Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  The truck behind him, which had been blasting its air horn, crushed in the side of his car and slammed it into the guardrail. Another car struck the rear of the semi, shearing off its roof. It began to burn in a quiet, almost apologetic fashion beneath the truck. A green Ford rolled end over end like a flipping domino, and the car which had struck it piled into the side of the semi and the burning car wedged beneath it.

  By the time they closed the Hampstead toll station, there were eight dead. Four cars, including Joe Ricci’s, had incinerated. The state police and two officers from the Hampstead police force watched helplessly as the burning cars smoked and sparked. Twenty minutes later, a tow truck from the garage on that day’s rota sheet began to separate the wrecks.

  A Hampstead policeman named Bobo Farnsworth, who had responded to an assist call from the state police, peered in the shattered window of a demolished Le Baron and was amazed to see only charred upholstery and a sagging melted wheel—no grisly mummy lay across the ruined seat. Bobo had seen enough burned-out wrecks to know that in this one a roasted body was inevitable—the hands should be fried to the chest, and the whole black thing no larger than the size of a big dog. He looked closer at the rubble within the car and saw the glint of a belt buckle resting on black liquid near an exposed spring. Mary Louise Ricci, still knowing none of this, fell asleep in the Riccis’ most comfortable chair just as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid blew up a train and picked themselves up from the Bolivian dust in a shower of paper money.

  9

  Leo sat in his car while the engine idled, pushing forward a foot every fifteen minutes. From the two out of five toll booths that were open, lines of stationary cars snaked backward halfway to Norrington and Exit 16. Outlaw cars cruised down the two left lanes, which had been officially closed, and tried to nose in farther ahead. Leo noticed with satisfaction that drivers were keeping almost bumper to bumper, refusing to let the outlaws improve their place in line. Ahead, on the other side of the Hampstead toll station, he from time to time saw flickers and flashes of red lights. So there had been a bad accident.

  At nine o’clock, still fifty cars from the booth, he switched on his radio and turned to the Woodville station. The news reader described the latest confusion in Iran, and announced the number of days Americans had been hostaged there. He moved onto the fracas about property reassessment in Hampstead. Leo listened to all this with faint interest. Then the news reader pronounced the words “Woodville Solvent.” Leo straightened in his seat and turned up the sound. “This bizarre tragedy resulted in the deaths of two men, Frank Thorogood of Patchin and Harvey Washington, a Woodville resident. Investigations conducted by the Public Health Department indicate that carbon-monoxide poisoning was the cause of death. The plant has been closed indefinitely so that safety-monitoring measures and repairs may be carried out.” The nervous, straining sound of Ted Wise lying through his rabbity teeth cut in. “We became aware of the problem when . . . no one could feel a greater sense of loss than I . . . possible that our owners may decide to terminate . . .” That was new to Leo—he must have been listening to Pierce when Wise decided to be cute and refer to our owners. Of course he had not decided to be cute: he had been too rattled to be anything but stupid. But this was a lapse which only Leo would notice. By the time the news reader had moved on to the weather and the traffic report, Leo was almost smiling with self-satisfaction.

  * * *

  All traffic funneled into one lane. An imperious policeman waved a flashlight, flares burned, the bars of light on the tops of police cars flashed blue and white and red. The wreckers had towed away most of the crumpled automobiles, but the sixteen-wheeler still sagged against the guardrail: a recumbent elephant. The three lanes blocked off by conical orange markers were littered with broken glass, hubcaps and detached tires, a fender dented in half like a huge silver V. The smell of scorched metal and rubber hung over it all. As Leo inched into his place in the single line of cars, he looked sideways past the policeman with the flashlight and saw an unrecognizable car jammed beneath the undercarriage of the truck. The entire top of the car was sliced off down to the door handles. Inside that improbable cripple had been a human being. Stony, Leo thought, and then recalled with terrible clarity the two young dead men on their backs in the glass room, eyes and mouths open: and again saw white froth sliding toward a drain. He pushed these visions backward into some dark empty chamber in his mind and snapped his head forward as the tall officer waved the flashlight past his window.

