Dragon’s Lure
Legends of A New Age Book One
Edited by
Danielle Ackley-McPhail,
Jennifer Ross, and Jeffrey Lyman
PUBLISHED BY
Dark Quest, LLC
Neal Levin, Publisher
Howell, New Jersey 07731
www.darkquestbooks.com
Copyright ©2010 Dark Quest Books.
Smashwords Edition
All stories Copyright ©2010 by their respective authors.
Cover art Copyright ©2010 by Thomas Nackid.
All interior art ©2010 by Linda Saboe.
The Dragon’s Retorte ©1987 Claire Stephens McMurray, Rev. 2009.
The Dragon Song ©1982 Randy Farran.
All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
All persons, places, and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Art: Thomas Nackid, www.tomnackidart.com
Proofreading: Lee C. Hillman
Contents
Dedication
Baited Breath
John Grant
Weathermaker
Vonnie Winslow Crist
The Gargler's Game
Patrick Thomas
He Who Burns
James Chambers
Flying Away Home
Misty Massey
Emberling
Danielle Ackley-McPhail
The Bakunawa
Michael Penncavage
Perchance To Dream
C.E. Murphy
Off-The-Wagon Dragon
Hildy Silverman
Thus The Trap
Bernie Mojzes
The Dragon Song
Randy Farran
Point Of Ettiquette
C.J. Henderson
The Dragon's Retorte
Claire Stephens McMurray
Red Dragon Symphony
Robert E. Waters
The Fall Of Teotihuacan
D.C. Wilson
Lord Bai’s Discovery
Jean Marie Ward
Fire In The Hole
Keith R.A. DeCandido
Drawing Fire
Anna Yardney
The Dog And Pony
And Dragon Show
Jeffrey Lyman
Red Talons
James Daniel Ross
The Dragon Muse
David B. Coe
Author Bios
Artist Bios
Dedication
To Linda Saboe
for
doing your
asolute best for little more than thanks,
with
even less time.
You
bring our words
to glorious life,
with a talent that
is
truly God-gifted.
We do thank you.
(this
dedication refers to artwork present
in the print version of this
anthology)
Baited Breath
John Grant
Come here,” Natalie said in the tone she uses when there is no point in my arguing. I joined her in the kitchen.
“Look,” she said.
I followed the direction of her finger and saw just what I’d expected to see: a stretch of wainscoting. We’d recently had the kitchen refitted, and the design she’d chosen had been big on “the natural look”—which meant lots of stained pine that you were supposed to think was oak. The wainscoting was no exception to the rule.
“What?” I said.
She sighed. Dumb male. “Dark bits.”
“Well . . . yes.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. She was getting all wound up about a couple of knots. All wood has knots in it, even pine stained to make you think it’s oak. We men understand these things.
“They’re not knots,” Natalie said.
“They’re not?” We understand them most of the time, anyway.
“They’re scorch marks.”
“They’re what?”
I knelt down for a closer look. The linoleum design mimicked polished oak floorboards. I hadn’t been the one to choose it.
She was right: those were scorch marks—two of them, about nine inches apart and a couple of inches above floor-level. I could even, if I put my face near enough, catch a very faint whiff of singed sealant.
“I wonder how the devil those could have—?” I began, glancing up at Natalie. I was surprised to find her glaring down at me, her hands on her waist, elbows out. “What’ve I—?”
“You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you, Jim Holmes?”
“Of course I’ve not been—”
“There’s no use—Let me smell your breath.”
I got to my feet. “Even if I had been smoking, do you really think I’d do it lying down on the floor in a corner of the kitchen?”
She snorted—you never know with men—and then made a display of sniffing as I slowly exhaled.
“You haven’t brushed your teeth yet this morning,” she observed.
“That’s a different issue.”
“But it’s all right. Neither have I.”
“No smoke?”
“No smoke.”
Once upon a time I was a two-packs-a-day man, and my several attempts to quit had come to nothing. I fell head over heels for Natalie Moorehead, as she was then, at the very first sight of her. She was very slender, had short dark hair and a birdishly narrow face, and possessed the most wonderful eyes I’d ever come across: I could gaze into her eyes and dream dreams. But she didn’t smoke at all—and objected to those around her doing so. I quit on the spot. That was six years ago, five of them married, and I’ve never thought of lighting up once.
The breath test developed into a kiss, clean teeth or otherwise, and the kiss in turn developed, as happens.
Later in the day, however, while I was wrestling with an obdurate sentence in the grant application I was trying to put together, I suddenly remembered those odd scorch marks in the kitchen and went to have another look.
There were three of them now. The third was three or four feet along the board from the other two. Was it possible Natalie and I just hadn’t noticed it earlier?
I put my head on one side, considering.
No.
The dark patch was larger than its predecessors, and really quite difficult to miss.
It was then that I saw the droppings—a little heap of them right in the middle of the mat in front of the sink.
Damn!
Those weren’t mouse turds. Those were—
Just as a check, I drew the curtain, plunging the kitchen into twilight.
Sure enough, they glowed in the dark.
“Natalie!” I yelled at the top of my voice.
At the hardware store the proprietor, Maggie, raised an eyebrow with articulate slowness.
“Miniature dragons, you say?”
“A real infestation of them,” Natalie assured her. “You should have seen the mess at the back of the food cupboard.”
