The Dragon Griaule (49 page)

He removed his hand from Snow’s throat and patted his cheek. Snow felt the pull of the gulf below and tried to sink into the wall.

‘I’m an intuitive sort,’ Jefe said. ‘I know you can help me access the portion of my life that’s closed off. I think I knew that the instant I first saw you, but I understand now that you were afraid. That’s why you refused me. You needed time to adjust, to acclimate to my presence. I tend to forget the effect I have on people. I can’t always be expected to notice it. Obviously I don’t have the same effect on myself.’

Snow would have preferred to tune him out and concentrate on his footing, but Jefe kept on bellowing nonsense into his ear, inducing him to listen. He had the cogent, albeit somewhat hysterical thought that he might have been onto something when he berated Yara after Enrique Bazan’s visit – maybe when translated into human form dragons were reduced to prattling twits with superhuman powers, yet once returned to their natural state they expanded into their bodies and became the mysterious cosmic beasts of legend. Or not. Maybe they were assholes, whatever their shape.

Jefe gave him a hug and kissed him on the cheek, a move that made Snow cringe. ‘We’ve been up here long enough,’ he said. ‘We can talk more later. Let’s go down, shall we? Let’s finish the joke. Yara will be surprised to learn she has lost. We’ll show the bitch, won’t we?’

Snow had a presentiment of what was about to occur, but the idea that he might be carried down from the wall swept all else aside.

Jefe winked broadly at him, grabbed his belt and, before Snow could react, he leapt for a nearby chain, Snow hanging from his left hand. There was a split-second when he thought Jefe had lied and the joke was on him, but he felt a severe jolt that stopped his fall, the belt buckle digging into his gut with such force, he couldn’t breathe. Once he recovered he saw that they were descending at a rapid clip, the floor growing larger
and larger. This time he didn’t shut his eyes – he yearned for the floor, he wanted the floor above all things, he willed it to rise to meet him, and when Jefe deposited him on the concrete, when the rough surface abraded his cheek, he almost wept with relief and lay there soaking up its beautiful wideness and firmness. He remembered Yara and looked for her. Spied her thirty feet above on a ledge, on the wall that portrayed clouds at dusk. She stared at him – he couldn’t make out her expression, but a bolt of terror shot through him, as if she had beamed it into his heart. Jefe flew in swoops and ascensions high above, sticking close to the wall, and then went higher yet, out into the center of the shaft. Something was different about his flying. It was less dervish, less spectacular than earlier, having a languorous air that reminded Snow of a trapeze artist doing lazy somersaults, relaxing, gathering momentum for his next show-stopping trick. Panicked, realizing what that trick must be, he sprinted to the panel and started to enter the code, but blanked on it. Her birthday. Seven . . . seven something, he thought. Fuck! He racked his brain. Seven thirteen ninety-one. He put in the numbers and his forefinger hovered over the keypad as he tried to locate Jefe among the chains. Spotted him descending from the heights, from the wall across from Yara, tumbling and twisting, a mad Olympic diver committed to a suicidal plunge, already halfway to her, more than halfway . . . Snow jabbed the Enter key, knowing he was too late.

Had he thrown in one less tumble, one less frill or flourish, Jefe might have saved himself. As it was, his momentum almost carried him out of danger. The grinding noise stopped abruptly and his graceful run became floundering and disjointed high above the concrete floor. His fall lasted two or three seconds, no more, but the replay, when Snow summoned it, took much longer to unwind. Jefe flung out a hand, snatching at a chain still attached to the ceiling, his fingertips grazing the links, and he went down without kicking or flailing his arms, his body describing a simple half-roll onto its side. He gave no outcry and impacted with a sickening crack, a leg touching first, as if he had made an effort at the end to land on his feet. He sagged onto his back so that, if he were still aware, he would have seen the
chains collapsing, appearing as they descended to coalesce into a cloud of silvery serpents with long, lashing tails, their lengths all entangled. They smashed into the concrete with a clashing sound, dozens of them striking out in every direction as they hit, one leaping straight at Snow, cobra-quick, missing him by inches. Then it was quiet. An ominous quiet despite the happy result it represented. The lair had been made over into a piece of Gothic art, a stage set for the final scene in a surrealist play, a grim medieval fable whose ending was open to interpretation. A considerable fringe of chains remained connected to the ceiling, curtaining the huge photomurals, and a pall of concrete dust was suspended throughout the lower third of the shaft, a lunar fog partially obscuring the mountainous heap of chains that lay dead center of the floor, like a burial mound intended to confine some immortal monster.

