Memory of Dragons

by Michael G. Munz

  The bus drew closer. It carried the thin man in the same seat as before. As it passed, the two locked eyes and the other regarded Austin with the same cold smile as before, this time with a twinge of triumph. Yes, Austin thought, you won. You made me uncomfortable enough to leave the bus early. Aren’t you swell? Austin mocked him with a grin of his own and a jovial wave. The thin man’s eyes narrowed in the last moments before the bus took him away.

  He made the rest of the walk swiftly. Only once did he glance back, victim of an uneasy feeling that the thin man had doubled back, still in pursuit. There was no one there. He ignored the feeling the rest of the way, and made it at last to the hotel on the cliffs overlooking the worm. The beach Rhi had mentioned stretched west into the distance from below the hotel. The worm lay in the surf to the south.

  Austin stood outside the hotel for a time, absorbing the incredible view until, shaken from his reverie by a pair of surfers ascending the path from the beach, he entered the hotel and checked in.

  Half an hour later, carrying only his blue daypack, Austin walked south along the grassy clifftop toward the worm itself. Grazing sheep roamed the area untended. Though the wind buffeted him as he approached the water, and the clouds now threatened to overpower the sunshine, it could not diminish the beauty of the sea and the cliffs around him. He could see why Rhi had loved it.

  Wishing she could see the smile on his face, Austin hiked down the cliff to cross the now-uncovered causeway on his way to the worm. Water-worn crags in the stone, wet and clustered with mussel shells, tested his footing. More than once he stumbled in his eagerness to reach his destination. He crossed the final distance at last, gaining the safety of the worm itself, and then climbed a steep path toward the long ridge that crested the creature’s back.

  A short while later found Austin eating a lunch assembled from supermarket fare and enjoying the view from atop a rocky outcropping between the beast’s shoulders. Facing the water, he could imagine himself riding on a small island in the middle of the ocean, far from anything, the way he used to do as a boy. Though his parents dutifully ensured he learn to socialize with other children — he had begged to be homeschooled — an occasional craving for solitude was one he carried into adulthood. It was a craving Rhi understood, even shared. It was one reason his cell phone remained at home on this trip.

  That his arrival had successfully coincided with the tide gave him no small satisfaction. Rhi would have teased him for the fastidiousness with which he had planned everything out. Austin caught himself thinking of various comebacks to her imagined quips. It lifted his heart to think of her there. He pondered the odds that she once sat in that very spot.

  When Austin had finished his lunch, he packed up and began to further explore. The coastal side of the worm sloped gently to the sea, but waves and weather had shaped the seaward side into steeper, rocky slopes filled with the tiny caves Rhi had once talked of exploring.

  In checking his watch to gauge the tide’s return, Austin missed spotting the lone, thin figure in the red sweater crossing the slowly flooding causeway in the distance behind him.

  FIVE

  Austin stumbled and caught himself in time to save dashing his knees on the rocks. A mark in a cave had snared his attention. Half-seen in the corner of his eye, the double-take it inspired almost sent him tumbling. He regained his balance and crept closer, curious. Was it more than coincidence?

  Just inside the cave, barely sheltered from the sky above, lay a flat, slightly inclined rock about two feet wide. Atop the rock was a mark, blackened such that it seemed burned rather than painted. Yet what most caught his eye was how it appeared almost identical to the eight-pointed outline of Rhi’s pendant.

  He knelt for a closer look. Its shape looked too symmetrical and precise to be an accident of nature. Had he found it elsewhere, he might have allowed for the remote possibility it was the stain of a decayed starfish. But to find it in this place? He erased the idea from the chalkboard.

  Here, it must mean something. But what?

  Austin touched the mark. It had no indentation, only a discoloration that did not rub off on his fingers. It was otherwise smooth and unremarkable.

  Why was it here? The question tasked him. Could he ever know, or had whatever significance it held been lost with Rhi? Had she ever seen it in her visits? Would she not have mentioned it, if so?

