Dragon(e) Baby Gone

Excerpt

I guess there’s always been a Department of Intangible Assets, in some
way or another, since humanity first banded together against the dark. Ancient
orders of knights, sects of religions, monasteries and their like had been the
first real organizations determined to hold off the things that bled into our
world from other realities. Great and epic individuals did a lot of work in the
past, though more often than not mere pawns as one ultra-powerful being played
against another. Gilgamesh. Solomon. Miyamoto Musashi for a while even worked
as a kind of Japanese defender against the supernatural. Things must have been
easier back then. If somebody had a problem with a corpse rising from the
ground and eating people, or with creatures slinking out of the mountains and
taking children, they could talk openly about it, and people would fit it
neatly into whatever cultural narrative they had. No press releases concerning
carbon monoxide leaks, no awkward local police trying to stutter their way
through an ogre rampage by blaming gang violence and drugs. If you were a 17th
Century farmer in the Tajima Province of Japan and tengu started picking off
your village one by one, Musashi would come by one day, cut down all those dark
spirits, and then leave. You’d replant your fields, mourn your losses, and tell
warning stories about warding off evil. And, probably, pay him whatever he
wanted.

Modern times gave way to a general idea that reason and logic were
enough to stop something from dragging you into the sewers and wearing your
skin to protect itself from daylight. It’s easy to see why: it doesn’t happen
to a lot of people, therefore it must not happen. I see it all the time, people
who say things like “I’ve never seen a ghost, so they must not exist.”
Oh yeah? Because if spirits did exist, they’d all be tripping over their ghost
dicks to haunt you? Do you understand the preternatural forces that conspire,
the circumstances that line up, to create any kind of ghost? Let alone one that
shows up in your room at night and moans about revenge or betrayal or rattles
some chains and teaches you a valuable lesson about being selfish?

“Well, there’s no such thing as Bigfoot. All those pictures are super
blurry and grainy,” they say, their voices nasally and snobby, like all the
knowledge of the world is pumped directly into their tiny brains through their
tiny phones. I don’t care to get into whether or not any of the literally
thousands of kinds of entities that flit in and out of forests would like to be
called “Bigfoot,” but just because you haven’t left your couch in twenty years
doesn’t mean there’s not something out there you don’t understand. Go stand out
in a remote Colorado forest one night.

Turn off your phone, open your eyes and ears, and wait. When you feel
those eyes watching, and when you know, deep in that primitive monkey brain,
way, way down inside, that there’s more than just the animals you have names
for sharing that clearing with you, then you can call me to tell me that there’s
no such thing as Bigfoot.

That is, if you live to turn your phone back on again.

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