Hitherby Dragons

Dracula is undead. Dracula defied God.

Hopping Vampire is undead. Sun and moon spirits animated his exposed corpse. Dracula cannot go to China. If he did, sun and moon spirits would animate his corpse too. He’d still have defied God, so he’d still be Dracula. Only, now he’d be Hopping Dracula. It’s too embarrassing!

Zombies are undead. Traditional zombies are people who just think they’re dead. Modern zombies actually come back from the grave to eat people’s brains or defy thermodynamic laws. If they ate Hopping Dracula’s brains, he’d be even more embarrassed. He’d have to hop and drool. No one would be seduced.

Bunnies are undead. Shops sell bunnies to children. The bunnies bite the children. The children turn into bunnies. The parents give the bunnies back to pet shops. That’s how the pet shops profit! Bunnies won’t bite Hopping Dracula. Since he hops and is undead, they think he’s already a bunny.

Bunnies live in pet shops. Pet shops keep bunnies in the back. They’re not safe in sunlight. The bunnies wriggle their noses. They eat carrots. They think about eating human souls. Pet shops handle bunnies with special holy gloves. The gloves are blessed by a priest. This keeps the pet shop personnel safe. If you have blessed gloves, you can handle a bunny. You can also handle bunnies safely if you can make the symbol of the cross with your index fingers. You cross one finger over the other. This makes the bunny remember Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross. The bunny hisses. It withdraws. The bunnies still blame the Romans for that. If you don’t have index fingers, the bunny will devour your soul. Count your fingers before confronting a bunny!

Jesus’ sacrifice seems to have been good for sinners but bad for the undead. It’s not clear. Bunnies and vampires aren’t reliable in matters of theology. No one knows why they fear the signs of God. Maybe they’re not scared of the sacrifice on the cross. Maybe they’re thinking of James. James was the strongest bunny hunter ever. He also hunted vampires. He beat them up with a giant depleted uranium cross. He left a trail of blood across Europe. This was from the bunnies, not the vampires. When he killed vampires, there was no blood. Vampires do not bleed when they die. Instead, they turn into insects.

James killed bunnies. This made them bleed and fear the cross. He also killed vampires. This made them fear the cross and turn into insects. Then James would squish the insects. The insects turned into paste. This is how James invented peanut butter. He gave the credit to his good friend George Washington Carver. No one would eat peanut butter if they knew a vampire hunter invented it. People have a weird investment in the origin of their food. Once it’s dead, it’s just protein, carbs, and fat. Vampires are dead. That’s why they’re just food. If they were alive, they’d be better for testing pharmaceutical products on.

Peanut butter has a lot of fat. This is because the peanut butter farms overfeed their vampires. They do not give them good quality blood. They give them only the blood that they can’t feed to real people. Also, they give them a lot of peanut butter made from the bad parts of other vampires. Stink bugs! It’s very gross. Then the vampires are herded to a special room. Bang! An automated depleted uranium cross hits them in the head. They die. Bugs run everywhere. You should only eat free range peanut butter. That’s more humane. The vampires roam happily in airy crypts. They eat only the healthiest blood. It’s taken from people who don’t have anything better to do. Then the vampires are humanely killed using Buffy. Vampires love getting killed by celebrities. It makes their eternal night.

Bunnies are not as excited about getting killed by celebrities. Of course, you don’t make peanut butter out of bunnies. Bunnies don’t turn into bugs when they die. Most turn into dead bunnies. A few turn into mutated dinosaurs. Once, James made a horrible mistake. He killed the Easter Bunny. Bang! Raar! James felt bad. “I’ve killed the sacred symbol of the resurrection. I thought I was just killing an ordinary bunny. I’m sorry, Easter Bunny!” Then he took the little mutated dinosaur to monster island. “Run free, little Godzilla! Run free!”

That’s exactly how it happened; and if you watched the History Channel, you’d know this stuff too.

¹ requires familiarity with massively multiplayer online computer games

Meredith stands outside Jesus’ tomb. She’s a pixel person. She’s got red hair and a white dress and she’s constructed of ten thousand polygons.

“Do you think he’ll show?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Sabin says. He’s a thin pixel man. Kind of coffee colored, kind of gray. “I heard some Romans caught and killed him a few days ago.”

“Wow,” Meredith says. “Long time between spawns.”

