Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  He listened to the General’s voice for a time.

  “Months. That was what Wise said.”

  The General spoke again.

  “He guarantees it, sir.”

  Leo heard the General out once more.

  “That’s right. Our problem now is to take care of the situation right here. That’s what my idea is all about. One of these geniuses gave me the idea when he said that this DRG stuff is sort of like carbon monoxide. We’ll rig it, is what we’ll do. As far as anybody knows, this is Woodville Solvent. We’ll keep it that way. And we’ll give an anonymous phone call to the television stations in New York, we’ll call the Times, we’ll get all the agencies and public-health people out here, and we’ll have the place all cleaned up and looking like a factory.”

  Pause.

  Leo swept his eyes across the six people staring at him from the other side of the desk. “No, they won’t say a word. We’ll announce that the plant is closing while safety inspections are carried out, and you can move them somewhere else and start up all over again after everybody forgets about this. In the meantime, we can talk to this Bruckner guy in Boston and see if he can give us any help. He invented this crap, he ought to know if we can do anything about it.”

  Pause.

  “Thank you, sir.” He hung up the phone and turned to the scientists. “Let’s go down and take a look at your furnace. We’re going to hide this mess in plain sight. Some of you yo-yos are going to make the eleven-o’clock news.”

  * * *

  An hour and a half after his arrival at the plant, Leo Friedgood was seated on a wooden crate in the basement, watching Ted Wise and Bill Pierce work on the furnace. Two unmarked green trucks from an army base in New Jersey sat in the parking lot, and a team of soldiers was carrying out the monkey cages, canisters, crates of laboratory equipment, and boxes of records. What remained of the body of Thomas Gay had been scooped into a zippered bag and removed.

  Two hours after that, Leo stood at a window and watched a CBS car pull into the lot just behind a police car. The temperature in the office was over eighty degrees. Everybody knew his lines. Leo turned back to the desk and called the Environmental Protection Agency. Then he called the Patchin County Health Department. At the start of both conversations he introduced himself as Theodore Wise. Turning back to the window, he saw the research director and Bill Pierce leaving the building to confront the police. A tall lean figure in a blue suit—the reporter—a technician and a man carrying a video camera and Portapak left the CBS car. The reporter drifted toward Wise and the policeman. When a sound truck came through the gates, Leo left the window to go downstairs.

  Barbara, the research assistant, and two of the scientists stood by the desk in the foyer. Leo smiled at them, descended the stairs, and ambled out of the building.

  The famous reporter from CBS stood next to Bill Pierce and held a microphone between them. “Is there any proof to the rumor that this tragedy occurred because of carbon-monoxide poisoning?”

  “To the best of my knowledge . . .” Pierce began.

  Thus, for several hours, it went. By the time the police had finished, calm still night had descended. And by the time he left to drive home, Leo Friedgood had almost forgotten about the invisible, odorless cloud of something called DRG-16 which was floating high up in the air currents over Patchin County.

  6

  Eventually, when Ted Wise and Bill Pierce broke their silence, they and a hundred newspapers would blame this almost thinking cloud for everything that befell Hampstead and Patchin and Old Sarum, Witchley and Redhill and King George, all these excellent towns between Norrington and New Haven with their commuters and artists and country clubs and granite hills and saltbox houses. There would be investigations, there would be indictments, petitions, demonstrations, lawsuits. There would be speeches, pompous, self-serving, and well-meant. All of this would be proper, but beside the point. For the blame for the months of coming turmoil was not the sentient cloud’s.

  It was yours, you who lay on your bed now, dazed and satisfied. You who had to begin discovering yourself once more.

  Your history, Hampstead’s history. . . .

