The Dragon of Lake Glibly

Fiction by Craig S. Shoemake

From where I’m parked, on a bluff overlooking the lake, a steep asphalt path winds down to the cemetery.  I reach out to depress the door handle, touch the metal coldness, and pause.  

No.  For the moment I’m going to keep sitting here, gazing through the windshield at the blue stripe of Lake Glibly stretching into the distance.  In clear weather you can spot the north shore, but not today.  Haze—the more honest term, I think, is smog—obscures the view.

It didn’t used to be this way.  I grew up on the eastern shore within eyeshot of the lake a decade before the building boom commenced, the boom that turned our quiet countryside into prime suburban real estate.  Tracts of lush, old growth forest abutting stretches of shoreline fell to the bulldozers.  A two-lane road girdled the lake.  New homes sprang up and strangers moved in faster than you could meet them.  Mom got a job upstate and took me with her before I could witness the full extent of the carnage, so my memory of Lake Glibly is relatively unsullied.  The body of water I’m looking at now is like the face of an old friend after a car accident and reconstructive surgery—same shape, different features.

My fingers still rest on the lever and this time I don’t hesitate.  I press down, hear the click of the mechanism unlocking.  I push the door open and then I’m outside, standing up, the blast of mid-summer hitting me like the punch from an open oven.  I lock the door, bite my lip, and start down the path toward the cemetery.

I find the marker after a brief search.  The stone is small and gray, of nondescript granite, the writing clear as on that day thirty-one years ago: Richard J. Murphy 1902-1978.  Adjacent stands another stone: Winifred Murphy 1905-1966.  Nobody lies under the second marker, and this knowledge bothers me more than I would have expected.  I read the names and dates several times, calculate their ages, and then turn toward the lake.  Standing between the stones, the body of water takes on added significance, a threat, of sorts, because I know more is there than meets the eye.  The graves prove it.  

I stare at the water, searching for something I don’t expect to find, my pale skin baking in the sun.  Time seems to drift away and I remember and remember, trying to bring back that day, to conjure the scene once more.  I’m praying, but not to any god…

My temples start to throb and I rub them, sweat greasing my fingertips.  The lake remains as calm as when I showed up fifteen minutes ago.  Now I know I can go home and write in my journal: August 24—no miracles today.  I indulge in a self-mocking smile and turn to go, then recall the other grave.  My near omission embarrasses me.  I start walking, and in a couple of minutes find it.

“Hi Dad,” I say.  “Ryan here.”  The stone says nothing, and I don’t attempt further conversation.  My feelings are vague and mixed, some far away, some closer than I’d like, an assortment of childhood recollections and more recent, open wounds.  I wonder why I came here and realize it wasn’t to read headstones.  

Looking at the lake again, I try to ignore the boats with their unfurled sails of white and rainbow colors.  When I was young you never saw them, but today they swarm the surface like an invasion of water bugs.  I find them vaguely offensive, in the manner a party of revelers holding a cookout amid the ruins of Stonehenge would be.  Same as it ever was, sang David Byrne, and right now I wish it was true; I was foolish to hope nothing had changed.

I look at Dad’s headstone again and reread the letters.  I consider the facts: I’m an overweight, middle-aged man, one of millions who never really knew his father.  

“Goodbye Dad,” I say, and trudge up the hill, sweat stinging my eyes.

I turned eleven the day he died.  

He was returning from a business trip, one of the dozens he took every year.  Summer had started, Mom was happy, and I was expecting to get a monster poster.  I was an Ultraman fanatic, and a like-minded friend of mine, son of a Japanese mom and an American serviceman, had slipped me a trove of monster books.  They were, unfortunately, all written in Japanese, and despite the book on kanji Dad had brought back from his trip to Osaka the previous year, eternally beyond my comprehension.  I cut a lot of the pictures out and taped them on my bedroom walls, but at business card size they hardly did justice to the terrors portrayed.  I needed something bigger, something worthy of my veneration.  Dad had promised a poster.

“He better bring it,” I said.  

Mom and I were sitting in the airport, awaiting his plane’s arrival.  Ordinarily we wouldn’t have bothered to come, but this had been a long trip—to Taiwan or Hong Kong, I forget which—and Mom wanted to do something special.  Plus, they planned to take me out for dinner.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “he will.” 

We stared out the terminal windows.  They must have announced the plane’s arrival because Mom jerked suddenly and grabbed my hand.  A few minutes later Dad issued from a tunnel with a crowd of fellow passengers and he and Mom hugged and kissed.  Dad took me by the elbow in that vigorous, manly way he liked to do and said:

“Happy birthday Ryan!  Seen any monsters lately?”

“Only on TV.  Though Mr. Murphy thinks he heard his monster the other morning.  But I kind of doubt it.”

“He doesn’t give up, does he?”

Dad started telling Mom about the work he did on his trip.  I fell silent.  For some reason I felt glum.  I wonder now if my mood wasn’t a premonition, but I was probably just anxious to see the promised picture, the only birthday present that mattered.  Perhaps Dad would give it to me in the car.

I guess I should say something about Mr. Murphy, the widower who lived next door to us.  At one time he’d been someone important—big in state politics with lots of business interests, I learned later—and from years of travel and connections to famous people he’d collected all sorts of foreign trinkets and autographed memorabilia.  I didn’t know much about that part of his life, though; to me he was just the nice man who lived next door in the house full of cool stuff, who sometimes let me and my friends in to play with the models and machines he’d collected.  

I think his life went downhill after his wife died, which happened the year I was born.  He turned into a sort of recluse.  He stopped going places, the famous people no longer visited, and he spent all his time on the lake, fishing like there was no tomorrow.  He always gave mom some of the fish he caught, and I remember our freezer packed to the gills—pun intended—with Mr. Murphy’s hauls from Lake Glibly.  

His most memorable distinction, however, was his belief a dragon lived in the lake and had caused his wife’s death.  I’m not sure how many people knew this story, which he told me on several occasions, though I’m certain he was alone in his belief; Glibly’s not famous for anything, least of all a monster.  Like most northern bodies of water, glaciers scraped the lakebed out, so it’s not ancient from a geologic perspective—maybe twelve thousand years old, give or take.  And besides, though deep in spots, Lake Glibly just isn’t big enough to hide that sort of thing.

None of these facts bothered Mr. Murphy.  One time when I came home from school he was sitting on his front door step, puffing on a cigar and messing with his lures.  He waved me over.

“You seen him, Ryan?”

