Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  The gun went off but even I could see Les wasn’t trying to hit anybody. He had that peashooter raised up at a forty-five-degree angle above our heads. Then what I was afraid of was that the big cop, Bobo, was going to plug Les out of sheer overexcitement, but Bobo stayed calm. His gun—a much more serious instrument than Les’s—was out, but that was only right. Bobo was making sure that Les McCloud wouldn’t try to do in his wife. Les anticlimactically collapsed onto his keester and started to bawl.

  I had my arm around the boy’s shoulders when Bobo went up to confab with the McClouds. The boy was shaking, as much because of me and what he’d seen as because of Les. “You’re a special person, Tabby,” I said. “We’re all going to need you.”

  “I did get that mailbox,” he said. “Not yours. His.” He nodded toward the three of them in the middle of the street, Les swatting away the comfort Patsy wanted to give him.

  “Just keep your lip buttoned about that,” I advised. “About the other thing too. I’ll tell you all about that, and you’ll see why it had to happen.”

  “It did happen,” Tabby said, as if he had not been sure. “On that boat, too.” He separated himself from my arm, and looked up at me with that same trembling suspiciousness I would even then have sacrificed a limb to erase.

  “Sure it happened. I just told you it had to.”

  Bobo and Patsy were coming up the street toward us and I had to shut up. I looked at the unassuming puff of feathers on my lawn and for some reason thought of Babe Zimmer, and Harry’s voice choking up when he told me about her on the telephone.

  Then Patsy Tayler and Tabby saw each other. Patsy had been saying something about a cup of coffee, she was being what they used to call “a game girl” when I was a kid, trying to act as if the sight of her pajamaed husband waving a gun on the street really wasn’t much out of the ordinary. And she glanced up toward us and this act fell to pieces. She barely looked at me; her eyes locked on Tabby. She stopped moving. I knew that the boy was a part of whatever she had been looking at back there on the road when I thought she was drunk—he was the only thing on Beach Trail for her. Her grandmother had got that look now and then, when she walked into a shop and froze when she saw someone who was going to fall down dead of a coronary in a week or two. It was simple recognition, but horrifying because it was so simple. Tabby just stood and took it in. He had that strength.

  Nothing is ever isolated, nothing is ever random, everything is connected, and I saw myself rolling over Norm Hughardt’s body in his fussy little back garden—I saw Charlie Antolini giving me a smile full of innocent happiness. Ah, shit, I thought.

  Bobo of course thought that Patsy was reacting to what had just happened and he began to push her along toward us, shepherding her with gentle nudges and pats. Now that nobody was going to get shot, he wanted to get her off his hands.

  The physicists are right, there is uncertainty but no randomness.

  “Could you help the lady out for half an hour or so?” Bobo asked. “I ought to be seeing if I can catch whoever whacked these . . .” He gestured toward my poor old mailbox.

  “There’s coffee on the stove,” I said. “Good and strong. I’ll see that the boy gets home, Officer.”

  Patsy was staring at the ground now, probably to make sure it wasn’t going to cave in beneath her feet. “Tell Les to come down to the station with his permit,” Bobo said, and she nodded. She glanced at Tabby again. I put my arms around both of them. Patsy was only an inch or two taller than the boy, and I fancied that I could almost feel the blood pounding along just beneath her skin. I towered over them like some ancient reptilian bird.

  2

  Five minutes later I was pottering around in my kitchen, pretending that I was an absentminded old slob who had trouble locating three clean cups. In truth I was an absentminded, etc., who had felt the shock waves of the meeting of Patsy Tayler McCloud and James Tabb Smithfield, and who could still virtually hear them booming through my kitchen. The dishes should have rattled on the shelf, the cups rotated on their hooks. The two of them, sitting silently and nervously on my kitchen chairs, set up reverberations so strong. Having seen so much in each other, they could not speak. They would not have known where to begin, the subject of their commonality was so vast.

