A few drops of moisture hit my face as the clouds above the stadium began a downpour. I was far enough away to avoid getting drenched, but it was disconcerting to watch the gray sheet of rain sluice off the stadium not half a mile from me.
Rainbows unfolded over the lake as the sun shone through the localized storm.
I looked at the stadium, really
looked
at it for the first time in a while. Where Aloeus had come from, the Portal, and the world beyond it.
I had been one of a select group who were able to see the Portal without either paying to reach it or being paid to guard it. A friend at WKYC—yes, I was a local TV news whore at one time—had to attend a funeral and had given me his season tickets for the game. I had gone to see a division championship battle. Instead, I had gotten the show of the millennium.
It had been a few months shy of ten years ago, when I had seen it open—twenty feet above the Pittsburgh thirty-five yard line. Halftime, tied game, and I don’t think anyone really remembers that the Steelers went on to win the division when they played the second half at Three Rivers.
It sort of grew out of a point in the air, swelling until it sliced into the turf. It still gives me chills the way the silence in the stands grew with the sphere. It can be really scary when thousands of people are being really quiet.
The Portal was a mirrored sphere about fifty feet in diameter, rippling with rainbow shimmers of color. Mirror, but not quite a mirror, since the reflection on the sphere wasn’t of the surrounding stadium, but a coliseum of a much more ancient vintage. Within moments we could all feel a breeze from it carrying the smell of damp mulch and swamp gas. Probably from the reflected coliseum which seemed to have been overtaken by wetlands and reeds.
The PA system whined, broadcasting whispered muttering. TV monitors across the stadium, and beyond, began showing strange ghost images, as if Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch had collaborated to make a Philip Glass music video.
The cameramen were the first to approach it, hopelessly trying to get the image on tape.
Then they came.
A small band of folks in ragged garb first appeared in distorted reflection on one side of the mirror, growing closer until they slipped through the surface. If you tried, you could pretend this quartet of guys were funky-looking humans. But, I think to the last of us, we knew. These folks weren’t from around here.
They were all tall, six feet to a man, and had hair that didn’t look quite right. The shade was off, and the way it grew around the skull followed subtle curves that didn’t belong to a human face. Their ears were long and pointed, eyes narrow, chin long. Three of them had a bluish cast to their skin, one was a fire-engine red that would put Chief Wahoo to shame, and the last one was black—and not the black we mean when talking about human skin color, but black, like a shadow on the brightest day.
Elves. Fugitives from a kingdom on the other side of the Portal. A regime that must have been a true horror when you consider five guys from a feudal agrarian society—magic or not—walking into a Browns game . . .
Let’s just say that they must have burned all their bridges before being prodded by microphone-wielding sportscasters and being surrounded by three-hundred-pound guys in dog masks started looking attractive.
It took about ten hours to clear the stadium. The police were the first to set up a perimeter around the field. Then around the stadium. In forty-eight hours, when some of the nasty things—and Aloeus would have been classed in that group at the time—started coming through, the perimeter became the province of the National Guard.
The next twelve months were pretty rough. No TV at all, radio intermittent enough to be almost useless. Only completely digital communications worked, and those became less than reliable. Computers would work for a time, but were subject to massive random failures. Everything was pretty damn chaotic.
The Feds tried to step in, and that gave Mayor Rayburn his moment of glory. The common legend is that Cleveland’s mayor saw what the Portal meant, not just in relation to the short-term chaos it was causing, but in what it could mean for the area, long-term. Not that many appreciated it at the time.
When FEMA was all set to come in, declaring northeast Ohio a disaster area, Mayor Rayburn drew a line in the sand, saying, “This far, no farther.” The nation was appalled that the city would stop federal aid at the city limits, but his explanation was terse, “I will not have this natural resource nationalized through the back door.”
The President scoffed at the accusation, but subsequent efforts to claim the Portal through everything from the Defense Department to the National Parks Service showed that Rayburn was prescient. While the legal battles between city and federal government rolled up toward the Supreme Court, Congress made the point moot. The federal legislators—a majority of whom belonged to a party that wasn’t the President’s, and made much political hay over limiting the interference of the federal government in people’s lives—saw a grand opportunity to thumb their nose at their least favorite executive without damaging their own power base. They sent up a veto-proof bill that granted the Portal exclusively to Cuyahoga County.
It was later uncovered that, during this whole time, Mayor Rayburn had established several unilateral trade agreements across the Portal that rendered FEMA assistance unnecessary.
Once Cleveland got out of that first year, Rayburn’s decision began paying off. Once city and social functions resumed some sort of normalcy, the Portal began to grow us its first cash crop. Tourism. Nearly two million people the first year. All to see a place where things now existed that were never seen outside a Tolkien novel or a Grimm fairy tale. The money that came in the second year undid the damage of the first. The year after
that
helped undo the last quarter century of urban neglect. The year after that, and the census found that for the first time since the seventies, the city’s population was growing. There were people who moved here simply because a herd of unicorns had taken up residence in Hunting Valley.
Magery itself became a major industry. The powers wrapping northeast Ohio could be used to do many things that couldn’t be done elsewhere, everything from removing an inoperable brain tumor to giving you a whole-body makeover that could go as far as gender and species.
Last, but not least, the Portal itself was the ultimate money-maker. How much would you pay for a chance to start over on another world, one with completely different rules? A lot of people would pay considerably, and the city charged what the market would bear—slightly less than a passenger ticket on the space shuttle.
