Tales From Gavagan's Bar (12 page)

             
"My dear young man," he said, "if it is a matter of a psychosophist, I should ask nothing better than the opportunity to assist you. They are the most repulsive of existing beings. Let me see—ha, I will provide you with the king of all the cats, and mouse corpses will litter the doorstep of Fairfields."

             
I explained that the king of the cats wouldn't do me much more good than the crown prince, because of my traveling.

             
He put a hand up to his mouth and spoke from underneath it. "Hm, hm," he said. "That makes it more difficult, but the project is a worthy one, and I will not willingly abandon it. I will lend you my dragon."

             
I laughed, thinking that Abaris was a much cleverer man than he looked, to have turned a mild joke around on me in that fashion. But he didn't laugh back.

             
"It is a very young dragon," he said, "hatched from an egg presented to me by my old friend, Mr. Sylvester. As nearly as I can determine, I am the first person to raise one from the egg, so I must ask you to take particularly good care of it, as I wish to present a report at the next meeting of the Imperial Society."

             
I thought he was carrying the joke so far that it strained a bit, so I said of course I would take the best of care of his dragon; and if it wearied of a diet of mice, I'd be glad to see that it was provided with a beautiful young maiden tied to a tree, though I wouldn't guarantee the results, which I understood to be usually unfortunate for dragons in such cases.

             
He gave a giggle at that, but it trailed off in a nasty kind of way and he tapped his fingers two or three times on the bar. "It appears that you treat this with a spirit of levity," he said.

             
"These are high matters. Therefore, and purely as a preventative, I shall accompany the loan of the dragon with an engagement. I shall require you to permit me to put a curse on you when I return from the Brocken if my dragon is not returned in good order." He produced a knife with a small, sharp scalpel blade. "Prick your thumb," he said.

             
Well, things had gone too far for me to pull out at this point without being ridiculous; and besides I was curious about what kind of charlatanry he was going to produce by way of a dragon, so I stuck myself in the thumb and a drop of blood came out on the bar. Abaris leaned over it and made a little sort of humming song, all in minors, twiddling his fingers in the way Mr. Cohan described. I didn't like the expression on his face. The drop of blood vanished.

             
[Mr. Cohan had been leaning against the back of the bar with his arms akimbo. Now he came to life. "Vanished, did it?" he said. "The devil of a time I had trying to get the mark of that drop of blood out, and the best part of it's there yet. If you get the right angle and look close now—see—there it is, like it worked right through the varnish into the wood. Isn't that queer, now?"]

             
There was nothing queer about the dragon, though [said Murdoch, and for the first time Witherwax noticed that the Zombies were beginning to have some effect on his speech]. It was a real dragon. I knew it was, as soon as Abaris brought it to my place in a metal box, and that was when I really began to worry a little. It hooked its feef—I mean, it cooked its food on the hoof. Wouldn't touch a dead mouse at all, not at all. But when it got near a live one it would go
whooof
and shoot out
a flame, and there was mouse, all cooked.

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Witherwax said: "I never thought of that. They must have the flame for something, though. That is, if it was a real dragon."

             
Murdoch stuck out a finger. "Look here, ol' man, don't you believe me? It's bad
enough—"

             
"Now, now," Mr. Cohan intervened heavily. "There will be no arguments of the kind in Gavagan's Bar. Mr. Murdoch, I am
surprised at you. Not a word has Mr. Witherwax said to show he doesn't believe you. And as for the dragon, I seen it with me own two eyes, right here on this bar; and near the end of the bar and all it was."

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He brought it in here in a big tomato-juice can [the bartender went on], to show it to me because it was here he heard about it first, and because of the wonderful way it would be cleaning the mice out of his place, so there was hardly one left. I wi
ll say it wasn't much to look at, being like one of them alligators about a foot and a half long, with a couple of little stubby wings sticking out of its back.

             
Maybe it didn't like being out on the bar or something, because before Mr. Murdoch could get it back into the can, it run down to the end there, and there was a felly sitting drinking a Tom Collins and minding his own business. This dragon let off a puff of flame about a foot long that burned all the hair off the back of the felly's hand, and would you believe it? It boiled the Tom Collins right over the side of the glass so it made a mark on Gavagan's varnish. This felly jumped up and run out of here; and as that sort of thing is bad for business, I told Mr. Murdoch he'd have to keep the dragon out of the place; and that was the beginning of all his troubles.

