Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  A wind started blowing from the East, sweeping the ragged remnants of cloud ahead of it, leaving nothing but the bright pinpoints of stars against the deep, dark sky. It scattered sand over the corpses.

  The only female, he thought, as her gilded claws touched him here and there, drawing now blood, now pleasure, in caresses that ignited his body without disturbing his mind’s ordered thought. The only female.

  And George was the last male.

  There might be just enough humans per dragon that humans would not resent them but worship them and set them up in temples, in the old way. They’d bring them victims to become burnt offerings to the drake’s majesty.

  His children would live in splendor.

  Yet, George squirmed uncomfortably. His mother had told him that drakes had come from elsewhere. They were aliens who could change their shape and mingle with the ruling species of the worlds they colonized.

  An alien species, they had been.

  An alien species they remained.

  They could only survive by deceit and murder, by greed and power, by making themselves the rulers of a civilization they hadn’t built.

  They didn’t belong to Earth.

  The caresses of the female taunted George into transformation. Spasmodic cough shook him. His body changed.

  His mind worked at fever pitch.

  Maybe it was all for the best. The drakes were cunning. Maybe this time they would take good care of their human livestock. Maybe they’d even guide it into space travel, take it to the stars, to meet the celestial dragons George’s mother had dreamed of.

  “We’re the last ones left, you know? From all the worlds and all the stars,” the female said. She stood, in human form, next to his jade-green girth. Her eyes sparkled with amusement.

  “How do you know?” he asked, his voice was no longer human, but the sounds only another drake would understand.

  “Because I am an ancient one. An ancient, ancient one.” She smiled, the smile of the serpent bent on temptation. “I came here, with the last party of drakes, from the stars. We were the last ones left there.” Her naked foot kicked derisively at the sand. “We brought civilization to this mud-ball. We dragged these pitiful apes up from their caves. They’ve been sorely remiss in their gratitude recently. But all that will change.”

  Even as she pronounced the last word, she metamorphosed. Her arms stretched till they became forepaws attached to a long, sinuous, silvery body that shone wetly under the moonlight.

  She was beautiful. More beautiful, thought that part of George that was still George, than any human. She was a primordial female, a creature of stars and sky and elemental sea; the end of the beginning, the seed of the end.

  She stretched her head, opened her mouth. From the sharp-fanged cavern a sound emerged that was not laughter and yet had the same feel as her laughter.

  The challenge.

  She flew up into the sky, straight up, laughing her drake laughter.

  He flew after her, pulled by invisible strings. Heavier, sturdier, he flew slower. Yet, he’d catch her in the end, because she wished to be caught.

  She gave him a run. Their sparkling bodies wove shining lines in the sky. Their afterimages drew the twenty secret symbols of the alphabet of Mu, the sacred alpha of lost Atlantis.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, he caught her. Their bodies pressed together, metallic scales against metallic scales, his foreclaws holding her still, their wings flapping in unison, to keep their combined weight aloft.

  Pleasure blotted out his thoughts, spread through his nerves, tingled in his skin, inflamed his brain.

  There was only the serpent and the serpent’s joy, as the female’s quiescent body allowed itself to be guided by his.

  The sky turned the opaline color that precedes dawn.

  His dream lasted until he heard her dragon-challenge and felt her pulling away from him.

  Now they’d descend separately to the sandy beach that seemed so far below. On the way down she’d flame him. She’d gorge on his remains and on whatever humans she could catch, until—bloated and satiated—she’d crawl into some cave to spawn the litter that would one day rule the world.

  George started opening his claws, ready to accept his fate and search Elisha’s ghost in whatever Hades awaited dragons and their victims. He’d die like Elisha who’d been his bride and died a sacrifice to his dragon instincts.

  But even as his heart gave up, his reason awakened.

  Dragons had destroyed themselves before, in the stars. Despite the many worlds they’d lived in, they’d come to an end. How, but through their own voraciousness? And how many species had they killed in their wasteful savaging?

