Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “I don’t feel good,” Sherri admitted. “I couldn’t eat nothing.”

  “You sick?” Clark looked again at Sherri, who did not in the least resemble a vulture. Her face was pale and doughy, her eyes puffy. Black roots were visible at the part in her hair.

  “I want to go lie down. But I have to clean the kitchen first.”

  “Suit yourself,” Clark said.

  Clark was no longer the slim young man who had played ball with Tabby on the lawn before the Mount Avenue house. His body had thickened, a network of red veins had blossomed over his cheekbones. The petulance Graham Williams had noticed was now a permanent part of his features, and it spoiled what had been handsomeness. In fact, Tabby, who had finished his breakfast and was waiting to talk to his father, could see none of Clark’s old attractiveness in the porcine face across the table. “Why don’t you try to get some rest, Sherri?” he asked his stepmother.

  “Let her do what she wants,” Clark said. “When’s the school bus come, anyhow?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “So read a book, do some homework. How’s it going at school anyhow, Tabs?”

  “Pretty fair.”

  Clark shrugged.

  “How’s your work going?” Tabby asked.

  “How’s my work going, he asks. Like work, that’s how it’s going. You’ll find out.”

  “You going to see some accounts today?”

  “That’s what they pay me for, kid.”

  “What accounts?”

  Clark put his napkin on the table and gave Tabby a flat glare. “You want to know what accounts I’m going to today? Okay. Bloomingdale’s. That satisfy you? Caldor’s. A couple others in Woodville. Then I get over to Mount Kisco and Pound Ridge. Satisfied?”

  “He won’t give a straight answer,” Sherri said from her stool. “Don’t even try.”

  “Hey, lay off, okay? What’s it to you, anyway? I work, I come home. That’s enough. I don’t have to pass an exam on it.”

  “I was just interested, Dad.”

  “Okay. But do I pump you about school? Do I ask you who your friends are, what you do at night? Do I? Hell no. I got enough of that from my old man. You do what you want, that’s fine with me.”

  “Did you know that our name wasn’t always Smithfield?” Tabby asked quietly.

  “I suppose it used to be Morales,” Clark said, and Sherri got off her stool and left the room.

  “She looks sick,” Tabby said.

  “She’s sick of Hampstead, that’s what she’s sick of. You’d think she’d be grateful to be in a house like this. Don’t worry about her, Tabs. She’ll adjust.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  His father snorted; wiped his lips with a napkin. “What’s that garbage about our name?”

  “I heard it used to be Smyth. With a y.”

  “News to me. Where did you hear that?”

  “A kid at school.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Don’t pay any attention about what those kids say. Just do your work, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything else on your mind, Tabs?”

  Tabby shook his head, and his father stood up. In a minute he would be gone; when he came home he would be drunk. “Well, maybe,” Tabby said.

  Clark waited silently.

  “Do you know anything about a fisherman being killed on his boat a long time ago, here in town? I know it sounds crazy.”

  “What the hell, Tabby. Go out to the bus stop.” Clark pulled his suit jacket from a chair and turned toward the kitchen door.

  “His name was Bates Krell.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Or did you hear of a farmer here named Gideon Winter?”

  “Nobody’s had a farm here for a hundred years,” Clark said. “Get your ass in gear, Tabs. You’ll miss your bus.”

  Tabby gathered up his books and papers and went outside to wait on the corner. His father drove past in his new red Mercedes and waved as he turned into Beach Trail.

  When Tabby got near to J. S. Mill, he saw the Norman twins through the window of the bus. They were talking to a dark-haired man who looked muscular but not athletic. The three of them were across the street from the school’s entrance, and the man was leaning against the side of a gray van.

  4

  “So you got another kid,” Gary Starbuck said to Dicky and Bruce. “Does he know what he’s supposed to do?”

  “Hey, man,” Bruce protested. “We don’t even know what we’re supposed to do yet.”

  “You know.”

  “What are we supposed to be, mind readers?”

  Starbuck sighed. “Listen, it’s a job, right? That’s what you know. You’re going in with me on a job, right? That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “Right,” Bruce said.

  “So you got this other kid.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Is he a big kid?”

  Dicky and Bruce shook their heads.

