Dagger Key and Other Stories

His mind burned with questions that she would never answer…or that she never could answer. And that, he thought, was the crux of the matter. She didn’t have all the answers. Perhaps she didn’t even have all the questions. If she was the queen of the house, why hadn’t the people he questioned on his first visit known her? Perhaps they had been dissembling, afraid to speak of her, but he didn’t think so. It might be that Grace was not the only power in the house, that there was still power to be had by anyone resourceful enough to grasp it. And then he wondered, if her contempt for him was as she stated, why had she appeared uncomfortable a moment before? Why had she looked away from him? It was as if she was putting on an act for someone and the act had broken down and she’d had to pull it together.

“That’s the spirit!” She tapped her forehead. “I can hear the wheels spinning. If anyone can beat the odds, it’s a great big criminal type like you!”

He could have sworn there was a note of urgency in her voice, of pleading. The uglies surged forward—she snapped at them and they heeled.

“Better get going, Roy,” she said. “I’d like to give you a head start, but I won’t be able to hold them much longer.”

He gripped a doorknob shaped like a hand, and the contact sent a cold charge through his emotions. If she wanted a game, he’d give her one. He’d give her all she could handle. But then he turned the knob, heard the uglies growling at his back, and his anger was drowned beneath a tide of terrible recognitions. The hopelessness of his situation, the complexity of the problem he confronted, and, most disabling of all, the appropriateness of the punishment he faced. To run ceaselessly, to hide, to exist—however fractionally—without the consolations that made existence endurable. He wondered where he would return when he returned to the world. Had to be the lake. Where else? He understood why it had seemed such a good fit. It was his resting place, his final worldly destination. He’d spend eternity, if eternity there was, scurrying through the maze of this black sedated house like a rat in a ruin—all that was left to him of heaven—and mooning about the lake where death and love had found him.

He set these considerations aside and opened the door, passing through flickering white lights and into the shadowy space beyond. He thought again of Grace, her clean beauty, the simple virtues he had so desired. She no longer seemed to embody those qualities, and it would have been easy to hate her; but though revenge had motivated her, or so she claimed, hating her was not in his best interests. If he was to win at this, he knew he had to make it a fool’s game, he had to play himself as she had played him…if she had. If she had been so accomplished an actress that she could counterfeit love in all its frailty, with its self-doubts and confident passions. The longer he considered the question, loping along a black corridor that led everywhere and nowhere, the more certain he became that she was acting now, that her coldness and sarcasm were a show designed to impress some hidden, watchful eye. The real power in the house. And the break in her voice, the momentary lapse in tone…it had let her true self come through. She wanted his help, she was depending on him, but had to present a hostile front in order to maintain her position. And if he were wrong, well, what would be the harm in that? Better to be wrong forever than to live without hope.

He hewed to this logic, letting it build an inspiring edifice within him, gothic and noble, with great arches and vaults into which he could pour his faith, a statue of a redheaded Virgin upon its altar, and, hearing the faint sounds of pursuit at his back, with love in his heart, he began to run.

LIAR’S HOUSE

In the eternal instant before the Beginning, before the Word was pronounced in fire, long before the tiny dust of history came to settle from the flames, something whose actions no verb can truly describe seemed to enfold possibility, to surround it in the manner of a cloud or an idea, and everything fashioned from the genesis fire came to express in some way the structure of that fundamental duality. It has been said that of all living creatures, this duality was best perceived in dragons, for they had flown fully formed from out the mouth of the Uncreate, the first of creation’s kings, and gone soaring through a conflagration that, eons hence, would coalesce into worlds and stars and all the dream of matter. Thus the relation of their souls to their flesh accurately reflected the constitution of the Creator, enveloping and controlling their material bodies from without rather than, as with the souls of men, coming to be lodged within. And of all their kind, none incarnated this principle more poignantly, more spectacularly, than did the dragon Griaule.