Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “I watched you when Graham was telling us about Bates Krell. I could tell what you wanted to do—you want to kill the Dragon by yourself, don’t you? Just like he did. It was written all over your face.”

  He nodded: if she had seen that much, then she knew the most important thing.

  “I could kill him,” he said. “If Graham could do it when he was only twenty, I could do it now.”

  “You know who he is,” Patsy said, finally stating the real subject of all their conversation. “I thought you did.”

  “I’d like to bring you his head on a plate,” Tabby said, smiling grimly. “That’s what I’d really like.”

  There was an electric silence between them for a moment, and then before Tabby could speak again, Patsy said, “I’d rather come with you. Let’s both put his head on a plate.”

  It was just what he had been thinking, advanced another step in reasoning. He inhaled: now she would never leave him alone long enough to do anything anyhow. Patsy had forced his hand beautifully, and made it impossible for him to make any choice but the one he most desired but had not yet come to. He and Patsy would kill the Dragon together.

  “He killed my father,” Tabby said. “He made everything be this way. I saw his face when I was five years old—I was a little boy, and I saw him murder someone.” Tabby’s sense of outrage seethed, then calmed. “I want to do it tonight,” he said. “Let’s do it tonight.”

  “Two of us should have a better chance than you alone,” Patsy said. “And we’ve been each other’s good luck, haven’t we?”

  He could see the fear in her face, and knew it matched his own; but she was strong enough to carry both of them through. Tabby’s hesitation died.

  “Tell me his name,” she said.

  “It’s that doctor who lives in the big house just above the beach. Dr. Van Horne.”

  “And you’re sure about that—I won’t ask you how you know, I just want to be sure that you really do know.”

  Tabby nodded, seeing amazement and surprise and, even more than these, confidence in him replace the fear in Patsy’s face. “I really do know,” he said. “It has to be him. But you have to promise me—you won’t tell Richard and Graham.”

  “I should.” She looked into his implacable face. “But I won’t. I promise.”

  * * *

  “Tonight,” Tabby finally said.

  “About six or six-thirty? I usually go out for a walk around then. I don’t want to make Graham suspicious. And there’s something I want to pick up from home.”

  “I’ll meet you out on the street. Richard and Graham are so tied up in each other, they’ll never notice we’re gone.”

  Patsy gave him a nervous smile, acknowledging the rightness of this.

  “And you really won’t tell the others?”

  “I promised you.”

  “You’re pretty special,” Tabby told her. He was seeing her suddenly and for the first time not as someone separated from him by the disparity of age and sex, but as an equal. A robin began its song. Standing a foot away from Patsy McCloud in the hazy sunlight before his grandfather’s old house, Tabby took in this small woman with prominent cheekbones and delicate lines around her large brown eyes—

  you too, buster

  —and was the adult man he would be someday, looking at a woman he had known so long and with so much affection—

  ??? what??? Tabby?

  —that his imagination could follow hers by instinct. Around Tabby the world wildly swayed, and he was twenty years older, the true partner of Patsy McCloud, and so much information about himself and Patsy streamed out from her that he could not sway with the world: fields of flowers, glistening with rain, lay about them: he took an awkward, lurching step backward, and that broke it. The world was still and Patsy’s history, which had somehow miraculously been the history of himself and Patsy, was no longer flowing into him. That odd singing vision had left him; the robin’s song had ceased.

  what the hell???

  Patsy I, Patsy I . . . how?

  “What was that?” she said to him—her face was wild. She stepped right into him and put her arms around his chest. “My God,” she said.

  “I can’t, uh . . .” he began. “I can’t, uh . . .” He blinked rapidly, then stepped back from her, still holding her arms. “Holy mackerel.”

  They dropped their arms and moved apart from each other.

  “Okay,” Tabby said. “Okay. Six o’clock.”

  He watched her go away from him—she turned and waved just before she went back up Beach Trail.

