Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  We began to go back toward Beach Trail in the dark. I didn’t have the heart to turn on the torch again. It was screwy, as Tabby said, but with the streetlamps way up on Mount Avenue shining on the huge trees on both sides of the road, I could almost feel myself back in the world I had tried to resurrect for them, a world that was a few poor farms on the crumbling edge of a great forest. Patsy and Tabby kept trying to sneak looks at each other when the other wouldn’t notice. Huge black wings were unfolded over us all. I thought so, I still hoped not.

  That was the night the Norman twins met Gary Starbuck in the parking lot of a Post Road diner and began to set up their big score; three nights before a Hampstead policeman named Royce Griffen shot himself in his car.

  We stopped before my house. I sighed. The tasks, both tasks, seemed impossible. “Will you meet with me once more? Talk it over, do what you like, but I think we have to see each other again. Tabby, maybe you could arrange to run into this Richard Allbee. It might help convince you somehow, if it’s like . . .” I nodded toward Patsy. “Another meeting?”

  Reluctantly they agreed. We went toward our separate houses in the misty intermittent dark.

  4

  When you think about it, what could I have said to them? A being who killed animals and children three centuries ago is now murdering women in our little corner of Connecticut? And this same being was a lobsterman in 1924, when I looked at him from Rex Road across the Nowhatan and almost fainted because I knew I had seen the face of evil? And that someone we might even know, someone who moved freely through Hampstead, now wore that face?

  Give me a break, Tabby could have said, and I would not have blamed him. Especially since what I had already told him and Patsy was that they and I and this Richard Allbee character had made him stronger just by being in Greenbank. And had meant that Gideon Winter was only a part of the madness hurtling toward us. Wake up, I really should have said, sleepyhead wake up, but I didn’t know that then.

  7

  The Dragon and the Mirror

  1

  Not long after Graham Williams finally confessed his idea to Patsy McCloud and Tabby Smithfield—about the time that Dr. Van Horne was picking through the antique shops of Patchin County for the right mirror to hang on the space he had cleared on his wall—Pat Dobbin became concerned enough about the white spots which speckled his shoulders, chest, and arms to see his doctor. This was Tuesday, June 3. Dobbin still could not think that the spots meant that anything was seriously wrong with him. He certainly did not imagine that he had any sort of disease. He went to his doctor because he did not want the white spots to spread to his face.

  In this regard, Dobbin’s doctor was not very satisfactory. He did not produce a tube of salve (Dobbin’s fantasy) and say, “Rub this on the area twice a day and your problem will disappear.” Instead, he examined the spots carefully and asked a lot of questions about where they had begun and how quickly they had spread. He had leafed through a textbook on diseases of the skin and found nothing that quite corresponded to Dobbin’s affliction. He had all but scratched his head. Instead of a salve, what the doctor produced was an appointment at the Yale Medical Center in New Haven.

  Dobbin drove to the medical center two days later, still thinking that his congenial expensive doctor had overlooked some simple explanation. Parking his car, walking into the vast modern structure which was the medical center, he still felt a robustly healthy man. He knew he was booked in for three days, but he saw this time as a kind of eccentric vacation—he brought pencils and sketch pads, intending to continue his work.

  The first morning his clothes were taken from him and he was swabbed, scratched, and stabbed thirty times for a series of allergy tests; he was X-rayed and wired up to a variety of machines, only a few of which he recognized. Doctors came into his room in such number that he never got their names straight. They seemed to enjoy his skin condition far more than they did him. One doctor told him that every bite of food he took would have to be weighed and measured; another who looked as though he had just graduated from high school told him that all of his waste would have to be examined—he could not use the toilet in his room. The white stuff coating his lesions was scraped from his hands and shoulders by a man—a doctor?—with Coke-bottle glasses and stringy hair to his shoulders.

