Chasing the Dragon Read online

  She gunned the power and the bike slid smoothly and infuriatingly silently up to high speed. How could you have any satisfying emotional outburst with this modern technology? She snarled at it and pushed it to the limits every which way she could, but it never made a noise and the traffic was too busy to risk breaking it.

  She was early at the flower stall. They looked at her with the usual odd looks as they made up her order. Half the petals came off during the ride to the memorial. Lila stood with her bunch of sticks and half flowers in the shade of a eucalyptus tree looking at the stone where Max's name was carved with a flourish. It glowed because the faeries had done it. Max's portrait was there. She looked older than Lila remembered her, but she was smiling.

  "I brought these for you," Lila said, and dropped the flowers down on top of yesterday's and the day before's. "I wish you'd say something. Thanks would be nice."

  She'd sort of hoped the faeries would have enchanted the portrait to speak or leave her a message, but so far it was just a picture.

  "I can't keep coming back is what I wanted to say." She put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips, feeling cross. "I don't see the point. You're not really here."

  People out walking in the park area, of which the memorial gardens were a part, were visibly avoiding her.

  "So I guess this is good-bye."

  Surely there ought to be some greater sense of occasion?

  "Bye then."

  It felt so wrong, so inadequate, so ... nothing. She didn't know what to do. She could barely accept that Max was dead. She certainly couldn't accept that she had lived a lifetime alone and died in old age. She had seen her only a few months ago, still young. And another part of her felt that she couldn't just leave Max here and walk away. But she'd already done that. Fifty years ago. She thought that if she'd come here enough, then one day it would all seem real.

  The flowers had a blank card. She never wrote on it, but today she wanted to. She took out the pen, not without misgiving, and uncapped it. It was a fountain pen. The nib was a bright silver. She didn't know if it would even write, but it did. Good-bye, Max. She almost put wish you were here, but at the last moment she stopped and put the lid on the pen. She wasn't sure it was true. How old would Max be now? Eightyfive. Coming back just to hear her sister complain wouldn't really be that wonderful. She didn't want any repercussions.

  The ink was incredibly dark and opaque. It wasn't like a liquid. Simply where the nib passed went utterly black. It was a strange colour. When she looked at it against the flowers and the ground it seemed too dark, unnatural, so she folded the card over the words and put the pen away.

  "You know you're supposed to clear up when they've died," a sharp voice said from a short distance behind her.

  She sensed disapproval of multiple kinds as she turned and found the park attendant on his small motorised scooter looking at her with a scowl through his visor. After a minute she realised he was talking about the flowers.

  "Yeah I will," she said.

  He gave her a nod that indicated he didn't think that was likely. "Well I have all the contacts for these memorials and I will pursue it."

  "You do that," she said.

  He stared at her dress. "This your bike?"

  "Yes."

  "It should be in the parking lot. This is a tow zone. I can't tow it because I don't have the equipment, but I-"

  "I was just going," Lila said, and marched forwards, yanking up yards of water-spotted silk as she did so before throwing her leg over the bike and jamming the dress in around her.

  "-can issue you with this ticket." The official did something with his phone unit, and she registered an official complaint against her in the city administration data. "So you can ride it to be impounded yourself."

  Lila, who had been about to ride off, sat back and took her hands off the bars. "Let me get this straight: you want me to ride my bike to the pound so it can be locked up and then I can pay to have it unlocked?"

  "It is officially within my authority-"

  "After you interrupt me on the site of my sister's grave memorial."

  "You'd been here some time, and you come here every day. You have never, as far as I can see, tidied up. It's not like she died yesterday, now is it?" Then he hesitated and his brows beetled together. "Your sister?" It was his turn to get puzzled.

  Her amazement at his attitude was almost refreshing in a way. "Well, here's my official response," she said, and gave him the finger before driving off.

  At the beach she parked carefully, simmering with rage, and ripped the side of the dress in getting off the bike too forcefully. She felt its bodice tighten with reproach and the train hissed at her, but she refused to take the responsibility. The gaggle of youth converged on the region went quiet on seeing her, although this time it lasted longer than usual, and the man at the coffee stand was placing her cup at maximum distance from himself even before she'd reached it.

  She picked up the cup, already able to taste the contents just by coming into contact with the steam. "This," she said, holding it aloft and pointing at it for the stallholder's benefit, "is the worst coffee I have ever tasted." She took one, obligatory sip, and dropped the cup directly into the bin.

  He stared at her and then blurted. "Don't put a frog in the onions."

  Lila looked at him for a long minute, during which she parsed the sentence a few hundred times. She decided she didn't want to know and turned around, lining the four boys and three girls up under her stare.

  "You should all be in college. I am reporting your whereabouts to the educational system and the student benefits' office. You can still make your ten o'clock classes if you run. There'll be an extra fine if you miss it, and if you miss even one more hour of school or drop below a C average, you will have your travel permits removed for six months." The vitriol with which she delivered this was stinging. They sat openmouthed and then started as, one by one, their personal organisers all began to ring, pip, and sing shrilly at maximum volume to confirm the bad news.

