“Before death?”
“Yes.”
The picture that the doctor painted for me, in his bad Transylvanian accent, was less pretty than the scene at the river, if that was possible. Without the magical infrastructure to hold its body together, the sheer mass of the beast would tear it apart. The loss of magic would be as severe for it as the sudden loss of a skeletal system would be for a human being. Combine that with the probable speed the dragon was going when this happened—dragons have been known to break the sound barrier—and the result is akin to shooting a frozen turkey out of a cannon and into a brick wall.
“Couldn’t a dragon survive that?” I had asked. “If the impact wasn’t fatal?” Dragons were supposed to be able to survive lethal wounds to the brain, the heart, just about anything that didn’t cause outright dismemberment.
“No,” he said gravely. “The damage descends to the cellular level.”
The awful smell of the corpse was because it did rot quickly. Unlike a normal corpse, large segments of its flesh were dead before it was. The growth of bacteria in the body was three or four times as fast as in a normal body. Instant gangrene.
Only a fraction of the corpse had rotted by the time I had arrived, but even that amounted to a half a ton of distilled putrescence to poison the air for a quarter mile in every direction.
Probably, if I was a crime reporter, covering people’s dead kids for a living, I would have found the last few minutes of this dragon’s life a little less affecting. But the deaths I’d covered in the last ten years were those of people’s political careers, the blood largely metaphorical.
I stared at the screen on my laptop, convinced I was writing crap.
I kept thinking of the damn dragon, my hands hovering over the keyboard, unmoving. What had it been thinking? Where had it been going? Could it sense the end coming, like feeling the tidal bore before the wave crushes your body—or was it caught completely unaware? What would it be like to be stripped of your reason as the laws of nature decided to tear your body apart?
There was a chorus of chairs scraping around me. I glanced up and saw Public Safety Director Julian Nesmith walk into the room, toward the podium. Everyone was standing, and I pulled out my nondigital notebook. Most everyone here pulled out a similar pad of paper, or a palm-top organizer and a stylus. A few people pulled out digital recorders, but the printed word held the upper hand.
That was something that always struck the new people, especially in my profession. The lack of video. Even after the techies figured out how to get good quality digital imagery near the Portal, the photographic image had taken a cultural back seat in my hometown. There were only two digital cameras in evidence, in the back.
The Portal had struck a deathblow to television in northeast Ohio, which—in the chaos right after the Portal opened—was barely noticed at the time.
What the Portal does—in addition to opening the gates to another reality and giving us sprites and elves, mages and dragons—is play havoc with any recording medium. Take a pre-Portal tape recorder and try to dictate something, what will play back will sound like the taped inner monologue of a paranoid schizophrenic Tibetan monk, backward. Video, you’d get a fun-house mirror vision of hell seen by a color-blind housefly.
Luckily, digital communications had proved a little less susceptible to the interference. Even when the phone lines seemed to only produce garbled static, anyone with an ISDN line had been able to—at least half the time—get on the Internet. This apparently had to do with redundancy and error-checking. What it meant in practical terms was that now every electronic communication device anywhere near the Portal had to carry at least three computer processors to transmit multiple signals that could be combined at the other end to filter out the garbage. It also meant that video monitors had to be high definition flatscreen LCDs, audio recordings had to be on CD or silicon, the hard drive on my laptop had to have five times the space to store enough copies of my data so I could be certain to get it back along with a custom operating system with three-way redundant check sums that could weed out ghost data on the fly.
Bottom line, consumer electronics in this town were specialized and very expensive.
But Cleveland now has more local dailies than New York City, so I guess it’s a blessing.
Because of that, Julian Nesmith was one of a select few American public officials who didn’t have to stare into klieg lights and flashbulbs when she gave a press conference. She was also one of the few American public officials who would never need a microphone. An even five feet of pure adrenaline, she had one of those personalities that tore into a room like a rototiller into a vat of Jell-O.
“I have a short statement, after which I’ll take a few questions.” She looked at the clock on the wall, hands gripping the sides of the podium. She was perched on a step stool that was invisible behind the podium, and the posture that resulted reminded me of an old revival preacher haranguing us sinners. “We’ll try to get this wrapped up by twelve.” I had no doubt, with Nesmith leading the proceedings, that by twelve-oh-one this room would be empty.
“Between three-twenty and three-twenty-five this morning, several people in the Flats and surrounding areas reported seeing a dragon in an uncontrolled dive, heading for the Cuyahoga River. It struck a cargo ship, the Huron Star, that was anchored for loading at a facility on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River.
“A forensic examination of the body began at five this morning, concluding fifteen minutes ago. The examination was supervised by Cuyahoga County Coroner Egil Nixon. Copies of the findings will be passed out at the conclusion of this press conference. To summarize the findings; the dragon has been identified as Aloeus, resident of 1000 Euclid Avenue.”
There was an uncharacteristic wave of muttering, interrupting Director Nesmith. There were a few shouts, premature questions that were ignored. She waited patiently for the room to calm down.
Aloeus was the first dragon—one of the first anything to come through to our side of the Portal.
