Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Maybe what I’m saying is that I felt leadership pass from me to Richard, or understood that it had been his all along.

  People attracted by the tower of smoke and flame from the Van Horne house had begun to appear on Mount Avenue, walking slowly toward us, their faces tilted up so that they seemed to be watching a high-wire act.

  I wondered if my heart was up to what was to come. I wondered if Tabby could really be alive. The three of us stepped onto Poor Fox Road more or less in unison.

  * * *

  The sky changed—without any transition it went from the hazy blue it had been to a gaseous, bubbling red. Patsy stopped moving, and I stopped too. What was above us looked like the expression of an ultimate rage, anger taken to a total limit. A thousand soundless but vivid explosions tore the sky’s fabric, sending waves out to thrash and pound against each other. A moment later the sky was bright yellow; then a hard monochrome blue no sky ever was before; then a deep violet-purple; and then it was black. Two moons hung over us, one that ferocious bubbling red and the other white and dead.

  All of Poor Fox Road was illuminated by cold moonlight. Patsy gripped my arm so tight it hurt. “Okay,” Richard said, and we began to go forward again toward Bates Krell’s house.

  When we came to the place where the road bends, I saw a dark shape hanging from one of the big trees alongside the Academy fence. It slowly spun and twisted as we came nearer, a shadowy elongated cocoon. Both Richard and Patsy had seen it, too, and I felt Patsy tighten her grip on my arm again. A second later I saw that it was a body hanging upside down from the tangle of branches.

  The body twisted around to face us, and the silver light fell directly across it. The chest had been sliced open and the ribs broken, and the whole middle section of the body was a black hole. Beneath the slashes and wounds, I recognized the face of Bobby Fritz. The terrible face was laughing at us, the mouth split into a Halloween grin. Bobby Fritz’s corpse screamed “You’re dead! You’re dead!”

  Patsy gasped and pulled at me. Bobby’s dangling arms burst into flame. His hair shrivelled and twisted in the heat, and a moment later it too began to burn, making a little puff as it went alight.

  Richard reached back and gave me a yank, and I pulled Patsy along in my wake.

  We moved awkwardly forward for a few paces, and then Patsy seemed to find her rhythm again. “I’ll be okay, Graham,” she said. “You don’t have to frogmarch me.” She pulled her arm away from mine, and then looked back over her shoulder. By reflex I too looked back.

  The blazing corpse of Bobby Fritz spun around like a mechanical toy, and beneath the flames we could see his mutilated features.

  Patsy McCloud snapped her head forward, and her eyes found mine. She said, “I told you, I’m okay,” and marched right past me.

  Just a few minutes later we saw the Krell house come into view past a wasteland of wrecked cars, and all three of us slowed our pace, as if we thought we could sneak up on it. The windows, or the black holes where the windows should have been, shone redly; but we knew Krell’s house was not burning. And we knew we could not sneak up on it; we were walking more slowly because suddenly we were in no hurry to do what we knew we had to do.

  Even when I was twenty and straight and pretty well muscled, that house had spooked me. I knew a lot more about it now.

  Richard quickly moved on ahead of us, and went right over the moon-washed scurf of weeds to the door. He held the shotgun straight out at his hips and looked back at us. I saw his jaw muscles jumping. Patsy went straight toward him. I came up beside the other two, and Richard said, “Here goes nothing,” and turned the knob and pushed open the door with the barrel of the shotgun. Patsy flattened her hands over the top of her head. Red light spilled out over our legs.

  You will have worked out already that Patsy covered her hair because of the bats, but I didn’t get it until I had looked in. Richard was pointing the shotgun into the room as if there was going to be something he could shoot. Maybe half a dozen bats came wheeling and skittering out of the corners of the room; Richard tried to wave them away with the barrels of the gun, but two of the bats merely circled off and flew back toward us.

