The Dragon Griaule

‘I thought,’ – she was beginning to have difficulty in ordering her words – ‘I thought you were excited by it. You used to talk . . .’

‘Oh, I am excited!’ He laughed dully. ‘It’s a storehouse of marvels. Fantastic! Overwhelming! It’s too overwhelming. The feeling here . . .’ He turned to her. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘How could you stand living here for all these years? Are you that much stronger than me, or are you just insensitive?’

‘I’m . . .’

‘God!’

He turned away, stared at the heart wall, his face tattooed with a convoluted flow of light and shadow, then flaring gold.

‘You’re so at ease here. Look at that.’ He pointed to the heart. ‘It’s not a heart, it’s a bloody act of magic. Every time I come here I get the feeling it’s going to display a pattern that’ll make me disappear. Or crush me. Or something. And you just sit there looking at it with a thoughtful expression as if you’re planning to put in curtains or repaint the damned thing.’

‘We don’t have to come here anymore.’

‘I can’t stay away,’ he said, and held up a pellet of brianine. ‘It’s like this stuff.’

They didn’t speak for several minutes . . . perhaps a bit less, perhaps a little more. Time had become meaningless, and Catherine felt that she was floating away, her flesh suffused with a rosy warmth like the warmth of lovemaking. Flashes of dream imagery passed through her mind: a clown’s monstrous face; an unfamiliar room with tilted walls and three-legged blue chairs; a painting whose paint was melting, dripping. The flashes lapsed into thoughts of John. He was becoming weaker every day, she realized. Losing his resilience, growing nervous and moody. She had tried to convince herself that sooner or later he would become adjusted to life inside Griaule, but she was beginning to accept the fact that he was not going to be able to survive here. She didn’t understand why, whether it was due – as he had said – to the dragon’s oppressiveness or to some inherent weakness. Or a combination of both. But she could no longer deny it, and the only option left was for them to effect an escape. It was easy to consider escape with the drug in her veins, feeling aloof and calm, possessed of a dreamlike overview; but she knew that once it wore off she would be at a loss as to how to proceed.

To avoid thinking, she let the heart’s patterns dominate her attention. They seemed abnormally complex, and as she watched she began to have the impression of something new at work, some interior mechanism that she had never noticed before, and to become aware that the sense of imminence that pervaded the chamber was stronger than ever before; but she was so muzzy-headed that she could not concentrate upon these things. Her eyelids drooped, and she fell into her recurring dream of the sleeping dragon, focusing on the smooth scaleless skin of its chest, a patch of whiteness that came to surround her, to draw her into a world of whiteness with the serene constancy of its rhythmic rise and fall, as unvarying and predictable as the ticking of a perfect clock.

Over the next six months Catherine devised numerous plans for escape, but discarded them all as unworkable until at last she thought of one that – although far from foolproof – seemed in its simplicity to offer the least risk of failure. Though without brianine the plan would have failed, the process of settling upon this particular plan would have gone faster had drugs not been available; unable to resist the combined pull of the drug and John’s need for companionship in his addiction, she herself had become an addict, and much of her time was spent lying at the heart with John, stupified, too enervated even to make love. Her feelings toward John had changed; it could not have been otherwise, for he was not the man he had been. He had lost weight and muscle tone, grown vague and brooding, and she was concerned for the health of his body and soul. In some ways she felt closer than ever to him, her maternal instincts having been engaged by his dissolution; yet she couldn’t help resenting the fact that he had failed her, that instead of offering relief, he had turned out to be a burden and a weakening influence; and as a result whenever some distance arose between them, she exerted herself to close it only if it was practical to do so. This was not often the case, because John had deteriorated to the point that closeness of any sort was a chore. However, Catherine clung to the hope that if they could escape, they would be able to make a new beginning.