Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “But that still leaves a couple hundred,” Richard said.

  “Yep,” Williams said. “That it does. You know, before you people came here, I wasn’t too sure about all this stuff. And I would have read about Mrs. Friedgood and Mrs. Goodall and just wondered about it. But when I saw Patsy and Tabby on that Sunday night, I knew. He was on his way back. And he was getting stronger, too—maybe as strong as he must have been in the Black Summer and the months after it.”

  “What makes you think that?” Richard asked.

  “The Black Summer of 1873 started just the way this one did. A woman was found cut to pieces in her farmhouse. A week later, another woman was found behind the row of shops along Main Street. She was in the same condition. There were two others, one of them a little Smyth girl. And all of that was before the deaths at the old cotton mill.”

  Richard asked another question, and Patsy heard his voice as if it came from a hole deep in the earth or from a telephone receiver left lying unattended on a table. “What made the Black Summer so much worse than the summer of 1841?”

  “Oh, we were all back by then, you see,” Williams said, and Patsy sluggishly thought all back, isn’t that nice, just like a reunion. . . . “Williams, Smyth—Smithfield by then, of course—Tayler, Green. All back. The Greenbank Congregational Church had been revived too—by 1873, something that had happened all the way back in 1811 seemed like a fairytale to them.”

  “Those children with the terrible first names,” Richard said. “‘Darkness’ and ‘Eventide’ and ‘Sorrow.’ They had our last names, didn’t they?”

  “You’re thinking well, Richard,” the old man said. “Sorrow’s full name was Sorrow Tayler, and she married Joseph Williams. Darkness was Darkness Smyth, and Eventide’s last name was Green. And there was a ‘Shame’ too, as Dorothy Bach knew very well. A little girl named Shame Williams was born in 1652, and died before she could be baptized.”

  “Sorrow Tayler,” Patsy murmured. The name seemed very beautiful to her.

  “Most of them were girls,” Williams said. “And in time they all had children themselves. Williamses married Taylers, and Smyths married Greens, and then Williamses married Smyths.”

  To Patsy it seemed like a beautiful formal dance, all these marriages and couplings going on so long ago in the past. . . . Her fingers twitched, and her lips were numb. A Williams took a Tayler, and a Smyth took a Green, and then a Williams took a Smyth . . . it was all a circle, and for a second she saw the circle in her mind, glowing gold like a wedding band. Something smoky, something not right, flickered in the middle of the golden circle, and Patsy shook her head.

  But then Marilyn Foreman’s hand clamped down hard over hers, and Patsy saw what was in the middle of the circle.

  She did not hear it herself, but she emitted a low terrified moan, and both Richard and Graham realized that Patsy had fallen back into the couch. As she moaned, she slipped down, already unconscious, and her head fell to the cushions. Before they could reach her, Patsy’s hands began to twitch, and then her whole body shook violently enough to rattle the couch against the floor.

  Richard grabbed her hand, not knowing how to stop her convulsions. Finally he stepped next to her and put his arms around her and held her tightly against him, taking the shock of her movements into his own body.

  15

  “Get that piano outside,” Starbuck said, “and put it down easy. Then come back in and get this mirror.”

  No, Bruce thought, and knew that Dicky was thinking the same thing, let’s just leave that mirror where it is, we don’t want to mess with that thing, no sir, no way. Just before he had seen the light from Starbuck’s flashlight burst on the surface of the mirror the way it must have done right away, he thought he had seen something in there, something touched by the swallowed light (which of course had never been), something like a worm or a leech—flinching back from the light.

  Like hell. That was a crazy thought. That was something to tell freaked-out Skippy Peters, and then watch his Adam’s apple bob around in his skinny neck.

  “If you shake your fucking head at me once more, I’ll tear it off your fucking neck,” Starbuck whispered at him. “Get moving on that piano.” The light burned in Bruce’s eyes. “I swear, I’ll shoot your balls off if you don’t get moving.”

  “I was just thinking,” Bruce whispered back, and he felt Dicky quiver beside him.

  “Thinking, shit,” Starbuck hissed at him.

  “We could put the mirror in the piano, make only one trip,” Bruce improvised.

