Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  The dragon was listening to him attentively, though with a slightly puzzled air. Guerra said, “Anyway, what’s this about finding your way back to your own world? How’d you get here in the first place?”

  “How did I get here?” To Guerra’s astonishment and alarm, the dragon rumbled croupily, deep in its chest, and the ragged crest stood up as best it could, while the head seemed to cock back on its neck like the hammer on a pistol. A brief burst of fire shot from the fang-studded mouth, making Guerra scramble aside.

  “That’s easy,” it said, tapping its claws on the asphalt. “I got written here.”

  Guerra was not at all sure that he had heard correctly. “You got…. written?”

  “Written and written out,” the dragon rasped bitterly. “The author put me in his book right at the beginning, and then he changed his mind. Went back, redid the whole book, and phhffttt.” More fire. Guerra ducked again, barely in time. “Gone, just like that. Not one line left—and I had some good ones, whole paragraphs. All gone.”

  “I’m having a very hard time with this,” Guerra said. “So you’re in a book—”

  “Was. I was in a book—”

  “—and now you’re not. But you’re real all the same, blocking traffic, breathing fire—”

  “Art is a remarkable creative force,” the dragon said. “I exist because a man made up a story.” It mentioned the writer’s name, which was not one Guerra knew. “I’m stranded here, loose and wandering in his world because he decided not to write about me after all.” It bared double rows of worn but quite serviceable teeth in a highly unpleasant grin. “But I’m real, I’m here, and I’m looking for him. Followed him from one place to another for years—the man does move around—and finally tracked him to this Oakland. I don’t know exactly where he lives, but I’ll find him. And when I do he is going to be one crispy author, believe me.” It snorted in anticipation, but Guerra had already taken refuge behind the patrol car. The dragon said, “I told you, after that I don’t care what happens to me. I can’t ever get home, so what does it matter?”

  Its voice trembled a little on the last words, and Guerra worried that it might be about to start weeping again. He edged cautiously out from the shelter of the car and said, “Well, you sure as hell won’t get back home if you fry up the one guy who maybe can help you. You ever think about that?”

  The long neck swiveled, and the dragon stared at him, its eyes red and yellow, like hunters’ moons. Guerra said, “He lives in Oakland, this writer? Okay, I’ll find out the address—that’s one thing cops are really good at, tracing people’s addresses—”

  “And you’ll tell me?” The dragon’s whole vast body was quivering with eagerness. “You would do that?”

  “No,” Guerra said flatly. “Not for a minute. Because you’d zip right off after him, and be picking your teeth by the time I got off my shift. So you’re going to wait until I’m done here, and we’ll find him together. Deal?” The dragon was clearly dubious. Guerra said, “Deal—or I won’t give you his address, but I will tell him you’re looking for him. And he’ll move again, sure as hell—I would. Think about it.”

  The dragon thought. At last it sighed deeply, exhaling tear-damp ashes, and rumbled, “Very well. I’ll wait for you on that sign.” Guerra watched in fascination as the shabby purple wings unfolded. Worn claws scrabbling on the sidewalk, the beast took a few running steps before it lifted into the air. A moment later it landed neatly on the top frame of a billboard advertising a movie that apparently had a mermaid, a vampire and a giant octopus in the cast. The dragon posed there all during Guerra’s shift, looking like part of the promotion, and if it moved even an inch he never saw it.

  The road crew was back at work, and the intersection was in serious need of a patrolman. Both streets were torn up, the traffic lights were all off, and Guerra had his hands full beckoning cars forward and holding them up, keeping drivers away from closed-off lanes and guiding them around potholes. It kept his mind, as nothing else could have, almost completely off the dragon; although he did manage, during a comparative lull, to call in for the current address of the writer who had carelessly created the creature and then forgotten about it. Like God, maybe, Guerra thought, then decided he might not mention that notion to Father Fabros on Sunday.

