Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “Gosh,” Charlie said.

  “Too much sun,” I said. “Knocked him flat. Damn shame. Maybe I can give you a hand.”

  When she looked up at me I realized that she literally had not noticed me before. She blinked me away and went back to yanking on Charlie’s paw.

  “No help there, like I said,” I offered. “He’s just been born again. An uncle of mine did the same thing at a Chautauqua on Fairlie Hill in 1913. Went down like an ox. But I’m pleased to offer my own services.”

  She gave an agonized pull at Charlie’s hand once more and then looked up at me. “Please, Mr. Williams,” she said. Her voice was all trembly. “Help me with the Doctor.”

  “Lead the way,” I said, and followed her at a quarter of her pace across the street. She had the door open and was waving me in when I was only half way there.

  5

  Norm Hughardt was what I guess they call an internist today, now that G.P.’s are out of date, and he was a pretty good doctor and a very good snob. His dad used to be the same way. When I was some kind of a hotshot, old Dr. Hughardt was happy to see me and tell me to lose weight, change my habits, etc., but after I fell into disgrace he wasn’t so happy about it any more. Norm went to J. S. Mill about ten years before Charlie Antolini did. After that he went to the University of Virginia and Yale Medical School. When he was about Charlie’s age he returned to Virginia for some kind of seminar and met this big blond tennis player and brought her back here. He was in practice with his father, but after his father gave up on me (the old man died pretty soon after) he wouldn’t take me as a patient because he thought I was a Communist, which was a lot of bilge. Still, he was supposed to be the second best doctor in Hampstead, the best one being Wren Van Horne, who shines up the plumbing of half the ladies in town. Wren and I went back a good ways, but he was no good to me as a doctor.

  I guess Norm told his wife to always refer to him as Dr. Hughardt in front of other people. He had a pointy little beard and an impressive bald head. He couldn’t be bothered with you unless you were famous or likely to be. He worked on all the actors and illustrators around town. When he thought of something funny, he called up Sarah Spry so she could put it in her column. He hadn’t spoken to me in twenty years, I bet. Maybe twenty-five.

  Evelyn was sort of hissing at me when I got to the front door. I could tell that even though she was too rattled to do anything herself, she wasn’t easy about letting me in the house. I was Joe Stalin’s nephew, or some similar nonsense. Besides that, I wasn’t even dressed up to the pink housecoat and fuzzy footgear standard. I was wearing a pair of old black hightop basketball shoes, lumpy baggy tweed suit-pants, and a green turtleneck sweater with ragged holes at the elbows. Also, I had not shaved. I almost never shave under my chin anyhow. I don’t want to cut my throat.

  “Well, what is it, Evelyn?” I asked. The entry was papered with framed cartoons, and I recognized the styles of Hampstead’s and Hillhaven’s half-dozen famous cartoonists. The one signed Hope this hurts you more than it does me, Best, Pat Dobbin showed a little bald guy with a pointy beard sawing into the belly of a Dobbin lookalike while bills and coins spilled out of the wound. Pat Dobbin had made himself look the way he likely looked to himself in the medicine chest mirror, which is to say handsomer than he really was.

  “Please,” she said. “Come to the back, Mr. Williams. Dr. Hughardt was just going outside to check on the sprinkler system . . . and . . . I saw him fall and . . .” She was pulling on the ratty old turtleneck, trying to get me to increase my speed.

  “He fell, did he?” I asked. “Tripped, maybe?”

  She let out a sob.

  “You just call the ambulance, Evelyn,” I said. “They’ll get here in a jiffy.” I knew this from experience, and I told her the number. “Tell them Norm’s unconscious and give them your address. I can find my own way to the back door. I’ve been in this house a hundred times.”

  Sure I had. About that, anyhow, back in the twenties. The kitchen had been enlarged into the butler’s pantry and the range looked like a spaceship and a big copper hood floated in the middle of the room, but the back door was in the same place. It banged to and fro in the little breeze we had that morning. I heard Evelyn dialing the phone.

