Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  When it hit the floor and shattered, all the laughter ceased. Archie and the other men were looking at him; he saw dislike in their eyes, and it was naked. Again he felt light-headed.

  “I’m getting out of here,” he said. Les kicked the broken glass aside and went toward the door.

  6

  “Reborn?” Richard asked. “You mean reincarnation? I can’t believe in that. You can talk all you want, but you’ll never convince me that this Winter person was born as three different men in three different decades, and all in the same town.”

  “Not born in that way,” Williams said. “I’m not talking about reincarnation in the strict sense—that’s more a metaphor for what I mean. When your great-great-granduncle was born, Gideon Winter was nowhere in evidence. The Winterizing, to make a joke at your relative’s expense, came later.”

  “Well, if you’re talking about possession, I’m not sure I believe in that either,” Richard said.

  “And that’s fine with me,” the old man said. “I’m not sure I do either. Not unless an entire stretch of seacoast can be possessed. Or can possess. A man named Gideon Winter arrived here roughly three hundred years ago, and various things happened. Bad things. Bad economically, bad in every way. You could use the word ‘evil,’ but I suppose you’ll tell me that you don’t believe in evil either.”

  “I believe in evil,” Richard said, and Patsy surprised them both by saying softly, “I do too.”

  “All right,” Williams said. He put his baseball cap back on. “Maybe it wasn’t the man, but what happened to him here. Maybe it was something the place did to him. This is a fancy theory I have been working on for fifty years or so.”

  “You mean since that man. Since Bates Krell,” Patsy said.

  Williams glanced appreciatively at her.

  “Oh, I know about him,” Patsy said. “I just didn’t know his name until I heard you say it to Tabby. I saw him. I mean I saw him.” She colored. “A long time ago. I saw him kill a woman.”

  She colored even more deeply when Graham Williams picked up her hand and carried it to his lips. “Of course you did, and you don’t know how good it makes me feel to hear you say so.”

  “Shouldn’t we talk about what it says in here?” Patsy said, touching the big blue library book. “About Winter?”

  “Sure,” Williams said. “If you like. You know what this is, though. Mrs. Bach was not a professional historian. She just assembled records. She didn’t try to draw any conclusions from them. Her History is a sourcebook, but no more than a sourcebook.”

  “Well, I thought it was kind of inconclusive,” Patsy said.

  Williams stood up and wandered off to a distant bookshelf; he returned with his own copy of the book. “Sure it’s in conclusive.” He dropped the book on the coffee table, then sat and picked it up and opened it in his lap. “Dorothy Bach expected other people to make the conclusions—all she wanted to do was gather as much data as she could. She just put together raw data.” He flipped through the early pages of the fat blue book. “So you see what she was able to find. Land records. Stock transfers. Births and deaths, from the parish records on Clapboard Hill. Which got its name from the way of calling worshipers to service—they clapped two small boards together. Let’s take a look at what she has for the year 1645.”

  “Gideon Winter’s arrival,” Patsy said. “Here it is. ‘A landowner named Gidyon or Gideon Winter of Sussex purchased 8.5 acres of seacoast land from farmers Williams and Smyth.’ And that’s all it says about him on that page—until she says that his name did not appear in the parish records.”

  “Dorothy Bach was an old woman when I started to look into this,” Williams said. “But I felt I had a compelling reason to bother her. I’d been brooding about Krell for two or three years.”

  “Hold on a second,” Richard asked. “What is all this stuff about somebody named Krell? I keep hearing the name, but I don’t know anything about him. Patsy, you say he killed someone? And you saw him do it?”

  “Not really saw,” Patsy said. “I saw it with my mind once. I knew it was something from a long time ago. It was on the river, and the new buildings weren’t there. There were more fishing boats. I saw him strangle a woman to death—or until she was unconscious, anyhow—and then wrap her in an oilcloth and drop her overboard.”

  “And you know that this was Krell.”

