A Stark and Wormy Knight

by Tad Williams

  “Clawed the Flyest, thought your Great-Grandpap, but he is deedly a noisome bore for true. Still, he dubited not that Sir Libogran, for all his slathering self-regard, would quickly carry through on his executive intent. Thus, to protect his own beloved and familiar hide for a few moments langorous, your Pap’s pap’s pap proceeded to confect another tongue-forker on the spot.

  “ ‘All right, thou hast me dart to tripes,’ he told the knight. ‘The realio trulio reason I cannot permit you into my cavernous cavern is that so caught, I must perforcemeat give up to you three wishes of immense valuable. For I am that rare and amnesial creature, a Magical Wishing Dragon. Indeed, it was in attempting to claw her way toward my presence and demand wishes from me that your princess gained the preponderosa of these pine-burns, for it was with suchlike furniture of evergreenwood that I attempted pitifullaciously to block my door, and through which she cranched an smushed her way with fearsome strength. Her head was damaged when, after I told her I was fluttered out after long flight and too weary for wish-wafting, she yanked off her crown and tried to beat me indispensable with it. She was a pittance too rough, though – a girl whose strength belied her scrawnymous looks – and detached her headbone from its neckly couchment in the crown-detaching process, leading to this lamentable lifelessness.

  “ ‘However,’ went on your Great-Grandpap, warming now to his self-sufficed subject, ‘although I resisted the wish-besieging princess for the honor of all my wormishly magical brethren, since you have caught me fairy and scary, Sir Libogran, larded me in my barren, as it were, I will grant the foremansioned troika of wishes to you. But the magic necessitudes that after you tell them unto my ear you must go quickly askance as far as possible – another country would be idealistic — and trouble me no more so that I can perforce the slow magics of their granting (which sometimes takes years betwixt wishing and true-coming.)’

  “Libogran stood a long time, thinking uffishly, then lastly said, ‘Let me make sure I have apprehended you carefully, worm. You state that you are a Magic Wishing Dragon, that it was her greed for this quality of yours which cost the unfortunate princess her life, and that I should tell you my three wishes and then leave, preferably to a distant land, so that you may grant them to me in the most efficacious manner.’

  “ ‘Your astutity is matched only by the stately turn of your greave and the general handfulness of your fizzick, good sir knight,’ your Great-Grandpap eagerly responsed, seeing that perhaps he might escape puncturing at the hands of this remorseless rider after all. ‘Just bename those wishes and I will make them factive, both pre- and post-haste.’

  “Sir Libogran slowly shook his massive and broadly head. ‘Do you take me for a fool, creature?”

  “ ‘Not a fool creature as sort,’ replinked your grandpap’s daddy, trying to maintain a chirrupful tone. ‘After all, you and your elk might be a lesser species than us Draco Pulcher, but still, as I would be the first to argue, a vally-hooed part of Clawed the Flyest’s great creation…’

  “ ‘Come here, dragon, and let me show you my wish.’

  “Your Great-Grandpap hesitated. ‘Come there?’ he asked. ‘Whyso?’

  “ ‘Because I cannot explain as well as I can demonstrate, sirrah,’ quoth the bulky and clanksome human.

  “So your forebear slithered out from the cavernous depths, anxious to end his night out by sending this knight out. He was also hoping that, though disappointed of his foreplanned feast, he might at least locate some princessly bits fallen off in the cave, which could be served chippingly on toast. But momentarily after your Great-Grandpap emerged into the lightsome day, the cruel Sir Libogran snatched your ancestor’s throat in a gauntleted ham and cut off that poor, innosensitive dragon’s head with his vicious blade.

  “Snick! No snack.

  “This treacherness done, the knight gathered up the princess’ tree-tattered torso and emancive pate, then went galumphing back toward the castle of her mourning, soon-to-mourn-more Mammy and Daddums.”

  * * *

  “But how can that be, Mam?” shrimped wee Alexandrax. “He killed Great-Grandpap? Then how did Grandpap, Pap, and Yours Contumely come to be?”

