The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  By now I wasn’t working just on the memory of those two episodes, you see. The vocabulary and phrases I’d been analyzing had given me plenty of material for experiments. In fact, it had been a very productive evening. I now had:

  A working theory of how the magic in this language worked. To talk about things without altering the state of the universe, you used the subjunctive; to make things actually happen, you used the indicative. The informants had probably switched their translations around to make it harder for outsiders to work this out – maybe even hoping that their seeming cooperation would discourage the researcher and send him away. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been totally consistent with this tactic, and the few phrases that did work would have encouraged him to keep prying until…

  Until what? Well, the evening’s study had also shown me that the bigger the change, the bigger the headache. Making a pencil disappear cost me a single stab of pain; making Aunt Georgia’s antique French clock vanish into thin air had given me a nasty migraine that still hadn’t gone away. (Not to mention the headache of replacing that clock. I should have practiced on something less valuable.) Given the increased trouble I was having concentrating, I feared that I’d done myself more damage than just a temporary headache. If the original researcher had been incautious, might he have killed himself by overuse of the language? Problem, from the point of view of the native informants, solved – or it would have been, if Koshan Idrisov hadn’t stolen the notebook and tried to sell it. They must not have known about that notebook. Hmm, and did something about the language explain what had happened to Koshan? Had he made himself disappear by accident? What happened if you said “M?n vlaad kzmtq,” or “I am nowhere?” I decided not to test that query.

  I also had the data from the notebook stored as a series of images. I’d photographed the pages with my cell phone, sent them to my office computer, and downloaded them to the spare flash drive I kept in my top desk drawer. Now I could give Dr. Osborne the notebook, get him out of my hair, and continue studying the language at my leisure… if I dared. I would think about that tomorrow, when my headache would have abated and I could think straight again.

  I tore my notes into minuscule scraps and dropped them in the wastepaper basket before leaving the office. My headache let up slightly on the walk home; darkness and fresh air both helped, giving me the hope that I hadn’t inflicted permanent damage on myself while experimenting with Alt-Shaimaki. The only problem was the occasional car flashing its headlights into my eyes. That hurt enough that I took to standing still, staring away from the street, every time I heard a car engine.

  Except for a light in Michael’s room, the house was dark. Laura was probably still out singing at the White Horse. I didn’t need to deal with Michael again tonight, so I decided to try and get inside without his noticing me. I wanted to talk to Laura first, to tell her what I’d figured out about Alt-Shaimaki. Maybe by the time she got up tomorrow I would have recovered enough to give her a small – a very small – demonstration. Maybe I could “disappear” a dust bunny or the tip of a pencil. A whole pencil? That might be pushing it.

  I let myself into the house quietly, didn’t turn on any lights, and – in comfortable darkness – put the notebook away in my gun safe where I should have been keeping it all along. Good, this time I remembered. I hoped that was a sign that any brain damage caused by the language repaired itself with a little rest. It wasn’t like I could exactly ask a neurologist about that.

  I let myself into the bathroom and felt in the medicine cabinet without turning on any lights. There should be a bottle of aspirin… Okay. Good. I shook a tablet into my hand, tasted it to make sure it was the aspirin and not some other small pill, shook out two more and felt for the plastic glass to get some water.

  A voice from Michael’s room froze me where I stood, hand on the faucet.

  ***

  After Sienna went out, Michael had tried to watch a movie in the living room. Couldn’t keep his mind on it. He locked up the house and went for a long walk; that didn’t work either. Finally, back in his rented room, he called Hank.

  “I have the data,” he said as soon as his employer answered. “I can fly out tomorrow to bring it to you.”

  “You’ve got the notebook? Good man!”

  It would be easy to let that statement pass, but for some reason he couldn’t do it. “I’ve got all the information that was in the notebook. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “I want the notebook,” Hank said testily. “You know that. I can’t risk letting Ed Osborne or anybody else getting hold of it.”

  “Why? Are you afraid he’ll publish before you?”

  “If what I suspect is true, it’ll be a disaster if anybody publishes that information. You have to get the notebook away from her.”

  “I’m not going to steal from her.”

  “Interesting moral stance. You don’t mind stealing the information, but you draw the line at the book? You’re not against stealing, Ryan, you’re just against getting caught.”

  So much for compromising with his conscience.

  “She’s a good person, and she’s had too much to deal with already. I’m sorry, Hank. You need to go pick on somebody your own size. I’m not going to help you persecute this woman just to get you another exotic curio.”

  Hank spoke, agitatedly, loudly, and at some length. Michael held the phone away from his ear as his employer’s voice rose. His own eyebrows rose as he took in what the man was saying.

  “Excuse me, you believe this? You think people can do magic just by chanting the right mystical phrases from some obscure language?”

  “There’s no chanting and no mysticism involved, Ryan,” Hank snapped. “There have been weird stories about the Shaimaki for years, and the man who brought that notebook to this country showed me enough to corroborate those stories. Call it magic, call it a little-known side effect of quantum physics if it makes you happier, but he demonstrated the language to me. I’m not just looking for another item for my collection this time. I’m trying to save the world.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of hyperbole, even for you? How do you think some illegible scribbles in a grease-stained notebook are going to destroy the world?”

