Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Like an eccentric parody of a suburban social life, the two households often ate dinner together, went on walks, laughed together over drinks, even went to movies. Richard found that there were no impediments to his adopting Tabby, and began the legal procedures in late October. Graham and Patsy messed along together comfortably for a time, as if they were father and daughter.

  But eventually Graham recognized that their roles had reversed. Instead of his caring for her, Patsy now seemed to be protecting him, coddling him, almost nursing him! For Graham this was deeply disconcerting. He did not want to feel as old as that. Like Richard, he wanted to get back to his work. And eventually Patsy came to decisions of her own.

  * * *

  Richard Allbee helped Graham get started. They were having a drink together in Graham’s living room just before Christmas. A foot-high plastic tree on a bookshelf was the room’s only acknowledgment of the season. Graham lived alone now, and felt a small secret relief that the woman he loved most in all the world no longer tried to make him eat breakfast every morning. Richard also was alone: Tabby had persuaded him to let him go to Aspen with the family of a school friend. The two men were having their own defiant little Christmas. Richard was roasting a duck, and had brought over two bottles of a good Margaux to drink with it. “Hey, I’m an ex-alcoholic,” Graham protested. “I can’t have a whole bottle of this stuff.” He had dolled himself up for this dinner—in his attic he had unearthed a green velvet smoking jacket with black satin lapels, and this wonderful garment covered a neatly pressed blue woolen shirt and framed a knit tie with wide irregular horizontal stripes. On his feet were heavy black shoes from which he had not bothered to wipe the dust.

  “Then stop drinking that gin,” Richard said.

  “Oh, I lay off this stuff most of the time—save it for special occasions. You know.”

  For a moment Patsy McCloud was almost in the room with them, so clearly had the allusion evoked her.

  Graham broke the silence. “Hear anything from Tabby lately?”

  “He calls every other day—I talked to him just before I came over here. He’s having a great time. I miss him, but I’m glad I let him go out there.”

  They each knew that the other was still thinking about Patsy.

  “Graham,” Richard said, “I still don’t know what really happened.”

  “No,” the old man said.

  “I thought I would somehow understand it better as time went on. I thought I’d come around to thinking that the Telpro business was more important than we thought at the time.”

  “That Telpro installation was just out there in the world,” Graham said. “I think Gideon Winter could grab it and use it because of the name—DRG. Or the other position is that the name was a coincidence, and the accident was a real accident, and Winter simply capitalized on it. There’s one other possibility, but I don’t like that one.”

  “That we are partly responsible for the so-called accident too,” Richard said.

  “That we helped send that poison bob, bob, bobbing through Patchin County.” Graham made an expression of distaste. “I think it was what that research guy, Wise, said it was—a wild card. I think once he realized what had happened the Dragon couldn’t believe his luck. Everything was helping him get stronger. He really could have caused another Black Summer. Hell, I guess he did.” He cocked his head and regarded Richard almost cheerfully. “At least we know what caused the fire at Royal Cotton.”

  “You think it was a dragon? You really do?”

  “You killed it, didn’t you?”

  “I think Patsy killed it,” Richard said. “Whatever the hell it was.” He was silent for a moment. “You ought to write the whole thing down, Graham—put it all down just the way it looked to us. Then at least we’d all have that much straight.”

  “I’d be too tempted to invent things,” Graham said. “I’d make up dialogue. I’d speculate about what happened to certain people. Pretty soon I’d be writing a novel.”

  “That’s okay too,” Richard said. “That sort of fits.”

  Graham nodded. “But it’s still impossible. As much as we’ve talked, I still don’t know enough about what you and Patsy were doing in May and June. I’d have to make it up, and you’d be likely to get ticked off at what I wrote about you.”

  “I’ll let you use my diaries,” Richard said.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Patsy keeps a diary too.” He was grinning.

  “I know. I’ll think about it.”

  The next morning Graham called Richard and asked him if he would mind bringing his diaries across the street.

