The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  Very cautiously the horse placed his hoof on the sand, only to draw it sharply back to the verge that same moment, as where his hoof had been the sand moved all by itself, its fine grains began to flow into the depths of the earth, into the emptiness beneath, like through an enormous hourglass, until a small stone blocked up the hole. Upon that, as if by magic, the surface of the sand was smooth once again. An unwitting traveler may not have feared it in the slightest.

  “Huh!” exclaimed Viivian impatiently. “Easy does it. Softly and quickly forward,” she said, guiding the horse onto the sand. And the horse moved sideways across the shimmering, whispering sand, as nimbly as a ballet dancer, as lightly as though he were dancing across freshly laid dove’s eggs. They flew like the wind and after only a few minutes they had crossed the quicksand and were standing safely on the firm, heather-covered ground at the edge of a small wood. The stretch of sand surrounding this mysterious, unknown wood had not been as wide as it had looked from a distance. Laughing excitedly, Viivian patted the horse’s neck. But now the horse no longer paid any attention to these otherwise very pleasant displays of affection; he was listening out and sniffing the dark woods.

  “What is it,” asked Viivian, though she too was listening carefully. Close by, from behind the trees, her own voice echoed back as if it had struck a wall. Above the trees the darkness was impenetrable, the stars were no longer visible. Viivian coughed warily. Her voice boomed as if they had been standing inside a great cavern with trees growing all around. Without her having to urge him, the horse began slowly walking forward; through the trees there ran a winding path that seemed to be leading them down and down into a gorge. All around there grew tall ferns reaching as high as the horse’s withers.

  “Dead Man’s Hands,” said Viivian in nothing but a whisper. She could feel her own whisper resound like a warm breath against her face. As she stretched her hand out in front of her she fumbled the black rock of the cliff face, which did not feel at all as cold as stone but was soft and warm, as if she had gently brushed a feather pillow. She brought the horse to a halt and pulled the dagger from its sheath.

  “Just as I suspected, soapstone,” she said as she carved a thin piece out of the rock and let it drop to the soft moss on the forest floor. “We must be in some sort of pass or cave,” she said to herself. The air was almost unpleasantly warm, humid and difficult to breathe; her undershirt clung stickily to her back and she was too hot. All of a sudden the horse startled, took a great leap and they flew like a shot across a dizzyingly deep gorge. At once the air cleared. Viivian felt against her face a gust of fresh air, heavy with the fragrances of strange spices. The smell of cloves. It reminded her of the dentist. Onward they traveled, down and down into the gorge. “But how we find our way back is another matter altogether,” she said to herself, giving the horse’s neck a calming pat. The horse shook the reins and seemed clearly distressed.

  “Let’s have a little rest, my old friend,” she said, dropping the reins and jumping down from the saddle. They had arrived at an opening in the trees, perfect for a rest, with a small, clear spring rippling out from the rock face.

  “A little bite to eat would certainly not go amiss,” she said, throwing herself down on a soft knoll. “The next time we set off on a long journey like this we shall have to pack something small to eat,” she said as she rummaged in her saddlebag for a pen. This adventure would be of no use whatsoever unless she carefully marked the route they’d taken on the map. As always, she could not find a pen: she lived in a house in which pens disappeared the minute they came through the door. She did however pull out of the bag a nice, white parcel. Very carefully she opened it up. Inside there was a smoked pig’s knuckle.

  She had seen this somewhere before. The previous day in Trotter’s grocer’s shop she had stared at it as she had stood in line to pay for her chewing gum.

  “Oh my!” she shouted out loud. She would rather be anywhere in the world than in Trotter’s grocer’s staring at a pig’s knuckle. She beat the air with her hand to banish the disturbing thought and realized to her relief that she was still sitting on the knoll at the bottom of the gorge. Beside her the horse was sipping water from the spring. “Anyway, I don’t particularly care for smoked meat,” she said, wrapping the knuckle up again.