“It’s the only thing that keeps camping down,” Sabin says. He gestures around. There are a few dozen people waiting around the tomb. “Think about it—if all you had to do to kill Jesus was to wait until the last group was done, there’d be hundreds, thousands of people here. Rome would be full. As it is, people just kind of swing by, hope they’ll get lucky. Only a few of us sit around and wait.”

“Yeah.”

Meredith sits down on a gravestone. She plants the butt of her spear on the ground.

“Why you here?” Sabin asks.

She looks a bit embarrassed. “Just kind of spectating,” she says. “LOL.”

“Not in it for the loot?”

She looks at her spear. “This one’s +8,” she says. “And improves my fortitude and magic to boot. It’s already better than Longinus.”

“Too bad,” Sabin says. “There’s the grail, too, you know.”

She snorts. “They’re selling 5-packs at the auction,” she says. “Buy 10, get a free indulgence.”

“Ah.”

She looks at him more carefully. “You know that,” she says. “So why are you here? Leveling up?”

“I want to ask him a question,” Sabin says.

“Oh?”

“‘Why?’” he says.

A pixel rabbit hops by. It’s got a basket of eggs. It looks Meredith up and down.

“Wanna cyber?” it asks.

She shakes her head.

It tilts its head to the side. “Or we could fight. There’s a save point and dueling arena in the tomb.”

“I’m camping Christ,” she says.

“Me too,” the rabbit says. “But it’s more fun if you do something while you wait.”

“Why you?”

“I’ve got a secret hacker code,” the rabbit says. “It lets me see things as they really are. So I was curious.”

“I don’t think they actually implemented the underlying godhead,” Sabin says.

“It’d be an easter egg,” the rabbit says. “They’re programmers. There’s no way they could resist.”

“I want to know if things get better,” Meredith says.

The rabbit looks at her. “Around level 20 or so,” it says. “Then you can get at the really cool quests.”

“No,” she says. “I mean, I want to know, is there really a moment when the world starts making sense again?”

The rabbit sits down. “Maybe,” it says. “I mean, tomorrow’s Sunday, right? Maybe Jesus’ll respawn then and fix everything. Maybe not. I doubt we’ll be able to tell.”

“. . . will they post an announcement?”

Peter Cottontail hides eggs.

“This one,” he says to himself, “I painted like the world. It tells the story of how Attaris Bunny broke the sky and stole the stars.”

He looks around. He scampers over to a bush. He plans to hide it under the bush. He looks up nervously, as he does each time, towards Eden Above.

“That story, Peter?”

Peter startles. He almost drops the egg. He spins around. Then he hides the egg behind his back. “Why, Betty!” he says.

Betty Bunny has her hands on her hips. She’s pink, except for her tail and waistcoat, which are yellow.

“It’s important,” says Peter.

“It’s not important. Nothing’s important. Not this close to Eden.”

Peter pouts. After a long moment, Betty relents. She looks down. She sighs. “But why that?” she says. “Why would you ever want anyone to know that?”

Peter brightens. He turns his back on her and finishes hiding the egg under the bush. Then he hops off towards the forest.

“Peter?”

“Come on!” he says.

Reluctantly, she hops after him. She follows him into the forest. He hops to the left. He hops to the right. Finally, he finds just the right tree. He pulls out an egg. It’s painted a dull cold red.

“This one,” Peter says, reverently, “is going to have the story of the serpent. And I’m going to hide it here, right under the tree of life.”

Betty flushes.

“You have to tell it,” Peter says. “You’re the best at it. I always get choked up.”

Betty frowns at him.

Peter puts the egg back in the basket. “It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to do it yet.”

He finds a different tree. He takes out an egg. “This one’s about the genocide in Asia,” he says. “When we killed all the lucky rabbits.”

It’s painted brilliantly. It’s a den and a backdrop of blue and there are white rabbits sitting in it, drinking tea and looking out their window at the night. The rough blue-black paint of the sky catches just the slightest spark of light.

“That was exaggerated,” Betty says.

“They weren’t all that lucky,” Peter agrees. His voice is sad. He looks up at Eden Above. He looks down. Then, quickly, he hides the egg. He scampers to an abandoned mouse hole, looks down, and then glances back at Betty. “Do you have any eggs?”

“Peter!”

“You knew I’d be out here,” he says. “You knew I’d be doing this. You didn’t bring any eggs? Even if it’d break my heart?”