  “Ask the men who worked on the Manhattan Project,” Hank snapped.

  “A bit late for that… I’m sorry, Hank. I can’t believe you, and I’m not going to lie and steal for you this time. You don’t have to pay me… although I did get you the information you said you wanted.”

  “I’ll pay you triple rates if you get that notebook away from her! Don’t you see, Ryan, she can read it! That makes her as dangerous as Osborne!”

  Michael sighed. If he closed his eyes, he could see the jagged script and jumble of symbols that filled the pages he’d photographed. “How do you know she can read it? I sure as hell couldn’t make head nor tail out of the thing.”

  “You’re not my only source of information,” Hank told him.

  “Oh? Who else have you paid to spy on her for this famous notebook? Besides me, I mean.”

  Before Hank could reply he heard the bathroom door open and whirled to see Sienna standing there in the peasant blouse and full crinkly skirt she’d donned for her dinner date.

  She was white as a ghost again, freckles standing out across her nose, lipstick a glaring contrast to her skin tones. How much had she heard?

  “It was all about the notebook, then?”

  Her husky half-whisper broke his heart.

  “You were spying on me all along. I suppose Dr. Osborne sent you. Just like he sent Paco, and the jerk who tried to rent the room before you and then broke into the house. I should have realized you were just another one of his flunkies.”

  “Sienna, no! I’m not…”

  She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Why should I believe anything you say? I’ve heard enough. I want you out of this house by morning.”

  “I have a lease,” Michael said.

  He realized
a moment later that that hadn’t just been the wrong thing to say; it had been an extremely wrong thing to say.

  “If you have any sense of decency – which I doubt – you’ll tear up that lease and get out of here tomorrow. Oh, don’t worry. I’ll refund your money. That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it? Money.”

  14. Never show an open house by yourself

  I was scheduled to show an open house with Davis the next morning. I would have preferred something that would keep me too busy to think – open houses often involved long spells of boredom punctuated by rushes of several potential clients at once – but at least this allowed me to be out of my own house for the day. With any luck, by the time I returned Michael would have moved out.

  That prospect didn’t actually make me feel any happier, no matter how many times I told myself that all I wanted was to be let alone to live what had been a perfectly acceptable, if not exactly thrilling, life before magical languages and burglarizing thugs had turned everything upside down.

  Probably I was too worried about the dangerous possibilities of Alt-Shaimaki to feel good about anything until I’d puzzled out what to do with my new understanding. Now that I had thought about it, I’d realized that I could no longer hand over the notebook to Dr. Osborne and bow out of the loop. In the last few days he’d revealed himself to be unscrupulous and slightly unbalanced – not that unusual, really, for a tenured professor. A lot of them had left the wreckage of other people’s careers behind in their scramble to reach the top; I knew that, and if I’d stayed in academia I wouldn’t have turned my back on most of my colleagues. But in Dr. Osborne’s case it was worse. Not only would I not have trusted him with my career (if I’d had one); I dared not trust him with the level of power Alt-Shaimaki offered.

  I wasn’t sure I trusted myself with it, but at least I had a healthy respect for the dangers of overusing the language.

  I tried to imagine who could be trusted with this kind of information. Somebody strong-minded, steady, reliable…

  Couldn’t picture it. An image of Michael Ryan kept coming into my head. Probably because he’d proved himself to be the exact opposite of all that.

  By the time I reached the house we were supposed to be showing, I was in a flaming temper and had a raging headache without even using a single word of Alt-Shaimaki. I was early; Davis hadn’t shown up yet, and the family who lived there were hustling through an early breakfast before decamping for the day. Mrs. Rivers was kind enough to offer me a cup of coffee while she washed up the breakfast dishes and shoved them into the dishwasher.

  “If anybody wants to see how the dishwasher works, the detergent pods are in this canister,” she told me.

  “You don’t mind if I run it?”

  “My dear, I’d be delighted!” Mrs. Rivers ran fingers through her short curls, turned to shout, “Billy, put those running shoes in the closet or I’m donating them to Goodwill!” at a teenage boy, and tried to refill my brimming coffee mug for the third time. “Do you take milk? Oh, sorry, I already asked that. Jessie May Rivers, quit fooling with your phone and get ready to go! Ms. Brown, feel free to make yourself more coffee, just be sure and put your mug in the dishwasher when you’re done, okay?”

  “It’s driving me crazy,” she confided while the two kids clumped up and down the stairs, “trying to live here while keeping most of our possessions out of sight and maintaining perfect cleanliness just in case somebody wants to see the house. I do nothing but run the dishwasher and do the laundry and yell at the kids to pick up their stuff. Today will be like a vacation. George and I are going to take the kids to Schlitterbahn, and I won’t have to clean up after them for the whole day! Do you think this open house will work?”