  By Dobbin’s second day, he no longer felt healthy. He learned that he was mildly allergic to certain pollens, certain kinds of pipe tobacco, cat hair, and starch. Even his unaffected skin was inflamed and bruised from the results of these tests. His blood pressure and cholesterol levels were high, his red count was low, he had a vitamin B12 shortage. One of the vertebrae in his lower back was a quarter-inch too close to the next vertebra, so he had an incipient back problem, he had low-grade sinusitis and a very slight heart murmur and his liver was damaged. On top of everything else, one of the doctors informed him in passing that he could probably expect to develop gallstones sometime in the next five to ten years.

  But none of this explained what was happening to his skin.

  On the morning of his third day, the senior doctor assigned to him asked if he wouldn’t mind staying in another four days.

  He was popular for his sketches of the doctors and the day-shift nurses. He became so institutionalized that he watched television all day long. He ate and drank what they gave him and eliminated into Tupperware.

  He answered what seemed to be several million questions about his life and habits. He listed every place he had been in the past decade, all of his living relatives, the liquor he drank, his sexual partners. The answers to this question created, he thought, a little stir on the fourth floor: New Haven was not so far from Hampstead.

  On the fifth day Dobbin noticed the first of the lesions on his face, a tiny white speck at one corner of his mouth.

  On the sixth, his next to last, day in the medical center, the senior doctor entered his room and sat in the chair by the bed. By now of course Dobbin knew his name, Dr. Chaney; he had drawn half a dozen much-appreciated caricatures of his face, which was aloof and thin, underslung, like a giraffe’s. Chaney smiled at Dobbin and perhaps absentmindedly began to take his pulse. “We’ve been looking very carefully at the material taken from your lesions, Mr. Dobbin,” he said.

  “Nice of you,” Dobbin replied.

  Chaney dropped his wrist and looked up from his watch. “It turned out to be a bit of a surprise for us. We found that it is a liquefied integument containing melanin, sebum, the cells of blood vessels and lymph channels, the characteristic material of nerve endings, epithelium cells, in short all the matter to be found in the dermis and epidermis.”

  “So it’s skin,” Dobbin said. He had recognized the last two nouns.

  “Correct.”

  “That white stuff is skin.”

  “Correct again.”

  “Well . . .” Dobbin lolled handsomely back against his raised pillow. “I don’t get it. What does it mean?”

  “That your skin in a sense is becoming colloidal, not connected. And the function of skin is that it is connective—that is the meaning of integument.” Dr. Chaney helpfully linked his fingers together to demonstrate. “Not many laymen think of it this way, but our skin is an organ, just as the heart and liver are organs. In your case, this organ is spontaneously losing the characteristics of a solid.” He smiled again. “You’re rather a rare bird, Mr. Dobbin. Your skin is liquefying.”

  Dobbin could not speak.

  “Now, you’re scheduled to go home tomorrow. And I think we will keep to that schedule. I shall want to see you back here in a week—”

  Dobbin interrupted. “You mean I’m not allergic to anything? I don’t have VD or cancer or what the hell, the mumps or even pimples? What are you guys going to do to stop me from turning into a puddle?”

  “Well, you do have some allergies,” the doctor said. “But that isn’t the problem with your skin. That problem can only be a reaction to something you have encountered—like an infection, but in this cas
e there is no virus and no bacterial cause. We are going to take some further samples of your skin, from both the affected and the unaffected areas, and we’ll turn our computers loose on the problem. We will come up with some possibilities, Mr. Dobbin.”

  “You mean you hope you will.”

  “Our computers can assemble data faster than a roomful of researchers working twenty-four hours a day. We’ll find out what sort of agent might cause a reaction such as yours. Then we will be able to halt the reaction. After that a few skin grafts will see you back to normal, should they be necessary.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There is nothing to worry about at this point,” Chaney said. “Let’s just leave it all to the computers, shall we?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  Dobbin spent another day with the game shows, the soap operas, and made-for-television movies. His mind, protecting itself, chimed with commercial jingles for designer jeans and mouthwash. He ate three more hospital meals and slept with the aid of a powerful tranquilizer. Dr. Chaney did not appear again in his room, but the young doctor with cobweb hair came along to poke another needle in his hand, slice off an inch-long section of skin, and tape a thick bandage over the wound.

