Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “Sure,” Richard said, “and then I guess we’ll have to break it off. Laura and I have tons of things to do . . .” He paused, seeing that the reporter was staring at her pad, flushing.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah Spry repeated. “I seem to be . . . I seem to be having . . .”

  The telephone rang in the kitchen.

  5

  There, in the middle of her notebook, was what had caused her to lose the thread of the interview. Sarah knew she was blushing, but she could not help it any more now than she had been able to back in her blushing days, when any boy with a crack about fire-engine hair could bring the blood burning into her cheeks. She stared at the sentences, but they would not unwrite themselves. I guess I’m trying to bring the past back to life. Naked swimmers. I believe in the structures of these older houses, I believe in the values they express, and I . . .

  Then, farther down the page, in her neat small writing, was the second wrong thing. I was trained as an architect, but I didn’t really begin doing the kind of work I truly loved until we bought our first house in London. I’m lost. That first house was my real university. I’m afraid. My business took off when a few people . . .

  Sarah dropped her pen on the floor.

  Naked swimmers.

  I’m lost.

  I’m afraid.

  It was as if those two poor lost children, Martin and Tommy O’Hara, had spoken to her straight through her pen. She had not heard Richard Allbee say those words, she had not consciously written them: there had been a moment when it was as if a gear had slipped, or the picture had gone fuzzy on the television tube, and in that moment of mental fuzz the unspoken words had expressed themselves through the pen and onto the paper. Lost. Afraid. She bent to retrieve the pen, her head seeming to detach itself from her body and view her awkward groping for the pen with cold indifference.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She heard herself say it and saw her fingers close around the pen. “I seem to be (having some trouble) . . . I seem to be having (a little difficulty keeping myself in order) . . .”

  When the telephone rang she could have fallen on the floor with gratitude.

  6

  “Patsy’s in trouble,” Richard heard Graham say. “I don’t know what kind of trouble, but she needs us, Richard. Believe me, I wouldn’t call you on a day like this if I didn’t think it was serious.”

  “Trouble like Saturday night?” Richard asked, imagining Patsy trembling and convulsing somewhere on a strange floor.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, no. It didn’t sound like that. But she needs our help, Richard.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At the funeral home just off the Post Road on Rex Road—around the corner from the Tack Room. Bornley and Holland.”

  “I’ll try to get away,” Richard said.

  When he came back into the living room, Laura had left the couch and was standing in the back door with the two teenage boys. “Everything’s out of the truck, Richard,” she said. “One of the dining-room chairs has a broken leg, but that’s the only damage I can see.”

  He looked toward Sarah Spry, who was clutching her pen and leaning forward over her knees like a third-grader who has to go to the bathroom. The flush was gone from her cheeks, and her entire wizened face looked inward and withdrawn.

  “Okay,” he said. “If we see anything else, we’ll write to the company. You guys did a good job.” He gave each of them ten dollars.

  “Mister, is that lady all right?” one of the boys asked.

  “I think so. Here’s five for the driver, but it’s five more than he deserves.”

  The boys left, and he turned to the reporter.

  “I’m afraid that the interview must be over,” he said. “I have to go down into town. Do you have everything you need?”

  She nodded, put her hands on her knees, and dipped a little when she pushed herself up. “Yes. I have plenty.”

  “Would you like to rest here for a bit before you go? Can I get you anything?”

  She smiled. “No, thank you.”

  “I just thought you seemed . . .” He paused, for he did not want to say “disturbed”; then he realized that a more accurate word was “frightened.”

  “Oh, I seemed, did I?” she said. Sarah was still smiling. “I think that conversation this morning caught up with me. That was not nearly as pleasant as this one was. No, I’ll be fine, Mr. Allbee. I’ll just be on my way. The story should be in Friday’s Gazette.”

  He walked her to the back door. The moving truck was gone, and a mountain of brown paper and devastated packing cartons reared up beside the driveway. Beside the yellow-and-brown mountain smoldered two cigar butts the size of dog turds.