The trouble with food cupboards is that the stuff you don’t like so much tends to get shoved to the back of them, slowly building up a thicker and thicker layer of disliked foodstuffs that’s less and less liable to be disturbed when you’re looking for something to eat. When we’d scrabbled out all the packets of novelty pasta we’d stocked up the last time our nephew had visited, the marshmallows bought for an experimental cake that never got baked, the dried fish Natalie’s friend Belinda had brought back from her Florida vacation as a tourist gift—we weren’t certain whether we were supposed to chew it like jerky or frame it for the wall so in the end we did neither—and lots of other intriguingly unappetizing items, not all of which were any longer identifiable, we found dramatic evidence that dragons are, at least in extremis, less fussy eaters than we humans are. They’d burned holes through from the cavity wall and eaten at will. Natalie’s face was a picture of nausea as she and I shared the chore of filling big black garbage bags with spoiled food and paper towels smeared with dragon droppings. She’d sent me out of the kitchen while she bleached the shelves. I could bet she’d be bleaching them again before we went to bed tonight.
“You don’t usually find the little ones so far north as this,” observed Maggie.
“That’s what Google told us,” I said.
I got a withering look from Maggie. She knew more about hardware and domestic gadgetry than anyone else we’d ever come across, and she wasn’t worried about hiding her expertise under a bushel. She was on her fourth husband, and the rumors around town ran that she’d divorced the first three for their lack of home-improvement skills.
“It’s climate change,” said Natalie, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“Hmmf,” said Maggie, a staunch Republican. “Well, the best I can give you is mouse traps.”
“Mouse traps?” said Natalie, raising an eyebrow of her own. “You sure?”
“Why not?”
“These dragons, they’re, well, they must be at least—” She put her two index fingers about three inches apart from each other.
“That’s about mouse size,” said Maggie. “That’s why I said mouse traps could solve your problem.”
The holes at the back of the cupboard had seemed to me to be bigger than that. “We’ll take a couple of rat traps as well.”
“It’s your dime.” Maggie shrugged.
Natalie put her hands on the counter. “Humane ones.”
“No,” said Maggie and I simultaneously.
My wife’s lip jutted. “Why not?”
“Because,” drawled Maggie, “if your dragon’s still alive in your trap it’s going to burn its way out, right?”
“Oh,” said Natalie.
Maggie looked at me. “You thought about calling in an exterminator?”
“There aren’t any locally.”
“I knew that. I was just asking.”
Natalie refused to touch the traps, mouse or rat.
“They’re evil,” she said, pulling herself up on to the window seat in the kitchen and putting her arms around her knees. “Those traps are. I can sense it. It’s like they’re radiating death.”
Myself, I thought they were radiating the threat of mangled fingers and thumbs, but I said nothing.
“It’s lucky we don’t have cats,” Natalie added.
“It is? You mean, they’d try to catch the dragons and get their faces burned?”
“No, idiot.” She glowered at me. Those eyes of hers. “They’d get their paws stuck in the mouse traps.”
I peered at the mechanism of the mouse trap in my hand. “Not if they couldn’t get at them. Placing mouse traps—it’s a whole art on its own. Like feng shui. You put the traps where the cats can’t actually get at them.” I gestured at our food cupboard, now empty except for, on the third shelf up, a box of Cheerios the dragons had disdained. “I could put them in there and shut the door.”
“So the cats couldn’t get at them?”
“We don’t have any cats.”
“A stray could get in.”
“It could? Through the cat flap, you mean?”
“We don’t have a cat flap, Jim. Why must you always be so obtuse?”
I looked again at the mouse trap in my hand. Maggie had given us the choice between expensive metal ones and cheaper wooden ones that still seemed ridiculously expensive to me. We’d chosen the wooden ones. Now I was wishing we’d bought the metal traps instead. According to Maggie, the aluminum devices were less sensitive, so there was a greater chance of a mouse—or, as it might be, a dragon—sneaking in and stealing the bait without setting off the trap. It was beginning to become evident to me why this might be a good thing.
“Houdini would have a problem setting this bloody gadget,” I told Natalie.
“What do you mean?” From her refuge in the window she peered across the room at me, and at the trap I was holding.
“If you’d come a little closer I could show you . . .”
“Yeah, right.”
The trap was made of wood and rigid, copper-colored wire. You had to pull back a rectangular section of the wire against a powerful spring, then hook over it another, straight section to lock the whole arrangement in place. The trouble was that the entire locking part of the procedure depending on putting a tiny, rounded, shiny, and seemingly quite friction-free hiccup of wire into a minuscule slot at the side of the pallet that would hold the bait.
“You put the bait in first,” offered Natalie.
“I know that much,” I said. I hadn’t, but there’s such a thing as masculine mystique and we guys have to retain it as best we can. “You wouldn’t like to try this thing yourself, would you?”
She shuddered.
Yes. Okay. She’d told me. The traps radiated evil. She wasn’t coming anywhere near them.
Which left me with the puzzle of how I was going to bait and set the damn things without making roadkill out of my fingers.
In fact, now I thought of it, there was an even more profound puzzle than this. You bait a mouse trap with cheese. What do you use for a dragon trap?
I asked Natalie.
“Judging by the havoc at the back of the cupboard,” she replied, “just about any known foodstuff will do.”
“Yes,” I said, putting the trap down on the counter for a moment, “but we’re looking for efficiency here. Besides, we know the little buggers can go for a year without food if they have to. The empirical evidence suggests they can do without Cheerios even longer. We don’t want the vermin to go around scorching our walls and leaving their poops everywhere for another year, do we? We have to find something we can put in these traps that’ll make them home in like a wasp to a honey pot.”