  “Yeah?” The light swung toward the mirror again. “Yeah, okay. It’ll go under the top of the case. Just don’t chip the frame.”

  Dicky and Bruce edged around the piano and began to thread their way across the room. Starbuck played the flash idly on the sculptures, and as idly picked up the one nearest him. It was a small statue of a dancer, and he was surprised by its weight. He turned it over and saw the name scratched into the base: Degas. “Hold it,” he said, and the boys froze. “No, not you, assholes,” he said, and excitedly shot the flash toward the next small sculpture. It looked just like the one he cradled in his palm. When he shot the light down the length of the room, he saw two more of the little sculptures of dancers.

  Starbuck pulled the radio out of his pocket and spoke into it. “Hey, kid? You there.”

  “What?” came Tabby’s frightened voice.

  “Get the van up here right now. We’re gonna split in a couple of minutes.”

  “You want us to . . . ?” Dicky and Bruce had frozen halfway to the wall where the mirror hung.

  “Fuck, you’re dumb,” Starbuck said. “Get the mirror. Get it inside the piano. Push the piano outside. Then you can get yourselves back in here and take all those pictures off the wall. You understand all that?”

  As the shaken Norman twins continued toward the wall, Starbuck went for the second Degas sculpture.

  He was speculating, in the last few seconds of his life, that the things in this room represented at least two years’ worth of the good life, even at ten cents on the dollar, which is what he knew he could get for them. With the silver, the piano, the sculptures, and the paintings, he would be able to fade out of the Beach Trail house months before any of the dozy local cops began to look for him, and take his time getting to a new place. He was thinking of going back to the Midwest, territory he had not seen for a long time; to Grosse Pointe or Lake Forest, some town so rich that when you inhaled, your bank account got fatter.

  Then he dimly saw an old man with a gun in his hand coming through the living-room door, thought, no, he’s young, he’s just a kid, and then he heard Dicky Norman screech in pain and terror. After that the room seemed to explode, and the explosion cut him off forever from the interesting spectacle of Dicky Norman spouting blood all over a painting he would have sworn was a Manet. His own pistol was in his hand by then, but first his fingers would not work and then he was wondering if you could still sell a Manet that had Dicky Norman’s blood all over it, and then he was gone.

  16

  Tabby tossed the radio onto the passenger seat and then climbed into the driver’s seat. Static-laden conversation erupted from the radio, and he jerked his hand out for it before he realized that he was picking up Starbuck’s orders to the twins. The thief sounded angry. Tabby twisted the key in the ignition and then put his foot down on the accelerator.

  The engine caught. Tabby had now exhausted everything he knew about driving the van. He looked in dismay at the gearshift, which was four feet long, and angled like the shift on a truck. Above the knob at the end of the shift was a red button. Tabby grabbed the shift, pressed the button, and yanked the shift down. He did not depress the clutch, since he did not know it was there.

  The van growled: it sounded as though it was eating itself, devouring its own wheels and gears.

  Tabby let go of the shift, then grabbed it again and wrenched it sideways at the same time as he floored the accelerator.

 
The van trembled like a dog in a seizure. From the sounds it was making, soon it would begin to defecate its own parts out the exhaust pipe. This was hopeless.

  Tabby threw open the door and began to run up the drive. Then he remembered the radio, and sprinted back for it. He was running past the Japanese maple and about thirty-five feet from the house when he realized that since he was going to be seeing Starbuck in seconds, he would not need the radio. The security light angling down from beneath the rain gutter dazzled and fixed him—he saw himself exposed before a pitiless judgment.

  He would have to confess to Starbuck that he could not make the van go, that was all. The thief or one of the Normans could go back down to the gates and bring the van up. All Tabby had to do was go inside and tell Gary Starbuck that he could not get the van to move.

  Fearful Tabby closed his eyes and saw. A column of flame rose fifty feet into the air; then it lifted from the ground and was in the shape of a huge bat with its wings extended, a giant bat made of fire.

  Tabby stopped running. His mouth had gone cottony, and his heart was pounding.

  He took a tentative step forward. Something was going to happen inside that house; all the atmosphere seemed charged with that weird electricity which had flickered earlier through the sky. Tabby saw something glowing in one of the downstairs windows.

