Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (35 page)

“Dominie,” I said, “the goblins, er, wish to know if you will like them now.”

Clement’s white-blind eyes were falsely bright with tears. He said, sounding genuinely surprised, “Do the goblins
wish
me to like them?”

The heat and mass of small bodies was all around me, the weight of their yearning almost as palpable.

“Yes,” I said for them. “They do.”

Clement slipped St. Christopher’s Glass into his sleeve and said, “I have been wrong about so many things. Perhaps I have been wrong about them as well.” He sank gracefully to his knees, wings fanning wide for balance and surrounding us all with the scent of nutmeg. “Come,” he said, and his smile was breath-taking. “Let me meet these goblins who wish my friendship.”

They pressed past me, though I noticed they were careful not to crowd Clement. Their leader said, “Ta
very
much, guv,” and then I was on the outside of the newborn community of goblins and demi-angel. I had to remind myself sharply that I wanted to return to my home, not to be adopted by the goblins of the night city.

The vampires had moved away with their victim, and matters in that quarter were ominously silent. I sat down on the steps of St. Christopher’s to wait, and wished wearily that there were any point in waiting for dawn.

The lamplighters had come around to extinguish the streetlights, averting their eyes with obsessive care from the clustered blood of vampires, before anyone, goblin, demi-angel, vampire, or shadow, remembered my existence. But finally a single vampire approached the church; when he spoke, I knew him for Dafira, and I tried not to notice the darkness staining his mouth and chin and spotting the collars of his shirt.

“We have decided. We shall destroy the night factories and give the shadows back their names.”

“All at once?”

“If we try to take our time over it, it will not happen at all,” Dafira said grimly. “We may be short-sighted selfish fools, but we have at least learned that much from experience.”

“Ah. . . . Er, yes.”

“Will you come with us? We must explain to the dominies and the shadows, and we thought perhaps you would like to watch the destruction of the factories. It should be quite spectacular.”

It was kindly meant, and I could not deny that I was curious. “But then you will take me home?”

“Yes,” Dafira said without hesitation or hedging.

“I will trust you,” I said, and shook hands with my second vampire.

for Elise Matthesen

After the dragon, she lay in the white on white hospital room and wanted to die.

The counselor came and talked about stages of grief and group therapy, her speech so rehearsed Megan could hear the grooves in the vinyl; Megan turned the ruined side of her face toward her and said, “Do you have a group for this?”

She felt the moment when the counselor dropped the ball, didn’t have a pre-processed answer, when just for a second she was a real person, and then she picked it up again and gave Megan an answer she didn’t even hear.

The doctors talked about reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and Megan agreed with them because it was easier than listening. It didn’t matter; they could not restore the hand that had seared and twisted and melted in the dragon’s heat. They could not restore the breast rent and ruined by the dragon’s claws. They couldn’t stop the fevers that racked her, one opportunistic infection after another like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Her risk of thirteen different kinds of cancer had skyrocketed, and osteoporosis had already started in the affected arm and shoulder.

They could not erase the dragon from her body, and she hated them for it.

In death, a dragon reverts to the minerals from which it rises into life. Rhyolite, iron, bright inclusions of quartz, and—stabbing through—the dragon’s terrible obsidian bones, every edge sharper than cruelty.

No dragon can be moved from where it dies; the last profligate expense of heat welds it to the geology of its death. The dragon that died on that strip of beach in Oregon turned the sand to glass for fifty yards. Strange glass, black and purple and green, twisted in shapes no glassblower could imagine. The government brought their Geiger counters, but there, they were lucky. This dragon had not risen from Trinity or the Nevada Proving Ground or Pikinni Atoll. Its poisonous heat did not survive it.

After the dragon, her mother would not look at her.

She came, and she yanked the curtains back, dazzling Megan’s aching eyes. She turned her smile like a
call-me-Nancy
searchlight on nurses and orderlies and doctors and interns; no one could escape, least of all Megan. She gossiped ruthlessly about women Megan knew, women who were healthy and successful and happy, women who were not lying in a white on white on white hospital room, women who had never seen a dragon. She brought flowers, daffodils and gaudy tulips and vast red roses, and the hospital room took them in and made them look fake and shrill, like her voice.