  It was as though they were two old lovers who decades ago had destroyed their marriages, abandoned their children, left an entire town flaming with outrage and rumor; or two generals who had once jointly directed a massacre. You see where I am going with these farfetched comparisons. Part of the immensity of the feeling that made me turn away from them was shame—guilt, too. They had learned to repress and hide their differences from other people. Now each was face to face with the one person who instantly saw through that disguise. They exposed each other. And this was much more difficult for Patsy than for the boy: she had lived longer with her disguise, and it was thinner than Tabby’s.

  At last I could stand it no longer. “We might as well speak,” I said, and took three cups to the blackened pot on the range.

  They stirred on their chairs, and pretended to be interested in the scars on the wooden table.

  I set the coffee down before them. Tabby muttered his thanks, and Patsy sort of minimally nodded.

  “The two of you know what you are,” I said. “And if you don’t want to talk about that in front of me, that’s fine. I know a little bit about it anyhow—at least enough to recognize it when I see it.” Tabby was looking at me alertly, Patsy concentrated on her cup. “And I knew your grandmother, Patsy. I remember what she was like and what she could do, though ninety percent of the people in this town just thought she was a good-looking woman who had a screw loose somewhere.”

  Patsy glanced up at me. “Was she attractive? I never knew her before she was . . . um . . . before.”

  “As attractive as you are yourself,” I said. “And she chose to leave the world, to put it that way. Nobody committed her. She wanted to be there—I think she saw too many monstrosities on the outside—she didn’t feel she could face them anymore.”

  I could not have selected a better noun. She had just used it herself in her diary.

  “Monstrosities, yes,” Patsy said, almost relaxing for the first time. The dishes would have stopped rattling, the cups ceased to revolve. “I’m afraid I’ve become familiar with monstrosities.”

  She darted an inquisitive look at the boy, silently and shyly asking a question. I think it was the first time in twenty years that Patsy had ever, even so slightly, imagined that there might be this comfort in her talent, that it might be shared. But Tabby shook his head; and then he saved it for her. “I guess I have too. From when I was a little kid. One time. Maybe twice—I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe three,” I said. “Don’t forget me and Bates Krell on his boat.”

  Tabby swallowed, and Patsy kept glancing at him as if he were about to burst into flame.

  “Well, what have you seen?” I asked her.

  Startled, she lifted her head. “You say you knew my grandmother. What did she see?”

  “She knew when people were going to die,” I told her flatly. “That’s what I gathered, anyhow.”

  “I want to go home,” Tabby said.

  “Do you see people die?” Patsy half-whispered to him.

  “How do you mean? Once I saw a guy get stabbed in a bar where my father worked.”

  “So Clark was a bartender. That must have given Monty the black-and-blue fits,” I said. “But you know what she means, Tabby. Did you ever see it before it happened?”

  Reluctantly he nodded. “Okay, if you have to know. I saw something when I was five. It was that woman, that Mrs. Friedgood, getting killed.”

  “Did you see who did it?” I asked, trying to stay calm. I was dog-tired, and my chest hurt: I was beginning to realize how much of the unthinkable was opening up before us.

  “Sort of.”

  I kept looking at him, and he sipped at the coffee. “It was a long time ago.” Then he gl
ared at me with a fifteen-year-old’s resentment. “What do you know about it, anyhow?” For a second I thought he would cry, he must have been thrust back into that moment with his father and grandfather in JFK airport, but he refused to show that weakness before us. I got the full blast of his resentment again. “Nothing’s worse than that. You think it’s fun to have stuff like that happen in your head?”

  All during Tabby’s speech, Patsy kept up a silent accompaniment of nods.

  Mrs. Friedgood probably thought there was something worse, I almost said, but could not. The atmosphere in that room was extraordinary. Patsy and Tabby had united at last, even if it was against me. They had found each other; they could admit to themselves that they had found each other, with all that involved, and the release of emotion was like what you feel when you open the door of a blazing woodstove.

