Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “Something did; of course something happened, you fool. Didn’t I say there was a pattern? Look in my book! All the data are there.” And then for an instant Graham Williams was like Royce Griffen on the patio of a splendid Mount Avenue home fifty-one years in the future: he thought he caught an evil smell when Mrs. Bach leaned forward and spilled her tea over her table and dampened the unfolded copy of the Hampstead Gazette lying there, he thought he saw something crawling down the walls . . . but it was only the convoluted pattern of the wallpaper. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and helped her mop up the tea.

  8

  “Anyhow, I was right about a couple of things,” Graham said to Richard and Patsy. “Dorothy Bach was crazy, all right. She had fallen in love with the figure she thought she saw way back there in the past, and so she hid the facts about his behavior that most reveal it. She didn’t suppress anything, she just hid it—behind her objectivity.”

  Patsy flipped the pages of History of Patchin. Suddenly she was tired. She thought of the story Mr. Williams had just told, of the sailors staring down in horror at the faces of those caught in the earth. . . .

  History of Patchin shook in her hand. Graham Williams was saying, “One thing she let through her net is that Winter never attended the church services on Clapboard Hill—and imagine how that must have seemed to the others, who would have gone if they’d had to swim halfway across the Sound.” Richard Allbee was drumming his fingers on his knee and looking puzzled, and the book by that crazy old woman Graham had met in 1929 trembled in Patsy’s hand like a trapped sparrow. A second later it trembled even more violently.

  Patsy dropped the book on the coffee table, gasping. The blue cover flew open and banged itself against the wood.

  9

  Gary Starbuck said, “I mean, I thought Key West was bad, but I sort of expected weirdness in Key West. Place is full of queers and transies, guys who think about two things only, dope and sex, and around here I thought I’d get your basic Norman Rockwell situation. But to tell you the truth, I think people are even screwier here than they are in Key West. And not just because they’re richer. Their heads are fucked. They act like the real rules of life don’t apply to them.”

  The Normans were rigid with attention, taking all this in as if it were Scripture, and Tabby was remembering Key West and skinny Poche sitting on the toilet seat with a needle drooping from the crook of his elbow. Poche had been wearing a ratty off-the-shoulder orange dress and high heels at the time. Poche had looked at him dreamily, his mascaraed lids just clearing his pupils, and said, “Beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes.” That was Poche-code for Now I’m fine, man, now I’m as mellow as a monkey up a tree. The real rules of life had applied to Poche, all right. A couple of months after Sherri had kicked him out of Clark’s life, Poche had turned up dead in a cell in the sheriff’s jail. The doctor certified that Poche had died of natural causes (overlooking various broken bones and bruises), and Tabby had wondered if Poche had been wearing his orange dress when he died.

  Bruce Norman yelled, “Hey, what the fuck?”

  Tabby’s heart pounded. He pictured a police car turning on its siren, flashing its light bar, swinging in ahead of them. . . . Dicky too must have been nervous, for he shouted, “What? What?” Starbuck savagely cramped the wheel, and Tabby and Dicky pitched sideways in the rear of the van. Tabby grabbed the back of Bruce’s seat and pulled himself forward so he could look out the windows. There was no police car ordering them to the side of the road. Tabby could see nothing but the black road, the headlights of the van streaming out, and a thick hedge on the side of the road. “Goddammit,” Starbuck said, and twisted the wheel far to the left, swinging the van across the road.

  Bruce was laughing.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Starbuck ordered; as he spoke, something thudded against the van.

  “I never saw anything like it,” Bruce said as Starbuck braked, shifted into the parking gear, and jumped out of the van. “I swear.”

  “What happened?” Dicky and Tabby asked together.

  “A dog, a fucking dog,” Bruce said. “It jumped right over the hedge and ran right into us. He tried to miss it, but . . .” Bruce stopped chuckling as Starbuck screamed “Jesus Christ!” from down on the side of the van.

