The head was fearsome: eyes with fiery red irises surrounded in flanges of flesh. Coiled horns that were more like boneless antennae streamed back from the upper part of the head, with tendrils like those of a catfish rooted above the upper lip, which was curled back to show long, dagger-fine teeth. And as the head came through the fog, flanked on either side by human-like figures carrying candles in their hands, it lifted and the jaws opened wide and from it came a bellowing mournful cry like the one they had heard from a distance...but this time so close and deep that it caused Lee’s bones to vibrate inside his meat, and he knew that this time the dragon was not some shed skin borne aloft by the procession. This time, the dragon was alive.
“Oh my God,” he whispered aloud, encircling the girl with his arm to shelter her, as puny as that gesture was in the presence of this approaching creature and its attendants. It was a religious spectacle. The baroque, scaled and silvery-colored animal was more awesome and beautiful and terrible than a living cathedral. Lee found himself thinking of the Catholic psalm De Profundis. “Out of the Depths.”
Despite the dragon commanding his attention, he began to take note of the appearance of the humans parading in its company, their strange faces weirdly under-lit by the glowing candles. At first they had appeared to be a race of mutants and freaks too varied in aspect to be of one origin, but then it became apparent that they wore mummers’ masks. Some of these colorful faces reminded him of photographs he’d seen online or in books of Vietnamese water puppets. Others, however, were more like skulls from Mexico’s Los Dias de los Muertos – November 1 and 2, All Saints Day and All Souls Day, when Catholics prayed for the souls of those in purgatory. Maybe some of these bizarre and unsettling visages weren’t masks, after all, and those were the faces Lee tried not to look at too closely.
When they had been to this city and met this parade before – in a dream that Lee recalled at the same time that it all seemed entirely new to him, in a strange kind of partial amnesia – the parade had gone on past them. Its members had ignored them as they watched it pass. The procession had vanished into the mists from which it had come. But this time, this time, it came to a halt directly before them.
Lee was shaking. Afraid the dragon would raise its great lion-like, reptilian head and let loose another bellow. Would its breath wash over them in billowing flames? But the thing’s fierce crimson eyes merely watched them imperiously, as a single human-like figure broke the ranks of the halted parade and came toward them. As the small, frail figure neared, carrying a candle in one hand, it began to extend another hand in a gesture of beckoning, or invitation.
Lee found himself lurching a step forward to take the being’s hand. It was an instinctual sense of recognition, almost like a sudden tug of yearning, that made him reach out to her. But her voice, from behind one of those smiling water puppet masks, stopped him. It was the voice of an old woman, and said, “You can go back. This wasn’t supposed to be your dream.”
Lee looked from her face back to her hand, and he realized that in it she held a second candle now. He half turned to the naked girl under his arm, and let his arm slip away from her narrow shoulders. She looked up at his face.
“Thank you, ba,” she said.
Lee watched the girl go to the old woman, who handed her the extra candle.
Lee stood there watching them as the procession, the dragon in their midst, low to the ground on feet clawed like an eagle’s, resumed their march. They streamed past him, many legs, many candles, murmuring in their uncanny voices. Finally, the dragon’s plumed tail and the last straggling members of the parade (loping dwarves or children in huge, outlandish masks) had gone by him. But Lee did not follow, only turned to continue watching as they disappeared into the fog in the direction of the stunted lighthouse at the end of the wharf.
After a few minutes, there came no further sound. No shuffling footsteps, no chittering animal-like voices, no final bellow from the reborn dragon. Just the sound of the sea, and Lee felt that it was the sea itself, and not just the fog, that the procession had slipped away into. Were they even now proceeding across the floor of the silvery living ocean – their candles still burning?
17: Evening Star
In November, the problems that had been plaguing ManuCel for weeks resolved themselves as mysteriously as they had begun. Some speculated that a troublesome employee they had since fired had either deliberately or through carelessness been contaminating the tissue constructs, though Lee Todd himself hardly believed that this could have been the cause.
In November, Mars – the red planet of the god of war – finally receded from its close dance with the Earth. Instead, in the first week of November, the planet Venus became visible again after a year-long absence. By May, this world – the “evening star” – would become so bright that it would be visible even before the sun had set.
In November, Mai took a leave of absence from her job at the nursing home. Several times she spoke to Lee on the phone of going back to Vietnam. Sometimes he actively tried to dissuade her, but other times he just listened. For the entire week following the funeral he didn’t see her in person. Over the phone, she muttered to him (softly, as if speaking to herself) of her guilt, her self-hatred, that she should never have become involved with him, that it was her fault, and that they must never see each other again. She deserved punishment. She didn’t deserve a happiness bought at the expense of her daughter’s life.
In November, the Leonid meteor showers streaked across the sky in three separate waves, peaking on the 19th. On their first night, however, Lee found it impossible to drag his body from the sofa, away from the numbing gravity of the TV screen, to go outside and gaze skyward.