“Seen who, Mr. Murphy?”—though I knew where the conversation was going. 

“The beast who took my Winnie.”  He had removed the cigar from his mouth and held it between his fore and middle fingers, like Groucho Marx.

“Not today.”

“I heard him this morning, before you got up.”

“How could you tell if I was up?”

“I see your light.”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback by this revelation.  The silence piled up while he stole a puff or two.  “What did the monster sound like?”

“A dragon, not a monster.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Dragons have great dignity.  They’re majestic, graceful, terrifying.  In the Orient they bring good luck.”

“But your mon—I mean dragon—didn’t bring you good luck.”  Perhaps I was being overbold in stating the obvious.  

He gave me a piercing stare.  He had wet blue eyes, like something was wrong with them.

“No, he didn’t.  You can never tell with dragons.  Sometimes they bring good luck, sometimes bad.  But with monsters it’s always the same—”

“Bad,” we said in unison.  I laughed, but he just lifted his gaze toward the lake, thrust his cigar back in his mouth, and went on working with his lures.  

I wanted to show him something, so I sat next to him.  I took one of my monster books from my book bag.  I showed him pictures of Bemular, Jiras, and Telesdon, each of whom had appeared on Ultraman.  

Mr. Murphy glanced at the pictures.  He didn’t seem impressed.  “My dragon’s not like any of those,” he said.

“No,” I agreed.  “They’re too big.  It’d be pretty obvious if one of these lived in the lake.”

“They’re not graceful either.”

I grunted indifferently, unsure what he meant.  I just thought they were cool.  

I never learned what the dragon sounded like.

Mr. Murphy was the only person from whom I ever heard the story of Winifred Murphy’s death, though Mom said one time she “simply drowned.”  No one knows what really happened to her—except, of course, Mr. Murphy.  

He and his wife used to like boating.  He had retired very well off, and they were making up for lost time together.  They didn’t fish, preferring to row up and down the lake, over time visiting every cove and backwater until they knew Glibly like their front yard.  One afternoon while they were in one of the lonely parts of the lake a storm blew up, so fast it hit them before they could reach shore.  

“Everything went dark,” he’d say, the emotions always fresh in his voice when he told the story.  “A spout arose on the water and came right for us.”

As implausible as it sounds, this could have happened.  Twisters spring up around here from time to time, and one summer a tornado came out of nowhere and tore up some houses a quarter mile from ours.  So maybe a little one got on the lake and did exactly what Mr. Murphy said.  The part I had a hard time with was the dragon.

“So there we were, my Winnie and me, alone on the churning waters.  I wasn’t worried about myself because I lifeguarded in high school, swimming champion too, but Winnie never learned to swim.  The lake was usually so placid she wasn’t even wearing a life preserver.  Besides, our boat was wide and sturdy.  And she had me with her.  Maybe we were stupid though.

“Anyway, this black funnel of water and wind came right for us, roaring like a locomotive.  We rowed like crazy but it caught us, and then . . . I saw him—”

At this point he’d always pause, his eyes big as saucers, and his hands held up as if to ward off something.

“You never saw anything so terrifying!  He rose from the water, neck thick as a barrel and long as a station wagon.  He had a head as big as a VW, with spears for teeth and headlights for eyes.”  A distant, shell-shocked look would come over his face, the sort you see in pictures of disaster victims.  Which always made me wonder if he wasn’t telling the truth—his truth, at least.  “His hide was black and scaly and glittered like diamonds.  Winnie screamed.  Hell, I screamed, too, never having seen such a thing.  Then our boat flipped over.”

I knew the rest by heart.  The dragon submerged and Mr. Murphy swam around for more than an hour looking for his wife.  Unable to find her, he got to shore and called the search and rescue people.  They didn’t find her either, though they did collect remains of the boat.  Something had smashed it to little pieces and everyone thought that pretty strange.  The investigators chalked the accident up to “freak weather” and closed the case.  Mr. Murphy—I heard this from Mom and Dad, who attended the funeral—proved inconsolable, and insisted a grave be dug for his wife and an empty casket laid in the earth.  A lot of other mourners turned out too, but from that time on Mr. Murphy turned his back on everything, spending the rest of his days fishing and boating and telling monster stories.

Dad took us to a Japanese restaurant, celebrating my birthday and his return in grand style.  He had fallen in love with sushi on one of his trips to Japan.  I’d heard of the stuff, but never tried any.  While we waited for our food, Dad gave me the monster picture he’d promised.  He took a cardboard tube from his briefcase—too short, I remember thinking—and unfurled the poster from the tube.  

“Ta-daaaah!  What do you think Ry?  Is that a monster or is that a monster?”

My heart sank.  I immediately recognized the fishy visage of the Creature From the Black Lagoon, having seen the now classic 1954 film with my father on TV only weeks before. 

“Thanks Dad,” I said, hoping my lack of enthusiasm didn’t come through in my voice.  The look of innocent self-satisfaction on his face indicated I’d fooled him, at least for now.  Mom was another matter.

“Honey, he’s into Japanese monsters, not…this.”  She waved a dismissive hand.  

“But that’s a monster, too!  We watched the movie together, remember Ry?”  

I nodded, but Mom pressed her point, and by the time dinner came I wished I’d never asked for a picture.  Unfortunately, worse ensued that night.

On our way home from the restaurant, a drunk in a pickup truck careened into the driver’s side of our car, instantly killing my father.  I, by some miracle, crawled unscathed from the wreckage, while Mom suffered whiplash severe enough to put her into a neck brace.  

Days slipped into weeks, and Mom and I dealt with our loss as best we could.  We went to grief counseling in the afternoons; and in the evenings, after I’d finished my homework, she would cling to me like a distraught child clutching her doll.  Watching my mother transform daily into a needy girl, tempestuous tyrant, or sullen mute proved more terrifying than that awful night of crunching metal, flashing lights, and gray shapes of paramedics with their crackling walkie-talkies.  Her light and cheerful presence, until then a constant fixture in my life, vanished.  Dad’s absence had been a constant in our lives, but this new and different sort of absence, of permanent duration, crushed me.  

I came to think of our previous lives together in terms of a metaphor: during a long journey at sea, ports are visited but infrequently.  This does not make them unimportant.  If Mom had been the captain of the ship of my life, the sporadic occasions of Dad’s presence had served as our ports of call.  I came to understand the two of them had worked out this arrangement in the early years of their marriage, and in so doing surrendered a part of the life they wanted in hopes of something better in the future—more money, more opportunities, more time together.  That future never happened, and I never got to know my father—except as the guy who mostly got it wrong whenever he tried to please his son.

