Original Fic: Hear Not the Music
Feb. 2nd, 2009 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marbleglove"Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad"
In that vein, I have two drabbles and a short story:
Monsters
----------
“There are really two kinds of monster,” she informed me while staring quite fixedly off to her right. There was nothing there: I had checked. Several times.
“Two kinds?”
“Yes. They may come in all shapes and sizes, but there’s just the two kinds. One you have to stare directly at to keep them from attacking,” she said as she continued to stare directly at something or nothing. “If you stare them down, sometimes they’ll even go away. The other kind likes the attention and wants to see the fear on your face when it attacks. Those you have to ignore, even if it’s right in front of you.”
I notice, of course, that while she continues to stare to her right, she also continued to not look anywhere else.
“Those mostly like sneaking up behind you, anyway. You can hear footsteps and sense a presence, but it’s when you turn that it attacks. So even if it’s breathing down the back of your neck, ignore it.”
“Do they go away after a while, too?” I wondered why I was humoring her like this. And I strictly marshaled my sense of sanity to be sure it was just humoring her.
“Hmm. I’m not really sure. They don’t go away if you even think about them, but if you don’t pay them any mind then you don’t’ really notice if they leave after a bit.”
Suddenly she was looking at me directly and not at all at the bit of nothing much to her right. I wondered if the monster there had finally left.
“Of course, sometimes they switch.”
“Switch?”
“Yeah. Go from being stopped by a glance to invited by it. And vice-versa.”
“How can you tell?”
She shrugged. “It becomes clear.”
Shhk, shhk, shhk
------------------------------
“Welcome! Welcome. Come, have a seat.”
I paused to admire the delicious beauty of the role reversal before taking my seat. The irony was scrumptious, although I was not yet the spider and he didn’t know that he was the fly.
A large black bib is swung around me and carefully sealed so that nothing of the events of the next half hour might muss my clothing.
“What would you like?” (said the fly to the spider), asked my hair stylist.
“My hair has gotten too long and too heavy. Make it shorter so that it doesn’t hang quite so straight and limp down my back.”
“Ah.” Combing his fingers through my hair with a pleasant scalp massage, he lifted the hair this way and that until he found a length of which we both approved. “This?”
“Yes.”
And the warm water and the soap to make my hair clean and manageable. The color darkened and the texture all the more heavy and straight. But it was with the comb that my transformation began or ended or at least hit that significant turning point.
Where before my hair was a dead weight behind me, now it was alive with vibration. With each stroke of the comb, the vibration up my hair and to my scalp told me exactly where the comb was. I sat in my head as in the center of a web and, with my eyes closed, watched the world around me by the vibration of my web.
When the silver scissors began to flit and snip about my head, the chase was on.
A little bit here and a little bit there, scraps of hair fell onto my bib. I was glad for its existence.
Sneaking a glance through my lashes, I saw the scissors opened and closed, glinting and sparkling in the mirror, making its characteristic shhk-shhk-shhk noise.
I know its exact position before it ever cuts the second strand of hair in any lock. Time after time after time; shhk, shhk, shhk.
When it is over the scissors came to rest. Put aside, they looked oddly solid.
I let them be.
After thanking my stylist, I walked away. As I walked, my new short hair moves with each step I take and every blow the wind makes. I walked away satisfied.
Another year gone by in which both I and the flitting silver fly, shhk, shhk, shhk, survived our encounter.
But I had been careful. I ate before I came.
A Touch of Chaos
------------------------------
Sanity: Seeing only that which is real. Acting with sound judgment or reason.
Insanity: Seeing that which is not real. Refusing to see what is real. Using poor judgment. Acting wildly.
