Dragon Tears (52 page)

Connie had stripped off the burning jacket and stamped out the fire by the time Harry realized his gun was empty, climbed off the dead troll, and managed to reach her. It was amazing she’d been able to act fast enough to avoid going up like a torch, because shedding the jacket had been complicated by the fact that her left wrist was broken. She’d suffered a minor burn on the left arm, as well, but nothing serious.

“He’s dead,” Harry said, as if it needed saying, and then he put his arms around her, held her as tightly as he could without touching her injuries.

She returned his hug fiercely, one-armed, and they stood that way for a while, unable to talk, until the dog came sniffing around. He was lame, holding his right rear leg off the floor, but he seemed otherwise all right.

Harry realized that Woofer had not, after all, been the cause of a disaster. In fact, if he hadn’t plunged down those stairs and knocked Ticktock ass over teakettle, thereby preserving the surprise of Connie’s and Harry’s presence in the house for just a few vital additional seconds, they would be dead on the floor, the golem-master alive and grinning.

A shiver of superstitious dread swept through Harry. He had to let go of Connie and return to the body, look at it again, just to be sure Ticktock was dead.

They built houses better in the 1940s, with thick walls and lots of insulation, which might have explained why none of the neighbors responded to the gunfire and why no oncoming sirens wailed in the fogbound night.

Suddenly, however, Connie wondered if, in his last moment of life, Ticktock had thrown the world into another Pause, exempting only his own house, figuring to disable them and then kill them at his leisure. And if he had died with the world stopped, would it ever start up again? Or would she and Harry and the dog wander through it alone, among millions of once-living mannequins?

She raced to the kitchen door and through it to the night outside. A breeze, cool on her face, ruffling her hair. Fog swirling, not suspended like a cloud of glitter in an acrylic paperweight. The rumble of waves on the shore below. Beautiful, beautiful sounds of a world alive.

They were police officers with a sense of duty and justice, but they were not foolish enough to follow prescribed procedures in the aftermath of this one. No way could they call it in to the local authorities and explain the true circumstances. Dead, Bryan Drackman was just a twenty-year-old man, and there was nothing about him to prove that he’d possessed astonishing powers. To tell the truth would be a ticket to institutionalization.

The jars of eyes, however, floating blindly on the shelves in Ticktock’s bedroom, and the mirrored strangeness of his house would be evidence enough that they had crossed paths with a homicidal psychopath, even if no one ever produced the bodies from which he had removed the eyes. They were able to provide one body, anyway, to support a charge of brutal murder: Ricky Estefan down in Dana Point, eyeless, with snakes and tarantulas.

“Somehow,” Connie said, as they stood in the pantry staring at the shelves laden with cash, “we’ve got to concoct a story to cover everything, all the holes and weirdnesses, the reason why we broke procedures on this case. We can’t just close the door and walk away because too many people at Pacific View know we were there tonight, talking to his mother, seeking his address.”

“Story?” he said blearily. “Dear God in Heaven, what kind of story?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wincing from the pain in her wrist. “That’s up to you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You’ve always liked fairy tales. Make one up. It has to cover the burning of your house, Ricky Estefan, and this. At least that much.” He was still gaping at her when she pointed to all the piles of cash. “This is only going to
complicate the story. Let’s just simplify things by getting it out of here.”

“I don’t want his money,” Harry said.

“Neither do I. Not a dollar of it. But we’ll never know who it was stolen from, so it’ll only go to the government, the same damn government that’s given us this pre-millennium cotillion, and I can’t tolerate the idea of giving it more to waste. Besides, we both know a few people who could sure use it, don’t we?”

“God, they’re still waiting in the van,” he said.

“Let’s bag this cash and take it out to them. Then Janet can drive them away in the van, with the dog, so they don’t get wrapped up in it. Meanwhile, you’ll be putting together a story, and by the time they’re gone, we’ll be ready to call in.”

“Connie, I can’t possibly—”

“Better start thinking,” she said, pulling a plastic garbage bag from a box of them on one shelf.

“But this is crazier than—”

“Not much time,” she said warningly, opening the bag with her one good hand.

