Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Richard lifted the bedside phone and put it in his lap and began to dial.

  For Tabby, everything was moving with agonizing slowness. He turned his back on Richard, hearing the maddeningly slow clicks of the dial, and closed his eyes.

  oh Patsy Patsy hang on please

  we’ll find you Patsy—God we will

  don’t don’t don’t die I love you

  Behind him a surprised-sounding Richard was talking with Graham: when Tabby heard him say, “You think you know the house?” he could concentrate no longer. “You think your arm’s broken?” he heard Richard say, and that snapped his concentration for good.

  “Get your shoes on,” Richard told him. “Graham’s coming over right now—I’ll just throw on a bathrobe and we’ll get going in my car. He thinks he knows where she is.”

  * * *

  As much as she heard Tabby speaking in her mind—and that was only dimly—the air about Patsy seemed charged with a particular Tabby-ness, a fresh sprinkling of his personality that was curiously detached from Tabby as a person; the essence without the form that gave the essence its meaning. Instantly the crowd of flies filling the air seemed to lessen.

  Down there, the redness and the pulsing light were diminishing second by second. The blood-soaked creature on the cellar stairs retreated, still holding out one arm toward Patsy as if he expected her to help him escape. Even after his head had disappeared beneath the red tide, the arm still reached out, imploring. Watching that arm sinking slowly into the red tide, going to the elbow, then to the wrist as the fingers stretched hopelessly out, Patsy began to weep. The tide of blood in the basement fell back slowly from the stairs, going down some invisible cosmic drain.

  She looked toward the spotted ceiling. Hundreds of flies buzzed in circles up there, throwing themselves against the crumbling fabric, trying to get out.

  Patsy stumbled, then went blindly out of the kitchen. She stepped over the holes in the floor, skirted the board that had brought her down earlier. Now she could see the door clearly in the moon-washed interior—it was even open a crack, and an oblong of light had fallen into the room. Across Poor Fox Road black and white leaves stirred and whispered.

  She waited in the middle of the road. She busied herself in plucking drying flakes of yellowish gunk off her clothes. When she chafed her palms up and down her calves, most of the pasty yellow stuff shredded away. Patsy crossed the street to her car. A few seconds later, headlights poked around the bend of the little overgrown road.

  She could see their faces through the open side window of Richard’s car—three white ovals pressing toward her. Patsy saw that Graham’s right arm was in an impromptu sling made from a red paisley bandanna. An enormous bruise purpled his right cheek.

  From Tabby, she felt a warming uncomplicated blast of concern and love.

  “Can you drive your car, Patsy?” Graham boomed at her. “We shouldn’t leave it here all night.”

  Patsy nodded.

  “Sure?” Richard asked, leaning over Tabby to get a closer look at her. “Why don’t you let me come with you?”

  “Yes. Okay. I’d like that.”

  “Then drive back to my house,” Graham said. “None of us is going to get any sleep tonight.”

  5

  Patsy and Richard sat on Graham’s old couch, Graham straddled his typing chair and sat facing them across his coffee table, scowling. Tabby sat cross-legged on the floor before Richard and knew that the scowl was chiefly meant for him: he could tell, too, that Graham was as angry at himself as at him. Now they all knew what had happened to one another that day, and each of them, Tabby thought, was thinking that his luck must be running out.

  “I asked you a question, Tabby,” Graham said. “How did you know that Patsy was in trouble? And how could you describe the setting so well that I could identify it? What’s going on here, Tabby?”

  “I just knew,” Tabby said.

  “Just knew. Pah! Don’t you realize, son, that everything that happens to us is important—part of the pattern? And that if we can’t read the pattern we can’t do our job? You can’t hide anything from me, Tabby, not if you’re serious about helping us.”

  “I’m serious, all right,” Tabby said. He didn’t mind telling Graham and Richard about the connection between Patsy and himself, not if Patsy didn’t mind, but he could not tell Graham Williams and Richard Allbee what he had been doing the night he and Patsy had discovered the connection, even though he felt closer to them than to anyone except Patsy. They would not understand—Tabby himself barely understood anymore how he had let himself get talked into going with the Norman twins. Tabby was serious; how serious, Graham and Richard would learn when they found out that he had destroyed the Dragon.

