Dragons & Dwarves

  I grunted in frustration. It had already taken me fifteen minutes to move half a block, so I decided to change modes of transportation. I cut off a rust-bucket Hyundai and pulled my Volkswagen up on the sidewalk.

  It was already headed toward the nineties, so I had been driving with the AC full blast. So I wasn’t quite prepared for it when I opened the door.

  The smell of the decedent hit me like damp towel soaked in rancid bacon fat. The kind of smell that sort of slithers in when you inhale it. My lungs stopped in a sort of appalled shock, and I had to force myself to keep breathing.

  Jesus, it’s coming from the river.

  During my twenty-some years as a reporter I had been close to some ripe bodies. That did not make me relish dealing with them. During my career I had done my damnedest, in fact, to get away from situations where I had to deal with them. I hadn’t planned on getting close enough to the dragon to smell it.

  Apparently, there was a flaw in that plan.

  I could picture Columbia laughing at me. So Maxwell’s uncomfortable with magic? Let’s not just hand him one of Morgan’s stories, let’s give him the one with the highest gag factor.

  I decided that she was pissed at me, and this was her way of showing it.

  It only got worse as I walked toward the bridge. I wasn’t getting anywhere near the source of that smell without a little preparation.

  It landed last night! These things must rot real quick.

  I stopped in a drugstore two blocks away. The place was empty except for a scrawny little Indian guy who was busy lighting the fifteenth lucky-number votive candle on the counter in front of the cash register. It wasn’t doing any good. The guy’s eyes were watering. I grabbed what I needed and placed it on the counter next to a Madonna backlit in red wax. “Hey, if you’re staying here, you need some of this.”

  The guy blinked at the small blue-green package. I shelled out five bucks, tore open the box and unscrewed the lid of the small canister of Vicks Vapo-Rub. I got two fingerfuls of the gel an smeared it above my upper lip, under my nose. “Menthol,” I explained.

  I held my hand out to the guy.

  “Many thanks,” he said as he repeated my gesture. He took a few deep breaths. I could almost see his sinuses clear as he smiled. “Oh, God, thank you.” He pushed my five back at me. “No charge.”

  My good deed for the day.

  I walked out, taking my own deep breaths. I still sucked air through my mouth, the gel couldn’t kill the evil slithery smell, but it prevented the smell from triggering a gag reflex or shutting my lungs down in horror.

  The closer I got to the bridge, the more I had to watch my step. The sidewalk was splattered with the stomach contents of people less prepared than I.

  In theory I was supposed to meet the Press photographer out here. Looking at the traffic, I decided that waiting for the guy was an exercise in masochism. I doubted that he would have any trouble finding carnage to digitize without my help.

  So I walked up to where the cops had set up a perimeter, a few hundred feet from the bridge itself. A pair of black-and-whites lorded it over a forest of red cones that blocked all four lanes of Carnegie, diverting everyone onto Ontario or I-90. No cops immediately in evidence, so I just walked past the roadblock.

  Once I passed the perimeter, I heard a car door slam, and a slightly strangled voice say, “Hey . . .”

  I turned around and saw a uniformed cop coming out of one of the black-and-whites. The cop was a kid, less than half my age. It was probably some detective’s idea of a joke setting the guy up here.

  “You,” he coughed, “can’t go up t-there.”

  I was impressed that the guy wasn’t falling to his knees from the smell. He was sweating. The druggist’s eyes had been watering, but this guy’s eyes were leaking down the sides of his face.

  “Kline Maxwell, Cleveland Press.” Instead of reaching for ID, I reached for the Vicks. I did it slowly, because one should never make sudden moves in front of cops in obvious physical and emotional distress. “You need some of this.”

  He made eyes at me as if I’d just turned into a two-headed dwarf. I could tell he was a rookie who’d never had my dubious pleasure of being too close to an overripe corpse. I gestured with my other hand, over my upper lip. It took a moment before the light dawned and he followed my lead. The few ragged breaths he took made me feel like the Good Samaritan.