  The radio, forgotten in his hand, emitted a long wavering screech of agony.

  Tabby took another step forward. Whatever was glowing in the downstairs window was urging him forward. Part of him knew that whatever was going on in that house was too much for him, that it was like that still very dim memory of a future event he had seen when his father and his grandfather had tried to pull him into twin halves at gate 44 in JFK airport—that dim, shocking memory of a man opening up a woman’s skin with a long red weapon—but the rest of Tabby Smithfield heard a silent voice from within the big imposing house which softly and insistently invited him inside.

  It’s nice in here, Tabby, just come up to the door, it doesn’t matter that you can’t drive the van, nothing like that matters anymore, just come in and join us. . . .

  Dazed, and with the two images—the fire-bat and the man opening up the dying woman’s skin—rolling down through a receding corridor in his mind, Tabby took another step toward the house.

  Then he heard a shot coming from the same room where the inviting shape had glowed through a large window.

  17

  Richard’s arms ached: Patsy thrashed against his restraint like a bull in a pen. “I don’t know if I can hold her much longer,” he said desperately to Graham Williams.

  “I’ll get her legs,” Williams said, and went as quickly as he could around the coffee table. He grasped one of her ankles with his right hand, and she kicked out strongly enough to throw him off-balance. He sat heavily on the flimsy table, and both men heard it crack. Williams grimly leaned forward, pursing his mouth with effort, and caught her flying leg under his arm. As he pinned it down with his elbow, he reached out and grasped her other leg with his free hand. Patsy’s hips whipsawed. Williams felt a sudden pain in his chest.

  Richard saw Graham’s face go white: it was as if the sharp crack from the table had come from within the old man. Patsy thrashed against his arms again, and screamed a single word.

  “Run!”

  Richard shook his head at the old man, telling him to let go, that he could handle Patsy’s convulsions, but Williams strengthened his grip, and Patsy’s movements became tighter and more easily controlled.

  “Run!” she screamed. Then she let out a long wail that made Richard almost drop her.

  Richard heard a loud cracking noise behind him.

  He ducked his head, imagining that a window had exploded in, and then saw the glass front of a framed film poster beside Williams’ desk shatter and crumble to the floor in a glittery jigsaw puzzle.

  “Aaaah!” Patsy screamed.

  The paperback detective novels jammed on top of the art books were snapping out of the bookcase, sailing into the air and then swirling upward. Richard heard the frame of the poster behind him crack apart like kindling. He watched the books on the top row of the bookshelves across the room cannon off the shelf and sail across Williams’ desk.

  The typewriter rocked on its pad, then rolled right over and thunked against the floor. Bing! rang the carriage return.

  Books flew randomly off the shelves: Richard and Graham watched two of them ascend straight up to the ceiling, where they clung for a moment like flies before dropping to the floor.

  Another of the framed posters (Glenda, Richard saw, a tinted drawing of Mary Astor in Gary Cooper’s arms) flopped straight over on its face and jittered like a dying cat as the glass tinkled into a thousand bright sections.

  18

  Come on in, Tabs, we need you now, said the silent voice in his mind, and he stepped forward again. For a moment he saw dozens of people lined up at the big windows; then they broke apart, turned to one another or turned away. Why, it’s a party, Tabby thought, how can there be a party? He lifted the radio to his mouth and said, “Hey, what . . .”

  “Come on in,” the radio said to him. “Get in here, Tabby.”

  He could not see the people very clearly, but the Norman twins were not among them.

  “Get in here,” the voice on the radio said again.

  The people parted, and Tabby saw that what had been glowing was a mirror far across the room. Now its center was a delicate rose-pink that pulsed and glowed. Tabby began to move again.

  But then Bruce Norman burst through the front door. He had his arm around Dicky’s chest, and seemed to be pulling at him. Dicky’s face was marble-white. He was moving very slowly. “Where’s the van?” Bruce shouted.

  Bruce was red with blood: blood plastered his shirt to his thick chest. Dicky too had splashes of blood on his face, and his entire side was stained so deeply that the colors of his clothes were not visible.

  Tabby pointed down the long lawn. He had seen that all that blood was Dicky Norman’s.