------------------------------
He had always enjoyed dark and stormy nights like this. It was the touch of chaos in an otherwise orderly world that made life perfect. Every day things happened for a reason, cause and effect. People acted with certain motives. Even seemingly chance occurrences and coincidences could be analyzed and predicted. But not even weathermen understood the weather and the real epitome of weather was the storm. The wind and the rain, the thunder and the lightening were a shock to the system. They couldn’t be understood. They didn’t need to be understood. The only thing to do was sit back and enjoy them.
It wasn’t raining yet and the thunder was a distant rumbling, the lightening a series of brief muted glows behind distant clouds. It was the wind, though, that was a joy and a signal of the coming storm. It swept down the street, here and gone and back again. Leaves rustled on the trees and swirled over the grass and pavement. It made him feel like a part of the world. He was an observer, as always, but the whole world was with him, now, anticipating the coming show of nature’s might.
A good rough storm should have been a wonderful way to end a difficult day. But even as he sat on his porch he doubted that even this could settle his unease. For once, his work, analyzing evidence and tracking criminals, had not been a matter of logic and order from which the storm was a pleasant break. For the first time he had to consider the fact that maybe storms weren’t the only touch of chaos in the world, or even a large portion of it. Maybe they were just the tip of the iceberg. The anticipation he felt for the storm was, for the first time, tainted with fear and he blamed it all on that damned fraud of a “psychic.”
He hadn’t intended to take the evidence on his current case to a psychic for further leads. It would have been a waste of time. “Psychics aren’t real”, he had explained to the agent who had suggested he go down. “They might be fun carnival shows, but we are trying to work here. Surely I have better things to do with my time.” But the case had hit a wall and he didn’t have anything better to do. As his solitaire games were failing to spark any inspiration, he thought he might as well go see the psychic.
Apparently the “psychic” came in for an afternoon once a month as an “expert consultant.” While she was here, she was given an empty conference room for her use and she chatted with anyone who stopped by. Sometimes she could tell them something useful about a problematic case. But it was far from controlled circumstances. If she sometimes suggested startling new directions of investigation, well, she did work as a librarian in her small town. Maybe she was just that smart and knowledgeable. Or maybe she had criminal connections that no one had found out about yet. The lines on her face certainly indicated a life that was neither easy nor painless.
She hadn’t given him anything particularly useful for his case, just a few good guesses as to the people involved. Talking with a talented “psychic” was at least a good brainstorming technique, and he had a few new ideas of what to look for. But rather than leave immediately he stuck around, like many of the other agents, to chat. It had been fun leaning against the wall, and just hanging out, and hearing bits and pieces of other agents’ cases.
She had sat on the floor, not, she said, because it was necessary, but because it was more comfortable than the chairs available. Given the chairs in question, it was a reasonable explanation. Rather than have her be alone on the floor several of the agents also sat on the floor or the edge of the table or leaned against wall. That, along with all the evidence boxes scattered around, gave the whole proceedings the aura of a late-night college gathering.
After several enjoyable hours, he had thought to himself that she really was amazing. Was it possible that she actually was psychic? That psychic powers exist? It was a ludicrous thought and yet for the first time in his life it presented itself to him as a serious question.
And as he considered it, he looked at her more intently trying to find some evidence one way or the other. There were really three options although there was some overlap between them.
One, she was, either intentionally or unintentionally, running a fraud. Good instincts and lots of brains could explain either an ability to pretend to be or a belief in being psychic, or “Skilled” as she called it.
Two, he was suffering from (what would hopefully be temporary) insanity or idiocy. She was making connections that he couldn’t always follow, so either those connections were obvious and he was insane, or they were subtle and he was stupid, but whichever, they were truly there in the evidence presented. This was not a pleasant option, but there nonetheless.
Three, psychics did exist. There were people with abilities unaccounted for by current science, and they could see connections in cases that simply weren’t noticeable to others who had only the standard five senses.
The question somehow became vitally important to him, but which answer was right? There was no real way to discount any of the three although he wanted to kick himself for even considering the second two possibilities. How do you tell if you’re crazy? How do you tell if someone is psychic when you’re not even sure psychics exist? This train of thought, on its hideously circular route, was stopped in its tracks, when the subject of them broke off what she was saying mid-sentence and turned to look straight at him with big surprised eyes.