  All at once she heard a strange spluttering sound nearby; the spluttering stopped and she could clearly make out the wheeze of heavy breathing, as though someone nearby were having an asthma attack.

  “To be or not to be,” came the hoarse, tense voice very close at hand. “That is the question. What beautiful words. But the man who wrote them certainly didn’t imagine what an enormous question this may actually be for some. It’s as if those words were written about me,” said the voice. There then came the abrupt sound of someone blowing their nose.

  The horse’s ears twitched as he listened to this, but did not seem particularly afraid. Viivian stood up.

  “Who’s there?” she said to pluck up her courage as for safety’s sake she gripped the handle of her sword. The voice sounded a touch unreal, as if someone had spoken with a pillow pressed against their mouth. She edged her way closer. The bearer of the voice had obviously not heard her and continued his monologue.

  “Anyway, to be is only a verb. I am, you are, he is, she is. He is not really here, and neither are you, so I can’t really be sure whether I am here either. What a curious thought! Like a circle.” Again someone blew their nose heartily.

  Viivian was now standing right at the mouth of a small cave. Now and again, carried by the faint breeze, a horrid, stale smell wafted out of the cave and reached her nose. The smell of an unemptied garbage can. On the ground, scattered around her feet, lay various cutlet bones, all licked spotless, and old eggshells. Some of them were green with mold around the edges. Viivian stretched her neck to see as far as she could into the dark cave when there came a sudden clatter, as if someone had dropped a sewing box.

  “Oh!” cried the startled voice. Viivian was also startled, took a step back, and just to be safe drew her sword halfway out of its sheath. She then took several sharp steps backward as a strange being came running out of the cave and very nearly stumbled on top of her. “Huh, boo!” bellowed the creature in a terrifying voice.

  The horse raised his head from the tussock where he had been nibbling at the short, fresh grass and looked absently and fearlessly toward the cave.

  “Boo-oo!” the creature shouted right at Viivian’s face and breathed out such a foul stench that she almost fell over dazed. The animal—assuming it was an animal—was just larger than the horse but a lot fatter. Its four short, bulky feet, all covered in fur, resembled a bear’s paws, while its back, all apart from a perch’s fin half a meter high, was covered in dark green lumps like a newborn pine cone. With its large buck ears pricked, it stretched its long, thick neck toward Viivian. Its dark eyes, shaded by long, velvet eyelids, were clearly more used to the squalid cave’s darkness than to the dim half-light, for they were blinking as if the animal were trying to hold back tears. And as for the poor animal’s nose, it resembled a trumpet—next to that, even a pig’s snout looked almost like a rosebud about to burst into flower. It was not a nose at all, it was a trumpet. The animal’s head was covered in lumps and bumps, scratches and sores, clumps of coarse hair and small horns. Its tail end disappeared far off into the cave, thinning like that of a lizard.

  The creature looked over Viivian from head to toe, then blew a wet cloud of steam from its snout.

  “That will be quite enough, thank you,” Viivian said in disgust. The creature stared at her, its eyes wide and round. “Perhaps you should blow your nose more often,” she snapped.

  “Boo!” the creature bellowed loudly.

  “Boo-hoo, and good evening to you too,” replied Viivian. “I overheard you talking to yourself, so I know full well that you can speak properly.” The creature looked at her, somewhat hur
t.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you, I’m not normally this uncouth unless it’s absolutely necessary,” she said softly. “It seemed there would be no end to all your booing,” she smiled.

  “Why are you not afraid of me?” asked the creature in a hushed, curious voice.

  “I don’t know,” she said, somewhat baffled. “The horse isn’t afraid of you either.” The creature looked the horse up and down.

  “Is this your horse?” it asked pensively. “It’s very beautiful indeed. To me. My wife died recently. It’s barely been two hundred years.”

  Viivian anxiously thought of something appropriate to say. “My condolences” or “how terribly sad” or “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  “How?” asked the creature, intrigued.