  He waved as she got into her car, and then turned back to Laura. She was standing a few feet away and had her arms crossed over her chest. A black smear of dust bisected her forehead. “I can’t believe that woman came here to interview you on our moving day. She’d better be good to you in her article or I’ll go over to her office and burn her desk.”

  “Well, it’s over with,” Richard said. He patted his pockets to locate his car keys. “The timing for this is terrible, but Patsy McCloud apparently is in some kind of difficulty. That was Graham Williams on the phone. Patsy’s down at a funeral home on Rex Road. I really ought to go, and I’d like you to come with me.”

  “Graham Williams can’t handle it himself?” Laura inspected the palms of her hands, then wiped them free of dust on her jeans. “You and Graham are the Patsy McCloud Appreciation Society, it looks like. You spend all Saturday night with her, and now you have to rush off to help her bury her husband.”

  “I know it looks funny, I know it sounds funny and probably smells funny too, but she needs help. That’s all I know. I wish you’d come along.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of missing it,” Laura said. “But the real reason I’m annoyed with you is that you forgot all about your present, and I spent about a week picking it out.”

  “My present?” he said stupidly. “Oh, my God. You got me a present. I did forget. The movers came, and then Sarah What’s-her-name, and then Graham called . . . Oh, Laura, I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

  “You ought to be, buster,” she said. “I hid it in a kitchen cabinet. Do you have time to see it now, or do we have to rush off to your precious Patsy right away?”

  “Let’s go see it,” he said, and put his arm around her as they went back into the kitchen.

  Laura bent over and opened one of the bottom cabinet doors. She took out a silver-gray box about a foot high. “I sure hope you like this,” she said, standing up and offering it to him. “It’s a house present. I never spent so much on anything before in my life.”

  He took the box and set it on a counter. The box weighed less than he had for some reason expected. He lifted the top, and then looked sideways at Laura. She was still miffed, but far more than that, she was eager for his response.

  “Whatever you do, don’t drop it,” she said.

  He lifted the paper covering the top of whatever was in the box, and then put his hands in. It was cool porcelain with a smoky yellow glaze. His finger found a square bottom. This was hollow, which accounted for the lightness of the object. He hooked his fingers into the base and picked it up out of the box.

  His expectant smile froze on his face. He was holding the grinning yellow head of a dragon. Two horns pricked up from its flat forehead; a thick wing like a frozen wave rose up just behind the head.

  “It’s Chinese,” Laura said. “A roof dragon—an ornamental tile. The color means that it was on an imperial palace. I thought it would be good luck for us.”

  “Yes,” he said, scarcely able to breathe.

  “I see your enthusiasm is unbounded. Put it back in the box and I’ll take it back as soon as we get our stuff unpacked.”

  “No,” he said. “I want to keep it. I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Do you really?”

  “I do. I love it. I w
as just surprised. Honest. I love it.”

  “You look funny.”

  “I remembered something Graham Williams told me—there used to be a man here who was called the Dragon.” And that was all he could tell Laura about Saturday night.

  “Did your father know him?”

  That made him smile. “No, it was a long time ago—back at the start of Greenbank.”

  “Well, now there’s another one,” Laura said. “Let’s find a place for it.”

  Richard carried the dragon’s head into the living room and set it on top of the mantel. Then he hugged Laura. Part of him felt that now the chaos had been admitted, had been allowed inside, that the door in his dream had opened and Billy Bentley had come storming in with his hair plastered to his forehead and his clothes dripping from the storm.

  “You do like it, don’t you?” Laura asked. “You’re not just saying it?”