  “Fie, fie, shut that o-shaped fishmouth, my breamish boy. Did I say aught about killing? He did not kill your Great-Grandpap, he cut off his head. Do you not dismember that your great-grandcestor was dragon of the two-headed vermiety?

  “As it happened, one of his heads had been feeling poorly, and he had kept it tucked severely under one wing all that day and aftermoon so it could recupertate. Thus, Libogran the Undeflectable was not aware of the existence of this auxiliary knob, which he would doubtless of otherwise liberated from its neckbones along with the other. As it was, the sickened head soon recovered and was good as new. (With time the severed one also grew back, although it was ever after small and prone to foolish smiles and the uttering of platitudinous speech – phrases like, ‘I’m sure everything will work off in the end’ and ‘It is honorous just to be nominated,’ and suchlike.)

  “In times ahead – a phrase which was sorely painful to your great-great-Pap during his invalidated re-knobbing – your G.-G. would go back to his old, happy ways, horrorizing harrowers and slurping shepherds but never again letting himself even veer toward rooftopping virgins or in fact anything that bore the remotest rumor of the poisonous perfume of princessity. He became a pillar of his community, married your Great-Grandmammy in a famously fabulous ceremony – just catering the event purged three surrounding counties of their peasantly population – and lived a long and harpy life.”

  “But Mam, Mam, what about that stark and wormy Sir Libogran, that…dragocidal maniac? Did he really live hoppishly ever after as well, unhaunted by his bloodful crime?”

  “In those days, there was no justice for our kind except what we made ourselves, my serpentine son. No court or king would ever have victed him.”

  “So he died unpunwiched?”

  “Not exactly. One day your Great-Grandpap was on his way back from courting your Grandest-Greatmam-to-be, and happened to realize by the banners on its battlements that he was passing over Libogran’s castle, so he stooped to the rooftop and squatted on the chimbley pot, warming his hindermost for a moment (a fire was burning in the hearth down below and it was most pleasantly blazeful) before voiding himself down the chimbley hole into the great fireplace.”

  “He couped the flue!”

  “He did, my boy, he did. The whole of Libogran’s household came staggering out into the cold night waving and weeping and coughing out the stinking smoke as your Grand’s Grandpap flew chortling away into the night, unseen. Libogran’s castle had to be emptied and aired for weeks during the most freezingly worstful weather of the year, and on this account the knight spent the rest of his life at war with the castle pigeons, on whom he blamed your Great-Grandpap’s secret chimbley-discharge – he thought the birds had united for a concerted, guanotated attempt on his life. Thus, stalking a dove across the roof with his bird-net and boarspear a few years later, Sir Libogran slipped and fell to his death in the castle garden, spiking himself on his own great sticker and dangling thereby for several days, mistaked by his kin and servants as a new scarecrow.”

  “Halloo and hooray, Mam! Was he the last of the dragon-hunters, then? Was him skewerting on his own sharpitude the reason we no longer fear them?”

  “No, dearest honey-sonny, we no longer fear them because they no longer see us. During the hunders of yearses since your Greatest Grandpap’s day, a plague called Civilization came over them, a diseaseful misery that blinded them to half the creatures of the world and dumbfounded their memories of much that is true and ancient. Let me tell you a dreadsome secret.” She leaned close to whisper in his tender earhole. “Even when we snatch a plump merchant or a lean yet flavorful spinster from their midst these days, the humans never know that one of us dragons has doomfully done for the disappeared. They blame it instead on a monster they fear even more.”

  “What is t
hat, Mam?” Alexandrax whimpspered. “It fears me to hear, but I want to know. What do they think slaughters them? An odious ogre? A man-munching manticore?

  “Some even more frightfulling creature. No dragon has ever seen it, but they call it…Statistics.”

  “Clawed Hitself save us from such a horridly horror!” squeeped the small one in fright.

  “It is only a man-fancy, like all the rest of their nonned sense,” murmed his Mam. “Empty as the armor of a cracked and slurped knight – so fear it not. Now, my tale is coiled, so sleepish for you, my tender-winged bundle.”

