The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  ‘You’ve been in my head,’ the man said.

  Snow was caught off guard, perplexed by this peculiar phrasing.

  ‘You or someone very like you,’ the man went on. ‘I’ve been trying to remember.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course not. Why should you?’

  Snow’s sense of unease spiked. ‘Look, I . . .’

  ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Snow, uncertain whether or not he could pull off an outright lie.

  ‘So who am I?’

  ‘I figure you’re the guy who lives in the big house on the hill.’

  ‘And you believe that because . . . ?’

  ‘You’re obviously not from around here and yet you act like you’re in charge.’

  The man chuckled. ‘I believe you know more about me than that.’

  Sitting up straight, Snow said, ‘I’m not sure what you think I know, or why you’re fucking with me. I’m just going to drink my coffee and move along.’

  ‘That’s a real shame. Visitors are at a premium here.’

  Snow’s eyes went to Itzel. She stood with her head down, hands spread on the countertop, unmoving, as if bracing herself.

  ‘You ought to stay a while,’ the man said. ‘I’ll put you up at my place.’

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I can’t afford to miss my bus.’

  ‘Tres Santos may not look like much, but it offers a variety of attractions for the casual tourist. Of course the main attraction is . . .’ He performed a florid gesture, as though presenting himself to an audience. ‘Me. People come from all over to ask for my advice. I counsel them, and sometimes I put on a little show. An entertainment. It’s only an exercise routine, but I’m told it’s unique.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Snow gulped down coffee. ‘Wish I had the time.’

  Without warning, the man hauled Snow’s pack over to his side of the table.

  ‘Hey!’ Snow made a grab for the pack, but the man fended him off. ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Having a peek inside.’

  The man unzipped the top of the pack and began to inspect the contents.

  Snow froze – then, thinking a lack of response would lend substance to the man’s suspicion that he, Snow, knew more than he had admitted, he reached for the pack again. The man caught his wrist and squeezed until the bones ground together, causing Snow to cry out. He struggled to break free, but the man’s grip was irresistible.

  ‘Please don’t do that again,’ the man said, letting him go.

  Snow put pressure on his wrist to quell the pain and gazed out into the street. The gray sky and reddish mud, the puddles, the houses and the portion of the hillside framed by the doorway seemed to flutter, as if all the air and every object within view were made of the same inconstant stuff and troubled by a single disturbance. He was in deep shit, now. A thrill passed through a nerve in his jaw.

  The man riffled through Snow’s passport. ‘Snow,’ he said, and repeated the word a couple of times, as if amused by it. ‘George Snow.’

  ‘Craig,’ said Snow, speaking out of reflex.

  ‘It says here, George.’

  ‘I don’t like George. My middle name is Craig. That’s what I go by.’

  ‘I think George is better for you,’ said the man indifferently.

  He pulled out a filthy work shirt from the pack, deposited it on the floor, and extricated a pair of jeans.

  ‘It’s just dirty laundry,’ Snow said, and rubbed his wrist.

  ‘So it would appear.’ The man searched the pockets of the jeans. ‘What’s this?’

  He fingered out a pill bottle, opened it, and shook three blue capsules out into his palm. ‘These aren’t prescription, are they?’

  Alarmed, first by the fact that he had brought the pills through customs unawares, and secondly because he feared the man would force him to take them, Snow finally said, ‘A woman gave them to me in Miami. I didn’t realize I had the bottle with me.’

  ‘It’s contraband? Drugs? Are they any good?’

  ‘If you like to hallucinate.’

  The man studied the pills and then popped them into his mouth. After a swift internal debate, realizing that if the man felt he had been poisoned he might punish him, Snow elected to err on the side of caution.

  ‘If I were you I’d bring those things back up quick,’ he said. ‘The woman who gave me them, she said not to do more than one.’

  The man shook out two more pills and gulped them down.

  ‘Jesus! You need to stick a finger down your throat. Trust me, that shit will fuck with your head!’