  “In some way,” Viivian replied, a little surprised. “I share your sorrow.” The creature looked at her in delight.

  “Listen,” he said in a friendly, familiar voice. It looked as though he had sat his rear end down, and Viivian thought it might be polite to sit with her legs crossed at the mouth of the cave once she had cleared a spot among the bones. “Tell me the truth: do I exist?”

  Viivian thought for a moment. “Yes, you do,” she said, very seriously. “Does life seem unreal to you?”

  “What does that mean?” asked the creature, raising his eyebrows.

  “I don’t know, but sometimes I feel as though I know that I exist, but I don’t know exactly where,” she said.

  The creature pondered this, then burst into happy laughter. “That’s what I feel too,” he said with a chuckle. Together they laughed long and hard.

  “Sometimes when you meet a complete stranger, it suddenly feels like you have known them forever,” Viivian said, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes.

  “Indeed it does,” said the creature, sniffing horridly.

  “Couldn’t you blow your nose every now and then?” she suggested, but the creature was pretending not to listen.

  “Do you know what I am?” he asked, still laughing.

  “No,” replied Viivian, somewhat taken aback. She had not given the matter a second thought.

  “Guess.”

  “A brontosaurus or some other sort of dinosaur,” she hazarded.

  The creature giggled excitedly. “No.”

  “A bugbear.”

  “Ahem, no,” he chortled amusedly.

  “A nightmare.”

  “No.”

  “You are…a very large pangolin,” Viivian decided after a lengthy guessing game.

  “That must be it,” cried the creature. But when he noticed that Viivian was becoming rather annoyed at always guessing wrongly, he bent down toward her ear.

  “If you promise on scout’s honor to keep it to yourself, then I’ll tell you what I really am,” he whispered. Viivian gave a serious nod.

  “A dragon,” said the creature, no louder than a breath. At this, Viivian stood bolt upright, as if she had been stung by a bee, slapped her hands against her knees, jumped up and down, fell to the floor holding her stomach, and swayed back and forth unable to breathe.

  “Now I’ve frightened you to death! I’m sorry,” said the creature helplessly. Viivian managed to take a deep breath, hooted loudly, wooh, she shouted, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Don’t shout, my friend, I won’t harm you,” he said, trying to calm her down.

  “Huh, huh,” said Viivian, who could speak once again. “I wasn’t shouting. A dragon!” She laughed so hard her sides almost burst. The creature looked at her disapprovingly.

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “If you’ll forgive me, you really are the most badly drawn dragon in the world!” she said, then added skeptically: “Or else you’re pulling my leg.”

  “I’ll bet you I’m not lying,” the dragon said firmly. “I have papers and documents to prove it.” With that he scurried into the cave and soon afterward came the sound of scratching, digging, and the rumbling of stones. A moment later he returned, slightly out of breath, bringing with him a foul gust of wind like that of a bedroom that had not been aired or cleaned for a hundred years, a smell so strong that anyone less hardened to such things than a nine-year-old girl would surely have fainted on the spot.

  “This is a document dated August 1123,” said the dragon as he thrust an old parchment into her hands. “And this is a sketch for my portrait,” he said, proudly displaying a quickly drawn, smudged charcoal sketch from which she could barely make out the dragon’s essential features.

  “Several hundred years ago an artist came here and drew my picture. It was meant to be part of a larger work of art, so it’s not a proper character study. Still, quite a resemblance, isn’t it? He gave me this by way of thanking me for posing as his model. Since then, technically speaking, I have been by myself down here,” said the dragon and pressed the shabby picture lovingly to his chest. Looking very serious and businesslike, Viivian carefully unrolled the parchment.

  Once she had spread it out, she read through the parchment. Viivian took a long, hard look at the dragon from the tip of his trumpeted snout to the point where he disappeared into the darkness and read through the document one more time, and all the while the dragon stood waiting intently. Finally Viivian raised her head and stared the dragon solemnly in the eyes.