  “I will,” he said, curling up like a sleepy hoop, most yawnful. “I s’pose no knights is good nights, huh, Mam?”

  “Examply, my brooded boy. Fear not clanking men nor else. Sleep. All is safe and I am watching all over you.”

  And indeed, as she gazed yellow-eyed and loving on her eggling, the cave soon grew fulfilled with the thumberous rundle of wormsnore.

  The Storm Door

  NIGHTINGALE DID NOT TAKE THE FIRST cab he saw when he stepped out into the rainy San Francisco streets. He never did. Some might call it superstition, but in his profession the line between “superstitions” and “rules of survival” was rather slender. He stepped back onto the curb to avoid the spray of water as the second cab pulled up in response to his wave. Paranormal investigators didn’t make enough money to ruin a pair of good shoes for no reason.

  Somebody should have warned me that saving the world from unspeakable horrors is like being a teacher – lots of job satisfaction, but the money’s crap.

  “Thirty-three Gilman Street,” he told the driver, an ex-hippie on the edge of retirement age, shoulder-length gray hair draggling out from under his Kangol hat and several silver rings on the fingers holding the wheel. “It’s off Jones.”

  “You got it.” The driver pulled back into traffic, wipers squeaking as city lights smeared and dribbled across the glass beside Nightingale’s head. “Helluva night,” he said. “I know we need the rain and everything, but…shit, man.”

  Nathan Nightingale had spent so much of the past week in a small, overheated and nearly airless room that he would have happily run through this downpour naked, but he only nodded and said, “Yeah. Helluva night.”

  “Gonna be a lot more before it’s over, too. That’s what they said. The storm door’s open.” The driver turned down the music a notch. “Kind of a weird expression, huh? Makes it sound like they’re…” he lifted his fingers in twitching monster-movie talons, “coming to get us. Whooo! I mean, it’s just clouds, right? It’s nature.”

  “This? Yeah, it’s just nature,” agreed Nightingale, his thoughts already drawn back to that small room, those clear, calm, terrifying eyes. “But sometimes even nature can be unnatural.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess so. Good one.” But it was clear by his tone that the driver feared he’d missed the point.

  “That’s it – the tall house there.”

  The driver peered out the window. “Whoa, that’s a spooky one, man. You sure you gonna be okay, man? This is kind of a tough neighborhood…”

  “I’ll be fine, thanks,” said Nightingale. “I’ve been here before – it was kind of my second home.”

  “If you say so.” The driver called just before Nightingale slammed the door, “Hey, remember about that storm door. Better get an umbrella!”

  Nightingale raised his hand as the man drove off. An umbrella. He almost smiled, but the wet night was getting to him. If only all problems were that easy to solve.

  * * *

  As he pressed the button beside the mailbox lightning blazed overhead, making it seem as though one had caused the other. A moment later the thunder crashed down, so near that he did not hear the sound of the door being buzzed open but felt the handle vibrating under his hand.

  The light was out in the first floor stairwell, and no lights were on at all on the second floor, what Uncle Edward called “the showroom”, although no one ever saw it but a few old, trusted collector friends. Enough of the streetlight’s glow leaked in that Nightingale could see the strange silhouettes of some of the old man’s prize possessions, fetish dolls and funerary votives and terra cotta tomb statuettes, a vast audience of silent, wide-eyed shapes watching Nightingale climb the stairs. It was an excellent collection, but what made it truly astounding were the stories behind the pieces, most of them dark, many of them horrifying. In fact, it had been his godfather’s arcane tales and bizarre trophies that had first lured Nightingale onto his odd career path: at an age when most boys wanted to be football players or firemen, young Nate had decided he wanted to hunt ghosts and fight demons. Later, when others were celebrating their first college beer-busts, Nightingale had already attended strange ceremonies on high English moors and deep in Thai jungles and Louisiana bayous. He had heard languages never shaped for the use of human tongues, had seen men die for no reason, and others live when they should have been dead. But through the years, when the unnatural things he saw and felt and learned overwhelmed him, he always came back here for his godfather’s advice and support. This was one of those times. In fact, this was probably the worst time he could remember.