“All right, all right,” he said exasperatedly.

“Can’t wait to hear it,” she said, scooping bundles of currency into the first open bag as he opened a second. “It should be highly entertaining.”

Good day, good day, good. Sun shining, breeze blowing through his fur, interesting bugs busy in the grass, interesting smells on people’s shoes from faraway interesting places, and no cats.

Everyone there, all together. Ever since this morning early, Janet doing delicious-smelling things in the food room of the people place, the people and
dog
place, their place. Sammy in his garden, cutting tomatoes off vines,
pulling carrots out of the ground—interesting, must’ve buried them in the ground like bones—and then bringing them into the food room for Janet to do delicious things. Then Sammy washing off the stones that people put down over part of the grass behind their place. Washing stones with the hose, yes yes yes yes yes, the hose, splattering water, cool and tasty, everyone laughing, dodging, yes yes yes yes. And Danny there, helping to put the cloth on the table that stands on the stones, arrange the chairs, plates and things. Janet, Danny, Sammy. He knows their names now because they have been together long enough for him to know them, Janet and Danny and Sammy, all together at the Janet-and-Danny-and-Sammy-and-Woofer place.

He remembers being Prince, sort of, and Max because of the cat who peed in his water, and he remembers Fella from everyone for so long, but now he answers only to Woofer.

The others come, too, driving up in their car, and he knows their names almost as well because they’re around so much, visiting so much. Harry, Connie, and Ellie, Ellie who is Danny’s size, all of them coming over to visit from the Harry-and-Connie-and-Ellie-and-Toto place.

Toto. Good dog, good dog, good. Friend.

He takes Toto straight to the garden, where they aren’t allowed to dig—bad dogs if they dig, bad dogs, bad—to show him where the carrots were buried like bones. Sniff sniff sniff sniff. More of them buried here. Interesting. But don’t dig.

Playing with Toto and Danny and Ellie, running and chasing and jumping and rolling in the grass, rolling.

Good day. The best. The best.

Then food. Food! Bringing it out of the people food room and piling it up on the table that stands on the stones in the shade of the trees. Sniff sniff sniff sniff, ham, chicken, potato salad, mustard, cheese, cheese is good, sticks to the teeth but is good, and more, much more food, up there on the table.

Don’t jump up. Be good. Be a good dog. Good dogs get more scraps, usually not just scraps, whole big pieces of things, yes yes yes yes yes.

Cricket jumps. Cricket! Chase, chase, get it, get it, get it, got to have it, Toto too, leaping, jumping, this way, that way, this way, cricket….

Oh, wait, yes, the food. Back to the table. Sit. Chest puffed out. Head cocked. Tail wagging. They love that. Lick your chops, give them the hint.

Here it comes. What what what what? Ham. A piece of ham to start. Good, good, good, gone. A delicious start, a very good start.

Such a good day, a day like he always knew would come, one of lots of good days, one after another, for a long time now, because it happened, it really happened, he went around that one more corner, looked in that one more strange new place, and he found the wonderful thing, the wonderful thing that he always knew was out there waiting for him. The wonderful thing, the wonderful thing, which is this place and this time and these people. And here comes a slice of chicken, thick and juicy!

All of the outrages to which Connie and Harry refer as items in her collection of atrocities from the “pre-millennium cotillion” are true crimes that really happened. No one as powerful as Ticktock walks the real world, of course, but his capacity for evil is not unique to fiction.

This is the tenth afterword I have written for Berkley’s handsome reissues of my novels. The creation and publication of most books provide a fresh series of anecdotes that are amusing or interesting, or that at least reveal me to be a hapless naif, which amuses my wife and friends. Once in a great while, a novel goes through the great grinding wheels of modern publishing so smoothly that I have insufficient material for a piece such as this. So, thank you for coming, you’ve been swell, be careful going home.

Well, all right, I can discuss the title of the novel, which was originally
Ticktock.
I believed that a ticking clock suggested suspense and an urgent countdown. My publisher, at that time, thought instead that it suggested tedium, melancholy, despair, and the depressing tyranny of time, and that it left the reader with the incorrect impression
that the plot was a boring saga about clock-making. My agent agreed. She felt also that it sounded like a children’s book.