  “Prove it to me,” Graham said.

  You bet I will, Tabby thought, and said, “Okay. You want to, Patsy?” He looked up at her, and she was nodding at him. “Okay. I don’t know what you call it, exactly, but Patsy and I, we, uh, we can . . .”

  “Telepathy,” Patsy said. “We can send messages to each other.”

  Behind Tabby, Richard Allbee inhaled sharply.

  “Ah,” Graham said. He was smiling. “Of course, it had to be that. I knew the first time I saw the two of you together that you were two of a kind. Good. Thank you for telling me. When did you first notice that you had this ability?”

  This question led to paths Tabby did not wish to take. He said, “It just happened.”

  “Nothing ‘just happens.’ Patsy?”

  “It was the first night all four of us were together,” Patsy said. “The night I had the fit and saw the dragon-head coming out of that book.”

  Graham straightened up, and adjusted the sling on his arm. “As long ago as that,” he said. “But it does fit, do you see, it fits beautifully. Because we came together and we fit. And we fit because we had to: and the reason we had to is that our enemy was just finding his real strength then. He and the four of us turned a corner together. Tabby! Do you have anything to tell us? Anything to add?”

  Tabby shook his head.

  “Well, let me tell you what is in store for us—let me tell you about the Black Summer, and then you might want to change your mind. Of course, by now you can probably guess what went on then. At least some of it. Because it’s going on around us now—I think Gideon Winter is trying to reenact the summer of 1873, and I think he’s doing a pretty fair job. We have people moving out of town, we have the fires and all the deaths . . .” His face pinched with pain, and he carefully adjusted his improvised sling again. “Pretty soon the trains’ll just go past the stations here—Greenbank and Hampstead. The drivers will just ‘forget’ to stop one day, and then pretty soon they’ll ‘forget’ again, and before long they’ll hardly even see those stations when they run past them. Once in a blue moon they’ll look and see the big red HAMPSTEAD sign and they’ll scratch their heads and wonder why it gives them a twinge. And you know, it won’t make any difference at all—no one’s going to be waiting for the train anyhow, those platforms’ll be deserted. We’re going to be sealed off, friends, and the town is going to accept it—it’s already halfway there. And Hampstead could be nothing but a big grave-yard for the next two years, the next five years, the next ten . . .”

  Graham fixed them all with his glare, then rubbed his throat with his left hand. “Dry. I’m gonna need some lubrication. Tabby, you step over to the refrigerator there and get me a bottle of beer, will you? Patsy, you want anything? Some of that gin? Richard? Might as well settle down, it’ll be a long speech. I’m going to tell you about that summer of 1873, but I’m also going to let you in on what happened between me and Mr. Bates Krell, whose house we saw tonight. It’s about time you kids let me get all that off my chest.”

  Tabby got a beer for himself, too.

  3

  The Burning River

  1

  “I was twenty,” Graham began. “Closer to Tabby’s age than either of yours, which is something you ought to remember
as we go along. I was working on my first novel—one I published eight years later. I thought I had a pretty good subject for a novel, and in fact the subject was going on right around me, because I wanted to deal with the disappearances of women from Hampstead. My parents had known one of these women, Daisy West. And I knew that Daisy’s husband, Horace, who was actually a very mild man, had fallen apart when Daisy vanished—he went down to the police station and threw a punch at Nails Kletzka, the chief. And Nails put him in a cell for the night. That was the sort of thing I wanted to work on. The effect on other people when somebody disappears, how lives are changed by that.