  All for nothing.

  Even on Earth, they’d been uncontrolled devourers and brought themselves to the brink of extinction. They’d do it again. They’d ride mankind to its grave.

  If he tightened his claws

  She was a quarter his weight

  If he let his fangs sink into that sinuous silver neck

  The thoughts never came to their logical conclusion because the worm in him twisted in revulsion at each of them.

  Sacrilege, his instinct screamed. Sacrilege. It can’t be done. It shouldn’t be done. If you

  But the human George had already lowered the drake’s powerful jade head.

  He felt his jaws clamp on her silver neck.

  She struggled for only a second.

  George tasted the bright poison of her blood burning a path down his throat, scorching him alive as he swallowed.

  Tasting his own death, George let the inert weight of the female pull his dazed body downwards into the sea

  Above, the bright stars glared in an indifferent sky. Below, the lights of the city twinkled paler and paler as the sun rose. To the west, the undisturbed sea stretched like molten silver.

  Songs

  I went to a workshop in the Oregon coast. One of the assignments was to write, in twenty four hours, a ghost story set in a particular room of a particular hotel assigned to us. I’d never written a story under that kind of deadline, with no time to think or research, and I felt as if I were staring down an abyss from which no idea emerged. Then I noticed the antique radio in the room. Phil and Nick came to life at that moment. Of all my characters they remain—no pun intended—two of the most haunting.

  Phil rode the accelerator the two hours from Portland airport to the coast, fuming on single lane stretches behind eighteen wheelers, and speeding up around them as soon as opportunity offered.

  He must find Nick; he must talk to Nick; he must explain.

  The impossibly tall trees clustered together on either side of the road, forming a green tunnel that enclosed the road on either side, reinforcing Phil’s impression that there was no turning back, no turning around. He was on a one-way road back to the past.

  Twenty years back.

  He lit one cigarette from the end of the other, the nicotine bitter on his tongue, soothing in his bloodstream. Clouds of smoke filled the small rental car.

  Tobacco smoke on Phil’s nostrils masked the chemical smell exuding from his every pore. Take enough medicine and you’ll start smelling like a pharmacy.

  It had been hell refraining from smoking all the way from Denver, in the plane.

  Damn, oh, damn, they should have flights for the dying only; for those beyond risk of illness from passive smoke—great flocks of moribund, shuttled through the sky in a cloud of bitter, soothing smoke.

  Cyanide or hemlock, sir? Will that be all?

  If only it were that simple.

  He chuckled, deep in his throat.

  If that could be all.

  To close one’s eyes and end it all.

  He longed for that nothingness like a tired child longed for bed after a long day.

  If only he could be sure of that rest, that nothingness, he wouldn’t submit to this nonsense of drug cocktails and the indignity of losing his senses and faculties one by one, of watching old age arrive prematur
ely and install itself in every mirror.

  He could stand not seeing his nephew and niece grow up. He’d come to accept that chances were one-year-old Stacy would become a woman with no memory of him. Ian would learn baseball from someone else. It wasn’t like his sister would ever mention him to the kids now. Not now.

  But what if consciousness and memory subsisted after death?

  He lit another cigarette and pushed the car, faster, faster, through the asphalt-paved tunnel amid towering trees.

  His dreams, if dreams there were after death, would be of Nick. Even Nick’s name, after all these years, still brought a reaction. Nick, Nicky, Nicholas Stevelanos. His heart went out to meet the syllables full of joy and winced away from them like a guilty child.

  Giving up Nick had been Phil’s greatest mistake ever. Abandoning Nick in that motel room, to face the cold morning alone, had been Phil’s most egregious crime.

  The one he didn’t want to answer for eternally.

  So now Phil would go back. He sucked in the bitter smoke, pressed the gas pedal and made himself think of finding Nick as a sure thing. He’d go back to the motel and Nick would be where Phil had left him twenty years ago.

  Twenty years.

