Fire Star

  Vincent held the artifact as though it were a pen. “This is a dragon’s claw,” he breathed.

  46 TO THE CAVERN

  Brother Bernard shook his head wildly and threw his weight against the base of the chair. A leg squealed, gouging a scratch on the floor. “No, you mock me. There is no such creature. How can you speak of such things in this place?”

  Vincent looked at the fallen knapsack. “Give me your water.”

  “What?”

  “Your flagon.”

  Bernard shook his head. “I —”

  Vincent dropped down and tore at the buckles. “Watch,” he said, uncorking the flagon and tipping it until the water lapped the neck. He dabbed the point of the dragon claw into it, then spread the crumpled paper on the floor and proceeded to write the letter G on its reverse. “A gentle squeeze brings forth a kind of ichor. The colder the water, the better the flow.”

  Ichor? The blood of the gods? Lord, preserve us! Bernard turned away with a hand to his head. Now he understood why the abbot was concerned. Brother Vincent had clearly turned quietly mad.

  “I found it after years of meditation,” said Vincent. “Day after day I pleaded for an answer. One night it appeared. There, in the center of this floor, lit by the light of a distant star.”

  “Brother, you must pray with me,” Bernard be-seeched him. He fell to his knees and began to beg for mercy and understanding.

  “But this is my prayer,” Vincent insisted. He knelt opposite Bernard and shook him into silence. “With this, I have touched the heart of the universe. I have uncovered that which cannot be seen. I have brought forth life where there was only clay. I have looked through the eyes of God.”

  “NO!” Bernard shouted. “This is blasphemy! Delusion. Your mind has taken leave of its senses. What proof do you have that what you say is real?”

  Chirr! went the squirrel.

  Brother Vincent smiled, for there was the answer. “His name is Snigger. You will find him in the early body of my texts. I brought him here, through space and time. The raven …” He looked absently towards the window. “The raven is a messenger of love from the north.”

  “I must leave here,” Bernard said, turning left and right in search of the hatch. “Please return with me, brother. Let the abbot … let the Church redeem your soul!”

  Brother Vincent laughed. “On the fourteenth day of this month, the world will change. A new dimension will open to us all. A chance for all souls to find redemption.”

  Bernard shook his head.

  “I can prove it,” said Vincent, with steel in his voice. “Ten minutes, brother. Ten minutes that will change your grasp on reality.”

  Beneath the weight of his habit and the scapula which covered it, Bernard felt the quickening thump of his heart.

  Vincent crossed the floor and lifted the hatch. “Follow me,” he said, descending swiftly.

  In a matter of strides, he was through the door and heading toward the cliffs.

  “Where are we going?” Bernard shouted, struggling with the pace and the breath-snatching whistle of the coastal wind.

  Vincent walked on and did not turn. Suddenly, he was gone from view, stumbling down a man-made path which slanted through a wet dune and onto a narrow beach covered with rubble from the cliffs above. The sea, as if taunted and enraged by his presence, crashed against the rocks and threw spray into his face. Still he walked on, crossing the stones with a jaunty balance, resembling a puppet suspended on strings.

  He was sitting on a ledge at the mouth of a cavern when Bernard finally caught up.

  “Well?” cried Bernard, struggling against the snarl of the sea.

  “Closer,” Vincent shouted, beckoning to him.

  Bernard lifted his habit and looked for a step. But long before his leg was off the ground, his heart was firmly in his mouth. From within the cavern he could hear a sound. A low, guttural, rumbling cry. An animal of some kind. A large, wild creature. He crossed himself and urinated down his leg. The voice was like nothing he had heard on God’s earth.

  Grrrrr-ockle, it went.