  “She knows,” Williams said. “And I know—in part, I know because she knows so well. But what you don’t know, Richard, is that I killed Bates Krell. I had to kill him. And doing it soured my life. It soured my life even though I always knew that he’d have killed me if I hadn’t got him first—I even tried to turn myself in to Joey Kletzka, the chief of police here, but he wouldn’t listen to me—it was like he knew more about it than I did . . . aaah. I’m getting worked up about this.” He smiled at Richard. “You know, I can feel my heart pounding.”

  “I don’t think I understand any of this,” Richard said.

  “Join the crowd. That’s how I felt when I went to see old Dorothy Bach. I say old, but she must have been six or seven years younger than I am now. She had given up on history by then, and spent all of her time in her garden. Oh, she gave talks to the ladies’ groups now and then, because that was how she got started doing her research, but when she got too old to lift a parish record book she gave herself to her azaleas. She lived up at the top of Mount Avenue, right on the Hillhaven border. I’d looked into enough Hampstead history to know the right questions to ask her, so after she showed me into her drawing room—you see how long ago this was, people still had drawing rooms—I thanked her for agreeing to see me, and then I got right to it. I asked her if she had had more information about Gideon Winter than she had put in her book.”

  He looked at Richard, then at Patsy. He had an eagle’s face, Patsy thought, an old, old eagle’s face. She had never been so conscious of Williams’ age before, and she thought that she was so struck by it now because at this minute his eyes looked young.

  Williams’ mouth twitched. “She thought I was accusing her of doctoring the facts. I think she damn near threw me out of the house—Dorothy Bach was proud of that history book, a lot prouder than she’d ever be of her azaleas. ‘Are you asking me if I suppressed information about one of the founders of Greenbank?’ she asked me. I assured her that I knew she would never do anything of the sort, and that present and future historians of the area would forever be in her debt—she wanted to hear guff like that, but on the other hand it was true, and she deserved to hear it. ‘I guess,’ I told her, ‘I’d be grateful if you could be more speculative than you could be in your book.’ ‘You want me to speculate about Gideon Winter, Mr. Williams? You want to know what I thought of the Dragon as I was doing my researches?’”

  7

  “Yes, I would like to know just that,” the young Graham Williams had said to the ancient lady on the brocade sofa. Her dress was at least ten years out-of-date, with its high black neck that came to just beneath her chin and its ruffled sleeves. Her face, as she set down her teacup without even glancing at it, was wrinkled, clever, considering. She had pushed her lips slightly forward, and the line at the top of the upper lip looked as sharp as a knife blade.

  “What makes you think that I speculated at all about him?”

  “Because of his mystery,” Williams replied. “He came out of nowhere, he soon owned most of the land, catastrophe followed him, and he vanished. You don’t name him in your compilation of burial records, so he wasn’t buried. Not here, anyhow. I think you must have turned him over in your mind once or twice.”

  “Everything you have just said is in error, young man.” The upper lip still jutted forward. “He came from the county of Sussex in England. Because the other farmers agreed to sell him no more land after a certain point—at least that was my conclusion, for they could certainly have used the money—he never owned more than just about half the land in Greenbank. And he was most certainly buried in Greenbank. But he was not b
uried in the church cemetery. No. When they buried the Dragon, they buried him on a beach.”

  “Gravesend Beach,” Williams had said softly.

  She shook her head. “Now you are the one who is speculating. No, not there. The name derives, I am almost certain, from the practice of burying anonymous shipwreck victims up the hill from the Sound at that point. Gideon Winter, and again I must say that I am almost certain, was laid to rest on the long spit of land that juts out into the Sound about a mile and a half west of the public beach. It was briefly called Point Winter. Since 1760 it has been known as Kendall Point. And it was where, as you may know . . .”

  “Where General Tryon’s troops landed to burn Patchin and Greenbank.”

  Her mouth relaxed. “So you know a little of local history, do you? Do you know what else happened at Kendall Point?”

  He shook his head.