  “Oh, God, that’s better.”

  I pocketed the Vicks. “New on the force?”

  He nodded. “Two days.”

  “Tell whoever set you on that duty that they’re an asshole.” I said as I turned around.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Maxwell, I still need to see an ID.”

  I fished out my wallet and hand him a press card and my driver’s license. Once we were both satisfied about who I was, he said, “I’m not supposed to let anyone up on the bridge.”

  “We all got our jobs to do.”

  “It’s a crime scene, sir.” The kid took my arm and steered me back toward Carnegie. I was about to make the obligatory noises about hassling the press and the public’s right to know, when he said, “You know it’s just luck I noticed you.” He coughed. “I have to hide the car from this damn smell. If you’d just walked around the other side . . . The other car’s empty.” He coughed again and shook his head. “Just lucky I caught you, right?”

  He gave me a pat on the shoulder as he escorted me past the nose of his car. After which he opened the door and slid back into the driver’s seat.

  The kid would have had to taken an ad out in the Press for his hint to be any broader. I walked around the back. True to his word, the rookie cop didn’t notice me.

  I walked down the center line, toward the knot of cop cars blocking the westbound lanes of the bridge. The sound of the traffic jam was distant, overwhelmed by the sense of stillness. First impression: the only movement was from the flashers on the cop cars, and a circling mass of black birds that were doing lazy circles over the Cuyahoga River in imitation of the dragons much farther up in the sky.

  Two massive stone pylons flanked the entrance to the main span of the bridge. Built in 1932 in a style that might be called art-deco-classical-Babylonian, the godlike humanoid statues loomed impassively over the tiny human inhabitants of the bridge. Their gaze fixed on the distant eastern horizon, as if everything here was beneath their notice.

  Glancing up at the northeast pylon, towering over the cops, I saw something man-sized, leathery and reptilian perched on the statue’s left shoulder. I might have caught sight of a gargoylelike wing and a skull-like face, but then it skittered around the pylon, out of sight.

  Whatever it was, I didn’t like it.

  Par for the course.

  One cop broke from the herd and headed in my direction. I started angling toward the guardrail so I could get a good look at what had brought me here.

  “Kline Maxwell,” the cop called out to me. I wasn’t that surprised that he recognized me. I recognized him.

  Thomas O’Malley, SPU police commander. He was thin and dark, with a sharp face that led like the bow of a ship. He looked less like a cop and more like a Mafia stool pigeon, to the point where his voice seemed to carry a hint of New York in it. Despite his name, the only thing Irish about him was the fact that the Democratic political machine—in the guise of Adrian Phillips back when he was Mayor Rayburn’s campaign manager—had got him his job.

  “O’Malley,” I acknowledged him as I reached the guardrail. I tried to lean nonchalantly on the rail, which was hard with the wind blowing the smell of rotting mentholated fish in my face. “Any comments about the floater?”

  I noticed that O’Malley had a greasy trace of white under his nose. I wondered if it was better than Vicks. “What’re you doing here?” he asked.

  “Freedom of the press, hear of it?”

  O’Malley shook his head. The gesture reminded me of a bird of prey tearing a gobbet of flesh from a corpse. “This is a little far from Lakeside,
Maxwell—or are you doing an exposé on the city contracts to move the corpse?”

  “So is the Special Paranormal Unit in charge of the investigation?”

  “Did someone say there was an investigation?”

  “Fifteen tons of dragon falls out of the sky. I may be slow, but that is out of the ordinary, isn’t it?”

  “Icky-eff, it happens all the time.”

  “Yeah, right.” I turned to look down at what brought me here.

  God, what a mess.

  “I can’t see you walking the pavement unless some politician’s getting his ox gored.” His voice sounded distant, far away from the enormity below me.

  “Morgan?” he asked.

  I nodded, mute, staring.

  “How is he? I heard they had to keep an eye on him.”