  Starbuck’s face popped up in the side window. A thick vein stood out on his forehead; his deep eyes were now as flat and hard as a pair of black stones. He wrenched open the door and hurled himself into the seat. Then he clenched the wheel and straightened his arms. He looked as though the top of his head were going to lift off in a plume of smoke. “Did you see that?” he said to no one in particular. “Can you believe that? That fucking mutt committed suicide! He ran into me deliberately!” He rocked back and forth stiff-armed. “And the son of a bitch dented my fender, God damn his mangy hide.” Bruce was still restraining his desire to laugh out loud, and Starbuck nailed him to his seat with a glare. “You two animals stink, you know that? You been stinking up my van since you got in. The way you fuckers reek is gonna wake the old fart up, I swear.” Still fuming, Starbuck threw the van into gear and sped down Greenbank Avenue. Now and then he shook his head and muttered unintelligibly.

  Almost as soon as they had passed the access road to Gravesend Beach, Starbuck twisted the wheel savagely and spun the van into an asphalt driveway between two pillars. In the back, Tabby and Dicky went sprawling. Starbuck cramped the wheel again and shot the van into a dark place beside a high thick wall of vegetation. He cut the lights, and for a moment they sat in darkness. Tabby was aware of the sour smell of Dicky Norman’s exhalations. Then Starbuck flicked on a pocket flashlight and held it high up against his chest, making his face shadowy but visible.

  “You. Kid. I hope you know how to drive this fucking van.”

  He was still in a savage mood, and Tabby had sense enough to stretch the truth. “I guess I do.”

  “Okay. Remember, use the radio if you see anybody come in. Or if you see any lights go on. If a cop comes in and sees the van, you lie down on the floor and get us out right away. When I call you, you drive the van up to the entrance so we can load the stuff in. Got it?”

  Tabby nodded.

  Starbuck shook his head. “I oughta have my head examined.”

  Tabby watched Starbuck lead the Norman twins up toward the huge white house. A floodlight angling down from under the rain gutter dwarfed their bodies by pushing long shadows out behind them. They were fifty feet from the van, and still had a long way to go. The radio! Tabby suddenly remembered. He fumbled for it on the dark floor of the back of the van, found it jammed between a wheel cover and a metal wall, and switched it on. Gary Starbuck was just disappearing around a Japanese maple.

  Tabby heard him breathing. Then beneath the breathing noises he heard their feet moving across the grass.

  He looked anxiously toward the steering column and the gearshift, hoping that he would be able to figure out the van when Starbuck called for him. Clark had let him drive the red Mercedes once, but it had an automatic shift. Then there was a quick flashing illumination outside the windows, and Tabby stopped breathing. But it had been the sky, not the police.

  “Didz whaz suppuf?” came Dicky Norman’s voice over the radio.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Starbuck replied very clearly.

  The sky flickered again: it was as if the veins and arteries in a body were suddenly illuminated.

  Starbuck was now kneeling before the front door, and Tabby saw him look up. In the next instant the sky was black again, illuminated only around a cruising moon. Starbuck had been carrying a small satchel like a doctor’s bag, and from it he took a tool which looked to Tabby like a slightly fatter bicycle pump. A rod extended from the tubular object. When Starbuck turned it on, a high-pitched electronic whine came to Tabby over the radio. As Starbuck inserted the rod into the lock, the whine changed pitch, became louder and more intense.

  In less than a minute, Starbuck pulled the whole inner workings of the lock away fro
m the door. “That’s it,” his voice said over the radio. “I don’t want you assholes to make a single sound when we’re inside. You just listen to me.” Starbuck rose to his feet and quietly put his machine back in the pack. He pulled at the gutted doorknob, and the door swung open. Then he led the twins inside and closed the door after them.

  Tabby thought of the dog deliberately diving at the van: he felt dizzy and light-headed.

  “Kitchen,” Starbuck’s voice whispered over the two-way radio.

  Then Tabby realized that he was all alone in the van. Starbuck and the Normans were already deep inside the house: they had forgotten him. He could open the door. He could climb out of the van and go home! They would never know until the job was done.