Jabbing a finger at him she had said with a tone of absolute authority, “You, stay. Everyone else, out.”
He had looked at the others in confusion but they looked as surprised and unsure as he did. After a long moment, with a shrug, one of the agents closest to the door made his exit. The others slowly followed, throwing curious looks over their shoulders.
That had been the nightmare, not a bout of stormy weather hours later. And yet, unlike with every other storm he’d ever lived through, this time the thunder sounded ominous and the lightening seemed like an attempted distraction from something much closer. Much closer and much more dangerous.
The nearly denuded tree in his yard creaked rather than rustled.
And a large shape swooped in to crouch beneath it. Its outline shifted in each gust of air. Was it more catlike or more lizard-like as it reached up the trunk a good five feet in a stretch? Was it sharpening its claws or climbing to have the advantage of high ground?
On an overcast night like this, even though it was still early in the evening, the shadows lay thick on the ground. It was hard to see anything with any definition except during the sudden flashes of lightning as the storm approached. It was just the sort of night in which it was easy to let your senses play tricks on you, but he was a rational observer, he told himself, and would not be tricked into irrational fears.
She had neither spoken nor looked away from him until the room had completely emptied out. While waiting she just got to her feet and, when they were the only two people left in the room, she shut the door and locked it.
Still staring at him, she had spoken with disturbing intensity.
“Okay, I’m going to tell you something. Just listen.
“What it means to be Skilled is to be able to interact with the world in a way that not everyone can. Some Skilled can see connections and find information hidden from regular people. Many Skilled can change the world around them based on their will alone. But it does take focus to control those changes or that knowledge. In some ways it’s the easiest thing in the world, and in others it’s the hardest. The sort of focus needed to survive in a world that shifts under your feet does not come easily. Or quickly.
“Most people with Skill are easily identifiable to others with Skill. And not all of those others are human. And not even all the humans are nice. The survival rate of those with Skill is incredibly low. Those that survive are generally found early by someone Skilled who helps them, trains them, and protects them from the monsters while they’re training. A lot of monsters hunt those with Skill specifically. It’s the reason why you don’t find a lot of Skilled people with high levels of education or professional advancement. Too much of their time and energy is focused on controlling their Skill.
“Being Skilled can help protect you from the monsters, but it rarely makes up for also making you a target. Are you with me so far?”
He had glared at her. She spoke quickly and intensely and if it weren’t for the content, discussing monsters and impossible abilities, he would have found her obvious nerves contagious. At least this had been more like what he had expected from someone who called herself a psychic, or “Skilled”, or whatever it was she called it. At least this answered his question. He was not mad, and she was not a psychic. She was clearly a fraud. It was annoying that he had been convinced for almost a minute that she might be for real. It had been stupid of him. But at least it was reassuring that he hadn’t been blind for a lifetime.
“Yes.” He had bitten out. “I can follow the story you’re telling.”
“Good boy.” She had seemed almost relieved at his derogatory tone.
He sat on the porch, still as at a stakeout, staring at what was crouched beneath his tree, telling himself that it could not possibly be alive. It seemed to sense him anyway. It turned to look at him with eyes that shone in the dark.
It was a dragon.
And he was pretty sure it was hungry and he was edible. She had created this fear in him, but it wasn’t any less for knowing its source.
He had continued to glare at her, as she had continued to speak.
“Every so often, though, a person with Skill doesn’t show it. If it’s just ignored or suppressed, then the monsters come and get you and you have no defense. But if the Skill itself is used to make itself not-exist, if it is renounced with a person’s full belief that it does not exist, if they pretend hard enough that they aren’t Skilled, then sometimes the monsters believe it, too. It’s probably a better defense than any Skill at summoning fire, walking across bridges that aren’t there, knowing events of far away, or the like.
