Chapter 13 #2
because after I cried “Oh my god” the mouth moved. Lips closed and opened. Teeth shone. A tongue shifted. Noise emitted. Actual
words.
The dragon spoke.
It said, “Now how did you end up here?”
I shrieked and cursed. Echoes of my screams bounced off the cavern walls. The dragon said “Shhhhh,” like a steam engine. Smoke
poured from its pursed lips, and I broke into a flurry of hacking coughs.
“Let me see if I can guess,” said the dragon. It unfurled itself and moved closer to me. It bent its head down. It sniffed
me. My clothes and hair flew upward, sucked in the air. “I would guess early 2000s. Definitely post-1950, but the smell of
entropy is strong—you’ve been here a while, haven’t you? Over a year I’d say. How’ve you managed to survive for so long? How’ve
you found me?”
“You can talk?” I gasped.
The dragon rolled its boulder-size eyes and leaned back. Its body was doubled over itself, rolled up in folds of craggy, armored
skin, so rocky and worn it wasn’t clear where dragon ended and earth began. “These conversations are always tricky,” he said—his voice rumbled with a devilish, male baritone, deep and throaty. “I know I’m probably causing a certain emotional
reaction right now, but please understand that this is just as novel an occurrence for me. Don’t spoil it with shallow quibbles.
Yes, I can talk. You should hear me scream.” His mouth didn’t move much when he spoke. I imagined some organ the size of a
house deep inside him, punctured with intricate flaps and holes, emitting such a booming voice.
“You’ve been here this whole time?” I surprised myself with the question, but it had been over a week since the dragon’s attack
and I had been out here every day digging things up. I remembered how the dragon had disappeared into a void of ash and smoke—we
had never seen it fly away.
“I try to get a few weeks of sleep between feedings,” he said.
“And I prefer the underground, where I won’t be disturbed.
When I was smaller, I used to sleep in trees.
I could perch like a bird and no one would be any wiser.
Now tell me, where did you come from? What’s your name?
” Gone was the dragon’s ferocious violence from weeks ago, all of that energy was condensed into a leering, sniffing eagerness.
Despite his size, he squirmed around the cave with ease.
His tail moved like that of a cat, snaking around me inquisitively.
“My name is George,” I said. “I came from over there.” I pointed vaguely over my shoulder, disoriented and overwhelmed. “On
the slope of the next hill over, a smallholding a few miles away.”
“No, no, no—your time. You time traveled. I can smell it on you.”
“What? Yes. Right. I time traveled.” Adrenaline coursed through me. I felt my forehead and it was ice-cold. My ears were hot.
“I came from here.” My mind blipped for a second. “But not originally. From London before. In the future.” I struggled to
find the words that would give an accurate account of my story. Breathlessly I told the dragon about the moment I had time
traveled, waking up in Greenwich in 1300, spending a whole year here. He was stoic the whole time, nodding along. He was a
terrifying, horned monstrosity, but he was calm and listening. It was like I was speaking to a travel agent about a holiday
that had gone horribly wrong. It wasn’t clear if he had ever had an interaction like this before, but he didn’t seem shocked
or surprised by anything I said.
“Spontaneous time combustion,” the dragon muttered to himself—but even his mutterings were loud enough to reverberate in my guts.
“Mental torture, emotional duress, heartbreak. Any number of combining factors can create ruptures and random collapses, which unfortunately only helps prove theories about entropy. You’re just a bunch of dust mites at the end of the day, so what if one of you flies through the window. ”
I noticed the dragon’s accent. It was unplaceable, but it was clear and modern, that was the most notable thing about it.
There was a calm, orderly tone to his voice, almost like a customer service rep explaining a tech issue. It gave me chills.
“You can time travel too,” I said.
“I can,” said the dragon. “I can come and go as I please, though I try to move sequentially when I can. I’m five hundred and
fifty-five years old and often lose track of where I’ve been. Sometimes I’ve run into myself—have you ever talked to your
literal self? It’s uneventful. It gets paradoxically boring because of course it’s a conversation you’ve already had with
your other literal self who said the same things before you, to you, ad nauseam. Still, it’s refreshing to have company, seeing
as I’m all alone.”
“You’re the only dragon?”
“Only one there’s ever been. I’ve seen my own birth, no brothers or sisters. I’ve seen it all. But not often a human in your
predicament.”
“But you have before? There have been others this has happened to?”
“Very rarely. Spontaneous time combustion can occur only once in a human, organically at least. My own father was a human, actually. I remember an egg breaking and a man’s hands.
I would sleep outside his house in a tree.
” The dragon paused here and exhaled a ponderous line of smoke like from a cigarette.
“Hey, I can take you back if you want. To your own time period. Name the place and I’ll take you there, go on, I’m dying to know. ”
My breath caught on itself. Through all the shock, I hadn’t considered this. “How does that work?” I asked. I was weak and
unsure. “You can just time travel whenever you want? How does a dragon show up in the future and not cause chaos?”
“Future? There’s no such thing as the future.” He chuckled. The cave walls shook. “And I have agreements with the places I
travel between, at least, with the places outside the entropic zone. My agreements are mutually beneficial, so nothing is
disrupted. We’re harmonized and recyclable.”
“That rubbish you spit out, the fire and the lava—it’s all stuff from the future.”