On a Saturday morning about three weeks after the accident, a knock rang on our front door.  I was sitting in the family room watching The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Show and eating a bowl of Froot Loops.  Mr. Murphy greeted me when I opened the door.

He wore a fisherman’s hat and toted his usual cigar.  He also had a couple of fishing rods in hand.

“You ready to go, Ryan?”

“Go where?”

“Fishing!”

He shook the rods, like I hadn’t seen them.

“Why do you want to go fishing with me?”

I immediately understood this was an impolitic thing to ask, but I was genuinely curious.  He had never invited me before.

“I need an assistant.”

“To catch fish?”

“Not just that.”

Taking this as an oblique reference to his ongoing quest, I turned and shouted, “Mom!  Can I go be Mr. Murphy’s assistant to catch fish and maybe even a monster too?”  I realized what I’d said.  “Sorry Mr. Murphy, I mean dragon.”

He nodded.  “Apology accepted.”

Mom emerged from the kitchen, still moving stiffly on account of her whiplash.  “Hi Mr. Murphy.  You want to take Ry fishing?”

“Howdy, ma’am.”  Mr. Murphy tilted his head and touched the brim of his hat.  He was always like that toward Mom.  She called him “a gentleman,” implying, it seemed, that I should learn from our neighbor’s chivalrous ways.  “I certainly do.  Need some assistance if I’m going to land the big one.”

“Well, I don’t see why not.”

I donned a broad brimmed straw hat and a long-sleeve collar shirt per Mom’s request and the two of us headed to the little wharf where Mr. Murphy kept his rowboat tied.  I helped him unloose the rope and coil it in the center of the boat.  

We pushed off, Mr. Murphy rowing while I sat in the prow.  A broad, clean sky stretched overhead.  A light breeze tickled my neck.  

He designated me “The Skipper,” but I didn’t feel qualified for such a position and said so.  He didn’t answer at first, just plugged away at the oars, taking us farther and farther from shore.  He had developed a method of rowing with the cigar snagged between the fingers of his left hand and flicking his hand real fast to his mouth to steal a puff.  He did this without losing a beat.  I watched him, impressed by his dexterity.  He only faltered when he coughed.

“Nonsense,” he finally said in answer to my objection.  “You are every bit qualified.  You’ve got keener eyes than I do and from your vantage, you can reconnoiter our position and judge whether the waters are prime for catching fish.”

“How do I tell that?”

“Nothing to it.  Just keep your eyes peeled.”

That was the extent of the fishing instruction I received from Mr. Murphy.  For all the time he spent fiddling with lures and rearranging his tackle box, I never got the sense he cared much for the technicalities of the sport.  He simply wanted to be on the water, a hook dangling in the depths, waiting for whatever might happen along.

Mr. Murphy rowed us as far from the houses as possible.  He knew every quiet corner of the lake like no one did, and we drank our Pepsis and ate our Pringles and egg salad sandwiches in a place that time forgot.  It was a shallow cove where ancient stumps thrust up from the muddy water and thick, hairy vines hung off tree limbs, some dangling into the water.  I imagined the Devonian Age must have looked similar.  Unfortunately, the fishing had seen more nibbles than bites—after an hour, only a couple of perch lay in the steel bucket in the middle of our boat.

I finished my sandwich and decided to pop the question I’d wondered about for many years.  “Hey Mr. Murphy, why’d you start fishing after Mrs. Murphy died?”  He’d always said fishing didn’t interest him until after his encounter with Glibly’s monster.

The old man chewed his sandwich in a patient, methodical fashion which didn’t allow for many pauses or lengthy conversation, so a minute or more passed before he stopped moving his mouth, swallowed, and spoke.  

“Honest, I didn’t want to fish.  Never had.  I didn’t want to do anything, except leave.  Go someplace I’d never gone before.”  He turned from the water to look at me.  “You might be dealing with a bit of this yourself, now and in the future, just because things are too big to deal with all at once.  You lose someone like you lost your Dad, like I lost my Winnie, and you start looking at the ground, wondering if it’s going to hold you up for the next step.  Know what I mean?”

I stared at my sneakers.  A bright red dragonfly had alighted on one.  

“Yeah.  I guess so.”

He chuckled gently.  “Yeah, you know all right.”

He started cleaning up the remains from his lunch.  I wondered if he was finished with our conversation.  I hoped not.

“What does that got to do with fishing?” I asked.

“I’m getting to it,” he said, dabbing a napkin to his lips, the whiteness of which stood out against his sunburned skin.  He started coughing and held the back of his wrist to his mouth.  

“You all right?” 

“Just emphysema.  So they say.”

“What’s that?”

“Bad stuff in the lungs.  Messed up on account of my stogies.”  He chortled, launching another coughing fit.  “Trouble with doctors, they don’t understand, sometimes for people, pleasure and satisfaction matter more than living a long time, even being healthy.  They don’t get it.”  He grinned though a suppressed hack and the gleam of sunlight off his gold teeth startled me.

“About the fishing,” he said after getting everything put away.  “Like I was saying, I wanted to get the heck out of here.  Go anywhere that didn’t remind me of Winnie.  But after a while I started thinking: ‘How am I gonna not think about her?  I mean, can I forget about my bones or my beard or…heck, my lungs?  Can’t do it.’  So when I understood that, I knew I had to tackle the worst thing of all, conquer what bugged me most.”

“What was that?”

He wore a face of doom.  “Fear!” he said, so loud I jumped.

“What were you afraid of?” 

“This lake.  Darkness.  Storms.  The unknown.”  He leaned forward in dramatic fashion.  “Death.” 

I gnawed my lower lip.  

“Not sure I understand,” I said after a bit.

“You do—or you will.  If not today, someday.”  He baited a hook and made a cast.  

I’d nearly forgotten my own line.  I gave the rod a pull, but nothing pulled back.  

A while passed.

Then he said, “Your mama told me you’ve had nightmares.”

I fought down a blaze of righteous indignation; Mom had no business telling people about my dreams.

“Yeah.”

“’Bout what?”

“Dad.”

“What kind of things?”

“Cars.  Ambulances.  I see him.  Only he doesn’t look like Dad.  He looks like…a zombie.”  Tears welled in my eyes.  I blinked against the sting and turned my face away.