  Austin cast about for further marks, checking first around the rock itself, then deeper into the cave whose mouth it branded.

  Rhi never ascribed any particular significance to the pendant’s design. She liked it, and he had assumed she must have liked it before the amnesia, too. He had never searched for any overt symbolism in its shape that could account for what the same shape was doing here.

  Another possibility occurred to him: Rhi might have made the mark here during one of her recent trips, perhaps even on her final visit. An act of whimsy? It was a simpler explanation than the mark holding some greater meaning, no matter how tempting the latter might be. Still, he needed evidence! There was no sense hypothesizing without trying to gather more data.

  Austin scoured every cleft and cranny within the shallow cave. He found tide pools filled with anemones, more mussel shells — the loose, empty ones he sifted aside and discovered nothing — but no other marks, nor anything else of recognizable significance.

  He crouched over the mark again to study it further. The burn felt too exact to be simple graffiti. If it had been whimsy, what could she have used to make such a burn that she would have already carried out here?

  Austin swung back toward more deliberate explanations: either Rhi, or someone else, made it for a reason. Whether it had to do with Rhi’s amnesia — a concept that tempted him with answers to long-asked questions — was a separate matter. Whatever the cause for the mark, it was possible that its creation occurred prior to her amnesia.

  Yet if there was any connection at all, he needed to know. That he knew no way to learn more was a problem, of course.

  Austin checked his watch. It was almost time to get back. His window before the tide cut him off from the mainland was closing, and there would be no time at all to explore tomorrow before he had to leave Rhossili. If there were ever any clues to the memories Rhi lost, they were here, somewhere. If finding them meant wading or even swimming back, then, well, so be it.

  On the hypothesis that the cave indicated a vantage point rather than hid something itself, Austin climbed back up the slope to the rocks above it. From there he saw only more water, more tide pools, more rocks, more grass. A search of the ground there yielded no marks, nor anything else out of the ordinary.

  Except . . .

  Austin crouched, chasing a glint in his peripheral vision. Something in a cleft between two abutting stones caught the hint of sunlight that shone into the shadows there. He could make out nothing beyond a vague shape. Under any other circumstance, he would disregard it as a discarded can or broken bottle. Suppressing an aversion to shoving his hand into dark holes, Austin reached in with creeping fingertips.

  The object was too short to be a bottle, too solid to be a can. In fact, its weight and smoothness marked it as something likely hidden rather than discarded. Austin’s heartbeat quickened. He drew it from its safehold.

  Corinna put extra artistic touches on the foam of a customer’s latte. The poor, entitled woman was in a hurry — a fact expressed via drumming nails, put-upon sighs, and use of the phrase “And I’m in a hurry!” no less than thrice when giving her order to Sara at the register. With the sweetest smile Corinna could manage, she took the time to get the design far more perfect than warranted, and then, at last, set it on the bar. Corinna returned the woman’s scowl with a wink and watched her dash off with the latte.

  “Think she was in a hurry?” Sara asked, counting out the tip jar.

  Corinna grinned. “Was she? She ought to have said so.”

  “I know, right?” Sara handed her a portion of the tips. “Your pendant is darling, by
the way. New?”

  “Just picked it up yesterday on my way through Cardiff,” Corinna answered. “Like it?”

  Sara’s eyes flicked to the eight-pointed pendant’s onyx gem. “Picked it up?” She smirked, arms folded, stepping closer. “You nicked that, didn’t you?”

  “Hmm. So what if I did?”

  “Corinna!”

  Corinna giggled. “Oh, relax, he was a tourist. Yank accent, travel bag, bewildered look. You know how they are.”

  She added more beans to the grinder and ignored Sara’s outraged façade that couldn’t quite cover the amusement beneath.

  Corinna never stole from anyone but tourists. If they could afford to visit another country, they could afford whatever she managed to snatch from their pockets, and she never did anything with the credit cards. She got the thrill of a well-executed pick — and some cash — and they got a fun story to tell about a pickpocket. It was win-win, really.