“A jam pot,” she said.
“Eh?”
“It’s jam pots that wasps like. Honey pots they can”—she rocked her hand in the air—“take or leave.”
“All right,” I said heavily. “A jam pot. But we still want the dragons to be drawn to it with a yearning they can’t possibly resist.”
“Poetic, yet,” said Natalie.
It was at this moment that, out of the corner of my eye, I for the first time spotted one of the creatures. Under cover of the banter between Natalie and myself, it had snuck out of the hole behind the third shelf up in the food cupboard and had started looking at the Cheerios carton with a sort of any-port-in-a-storm attitude.
I looked from the dragon to the trap and back again. Someone once said that humans might have exterminated mice a thousand years ago except for the fact that mice are so goddamn cute. Nowadays there’s Mickey and there’s Minnie and there’s Mighty and there’s Fievel and an entire mousely forest all over children’s TV saying we shouldn’t just take a shotgun and blast whole colonies of the critters to scattered blood splashes and bone fragments. In earlier eras there were fewer excuses, but still there were plenty of nursery stories extolling the virtues of the verminous little rodents.
The miniature varieties of dragons, according to the sites we’d googled earlier in the day, weren’t nearly as obnoxious as mice. To judge by the one I was watching out of the corner of my eye, they had the survival advantage of being even cuter.
The beast saw I was looking and, with a flutter of wings and a smoky protesting belch, vanished back into its lair in the wall.
Even though it had disappeared, I could still feel its eyes on me, staring at me from its lair. And the eyes of all its little friends. It was a creepy sensation.
Nevertheless, could I set a trap that would break the neck of a sweet little creature like that?
Well, actually, I discovered, after a brief examination of the contents of my innermost soul, I could.
Often enough I’ve seen film of the bigger draconian varieties on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. They’re cute too—contrary to common sense, since they’re supposedly the surviving remnants of the dinosaurs, an animal phylum I’ve always found the very opposite of cute. Smaller children carried on gobbling their popcorn eagerly as the stomping of T. Rex made the theater shake during Jurassic Park; me, I was trying to hide behind my mom. Yet when I was older I had to admit the dragons were okay. Once or twice every year there’ll be a scare story in the media about a dragon mauling some dimwit who thought it’d be fun to feed it his sandwiches—more accurately, who stopped feeding it his sandwiches—but most of the time the big guys are content just to co-exist with the chimps who took over the planet some sixty-plus millions of years after the dragons’ dinosaur siblings vanished.
I’ve never in fact confronted a major league dragon face-to-face, you understand, but I‘m sure such an encounter would, if it ever happened, go well.
This didn’t mean I wanted dragons infesting my home, eating the contents of my food cupboard, leaving their glow-in-the-dark turds all over the house, or terrorizing the cats I did not in fact possess.
And I assumed Natalie felt the same way.
“I’m not going to bait these traps with jam,” I told Natalie.
“They don’t like jam.”
“I know.”
“I could have told you that.”
“You probably did.”
“No need to get snotty.”
“Well,” I said, “what about a virgin?”
“A virgin?”
“Yes. Apparently dragons really like virgins. Cross a thousand miles of rough terrain to sink its teeth into a juicy young virgin, a dragon will.”
“And you have some to spare?”
“Well, not exactly . . . .”
It’s not rocket science that virgins are extremely hard to come by in northern New Jersey—unless their daddies are in the Mafia, in which case a whole host of other problems arise. It’s also not rocket science that it’s extremely hard to persuade the average virgin, should one be located, to squeeze herself into the jaws of a mouse trap. Aside from anything else, she’s likely to be too big.
And, hell, there are humanitarian considerations as well.
“Jewels,” I said to Natalie.
“Jewels?”
“Yes. That’s the other thing dragons are said to lust after even more than virgins. Jewels. Pearls, rubies, diamonds, amber, opals, emeralds . . . .”
“I know what jewels are.”
“You have one on your wedding ring. A sapphire.”
“Huh?”
“And another on your engagement ring. There’s nothing wrong with a zirconium, as we agreed at the time, and I’m sure our dragons will think the same.”
“No.”
“And then there’s your jewelry box. Well, your mother’s jewelry box. Such a little thing to—”
“No.”
“But—”
“Can you really believe, Jim Holmes, that I’m going to—?”
We discussed the subject a lot before we went to bed, but by then we still hadn’t decided what would be the best bait to put in the traps, and so the traps remained unbaited.
Later, sleepless, I left Natalie snoring in that soft, unspeakably sexy way she has, and crept downstairs once more to the kitchen. We’d put whatever we’d been able to salvage from the cupboard into an old cooler we used on the rare occasion we had friends over for barbecues. I dug out a strand of spaghetti, a little lump of crystallized ginger (made even littler by my taking a bite out of it), a button of baking chocolate, a palmful of genuine New Orleans hot seasoning salt Belinda and her husband had given us a year or two ago and which we’d never quite dared use, a garlic-and-herb-flavored water cracker, and one or two other items. I put each of the foodstuffs in a separate place on the kitchen floor. Perhaps by morning our little leather-winged friends would sort out for us the knotty conundrum of the best bait to use in a dragon trap.
Or perhaps they’d just scarf the lot. Who knew? I wasn’t a professional draconologist, not by any manner of means.
I snuck back into bed. Natalie didn’t stir.
That was the end of Saturday.
I was woken the next morning by a shriek from downstairs.