  “That’s okay. He don’t have to be big. He has to be smart, is important.”

  “He’s smart,” Bruce said. Tabby had somehow duped Bobo the Clown on Sunday night. Bruce had expected him to do it, but it at least proved his intelligence.

  Starbuck sighed again. “I ought to have my head examined.” He crossed his arms over his chest, and his biceps bulged. “Okay. You know that house just above the little beach there? A doctor’s house?”

  The twins nodded. “Van Horne,” Dick said.

  “You got it. We’re going in next Saturday. I’ll take the locks off, we go in nice and clean. There’s no alarms on the house. Lotta goodies in that place. I even know a guy who’ll take his piano. You guys can lift a piano, is my guess. I’ll give you five hundred apiece, okay? Then we’re straight, right? After Saturday, you never heard of me. You get your thousand, you’re cool.”

  “You mean we all go in?” Dicky asked.

  “No, I go in and you play checkers on the porch. What the hell do you mean? Sure you go in.”

  “What about Tabby?”

  “The other kid? He’s the lookout. He sits in the van with the radio. If he sees a cop, he tells us. He gets fifty bucks, plus whatever you guys give him.”

  “We get five hundred apiece,” Bruce said.

  “That’s our deal.”

  Dicky and Bruce gave each other a look of perfect understanding. “We’ll give him fifty apiece,” Bruce said.

  “Sure you will,” Gary Starbuck said. “Just meet me in the Lobster House parking lot at eleven o’clock. This is an old guy here, he goes to bed at nine.”

  “But why not go in on a weekday?” Bruce asked. “I don’t get this. He’s a doctor, he goes out of the house all day.”

  “He’s got a housekeeper and a cook, is why,” Gary said. “The housekeeper’s as old as he is and the cook drives in from Bridgeport. Eleven is the right time. We could do it later, but why should we waste the whole night?”

  “One more thing,” Bruce said. “You got a piece, right? When you go in, you’re carrying.”

  “Just forget about that,” Gary said. “I never used it yet. I do good clean work, just like my daddy taught me.”

  5

  Dr. Wren Van Horne looked better than he had in years: his receptionist had told him, his colleagues at the Hampstead Clinic (in which he and they had substantial shares) had told him, even his patients were telling him that. Hilda du Plessy, who had been Wren Van Horne’s patient for forty years and had adored him for each of them, had found something new to admire in Dr. Van Horne on her last visit. “You’re getting younger!” she gasped. “Why, Dr. Van Horne! It’s true. You look ten years younger.”

  “Well, then in a year or so I shall be passing you, Hilda,” Dr. Van Horne purred at the old dear—who half an hour later as she piloted her ancient Bentley into the parking lot between the river and Main Street was still thinking about him. Her thoughts were generally of the kind widows are prone to have about the doctors with whom they are i
nfatuated—the words gentle and firm never actually expressed, buzzed beneath her reverie—but also incorporated observations with the detail of more than half a lifetime’s experience. Hilda du Plessy was right; Wren Van Horne did not just look better, he looked younger. His eyes were clearer, his back straighter. The crepe beneath his eyes was nearly gone. His hair looked somehow fuller: “Blow-drying,” Hilda said to herself as she walked through the Waldenbooks store to emerge onto Main Street. “He’s blow-drying his hair after all this time—why, I could have told him about that ages ago, if he’d paid any attention to me.”

  Hilda du Plessy passed right through Waldenbooks because she would never have bought a book there: Ada Hoff at Books ‘n Bobs up the street knew what she wanted. Ada Hoff was a real book woman, Hilda considered, unlike the young people who worked at the big chain bookstores. Ada Hoff knew her customers by name and understood that some people had special tastes—there would be a nice little pile of new things waiting for Hilda behind the counter.

  On the day each month that Hilda drove from her house on the Old Sarum border to her medical appointment, she gave herself a series of treats.

  She pushed in the door of the rambling yellow colonial at the top of Main Street that was the Books ‘n Bobs and went past the display counter of best-sellers without a glance. Ada Hoff was standing behind the front desk dabbing at her nose with a linen handkerchief the same daffodil shade of yellow as the bookstore—it was Ada’s favorite color. “Feeling all right, Ada?” Hilda inquired.