  Then I saw long red hair streaming from the head of one of the two bats taking another dive past Richard; and I took in that both had white faces. I did not want to see their faces—I knew I would recognize them, and that would have been worse than the sight of Bobby Fritz hanging upside down from the tree.

  Richard gasped, and let the barrels sag down: he had recognized one of those tiny faces.

  My temper jumped up inside me like a wild beast. Tabby’s own face shone in my mind, and I gripped Richard’s free arm as he had done mine four minutes earlier, and I pulled him into the house with me. “It’s daytime!” I shouted, “daytime!”

  For a second or two, maybe more, it was—we saw the real sunlight splashing against a wall, the real barrenness of the place. Ruptured floorboards, cracked walls, thick dust: we saw it. There were no bats. Patsy rushed inside and got right up next to me, and I felt strong enough to take on three Bates Krells. My temper still sizzled. Giant dogs and bats with human faces! Two moons! This stuff turned my stomach.

  A movement at my side registered in the corner of my eye, and I turned my head and moved forward at the same time. What I saw was Les McCloud standing in the doorway to another room, wearing striped pajamas and a gaping robe and already pulling the trigger of a small pistol. A long line of flame erupted from the pistol’s little barrel, squirted just past Patsy and me, and shot harmlessly into the room to our right.

  Black night immediately returned, and the blast from the shotgun flared out just as I saw Les begin to fade into nothingness. The wad of shot smacked into a wall. “He’s gone,” I said, but no longer felt like challenging the darkness.

  I could hear Richard breathing hard as he ejected the spent cartridge and sent it rattling to the floor.

  We all could see that the source of the red light filtering through the dark was the room that lay beyond the door where Les’s spectre had appeared. It spread outward from that room, filling the doorway with a red haze.

  “I know where we have to go,” Patsy said, flicking a sideways look at me. Her face seemed bony and drawn in the dim light, neither male nor female.

  “Patsy,” I said, “no one is going to make you go down there.”

  “He’s right,” Richard said. “Not after the last time. You could wait outside—you came this far, and that’s enough. If Tabby’s down there, we’ll find him.”

  “Tabby’s dead,” she said with that same flat certainty. “But I’m still going with you. We have to be together, don’t we? That’s what you think, isn’t it, Graham?” Her eyes slid toward me, more bravely than before.

  “I don’t know what I think anymore,” I said truthfully.

  “Well, I think I want to end it,” she said. Then she surprised us both by pulling her pistol from her waistband—I guess both Richard and I had assumed that she had left it in Wren Van Horne’s house. “I’ll use this, too, if I have to. There’s one bullet left in it, I think. You two guys can wait out on the sidewalk if you like.” She tucked the gun away back under her shirt and looked at us, just waiting to see what we would do. She was small and brave and willful, grown far past the woman who had come running around the corner toward three men and a boy on that night when the first birds had fallen from the sky. Patsy had come a farther distance than any of us.

  “Well, let’s go then,” Richard said, tucking the shotgun up under his arm. “We all want to end it.” He looked at me and I saw that despite the calm in his voice he too had been moved by Patsy.

  She abruptly turned around and walked through the hazy doorway into Bates Krell’s kitchen. Richard and I followed closely behind. The door to the basement still hung wide open on its hinges, and we saw that Patsy had been correct—the light came streaming up the basement stairs. When the three of us looked down we saw how strong, how dark it was, how it pulsed. Going down
there would be like walking into an enormous heart.

  I stepped forward first. If anything were going to happen—if there were booby traps on these stairs—I wanted it to happen to me, not those two. Being seventy-six has a few advantages, one of them being that a premature demise is no longer possible. Still, I took those stairs slow and easy, and kept my eyes open. Like a heart—the image grew more accurate the farther down I went. I was bathed in that redness; the pulsations of the light vibrated through the treads of the stairs and the flimsy handrail.

  Richard came up beside me—he too wanted to be between Patsy McCloud and whatever might be in the basement. We moved around the side of the staircase.