At last, Mai agreed to meet him for lunch. She did not sit on his side of the table to view the same menu with him, as had always been her habit. He noted the puffiness of her beautiful, tattoo-outlined eyes. He placed his hand palm-up on the table between them. She only stared at it for a few moments as if not comprehending his meaning, but finally she placed her own hand into it. He rubbed his thumb gently across its brown surface, then he turned it over and opened the fingers like petals.
When she had plunged the knife into her husband’s neck, in an act that had been judged by the authorities to be justifiable homicide, her fist had slid down the length of the handle after the blade found resistance in bone. Her fist had slid onto the blade itself, and her palm had become deeply lacerated. Seeing that scar, still raw, for the first time, Lee was reminded of her ugly vertical cesarean scar, which had more the look of a disemboweling. But he traced his finger over the wound and smiled. “Remember you told me your lifeline was too short? Look.” He pointed at where the wound branched off from that natural crease. “It’s longer, now.”
“I don’t want it longer,” she murmured. “I want it to end now.”
He closed the hand, but still clasped it between both of his.
On November the 8th, Lee had summoned up enough energy to go outside in order to view a total lunar eclipse. Passing through the Earth’s two shadows – the light, outer penumbra and the darker, inner umbra – the moon, when it became fully eclipsed, caught refracted rays of light that made it glow an eerie, coppery red. From in front of his house, Lee observed this phenomenon clearly. In his dour frame of mind that night, he thought that the moon looked as if its craters had erupted to flood the entire orb in blood.
A week after they had had lunch, he managed to talk her into having coffee with him. This time she didn’t speak directly about her daughter, and so Lee was not tempted to tell her about his series of dreams, as he had been the last time he’d seen her. In any case, the recurring dreams had ended. He had not been to their realm again...
Mai reminisced about Vietnam, making him worry that she might still be contemplating a return. One of her stories cut through his melancholy, however, and intrigued him. At first, he found it both charming and a bit appalling that people could believe in such things. The story was this: M
ai had had an aunt who died at the early age of twenty-four. One day a “crazy puppy” (rabid, Lee imagined) had pursued the young woman down the street, snapping at her legs. She had evaded it, but it had managed to “bite her shadow.” After having had her shadow bitten, and thus apparently poisoned, the young aunt had grown sick and died.
But after his initial reaction, as an American and a scientist, to reject such a primitive notion, Lee found that he couldn’t entirely discount this or any possibility – not after the things he had experienced in dreams that had been more than dreams. He recalled the story Mai had once related to him of an infant girl child who had crawled onto her bed and then scampered away. A ghost, or some sort of forerunner. No...not everything could be calculated and labeled and charted like the spinning of the planets.
After coffee, Mai agreed to walk for a while through Salem with him. He was reminded, of course, of walking these streets with her daughter, but he didn’t speak of that. She asked him if Margaret were still living with him. For now, he told her. Was she at the house now? she asked him. No, at work, he said. He had left work early today so as to spend this time with Mai.
Without looking at him, strolling beside him, Mai said she’d like to see his house some time. She had been too shy to ask him before, too afraid to run into Margaret, he knew, despite the fact that Lee’s wife was quite content with her own new lover.
“Would you like to go there now?” Lee asked, after a long pause during which they’d put more of the brick-composed sidewalk beneath them, following a red stripe along which parties of people bearing candles were led during Halloween-time “ghost tours.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Okay. We go.” She fumbled for his hand, and he clenched hers.
The weekend after Halloween, there had been an aurora borealis in the sky in the early evening. A coworker told Lee it could possibly disrupt cell phones and TV reception.
At the time, he hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to bother with such a thing...but as he reflected on it later in the month – and despite the fact that he had never been one for astrology and horoscopes – he liked the idea that the heavens and their bodies could reach out across great distances and affect humans and their tiny inventions in this way.
For the first time in his life he found appealing the notion that the moon influenced not only the tides of the ocean, but the tides of the body’s own water, of which it was mostly composed – each human body like a single drop in a communal, living sea of flesh.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed milieu Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections PUNKTOWN, VOICES FROM PUNKTOWN, PUNKTOWN: SHADES OF GREY (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and GHOSTS OF PUNKTOWN. Novels in that setting include DEADSTOCK (finalist for the John W. Campbell Award), BLUE WAR, MONSTROCITY (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award), HEALTH AGENT, EVERYBODY SCREAM!, and RED CELLS. Thomas's other short story collections include THIRTEEN SPECIMENS, NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS, DOOMSDAYS, TERROR INCOGNITA, UNHOLY DIMENSIONS, AAAIIIEEE!!!, HONEY IS SWEETER THAN BLOOD, and ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN (with W. H. Pugmire). His other novels include LETTERS FROM HADES, THE FALL OF HADES, BEAUTIFUL HELL, BONELAND, BEYOND THE DOOR, THOUGHT FORMS, SUBJECT 11, LOST IN DARKNESS, THE SEA OF FLESH AND ASH (with his brother, Scott Thomas), BLOOD SOCIETY, and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM DEALERS. His stories have appeared in the anthologies The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The Grimscribe’s Puppets, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, and others. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
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