  7

  Two hundred years ago, there was no Hampstead, only Greenbank, a collection of farms and a church above Gravesend Beach. The Beachside Trail (now Mount Avenue) connected Greenbank to Hillhaven and Patchin, of which it was considered an adjunct. Thus when General Tryon sailed down from New Haven to burn Patchin and landed on Kendall Point in 1779, a small detachment of soldiers, only ten or eleven, went down the Beachside Trail to burn Greenbank too. Patchin’s men took potshots over hedges and fences with their Brown Besses, the women and children and animals took shelter on Fairlie Hill or in Patchin Woods; and some lingered in their town, boys and women. Reports said that one or two male residents joined the destruction. The Reverend Eliot, Patchin’s vicar: “The burning parties carried on their business with horrid alacrity, headed by one or two persons who were born and bred in the neighboring towns.” A boy (one of nine fatalities) was shot and killed, at such range that his clothes began to burn. The other eight murders are known to have been committed by Jaegers—German mercenaries—and British soldiers; this one, the murder of the boy, was unobserved and so remains a mystery.

  This event, the killing of a thirteen-year-old boy in the midst of a general destruction, is the second stain on the land.

  Ten years later, George Washington, the President of the thirteen United States, visited Patchin. His diary mentions that along his route—he took the Beachside Trail—he saw many chimneys standing in the ruins of burned houses.

  For the next two hundred years, the same names recur in the parish records: Barr, Wakehouse, Jennings, Annabil, Williams, Winter, Allen, Kent, Moorman, Buddington, Smithfield, Sayre, Green, Tayler. The names go backward, too; the original four farmers on the Beachside Trail, settled in 1640, were named Williams, Smyth, Green, and Tayler. In 1645 they were joined by a landholder named Gideon Winter. (Monty Smithfield’s manor on Mount Avenue was built on the site of Gideon Winter’s farmhouse.)

  And some of the names appear in Hampstead criminal records. In 1841, a traveling man who had camped himself like a Gypsy in the woods bordering Anthony Jennings’ onion fields murdered two children named Sarah Allen and Thomas Moorman and roasted the bodies in a pit before he was captured by a posse of farmers led by Jennings. By torchlight they led him back to the Hampstead Common (now lost, cut in half by the Post Road), and under the eye of the town sheriff, put a rope around his neck and tried him on the spot. From his elegant house in Patchin, Judge Thaddeus Barr rode down the Beachside Trail on his bay gelding. He wore his robes and hanging hat and sentenced the man to death—he knew he could never have got the murderer to the county courthouse in Norrington. Under Barr’s questioning, the murderer refused to give his name, saying only, “I am one of your own, Judge.” After his death, he was recognized by a man in the crowd as a feeble-witted cousin of the Tayler family who had been sent to the poor farm as a boy.

  In 1898, Robertson Green—known as “Prince” to his friends—a twenty-two-year-old man who had dropped out of divinity school in New Haven and lived in separate quarters in his parents’ big clapboard house on Gravesend Avenue, was tried and convicted for the murder in the spring of that year of a prostitute in Woodville. Details of Prince Green’s life emerged during the trial, and they were bizarre enough to be taken up by the New York tabloids. His habits had altered after his return from New Haven—he had insisted on sleeping in an oaken coffin which he had ordered from Bornley and Holland, the Hampstead undertakers. He never opened his curtains; he invariably dressed in black; he was addicted to laudanum, then readily available at any pharmacist’s shop. He had been visiting the Norrington and Woodville prostitutes since his return from New Haven (Hampstead assumed), and four of these women had been butchered by an unknown person from May to September 1897. Prince Green never confessed to these killings, but he was sentenced to be executed as
surely for their deaths as for that of the woman over whose body he was discovered in a Woodville slum back street—Redbone Alley. The New York Journal American quoted the young man’s father as stating that his son had been deranged by excessive absorption in the verse of the decadent poets Dowson and Swinburne. Early on, they had begun calling Green “The Connecticut Ripper”; in some later editions he was called “The Ripper-Poet.” “There were days,” his father said to the reporter, “when he behaved as though he did not know his mother’s name or mine.”