Betty sighs. “Fine,” she says. She rummages around in her waistcoat pocket. She pulls out an egg. It has stick figures on it. They are the stick figures of rabbits. They look a lot like human stick figures except for the quintessential quality of bunnyness.

“It’s about peace,” she says. “It’s about every bunny who muddled through, even—”

She looks up. “Even knowing—”

Peter takes it gently from her paws. He hides it in the mousehole.

“See?” he says. “It’s important that they know.”

He thinks, and then he takes out an egg of his own, painted with a thin and wasting rabbit carrying a lantern and staring down a deep dark hall.

“Starvation,” he says.

After a nervous look upwards, he hides it with hers.

“I’ll tell you the story,” Betty says. “If you want.”

Peter takes out the dull red egg. He cradles it in his clever paws. He holds it up to her. It listens.

“We were young,” Betty says. “In the dawn of the world. In the garden. And the serpent tempted us, as it did Man.”

“Yes,” Peter says.

“We took down the apple,” Betty says. “A bunny and a cottontail. And ate it, so that we would know good from evil. We learned to make waistcoats to hide our shame.”

Peter nods. For a long time, Betty is silent.

“But we were very small!” Betty cried.

“You have to finish,” Peter prompts. “The egg won’t be done until you finish.”

“We weren’t hungry enough,” says Betty. “We couldn’t finish the whole apple, not even between the two of us. So we only learnt enough to last a thousand years.”

Peter nods.

“That’s how it was,” he says.

“Soon we’ll forget,” the bunny says, looking very small against the wind, “and go back to Eden, and we won’t have choices to make any more.”

The garden hangs above them. The strange devices that hold it out of human reach thrum low.

“It is a little closer,” Betty says, “every day.”

She thinks.

She adds, “The end.”

The egg clicks. The egg whirrs. “Data stored,” it says.

Peter takes the egg back to the tree of life. He leaves it at its root. He hops away. When he is at the edge of Betty’s sight, he stops, and turns back.

“Come on,” he says. “Come on!”

“There’s no one who’ll ever find them,” Betty says. “No one who’ll know—”

“We have to hide the egg about my birthday,” Peter says. “Otherwise no one will know which day to celebrate!”

“Oh,” Betty says.

She begins to hop after him.

“And the one about the War?” she asks.

“And the one about the War.”

There is a room in Gibbelins’ Tower that overlooks the chaos. Its window has no glass, and there is always a wind. There are strands of pink and green and silver in that wind, torn upwards from the surging sea.

Straight across the window, more miles distant than a bird could fly, there is a lighthouse. To the left of the window, there is a bridge. There is something that might be a tugboat, off to the right. If so, it is foundering, and will most likely drown with all its crew beneath the terrible sea.

Martin stands there, looking out. Jane enters.

“The door says ‘keep out’ and ‘no girls allowed’,” Martin notes.

“Also, ‘toxic’ and ‘radiation warning.’”

“Does this, for you, occasion no concern?”

“Nope.”

Jane stands next to Martin and looks out the window.

“What’cha doin’?”

“Taking measurements. And you?”

“I made an armored umbrella,” Jane says. She holds it out to him in two hands. “See?”

Martin takes the umbrella. He studies it. Then he steps back and opens it with a flourish. It clicks open with a clang and a click. It’s a pretty ominous umbrella.

“Martin!” Jane accuses.

“What?”

“You’re inside.”

“Not topologically!” Martin protests.

“Does luck really care?” Jane wonders.

“It’s very nice,” says Martin. He rotates it. He puts it over his shoulder. It clangs against the stone wall. “What’s it for?”

“I thought that it would be raining screws and bolts,” Jane says. “Since it’s a season of metal.”

Martin considers. He looks outside. “It’s pretty chaotic,” he says. “So maybe. But that’s not what the season means.”

“And maybe appliances,” Jane says. “We could finally get a dishwasher.”

Martin re-estimates the umbrella’s tensile strength.

“Or a tank!”

“I don’t want a tank,” Martin says, reflexively. He does, of course, but he’s a responsible boy who knows that tanks kill more family members every year than intruders or enemies of the state.

“What’s it actually mean?” Jane says.

