Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “And you saw the fire-bat. That’s what you call it?”

  Tabby nodded.

  “Where have you seen it before?”

  “One night when I was on the beach—that night all those houses on Mill Lane burned down. And all those firemen were killed.”

  “Jesus,” Richard said.

  “And in my house—tonight. But it was like I was in the Daddy’s Here house.”

  “Oh, my God,” Richard said, remembering the nightmare from his earliest days in Hampstead. “Billy Bentley.”

  “He was there. Shouldn’t we call Mr. Williams and Patsy? Don’t you think we ought to see if they’re all right?”

  Richard did not want to tell the boy that he had already tried to call Graham and Patsy; while Tabby had been washing his face in the downstairs bathroom, Richard had dialed both their numbers. Neither Graham nor Patsy had been in. He said, “Look, it’s almost eleven at night. Graham’ll be in bed, sound asleep. Patsy too, probably. We’ll try to call them in the morning. In the meantime, I guess this is your home now, if that’s all right with you. I wouldn’t mind the company.”

  Tabby had pushed himself deeply into Richard’s guest bed, and now he rolled over and locked his face into the pillow. His shoulders were trembling; Richard, too tired to be perceptive, finally understood that the boy was crying. He patted Tabby’s back and sat with him for some minutes. Finally he said, “Your father and my wife. I suppose we could be sorry for each other, instead of being sorry for ourselves. You want to try that?” Tabby nodded into the pillow. Richard stroked his back and said, “Besides that, you need someone like me and I need someone like you. Tomorrow we’ll go get you some clothes and anything else you need. Okay?” Still crying, Tabby nodded into the pillow again—he did not want Richard to see his face. “I’m going to bed,” Richard said. “My room is right down the hall, in case you need anything.”

  Richard did not think he could sleep—he was exhausted, but his inner pulse raced. He lay in his own bed with all the lights off, trying to calm that inner engine that chugged and chugged, wanting him to get dressed and go out to search for Graham and Patsy—he would have, if he’d had a single clue as to where they were. He and Tabby had escaped the Dragon; could Patsy and Graham do the same? Interspersed with his anxious thoughts about the other two were worries about the boy now sleeping down the hall—part of Richard knew already that he wanted Tabby Smithfield permanently in his life, but would the boy accept him as substitute father? And could he really be a substitute father? Wouldn’t Tabby resent any attempts to replace his true father? And wouldn’t he have relatives—family—whose proper role it would be to raise him? But when Richard Allbee thought of Tabby Smithfield’s family, he saw himself and Patsy McCloud and Graham Williams. And where were they now? Did the fire-bat visit them too? Were they alive? In the midst of these spinning circles, Richard fell asleep. And was instantly dreaming. . . .

  He was carrying a huge heavy sword in his hands—so large that he had to support it across his forearms, so heavy that all the muscles in his arms were shrieking. But he could not stop, he could not rest. Around him was the pure, the primal Bad Place: a dank countryside of craters and leafless trees, of burned farmhouses and stinking pools. Richard trudged forward, his arms shaking with pain, toward a flat yellow horizon. When it was time, and when he had reached the right place, he stopped. Now the burned farmhouses were far behind him; on the surface of the gray tarn some twenty feet before him smoke or fog corkscrewed up. He planted his feet on the damp ground. In his arms the sword was becoming lighter; had begun to glow. He grasped the handle with both hands and lifted the sword as high as he could in the air. Then—already bringing it down—he saw that Laura lay on the ground directly before him. Richard screamed, but he could not stop the descent of the sword: it cleaved through Laura’s body and bit into the earth. From both wounds, a fountain of blood erupted, drenching all the landscape and instantly soaking him. Richard moaned, opened his eyes and expected to see a red world—instead he saw Tabby’s face, so worried it was pinched far down into itself.

  “It’s Patsy,” Tabby said. “She’s going to die.”