  His shift ended in twilight; the traffic had noticeably thinned by then, and he felt comfortable turning the intersection over to Officer Colasanto, who was barely in his second year. Walking to his car, Guerra gestured to the dragon, and it promptly took off from the billboard, climbing toward the night clouds with a speed and elegance he had never imagined from those ragged wings and age-tarnished body. Once again the bone-image came to him of such creatures stooping from the sky at speeds his ancestors could not have comprehended before it was too late. He shivered, and hurriedly got into the patrol car.

  He checked in at the police station, joking amiably with friends about the morning’s dragon alarm—neither Lieutenant Kunkel nor Officer Levinsky was present—changed into civilian clothes, and hurried back out, anxious lest the dragon should become anxious. But he saw no sign of it, and had to assume that it was following him beyond his sight, hungry enough for revenge that it was not likely to lose track of him. Not for the first time, Guerra wondered what had possessed him to take sides in this mess, and which side he was actually on.

  The dragon’s author lived in North Berkeley, past the chic restaurants of the Gourmet Ghetto, and on out into the classic older houses, “full of character,” as the real-estate agents liked to put it, if a little short on reliable plumbing. Guerra found the house easily enough—it had two stories, a slightly threadbare lawn and a tentative garden—and pulled into the driveway, expecting the dragon, in its fury and fervency, to land beside him before he was out of the car. But he only glimpsed it once, far above him, circling with chilling patience between the clouds. A motion-detector floodlight came on as Guerra walked up the driveway and rang the bell.

  The author answered with surprising quickness. He was a middle-sized, undistinguished-looking man: bearded, wearing glasses, and clad in jeans, an old sweatshirt, and sneakers that had clearly been through two or three major civil conflicts. He blinked at Guerra and said “Hi? What can I do for you?”

  Guerra showed his badge. “Sir, I’m Officer Michael Guerra, Oakland Police, and I need to speak with you for a moment.” He felt himself blushing absurdly, and was glad that the light was gone.

  The author was sensibly wary, checking Guerra’s badge carefully before answering. “I’ve paid that Jack London Square parking ticket.”

  Guerra had just started to say, “This isn’t exactly a police matter,” when, with a terrifyingly silent rush—the only sound was the soft whistle of wind through the folded wings—the dragon landed in the tentative garden and hissed, “Remember me, storyteller? Scribe, singer, sorcerer—remember me?”

  The author froze where he stood in the doorway, neither able to come forward nor run back into his house. He whispered, “No. You can’t be here…. you can’t be….” He did not seem able to close his mouth, and he was hugging himself, as though for protection.

  The dragon sneered foul-smelling flames. “Come closer, you hairy hot pocket. I’d rather not singe your nice house when I incinerate you.”

  Guerra said, “Wait a minute now, just a minute. We didn’t talk about any incineration. No incineration here.”

  The dragon looked at him for the first time since it had landed. It said, “Stop me.”

  Guerra’s gun was in the car, but even if he could have reached it, it would have been no more practical use than a spitball. His mouth was dry, and his throat hurt.

  Remarkably, the author stood his ground. He spoke directly to the dragon, saying, “I didn’t write you out of the book. I dropped the damn book altogether—I didn’t know how to write it, and I was making an unholy mess out of it. So I dropped a lot of people, not just you. How come you’re the only one hunting me down and threatening my life?
Why is this all about you?”

  The dragon’s head swooped low enough to be almost on a level with the writer’s, and so close that a bit of his beard did get singed. But its voice was colder than Guerra had ever heard it when it said, “Because you wrote enough life into me that I deserved more. I deserved a resolution—even if you killed me off in the end, that would have been something—and when I didn’t get it, I still had this leftover life, and no world to live it in. So of course, of course I have been trapped in your world ever since—miserable dungheap that it is, there is no other place for me to exist. And no other emotion, out of all I might have had…. but revenge.”

