Dragons Live Forever

Dragons Live Forever

I had a reason for driving up the ruined access road to the crumbling mansion on the hill. Nobody ever goes up there without one. My reason had to do with a book, or that's what I told myself at the time.

The real reason had more to do with a memorial card which had stayed stuffed in my purse's credit card holder through Cairo and Paris and Bogotá and New York, plus half a dozen other places that I could only keep straight by carefully organizing my notes and photographs. I'd actually never liked anything about that memorial card, but in almost two years I'd never thrown it away. Sometimes, I could feel it "looking at me" from its grave at the bottom of my purse, and even though I'd buried it, its gaze was always kind.

I could feel those memorial-card eyes on me as I slowly edged along what might once have been a driveway. It was a cement and turf obstacle course now, and I cringed inside every time I heard the underside of my rental car scrape and drag across a slab of up-tilted concrete.

I was going anyway. I was trashing my rental car anyway because of a book and a memorial card with kind eyes that could look through anything.

I told myself I wasn't crazy.

People tell themselves the stupidest things sometimes.

Eventually, the "driveway" became impassable, and I stopped. I looked around at the dense evergreen thicket that nearly made a tunnel over my car, and then up at the decaying mansion that now towered overhead. The great black building reminded me of a rotted skull with its eyes fallen in and its jaw left gaping open. It had been considered haunted for as long as I could remember, but now it was starting to look bad even as a hideout for a ghost--or a monster.

I did not get out of the car.

The air inside began to cool and the engine ticked in the winter cold. Uncommon cold, given how deep in the South I was. But then, the nearby town where I'd grown up was slightly famous for its uncommon cold, and its amazing, occasional flurries of snow.

Thoughts of the soft, beautiful snow of my childhood reminded me of the reason why I’d come, and I carefully dug through the mound of pads, pens, film canisters, and "traveler's necessities" in my purse until I found the card holder. I held the battered leather-bound rectangle in my hands for a long moment, feeling the weight of the sacredness inside. Like all things that hold magic, the memorial card only held its power if it was looked at infrequently, and during times of greatest need. Magic grows thin and wears out if you try to use it everyday.

With a single tug, the card came free. There was the picture of my grandmother--the picture I'd never liked--taken with a soft-focus lens and then manipulated somehow so that the edges of her seemed to fade into whiteness. It's possible the card-printer was trying to make her look as if she were glowing like an angel. I thought she looked washed-out and wrong. My Grandma would never have wanted to be a paper saint, and even at her most frail, she was never pale or washed out.

The printers hadn't messed with her face, though, and I saw the same soft, alert dark eyes I remembered. I ought to remember them--I see them in the mirror every day. Her thin gray hair and wrinkles had only ever been window-dressing. I was a grown woman before I truly realized she was old. I ran my fingertip over the fake-gold stamped letters that made up her name: Kimberly Boggs Gardner. I did not turn it over to see that stupid "Do not stand over my grave and cry" poem that my aunt picked out, and which my grandmother would have forced a smile and pretended to like, just to be nice.

I remembered the real Grandma, not the airbrushed-angel one, and thought about why I’d come to the haunted mansion on the hill. "She would want you to do this."

I took another look up at that hulk of a decaying house. I admit I was having my doubts. The book sitting next to me on the passenger seat showed that Grandma's best bedtime story was more than just a fairy tale, but that didn't mean she hadn't sweetened things in her memory. It also didn't mean that things hadn't changed over the many, many years.

What if I found the axe murderer some people said lived up on the hill? What if I found only a dead, rusted body? Or, most devastating of all, what if I found nothing, and ruined Grandma's beautiful story with a cold, thin reality?

A tiny fleck of snow, no bigger than the letter "D" on a dime, spun round on the wind and stuck to my windshield. I stared at it and watched it melt against the still-warm glass.

Snow.

On the first of December, in Florida.