Dragons! by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

Author:Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois [Dann, Jack & Dozois, Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Dragons, Fiction, Anthologies, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9780441166312
Google: LscRWlYwo8AC
Amazon: 0441166318
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1993-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Paper Dragons

by

James P. Blaylock

Here's one of the strangest and most strangely beautiful stories you are ever likely to read: as evocative, melancholy, and mysterious as a paper dragon soaring against the darkening sky of evening. . . .

James P. Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, and now lives in Orange, California. He made his first sale to the now-defunct semi-prozine Unearth, and subsequently became one of the most popular, literate, and wildly eclectic fantasists of the '80s and '90s. His critically acclaimed novels include The Last Coin, Land of Dreams, The Digging Leviathan, Homunculus, The Elfin Ship, The Disappearing Dwarf, and The Stone Giant. His most recent book is The Paper Grail.

Strange things are said to have happened in this world—some are said to be happening still—but half of them, if I'm any judge, are lies. There's no way to tell sometimes. The sky above the north coast has been flat gray for weeks—clouds thick overhead like carded wool not fifty feet above the ground, impaled on the treetops, on redwoods and alders and hemlocks. The air is heavy with mist that lies out over the harbor and the open ocean, drifting across the tip of the pier and breakwater now and again, both of them vanishing into the gray so that there's not a nickel's worth of difference between the sky and the sea. And when the tide drops, and the reefs running out toward the point appear through the fog, covered in the brown bladders and rubber leaves of kelp, the pink lace of algae, and the slippery sheets of sea lettuce and eel grass, it's a simple thing to imagine the dark bulk of the fish that lie in deepwater gardens and angle up toward the pale green of shallows to feed at dawn.

There's the possibility, of course, that winged things,

their counterparts if you will, inhabit dens in the clouds, that in the valleys and caverns of the heavy, low skies live unguessed beasts. It occurs to me sometimes that if without warning a man could draw back that veil of cloud that obscures the heavens, snatch it back in an instant, he'd startle a world of oddities aloft in the skies: balloon things with hovering little wings like the fins of pufferfish, and spiny, leathery creatures, nothing but bones and teeth and with beaks half again as long as their ribby bodies.

There have been nights when I was certain I heard them, when the clouds hung in the treetops and foghorns moaned off the point and water dripped from the needles of hemlocks beyond the window onto the tin roof of Filby' s garage. There were muffled shrieks and the airy flapping of distant wings. On one such night when I was out walking along the bluffs, the clouds parted for an instant and a spray of stars like a reeling carnival shone beyond, until, like a curtain slowly drawing shut, the clouds drifted up against each other and parted no more. I'm certain I glimpsed something—a shadow, the promise of a shadow—dimming the stars.

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