The Fifth Dragons of Creativity, The Dragon of Putrefaction, Part Four of Seven

The Dragon Master

*****

Looked in the mirror.

Checked my zipper, and opened the door.

They were still there.

“You been standing there the whole time?” I asked.

“Well, no,” said George, but he didn’t look me in the eye.

“Well, yes,” said his wife Mary.

A good looking woman with a homely stump of a man named George.

There was one more.

A young woman was trying to force the husband and wife team of polar opposites apart at the shoulders the way a latecomer tries to pry open closing elevator doors. She was blond and built and looked to be about twenty two, but had the roughed-up voice of a woman in her forties.

“You can sign my book now, right?” she asked. “Just put ‘You need to be on my next cover,’ and sign it ‘Love, Ben.’”

“Give it up, Vicki,” said George. “Come on, Ben. What do you say? You come over to our place and meet Mary’s sister. She loves mysteries and all that shit. She’s got connections. She could do some things for you.”

“Hollywood,” winked Mary.

“That too,” said George. “You know what I mean?”

“Come on, you guys,” said Vicki. “Leave him alone so he can sign my book. Then you can have him.”

Bathroom stalkers are the worst type of fans. They’ve got no pride, and they’re proud of it. As they extend their books toward you to sign or are asking you to come over to their house, they really should be wondering if you washed before zipping.

They stood in the hallway, the tapioca colored wallpaper and the Thomas Kincaid paintings on the wall behind them lending a certain abnormal normalcy to the situation.

“You guys mind parting like the Red Sea so I can catch up with the hostess?” I asked.

“No can do,” smiled George. “She’s holed up with her kid. Little tyke’s throwing a fit. Having a conniption about her Teddy Bear. So come on with us will you? We’ll take you away from these Philistines.”

“Okay, but maybe next week. I’ve got to schmooze with the hostess or my agent will kill me.”

Vickie whipped out a copy of my latest book with one hand and extended a pen with the other.

“Please,” she said, and batted her eyelashes like a silent screen heroine. “Wouldn’t I look cute on the cover of your next book?”

“Since you asked,” I said.

“Oh Jesus, Ben, come on,” said Mary. “You can stroke the nympho later.”

“Nympho?” I said. “I’ve been hiding in the bathroom all this time when there was a nympho roaming the halls?”
excerpted from "The Teddy Bear Suicides," by Ferrel D. Moore

*****

"I don't like caves," I said.

"You're afraid of the dark," you replied.

And it was dark.

"This is a mistake," I said, but my voice cracked with fear the way thin ice fractures and gives way beneath your boots. "How can a dragon live underground? It would be too big to slither down these tunnels. And there's not enough air for it to breathe."

My voice echoed down the harsh blackness ahead like a bell ringing in an empty village.

I look to you for confirmation, but since you two became one, you are like a new woman who knows more than either of you individually.

When I returned to my body after seeing into the eyes of the Dragon of Condensed Starlight days ago, I found that the two women I had left behind were now one. There was no longer Lea and Scarlett, but a new woman waiting for me asleep by the fading orange glow of the fire.

Once you have experienced the Dragon of Condensed Starlight, you see magic as plainly as I now do. I did not have to question whether the two of you were now just one woman. It was clear that you were one. The hows and whys were hobglobins clawing for attention. But I have changed since I began this journey- I will push aside monsters of doubt to see but one golden sunrise of understanding.

"Worry less about Dragons and more about the Dragon Master," you say.

In the wavering torchlight, your rich grey-blond hair is streaked with shadows and your eyes look back at me between sparks that pop and leap from the pitch torches like magic streaking into the darkness from Merlin's wand.

"My feet hurt," I say.

I stop, lean against the hard and painfully uneven cave wall, and bend to adjust my boots. The soles are too thin, and it is as though they are not there at all. Each step is like walking down the side of a rocky mountain barefoot.

"And I don't believe," I continued, "that there is a Dragon Master. I was perfectly happy above ground. We met the first Great Dragons of Creativity and lived to tell about it. Isn't that enough? We know more about ourselves than we ever did. We can tell stories that will be the better for it and people will appreciate what we create. Was there any reason to crawl down this miserable hole where the air is as cool and dry as a witch's heart?"

"You know the answer," you say. "The Dragon of Condensed Starlight only gifts those who will carry on to the Seventh and last Dragon. If you do not continue you with me, you will become a writer whose stories are good only for a time, but then will grow stale as bread left on the table for too long."

"There is nothing wrong with telling a few good stories," I say, straightening my back and feeling it snap into place. "We could afford to eat and live with those who love what we have written. Is that not enough?"

A cold wind blows down the tunnel as though chasing us. I feel my skin tighten and instinctively duck my eyes.

"If you do not continue," you say, "the Dragon of Condensed Starlight will come for you, pick you up in her taloned claws, and carry you high and far away until she hovers over the Abyss and drops you down into it. Your screams will rend the night like a broken heart tears the soul."

I look back toward the way we came, just for a fool's moment, then say, "I was just testing you. We should get moving again."

And then I am up and walking. Even this dark, dank cave is preferable to being dropped into the abyss.

"It will do us no good to be moving if we do not find the Master of Dragons," you say, but I notice you walk with me.

"Tell me again why we must find this DragonMaster."

You grasp my sleeve and stop me from taking another step.

"Because no storyteller can face the Dragon of Putrefaction by themselves."

"And why is that?" I ask nervously.

"Because it will devour you."

It is sometimes difficult to remember why I began this journey.

We round a corner and I see torch lights up ahead.

"What is that?"

"It is," you say, "The entrance to the Depths of Darkness."