Nancy came in and out like a cyclone, and she never looked at Megan. Megan lay and tried to remember the last time Nancy
had
looked at her, had seen her, had known her, and the next time Nancy came, Megan got her answer. “I found this picture of you, sweetie, and I thought you might like it.”

Megan squinted and managed to focus on the picture; she hadn’t lost the burned eye, but it had almost no vision. From the portrait frame, her eighteen-year-old self smiled at her as dazzlingly as sunlight, unharmed and unaware that harm could come to her. She still called her mother “Mom,” not knowing yet the protection of irony, of distance, of pretending not to care. There was no dragon in her flat glass-protected world.

And of course that was the daughter Nancy wanted to see when she was not-quite-looking at Megan: eighteen and blonde and going to prom with the boy she’d dated for three years. Going to college. Surfing just for something to do on the weekends, a way to hang out with her boyfriend and his friends. Even then, it hadn’t been true—even then the boys called her “Surfer Girl” more as a warning than a joke—but Megan had believed she could make it be true just as much as Nancy had. And she’d worked so fucking hard at it. Even when she quit school, got a job as an instructor, as her hair went sunbleached on top and brown underneath, she hid her failure from her mother as much as she could. For fifteen years, she’d hidden it, from her mother, from herself, and now she knew just how well she’d succeeded.

Nancy said, “I’ll just leave this here where you can look at it.” She was gone before Megan got her eyes open again. Her eighteen-year-old self smiled at her from the bedside table. Megan snarled back.

The beach in Oregon had no name. There was no need; it was just another piece of coastline, a narrow strip of sand hedged about by rocks. Sandpipers and sea lions knew it but did not name it, and if the whales gave it a name, they told no one but their children.

It still has no official name, but it has a designation: DI-2009-002-177. The 177th dragon incursion known to the Department of Defense to have occurred on American soil, the second such in the year 2009. There was a polite skirmish between the federal government and the state of Oregon, which the state of Oregon won; DI-2009-002-177 remains public land.

Inevitably, locals and tour books and websites begin to call it Dragon’s Beach.

For a long time after the dragon, she hated in the same way that she breathed. She hated the doctors and the nurses. She hated everyone who visited her. She hated herself. Above all else, she hated the dragon, the smell of it that would not leave her nostrils, the bright lidless regard of its eyes. She hated it for not killing her, for leaving her trapped in this ruined mockery of a body. She hated it for dying and leaving her to face the world alone.

Her physical therapist was a rangy blonde woman who looked like her name should be Astrid or Olga. Actually, it was Jenny, and she was a third generation Los Angelina who spoke Spanish on the phone with her husband. She insisted that Megan move her arm in ways it no longer moved, insisted that she walk the length of the hall outside her room, and when she finished and collapsed, sweating and dizzy and nauseated, Jenny said, “Good. Tomorrow we’ll do it twice.”

Before the dragon, Megan could have kept up with Jenny easily—she could have run Jenny into the fucking ground. Now that was as far gone from her as picking up a water glass with the hand she no longer had.

No one knows the total of the dragon’s devastation. Human beings can be counted: five dead. Domestic animals can be counted: one dead, a Labrador retriever who died in the same instant as her owner, neither of them with even a chance to understand the death that stooped for them on silicate wings. Trees large enough to be landmarks can be remembered, although there is nothing left of them, only ashes. But even the best photographs, the most careful computer-generated reconstructions, can only guess at the squirrels which might have lived in the trees the dragon burned, the insects which were in its path, the earthworms which died beneath the heat and weight of its feet. There are craters left where the dragon stood, and the earth in them is scorched and lifeless.

After the dragon, after the surgery, after all the therapy, she still wasn’t whole.

They let her go home to a musty, dark apartment she almost didn’t recognize as hers. It was like walking through the home of someone who had died.

