Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Dragons?" Prentice said, sounding excited and wary at once. Rory felt the boy tremble.

"Yeah," Rory said. "I used to hide under the covers of my bed at night, imagining there were dragons out there; in the room when the light was out, when there was nobody else there. I'd hunch down under the covers with just an air-hole to breath through, and shelter there. The dragons couldn't get you through the air-hole; they could only get you if you put out a foot or a hand, or worst of all your head; that was when they struck; bit it off, or pulled you right out and ate all of you."

"Waa! Alien!" Prentice said. His arms squeezed Rory's neck.

"Yeah," Rory said. 'Well, I guess a lot of horror films come from that sort of background. Anyway; I used to be petrified of these dragons, even though I knew they probably didn't exist; I mean I knew there was no Santa Claus, and no fairies and elves, but still thought ghosts and dragons were a possibility, and it only took one to kill you… I mean how did I really know I could trust adults? Even mum and dad? There were so many things I didn't really understand about people, about life. Most of the time you could just ignore a lot of the stuff you didn't know; it'd come in time, you'd be told when you needed to know… But how did you know that there wasn't some big secret, some big, evil deal going down that involves you but had been kept secret from you?

"Like, maybe your parents were just fattening you up until you would make a decent meal for these dragons, or it was an intelligence test; the kids smart enough to have sussed out the fact there were dragons around were the ones that would survive, and the ones that just lay there, trusting, each night, deserved to die, and their parents couldn't tell them or the dragons would eat them, and stories about dragons were the only clues you were ever given; that was all the adults could do to warn you… I was pretty paranoid about it. I used to be frightened to fall asleep at night sometimes, afraid I'd stick my head out from under the clothes while I was asleep and wake up to find my head in a dragon's mouth, before I died."

"Wow!"

Rory grunted, shifting Prentice's weight again. Kid wasn't so feather-light after all. "But then one night, under the covers — I was just getting older, I guess, but anyway — I was sort of reviewing the day, and I was thinking about school, and what we'd learned, and we'd been doing the Second World War, and I hadn't liked the sound of this Hitler guy at all; and I'd asked dad, just to double-check, and —»

"So he was still alive? When you were ten?"

"Oh yeah; didn't die until I was twelve. Anyway; he brought down this book; history of the War in pictures, and it had like all these photos of the death camps, where the Nazis murdered millions of Jews, and communists, and homosexuals, and gypsies and anybody else they didn't like… but mostly Jews, and there were like just piles of bodies; incredibly thin bodies, like bones; skeletons wrapped with tissue paper, and piled higher than a house… and pits; long pits full of bodies, and the metal stretchers they were put onto to be shoved into the ovens, and the piles of wedding rings and spectacles; glasses, and even artificial legs and weird stuff like that…

Anyway, that night they put a night-light in my room, in case I had nightmares, but the shadows were even worse than the darkness, and so I just lay there, under the covers, quivering with fear thanks to these damn dragons, and I wished Ken was back from University because sometimes I was allowed to sleep in his room, and I wished I was allowed a torch in my room, but 1 wasn't, and I was wondering about crying really loudly, because that would bring mum and dad in to see me, but then what did I say was wrong? And then I suddenly thought…

The dragons might be there; they might be real and they might be every bit as vicious as I'd imagined, but I'm a human being; so was Adolf Hitler and he killed millions of people!

"And I threw back the bedclothes before I had any more time to think about it and burst out of the bed; threw myself into the middle of the bedroom, screaming and roaring and thrashing about."

"Ha!" Prentice said, squirming.

"That brought mum and dad through; thought I was having a fit or something. But I just looked up from the carpet with this great big reassuring smile and said there was nothing to worry about." Rory smiled at the memory, bringing his head up to look around. A break in the dunes let the sound of surf grow louder. There was a car in the distance coming towards them.

"Brilliant!" Prentice said.

Rory grunted, shifting Prentice's weight once more. "Never had any trouble with dragons after that."

"I'll bet you didn't!"

The car hummed nearer as the view to one side slowly opened up through the dunes to reveal the shining beach and blue-green ocean.

"Let's see if we can get a lift off this car, eh?" Rory said. "You okay to get down?

"Yeah!" Prentice slid off onto the grass and stood there, favouring his good leg, while Rory stretched and rubbed at his lower back. He stuck one thumb out when the car was still a few hundred yards away. Prentice reached up and put something on the thin collar of Rory's shirt. It was the little paper Lifeboat flag. Rory held his collar out so that he could look at it. He looked down at the boy's grinning face. "Thanks," he said.

"That's your medal, Uncle Rory," Prentice told him. "For being a brilliant uncle."

Rory ruffled the boy's hair. Thanks, Prentice." He looked back at the car. Was it slowing?

"I used to worry about Darth Vader," Prentice confessed, putting his arm round Rory's waist and lifting his foot to massage it with one hand. "I'd lie under the covers and make the noise he makes when he's breathing, and then I'd stop, but sometimes it would go on after I'd stopped!" Prentice shook his head, and slapped one hand off his forehead. "Crazy, eh?"

Rory laughed, as the approaching car started to slow down. "Yeah, well, that's what stories do to you, sometimes. Your dad's always tried never to tell you lies, or stories that would scare you or make you superstitious, but —»

"Ha!" Prentice said, as the battered Cortina II drew to a stop just past them. "I remember he tried to tell us clouds came from the Steam Packet Hotel, in the town. That's what they were: packets of steam from the Steam Packet Hotel. Ha!"

Rory smiled as they walked towards the car, him supporting the limping boy. Rory looked away for a second, towards the beach, where the long Atlantic rollers crashed against the broad expanse of gold.

He sniffed the glass; the whisky was amber, and there wasn't much of it. The smell stung. He put it to his lips, hesitated, then knocked it back in one go. The drink made his lips and tongue tingle; his throat felt sore and the fumes went up his nose and down into his lungs. He tried very hard not to cough like he'd seen people cough in westerns when they tried whisky for the first time, and got away with just clearing his throat rather loudly (he looked round at the curtains, afraid somebody might have heard). His eyes and nose were watering, so he pulled his hanky from his trousers, blew his nose.

The whisky tasted horrible. And people drank this stuff for pleasure? He had hoped that by trying some whisky he'd understand adults a bit better; instead they made even less sense.

He was standing between the curtains and the windows of the ballroom of the Steam Packet Hotel, on the railway pier at Gallanach. Outside, the afternoon was wet and miserable-looking, and what little light there had been — watery and grey — was going now. Sheets of rain hauled in off the bay, blew around the steamers and ferries moored round the windswept quay, then collapsed upon the dark grey buildings of the town. The street lamps were already lit, and a few cars crawled through the rough-mirror streets with their lights on and their wipers flapping to and fro.