“There now,” I heard him say, his voice raspy but comforting.  “No need to worry.  We’re all by ourselves out here.”

I took a deep breath and faced the old man.  “It’s like I’m scared of everything, Mr. Murphy.  Scared of cars, the dark, even Mom.”  I caught myself yelling and stopped, shut my mouth, ashamed.  I stared at my line where it entered the water and sniffed.

“Now what’s all this about?  Mrs. Kasper has to be the most unfrightening dame I ever met.  Let me tell you, young man, three months went by before I worked up the courage to ask Winnie for a date.  How’s that for sheer terror?”

I laughed despite myself.  

“She just doesn’t seem like Mom anymore.  I don’t know.”

I reeled in my line and checked the hook.  Something had made off with the worm.  I took another from a jar I’d packed the night before and stuck it on the metal barb.  I hated the way they wriggled when I gutted them and wondered if they felt pain.  I made my cast and forgot about the worm.  I had my own pain to deal with.

“Hardly surprising, given what she’s been through.”

“Yeah, but I lost someone too!”  

The words came out in a rush, surprising me.  I clanged the rod on the edge of the boat.  

All Mr. Murphy said was, “Hmph.”

 “So Mr. Murphy, what are you going to do if you hook the dragon?”

Two weeks later, the two of us were on the lake again.  Rain loomed in the forecast, but Mom let me go anyway.  “He’s a kind man,” she said with motherly enthusiasm as I went out the door.

We caught a lot of fish that morning, including a foot long bass which came in on my line.  I felt like I’d laid an egg.  Mr. Murphy offered cooking suggestions, but I said I’d leave the details to Mom.

He didn’t seem to want to answer; he knew I had doubts.  The silence dragged on.

“That’s a good question,” he replied at last.

Thunder, or perhaps a jet, growled in the distance.  I looked up and saw how dark the sky was, like evening.  My watch—the one Dad wore the night he died—said thirteen minutes after eleven.

Mr. Murphy lit a cigar, his first that morning.  He tended to spend the early hours coughing, clearing out.  Though unpleasant to listen to, in the silent places of the lake the sound reassured me.  Somebody’s here with me, the racket seemed to mean.

He exhaled a plume of smoke.  

“Can’t say for sure.”  

His voice startled me.  I had been tending my line, watching the floater for any movement.  I turned and peered at him.  His eyes, blue like the sky before sunrise, gazed at me.  He had his thinking cap on, I could tell. 

He touched the brim of his hat, pulling it further down his forehead.

“Maybe I’d ask him, ‘Where’s my Winnie?  Where’d you take her?’  And maybe he’d tell me.  Who knows?  Never can tell ‘less you try, right?”

“Right!”

“When I first got out here, I wanted the beast to grab my hook and pull me down.  Take me wherever he took her.  I was bitter and angry and kind of daring him.  You know, like ‘Gimme your best shot, bucko!’  That sort of thing.  So I’d sit out here, all by my lonesome, even into the late hours.  Heck, once I slept all night in the boat and got rained on.  I’d toss my line out and say, ‘Take that, you bugger!’”

“Did you ever see him?”

His answer surprised me.

“Yeah.”

His voice had dropped an octave.  Moments like this, I knew even if nobody in the entire universe believed in Mr. Murphy’s monster, he sure did.

“It wasn’t far from here.”  He sat up straight and craned his neck, looking around to orient himself.  He pointed.  “That way, a quarter mile or so, one of the darkest coves of the lake.  There I encountered further evidence of the Beast.  Minding my own business, fishing like we are now, and the clouds got dark all of a sudden.  The wind tossed up.  Even a few lightning bolts.  I got a little scared, but I didn’t know why.  I swim real good, so I guess it’s just my human nature to fear these kinds of things.  I started rowing toward shore when suddenly the bottom of the boat scraped against something.  A rock, I figured, so I tried rowing backwards.  The waves were tossing pretty good—nothing dangerous, but enough to make it hard to gauge my progress.  Then I noticed my oars hardly hitting the water.  I mean, they were almost out of the water.”

Mr. Murphy paused for dramatic effect—he was really good at that—and we glared at each other with huge eyes.  

“Go on,” I urged.

He puffed on his cigar, said, “The gosh darn boat was rising up out of the water!  I can’t tell you how scared I was.  Even Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera didn’t scare me like that!  Then just as suddenly the boat splashed down and I fell over backwards.  When I got up, I noticed something, black and like an overturned canoe, only twice as long, moving away from me faster than a man could swim.  Then—” he flicked a hand—“gone.”

“What did you do?”

He snorted.  “What do you think I did?  I got the hell out of there!”

“So there really is a monster.”

“A dragon, my boy.  A dragon.”

“Yeah, I mean . . .”

“’Course there is!  Don’t you believe me?  I seen him twice.  He took the woman I loved.  He lifted my boat on his back.  I’m telling you, that beast is Death incarnate—Death and Mystery and the Unknowable!  They say this lake’s ten or fifteen thousand years old, which means there’s been plenty of time for something to crawl into it or grow up out of its muck.  Who knows?  But when I die, Ryan—and the day’s not far off—I want to be buried up on Julie’s Ridge next to where I put Winnie’s empty tomb.  I want my spirit to keep watch, find that Beast and bring him to account!”

And right then, something grabbed my line.  Hard.  If I hadn’t been gripping my rod’s handle so tight it might have flown from my hands.  I jerked back, but the thing on the opposite end jerked harder.  

Mr. Murphy noticed.  

“You got something?”

“Feels like it!”  

“Give him some play!  Let out your line!”

I did, at the same time twisting my rod a little left and then a little right.  Whatever it was kept pulling, heavy and implacable, like nothing I’d felt before.

A thrill coursed through my limbs—and a tingle of fear.

“Maybe it’s the dragon, Mr. Murphy!”  

I flashed him a smile, but his expression was grim.  I’d seen that face before—even hauling in a perch he got that look, as if engaged in some death-defying struggle.

I couldn’t yet judge the seriousness of the situation.  It might be a snapping turtle—they got big in the lake—or maybe not, but whatever the thing was wasn’t letting go.  I drew up on the rod and felt a give, then it came right back, snapping the top of my rod into the water.  It was playing me!

The reel screamed, the line flying out.  I grabbed for the handle to stop it while clutching the rod with my other hand and pulling the rod handle butt hard against my solar plexus.  

For a terrifying instant I wondered if I would have to let go or be dragged overboard.  Then—

The tension snapped.

“The line broke!” Mr. Murphy thundered.  