  4

  Patsy, lonely, had tried to call Graham Williams; when Graham had not answered, she dialed the first four digits of Richard’s telephone number, and then hesitated—she was not sure she could trust herself around Richard Allbee. Especially this late in the evening, and especially in this mood. Patsy had been feeling restless, indeed almost reckless, most of the day; and she’d had very little to do except read and watch television. She had found a copy of one of Graham’s books, Twisted Hearts, at Books ‘n Bobs, and was halfway through it, but she did not want to gulp it down—it was too good for that, Patsy thought. She was a little surprised at how much she liked Graham’s novel. But she did not feel like reading now; and television offered only the usual popcorn. She would have liked to spend several hours with Richard, just seeing what would happen if they were alone in the same room. But Richard, she knew, would never begin anything with her—he was out of practice, he had been married too long. He was unsure of himself. And Patsy was unsure that she could initiate anything with Richard, or indeed that it would be right to do so. Richard was still deeply in mourning, his emotions were scrambled. If she began anything with him, he would make too much of it—it would touch him too deeply. And wouldn’t it seem too pat, almost cornball in fact—the widow and the widower? That was unaesthetic. Patsy gently put down the receiver. She could always take a bath. If she still felt this way tomorrow, she would go out and spend too much money on clothes. When she pulled out her credit card, only she would know how virtuous she was being.

  She got about six paces away from the phone when she decided that she would call Richard anyhow—she didn’t need a bath, and she didn’t like shopping. Patsy turned around, and that was when her telephone rang. She would have bet a hundred dollars that the person on the other end of the line was Richard Allbee.

  But she would have lost her bet: the caller said, “Patsy, I’m really glad you’re home. This is Graham.”

  “I just called you!” she cried. “You’re not there!”

  “I just got back. Patsy, I’ve discovered something, and it could be the clue to everything—I think I know where he is, Patsy. And who he is.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “Can you tell me over the phone?”

  “Not now,” Graham’s voice said. “Trust me, Patsy, there’s a reason. I want you to meet me someplace.”

  “Well sure, okay,” she said, pleased and a little flattered. “You name it.”

  “Do you know Poor Fox Road? In Greenbank?”

  “I never heard of it,” Patsy said.

  “It’s a little obscure, but it’s . . .”

  “Oh. I know. It’s where that Fritz man was killed. I remember. The gardener.”

  “Can you find it? It’s just across Mount Avenue from the entrance to Gravesend Beach. You have to look hard to see it—it’s not marked. It looks more like a driveway than a town road.”

  “I think I’ve seen it,” Patsy said.

  “Well, there are three or four houses down the end of that road. They’re all vacant now. I want you to meet me at the little brown clapboard place next to the house with all the junked cars on the lot.”

  “Doesn’t it have a number?”

  “No number, but you can’t miss it. Brown clapboard. Sagging roof. Just look for the place you’d choose if you wanted to store your shrunken-head collection. Just go inside. If I’m not there, I’ll be along in a second. I have to get some things together—some things I want you to see.”

  “Brown clapboard, sagging roof, shrunken-head collection. You seem very excited, Graham.”

  “You’ll see why. I’ll see you on Poor Fox Road as soon as I can get over there.” He hung up.

  Patsy went straight to her bag, which was sitting openmouthed on the kitchen counter, and began to search inside it for her car keys.

  Only fiv
e or six minutes later she was pushing down her brake pedal, looking out the windshield of her car at what almost had to be Poor Fox Road.

  Her headlights illuminated a narrow track over which the overgrown trees and tall bamboolike marsh grass seemed to lean. Patsy caught a disturbing glimpse of the moon sailing up into the sky—just an image of it between two black looming maples—and did not recognize until a moment had passed that she had been disturbed because the moon had seemed too large, almost twice its normal size.

  She was traveling very slowly, still not absolutely certain that she was on the right road, and when she went around the bend where Bobby Fritz had so happily met Dr. Wren Van Horne, she began to hear what sounded like the noise of working machinery—a pounding, a drumming. Patsy assumed without even really registering the thought that the Academy was the source of this sound. Then her headlights found the first of the houses; then the second, which sat in a sea of junked cars; then the third. And her heart sank.