  “Anyhow, I had me a little notebook in which I’d scribble my ideas, and I’d take long walks, getting away from people—my family, I guess I mean—and write down the little things I thought of. And most days, where I walked was alongside Rex Road—that road that runs along the river from Greenbank Road all the way into town. In those days almost all the left side of Rex Road was open field, right down to the river. You could walk for two, three miles and never lose sight of the water. I’d watch the traffic on the Nowhatan, write down some notion, and amble along. When I got hungry I’d sit down and take a sandwich out of my canvas back-pack—I always had a couple of books in there too, maybe a little volume of John Donne or Rupert Brooke. I was a high-toned young fellow, if I wasn’t always as discriminating as I imagined. High-toned. Naive—and about as capable of writing the book I wanted to as a hamster. Me and my Donne and Rupert Brooke—they weren’t the weapons that let me survive that summer.

  “Well, one day I was sitting there in the field beside Rex Road, watching the boats on the Nowhatan and eating my sandwich. I looked up, and my eye was caught by a man puttering around on the deck of a chunky little lobsterboat making its way toward the Sound. He was bearded, a big guy, with a heavy blue coat on his back and a cap jammed slantwise on his head. For some reason I felt a sudden disturbance—I mean, I felt disturbed, but I mean more than that. I felt a disturbance, a hitch, an error in the pattern of things somehow: as if I’d glimpsed two moons in the sky. I felt a sudden wrongness; maybe that’s the best way to put it. I put down my book, and the sandwich went dry in my mouth. The boat swung out, shifting itself in the current, and the man in the cap held on to the railing beside his cabin and raised his head. He was looking straight at me, as if all along he’d known I was there on the bank.”

  Graham stopped—Patsy’s face had gone white and alarmed. Her eyes looked widely dilated, and he knew that whatever she was seeing, it was not the four of them in his shabby living room.

  Then Tabby said, “You knew,” and he looked at the boy, who had the look of kinship to Patsy that Graham had seen the first time he met them—Tabby’s face too was frozen and white.

  “You knew,” Patsy echoed.

  They were seeing it with him—seeing it better than he, because he was looking back through his memory and they were seeing it freshly, directly.

  “Yes, I knew,” he said. “I knew that I had seen a devil. The way you’re seeing him now.”

  “My God,” said Richard. “Are you, Patsy? Tabby?”

  They nodded, almost in unison.

  “My God,” Richard repeated. “I suppose we ought to be getting used to things like this by now, but . . .”

  “You saw the world go crazy,” Tabby said.

  “Once in my life I was like you two. I had some kind of a vision, and it rocked me. I saw the world turn black, or maybe my sight went black for a second, and then I saw smoke lifting up off the ground, and I saw flames covering the surface of the Nowhatan. The river was nothing but flame. It stank like a dump. Then the vision went away. I was just looking at the good old gray Nowhatan again, and a tubby little lobsterboat was putting out to the Sound. That man on deck had paid no more attention to me than he would to a dog.”

  “So you felt you had to follow him,” Patsy said, and Tabby chimed in with, “To find out about him.”

  “I was back there the next day, and I had my notebook and my lunch but I wasn’t hungry and I hadn’t written anything. I was tense as a whippet. You know, I think I was waiting for that terrible vision to repeat itself—and I was sure it would. It was the confirmation that I wanted—confirmation that there were realms of existence, realms of being, beyond anything I had known before. I couldn’t take my eyes off that little boat docked only a little way downstream. Well, the man appeared; he started up his engines; he went right past me, just as he had the day before. And just as he had the previous day, he lifted his head and saw me standing on the bank—his glance just glided over me. He was a stocky, powerful-looking man and I could still feel the touch of his eyes. The boat chugged past me. Nothing at all happened. I stood there, like a rejected suitor, and watched it go. I felt empty and flat. The boat went on, an ordinary lobsterboat, around a bend in the river . . . and me standing there with my mouth open.

  “So you’re right,” Graham went on. “I had to find out about him. Late that afternoon I was across the river. I pretended that I had a message for one of the lobstermen but that I had forgotten his name. ‘A big man,’ I said, ‘with a beard. He wears a cap. This is where he docks his boat.’ A scrawny little mate grinned at the others and said, ‘It’s Krell. He means Bates Krell.’ He turned back to me, and I saw sheer malice glinting in his eyes. ‘Have a message for Bates Krell, do you? He’ll have one for you and all, boy.’ They all laughed, and another fisherman said, ‘He’ll have more than a message, sonny.’ Of course I didn’t understand then what they meant, but I understood something—they were afraid of the man.