  “It was once the most famous disaster in the state of Connecticut. And it still would be, if our memories were longer than they are. The entire congregation of the Greenbank Congregational Church attended a church social on Kendall Point in August of 1811. It was a beautiful spot, and considerably breezier than the church grounds, so on a hot August day it was much more comfortable. They could take their food and tables down to the Point on wagons, and only have to carry the tables the last thirty feet, at the end of the wagon track. And once they were on the Point, they could see the traffic on the Sound from both directions. Sailboats, merchant boats I mean, steamers, even pleasure craft from Long Island and down from New Haven—the Sound was even busier in those days. Not to mention the fishboats.”

  She was staring at him with pale eyes in which a hidden joke lay sparkling. She picked up her teacup again, and Williams saw that her fingernails were black. He had blinked in disbelief: in 1929, ladies, especially old ladies who were distinguished amateur historians living on the Golden Mile, did not have dirty fingernails. Then the young Graham Williams had remembered the azalea bushes crowding the side of the house, and realized that Mrs. Bach did her own gardening. But even so . . . wouldn’t she have cleaned her nails before greeting company? He glanced again at her blackened nails—this time he saw brown earth smudges on her hands, and he felt slightly sickened.

  “Oh, they were going to have a beautiful time, a beautiful time,” Mrs. Bach had said. “Tables filled with roast pork and homemade sausages, currant bread, potato salad, blood pudding, preserves . . . it’s in all the documents. They were going to feast. The minister, Reverend Greenough, played the violin, and after they had said their prayers and the children had run off some of their nervous energy, the reverend intended to play some hymns for his flock. After the enormous meal, there would be an hour or so of jollier music. Jigs. There would have been many a man in that congregation who could call a jig out of a fiddle or a banjo.” Mrs. Bach knitted her smudged hands together. “But there was no feast and there were no hymns and there were no jigs. Instead, it happened.”

  “It?” He thought. “Some sickness?”

  “If you like—a fever, if you like. But it was Kendall Point that was fevered. As they sat on either side of their three long covered tables, the land split open underneath them. Great fissures opened first on the inland side of the Point, and then split seaward quick as you could wink. The first table fell in, and the Reverend Greenough must have seen it. He was standing up at the head of all three tables, saying a prayer. The entire congregation was looking in his direction. Then the land opened up and swallowed the most inland table before the people sitting around it could scream. You can’t tell me Reverend Greenough didn’t see that. And if his responses had been quicker, he could have saved himself and all the rest of them.

  “But the Reverend Greenough did nothing, and the Reverend Greenough said nothing. The opening hole took the second table. And now there was plenty of screaming. The crew of a merchant vessel called the Pequot saw the second table go down and heard the screams. They anchored and sent a dory with eight sailors toward the Point. Well, of course, the people at the third table had scattered, and they too were screaming. The reverend had come out of his trance, and his voice was loudest among them. The sailors heard him invoking the name of the Almighty as he ran toward the water. On both sides of him, men and women were running in all directions . . . but they did not get far. Off the central fissure, smaller fissures opened up and took the people from the third table, took them one by one. And the last split in the earth took Reverend Greenough. They were all gone by the time the dory landed on the Point.” Mrs. Bach nodded almost happily at the young Williams.

  He had said, “You mean it was like the land had chased them? Hunted them down, one by one? Did they get out of the fissures?” But he had already known the answer to that.

  “The sailors came up on the Point,” Mrs. Bach said. “The sounds of the screaming hurt their ears. That’s what the captain of the Pequot wrote in his log. My men this day have had their ears punished by the screams of the Kendall Point dying. They could see that wide crack in the earth, beginning thirty or forty feet back where the carts stood, dividing all of Kendall Point like the trunk of a tree from which the smaller fissures at the top branched off—zigging and zagging through the earth. And everywhere in this maze of fissures, people were trapped. The tables were upended, the food steamed all around them, they struggled to get free, but they could not.” Mrs. Bach’s eyes glinted. “And the sailors could not pull them free. And do you know why, young man?”

