FanStory.com - Traitorous Percy's Thready Contrailby Jay Squires

Doctrex has been delivered by his captor, Zarbs, to the Palace of Qarnolt. He is unconscious owing to a horrendous wound on his ribcage. He awakes to a doctor examining him and telling him he had been given a narcotic for the pain. Doctrex recalls how he and the medic Garvin had tried to keep Jed from slipping into a coma after being given a narcotic for pain. Panicky that he might suffer the same fate, he resolves to stay awake. Meanwhile, he is horrified by creatures, moving, crawling, on the ceiling. The doctor tells him they are carved there, but the narcotic and the torchlight throwing shadows on the ceiling is causing him to imagine their danger to him. Doctrex wants to ask about Zarbs, but he can’t seem to articulate it.

Frantic to stay awake, horrified of looking at the creatures on the ceiling, Doctrex is convinced are waiting for him to sleep so they can devour him, He accepts the possibility that he is losing his mind. In order to stay awake, he puts all his concentration on an odd-looking, overlarge fly on the sheet. Becoming fond of the fly, he names him Percy. Then, he discovers Percy, who seems to be trying to lure him into looking at the ceiling, might be of the enemy camp. Feeling betrayed, and with no way out of his dilemma, in a final act of courage he flings his head back and stares up at the ceiling.

                                                               The Final Paragraphs of Part 2

          A melody recklessly played through my mind. I hummed. Words followed:
Oh how you danced
                                                On the night we were wed ....
         Why? What’s happening to me? I’m General Doctrex. I lead the mighty Kabeez army. I am not the narcotic. I must be rational. Keep thinking ...
         If Percy was, indeed, the enemy’s third flank, then once he realized I was using his lenses as a buffer between me and the General’s soldiers, and that I refused to look up from the lenses at the creatures directly—damn you Percy!—you allowed the fourth flank, the clouds floating across your lenses, to seduce my embattled imagination into surrender.
          I suddenly felt the full, massive weight of entrapment settling over me. I breathed dry, hot air, rapid and feathery; my heart raced. I would not yield to the enemy’s general. I would die before I surrendered.
         “I ... too ... am a general.” I said, loudly and with conviction—amazed that my words didn’t make it to my throat. Still, I was adamant in my resolve. I could no longer shift back and forth in my allegiance.
         Gathering every bit of courage I could muster, I threw my head back, fixed my eyes on the ceiling, and felt my breath leave me; when it returned it was tugging a gasp that sent Percy circling above, before he dropped back to me, as on a piece of decaying carrion.

Unblinking, I gaped. The domed ceiling was crammed with all the creatures I had first seen when the doctor was in my room, and just a moment ago on Percy’s lenses. Beyond doubt, my imagination had created the movement. I felt the urge to laugh and cry. The doctor was right. These creatures had been chiseled out of the surface of the domed ceiling. That and nothing more. The torchlight ignited the peaks and sent the shadows flowing through the valleys of the carvings.

The six torches angled out from each of the three walls I could see, and I was sure from the unseen wall behind me, they cast their light upwards to the ceiling, sending out fingers of flickering light that played with the shadows between the heads, wings and claws, and seemed to bring the creatures to life. As I watched, the spread wings did seem to waver, and uncannily, the serpent appeared to be making incremental progress toward the frog, whose eye, at that instant, seemed—rather, light and shadow conspired to make him seem—to blink.

Imagination. It was all illusory. Percy was once again vindicated. I smiled down at him. You merely tried to get me to see what was there. You knew only that would set me free. Surveying the truth of it, giddiness bubbled up in me. I resisted the urge to laugh outright, fearing Percy would lift off my chest in search of other challenges. I kept my grin on him. He was on his back four legs again, but now he raised his stubby front legs straight up on either side of his head, pumping first one and then the other, like a prizefighter. Was he celebrating? I winked at him. Of course! You should celebrate, Percy. That means you were on my side after all; you fulfilled your mission by forcing me to overcome my fear of the creatures. Dance on my loyal soldier.

I glanced back to reaffirm my courage. The creatures were still undulating their stony and benign ferocity through shadow and light. But now I watched them without dread. By isolating one creature from the others, I could see it transmogrify before my eyes while I maintained emotional distance from it.

So now, only the enemy General waited for me. But thanks to Percy, I could now gaze upon the creatures with equanimity. I could study each in detail. And my study of them would keep me from surrendering to the General’s charm. Make no mistake, the General was charming—charming and patient. But now his soldiers had come over to my side.

I started a slow and deliberate study of the ones that had been the most frightful before. I saw how the artist had inset gems into the sockets of the monkey-faced, bat-winged demon. Catching the torchlight, they glowed like coals. Added to them were the flickering shadows that mimicked a breeze, producing an eerie fluttering of the wings. Especially when one was as susceptible as I.

How odd that among all the creatures a bullfrog would occupy such a prominent position. Almost as comic relief, his mouth had been carved into a perennial grin, the meaty lips stretched slightly opened as they curved around either side of his head. Shadow and light played on the thin space between his lips. Eyes sat on twin mounds atop his head. In slits between sleepy eye lids, every bit as heavy-looking as mine felt, two obsidian eyes seemed to peer down at me.

Next I followed, with the dispassion of a scientist, the apparent progress of one of the many vipers resident on this ceiling. The artist had frozen this one’s movement diagonally down and across the generous belly of the bullfrog. My study of the viper was briefly distracted by another glimpse of the bullfrog’s eyes blinking shut and instantly popping back open. Mine shot up to meet his. They stared back, black and empty.