  I don’t know what we expected to find. Nightmares from Hieronymus Bosch, fiends devouring Tabby’s body, Gideon Winter flying at us: anything but the wide empty space we were looking at. Glass bricks spaced here and there along the top of the walls glowed with the same redness that filled the cellar. At the far end of the room a battered workbench stood against the wall. That was it.

  “Tabby isn’t here,” Richard said, momentarily perplexed. The anticlimax of coming into a room bare of anything but a beat-up workbench and a lot of inexplicable red light stopped him in the dead center of the cellar. Patsy drifted off to one side, and I went up to the workbench. We had come to the right place, I was sure of it, and thought that maybe I could find something to lead us to Tabby.

  In the air around me I became aware of a kind of thickening—as though that pulsing redness had curdled the air. What was happening was the gradual heightening of a condition present since we had come down the stairs. We were getting over the shock of not being shocked, to put it like that, and the real character of the place was finally reaching us.

  Krell’s basement, not empty, was crowded with the emotions which had been set free there. Terror, despair, a soup of human misery roiled in the air around us. Until the summer of 1980 I would have rejected the notion that such an experience was anything but the projection of a suggestible observer. But in Krell’s basement I knew I was not projecting all that misery. My stomach cramped into a bitter knot. The wrongness of the place, the monstrosity of the pleasure given by torture, had assailed me. I wanted to get back outside as fast as I could. The big heart of the basement beat almost audibly around Patsy and Richard and me, and for a second I saw the walls thronging with spiders, hideous black shapes circling toward me, a body stretched in agony on the workbench. Those pictures were all from books I had read in childhood. The three of us had to get back outside.

  I started to move toward Patsy, seeing on her face that she too had been poisoned by this place, and the packed earth beneath my feet trembled and nearly threw me to the floor. A hand thrust up through the surface of the floor. Then another shot up out of the earth. Another pair of hands almost immediately pushed up only a couple of feet away.

  “Let’s get out of here, for God’s sake,” Richard was saying, clubbing away the first pair of hands with the stock of the shotgun.

  Patsy said, “I don’t know if we can make it to the staircase,” and I saw what she meant. The earth between us and the stairs seemed to be shredding into brown sugar, granulating.

  “You won’t believe this, but there’s a door over there,” Richard said, and as we turned he pointed to the nearest wall. Set into the concrete blocks was a wooden door with big iron hinges and wide black iron crossbraces. It certainly had not been there earlier, and for a moment it looked as sinister and forbidding as everything else in Bates Krell’s little playpen.

  Both Richard and I went forward, trying to figure out if running for the stairs was worth the gamble. Richard pulled Patsy into a clear area, and as he did so the head and torso of a boy in his early teens broke through the crumbled earth.

  A vision or hallucination Richard had described during our long talks came back to me—the cemetery ripping itself apart, vomiting out its dead. Richard’s vision was our truth, I saw, and then thought: of course, that’s how the Dragon works.

  “Graham?” Richard said. “The door?”

  He was thinking that maybe we still had a second or two to reach the stairs, if we ran like hell—and thinking that, then he would be the only one to make it. I couldn’t move that fast, and Patsy looked ready to keel over.

  I backed toward him, and he put an arm around Patsy’s waist and got her moving. I checked on them over my shoulder, and saw Patsy recover herself and almost visibly accept the idea of using that door, even if it did look like it could lead only to another torture chamber.

  Richard pulled the door open and we hurried through. I had to bend my neck to avoid clubbing my forehead on the lintel.

  3

  You see why I wanted to describe this series of events in the first person: why the pose of an objective narrator would be no good, a lie to you and me both. That heavy crossbraced door wasn’t there. I went through it, and if I hadn’t ducked I would have banged my head on it, but even then I knew that no such door had ever stood in Krell’s basement. And Richard Allbee and Patsy McCloud knew that as well as I did. The door was the dream of a door; our dream; but also the Dragon’s way of taking us where he wanted us to go.