  He felt between them the cushion that was Lump Allbee, the modest darling of his dream. “I love it,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  7

  When Patsy opened the massive front door to the funeral parlor, she tried to dismiss the memories of the previous night. Mr. Holland had been waiting for her, and his narrow face as he came oozing across the carpet was a rebuke to fancy of any sort. He was actually a kind and nervous man, Patsy knew, but nature or heredity had given Franz Holland the face and structure of a Dickensian villain. His eyebrows twisted and twirled, his nose pointed, his shoulders hunched. He always wore expensive suits on his lanky frame. His lips were slightly too red for his pallid face. He wanted to be thought “civilized” and “superior” and so he aped those mannerisms he thought represented distinction. He was fond of laying one finger slantwise across his upper lip, of standing with his hips cocked and one foot slightly forward; of walking with his hands behind his back. When he walked toward Patsy across his thick carpet, he actually combined two of these gestures, and held his left index finger slantwise across his upper lip and his right hand behind his back. Patsy thought he looked like some pompous bird begging for silence.

  As he neared her, the left hand languidly dropped, the right languidly met it, and Mr. Holland very slightly bowed. “Mrs. McCloud, thank you for coming to us,” he said in a pleasant baritone voice. “Just remember that we are here to make this process as easy and painless for you as it can possibly be. As I said to you on the telephone yesterday, Mrs. McCloud, the last ceremony we give our loved ones can be as much a thing of beauty as the others—as beautiful as a christening or a wedding. Now, you have a suit for me?”

  Patsy had been assured yesterday by Mr. Holland that although Les had been too burned in the fire that followed the accident for an open coffin, there was certainly enough of Les left to be dressed in his favorite suit. “Which we really do prefer, Mrs. McCloud, don’t we? We want to think of our loved ones as attired in the raiment of glory, my father used to say, which often as not is provided by Brooks Brothers. So if you’ll bring along some suit, shirt, and tie Mr. McCloud particularly liked . . . ?”

  Mr. McCloud’s favorite shoes were not required.

  Patsy passed over the small brown paper bag she had been carrying. Franz Holland hitched it up under his arm as easily as if it contained his lunch.

  “Mr. McCloud’s parents will be arriving today, will they?”

  “Yes,” Patsy said. “They’re taking the Connecticut limousine from Kennedy.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Holland said, bowing forward and clasping his hands behind his back. “Of course I remember the senior McClouds very well. They came to us when your husband’s grandfather passed away, and I think they were very pleased with what we did for them. Which brings me to an important question. Have you thought about the casket you would like to provide for your husband’s remains?” He guided her, without actually touching her elbow, around a corner into a large room filled with reclining coffins.

  “I think you can see that we offer a wide range of choice, Mrs. McCloud,” he said, very nearly gesturing at the rows of yawning coffins. “And I’m sure you would agree with us that in this most personal of matters, choice is essential. And if I may . . . Madame is a Tayler, is she not?”

  It took Patsy a second to realize that Mr. Holland meant her.

  “Yes.”

  “My father and myself conducted the funeral for Madame’s grandfather. Bornley and Holland have worked with many generations of Taylers, Mrs. McCloud.”

  “But not Josephine Tayler,” Patsy said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You didn’t work with Josephine Tayler, did you? My grandmother. Tayler was her maiden name too; she and my grandfather were distant cousins. You worked on her husband, but not on her. You put him in one of your boxes, but not her.”

  “Madame’s grandmother fell ill, did she not?” Mr. Holland inquired, stepping one pace back. “It was a very sad story. Madame’s grandmother was a lovely person. I believe other arrangements were made.”

  Patsy could not have said why she felt so hostile. “Yes, they certainly were. Madame’s grandmother was the town crazy lady, and so her fine husband let her be put away in an asylum for most of her life.”

  Now the finger was back at its post across the upper lip. “It is a tragic history, Mrs. McCloud. And no doubt the circumstances bring it back to you. But if there is something to be learned from that history, madame, it is that we ought provide as well as we can for our loved ones when they are no longer able to provide for themselves.”

  “I want my husband cremated,” Patsy said. “He was almost cremated anyhow, wasn’t he? I want to finish the job. Just sell me the simplest damn coffin you have, and cremate him inside it.”

  Franz Holland visibly drew back. “Of course there are other family members to consider . . .”

