Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  He did not have to wait long. A few minutes after he had secreted himself in the narrow alleyway, O’Halligan’s door opened and his father swayed out into the sunlight. He got across the sidewalk and stood over the curb, scowling down at the gutter. Then Clark turned around and stared moodily at O’Halligan’s door.

  “No, Dad,” Tabby said.

  A tall woman with black hair and electrically bright lipstick came out of the door after Clark. She wore a white sleeveless shirt and baggy tan shorts; she had, Tabby saw, beautiful legs. Then Tabby saw that she had heavy gold jewelry around her neck and both wrists. She made Sherri Stillwell look like a scrubwoman. This woman was not as drunk as Clark. She linked her arm through his and said something that looked conciliatory. Clark shrugged, then shook his head. The woman pretended to drag Clark back into the bar and Clark slapped at her hand on his arm. The woman gestured up Main Street, said something else; now Clark nodded. They began to move up the street. And where were they going? To Framboise, for a few more drinks and then a long lunch? And after that, to a Norrington motel?

  Tabby watched them make their way up the sunny street. Now and then they paused so the black-haired woman could look into the shop windows—his father was used to this woman’s company, Tabby understood. Of course. His father did not have a job at all. He just pretended to go to work. He had moved into “Four Hearths,” bought the Mercedes he had yearned for, and settled down to the job of spending Monty Smithfield’s money.

  Tabby wanted to cry. He fled back down Main Street, his eyes hot. Had he actually thought that his father could help him with the Norman twins? His father’s dishonesty was so vast that the betrayal it implied was too large for Tabby to contain: it spilled out of him, staining the sidewalk and the windows he saw. Dishonest, dishonest. Tabby saw his father as a ruined man; saw himself as ruined too.

  He had reached the entrance of the big stone Hampstead library on the corner of the Post Road and Main Street, just before the bridge over the Nowhatan. He had to sit down; he had to think about himself and his father and Sherri. Tabby pulled the door open and entered the cool library.

  He pushed through a turnstile and stood on a checked tile floor before a long desk. One of the two women at the desk looked curiously at Tabby, who frowned and darted past her. He would be able to hide himself in the midst of the tall magazine racks beyond the desk. Tabby felt as though everybody in the library—the old men reading newspapers at the tables, the women at the card file, even the small boy going upstairs to the children’s library—were watching him, aware of his shame.

  The library seemed to lengthen and widen, the black-and-white pattern of the floor to tremble and vibrate. A round schoolhouse clock behind the desk had ceased to move: the vividly black second hand hung between the two and three as if nailed to the face.

  The magazine racks were swaying. No; rippling, Tabby decided, like seaweed growing underwater; like heat rising from a highway.

  He stood in wonder more than fear in the altering library. His shame had gone. The walls seemed gently to be bowing out. At the same time that Tabby took in the warnings of the stopped clock and trembling floor, he was lulled by them.

  Something was going to happen to him, he knew. The library seemed filled with a magical and transforming light.

  His feet took him to the history section. Here were two long stacks with a narrow aisle between. Tabby stepped between the stacks and heard the broad room hum like a dynamo. His aisle was smokily dark: for a second, surrounded by the high wall of books, Tabby thought he saw puffs of brown dust rise between his feet.

  Ah.

  A fat, slow-moving bolt of lightning angled down out of a dark sky, lengthening itself like a telescope.

  “So here is the boy,” a voice said behind him.

  The stacks and the library were gone, and he was outside, standing—hiding?—by the side of a wooden house. The night was full of noise—he could hear fire, loud curses, a dog furiously barking.

  “You should have gone to Fairlie Hill, boy, with the others.”

  Hiding, yes. Tabby reached out and touched the smoothly planed wood of the house. His feet were caught in flowers.

  “Master Smyth,” the boy said. “Do you wish a ball in the back?”

  Tabby turned around. He had been afraid that he would know the face, but he did not. It was long and arrogant and slightly crazed. The chin was wet with drool. The teeth were large and discolored; the tea-colored eyes, the worst part of the face because the least human, glittered as if they had been varnished.