  She decided not to walk on the beach or hang around for the grisly aftermath. She'd had it with that place, and anyway, stay much longer and who knew what she might do, or think? She might start screaming or crying or trying to kill someone who probably didn't deserve it just because things hadn't worked out for her, because Max was dead and gone, Zal was lost, because she hurt and the world had moved on without her and become a place she could never be at home in and there was no going back.

  For the benefit of the kids still trying to curse her and hit her with loose stones she rode out of the parking lot backwards and gave them the finger as well before taking the freeway to her date with the dust sheets of abandonment. All the way she held her breath and kept her mouth shut. Her chest felt like it was going to burst, but she had to keep everything in. She felt nuclear, atomic, like her rage would destroy the world, or worse, that it wouldn't. It wouldn't do anything, just explode and then trickle away and there'd be nothing left. If there was nothing, what would she do then? What would she be?

  The bike tires screamed on the asphalt. She fishtailed wildly. The speedometer reached its limit and the battering of the air froze her face and shoulders. There was a point somewhere on the highway when a stone or something caught the tires. She felt the bike judder faintly, and then it was airborne. It skimmed the ground for seventeen metres and struck a concrete abutment where two lanes divided. She was thrown free of it, but not far. Beige slabs flew up to meet her.

  Lila got to her feet without knowing where she was or what was happening. The clear memories and miss-nothing processing of her machine body wasn't able to penetrate the daze that slamming headfirst into a solid bridge support had brought upon her. She had the vaguest of notions about what had just happened, but it seemed no more than imaginary. Somewhere behind her traffic was stopped, people were talking, exclaiming, but she only saw the concrete wall she had hit and the pattern of cracks she'd made in it that matched the pattern of lines she felt
in herself. She moved cautiously, in case she fell apart.

  To her surprise she could see things she'd never noticed before. There was a river crossing here, for instance, right where the roads crossed. In fact, the underneath road was the river and the over road was a covered wooden bridge. She was standing on a small bank beside it, and there was a boat not far away from her coming against the flow of the strange grey liquid that lay deep and current ridden beneath the fragile surface of the ordinary Otopian day. Standing in the boat was a person dressed in robes, using a long pole to skillfully press the craft through the least difficult water. It was hard work but they kept at it patiently and as they came level with her, as she finished noticing all this, they let the boat turn about in the current and beach itself on the end of the sandy shelf where she was standing.

  "Don't move," said the figure. Their voice had no sound, only the imaginary quality of her accident, but it was quite certain.

  She wished to know where this was and with the same certainty she got her answer.

  "This is Last Water, always and everywhere. If you move you will cross it and not return."

  An idea came to her. "This is Thanatopia?"

  "It has no name, but you call it that. Be still. Others are watching."

  Lila considered this. The grey water reflected almost no light at all, but it moved vigorously. Above it the concrete highway, its cars and people were slowed almost to a standstill. "Others?"

  "From this place most things can be seen. I have been looking for you. But I am not the only one." The figure barely moved. Its hands on the pole had only three fingers, or two and some kind of thumb that opposed them. The grey was not exactly grey, she decided, looking at its odd flesh, only colourlessness.

  "Am I dead?" She thought not.

  "Not enough," it replied in its smooth, silent way. "But if you like you need only step forward."

  "How do I go back?"

  "You are already slipping away. The living cannot linger. Give me a token so I can find you again."

  "Who the hell are you?" She had no intention of obeying such a request.

  "I am one who seeks to prevent you from falling into the grasp of She Who Waits."

  "And I believe you because?"

  "I am one of Ilyatath's servants."

  The use of the correct name for the elf floored her suspicions. She had a lot more questions, but the river and the bridge were fading away and the bright, brassy colours of Otopia were every moment more brilliant.

  The hooded figure held out its hand and opened it. On its thick, gigantic palm lay a tiny flower, grey in petal and stem, and a crumpled piece of soggy cardboard. The flower, she knew, was one that Tath had carried to show his allegiance to the elven revolutionaries. The card ... with disbelief she could read enough of the writing on it to know it was the one she had just left behind. As she watched the card became dust and the words alone remained, caught in the air, their lines twisting around one another. They moved like snakes.

  "Do you know her?" she cried out. She had nothing on her that would do. In desperation she tore out a few strands of her own hair and tried to give it across. To her alarm the words slithered out of the creature's palm and around the strands, coating them in black, before recoiling to turn and writhe. She saw them snatched away and pocketed. The vision was so flimsy now that it was almost invisible.

  "Do not come here again unguarded," the figure said before it was gone. It held up its fist, shaking with the effort of holding the words at bay. "Do not give life to the things of this place."

  She stood on the burning hot road. A medic was trying to get her attention, spritzing her with something stinky out of an aerosol and patting her face with a wet swab. She swatted him away irritably and gathered her bearings. Of course the bike was toast. She hadn't thought her heart could drop another notch, but at this realisation it did.

