Beautiful Blood

by Lucius Shepard

  “Where’s your money?” the man asked, his rotten breath gushing forth, as from the sudden opening of a stable door.

  Rosacher had no thought of lying—he indicated his jacket, which lay across the back of a chair, and watched with muddled despair as the man rifled his wallet. Beside him, Ludie made an affrighted noise.

  “This can’t be all!” The big man thrust the few bills he had extracted from the wallet at Rosacher. “It won’t do! Not by half!”

  Myrie appeared at his shoulder. “I told you he’d no money, Arthur. It’s his possessions what are valuable.”

  “His possessions? This sorry lot?” The big man pushed him away in disgust and, as Myrie fought to maintain his balance, Rosacher thought how strangely genteel a fate it was to be robbed and beaten by two men named Timothy and Arthur.

  Myrie, who had fetched up against the workbench, hefted the microscope. “This here’s bound to bring a price!”

  Arthur stared at it. “What’s it for?”

  “He uses it to look at blood.”

  “Blood, you say?”

  “It lets him look at it close-like.”

  “Oh, well. Now that is a treasure!”

  Myrie beamed.

  “Yes, indeed,” Arthur went on. “Why we’ll just carry this little item over to Ted Crandall’s shop. Ted, I’ll say, I know you’ve dozens…No, hundreds of people begging for a device that’ll let them look at blood. Close-like!” He gave a forlorn shake of his head. “God help me, Tim. You’re a fucking champion!”

  Myrie’s smile drooped; then he brightened and went to the ice chest. “There’s this!” he said, producing the syringe. “He sets great store by it.”

  Arthur examined the syringe under the lamp. “This is the blood?”

  “I reckon someone might pay dear for it,” Myrie said, and gestured toward Rosacher.

  Arthur gazed in disgust at Myrie; without a word, he thumbed the plunger and squirted golden blood onto the little man’s coat. Myrie yelped and flung himself away.

  “You brainless ass!” Arthur said, squirting him again. “Dragging me from the tavern for this! I’m marking tonight down. You owe me plenty for this exercise.” He appeared to be on the verge of leaving, but then caught Rosacher’s eye. “What are you looking at?”

  Rosacher, not yet up to speaking clearly, managed a perhaps intelligible denial of looking.

  “I understand.” Arthur flourished the syringe, which still contained a small amount of the golden fluid. “You’re concerned about the blood.”

  “I…” Rosacher hawked up mucus from his throat. “I wish you’d put it back.”

  Arthur cupped his ear. “You wish what? I didn’t catch the last bit.”

  “The blood will degrade if it’s left out in the air.”

  “Too right! We wouldn’t want it to degrade. I’ll put it somewhere safe, shall I?”

  Arthur dropped to one knee and gripped him by the throat. An instant later the syringe bit into Rosacher’s left thigh. He cried out and tried to shake free, but Myrie kneeled and pinned his legs as Arthur pushed in the plunger.

  The only immediate effect of the injection that Rosacher could discern was a sensation of cold that spread through the muscles of his thigh. Grinning broadly, Arthur dropped the half-empty syringe on his chest and stood.

  “Well, now,” he said. “I believe my work here is done.”

  He strode to the door and Myrie, after seizing the opportunity to spit in Rosacher’s face, hurried after him.

  Ludie came to her knees and began working at his bonds, saying, “They forced me, Richard! I’m sorry!”