Simple Illusion ... Smiling, I pulled my attention back to the viper. His trail took him just below the bullfrog’s wide, spatulate mouth and the sagging sack of a throat beneath. The viper seemed to shimmer between flickering light and roving shadow. No wonder I so readily believed, when I was under the full effects of the narcotic, that the viper and all the other demons were a threat to me. From where I lay, only one of his gold-bejeweled eyes was visible to me, so intent did he seem to be on his prey somewhere on the other side of the bullfrog. But oh, how that one eye glittered in its bath of torchlight!

My attention drifted back to the bullfrog’s eyes. I kept staring at them, waiting for the elements of light and shadow to combine in the right order to simulate the blink I’d seen twice earlier. As my gaze held to those almost liquid, black orbs between the slits, a part of me noticed my breathing had slowed and softened. I gulped in some air and turned away before I could be sucked into a trance, not unlike the one caused by the clouds on Percy’s lenses.

This was good. I was learning my limits. Too much focus could be detrimental. I was feeling better about myself. Slowly, I was regaining control of Doctrex. During that ineffably deep sadness of a few moments ago, I thought, along with the loss of Percy’s allegiance, I had irretrievably lost Doctrex, too.

Perhaps the narcotic was wearing off after all. I was beginning to see myself with more clarity and reason.

Percy—I’m sure feeling isolated from my conversation with myself—hopped up on my chin, then to my nose. His breath gently riffled my lashes. Crossing my eyes was the only way I could see what was still a blurry double version of him. Was he trying to tell me something? “Perthy?” I felt a tickle of his feet on my chin and finally brought him into focus on the sheet in the vicinity of my chest. Tucking my chin into the center of my clavicle put me within three inches of him. “Perthy?” I questioned, again.

He brought his stubby front legs to either side of his little fly face and waggled his head, side-to-side, then stopped as though to study me.

What was that? Was he mocking me? I arched my eyebrows. “What?”

He hesitated a moment, brought both front legs together on one side of his face, then angled his face down to them. The surface of his lenses slipped down to his chin, and on their descent turned sullen-gray and non-reflective.

“What? Thleep?” I managed to get out. I stared at him, open-mouthed. “Oh, Perthy ...” I felt ill. This was final, irrefutable proof he was in the enemy camp after all. Nothing he could do would win back his allegiance.

A rage erupted from a place within me that was black, hot and thick.

“Nooooooooo!” I shrieked, and it echoed on in my ears long after he leaped, straight up, about four feet from the sheet, spiraled there, then zipped down to alight at knee-level. I brought my arm out from under the sheet and in one movement whipped it in an arc to within a fraction of an inch over his body.

“Go!” I shouted, and he shot up even higher than before and traced a wider spiral. I thought he was gone for good, until he made a pass so close to my face I heard and felt the movement of his wings, and then he glided down to a spot on the sheet near my chest. He crouched on his back four feet and stared at me.

“Go,” I said again, but I was exhausted from my effort, and there was no volume to my voice. My arm lay outside the sheet, but it could easily have been someone else’s. At first, I didn’t bother to lift it because I was sure it wouldn’t obey my command. But now would have been such a good time to swat Percy. It took all my concentration just to start by moving my fingers. I took a few short preparatory breaths the way Klipal Lesn did before hoisting the boulder over his head. My arm seemed to lift itself off the sheet, but before I could swat Percy it collapsed back to my side. When I saw that Percy seemed to cock his head and stare at me, I was infuriated. I tried again. My arm seemed to drift a foot above the sheet, then crash back like a fallen tree. Percy continued to stare at me, but his lenses went to a gray, flat surface as he brought his head and his eyes to his chest.

“Go, Perthy,” I said, knowing I was dipping deep into my energy reserves to voice it. “Get off me, traitor! I don’t want you.” I barely managed to emphasize the words with a shake of my head. He slowly raised his lenses to me and I saw my cold, loveless eyes reflected there.

As much as my reason raged against him, I experienced a sharp lance of isolation and loss the instant he lifted off my chest. Veering off to my right, he hovered about ten feet to the side of my bed. “Go,” I mouthed. He raised higher, banked back toward the bed and proceeded to make lazy circles around me, about midway from the ceiling. Trying to ignore him as he completed circuit after languorous circuit, I stared through his orbit at the mystery of the torchlight feathering the ridges and then getting swallowed up in the valleys of the carvings on the ceiling, creating the creatures’ subtle, macabre dance. Just now, the bullfrog’s glinting black eyes seem to slide slowly back and forth between the lids, but then ceased their movement the moment I focused directly on them.

I brought myself back to Percy’s orbit. Evidently, easy to forgive my outburst against him, this joyful aviator buzzed his rotation around my bed. Keeping my head still, I followed him with my eyes, one circuit, two circuits, three .... I lifted my head a little and blinked. It couldn’t be! It had to be my imagination. Extruded from somewhere behind his whirring wings was—could it be?— a contrail like a jet would leave behind, but thinner, like a thread.

He tightened up his revolutions over my bed, now, but their velocity was increasing, and the contrail didn’t dissipate as a jet’s would. The threads remained and he travelled at such a dizzying speed I couldn’t keep my eyes on him. I noticed, only from the configuration of the threads, that he had altered his odd circumgyration. The threads crisscrossed each other, forming a kind of webbing or a net.

I knew, now, what he was doing. It was his final act of aggression, and I was powerless to thwart it. I watched as he made one final circuit, performed a feat of aerial acrobatics, which I figured as his final coup de grace, and shot straight up toward the ceiling. As the net drifted toward me, but before it enwrapped me like a warm fog, I thought what I glimpsed through the tiny holes in the webbing was a pink lightning bolt of a tongue flick down from the ceiling and gather Percy to be with his brethren.