did his clothes and school blazer with the crest of a shield and two crossed rapiers.

Art, the most typical and normal 15 foot tall giant gladiator of a knight, looked at the sea dragon eye to eye. Maybe not quite, eye to eye exactly, as the beast was still a dozen or so feet taller than himself, but he at least matched its girth and stood a lot closer to it now than he had before he grew into an enlarged, hulking demigod .

“Gran always said you lived at the bottom of the Thames near the Queen’s Bridge. I think we’ve had enough unusual things going on today, yeah mate? Why don’t you go back home so we can get some lunch and make our way back to Hemel,” bellowed Art. His voice was much deeper and louder than he had expected it to be, but then again it was probably normal for a 15’ tall knight of the realm to sound that way.

The Sea Snake let out another one of its usual ear splitting roars.

Art let out a sigh.

It looked like he’d have to fight a dragon today after all. It wasn’t what he thought would happen on a normal school trip to the museum, but he guessed this must be expected when you suddenly developed magical powers and had to deal with an unruly legendary monster.

He brought the sword back like a cricket bat, ready to swing and defend his classmates from the Water Dragon of London. So much for a usual Thursday in the city.