“And I’m telling you now that you are one of these people.”
He had barely opened his mouth to emit a disbelieving laugh when she put up her hand.
“Don’t interrupt.
“The problem is, a moment ago you stopped disbelieving. As soon as you allowed for the potential of Skill to exist, you became visible to me and anyone else who might look at you with Skill. You just put yourself on a playing field where the potential for a really nasty death is really high. And if you don’t get training it’s pretty much inevitable.
“You’re already an adult with a career. Are you willing to devote the next twenty years to learning control? For the duration, you’d be in constant danger and put everyone around you in danger as well; and it only gets somewhat better after training. If that’s what you want, I will take you on as a student and I will do my best to protect you, but it will mean giving up everything you have.
“There is an alternative to either uprooting your entire life or getting eaten by the next hungry demon that wanders by. And it’s this: go back to not believing.
“You were in this room for nearly three hours when I couldn’t sense you as one of the Skilled.
“I lied to you about everything. There is no such thing as Skill. I’m a fraud and a con artist. And above all else, you have no Skill. And you had better believe it with your entire heart and soul.
“You tell yourself that and you believe it and you might be safe. As safe as anyone else, at least.
“So what’s your decision?” She had finally shut the hell up and waited in silence for him to respond.
Knowing in his bones that the dragon would pounce very soon and wanting little more than to run and hide, he reminded himself that he was a rational man. He forced himself to disbelieve.
“No,” he said as sternly as he could manage. He got to his feet. “It is not real. Dragons do not exist. I have utter faith in its nonexistence. I do not believe in it. It is not here. It is not real.”
With each sentence, he forced himself to walk a step closer. He faced it and walked forward and did not close his eyes until he automatically flinched as a foot whipped at him to rake his face. “It does not exist.” He absolutely refused to feel any pain caused by a supernatural creature that could not exist. And he did not feel pain. The foot hit him, not with the deadly quality of four sharp claws, but with the scratchiness of old dirty fabric.
A sheet was caught up in some roughness of the tree bark. It was an old tattered thing covered in dirt and grass stains. When the wind blew this way and that, the sheet seemed to move with a will of its own. But it was just a sheet.
He laughed at his own nerves, but couldn’t shake the edginess. “Of course it’s just a sheet. What else could it possibly have been?”
His decision, he thought, was that right there in the conference room he had wanted to throw a temper tantrum like nothing else on this world. He had wanted quite desperately to throw something and watch it shatter. Unfortunately the only breakable things in the room had been the two of them and his box of evidence.
It should have been easy for him. He had never before believed in psychics, and even if he had doubted his disbelief for a moment, the disbelief had come back. But she had somehow known that he had had a moment of indecision. She had known and now, rather than the traditional scam, she was telling him to not believe.
It was a good ploy by which to lure him in, he told himself, but it wouldn’t work. And, a tiny voice in his head had whispered, if it wasn’t a scam, then not letting himself believe was also the right decision even if it was right for the opposite reason. But, in telling him to keep his world the same, she had made the cracks all the more noticeable. And, he thought, she knew that perfectly well.
“What,” he spoke with heavy sarcasm, “you’re not giving me time to think it over?”
“No. Your decision?”
His hands clenched into fists, more angry than he could ever remember being, he had hissed at her, “You fraud.”
“Good boy.”
And with that she unlocked the door, and disappeared into the crowd of agents who had loitered outside waiting to see what had happened. He had picked up his box of evidence and returned to his cubicle, not responding to any of the questions asked of him. He had accomplished nothing after that and had been glad when the time finally came for him to go home.
Now, as he held in his hands an old tattered sheet that was not a dragon, and the rain finally started to fall, he shouted up at the clouds and the stars they hid, “I don’t believe in psychics!”
He stood in the rain getting colder and wetter with each passing second, and murmured to himself, “It’s not real. It’s just not.”