  “He’s right,” Patsy said, reaching across the table to take Tabby’s hand.

  “To an extent.”

  “Is that what you think? Is that all you know? Do you know what it feels like to think—to know—that you’re going crazy?”

  “I did when I saw Bates Krell for the first time,” I said. “And when I went out behind the Sawtell Country Club with John Sayre’s wife and saw John dead on the grass with a pistol still in his hand.” They could have made me weep then, with their beauty and their certainty. “I’ll tell you all about that, because I’ll have to. There are things you both have to learn.”

  “Why?” Tabby asked. Patsy’s support made him almost belligerent.

  “Why?” I echoed him mildly. “For one reason, because Johnny Sayre was a decent and brave man. His ghost deserves that you know what I think the real story of his suicide was. And for another, because the three of us are connected. Connected by history, which is something I know about, at least in this part of the world.” I smiled at him. “I could tell you about it, but I’d rather show you.”

  “Show me?”

  “Would you mind taking a short walk? You too, Patsy. It’ll only take five minutes, even for me.”

  “I’m not going to that house,” Tabby said. He blinked when he realized I didn’t know what he meant. “The Friedgood house.”

  “No.” I understood. He had been driven to look at it already. The day of the murder? During the murder? At that moment, I began to fear for him; for Patsy too; and for myself. I believed him, but I could have no guarantee that he would believe the crazy story I would tell him; the more so since it was less a story than a messy assemblage of hints and intuition. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of the Dragon?”

  Two blank looks met me.

  “And I suppose you don’t know that your name wasn’t always Smithfield,” I said to Tabby.

  He shook his head: disbelief was already setting in.

  “I’ll just get a flashlight,” I said.

  3

  The English term for “flashlight” is “torch,” Richard Allbee reminded me when he looked at these pages, and my big heavy-duty emergency flash certainly glowed like a torch as we went down Beach Trail to Mount Avenue in the middle of the night. I was thinking of those other torches that came waving down this road, but the other two were not. They impatiently went before me, trying to get me to speed up I guess so they could get it over with and go home.

  At the corner I could hear the sea hissing and slapping on the stretch of private beaches up from Gravesend Beach. A few forlorn streetlamps burned in the mist just beginning to appear in the lower patches of Mount Avenue. Down by the long drive to the Van Horne house, a tall looming tree picked out by the light was skull-shaped, the point of the chin nearly touching the ground and the great round crown far up in the black sky. “Just a little way down,” I said.

  I suddenly felt rejuvenated—my chest stopped paining me, my back straightened enough to remind me of what it was like to be young. I’d need more of this, if everything I thought was true.

  “The Dragon had a name,” I said, making the most of the opportunity to be cryptic, and led them along the high stone wall toward the Academy.

  In a bank of dark green myrtle my “torch” found the low marker, a bronze plate set in granite. THE BEACHSIDE TRAIL, read the first line.

  “Five, six years ago the Historical Society put this thing here,” I said. “Nobody ever stops to read it, of course. Which might be okay, since it tells about a tenth of the real story. But look at the names. Read them out loud.”

  Patsy silently read the stuff about this being the site of the first settlement here, and when she got to the names of the farmers, she read them out. “Ebenezer Williams, Roger Smyth, Josiah Green, and Benjamin Tayler.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re a Tayler, I’m a Williams, and Tabby is a Smyth. They changed their name around 1880 when a Smyth bought up all this land here—he thought Smithfield sounded grander than Smyth, I guess. His grandson sold the whole thing after the Civil War, and eventually the Vanderbilts bought it and put up the building the school uses now. But the name stayed.”

  “So what?”

  “We’re the last of these families, for one thing. That’s important. Now I almost think that the last Green descendant has to be here somewhere in town—”

  “Well, he is,” Patsy said. “I had dinner with him and his wife tonight. Richard Allbee. He just bought the house across the street from you.”

  “Does he have children?”

  “His wife is pregnant,” Patsy said.