  “It says here that in August of the year 1123 a young woman by the name of Klaara, the sweetest and most beautiful young woman in Genoa that year, was sacrificed to appease the dragon so he could maul and eat her.” The dragon seemed somewhat embarrassed and began to fidget nervously.

  “Yes, that was rather an unfortunate incident,” he said. The dragon then raised his head and looked Viivian fearlessly in the eyes. “But in actual fact it wasn’t my fault at all.”

  “It says here: to appease the dragon. You must have done something,” she retorted.

  “Look, it’s like this,” said the dragon, taking a deep breath. “Some time around the year 1100 finding a bite to eat round these parts was a bit of a problem, given the amount I used to put away as a youth. That, and of course the fact that humans had begun intruding into the forests too. So one evening I had just left my home, when…” The dragon’s story came to an abrupt halt and he raised his paws up to cover his snout.

  Viivian cleared her throat. “When…?”

  “As shameful as this is to admit, I find all kinds of eggs quite delicious. Sea birds’ eggs, chickens’ eggs, even small birds’ eggs. Tortoise eggs are especially good, have you ever tried them?”

  “You’re trying to change the subject,” Viivian pointed out angrily.

  “No,” shouted the dragon. “On the contrary. Because it was that same year, when people realized I actually existed and that I lived here in this very forest, I went out at night—what a fool I was!—like a thief I went out to the edge of the town to steal eggs from people’s chicken coops. I decided, once and for all, to eat as many eggs as I could find and have my fill of them for some time. But of course, the clumsy thing that I am, I trampled on the chickens and the coops, a few pigs, water barrels and everything else under my feet. Smashed everything to smithereens, if you see what I mean. To this day I still feel very sorry about this, but back then I was considerably larger than I am today; age and the shortage of food have shrunk me beyond recognition. Sometimes when I look at myself in the spring, I can hardly…”

  “Get to the point,” said Viivian firmly.

  “Well, people simply made up their minds—as I had destroyed their possessions—a dragon, they thought, it must want to eat people. They had scriptures claiming that dragons eat people. So the good townfolk assumed that, despite all my efforts, I had been unable to find a single tasty human on my egg excursion and would certainly come back again and again unless they did something about it. And
so the only logical idea that occurred to them was to find the tastiest, tenderest young lady in the town and deliver her, as it were, straight into my bed, so that I would never again destroy their houses.”

  “You do rave on. So what, my good friend, happened to the girl?” asked Viivian, assuming the dragon’s tone of voice.

  “It’s a very sad story. She was brought all the way out here, she was standing where you are sitting now, at precisely the same spot, nine and a half centuries ago, crying and wailing, and I had been thinking so hard—my head ached with all the thinking—trying to think where I could put her and what I would feed her, because as I said provisions were so hard to come by back then, but when I walked out here to say hello and bid her welcome to my humble abode, she looked at me and fell to the ground, pale and silent. She didn’t make a sound. I rushed over to the brook to collect some water and tried to revive her, but when I returned and touched her I realized that her heart had stopped—forever.”

  “How terrible,” said Viivian sorrily. “What did you do then?”

  “Then I ate her,” said the dragon nonchalantly. “But things didn’t stop there.”

  “I think perhaps we should be on our way,” said Viivian. The horse raised his head, rattling the bit. “Goodness only knows what the time is,” she said, squinting at her watch, which often showed all sorts of times, especially if she forgot to wind it up.

  “Oh, please don’t go yet,” the dragon said sadly. “It’s so rare that anyone ever stops and listens to me.”

  “We really ought to be off,” said Viivian and glanced again at her watch; she had a feeling it looked somehow strange. Instead of numbers, twelve little ant faces stared back at her. They were looking at her boldly, almost grinning. Their small hands gripped the clock’s hands and spun them furiously, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. Then, like soldiers performing a drill, the little creatures lined up in twos at the center of the clockface, handing the hands of the clock back and forth, carrying them first up toward the top, then heave-ho, about-face, and marched back toward the base.