  They’d been only twenty two. They’d just finished college. That last summer together, after four years as Nick’s roommate—as Nick’s lover—Phil had told himself over and over that he wasn’t really gay; that he just happened to really like Nick; that anyone would like Nick.

  At the threshold of adulthood, Phil couldn’t bear the thought of telling his large Italian family that he was gay, that he had a lover, that they would be living together. Phil had run from Nick to avoid facing up to the family; to avoid facing up to the world.

  Like it had helped. Like Phil’s family hadn’t found out. Like he hadn’t ended up being shunned and given the cold shoulder anyway. By everyone except Tessie, his sister, who lived in Denver.

  Even Tessie had turned remote and distant a year ago when he told her he’d tested HIV positive. She’d said something or other about not knowing he was promiscuous. As though he’d caught it from being promiscuous and not from sweet talking I’d-never-want-anyone-but-you Mike.

  Though maybe Mike had a point when he’d said that Phil had been unfaithful first, that Phil had always closed his eyes and thought of Nick.

  Phil made a face at his memory of the final argument with Mike, as he passed an eighteen wheeler.

  Mike could never compare to Nick. Nick who had had the voice of an angel the mind of a guiltless imp. Nick, with his large black eyes, his pointed little chin and his just-a-little-too-long fur-fine black hair always disarrayed around his pale-skinned face.

  That face would have been at home in an Elizabethan portrait, painted on a board, in an old fashioned inn, the background all black and only Nick’s face staring out.

  Only no portrait could capture Nick’s voice. Nick’s strong, clear voice that could lend depth to the most trivial of songs.

  Phil had tried to find Nick, off and on, through the last twenty years. When regret shook him, when another relationship collapsed, Phil hired detectives to find Nick.

  The detectives had traced Nick’s family. No clues there. His parents, once solid denizens of Akron, Ohio, had divorced. His father had moved to Italy, or maybe France. No one seemed to know for sure. His mother had dropped off the face of the Earth. Nick’s older sister had married an Australian and moved across the globe. Letters addressed to her came back unopened.

  So it had come down to Phil personally looking for Nick. And he was looking for Nick where he’d left him; in the same place where they had parted. As though Nick were a piece of clothing Phil had misplaced or a book he’d left half-read on the kitchen table, face down, waiting to be picked up and resumed.

  The arrogance of his action burned clear into Phil’s mind, as he turned off the highway and up the little curving ridge towards Gateways motel.

  It was where it should be and, thank God, didn’t look so different. Someone had got the brilliant idea of painting the boxy structure white with a blue trim, and of sprinkling little Swedish folk-couple motifs all around. A little picket fence encircled the handkerchief-size garden. Twenty years ago, the house had been green, and the garden an overgrown patch.

  Phil got out of the car, pulling his collar up against the chill wind from the sea. The houses around the motel looked as he remembered them: modest fifties cubes in Earth tones. Gold-port was not your most fashionable seaside resort.

  His heart beat fast, in anticipation, though he couldn’t say what he anticipated, not even to himself, without laughing.

  Nick couldn’t be inside this shabby motel, waiting for Phil. And yet, Phil’s heart beat near his throat.

  Okay, Nick, okay, last chance, he thought. He threw his cigarette butt down, stepped on it. Last chance to see me still looking more or less as you knew me. Last chance to see me grovel and beg your forgiveness. Last chance to hear me tell you I was an idiot and I should never have left. Last chance, Nicky. Oh, please, give me a last chance.

  A blonde woman, walking her dog, shot Phil an odd look. He forced a smile in her direction and hurried down narrow cement steps into the motel.

  The motel lobby looked just as Phil remembered—maybe large enough to hold three thin people. Mildew stained the wooden wall paneling. The receptionist’s desk was a narrow, waist-high table. It all smelled of stale crackers, though no crackers were in sight.

  A cheerful, matronly blonde smiled at him from behind the desk. “You’d be Mr. Cesari?” she asked. “Phillip Cesari?”

  Phil nodded.

