Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “I never told his parents that he used to hit me,” she said. “There I was, with my one big fat last chance, and I couldn’t do it—no matter how nasty Dee got with me about the cremation, I couldn’t tell her. Why do you think that was?”

  “Because you’re a decent person,” Williams said. He sipped at his own drink. “Maybe because it wouldn’t have made any difference anyhow. His mother would have thought that you were lying, or if he did beat you, that you deserved it. Anyhow, at a certain point it isn’t appropriate anymore for parents to know such things about their children. They prefer the myth they know.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference, you’re right,” Patsy said. “She never understood what Les was—I mean she never understood what happened to him after he left home. She didn’t grasp his success, and she couldn’t ever see what his success did to his personality. Did you ever have any children, Graham?”

  “Never,” he said. He smiled.

  “Why are you smiling like that? Oh, I know. It’s because I forgot. You told me before. You told all of us. We’re the last of our families. At least until Richard’s baby is born.”

  Patsy looked around the room. “Don’t you have a record player or anything, Graham? I’d sure like to hear some music. Don’t you like listening to music?”

  “I have a radio,” he said, and stood up to go across the room and turn it on. He found a station playing dance music, big bands breathing out standard songs like “Rose Room” and “There’s a Small Hotel,” and let it play softly.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Patsy said. She tapped her stockinged foot. “Pretty soon I’ll ask you to dance, Graham. You’d better be ready.”

  “I’ll be honored.”

  “You know when I decided that you were one of the good guys? It was on that terrible night when Les was waving his gun around. I saw you step in front of Tabby. God, I thought that was wonderful. You could have been killed.”

  “Most people would do it.” Graham leaned forward and tipped more gin, then more tonic, into her glass. He dipped his hand into the ice bucket and retrieved three half-melted cubes and dropped them into Patsy’s glass.

  “That’s what you think, buster,” Patsy said. “You’re dead wrong there, and you think that way because you’re one of the good guys. You know what I thought later? I thought, there were three men there, and mine was the worst. Honest to God.”

  “He was certainly the drunkest,” Graham said.

  “Let’s face facts, Graham old buddy, he was the worst. But I was remembering some little things about him when his parents were around, and you know, sometimes I wish we could have another chance at things, you know?”

  Patsy went on to speak about Les in an emotional and thoroughly confused and contradictory way, sometimes with resentment and sometimes affectionately. She continued to drink, waggling her glass at the Bombay bottle when she wanted Graham to pour her a refill, and once or twice she seemed to be close to tears. Graham Williams minded none of this, in fact he cherished it. He wanted her to say anything that came into her head. He would listen to everything with the same seriousness and good humor. He understood that it was often difficult for any woman, but a woman like Patsy especially, to be taken seriously, and that maybe this was the greatest flaw in her marriage: Les McCloud had taken himself so seriously that there was no seriousness left over for his wife.

  3

  Civilization and Its Discontents

  1

  Six weeks after DRG-16 had been vented from the secret Telpro plant in Woodville, the town of Hampstead, Connecticut, had altered from what it had been before May 17—the changes were not as great as they would yet become, but nothing now was quite the same. In the imagery of Richard Allbee’s dream, Billy Bentley was inside the house: he had broken a couple of windows and was going to smash up some of the furniture before he moved on to bigger things. Things were different in Hampstead. The tides still came in on Gravesend and Sawtell beaches, the tennis matches still grunted and sweated along on the private courts and at the Racket Club, men still squeezed into the parking spots at Riverfront Station and took the 7:54 and the 8:24 to New York; at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, Hampstead people still sat on the deck of the Sawtell Country Club and drank their complimentary Bloody Marys and watched the sailboats far out, the windsurfers rolling and tipping in the nearby surf, before the Sunday brunch. But many parents now locked their children in their rooms at night—in the five days since Richard Allbee had returned from Providence, a fourteen-year-old boy from Hampstead, a seven-year-old boy from Hillhaven, and a twelve-year-old girl from Old Sarum had drowned themselves in Long Island Sound.