Me,
she thought.
I died.
She went into the bathroom, stared, frowning and only half seeing at the brightly colored poppies on the shower curtain. A dead woman had chosen that curtain, and now she could not remember what being that woman had felt like. The woman in the mirror would never have chosen that shower curtain. The shiny skin along her jaw creased strangely when she tried to smile, and the eye looked as false as glass. Her hair was growing out again, though it was still not long enough to cover the warped cartilage of her ear.

“At least you won’t frighten small children anymore,” she said, her voice strange and hoarse and deep. The dragon had dropped her voice from soprano almost to tenor, and she could not accustom herself to it. Could not abide with it.

“This isn’t me!” she cried, harsh as a crow. “I died—I died! This isn’t me!”

The mirror shattered, great pieces falling into the sink and onto the floor. Her hand was bleeding. She looked at it for several moments, watching the blood welling red and reproachful in the cup of her palm, before she remembered what to do next.

Sightseers come to Dragon’s Beach, but they don’t stay long. The rough glass of the beach is too dangerous to walk on, the earth crumbles horribly beneath your feet, and besides, there isn’t anything to
see
. Just a weird rock formation and some holes in the ground. If you’re stubborn, you can chip away a piece of the glass as a souvenir, but word gets around that it always,
always
draws blood, and anyway it’s dull and ugly when you bring it back home.

Then there’s an internet scare that the glass is carcinogenic, and after that the sightseers don’t even get out of their cars.

After the dragon, she tried things she’d never tried before.

It began with the mirror, which had broken into three large shards and seven smaller ones, along with all the bits too small to count. And she knew that she should simply throw them away, counted and uncounted, that the mirror was broken and that was that, but she couldn’t. She saved them instead and remembered her father teaching her to do jigsaw puzzles. After he had died, when Megan was nine, Nancy had thrown out puzzles by the armload.

Megan kept the shards of the mirror, despite the eerily accurate echo of her mother’s voice in her head: “Sweetie, you don’t know the first thing about working with glass, and you know you’ve always been so
clumsy. . . .
” She kept the pieces of mirror and began, not idly, to look at DIY and crafts websites.

Jenny had explained in careful and appalling detail the possible effects of failing to keep up with the prescribed exercise regimen, and Megan would not give more of herself to the dragon now that the fucker was dead. She went to the gym three times a week—the
gym
, god help her, which she’d always considered as a feeble second best to surfing or running or rock climbing, any of the things she couldn’t do now, might not be able to do ever with her newly friable bones—dragging her wreck of a body like a reluctant dog on a leash. At first it was a nightmare, one more new nightmare to add to the stack, but she said grimly to herself,
If you survived the dragon, you can survive anything,
and kept going. And no one was cruel. They tried not to stare where she could see them, and after a couple of weeks, the body builders began, very respectfully, to give her tips. She was both startled and grateful, and after another week she began to remember how to say, “Hello” and “Have a nice night.”

And then she met Louise.

Louise was Nancy’s age, but where Nancy was soft and feminine and restless, Louise was wiry and fiercely androgynous and had the strength of her own inner stillness. Louise was a cancer survivor; one breast was gone, and there were pain lines on her face that never entirely smoothed out. But what first attracted and held Megan’s attention were her tattoos. They started on her forearm and swirled up to her shoulder and then down both sides of her body beneath the tanktops she wore. The colors were vibrant, triumphant, and when Megan finally found the courage to ask to see the rest, she learned that the colors and the beauty and the pageantry of Louise’s tattoos were all emanating from a lion tattooed over her heart. The tattooist had used the topography of Louise’s chest, the scars and concavity, as guidelines, and the result was grotesque but also beautiful.

“Why a lion?” Megan asked, and then was afraid it was a rude question. Before the dragon, she’d never had this sort of conversation, about real pain and disaster and how you lived with being broken.

But Louise just grinned, a little ruefully, and said, “Strength in the Tarot. And Aslan from the Narnia books. And I’m a Leo.”