  I got outside and stood there, breathing hard. The sun seemed a lot warmer than it had been while I inspected the damage to my mailbox. Norm Hughardt was lying down on the dry part of his lawn. Water from underground sprinklers sprayed up just beyond him, wetting most of the grass and the red brick wall at the back of his property. A hopeful little rainbow arched over one of the fountains. Three of the jets, the nearest ones, seemed to be out of whack. Norm’s face was in the grass and the toes of his shoes pointed straight down. He didn’t look anything like Charlie Antolini, or even like my Uncle Hobart, who collapsed on Fairlie Hill when he discovered Jesus.

  I moved myself toward him. “Norm?” I said. “How you feelin’?”

  Norm did not answer. Stroke? Heart attack? I knelt effortfully beside him. He was dressed in the vest and pants of a blue three-piece suit. His shirt was clean and starched. I bent over to look at his face and saw that his eyes were open and staring into Bobby Fritz’s springy grass. “Oh, damnation,” I said and pushed at his shoulder. His top half pitched over. Under the vest was a neat red and blue striped tie. I used both hands to push at his hip and rolled him over. Now he was staring straight up into the sky. “Norm, you stuffy bastard,” I said. “Wake up.” I wondered not for the first time why someone so right-wing would wear chin hair like Lenin’s.

  I put my head to his chest. Nothing moved in there. Then I put my face up against his mouth. No breath, just the smell of cologne and mouthwash. I pinched his nostrils and breathed into his mouth the way they do on TV. I was sweating. It was terrible, that someone so much younger than myself was dead. I repeated the breathing gimmick.

  “What are you doing?” his wife screeched from the back door.

  “My best, Evelyn,” I said. “You called them?”

  She gulped and nodded. Then she fluttered near Norm and me. “Mr. Williams,” she breathed, “do you think he’s . . . do you think he’s . . . do you think . . .”

  “Best to wait for the medics,” I said.

  “He looks so normal,” she said. Which was pretty close to the truth.

  “Help me up,” I said. And stuck out my arm. She gaped at my outstretched hand as if it were holding a turd. “Give me a pull for God’s sake, Evelyn,” I said. And she grabbed hold and got me up on my feet. Both of us stood there looking down at Norm Hughardt lying face up on the grass.

  “He is. He’s dead,” Evelyn said.

  “Does sorta look that way,” I allowed. “What a damn shame. Not a mark on him.”

  It could be that this was a tactless remark. Evelyn Hughardt stepped away from me, wrapped her arms around herself and went into the house. But maybe she had heard the bell, for after a few seconds she reappeared with my old acquaintances of the Emergency Services Medical team.

  They froze when they saw me. “You again?” the big mustached one said, and the cop with them shook his head. This was a blowhard named Tommy “Turtle” Turk, the worst cop on the Hampstead force. He was only a couple of months away from retirement and had a belly the size of a half grown walrus, but he still liked to use his fists.

  “Not me, Turtle,” I said. “Open your eyes.”

  I sometimes call the paramedics when I get my bad chest pains.

  By this time the boys were all over Norm Hughardt, hooking him up to the stuff I hope they never have to use on me. Turtle got tired with trying to slap me down with his eyes and went over to grill the widow. I watched the boys jolting Norm with one of those things that resemble truck batteries. Norm jerked, but not with anything like life.

  “He’s gone,” said the big one with the mustache. Then he looked up at me and said, “This is the second one this morning for us, and the other crew had one of their own. What the hell’s going on here?”


  “Three heart attacks?”

  “Who the hell knows?” he said, and sent one of the other boys out to the ambulance for a stretcher and a blanket.

  I wandered over to Turtle and Evelyn. Turtle was asking her if they’d had an argument before the Doctor went outside. He glared at me, then he glared back at Evelyn.

  “No,” she said.

  “Okay, what are you doing here?” Turtle bellowed at me.

  “This lady asked me to help. I rolled Norm over. I told her to call the medics. I was just walking by.”

  “You mean you were—” he stopped, and I wondered what word he had censored. Slinking? Oozing? Turtle hitched up his belly and grinned like an ape. “I scare you, don’t I? I know I do, Williams.”

  “Mr. Williams,” I said.

  “And I know why. You’re yellow. You’re as yellow as they come. I know all about you, Mr. Williams.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “Good-bye, Evelyn. I’m very sorry this happened. Call me if you need anything.”