  “Rotten cold,” Ada said. She was a large round-faced woman a few years younger than Hilda herself. Ada usually wore a blue blazer and a yellow shirt, or a yellow blazer and a blue shirt, as today. Her hair was elaborately black, somehow so mannered it looked painted. “We’ve all got it. Spence and Thom didn’t even come to work today.” Spence and Thom, two bachelors who lived together, were Ada’s assistants. Spence did all the packing and unpacking and the bookkeeping, and Thom arranged the windows and spelled Ada behind the counter. Hilda considered Spence and Thom excellent company and could spend hours near the pottery and macrame sections gossiping with either one. The news that they were not in the store spoiled her day a little—Ada was too businesslike for gossip.

  “Oh, what a shame,” Hilda said. “Don’t give it to me, please, Ada—I’ve just come from the doctor.”

  “Which reminds me. I have some new things to show you,” Ada said, and searched under the counter for a time before placing in front of Hilda a stack of two hardbound and three paperback books. The hardbacks were Nurse Thompson’s Dilemma by Janet Randall Minor and The Hero in White by Carrie Engelbart Hoskins; the paperbacks, Love in a Ward, Dr. Batholomew and Dr. Dare, and Dr. Peachtree Makes His Rounds, were all by Florence M. Hobart. Hilda gazed at them for a moment of unalloyed delight. Her addiction was hospital novels. And a new Janet Randall Minor on the same day as three rediscovered Florence M. Hobarts was almost miraculous for her. The little splash of disappointment of Spence and Thom’s not being in the store burned to nothing in the blaze of Hilda’s intense satisfaction.

  “There are still five or six more of those Hobarts,” Ada said. “Some are out of stock and some are reprinting, so they say. We’ll have them in for you when they’re available again.”

  “Oh, my goodness, thank you, but this is lovely,” Hilda gushed. “I’ll take them all, of course. Charge them, please. I don’t know how I’ll ever decide which to read first.”

  Hilda signed the charge slip and left the bookstore to walk down Main Street, still virtually humming with delight. She heard a finch warbling in the branches of one of the dwarf fruit trees in oaken barrels strung out along the sidewalk, and tilted her head and whistled back at it. The heavy bag in her hand was full of treasure—soon she would be sorting through that treasure, sifting and weighing it. Hilda crossed the street, walked past the office of the Hampstead Gazette, and ascended the brick steps of a French restaurant called Framboise.

  Here too one of the stages of her monthly ritual of treats began badly. The headwaiter was not posted by the lectern which supported a telephone and the reservation book. Hilda peered into the restaurant. Only two parties, a man and a woman at a table for two and a group of four men at a center table, were in the main dining room. The man and woman were conspicuously drunk. Another false note. Three waiters in dark blue waistcoats and black bow ties had congregated around a service trolley at the back. Hilda waited for the headwaiter to appear. One of the waiters glanced at her, then coughed rheumily into his fist. Hilda set her book bag on the floor beside the lectern and pointedly looked at the reservation book. There was her name, a version of it anyhow: DIPLESSI. She said “Ahem” in a clear loud voice. One of the waiters picked up a menu from the trolley and lounged toward her across the room.

  “Where is François today?” Hilda asked.

  “Home sick,” the boy said.

  “I am du Plessy, which you have misspelled in your reservations book. Will you please conduct me to my customary table?”

  The boy in the blue waistcoat looked at Hilda blankly.

  “Outside. On the corner of the terrace. More properly, the balcony. Which you are pleased to call the terrace. That is where I sit.”

  “This way, ma’am,” the boy said, galvanized by Hilda’s tone. Hilda picked up her bag of treasure and followed the boy through the restaurant and out onto the balcony, where four tables were lined up beneath a striped awning.

  “Mine is the end table,” Hilda said when he paused before the middle table. At her table, she sat facing the street and said, “I should like a drink, please. A brandy Manhattan, please.”

  “Rocks?”

  “Without ice, please. In one of those glasses with a stem—you know.” She sketched the shape of the glass with her fingers.