  The other thing we all knew was that there was no less danger on the other side of the door than in Bates Krell’s funhouse. Our door was not an escape—but we could not go back, once we had chosen it.

  * * *

  We found ourselves in a foul-smelling tunnel so narrow that we had to go in single file. Richard first, then Patsy, then me. I brushed my hand against the curving wall of the tunnel and then quickly jerked it back—damp, spongy, resilient as rubber, it had felt like living tissue. Far ahead of Richard dim hazy light came leaking around a bend in the tunnel, seeming to promise that we would come out aboveground somewhere on Poor Fox Road or the marshy land just beside it. As we moved toward the light the walls gradually widened out, and eventually we could almost walk three abreast.

  “I hope we’re going to get out of here soon,” Patsy said. “Are we going to wind up outside?”

  I shrugged.

  “It stinks in here,” Patsy said. “Like a sewer.”

  “As long as we get away from that house, I don’t care what it smells like,” Richard said. “You saw the women, didn’t you? Krell didn’t drop them all overboard. And he killed a lot more people than anyone suspected.”

  That had occurred to me too. By the time we had fled through the door, at least thirteen or fourteen boys and women had broken out of their shallow graves. Krell’s basement had earned its powerful echoes and resonances.

  We came to the bend in the tunnel and were suddenly walking into a light so strong that it obliterated detail. For a second I was blinded, and my eyes stung, and I covered them with a hand. We had stopped moving. When I put down my hand I squinted into the dazzling light and saw that a person was standing against the tunnel wall up ahead. It was just a black shape, unsexed. “Okay?” Patsy asked, and I nodded. We started to go forward again.

  “Who are you?” Richard called out. He raised the gun at his waist.

  Just then I had an idea about where we were—about what this tunnel was supposed to be.

  We came forward far enough to see that the person up ahead was a woman; and even before we were able to see anything of her face and clothing it was clear that she was crying.

  “Patsy?” the woman said.

  Patsy did not say anything. She took my arm with her left hand and Richard’s with her right.

  Her plain, dogmatic face swam out of the light. Severe black glasses, limp hair. The woman wore a rusty tweed suit that turned her body into a fuzzy tube. She did not look like someone who cried much.

  “Oh, my God,” Patsy said. “Marilyn Foreman.”

  “Get out of here. Get out of here. You’re dead already, just like the boy. The farther it goes, the worse it gets.”

  Patsy moaned, and lowered her head and practically pulled Richard and me after her. “Leave me alone.”

  W
e were going past the woman now, and she curled her hands into her waist and hissed against the tunnel walls to let us by. I brushed my arm against her clenched hands and felt their pure and burning cold.

  But we were already past her, and Patsy McCloud was still hauling at us like a mother marching two boys toward the woodshed. Her face was entirely grim. The woman behind us hissed again.

  Patsy paused, and her grip on my arm relaxed.

  I looked around. Richard Allbee did the same. The tunnel was empty.

  “Did we just see a homely little woman who looked like a grade-school teacher?” Patsy asked. “Did she tell us to go back?”

  “We saw a homely little woman and she told us to go back,” Richard said.

  We began to move forward again.

  “Thank God,” Patsy said. “If we’re going crazy, at least we’re doing it together.”

  We took another step, and the light intensified with brutal suddenness. Patsy twisted away. My eyes painfully curdled, as if they had been poached. I stumbled forward, suddenly alone, and when I could open my stinging eyes again I too was grateful to have company in my delusions.

  We seemed to have left the tunnel and come into a long book-lined room; yet the room had the same stink of sewer gas as the tunnel. Patsy and Richard, some yards away from me, moved closer. I think they must have recognized the room before I did. I looked sideways at a brown row of un-jacketed books and saw that it was familiar stuff. Like Krell’s basement, this place echoed with unheard miseries, with a sordid emotional life. It too was one of the Bad Places. A wad of tarry goop dripped down the spines of a couple of adjoining books. More of the goop oozed down over other shelves and onto the floor.