I threw myself out of bed and ran to see what was the matter. Natalie was standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at the little offerings I’d set out on the floor in the small hours.
“They’ve raided the cooler!” she wailed.
Quickly I explained. “It was a stratagem,” I concluded.
It was only then that I paused to check which of the foodstuffs had been sampled and which avoided.
Most were untouched, but an erratic line of small scorch marks across the floor told me even before I took a closer look that at least one of my offerings had been popular.
“I only,” I told Natalie, “put the glass of cooking sherry there as a joke.”
“Some joke,” she said bitterly, pointing at a small pile of green vomit in the corner.
“I’ll clear it up,” I muttered, meaning not just the puke but the kitchen as a whole.
While I was doing the clearing up, I had an idea.
I found Natalie in the little alcove off the guest bedroom. It was hardly more than a closet but she’d fitted it up as an office with a table and chair we’d picked up at a yard sale. She was staring intently into the screen of her laptop.
“No,” she said immediately when I told her my idea. “No, no, no, and no. I’m not having it. No. No way. Do I make myself clear?”
“Entirely. You’re right, of course.”
Well, I could always try out my scheme when she wasn’t around. She was, after all, being unreasonable. We’d agreed in the kitchen that it was basically impossible to bait traps with cooking sherry—and undesirable, too, because the whole place would soon start smelling like a brewery. But—
“To repeat,” she said, banging the side of her fist on the table to emphasize each syllable. “No. Jello shots are just not an option. It’d be undignified.
“Besides,” she added, fingers clicking across the keyboard, “I have a far better idea.”
Sunday afternoon I went down to the basement and found, in a trunk where I’d packed it when first Natalie and I had moved into this house, my old BB gun. Probably kids nowadays would laugh at this device, so antiquated and hokey alongside the Armalites and Uzis their NRA-loving parents give them; but it had served me sturdily and well all through my childhood and adolescence. I had killed exactly one sparrow with it; after that I shot only at empty soda cans and home-made paper targets. I didn’t remember having wrapped it in oilcloth before packing it in this trunk, but obviously I’d done so. Now, when I pulled it free of the clammy sheets, the matte metal shone and the wood glowed.
Along with the gun I’d stashed a half-full box of ammo. I felt like a sort of suburban John Dillinger as I hefted the weapon, loaded it, and took a potshot at an old crate at the far end of the cellar.
The BB ricocheted off the crate with a satisfying ping.
Of course, it’d have been a bit more impressive if the BB had actually gone into the crate, but that plywood can be tough stuff.
I left the gun propped up just behind the hinges of the basement door. If Natalie knew what I was planning there’d be hell to pay.
I was hoping she’d fall asleep in front of the television that evening, the way she very often does, but she insisted on watching HGTV so it was me who fell asleep on the couch. I woke to find the lights turned low in a silent room and a little note on the coffee table saying: “Join me in bed, Big Boy.” All very well and good, and an invitation that in the ordinary way I’d have been hard pressed to refuse, but a glance at my watch confirmed it was the middle of the night—about three-thirty—and my beloved doesn’t take kindly to being woken up from her beauty sleep, whatever the motivation.
Just as well.
I had nefarious schemes to enact . . . .
I rescued the gun from the basement and the bottle of cooking sherry from the shelf. I poured a small glass of the hooch and placed it in the center of the kitchen floor. After a moment’s thought, I half-filled a tumbler with it for myself. I switched off the light; there was just enough moonshine coming in through the window I could still see what I was doing. Then, gun on one side and tumbler on the other, I deposited my butt on the second bottom step of the stairs.
And waited—though not for long.
I heard them before I saw them. I’d left the door of the emptied food cupboard alluringly open. The cupboard itself acted as a sort of soundbox, or echo chamber, amplifying the little clickety-click noises the dragons made with their claws as they emerged from their hidey-holes.
The beasts also cheeped, which for some reason was something I hadn’t been expecting. For all I knew otherwise, they might have been holding learned conversations among each other about higher mathematics or free-form poetry.
Then, through the gloom, I could see one of them venture out to the edge of the shelf he was on and, perching there, preen himself, folding his wings across his body—or her body, but I assumed it was a he—and scratching at his ears with the tiny talons that jutted out where you’d have expected elbows to be if he’d had not wings but arms. Not that you can scratch your ears with your elbows, of course, but that was the general principle.
This first little guy was on the fourth shelf up, which meant he was about shoulder high to me if I’d been standing. He’d not been there more than a few moments when another dragon appeared on the shelf immediately below him. This one seemed very much warier, squinting around the kitchen’s dimness in search of any threat. For a second or two he stared straight at me, but I must have been keeping even stiller than I was trying to because the dragon evidently concluded I was just some large inanimate mass, and his gaze traveled on.
Yet again I was struck by how astonishingly cute these creatures were. No wonder people kept trying to keep them as pets.
Fourth Shelf Dragon leaned over the edge and chirruped something down to his friend—“Last one to the booze is a pieface,” at a guess, because the next thing he did was flutter down to land neatly beside the glass of sherry I’d laid out.
Watching him, Third Shelf Dragon became even more apprehensive, chirping up a storm of objections to his buddy’s foolhardiness and running his gaze once again all over the room.
This time, when he glanced at the bottom of the kitchen stairwell, he made me.
He let out a puff of flame three times his own length and shrieked a warning.
Fourth Shelf Dragon pulled his head out of the sherry glass and stared dopily up at the cupboard.