             
Now, Mr. Murdoch, it's all right. I was just going to tell them that the reason you brung the dragon in here was thinking it would maybe help with the rats we have in the cellar, bad luck to them; and also because it was getting hungry. The mice were clean eaten out; and Mr. Murdoch had no luck at all when he brought it home a piece of beefsteak or a pork chop, for beef or pork it could not have but must catch its food for itself. The dragon was getting thin, he used to say, and would be saying something like "Kwark, kwark," and even trying to catch flies, that was so burned to pieces with the flame that it had nothing to eat from them at all.

             
So what does Mr. Murdoch do? He does what any man of good sense would do and tries to take it to the zoo until Mr. Abaris gets home from Brooklyn or wherever it is. He puts it
in the tomato-juice can with a cardboard top, but the dragon did not like the trip here to the bar at all, and it burns a hole in the cardboard, and out it comes. Then he puts it in a wooden box and the same thing happens, only it nearly burned up the apartment that time. Then he tries to call the zoo to come get it, but devil a bit would the zoo have to do with that.

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"Why not?" asked Witherwax.

             
"Oh, it's a long story, a long, long story," said Murdoch. "They said they couldn't take it unless I gave it to them, and I said I couldn't do that, and they said I should take it to a pet stop—I mean, pet shop; and I to
ld them it burned a hole in the box. That was bad, because the zoo, it said, what did it say? It said, oh yes, they'd send a wagon right around for the dragon, in charge of a keeper named Napoleon Bonaparte. So I hung up. Maybe the whole thing didn't happen." He drained the last of his Zombie unhappily.

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It happened as I'm the living witness [said Mr. Cohan stoutly]. When Mr. Murdoch gave me the word on this, I says to him, if you can't take the dragon to his food, then do the next best thing. Doc Brenner now, he tells me there's places where you can
buy rats and mice and things like that for experiments; and if this isn't an experiment, what is? So when I got the address of one of those places from Doc Brenner, Mr. Murdoch goes there right away, and then he remembers he has ordered some wood to make bookshelves out of. So what does he do but leave the key to his place downstairs in the restaurant.

             
Well, this boy that brought the boards in—he was in here afterwards, and young as he was, I wouldn't refuse him a drink, because he was needing it—this lad put the boards down, when all of a sudden a mouse runs out of the corner by the pipes, with the dragon after it. It must of been a new mouse. The dragon was not stalking like a cat, the way it usually did, but hopping across the floor, with its claws scratching the boards and its wings trying to fly, and every
third hop it would let out a flame a foot long.

             
The mouse made a dive for that pile of lumber, with the dragon after him. The lad that brought the boards was hit by a tongue of flame—he had a hole in his pants leg you could shove your fist through—before he got out of there, thinking maybe Gavagan's would be a better place for him. What happened next I cannot tell you; but the nearest a man can come to it, the mouse crawled in among them boards, and the dragon set them afire while trying to cook the mouse.

             
However that may be, when Mr. Murdoch got back with a box under his arm and live mice in it, his apartment was in a fine grand blaze, and firemen spraying water through the window and chopping things up with their axes and having themselves a rare old time. That part was all right, because Mr. Murdoch had insurance. But there was no insurance on the dragon, and when he got in afterward, by God, not a trace of the beast could he find. Whether it got burned up, or flushed down with the hoses or run away to the Fairfield Restaurant, he has no idea at all. And now here's this Abaris coming back from Brooklyn and Mr. Murdoch with no dragon for him, nothing but the box of mice he has been keeping, hoping the dragon would show up.

             
So now this Abaris will put the curse on him, and what it will be I don't know and neither does he. No, Mr. Murdoch, you will excuse me from giving you another double Zombie this night.

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". . . so this guy Donnelly proves," said Mr. Witherwax, waving his Martini under young Mr. Jeffers's nose, "that the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Mayans must have come from the same place, and this Atlantis is the only place they could have come from."

             
"What's this?" said Doc Brenner, who had been engaged in contemplating the stuffed owl over the bar. "Don't tell me that you've fallen for Donnelly's ancient maunderings!"

             
"You mean it ain't a new book?" said Witherwax, with the air of a man about to look crestfallen.

             
"God, no! It came out in the eighties, and the only people it fools now are those who believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare." Brenner turned to the bartender. "Mr. Cohan, this puts me in a weakened condition. I need a Sazerac to restore my strength."

             
"But look here," said Witherwax, "there has to be something to account for all those legends of floods and places that disappeared under the ocean."

"Not any more than there has to be a historical event to account for the Book of Revelation," said Brenner, firmly. "Continents only move at the rate of a fraction of an inch a year. There's no conceivable way you could get the whole Mid-Atlantic ridge down two or three miles below the surface in the ten thousand years allowed by the story, which originally came
from Plato. Atlantis just never existed."

             
"I used to think so, too," said a young man with blonde hair so wavy it looked as if it had received professional attention.