Yara called out to Snow, telling him to bring the machete, and he shouted, ‘Not until you’re down!’

‘The machete!’

Stubbornly, Snow asked what he should do to help her down. She stood pressed flat to the wall on the narrow ledge, arms outspread for balance. He knew she must be afraid to do so much as nod for fear of toppling off the ledge, yet she briefly lifted a hand to point at the mound of chains. He saw nothing and said, ‘What are you pointing at?’

‘He’s alive! Look at the chains!’

‘Where? I don’t see anything!’

‘The pile of chains! The section nearest me! Just look!’

He could detect nothing, no trace of blood, no sign of a living presence, but came forward, stepping over outlying snarls of chain shaped like the ridged and twisted roots of a metal tree, like crocodile tails, like the spines of antediluvian creatures whose heads were buried beneath the spill of silver links. The mound was three times higher than his head and shed a cold radiance. He began to circumnavigate it, pacing slowly, warily, alert for movement, yet seeing none.

‘Where do you mean?’ he shouted, and then saw chains slither down across a slight convexity at the edge of the mound where they were piled only four and five feet deep. His heart
jumped in his chest, but there was no further movement.

‘The mound’s settling, that’s all!’ He glanced up to Yara. ‘How do I get you down?’

‘Are you sure?’

He waited a bit, watching the mound, and said, ‘Yeah!’

‘Go to the panel – key in nine-nine-nine! That’ll start the chains moving down!’

‘Don’t you want me to come up?’

‘I can hang on long enough to reach the floor!’

A rattling at Snow’s back – the chains shifted, the base of the mound bulged, and then a bloody-knuckled fist punched out from it and Jefe’s fingers clawed the air.

Galvanized with fear, Snow ran for the stairs. He pounded down the steps, grabbed the machete, and raced back again, pausing on the landing to gather his courage, and his breath, and then re-entered the lair. Lengths of chain were draped around Jefe’s torso and legs, but he had fought mostly free of them and gotten to his knees. Blood welled from splits on his chest and arms – it was as if his skin had not been torn or abraded, but rather had cracked like a shell. He stared balefully at Snow, yet spoke not a word and made no threatening movement. Yara shouted, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Jefe did not react to her, continuing to watch Snow, who approached with trepidation, holding the machete behind his head, poised to strike.

He assumed Jefe would lunge at him when he came near, but he closed to within a few feet, just beyond reach, and Jefe had not moved, merely tracking his progress. This gave him confidence and he aimed a blow at Jefe’s head. Jefe flung up his arm to block it and the blade skimmed along the inside of the arm, taking with it a shaving of skin. Not human skin, but a rind of sorts, a thick sheath protecting his flesh, and Snow, as he retreated, remembered how hard Jefe’s hand had felt when he slapped him.

‘Don’t let him stand up!’ Yara shouted. ‘If he stands, he’ll be harder to get at!’

Snow did not believe Jefe
could
stand and he was uncertain whether or not Yara’s statement was accurate. The mound made it impossible to get behind Jefe and his range of motion
enabled him to defend attacks from every available angle. On his feet and badly wounded, he might be vulnerable to a range of attacks – in his current posture there was no option except to try another frontal assault. Snow stabbed with the point of the blade and Jefe deflected it with ease. He feinted a backhand slash, shifted his stance, and swung the machete straight down at the top of Jefe’s head – but he strayed too close to his target. Jefe clubbed his wrist, sending the machete skittering across the floor, and snatched at his shirttail. Snow broke free and hurried to retrieve the weapon. As he stooped for it, Yara shouted a warning. Jefe had clambered to his feet and was heading toward the stairs, dragging his right leg, his torso bent to the right, staggering, going off-course and having constantly to correct it, a crooked man on a crooked path. Snow darted after him and took a swing at the side of Jefe’s good knee, hoping to cut a tendon, but due to the awkward angle at which he delivered it, the blow had little force and did no discernable damage. Moving with an old man’s stiffness and deliberation, Jefe turned to him and gave a hissing cry, like that of an enraged cat. His face had lost every ounce of humanity, revealing it to have been a cunning mask behind which some odious and repellent thing had hidden, and now that the tissues of the mask were dissolving, a corrosive anger shone through, directed not only toward Snow, but toward all things not itself, a vicious, wormy hatred that had kept it alive for millennia and become its sole reason for existence. All of this conveyed by a mere glance. It was as if a germ of the dragon’s vileness had spanned the distance between them and infected Snow, breeding of an instant its semblance in his brain and inspiring in him a consonant anger. As Jefe labored toward the stairwell, Snow let that anger spur his actions and guide his hand.