When the room calmed down, she continued. “Death came prior to impact due to multiple trauma caused by leaving the immediate influence of the Portal. In the opinion of Coroner Nixon, it is death by misadventure.”
There was more commotion this time, but the director talked through it. “Because the body represents a present threat to public health and safety, I have authorized its disposal. The Coast Guard is currently towing the body a safe distance out into Lake Erie where it will be chemically treated and burned. I have five minutes to take questions.”
A sandy-haired kid, half my age, from the Plain Dealer asked, “Have there been any estimates of the amount of damage?”
Cut right to the chase, kid.
“Approximately two hundred thousand—”
My cell phone started vibrating at me. I had forgotten to turn it off. It was absolutely the wrong time, but I’m one of those guys who can’t stand to let a phone keep ringing. I flipped it open one-handed and whispered harshly, “This better be good.”
There was a whistle of static on the line. Piercing, like trying to talk to a fax machine. There was a chorus of voices beneath it, mumbling, whispering. It was the common static from the Portal, but it felt sinister, and it didn’t go away the way it usually does when the phone finally deciphers the real signal.
When sense wasn’t immediately forthcoming, I closed it.
“. . . don’t know as of yet. I’ll direct you to the SPU liaison for that question.” O’Malley’s Special Paranormal Unit again. It was virtually an autonomous district within the Police Department, one of several outstanding gripes the Police Department had with City Hall. Hearing the initials made me severely pissed off that I’d missed the question.
“Madam Director,” an older guy, from the Leader, was asking this one. “Don’t you have any reservations about the method used to dispose of—”
My phone buzzed again.
I pulled it out. “Goddamn it.” I kept my voice to a whis
per, but some of my fellow pillars of the fourth estate turned to look in my direction.
It didn’t surprise me this time when my ear was met with a piercing whine and the subliminal muttering. This time, a voice made itself heard over the babble.
“Is this a dagger I see before me?” The voice’s tone and pitch warbled like an old cassette tape that kept sticking.
“What?” I whispered at it.
“The handle toward my hand?” The keening background noise increased, and the voice itself stretched toward breaking. “Come, let me clutch thee—”
The voice, and the other noises abruptly cut off. A few seconds of clicking, then a dial tone. The caller ID on my phone was no help, the anonymous thespian had his number blocked.
Great, someone with an unlisted number is phoning in Shakespearean quotes to me.
This time I turned the phone off.
CHAPTER THREE
THE dragon Aloeus, first of his kind to reside here, has also been the first of his kind to die here. Shortly before four this morning, Aloeus plunged to his death on the shore of the Cuyahoga River. This afternoon his body was towed out to the open water and burned.”
“The Cuyahoga County coroner issued a statement ruling Aloeus’ death accidental, ‘death by misadventure.’ A victim of the ‘Icarus Effect.’ Dr. Newman Shafran of Case Western Reserve University, the person who first described it, explains the effect as follows . . .”
I liked this better.
With a first draft safely wired to the Press server, I was the last to leave the Justice Center. Most of my colleagues were off, some on what would be fruitless attempts to get comments from other dragons, others to comb the West Side of Cleveland in search of a witness or a dozen, others to pull the chains of whatever personal contacts they had in the city government.
I didn’t mind being the last out. I had been doing this for way too long to engage in a panicked rush to be the “first” to get something. Instead, I had written out a first draft of the feature once I’d gotten enough material to write one. Without the deadline pressure looming as large, I was free to ponder how I was going to attack this story.
I left the Justice Center by the Lakeside exit. Across the street, beyond the park flanking City Hall and past the twenty-foot wall surrounding the old Browns Stadium, I could see the lake. In the distance, I could make out a pillar of oily black smoke on the horizon.
We sent a dragon to Valhalla today . . .
I watched the smoke for a moment. I knew I wanted to write about Aloeus. Not just the carnage in the Flats. Everyone would rehash that. I wanted to get a sense of who it was that died this morning.
I caught a whiff of ozone and heard thunder rumbling from the permanent cloud formations above the stadium. I looked up at the swirling vortex, and saw a pillar of black clouds stacked above the site of the Portal. I could see lightning flashes break across the slowly rotating mass. Except for the smoke on the horizon, the sky was otherwise a cloudless blue.
The strange weather here was not actually due to some magical aura cast by the Portal. It was plain old meteorology. The Portal didn’t just let in dragons and elves and magic and such, it also let in—and out—very large volumes of air. The difference in air pressure, temperature, and humidity between the two sides of the Portal had created a standing weather front on both sides. There was always some sort of atmospheric effect marking the site of the Portal.
A few drops of moisture hit my face as the clouds above the stadium began a downpour. I was far enough away to avoid getting drenched, but it was disconcerting to watch the gray sheet of rain sluice off the stadium not half a mile from me.
Rainbows unfolded over the lake as the sun shone through the localized storm.
I looked at the stadium, really looked at it for the first time in a while. Where Aloeus had come from, the Portal, and the world beyond it.
I had been one of a select group who were able to see the Portal without either paying to reach it or being paid to guard it. A friend at WKYC—yes, I was a local TV news whore at one time—had to attend a funeral and had given me his season tickets for the game. I had gone to see a division championship battle. Instead, I had gotten the show of the millennium.