“Crap!” I shouted.

“Crap indeed.”  He glowered at the water, at the ripples expanding outward, evidence of the struggle.  “I’d give my left pinky to know what that was.”

“Bass?”  

I reeled in the rest of my line.

 “There’s no bass in this lake your line couldn’t handle.  That my dear boy . . .” he shook his head “. . . was bigger.”

The shorn and hookless line dithered over the brown waters.  I gaped at its broken end and noticed my hands—they were trembling.  

My chest burned, a sensation I only had on those occasions when most miserable or overjoyed, and I brushed at my eyes with the knuckles of my left hand.

Something changed inside me.

I wanted to believe.  No talk-in-the-head prayer or Sunday school teacher’s pontifications had ever moved or convinced me, but at that moment I desperately wanted to embrace the Mystery.  I wanted Lake Glibly to be something more than water and mud and fish.  

A cool droplet struck my arm.  I saw little rings expanding on the water’s surface—one, then another and another, until the water drops were everywhere, and my skin ran with their cleansing moisture, their torrent soaking my t-shirt and shorts.  The predicted rain was falling.

From that time forward my adventures on the lake with Mr. Murphy took on a kind of urgent, questing quality.  Everything became imbued with the weight of metaphor.  The lake, like a Cloud of Unknowing, concealed would-be revelations, and my every cast with rod and hook was a probing after the Mystery.  I sought more than fish, for I was no longer a mere boy spending time with a kindly neighbor, nor even a grieving child getting nurturance he didn’t know he needed.  

No—I was Lancelot riding for the Grail, Moses ascending the Mount, Ahab chasing the Whale.  That singular moment when Something took hold of me from the Deep had remade our relationship, too, mine and Mr. Murphy’s.  He seemed to acknowledge me now as an equal partner, a fellow initiate into the Mystery he had lived with those many years.  We had become brothers in the Quest, hunters after Immortality—like Gilgamesh and Enkidu.  Only in our story, Enkidu would outlive his master.

Summer wore on, and Time and Age—accompanied by their children Sickness and Decay—did not go easy on Mr. Murphy.  His coughing fits became more frequent.  They waxed and waned in their severity, but I could tell they were wearing him down.  He’d smile, groan about chasing away the fish, then tell me he had lived like this for many years and not to worry.  

I tried not to.  

“Shouldn’t you stop smoking cigars?” I asked him one afternoon.  August had arrived.  We’d been three months on the water.  

“Too late for that,” he said, a guilty nub bobbing up and down on his pale lips as he spoke.  “Besides, what do I have to be afraid of?”

“Dying?”

He guffawed.  “What’s that but a little pain?”

I made a cast.  My mood was somber.

“Does it hurt, Mr. Murphy?”

“You mean my chest?’

I nodded.

“Kind of scratchy in there.”  He patted himself.  “Just don’t you take up smoking, please.  Not worth it.  If I had things to do over, I’d never touch the stuff.”

I squinted at the water, at my bobber floating on the surface.  The sun shone bright and hot and gnats flitted in a tight circle around where my line connected to the little red and white plastic buoy.  Occasionally the bugs would dive and glance off the lake.    

“So what do you think it’s like?” I asked him after a bit.

“What?”

“Dying.”

“Well, I intend to find out.  But I’m not so concerned about the process—I’ll leave details to the docs—as I am with what lies on the other side.”

 “Do you think heaven’s real?”  I had no idea what denomination he belonged to.  Mom and Dad had always gone to the Glibly United Methodist Church.  Mom still went and I attended Sunday school there, but I couldn’t have told a Methodist from a Baptist if one of them sat on me.

“Can’t say, Ry.  But if there is, you can bet it’s nothing like what we can fathom.  Hah, fathom…”  

Silence ensued.  We had gotten used to not speaking, something everybody who spends a lot of time on the water understands.  You talk at lunchtime, you talk about what’s needful, or—better—you don’t talk at all.  Scares away the fish.  Sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t around, and I was alone with my thoughts and the lake, the boat and the sky.  I’d think about Dad, and if we were anywhere near it, I’d turn my eyes south toward Julie’s Ridge where the cemetery lay spread and try to pick out his grave.  Would Mr. Murphy be there someday I wondered, soon perhaps?  

Wondering that always brought me back to the here and now and I’d glance over at my companion on this journey we seemed to be taking together, a journey leading nowhere but into ourselves.  I had come to understand why he dropped by that morning three weeks after my father died.  He knew what I was suffering, and while the flavor of loss differs from person to person and depends on the relationship—the death of a spouse is different from a child’s losing a parent—he understood something fundamental about my situation I could not have.  He also knew Mom could not be any more than what she already was—my mother; she couldn’t be my father as well.  Moreover, she was a grieving spouse, something an eleven-year-old boy would have little or no appreciation for.  

I recognized something personal at stake for Mr. Murphy, too.  The secret of Lake Glibly’s dragon, of his wife’s death, would be forgotten if he didn’t pass the knowledge on to someone else.  He had to find a willing receptacle.  So, he took me on as his acolyte, the presumptive Keeper of the Flame, the one to carry on the search.  Like Gilgamesh of old, Mr. Murphy sought immortality—not the deathlessness of body or form, but of memory, purpose and meaning.

Summer drew to a close.  I bussed off to sixth grade.  Homework began to crowd my weekends and I spent less time on the lake.  By October I was up to my eyeballs in a class project on ancient Egypt, the study of which I embraced with the fervor of a convert.  I never spent so much time in the library and by the semester’s end I’d penned a fifty-eight-page paper, complete with maps and pictures (which helped inflate the page count), and a glossary.  Mrs. Greenburg, my teacher, pronounced me “quite an Egyptologist” in indelible red ink and gave me an A+.  I showed the report to Mr. Murphy.

By this time—the snowy depths of December—the effort in our relationship came all from me.  With ice covering the lake and chill blasts off its white surface rattling over the rooftops, Mr. Murphy seemed to shrink in upon himself.  At the time I didn’t know his age, but that winter added ten years to what I guessed was already a high count.  He coughed and smiled and promised he’d read my work.  I doubt he ever did.

I shoveled his driveway when it snowed and checked in on him every weekend.  If he asked me about school, I’d launch into a peroration upon the rise and fall of ancient empires; the Egypt project had infected me with a general love of history and a compulsion to run at the mouth about everything I was learning.  I spiced even casual conversation with pretentious name dropping—Cyrus, Hammurabi, Alexander, Thutmose, Sargon and Hannibal, to mention a few of my favorites—going on as if I knew them personally, like we slapped hands on the playground.  My mother got to growling at me whenever I did this, forcing me to seek out more favorably disposed audiences.  