  The machines buzzed like summer bees in her head, dizzy, drunk, their pattern grown slower to repeat but no clearer. Lila stooped to gather the rags of the dress in her hands like an old dowager and began to walk stiffly towards the exit ramp. A variety of individuals continued to try talking to her or treating her, but eventually they settled for photographing her and insults when she showed no signs of cooperation. Later a smelly, noisy old car drew up beside her and the door of it opened with a creak.

  Malachi leant back in the leather seat, his elbow on the car door, fingertips at the wheel. He looked through the windscreen, shades flat to his face. "Get the shit in."

  She got the shit in, yanked the dusty dress train around her ankles, and shut the door. They growled off into the burning heat, wind dashing over the shield and messing her hair, turning it into a thousand little whips.

  Lila flipped down the sunshade and uncovered the small vanity mirror on the back of it. Ghastly was the word for it. She flipped it back up again.

  "Have you ever met the dead?" she asked. "Or I mean, the people in Thanatopia who aren't dead." And then after a second of speculation, "Do faeries even die?"

  Malachi drove in silence for a minute, but slowly his agitation lessened and finally he said, "We don't die in the way that you do. We wouldn't go to that place you mentioned." But he didn't sound 100 percent certain.

  "It wasn't like the first time I was there," she said. "Nothing like it. Only there was a boat and water, and there were boats last time."

  "Dare I ask what you're talking about?"

  "I went to try and save my parents, with Tath," she explained. "But I couldn't. They crossed the water into Thanatopia proper...."

  "No," he corrected. "Thanatopia is the place you were in; you cross out of it."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes," he said. "Faeries can go to Thanatopia but they can't cross. We call it Uldis, the thing that lies under Under. We're much changed there, so we never go. Not ..." He glanced at her for the first time. "What happened to your clothes?"

  But Lila was not going to be deterred. "So what happened to Poppy and Vid? Jack killed them."

  Malachi winced and shuddered. He made a warding sign and Lila felt the car engine catch for a second. "Gone," he said.

  "Dead."

  "Gone," he repeated with slow solidity. "Not dead. Gone for all time gone. It wasn't Jack that killed them, remember." He slammed on the brakes suddenly, barely managing to stop at the light, and swore under his breath.

  The last line was a warning to her not to mention what he was speaking of. She knew what he meant. The Hoodoo. That had killed them because they had violated the terms of Zal's trial and tried to save him against the too-powerful force of the Giantkiller. She resolved to know and understand more about this, but it wasn't the moment. Malachi was gentle, but she took him seriously enough to know when to stop. His tension signalled fear and he was rarely afraid. She sank into the seat and felt one of its springs pop underneath her.

  Lila asked for a detour to get takeout. Mal paid for it and they stopped to eat it streetside in the busiest part of downtown, watching people go by.

  "Were you dead?" he asked finally after she'd gone through half a box of special noodles and he'd picked over and not eaten monks' vegetables.

  "I don't think so," she said, taking hold of his box of dinner and starting on that too. Sauce dripped on the dress but she was glad to spite the thing.

  Mal delicately opened a box of Faerie Flumsie and began to spoon it into his mouth. The stuff was sickly. She didn't think she'd ever seen him eat it before. "Bad day?"

  He snorted at her. She crammed bean sprouts into her mouth; she just couldn't seem to get enough in fast enough. Who knew that a brush with death could make her so hungry? She wasn't even sure that eating was a habit more than a necessity. The food was so good. Her piglike manners made him squirm and she grinned to herself.

  Malachi almost choked on the Flumsie and at last admitted defeat, dropped the spoon into the gooey sticky mess, and dumped the box on the backseat. "I thought you were dead," he said, looking through the windscreen a
t the city street. "I had this feeling, and I'm not wrong about these things. Just for an instant. It wavered. I put it down to my imagination. And then the report came through about the accident and I ..." He beat the steering wheel softly with the thick paw palm of one hand and took a breath. "I felt like there was suddenly no purpose for me anymore, like it was time for my name to be wiped off the roll of interesting things, unstitched from the pattern and put to the edges where the colour's all flat and finished. The strings pulled. I almost didn't come out to see. I figured if it had happened you'd have meant to do it and you'd have done it right."

  Lila stopped eating. Noodles hung out of the side of her mouth. Her throat felt too big, stuffed up. She couldn't swallow. His tone was so hurt.

  "Did you do it on purpose?" he asked, turning and staring at her with an intensity that was way out of character for him. Through the black lenses of his shades the orange fire of his eyes blazed bright enough to show like embers.

  A flare of shame at her secretive self-destructive ways made her face heat up. With great difficulty she bit through and gulped the salty, slimy mass in her mouth. She wanted to shake her head no, but she thought he deserved the truth and gave the merest nod.

  "Goddamnit!" He snatched the food cartons from her hands and flung them overboard onto the pavement, sending her chopsticks after with such force they splintered on contact with the ground. Amid loud complaints from passersby he started the engine and with a squeal of tires and a gout of smoke yanked them into the heaving traffic.

  Noodles slid down her chin. "I'm sorry," she said, honestly and very quietly, contrite.