  “Well, I waited for him to come in with his catch. I didn’t have a clue about the meaning of what had happened, but I thought I understood that this man Krell was in some way responsible for the very thing that had led me to my first sight of him—the disappearance of Daisy West and those other women. Krell brought his boat in just before sundown. He had a small catch and I hung back on the edge of the docks and watched him as he negotiated a price for his lobsters with the fish merchants who came there for that purpose. He seemed surly, aggressive, not at all stupid—he seemed ordinary, but I knew he was not. I wanted to know where he lived: I wanted to know all about his life. The aura of that extraordinary vision I’d had clung to him, and I felt a kind of obsession with the man.

  “When he went home I followed him. I didn’t think he saw me. He walked those two or three miles up Greenbank Road just looking straight ahead, just marching along in his rubber boots and little cap, as if the whole world belonged to him. It had grown dark, and there was nothing on either side of Greenbank Road in those days but fields and marshes. No lights. I went through the fields, covering myself in burrs and thistle, ruining my shoes and pants.

  “So that was how I learned where his house was—and as soon as I saw it, I knew that it was no more ordinary than its owner. It was absolutely his. Or he was its. I hid in the trees on Poor Fox Road and watched him slouch up his path, open his door, and go inside. That terrible little house closed around him like a fist. I backed away, almost with the sense that the house itself was seeing me with Krell’s eyes—I was suddenly spooked, everything around me seemed threatening, and I took off for home. And when I got there and survived the treatment I got from my parents for showing up so late and in such a shabby condition, I had to think of what I could do next—for, knowing what I was pretty sure I knew, I had to do something. I couldn’t just write a book about a fisherman who killed people: I had to step over the line and act. I think I had the worst nightmares of my life that night.

  “But in the morning, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to get the evidence that would send Bates Krell to jail. And I was going to get it by secretly boarding his boat in the middle of the night and finding something that one of the women had dropped there—as a fisherman, I’d realized, Krell had the biggest pocket in the world to hide things in. The Nowhatan; Long Island Sound; the Atlantic Ocean. He could have thrown half the women in Hampstead overboard, and
as long as he’d taken the precaution of weighting them down, no one would ever find them.”

  Graham, intent now on his story, did not see the odd expression, half of apprehension and half of stubborn determination, that went across Tabby Smithfield’s face.

  2

  “Two nights later,” Graham continued, “I did it. I got on board Krell’s boat. I found something, but it wasn’t what I thought I was going to find.

  “I had to wait until my parents were asleep, and then make damn sure I didn’t wake them up. You know what parents are—everything wakes them up. So I didn’t get moving until after midnight, and I just crept into my clothes and went down the stairs like a ghost, terrified that my old man would start shouting. When I got outside, I closed that door so quietly even I didn’t hear it click. Then I tiptoed into the road and got about fifty paces away—and then I ran like hell.

  “And I didn’t stop running until I got to the bridge. I hadn’t seen a living soul the whole way—not even a car. Hampstead was really just a small town in those days, and small towns go to bed early. I flew: I couldn’t have walked even if I had wanted to, my body wouldn’t have let me. I suppose my footsteps might have disturbed the sleep of a citizen or two, but I thought what I was going to find would be much more disturbing—proof that Daisy West and the others had been murdered, just like the women before them, back at the start of 1924. By the time I got to the bridge I had run about two and a half miles, and my legs were pretty sore, but I don’t think I was even breathing hard. That’s how keyed up I was! I leaned on the iron railing of the bridge and looked up the river. I could see it. Krell’s boat, the Fancy, was docked just where it had been the day before. There wasn’t a single human being in sight.

  “I walked the rest of the way. There were a couple of taverns down that way even then, speakeasies they were, and a few late-night drinkers went past me on Riverfront Avenue. I turned my head away, and I suppose they did the same. As soon as I could, I ducked between the buildings and got closer to the river.