Mr. Murphy always seemed happy to listen.  He’d nod his head and smile and if he coughed, he’d flutter his hand in the air and say, “Go on, Ry, go on.”  I think now he didn’t give two cents for any of it—twentieth century Americana was his intellectual field—but at the time my youth and self-absorption allowed me to mistake his agreeableness for enthusiasm.  When I ran out of steam, we’d talk about future fishing trips, and he’d lead me further into the bowels of his memorabilia collection.

Winter dragged on and I got itchy for the thaw.  As if to gear up for the spring hunting season, I started reading about lake monsters.  I first read all the books in the local library, then ordered in more via the county system.  I learned all our region’s lakes had formed during the final stage of the Wisconsin Glacial Episode, around ten to twenty thousand years ago.  By this fact I reasoned that whatever Mr. Murphy had seen, and whatever had grabbed my line (I never doubted they were one and the same), could not be a dinosaur or one of their descendents.  Some researchers speculated these lake cryptids—the designation for any animal of doubtful existence—might be surviving Basilosauruses (more properly known as Zeuglodon cetoides), an ancient, skinny whale thought to have died out about 35 million years ago.  Whatever it was must have found its way into the lake during the millennia intervening since the retreat of the ice sheets.  

On an unusually warm day in early spring, when you could hear the ice cracking on the lake, I lugged some books over to Mr. Murphy’s house to discuss my findings.  I was convinced Glibly’s monster had to be a natural animal flying under the radar of science. 

He would have none of it.

“You’re still thinking in terms of monsters,” he wheezed, flicking dismissively at an artist’s rendition of a plesiosaur.  “This is no monster, Ryan.  He’s a dragon, a beast beyond the natural order.”

I scratched my head.  “But nobody reports dragons in North America.”

“Maybe that’s ‘cause they’re all looking for monsters.”  His expression should have tipped me he was pulling my leg, but I was sufficiently worked up to miss its import.  

“I still don’t get the difference between monsters and dragons,” I said, my tone turning petulant.  “Isn’t it true they call them dragons in China but here we call them monsters?  Aren’t they the same thing?”

He fell silent at that, a frown on his face.  I suspected I’d scored a point.  I had, though not in the way I’d hoped.

“You may be on to something.  Wait here.”

He struck off toward his office.  I could hear him rummaging around on the bookshelves.  He finally returned toting a volume on world mythology, which he set down on the coffee table and began flipping through, coming at last to the section on Chinese religion.  A few pages more and he let out a whoop.

Laying a speckled finger on a full-page illustration, he said, “This is what I saw!”

The painting depicted a classic East Asian style dragon, replete with sinuous, snake-like body, four small legs with outstretched claws like a bird-of-prey’s, a beard, and insane looking, bulbous eyes.  The caption underneath confirmed the strong association between dragons and bodies of water.

We stared at the magnificent picture in silence

“So how did a Chinese dragon end up in Lake Glibly?” I wondered aloud.

“Must have got lost,” Mr. Murphy said, and burst into a fit of coughing.

On my next foray through the library stacks, I hunted Chinese dragons.  Our local branch had nothing on the subject, so I had to attack the matter more obliquely.  Searches on Chinese religion and folklore took me the right direction and I found several books through the county system.  When I exhausted that resource, I inveigled Mom to order through bookstores on my behalf.  I also hit a few used bookshops. 

By such tactics I expanded my knowledge on Chinese dragons enormously, and no doubt became, for that year at least, the county’s reigning savant on the subject.  I shared my findings with Mr. Murphy.  He showed particular interest in a ragged little tome called The Dragon Kings of China which I had picked up in a secondhand store.  Originally written in Chinese and published in Peking back in the thirties, the text was riddled with typos and grammatical errors; it appeared not to have been translated by a native speaker of English.  No other book I’d seen though had so many obscure details—even a dragon taxonomy based on their colors and places of habitation as attested to by ancient texts.  Its author, a scholar who lived around the turn of the century, was also something of an artist, and obsessively filled the book with dense, hand-drawn ink portraits of different dragon species, which numbered 108.  One portrait, of the type known as Panlong, caused Mr. Murphy to sit up.  He glanced at the picture, read the caption, and said, “This is the one.”  

April was warm and sunny outside, the lake nearly thawed out.  The windows were open and a pleasant breeze blew through the house but Mr. Murphy lay wheezy and immobile on his couch.  An old black and white TV sporting the animated face of Walter Cronkite ran in a corner of the room, its sound turned down.

“Listen to this Ry,” he went on.  “Listen to what the author says about this dragon: Ancient philosopher Yang Xiong wrote in a Regional Speech dictionary ‘dragons which do not yet ascend to heaven are called p’an-lung.’  Panlong apparently means ‘coiled dragon.’  And they’re lake dwellers!  They haven’t ascended to heaven, meaning they’re still hanging around here.  This is what I saw.  This is it!”  

He excitedly tapped the picture which, frankly, looked like every other dragon drawing in the book.  But I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and accept his identification of the species we were dealing with.  This, I imagined, must be how biologists feel when discovering new life forms in remote jungles.

The next day when I came home from school Mom greeted me at the door.  Her face was strained.  

“Ry, they rushed Mr. Murphy to the hospital this afternoon.”  Several awful moments slipped by before I understood that meant he wasn’t dead.  

“You mean he’s sick?” 

“Very.”

I wanted to see him right away, but she didn’t think it a good idea.  I insisted.  Finally, she called the hospital.  He was in intensive care, his lungs filled with fluid.  Only immediate family could visit.

For days I stalked the house like a blind and senseless person.  I couldn’t sleep and even the spaghetti Mom fixed didn’t interest me.  She called the hospital every day, asking about Mr. Murphy’s condition.  “Stable,” they said.  Mom hugged me and told me that was a good thing.  

One evening after dinner I slipped out of the house without telling Mom.  I had a pile of homework but couldn’t face it.  I went to the lake.  Rain had fallen earlier and the air felt moist and clean.  From the shore I saw the last pink hues of sunset hanging above the trees on the opposite side.  Tucked under an arm I carried The Dragon Kings of China.  I had obsessively read and reread the book over the past several days.  Dragons, I had learned, possessed healing powers.  