In that vein, I have two drabbles and a short story:
Monsters
----------
“There are really two kinds of monster,” she informed me while staring quite fixedly off to her right. There was nothing there: I had checked. Several times.
“Two kinds?”
“Yes. They may come in all shapes and sizes, but there’s just the two kinds. One you have to stare directly at to keep them from attacking,” she said as she continued to stare directly at something or nothing. “If you stare them down, sometimes they’ll even go away. The other kind likes the attention and wants to see the fear on your face when it attacks. Those you have to ignore, even if it’s right in front of you.”
I notice, of course, that while she continues to stare to her right, she also continued to not look anywhere else.
“Those mostly like sneaking up behind you, anyway. You can hear footsteps and sense a presence, but it’s when you turn that it attacks. So even if it’s breathing down the back of your neck, ignore it.”
“Do they go away after a while, too?” I wondered why I was humoring her like this. And I strictly marshaled my sense of sanity to be sure it was just humoring her.
“Hmm. I’m not really sure. They don’t go away if you even think about them, but if you don’t pay them any mind then you don’t’ really notice if they leave after a bit.”
Suddenly she was looking at me directly and not at all at the bit of nothing much to her right. I wondered if the monster there had finally left.
“Of course, sometimes they switch.”
“Switch?”
“Yeah. Go from being stopped by a glance to invited by it. And vice-versa.”
“How can you tell?”
She shrugged. “It becomes clear.”
Shhk, shhk, shhk
------------------------------
“Welcome! Welcome. Come, have a seat.”
I paused to admire the delicious beauty of the role reversal before taking my seat. The irony was scrumptious, although I was not yet the spider and he didn’t know that he was the fly.
A large black bib is swung around me and carefully sealed so that nothing of the events of the next half hour might muss my clothing.
“What would you like?” (said the fly to the spider), asked my hair stylist.
“My hair has gotten too long and too heavy. Make it shorter so that it doesn’t hang quite so straight and limp down my back.”
“Ah.” Combing his fingers through my hair with a pleasant scalp massage, he lifted the hair this way and that until he found a length of which we both approved. “This?”
“Yes.”
And the warm water and the soap to make my hair clean and manageable. The color darkened and the texture all the more heavy and straight. But it was with the comb that my transformation began or ended or at least hit that significant turning point.
Where before my hair was a dead weight behind me, now it was alive with vibration. With each stroke of the comb, the vibration up my hair and to my scalp told me exactly where the comb was. I sat in my head as in the center of a web and, with my eyes closed, watched the world around me by the vibration of my web.
When the silver scissors began to flit and snip about my head, the chase was on.
A little bit here and a little bit there, scraps of hair fell onto my bib. I was glad for its existence.
Sneaking a glance through my lashes, I saw the scissors opened and closed, glinting and sparkling in the mirror, making its characteristic shhk-shhk-shhk noise.
I know its exact position before it ever cuts the second strand of hair in any lock. Time after time after time; shhk, shhk, shhk.
When it is over the scissors came to rest. Put aside, they looked oddly solid.
I let them be.
After thanking my stylist, I walked away. As I walked, my new short hair moves with each step I take and every blow the wind makes. I walked away satisfied.
Another year gone by in which both I and the flitting silver fly, shhk, shhk, shhk, survived our encounter.
But I had been careful. I ate before I came.
A Touch of Chaos
------------------------------
Sanity: Seeing only that which is real. Acting with sound judgment or reason.
Insanity: Seeing that which is not real. Refusing to see what is real. Using poor judgment. Acting wildly.
------------------------------
He had always enjoyed dark and stormy nights like this. It was the touch of chaos in an otherwise orderly world that made life perfect. Every day things happened for a reason, cause and effect. People acted with certain motives. Even seemingly chance occurrences and coincidences could be analyzed and predicted. But not even weathermen understood the weather and the real epitome of weather was the storm. The wind and the rain, the thunder and the lightening were a shock to the system. They couldn’t be understood. They didn’t need to be understood. The only thing to do was sit back and enjoy them.