  She blinked. I wanted to hug her. Turtle would probably have jugged me for attempted rape. I went slowly through the house and out the front door.

  Charlie Antolini was still lying blissfully on his immaculate lawn. Flo Antolini squatted beside him, weeping but talking fast.

  I crossed the street. “Norm Hughardt keeled over in his back yard,” I said. “Damn shame. You want any help?” This was sheer bravado. I needed to lie down, bad.

  “He won’t get up, Mr. Williams,” Flo said. “I can’t make him come inside.”

  I craned over to look at Charlie. “How you feelin’ Charlie?”

  “Beautiful.” Beyoodiful.

  “It’s time to go inside now. We might get a little rain soon.”

  “Okay,” he said, and held out his arms like a child. I took one, Flo the other. He almost pulled us over, but Flo planted her legs and kept us steady.

  “Jeez, that was nice,” Charlie said. “I never did that before.”

  Flo thanked me and began to lead Charlie toward the house. He kept stopping to admire the grass and the daffodils, but finally she got him inside. The curtains closed with a silent crash.

  Turtle blasted away from the curb with a big manly roar of the patrol car. The paramedics were just bringing the stretcher out of Norm Hughardt’s house.

  I looked up and down Mount Avenue and mentally saw a crowd of Jaegers and lobsterbacks racing toward me, waving torches and muskets. I saw the storm, the bolts of lightning of that night. The big houses were burning. Rest was imperative. Among the German mercenaries and the British soldiers there was one other, the one the Reverend Andrew Eliot had mentioned. . . . headed by one or two persons who were born and bred in the neighboring towns. One person, I knew, born and bred in Greenbank. (Reverend Eliot, a decent man, had been protecting one of his own.) I could almost see his face. He looked a lot like me. Out there was a dead child—a real child, though I did not know it then. The ambulance zipped past me, blowing the illusion apart. I got myself turned around and went home.

  6

  Now suppose that the thinking cloud had been born in Hampstead instead of Woodville. Suppose also that Dr. Wise knew what he was talking about. We have about twenty-five thousand people in town. If the immediate death rate was from 5 to 8 percent, between twelve hundred fifty and two thousand people would have dropped dead Saturday night. The streets would have been full of bodies. Instead, only five people died in Hampstead over Saturday night and Sunday morning. The murder of Stony Friedgood stole everybody’s attention, especially when it was followed by another murder like it, and we never got around to putting things together.

  The oldest person to go was a guy my age, a retired boat dealer who lived on Gravesend Road. The youngest was a seven-year-old boy. That bites at me. No kid should die from something like that. It could have been Tabby, see, it could have been Tabby Smithfield. The kid’s parents had only moved here eighteen months before.

  Somewhere in between the boy and the boat dealer was a friend of mine. I heard about it when I got home. The phone was ringing. It was Harry Zimmer. Babe was dead, he said. She’d had a little emphysema, but that wasn’t what killed her. She had just dropped dead as soon as she got out of the pickup—fell down, a goner, in the parking lot at Gravesend Beach. Wasn’t that a hell of a note? Harry was crying. “I just wanted you to know, Mr. Williams,” he said. “Babe always said you were a real gentleman.” I said the things you say.

  Hell and double hell. I can’t write in my own voice anymore. Savage old Turtle was right, and I’m yellow. This is a screwball way to write a book anyhow.

  So what I’m going to do is put down about the Allbees buying the house across the street and how they met Patsy McCloud. “Pasta is prologue,” and that. Pretty soon we’ll get back to Tabby, and then I’ll tell you about Gary Starbuck, the thief, and the little gang Tabby almost got into, and the stories Pat Dobbin was illustrating. It all belongs here, believe me—or don’t, you’ll find out anyhow.

  Then we’ll get to the part I hate to write about. I loved Wren Van Horne, he was only eight years younger than I, and we grew up here together. But I loved Babe Zimmer too, that nice pumpkin-faced old lady who thought I was a real gentleman.

  If I’d been like Tabby when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have ended up this way.