Leaping forward, sensing the truth of the blow as he swung the machete, he sank the blade into the side of Jefe’s neck, the tip transecting the hindward portion of his jaw. Jefe made a cawing noise and jerked away, tearing the machete from Snow’s grip, so firmly was it embedded in meat and bone. Blood seeped from around the edges of the blade. Jefe stumbled out onto the landing, his step grown discontinuous. He slipped, clutched
ineffectually at the railing, and then pitched forward, bumping down the stairs on his belly and onto the landing below, dislodging the machete. He picked himself up and kept going, blood fron the wound cape-ing his back with a darker crimson.

An unusual calm, sudden in onset, was visited upon Snow. Not unusual as regarded its emotional basis, for he knew to his soul Jefe was dying and a menace no more, but in that it seemed to proceed from an inner resource he had not known he possessed. He stood calmly, then, watching Jefe totter from view before returning to the lair. Yara called on him to finish Jefe, but Snow walked over to the panel by the door, keyed in nine-nine-nine, and set the chains to rattling downward. The noise drowned out her cries. Once he knew she would be safe, he went downstairs at a leisurely pace, scooping up the machete, and entered the dining room. He stopped by the sideboard and, taking a minute to make his selection from among the whiskeys and tequilas, he poured a double shot of single malt and sipped it appreciatively. A tremor palsied his hand. He downed the scotch and strolled off along the tunnel, following Jefe’s blood trail.

He had not been out of the complex for almost two weeks and the sight of daylight at the tunnel’s end disoriented him, as did the wideness of the world and the hills enclosing the grassless stretch whereon the village had been established. Under a dreary sky eight or nine women – two of them dressed in filmy peignoirs, the others clad in shawls and long colorful skirts and embroidered blouses of coarse native cloth – had gathered at a point midway between the village and the pink house, and were staring with grim fixity at something Snow could not see from his perspective. On stepping from the tunnel mouth, he spotted Jefe to the right of the entrance – he still dragged his leg, yet made a doddering run across a stretch of sloppy ground, hitching his shoulders repeatedly as he went, going about ten yards before losing his footing and sprawling, splashing down into a puddle. It took several tries for him to stand. A commingling of blood and brick red mud slimed his chest and back, and he wore an expression of abject stupefaction. Appearing to have no awareness of Snow, he made a second and shorter run back toward the tunnel,
adding a little hop at the end, but with no better outcome. Snow recognized he was attempting to fly and wondered whether he knew that he did not possess a dragon’s body.

A voluptuous black woman with blond spiky hair, holding the neck of her peignoir shut against the cold, approached Snow, circling away from Jefe. She touched the handle of the machete and said, ‘You did this?’

‘Yes. With Yara’s help.’

‘Yara? I don’t know this Yara.’

‘La Endriaga.’

‘La Endriaga is not Jefe’s woman?’

‘She was his prisoner. Like you.’

As Jefe made another effort to fly, the woman shouted excitedly in Mam to the others – Snow understood only the words ‘La Endriaga.’

One of the village women shouted in response and the black woman asked Snow if Jefe was mortally wounded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood, but he may still be dangerous.’

She reported this to the group and two of the women ran for the village, most likely to spread the news.

Jefe fell again – he lay on his side for a long count, his breath venting in gasps.

Snow’s calm had eroded into a mood as gray and energy-less as the sky above Tres Santos. The clouds looked to have the inert weight and solidity of battered armor plate, though thunderheads with dark bellies had begun pushing in from the north. As Jefe gathered himself for a further attempt, Yara limped from the tunnel. She stood at Snow’s side and watched Jefe perform his miserable trick. Her eyes brimmed with tears. This must be for her, he thought, like watching someone who had once had promise, with whom she had invested her precious time, and was now reduced to an addled derelict with half a functioning liver, putting on a show of his degeneracy and decrepitude in a parking lot, hoping his audience would throw quarters at him so he could buy a pint of fortified wine.