  It was brown, or something like brown, and clapboard; and the roofline noticeably sagged. Black windows gleamed at her as she drew her car up before it: but she immediately saw that she had been mistaken, the glass was broken in, long gone. The mistake seemed of a piece with the house. What had caused her despair had not been the shabbiness of the house, she had expected that; it was the atmosphere which surrounded it, of being permanently apart—selfish. She did not want to go in there. The headlights of her car brought the little building forward, emphasized its isolation and starkness. Patsy cut off her ignition and turned off her lights.

  She contemplated the house. She examined the sharply defined masses which were trees, and the hulks of abandoned cars—somehow made almost beautiful by the streaming moonlight. She gazed without interest at the other houses she could see, and saw that none of these were inhabited. Poor Fox Road was a little ghost town. She looked back at the house and found that it had lost whatever particularity it had previously had. It was just another empty building. Really, there was no reason not to take a look at it—and Graham had been so excited.

  Patsy opened the door of her car and stepped out. The machinery sound, that pounding as if jackhammers were at work in the center of the earth, abruptly ceased. She looked over her shoulder at the school property, startled, but saw only the mesh of the fence crowded with moonlit leaves.

  In front of the house she hesitated for a moment, hoping to hear Graham’s old car grinding toward her. There was no real path up to the front door anymore, only a mat of weeds. Patsy looked down the narrow track of the road again, really expecting to see Graham’s headlights sweeping through the moonlight. Patsy thought for a second: he’s never going to come: and then shook her head at her foolishness.

  She went up through the thick weeds and felt the remains of the path through the soles of her shoes. “Come on, Graham,” she said aloud. The house, she thought, must have been connected to whatever happened to Graham in the twenties; as she put her hand on the brass doorknob, Patsy realized that this mean crumbling house must be an important part of the story that involved all of them. Patsy decided to follow orders.

  She turned the knob and pushed open the door, and a squeaking bat swooped out of the house and clamped itself over the side of her face. Too startled to scream, Patsy tried to tear the creature off her face and felt its tiny claws digging into her hair, into her cheek. Her fingers found the small furry body. The bat’s high-pitched squeaks drilled into her ear. She felt its head moving, burrowing in her hair. Her eyes closed, dancing frantically back and forth, Patsy half-stumbled over a sill as she entered the house.

  The door slammed shut, but in her terror Patsy hardly heard it. The bat’s furry body revolted her, but not only did she have to touch it, she had to wrap her fingers about it. Slapping it with her hand had only increased the frequency of the shrill hate-filled noises echoing through her head. She could feel its tiny teeth working on her scalp. Patsy’s breath came in short, rapid surges, and she heard herself begin to release an eerie un-Patsy-like wail as she worked her fingers under the body of the clutching animal. At last she thought her grip was secure enough to dislodge it—the bat’s heartbeat throbbed like a bird’s in her hand—and she tore it off her head.

  The bat had gone sailing away as soon as it was free, and as Patsy opened her eyes, she threw out her arms and moved in an agitated circle. Her eyes told her nothing—she was in a black, flat environment. Holding her arms and hands over her head, still panting, Patsy started to move quickly across the room. That jackhammer-drumming sound seemed to envelop her, to rise up all about her. Patsy could not really see the floor at all: she was vaguely conscious that it was a pattern of darker and lighter patches, but had no time to imagine what that meant. She was now as terrorized by that overwhelming sound as by the possibility of the bat making another pass at her, and she moved straight toward the door. That sound seemed to boil out of the walls. Patsy had taken only a couple of awkward and hasty steps when it seemed that the floor rose up and slapped her down.

  She landed on her side, grunting. Now she could see what had felled her—before the moonlit square of window a broken floorboard slanted up like a broken spar. Her head was only inches from the ground. Above her she was suddenly conscious of black wings, of more than one body zigzagging through space. Patsy crawled forward around the hole in the floor. The boards pitched beneath her. That pounding noise rose straight up through the floor. She scrabbled across the treacherous floor, scraping her palms on broken boards, for what should have been twice the distance to the front door. The bats whickered overhead, how many she could not tell. When her hand touched a sticky metal pipe, she cried out—she had gone deeper into the house. All her crawling had taken her farther away from the door.