  Its head and neck cocked back then, as Guerra had seen them do before, and he turned and sprinted for his car and the useless gun. But he tripped over a loose brick from the garden border, fell full length, and lay half-stunned, hearing—to his dazed surprise—the voice of the author saying commandingly, “Hold it, just hold the phone here, before you go sautéing people. You’re angry because I didn’t create a suitable world for you, is that it?”

  The dragon did not answer immediately. Guerra struggled wearily to his feet, looking back and forth between the house and his car. A family across the street—a man in a bathrobe, his small Indian wife in a sari, and a young boy wearing Spider-Man pajamas—were standing barefoot on their own lawn, clearly staring at the dragon. The man called out, loudly but hesitantly, “Hey, you okay over there?”

  Guerra was still trying to decide on his response, when he heard the dragon say in a different tone, “No, I’m angry because you did. You made up a fairy tale that I belonged in, and then you destroyed it and left me outside, in this terrible, terrible place that I can’t escape. And I never will escape it, I know, except by dying, and we dragons live such a long time. But if I avenge myself now, as you deserve”—it swung its head briefly toward Guerra—“then policemen like him will in turn kill me, sooner or later. And it will be over.”

  “SWAT teams,” Guerra said, trying to sound stern and ominous. “Whole patrols. Divisions. Bomb Squad, FBI, the Air Force—”

  “Hold it!” The author was very nearly shouting. “That’s it? That’s your problem with me?” He held his hands up, palm out, looked at them, and began rubbing them together. “Give me five minutes—three minutes—I’ll be right back, I’ll just get something. Right back.”

  He turned and started toward the house, but a fireball neatly seared a stripe of lawn at his feet. The dragon said, “You stay. He goes.”

  The author looked down at the crumbling, crackling grass, then turned to Guerra. “Through the door—sharp left—turn right, straight through the other door. My office. Notebook beside the laptop, Betty Grable on the cover, you can’t miss it. Grab that, grab a couple of pens, get back out here before he trashes the landscaping. You know how much it cost to put this lawn in?”

  But Guerra was already at the door. He hurried through to the office as directed, snatched up notebook and pens, paused for a moment to marvel at the books and electronics, the boxes of paper and printer cartridges, the alphabetized manuscripts in their separate folders—this is how they live, this is a real writer’s workroom—and raced back out to the lawn, where the author and his creation were eyeing each other in wary silence. Guerra was relieved to see that the dragon’s head and neck were relaxed from the attack position, and horrified to realize that the neighboring family—with the addition of a smaller boy in Batman pajamas—were now standing at the edge of their lawn, while a girl coasting on in-line skates was gliding up the driveway, and a large man with a pipe in his mouth, who looked like a retired colonel in a movie, was striding across the street as though to direct the catapults. The larger of the two boys was telling his brother learnedly, “That’s a dragon. I saw one on the Discovery Channel.” I could have switched shifts with Levinsky, like we were talking about the other day….

  “Thanks,” the author said, taking the writing materials from Guerra’s hands. Ignoring the growing assembly on his lawn and his driveway, and the cricketlike chirps of cell-phone cameras, he sat down cross-legged on his own doorstep and propped the open notebook on his knee. “I did this in Macy’s window one time,” he remarked conversationally. “For the ERA or the EPA, one of those.” He rubbed his chin, muttered something inaudible, and began to write, reading aloud as he went.

  Once upon a time, in a faraway place, there lived a king whose daughter fell in love with a common gardener. The king was so outraged at this that he imprisoned the princess in a high tower and set a ferocious dragon to guard her.

  The dragon slithered closer and craned its neck, reading over his shoulder. The author continued.

  But the dragon, fierce as it was, had a tender, sympathetic heart, greatly unlike the rest of its kind—

  “I don’t like that,” the dragon interrupted. “‘The rest of its kind’—it sounds condescending, even a touch bigoted. Why not just say family, or ‘the rest of its kinfolk’? Much better tone, I think.”