“It’s the season of gathering,” Martin says. He goes over to a cot in the corner of the room, reaches under it, and pulls out a handful of dust bunnies and lint. Martin does not vacuum this room very often, and the last time he exposed the Roomba to the vapors of chaos, it developed sentience, extra LEDs, and an End of Everything Button. “In the spring, you see, it’s all right to be choosy. To say, ‘I’ll keep this dust bunny, but not that one. I like fruit, but I don’t like squash.’ But when the months pass and the year grows older, it’s important to collect everything you can. To look for the good and the salvageable in everything. To have hope for things, even if it costs you.”

Martin sifts through the dust bunnies and finds the one that’s made of chocolate. He sifts some more and finds the great dust bunny leader that organized the others and kept them peacefully under the bed rather than messing up the whole room. He hands these, and the best of the remaining bunnies, to Jane. Then he goes to the window and lets the others fall down into the chaos below. He dusts off his hands.

“It’s crying,” Jane says.

“The world is not kind to dust bunnies,” says Martin. He takes the bunnies from Jane’s hands, all but the chocolate one, and puts them back under the bed.

Jane licks the salt of dust bunny tears off of her hands.

Martin looks at her.

“I like salt,” Jane says.

Martin looks back out the window. “Anyway,” he says. “If there’s a tank up in heaven, or a dishwasher, that they don’t need, then I guess this is the right season for them to drop it on me so I can make it good. So I’ll be keeping the umbrella.”

Jane smiles. She hugs Martin.

He scruffles her hair.

“If it’s a season of metal,” Jane says, “then I want them back.”

Martin hesitates. “Which ones?” he says, warily.

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “Just . . . you know. Them. The gods they took.”

Martin nods.

“Iphigenia,” Jane says, because things happen in a certain order and chaos succumbs to the dictates of pattern when it must.

“How do you take her back?” says Martin.

Jane is suddenly shy.

“She made her from me,” Jane says. “She cut her out of me like with a torch. And I could never figure out if a sculpture belongs to the sculptor or the stone.”

Martin sits on the cot. “Jane,” he says.

Her eyes go round. “Are you all right?”

“I think that there is nothing I need less to imagine in all the world than the idea that sculpting people is taking from them,” he says.

“Oh,” Jane says.

“Everything everyone does,” Martin says, “is about changing the world. Making it different. And sometimes there is pain. But it is a gift and it must be a gift because you cannot gain rights to someone else simply by acting upon them.”

Jane peers at him.

“That’s backwards,” she says.

Martin grins.

“What?”

“It is the dharma of a god,” Martin says, “to view certain moral and causal relationships from the other side.”

“Oh.”

Martin adopts an expression of intense intellectual concentration. He looks like a boy trying to read his own thoughts in a mirror. He offers, “If she had no right to carve from you, then why should she have claimed the result?”

Jane shrinks in on herself for a moment, but she is Jane. She straightens out again and grins.

“She deserves some compensation for her pains,” says Jane.

“That’s true,” Martin says. “It was good work!”

“She’s very fiery and stuff. And she kept the sun going.”

Martin looks dubious. “I bet the sun would still be going anyway.”

“It might have fallen into the sea!”

“Copernicus would argue.”

“Maybe,” says Jane. “We could unearth him and find out.”

“He’s not in his grave,” Martin says, sulkily.

“He’s not?”

“. . . so I hear.”

“If I welcome her,” asks Jane, “do you think that she’ll come?”

“Yes.”

“It’s that easy? Just . . . tell her that she can be mine?”

“Is that easy?”

“I guess not,” says Jane.

“I was always glad,” Martin says, “that you accepted what I’d done to you. Because you could have stopped it.”

“It’s ’cause you keep not pushing the End of Everything Button,” Jane says. “I think that’s very noble of you, considering that it’s red and has that ‘don’t push’ label and all.”

“It is very difficult,” concedes Martin. “I’m a scientist.”

“So I’ll do it,” says Jane. She takes the chocolate dust bunny to the window. She kisses it. It does not respond. It is as nihilistic and detached as only a Cadbury bunny can be. “Go,” she says, and tosses it out into the chaos. “Tell Iphigenia she’s welcome here. Tell her she can come home.”

“A chocolate dust bunny?” Martin says.

“It can keep the sun running for Tina,” says Jane. “Since, you know, she won’t have Iphigenia any more. And if she eats it, she’ll get sick!”

The wind picks up the bunny in the air and tumbles it off towards land.

“Bunnies are a double-edged sword,” Martin agrees.