The Catalogue and the Dead H.
The Catalogue
The warrior held a catalog of dragons he had ordered from a shop down the road. Not one photograph corresponded with the dragon he knew. The blurb boasted it had the record of every existing dragon, alive or dead, including lineage, employment, published material in extract, education, esoteric orders, universities, awards, citations, bankruptcies, divorce, cemetery plot, memorial. He examined it several times looking for lacuna. Nothing. He threw it into the fire.
Before it burnt entire, he noticed something odd. He lifted it out of the fireplace and flattened it, spreading ash everywhere. He saw a line drawing, a profile rather handsomely accomplished.
He had hoped to verify suppositions regarding the dragon. Was he actually a dragon? It appeared not, for he was not listed inside the catalog. However, the fire portended something. He meant to inquire in person.
He stuffed the drawing into his pocket and strode off to the shop.
The front window was clouded over. A sign had been posted: ‘Dr. Agon.’ Was a medical doctor within?
“Nurse!” a matronly receptionist bellowed as the warrior came into view. “Another patient.”
“I haven’t introduced myself.”
She screwed her lips
The nurse, meanwhile, had opened the door at the rear of the room and gave a startled cry. “A warrior.”
“Are you a nurse?”
She nodded.
“I want to meet the directors.”
Dr Agon sat at ease amid a body of dragons. “We hoped you would arrive, warrior.”
He began the procedure by placing a scalpel on the table.
The warrior clenched his fists.
Dr Agon laughed. “We do not intend to use force. We are not so sinister as you may imagine.”
“Then why the sharp instrument?”
“We are going to dissect.”
The warrior wondered which was the cadaver among them.
Dr Agon rose heavily from his seat. He gestured toward an empty chair opposite him across the table. “Be seated. You are among friends.”
The warrior could not agree. He recognized his former wife, Nancy, and her lover, Joe among the group. He wondered at that. Were these dragons truly his friends?
Dr Agon clapped his hands and a door opened revealing a bound dragon blinking at the light.
The warrior gasped. It was his friend, the dragon.
“Guards, bring the patient before me,” the doctor ordered.
The heretofore-stolid guards, now aflame with purpose, manhandled the dragon, buffeting him, and then threw him at Dr Agon’s feet.
“Stand, John,” so the doctor named him. “You have come to trial at last. Do you have any statement to make, utterance, vague remark, invention, prophecy, or narrative?”
John shook his head, “No.”
“Speak up, man,” puffing on a cigarette. “Have you no shame?”
“I am unjustly bidden here and I demand release.”
The warrior could stand it no longer. He stood. “What is the charge laid against him?”
The body of dragons looked hard at the warrior.
Dr Agon, however, explained in a patient fatherly voice, “You supply the charge.”
The warrior sat and considered this fly in the ointment. Accusation? He had come only with questions about the dragon and the catalog. He hadn’t expected this. “I am unprepared, Doctor. Give me a moment.”
Dr Agon graciously acquiesced. “Not more than that.”
The warrior turned to look his ex-wife in the eye, but she continually gazed absently beyond him or into her lover’s face. The warrior drew away and contemplated.
“Well?” the doctor demanded.
The warrior pointed his finger at John and asked, “In divorce it is hard to find first causes. Both man and woman are to blame. Yet in this case your arrival to our house, into which we welcomed you and your wife as a long term guests, precipitated my own divorce. Was the gazing at the Ouija board, and your interpretations from other planes, and the bringing down of spirits of the dead responsible for the mayhem that ensued. I almost from overwhelming passion killed her and her lover. Did the occult intrude into our world through your clairvoyance? Weren’t you the harbinger of disaster.”
The doctor smoked down his cigarette to its last bit. He wrote rapidly on a pad of paper. The secretary read aloud, “Dismissed. John stands acquitted.”
Dr Agon took off his mask and revealed a happy face, more sensitive and youthful, delineated by good fellowship and humor, the face of a giant. He opened his palm, a signal to all the dragons to leave. Only the warrior remained rooted to the spot.
Stretched out on the table was a cadaver that looks uncannily like his recently dead father.
“Are you visiting casually?” the warrior asked.
His father worked his mouth, but no words emerged.
Dr Agon’s scalpel glinted in the afternoon sun.
The warrior cut away the dark psychological miasms that had poisoned his father’s physical matter. The labor required infinite skill and dexterity. He slew the larger demonical shapes with his sword.
At last the cadaver, now lighter than air, floated off into space.
The Dead H.
He went out and walked toward a nearby park. Distracted by what had just ensued, he had not noticed three dragons waiting for him.
They held him at bay beneath the leafy expanse of a vast tree. They pressed spears into his chest.
“Do you think we should unman him?” one of the dragons asked his mates.
They grinned.
“Is there not a sheriff about?” the warrior asked.
One of dragons snorted, “I am the sheriff.”
“Then I am free.”
The dragons only dug the spears a bit further into his chest so that blood began to dribble down his shirt. “We suspect you have been negligent and violated codes and codes of code of conduct. “
“Your proof?”
A dragon pulled an object of childish fascination from a breast pocket. It was a tiny red plastic airplane. “Do you recognize this?”
He had always been entranced by that airplane.
“We stole this from your father’s coffin last night.”
The warrior laughed hysterically. “How was this possible? Might I have that airplane?”
“Only if you promise to give it back.” He handed it to the warrior who took it and studied it with waspish intensity.
“I see my father at the controls of his plane. Who made this miracle?”
The dragons shrugged their shoulders.
“I’ll demonstrate how it works myself.”
His father ignored him, as he was too engrossed with his own self.
“Father, I am your son.”.
The warrior devoted his entire intelligence to the figure sitting beside him. They flew through the sky. By what means he had entered the plane, he could not comprehend.
“Do they say you resemble me?” his father asked.
The warrior stammered. “No one mentions you. You are scarcely remembered.”
His father, H., pulled hard on the throttle, and the plane shot vertically upward.
“Dad, where are we going?” After all, H might have gone mad after his death. The warrior searched outside the window for a clue as to their whereabouts.
“Where ever you might like to go.”
The warrior nodded.
“Would you like to visit your mother?”, vaguely pointing down with his hand.
“I am not sure how we have finally met?”
H. coughed. He spoke into the microphone in an unrecognizable language.
“What was that?”
A voice from the microphone explained, “That was the language of the dead H.”
The microphone cackled, probably from some interference.
The warrior tried to grasp the uniqueness of the situation. “Dad, I have questions for you.”
“I will listen.”
The roar of the engines increased to such a high pitch the warrior could hardly hear his own voice. Nevertheless, he pushed on.
‘Were you conscious when I identified you for the last time before the attendants sealed the coffin?”
H. reached for his breast.
The warrior felt a growing numbness and a broken heart of his own. “Did you allow yourself to sicken and die? Is there a poetic correspondence between your manner of death and your way of life?”
H. sat stolidly at the controls.
Tears welled up in the warrior’s eyes, just like at the gravesite. “Does life grow more bitter as one matures?”
H. shouted something, but it was incomprehensible. He pushed the warrior against the door of the plane with astonishing strength. The warrior fell headlong out of the plane, and watched the plane disappear into a point of light. He floated down to earth, wondering if he would ever see him again.
The three dragons happened to be lounging on a verandah just where the warrior touched down.
“Did you enjoy your flight? What about the view?”
He replied, “The sky is immense.” In vain, he searched that immensity, and then returned the airplane to them.
Warrior, Felt, Undertaker, and other stories 