  ‘Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen to me.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve done a shitload of drugs and one of those pills messed me up for a more than a day.’

  The man seemed to take offense at this statement and said defiantly, ‘I have a strong resistance to drugs. I could swallow them all and it wouldn’t hurt me.’

  Despite the man’s confidence, Snow was unconvinced, but there was nothing for it other than to hope he knew what he was doing.

  ‘If they don’t affect you,’ Snow asked, ‘why take them?’

  ‘Sometimes they affect me – they just don’t harm me.’ The man lost interest in the pack, pushing it aside with his foot. ‘Your coffee must be getting cold. Would you care for more?’

  Anything to delay, thought Snow. He needed time to think how to deal with this teensy fucker. He said he would and held up his cup to attract Itzel’s attention.

  ‘I have better coffee at my place.’ The man scraped back his chair. ‘Bring your pack. I’ll have someone wash your clothes.’

  Hoping for guidance, Snow glanced at Itzel once again, but her eyes were glued to the countertop . . . perhaps a message in itself. He thought about taking a swing at the man, catching him by surprise, but doubted that would end well. Despite his stature, the man’s strength hinted at extreme physical competence, so running was probably out of the question.

  The man preceded him into the empty street and established a brisk pace, heading for the pink building, but stopped abruptly and, putting a hand on Snow’s chest, said, ‘You know who I am. Don’t deny it.’

  Snow believed that if he admitted to any knowledge, it would be a fatal misstep. He could feel his heart beating against the man’s palm. ‘I’ve never laid eyes on you before today.’

  The man struck him in the face – it was a light slap of the kind used to wake someone up, but his hand felt like solid bone and the blow twisted Snow’s head around and made him take a backward step.

  ‘I think you have,’ said the man.

  ‘I swear, I’ve never seen you! I don’t know anything about you!’

  The man seemed dispirited, as if he had been seeking not an admission, but rather had hoped to learn something. He started walking again, The gray light flattened things out – the hill with its two buildings resembled a painted backdrop.

  ‘You can call me Jefe,’ the man said. ‘That’s what everyone calls me, but it’s not who I am.’

  Women peered from the windows of the pink building as they approached – one of them beckoned, soliciting a visit – yet Jefe paid her no mind and entered a door with an intercom mounted on the wall beside it. Beyond lay a tunnel with concrete walls and a ceiling less than a foot higher than Snow’s head, lit for its entire length by fluorescent fixtures. He pictured electric carts rolling along the tunnel, conveying grim uniformed men with side arms and secret orders and missile codes toward a command center. He kept an eye on Jefe, watching for a sign that Luisa’s pills were having an effect, but the man’s walk held steady and his conversation was terse and on point.

  After three or four minutes, by Snow’s estimation, they came to a large paneled room with indirect lighting, a burgundy carpet, and three doors leading, he assumed, to bedrooms, kitchen, and so on. Its central feature was a long banquet table set about with high-backed chairs, the dining surfa
ce fashioned from an ancient church door carved with a complex scene that illustrated a typically Temalaguan confusion of cosmologies – anguished men and woman supplicating the angels who hovered just beyond reach, appearing both disinterested in their suffering and unaware of the doings of the less well-defined beings above them who looked to be doing a portage across the heavens with some kind of solar vessel. A mahogany sideboard stood against one wall, supporting an array of liquor bottles, ice buckets, and glasses, and mounted above it was a flat screen TV. Four photographic prints in aluminum frames hung on the opposite wall, each depicting a spectacular cloud formation. For all the luxuriousness of its appointments, the room stood two-thirds empty, far too spacious for such a paucity of furnishings, and this indicated to Snow that while its primary inhabitant might have an awareness of interior decoration, he was seriously myopic as regarded an overall aesthetic.

  Jefe told him to have a seat at the table, spoke into an intercom mounted on the wall, and then said to Snow, ‘I’m going upstairs for an hour or two.’ He opened the door to reveal a stairwell. ‘Yara will bring coffee and whatever else you require.’