  Strangely, the third floor of the house was dark, too.

  “Edward? Uncle Edward? It’s me, Nathan. Are you here?” Had the old man forgotten he was coming and gone out with his caretaker Jenkins somewhere? God forbid, a medical emergency… Nightingale stopped to listen. Was that the quiet murmuring of the old man’s breathing machine?

  Something stirred on the far side of the room and his hackles rose; his hand strayed to his inside coat pocket. A moment later the desk lamp clicked on, revealing the thin, lined face of his godfather squinting against the sudden light. “Oh,” Edward said, taking a moment to find the air to speak. “Guh-goodness! Nate, is that you? I must have dozed off. When did it get so dark?”

  Relieved, Nightingale went to the old man and gave him a quick hug, being careful not to disturb the tracheotomy cannula or the ventilator tubes. As always, Edward Arvedson felt like little more than a suit full of bones, but somehow he had survived in this failing condition for almost a decade. “Where’s Jenkins?” Nightingale asked. “It gave me a start when I came up and the whole house was dark.”

  “Oh, I had him the night off, poor fellow. Working himself to death. Pour me a small sherry, will you, there’s a good man, and sit down and tell me what you’ve learned. There should be a bottle of Manzanilla already open. No, don’t turn all those other lights on. I find I’m very sensitive at the moment. This is enough light for you to find your way to the wet bar, isn’t it?”

  Nightingale smiled. “I could find it without any light at all, Uncle Edward.”

  When he’d poured a half glass of for the old man and a little for himself as well, Nightingale settled into the chair facing the desk and looked his mentor up and down. “How are you feeling?”

  Arvedson waved a dismissive hand. “Fine, fine. Never felt better. And now that we’re done with that nonsense, tell me your news, Nate. What happened? I’ve been worrying ever since you told me what you thought was happening.”

  “Well, it took me a while to find a volunteer. Mostly because I was trying to avoid publicity – you know, all that ‘Nightingale – Exorcist to the Stars’ nonsense.”

  “You shouldn’t have changed your name – it sounds like a Hollywood actor now. Your parents wouldn’t have approved, anyway. What was wrong with Natan Näktergal? It was good enough for your father.”

  He smiled. “Too old country, Uncle Edward. Remember, being well-known gets me into a lot of places. It also leads people to misjudge me.”

  Arvedson made a face. He still hadn’t touched his sherry. “Fine. I’m also old country, I suppose. I should be grateful you even visit. Tell me what happened.”

  “I’m trying to. As I said, it wouldn’t do to recruit just anyone. Ideally, I needed someone with special training…but who gets trained for something like this? I figured that my best bet was
through my Tibetan contacts. Tibetan Buddhists spend years studying the Bardo Thodol, preparing to take the journey of dying, which gave me a much larger group to choose from. I finally settled on a man in Seattle named Geshe, who had pancreatic cancer. He’d refused pain relief and the doctors felt certain he only had a few days left when I met him, but he was remarkably calm and thoughtful. I told him what I wanted, and why, and he said yes.”

  “So you had found your…what was your word? Your ‘necronaut’.”

  Nightingale nodded. “That’s what I called it before I met Geshe – it sounded better than ‘mineshaft canary’. But after I got to know him it…it seemed a little glib. But he was precisely the sort of person I was looking for – a man trained almost since childhood to die with his eyes and mind open.”

  Lightning flashed and a peal of thunder shivered the windows. In the wake, another wash of rain splattered against the glass. “Filthy weather,” said Davidson. “Do you want another drink before you start? You’ll have to get it yourself, of course, since we don’t have Jenkins.”

  “No, I’m fine.” Nightingale stared at his glass. “I’m just thinking.” Lightning flashed again and so he waited for the thunder before continuing. “You remember how this started, of course. Those earliest reports of spontaneous recovery by dying patients…well, it didn’t seem like anything I needed to pay attention to. But then that one family whose daughter went into sudden remission from leukemia after the last rites had already been said…”

  “I remember. Very young, wasn’t she? Nine?”