Over the course of a decade, the home of the Portal had grown more and more secure. Where the stadium was once surrounded by barbed wire and AA batteries, it was now contained within a forty-foot-tall brick wall that tried to look vaguely like a castle. The anti-aircraft batteries now stood in handsome cylindrical towers where people could ignore them if they wanted to. Not a hint of razor wire.
And every week a bus would pull into the stadium, drop off our émigrés and pick up the Portal’s latest refugees.
Above, the sky was always swirling and black. Marking the place where our world ends, and another one begins. A connection between here and there. An unexplained freak of (super)nature that had become the backbone of this city’s economy. And the fact that no one really could explain it, mages and scientists alike, meant that everyone here was living on borrowed time.
The door opening was chaotic enough. Something about Aloeus’ death made me wonder what would happen if the door ever shut?
CHAPTER FOUR
I
DECIDED that, if I was going to focus on the dragon himself, I needed to start with the dragon. I headed my Volkswagen up Euclid to see the legal residence of the late dragon Aloeus up
1000 Euclid. The address had sounded familiar, but it wasn’t until I reached the light at East Ninth that I realized why.
The intersection of Euclid and East Ninth has been a financial nexus since the 1900s. The Huntington Bank Building lorded over the northeast corner, a massive gray stone pile over a century old. Across from it on Ninth was the characterless white facade of National City Bank, an architectural cipher perpetrated in the nineteen-sixties. Across Euclid from the blank whiteness of National City Bank was the brand new corporate headquarters of First Cleveland Savings and Loan.
1000 Euclid was on the southeast corner, the old Cleveland Trust Building.
Aloeus lived here?
I thought as I pulled up half a block to a parking lot.
The Cleveland Trust Building had been empty for a few decades before the Portal opened, ever since Cleveland Trust and its conglomerate successors merged into nothingness. Apparently, sometime in the last ten years, it had found a new occupant.
I felt a little chill. For many people, this kind of revelation would just wash over them. Not knowing that the Cleveland Trust Building was occupied? Why should they know?
I
should know. That was my job. This building wasn’t just some random empty real estate. Cleveland Trust was an inexorable part of the city’s history. It was thanks to that particular bank that the city went into default in the nineteen-seventies, and since the building had been vacated, it had been owned by a succession of movers and shakers. Racking my brain, I think the last time I heard about who owned the building it had been bought by Forest Hills Enterprises, Leo Baldassare’s development company, maybe a year or two before the Portal opened.
In retrospect, it was interesting how the building never appeared to have been taken up in the economic boom that had gripped the rest of downtown. I wondered if Baldassare still owned the building.
Unlike its neighbors, the Cleveland Trust Building wasn’t a high-rise, though it dominated the intersection. It was four stories of domed neoclassicism, someone’s platonic ideal of a bank.
Looking at it, it still seemed empty to me. But examining it made me realize that the windows were tinted black, so there was no real way to tell if anyone was home. I wondered if a dragon ever resided there, or if the address was just a front. It was common enough for people involved in the higher levels of this city to rent properties just to have a legal address. I still remember the bad old days when Council members would have one address in their ward, and another one as far as their school district was concerned.
While I watched from the parking lot, I saw two or three people walk up and try the doors. Fellow members of the journalistic community. I saw about a dozen guys hovering about the building. No luck, apparently.
I stepped out of the Volkswagen and into the humid August air. I’d decided to give my obligatory fifteen minutes to this angle before I went somewhere else to ferret out Aloeus’ history.
I crossed Ninth and headed toward the steps in front of the central set of massive entry doors. One of the people milling around called out to me, “Ain’t no use, no one’s answering.”
I turned around and saw the sandy-haired kid from the
Plain Dealer
, the one who’d asked about property damage. He was shaking his head. “Typical. They only speak through their lawyers, and the lawyers don’t speak.”
I nodded and continued up to the doors. They were solid metal, decorated with embossed scrollwork, but no windows. I stood there a few moments wondering exactly what it was I was going to do. Knock? While I stood there, pondering the lack of a doorbell, intercom, or even a knocker, I heard a skittering noise above me.
I looked up and saw a leathery gargoyle wing flash from up on the roof. I was at the wrong angle to see what it was, so I backed up a few steps to get a better look at it. Before I could tell what it was, a voice called my attention back to street level.
“You’re Kline Maxwell, aren’t you?”
I turned around to face the kid again. “Yeah.”
“You used to be big, didn’t you?”
To hell with you, too, kid.
“I suppose you could say that.”
He held out his hand, “I admired your work all through college.”
I pondered snubbing the brat, but I was slightly more professional than that. I took his hand and shook it quickly, once. “And you are?”
“Sam Barlogh. So is there some sort of political angle to the dragon’s swan dive?”
I looked over my shoulder, up at the roof of the building. Whatever had been there was gone now. “There’s a political angle to everything.”
“What’re you looking at?”
I turned back to face him. “Nothing.”
“But—” I was saved from further conversation by a black Caddy limo pulling up to the curb. My comrades, Sam Barlogh included, converged on the vehicle as the rear passenger door opened.
The nexus of the attention was an older gentleman—white hair, clean-shaven, narrow glasses with gold rims, charcoal-gray suit with black armband. He had one of those expressions that made you think the owner went through life smelling something unpleasant. He pushed his way through the reporters without looking at them or speaking. He headed directly toward the Cleveland Trust Building, and the doors opened for him before he reached them.