  From her point of view, that meant, “Will anybody make an offer?” I decided it would be needlessly unkind to tell her that from a realtor’s point of view, the reason for spending all day guarding an open house was not so much to sell the place, as to collect names and addresses of potential clients who might wander in. “You never know,” I said vaguely, and decided to run the dishwasher and put up the clean dishes regardless of whether anybody wanted an appliance demonstration. The woman clearly needed a break.

  They left barely ahead of the scheduled opening time, and I was too busy for the next few minutes to call Davis and ask what was keeping him. There were throw pillows on the living room floor to pick up and various bits of flotsam from the Rivers’ daily lives to hide in a closet. Even after cleaning up the obvious things, I kept finding junk strewn around by the kids that also had to be hidden in order to give the house that “newly decorated, never really lived in,” look that was de rigueur for showings. By the time I was ready to set up my brochures and visitors’ book on the dining room table, I had a new appreciation for Mrs. Rivers’ problems. Maybe she could board the two teenagers somewhere else while they were trying to sell the house? Like, the nearest kennel?

  The doorbell rang and I hustled to meet the first viewers, pasting a welcoming smile on my face. It was good that there were people so eager that they showed up the minute the open house was supposed to start. Wasn’t it?

  Half an hour later, after three separate couples had tramped through the house – none of whom had been willing to fork over their names and addresses for my visitors’ book a.k.a. potential clients list – I found out why we were drawing such a crowd.

  “Oh, you don’t need our address, we’re not looking to buy,” the last woman confided in me. “And we live just down the street. We just wanted to see what Sophie Rivers has done with the place. For the last year she’s been telling everybody how much they’ve spent on remodeling and decorators, trying to turn this house into her dream home. But she never invited anybody over! And now George has been transferred and they have to sell. Karma, I call it.” She sniffed disdainfully at the black tiles and granite-topped counters in the kitchen. “Very trendy, I suppose, but I prefer something a little more traditional. We have lived here since 1978 and never felt the need to tear out and replace the center of our home.”

  I had a mental picture of her kitchen: avocado tiles and dusty yellow appliances.

  “Is everybody who’s come in a neighbor?” The two preceding couples were still poking around, making jokes about the jacuzzi in the master bathroom.

  The woman I was talking to sniffed again. “Naturally. Everybody was curious.”

  If so, then the block must be underpopulated; after that early whirlwind of activity, nobody at all turned up for quite a while. I had plenty of time to stare at my disgracefully pristine visitors’ book. And to call Davis.

  I could tell from his voice when he answered that I wasn’t going to have a partner today. “Davis, you sound terrible. Allergies?”

  “I wish,” he said, or rather croaked. “But it feels bore like flu. I told Georgia I wouldd’t be id. I’b sorry, Siedda. I guess I could cobe over…”

  “No, thanks, I don’t need you sharing whatever bug you’ve got with me – not to mention the rest of the neighborhood, who have been trooping in for a free look at the Rivers’ remodeling job.”

  “I dod’t like you beidg there alode. You could call Carly.”

  “She’s got other things to do. Don’t worry, Davis, I can handle it. It’s not like we’re exactly being swarmed by potential clients. So far, we’re just providing free entertainment for the neighbors.” I had no idea what Carly’s schedule was, but I would take the “risk” of running an open house by myself over the certainty of hearing her embellishment on the terrible experience she hadn’t really had once.

  In the next three hours I had just two more visitors, a young couple who brightly admitted they weren’t really in the market for anything more pricey than a condo in Round Rock. They had just decided to drop in and look at a really nice house to cheer themselves up.

  I didn’t even try very hard to get them to sign the visitors’ book, but they did anyway. Oh well, maybe seeing one signature would inspire others to follow suit.
>
  Two or three apparent signups would be even better, wouldn’t they?

  My tote bag yielded two different ballpoint pens and an ultra-fine black Sharpie. I added Rebecca Sharp of Vanity Place, J. Kilroy@was_here.com, and Mme. Defarge of Rue Robespierre, Paris to the single kosher entry in the visitors’ book, making a mental note to warn Aunt Georgia not to bother with the first four names. I was modestly proud of Mme. Defarge, who had signed up in a sophisticated, spiky handwriting not dissimilar to German script and quite different from the clunky, graffiti-like capitals of J. Kilroy. Maybe I could add document forgery to my modest skill set? Michael would probably know whether there was much of a demand for people to fake doctors’ notices and accountants’ letters…

  Not that I would be asking the rat, even in the very unlikely event that I ever saw him again.

  I played with my phone again, looking at the photos I’d snapped the night before. I wouldn’t have minded if they were a little bit higher-resolution; when I blew them up enough to read individual words, the slashing black lines of German script were just a bit fuzzy. Still legible, though.

  Still tempting. Still dangerous.

  If I’d found a sentence that meant, “Many people want to buy the house,” I would have been sorely tempted. Wait, I could almost construct that; this was the word for “many,” and “people” occurred on the second page of the notebook – a quick search for that picture – and –

  And I needed to stop scrolling through these photos before I put together something I might carelessly subvocalize. I wasn’t crazy enough to risk brain damage just to score points in the real estate game! A good thing I’d left the actual notebook locked in my gun safe…