It wasn’t raining yet and the thunder was a distant rumbling, the lightening a series of brief muted glows behind distant clouds. It was the wind, though, that was a joy and a signal of the coming storm. It swept down the street, here and gone and back again. Leaves rustled on the trees and swirled over the grass and pavement. It made him feel like a part of the world. He was an observer, as always, but the whole world was with him, now, anticipating the coming show of nature’s might.
A good rough storm should have been a wonderful way to end a difficult day. But even as he sat on his porch he doubted that even this could settle his unease. For once, his work, analyzing evidence and tracking criminals, had not been a matter of logic and order from which the storm was a pleasant break. For the first time he had to consider the fact that maybe storms weren’t the only touch of chaos in the world, or even a large portion of it. Maybe they were just the tip of the iceberg. The anticipation he felt for the storm was, for the first time, tainted with fear and he blamed it all on that damned fraud of a “psychic.”
He hadn’t intended to take the evidence on his current case to a psychic for further leads. It would have been a waste of time. “Psychics aren’t real”, he had explained to the agent who had suggested he go down. “They might be fun carnival shows, but we are trying to work here. Surely I have better things to do with my time.” But the case had hit a wall and he didn’t have anything better to do. As his solitaire games were failing to spark any inspiration, he thought he might as well go see the psychic.
Apparently the “psychic” came in for an afternoon once a month as an “expert consultant.” While she was here, she was given an empty conference room for her use and she chatted with anyone who stopped by. Sometimes she could tell them something useful about a problematic case. But it was far from controlled circumstances. If she sometimes suggested startling new directions of investigation, well, she did work as a librarian in her small town. Maybe she was just that smart and knowledgeable. Or maybe she had criminal connections that no one had found out about yet. The lines on her face certainly indicated a life that was neither easy nor painless.
She hadn’t given him anything particularly useful for his case, just a few good guesses as to the people involved. Talking with a talented “psychic” was at least a good brainstorming technique, and he had a few new ideas of what to look for. But rather than leave immediately he stuck around, like many of the other agents, to chat. It had been fun leaning against the wall, and just hanging out, and hearing bits and pieces of other agents’ cases.
She had sat on the floor, not, she said, because it was necessary, but because it was more comfortable than the chairs available. Given the chairs in question, it was a reasonable explanation. Rather than have her be alone on the floor several of the agents also sat on the floor or the edge of the table or leaned against wall. That, along with all the evidence boxes scattered around, gave the whole proceedings the aura of a late-night college gathering.
After several enjoyable hours, he had thought to himself that she really was amazing. Was it possible that she actually was psychic? That psychic powers exist? It was a ludicrous thought and yet for the first time in his life it presented itself to him as a serious question.
And as he considered it, he looked at her more intently trying to find some evidence one way or the other. There were really three options although there was some overlap between them.
One, she was, either intentionally or unintentionally, running a fraud. Good instincts and lots of brains could explain either an ability to pretend to be or a belief in being psychic, or “Skilled” as she called it.
Two, he was suffering from (what would hopefully be temporary) insanity or idiocy. She was making connections that he couldn’t always follow, so either those connections were obvious and he was insane, or they were subtle and he was stupid, but whichever, they were truly there in the evidence presented. This was not a pleasant option, but there nonetheless.
Three, psychics did exist. There were people with abilities unaccounted for by current science, and they could see connections in cases that simply weren’t noticeable to others who had only the standard five senses.
The question somehow became vitally important to him, but which answer was right? There was no real way to discount any of the three although he wanted to kick himself for even considering the second two possibilities. How do you tell if you’re crazy? How do you tell if someone is psychic when you’re not even sure psychics exist? This train of thought, on its hideously circular route, was stopped in its tracks, when the subject of them broke off what she was saying mid-sentence and turned to look straight at him with big surprised eyes.
