Chapter 19 To Cage a Dragon
TO CAGE A DRAGON
I shield my eyes from the light until they can adjust. Overhead, a sturdy fixture of dark metal comes into focus, cupping a glowing, old-fashioned bulb.
I had to crouch and scuttle through the door, but the walls are a reasonable twelve feet apart.
I can see now that they are lined not only with brick but also a thick spread of black tar over which a dizzying pattern of words and drawings has been scribbled in something similar to white chalk, but gritty, more permanent.
I recognize the same soft-slanting script from the outside, lean and fast as letters go but not ours.
These look older than the Roman alphabet, Middle Eastern maybe, but I couldn’t say what the language is.
The words move in all directions, as if the writer had no sense of bearing, no care for the readers who came after.
And they are broken up only by geometric drawings—circles, lines, triangles—that have been fitted with the writing and intersect in such complex ways as to remind me of crop circles, blighting the fields of England in beautiful, fractal designs.
Even the ceiling and floor are rendered in a crazed aberration of letters and drawings, which circle the light as if holding it in place.
It seems to draw the walls inward in an optical illusion, making the space smaller than it is, stifling the air. A wave of claustrophobia overcomes me.
A clang echoes off the walls, reverberating through me, and I realize Arla has closed us in, locking the door from the inside.
“Just a precaution, kitten.” She steps toward the center of the room.
Dubious, I spin slowly, taking everything in, afraid to touch the wall in case the frenzy is contagious.
The room is empty except for a ring of dull, unexceptional stones rising from the center of the floor, maybe six feet across, mortared tightly together and capped by an iron lid cast with the same symbol I’d seen drawn at the bottom of the note cards.
The entire thing is slick with glistening slime mold, blazing a deep purple-black.
Gelatinous and sleek, it branches and trails, rushing from beneath the lid in a semiaquatic mess crisscrossing the structure like ganglia in the brain.
“A well?” I ask, incredulous. “Here?”
“Did you have somewhere else in mind?” she retorts.
I shake my head, baffled. “Elliott Bay is right outside your door. The flooding, the saltwater infiltration—”
“Relax, kitten,” she says, stopping me. “It’s not for drinking.”
“It’s not?”
“No.” She stifles a simpering smile. “You might even say it’s not really a well.”
“What is it?” I ask.
She approaches the stones and lays the tips of her fingers gently against the iron lid. “This, Jude, is the Fathom.”
I look at her. “I thought you were the Fathom, you and Brennan and the rest.”
“I am,” she says, smiling sweetly. “And now so are you. But this…” she says, tapping the broad iron circle, “this is the source.”
“The source of what?” I step nearer but remain cautiously apart from her, uncertain of what she might reveal next.
“Our source, Jude.” She turns, sits lightly against the edge of the stone circle, resting her hands on it. “Do you remember the story I told you about the great fire and the second Seattle?”
I nod.
“Many people attribute that fire to a carpenter’s overturned glue pot.
At least, that’s the official account. But if you look at the original reports, there were discrepancies.
First it was a paint shop, then a boot and shoe store, then the poor young cabinetmaker.
Fact is, it was pandemonium. You can’t blame them for getting it wrong. ” Arla crosses her arms.
“Getting what wrong? What does any of this have to do with this room?” I slide a step away, wary.
“The truth,” Arla says, “is that it wasn’t a man who started that fire at all.
Just like it wasn’t a man who was responsible for the flooding that plagued the first version of our city and forced them to build up.
” She stands, reaching over to untwist a large dogbolt like those seen on a porthole cover, then another and another, each one scraping and squealing as they give.
“Then what was it?” I ask, watching her, curious despite my concerns. I know a thing or two about inexplicable fires. Heat blazes against my fingertips, the memory trapped forever in my skin.
Arla grins as if she hoped I’d ask this question and lifts the heavy iron lid, which swings up on an equally heavy iron hinge. “This.”
I step forward, neck craning, eyes darting from Arla’s face to the opening yawning before me.
This is the moment when the villain pushes the unsuspecting damsel over the ledge.
I’ve seen it in enough movies to know. If I were smart, I wouldn’t get near that ring of eldritch stones.
