Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  He tilted his head and looked at Graham. “Buster, if you laugh at me, at what I’m going to say to you right now, I’ll smash this drink right in your face. Okay? Okay. I thought I saw the northern lights. You know? Streams of light, pouring down from the ceiling toward the screen—almost like fireballs, some of ‘em were. Blue and yellow and red . . . all sparkly and electric-looking. I saw it, man. I was so scared all of a sudden I thought I’d shit. I was sure the whole damn theater was on fire. Reminded me of night artillery practice when I was at Fort Sill. Zoom, zoom, zoom, you know? Fuckin’ air was full of that stuff—and then it all ran right into the screen. So . . .” He sipped at his drink and looked hard at Graham, a real cop’s stare, to check out how he was reacting to all this. “So when I saw Wiak—when I saw something crazy come at Wiak and blow him into cottage cheese, I thought it was the same thing.”

  “Spigger” turned out to be easy. Nearly all the survivors remembered it, and most of them remembered that the man who had made the joke was one of those larking about in the middle aisle when the lights went down. They agreed that it was not Johanssen—his humor was not so crude. Maloney seemed the best bet, Artie Maloney, who came back from ‘Nam with a boxful of medals he would take out of his desk at home sometimes and show if you were both drunk enough. It seemed likely that it was Maloney who had shouted out “Spigger!” when the first black man who was not a policeman appeared on the screen. “Spigger! Half-spick and half-nigger!” The boys went crazy. If there was beer in their mouths, it went all over the head of the guys in front of them. “Half-spick and . . .” You could hear Maloney’s phrase echoing through the Nutmeg Theater—but the truth is that Maloney’s joke was not really so good. It is quintessentially the sort of thing a half-drunk twenty-eight-year-old Irish cop would say when he had his feet up on the seat in front of him and felt he could get away with saying anything that popped into his mind. Older police officers like Jerry Jerome and Rod Fratney ordinarily would not even dignify such a crack with as much as a smile.

  Why, then, was Maloney’s dull remark so successful? It occurred to Graham that it might have represented at least a release from extraordinary tension. What if more than Jerry Jerome had seen the streams of light like tracer fire blazingly enter the screen? What if every man there—every man but Artie Maloney—had seen the lights, and wondered if he was losing his mind? “Spigger” might have brought them back to themselves, jerked them out of their bewilderment.

  But perhaps not all the way out, and maybe “bewilderment” is the wrong word for their condition. For there is one more thing that most of the survivors of the Nutmeg Theater gradually confessed to Graham Williams; in all the confusion, one more area of agreement.

  It was a twenty-year-old kid who first hinted it to Graham, and he looked as embarrassed as Jerry Jerome had in the Bridgeport bar. The boy, Mike Minor, once might have looked authoritative in his uniform, but in a KISS T-shirt and jeans, sitting on a wooden rocker in the kitchen of his parents’ house, he still seemed undone by the events in the Nutmeg Theater. His eyes were too large for his head, and a vein in one lid kept insistently bumping and bumping, as if it wanted to go somewhere else. He had quit the force in September, and was thinking about trying to get into computer training somewhere: to Graham it looked as though he would be better off waiting another six months. His attention span was roughly equal to that of a four-year-old. “I thought I saw maybe something like spiderwebs way up there when the lights went down, yeah,” he told Graham. “Not lights exactly, but something that was sort of floating, sort of floating lines . . . spiderwebs. You want a Coke or something?” He twitched over to the refrigerator and took out a can of Diet Pepsi, brought it back to the butcher-block table, snapped off the tab and poured about half of it down his throat.

  “Man, I just couldn’t figure it out when Larry took off his clothes like that. And I couldn’t tell you why he did it. He was nothin’ but a goddamned animal, if you want to know the real truth about Larry Wiak.”

  Mike Minor nervously drank the rest of his Diet Pepsi in two huge swallows. “When he came walking out of those shadows all big and white like that, he terrified me, man.” The boy nodded, ducked his head like a puppy who fears a blow. “And when Rod Fratney yelled what he did, and that other guy over on my side screamed just like a girl in a horror movie, I could have pissed my pants. Because I knew he was there, man, he was right where I was.” He glanced at Graham, who was already nodding with the boy. “Man, he’d seen it too. Just like old Rod. And me.”