Slowly, slowly, far too slowly his gaze swung around in my direction. I had plenty of time to raise the BB gun, aim and fire.
Third Shelf Dragon vanished as if he’d never been there.
His pal in the middle of the kitchen floor didn’t.
The little reptile screamed.
It was like the scream of a scalded child, only far quieter. The quietness didn’t make his agony any easier to hear, though.
I reached up and clicked on the kitchen light.
By sheerest chance, my pellet had taken him in the neck. I still think that if I’d hit him in the chest—which was what I’d intended to do if I’d had any properly thought-through intentions at all—I still think the pellet would have bounced harmlessly off, stunning him perhaps, but that’s all. Instead there was more blood pouring out of him than it seemed possible an animal so tiny could hold.
As I watched with my mouth stupidly open, all I could register was that the spurting blood was bright red, whereas quite irrationally I’d expected it to be green.
He staggered round in crazed circles for perhaps half a minute, and then he fell flat on his face, wings crumpled around him like a broken seaweed-yellow parasol in the midst of what was now a slowly spreading pool of that infernally bright blood.
A perfect smoke ring rose from his head and melted in the air.
I felt as if I’d just murdered my grandmother.
There was a dreadful, accusatory stillness from the dark well of the cupboard.
I’d not only murdered my grandmother, I’d done so in front of witnesses.
For the first time it occurred to me that dragons, even the little household-pest-type varieties, are not entirely defenseless. If the dead fellow’s family and friends all decided to make a concerted rush at me, I could be toast.
I gulped.
I wished I hadn’t thought of that expression.
Now it was my turn to be the wary animal in the kitchen.
I slammed the cupboard shut. After a minute’s feverish search through a drawer I found some duct tape, and put a length of it up the side of the door just in case the dragons had worked out how to pop the catch.
I poured the remains of the sherry in the glass down the sink, then did the same with the contents of the tumbler I’d poured myself. I needed the booze—but not this booze.
Then I set to clearing up what was left of Fourth Shelf Dragon.
It took me longer than I’d thought, and by the time I was done I was in tears.
“Where you been?” said Natalie, half waking as I clambered into bed beside her.
“Fell asleep on the couch. Hush, now.”
“Dutch purples mince electric.”
“They do.”
“Zip splendid?”
“You’re asleep.”
“Not.”
She was.
The package Natalie had ordered online on Sunday arrived Tuesday morning.
I hefted it in my arms curiously as the brown-uniformed UPS guy, whistling, strolled back to his van. The box was perhaps four feet long and about five inches wide, and wasn’t very heavy. When I shook it, nothing rattled.
The label said it had come from Wollheimer’s Circus Supplies, based somewhere in Wisconsin.
I took the box inside to Natalie and asked her what it was.
She put on her patented enigmatic expression. It made her look like the ineffable Indian princess in some old 1930s adventure movie, and normally I loved her for it. Not now, though. Even so, I kept my irritation hidden. I still hadn’t told her about my slaughter of one of the dragons on Sunday night, so who was I to complain about others keeping secrets?
“You’ll find out soon enough,” she said.
“Is it to do with the . . . er . . . with the dragon problem?”
“Of course it is. You knew that without asking.”
“Well . . . .”
“Just put it down on the bed, will you, Jim?”
Meekly I obeyed.
“And shut the door behind you when you go.” She smiled sweetly.
My plan to spy on her through the bedroom keyhole was foiled by the simple fact that our bedroom door doesn’t have a keyhole.
There was no use trying to weasel the information out of my wife. She was expert at resisting interrogation and trickery and I was lousy at weaseling.
In the absence of hard data my speculations ran rampant. Was it possible that snakes ate miniature dragons? The box was about the right size and shape for a decent-sized snake. But how would you stop the snake from wriggling when it was in transit? Anesthesia, perhaps, but didn’t anesthesia kill snakes, the way it does dolphins? Besides, wouldn’t the animal rights people be down on Wollheimer’s Circus Supplies like a ton of bricks if they tried sending snakes packaged like that?
I made myself a cup of coffee, listening to Natalie opening her mystery package in the bedroom above me.
I thought I heard a scuttling noise from the cupboard, but it was probably just my guilty conscience at work. We’d seen nothing of the dragons since my unspeakable crime on Sunday night. I’d been secretly hoping they might have decamped en masse, but a turd that appeared on the stove top on Tuesday morning had dashed that dream.
Even if dragons were the natural prey of snakes, I really wasn’t sure I wanted a snake let loose upon our dragons. I’ve never actually been eaten alive, but I’m sure it must be unpleasant. Every time I closed my eyes I could see the death agonies of Fourth Shelf Dragon, and that was after he’d merely been shot with a BB gun. How much worse would it be for a dragon if its final moments were in a viper’s venomous jaws?
I shuddered, spilling my hot coffee over the back of my fingers.
The following day brought another package for Natalie. This time it was much smaller and was left in the mailbox by the postman. As I carried it and the usual fistful of bills and insurance offers up the driveway I gave it a good shake. The contents sloshed around. Some kind of liquid in a metal canister. This package, too, came from Wollheimer’s. It puzzled me that Natalie hadn’t ordered both of them at the same time.
“Because Maggie’s not open on a Sunday,” she explained, grinning.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“I couldn’t get her advice until Monday.”
“Her advice about what?”
“Her advice on whether ordinary lighter fuel would do.” She was tugging with her teeth at the tape that held the mailer shut. “She said it wouldn’t—that I could burn my mouth really badly if I tried using it. Not to mention the risk of swallowing some and making myself ill. Could you pass the scissors?”