  The hospital released his clothes, his car keys, and his money, and gave him an appointment card for his return. Half in a daze, he drove back down I-95 to Hampstead. This was the day of the third murder, though neither Dobbin nor anyone else in Hampstead would know it had happened until two days later.

  When he turned into his driveway, his house looked smaller than he had remembered it. His mailbox was jammed with bills, magazines, and fliers with supermarket coupons.

  Dobbin marked the date of his return to the medical center on his calendar. He wandered into his workroom and watered the plants. After he sat down at his draftsman’s table, he looked through the drawings he had done—half of them he destroyed. Dobbin began again. This time he gave Baldur the Bad, the evil magician of The Eagle-Bear Stories, the face of Dr. Chaney.

  2

  While Pat Dobbin was in New Haven waiting to hear that he had contracted some new kind of super-herpes (for that had been his latest, and last, fantasy about the origin of his lesions), Hampstead suffered the visitation of an unseasonal flu. In the first week of May, there had been the usual wave of colds, brought on by the shift in the weather; but the flu was a winter affliction; it had no place in the first week of June.

  For example, this was the last week of school at J. S. Mill, and the teachers were busy with year-end reports and grade computations. The students were supposed to be studying for their final exams. But the principal and four of his staff, too weak to get out of bed, missed the entire week. Tabby’s class had a particularly large number of victims—forty of the one hundred and five sophomores missed at least three days of school.

  Graham Williams spent three days moving, when he had to move, from his bed to his toilet and back again—he was too sick to think further about the subject he had brought up to Patsy McCloud and Tabby Smithfield.

  Les McCloud felt a pain in his gut as he was driving home from the police station after showing his permit and getting a lecture from Bobo Farnsworth—his forehead began to drip perspiration, and he stopped his car on the stretch of Greenbank Road which paralleled the thruway and staggered out in time to vomit into a patch of wild chicory. Just as he was wiping his mouth, his bowels burst into agony and exploded. He lay down in the weeds and toed off his loafers. He thanked God he was not at his office in New York. Les unbuckled his belt and pushed off his trousers. Within view of several dozen cars proceeding up I-95, he gingerly removed his boxer shorts and tossed them aside. Then his stomach convulsed, and he threw up again. He felt like Job. Panting, he waited for his bowels to trumpet again, which they did. Then he wiped himself with weeds, slid his trousers on, and staggered back to his car. He drove the rest of the way home very slowly. As soon as he got inside the front door, he began yelling for Patsy.

  At Greenblatt’s checkout counter only two of the girls showed up for work all the first week of June. Bobo Farnsworth never got sick, and so he found himself filling in for those who did: he worked twelve-hour shifts for two weeks straight, twelve on and eight off, and when Ronnie was finally able to get out of bed she made him his favorite dinner at eight o’clock in the morning—southern-fried chicken and hash-browns. “What’s it like out there these days?” she asked him. Ronnie herself could not eat the chicken; the smell of the oil turned her stomach. “Like a hospital,” Bobo said. “I hope the killer’s puking his guts out, damn him.”

  Hampstead’s doctors saw their waiting rooms crowded with people they could not help. “It’s a new strain,” they told the victims. “There’s no magic pill, just drink plenty of liquids and stay in bed.”

  The victims told each other: “The worst part is, you know it’s not going to kill you.” This was not completely accurate. Nobody who caught it actually wished to die, but several did. They were all male, and all over sixty. Graham Williams was lucky to have survived. Harry Zimmer followed Babe to Gravesend Cemetery only three weeks after her death. He felt a tickle in his throat while fishing off the breakwater Monday morning, and thought he must have caught a cold from Lee Wilcox, who had marched next to him, carrying the VFW flag, in the Memorial Day parade. By afternoon his nose was streaming, and his head ached. He disgusted one of the summer people, a chunky New York blond with sunglasses stuck in her hair, by sneezing all over her in the supermarket when he couldn’t get his handkerchief out in time. The next day he nearly fainted when he tried to get out of bed. The freezer was full of frozen fish, but he was too weak to thaw and cook it. His only food for a day and a half was bourbon, peanut butter, and a yellowing lettuce he found in the crisper at the bottom of his refrigerator. He had a quart of milk, but it had turned bad—since Babe’s death, Harry’s housekeeping was erratic. He called his doctor twice, and both times the line was busy. He died in bed on the fifth night of the illness, never knowing that Lee Wilcox had died too. Harry’s grandson discovered him a day later.