  “Your father is on a British prison ship, Master Smyth,” the man said. “I believe he has not long to suffer. Nor shall you.”

  A long, weightless-looking musket swung up in the man’s hand. When the barrel was six inches from Tabby’s chest, the musket exploded.

  Tabby sprawled backward into the flowers at the side of the house. There had been no pain, only that enormous blow. The tea-colored eyes gloated down over him. His shirt had been ignited in a dozen places by the flashing powder, and it was burning against his skin.

  The reason that he could not feel his skin blistering was that he was dead. With a kind of impatience Tabby rose visibly out of the body in the flowers and saw that the boy’s face was not his. Yet it was like his.

  “Two of them this night,” the man said, his chin gleaming with his drool. “Farmer Williams and the Smyth boy. They shall not go forward.”

  The spirit or soul which was Tabby rose above the men and the dead boy with burning clothes. The red of a hundred fires irradiated the sky.

  Tabby saw a long white corridor before him, a pulsing incandescent light at its end. Radiations of bright color darted through the ball of light. The corridor and the light soothed and vivified him; he knew that in its midst would be the very sensations of heaven, which came to him as the touch of music against his skin, as cool and awakening as seawater. He began to move toward the pulsing light.

  Then he was on his side, uncomfortable, on the floor between the stacks of books in the history section. One book lay open and face-down beside him. History of Patchin, by D. B. Bach.

  “Son?” It was one of the women from behind the desk. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Tabby said automatically. He got up on his knees, and his head swam. “Just a little weak. Don’t know what happened.”

  The librarian bent over and, instead of taking his hand as he expected, removed the book from his grasp. “If you’re a J. S. Mill boy, you’re supposed to be in school,” she said.

  “No classes today,” Tabby said, finally getting to his feet. “The flu.”

  “The flu is what you’ve got,” the librarian said. “Go home and go to bed, young man. Don’t stay here and infect the rest of us.”

  Clamping History of Patchin firmly under her elbow, she led him back to the turnstile and out the door.

  Tabby stumbled as the sun struck him. He looked over his shoulder; the librarian was waving him away. Tabby went to the curb and sat, so that his head would stop swaying. His fingers found a long twig and dragged it through the loose dirt beneath the hedge.

  Then he saw that the line he had drawn in the dirt was filling with red liquid: with blood: as if a lake of blood underlay the earth’s surface. He drew another line in the dirt with his stick, and that too became a channel filled with blood. Sluggishly the red liquid reached the top of the grooves in the earth and overflowed to pool in the dust. In horror Tabby dropped the stick into the pooling blood.

  Tabby’s legs forced him upright. He turned the corner and went blindly up Main Street. When he reached the little pizza restaurant he saw Patsy McCloud sitting and writing at one of the little tables outside Deli-icious. If he turned around and walked away she would surely think he was snubbing her; but he did not want to force his company on her. She looked so ethereal, so much too good for Deli-icious . . . if she stamped one of her beautiful feet on the sidewalk, would blood darken just under the surface of the concrete?


  Feeling as if every step were taking him deeper into exile by taking him farther from Patsy, Tabby walked past the front of the deli.

  Then he heard her light, sailing voice, and could have fallen down out of gratitude. He looked shyly toward her: she was one of his own.

  * * *

  “Yes, I saw his face,” he was telling Patsy five minutes later. “It was a crazy face—like a mean old dog. His eyes looked like someone was holding a match up behind them. He didn’t even bother to think about shooting me, he just shot.”

  “And it wasn’t a face you know.”

  “I never saw it before.”

  “And you think it might have been Gideon Winter?”

  “Well, that’s what he’d say, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Patsy said. “I think he would.”

  They were silent for a moment; Tabby, who had no idea what he thought of the things that had happened to him that morning, also had no idea what Patsy was thinking. From the expression on her face, she could have been wondering if it was time to have her car serviced, or if she wanted new stockings.