  Tabby decided to walk up to the hole in the ground filled with blackened rubble that until three days ago had been “Four Hearths.” This was his father’s only grave.

  As he walked up the hill Tabby again had the crawly sensation that he was being followed, but he did not even bother to look over his shoulder. The feeling was a part of that weakness for which Patsy McCloud and “Four Hearths” were the cure.

  3

  “What time is it, Richard? Should we be getting back inside?”

  Richard Allbee, sprawled on a lawn chair, raised his arm and squinted at his wrist. “About five to six. Why go back inside? It’s so nice out here. But I suppose I ought to start dinner soon.”

  Graham took a long draw on his cigar and then released a thick plume of smoke. “I guess I don’t associate thought with my backyard. Thinking is indoor work. But if you want to stay out a little longer, that’s fine with me. Where did Patsy wander off to?”

  “You got me,” Richard said. “Maybe she wanted to talk to Tabby.”

  “Yes,” Graham said. The sling was gone; he had not after all broken his elbow but only bruised it. He too lay back on an untrustworthy lawn chair, the straps of which were frayed and rusty. The tallest of the weeds pushed up against these plastic straps, and indeed felt much tougher than them to Richard—if the straps finally let go, the weeds would probably hold him up by themselves. Graham said, “They’re very close. Well, they would be, given what they have in common. I’m sorry you weren’t there the first time they met.”

  Richard rolled over on his side to look directly at Graham. Beyond the old man, who was particularly garish this evening in a red sweatshirt and the yellowish-tan tweed trousers of what must have been a forty-year-old suit, the unkempt backyard straggled in a wilderness of weeds and knee-high grass forty yards to an impenetrable wall of foliage.

  “After Tabby and Patsy had seen each other, I think Patsy got ten years younger on the spot,” Graham said. “They share something we’ll never really understand—no more than a person blind from birth must understand the concept of color. But even so, I think it’ll work for us. It’s part of our arsenal.”

  “Graham,” Richard asked, “what do you think is really going to happen to us? Believe me, I wouldn’t ask this if Tabby and Patsy were here, but have we got any kind of a chance at all?”

  “Yep,” Graham said. “’Course we do. Even after the Black Summer, our people destroyed him. It’s harder for us now, of course—everything else has changed, too. A hundred years ago, it didn’t matter quite so much if Hampstead was cut off. We grew most of our own food, d’ya see? Most of this was farmland—we lived off the land. But pretty soon, the grocery stores are going to be damn near empty, and things are going to get serious. We’re going to have riots over food. People are going to get killed for meat and flour and sugar.” He drew on his cigar again, and held it up as he exhaled. “There won’t be any more of these, either. Oh, I don’t know if the government will really let it get so far, as far as food riots anyhow. I suppose they’ll allow in just enough food to keep us from starving.”

  “You’re thinking of that Telpro story on the news,” Richard said. “The world thinks that is the reason for all our troubles here—they think that stuff is driving us all crazy. And I think it is too. DRG.”

  “One of history’s jokes,” Graham said. “The name, I mean. Or it could be a sign that our enemy has a million weapons
lined up against us . . . or—get this, Richard. Maybe it’s all this DRG. Maybe we’re completely out of our heads.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  “Nope,” Graham said, and was going to say more when a great commotion on the other side of the tangled screen of trees made both men sit up on their stretched-out chairs.

  “What the hell . . .” Graham began, and looked over at Richard, who was already on his feet. The sound coming from behind the dense gathering of trees had already doubled in volume—it was as loud as a rock band and twice as cacophonous, filling every particle of the air.

  “Get up!” Richard shouted, but knew that his words too were lost—Graham seemed helpless, his face working foolishly and his big hands flying up and down. Finally Richard saw that Graham could not get out of his chair, and he grabbed his forearms and pulled him out. A hot breeze, springing up from nowhere, flattened the old man’s sweatshirt against his back and pulled at Richard’s hair.

  The sounds of white-hot metal being plunged into cold water—that was the image in Richard’s mind—now were joined by the more obvious noises of fire. Graham got to his feet just as the nearest trees burst into flame.