“Yes, but there’s no such thing as ‘future’ in the way you’re thinking of it, George. You imagine a clock ticking by—I can
think of no worse invention than a clock. In reality, time is its own living beast. It has a space which it occupies. Think
of it like me—time has a head, time has a tail, time has appendages that branch out from its body and grow, it’s always growing,
always moving forward.” The dragon extended an arm and flexed his claws. One clench of his fist could pulverize me.
“And you’re able to travel across this body of time,” I said. “You can travel to a place that’s more forward in time than
here. And what do you do there? You go and eat their rubbish, then come spit it out here? You’re some kind of bin collector
for the future?”
“I have my feedings and I have my expulsions, yes. They create a system of balances across time for all parties. I fulfill
a need that the world would be missing otherwise.”
I shook my head, unbelieving in this practicality.
“You took out a whole hillside the other day. The people here are finding bits of trash from the future—the king knows about you. Doesn’t that cause problems?
Where I came from there’s no such thing as dragons, but I’d imagine if you keep doing what you’re doing it would cause some kind of reaction.
” I was drunk on a delirium I had never felt before, words just slipping out of me.
The threat of very immediate danger—the dragon’s tree-trunk fangs, its rocky hide and slithering tail—couldn’t be disguised by the trickery of his more humanlike personality.
The dragon furrowed his brow. Large reptilian platelets folded upward and he shook his head. “No, no, no, that’s not how it
works, George, because there is no future. That’s what I’m trying to explain without causing you too much distress. What we’re
in right now, this is called the past. While your survival out here is commendable, it’s slightly misguided because you’re only an echo. Time has a head and a
tail, and this is the tail. Imagine a shooting star hurtling through space: there exists, at only one point and time, the
present. This world, even the world you came from, it’s all just the afterburn image of the present. The present is all there
is. That’s where it’s all happening.”
I had the sudden remembrance of stale coffee, dry cleaning, and industrial air-conditioning. “You came from the future?” I
asked. “How does a dragon—”
“I came from where I came from.” The dragon smiled a devilish, fanged smile. “I’m also half a millennium old. Time itself
is where I’m from. You’re wondering how a dragon could exist in the modern world—well what, George, is a modern world? I could
ask the same of you. Why would a man willingly send himself even further from the present?”
“Well, it wasn’t willingly,” I said. “And I think what’s considered present is pretty subjective. This is the world I’m living in and I’m very much alive.”
“I think you’d be surprised by all the ways you’re not,” said the dragon. He winked. The wink failed at being “knowing”—a
pinkish, translucent membrane slipped horizontally across his eye, under the main eyelid, reminding me just how much of an
animal he was. My cheeks flushed with warmth as blood rushed through me in different ways. I felt dumbstruck and without any
words to say. Well, I did have words to say—I wanted to ask, “So you’re saying nothing in the past matters?” but the words
felt too unreal to utter. The crisp modernity of the dragon’s speech had struck something inside me, knocking me off-balance.
His mere existence seemed to denigrate everything I had built in the past year. Everything was up in flames.
“So tell me,” the dragon said, “I can’t wait any longer. What year have you come from? I want to see if I’ve guessed correctly.”
I actually had to think for a second. I shook all weariness from my head, how clouded I was with disbelief and exhaustion,
and then I said it: “2026.” My voice cracked. The number sounded like an epithet.
“How queer.” The dragon—the enormity of him—smirked. “And what a shame. Right on the cusp of the entropic zone.” He moved
toward me. The bluntness of his pointed snout, the sharpness of his jagged teeth, his snake eyes, all of it made me back up,
but his tail was in the way. A wall of leathery skin hedged me in on every side.
“What’s the entropic zone?” I asked.
“I think you already know,” the dragon said. His eyes did the opposite of twinkle. “And I think you’d better get back to your smallholding.”
Suddenly I was lifted up. Ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred feet in the air. I was taken upward in the fastest lift in the world,
even though the dragon must have been moving comically slow in comparison, carrying me with both hands as you would a prized
piece of glassware. With his tail he broke a hole in the weakened roof of the cave, and the sun, for once, was not shining.
The horizon was awash with dwindling pink. Simon would be worrying about me, and I thought to myself almost as if in the voice
of the dragon, how pedestrian of a thing to do.
The dragon set me on the ground. “I’ll be leaving for my next feeding now,” he said. “I’ll return to this place in a few days’
time and I’ll have to do my expulsions again, but after, if you catch me before I fall asleep, I can send you back to your
own time. I’ll speak to my people and we’ll get it sorted. Twenty twenty-sixxxx—what a mouthful. Delicious.” Only his craggy,
twisted head showed above the surface of the earth, like a smiling, eager crocodile.
“If I want to come, what do I need to do?” I asked.
“Come to this cave after I’ve finished with my expulsions. Come alone. It won’t work on anyone who’s never time traveled before.”
“But what do I do? What happens? We just disappear?”
A jet engine took off: “HAHAHA.” The dragon’s bellows stormed the sky, dashing pebbles and rocks away from us in pulses.
“You’re too naive for a time traveler,” he said.
“If only you could be so lucky as to simply disappear—no, that’s a luxury reserved for me.
For you to be able to time travel, my new little friend, well .
. . I eat you.” I flinched. The dragon’s forked tongue flitted in between its needle teeth.
“I slurp you up like a noodle in a soup—like a noodle stuck in a—what do you call them? A straw? Like slurping through a straw. I gobble you up. I swallow you whole.”