  Snow had nurtured a faint hope that Yara had survived the disappearance of the cult, but that had been wishful thinking and now, hearing her name, her presence alluded to so casually, it was as if a bomb had gone off in his head, obliterating his ability to reason. Once Jefe had gone he stood up from the table and immediately sat back down, dizzy to the point of passing out. He stared at the two doors at the far end of the room, shards of memory falling through his mental sky, and when a woman entered, wearing a shapeless gray smock (a nightgown, his initial impression), moving stiffly, slowly, her hair close cropped, a monastic look, lines of strain on her face deeper than those he would have predicted a thirty-year-old to have . . . and when he recognized her to be Yara, his Yara, miraculously alive and still beautiful despite the attrition of time, he started up from his chair again, intending to embrace her, a great joy building, enfolding him like a garment he had prepared in anticipation of this day yet never thought to wear . . . but then he halted his approach. Her expression betrayed no trace of any kindred emotion, not an ounce of welcome or happiness. She wrangled a chair back from the table and collapsed into it, breathing shallowly. After collecting herself, she said, ‘You have some things to wash?’

  ‘Yara,’ he said. ‘It’s me . . . Craig.’

  ‘I know who you are. Show me your clothes and I’ll wash them.’

  Baffled by her response, he asked what he had done to anger her.

  ‘Apart from running out on me?’ She sniffed. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I tried to persuade you to come with me.’

  ‘You should have tried harder. You could at least have told me you were leaving. You didn’t have to sneak away.’

  ‘You don’t . . .’

  ‘I hunted for you everywhere. People thought I was demented, I went on about you so. You should have told me. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you and we could have said a proper goodbye.’

  ‘It was all . . .’ He gave his head a frustrated shake. ‘You don’t understand how much I beat myself up for abandoning you, but I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘I guess I shouldn’t blame you for being yourself.’

  That stung him, but he reminded himself that these emotional post-mortems unfailingly began with a litany of bitterness.

  ‘You’re not truly at fault,’ she said. ‘You weren’t a part of what was going on. But it hurt and I hated you for a long time. Seeing you again brings back a great deal of anger and heart-sickness, but I suppose it’s just residual emotion.’

  ‘Yara, listen. I . . .’

  ‘Don’t bother. It’s all in the past.’

  ‘Maybe for you. It’s been my present for the last thirteen years.’

  She laughed humorlessly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a romantic at heart!’

  ‘Listen to me for a minute, okay?’

  ‘If you’ve come here thinking you can rekindle our affair, forget it. That part of my life is over.’

  ‘How can that be?’ he asked. ‘You’re still young, you’re a beautiful woman.’

  She liked hearing that, he could tell, yet tried to hide the fact, thinning her lips in disapproval.

  ‘I didn’t come here for any reason I can name,’ he said. ‘I assumed you were dead. I may have hoped to see you again, but the hope wasn’t real. It was . . .’

  ‘Stop it!’

  She slapped the table and, as if cued by that percussive sound, a mechanical grinding issued from the stairwell, growing louder with each passing second, impeding their conversation.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ Snow asked.

  ‘He’s flying. Shut the door.’

  Snow did as instructed, reducing the noise by half, and returned to the table.

  ‘Did you notice there aren’t any men in the village?’ Yara asked, cutting off his unspoken question. ‘Within a month after we came to Tres Santos, Jefe had killed them all. Some tried to run, he seemed to know when they ran, and where, and he hunted them down. He kills every man who comes here except for the PVO guys, and he’ll kill them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. I actually believe he gets along with men better than he does with women, but it’s like he’s obeying some beastly imperative, wiping out the competition.’ She paused. ‘He’s probably going to kill you.’

  Snow wanted to make light of what she had told him, but could not.