  And by now there had been four murders: one more since Bobby Fritz. Women alone at home had become careful about answering their doors, and the UPS drivers and Bloomingdale’s deliverymen often did not bother ringing doorbells in Hampstead anymore; they slipped the packages inside the screen door, knocked hard, and left. No one ever jogged alone now, but only in pairs or groups of three. Sometimes in the middle of Main Street you might see a slender, prosperous-looking woman suddenly choke up and burst into tears; and you would not know if she were in the midst of a divorce or if one of her children had gone out for a one-way swim—or if Hampstead’s troubles had just become too much for her.

  Yes, there were tennis matches and parties of six at the country-club Sunday brunch; and people went into Greenblatt’s and Grand Union and bought beer and spareribs and charcoal briquets, just as if it were an ordinary summer. But now the conversations on the tennis courts and the sparkling deck of the country club were as much about death and suicide as about Wimbledon and the bond market and the colleges their kids were applying to, come autumn. Now the conversations were apt to be about how quickly you could get out of Hampstead and if you could still sell your sixty-five-year-old Federal colonial with three wooded acres and twenty more years to go on the mortgage. And sometimes the conversations would slip into muddy waters, into areas no one understood or even wanted to understand—Archie Monaghan tried to hint to Tom Flynn, his law and golfing partner, that not long after Les McCloud’s messy crack-up on I-95 he had imagined hearing and smelling something odd coming from that same bush Les had been so excited about.

  Ronnie Riggley could have answered the questions about selling those desirable colonials on three wooded acres—if she had felt like being utterly honest, she would have said that if it was in Hampstead, you couldn’t give it away for free with the purchase of a box of Cracker Jack; and that if it were in Hillhaven or Old Sarum, you had about a fifty-fifty chance of being able to give it away for free. What you couldn’t do was sell it. You couldn’t even lease it, not since the discovery of the fourth body and the suicides of all those children.

  Graham Williams saw a For Sale sign on Evelyn Hughardt’s lawn, but never saw Ronnie or any other salesperson showing prospects around the Hughardt house; instead he one day saw a moving van parked down at the bottom of Beach Trail, and Evelyn Hughardt supervising the men carrying her furniture out of her house. “You find a buyer, Evvy?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “But I’m going back to Virginia anyhow. Hampstead doesn’t feel right to me anymore.” She looked back at her house, where she and Graham saw a man inside the front door packing up the framed cartoons. “Does that make sense to you, Mr. Williams?”

  “Perfect sense,” Graham agreed.

  She was not alone, he knew. As in the Black Summer of 1873, many people were simply moving out. They decided to take their vacations early, or they suddenly remembered that they had always wanted their kids to see the Smoky Mountains or that these same kids hadn’t seen their grandparents in a year and a half. Now there was a vacant house every couple of blocks, most of the time with a realtor’s sign before it, but sometimes not; Graham bet himself that by August there’d be two or three vacant houses on every block. And that by then people wouldn’t care if they sold their houses or not—they’d just want to get away.

  Evel
yn Hughardt looked at him sharply, and he saw a pallor beneath her honey-colored tan, and some indefinable expression at the back of her eyes: an expression that should have been no part of a handsome woman like Evelyn Hughardt. “I wonder what you know,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I think there’s only one killer,” he said, pretending that this was what she had been alluding to. There were people in Hampstead who claimed that Gary Starbuck had killed the first two victims and a “copycat killer” the second two.

  “That’s not what I mean, Mr. Williams. Have you noticed that you never see birds anymore in Hampstead, not live ones anyhow? They’re all like that.” She pointed her foot at a bundle of feathers rolled into the gutter across the street; ten feet from it was another dead bird. “And you know what else you never see in this town anymore? Pets. There are no more pets. The dogs all ran away or got run over, the cats just vanished . . . maybe they all got run over too. What do you think?”

  “It’s a mystery, Evvy. I’d guess they just took off, being cats.”