Jabbing a finger at him she had said with a tone of absolute authority, “You, stay. Everyone else, out.”
He had looked at the others in confusion but they looked as surprised and unsure as he did. After a long moment, with a shrug, one of the agents closest to the door made his exit. The others slowly followed, throwing curious looks over their shoulders.
That had been the nightmare, not a bout of stormy weather hours later. And yet, unlike with every other storm he’d ever lived through, this time the thunder sounded ominous and the lightening seemed like an attempted distraction from something much closer. Much closer and much more dangerous.
The nearly denuded tree in his yard creaked rather than rustled.
And a large shape swooped in to crouch beneath it. Its outline shifted in each gust of air. Was it more catlike or more lizard-like as it reached up the trunk a good five feet in a stretch? Was it sharpening its claws or climbing to have the advantage of high ground?
On an overcast night like this, even though it was still early in the evening, the shadows lay thick on the ground. It was hard to see anything with any definition except during the sudden flashes of lightning as the storm approached. It was just the sort of night in which it was easy to let your senses play tricks on you, but he was a rational observer, he told himself, and would not be tricked into irrational fears.
She had neither spoken nor looked away from him until the room had completely emptied out. While waiting she just got to her feet and, when they were the only two people left in the room, she shut the door and locked it.
Still staring at him, she had spoken with disturbing intensity.
“Okay, I’m going to tell you something. Just listen.
“What it means to be Skilled is to be able to interact with the world in a way that not everyone can. Some Skilled can see connections and find information hidden from regular people. Many Skilled can change the world around them based on their will alone. But it does take focus to control those changes or that knowledge. In some ways it’s the easiest thing in the world, and in others it’s the hardest. The sort of focus needed to survive in a world that shifts under your feet does not come easily. Or quickly.
“Most people with Skill are easily identifiable to others with Skill. And not all of those others are human. And not even all the humans are nice. The survival rate of those with Skill is incredibly low. Those that survive are generally found early by someone Skilled who helps them, trains them, and protects them from the monsters while they’re training. A lot of monsters hunt those with Skill specifically. It’s the reason why you don’t find a lot of Skilled people with high levels of education or professional advancement. Too much of their time and energy is focused on controlling their Skill.
“Being Skilled can help protect you from the monsters, but it rarely makes up for also making you a target. Are you with me so far?”
He had glared at her. She spoke quickly and intensely and if it weren’t for the content, discussing monsters and impossible abilities, he would have found her obvious nerves contagious. At least this had been more like what he had expected from someone who called herself a psychic, or “Skilled”, or whatever it was she called it. At least this answered his question. He was not mad, and she was not a psychic. She was clearly a fraud. It was annoying that he had been convinced for almost a minute that she might be for real. It had been stupid of him. But at least it was reassuring that he hadn’t been blind for a lifetime.
“Yes.” He had bitten out. “I can follow the story you’re telling.”
“Good boy.” She had seemed almost relieved at his derogatory tone.
He sat on the porch, still as at a stakeout, staring at what was crouched beneath his tree, telling himself that it could not possibly be alive. It seemed to sense him anyway. It turned to look at him with eyes that shone in the dark.
It was a dragon.
And he was pretty sure it was hungry and he was edible. She had created this fear in him, but it wasn’t any less for knowing its source.
He had continued to glare at her, as she had continued to speak.
“Every so often, though, a person with Skill doesn’t show it. If it’s just ignored or suppressed, then the monsters come and get you and you have no defense. But if the Skill itself is used to make itself not-exist, if it is renounced with a person’s full belief that it does not exist, if they pretend hard enough that they aren’t Skilled, then sometimes the monsters believe it, too. It’s probably a better defense than any Skill at summoning fire, walking across bridges that aren’t there, knowing events of far away, or the like.
