Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  Dog, hold thy nose to the ground,

  God has made me and thee, hound!

  I kept repeating this, my eyes focused on that same rapidly approaching spot in the road, even as I remembered that the mad-dog hex should be placed, ideally, before the dog sees you. But hellfire, no one in the truck had seen me yet, had they? And just as it hit that hexed spot in the road, the truck slewed sideways, nearly overturned but didn’t, and stopped dead.

  “Well, I’ll be,” I said, then scrambled backward as the front doors flung open beneath me.

  “Who’s up there?” someone called. Of course—as long as they thought I was armed, they wouldn’t risk poking their heads out of the truck. As quiet as I could, I shinnied over the roof’s edge at the rear of the truck and dropped to the pavement. Behind me was the steep, wooded downslope; in front of me, the truck’s headlights illuminated a rock face split with glittering trickles of runoff. I ran for the downslope, then stopped myself, skidding in the leaves and cursing silently, ran back to the rear of the truck and made a two-handed pass over the latch. I never had been so pleased to unlock a door. “It’s open!” I hollered. “Run!”

  The rear doors flung open, nearly knocking me down, and out poured a dozen whooping, yelling people, men and women, some maybe fifteen, some maybe nineteen. The instant they landed on the pavement, they all lit off into the woods, and I took off right behind them—or thought I had. But someone tackled me from behind, and I fell on my face just off the road, the wind knocked out of me. I struggled to my knees, coughing leaves, but a man’s strong arms wrapped around my chest and held me tight.

  “I God, I knew it was you!” a voice said. “I knew you were out there somewhere, Allie Harrell!”

  I saw a lightning flash, a pillar of rock, and a redheaded girl coming at me, and felt a searing pain that made me cry out. Then the man threw me to the ground, and my memories were my own again.

  “You ain’t Allie,” he said. “You ain’t one we just picked up, neither. What witchery is this?”

  I rolled over. Standing above me was a broad-shouldered man with a badge gleaming red in the taillights. Just as I registered that something was wrong with his face, he seized my collar and hauled me up like a hooked fish. His mouth hung crooked, his skin was taut and shiny, his hair was an uneven stubble, and one ear was nearly gone, melted flat against his head. His eyes were dark, hot coals.

  “You’re burned,” I said.

  “I appreciate your noticing,” he said. With his free hand he pawed at me, yanked up my flannel shirttail to look at my belly.

  “Not fixed yet,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why don’t you want the mountain folks to have children? Why cut off their generations?”

  “Someone’s put notions in your head,” he said. “In this county, Missy, we enforce the law, and Virginia law says the feebleminded and shiftless, like you hillbillies, should not be allowed to reproduce theirself. It ain’t my say-so, it’s the state’s.”

  “It’s criminal,” I said.

  “That ain’t what the U.S. Supreme Court says. What the U.S. Supreme Court says is, ‘Three generations of imbeciles is enough.’”

  “Allie Harrell,” I said, “is no imbecile—”

  He slapped me, hard.

  “—and you know it,” I finished.

  From up the slope came another rifle shot, and the taillight behind him exploded. He didn’t look around, just dragged me by my jacket into the shelter of the downhill side of the vehicle. Two other men with badges crouched there, guns drawn.

  “Here they come, Sheriff!”

  “If you see ’em, shoot ’em,” the scarred man replied, still staring at me and not them.

  “Watch out for a flamethrower,” one deputy told the other. “That’s how they got Larsen, and, uh.” He nodded toward the sheriff.

  “When’s backup getting here?” the sheriff asked.

  After a long pause, the talkative deputy asked: “You want us to radio for backup, sir?”

  This time the shooter got one of the headlights.