  “And it makes perfect sense to you that I’m leaving the only house I have. I’ll say it again. I wonder what you know.”

  “One thing I know is that this happened once before—about a hundred years ago, the town’s population dropped by half.”

  “A hundred years ago,” she said, sounding disgusted with him. “A hundred years ago, did people hear things they shouldn’t?” He beetled his eyebrows, wondering what she was getting to, and she said, “Or see things they shouldn’t? Let me fill you in, Mr. Williams. There are people in this town who have sophisticated electronic equipment. This equipment can be used to record voices, and then play them back by remote control. The equipment can project voices and make them sound like they are right in the next room, Mr. Williams. And I think they can do this with pictures too, Mr. Williams—not just voices, but pictures! Moving pictures. Projected right into your own bedroom! Doesn’t that sound like something our friends in Moscow would use on us, Mr. Williams?”

  So Evvy Hughardt had absorbed her husband’s politics and his view of the Scribe of Beach Trail.

  “I heard Dr. Hughardt talking to me,” she said. “They’re testing that machinery on me, aren’t they? I’m the guinea pig for their fancy equipment. It sends out rays. Or beams, whatever you call them. Are you one of their colonels? That’s what they usually are, aren’t they, the high-ranking ones?”

  Evelyn Hughardt had heard something, had thought that she had seen something, and since then her mind had been chasing itself in obsessive circles.

  “You should have left the pets alone,” she said, and turned and ran toward her front door.

  * * *

  MASS MURDER IN CONNECTICUT, ran the headline in the New York Post after the fourth murder, and the New York Times asked, HAMPSTEAD: THE CURSE OF AFFLUENCE?

  It was this second article which Ted Wise and Bill Pierce, now far out in the deep country at a Telpro installation in Montana, read on their computer screens—Telpro paid for their access to the Times and to the wire services, in order to sweeten their isolation. “We have to tell,” Pierce said; and Wise agreed, but asked for more time—he didn’t understand the Times paragraph about the children who had drowned themselves, for that seemed totally unrelated to the action of DRG-16.

  Hampstead did feel cursed, and not just because its expensive real estate had lost its value; what was happening to the town seemed to some like an almost biblical set of afflictions. The unease in Hampstead went beyond the fear for safety or the paranoid suspiciousness of strangers people began to exhibit; it became an unease of soul. The town seemed to be punishing itself, as if the madman who had killed and butchered four people had been somehow created by Hampstead’s deepest, most secret impulses—as a judgment on its values. Values, yes. The punishment was for wrong and distorted values: and if the comfortably potbellied middle-aged men in the town’s pulpits played this wrinkled old card in the sermons on that Sunday, they could look for justification no farther than the excellent, sometimes great New York Times.

  Residents of Hampstead not in the churches on Sunday, the twenty-second of June, might have seen a camera crew rolling slowly up the middle of Sawtell Road, relaying the memorized words of a CBS correspondent to a studio in New York. Hampstead and its bizarre set of problems was the cover story on Charles Kuralt’s Sunday Morning. The correspondent, who wore thick eyeglasses and an expression combining soulfulness and fret, came out onto Sawtell Beach and looked soulfully, fretfully (and in fact mistakenly) over his shoulder at the bright water. “This,” he said, “is where it ended for Thomas and Martin O’Hara and nine other children—here on this gentle beach in this exclusive community. And up Bluefish Hill, in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house only a hundred yards from where I stand, is where it ended for Hester Goodall, the second victim of this community’s mass murderer. Death is no respecter of persons, nor of the place they hold in the world. And here in Hampstead, Connecticut, they are wondering where it all went wrong: where the dream went sour.” Another glance out at the gently lapping water. “Back to you, Charles.”

  2

  The day after the CBS reporter implied that Hampstead somehow deserved its problems because it was rich, Sarah Spry was still in her office at six o’clock, trying to write a Gazette article. Sarah would have called this article a “think piece,” and she intended it to show that she had indeed been thinking hard. She had seen Sunday Morning—a program she normally respected. Unfortunately, Sarah was having troubles in bettering its hackneyed efforts—she had ideas of her own she wanted to get down on paper, but the usual effortless connection between Sarah’s mind and her typewriter was failing her now.

