The Dragon Book (74 page)

(And did I keep turning over in my head what Cauter Pike had said, We’ll have you
to
supper, to make myself more easy that he had not said,
for
supper? I surely did that thing.)

And I began to know that I would not be disappointed this time because after I had walked one circle (shaped more like an egg with an ax wedge out of the side), my second pass I was knee deep in the rock, and my third pass was hip deep. It wasn’t like walking through rock, but like walking through a thick fog colored and shaped like rock, and as my head sank below the surface (and I confess I took a deep breath before I went under, though I knew better), the fog cleared, and I was in a deep tube-like well with smooth rock walls, like a borehole, and I walked down in a spiral as if there were a staircase, only of course there wasn’t. The farther down, the warmer I got, and soon I was sweaty and no longer missed the jacket. Then a rock floor rose up beneath me and knocked me off-balance, dropped me to my knees, as if my elevator had come to rest, and I knew I was at the bottom—or as near the bottom as Pearl was likely to get, or want to get.

I walked through a Dragaman-sized rock archway and found myself in a cave so big its ceiling and far walls were lost, though everything for about twenty feet around was illuminated by a dim and sourceless reddish light. A shallow branch trickled over the rocks at my feet. I heard bats chitter to one another and fancied I saw their pinpoint eyes like stars in the darkness above. I couldn’t help but shudder. I never harbored a love for bats, however helpful they could be in the wizard way. As I moved around, that weird light moved with me. I looked at my hand and saw where the light came from, as if I had brought into the deep, deep dark some measure of sunlight that shone out through my skin. But away in the distance was another source of light, more natural-looking in this unnatural place, and walking upstream along the branch seemed to bring it nearer. So I went on thataway, through stalagmite thickets, until I came into view of the prettiest log cabin you ever saw, with a shake roof and flower boxes in the front windows and outflung shutters that would have said, “Welcome, friend,” if you had come upon the place in any mountain holler. But because the cabin was in fact in the bowels of the Earth, its message was a tad more complicated, especially since those flowers stirred without a breeze, and there seemed to be no reason for the patch of afternoonish light in which the home place sat. But I walked on toward it, and as I got closer I heard someone singing inside. It wasn’t the Dragaman’s yawp, but a girl’s voice that could carry a tune.

Figuring politeness would stand me as well belowground as above, I stopped about twenty paces from the door, and called: “Hello, the house!” Two or three echo-Pearls repeated me, aways off in the ceiling somewhere.

The singing stopped right quick, and the girl came to the window, holding a dish and a washrag. She was a good deal prettier than I expected, and her red hair was longer, but when she smiled, her front teeth gapped just like her father had said when he held a gun on me on the slope of Cove Mountain the night before.

“Oh, hello!” she cried. “You must be Pearl.”

“Yes, ma’am. And you must be Allie Harrell.”

“Honey, you hear?” she said, addressing someone in the cabin behind her. “Pearleen Sunday has come to supper.”

Someone rumbled a reply that I couldn’t quite make out, but the gout of flame that spit from the cabin’s stone chimney, like from an Alabama steel mill, was easy enough to recognize.

“My goodness, you’ve come a long way! You come right in this house this minute and put your feet up. Oh, and please don’t mind the flowers. I’d hoped for spiderwort, but these are what came up. What can you do? There’s cider on the hearth, and chicory brewing—oh, and I need to put on the biscuits! I swear, I’d forget my head if it weren’t tied on …”

The window-box flowers were long and snaky, with bulbs on the end that opened and closed, and as I stepped through the doorway, they strained in my direction like geese wanting a handout through a fence.

The inside of the cabin was a sight larger than the outside, but still homey compared to that dark reach of cavern. The front door I came through was Pearl-and Allie-sized, but the stone fireplace was big enough to roast two oxen longways, and if the chimney was its match, I guessed this was how Cauter Pike came and went. The rocking chair beside the hearth could have held a family, but the Dragaman still looked squinched and uncomfortable sitting in it, knees practically in his face and shoulders hunched beneath the ceiling, which was no higher than what you’d find in the average railway station. Not that he cared about any of this. He gazed at the redheaded gal who bustled and chattered around the kitchen the way Gabriel must have looked at Evangeline in Acadia long ago.

He glanced at me.

“Now, Pearl,” he said. “It ain’t what you think.”

“All I think,” I said, “is that building this house in a Dragaman’s cave, and toting down all the provisions, must have been a piece of work.”

“I love this house!” Allie sang out. “I never thought I’d have a house this nice, on Cove Mountain or under it, neither.” She set a pitcher precisely in the middle of the long oilcloth-covered table that ran along the back wall, benches to each side. The table was set for twelve.

“Let me help you,” I said. “Who all else is coming?”

“You keep your seat, and as for who, you’ll see directly,” Allie said, with the same pinched expression as when she had acknowledged the flowers. “You’ll like them, I’m sure. They’re so … interesting. Isn’t that the word you’d use, Cauter honey, interesting?”

“Danged interesting,” Cauter Pike agreed.

Allie started singing again, all the while banging plates and cups together, and in the hubbub I murmured: “Cauter Pike, what do you think you’re doing, playing house with this woman-child? Her pa’s worried sick. Do you intend to keep her here the rest of her life, until she’s a sick old lady, and you still as green as the mountain?”