  In 1917, legalized murder occurred in France, and boys named Barr and Moorman and Buddington were killed in the trenches. Their names are on the World War I monument erected on the Post Road, just opposite where the Lobster House Restaurant is now.

  The model for the soldier who appears on the monument, a lean and handsome young man in puttees and campaign hat, was Johnny Sayre, who in 1952 took his own life with a .45 automatic pistol on the grass leading down to the dock behind the Sawtell Country Club. No one at the time understood what made the fifty-three-year-old John Sayre, who had been a lawyer and a power in town and much admired, decide to end his life. He had canceled his appointments that morning; his secretary told the police that Sayre had seemed distracted and short-tempered for days. Bonnie Sayre told the police that she had not wanted them to go to the club that evening, but that John had insisted—they’d had a date with Graham Williams for two weeks, a premature birthday celebration for John. On his actual birthday, they would be in London. The secretary said that he had skipped lunch and stayed in his office; Bonnie Sayre reported that he had ordered only a salad for dinner. While the rest of them were having their drinks, John had excused himself. Then he had gone outside—he must have been carrying the gun in his belt all the time. They had heard the shot a few minutes later, but it had sounded like a car backfiring in the parking lot, like a door slamming in the rear of the club’s restaurant. A waiter on his break had discovered the body.

  Neither Bonnie nor the secretary thought it worthwhile to tell the police that John Sayre had written two names on the jotting pad beside his desk phone on the morning of his suicide: Prince Green and Bates Krell.

  The secretary, who had lived in Hampstead only two years, did not know the names. Bonnie Sayre had only the dimmest memory of Prince Green’s crimes. There had been a big house on Gravesend Avenue before which she and her sisters had been forbidden to linger: in it lived two old people who never came out. There was a shadowy memory of shame, of disgrace: of scandal. Bates Krell, now . . . When Bonnie Sayre saw the name deeply scratched into the telephone pad two days after her husband’s death, some half-fledged feeling stirred in her, and it took her a moment to recognize it as unease. He had been of the generation immediately before hers, which is to say, the generation following Prince Green’s. Bates Krell had owned a lobster boat, docked it on the Nowhatan River where the Spaulding Oil Company was now. He had been disreputable, perhaps threatening—a broad, filthy man, bearded and agate-eyed, who hired boys to assist him with his nets and beat them for the most minor infractions. One day he had vanished. His boat sat moored in the Nowhatan River until the state impounded and sold it. There was a story which went through Bonnie’s school, a husband or a father ordering Bates Krell out of town, a story of wives or daughters out on the lobster boat at night . . . but why would her husband invoke this name before he killed himself?

  Prince Green, Bates Krell. John Sayre’s pen had nearly torn through the paper.

  Now there are no lobster boats along the river, no fishermen at all where once there were many; now there are Spaulding Oil and the Riverside Building, which houses dentists and an insurance company; the Seagull Restaurant and the Blue Tern Bar, where teenagers drink; the Marina Restaurant; and the offices, in a little dingy section of warehouses, of the Scientology movement.

  Now no one knows the old Hampstead names; now the hateful anti-Semitism of the twenties and thirties in Hampstead is gone, and the town is more than a quarter Jewish; now people move in from New York and Arizona and Texas; and move out to Washington and Virginia and California. The publisher who bought the green house does not know that eighty years ago well-brought-up girls were ordered by their parents to walk quickly past his six-bedroom brown clapboard house, nor that in his home office on the side of the house a dazed boy used to sleep in a coffin and dream of traveling through the sky on wings like a gull’s, his mouth and hands stained red.

  Now Hampstead has a trailer park (carefully hidden behind a screen of trees on the Post Road), two burglaries every hour, five movie theaters, two health-food stores, more than a dozen liquor stores, twenty-one trains a day to New York. Thirteen millionaires live at least a part of the year in Hampstead. There are five banks and three famous actors, a private psychiatric hospital with an active drug-rehabilitation program. In 1979, Hampstead had two rapes and no murders. Until 1980, murders were almost unknown here since the days of Robertson “Prince” Green, who had observed decorum by committing his crimes in Woodville.