  “He had seen Dicky Norman, you mean.” Graham had expected this.

  “Well, two nights before we went to that Choirboys show, supposed to be the biggest party of the year and all that, two nights before that I was out on patrol. And I got lost. I was somewhere near the Academy, but I couldn’t get my bearings. Some road—some narrow road with no street signs. I couldn’t even remember how I got there. It was like being in a bad dream, man. For a second I was real panicked, like ‘Where am I, man? I’m a cop and I don’t even know where I am!’ There was nothin’ but these big trees all over. I couldn’t even remember what part of town I was in for a couple of seconds. I decided to turn around and go back the way I came until I saw something familiar. So I get the car pointed into the trees, and I put the car in reverse, and I look in the rear-view mirror . . . and I saw Dicky Norman. Man, it’s crazy, but that’s who it was. His skin looked red because of my taillights. He was just coming out of the trees on that side of the road, like that’s where he slept or something, and one of his arms was all torn off and that big round face looked gray and tired and . . . waxy. He was moving right toward me. Boy, I pushed that car into Drive and spun right out of there—gave the right-front fender a huge big dent.”

  “So when Larry Wiak started coming out of the shadows toward the screen . . .” Graham did not have to say any more.

  “Yeah. I mean, nobody can ever ask Rod Fratney anything ever again, but I know—I know. He saw him too.” He looked defiantly at the old man across the butcher-block table and concentrated on flattening out the aluminum can with the palm of his hand.

  “I’m sure he did,” Graham said, and the boy glanced suspiciously toward him. “I saw a lot of funny stuff myself, last July and August.”

  “Yeah.” The boy ducked his head again and tamped down a wrinkle in the seam of the can. “Yeah. A lot of funny stuff.” When he next looked at Graham, his eyes seemed inflamed. And then he dropped his bomb: not all at once, for he was still not sure of Graham’s trustworthiness, and not at first directly, for among those he distrusted was himself: but Michael Minor took Graham a long way toward understanding what actually happened in the Nutmeg Theater. “Did anyone tell you about the movie?” he asked.

  And that was one thing that none of the survivors had mentioned. Graham looked at the boy’s painfully strained eyes and said, “Tell me about the movie, Mike.” His stomach tightened, and he knotted his fingers together so they would not tremble.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you,” the boy said. He was silent for a long time, scratching the back of his left hand. “Like it was about us?” He cocked his head, looked sharply at Graham, and went back to scraping his nails across the back of his hand. “But then it sort of changed. It got different.” Graham waited impatiently while Mike Minor struggled with his inadequate vocabulary.

  “It got different, you said.”

  “Oh. Yeah, it got different.” The boy straightened up in the rocking chair, and his face drew into itself. A cold light like hoarfrost from the window beside him lay across the plane of his cheek, made it as blunt as the side of an ax. Suddenly the boy looked ten years older to Graham. “It got like it was a 3-D show. I could see into it just like into a room.”

  The boy stirred in his chair. “Then I saw what that room was. It wasn’t the police station in the movie anymore—I mean, it was a police station, but it wasn’t the same one. You know, it sounds dumb, but it took me a long time to recognize it. It was the
Hampstead police station. The one we’d all just left. Mo Chester, the night deskman, was up there, and McCone, his partner . . . ah, this is where some of the guys started making noise. I can’t tell you why, but it didn’t seem funny that our own station and two of our guys should show up in the middle of The Choirboys. It seemed great. Then they showed the muster room, and every cop we had was in that room, even the ones who didn’t come to the show. Royce Griffen. That was what I noticed first: Royce Griffen’s hair, that real bright red hair he had. And then I noticed the back of his head.”

  Minor crossed his legs and put one hand up to the frozen-looking cheek. “It was like hamburger. Just gross. And I saw that every guy in there was dead. They had these big wounds, these big mushy wounds. And their skin was all sort of greenish . . .” He was trembling now, and Graham understood that his peculiar posture was supposed to keep him so rigid he could not shake. “That’s what I saw, anyhow.”

  “That was all that you saw?”