  I tried to swallow, but my throat was tight and dry. I whispered, “Droll, O’Malley, very droll.” I don’t even know if he heard me.

  The dragon did not go neatly. I had expected the body to be floating, more or less peacefully, spread-eagled in the river. That was a way too optimistic scenario. Crooked as the Cuyahoga was, it was, in retrospect, pretty damn lucky it hit the river at all.

  Here, under the bridge, the river went mostly northwest for about a mile before it took a hairpin turn due west. The dragon, from the look of the wreckage, had been heading due east, and met the ground about seventy-five feet shy of the river, at the edge of a gravel-mining operation. The impact zone had just missed the loading gantries.

  It was going at a shallow angle, because the body didn’t go splat there and then, though there was gore on the gantries about a couple hundred feet up.

  The body bounced or slid, off of the land, and tore across the cargo ship that had been anchored by the gantries. The deck buckled, machinery twisted and caved in, the great doors to the holds bent inward, everything splattered with black-red gore.

  The dragon had made it almost all the way into the river. Its tail was the only thing left on the cargo ship. Muscular and black, it was caught up and twisted in a pile of wreckage on the starboard side. It looked as if some gigantic monster had taken a bite about midway down the ship, a semicircular area where the deck didn’t exist anymore. It had become a satanic jungle gym of twisted girders, chain, and steel cable.

  About a dozen firefighters and emergency workers were scrambling around the wreckage, and I could see four blue white sparking flares where they were cutting the tail free. Looking at the firemen, the dragon’s tail was put into perspective. It was thicker than a human torso, and the part where it lay flat on the remains of the deck came up to mid-thigh on the tallest of the emergency crew.

  In the river floated the rest of the body. The current was dragging the corpse north, but the tail anchored it firmly so that it pointed at an angle toward the center of the river. The wings had been shredded by impact, and were splayed out over the water like a tattered oil slick. The body seemed little more than a ragged leather sack, black mostly, but in several places there were brief glistening flashes of white where fractured bone had torn free of muscle and skin.

  The neck, near a third of its length, had been twisted so far as to nearly decapitate the body. In places it was held on by strips of muscle and sinew thinner than a human arm. The head floated on its side, and it was hard to believe that the open golden eye was not looking right at me.

  “The worst icky-eff since that griffin in Hunting Valley,” O’Malley told me. I wondered how long it took to cultivate that blasé attitude. I couldn’t manage it. I looked at O’Malley and decided that all it took was not giving a crap. “At least this time,” he continued, “no one was hurt.”

  “Except the dragon.”

  O’Malley shrugged, and pulled at my shoulder. “Okay, long enough.”

  I resisted the pull, more out of orneriness than an actual desire to remain there to watch the carnage. “Any witnesses?”

  “Witnesses?” He snorted. “Every West-Sider who was awake and outside at three-thirty in the morning. This isn’t something you miss, Maxwell.”

  “Did anyone see what happened?”

  “What happened?” O’Malley pulled me away from the guardrail and shook his head. “A dragon took a nosedive into the Flats, Sherlock. I know you aren’t up on your forensic pathology from working City Hall so long, but maybe I can explain multiple blunt trauma to you as I walk you off the bridge.”

  I shrugged out of his grasp and kept looking over the water. There was a Coast Guard ship down there, holding position downstream from the head. Around the base of the ship the normally mud-brown waters of the river had turned a sickly rainbow-shimmered shade of black—a slick of the dragon’s blood.

  As I watched, a figure broke the surface near the base of the cutter. His wet suit was almost as black as the water he swam in.

  Whatever they pay that guy, it isn’t enough.

  He gave a thumbs up to the people on the ship and a pair of winches in the back began reeling up cable. The cables slid out of the water behind the ship, gradually growing taut between the rear of the ship and the shoulder blades of the dragon.

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Come on.” He was more insistent, grabbing me this time. “Nesmith is going to give a briefing. You can ask her all the questions you want.”