  4

  Recognitions

  1

  “The husband didn’t do it,” Ronnie Riggley told the Allbees on Wednesday morning as she turned out of the shopping center. “There was something funny going on with that lady. I don’t mean she was the town pickup or anything, but she definitely gave out her favors. Bobo thinks that her husband knew about it. On Saturday she came into Franco’s and met some guy there. They didn’t stay long, and none of the dummies at the bar recognized the man.”

  “From out of town,” Laura suggested.

  “Could be, but we always say that in Hampstead.” Ronnie laughed. “If someone’s house gets broken into, which happens all the time, people always say the burglar came from Norrington or Bridgeport. But what happened is that the guys at the bar looked at Stony and didn’t even bother to look twice at the guy. Bobo says they have about five different descriptions of him. He could be a blond guy in his forties, or a white-haired guy in his sixties. The only thing they agreed on was that he wasn’t a regular at Franco’s. But I guess a few of the guys recognized Stony. I shouldn’t be telling you this before you even move here, but I gather that some of our executive wives hang around Franco’s. I don’t know, what do they think they’re going to find? Lumberjacks? I’m probably too straitlaced, but I think that’s so dumb.”

  “It still could have been the husband,” Laura said. “You said he knew about her affairs.”

  “Oh, he’s got an alibi,” Ronnie said. “Good old Leo Friedgood was in Woodville all afternoon. He works for some giant corporation, and not only could a couple of people vouch for him down there, he spoke to General Haugejas a couple of times on the phone.”

  “Henry Haugejas?” Richard said in surprise. “The one who was in Korea?”

  “Is there another one?” Ronnie asked. “Iron Hank. One of the detectives talked to him personally. He told Bobo he felt like standing up the whole time he was on the phone.”

  “A real character, I guess,” Richard said. “Still carries his guns around with him.”

  “He shot a mugger two years ago,” Ronnie said. “Can you imagine that? It was in midtown New York.” Ronnie laughed. “We’re going to look at a four-bedroom house right on the Hampstead–Old Sarum border first. It has lots of character. And then we’ll look at a house in Greenbank. I have a feeling about that one.”

  2

  Ronnie was doing her best, Richard knew. Any real-estate agent is limited by the range of houses actually on the market. Besides that, house prices in Patchin County had tripled in the past ten years, mortgage rates were currently at their highest level in history, and many houses he and Laura would have liked were now far beyond their
price range.

  “Old Sarum is a lot more rural than Hampstead,” Ronnie said—quite unnecessarily—after they had gone for nearly a mile without seeing a house of any sort. “A lot of people like that.”

  Laura made a noncommittal sound from the backseat.

  “Unfortunately, the owner will be in the house while I’m showing it. Something happened, I guess. She really wanted to stay home. She’s a widow.”

  Finally they reached an overgrown driveway. The house was a cottage to which rooms had been added by various owners. A glassed-in studio topped the modern garage. The whole thing had been built on the side of a densely wooded hill, and appeared to swarm over it, working its way toward the top like a bank of ivy.

  Laura asked, “Can we really afford this one?”

  “Mrs. Bamberger wants a quick sale,” Ronnie said as they left the car. “She’s going to Florida in a couple of weeks. I thought it was worth a look anyhow.” She gave Laura and Richard a rueful look. “I’m afraid she’ll talk your ears off.”

  Mrs. Bamberger, a wide old woman in a dark blue pantsuit, met them at the door. Gold eyeglasses dangled from a chain around her neck. “Hello, Mrs. Riggley,” she said to Ronnie. “Mr. and Mrs. Allbee? Just come in and poke around. I’ll stay out of your way.”

  But as Ronnie had predicted, she did not stay out of their way. Mrs. Bamberger accompanied them on their tour, describing the house and her possessions. These were uniformly eccentric. The rooms were so crowded with heavy antique furniture that Richard had to strain to get an idea of their true size. Some of the rooms were interconnected, so that going through them was like passing down a line of railroad cars. In some cases they had to go up a set of steps to enter the next chamber. Mrs. Bamberger talked and talked. That fire screen we bought in. All that Meissen was a gift from. Don’t you love fireplaces. My children once. The ceilings in most of the house were only a few inches above Richard’s and Ronnie’s heads. Mrs. Bamberger kept up her commentary until they reached the studio over the garage, where she seemed to relax.