  “What was the book you were holding?” she eventually asked.

  “A history book. History of Patchin, by someone named Bach.”

  “I think we ought to get a copy,” Patsy said. “I’ll do it.” She smiled. “We don’t want you to make a career of fainting in libraries.”

  He tried to return her smile.

  “You see backward,” Patsy said. “That’s interesting. Did you ever see forward?”

  “I guess,” Tabby said, flushing. “Once. When I was five. You know—I saw Mrs. Friedgood.” His flush deepened. “But mostly I saw backward.”

  “I’ve never seen backward,” Patsy said. “Well, we make a dandy pair.”

  “I can’t believe we’re sitting out in front of Deli-icious talking about this,” Tabby said. “In fact, I can hardly believe I’m talking about it at all.” He shook his head. “There’s another thing, too. After I left the library, I saw the ground bleed. I saw blood come out of the ground. I did.”

  Patsy looked questioningly at the concrete sidewalk, and Tabby remembered his fancy about her stamping there with her loafered foot. . . .

  Both Patsy and he jerked their heads up in the following second, for a woman somewhere across the street had begun to scream. Everyone, the people passing by, the clerks from the hardware store, Mr. Bundle from the antique shop, the bearded men at the next table, was outside and standing up, looking across the street, trying to find the source of the screams.

  Then a man was pointing, and then Patsy pointed, and then Tabby saw her too. A thin old woman in a loose black dress, standing beside one of the tables on the balcony of the French restaurant. Her hands were pressed to her eyes, and her mouth was open wide as a cave. More noise came from her than it seemed her body could produce: there was nothing left in her but the bellows which created that high ragged sound.

  People from the restaurant burst out onto the balcony as Tabby and the others watched from below. His father was the third man to emerge from the interior, and seconds before his father could reach the woman, she collapsed.

  Tabby knew that the old woman was dead: it was as if he knew that a person could not live after making such sounds because a person could not survive whatever had caused those sounds.

  Tabby saw his father let the waiter kneel beside the old woman. Though the screams had finished, he could still hear them. Tabby watched his father wander past the kneeling man and the dead woman toward the railing—he was trying to see what had happened.

  His father looked down at the sidewalk beneath the balcony; looked at the street; and then his father looked at the little crowd before the hardware store, the delicatessen, and the antique shop. And his father’s eyes found him.

  9

  Hilda du Plessy watched in dismay and distress as the little finch struck the sidewalk. Her appetite had gone: she could not eat her lunch while a dead bird lay unnoticed on the pavement beneath her.

  “Your order, lady?” the waiter said from behind her.

  “Ah . . . nothing—just a salad,” Hilda said.

  “Just salad? What salad?”

  “Any salad. Watercress. Tomato. Spinach. I don’t care, you fool.”

  “House salad,” the waiter said, and then mumbled something Hilda did not understand and which would have astounded her if she had.

  In agitation Hilda sat at her table, The Hero in White forgotten beside her bread dish. She could no longer see Dr. Van Horne through the window of the antique shop. More than anything else at that moment, she longed to see his reassuring features—if he saw her on the terrace, he would smile and wave. Perhaps he would call out her name. Perhaps—if he were not busy—he would come to her table and join her for lunch. In the world of Florence M. Hobart, such things happened regularly.

  In the novels of Florence M. Hobart, birds warbled, birds cooed and nested, birds printed their shapes against the sky at dawn, but birds assuredly did not fall dead from trees. Hilda glanced down at the sidewalk, hoping that the finch might have flown off while she spoke to the boy, but it was still there, an inert ungainly thing, with one fanlike wing extended.

  She put her bag in her lap and nearly stood up to leave.

  But there was Dr. Van Horne at the window of Olden and Golden: he had found something he liked, and was paying for it. Now, that was more in the key of things. That was more suitable for Hampstead in Patchin County on a fine sunny June morning. The town’s best and most distinguished doctor buys some fine old thing . . . yes, that was proper, that was perfect in fact, as perfect as a moment in a myth. On such a moment, Florence M. Hobart or Carrie Engelbart Hoskins might have said, eternity could fairly put her seal.