  When she thought of a phrase—and it took more concentration than phrase-making usually did—she rattled the keys of her typewriter and a few minutes later saw that most of the words had sailed in from some lunatic’s mind: they were not at all what she had imagined she had been typing. Her first paragraph read:

  Have we nayamgam this Oregon ourselves? Such is thamm wisney of thup medstar and checkout girls. Many will hack and hout about a plague, quotinga the pometry flacked in the booty of gardenmaker Robert Fritz. Hazzenwits redoubt and doubt again.

  Sarah stared at these lines, at one moment seeing in them the sentences she thought she had written, in the next seeing only the dreadful macaroni she actually had typed. Sarah shook her head—it was as if her eyes were cloudy. She tried again, and her fingers pounded out Now we must swim against the currents of guilt which . . . Sarah peered at the page.

  Naked swimmers nakt swim gainst, say which

  She jerked her fingers off the keys.

  * * *

  Sarah Henderson Spry had never thought of becoming a gossip columnist, and although that was how most people would identify her, “What Sarah Saw” was only a small portion of her duties at the Gazette. She edited and did most of the layout for the paper’s second section, she reviewed art openings and all the plays at the Hampstead Playhouse and the Theater in the Glen; and she still did some of the basic reporting which had been her first job at the paper, back when Sarah Henderson had been completing her second and last year at Patchin University. Reporting then was all she had wanted to do, it had stirred her blood—finding out how things worked. The Gazette had become her home, and she had never wanted any more than it gave her.

  Of course one of the things it gave her was her introduction to tragedy. She had been twenty-five and still the youngest person on the staff in 1952 when she had been ordered out to Sawtell Country Club to cover John Sayre’s suicide. She took a camera and a notepad, and when she got out onto the beach behind the club building, Mr. Sayre’s body was still there. Sarah had photographed the policemen, the waiter who found the body, Bonnie Sayre and Graham Williams, and then finally she had the stomach to photograph the dead lawyer. Joey Kletzka, once known as “Nails” because for twenty years he’d worked as much as a carpenter as a policeman, stood a short way down the beach with
his hands on his big front porch of a belly and talked about some boy named John Ray, a boy who had been washed up dead on this same spot four days earlier. . . . Chief Kletzka was sixty-three then, in two years he would be retired; in three, himself a suicide. John Sayre’s brains had been blown out the back of his head, and his face was black with powder burns. Sarah took the picture because her editor demanded it, but she didn’t ever want to look at it. She went around the body to talk to Bonnie Sayre, who instead folded into the arms of Graham Williams. It had been a hot moist night. Under Williams’ sleeves had been large scoops of perspiration. “Not now, Sarah,” he had said gently, winning her respect. Then he had won her affection by saying, “Tomorrow we’ll probably be going to John’s office. Maybe you could meet us there. Bonnie is in no condition to say anything now.” And so she had gone to the office, and she too had seen those names scratched into the telephone pad. Prince Green, Bates Krell.

  As her job on the newspaper had grown, so had her role in Patchin County—Sarah was single-minded, but serially single-minded about many tasks. When her job at the Gazette was done, she had no qualms about chairing meetings of professional women, about organizing groups and seminars for women in newspaper and magazine work, about buzzing off to fund-raising parties and charity balls . . . in fact, nearly thirty years after she had tried to photograph John Sayre’s body without really looking at it, Sarah was a nearly indispensable part of social and professional life in Patchin County.

  * * *

  Sarah pushed herself away from the typewriter, squinted again at the gibberish she had written, and shuddered. Naked swimmers—those words again, typed out as if by themselves. She saw the little O’Hara boys as she had known them, Thomas smiling and baby Martin scowling, being serious about some Star Wars invention, and quickly went to another desk in the Gazette office. She pulled out a legal pad and a pencil from the top drawer.