I trudged the shore to where an enormous boulder hidden by a thicket of trees slid into the lake.  I mounted the rock, from which I had a good view of the water and glanced around.  I didn’t want to be seen.  

No one was nearby.  I addressed the dragon.

“Panlong!  Are you there Panlong?  It’s me, Ryan.”  

My voice quivered.  I felt idiotic and exhilarated at the same time.  

I waited, hoping for a sign.  Receiving none, I plunged ahead.  

“I’ll bet you already know who I am.  Not saying you’re God or anything—heck, I don’t think I even believe that stuff anymore.  Not after what happened to Dad.”  I paused, hesitating to say what I wanted to say.  “But I think…I think I believe in you.”

There.  My big confession.  I was a believer.  

I was uncertain, however, what the import of this heretofore hidden truth might be.  Did it mean I had faith?  They talked about faith in Sunday school.  But that was faith in God.  This was different.  This was…  

Well, I had no idea.  What exactly was I confessing faith in?

Perhaps I was a pagan, a heretic, or, worst of all, an idolater.  If anyone found out, they’d expel me from church.  They’d turn me away at the door, their faces stern and accusing.  My long-suffering mother would die of shame.  Mrs. Milton would throw me out of Sunday school.  She was a kind lady—she baked cookies for our class every weekend—but would she be so kind once she knew what I’d become?

I wondered, and it occurred to me if anyone overheard what I’d just said, they’d take me for a lunatic.  So, there I stood, the idolater and lunatic, talking to the lake.  Talking, I hoped, to Panlong.

“Well, if you know about me, you gotta know Mr. Murphy.  He’s like your biggest believer.  Your number one fan.  He taught me everything.”  

I screwed up my face, ready to recite everything the old man had ladled into me.  I couldn’t think of anything.

“Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.  It’s not like Mr. Murphy’s my Dad or anything.  But he did teach me stuff—about you.”  

But that wasn’t true either.  Aside from the story of his wife’s disappearance and his insistence the monster was in fact a dragon, he’d never said much.  Technical specs weren’t his forte.  I was the one whose research led to our ID-ing the dragon as Chinese, of the species Panlong.  

My address to the spirit of the lake was not getting any easier.

“Well, I guess I’m not sure what all he taught me.  But I really like Mr. Murphy, for sure.  He’s like…my best friend.  Yeah, I guess that’s kind of weird.  I mean…I’m only twelve years old and he’s…I don’t know.  Old.  He just wants to know why you took his wife from him.  That’s all he’s ever wanted.  You owe him something, know what I mean?  You took his wife, and now he’s sick.  Can’t you do something about it?  I mean, what do dragons do anyway?”

I fought back tears.  But I was expecting an answer, too.  I expected a voice from the deep or a rumble from the clouds.  An earthquake.  Anything.  

I slapped my hip in frustration.  

I was a lunatic all right.  An angry lunatic.

“Panlong, where are you?  He fished here for ten years and you never showed him anything.  You never did crap for him.  Can’t you do something now?  Please, Panlong, help!”

My eyes burned.  I glared at the dirt and stomped on the boulder. 

“This is the stupidest thing I ever did in my life,” I muttered, and turned to jump down off the rock.

Something slapped the water.  

I whirled around.

From a point about sixty yards offshore a heavy circular wake rushed out.  I stared, slack jawed.  If I had fallen into the lake from twenty feet up, I don’t think I could have made waves so big.  The expanding undulation surged outward, dissolving in the evening light.  Wavelets bounced against the shore.

I had made contact.

“Mr. Murphy, I think you’re going to be all right.”  

A nurse had just ushered Mom and me into his room.  Mom greeted the old man with a kiss to the cheek and took a seat.  I stood at his bedside. 

I had brought Panlong’s assurance of his inevitable healing but my optimism didn’t survive a thirty second view of Mr. Murphy’s face.  

He looked awful.  He had lost weight and his eyeballs lay sunk in his head.  His skin had a sallow color, like a weathered banana peel.  Dad had looked better when I saw him in his coffin at the funeral home.   

“What makes you think a crazy thing like that?” Mr. Murphy asked.  He wasn’t smiling.

In a hushed tone so Mom wouldn’t hear I told him what happened to me at the lake.  

He snorted.  “It was just a big old carp.”  

Imagine Paul dissing the risen Jesus as an optical illusion.  A long silence ensued.  

“But Mr. Murphy, I don’t think that’s possible.”

He chuckled, the phlegm rattling in his chest.  He started to cough and seized my hand, gripping it tightly until the hacking subsided.  

“You ever seen a two-foot carp jump?”

I thought hard.  “I’m not sure.”

“Trust me.”

“But what if it was Panlong?”

“No dragon’s going to save an old man from his own foolishness.”

I assumed he meant the cigar smoking.  I wasn’t sure.  My brain was filled with sludge, for his words brayed like blasphemy, like apples falling up or mules giving birth.  My newfound faith staggered in the headwind.

He squeezed my hand again.  The clouds cleared from my vision.  I was staring at a very sick old man.

His kindly blue eyes appeared waterier than ever, but whether from sadness or illness I couldn’t have said.  He held me with them.

“Ryan, you’re looking for a cure.  But sometimes the disease isn’t what you think it is, and sometimes the cure’s not what you wanted.”

He didn’t let me go.  He let his words sink in.  

“But I just want you to get better.”

He smiled.

 “Go on home, my boy.”  He patted my hand.  “I’ll be fine.  You carry on the search, any way you can.”

I didn’t say anything.  What could I say?

“All right?” he asked.

Mom, at last, broke the spell.  

“We hope you get better Mr. Murphy,” she said, and in her tone, I heard the understanding this was the last we would ever see each other in this world.  I’m not sure how I came to that conclusion, I just did, and I couldn’t accept it.  I bolted from the room, an anguished cry gurgling up my throat.

The funeral fell on a Sunday.  I remember it well.

The mourners came from out of town.  I didn’t recognize any of them.  Most looked old and rich and dignified in their black suits and sable dresses.  At the memorial service, several stopped to talk, remarking how pleased they were to at last meet Mr. Murphy’s “fishing companion.”  They had heard about me, they said, and they wanted to thank me for being such a comfort to him in his final year.  I told them he had done most of the comforting, and inevitably the story of Dad’s death would come out.  They showed me their sympathetic eyes and changed the subject. 