  Still looking at me, the sheriff shook his head, and muttered, “Dumber than owl shit.” He turned away, and said, “Yes, call for backup, you lunk-head! These crackers might kill us by accident, even if they mean only to pin us down, while that trash gets … away …”

  I heard his voice trail off, as he realized he was holding an empty jacket. By the time he began to roar, I was halfway down the leafy slope. All I had needed was for him to break eye contact; a distraction hex helped, but my being quick helped more. And since I had come away with my hat and my soogin sack and the rest of my clothes, I couldn’t begrudge him my jacket, though I’d play hell finding another that fit me so well, whatever shape I used. And as I ran down the mountain toward the lights of the town, I pondered four facts. One, the sheriff didn’t know where Allie Harrell was, either. Two three four, the Old Fire Dragaman had sung me a song about a girl named Allie, and said he was spoken for, and invited me to supper.

  THERE was no trick to finding Buzzard’s Rock the next afternoon, any more than there is to finding Chimney Rock in the North Carolina mountains. Climb to the highest point you can find, and look around, and there it is, a splinter of rock rearing up over the ridge.

  As I clambered up the rocky trail, the thing put me in mind of the tower in Genesis, the one that Nimrod built; or the tower of ill omen in the Rider deck, with flames and lightning and two figures falling, one caped and one crowned. You’d swear Buzzard’s Rock was one of God’s ruins if you didn’t know ruins were purely human-made things.

  The base was a jumble of boulders with barely room to stand, much less anything resembling a dwelling or a door in that wild place, certainly no log cabin like the Dragaman’s song. The day had been warm and sun-shiny, but up there on that exposed rock the wind cut through me, and the sheriff had my jacket. I shivered and held myself and kicked aside the smaller rocks in the pile, only to turn up larger rocks I couldn’t move so easy. There was nothing for it but a tether-and-plumb. I hunkered down in the lee of the rock spire, rooted in my soogin sack, found my roll of twine, and cut two one-foot lengths. The two ends that had been joined together I put in my mouth and held there, wet them down good, so they both would know me. Then I tied one of the lengths around my left wrist and said, “Plumb,” only not in English. The other length of twine I laid on the flat top of a shoulder-high rock. I pressed it down, and said, “Tether,” in the same old tongue I had used before. Then I began walking widdershins around the clearing at the base of Buzzard’s Rock, in the widest circle I could manage given the boulders all around and the precipice just the other side.

  Now I warn you, before you try it your own self, that this way to open an unseen portal and lower yourself into it does not always work; sometimes it accomplishes what a lot of magic accomplishes, which is slap nothing, and sometimes it closes an unseen portal and takes unexpected parts of the world with it, and that can be hard to explain to the neighbors, at best. But on this afternoon at Buzzard’s Rock, my hopes were higher because I had some powerful help: Cauter Pike had asked me to come to his house. A Dragaman’s invitation can slice through a lot of magics that otherwise would keep folks out, would keep me turning in a circle atop this rock until they came to take me to a hospital.

  (And did I keep turning over in my head what Cauter Pike had said, We’ll have you to supper, to make myself more easy that he had not said, for supper? I surely did that thing.)

  And I began to know that I would not be disappointed this time because after I had walked one circle (shaped more like an egg with an ax wedge out of the side), my second pass I was knee deep in the rock, and my third pass was hip deep. It wasn’t like walking through rock, but like walking through a thick fog colored and shaped like rock, and as my head sank below the surface (and I confess I took a deep breath before I went under, though I knew better), the fog cleared, and I was in a deep tube-like well with smooth rock walls, like a borehol
e, and I walked down in a spiral as if there were a staircase, only of course there wasn’t. The farther down, the warmer I got, and soon I was sweaty and no longer missed the jacket. Then a rock floor rose up beneath me and knocked me off-balance, dropped me to my knees, as if my elevator had come to rest, and I knew I was at the bottom—or as near the bottom as Pearl was likely to get, or want to get.