  Hilda relaxed back into her chair to wait for her salad.

  Only a few seconds later Dr. Van Horne appeared at the door of Olden and Golden. The owner held the door for him, and out he came onto the sidewalk. He carried a large heavy mirror—his car was directly in front of the shop. In his white suit and white hat, the doctor resembled a hero from the movies, or some famous author or painter. Though large, the mirror seemed light in his grasp. Hilda waggled her fingers at the doctor, hoping breathlessly that he would look up.

  Dr. Van Horne walked around to the street side of his car. He set the mirror on end and held it upright with one hand while he opened his passenger door with the other.

  “Oh, Doctor!” Hilda tinkled.

  He looked up. He did not know from where the sound came.

  “Dr. Van Horne?” Hilda waggled her fingers again.

  He saw her at her balcony table. But he did not smile. His features, his eyes, did not respond to her. Dr. Van Horne’s mythic aspect crumbled at once. For an instant, he looked almost slow-witted to Hilda.

  The mirror had turned black. It had been reflecting the potted trees, the steps up to the entrance of Framboise and the canopy, and then it had quite impossibly lost its light and filled with boiling smoke. Now it was black. The blackness seemed three-dimensional, like a corridor leading down from the oval door of the frame.

  Hilda’s fingers ceased to waggle. She was not even breathing.

  Something was happening inside that mirror, she saw. A face flickered in the gloom of the long corridor. She saw a hand; eyes; teeth. Then she saw this little section of Main Street rotting and decayed, the buildings shattered, the canopies ripped into flags, garbage blowing onto the steps. She recoiled. Now from within this decaying scene Dr. Van Horne regarded her. His ears hung below his jaw, his eyebrows twisted into peaks, his nose was a curved beak. His teeth came to points. Hilda screamed without knowing that she was going to do it, and found she could not stop.

  Some part of Hilda knew that she was attracting attention, that she was making a spectacle of herself, but still the screams insisted on tearing through her throat. They were runaway horses, dragging her after them.

  10

  When Clark Smithfield finally came home that
Tuesday night, he was drunker than usual upon his return to “Four Hearths.” His necktie hung untied over his belly, his suit was rumpled and creased. It was nine o’clock. Tabby and Sherri were sitting together on the living-room couch watching the ABC Tuesday Night Movie, Magnum Force, which had just begun. They had eaten hours before; Clark’s dinner was keeping warm in the oven. Clark slammed the front door and Sherri jumped but did not look up from the television. Seconds later the door to the living room flew open.

  “Cozy, aren’t you?” Clark said, leaning against the jamb. “I suppose you two have me all wrung out and dried by now.”

  Sherri glanced at him, looked back at the screen.

  “Oh, yeah,” Clark said.

  “Have a good day?” Sherri asked.

  “Yeah, great. You fucking hypocrite. Don’t pretend the kid didn’t tell you all about it.” Clark slouched into the room, tore off his jacket, and threw it onto a chair. He sat heavily in his rocker.

  Sherri looked darkly at Tabby, then back at her husband.

  “Get me a drink,” Clark said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, what I mean, is you should get off your lazy ass and pour about three inches of Irish whiskey into a glass with ice and then put the glass in my hand, or is that too complex for you?”

  “Excuse me,” Tabby said. “I’m going to my room.”

  “Yeah, get out, fink,” his father said. “You couldn’t wait to get home and tell her, could you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Well, her name is Berkeley, and she’s about seven feet tall and she’s thirty years old, and she’s got this great mouth just like a fishhook, and the reason she’s so tall is that her legs start way up here and don’t stop until they get to the ground and . . .”

  Tabby heard Sherri turning over the coffee table just as he closed the door. They were shouting at each other by the time he reached his bedroom.