  “Everybody’s a critic,” the author mumbled. “All right, all right, kinfolk, then.” He made the correction. The man who looked like a colonel was standing beside another man who looked like a hungover Santa Claus, and the Indian mother was gripping her sons’ shoulders to hold both boys exactly where they were.

  The author continued.

  Now the dragon could not set the princess free against her father’s orders, but it did what it could for her. It kept her company, engaging her in cheerful, intelligent conversation, comforting her when she was sad, and even singing to her in her most depressed moments, which would always make her laugh, since dragons are not very good singers.

  He hesitated, as though expecting some argument or annoyed comment from the dragon, but it only nodded in agreement. “True enough. We love music, but not one of us can sing a lick. Go on.” Its voice was surprisingly slow and thoughtful, and—so it seemed to Guerra—almost dreamy.

  But what the princess valued most, of all the dragon’s kindnesses, was that when her gardener lover had managed to smuggle a letter to her, the dragon would at once fly up to her barred window and hover there, like any butterfly or hummingbird, to pass the letter to her and wait to carry her rapturous reply.

  He paused again and looked up at the dragon. “You won’t mind if I make you a little bit smaller? Just for the sake of the hovering?”

  With a graciousness that Guerra would never have expected, the dragon replied, “You’re the artist—do as you think best.” After a moment it added, a bit shyly, “If you wanted, you could do something with my crest. That would be all right.”

  “Easy. Might touch up your scales some, too—nobody’s quite as young as they used to be.” He worked on, still reading softly, as much to himself as to them. What struck Guerra most forcefully was that his was very nearly the only voice in the crowded darkness, except for one of the small boys—“Dragons eat people! He eat those men up!”—and the roller-skating girl sighing to a boy who had joined her, “This is so cool….” Guerra gestured at them all to move back, but no one appeared to notice. If anything, they seemed to be leaning in, somehow yearning toward the magnificently menacing figure that loomed over the man who still sat tailor-fashion, telling it a story about itself.

  Now when the king came to visit his imprisoned child— which, to be as fair to him as possible, he did quite often— the dragon would always put on his most terrifying appearance and strut around the foot of the tower, to show the king how well he was fulfilling his charge….

  To Guerra’s astonishment the dragon appeared not only somewhat smaller, but younger as well. Before his eyes, slowly but plainly, the faded greenish-black scales were regaining their original dark-green glitter, and the tattered crest and drab, frayed wings were springing back to proud fullness. The dragon rumbled experimentally, and the fire that lapped around its fangs—like the great claws, no longer worn dull—was the deep red, laced with rich yellow, that such fire should be. Guerra stared back and forth between th
is new glory and the ballpoint pen on the Betty Grable notebook, and no longer wished to have switched shifts with Officer Levinsky.

  But beyond such wonders, the most marvelous change of all was that the dragon was beginning to fade, to lose definition around the edges and grow steadily more transparent until Guerra thought he could see his car through it, and the lights of houses across the street, and the rising moon. After a moment, though, he realized he was wrong. The lights were plainly coming from a number of low-roofed huts that clustered in the shadows at the base of a soap-bubble castle, and what he had taken for his car was in fact nothing but a rickety haywagon. The vision extended on all sides: whichever way he turned, there was only the reality of the huts and the castle and the deep woods beyond. And one of the castle towers had a single barred window, with a face glimmering behind it….

  “Yes,” said the dragon. For all its increasing dimness, its voice had grown as powerful and clear as a mountain waterfall. “Yes…. yes…. that was just how it was. How it is….”

  The sense of one common breath being drawn and exhaled was abruptly broken by a soft wail, “Dragon gone!” and the little boy in the Batman pajamas suddenly shrugged free of his mother’s grip and came racing across the street and the lawn. “Dragon gone!” Guerra made a dive for him, but missed, and was almost trampled by the boy’s father. The whiskey-faced Santa Claus came charging after.