Her peace with him. And yet, he’d be going to the tavern and drinking with his old play maker friends, and getting soused and rowdy and shameful. The old reprobate, who’d never loved Susannah.
She composed her face, in meek obedience and said, “I will try.” If she hurried she could make it to the study without John’s noticing. The phosphorus was soluble in grease, and her father was much too fond of her treacle cakes, which were greasy enough. She’d give him one, as a token of her good will.
And, since the symptoms would seem natural, everyone would say that William Shakespeare had tarried too long at the Bear, with his friend Ben Jonson, and drunk too much, and had died of his excesses.
Another George
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of hidden events, of something going on just beyond the veil of mundane reality. Two forms of this are particularly appealing to me: the semi-immortal among us and the shape-changer. This story unites them both in an almost too-mundane setting in which extraordinary things are about to happen.
He’d slithered through snow and walked under scorching sunshine, minding neither the cold nor the heat. He’d crept on his belly through tropical forests, he’d climbed snow-capped mountains, he’d crawled through deserts.
He’d caught late night flights and early morning ones. When he couldn’t find a plane, he’d clutched his clothes in an immense clawed fist, spread his leathery wings to the sky, and flown himself.
For days on end he’d forgotten to eat, only to fall, at last, ravenous, on whatever prey offered, animal or human, living or dead. It hadn’t mattered which.
He’d made it. He’d arrived.
The drive that had impelled him thither receded, wave on wave, like a retreating tide.
Like a man wakening in a strange bed, George Drake looked around and took stock. He sat at the table of a commonplace tourist-trap bar, in a commonplace coastal town.
Men, sitting one to a table, populated this dimly lit bar. The only girl—young and beautiful—danced under the strobe light on the dance floor.
The hair at the back of George’s neck rose in fear. He knew this set-up much too well, and he felt too small and tired for this.
A waiter, a spare middle-aged man, with brown hair and small features, wove through the tables from the bar, to clean George’s table with a grayish rag.
Not enough meat on those bones for a decent meal, George thought, then shook his head, blinked, looked at the waiter again. Not food. Not prey. Human. A human amid humans. “Whiskey,” George told the waiter. “Whiskey, please. Straight.” His voice hissed and boomed like an instrument too long unused.
The man jumped. A tick pulled his left eyelid. “A…?”
George cleared his throat. He knew that the man couldn’t possibly be intimidated by him as he looked now. In his human form, George was small and dark, with the Mediterranean features that must have been his father’s, and green eyes like his mother’s. He could have been a little Greek merchant, the owner of a corner grocery store or restaurant. The idea made him smile a little, as men smile at dreams they can’t own. “A whiskey,” he said.
Dropping his rag on the edge of the table, the waiter scurried away, as if his back brain felt something, knew something that his conscious brain willfully ignored.
George covered his face with his hands. If he had enough will power, he too would scurry away. The waiter’s behavior made perfect sense for any simian whose instincts told him something was wrong, though his reason could think of no danger.
Half simian himself, George could feel the same panic surge through him, tightening his heart, closing his throat. But he’d been called here, and the magnet that had pulled him remained, strong. He looked at the dancing girl and shivered.
Unlike the waiter, George knew what he feared and his reason concurred with his instinctive panic. He feared death.
The death he’d hastened here to meet.
George counted the men that sat, each at his own table. Twenty. He groaned. Far too many of them, running the gamut of the types of mankind: Scandinavian giants, small oriental men, dark towering colossi. All of them stared through red-rimmed eyes at the female. All were bigger than George. And they’d be stronger too, since they were, presumably, full drake.
George had no chance. No chance at all to win this game. Not that it mattered. The outcome would be death, win or lose.
The female danced beneath the strobe light, seeming oblivious to them all.
She swayed hypnotically, her perfect figure encased in a tight silver sheath dress. Her long golden hair glinted with a metallic shimmer.
Staring at her, made George’s head spin. A hungry need that he’d never known writhed to life in his belly. He clutched the edge of the table, glad of harsh wood against his palm. No. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t fight for the female. Yet, he felt his lips pull back in a teeth-baring snarl. The drake wanted to do battle and conquer.
The waiter glided across the bar, carrying glasses on a tray, and slid a condensation-dewed glass onto George’s table.
George breathed deeply, forced his lips down, made his mouth close.
The man looked even paler than he had before, though that should have been impossible. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed.
On an impulse born of empathy, of his own fear pulling his lips tight and making his hair stand on end, George pulled a handful of coins from his belt pouch, threw them on the man’s tray. “Go home.” His voice ground out with the ominous sound of gravel sliding down a ravine, the sound of claws scraping stone.
The man’s mouth worked, opening and closing. “My—My job.” His mouth closed with a snapping sound.
George shrugged. Even through his all too human empathy with the man, the sneering disdain of the drake came through. They were foolish, these apes, bound by stupid rules and codes of conduct that came not from the belly—like those of the drakes—but from the head. “Those coins are gold,” he said. “And many collectors would give their eyeteeth for them. Go home.” He looked away from the man, barely conscious that he still stood there, by his table, looking stunned.
George’s gaze followed a blond barbarian type who’d got up from one of the tables and crossed the bar to stand at the edge of the dance floor, watching the dancing girl. The first challenge.
Seconds stretched into eternity.
The girl danced, as if she didn’t know the ritual she’d initiated, the challenge she’d called.
From a table near the dance floor, a short oriental man in a jade-green business suit stood up. The two males looked at each other, nodded. Together, they walked out.
The waiter whimpered.
George drank his whiskey, savoring the caustic burn down his throat. The fights had began. The fights and the madness. He did not want this. He wanted to be left alone to live his life.
From outside came a sound of wings, a sound of rushing, a heavy thud that shook the bar.
The waiter put his tray down on George’s table and, clutching the handful of gold coins, and scurried away, knitting himself with the wall.
Soft happiness suffused the female’s features.
The oriental man came back in, smelling of sulfur. He walked confidently to the edge of the dance floor.
Another man stood up. They glared at each other with open enmity.
The waiter keened and ran for the door.
The oriental man and his new challenger headed for the door, too, close behind the waiter, but at a more leisurely, stately pace.
George closed his eyes, gripped his glass tightly, tried to force drink past his tightened throat.