  Patsy used the pipe, then the metal tub above it, to lever herself to her feet. Something slimy and foul covered her hands; she felt it on her legs too. Then she saw two bats whirl past the square of window—hadn’t there been two? two windows?—and shrank away just as she took in that their faces were white. The two bats swooped past her, squeaking in fury, and Patsy saw that one of the bats had flowing red hair and a woman’s face.

  The door just opposite her flew open, revealing a solid wall of flies that instantly dissolved into a million buzzing particles. They instantly covered her, fell on the sink, blackened the air. Patsy lifted her hands to wave them away, and was given a sudden vision, as if it had been beamed into her head, of Les McCloud yelling and stamping down on the accelerator in the last seconds of his life.

  Through the screen of flies a reddish light had begun to filter, pulsing with their comprehensive buzzing. The cellar door, the source of this reddish light, threw itself fully back against its hinges.

  Patsy stood transfixed as the red light washed over her: the flies exploded up into the air again. At the bottom of the cellar steps, a red liquid washed and lapped over the wooden treads. This liquid blanketed the floor—it appeared to be at least several feet deep. In pulsating red light, it surged up to take another of the treads. Then Patsy saw a red hand break the surface of the turbulent lake. Another hand broke free. A head followed—small, well-shaped, the head of a young person.

  The streaming body tried to find its footing on the bottom step. Another hand broke free of the surface behind it; then another. The first body was that of a boy or young man, Patsy saw: it grasped the rail with one hand and yanked itself forward and up. She could see the filmed eyes moving sightlessly, painfully. Another swimmer’s head broke through back in the vault of redness, the mouth wide open in a soundless shout of triumph.

  Tabby? Patsy sent out unthinkingly. Tabby? Where are you, Tabby?

  Tabby? Tabby?

  * * *

  Patsy, Tabby thought, coming abruptly out of a miserable half-sleep tormented by images of Gravesend Beach lathered with a bloody surf. Patsy? He felt as though he’d been tickled by a cattle prod—as though a powerful wave of electric current had just gone straight through him.

  Pat
sy was in trouble: mortal trouble. Tabby threw back the sheet and sat straight up in bed, more alarmed even than he had been in his own house.

  Patsy are you all right are you are you

  He felt nothing before him but the conviction of mortal danger.

  Tabby jumped out of bed. He felt small and frantic. Where was Richard’s room? Patsy, he thought despairingly, and suddenly saw a barren room with an oozing sink and a ruptured floor. Tabby turned blindly into the hallway, going toward the main staircase through the darkness. He heard deep, even rhythmic breathing, interrupted sporadically by snorts, and turned toward the sound. Tabby held out his hands, whimpering because of his urgency, and groped until he felt the edge of a doorframe. He eased through the empty frame, and then wiped his hands up and down the wall until he found the light switch. Tabby flicked on the lights.

  Richard Allbee lay back on his bed, openmouthed and snuffling. The sudden light did not awaken him.

  Tabby ran to the side of the bed. Richard snorted loudly but did not awaken. Tabby shook Richard’s shoulders, hard. “Wake up!” he said. “You have to wake up! Richard!”

  Richard’s eyelids fluttered, his mouth smacked. He uttered a half-audible moan. “Hey,” he said.

  “It’s Patsy,” Tabby said. “She’s going to die.”

  “What?”

  “She’s going to die,” Tabby said, and his voice broke. “She’s in some terrible old house, and something’s going to kill her, Richard. We have to help her.”

  “Help her how? How do you know this, anyhow? What can we do?” Richard was now wholly awake, but not yet fully in command of himself.

  “Call Graham,” the boy said. “He’ll know where the house is—he has to know.”

  “You’re sure?” Richard said, then wiped his face and looked at the boy. “Of course you’re sure. I’ll call him right now. I just hope he got back home.”