They asked about Mr. Murphy’s interest in fishing.  I got the sense they were bemused by his having taken up the sport.  They seemed to think it quaint, unbefitting the man they remembered.  This struck me as odd to the point where I wondered if we were talking about the same person.  Uncertain how to respond to their comments, I simply nodded and tried to appear understanding and serious, as if I had successfully dispensed some weighty assignment.  No one, it seemed, knew about the dragon, and I didn’t mention the real reason we’d been on the lake.

We drove from the memorial to the cemetery on Julie’s Ridge in a tight procession, a line of cars the length of several football fields.  By the time we got there, the air was heavy with moisture, the sky ready to open.  Occasionally a gust of wind would whip off the lake and shake the trees.  I saw whitecaps on the water.  Once assembled at the gravesite, everyone turned to the minister, no doubt hoping he’d get the rites quickly underway.  Otherwise, we’d all get soaked; it was just a matter of time.

With Dad’s service fresh in my mind, the proceedings felt distressingly familiar.  The minister piled on kindnesses about Mr. Murphy.  He talked about the deceased’s sponsorship of various charitable programs and mentioned his leadership of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.  I had no idea who or what the Elks were—TV documentary scenes of caribou herds came to mind—and the significance of my friend’s role call of accomplishments was lost on me.  The clergyman’s long-windedness sent my thoughts far away and my eyes sought the lake.

From where Mom and I stood at the fringe of mourners, I had only to turn a little to my left to view it.  The graveyard lies spread across Julie’s Ridge, a mostly barren, windswept bluff above the water.  From the cemetery entrance, the ground descends gradually and gravestones litter the slope, their lumpy gray ranks punctuated by the occasional cedar tree.  Thus from Mr. Murphy’s burial plot—situated about two thirds down the hill—I had an unobstructed view of the cove which marked the southern limit of the lake.

Gazing at that gray plain made me nostalgic.  I pictured Mr. Murphy and me fishing, sitting in the boat with our lunch and tackle boxes, not caring whether the fish bit, just talking…or not.  The weather on one of our last occasions together had been a lot like today, only cooler, and I remembered how mysterious the lake appeared, with banks of fog wafting over the sullen waters.  Belief in monsters came easy on such days. 

I didn’t know what to believe now.

The weather went downhill with my mood.  As the minister wrapped up his oration, I realized my face was dripping with moisture.  A fine mist had enveloped us.  The minister paused and everyone seemed to pause with him, perhaps rolling their eyeballs skyward and resigning themselves to burying their friend in the rain.  Mourners began unfurling umbrellas and Mom’s hand on my shoulder pulled me closer.  

The minister nodded and gestured toward the coffin.  I guessed the moment had arrived in the proceedings when they should lower it into the hole, or perhaps the weather was forcing his hand and he had abridged the ceremony to hurry things up.  I wasn’t sure which and never found out because at that instant something distracted me.

A blast of wind rushed off the lake and shuddered past us.  I closed my eyes against the flung grit.  Oohs and aahs and umbrellas exploding sounded around me.

I opened my eyes.  

It was like staring through a dirty window.  The mist had noticeably thickened.  Pillows of white and black clouds danced a jig over the lake, gradually coalescing into a pillar of wind and water a hundred or so yards from shore.

I squinted, watching the column of clouds drift across the gray surface in our direction, gathering volume.  I think the proceedings had stopped because at the fringe of my vision I noticed fingers pointing, heard murmurs of wonder.  

“Shouldn’t we run?” I wondered aloud, certain a tornado was forming on the water.  

I didn’t run.

The twister moved steadily closer, visibly gaining strength and, it seemed, purpose.  I recalled a Sunday school class a few weeks ago in which we read the story of the prophet Ezekiel and his vision—of a whirlwind out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself; and indeed, as I stared into the approaching maelstrom I perceived a brightness all about it, and out of the midst thereof I beheld flashing winds and shards of fire the color of gleaming bronze, and something like a vast lizard crawling up the sky, with horns like the tusks of elephants and eyes like burning lamps, and verily, I was afraid.

My mother screamed.  Everyone screamed.  

I screamed too: “Panlong!  Panlong!”

Mom yanked my hand, trying to flee with me, but I struck my shin against the coffin and fell.  The brilliance in the sky reflected off the polished sheen of the lid, and then the rain fell in gigantic drops, bursting on the shiny surface—drops like a dragon’s tears.

I lifted my head and stared up at the clouds like slabs of slate, my eyes blinking in the downpour.  The whirlwind had vanished.

I whispered: “Thank you Panlong, thank you.”

That was the happiest moment of my life.

It is perhaps not surprising I was the only one who noticed the dragon.  

I had to be circumspect when interrogating Mom about what happened; I didn’t dare give my secret away.  She saw the waterspout, she said, and from what I gathered, others did too.  A few paragraphs in the local paper several days later under the heading Waterspout disrupts philanthropist’s funeral became the official account of the incident. 

According to this reportage by a newsman who interviewed several mourners (though not Mom or me), an unusual formation of clouds and a mixing of warm and cool air currents spawned a brief waterspout on Lake Glibly which struck the southern shore of the lake, causing minor damage to gravestones and local flora.  Witnesses described a funnel of water perhaps a hundred feet high which quickly dissipated upon making landfall.  The interrupted funeral for Richard J. Murphy had to be concluded by cemetery staff as mourners were too shaken or sodden to comfortably resume it.  In conclusion, the writer acknowledged the bizarre coincidence that just such a waterspout, twelve years earlier, had killed Mr. Murphy’s wife, Winifred Murphy.  

That was all.   

I never told anyone, even Mom, my version of events.  Even then, at my young age, I intuited the chasm separating the perspective informing the official history from my own.  I accepted that difference—what choice did I have?—and simply considered myself privileged, more by luck and circumstance, though, than by any personal merit.  This, too, of course, is just an opinion. 

I never saw the dragon again.  Nor did I ever seek Panlong’s favor or implore him with prayer during the dark and lonely moments I suffered from time to time, as all people do, in the years following.  It was enough for me that on the one occasion I needed him most, he answered my call. 

When the apostle Thomas begged for proof, he was privileged to stick his fingers in the wounds of his Lord and Savior.  I asked the same and received a transcendent vision attended by apocalyptic weather.  I count myself satisfied, for I know what I know but am reconciled to the ultimate impenetrability of the universe.  It is this Mystery at the back of things which frightens people, and about which I’ve chosen to entertain as few thoughts as possible because I’m sure anything I seize upon will prove wrong in the end.  That is a kind of certainty, I suppose, and one I can live with.