  “One other thing—but it was just short. We had these little cells, holding cells, where we kept drunks overnight. Or where we put kids until their parents could come and pick them up. Six of them, all in one row. I didn’t know we had anyone in there that night, because I was on day shift. The camera went right through the door to the cells, and it showed the first three cells. It looked like a butcher shop in there, man. Cut-up bodies, bodies all ripped open with all this stuff hanging out of ‘em, blood all over everything . . . their clothes all mixed up with their insides.” Mike Minor locked his hands around his upraised knee. “Right after that I thought I saw Dicky Norman stumble toward the screen. And that’s when it happened.”

  The boy was shaking so uncontrollably now that even his voice trembled. “Guys were crying and yelling . . . I saw the guy right next to me, Harry Chester, Mo’s brother, catch a round right in his throat and jump up and have his head opened up by what must have been a .357, and I hit the floor and got my own gun out. I was sure Dicky Norman was coming for me again, and I just started shooting up toward the front of the theater . . . I probably hit a couple of guys, I don’t know. . . .”

  Graham stood up and went toward the shaking boy. After a second of hesitation he patted him on the back and went hunting for brandy. He found a bottle, poured an inch into a wineglass, and gave it to Mike Minor, saying, “It’s okay, son. It’s okay. It’s all over now. Anyone you hit was probably hit by a dozen other men, too.” Because first he had been hit by the movie.

  * * *

  When he knew enough to ask some of the other survivors about the film, he heard a dozen variations on Michael Minor’s story. No two had seen the same thing, but after the first few minutes, none had seen The Choirboys. Some had seen their wives and daughters making love with other cops, a few had seen their children’s bodies pulled from the gentle surf on Gravesend Beach. A cop named Ron Rice had seen something like a sea monster—a huge underwater reptile with a wide savage mouth—swimming along and biting children in half, tearing their bodies apart and turning the water red. Most saw dead people moving as though they were alive. Two or three more of the men Graham talked to saw red-headed Royce Griffen. Many of them saw the drowned children and were chilled by their white cold faces. A cop named Lew Holz told Graham, “The way they looked! You know, I maybe saw them for only about a minute or two, if that long, but . . . they looked damned funny. They weren’t kids anymore, they were something else, something you never want to see in this life, mister, and I don’t either. They looked as though they had been fathered by rattlesnakes, that’s how they looked.” Holz had not seen Jerry Jerome’s lightning bolt; like most of the others, he thought that Larry Wiak had been killed by Rod Fratney—even though Fratney was generally regarded as one of the worst shots on the Hampstead force. But by the time Graham spoke to Lew Holz, he no longer thought the question of who or what had killed Larry Wiak was the most important one he had to ask.

  Therefore, the second time he talked to Bobo Farnsworth about what he had discovered that night, he asked him, “When you got into the Nutmeg after running down from the station, did you happen to see what was on the screen?”

  For the movie was still running when Bobo ran into the theater; the projectionist, hit by a stray bullet, was alive but incapacitated on the floor of his booth; the screen was in tatters but The Choirboys or whatever the Dragon had put in its place was being screened on the shreds of fabric and the blank wall behind them.

  And Bobo, standing in the topmost part of a darkened room filled with dead men and dying men, had seen it.

  7

  Ronnie had fallen into an uneasy, twitchy sleep shortly after ten o’clock. Bobo hovered by the side of the bed, unwilling to leave her—drained by her lengthy illness, Ronnie looked translucent in her sleep, and Bobo feared that she might trip over from flutters and twitches into outright convulsions. He stroked her hand, then picked it up: it felt hot and dry and no heavier than a hummingbird. Holding her hand while she slept made him feel somehow false to himself, and he gently set her hand back down on the sheet. Then he went into the bathroom, soaked a washcloth in cold water, wrung it out, and returned to Ronnie’s side. He delicately patted the cold cloth over her forehead. Ronnie muttered something that sounded like Voon, but did not awaken. Bobo rested his fingers on her forehead and thought it felt a little less feverish.

  Nursing, Bobo had discovered, was more exhausting than police work. He had reported for the day shift, come home to take care of Ronnie, and now he felt as though he had gone thirty-six hours without sleep. Most of the exhaustion, Bobo thought, was a product of the anxiety he felt about Ronnie’s condition, but being in attendance on her for six or seven hours without letup had given him sore feet and a backache. He would have climbed on the bed beside her, but he did not want to risk waking her. He sat down by her side, took her hand again, and closed his eyes; then he went across the bedroom to an old overstuffed chair, removed the clothes from it, and dropped them on the floor, and then dropped himself onto the spongy seat cushion.

