The Dragon King and I

by Adrianne Brooks

  He lived, but that height had been nothing to sneeze at. I never visited him as I grew older, but I made arrangements to have flowers sent to the extended care facility where he lay to this day, paralyzed from the waist down. My mother kept his hospital bills paid, and we made a point to stay out of the way.

  That had been the first, but it certainly hadn’t been the last. My gift seemed to lay mostly dormant for a number of years after that. My second victim was my first grade teacher, though the newscasters called him a monster.

  What else were you supposed to call a man who kidnapped one of his students? He had me in his care for a week before the police found him. In many ways, my kidnapping was almost a vacation. He fed me, played with me, told me stories, and generally promised that we’d be together forever. I wasn’t sure how his wife and children fit into his plans for our future, but he didn’t seem concerned about them so I decided not to worry either.

  No, my time with Mr. Rockwell was peaceful, fun. But the police recovered him while he was away from our hiding spot, and when they took him he refused to tell them where he’d stashed me. So for another week, I was all alone in the basement of an abandoned hospital in the middle of town. I’d run out of food and water quickly, and afterwards it was just darkness.

  And fear.

  Fear played a big role.

  Mr. Rockwell only revealed my location after the aftereffects of my curse had worn off and he’d realized what he’d done. By then, it was a miracle that the paramedics and doctors that followed were able to save me at all.

  Mr. Rockwell was followed a few years later by Marcus Grimball. I was in the sixth grade and puberty had managed to punch me solidly in the teeth. I was an adolescent’s nightmare. All gangly arms, pimples, and hair that just wouldn’t stop growing. I was also one of the first girls in my class to receive her ‘monthly visitor’.

  Only, my first period wasn’t marked by mandatory speeches concerning the birds and the bees. Oh no. Instead it was commemorated with four hours of fright when a group of eighth graders followed me into the shower room after swim practice. They were old enough to know what they wanted to do, but young enough to still be afraid to do it, not to mention, ignorant of how to go about it.

  It wasn’t like today. Today it was almost normal for thirteen and fourteen-year olds to have sex lives of their own. Back then, it was practically unheard of. Back then you were a deviant if you even knew what acronyms for sex meant, and that was the only thing that saved me from something worse than the beating I actually got.

  It turns out, that when young boys don’t know how to express sexual aggression, they hit things. In my case, I was the designated punching bag. I did however, manage to get away. I ran and shut myself off inside my own locker. They tried to get in, and when they realized they couldn’t, they eventually gave up and left. This left me trapped inside said locker, until a custodian heard me screaming and let me out a few hours later.

  After that, things got much, much, worse.

  My overabundance of hormones almost got me killed more times than I can count, but eventually things sort of leveled out. It still got really bad around the time I was menstruating, but other than that, I was able to find a groove. I wasn’t happy by any means, safety was a laughable pipedream, but I could go through the motions of a day to day life by firmly refusing any and all overtures of sexual interest and or help.

  When I started researching what may have been wrong with me, I’d turned to scientific or medical explanations. I went to doctors, psychiatrists, and palm readers. The internet told me I had an overabundance of pheromones. A conspiracy theorist told me I was the offspring of the alien from Species. A bum off the street claimed I was a government experiment and that Big Brother, as always, was watching the shambles that was my life and taking notes.

  It was the palm reader who first whispered of curses.

  “I can see it.” she said, staring intently at my hand, heavily kohled eyes narrowed with either concentration or in protection against the heavy layer of scented incense smoke that hung in the air.

  I waited, but the silence stretched on and I finally rolled my eyes before responding.

  “See what?”

  She traced the weird squiggles on my palm as if following a road on a map.

  “This line represents your life.” she traced another, “This is your heart.”

  She tapped one more and nodded her head decisively. “And this is your luck.”

  “I have a luck line?” I asked doubtfully.

  I knew I was in the wrong place when she nodded.

  “Yes. From what I can gather,” she leaned over my outstretched hand until her nose nearly touched my skin. “It says that you were cursed from the very beginning to be an object of desire.” she used the hand that wasn’t holding mine still to gesture as she spoke. “These men you tell me about. They don’t love you. How can they? They have a greed for you, however, that goes beyond reason. They want you in the way that men once craved fire and warmth. They grasp at you like madmen wanting to hold the sun. If they catch you, they’ll try and fool you with pretty words, try to make you believe that their feelings are sincere. But the result would be the same.”

  Despite myself I leaned forward, eyes wide, and asked, “What result? What would happen to me?”

  She released my hand, and smiled. “I’m sorry, but our time is up.” the look on her face turned sly, “Unless of course you’re willing to pay a little extra to extend the session.”

  While that had pretty much been my one and only foray into the freaky and strange, I’d taken at least some of the charlatan’s words to heart.

  I, Alexandria Marie Greyson, was the victim of a curse. It was the only explanation that made sense, though as years passed knowing what was wrong with me was of little to no comfort. Having one answer meant that I now had dozens more questions. How had I been cursed? Why? Who had done it? And most importantly; how do I fix it?

