Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Dr. Patel stood up, looked at the clock, and then at Bruce Norman, who was sitting in a chair at the side of the emergency room, watching him with slitted and dangerous eyes.

  Dr. Patel picked up Dicky’s remaining hand and felt for a pulse; but his hands had been in Dicky’s wound at the moment of his death, and he knew there would be no pulse. He gently lowered Dicky’s hand to his chest.

  Bruce stood up. He stank of blood, and blood had soaked and smeared over his shoes, his jeans, and his shirt. The blood on his face was like war paint.

  “This is a dead boy,” said Dr. Patel, whose accent and diction were still those of India. “Can you tell me please how this wound was inflicted?”

  Bruce walked up to the small brown-skinned doctor and hit him squarely in the side of the head, knocking out two of the doctor’s teeth and sending him flying into Dicky’s IV stand. The doctor fell to the floor in a pool of dark liquid, and Bruce picked up his brother and carried him back outside to the van.

  At that moment, the nurses were all either in the emergency patients’ cubicles or around the corner at the nursing station, and none of them saw what had happened until Jake Rems, an alcoholic with a black eye and a broken nose, began squalling that a monster boy had killed his doctor.

  Dicky was back on his seat; Bruce was calmer. He drove down the highway to Woodville and the next hospital, St. Hilda’s, and there he accepted the news that his brother was dead.

  It was now twelve-thirty-one on Sunday morning, the eighth of June, and Patchin County was beginning its twenty-fifth day without rain.

  19

  Just after a quarter to one, Tabby had turned into Beach Trail and was trudging slowly up toward Hermitage and “Four Hearths.” He was too tired to think about everything that had happened. He wanted only to get inside his house, go up to his room, lock his door, and crawl into bed. In his mind he saw the fire-bat widening its red wings . . . the wings were as red as Dicky Norman’s left side, where Dicky had looked as though a crazy painter had slapped him with brushful after brushful of bright red paint.

  The fire-bat’s eyes were black holes, and clouds shone palely through.

  Tabby looked ahead up the road and saw the houses march one by one on either side of the black street, the streetlamps throwing circles of light on the ground, and thought that all of it, right up the hill to his house, looked like a setting in a dream, and that soon these houses would begin to swell and bloat, blood and foul yellow liquid would pour from the windows, the street would crack and turn over and bruised white hands would thrust up through the exposed earth . . . and the fire-bat would soar overhead, setting the bursting houses alight and crooning, Master Smyth. Do you wish a ball in the back?

  He groaned, lifted his hands to wipe his face, and saw for the first time since the Normans had come through the front door of the doctor’s house that he was still carrying Gary Starbuck’s two-way radio.

  It crackled in his face. “Tabby! Tabby Smithfield! You get back here! You get your tail back here right now or I’ll kill you!” The voice leaped out of the radio on a cascade of static, but it was strong and clear. It was the same voice he had heard speaking to him while he stood on the doctor’s lawn—Gary Starbuck’s voice. Starbuck was not dead, he was back there in a fuming rage because Tabby and the Normans had run out on him.

  Tabby stared down at the radio, not knowing what to believe. Bruce Norman had seen the doctor shoot Starbuck. But he himself had seen people at those windows, people Bruce had told him were not there. “Aaagh,” the radio whimpered.

  Radio signals, Tabby thought. It was picking up some kind of radio signals, and pretty soon Dr. Demento would come on, announcing that the next number would be “Surfin’ Bird” by the immortal Trashmen.

  But he knew that these were not radio signals. He was never going to hear “Steve Miller’s Midnight Tango” or “Song for a Sucker Like You” on this radio, and Starbuck, he was certain, was dead. And Dicky Norman too would be dead by now, his arm savagely ripped off by . . .

  . . . by a delicate rose-pink light that glowed at the center of an antique mirror?

  The lump of black metal and plastic in his hand grew suddenly warm. With an almost exhausted curiosity Tabby lifted it nearer to his face: an acrid electronic stink. Then the thing in his hand was unbearably hot. Smoke poured from the grille. The top edge drooped and grinned. A strip of metal sizzled against his palm, and he jerked his hand, sending the radio flying onto a lawn.

  It burst into flame while it was still in the air. Something within it went pop! and when it struck the lawn, a small specific cloud of blue gas emerged from its diminishing surface. Many of the pieces still burned, it cracked down the center, and as the plastic melted, small burning elements from inside the radio twisted and moved across the grass.

  One fiery piece seemed to have tiny legs and a shiny back like a beetle’s. It staggered some inches from the melting body of the radio, then turned crisp and transparent and died.

  A few tiny flames began to feed on the dry stalks of grass.

  Tabby realized that the entire lawn could catch fire, and he jumped onto the lawn and began stamping on the tiny flames.

  “Tabby? Is that you?” a woman called, and when he looked up he saw Patsy McCloud standing on the front step—then he recognized Graham Williams’ house. He had been too bone-weary to identify it earlier.

  “It’s me,” he said, and she jumped off the porch already running. Graham Williams poked his head around the front door, and Tabby waved. Williams grinned and waved back, rubbing his chest with his other hand. He stepped outside and pushed his hands into his pockets.