It had been a few months shy of ten years ago, when I had seen it open—twenty feet above the Pittsburgh thirty-five yard line. Halftime, tied game, and I don’t think anyone really remembers that the Steelers went on to win the division when they played the second half at Three Rivers.
It sort of grew out of a point in the air, swelling until it sliced into the turf. It still gives me chills the way the silence in the stands grew with the sphere. It can be really scary when thousands of people are being really quiet.
The Portal was a mirrored sphere about fifty feet in diameter, rippling with rainbow shimmers of color. Mirror, but not quite a mirror, since the reflection on the sphere wasn’t of the surrounding stadium, but a coliseum of a much more ancient vintage. Within moments we could all feel a breeze from it carrying the smell of damp mulch and swamp gas. Probably from the reflected coliseum which seemed to have been overtaken by wetlands and reeds.
The PA system whined, broadcasting whispered muttering. TV monitors across the stadium, and beyond, began showing strange ghost images, as if Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch had collaborated to make a Philip Glass music video.
The cameramen were the first to approach it, hopelessly trying to get the image on tape.
Then they came.
A small band of folks in ragged garb first appeared in distorted reflection on one side of the mirror, growing closer until they slipped through the surface. If you tried, you could pretend this quartet of guys were funky-looking humans. But, I think to the last of us, we knew. These folks weren’t from around here.
They were all tall, six feet to a man, and had hair that didn’t look quite right. The shade was off, and the way it grew around the skull followed subtle curves that didn’t belong to a human face. Their ears were long and pointed, eyes narrow, chin long. Three of them had a bluish cast to their skin, one was a fire-engine red that would put Chief Wahoo to shame, and the last one was black—and not the black we mean when talking about human skin color, but black, like a shadow on the brightest day.
Elves. Fugitives from a kingdom on the other side of the Portal. A regime that must have been a true horror when you consider five guys from a feudal agrarian society—magic or not—walking into a Browns game . . .
Let’s just say that they must have burned all their bridges before being prodded by microphone-wielding sportscasters and being surrounded by three-hundred-pound guys in dog masks started looking attractive.
It took about ten hours to clear the stadium. The police were the first to set up a perimeter around the field. Then around the stadium. In forty-eight hours, when some of the nasty things—and Aloeus would have been classed in that group at the time—started coming through, the perimeter became the province of the National Guard.
The next twelve months were pretty rough. No TV at all, radio intermittent enough to be almost useless. Only completely digital communications worked, and those became less than reliable. Computers would work for a time, but were subject to massive random failures. Everything was pretty damn chaotic.
The Feds tried to step in, and that gave Mayor Rayburn his moment of glory. The common legend is that Cleveland’s mayor saw what the Portal meant, not just in relation to the short-term chaos it was causing, but in what it could mean for the area, long-term. Not that many appreciated it at the time.
When FEMA was all set to come in, declaring northeast Ohio a disaster area, Mayor Rayburn drew a line in the sand, saying, “This far, no farther.” The nation was appalled that the city would stop federal aid at the city limits, but his explanation was terse, “I will not have this natural resource nationalized through the back door.”
The President scoffed at the accusation, but subsequent efforts to claim the Portal through everything from the Defense
Department to the National Parks Service showed that Rayburn was prescient. While the legal battles between city and federal government rolled up toward the Supreme Court, Congress made the point moot. The federal legislators—a majority of whom belonged to a party that wasn’t the President’s, and made much political hay over limiting the interference of the federal government in people’s lives—saw a grand opportunity to thumb their nose at their least favorite executive without damaging their own power base. They sent up a veto-proof bill that granted the Portal exclusively to Cuyahoga County.
It was later uncovered that, during this whole time, Mayor Rayburn had established several unilateral trade agreements across the Portal that rendered FEMA assistance unnecessary.
Once Cleveland got out of that first year, Rayburn’s decision began paying off. Once city and social functions resumed some sort of normalcy, the Portal began to grow us its first cash crop. Tourism. Nearly two million people the first year. All to see a place where things now existed that were never seen outside a Tolkien novel or a Grimm fairy tale. The money that came in the second year undid the damage of the first. The year after that helped undo the last quarter century of urban neglect. The year after that, and the census found that for the first time since the seventies, the city’s population was growing. There were people who moved here simply because a herd of unicorns had taken up residence in Hunting Valley.
Magery itself became a major industry. The powers wrapping northeast Ohio could be used to do many things that couldn’t be done elsewhere, everything from removing an inoperable brain tumor to giving you a whole-body makeover that could go as far as gender and species.
Last, but not least, the Portal itself was the ultimate money-maker. How much would you pay for a chance to start over on another world, one with completely different rules? A lot of people would pay considerably, and the city charged what the market would bear—slightly less than a passenger ticket on the space shuttle.
Over the course of a decade, the home of the Portal had grown more and more secure. Where the stadium was once surrounded by barbed wire and AA batteries, it was now contained within a forty-foot-tall brick wall that tried to look vaguely like a castle. The anti-aircraft batteries now stood in handsome cylindrical towers where people could ignore them if they wanted to. Not a hint of razor wire.