  She continued to talk, prying at the knots, freeing his arms, his legs, asking if he was all right, her speech muffled as though she were speaking from inside a closet. The numbing cold that had followed the bite of the syringe dissipated and warmth flooded Rosacher’s body, attended by a feeling of glorious well-being. He thought he should sit up, but the impulse did not rise to the level of will. Everything in sight had acquired a luster. Spiderwebs glistened like strands of polished platinum; the boards gleamed with the grainy perfection of gray marble; his broken glassware glittered with prismatic glory, a scatter of rare gems; his possessions scattered across the floor seemed part of a decorative scheme, as if the apartment’s sorry condition were the work of an artist who, guided by a decadent sensibility, had sought to counterfeit shabbiness by using the richest of materials. Ordinarily he thought of Ludie as a lovely girl, but now she struck him as the acme of feminine beauty. Her hair, kept short like a skullcap, gave an elfin look to the clever, triangular face with its sharp cheekbones and large eyes and lips that, due to a slight malocclusion, lapsed naturally into a sulky expression. The hollow at the base of her throat that each morning she sweetened with lime and honey water; her breasts barely constrained by the lacy shells of her bodice…His cataloguing of her physical charms grew more intimate and, energized by arousal, he stood and swept her up and carried her to his bed. Startled by his sudden recovery, she asked what he was doing. He sought to respond, but his thoughts effloresced rather than developing in a linear progression, evolving into elusive, inexpressible logics and fantasies. Touching her skin was like touching warm silk and all the opulent particulars of her body seemed an architecture created to house a central bloom of light. Her anima, he thought. Her spirit. As he joined with her, their flesh glued together in an animal rhythm, he sought that light, plunging toward it, wedding his light to hers in a spectacular union that concluded with a shattering of prisms behind his eyes and a confusing multiplicity of pleasurable sensations that he did not believe were entirely his own.

  At long last, leaving her drowsing, Rosacher threw on his trousers, went to the sitting room window and stood gazing out over the rooftops of adjoining shanties and the grander, slightly less ruinous buildings that spread in crooked rows up along the slope of a hill that merged with Griaule’s side. Of the dragon he could see only a great mound of darkness limned by the glow of the newly risen moon. The buildings were picked out here and there by flickering lights, and these lights appeared knitted together by golden lines that formed a constellate shape. Not the predictable shape of a bull or a warrior or a throne, but a complicated mapping of lines and points like an illuminated blueprint. He began to suspect that the pattern they made, like the patterns in Griaule’s blood, contained information that was imprinting itself upon the electrical patterns of his brain, translating its essentials into a comprehensible form. After staring at it for a quarter of an hour he realized that he had the solution to his problems in hand.

  It was such a simple answer that he was tempted to reject it on the grounds of simplicity, assuming that a solution so obvious must have flaws—but his only question was whether or not a small dose would produce the same effects created by the massive dose he had absorbed. When he could detect none other, he addressed the ethical considerations. Setting the plan in motion would be an abrogation of his medical oath, malfeasance of the highest order…yet was adherence to an oath more ethically persuasive than funding his research? Toward dawn, the effects of the dragon’s blood ebbing, Rosacher experienced irritability, a symptom such as might attach to a withdrawal; yet this soon vanished, though his feeling of contentment and well-being remained. He wondered if whether the irritability might be due to the size of the dose with which he had been injected. If the blood were not physically addictive, that might be an impediment to his plan. But then he realized that a psychological addiction would be more than sufficient for the purposes. The populace of Morningshade, powerless and possessed of no legitimate prospects, would pay dearly to see their hovels transformed into palaces, their lovers into sexual ideals, and they had no will—none he had noticed, at any rate—to resist temptation, whatever toll it might extract.

  3

  The town of Teocinte spread from the dragon’s side to sprawl across a substantial portion of the Carbonales Valley, flowing over a lumpy hill (known as Haver’s Roost, referring to an inn once
situated there) that bulged up from the valley floor, atop which stood the white buildings of government and a church under construction—from this point continued to spread in all directions for a mile and more, giving out into clusters of ramshackle structures no less derelict than those of Morningshade; yet while Griaule’s paralysis was a condition of apparent permanence, no one had yet chosen to build upon the ground close by his head, doubtless unsettled by the prospect of walking out their door and seeing the dragon’s gaping mouth the first thing each morning. Thus the area remained overgrown by stands of palmettos interspersed with shrimp plants and wild hibiscus, acacias, banana and thorn trees.