I gave them to her. “Would do for what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Haven’t you guessed by now? Could you get my stave, please? It’s still in its box, under the bed.”
“So it’s not a serpent,” I said as I pulled the long parcel out from among the dust bunnies and the orphan slippers.
At last I’d succeeded in startling her. “A serpent?”
I explained the theory I’d been harboring, and she was laughing like a drain before I got halfway through.
“Jim Holmes, I love you dearer than life itself, but I’ve never heard anything so stupid. Just wait ’til I tell my mom.”
“Not that.”
“Okay, not my mom. But Belinda’ll just eat this up.”
Belinda has been Natalie’s best friend since high school, and is odious. Luckily she now lives in California, having married a surfer, so there’s the full width of a continent to dilute her evil influence on my wife. Less luckily, we live in a digital information age in which distance no longer means what it used to. I’d be the talk of the chatterati in Los Angeles by the end of the week.
“Well,” I said once Natalie had subsided a little, “what are you planning to do?”
“If you’d done a little research instead of getting wild ideas about serpents”—she made a show of controlling the impulse to go off into giggles again—“you might have discovered that dragons are very hierarchical creatures.”
“They are?”
“Yes. Colonies of dragons, whatever the subspecies, have a clearly defined leadership structure. The biggest and strongest of them, male or female, is usually the top dog—ah, top dragon. That individual quite literally rules the roost—in fact, I think that’s where the expression comes from.”
I could feel my brows knotting. “I’m sure this is all fascinating in an ethological sort of a way, but what has it got to do with us?”
She’d finished unwrapping the smaller parcel and had put it on the table beside her laptop. Now she was extracting a long, brightly colored carton from its sturdier cardboard outer packaging.
I could read the print on the side of the carton.
“Wollheimer’s Circus Supplies,” it said, but I knew that bit.
It was the rest that made my heart plummet.
“Professional Quality Fire-Eater’s Stave.”
“This will work, I tell you,” Natalie repeated crossly.
We’d agreed the dragons probably slept during the day, so she’d had to put off her opening experimentational salvo until the evening. The past few hours had been a hell of impatience for her, waiting until she could claim the shadows were beginning to draw in. As you might imagine, it had been even more of a hell for me.
She’d held out until five o’clock. It was as much as I could reasonably have asked. The sun was as yet nowhere near the horizon but, as she explained to me, you could tell that was the way it was going.
The Wollheimer’s Stave was essentially a rod of some kind of non-flammable plastic with a handle at one end. Most of the rod was wrapped several layers deep in asbestos cord. The principle of fire-eating was fairly simple, according to the translated-badly-from-the-Latvian instructional leaflet I’d fished out from inside the packaging. First you soaked the asbestos string in some of your Wollheimer’s Professional Quality Fire-Eater’s Fuel—which was the stuff in the little canister that had arrived this morning. You set this alight. Then you swilled more of the fuel around the inside of your mouth, so that when you breathed out onto the stave the vapors produced an impressive torch of flame.
Quite how impressive was something we were about to discover.
“You sure you want to go through with this?” I said.
“Whyever would I not be?”
“You could blister the inside of your mouth. Very painful, that would be. Or you could set your hair on fire.”
“I’ve just wet it. As you very well know. Do you think I’ve put enough of this guck on the stave or should I add a bit more?”
The fuel smelled like the air near an airport on a hot day. I fully anticipated the entire kitchen going up in flames. Still, at least we’d be rid of all the ersatz oak fixtures.
“I should think that’s plenty,” I said.
“Do you have a match?”
No, I didn’t. Neither did she. In the end, after putting the canister of fire-eating fluid in the farthest corner of the kitchen, I switched on one of the burners on the stove and Natalie held her fuel-saturated stave over it.
With a who–oop! the fuel caught.
“Grab this, will you?” she said, holding the stave out to me. The heat was intense. I was sure my eyebrows were already history. I was also sure that, at last, my beloved was having very significant second thoughts about her new career as a human flamethrower—that, if I hadn’t been there as witness, she’d have abandoned it and gone back to my notion of baiting mouse traps with jello shots.
Which, of course, the new-found bleeding-heart in me would not permit her to do. I could still hear that weirdly childlike scream.
While I stood holding the burning poker, Natalie trotted to the far end of the kitchen and took a swig of fuel straight from its canister. She rolled the liquid from cheek to cheek, then spat the excess into the sink.
“Now or never,” she said, reaching for the stave.
I’ll give Wollheimer’s Circus Supplies this: their products certainly work. At least, these products did.
My wife’s first, tentative shower of flame took out part of my widow’s peak, a foot and a half of wallpaper edging, and the geranium Natalie had parked on top of the refrigerator a month ago while she tried to think of somewhere better to put it.
“Wow!” she said, carelessly emitting a second gout of flame every bit as potentially lethal as the first.
I cringed away from her. “It works! I admit it! It works!”
Holding the stave to one side, she grinned manically. “If the little buggers don’t think I’m the boss dragon after this demonstration, and if they don’t follow my orders slavishly . . . .”
She puffed another plume of flame for emphasis.
I gazed past her to the open cupboard. The dragons were there in strength, filling each shelf. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, perhaps more—perhaps the entire colony. There were some even tinier ones amongst the rest. I assumed these were babies, brought along by their parents to observe the spectacle.
“Don’t look now,” I said to Natalie, “but you’ve got an audience.”