  Several hours later he awakened, disoriented—sleep had come so swiftly upon him that it took him a moment to recognize that he had slept. Bobo leaned forward, and his back complained; trapped in his tightly laced shoes, his feet felt swollen and tender. Across the room, Ronnie was moving her hand exploringly across her face. Then she opened her eyes and saw him.

  “Oh, you sweetheart, you stayed with me,” she said. “Um. I’m so dry.”

  “Just a sec.” Bobo bounced out of the chair and brought her a glass of water from the bathroom. “How do you feel? I think you must have slept a couple of hours.”

  Ronnie tilted her head, considering; she sipped at the water. “I do feel better. You know, I think I could even eat something now. A little soup, maybe? Would you be a real sweetie and make some for me?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” he said.

  When he returned with a bowl of mushroom soup he sat on the edge of the bed and watched her eat nearly all of it. As she handed him back the bowl, she yawned hugely. “Oh! I’m sorry,” she said. “Bobo, I feel limp as a rag. I think I’m going to sleep for the next three weeks.”

  Bobo smiled at her.

  “What time is it? About twelve-thirty? Bobo, why don’t you go down to the movie? It probably started late, so it won’t be like walking in in the middle—you’ll only miss a couple of minutes, I swear. All I’m going to do is turn off the light and go back to sleep. I’ll be all right. I promise.”

  “Well, maybe I will,” Bobo said.

  * * *

  He did not go straight to the Nutmeg, but walked up to the old brick station house after he had parked his car. The theater was only a few minutes’ walk across the sloping municipal parking lot, and Bobo was interested in what had happened during the second shift. A few more cases of arson, an anonymous body rotting in a shed, a high-school boy who had tried to fly off the roof of his house? The night deskman, Mo Chester, would have something funny to say about the afternoon�
��s supply of weirdness. Mo Chester could always make Bobo laugh. Also, Mo would be chafing about having to miss the movie and the inevitable party afterward, especially since his brother could go to them.

  Bobo went up the steps and pushed open the massive wooden door, already smiling about Mo’s probable response to the surprise of his appearance.

  “Well, guess who’s here?” he said, clapping his hands together. “Can I get you any beer from the . . .” Theater, he was going to say, but the absence of an audience stole the joke from his throat. Mo Chester was not seated behind the desk, a telephone glued to his ear and a wry smile on his face. The desk was vacant. Gance McCone, Mo’s partner, was gone too, and that was doubly odd. Bobo could not remember ever seeing the desk completely abandoned.

  “Hey,” Bobo called out. “What’s the big idea, Chester? You and Gance on strike today?”

  His words went out into the depths of the station—it was as if he could see them go. Bobo was suddenly convinced that he was the only person in the station. At this point he had not become aware of the smell. He stood absolutely still in the wide entry of his station; then by reflex he reached for the place on his hip where his gun should have been. Danger bells were ringing very loudly in Bobo’s mind, and it was only when he touched his belt that he realized he was out of uniform.

  “Anybody?” he shouted.

  The phone rang just before Bobo went across the floor to look over the top of the desk, and the sound of the ringing is half of what triggered Bobo’s déjà vu. He suddenly felt as though he had been in this moment before: the shock of the empty station, the shrill insistence of a telephone: himself standing in precisely this way, flat-footed and off balance.

  Then Bobo became aware of the smell that pervaded the police station, and for the first and only time in his life he could identify the causes of the déjà vu experience and locate the real moment which lay behind the illusion of having been in precisely this same moment at an earlier time. Because he smelled blood—had just become aware that the odor of blood was so strong that the walls might have been smeared with it—and because the telephone was jangling and jangling, he had been put back into one of the unhappiest hours of his life: the time when he had responded to the call from Hester Goodall’s brother and after seeing the mess in the kitchen had telephoned the station and waited for the other men to come. Mrs. Goodall’s telephone had shrieked at them, but the priest apparently did not hear it and Bobo did not want to get involved with answering calls. The captains and the state cops could deal with Mrs. Goodall’s friends and family.