  * * * *

  The main thing that I loved about living alone was the silence. Sometimes simply talking to people was like listening to white noise. Often I could tune the sound out and be all right, but other times it was like hearing nails on a chalkboard. Almost painful. I loved talking to Rachel of course, but even that had its limits. It’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed the rest of my week so much. After Rachel’s visit, I was even able to catch up on a couple of assignments from school in addition to my sleep.

  I didn’t clean anything, but I did cook for the first time in almost a month which meant that I didn’t have to stare at left over take-out boxes the next day when I finally decided that a trip to a medium would be the same as a trip to a palm reader.

  Pointless, not to mention a complete waste of money.

  I was doing all right, wasn’t I?

  What was so great about joining society anyway? I didn’t like anyone out there. I even had an active aversion to at least fifty percent of the population. Wouldn’t it be simpler for all involved for me to just stay exactly where I was and travel beyond my doors as the need arose? I was already going to school from home. Why not take it a step further and work from home, too?

  I was so pleased with my own genius that the next time my mother called to check up on my progress I actually answered the phone. One could even say that I was…happy to talk to her.

  I guess that was a warning bell in itself, because she stopped in the middle of asking me to join her for dinner next week, to say;

  “People are beginning to talk Alexandria. I heard the wait staff gossiping the other day in the Country Club about how you were a lunatic and a,” her voice lowered with outrage, “strumpet. Now I don’t know what new nonsense you’re on about this month, but I expect you home for dinner on Sunday. And if this little excursion with Rachel is the only way to make sure that you do that, then you’d better be there. Now,” her voice was satisfied as if she’d made some grand point that she didn’t expect me to argue with. “You are going tomorrow. Aren’t
you?”

  Despite the question mark at the end of it, it was obviously an order.

  I didn’t even hesitate. Lying to her was almost second nature now.

  “Of course.”

  * * * *

  Friday came all too quickly. In the back of my mind I’d been hoping that something would come up and that the visit to Madam Clara would be cancelled without any extra effort on my part. Unfortunately, Rachel was scary determined to go through with the whole thing, and I realized that I’d need to take some sort of preemptive measure once my own resolve crumbled. By ‘preemptive’ I mean that when Rachel knocked on my door Friday morning I hid beneath my favorite blanket and pretended like I didn’t hear her.

  It was a good thing that I was now a self-proclaimed recluse since I probably wouldn’t have been safe walking down the streets if the vicious names she called me before finally giving up were any indication of her current temperament.

  I sort of felt like a kid who’d gotten out of going to school and I spent the rest of the day smugly satisfied with myself. My satisfaction only lasted until night fell. Then things changed. I was making a sandwich when it started. I’d dropped a slice of tomato on the kitchen floor and was debating using it anyway when there was a knock on my door. Thinking it was Rachel, I sprinted into the living room and turned off the television. Common sense dictated that she wouldn’t buy the whole ‘not home’ charade but I’d been raised with the age-old belief that if you were real quiet and held very still, scary things would go away.

  Rachel, when angry, was nothing if not scary.

  There was a pregnant pause after the television died down and then it came again. Then there was a third knock. A fourth. If someone had just been banging on my door, that would have inspired its own brand of uncertainty. But this wasn’t like that. It wasn’t…normal. It was steady, like a heartbeat. Over and over again, never speeding up or slowing down. For a full minute the only sound echoing through my apartment was that rhythmic thump, thump, thump, and my own pulse began to race as the realization dawned that it wasn’t Rachel outside my door.

  The panic started out small, like a worm. Wriggling down my spine and settling its uncomfortable weight in my gut. The sensation didn’t ease when the knocking abruptly stopped, it simply became more pronounced. I found myself shivering as I huddled there on my couch. Some wild sense of self-preservation had me sliding off of the couch and onto the floor behind it, where I then crouched and peeked around the bulky width of the furniture. Then, like a gunshot, the knocking started up again. Fierce and angry and I had to smother an instinctive scream with my hand. The knocking was replaced by scratching, and then the scratching was replaced with words.

  I couldn’t make them out through the door. Whoever was speaking was making no effort to raise his voice loud enough to be heard. He was almost whispering. Crooning even. It was enough to drag me from the admitted non-safety of the couch’s shadow. I crawled across the floor for no other reason than that I was too terrified to gain my feet, and when I was close enough I pressed my ear against the old wood that marked the entrance to my loft. It took a bit of concentration, but when I finally made out the words that were being repeated over and over in the otherwise empty hallway, my blood ran cold and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying.

  “Where are you? I know you’re here. I can smell you. I caught your stink on the other woman a few days ago. She led me to you. You should be here. You should be here. Where are you?” and on it went. I was shaking hard enough that I was half convinced that I was making the door tremble, and I would have moved away from it just to be safe, except that the solid presence of it was the only thing keeping me from curling up into a ball on the floor and screaming. They were sniffing me out now. If I wouldn’t come to them, they would simply hunt me down. Like an animal.

  All too quickly for my peace of mind, the constant murmuring on the other side of the door ceased. Then I heard a strange snuffling sound. My brow furrowed and I pressed my ear tighter against the door, trying to make out what it was. A shadow eclipsed the light seeping through the crack from the hallway and that sound I’d been trying to place became long and drawn out.

