There was still some debris in the lot when I drove up, but all the flags and banners and reminders of what happened had been removed.\u00a0 I was still a little shocky and in disbelief about the situation, kind of pushing it away like it had been something I’d read about or seen on TV.\u00a0 You know, not actually there at the scene of the devastation.\u00a0 I’d seen footage of tsunami (is that the plural, too) and I think there’s a level of escapism and a level of “sheer overwhelm” that us folk who get their information from the net have in handling real life.\u00a0 I also think there’s probably a correlation between that and the adrenaline junkies amongst us – we spend so much time in the virtual it’s hard to remember the physical, so we’ll do extreme things to feel “alive.”<\/p>\n
Just a theory, of course.<\/p>\n
I walked up, tossing my keys in my right hand.\u00a0 I’d have to return the car in the morning, but I was tired from the drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I saw a letter in the gutter between the corners of my roof.\u00a0 I’m sure there’s terms for it in carpentry and construction, but it was the little corner of overhang.\u00a0 It took me a few tries with a stick to knock it down before I made it inside.\u00a0 I knew who it was from.\u00a0 After all, I’d seen her naked around there before…which is something for a good X-rated game of Clue, I thought.\u00a0 (“On the roof, naked, and with a bat.”\u00a0 Well, this one was “Previously as a bat,” but nevermind.)<\/p>\n
I unlocked my door, dropped my keys in the octopus cup, turned on a light, closed & locked the door behind me (you remember who’s telling the story, right?) and then dropped down onto the futon, opening the letter to read.<\/p>\n
“Huh,” I grunted, about a few minutes later.<\/p>\n
Nothing for me to worry about now, that was for sure.\u00a0 I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the futon.\u00a0 I was asleep maybe fifty seconds later.<\/p>\n
This time I didn’t dream.\u00a0 I forgot how exhausting driving could be.\u00a0 I mean, you’re sitting and watching things and maybe (all the rental cars I’ve ever driven were automatics) occasionally extending your foot.\u00a0 It’s all the other things, because it’s not just like passive TV, where the most interest you get in a show (minus your being a powerful creature holding the magical might of an entire kingdom of fey who is most definitely concerned about the well-being of some meerkats) is in occasionally throwing popcorn at it if you’re disappointed in the lack of wit and character development.\u00a0 While driving you actually have to react, sometimes to actual events (like that bag of leaves that blew off the truck in front of me) and sometimes to perceived possibilities (like my occasional, “No, really.\u00a0 Is he going to stop at the stop sign or crash into me? No, he’s going to do a screeching halt and create the potential for an accident anyway.”)\u00a0 After just a couple of hours, your tailbone is beginning to complain, anyway.\u00a0 The scenery is moving past, but in long stretches of the west it’s not very different.\u00a0 (I’ve driven up in the Pacific Northwest and that scenery is riveting.\u00a0 If you like the colour green, of course.)\u00a0 And then, especially at night you’re looking for the deer who is going to take this moment to cross the road, and other than that, it’s dark and fields and lots of dark.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I can see why that kind of scenery is prone to myths of killers in cornfields, and abductions outside of places where there might be a payphone.\u00a0 Alas, while a lot of my friends have concerns about there not being original ideas due to the number of remakes of movies and TV shows, I don’t share their concerns.\u00a0 Cellphones change the plot of so many horror flicks it’s silly.\u00a0 “I’m in your house,” is still scary.\u00a0 “Good, then you know I have my shotgun in my hand,” is a fine response to that.\u00a0 Sure, there are short-distance cellphone disruptors, but I think it’s requiring horror movie writers to come up with new hooks, um, so to speak.<\/p>\n
I woke up because something was pressing against my thigh in a very uncomfortable fashion.\u00a0 Well, that’s the reason I woke up, but the reason I didn’t just take the dragon tooth out of my pocket and roll back over for another couple of hours was because of the Dragon.<\/p>\n
“Peredur?” I asked, groggily, staring at the face and the faint smell of burned wood.\u00a0 It wasn’t sulphur, it was more like a campfire.\u00a0 Great.\u00a0 Dragons have signature smoke scents, maybe like perfume.<\/p>\n
The eyes were right.<\/p>\n
“Flee, wizard.”\u00a0 He couldn’t fit in my place.\u00a0 He was there, and not there at the same time, like he had slipped into the skin of the house but not the physical space.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“G’way. I’m sleepin’.”\u00a0 I am a lot braver when I’m groggy and things could still be part of my dream.<\/p>\n
Then he roared.\u00a0 It wasn’t…loud.\u00a0 It wasn’t made of sound.\u00a0 It was made of terror and heartbreak.\u00a0 It was made of the breath of thorns and the coming of fire in the desert, where the resin of the cacti makes everything explode.\u00a0 It was made of heat and hot and there was something of lost music to it, like the kind that swells up in your dreams and makes you feel like crying, but you can’t remember anything of the tune.\u00a0 There were tears in it, and of course, fears, and it wasn’t at all like a shout.\u00a0 Sorry.\u00a0 I blame the still being asleep.<\/p>\n
I froze.\u00a0 It’s what we do with predators.\u00a0 Then I moved, trying to get up, but apparently I wasn’t fast enough.\u00a0 I saw his teeth come at me, and I was terrified, too much so to figure out even where I was, let alone catch the fact that his claw was aiming to pin me down.\u00a0 He was black and red and like those really good pictures of Smaug, except right there in my face, in my house, and then I was flung out into space.<\/p>\n
I rolled as I hit the grass, coughing, and aching.\u00a0 I picked myself up.\u00a0 I recognized this place.\u00a0 It was in between the eight corners of Monaco.<\/p>\n
I didn’t recognize the shadow that had burst through my door, the last thing I had seen as Peredur turned to face it.<\/p>\n
I took a deep breath.\u00a0 “Flee,” he said.\u00a0 Well, I had business in this Kingdom.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“To bedlam, then,” I said, aloud, and I walked between the trees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a letter. We don’t get to know what’s in it. Night falls. That starts a long over-due journey. And that’s it for “book one.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-seven"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}