  I walked through a Dragaman-sized rock archway and found myself in a cave so big its ceiling and far walls were lost, though everything for about twenty feet around was illuminated by a dim and sourceless reddish light. A shallow branch trickled over the rocks at my feet. I heard bats chitter to one another and fancied I saw their pinpoint eyes like stars in the darkness above. I couldn’t help but shudder. I never harbored a love for bats, however helpful they could be in the wizard way. As I moved around, that weird light moved with me. I looked at my hand and saw where the light came from, as if I had brought into the deep, deep dark some measure of sunlight that shone out through my skin. But away in the distance was another source of light, more natural-looking in this unnatural place, and walking upstream along the branch seemed to bring it nearer. So I went on thataway, through stalagmite thickets, until I came into view of the prettiest log cabin you ever saw, with a shake roof and flower boxes in the front windows and outflung shutters that would have said, “Welcome, friend,” if you had come upon the place in any mountain holler. But because the cabin was in fact in the bowels of the Earth, its message was a tad more complicated, especially since those flowers stirred without a breeze, and there seemed to be no reason for the patch of afternoonish light in which the home place sat. But I walked on toward it, and as I got closer I heard someone singing inside. It wasn’t the Dragaman’s yawp, but a girl’s voice that could carry a tune.

  I’ve gambled in England

  I’ve gambled in Spain

  I bet you ten dollars

  I’ll beat you next game

  Figuring politeness would stand me as well belowground as above, I stopped about twenty paces from the door, and called: “Hello, the house!” Two or three echo-Pearls repeated me, aways off in the ceiling somewhere.

  The singing stopped right quick, and the girl came to the window, holding a dish and a washrag. She was a good deal prettier than I expected, and her red hair was longer, but when she smiled, her front teeth gapped just like her father had said when he held a gun on me on the slope of Cove Mountain the night before.

  “Oh, hello!” she cried. “You must be Pearl.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And you must be Allie Harrell.”

  “Honey, you hear?” she said, addressing someone in the cabin behind her. “Pearleen Sunday has come to supper.”

  Someone rumbled a reply that I couldn’t quite make out, but the gout of flame that spit from the cabin’s stone chimney, like from an Alabama steel mill, was easy enough to recognize.

  “My goodness, you’ve come a long way! You come right in this house this minute and put your feet up. Oh, and please don’t mind the flowers. I’d hoped for spiderwort, but these are what came up. What can you do? There’s cider on the hearth, and chicory brewing—oh, and I need to put on the biscuits! I swear, I’d forget my head if it weren’t tied on …”

  The window-box flowers were long and snaky, with bulbs on the end that opened and closed, and as I stepped through the doorway, they strained in my direction like geese wanting a handout through a fence.

  The inside of the cabin was a sight larger than the outside, but still homey compared to that dark reach of cavern. The front door I came through was Pearl-and Allie-sized, but the stone fireplace was big enough to roast two oxen longways, and if the chimney was its match, I guessed this was how Cauter Pike came and went. The rocking chair beside the hearth could have held a family, but the Dragaman still looked squinched and uncomfortable sitting in it, knees practically in his face and shoulders hunched beneath the ceiling, which was no higher than what you’d find in the average railway station. Not that he cared about any of this. He gazed at the redheaded gal who bustled and chattered around the kitchen the way Gabriel must have looked at Evangeline in Acadia long ago.

  He glanced at me.

  “Now, Pearl,” he said. “It ain’t what you think.”

  “All I think,” I said, “is that building this house in a Dragaman’s cave, and toting down all the provisions, must have been a piece of work.”

  “I love this house!” Allie sang out. “I never thought I’d have a house this nice, on Cove Mountain or under it, neither.” She set a pitcher precisely in the middle of the long oilcloth-covered table that ran along the back wall, benches to each side. The table was set for twelve.

  “Let me help you,” I said. “Who all else is coming?”

  “You keep your seat, and as for who, you’ll see directly,” Allie said, with the same pinched expression as when she had acknowledged the flowers. “You’ll like them, I’m sure. They’re so … interesting. Isn’t that the word you’d use, Cauter honey, interesting?”

  “Danged interesting,” Cauter Pike agreed.

  Allie started singing again, all the while banging plates and cups together, and in the hubbub I murmured: “Cauter Pike, what do you think you’re doing, playing house with this woman-child? Her pa’s worried sick. Do you intend to keep her here the rest of her life, until she’s a sick old lady, and you still as green as the mountain?”