  She flashed out: “I don’t want to cremate any other family members, at least not yet, I only want to cremate my husband! And if you won’t do it, I’ll take him somewhere where they will!”

  “Mrs. McCloud,” Holland said wretchedly, and in that instant—the instant before control left her altogether—she pitied him, who was after all a sensitive man and talked that way because his father had taught him to do it. “Mrs. McCloud, as the wife of the loved one your wishes are supreme, and we will do whatever will make you most comfortable. But we do have your comfort in mind, and I want to ask you to consider . . .”

  Patsy nearly fainted. Mr. Franz Holland was dead. That pleasant, modulated baritone voice was coming out of a cracked, discolored mouth. The upper lip had split all the way into the nose, and she saw sunken gums and the roots of teeth standing out like distended veins. His tongue had blackened. Mr. Holland’s skin was dry and parchmentlike, very slightly brownish in color. In places it seemed to have exploded open, leaving ragged holes into a sagging horror of ropy purple organs. Patsy finally saw that the creature before her wore only a dickey and a necktie. The skin on its hips had sunk in around the bones, and the penis had shrunk almost completely away.

  Patsy screamed, having found her throat.

  The creature jumped, and then held out a hand toward her. The nails were purplish-black and several inches long.

  “Don’t touch me!” Patsy screamed.

  The creature backed away, hushing its dead bare feet across the thick carpet.

  This was what her grandmother had seen. Josephine Tayler had gone on as long as she could, seeing her friends and strangers suddenly presented in rotting bodies when they were going to die soon, and then she could take it no more and she had had herself subtracted from the world. Mr. Holland was going to die within a month, and eventually this is what he would look like.

  Only no one was supposed to see him when he looked like this.

  “Mr. Holland,” Patsy said in a shaking voice. She was looking down at the carpet. “I am sorry for screaming. I am having a difficult time. Please do not come near me. I apologize for making a scene. I am afraid that I am not quite myself.”

  “Of course, Mrs. McCloud,” came t
he low voice, and Patsy shuddered.

  “I wonder if I might use your telephone. I must call a friend to help me. No, please, do not come near me, Mr. Holland. Just show me where your telephone is.”

  The skeletal, shriveled feet hushed backward, and Patsy saw one of the claws pointing back out into the hall. “That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll find it.”

  “At the desk in the alcove beside the Chapel of Rest,” the thing said, and Patsy bolted past him, looking the other way.

  “Have I done anything?” she heard him ask. “Have I offended you so terribly?” He sounded almost tearful. “If you do wish to cremate your husband, then of course . . .”

  “Yes,” she called backward. “Stay in that room, please, Mr. Holland.” She saw the alcove half-hidden behind a red velvet drape. There was the desk and the telephone. The book was in the top-right-hand drawer, and she quickly looked up Graham Williams’ number and begged him to come as quickly as he could.

  “Yes, Richard too,” she said. “Both of you. Come get me out of here.”

  8

  What happened after the other three arrived at the funeral parlor was anticlimactic and can be reported in only a few sentences. Laura Allbee, who knew so much less than the other two about Patsy, seemed to comprehend the situation inside Bornley & Holland much better than her husband and Graham Williams—Laura immediately went to Patsy and put her arms around her. Richard and Graham huddled foolishly behind Patsy’s back, patting her shoulder and glancing uncertainly toward Franz Holland, who seemed uncertain whether he could now emerge from the casket showroom. Eventually Richard went over to speak to him, but Laura called out to the funeral director, “There’s no problem about a cremation, is there?”

  “Not if Mrs. McCloud wishes one,” Holland said. “I will make all the arrangements.”

  “That’s settled, then,” Laura said. She stood, and Patsy stood with her, still holding on to her. “We can all go home again.”

  Graham took Patsy back to Charleston Road, agreeing to drive her back for her car later that afternoon. “I had a touch of the Josephines,” Patsy told him. “Still, at least I know that all of you are going to have a long life.”