Gulp sat or crouched near us, with the end of her tail flung out in front of us, so we were barricaded in, by the fire, by the wall, and by Gulp's tail. Here Gulp was a dark but streaky iridescent green; it was some weird light, because she looked darker by ordinary daylight, and it was like thick red twilight in the cavern. Remember I said that when we'd first come down here last night (if it had been last night) there'd been something almost familiar about the weird light? Yeah. It was just like in my dreams. I couldn't decide if I recognized the smell from my dreams too. And I was often frightened in my dreams. But the damn crushing terror was new and like complicated in this Toto-I-have-the-feeling-we're-not-in-Kansas-any-more way, like maybe I had a whole five horrible new senses to experience it with or something, thanks a lot.
The dragons around us were different sizes and different colors; there were a dozen of them, maybe fifteen — that I could see — that I thought I could see. No, I didn't recognize any of them — which was a relief: I know, I'm spending a lot of time here redefining "limit" and "edge" (and "crazy" and "impossible") but recognizing one of these dragons from my dreams of dragons would have been waaay over any definition of any edge you like — even if in my dreams they were, well, friendlier. Or at least they were okay with my being there, which these guys were not.
It was hard to tell dragons from rocks and shadows, and while I was never sure about this either it seemed to me that it wasn't always the same dozen or fifteen dragons — although I thought Gulp was nearly as big as most of them. The one I could see most clearly, however, was a lot bigger than Gulp, facing us from the other side of the hearth. He was black, with no iridescence at all, although on some of him — eye ridges and nose, spine, elbows — the scales were outlined in red. I had thought Gulp was scary — he was scary. He made Gulp, look like a cuddly toy dragon. A fifty-foot cuddly toy dragon. Looking at the size of his head and the one front claw that were reasonably illuminated by the firelight I figured he probably went on forever. His tail probably came out at the caves by the Institute, near where I'd seen Billy that time I'd gone to find him, to tell him Dad had okayed my overnight solo. What a long time ago that was. Sort of the time version of the length of this dragon. And I wondered, suddenly, if dragons were what Billy had been worrying about, down there in the cave. He hadn't really seen a dragon tail, had he? Sitting in a cavern full of dragons, anything was possible. I might as well just get rid of "impossible" as a concept and stop wasting time trying to redefine it.
Monster Dragon's eye slowly blinked. It was like watching an eclipse. I had the feeling I didn't want to look into that eye, as if it might blind me, like you're not supposed to look at the sun, even during an eclipse. The leader, maybe? Alpha male and all that? In that case he might be Lois' dad too, if Old Pete was right and it's only the alphas that breed. I wondered who had inherited Lois' mom's position.
Cautiously I checked the inside of my skull to see if I could tell which boulder Monster Dragon's was. I expected him to be the largest and the hurtingest, but he wasn't. He was large, all right, but he was almost not a boulder at all, more like a . . . a big lump of clay the potter hasn't decided what to do with yet. A bit, you know, malleable. Or poised. Balanced. Almost peaceful, which was pretty damned dramatic under the circumstances. How did I know it was him? I don't know. And to the extent that I could wonder about anything in the old, comparatively-normal-human Jake way, I wondered just what the last three weeks of hanging out with Gulp had done to me.
Had she meant to teach me to talk to her? Or was that an accident of having to spend too much time with me — because of Lois? Having decided not to fry me, that is. Then why hadn't it happened with Old Pete? Because if he'd started having dragon-shaped, dragon-identified headaches, he'd have mentioned it — because it wouldn't be just boring human weakness any more, it would be about dragons.
Was it Lois again — the emergency of Lois? First the extended emergency begun by having stuck her down my shirt front right after she was born. And then . . . you know those stories of moms lifting the front ends of trucks off their children the trucks have just run over? Maybe it was like that. In the stress of those last moments back at Westcamp, I managed to get through to Gulp. I mean, just having a headache . . . Eric gives me a headache, and we've never gone in for mind-reading. (Automatically the thought followed: Now there's a really horrible idea.) And then I thought of his voice over the two-way, and I wondered how he was doing. How everyone at the Institute was doing. My father was hostage . . . ?
And I'm sitting around, trapped and helpless and hallucinating, in a cave full of dragons. I know dragons don't eat humans . . . but if we're playing the Walrus and the Carpenter here, I'm definitely an oyster.
So there I was — out of time, out of humanity, out of life, certainly life as I knew it, with an aching, echoing head full of . . . waiting. Oh great. What do I do now?
I can't tell you how bad this was, how lost I was, how mindsmithereeningly alone I was, in this flickery shadowy red-purply nowhere, full of huge breathing shadowy things with huge shining eyes. And there I was, scared silly, scared beyond silly. And one of the things I came out of that experience with is a total inability to use the word "telepathy." It just doesn't fit, okay? And also . . . telepathic dragons. Pleeeease. That is so last century. I've got like shelves of Mom's old story books with telepathic (if pouchless) dragons in them.
But the problem remains that us mouth-flapping talking-crazy humans don't have any words for any kind of silent stuff, which is maybe why we overuse "telepathy" so hard. Like a color-blind species making everything red because it's the only color they've heard of, even though they can't see it either, but it makes them feel clever, like they can imagine color. We can deal with radio waves, that they exist I mean, and even stuff like our dragon fence, but communication that isn't through our standard five senses is as taboo as the idea that any animals but us have real intelligence. So I've called it "telepathy" a few times already because I haven't got anything else to call it, but I'm stopping now. You can just make up your own word. "Ummgmmgmm" or something, because it occurred to me eventually that the nearest thing us humans do have to some of what dragons do is a kind of inaudible hum. Which is maybe how Lois and I groped toward a common wavelength at the beginning. Mouth talking isn't completely on a different planet from an audible hum, and once you've got to the vocal-cord-jiggling humming part. . . . That's still not right, okay? But it's a piece of some of it. Maybe.
I'm sitting here now, a long time after I woke up in the cave full of dragons for the first time, thinking, It's nothing like that. But what is it like? If it's like anything — and it's not like anything or I wouldn't be making such a drooling idiot of myself trying to explain — it's maybe more like sign language, except that it's going on in your head, with a little audible harmonic background some of the time. Like you might wave your hands (or you do if you're me) while you're talking. Part of where my Headache came from was just trying to grab on to something that almost makes sense, but not really — like the brain strain version of your eyes struggling to see through somebody else's glasses.