  Exit 18 was only three miles ahead. Now he was in a sweat to get home. It seemed that a massive and cruel movement of ill luck had touched him, brushing past with muscular haste; or had not brushed past but clung to him as if he were its epicenter. Darts of alarming light irradiated his mirror, burned across his face. At a mule’s pace he crawled the three miles to his exit.

  Rational, Leo knew that nothing had happened to his wife; he understood that his fears were the product of his work at the plant in Woodville and of the sudden reminder of mortality slipping behind him on the highway. He was not as tough as he had been impelled to be in Woodville, and now his mind was taking the toll for that callousness. You escaped that, his mind was saying, but this you shall not so easily escape. And after all, were not the news items he had heard proof that his strategy had worked? His mind was punishing itself for that success.

  All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

  Again he saw the two young men, Washington and Thorogood, on their backs in the glass room. He squirted out of the line of cars at his exit, gunned his Corvette up the ramp, and faked a pause at the stop sign.

  Leo wound through the quiet Hampstead streets. Lights burned in the big frame houses, ordinary family life went on. A man walked a dog, a large woman in a sweatsuit thumped down Charleston Road. On his corner, a lost-looking teenage boy stood at the edge of the road, gazing at the sky as if for direction. For a second, for less than that, Leo thought he knew the boy, who was fair-haired, perhaps slightly undersized, and wore a striped rugby shirt with the sleeves pushed up on his thin arms. The headlights swept past him, the boy jerked away, and Leo swerved into Cannon Road

  On their acre-and-a-half lots, the houses sedately marched uphill, pronouncing themselves good investments, not as grand as the houses on Hermitage Avenue up the hill, but shining forth from their lighted windows a solid affluence. In this world all children were blond, all refrigerators stocked with mineral water, expensive jogging shoes scuffed or virginal sat in every closet. Four houses up, Leo saw Stony’s car parked in the driveway. Then he saw that all the windows were dark. The car left out of the garage, the black empty windows: Leo exhaled, seeing these first signs of disorder. The top of his head suddenly went cold. He turned into the driveway and pulled ahead of his wife’s car.

  On his way to the front door, he paused on the gravel drive and looked about him. The boy had vanished from the Charleston Road corner. The big trees loomed up into the darkness, where they coalesced into one tree. All was silence and growing dark. Mr. Leo Friedgood returns home on a Saturday evening from a noble day’s work. Mr. Leo Friedgood surveys his estate. His chest felt tight. Leo turned around and went quickly to his front door.

  It was unlocked. The house was darker than the outside, and he switched on the hall light. “Stony.” No answer. “Stony?” He stepped forward, still thinking that there was a happy explanation—she had gone for a walk, she had stepped next door for a drink. But Stony never did either of those things, not at night. Leo turned on the dining-room lights and saw the empty table ringed with solid wooden chairs. “Stony?” The conviction that something terrible had taken place, which had begun in him when he had passed the wrecks on the highway, blossomed out urgently. He was afraid to go into the kitchen.

  Okay. Let’s get to the good part. What happened? They had stood beside a wall of gloomy monkeys in cages.

  Leo pushed open the kitchen door.

  A room within a room,
a structure like a glass cube, a tile floor . . .

  The mute presences of the range and refrigerator bulked in the dark kitchen. His own tile floor, red, was a shadowy sea. Leo flicked the light. He saw the Johnnie Walker bottle, the only thing out of place, upright beside the sink. His fingers gently found it. They pushed the bottle back into the corner where the draining board met the wall.

  Slowly Leo left the kitchen and went back to the dining room. He glanced up the stairs and continued into the living room. Here were silvery couches and padded chairs, a murky glass table, their colors drained by moonlight streaming in through the window. A tall clock ticked resonantly from the corner. He had seen when he had come in that the room was empty. Still he turned on the nearest lamp, and the room sprang into life.

  In a little alcove on a far side of the living room was a “den” with bookshelves and a desk. A previous tenant had outfitted this alcove with track lighting which Leo never used. He switched on the desk lamp. Framed diplomas stared down, as did a photograph taken at a Telpro institutional presentation of himself in the proximity of Red Buttons. Of course Stony was not in this little corner.

  Irresolutely Leo wandered back to the entry. He looked up the stairs. He called out his wife’s name. Leo went up three steps, peering into the darkness above him. He wiped his palms on the front of his sweatshirt. Then, grasping the handrail, he went up to the top and switched on the light. The door to his bedroom was closed.