  I kept thinking of the frogmen who had to anchor those cables.

  “You’ve seen enough.”

  I pretty much had, but O’Malley was a little more agitated than he should have been. I wondered why.

  “Look, they’re going to tow it to Lake Erie and sink it. The carcass is a public health hazard. Now let’s move it, Maxwell, before I cite you for interfering with police business.”

  I risked on glance back at the Coast Guard ship as O’Malley led me away. A glance whose significance flew right by me at the time.

  The irony was, if I wasn’t so used to the taxonomy of public officials in Cuyahoga County, if I was anyone else—say Morgan, who should have been reporting this mess—it would have hit me immediately that Adrian Phillips was out of place on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter dragging a corpse out of the river. Forget who, or what, the corpse was. But whereas O’Malley had managed to cultivate a blasé attitude about blood and carnage, the sight of major public officials had ceased to make much impression on me unless I was expecting some sort of wrongdoing.

  To extend the irony, I was probably the only person on the staff of the Press who could have identified Phillips at that distance while he was hiding behind an elaborate gas mask.

  So I glanced, noted the rotund figure of Adrian Phillips, chairman of the Port Authority, and didn’t think anything about it until much later.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ONE of the thirty-two dragons known to be resident in northeast Ohio died sometime between three and four in the morning today, police said. The dragon had been in flight, eastbound over downtown Cleveland, when it struck the ground on the west bank of the Flats about a quarter mile north of the Hope Memorial Bridge.

  “According to police sources, the suspected cause of death was the so-called ‘Icarus Effect,’ the name coined by Dr. Newman Shafran of Case Western Reserve University to describe the often fatal side effects when a magical entity strays too far from the Portal . . .”

  The words glowed up from my laptop, fairly stunning in their banality.

  “Icky-eff,” O’Malley had said. A much more evocative term than “Icarus Effect.” The latter sounded like a cheap thriller novel, the former was something you scraped off the sidewalk.

  Five times I was tempted to use the cop slang, but I didn’t because it seemed disrespectful—which was a damned odd reaction from someone who’d covered Cleveland City Council for nearly a decade.

  Whatever name you used for it, the event described by Dr. Newman Shafran would have been catastrophic for a dragon.

  I was one of about a half-dozen reporters in a small meeting room in the Justice Center, waiting for the press conference to begin. No on
e was making statements on-site, for the obvious reasons.

  I had started my wait by trying to run off a draft of the piece on my notebook computer. When that effort stalled, I followed an impulse to start getting some background on what it was that killed the dragon. My third call directed me to Dr. Shafran, the professor who’d written the first academic paper that described what our dragon had gone through.

  Shafran had been in and, to my surprise, was a source obscure enough to not yet be inundated by calls from other news agencies.

  “Icarus Effect,” he had repeated my words in a thick Eastern European accent. I couldn’t help picturing Bela Lugosi as he talked.

  “Yes, the police believe that’s the cause of death.”

  “Interesting. So close to the source, in fact. Odd.”

  “Is it possible?”

  The doctor chuckled and said, “Why, yes, anything is . . . possible.”

  “Can you describe how it could happen? I thought the Portal’s influence extended halfway to Canada.”

  “Oh, indeed, even farther. But mana, magical power you understand, it is energy—but not like light, or gravity, or any so-called force. It is a fluid. Like the air, or the sea, it seeks its own level, subject to eddies and currents.”

  “So how high up does it go?”

  “It completely dissipates at about three miles up over the Portal itself.”

  “So this dragon had to be flying up pretty high, right?”

  He paused. “Not necessarily.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As I said, the power ebbs and flows. The victim of the effect might be safely within the boundary—they can sense where they are, where the power is—but the power might suddenly shift, quicker than the victim can react. A point in space that was saturated with mana can abruptly become dead. Like an air bubble in the sea. Such volatility is much more likely at the edges of the Portals’ influence, but is theoretically possible anywhere.”

  “How long would it take . . . ?”