She chuckled complacently. The effect was like an oil well blowing, only on a smaller scale. A slightly smaller scale.
I’d no real basis for my interpretation of the expressions on the faces of the onlooking dragons, but I was prepared to bet those were gazes of awe. The little outbursts of fire they were themselves capable of producing were nothing like this—a candle flame against the sun.
There was no doubt about it. Natalie had been right. As far as the vermin that had infested our house were concerned, she was the boss dragon to beat all boss dragons.
I just hoped she’d be able to bear up under the burden of responsibility.
“Okay,” I said to her. “As soon as we’ve managed to douse your flames, we tell your devoted disciples to pack their bags and get the hell out of here.”
I could see a question coming into her mind, bouncing around a bit, then shouting to be given attention.
Natalie looked at me, eyes widening, and mouthed a single, soundless, fiery word.
“How?”
Wikipedia couldn’t help. Half the night spent googling couldn’t help. The reptile house at London Zoo, phoned transatlantically in the early hours of the morning, couldn’t help. Even Maggie at the hardware store, consulted a little later in the day, couldn’t help.
How do you communicate with dragons?
There are a few legends of dragons and humans talking to each other, but they’re just that: legends. Most often, at least until modern times, the prime modes of communication between the two species has involved one sticking a sword into the eye of the other, or one incinerating and/or eating the other. Neither mode was practicable in our situation.
Yet Natalie had succeeded in imprinting her status as boss dragon very firmly upon the minds of our little colony.
When eventually we knew them well enough that we thought we might be able to get through to them the notion that they should find another home, we didn’t want to.
They try to follow her wherever she goes, unless she roars at them to stay where they are. Roars they can understand. Otherwise, the sound of her voice, the sigh of her breathing, the scent of her hair, a lustrous glance from the peaty depths of her eyes . . . all these are irresistible lures to our—to her—dragons.
I can sympathize. I feel very much the same way about her myself.
They’re desperately eager to please her, so we managed to train them into the idea of using a tray of cat litter: no more luminescent poops in unexpected places. They eat only the food we put out for them each evening, and they now live in a big open hutch in the basement rather than in the cavity wall. They get sherry on a Sunday. We’ve blocked up the holes at the back of the cupboard, and our packets of pasta and rice are once more safe there. I’m not sure how our little friends are going to cope with existence when we go on vacation . . . or maybe vacations are a thing of the past, for Natalie and me.
Still, we mustn’t grumble. There are advantages of sharing the house with a colony of dragons.
We’re never likely to be troubled by mice or rats, ever again. Or crickets, salamanders, moths. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or, for that matter, snakes.
And should anyone ever try to burgle the place . . . .
Weathermaker
Vonnie Winslow Crist
May glanced over her shoulder at the closed door. She tipped her head in the direction of the heat vent and listened for the muffled sound of her parents’ voices. She smiled. They were still downstairs in the kitchen. Confident that she wouldn’t be bothered, May stretched out on her stomach and squirmed under Papa Chang’s bed.
The space under the box-spring was only about twelve inches high, so May was thankful she was slender and small-boned. She clicked on a small flashlight and stuck it between her teeth, which freed her hands to search for the loose floorboard. She slid her palms along the dusty oak floor and crawled toward the head of the bed. May sneezed twice, dropping the light both times.
Frustrated, she took the flashlight out of her mouth, shined it on the floor. “Where are you?” she muttered as she ran a fingernail along the joint where one piece of flooring abutted another. She sighed. There was no hint of a secret compartment. She ran a fingernail around a second board. Nothing. She sneezed again. The flashlight dimmed slightly.
“I know you’re . . . .” Before May could finish her sentence, she felt the third floorboard from the wall lift slightly as her fingernails traced its edge. “Yes!” May pried the board up, reached inside the small wooden compartment attached to the side of a support beam. She didn’t know if Papa Chang had built the secret box above the first-floor ceiling and below his bedroom’s floorboards, but as a child she’d seen him tuck a book swaddled in red fabric in it several times.
“Why do you hide the book?” May had inquired the first time she’d caught her grandfather concealing the silk-wrapped bundle.
“Because it’s magical,” Papa Chang had answered with a wink.
“Can I read it, too?” she’d begged.
“Not yet.” Papa Chang had patted her head. “It’s written in Chinese, though I’ve made some notes in English. When it’s your turn to take care of the dragon, then you may read it.”
“But I help you, now,” she’d reminded her grandfather.
“Yes, but that’s not the same. When I’m no longer able to honor Lung, then you must do so.” Papa Chang had taken her hands in his, looked into her dark eyes, and added, “No one else in this family believes except for you and me, so it is up to us. When I am gone, the book is yours.”
Then, he’d stood up and brushed the dust from his knees. “But tell no one about the book. Not your mother or father. Not your brother. Not even your friends. Promise me.”
“I promise,” May had declared, and she’d kept her word.
“And I’ll keep my word tonight,” she told Papa Chang’s spirit as she skinched out from under the bed.
Six months had passed since her grandfather’s heart attack, six months had gone by since anyone had visited the dragon, and their county had been six months without a drop of rain. May worried that her shirking of dragon-duty was responsible for the drought. But certain the solution could be found in Papa Chang’s book, she sat cross-legged and undid the wrappings.
Her fingers tingled when they touched its dark leather binding. The leather was ridged in a diamond-like pattern and softer than she thought it would be. When she opened the cover, she saw that the volume was indeed written in Chinese. The characters were small and exquisitely rendered in black ink. As she flipped through the pages, she spotted her grandfather’s notes. May hoped the words she needed were translated.