“And I’m telling you now that you are one of these people.”
He had barely opened his mouth to emit a disbelieving laugh when she put up her hand.
“Don’t interrupt.
“The problem is, a moment ago you stopped disbelieving. As soon as you allowed for the potential of Skill to exist, you became visible to me and anyone else who might look at you with Skill. You just put yourself on a playing field where the potential for a really nasty death is really high. And if you don’t get training it’s pretty much inevitable.
“You’re already an adult with a career. Are you willing to devote the next twenty years to learning control? For the duration, you’d be in constant danger and put everyone around you in danger as well; and it only gets somewhat better after training. If that’s what you want, I will take you on as a student and I will do my best to protect you, but it will mean giving up everything you have.
“There is an alternative to either uprooting your entire life or getting eaten by the next hungry demon that wanders by. And it’s this: go back to not believing.
“You were in this room for nearly three hours when I couldn’t sense you as one of the Skilled.
“I lied to you about everything. There is no such thing as Skill. I’m a fraud and a con artist. And above all else, you have no Skill. And you had better believe it with your entire heart and soul.
“You tell yourself that and you believe it and you might be safe. As safe as anyone else, at least.
“So what’s your decision?” She had finally shut the hell up and waited in silence for him to respond.
Knowing in his bones that the dragon would pounce very soon and wanting little more than to run and hide, he reminded himself that he was a rational man. He forced himself to disbelieve.
“No,” he said as sternly as he could manage. He got to his feet. “It is not real. Dragons do not exist. I have utter faith in its nonexistence. I do not believe in it. It is not here. It is not real.”
With each sentence, he forced himself to walk a step closer. He faced it and walked forward and did not close his eyes until he automatically flinched as a foot whipped at him to rake his face. “It does not exist.” He absolutely refused to feel any pain caused by a supernatural creature that could not exist. And he did not feel pain. The foot hit him, not with the deadly quality of four sharp claws, but with the scratchiness of old dirty fabric.
A sheet was caught up in some roughness of the tree bark. It was an old tattered thing covered in dirt and grass stains. When the wind blew this way and that, the sheet seemed to move with a will of its own. But it was just a sheet.
He laughed at his own nerves, but couldn’t shake the edginess. “Of course it’s just a sheet. What else could it possibly have been?”
His decision, he thought, was that right there in the conference room he had wanted to throw a temper tantrum like nothing else on this world. He had wanted quite desperately to throw something and watch it shatter. Unfortunately the only breakable things in the room had been the two of them and his box of evidence.
It should have been easy for him. He had never before believed in psychics, and even if he had doubted his disbelief for a moment, the disbelief had come back. But she had somehow known that he had had a moment of indecision. She had known and now, rather than the traditional scam, she was telling him to not believe.
It was a good ploy by which to lure him in, he told himself, but it wouldn’t work. And, a tiny voice in his head had whispered, if it wasn’t a scam, then not letting himself believe was also the right decision even if it was right for the opposite reason. But, in telling him to keep his world the same, she had made the cracks all the more noticeable. And, he thought, she knew that perfectly well.
“What,” he spoke with heavy sarcasm, “you’re not giving me time to think it over?”
“No. Your decision?”
His hands clenched into fists, more angry than he could ever remember being, he had hissed at her, “You fraud.”
“Good boy.”
And with that she unlocked the door, and disappeared into the crowd of agents who had loitered outside waiting to see what had happened. He had picked up his box of evidence and returned to his cubicle, not responding to any of the questions asked of him. He had accomplished nothing after that and had been glad when the time finally came for him to go home.
Now, as he held in his hands an old tattered sheet that was not a dragon, and the rain finally started to fall, he shouted up at the clouds and the stars they hid, “I don’t believe in psychics!”
He stood in the rain getting colder and wetter with each passing second, and murmured to himself, “It’s not real. It’s just not.”