  “Because the earth. . . ?”

  “Yes. Because the earth was already closing on them again. Like a mouth when it is full of food. One of the Pequot’s sailors lost an arm and bled to death when he did not get away quickly enough. The stones sawed through his flesh and gristle, and took off his arm at the shoulder. The rest of them wept and prayed—they could see the faces of the adults, looking up in horror, and see the tops of the children’s heads. It was as though the earth itself was screeching for help. For the screeches continued after the earth had closed itself up again. One of the reports I read held that the screams from beneath the surface of the earth continued all the rest of that day, but I suspect some old-fashioned fantastification there. I don’t think the screams could have lasted so long, do you?”

  “No. I don’t think they could have.”

  “Thirty-six adults and fourteen children,” the old woman said. “That’s what else happened at Kendall Point.”

  “What year did you say that was in?”

  For the first time, the old woman looked at him with real interest. “Eighteen-eleven.”

  “Eighteen-eleven. Thirty, thirty-five years after the burning of Patchin.”

  She was nodding vigorously. “Thirty-two years. You’ve seen the pattern, then, have you?”

  “I hadn’t gotten around to thinking of it as a pattern,” Graham had said. “But of course I remembered Prince Green, and then about five years ago those four women disappeared . . .” He was deliberately keeping his face and his voice still, remembering Bates Krell and what had jumped out at him from clear across the Nowhatan River.

  “Disappeared,” the old woman snorted. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Sarah Allen and Thomas Moorman? Two children?”

  Williams had shaken his head.

  “They were skinned and roasted—in a pit in the ground, sonny. A half-wit Tayler did it, and they caught him in one of the Jenningses’ fields and strung him up as soon as Judge Barr could get there. The Taylers are prone to go like that now and then; half-wit, I mean. And judging from the records, some of them are inclined to go another way too. But that poor half-witted Tayler killed those children in 1841. Exactly thirty years after the tragedy on Kendall Point.”

  “None of this is in your book,” Williams protested.

  “The death records are,” she said.

  He smiled. “You refused to speculate.”

  “That is correct. But didn’t you come here to ask me about Gideon Winter? The man they secretly buried on the spit of land t
hey named after him? Didn’t you want to know what I thought of him as I was doing my research?” Her eyes shone vehemently out at him. “I’ll tell you what I thought about him, young man. I thought that he would have gone far in this country if a handful of ignorant farmers hadn’t stopped him. Oh, he took them, he took them all right, and that’s why they called him the Dragon, he was smarter and stronger than they, and their women liked him—imagine this, young Williams, you’re a hardscrabble farmwife with homespun clothes and the stink of pigs and tallow in your nostrils and up comes a fine gentleman from Sussex, clothed by a tailor and rich as a king, with a smile bright as the sun and a voice soft as velvet. Wouldn’t this fine young man dazzle you?”

  She was waiting, so he answered. “I suppose. Yes.”

  “You suppose. Well, think about this. In 1650 nearly all of the children were dead. But in 1651 there was a whole new crop of conceptions, because the parish records show a new crop of baptisms in 1652. There was a boy named ‘Darkness’ and a girl baptized ‘Eventide.’ Another girl was baptized ‘Sorrow.’ I think they would have baptized each of those children Shame if they could. I’m just speculating, mind you, but wouldn’t you imagine that those children looked a bit alike?”

  “So you think they killed him.”

  “Don’t you?” she asked. “And don’t you think he killed the first generation of children, or as many of them as he could?” She was cocking her head, and he could see a broad gray line of dirt at the side of her neck. “Remember, children were primarily economic power in those times—they weren’t as sentimental as we.”

  “I think I can see how you feel about him,” Williams said.

  “Oh, women all love a dragon, Mr. Williams. I’m sure those four women who disappeared from town five years ago found a dragon to love.”

  He knew she was crazy then; he had only one more question to ask. “Something must have happened in 1870—in the early 1870’s.”