  Patsy ran into Tabby and almost knocked him down before she hugged him. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded.

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was holding a radio, and it sort of exploded,” he said, feeling a little light-headed now that he was circled by her arms. A metal catch on her white overalls dug into his neck. Patsy smelled pleasantly of perfume and fresh perspiration.

  “I was so worried . . . I passed out, actually I guess I had a kind of fit, and I dreamed you were in terrible danger.” She straightened up and took her arms from around him. “You were in danger, weren’t you?”

  “Well, I burned my hand,” he said, and showed her the fat strip of burned flesh across the palm of his hand.

  “We’ll soak that in cold water, but that’s not what I mean. Where were you tonight? What were you doing?”

  He could not answer that question. If he had to, he could explain, and Patsy would believe him, but the explanations would take too long, and he was too tired.

  “Why, you’ve got blood on your shirt,” Patsy said.

  He looked down. It was blood, all right—Dicky Norman’s. That was where he had wiped his hand after trying to pull Dicky back up on the van’s seat.

  Patsy’s face had gone even whiter. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m not hurt. I was just out with some people.” And two of them are dead now.

  Patsy’s head jerked back as though she had intercepted this thought. Her wide dark eyes caught his.

  Then the image of the fire-bat, its wings extended and clouds drifting past its empty eyes, slammed into his mind, along with

  I saw this

  oh no

  I saw this I saw this I saw this and it was going to kill you

  we can’t do this nobody can do this

  tell it to the Marines, buster, because we’re doing it.

  The words had flown between them as the dreadful image of the fire-bat had faded, and at the conclusion Patsy’s mouth actually twitched in a smile. “We are,” Tabby said. He tried

  I saw that too, Patsy

  or it slipped into his mind and he felt it instantly transfer to hers.

  we can’t

  no can’t

  tell

  can’t can’t tell

  anyone

  anyone else

  even Richard

&n
bsp; (Richard?)

  yesss

  A complicated series of emotions involving warmth, guilt, and deep physicality blew into him along with the sibilant yes, and he backed away mentally, knowing that this was too private for him.

  “Richard Allbee,” he said out loud.

  Patsy nodded, and then Graham Williams was on them, saying, “Come on in for a second, Tabby, you have to meet our fourth member, you look like you could use a rest anyhow, I guess we all could.” He realized that he was looking directly into Patsy’s face: she was exactly his height.

  this scares me, he thought

  and two of them are dead now? Patsy thought.

  later

  the fire-thing?

  later

  the fire-thing, damn you?

  I don’t know

  it was going to kill you, Patsy thought in Tabby’s brain, and he knew that she was telling him no more than the truth. The joyousness of what he and Patsy McCloud had discovered they could do went black and cold.

  “Are you all right?” the old man was asking him. “What the hell happened to you? What’s all that blood?”

  “I’m fine, really,” Tabby said.

  “Where were you, son?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Tabby said. “I can’t tell anybody—not now, anyhow. But I’m not hurt.”

  Williams glowered at the boy. “I get the feeling I’m missing something. There’s something going on here, and I’m missing it. Did he tell you what he was up to, Patsy?”

  Patsy shook her head.

  “Well, I suppose you’d better come on up and meet Richard Allbee,” Graham said. Then he shot another dark glance at Tabby. “You’re not in trouble with the police, are you? Were you out on another mailbox massacre?”

  “Something like that,” Tabby said, and could not look at Patsy. His face reddened.

  “Well, anybody your age has a license to be stupid,” Williams said. “But don’t overdo it.”

  The three of them were walking across the overgrown weedy lawn back toward the house, and a fourth figure, a slender well-knit man in his mid-thirties, came out to stand on the porch. He was only two or three inches taller than Patsy and Tabby, and his longish dark hair was combed straight back. The man looked sleek and capable to Tabby. Then he was close enough to see the man’s face in detail, and something in his chest jumped, whether in fear or in confirmation, he did not know.

  Richard Allbee, the fourth descendant of the original Greenbank settlers, was the man he had seen through the window of the Gryphon Diner in the Post Mall shopping center.

  The Normans had been bragging about a kid named Skip Peters, how he had done everything they wanted him to do, even the craziest things. In the midst of the Norman stories, Tabby had seen Spunky Jameson staring in at him through the window.

  Then he had seen that this was an adult; it could not possibly be Spunky Jameson, Spunky was a ten-year-old kid . . .

  . . . and he had suddenly had the feeling that this person knew him, that they had met, and that events both terrible and wonderful would flow from that meeting . . . he had felt himself slipping into a panicky dream, and then Dicky Norman pushed the tines of his fork into Tabby’s hand and broke the feeling apart. . . .

  “I should have known that you’d turn out to be Tabby Smithfield,” the man said.

  “You met each other before?” Graham Williams asked with evident surprise.

  “We looked at each other,” Tabby said.

  “Mysteriouser and mysteriouser.”

  The four of them stood outside a moment longer, not speaking, aware that it was the first time that all of them had been together.