  “She’s better off here than up there,” the Dragaman said. He spit a fireball into the hearth, and flames roared up the chimney. “Let me tell you a true thing, Pearleen Sunday, and you can put it in your head with all the other lessons you’re collecting up. There’s a lot of evil that don’t have anything to do with magic, not black magic, not your magic, not inside-the-mountain magic like mine. And when evil’s on the march, all that magic together does no good against it. Can I do air thing to stop all the innocent folks from being rounded up by the police, in Virginia and everywhere else in the world? No, ma’am, I cannot. But take one individual out of it and keep her safe, yes, ma’am, I can do that, and I did do that. That’s why Allie’s in this cave house right this minute, and don’t expect me to be sorry for it, neither. And when I brought her here, Pearl, well, I stopped her just short of doing something she would have been sorry for the rest of her days.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk of days, here in a place with no sun, and flowers made of snakeskin. It can’t be good for her. She looks a little peaked to me.”

  “Why, Pearl,” he said, with a crooked grin. “I do believe you’re jealous.”

  Before I could answer back to that, he bestirred himself, and said: “Allie, honey, I’m gonna stretch my wings a little before supper, see if I catch sight of them lollygaggers.”

  “Tell ’em hurry up,” Allie said, chopping scallions. “It’d be a shame to have all this beef stew and corn bread go to waste.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cauter Pike said. He couldn’t stand up in the low-ceilinged cabin, but he eased himself out of the rocker and onto his knees, then stuck his head and shoulders into the fireplace. “Whoo, that tickles!” he said as he shinnied headfirst up the chimney. Flames wrapped his long lanky body like a blanket. Just before his feet disappeared, the scaly green point of a tail, the size and shape of a shovel, dropped into sight, raked through the hot coals, then vanished up the chimney as well. That was as close as I had come to seeing a Dragaman change shapes. I ran to the door and looked up, but the light around the cabin didn’t reach far, and in the darkness above, all I saw was a trail of sparks like a meteor. The sound was of the world’s largest carpet being beat, beat, beat.

  “Oh, here y’all are,” cried Allie behind me. “Hello, fellas. I swear, I never will get used to you walking through the wall like that.”

  WHEN we all sat down, we were eleven, but Allie wouldn’t tell me who the twelfth place was for, the setting at my left hand. “Never you mind,” she said.

  The first supper guests to arrive, other than me, were the ghosts of fou
r of the eight miners working the Greeno Slope who had died when a lamp ignited a methane pocket in December 1910. Exactly whose lamp it had been was still a subject of debate.

  “Warn’t me,” said the youngest and smallest of them, who was only fifteen. “I ain’t tall enough to hit a pocket.”

  “Gas can hole up anywhere,” said the skinny one, “not just the ceiling, and you’re the one that has to be first to poke his fool head into ever’ crack he sees.”

  “Poor things,” Allie murmured into my ear. “They’re always grateful for the invite, but once they get here, all they talk about is work.” In fact, she had made up a pail of food for their four friends, who were working the late shift. Miners too spectral to dig, hunting coal that wasn’t there, in a tunnel closed for a decade, because that’s all they knew to do: It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Hesh up, all of you,” the one with the broadest shoulders told the others. “I was the foreman, warn’t I? Whatever happens down the hole on my watch is my fault, and that’s all there is to it.”

  The others all talked at once about this, even the Hungarian whose English wasn’t so good, disputing the foreman’s modesty or his arrogance in claiming to own their mutual disaster. You could tell they were miners because even with their helmets off at the table, they never exchanged direct looks, for fear their lamps would blind somebody. Yet for all their chatter, they still managed to put away the food, in the ghostly way I had got used to in the haunted house where I was partly raised. The food just vanished from the plates in front of them, bit by bit, though you couldn’t see it happen, and with each helping the ghosts got less transparent, but never so solid that you couldn’t read a calendar through them.