  47 WITH GROCKLE, THE DRAGON

  Brother Bernard Augustus had been a historian all his life, from school, through the best theological college, and now here, as librarian of Farlowe Abbey. He had documented many interesting studies and knew that this island had once been the center of a myth surrounding the wrath of a dragon. Long ago, too long for records to be kept, and therefore confined to the hearsay of centuries, it was said that a dragon had nested on the site of the ruined bell tower, where the original priory had stood. Fearful of her presence, two monks had climbed up into the belfry and oiled the staples of the unused bells, freeing each clapper without a sound. Waiting for a stormy night, a night so bitterly condensed with rain that a whole wing of dragons would be worthless of flame, the abbot had ordered the bells to be tolled. The clatter had driven the mother from her nest. The monks, hiding in the shadows of the balustrades, had leaped up and pierced her egg with spears. The mother, witnessing this dreadful act, had unlatched her jaw and issued a scream that had shaken the tower and split it asunder. The crash of stone brought every bell down. The abbot had been covered by the largest of them, trapped underneath like a wasp in a jar. Only then did the mother dragon descend, mantling her giant wings against the rain, before releasing a boiling flame that melted the brass and the abbot with it, until they flowed like the yolk of her unborn young.

  Until that day on the rocks by the cavern, Brother Bernard had told himself that stories like these were invented by charlatans and religious scaremongers. Now, with the ocean cooling his feet, spreading its solemnity up through his bones, he believed every word. His perception of truth, as Brother Vincent had suggested, had changed forever.

  He had seen a demon.

  The creature, squatting, was probably no bigger than a very large dog. But each time it gave out its savage grrr-ockle, the bellows of its lungs would lift its shoulders and its wings would arch into folded peaks. It was a monster, as tall as a teenage child when it stretched its ugly, scaly knees. He shuddered at the sight of its bladelike talons, as long again as the toes they grew out of. And its face! Its hideous pointed face. Those repeating teeth. Those rolling yellow eyes, laced by capillaries of bright green blood, centers darker than the wells of space.

  “Magnificent, isn’t he?” Vincent said. He dipped behind a rock and threw a limp hare at the dragon’s feet. Holding the kill with a single talon, it used the other foot to tear the skin apart.

  Brother Bernard vomited onto the rocks. In swept the sea to wash away the stains. Bernard wiped his mouth clear of the bile, but the agonies in his mind were not so easy to cleanse. “Where did it come from? Why is it here? What wickedness brought it into this world?”

  Brother Vincent adopted the pose of a saint. “Why do you fear him, brother? He is a gift of creation. A protector of the Earth. A child, no more than a few months old. He has flown here in search of his ancestor’s claw and is recovering from a journey, long and harsh. Look at his flank, injured, but healing. During his flight, he struck into a line of electrical cables and was almost killed. For days, until hunger drove him forth, he had to take refuge on an old church spire, assuming the stillness and guise of a gargoyle. His powers of survival and adaptation are remarkable. I learned yesterday that he has the capacity to draw the blood from the surface of his scales until they turn the color of —”

  “Stop!” Hands lodged against his brow, Brother Bernard rocked to the swell of the ocean. “It ails me enough to see you abiding by this beast. How can you speak as if you know it? As though it were some kind of pet? The fires of hell are in its belly. This … child will grow and kill us all!”

  Vincent shook his head. “The creature has no fire. Its birth was misgoverned and it fell into a stasis, resembling stone. It was revived by extraordinary means and came here to find salvation and purpose. For me, he is a miracle of universal consciousness. I wrote of him. And he appeared.”

&nbs
p; Bernard shot a glance at the dragon again. Grrr-ockle, it rumbled, tilting its head. Its amber eyes swiveled and focused upon him. The choice between loathing and understanding seemed too wide to breach for a moment. Nevertheless, for the sake of his brother’s soul, Bernard Augustus knew he must try. “Tell me, in plain words, how this came to be. Did you conjure this creature or is it real?”

  Vincent picked up a pebble and threw it to the sea. “For ten long years I have suffered,” he said, “trying to understand why Elizabeth betrayed me. I begged the Lord to show me a motive and He, in His mercy, sent me that claw.

  “I had no idea what it was at first, but Elizabeth had always believed in dragons and that was all the reason I needed to assume it was no ordinary talon. When I touched it, I felt inspired. My only thought was to write with it, and once I’d discovered its strange proclivity for producing an endless supply of ink, I began to work on a story.