  Graham Williams knew that what was “mysteriouser and mysteriouser” was their meat and drink now, and that knowledge filled him with dread—he knew that what was to come would make Patsy’s fit only a footnote to their story. Tabby had none of these premonitions, at least not while they all stood in the darkness outside Graham’s house. During that moment when currents of emotion jumped between them all, he first had felt unreasonably secure, as if nothing could hurt him now. Then he realized he was with an old man, and a younger man and woman: it was the structure of the household on Mount Avenue just before that household blew apart with the death of his mother.

  “Well, let’s get inside for a bit,” Williams said. “Tabby, there’s something you have to hear about. Patsy saw the Dragon tonight.”

  Richard Allbee opened the door, looking down at Tabby with an expression of kindly puzzlement, and Tabby remembered how Les McCloud’s gun had looked, how enormous it had been when its barrel was pointing right at his chest. That moment now seemed to have taken place centuries ago. He looked uneasily back to the place on the lawn where the melted, broken pieces of the radio lay.

  Graham Williams put his arm across his shoulder. Tabby went up the steps to follow Patsy into the book-lined corridor.

  20

  At three-fifteen that night, two small boys could have been seen walking down the newly paved access road to Gravesend Beach. The smaller of the two, four-year-old Martin O’Hara, was limping slightly. He wore dark blue shorts and a light blue T-shirt with a shiny portrait of Yoda on the front. His nine-year-old brother, Thomas, was wearing a new pair of Keds, straight-leg jeans and a dark green T-shirt with short yellow sleeves. Thomas had scaled up the waist-high chain-link fence across the public road at the entrance to the beach, swung his leg over, and then swung the other leg over and jumped down. Then he had reached down and lifted Martin over the fence. Now Martin was struggling to keep up with Thomas.

  “Hurry up,” Thomas called to his brother. He did not look back.

  “My feet hurt, Tommy,” Martin said.

  “We’re almost there.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Martin said in an eerie echo of his mother’s voice.

  A second later Thomas said, “You’re going too slow again.”

  “But I don’t want to be slow.”

  “You’re stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid, Tommy!” Martin wailed.

  In minutes they had reached the wide part at the end of the access road. Ahead and to one side of them was the gray empty beach, to their right the long length of the breakwater from which Harry and Babe Zimmer had liked to fish. The Sound was at low tide, a long black shelf of barely moving water with silver glints of light on its small rolling waves. “This is it,” Thomas said.

  “Yeah, this is it,” Martin repeated.

  Thomas jumped on top of the concrete retaining wall at the edge of this parking area, and helped Martin to get up on top of the two-foot wall beside him. Then Thomas jumped down onto the sand. “Come on, Martin,” he said. “Jump down.”

  “Carry me,” Martin said. “I can’t jump. It’s too high for me.”

  Sighing, Thomas came back and lifted Martin down onto the sand.

  “Now we have to take our clothes off,” Thomas said.

  “We have to?”

  “Sure we have to,” Thomas said, and sat down calmly and began to untie his shoes.

  Martin sat down on the sand only inches from Thomas and yanked at his own laces. A few seconds later he furiously yelled, “Tommy, I can’t! I can’t get my shoes off!” His brother, naked except for his shirt, knelt before him and tugged off the sneakers without bothering to untie the snarled laces. As Thomas pulled his shirt off over his head, Martin pushed down his shorts and red cotton underpants and stepped out of them. Then he sat and grabbed the toe of his right sock with his left hand, grunted, and pulled the sock off. He repeated the technique with his left sock.

  “Come on, come on,” Thomas said. He was standing up in the darkness, and to Martin he looked as tall and powerful as an adult. “Get your shirt off.”

  “I want to wear my Yoda shirt,” Martin said.

  “You have to take it off,” Thomas said.

  “I want to wear my Yoda shirt!” Martin said, his face working.

  “Jesus,” Thomas said.

  “You’re not
supposed to say that!” Martin exploded.

  “All right, come on. You can wear your shirt.” Thomas led the way across the beach.

  A fat, nearly continuous strip of seaweed marked the high-tide waterline. The boys stepped over it and cautiously marched down the drying strand. They didn’t want to step on any of the sharp rocks or on the broken crab shells that litter the beach.

  “Horseshoe crab!” Martin screamed. “Look! Horseshoe crab!”

  “It’s dead, it’s yucky,” Thomas told him. “Come on, Martin.”

  Martin scampered ahead and reached the water first.

  “Brrr!”

  “The water’s okay. It’s just a little cold,” Thomas said loftily. He strode into the water after his brother and repeated, “Just a little cold,” though in fact it seemed much colder than that to him. “It’ll get better.”

  They had to walk out nearly to the end of the breakwater before the water was even waist-high for Thomas. Martin was bobbing grimly along, holding his head up. “It’s still cold,” Martin said.

  “Just go as far as you can,” Thomas said. “It doesn’t have to be far.”

  “Don’t go away,” Martin said, his shirt billowing out around him in the black water.

  “I have to,” Thomas said. “You know I have to, Martin.” Then he looked down at his brother’s intent small face. “Give me a kiss, Martin,” he said on impulse, and bent to touch his brother’s cold lips with his own. Then he threw himself forward into the water.