  Then he saw a knob of white appear in the midst of the soupy redness where Bruce was holding up his brother. Dicky’s arm was gone, and the knob of white was his shoulder. He rushed to help Bruce support his brother, and his mind cleared: he seemed to himself to have been moving in slow motion since the column of flame had bloomed in his mind.

  Tabby firmly clamped his arm around Dicky’s back and felt Dicky’s heaviness, his slowness. Dicky was going to die, he knew. Together he and Bruce half-carried, half-pushed Dicky all the way to the van. Tabby moved to open the rear door, but Bruce screeched at Tabby, “Not in the back! In the front! On the seat!” Bruce’s eyes seemed to take up most of his face. Tabby helped get Dicky in the passenger seat, and then Bruce ran around the front of the van to climb in the driver’s seat.

  Tabby jumped in the back and slammed the door shut just as Bruce slammed the van backward into a tree. Dicky slumped toward the floor. “Pull him up, for Chrissake!” Bruce screeched, ground the gears, and shot out from under the trees in a shower of scattered earth.

  Tabby bent over the passenger seat and tried to haul Dicky back upright. His left hand slipped on the sheet of blood covering Dicky’s left side, and Dicky waveringly rolled sideways. The white knob of bone slid along the fabric of the seat.

  “Get him uuup!” Bruce yelled. He spun out onto Mount Avenue and turned in the direction of the Sayre Connector.

  Tabby hauled at Dicky’s right arm, and then Dicky got his legs under himself and helped push himself back onto the seat. Leaning over, Tabby looked into his eyes. They were looking straight ahead, focused on something a long way off. Dicky’s eyes were unearthly. Tabby thought that Dicky Norman looked more intelligent than at any other time in his life, but he was glad he couldn’t see what Dicky was looking at so intently. “Hold on, Dicky,” he said, and patted his good shoulder. Dicky did not even blink.

  “Where’s the guy?” Tabby asked. “Starbuck—where’s Starbuck?”
/>   “Fucker’s dead,” Bruce said.

  “Dead? I just talked to him on the radio.”

  “Fucker’s dead. The old guy shot him.”

  Bruce sped straight through a stop sign.

  “How did . . . I mean, what happened to Dicky?”

  “I don’t know!” Bruce screamed. He wiped a hand over his jowls, and left a bloody smear. “We were supposed to pick up this fancy mirror and put it inside this big black asshole of a piano. We were just gonna get the mirror when the old guy comes in with his gun. He doesn’t even say, ‘Stick ‘em up,’ or nothin’, he just shoots. And he got Starbuck—he blew that fuckhead away. Then Dicky gives out this gawdawful yell, and I look over at Dicky, and he’s shootin’ blood all over the wall and his goddamn arm is gone and he’s just standin’ there lookin’ up, and I thought the old guy was gonna blast us both.” He shook his head. “I thought the old guy shot him too, until I seen that his whole fuckin’ arm is gone. So I just got him out.”

  “I saw other people in there,” Tabby said.

  “Tabs, the old guy was the only other one in that room. You gotta get out now. I’m taking Dicky down to Norrington General, and you gotta get outta this van.”

  Bruce pulled up at the traffic light on the Sayre Connector. “Out, Tabs. Fast.”

  Tabby jumped down onto the road and slammed the door. “Good luck,” he said, but the van had pulled ahead through the red light and was speeding toward the on ramp to the thruway.

  * * *

  Fourteen minutes later, at eleven-fifty-six, Bruce Norman made it to the emergency room of Norrington General Hospital, a feat he accomplished by keeping the accelerator floored and the engine in the overdrive Gary Starbuck had constructed. When he came to the toll station he did not even think of slowing down. He hit the barrier at better than a hundred and ten miles an hour and split it into half a dozen flying saw-toothed sections. The nurses in the emergency room peeled his brother off him as soon as they came through the door, strapped Dicky to a cot and slid an IV in his arm. Dicky’s eyes never lost the intelligent faraway stare Tabby Smithfield had seen. An intern named Patel, who had been born in Uttar Pradesh and had a medical degree from the University of Wisconsin, began doing what he could to Dicky’s shoulder. But Dicky died while Dr. Patel was still putting little metal clamps on the severed arteries. It was three minutes past twelve.