  “I let the claw guide my hand, always believing that what was written would be the will and compassion of God. Soon I was documenting Elizabeth’s life, with her then grown daughter, in a place called Scrubbley. The story led me far and wide, from suburban America to the wasteland of the Arctic, but always staying connected to an ancient world of dragons. I assumed that the only purpose of this venture was to build something noble from the ashes of my sorrow, a means to alleviate the welter of my grief. But as the writing took me over, there came a revelation. In time, I wrote of a procedure through which a child, touched by the spirit of a dragon, could be delivered from an egg kindled by a human mother, without the need for a human father.”

  Brother Bernard closed his eyes.

  “Suddenly, light returned to my soul. I started finding more than amusement in the story: I began to find hope. Its world developed and drew me in. As the pages flew by, I knew I had created something far greater than a shelter for my hurt, a legend so convincing that in my mind I had reached out and touched a new reality. Even before this dragon appeared, I knew that Elizabeth’s love for me was pure.” He turned his head and looked at the baby dragon, grazing its teeth against the side of the cavern. “Now I know for certain.”

  Brother Bernard steepled his fingers, shaking them as if to make a cocktail of his words. “You are saying you were recording true events, even though you thought at the time it was fiction?”

  Vincent threw another hare to the dragon. “His role in the story was to seek out the claw. You see him before you. There is your proof.”

  “But how can that be? The laws of physics —?”

  “All wrong,” said Vincent. “Misunderstood. Consciousness binds the universe together in a vast, invisible realm which physicists label dark matter. With the aid of this claw, I have been able to access that realm and change the universe from within.”

  A cloud rumbled across the sun, sending out the first hard shrapnel of rainfall. Brother Bernard found it a welcome relief, for his skin was beginning to simmer with sweat. Dark matter. The words were the essence of turpitude and evil. Nightmares were tranquil compared to this. “How?” he said, as though he’d swallowed a boulder. “How can you change the order of things?”

  Vincent raised his cowl against the rain. “One day, I tried an experiment. I went back to a section of my manuscript and altered it. I wrote that a squirrel, captured by the villainess who deceived me and turned me away from Elizabeth, had escaped through a narrow wormhole in space.”

  “The squirrel in the folly?”

  “Yes. Until then, I had no idea that the claw had the power to alter matter or the flow of time.”

  “But this is merely coincidence,” Bernard rasped. He threw out his hands. “The squirrel might have come from anywhere.”

  “You are a tide’s lap away from a dragon, brother. How can you possibly deny what you see? There is no such thing as coincidence.”

  “But if this were so …” Bernard paused, becoming flustered. He shook a raindrop off his nose as he searched for his words. “If this were so, such a power would be …” He shook his head, unable to face the outcome of his thoughts. He looked up in great fear. “How does the story end?”

  “With him,” said Vincent, nodding at the dragon who was now retiring back into his shelter. “In the darkness, there is a fire star shining. In a few days’ time, it will reach its zenith. When it does, he will fly the claw north, to a dragon, waiting, like him, to be reborn.”

  “And you?” said Bernard. “What will you do?”

  Brother Vincent spread his hands and caught the rain in his palms. “I will go home to Elizabeth,” he said.

  48 ASLEEP IN THE FOLLY, 2 A.M.

  In the beginning was the auma, and the auma was all there was.

  All things were visible then.

  There was no future. There was no past. There was only the now.

  And the auma was the now.

  For an unknown time, in an unknown space, the auma existed as a pure white fire.

  Then, for no reason, for there was no reason, it began to expand.

  And time began.

  The auma reached out, filling no space, for there was no space for the auma to fill. But in time, it reached out to such an extent that holes appeared in its innermost structure.

  Into the holes came a new energy, darkness.

  And a binding force which the auma knew as G’ravity.

  With G’ravity, the auma reshaped itself, folding in, billowing out, making nothing at first but ripples and contours and patterns of light.

  Thus it explored the nature of Geometry, finding stability in aspect and symmetry and ratio and mass.