  Sara’s façade broke into a smirk. “You’ve got to stop doing that. What if you get caught?”

  “Me?” She fluttered her lashes and fired up the grinder. “Get on.”

  “But what if it had sentimental value?”

  Corinna turned away. “It’s not like I ripped it off his neck. I went for a pocket, I thought I’d get a few quid.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly hand it back to him! ‘Oh, sorry, mate, only trying to nab your wallet!’” She lifted it on its chain. “Besides which, I rather fancy it.”

  Sara leaned in close as another customer approached the counter. “You’re going to get cau-aught,” she whispered, singsong, before heading to take his order.

  “No, I’m no-ot . . .”

  Corinna had turned for a rag to wipe down the steam wand when she noticed the pendant vibrating against her chest. Before she could even be sure it was happening, it shattered in a dance of light that sent her crumpling to the floor.

  Austin needed to pry one of the rocks aside a few inches to get enough room to extract the object through the gap between them. It was a polished, heavy wooden box about the size of his open hand. Bound in strips of iron, it had weathered the elements well, bearing no trace of dirt or mold. Austin turned it over in his hands and marveled at both the discovery itself and anticipation of what it might contain. Designs he did not recognize adorned the box. Most ran along the iron bands, but one was carved directly into the wood on the lid: a Y-shaped tracing intersected by an ellipse. A simple catch held the lid closed.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  He looked in vain for some sort of release. Was it simply stuck from age? He cast about for a stone of suitable shape to tap the catch out, doubting the wisdom of doing so. Of stones there were plenty, but stones made for crude tools. The hotel might have something better.

  Austin tossed his selected stone back down and gave the box a careful shake to placate his curiosity. Though nothing rattled inside it, it did not feel empty.

  The thin man crested the slope without warning. “You should give that to me,” he said.

  Austin hadn’t heard him coming. Surprised to the point of consternation, all he got out was, “Why?”

  The thin man gave no answer. He skittered down the slope. At ten paces away, Austin began to backpedal at an equal pace and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

  “Mine. Give it to me.”

  Austin glanced back to check his footing, loath to take his eyes off the man despite the other’s smaller size. “Right. If it’s yours, what’s it doing out here?”

  The thin man stopped, poised atop the two rocks where Austin had found the box. “Give it to me, Austin Blanchard, and I may decide not to hurt you.”

  Austin swallowed and did a mental inventory of his daypack for something he might use as a weapon. Carefully, he crouched to pick up another rock, larger than the last. What had Rhi been involved with?

  “Come on, man,” Austin said, “that’s not funny. Why don’t you just — ”

  The rest of Austin’s sentence caught in his throat as the thin man’s eyes turned solid black. He sneered and dropped down to all fours with a laugh distorted as if he had a mouthful of something foul.

  “Just what?”

  Any possibility of response fled Austin’s mind when, before his eyes, the man’s skin began to bubble. Austin staggered back and tripped his heel on a stone. He lay where he fell, unable to turn from the sight before him:

  The thin man’s body contorted. It became a single, shuddering mass of liquid flesh and erupting bone. Quivering spines forced their way outward, stretching as if seeking purchase in the air itself. Clothing tore over a bloating body cast in a sickening mix of dark colors like a fresh bruise. The man’s transformed eyes — now pure black orbs — stared Austin down to hold him transfixed throughout it all. Only when the thing thrust its head skyward, curved black fangs bursting like fingers from what remained of its mouth, did Austin recover enough to scream.

  Austin was on his feet before he knew it, box clutched in one hand, pack bouncing on his shoulder and fleeing across the worm’s back. Vaguely, Austin was aware he was no longer screaming, instead devoting every ounce of strength to outrunning the nightmare in pursuit.