  And then Richard was standing still with his hands clamped around Graham’s wrists because what he was seeing had stolen his power to move. The hot wind fried his skin; the furry tips of the weeds nearest the property line were popping into flame like little candles. A fiery ball of light had burst sizzling out of the trees, leaving a smoking black hole behind it. Richard stood openmouthed until the huge ball of light slammed into the ground.

  In the middle of a burning circle stood a giant black dog. It swung its head and snapped its jaws at nothing.

  Richard and Graham were already moving backward toward the house, and in the sudden clarity of the silence they heard the dog’s teeth click together. Its growl seemed to grow right out of the earth—the low powerful sound vibrated in Richard’s belly. He was dimly aware of Graham picking up his lawn chair and dragging it along as they moved backward. The dog radared its massive head toward them. Richard estimated that he and Graham were perhaps twelve feet away from the back door—three or four seconds. Graham was moving as quickly as he could, and still fumbling with that chair. Neither of them wanted to turn his back on the dog, which had begun to bristle and crouch. A stiff ruff of hair stood up between its taut shoulders.

  The dog’s mouth quivered uncontrollably over the long white teeth. Strings of saliva looped out and collapsed into the weeds.

  If it jumped at them, it could tear them to pieces before they got a foot nearer the back door.

  The huge black head tracked from Richard to Graham; back to Richard; to Graham.

  The dog moved slowly toward them, still crouching, tracking the men. Richard felt a blanket of perspiration rise up out of his skin and instantly soak him. A drop trembled from one of his eyebrows and splashed down into his eye, and his vision blurred. He was afraid even to blink. The giant dog crept nearer, slavering and trembling.

  At last Richard could no longer bear not knowing the distance to the back door, and he twisted his head and glanced over his shoulder. He was immediately aware of a massive displacement of space—as though a building had taken flight. That rumbling low growl now hung in the air behind him, and Graham’s door, propped open for the ventilation, was only a few feet away. He reached for Graham just an instant after he saw the blur of preposterous colors that was the old man convulse.

  Richard caught a flailing arm and pinned it to Graham’s chest, pulling both of them backward, and realized that Graham had thrown his chair at the giant dog. They fell back into the house and landed heavily, Graham on top of Richard, on the kitchen floor. The dog’s muzzle jumped toward them through the door and then stopped suddenly as the animal’s shoulders caught in the frame. “Screen door!” Graham yelled, and rolled away. Richard squirmed out of the way of the gnashing teeth and flattened himself against the wall. As the dog snarled and stared at him with black eyes the size of footballs, Richard worked his way around the back of the screen door. He slammed it on the dog’s head, feeling the frame bend when it met bone. The dog retreated for a moment, then slammed itself into the doorway a second time, shaking all of Graham’s house. Richard heard a thud thud slap from the other end of the house—books were tumbling off the shelves. He used all his strength to smash the frame into the dog’s head. Now the animal was uttering a crazed set of squeals and roars. Richard’s heart was trying to jump out of his chest: he gave the head another battering, running the frame into the muzzle, and the dog violently waggled his head and shook Richard off-balance and onto the floor. One more charge and he’ll knock the wall in, Richard thought, and got back on his feet.

  The black football of the eye swiveled furiously toward Richard. He put his shoulder to the screen door and drove it again into the muzzle.

  The dog yelped and drew itself backward, leaving a four-inch-thick trail of drool on the floor. Richard saw a ribbon of blood spurt from the dog’s nose and soak into the hairs and whiskers beneath. A red stripe formed down the side of the muzzle, and the dog backed all the way out of the door, making a high-pitched keening sound.

  “Got him!” Graham yelled. “Got the bastard!”

  The giant dog lowered its head to the ground and clamped its paw over its muzzle. Richard opened the screen door and quickly grabbed the doorknob of the yawning door and slammed it shut. Then he locked it. He could still hear the dog crying outside, as loudly as if the animal had a microphone in its throat. Then he turned around and looked at Graham.