  ‘He can smell me.’

  The insight was enough to send me flying back from the door with a whimper I couldn’t control. The man on the other side howled as I crab-walked deeper and deeper into my home, and when next the pounding came it was done with such violence that even clasping my hands over my ears couldn’t drown it out.

  “I know you’re there.” He screamed at me. I heard doors down the hall open as my neighbors moved to investigate. “I know you’re there, bitch.” He snarled, as if these words were for my ears alone. “I can smell you.” He giggled. “And I’m not the only one.”

  Funny, how well his words now traveled across the intervening distance.

  I recognized the soothing tenor of Mr. Jenkins from 4A as he tried to talk the stranger down. The words outside my door were back to being unintelligible. But whatever Mr. Jenkins said obviously had no effect because the next thing I knew people were screaming and there was a dull thud against my door, too heavy to be a fist this time, followed by silence.

  Blessed silence.

  * * * *

  They say the man ripped him apart. I never saw the body. The police quarantined the hallway until they gathered what evidence they needed and had a team come in to clean up the blood splatter where poor Mr. Jenkins had been thrown and eviscerated against my front door.

  Witnesses say that the man who attacked him had yellow eyes. That he was exceptionally strong. Crazed. They also say that they never saw a weapon on him.

  “It was like…he just swung his arm and all of a sudden poor Marty’s insides were all over the place.” Mrs. Pearson sniffed and wiped the gathering tears away with a spare tissue she pulled from her purse. There was a sitting area on my balcony and Mrs. Pearson’s was adjacent to mine. We’d bonded over our mutual interest of spying on bystanders at night and the day after Mr. Jenkins, Mrs. Pearson and I had once again found ourselves sharing each other’s company.

  I leaned over my railing and patted her frail hand in sympathy and she shook her head at the disgrace of it all.

  “Why would he do such a thing? What was so important that he was willing to kill such a sweet man like Marty Jenkins?”

  To that I had no answer.

  My neighbors were more help in the investigation than I was. They knew what the murderer looked like. All I could tell the police was that he knocked on my door and told me I stunk. Not really much to base a manhunt on. I waited a full 42 hours, before desperation finally kicked in. I gathered my things and set off in search of Madam Clara. If psychos were searching me out at home now, then there really wasn’t anywhere safe.

  As Rachel had said; as much as I wanted to avoid going outside, Madam Clara might actually be able to help me. I wouldn’t know until I tried. Besides, if I waited much longer it may be too dangerous for me to step foot outside my front door let alone my apartment building. The curse was growing in leaps and bounds rather than stages and I didn’t know how much time I had before men like the one who killed Mr. Jenkins refused to let a little thing like breaking and entering keep them from me.

  Moving at night had both its dangers and its benefits. The single pro that had outweighed all the cons was the simple fact that there were less people on the road at night. Also I’d woken up late. I suppose I could have called Rachel to accompany me on this little adventure but with the way things had been going lately I decided not to push her luck. Two dead men on my conscience were plenty; I didn’t think I’d be able to handle it if anything happened to Rachel.

  Despite everything I’d been through over the years, I really loved living in the city. It was the premier thought in my mind as I hurried from my apartment building. On a Friday night the streets were usually crowded with partygoers and folks just getting off of work, but usually when I wandered around after nightfall the sidewalks and streets
were nearly empty. I liked that part the best. An empty city was like an empty library or school, it made you feel as if the entire thing was built just for you and gave familiar landmarks an individualism that they usually lacked when surrounded by people.

  One good thing about it being a Friday night? Once you walked past all the bars and clubs, everything else was virtually deserted. I lived in a semi-upscale area of town. Which meant that things bordered on that line between affordable and too expensive, and my neighborhood boasted its fair share of restaurants and bookstores and clothing boutiques. By the way, ‘boutique’ was simply a pretentious word that shopkeepers used so that they could up the price of their items by at least $20.00. I’m not sure if it was the same everywhere, but on my side of town where society matrons judged you not by the color of your skin but by the name-brand tag on your blue jeans? Most definitely.

  Anyway, the most lovable part about my location was that because it catered to a younger crowd and tourists there were lots of unique little stores around. So it was no surprise when I arrived at the address on the medium’s business card after about twenty minutes.

  It was a single story building built out of brick. It sat on a corner lot and the building itself was small enough in comparison to the size of the property that it could actually boast a yard. The grass and cheerful little flowers out front weren’t the only things preventing it from looking like a legitimate business.

  The architect must have been enamored with storybook homes because it looked like he or she had plucked this one right out of a fairytale picture book. It even had a trellis arching over the walkway and decked out in roses that guests had to pass under in order to get to the front door.

  It was creepy.

  I wouldn’t say that I had a thing against flowers. I just had a thing against unnecessary flowers and I found myself wrinkling my nose in distaste as I made my way along the cobblestone path. When I caught sight of the gargoyle head doorknocker I was sorely tempted to roll my eyes, but there was something about the intelligence trapped in that liquid black gaze that stopped me.