  The thin man had become — holy hell, become? — some sort of spider-thing from the chest down, a corpulent body skittering after him on eight bristled legs. Austin could not remember if any vestige remained of the man’s arms. He refused to look back. He did not want to know what happened to the man’s face in that last moment before he ran.

  Horrible, garbled shouts of “Austinnn!” chased him from behind. Fiendish legs snatched at his heels, twice tripping him out of control that he barely regained. By all rights the thing should have overrun him each time he stumbled. It was toying with him! It knew he couldn’t outrun it! Even if it should let him get across the causeway, he would have no hope of climbing the cliff back to the top! Yet all he could do was run.

  Unless — can spiders swim? It burst into his mind in a flurry of hope. Maybe if he made it to the water he could —

  Thin legs wrapped his ankles, yanking his feet and thoughts from under him. Austin tumbled forward to the ground. The box, loosed from his grip, smashed against a rock, its iron bands ringing. He rolled to one side and threw up his arms to shield himself as the spider-thing dragged its putrid body over him after the box. It smeared his left side with filthy gray silk. It was all Austin could do to not retch from the stench.

  A second later, it scrambled off to stand over the box. From there, it cackled at Austin’s struggle to rise against the silk that fused his arm, pack, and thigh together in a single clump. Somehow, Austin got to his knees and faced the creature. His heart pounded. Desperation screamed at him to get away despite the certainty that the horror would attack the second he tried.

  The thing, which retained human features between the chest and neck only, scooped up the box in one still near-human hand. Its malevolent grin shifted to anger.

  “Where is it?” it spat, shaking the box at Austin.

  Distracted with the sight of the thin man’s face now festered with additional black eyes and fangs, Austin did not immediately register that the fall had jarred open the box. He could only stare, afraid to view the thing any longer, just as loath to turn away and be attacked.

  “Where!” It tossed the empty box down the slope.

  The thing crept closer. Austin staggered back, fighting the silk, when a glint caught his eye. At the base of another rock lay a crystalline object the size of a deck of cards. The box’s contents? He nearly pointed it out. But what would the spider-thing do once it got what it wanted?

  “If I hand it over,” he somehow managed, “you’ll let me go?”

  The thing answered with a grinning nod too gleeful to be sincere.

  “You promise?” Austin stalled. The silk grew tighter, yet even were it gone, what options would he have? He reached for his pack with his free hand. The thing hissed and advanced, leaving the qu
estion hanging.

  “It will kill you, no matter what.” The words rolled through Austin’s mind as if from elsewhere. Fighting hesitation, Austin ripped the pack from his back to hold it before him defensively in a way he hoped might pass for capitulation.

  “Just wait,” Austin stammered, reaching inside. “Just wait a sec . . .”

  He would grab his travel guidebook and try to ram it into the thing’s mouth when it came at him. It was the best plan he had.

  The creature pounced before Austin got the chance. It slammed him into the ground to pin his legs with its own. Austin clutched the pack as the thing tried wresting it from him, hissing. He kicked out, half fighting, half panicked in a struggle that rolled them across the ground. Fangs, kept at bay with frantic dodging, slashed for Austin’s face, tearing instead through the pack itself.

  Austin shoved a knee into the thing’s abdomen. It squealed in pain, recoiling just long enough for him to grab the hardest thing in the pack he could find. The spider-thing regained itself, this time yanking the pack away fully. It skittered back again, leaving Austin’s ankles bound in its secretions.

  The creature tore the pack open. Contents went flying as Austin stared. The struggle had rolled him against the very rock where the crystalline object lay. Heat now pulsed against his palm from the thing he had grabbed from the pack: Fefferman’s “gomlen” orb.

  The horror that had been the thin man glared at the pack’s spilled contents, then scooped up the guidebook and hurled it into Austin’s head. “Where! Give now!”

  Austin’s back ached. His face bled. Fear sliced his every breath. He spared a glance to Fefferman’s gift that the creature did not fail to notice. Perhaps taking it for the box’s contents, it hissed in triumph and drew back as if gathering its strength for a final pounce.