  They were the people I had seen pulling into the driveway of the Sayre house.

  “But there’s another name,” Tabby said, leaning over to read the raised lettering. “It’s—”

  “It’s the Dragon,” I said. “That’s what they called him.”

  Tabby read the sentence out loud. “In 1645 a fifth farmer named Gideon Winter joined these men.”

  “I wonder if they used that wording on purpose,” I said. “But that would be to presuppose that Gideon Winter wasn’t a man, and I guess he must have been—a man in most senses, anyway. Born like others, more ambitious than most. Or just greedier. Well, not ‘just.’ I can’t think he was ‘just’ anything.”

  And now the darkness around the area I was illuminating depressingly reminded me of everything I did not and would never know about Gideon Winter, and I switched off the big emergency flash. The sea rattled on the private beaches down the cliffs on the other side of the mansions.

  “Two years after Gideon Winter’s arrival,” I told them, “most of the crops failed. There are no records of livestock sold, so I think most of the stock died.” Patsy and Tabby were dimly back-lighted by the streetlamp at the entrance to Gravesend Beach. Because of the mist, the night was very slightly chilly. They still didn’t get it. “In three years, most of the children were dead too. The first church was up the hill—Clapboard Hill in those days, but it doesn’t have a name now—and that’s where the children were buried. It would have been very near where your house is now, on Hermitage. Remember they had big families in those days. Five to eight children in a family was common. By 1648 our families were lucky to have one or two left. And Gideon Winter owned most of Greenbank. He had no children, at least none that were legitimate. All that is what they didn’t put on the marker. And maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe I just made it up out of sketchy old parish records. But Winter wound up with most of the land. And they did call him the Dragon. I can show it to you in the books.” Now I felt exhausted again: my rejuvenation had been brief. I was breathing hard and I wanted to sit down.

  “What happened to Gideon Winter?” Patsy asked.

  “I think they finally killed him,” I said. “I think they finally decided he was a devil instead of a man, and killed him.” I didn’t just want to sit down, I wanted to go to bed. Twenty-five years ago, I would have pulled a flask out of my pocket and had a couple belts of good cognac. “But that wasn’t the crime, not the real crime. That was the response of a bunch of barely literate, superstitious farmers. The real crime was what their victim had don
e to them.”

  “But how could anybody do that—make crops and animals die? Make children die?” Tabby asked. He didn’t sound shocked, but I heard in his voice that he had given up his belligerence and was almost interested enough to be believing me now.

  “I hope we never have to find out,” I said. “I don’t even think we could. We’re twentieth-century people. They were mid-seventeenth-century people, and for all practical purposes they lived on the edge of an endless forest. They believed in magic, in witches and demons.”

  I let them think for a second about what they believed in. “But here’s one fact for you. Patsy, you and your husband moved here how long ago? Eight, nine months?” She nodded. “And, Tabby, your grandfather died about three months ago. So you’ve been in ‘Four Hearths,’ what, six weeks?” He too nodded. “And Mary Green’s son moved back to Hampstead only days ago, I suppose. Williams, Smyth, Tayler, Green. Their descendants haven’t all been together here since before World War II. The Taylers lived in New York. Tabby’s grandfather lived in New York until he moved Smithfield Systems to Woodville in 1950. No member of the Green family has lived near Greenbank since 1944 or ’45, I forget which, when Mary went out to California. Williams, Smyth, Tayler, Green. We’re back. This place is ours, do you see? That’s magic, if you like.”

  “And if we’re back, you’re saying . . .” Patsy began.

  “Yes. If we are, maybe he is too. Because it’s not just that you have come back, but come back so strong, if you see what I mean.”

  Tabby said, “That’s screwy.”

  “I’m on your side, kid,” I said. “Just protect your flank. When I first met Bates Krell, I had a damn funny experience. I thought I was looking at a devil, and I’m an agnostic. I’ve always thought politics was a hell of a lot more interesting than theology.”