She leaned against a bed post, turned back to the beginning, and began scanning the pages one by one. When she located Papa Chang’s translations, she read them. Often, her grandfather had begun to translate a section, then stopped mid-sentence as if whatever he’d been looking for wasn’t there. And much of what was in English seemed mundane. But every now and again there’d be something interesting: “Deaf dragons are kiao-lung. Kioh-lung are dragons who can hear.” or “Dragons are fond of roasted swallows.”
She’d leafed through nearly half of the book when she finally found what she was searching for: “Supplications and Deals with Dragons.” The fourth translated supplication was the one she needed. May marked the page with a couple of loose red threads from the silk cloth, then stuck the book and flashlight into her waiting backpack.
After sneaking out of Papa Chang’s old bedroom, May jogged down the stairs and strolled into the kitchen. Her father was reading the paper at the table and her mother was putting the finishing touches on a casserole for the next night’s dinner. May went to the refrigerator, took out the milk, and poured a quart of the cold liquid into a glass jar.
Her father lowered the paper. “It’s been months since your grandfather wasted milk on his imaginary dragon. Why are you bothering to go down to the pond, tonight?”
“I promised I would.”
“Well, you’ve certainly taken your time getting . . . .”
“Charles,” May’s mother said in her doctor-in-charge voice. “I don’t think there’s any harm in May wasting a little milk once a month.” She rubbed her forehead, then continued in a more normal tone, “If nothing else, the stray cats will appreciate it.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
May glanced at her mother, noted her lips were pressed tightly together. She supposed Mom missed her dad, too, though neither of her parents had talked much about Papa Chang since the week after the funeral.
Her grandfather’s ashes had barely been spread on the surface of Willow’s Watch Pond when life for the rest of the family had returned to normal. Her brother had flown back to New York to continue his residency at one of the city’s biggest hospitals. Dad had resumed teaching Anatomy and Physiology at the University. And Mom continued to work extra hours at the hospital whenever she got the chance.
I miss Papa Chang more than anyone else, May thought as she stepped out the back door and hiked toward the pond. She hurried across the lawn. The night was full of lightning bugs blinking all around her and cicadas singing in the trees.
May was so lost in thought she almost missed the trail leading down to the small slate patio her grandfather had built near the edge of Willow’s Watch Pond. As she stepped onto the proper path, she stumbled on a loose rock and nearly dropped the Mason jar of milk.
“Careful,” she said to herself. It was a long, uphill hike to the house, and she didn’t want to have to make it twice.
A few minutes later, May reached her grandfather’s patio. She knelt, set down the jar of milk, and opened her knapsack. She took out a blue-chip enamelware bowl. It clinked as she placed it on the slate. She heard a splash from the pond. May chewed on her lower lip, scanned the watery green surface in front of her. There were dragonflies, water spiders, and the occasional venturous minnow visible, but no cow’s ears or stag’s horns.
She shrugged her shoulders. It had probably been nothing more than a frog spooked from its lily pad by her presence, though the dimming light made it difficult to see clearly for more than fifteen to twenty feet.
May picked up the quart jar of milk. Her hand shook ever so slightly as she unscrewed the metal lid, tipped the jar, and slowly poured the cool, white liquid into the enamelware vessel. She tried to forget vengeful mythical beasts, and focused instead on filling the bowl. Though the milk sloshed back and forth and splashed a bit as the last drops dribbled in, none washed over the sides onto the slate. She exhaled slowly. Spilt milk showed disrespect.
May swallowed hard. Milk was only the first step in luring a dragon. She grabbed the slumped over knapsack she’d lugged down to the pond, rifled through its contents, and removed a stick of incense, an incense burner carved from a pinkish stone into the shape of a reclining dragon, and a book of matches. She lit the incense and set it beside the milk bowl.
The selection of the incense had been difficult. She’d never paid attention to which scent Papa Chang had used. When May had searched through her grandfather’s wooden storage chest this afternoon, she’d found several kinds: cinnamon, sandalwood, patchouli, and ylang ylang. She’d decided on sandalwood.
“Lung,” May called. “I ask for your help.” She blew the thin line of drifting smoke in the direction of the water. “Lung,” she repeated. “There’s a drought, the plants are dying and the earth turns to dust.”
“Lung,” she called for the third time. “Your pond has a spring, but many lakes, streams, ponds, and rivers are drying up.”
If there was a dragon in Willow’s Watch Pond, Lung was not its full name. But Lung was all May could remember. Papa Chang had known the full names of all kinds of dragons—May did not. She did recollect that all the dragon names her grandfather had used contained “Lung.”
A loud splash came from the shallows to her left. With her flashlight, she surveyed the shoreline and water surface. She spotted some cattails across the pond swaying, heard loud rustling from that direction, and then, the light reflected off of a pair of eyes.
“Geeze!” she exclaimed, and immediately dropped the light. As she fumbled in the dark to retrieve it, May realized the glowing eyes still peered at her from between the cattails. Even without her hand-held light, they shimmered an orangish gold—just the color she imagined a demon’s eyes would be.
The clouds chose that moment to set free the full moon. Across Willow’s Watch Pond, a dark head on a snakish neck lifted out of the water. The head resembled a camel’s, the ears looked like those of a cow, the horns were like the branched antlers of a stag, and the gleaming eyes were surely those of a demon.