  Standing amid the brush at dusk three days after the encounter with Myrie and Arthur, Rosacher came to appreciate that Myrie might have underestimated the worth of his labors. Viewed from a hundred feet away, Griaule’s head, lowered to the ground, towered above all, looking in its grotesque conformation to be the fantastic conceit of a master builder, an improbable construction that transformed the entrance to a palace into an immense bestial image. The golden scales below the sagittal crest gleamed dully, holding the last of the sun, and one eye, visible beneath the bulge of the orbital ridge, showed black, as if the socket were empty. Framed by the upraised snout and twisted fangs, each as tall as a sabal palm and so festooned with moss that they had the appearance of scrimshaw, the cavern of Griaule’s throat might have been a gateway into the nether regions.

  It was cold, as cold as ever it got in the valley, and Rosacher’s breath steamed. As the light faded he began to hear noises issuing from the mouth, perhaps from even deeper within the dragon’s body, belonging to the creatures that wintered there: the ululations of frogs, bats shrilling, and hoarse, strangely exultant cries that he was unable to identify. The shadows merged into true night and insects announced its onset with a whining sizzle. His mind ached with fear, yet he forced himself to move toward Griaule, having to throw his legs forward, his pack bumping against his shoulders like a second, slower heart.

  Drawing near the mouth, he removed a lantern from the pack and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The scales of the underjaw, no more than six feet distant, glinted among tall weeds. He raised the lantern, illuminating a section of jaw some thirty feet above; higher yet, a portion of gum, brown as tobacco juice, came to light, as did the base of a fang. The wind blew across Griaule’s face and a breath of dry, dusty coolness briefly dominated the vegetable odors. Rosacher hooked the lantern to his pack, buttressed his mind against panic, and climbed, using vines hanging from the lip like strings of leathery drool to haul himself along. Minutes later, he slung a leg over the lip. He scrambled to his feet in a panic, turning this way and that, holding up the lantern to reveal stunted, pale-leaved shrubs sprouting from soil that had accumulated over the centuries; the head-high thickness of the tongue, a mounded shape shrouded in ground moss, and the dim concavity of the dragon’s cheek. Night sounds closed in around him—bleeps, rustlings, and what might have been thin screams—but he could detect no movement. Calmer now, he pushed through a fringe of vegetation to the tongue and suspended the lantern off the end a branch. From the pack he removed a veterinary syringe, the same Myrie had used. Cautiously, he plucked at the moss until he had cleared a circular area. The tongue was dead black. He placed the tip of the needle against it, but over a minute passed before he mustered the courage to shove it home, applying all his weight in order to penetrate the surface. He waited for a chthonic reaction, a great shudder or grumble of complaint. None occurred, but his anxiety did not subside until he had withdrawn the needle and emptied its contents into a flask. He repeated the process twice more, coming to scoff at Myrie’s fright and his own. There was nothing to harm him here. Only bugs, bats, and lizards. He worked hastily, but not too hastily for the sake of efficiency, filling twenty flasks, nearly a gallon of blood, and nesting them in cotton padding. In the future, he thought, he would contract this work not to men such as Myrie, but to the citizens of Hangtown, the village surmounting the dragon’s back where lived an assortment of outcasts. Though eccentric to a fault, they were honest enough and their familiarity with Griaule would preclude any repetition of the scene he had enacted with Myrie. He would need more blood, of that he was certain. Synthesizing a drug from a fluid whose constituency was a complete mystery would likely remain beyond the scope of his capabilities. Perhaps he could resolve that mystery with time and work, but his initial task was to determine an effective dosage and to find a suitable medium that would allow the drug to be absorbed into the bloodstream (syringes being in short supply).