  Leo went down the hall to the door and put his hand on the brass knob. This is an empty room, he told himself. Nothing has happened, everything is just the same. When I open the door, I’ll know that nothing’s happened and that Stony will be back in a few minutes. He turned the knob and pushed open the door. As soon as he leaned forward and put his head into the room, he smelled the peaty aroma of whiskey. Stony’s flat black shoes sat on the floor beside a neat pile of her clothes. Finally Leo caught the odor of blood, which in fact was very strong in the room. He glanced at what was on the bed, and then found himself back in the upstairs hall without any memory of having left the bedroom.

  10

  At ten minutes to ten the lights of two police cars streamed along the leafy streets toward Greenbank and the Sound; having finished her column, Sarah Spry finally left the Gazette building, unaware that the first page would have to be reset on Sunday afternoon. Richard Allbee put down his journal, undressed, got into the water bed in his rented house, touched Laura’s shoulder and found that she was trembling. Graham Williams heard the sirens pass by on the street behind his house and rolled over in bed. Tabby Smithfield, still outside, watched the cars streak past him and stood riveted to the grass before an unknown house on Cannon Road, incapable of moving because a long-forgotten memory had nailed his feet to the ground.

  Patsy McCloud did not hear the sirens or see the cars. As he did several times a year, her husband was hitting her upper arms and shoulders, every third or fourth blow slapping her face with his open palm, and she was making too much noise to hear anything but herself. The beating lasted until she ceased any signs of resistance and simply bowed her head into the protection of her raised forearms. Finally the blows were no more than a succession of taps. “You know you drive me crazy sometimes,” Les McCloud said. “Go wash your face, for God’s sake.”

  11

  Leo Friedgood, still being questioned by the police, missed the eleven-o’clock news, which reported the apparent suicide, in Boston, of an MIT scientist named Otto Bruckner. Leo would not be left alone until past midnight, when he would take a room at the Colonial Motel on the Post Road and sleep in his clothes, so tranquilized by the police doctor that the noises from the discotheque in the motel’s basement never disturbed him. But on the local news, Ted Wise spoke his piece, Pierce spoke his, and the famous reporter stood sleekly and elegantly upright as he announced that all the agencies had attributed the deaths of the two workers to carbon-monoxide fumes emanating from a faulty furnace. The famous reporter did not neglect to remind his audience of a similar incident in the Bronx four months earlier.

  The Sunday edition of the New York Times carried a foot-long obituary of Dr. Otto Bruckner. There were anecdotes about his modesty and absentmindedness, a list of his awards, a reasonable assessment of his place in the development of modern biochemistry. In death Dr. Bruckner was treated fairly by the Times, which is to say he was accorded more stature than he would ever have ascribed to himself. His obituary did not mention his work on DRG.

  Nor did the Sunday Times discuss the murder of Stony Baxter Friedgood. There would be only a short article in Monday’s paper. But Stony was not to be forgotten in death. Her photograph would appear four times in the newspaper, the first in a row of black-bordered photographs. In thirteen weeks, over the rest of May, through June and July, six more people were to be murdered just as Stony was. After that the news which came from this section of Patchin County was spotty and unreliable.

  2

  The Allbees

  1

  For Richard Allbee, the first real shock of being back in his native country had come late at night in the hotel suite he and Laura had taken to wait out the availability of the house on Fairytale Lane. Moving house ranks just behind divorce and death of a spouse as cause for anguish, and Richard had been unable to sleep; he felt as though he had just made the mistake of his life. Nervously he had wandered into the living room, switched on the television and been confronted—in the most concrete possible way—with his own past.

  Daddy’s Here was showing on an independent station, as it did every night at twelve-thirty in New York. In almost every large American city, the old series surfaced once a day on one of the less distinguished channels, offering its spurious vision of family life to anyone so fixated that he watched television after midnight or before six in the morning. Daddy’s Here was a staple, it was fodder for the softest programming hours, but Richard had not seen it since the days of its first airing.