  And in time, the auma gained in mass and, gathering itself, assumed a figure.

  And the figure it assumed was a perfect winged creature.

  And the creature was a dragon.

  And her name was Godith.

  By now, darkness was all around. Godith spread her wings far into the void and knew she could no longer touch her own eternity.

  So she desired to replicate herself, to reclaim the space she alone had created.

  She turned inward, then, to the fire within, and in one immeasurable instant of time, she opened her mouth and spoke the first word: hrrr.

  And the word flew out to every corner of the universe.

  And this is how the world began.

  The sea raged. The rain beat down. Darkness shrouded the small stone folly. On the first floor, underneath a blanket of burlap, the monk who had taken the name Brother Vincent dreamed of a gold-rimmed pocket watch.

  The dream was always the same. The hands of the watch were always traveling backward, quickening into a spinning blur. In the glass, he could see time passing. Ten years of prayer. Ten years of solitude. Ten years of life without Elizabeth.

  When the hands stopped, she was always there. Her flashing green eyes. Her soft red hair. Cradling a child that belonged to them both. It was a girl, and when he reached out and touched her hand her tiny pink fingers would curl around his thumb and there was joy in his heart, and truth, and light.

  Light.

  It swam above him. Through the voiles of his eyelids, it pushed the night aside. There was a clink of metal. Or was it glass? Vibration in the floorboards. Footfall? How? His eyes half flickered. There was Brother Bernard, kneeling by the window, still muttering softly in prayer. When the thunder broke and the rain had come, shattering the air in a wall of leaden drops, he had chosen to shelter here, in the folly. For six long hours, he had asked his Lord in heaven for guidance.

  It had come in the form of Abbot Hugo.

  “Wake him,” the abbot’s voice said.

  Vincent rolled over. Six of the Order. Two with lanterns, swinging on poles. “What is this?” he said. He flashed a glance at Brother Bernard. A green light flickered off a small silver object in the fat monk’s palm. It was a cell phone.

  “NO!” Vincent launched himself toward the trapdoor, but was caught by Brother Malcolm Cornelius, an ex-marine, a man of great strength.

  “Do not
make me tie you,” the abbot said, images of lanterns in his sad brown eyes. “We have the beast captured and bound.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. Set him free,” said Vincent, so fraught with anger that the words left his mouth on a bubble of froth.

  Brother Bernard, crying tears of remorse, crossed himself.

  “Abbot.” Brother Peter, a monk with too little skin for his cheeks and the posture of a vulture from the shoulder blades up, stepped into view. In his hands was a wooden box. He opened the lid to reveal a stack of papers. “This was in the roof space, hidden by burlap.”

  Abbot Hugo nodded. He removed the top sheet and read the first words: Housing Available. His brow creased into a puzzled frown. “We searched your cell,” he said to Brother Vincent, who was tugging without hope against the grip of Brother Malcolm. “There were only blank papers in your desk. You lied to me, brother — to protect this miscreant you found in the caverns.”

  “Please,” Vincent begged. “A few more days and the creature will be gone.”

  The abbot’s disbelief was barely hidden as he said, “Where to, brother?”

  “The Arctic wilderness. If you stop this, we are all endangered.”

  Abbot Hugo tilted his head, his beard brushing through the neckstrings of his cowl. With a sigh, he dropped the sheet back into the box and gestured Brother Peter to take it away. He studied Brother Vincent with a mixture of compassion, suspicion, and regret. Mostly regret. He stepped up close, close enough to whisper in the younger man’s ear. “What has become of you, Arthur?” he said.

  Vincent whispered back. “For the love of God, give the claw to the dragon.”

  Abbot Hugo stood away and switched his gaze to Brother Malcolm. “Take him to the abbey and lock him in his cell.”

  49 TOOTH OF RAGNAR, SAME DAY

  She was a mile out to sea, or rather out to ice, trying to establish where the dragon’s head lay in relation to the snow-packed contours of the island, when the Fain arrived. It could not be seen, but she felt it approach. So fast, so close, there was no time to react.