N. Wilson - The Dragon's Tooth

Holding his breath, Cyrus tugged open the door and looked into the dim light of a dank and stale cave.

The floor and wheel wells were covered in a heavy carpet, which was in turn covered with filthy blankets, cardboard boxes, empty whiskey bottles, a cracked milk crate, tattered books, a stained pillow, and used tissues. Glass from a small skylight had melted out and rehardened in the carpet. The space smelled like wet dog.

He leaned in.

Photos lined one side of the camper. They were hung neatly, in two parallel rows of ten. Most of them were black-and-white. All of them were of faces, and over the top of each face, drawn crudely in blue ink, there was a skull. Just beneath the ceiling, the whole wall had been labeled with black sticker lettering:

GUILT

“Okay.” Cyrus exhaled slowly. “This is creepy.” He looked back over his shoulder. The black sedan was idling. Horace wasn’t visible.

Cyrus climbed into the camper and knelt in front of the photos. Men. Women. Happy. Serious. Young. Old. All hidden behind skeletal scribbling. But there was a woman’s face near the end of the second row with only half a blue skull. White hair spread out on a starched hospital pillow. Eyes were closed in sleep.

Catherine Smith.

“No.” Cyrus tried to swallow, but his throat slammed shut. That was his mother’s halo of hair. Those were her closed eyes. Gulping, he snatched the picture off the wall. He wanted to crumple it, but he couldn’t do that to her. He looked up, eyes racing over the others. Top left. Second from the end. Blond hair in one of the few color shots. Eyes smiling behind a mask of ink, barely visible teeth and a prominent nose. The ocean and its cliffs were visible over his father’s shoulder.

Antigone had the same picture in one of her albums.

Cyrus reached for it and stopped. Something else was tucked behind it, another photo. Pinching the white corner of a Polaroid, he slid it out.

The picture had been taken in the camper. Daniel’s head was lolling against the bottom row of skull photos. Blood had dried on his forehead.

Slowly, stunned, Cyrus turned the image over in his hands. Someone had scrawled on the back.

Ashes, ashes, you all fall down .

“Cy!” Antigone’s voice jerked at him. Tugging down his father’s picture, he slid out of the dim camper and into the sunlight, eyes watering in the brightness. Antigone was storming toward him, fists clenched, mouth open.

“Jeepers, Cy!” Flustered, relieved, Antigone brushed back her hair and then hit Cyrus in the chest. “No disappearing!” Blinking, he stepped backward. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it. “If you disappear, too, I’ll take your scalp.”

The sky seemed to slip out of place as Cyrus looked up, fighting to breathe, fighting to keep hot, angry eyes from overflowing. Fear, with all its enormous weight, pressed down on his chest and slid through his ribs, filling him, stifling his lungs. In his hands, the three photos felt as heavy as tombstones. His sister took them.

“What?” Antigone asked. “What are these supposed—” She stopped. Cyrus turned away, numb, unwilling to watch his sister’s face. His legs somehow carried him to the waiting car.

The drive was hardly quiet. It was a big car, with two backseats facing each other. Even though the seats were wider than some couches, Antigone was right next to Cyrus and she couldn’t hold still. She yelled at Horace. She demanded a phone. She demanded the police. But by the time the Archer had disappeared around a bend, Cyrus heard none of it and he ignored her thumping. His forehead was resting against his window, bouncing with the road. While his fingertips mindlessly tracked the blistered braille around his neck, his eyes were racing through the drainage ditch, skimming over gravel, faded soda cans, plastic jugs, and cattails and grass and scum-spotted puddles. Just like his life. He had no answers. He had no control. He couldn’t make anything happen, and he couldn’t stop anything from happening. And only one kind of anything ever happened. He was a paper cup in the surf, a bulb of kelp torn up and thrown onto the beach, thrown all the way to Wisconsin.

Dan was gone. Why? There were people who would happily kill for the keys in Cyrus’s pocket. An old man — his godfather? — had been murdered for them in Cyrus’s room. Did those killers think Dan had them? That he knew where they were?

Another home was gone.

Lifting his head slightly, Cyrus let his skull thump back against the window. He shouldn’t have taken the keys. Skelton would be just as dead either way. The Archer would be just as burnt. But Dan would be stressing out about the motel and food and clothes and showers. He would be here, coming to breakfast.

Straightening his leg, Cyrus dug the key ring out of his pocket. Antigone grew quiet. Horace, perched on his broad leather seat with his back to the driver, adjusted his glasses.

Cyrus slid his finger through the center ring and let the weight dangle from his hand.

“If these are what they want, who do I give them to?” he asked. “The guy called Maxi? Do you know how to find him?”

Antigone looked at Horace. The little lawyer pursed his lips. The driver’s eyes flitted up in the rearview mirror.

“Well?” Antigone said.

Horace cleared his throat. “No, thank God. I do not.”

Antigone turned to her brother. Cyrus was expecting anger in his sister’s eyes, but he didn’t find it. Her eyes were like he remembered his mother’s being whenever he’d gotten hurt — which had been often. She wasn’t angry. She was in pain.

Blinking, Cyrus looked at the keys in his hand. “I’m sorry, Tigs. I didn’t know. I couldn’t.”

“I know.” Antigone tucked back her hair and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I would have kept them, too, Cy. You know I would have.”

Horace slid forward, onto the edge of his seat. Reaching out, he set one hand on Cyrus’s knee, and one hand on Antigone’s. “I am going to say something that may initially be perceived as wildly insensitive.” He coughed politely. “There are worse things in this world than your current circumstances. And an entire flock of those worse things — I do profoundly believe this to be the truth — would now be under way if the gentleman called Maxi was now in possession of what you, Mr. Cyrus, have been given. Worse for you, worse for all of us.” He sat up. “Ah, breakfast. And well earned, too.”

The car swung off the road, bouncing to a stop. Cyrus opened the heavy door and stepped out into a gravel parking lot and the sticky morning heat.

Antigone followed him, slamming the door behind her. Horace was already hurrying toward a low green-and-yellow building lined with murky windows. Behind it, tangles of brush were swallowing barbed-wire fencing, where a single cow was rubbing its shoulder against a sighing fence post. On top of the building, a large, flaking plywood sign spelled out PATS’ in hand-painted letters.

Antigone kicked a rock and watched it bounce away. “I couldn’t eat anything right now. Especially not here. Do you think they have a phone?”

“Who knows,” said Cyrus. The two of them moved toward the door. “Do you think it’s owned by someone named Pats? Or is there more than one Pat?”

Horace had stopped at the door. Pulling it open, he stepped to the side and smiled. “Mr. Cyrus, I wouldn’t have thought that you would be one to notice — or care about — an apostrophe.”

Cyrus glared at him.

“Right. Well, there are two Pats,” Horace said. “And this place belongs to both of them.”

Inside, Horace hustled all the way down to the far end of the long, dim dining room and squeezed into a corner booth.

Antigone looked around, irritated. “This place is a hole. Do you see a phone, Cy?”