Alan Foster - The Metrognome and Other Stories

There's plenty of terror amid the sunlight. It's just that most of us manage to shut it out. Occasionally, though, it impinges on our consciousness whether we want it to or not. The old drunk shambling across the street in front of the car. The bag lady sifting through garbage in hopes of finding something salable. The husband who goes berserk and murders eighteen family members in Arkansas. The teacher who finally has had too much and shoots a tormenting student.

That's true horror. Not bloodsucking aristocrats who turn into picturesque flying mammals or vast shapeless eminences from imaginary universes.

The line that separates the real world from unreality is thin and easily snapped, like cheap elastic. What is real and what is hallucination is not a matter of physics but of perception. Darkness is not always the catalyst for dreams. Life is as real as an individual desires it to be, or as insubstantial.

She saw Ehahm-na-Eulae clearly for the first time when she discovered Frank and her best friend, Maureen, in bed together. It was a nebulous, leering aquamarine smudge on the wall above and behind the water bed. Its long snout hung over the custom headboard, the sinuous body plastered against the woodwork and wall and ceiling like a huge, torpid spider. Clawed forelegs cupped the matching built-in bookcase at either side of the bed. Membranous wings scratched by livid arterial lines covered the ceiling from wall to wall.

Clearest of all the dimly perceived features were the dragon's eyes, bulbous citrine orbs cut by deep crimson slits: whip-scar pupils. Vitreous yellow bulbs, they seemed to float freely in their sockets like quicksilver on glass, mocking her. The triforked red tongue flicked nervously at her, and the armored tail caressed the ceiling.

Neither Frank nor Maureen noticed Ehahm-na-Eulae. They had neither the inclination nor the sensitivity to see him. Pearl had seen him several times lately, but never before in such detail. Wrinkled covers and sheets fell away from Frank's naked torso as he sat up fast. He brushed long black hair, away from his eyes and forehead, stared at her, and mumbled "Well, shit . . ."

How eloquent you are, Pearl thought wildly. How predictable. He was no prize . . . but Pearl was no prizewinner. Frank had been far better than nothing, a great deal better than the men she'd become used to. She'd had silly, little-girl hopes, fast fading now.

And Maureen . . . helpful, friendly Maureen . . . lay, lazily alongside traitorous dreams and smiled slyly, her grin a mixture of innocence and snollygostery.

To lose Frank was bad. To lose him to the one woman Pearl thought she could trust was worse. Emotional critical mass. Critical mess, she corrected herself hysterically. You read too goddamn much. She whirled and fled down the hall.

"Pearl . . . wait! Pearl, honey!"

Putting a restraining hand on his chest, the slim girl next to him ran her fingers through the curls there. "Forget it, Frank. There's nothing you can do now. Nothin I can do." She shrugged indifferently. "You can try to help someone like Pearl all you want, but some people are just born sorry."

"Yeah, but I . . ."

"There's nothing we can do," she repeated firmly. He allowed himself to be pulled down.

Halfway back to her own apartment Pearl stopped running. It was a foggy morning, and the beach on her left was still deserted. Stooped and jacketed against the Pacific chill, the lonely figure of some retired man stood silhouetted against the early morning light. He held a metal detector, moving the dish-shaped end back and forth across the bronze sand. Back and forth, back and forth, looking more insect than human, he formed a solitary icon of the elderly beach culture.

Waves massaged the tide line, sucking out and digesting the detritus of the weekend: beer cans; lost rubber sandals on their way back to Taiwan, forgotten toys, banana peels, thousands of fading cigarette butts, Popsicle sticks, sticky paper cones that had once held miniature cumulus shapes of cotton candy.

Her apartment did not face the ocean, but from her single window she could smell the distinctive sour seaweed odor. She mounted the two flights of stairs, pushed against the recalcitrant door, and stumbled inside. The secondhand alarm clock on the dresser insisted it was seven in the morning. She had– thirty minutes to get to work. No time for breakfast, even if she had been hungry. Just coffee.

A switch and several minutes turned the coils of the hot plate red; she, it, and the clock were the only alive occupants of the apartment. The hot plate and the ancient refrigerator filled what would have been the closet. There was a tiny bathroom nearby with a stall shower, john, and sink. The white porcelain was badly wounded, ugly black streaks and circles showing through.

Filling a cup with hot water from the pot on the hot plate, she added instant coffee and a little sugar, moved to the chair facing the window. Cream was a luxury not to be thought of.

She sipped tiredly. The water purchased by the beach city was highly mineralized. It gave the coffee a strong alkaline taste she could never get used to.

The window looked out on the apartment building across the alley. Yellow roll-up shades walled off the window directly opposite her own. She'd never seen they open. If humanity resided anywhere beyond that impenetrable barrier of faded yellow paper, she had no idea what it might look like.

Nor would she ever inquire. Prerequisites for communication in the megalopolis of Los Angeles were a willingness to initiate conversation and a car. Pearl had neither.

To her surprise, she found her hand was shaking. She'd thought Frank and she had it all together, and that had been helping her get it all together. Now her life was back where it had been last year, one of a karma kind with the broken windows in the back of the building that the garbage men consistently refused to pick up and that, the building's manager obstinately refused to break up and place in cans.

She surveyed her collection slowly, savoring each item so painfully paid for, and managed to smile. Her stopped shaking. A hobby was good for the soul, she'd been told. It also gave her something else to think about', besides her life, which had taken on all the aspects of permanent residence in a dentist's chair. A friend had suggested the hobby. That friend was dead, killed a year ago by a drunk driver, her body and mind shattered like, the windows back of the building's garage.

Bad year, Pearl thought, sipping. Worse before.

But the collection helped soothe her, took her mind off the comic-opera confrontation earlier.

The glass dragons stood neatly aligned on top of the dresser, guarding the steady tick of the old clock. Four dragon planters scattered around the room held plants in various stages of decomposition or health. The two coleuses were doing well, but they were notoriously tough.

The dieffenbachia was not as strong, and the purple velvet was nearly dead. But the planters alternately grinned or growled or pouted back at her, unchanged and overly enthusiastic.

Wings and teeth, claws and tails, scales and eyes of various size and composition and color filled the tiny room. They hinted at unknown lands and times, strange worlds where grace and power were the norm instead of the exception and wonderful magics made life a kaleidoscope of unending delight.

At night a dragon light lit the room, its horned head supporting the torn shade, a forty-watt bulb embedded neatly in its upcurving spine. From the ceiling hung a dragon kite, vast paper wings hiding the worst of the peeling plaster. Everywhere dragons concealed, brightened, or served some useful function.

Her thoughts drifted on the smell of decaying kelp and salt. Eventually they came around to consider the mist shape she'd thought she'd seen on the ceiling, wall, and backboard of the bed this morning. A fine dragon shape that had been!