But I’m like Anneli now, less smart than I am driven, and by something I can no longer contain.
When I get close enough to peer over the edge, my toe bumping a seeping stone, all I see is a ripple of black water, the light above reflecting off its gently swaying surface. I look at Arla, confused. “It’s just a well.”
“Look harder,” she says, encouraging me like she would a scared child, with a fake smile and a friendly dip of her head.
I look down again, watching the reflected light move gently across the surface of the water, at times taking the shapes of the letters written around me.
Until suddenly the picture changes, and I don’t see the letters at all but the glittering white columns of Solidago, the house spreading over the water in a pale shadow, exactly as it was the day I first saw it.
A cry emits from my throat, horror and grief commingling, and I clap a hand over my mouth.
The image breaks apart, a disturbance under the water rippling up, and my eyes claw their way back up to Arla’s gaze. I know now where she’s been getting her information, even if I don’t understand how it works.
She moves around the well and takes my hand, pulling me close to her side, surprisingly strong. My fingers ache in hers, but she doesn’t seem to notice how hard she’s squeezing. Together, we peer down a third time. “Qum!” she commands the water.
Darkness fills the well like smoke, hypnotic whorls of velvety night seeping up from the bottom, emanating from the water itself, opaque as squid ink, sucking at my eyes until I am peering into a blackness so dense I can scarcely recall the existence of light.
It is a place, an experience, a death I know firsthand.
Suddenly, the smoke parts, drifting to the edges, and the water pulses black and easy until a ripple crests across it, circling out like the years of a tree, followed by another and another and another.
I tug against Arla’s hand, but she won’t let go, and I can’t tear my eyes away even as the water grows more volatile, rocking in large waves that slap the sides of the well and break open in a frenzy of bubbles.
My other arm goes to Arla’s hand, attempting to claw her off me, but she is clamped down, a mollusk that must be pried open, and her face has taken on a prideful, manic gleam.
Even as I struggle, I cannot look away, knowing that something in that water is hurtling toward us from the depths. And I must know; I must see.
There is a heavy splintering sound that echoes up from the well, and it sets my insides quivering, legs barely able to stand.
A fin splits the surface and arcs back under, blue like the dorsal of a legendary marlin but spiked with the menacing black spines of an overgrown sea urchin.
It goes on and on, longer than any fish I’ve ever seen, and I watch rapt as each segment passes, a mixture of horror and awe filling me.
Beneath it, I can make out the pocked and mottled flesh of an eel, currents of electricity igniting along its surface, charging the water until it froths.
Finally, it disappears, and the water goes slack, only to be ruffled again as the long, dark hair of a woman emerges, swathing across the surface—the locks of a siren Rapunzel.
My mind works quickly to piece these impossibilities together, but before it can, one tentacle rises from the water followed by three more.
Dark and oily like the feathers of a crow they come, lined with slurping white suckers as if they are scenting the air.
They reach toward me, grasping, and for a mad second I want to reach back.
Until they fall against the water with a slap, spraying our faces in dirty droplets, and break apart into dozens of silvery-scaled fish.
A school of herring stirs the water to a boil in their panic, skipping the surface and flashing like aluminum in the sun, causing me to blink rapidly against the assault of shadow and light before they eventually sink out of sight one by one.
We wait, holding our breath for several long seconds before the water stills, whatever lurks within it receding from view, darkness spreading over the surface, hiding even our reflections.
Arla’s grip on me relaxes and I jump back. I want to press myself into the bricks that surround us for support, but don’t dare.
She lifts her fingers to her face and gently dabs at the drops of water, awe mixing with something far less innocent. “Now … You see.”
The light overhead burns into me, the painted letters singeing my retinas in white-hot fire. I suddenly can’t bear to look at them. “What was that thing?” I ask Arla, my mind reeling. Fish, woman, cephalopod, mermaid … monster.
“That is the Fathom, Jude.” Her eyes shine with fervor as she starts toward me. “That is our source. That is our god.”
I shake my head. The impossibility of it firmly burrowed there, Anneli’s deer-headed shadow more real, more plausible than I first dared to dream.
