Dragonfire: A Gulliver Swift Adventure

From Dr. Marsh's Field Notes

The garment bag I was holding by the hangar hooks wasn't dust-covered, exactly, but it had the air of something retrieved from decades in storage.

"That what I think it is?" asked Gulliver, but what the hell else could it contain?

"It's an apology," I said, the zipper whizzed open. "Even after what Commissioner Rose told me; heck, even after I confirmed it with Dr. Tate, it still seemed inconceivable to me, a creature like that could exist in our world. Mass hysteria, what else?"

Until I'd seen the beast myself, the spitting image of what the archeologist had described. Exactly what I'd spent so much time debunking in the belief that Swift had returned from the South China Sea in the grip of a psychosis so powerful he'd have to be institutionalized for the rest of his life were he not immediately treated with every therapy in the book. And some that weren't.

"We were so damned sure of ourselves, my colleagues and I, we put you through hell all those years ago and it wasn't only inappropriate, it was unwarranted. This," I wanted him to know, "is the least I can do to make it up."

"Hardly inappropriate," Gulliver granted, extracting his original bomber jacket from the bag, stroking it as through it was a long lost lover he never expected to see again. Burying the cracked leather and fleece collar in his face, eyes watering, he half-smiled at me-the man who'd convinced him the things he'd seen weren't real. "You had no reason to believe a word I told you and there was no way you could give me the benefit of the doubt."

Did I know he'd gone out two weeks after I'd discharged him from Merrivale and bought a substitute wardrobe?

Sure I did-maybe not the minute he purchased it, but word reached me soon enough. He'd replaced everything except the shoulder bag-because it was the only item I'd allowed him to take home, albeit emptied of its contents. It had long since been refilled, I saw. "I was good with it as long as you only wore it to show your first-years what archeology was not-and apparently I was wrong about that, too."

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, no," said Swift, more interested in how I'd managed to locate the jacket et al after all this time-if it still existed. And how had I gotten it here? "What did you do, beam yourself to Connecticut and back?"

"Wasn't at Merrivale." A gesture in the direction of the industrial buildings a block over on Fourth, one belonging to A-1 Storage, $1 First Month, Only $22.50 After; everything from my New York practice was in there, old case files, out-of-date reports, depositions, confiscated items. "Get dressed and get your daughter back."

The archeologist looked me in the eye. "You know what?" he said, reaching for the jacket and then withdrawing his hand. "I appreciate the gesture, but I don't think I'm going to need it this trip."

Now that he'd said it, I didn't think he would, either. The sonofabitch was cured, and I couldn't have been more pleased-except "wait, this much you could use over there, it rains."

"This much" was the stained old Fedora he'd last seen when he was first admitted for observation 22 years ago, in even more need of blocking than then. His breath caught in his throat.

"Don't just stand there," Lloyd Robertson came over to interject, "put it on."

"Something this sacred you don't just put on," Gulliver wanted him-and me-to know, "the rake is important, the angle, the snap of the brim. Like this," if he remembered right.

His memory wasn't about to fail him, the emotional reaction welling up in my own psyche singularly unprofessional as I watched the archeologist amble into the lab, the reporter alongside. It was way too soon for Tate and Bostridge to have completed the systems analysis, they didn't bother to ask if they could get through or not, Swift simply lobbing his bag at the portal.