  Four of the five older men who died were members of Hampstead’s VFW post, and two were members of J. S. Mill’s class of 1921, which meant that Graham Williams became the last surviving member of that class. “I’m a walking reunion,” he told Tabby months later. “Now I owe it to my class to live forever.” The fifth man, Dr. Harold Rubin, was a New York psychiatrist who came to Hampstead every summer and took a house on “Shrinks’ Row,” a series of pastel frame houses on a spit of land off the Millpond where cars were not allowed. Dr. Rubin caught a cold on his second day in Hampstead, took his sloop out anyhow, and two hours later thought he was seasick. His excellent lunch from the country club went overboard. He never made it to the cocktail party that evening given by his summer neighbor, Dr. Harvey Blau. He would have driven back to New York that night, but he did not think he could walk all the way to the parking lot at the end of the leafy mile-long spit of land. He died on the bathroom floor the next day, and his remains were not discovered until September. By that time, all his neighbors were dead too, though not from the flu.

  Hampstead’s only other fatality during these ten days was a seventy-year-old woman who died of a heart attack while eating lunch on the terrace of a French restaurant overlooking Main Street. Unlike Dr. Rubin, the elderly woman died in full view of fifteen to twenty citizens, Tabby Smithfield and Patsy McCloud among them.

  For ten to fifteen days, Hampstead’s doctors were under siege. The flu, which seemed to be local and spontaneous, doubled, tripled, quadrupled itself during this initial period. If, during this time, they saw patients with other complaints, they barely had time to properly attend to their symptoms: in any case, the few people who turned up complaining of the sudden appearance of ugly white spots on their hands or shoulders did not require immediate help. For a month after the initial wave of flu patients, the disease continued, though with less intensity, and the doctors still were not alarmed if the patients wit
h the tiny skin lesions returned with a few more of them; in fact they paid no particular attention to these patients until another doctor sent a man to the Yale Medical Center and word came back about Pat Dobbin, who by mid-July was in full-time care. Soon after the second, and then the third, patient arrived at the medical center, Dr. Chaney had submitted a paper to The Lancet, the British medical journal, on the subject of what he called “Dobbin’s Syndrome.” By September Dr. Chaney could add a footnote to his article, alluding to the events of May 17 and the accidental exposure of Hampstead’s citizens to DRG-16. He speculated that the missing researcher, Thomas Gay, was very likely the first victim of the syndrome he had identified but concluded with a defense of the name he had given it: “It may seem that ‘Gay’s Syndrome’ should be adopted as the appellation for these symptoms, but for several medical reasons I hold to the original appellation. Patrick Dobbin was the first patient presenting these symptoms to the profession, and his surname is irresistibly literary (Vanity Fair); and I submit that this is in many of its ‘unmedical’ and ‘spiritual’ characteristics a prototypically literary and Victorian disease.”

  Perhaps Dr. Chaney deserved what his patient had done to him in his illustrations.

  3

  On the Tuesday morning that Dobbin first went to see his doctor, Tabby Smithfield sat in the kitchen with his father, eating pancakes Sherri had made. “Come on, eat a couple anyhow,” Clark said. “You’re acting like the cook around here.”

  Sherri had perched herself on a stool before the range. “That’s how you treat me, why shouldn’t I act that way?”

  Clark flushed, and swabbed up maple syrup with a section of pancake. “This is our home,” he tried again. “I want you to eat with us. You’re sitting there like a vulture.”

  “Come on, Dad,” Tabby said.