“The night of the Great Seattle Fire there was another man. Not a carpenter or a painter but a Latvian immigrant, an autodidact and a polyglot with a zeal for ancient civilizations, dead languages, and Solomonic demonology. A man who had been planning and building and plotting for this day, the perfect opportunity to trap what he, and only he, recognized to be the source of the floods that plagued his less-than-fair city. And so he did. But not before it unleashed a vengeance so fraught it took most of Seattle with it. I believe you know a bit about what that feels like,” she said, seizing me by both arms.
I break free of her, twisting away, and back around the well. “How do you know this?”
Arla shrugs. “He left his journal behind, in this very room in fact. A detailed, calculated account of what he knew and what he intended to do about it. What drew him here, the plans, the research and construction, the moment of capture and everything that came after. This was his great white whale, his Moby Dick, harpooned with words instead of weapons, bound and bewitched. And now it’s mine. ”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Edward Rudzitin caged a dragon, kitten. And that dragon is here. That dragon is now. And she belongs to me.” Her face is sharper than I remember, hungrier. It bores into mine from across the room, cheekbones like knives, chin wicked as a thorn.
Rudzitin’s Pit Show … Oracle of the Pacific. The poster simmers in the background of my mind, a vital piece of this intricate puzzle I’m still placing.
“Dragon?” My brain seizes on this, adds it to the list, but still I can’t make heads or tails of it. “Or demon?”
She smiles. “Some men might call her a demon, but those men are blind and stupid. The Fathom is not a thing you can easily name,” she says, her voice rolling at the edges as if she is willing herself to soften it.
“Frankly, I don’t give a good goddamn what she is.
She is old—likely older than this world. And she has power.”
My head aches with everything it’s trying to process, unable to comprehend what she’s saying. “You say ‘power,’” I tell her, “but you mean magic, don’t you? She has magic. Like ours.”
Slowly, fragments are beginning to slot themselves into some kind of traceable order.
Arla’s information, her ability to siphon our magic, her power over us comes from this room, this being caged within it.
The club above, her little circle—everything has been built on this foundation.
The journal Rudzitin left behind is an instruction manual in summoning.
“She is the magic, Jude. Yours. Mine.” She stands before me, calmer but still buzzing with energy, like a prophet with a message she can’t unload fast enough. “And I hold her in the palm of my hands, just like I hold you.”
I rub my face. I need time, space to think.
I need answers. There has to be a way to understand what I’ve witnessed, to lay the pieces out and see where they line up and come together to form a complete picture—Rudzitin, this well, Brennan’s fears, Anneli’s paintings, Arla, the others, and me.
“How did you find this?” I ask, recalling Brennan’s story about her water-dowsing days.
Her face seems to narrow, eyes slanting, caught off guard. “I didn’t,” she says, moving past me. “She found me. She called me, and when she did, I came. The rest, she told me herself.” She lowers the lid, carefully turning each dogbolt to hold it in place.
“It speaks to you?” I ask, still trying to pluck facts from a chamber of myths.
“In a way,” she says. “With pictures like you saw on the water. With dreams. Sometimes with a feeling.” I watch her step away from the well and walk to the door. “She can speak to you too,” she says, glancing back at me. “If you’re good.”
I am beginning to see behind the curtain, the way Arla manipulates the others, dangles possibilities before them but holds the cards carefully against her own breast. If I’m good, indeed.
“Don’t you think it’s wrong?” I ask.
She turns to me. “Wrong?”
“Holding it—her—like this?” My mother’s words are a gnat in my ear— Some things simply don’t fit in cages.
“What would you have me do, Jude? Release her on the city so she can finish what she started, drown us all in a tsunami and plunge us into an era of darkness?” She puts it to me in sarcastic monotone.
“No.” It’s a reasonable answer, but I can’t help thinking that Arla’s intentions aren’t as altruistic as all that.
“Why doesn’t she hurt you?” I ask, lingering. I was so eager to get into this room. Now, it feels wrong to just leave. “Escape?”
Arla lifts a hand to indicate the walls around us with their cryptic writing, and says, “She can’t, kitten. She needs me. Just like you do.”