  The first murder of 1980 was discovered just after nine-forty-five at night on the seventeenth of May when the victim’s husband entered his bedroom. It would be a long time before anyone thought to remember Prince Green and Bates Krell or even John Sayre, the statue of whom at seventeen everyone we shall be concerned with in this story drove past, seeing it or not, four or five times a week.

  8

  The thinking cloud, a thousand feet above Woodville and Norrington, preceded Leo Friedgood on his way toward Hampstead. It moved without haste, ultimately without direction. When a curl of air sent its wings sifting down, it brushed random lives.

  A week-old infant lying asleep near an open window on this warm May night suddenly died—stiffened and ceased to breathe while her parents watched television in a downstairs room. Six blocks away (we are in Norrington now, in an area called Cumberland Acres), a fourteen-year-old boy cruising past a row of mailboxes on stakes pitched off his bike and lay still on a little mound of gravel, his bicycle sprawled a few feet beside him.

  Joseph Ricci, the third of the Dragon’s accidental victims, had been traveling home—much later than usual—to Stratford from a bar near the Kingsport offices of Loewen & Loewen, the accounting firm where he worked. It was a fifty-minute drive each way, but Joe Ricci had grown up in Stratford and could not yet afford a house in Kingsport, which because it was closest to New York was the most expensive of Patchin County’s towns. Joe was twenty-eight; he and his wife, Mary Louise, had a three-year-old son who had his father’s black hair and dark blue eyes.

  Joe reached the first of the two toll stations he would have to pass through before he got home. This was at the southwestern edge of Hampstead; the next toll came just before his exit. Joe cranked down his window, held out the book of tickets, and the uniformed woman in the booth extracted the loose ticket from the pack. It was ten past eight—he’d told Mary Louise to expect him at eight, and he still had half an hour’s drive before him. Joe Junior would be in bed already. It irritated Joe to miss his son’s bedtime, especially for an unhappy reason like tonight’s. His immediate superior, Tony Flippo, had asked him the day before to save Saturday night for him. They had to have an important talk. When Tony had asked him to come to Kingsport, Joe assumed that his boss and friend was going to go over some business ideas. They had talked in the past about starting their own office. But tonight Tony had not wanted to talk about Patchin County real estate, in which he fervently wished to invest, nor about the leasing company which was his other fantasy: he’d wanted to complain about his marriage. He wanted to hear himself rehearse his arguments for divorce. Tony was halfway to being in love with Michelle Sparks, one of the firm’s typists.

  It had been a pointless evening. Joe Ricci left his window down and gunned his car into the left lane. Two cars sped on before him; his mirror showed a phalanx of cars and a semi pushing on to the northeast. For no reason at all, he found himself reminiscing about his high-school girlfriend.

/>   Then suddenly the almost empty scene before him changed. His first impression was that I-95 was crowded with wrecked cars, bleeding people stumbling toward him; he saw a huge truck canted over on the guardrail, the flashing lights of police cars and ambulances. This vision jumped into his eyes with the power of reality and for a moment he could not breathe or think.

  He slammed on his brakes and cut his wheels to the side, realizing finally that he could swerve around the dreadful scene by using the shoulder. His head was buzzing oddly and painfully: for a fraction of a second he was conscious that the fillings in his teeth were vibrating. Yet in the midst of this buzzing pain, he knew that none of what he saw ahead could really be there. He took his foot off the brake and slammed it on the accelerator, wanting only to get past whatever it was on the highway, and the back end of his car fishtailed around.

  When he saw his hands on the wheel, he bit through his tongue. Bit right through it—blood oozed over his lips. His hands were covered with white bugs. That was all he could make of the shifting, almost fluid white surface coating his fingers and the backs of his hands. Joe opened his mouth but could not scream. His car was moving toward a swarm of lights. Banshee noises, unearthly screeches, battered him.