“She’s better off here than up there,” the Dragaman said. He spit a fireball into the hearth, and flames roared up the chimney. “Let me tell you a true thing, Pearleen Sunday, and you can put it in your head with all the other lessons you’re collecting up. There’s a lot of evil that don’t have anything to do with magic, not black magic, not your magic, not inside-the-mountain magic like mine. And when evil’s on the march, all that magic together does no good against it. Can I do air thing to stop all the innocent folks from being rounded up by the police, in Virginia and everywhere else in the world? No, ma’am, I cannot. But take one individual out of it and keep her safe, yes, ma’am, I
can
do that, and I
did
do that. That’s why Allie’s in this cave house right this minute, and don’t expect me to be sorry for it, neither. And when I brought her here, Pearl, well, I stopped her just short of doing something she would have been sorry for the rest of her days.”

“You’re a fine one to talk of days, here in a place with no sun, and flowers made of snakeskin. It can’t be good for her. She looks a little peaked to me.”

“Why, Pearl,” he said, with a crooked grin. “I do believe you’re jealous.”

Before I could answer back to that, he bestirred himself, and said: “Allie, honey, I’m gonna stretch my wings a little before supper, see if I catch sight of them lollygaggers.”

“Tell ’em hurry up,” Allie said, chopping scallions. “It’d be a shame to have all this beef stew and corn bread go to waste.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cauter Pike said. He couldn’t stand up in the low-ceilinged cabin, but he eased himself out of the rocker and onto his knees, then stuck his head and shoulders into the fireplace. “Whoo, that tickles!” he said as he shinnied headfirst up the chimney. Flames wrapped his long lanky body like a blanket. Just before his feet disappeared, the scaly green point of a tail, the size and shape of a shovel, dropped into sight, raked through the hot coals, then vanished up the chimney as well. That was as close as I had come to seeing a Dragaman change shapes. I ran to the door and looked up, but the light around the cabin didn’t reach far, and in the darkness above, all I saw was a trail of sparks like a meteor. The sound was of the world’s largest carpet being beat, beat, beat.

“Oh,
here
y’all are,” cried Allie behind me. “Hello, fellas. I swear, I never
will
get used to you walking through the wall like that.”

WHEN we all sat down, we were eleven, but Allie wouldn’t tell me who the twelfth place was for, the setting at my left hand. “Never you mind,” she said.

The first supper guests to arrive, other than me, were the ghosts of four of the eight miners working the Greeno Slope who had died when a lamp ignited a methane pocket in December 1910. Exactly whose lamp it had been was still a subject of debate.

“Warn’t me,” said the youngest and smallest of them, who was only fifteen. “I ain’t tall enough to hit a pocket.”

“Gas can hole up anywhere,” said the skinny one, “not just the ceiling, and you’re the one that has to be first to poke his fool head into ever’ crack he sees.”

“Poor things,” Allie murmured into my ear. “They’re always grateful for the invite, but once they get here, all they talk about is work.” In fact, she had made up a pail of food for their four friends, who were working the late shift. Miners too spectral to dig, hunting coal that wasn’t there, in a tunnel closed for a decade, because that’s all they knew to do: It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Hesh up, all of you,” the one with the broadest shoulders told the others. “I was the foreman, warn’t I? Whatever happens down the hole on my watch is my fault, and that’s all there is to it.”

The others all talked at once about this, even the Hungarian whose English wasn’t so good, disputing the foreman’s modesty or his arrogance in claiming to own their mutual disaster. You could tell they were miners because even with their helmets off at the table, they never exchanged direct looks, for fear their lamps would blind somebody. Yet for all their chatter, they still managed to put away the food, in the ghostly way I had got used to in the haunted house where I was partly raised. The food just vanished from the plates in front of them, bit by bit, though you couldn’t see it happen, and with each helping the ghosts got less transparent, but never so solid that you couldn’t read a calendar through them.

Ghosts I was familiar and easy with, but the four imps at the other end of the table were more of a problem. It wasn’t just that they were all naked, or that their fat red bodies were as smooth and hairless as store-bought dolls, or that their noses and chins nearly touched, or that they talked so fast and so high that you couldn’t understand what they said, any more than you could understand a cricket. It was mostly their ancient faces without expression, their deep-set eyes with no pupils, and, of course, their table manners—nearly as bad as Cauter Pike’s, and he ate beef stew with a shovel out of a bowl the size of a cauldron. Because they live so long, Dragamen take their sweet time doing most things, but eating is an exception, even when the meal is past the point of struggle. Between gulps and slurps, Cauter Pike carried on his masterfully noncommittal side of the imp conversation: “Well, I declare.” “Ain’t that something.” “How about that?”

Given the miners’ bickering and the imps’ clackety-clack, Allie and I had plenty of chance to talk to each other. I asked her how she liked living down here.

“Oh, it’s ever so nice,” Allie said. “And isn’t Cauter Pike just the sweetest thing?” At that moment, the sweetest thing was retrieving a whole carrot from where it had landed, behind his ear. “He plaited this green ribbon in my hair, and he says one day he’ll take me flying, so high I can see the whole New River Valley.” During this speech, she didn’t look at me, but studied a jar of chow-chow pickle like it held her future. I took it from her hand and set it down.

“Allie,” I said, “I hate to say this, but ain’t you stretching it a bit, this housewife business? Trying to make all this out to be normal? Honey, you have been carried off to a hole in the ground by an ancient creature of myth. Your going drove the sheriff half-crazy, and your neighbors have suffered.”

“Yes,” she murmured. “So Cauter says. It’s me he really wants. He’s just taking it out on them.”

“And your poor pa has looked for you these past three months. Don’t you want to see him?”

She sighed. “Of
course
I’d like that,” she said, as if she was explaining something obvious to a youngun.

“Well, why don’t you? Why don’t you come back upstairs with me?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what, honey? Afraid of the sheriff catching you? Or afraid that Cauter Pike won’t let you go?”