  The old man was dancing on the balls of his feet, his long white hair floating around the sides of his head. “Did you see it? Did you see it? I nailed the son of a bitch.” He danced back a few steps, then forward again, jabbing with a long stainless-steel carving knife. “I shoved this damn thing right into his goddamned nose. Hah!”

  “Good work,” Richard said. “I think he was just about to break down your kitchen wall.”

  “What’s he doing now? Is he still nursing himself out there?” Graham dashed to the window and Richard followed. The dog was supine on the carpet of weeds. When it saw the men looking at it, the dog picked itself up and barked twice. Then it swung its head around, sending splashes of blood flying onto the lawn, and looked for something to attack. Finally the dog saw the upended lawn chair Graham had thrown at it, picked it up with its long teeth and flipped it up and down until the chair was only a collection of long sticks held together with plastic rags.

  “Should we try to get out the front door?” Richard asked.

  “And go where?” Graham asked. The question seemed to sober him. He put the knife in the sink and passed his trembling hands over his face. “How far do you think we’d get? We wouldn’t make it across the street.”

  Though it still bled, the giant dog now paced back and forth over Graham’s weedy lawn, watching both the door and the window. “Let’s try something,” Graham said. “You go to the front door. Just look out. Let’s see what happens.”

  As soon as Richard left the kitchen, the dog ceased its pacing and loped around the side of the house. Graham followed Richard through the house and found him peering through the window set in the front door. He did not even have to look outside. The dog was uttering its repertoire of squeals and yelps and interrogatory whines so loudly that Graham would have had to shout to speak to Richard. He tapped him on the shoulder instead, nodded, and jerked his thumb back toward the kitchen.

  The dog beat them to the other side of the house and was already pacing the backyard when they looked out the kitchen window.

  “We’re trapped,” Richard said.

  “I think that’s the point,” Graham said. For a moment all his force of character deserted him, and he resembled a weary and badly made-up old clown. “Do you have any idea where Patsy and Tabby are?”

  Richard shook his head. He still did not understand.

  “That thing out there is keeping us from them. I
f it had been able to kill us, that would have been fine and dandy, but the main thing is that we can’t help Patsy and the boy. Gideon Winter is after them.” Graham’s eyes looked stricken. “He knows where they are, Richard. And he’s going to try to get them. I bet you Tabby got all worked up over my story about Bates Krell and thinks he can do in the Dragon all by himself.”

  “And Patsy insisted on going with him. Because she would know.”

  “Damn that boy,” Graham said. “I knew it, knew it, knew it. Tabby was holding out on us.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Richard said. He glanced outside to where the giant dog was trotting relentlessly back and forth through the weeds.

  “Well, there’s one thing I am sure of,” Graham said. “We have to get out of this house.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a gun.”

  Graham tilted his head, rubbed his hands on the red sweatshirt, drying his palms. “A gun? Christ, I have something around here somewhere. A shotgun. Shells, too. I haven’t looked at it in twenty years. Got it in London. Hang on, I’ll see if I can find it.” Graham walked past Richard and went out of the kitchen, almost literally scratching his head.

  Richard watched the dog loping back and forth across the backyard and listened to Graham’s progress through the house. After a minute or two Graham called, “Found it!” from the top of the house. He came into the kitchen with gray ovals of dust on his knees and a long double-barreled shotgun in one hand. “Up in the attic, still in its case. Never even got dusty.”

  He handed Richard the shotgun and thumped a box of shells on the table. “Here, you try her. I never was much of a shot.”

  Richard turned the shotgun over in his hands. The stock gleamed; an ornate pattern decorated the barrels. “A Purdy,” he said. “When you said you had a shotgun, you weren’t kidding.” He looked curiously at Graham, then cracked the gun open and peered down the barrels. Satisfied, he slotted in two shells and then scooped out a handful more and jammed them in his pocket.