  He hesitantly touched the door handle. From the radio came sounds of drawers opening. “Oh boy,” he heard Starbuck sigh. The thief sounded happier than he had been all night. If I even think you’ll talk about this with the cops, I’ll come back here and kill you. What would Starbuck, who had said those words to him, think if he returned to an empty van? I’m a businessman, see? I gotta stay in business. Tabby took his fingers from the door handle. His head hurt. He craned his neck forward and stared toward the big white house.

  10

  Les McCloud sat in his car, staring at the front of the country club—it looked very much like the structure Tabby would be anxiously studying through a van window four hours later. Les wanted another drink: above all, he wanted to forget what he thought he had seen sitting in the end booth. His hands were trembling. From the outside, the Sawtell Country Club gave no signs that right beyond those big lounge windows there might be sitting a horror, a dead man with the skin peeled right back off his shoulder blades like an anatomy lesson.

  But that was crazy. The whole thing was crazy. He’d been spooked, that was all, by the boy’s voice coming out of that bush . . . by that feeling of pure and utter wrongness. Les swallowed. He turned his ignition key and then punched on the Sony digital radio that had been one of his last birthday presents to himself.

  He wanted another drink. Where was he going to go?

  The disc jockey said, “That was a request, friends. Johnnie Ray singing ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried.’ You’ve got to admit—”

  Johnnie Ray. Johnnie Ray.

  “—that he put a lot of emotion into that number. Now let’s get back to our more usual material and—”

  That was the voice from the bush. Not the singer Johnnie Ray, but a little boy who had showed up in the middle school on the first day of school in 1951, an undersized kid with protruding front teeth and blond hair so flat and lifeless it looked dead. His clothes were all wrong. All the boys in the seventh grade that year were wearing chino pants, plaid shirts, and brown tie oxfords that would have looked more at home on a British lord in knickerbockers. When the boy named Johnnie Ray showed up in Miss Larson’s class, he was wearing a sweatshirt, boots, and blue jeans so new they hardly creased. Then they heard his name.

  “—give a listen to Miss Ella Fitzgerald and Tommy Flanagan and his trio. ‘How High the Moon.’”

  The poor kid hadn’t known what hit him. Suddenly the whole class had been laughing at him, laughing in that particularly jeering way that meant the whole class, all thirty-one of them, had found their scapegoat.

  Les shook his head and backed his car out of the space to turn it toward the long drive and Sawtell Road. Johnnie Ray’s voice. Even after the poor little shit had finally persuaded his parents that he needed a different wardrobe—they were from Texas, and Hampstead was the first northern place they had ever lived in—even after he made his parents take him to Sprigg & Son where the right chinos and shoes could be found, he couldn’t do anything about his voice.

  Les turned unseeingly out into Sawtell Road. Ella Fitzgerald was scatting crazily, pushing at an already relentless rhythm, but he barely heard it. The oncoming car he nearly struck honked angrily at him, and Les gave a distracted, halfhearted wave.

  Johnnie Ray’s Texas voice. A little husky, a lot slower than a Hampstead voice, dragging at the syllables. Not I’m lost so much as Ahm loo-wust. It had been the voice of that strange little Texas kid with the comic name. But that pathetic little kid from Texas had drowned the summer before they all went into the eighth grade. He had gone out with a boat from the sailing school—pathetically, he was trying to learn how to sail—and the sailboat had come back without him: tipped over, its mast shining under the water and the sail dragging like a shroud. August 1952. Hampstead police and the Coast Guard had dragged for Johnnie Ray’s body and turned up only tree stumps and hubcaps and a splintered, rotting dory that had been sitting on the bottom for a year and a half. Two weeks later, the boy’s body had rolled up on the beach at Sawtell Country Club at high tide, bloated and hairless and missing all its fingers and its nose and all but two toes. The fish had dined well on Johnnie Ray.

  But his voice had spoken to Les from the bush.

  Les screechingly stopped the Mazda as soon as he saw the red light at the Greenbank Road corner, and wound up jutting six or seven feet out into the intersection. He did not even think to back up.