  * * *

  Two years later, just before Graham Williams finished writing the excellent book called Floating Dragon, Richard Allbee took a new wife, a new baby, and Tabby Smithfield to France for a short vacation. He had completed two large restoration jobs in New England, and would soon begin another in Virginia. He had been invited by a French architectural association to speak at their general meeting, and Richard delightedly took the opportunity of bringing his new family to Paris. His wife, who was ten years younger than he and worked for the Museum of Modern Art, spoke nearly perfect French. They would return two days before Tabby had to register for his freshman year at the University of Connecticut; and the baby was three months old, untroubled by schedules, and eminently portable.

  Richard took them all to museums and parks and restaurants; he gave his lecture in a French which his wife had drilled into him; Tabby and his wife beside him, he pushed the gurgling baby down random streets and was implausibly content. If some malevolent power had given him the summer of 1980, other forces had given him this.

  Then two days before they were to return, an unaccompanied Richard pushed the baby’s stroller through the ornate entrance of the Intercontinental Hotel and turned for no particular reason toward the Place Vendôme. His wife had taken Tabby off shopping for an hour, and Richard wanted to give his infant son some fresh air—also he could feel his time in Paris coming to a close, and did not want to waste the small amount left. He idled through the Vendôme, inspecting shop windows, and then just as aimlessly began working his way in the general direction of the Opéra. After five or six blocks he began to think about how pleasant it would be to have a beer, and looked around for an outdoor café.

  Richard turned down a street he did not know and saw a small group of tables on the next corner. He pushed the baby to the café, seated himself at an outside table, and sat down. The baby made motorboat noises with his mouth and pumped his hands happily up and down. The waiter came and Richard placed his order with an accent his wife would have described as “Serbo-French.” Richard looked over the nine or ten other patrons of the café, hoping that no baby-adoring woman would come up to coo at his son and trap him into exposing more Serbo-French. Oui, madame, il est très beau. He could not go much beyond that. Then he saw the thick gray-haired man seated facing him on the opposite side of the café, and he thought his mind had gone. The summer of 1980 sped back toward him with its full freight of madness. He knew that face, and for a moment it held him paralyzed. The Dragon had shown that face to him in an endless tunnel, and had tried to murder him with it.

  Cold seconds later, he realized that the man who owned the face was not likely to do any such thing. The man was what he looked like, not a lethal toy of Gideon Winter’s. Richard saw the qualities he had seen in the tunnel, the air this elderly man had of being a merchant seaman or a bohemian poet, but saw also his utter ordinariness—he was a man who enjoyed looking like the middle-class conception of a poet. His father would be a good talker, a good drinker, at most times a good worker; his essential irresponsibility would only emerge under stress. He would always have many friends. Richard even saw his own resemblance to the man. In another twenty-five years he would not look so very different.

  Richard plucked his son out of the stroller and walked through the maze to the other side of the café. He held the tiny boy in his arms a
nd said, his heart beating, “Michael Allbee, meet Michael Allbee.”

  A stranger lifted a puzzled face to Richard. This was not his father; he no longer even resembled the figure of the tunnel. The man was a bourgeois Parisian—he looked startled and offended in equal measure. Richard and the baby retreated. The baby began to squall.

  Mystery upon mystery. Richard hastily pushed little Michael in what he thought was the direction of the Intercontinental and almost immediately was lost. For almost the only time in his life, his sense of direction had failed. He gave up and hailed a cab when the baby, who was still nursing, started screeching for milk in an unearthly and domineering tone. He did not tell his capable, attractive, and aggressive second wife about his ludicrous encounter with his “father”—she had long ago assumed that both his parents were dead. Richard did not feel truly comfortable again until he and his family were on the big Air France jet to JFK airport.

  Mystery upon mystery.

  Patsy McCloud had vanished from their lives, though none of them had quite accepted the reality of this. During her weeks with Graham, Patsy had taken to going out alone at night. Graham Williams customarily went to sleep before ten o’clock, and he could not object to her unexplained departures if he was aware of them only because the sound of the garage door banging down woke him up at three in the morning. Whenever this happened, Patsy greeted him six hours later with fresh coffee and orders about breakfast: she was firm and chipper, she appeared rested, she wanted him really to think about eggs. Quantities of eggs.