  “I’m Joanna. I’m the manager here.” She reached under the desk for a key, handed it to him. “Room three, right? Well, they’re actually efficiencies, with a little kitchen, you know? Glad you requested it in advance, because normally it would be booked, with the weekend coming up.” She pointed him out of the office. “It’s out that door to your left as you go, down the sidewalk, and through the gate in the picket fence. Then straight ahead, down the five steps. If you find anything wrong, let me know.”

  Phil followed her instructions. Out and down to the left and through the garden gate, to a patio door that his key opened.

  Inside the room, memories returned. Phil’s mind showed him the suite as it had been superimposed on the suite as it now was. The violently green shag pile carpeting peeked through the ecru Berber of the nineties. The wide, wide brown couch trembled like a double exposure over today’s three prim blue and pink armchairs.

  On the couch, Nick reclined and smiled his cat smile. There was a pad of paper on his knees. He would be writing a song. Nick’s long hand moved over the paper, holding the pen; Nick’s black eyes stared straight into Phil’s.

  Phil stared and smiled at Nick, then swallowed, shook his head. Nothing there. His memory played tricks on him.

  The living room smelled musty. The only pieces of furniture Phil remembered was the brown Formica dining room table and the four metallic chairs clustered around it. They sat in front of the counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room.

  The small kitchenette had been painted white and decorated in blue Swedish motifs.

  Incongruous for an Oregon coast motel. Or maybe not.

  Phil knew little of the region and its ethnic composition. Twenty years ago, he and Nicky had come from Ohio for a month, because Nick’s parents had paid for them to take a vacation. Twenty years ago, neither Nick nor Phil had been interested in anthropological studies.

  Phil felt a vague discontent.

  In the bedroom that formed a short leg of an L off the living room the four poster bed had endured a coat of pastel pink paint, but it was the same bed Phil remembered in its natural pine state. Teddy bears adorned the top of the built-in dresser, the built-in vanity and the bedside table. Phil dropped his suitcase on the bed and frowned.

  He’d thought

  Back in the living room, Phil looked around again, as if expectin
g Nick to materialize out of the pale yellow walls.

  An old radio cabinet just inside the door called Phil’s gaze. It was narrow and its domed top stood waist high. Its ivory buttons were almost as yellow as the horrible paint someone had slapped on the fine old wood. Worse, someone had nailed pieces of wood on either side of the dome, so as to balance a TV on top of the radio.

  Nick’s grandparents had owned a radio like this, but it had been kept, waxed and spotless, in a corner of Nick’s grandmother’s living room.

  Phil’s discontent remained.

  A sense of let down set in, after his frantic race to get here. A feeling of emptiness made his throat close.

  Some part of him, some deluded part that still believed in happy endings and premonitions, must really have expected to find Nick here, sleeping on the bed, as Phil had last left him.

  Phil glared at the mirror on the wall, above the built-in chest of drawers. His sunken eyes glared back at him, from within dark circles.

  So, he didn’t have active AIDS. Something to be grateful for, these days, that the final illness could be kept away with drugs. But those same drugs robbed him of energy and strength, of desire to live and hope. Daily, almost hourly, they reminded him of the death sentence that hung suspended over his head.

  He ran his hands back through his brown hair, trying to ignore the grey threads. If cancer came—when cancer came—then the hair would be gone and perhaps, before long-drawn death finished her invasion of his ravaged body, he would long for his hair back, grey and all.

  For now Phil should sleep, recover from the journey. He needed his rest, a regular schedule. Dr. Michelopolis had been very specific about that. All the medicines in the world would not save him if he didn’t eat and didn’t sleep.

  So first the medicines.

  Phil pulled the first of his tablet case from his bag. The label, glued to the plastic cover of the giant daisy wheel, read “Six p.m.” It was five local time, so it would be six in Denver. The compartment for today contained the fifteen pills he’d carefully sorted and counted into it this morning, before leaving home. He had five such cases, carefully labeled with the hour at which he should take the medicines.