  ‘Don’t look so shocked,’ Yara said. ‘I don’t know how you found this place, but you knew about the PVO, didn’t you? You must have realized you were taking a risk by coming here.’

  ‘There must be some way of dealing with him. What should I do?’

  Yara’s face, which had softened a little, walled over again. ‘I can’t help you.’

  Snow was hard put to think of anything to say.

  ‘Do you want me to explain?’ Yara asked. ‘Can you listen without interrupting, without telling me I’m being ridiculous? I don’t have the patience for that anymore. There’s a lot I don’t understand, but what I know, I know.’

  ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘Chances are you’re safe for today.’ She brushed strands of hair from her eyes and, with no small degree of malice, said, ‘Even if I’m wrong, we have time. He’ll be flying for hours.’

  *

  ‘As you recall,’ Yara began, ‘when we were together I used to go into the city to meet with various men, passing along Griaule’s instructions and delivering the money I’d collected from Club Sexy and other sources. I recalled little of those meetings, because I was under his thrall. But soon I realized the money was being used to establish the PVO, to fund their arms purchases and recruitment campaigns . . . even the construction of this complex. It was completed years before Jefe and I took up residence, and built according to a design I imparted to the architect. Of course I have no recollection of this, but I’ve been assured that was the case.

  ‘As the party grew in strength and numbers, the job of fund-raising was taken over by men who could operate with more efficiency than I, but I continued to serve as a conduit between the dragon and the party. It might seem odd that a woman could function as the putative leader of a male-dominated organization, especially once the party was on a solid footing. At any rate, it seemed odd to me. Yet I came to understand that extremist groups depend on a mystical element, an occult component, to lend gravitas to their actions. I was for the PVO that mystical element, the Virgin Mary who in effect gave birth to their messiah, so I was granted immunity from their prejudices, protected from their violence. Whenever a man crossed the line with me, as happened more than once, the party dealt with him mercilessly.

  ‘When you lived with me I wasn’t altogether certain about things. There were times I doubted my sanity and your doubts, your accusations, affected me more than I let on. Had you stayed, I might well have fled with you, because I was having a crisis of faith. I questioned the d
ragon’s reality and, in moments during which I was satisfied that he did exist and was not simply a function of my madness, I questioned his plan. Getting involved with the PVO was the antithesis of what I wanted for myself, for the country. After you left, however, my communication with the dragon sharpened. Previously I went into that little bone chamber, I went to sleep and emerged with vague messages. Now those messages came into my head while I was awake and were more defined. I could sense their flavor and configuration. It became evident that the PVO was only a step in Griaule’s plan. They would protect the dragon reborn until he no longer needed them. For a while I believed he had brought you and me together for some purpose. To test my faith, perhaps. But I know now that was a conceit. Disembodied, his will was weak and he required years to shape people to his purposes. I overestimated his influence where we were concerned.

  ‘Along with sharpened communication I experienced painful side effects that limited my mobility. Before long I was unable to venture into the city and I concentrated my efforts on the adherents, lecturing them on my enhanced appreciation of the dragon’s nature, counseling them and presiding over events like the one that frightened you away. You had a right to be afraid, as it turned out, but after each of them I felt enraptured, understanding that someday they would result in the achievement of our goal. We had additions to our community, and subtractions. Colonel de Lugo died, but not before he recruited his replacement. That was the way of it. Some left, others arrived, and little by little we approached the right mix of people that would enable the miracle to occur. I became so involved with the dragon, I was scarcely aware of my own life. One morning I woke to the knowledge that this would be the day. Everything was so sharp, so clear. I knew precisely what to do. From the first moment when the dragon touched my mind, I recognized that I would be the instrument of his renewal, but not until then did I fully comprehend the nature of that renewal, the act of transubstantiation it demanded. In this regard, the adherents had been closer to the truth than I. He may have whispered a promise to them, a guarantee that they would live on in him, and for all I know they do live on. But he made no such promise to me and I thought I was to die that morning.