  A thin silver crescent sailed clear above the hills, appearing to hover beside a fang partially cast in silhouette by its light. To Rosacher, shouldering his pack, the sight had the unreal vividness of an opium dream—it appeared to infect the rest of the landscape, lending an occult accent to the dark sky with its freckling of stars and the brush-covered field and the flickering orange lamps in the windows of outlying shanties on the hillside, like an illustration in a book of exotic fairy tales. Odd, he thought, that he could be reflective after having been terrified not long before. It was a transformation like that he had experienced in the narcotic grip of the blood, and he wondered if it were still in his system…or perhaps what he felt was not a relaxation from fear, but Griaule’s approval. The citizens of Morningshade would suggest that since Rosacher had been allowed to draw blood, he must be obeying Griaule’s will, and that his calmness was a sign the dragon had given its blessing to the act. Because they believed that through the exertion of his will Griaule controlled every facet of their lives, they might further suggest that the similarity of effect between this blessing of calm and that of the injected blood proved he had been Griaule’s pawn from the beginning. They might have told him that, if the dragon had been angry, the blood would have changed to acid in his flesh. He was not inclined to ridicule such notions as once he might, but the truth of the matter was irrelevant. Whether or not as a result of the dragon’s manipulation, he was embarked upon a course from which it would be difficult to turn aside.

  He moved toward a corner of the mouth, hoping to locate a less precipitous path of descent, and heard sibilance, like a chorus of whispers. He stopped dead in his tracks and the chorus subsided. A fierce tension stiffened his muscles. He lifted the lantern, but saw nothing inimical. Yet when he went forward again, after a half-dozen steps the whispering sounded again, louder and somehow larger, as if the number of whisperers had doubled or tripled. The voices held a querulous note, a charge of mean-spirited intensity, and he did not try to find their source, but picked up his pace, hurrying through the shrubs, skirting a forking of the tongue, head down, his fear restored in full. The voices fell silent, but as he approached the spot where he intended to begin his descent, they started up a third time, so shrill that he could no longer think of them as whisperings, but rather as an insane singing—they had a papery quality reminiscent of the scraping of cicadas. Tremulously, he held the lantern high over his head. Massed together, covering the illuminated portion of the interior cheek wall, were a host of insects. Large insects, each about the size of a two-year-old child, they resembled crickets with gray chitinous bodies, their many-faceted eyes pointed with reflected lantern light. Judging by the volume of their singing, by the way they stirred, seething forward, as if part of a tide, Rosacher guessed there were thousands more hidden by the dark, an army covering the upper wall and palette. They appeared to be one creature with a single cruel, inscrutable face replicated over and over; their feelers waved and their legs worked slightly, causing the tide of bodies to appear to billow and dimple like a mat bearing a repetitive design floating on the surface of choppy water. His astonishment gave way to terror. His bones were stalks of ice, his muscles incompliant. He tottered closer to the lip. The singing broke off and the insects surged lower on the cheek wall. Rosacher stopped walking and the singing resumed. He could, he thought, hurl himself off the lip and hope to snag a vine, or that the bushes below w
ould break his fall. He tried to slow his breathing, to gather himself, certain that the insects would swarm toward him; but instead of attacking, their voices again fell silent and they swung about, all in unison, so they were every one of them facing toward the depths of the dragon’s throat.

  Their synchronous action disconcerted Rosacher nearly as much as an attack would have done. He imagined a controlling agency that might pose a more significant threat than that of the insects themselves, and he was half-persuaded to accept the view that Griaule was not simply a moribund lizard of Brobdingnagian proportions, but a fabulous presence whose potentials were myriad and in large part unknown. He resisted the impulse to discover what had commanded the insects’ attention, afraid of looking away from them, but after a second or two, he turned to the throat. At first he saw only darkness, but then he noticed movement, though not the sort of movement he might have expected. A clot of atramentous black had materialized from the lesser blackness and billowed toward him, as if it were an entity that possessed the qualities of a gaseous cloud, one evolving into a shape and acquiring solidity, growing increasingly compact and menacing in form. A lion, he thought. No, a bull…or a crocodile with aspects of both bull and lion. He backed away from the cloud and, as it closed the space between them with a sudden surge, developing into a towering column that trembled with energy, on the verge—he believed—of assuming some final, dreadful shape, fear overwhelmed him and he flung himself from the dragon’s lip and fell screaming into the brush below.