  In London, that the almost thirty-year-old series still had a life had been curious and funny, but no one in London had seen it—the program had been something to joke about at parties. The ten-year-old me is still going strong, that’s right. What’s more, he’s still getting paid. The ten-year-old me had an excellent lawyer. This was truer than he had known at the time: along with Carter Oldfield, the only other principal actor still alive and the star of the series, Richard got a residual check every month of his life. The excellent lawyer, Phil Sawyer, had been Carter Oldfield’s, and he had persuaded Richard’s parents to accept a lower salary for the trade-off of an income even he had not expected to be lifelong. “Out here, nobody knows how long they’re going to work, so make the program the boy’s annuity,” had been the persuasive sentence. Annuity was a magical word to Mrs. Mary Allbee. The other two chief cast members had turned down Sawyer’s suggestion, but for Richard, beginning ten years after the program’s cancellation, the residuals had begun to arrive. He had been twenty-four, and the unexpected money gave him a freedom he badly needed. There it was every month, enough to keep a young couple afloat as they moved happily into the early days of their marriage. Richard had gone to graduate school in architecture, worked for two years in an architect’s office, moved to England and tried to write a novel, had finally found the work that satisfied him most. For three years the monthly checks had been invested, not spent—they had given the Allbees seven years of wandering without undue care, and after Richard and Laura had settled down in Kensington, the checks had been almost an embarrassment, like a youthful habit not quite outgrown. Richard had his work, Laura was an editor for a women’s magazine, and the green rectangle that meant Daddy’s Here was going into its umpteenth year in Cleveland and Little Rock simply went into Lloyd’s Bank and slowly multiplied itself.

  Six years’ worth of episodes, more than two hundred of them circling around the United States, showing the hardworking little Richard Allbee growing from eight to fourteen: growing through a youth utterly unlike his own real one
. In the world of Daddy’s Here, no problem existed that was not amusing and could not be solved by Ted Jameson—Carter Oldfield—in thirty minutes. There was no crime, no death or disease, no poverty, no alcoholism: the problems had to do with homework, girlfriends, buying birthday presents.

  With a kind of fascinated dread, Richard sat down on the suite’s stiff couch and watched himself move through his professional paces.

  He had missed the first five or six minutes, and so had also missed the line, thank God. The line, the sentence which his character, Spunky Jameson, uttered in three programs out of five, which brought sacks full of cookies to the studio, had become a curse; at fourteen he had hoped never to hear it again, and he still hated cookies. The black-and-white images of his past would spare him that much, anyhow. The Jamesons were seated around the table in their pine-and-Formica kitchen, and lovely Ruth Branden—Grace Jameson—was in a dither because she had dented a fender on the family car. She wanted to get it repaired before she told Ted. Flustered, she put salt into Ted’s coffee and sprinkled sugar on the roast. Ted sampled his coffee, squinted, made a quizzical face. “Hey, what’s the matter, Pop?” asked David Jameson, played by Billy Bentley.

  “This coffee just doesn’t taste right,” said Carter Oldfield, projecting kindliness and wisdom as well as momentary puzzlement. “Switch brands, honey?”

  Ten-year-old Richard Allbee giggled right on cue—he knew about the bent fender.

  That was how it had gone, more or less, for six years.

  Richard could not help thinking of their fates, of what had happened to the four of them. None of the other three had found fame in movies that each, to different degrees, had desired. Ruth Branden, that beautiful woman, the most professional actor on the set, had contracted breast cancer a year after their cancellation; while working on the pilot for another series, she had collapsed, and the doctors found that a new cancer had spread throughout her internal organs. She was dead in three months. Carter Oldfield was the only one of the cast to still have a career in television—that aura of kindly wisdom had been inextinguishable throughout Oldfield’s sieges of depression and boozing. Oldfield had moved from Daddy’s Here to another long-running series about a law practice in a small Midwestern town. Now he appeared in ubiquitous commercials for a brand of orange juice; “the juice that wakes up your body.” His hair had gone from dark brown to silvery gray, but he still looked much the same. In fact age had improved him—now he was like a hybrid of James Stewart and Melvyn Douglas. Richard smiled, remembering in how many scenes Carter Oldfield had kept his hands in his pockets because they were shakier than poplar leaves. Still, he had survived, and Richard could now think of him with affection. It was not the love with which he remembered Ruth Branden, but the man was a better actor than anyone credited him with being; he had only a one-octave keyboard, but he played it beautifully.