  The boy skulked away. Hilda lifted her bag to her lap and extracted the books. Intense satisfaction: contemplation of the jacket art, the familiar shapes of the authors’ names, the title pages, dedications, margins, bindings, whether or not the authors’ initials were stamped on the front covers of the hardbacks. (They were not.) She examined the typeface in the hardbacks, and then looked at the blurbs. These were invariably nitwitted, and Hilda took little notice of them.

  Then she made her choice: The Hero in White by Carrie Engelbart Hoskins. The Janet Randall Minor would be a deferred pleasure.

  Hilda delicately opened the chosen book. The loutish boy put her drink down before her. With intense pleasure Hilda glanced out at the sweep of Main Street before her, and then—unable to wait a second longer—read the first sentence:

  Edward Waterhouse was born to be of use.

  Now that was the real thing.

  Others had said it often of him, he was even given to admitting it himself in paraphrases such as: “I reckon I’m happiest when I’m helping someone.” From another these remarks would have sought approval and approbation; from Dr. Waterhouse they sought nothing. He was speaking only the truth as he had come to know it over the course of his forty-two years.

  Fairly purring with bliss, Hilda sipped her drink and read on.

  Forty-two: indeed that was Dr. Waterhouse’s age, and the years suited him well, having given him compassionate lines at the corners of his eyes, and elegant streaks of gray at his temples.

  Wren Van Horne in early middle age, Hilda thought, and I could not have described him better myself.

  If his age was an advantage to him in many ways, it was a disadvantage perhaps only in one. Dr. Edward Waterhouse was at the far edge of those years in which a man must marry, if he is to marry at all.

  All of which went to prove that Carrie Engelbart Hoskins was still under forty, Hilda thought. She looked up from the page, “a trifle irritated,” Carrie E. Hoskins would have said, and surveyed Main Street once again. Across the street an intense young woman writing notes to herself and men in blue jeans and beards sat at the outside tables before Deli-icious. Hilda’s eyes swept over the window of the Olden and Golden A
ntique Shop, the smaller window of Hampstead Pizza. A well-known actor left the hardware store on the other side of the delicatessen, and the bearded men frankly stared at him. Then Hilda’s glance returned to the window of the antique shop. Couldn’t she see, on the other side of the gilt lettering, the man she had just been thinking about?

  She had become almost unpleasantly excited. Hilda bent forward and peered at the window. The owner, short and bald, was now visible beyond the gilt letters. Dr. Waterhouse had vanished from Hilda’s mind, and she muttered, “Move—please move,” flustering the waiter, who had returned to take her order. The boy and the shopowner moved simultaneously, and Hilda saw that the gray-haired man behind the window was indeed Wren Van Horne. Standing there gesturing, the doctor looked even younger than he had in his office an hour earlier.

  “You want me to stand here?” the waiter disbelievingly asked from somewhere behind her; Hilda glanced upward as if asking for help, and saw another of the small orange-breasted finches just as it fell from a lower branch of the oak tree in front of the restaurant and plummeted lifelessly to the sidewalk.

  6

  You knew it was time for the mirror: did not know what it meant, but knew it was time.

  * * *

  Dr. Van Horne had canceled two of his afternoon appointments, and now was standing rather vaguely in the midst of the clutter of the Olden and Golden Antique Shop. “It must be special,” he was saying to the owner, who did not know him but had clearly taken in his age and bearing, his white linen suit and panama hat and assigned him to the diminishing category of Old Hampstead Money. “Very special, if you see what I mean.” He smiled, which did nothing to dissipate the impression of his vagueness. “I’ll recognize it, you see, but what I mean is that it should recognize me as well.”

  “Well.” Mr. Bundle was not sure where to begin answering a request so irrational. “There are some new things in—”

  “Yes, of course. I’ve spent hours looking already—I went to Redhill two days ago, and before that I drove down to King George, many interesting antique shops down there, and all of them had mirrors, but none of them . . . They weren’t right.” He swept his arm around in a gesture of wholehearted negation. “Not at all. What I need—now, that’s what we ought to be talking about, isn’t it? I cleared a space on a wall in my house—at the time wasn’t even sure what it was for. I just knew I had to get those paintings down because I needed the space. Then I knew. A mirror. Must be quite tall, and must be oval. Can’t be new. New won’t do at all.”