  August of 1952 had been a bad month for Sawtell Country Club. Four days after the Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, a guest at the club while he visited friends in Hampstead, found the body of the almost unrecognizable Johnnie Ray on the beach at seven in the morning, the respected lawyer John Sayre chose the same three square feet of beach as the arena for his suicide.

  The light changed, and Les turned into Greenbank Road, unconsciously making the decision to go to Franco’s.

  He was driving fast on the final stretch of Greenbank Road before it crosses the tall iron bridge over the Nowhatan and ends at Riverfront Avenue. The dog which took off from under a porch, a black-and-white dog with a feathery tail and an almost girlish smile on its muzzle, did not penetrate Les McCloud’s attention until it was nearly beside his window. He was aware only of a flash of color, of something moving quickly at his side, and he snapped his head over to see. The dog was smiling at him as it threw itself forward. Les slammed his foot down on the brake. His tires squealed and the Mazda’s back end swung out, but not before Les had felt his rear tires thunk into something that gave them only a moment’s resistance. “Holy shit!” Les yelled. He stopped the car on the shoulder of the road. He felt as though two conflicting orders of reality had just violently intersected: as though he had seen little Johnnie Ray’s face on the grinning dog. Shaking, he got out of the car.

  The crushed dog lay in the middle of the street. Blood moved slowly toward a drain. Les was grateful that the dog’s back was facing him: he did not want to see that eerie smile on a dead animal. He wondered what in the world he was supposed to do now, and put his hands in his pockets and looked aimlessly around.

  A tall man in well-faded jeans and a blue button-down shirt was striding toward him across a lawn. Behind him steamed a boy with the man’s face in miniature, and a woman in tennis whites.

  “Your dog, I guess,” Les said when the man hit the sidewalk. As the man drew closer, Les had felt relieved; this was a being like himself. His face, though young, was smoothed out by the exercise of power; his shirt and his hair were crisp. He all but had a sign pinned to his chest: HARVARD MBA, SIX FIGURES A YEAR, FUTURE CEO.

  “You guess,” the man said, and strode up until he was only a foot from Les. “And I guess you’re the maniac who killed him.”

  “Wait a second,” Les said. This was not going the right way. “You don’t know what happened.” The man’s eyebrows knitted together. “Let me explain.”

  “Like hell I don’t know what happened,” the man said. “We were eating dinner in the dining room, and from there we get an excellent view of the road. You came along at twenty miles over the speed limit and killed my dog. I’m just damn lucky that wasn’t my kid out there.”

  The boy standing next to the man opened his mouth and yelled, “You killed Tapioca!”

 
“I’m sure we can be reasonable about this,” Les said. “If you asked your son to go inside for a moment, we could discuss—”

  “Discuss? You think there’s something to discuss?” the man said in a loud voice. “I saw it. You came barrel-assing down that road like there was no tomorrow.”

  “That dog ran straight into me! And when I finally did see him, he was jumping at my car.”

  “Jumping at your car,” the man said. “Putting himself under your wheels.”

  “That’s right. He jumped right at me.”

  “You’re a liar. Or you’re crazy. Either way, you ought to be talking to the police.”

  “Now, listen,” Les said. “Your dog ran into me.”

  “Because you were speeding.”

  “You killed Tapioca!” the boy suddenly screamed.

  As Les and the man argued, the boy had stepped off to the side—obviously hoping that his father would deck this character—and now he suddenly dashed in toward Les and hit him soundly in the kidneys.

  “You murdered my dog!” he yelled up at Les’s face.

  “God damn!” Les exploded. He stepped away from the kid before he belted him. “Look, you,” he shouted at the man in the blue button-down shirt and exquisitely faded jeans. “I am a corporation vice-president! I don’t have to stand around and take this shit anymore!” He took his money clip from his pocket. It was sadly depleted. He had one ten and two twenties folded together.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the man asked.

  Les took the folded twenties from the clip. He held out the forty dollars; when the man only stared at the money, Les dropped the two bills and he and the man watched them flutter down to the roadside grass.

  “I don’t believe you,” the man said. “Forget that the dog cost about four times that. I just don’t believe you. Get away from him, Van.” The boy had been circling in for another assault on Les’s kidneys.