  At last she confided to Graham that she had met a man she liked. The man was a lawyer in Chappaqua, New York, a widower; he had first met Patsy years ago at the Club Med in Martinique, where she had spent ten days with Les and four other couples from the company. The man had seen her picture in Newsweek, learned her telephone number through Information; he had reached her during one of the rare hours she spent at the Charleston Road house. His name was Arthur Powers. He had remembered her, and what Patsy especially liked was that Arthur Powers did not quiz her about the events of the previous summer.

  Patsy sold her house through Ronnie Riggley—Hampstead was still a big convenient bedroom for New York, and some chemical ugliness four months before could not keep people away for long; especially when real-estate values had dipped so far. Les had carried mortgage insurance and a big life policy. If she lost money on the sale of her house, she still was left with almost as much money as Clark Smithfield had ruinously inherited.

  Patsy spent the Christmas of 1980 in Chappaqua with Arthur Powers.

  By that time she was gone altogether. After five weeks with Graham, she had driven to Manhattan—to stay with a girlfriend, she had told him without being any more specific. “I love you so much,” she said on the telephone, “I love you because I have to love you,” and the words made him ache to have her back, pressuring him about breakfast.

  Twelve days later, he got a postcard from some island. The postmark obliterated the legend on the card, and no matter how long he peered at those wavy black lines, they hid whatever was beneath them. The message read: AP quite a find after all. I miss you all so much. Sand white, sun hot. Delicious. Have a Bombay martini and think of me. Much love, P. The picture on the card showed a setting sun, palm trees, languid blue water. The brutal cancellation barely permitted him to identify a British stamp. British? Bermuda? Or did what he could see of the stamp merely look British?

  Patsy telephoned him from New York, from Chappaqua. She was always rushed, always tender. She and Arthur Powers were thinking of buying a house together. “His place is too much like yours, Graham! I’m spoiled, I want insulation.”

  She sent a printed card with an address: The Birches, 28 Woodland Glen, Chappaqua, New York. Married again but still Patsy McCloud, love you all always and forever, read the handwritten note folded around the card.

  She was gone; utterly gone. Richard met the woman he would marry at a party in New York and asked her if she had ever seen Hampstead. “London? Sure.” “Connecticut.” “Do people still live in Connecticut?” They survived this exchange. Tabby fell in love with a girl in his class, had no luck, then fell in love again. Graham labored over his puzzling book. Richard spent more and more time with the woman he had met, and finally brought her home to meet Tabby. Patsy was gone.

  She was married to a lawyer named Arthur Powers and she lived in Chappaqua. Or she was not and did not. One night Graham tried to get her telephone number from Westchester County information and was told that neither an Arthur Powers nor a Patricia McCloud was listed in Chappaqua. Richard sent a letter to 28 Woodland Glen telling her that he planned to marry again, but the letter came back stamped ADDRESS UNKNOWN.

  Each of them dreamed of her: Richard dreamed of Patsy McCloud standing on a sloping hill the night before he married again. She was smiling at him, and he understood at last that she wished him well.

  His telephone rang at four in the morning the night his son was born; he had just arrived home from the hospital. “Did something nice happen to you tonight?” Patsy’s dear voice asked him.

  “Oh, Patsy,” he said. “Something wonderful happened—I just had a baby. How on earth did you know?”

  “We Tayler women have our secrets,” she said. “I’m happy now. Are you?”

  “Now? I’m about to bust, I’m so happy.”

  “Good,” she said. “If you feel that way, I do too.”

  “I sent you a letter,” he managed to say, but Patsy was talking again, and his words obscured hers.

  I got it? I moved again? It could have been either.

  “Sorry,” they both said.

  “I have to go now,” Patsy’s clear voice told Richard. “I’m glad you’re a father at last.”

  “Patsy, what’s your telephone number? We’ve tried to reach you . . .”

  “We’re changing it. I’ll send you the new number as soon as I get it.”

  “Please do. I want to see you again, and Graham is pining for you, and Tabby wants to tell you all about his girlfriend.”

  She laughed. “Well, you’ve done a great thing!”

  “We did a great thing once,” he said, but the telephone was already dead.

  And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil, and bound him a thousand years.

  —Revelation 20:2

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