After years of struggles over titles—which I usually lost—and because I believed that I would soon be changing publishers and agents, I chose not to invest energy in another such dispute. I provided a dozen alternative titles. They were found wanting. I provided another dozen. They were scorned. I provided a third dozen. They elicited cool disdain.

I no longer recall who proposed
Dragon Tears
, but I remember that the word “dragon” had been in one of my suggested titles, “tears” in another. The moment this combination was conceived, everyone thought it was brilliant. Except me. I explained that
Ticktock
worked in at least three ways: First, the sound of a ticking clock suggests suspense (yes, it does, damn it); second, the lead characters in the story eventually refer to the villain as “Ticktock”; third, a major set piece in the novel literally involves a halt in the flow of time.
Dragon Tears
, on the other hand, had no connection to the story, because the novel contained no sobbing dragon, no dragon who laughed until he cried, no dragon who had medical problems with his lacrimal apparatus, in fact, no dragon at all.

Eventually, I accepted
Dragon Tears
and wrote the doggerel that appears at the start of Part Three, which gives the title at least a wispy connection to the book. For this compromise, I extracted the promise that the jacket art would
not
include a dragon. I believed that a dragon would give book-buyers the misleading impression that I had written a novel about dueling wizards, scheming trolls, and pissed-off fairies.

In my collection of original art related to my books, I have an astonishing number of color sketches by the cover artist, proposals of possible jacket illustrations for the publisher’s consideration, which include many stopwatches, clocks, sundials, and hourglasses. This is because the artist knew what the book was about. None of these received approval. We wound up with a teardrop into which is compressed a vividly detailed dragon, almost like a reptilian embryo (not the current cover). I felt the final image was a clever piece of work, beautifully rendered, but as I knew they would, when the book was published, disgruntled fantasy fans complained that within its pages they could find neither magical dwarves nor even a single elf.

As I hung up the telephone after resigning myself to having a dragon on the cover, I saw a squirrel at my office window. The cute little creature stared in at me, apparently fascinated, as if I were in a zoo cage and he regarded me as a particularly exotic specimen. Charmed by this example of Nature at her most Disneyesque, I smiled—and the squirrel spat on the window before scampering away. Spat or sneezed, or regurgitated: I’m not sure which.

I recognized in this odd moment a cosmic sign. A spitting—or sneezing, or barfing—squirrel doesn’t appear at a significant moment in the business day
by coincidence.
I realized that I must brood about this development until I understood what God was trying to tell me. I’m still brooding, haven’t interpreted the message yet, but I no longer find squirrels as cute as I once did.

(Dear reader: My intention has never been to bleed
from your image of the publishing industry all the glamour and intellectual excitement that you might have thought it possessed. That’s just an unavoidable side effect.)

After the squirrel spat on the window and departed, I had to negotiate with representatives for Garth Brooks, the country singer. I wanted to quote eight lines from his song “The River,” which nicely expressed one of the central themes of
Ticktock.
Excuse me, I meant to say
Dragon Tears.
In the past, when I had quoted lines from poetry still under copyright, I had paid modest fees for permission to do so. When I wished to quote lines written by the brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Louise Gluck, in my novel
Fear Nothing
, her publisher asked for fifty dollars. I thought this was too little and paid five hundred dollars instead. After the book appeared, Ms. Gluck wrote a lovely note to me, expressing her satisfaction with the context in which her lines were quoted. Mr. Brooks’s representatives asked for five thousand dollars. I did
not
think this too little, and I did
not
offer to pay ten times as much as they asked, but I did meet their price.

Subsequent to this bit of business, Mr. Brooks went through a divorce, issued an unsuccessful rock-’n’-roll album, and eventually semiretired. I continue to enjoy his music, and I do not mean to suggest that Koontzian hoodoo prevented this fine country singer/songwriter from enjoying uninterrupted connubial bliss and ever-escalating album sales. I
do
wonder if a spitting squirrel ever peered at him through a window and, if so, what he made of it.