Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “Only in this poem, Miss Threadgill,” he said.

  “What you read to me were the second, third, and fourth verses of a famous poem by Thomas Nashe called ‘In Time of Pestilence.’ Nashe was generally a rather feverish, violent writer, the greatest of the Elizabethan pamphleteers. He was given to the grotesque.”

  “‘In Time of Pestilence,’ by Thomas Nashe,” Bobo said. “Thank you, Miss Threadgill.”

  “What in the world are you people doing over there in the police station?” Miss Threadgill asked, and Bobo told her that she would be reading about it in the papers.

  11

  The stanzas from the Thomas Nashe poem were printed on the front page of the Hampstead Gazette the following Monday; but even before that, they appeared in a New York Times Metropolitan Section article headlined “The Connecticut Ripper?” In a box beside the article were photographs of Stony Friedgood, Hester Goodall, and Bobby Fritz.

  In a long conversation he had with Patsy McCloud on Tuesday night, Graham said, “It’s poetry, do you see? That’s the link. He’s deliberately referring to Robertson ‘Prince’ Green. Young Green’s father claimed he had been corrupted by poetry. And there was a newspaper article about the ‘Ripper-Poet.’ He wants us to know, Patsy. He wants us to know who he is.” All through this conversation, Graham Williams heard the whicker of the dragon’s wings: he heard them while Patsy told him about her marriage; he heard them in the title of the Nashe poem, which lay printed out before them on the front page of the Gazette; he heard it especially in a list of children’s names which were given in another Gazette article.

  On the night of the thirteenth—Friday the thirteenth, the day Roger Slyke accidentally found Bobby Fritz’s body—Richard Allbee called Laura from Providence; he said that he was having more problems than he had expected with the job, and would have to stay in Rhode Island four or five more days, maybe as long as another week. Laura told him not to worry about her: she said she would be fine, that she was sorry he was having difficulties but knew he could sort them out. She told Richard that things were quiet in Hampstead.

  Laura could not have told him about Bobby Fritz, for she did not hear about the discovery of the killer’s third victim until the next morning, when Ronnie Riggley called her up with the news. Yet she could have said, and did not say, to Richard that five more children had followed the example of Thomas and Martin O’Hara and drowned themselves. This had happened on the night of the eleventh, the same night Bobby Fritz was hacked to death, mutilated, and concealed in a ditch on Poor Fox Road; and Laura did not tell Richard about the five children because she knew he would worry about it, would worry about her, and she did not want to add to his troubles. Laura had seen the first article about the five children in Friday’s Gazette; their names were given again in the following Monday’s paper, which Graham Williams and Patsy McCloud had open on the table before them.

  Within what is known there is a deep layer of the unknown. No one on the staff of the Gazette ever said it in print, but the town had gone into shock: the nightmare of the random killings was not over after all, and an even worse cycle seemed to have been visited upon them. No one on the Gazette wanted to do more than report the facts, to print what was known: that was all there was, they imagined.

  And here is what was known. On the night of the eleventh of June or early on Thursday morning, the twelfth, these events took place: a twelve-year-old boy named Dylan Steinberg walked into the water at Sawtell Beach after leaving his clothes neatly stacked beneath his shoes on the sand and swam out until he became too tired to swim any farther, went under the water, and drowned; in separate incidents, three children named Carl Blockett, Monty Sherbourne (the son of the principal of J. S. Mill’s middle school) and Annette Crowley (the child of a travel writer on the staff of the Times), who were six, seven and thirteen respectively, drowned themselves with the same crazy deliberation off Gravesend Beach; and a five-year-old boy in Redhill named Hank Hawthorne (the son of an insurance executive and grandnephew of a noble old lawyer in Milburn, New York) left his bed in the middle of the night, stripped off his pajamas and threw them on his bed, then went downstairs, unlocked the door, and drowned himself in the wading pool on his front lawn. This is what the police and Gazette reporters knew; they would truthfully have said that there was no need to report the effect of this information on the town of Hampstead. That seemed obvious enough—it was not printed in the newspaper, but on the faces of those who were shopping for spaghetti sauce and romaine lettuce at Greenblatt’s, the faces of those buying typing paper or just looking at the big-screen-projection television at Anhalt’s on Main Street.

  But even here there was a profound layer of the unknown. Those people buying groceries at Greenblatt’s or stationery at Anhalt’s would have known that the mothers and fathers of the dead children were distraught, in emotional shock, traumatized; Hampstead was a sophisticated town, and the shoppers would have predicted that some of the parents would find their way into psychotherapy and others into the divorce courts. Because they were verbal and sophisticated people, they could have described the guilt the parents of the dead children must be suffering; they would have speculated about cults and phases of the moon and sunspots (much as Sarah Spry was soon to do); might have gone on to mention other cases of childish mass hysteria, which this did seem to be, after all, and if you had kids you ought to be locking them in their rooms at night or taking them back to the city, where they’d be safe. But probably no one except Mikki Zaber O’Hara—and possibly Sarah Spry—would have guessed that Mrs. Sherbourne and Mrs. Crowley and Wendy Hawthorne in Redhill dreamed on the night their children were killing themselves that they were comforting cold wet sons and daughters—taking their frozen bodies into their beds and holding them tightly against their breasts while they chafed their backs and brushed sand from their chests.

  12

  When Richard spoke to Laura on Friday night, he did not have to say that the source of the problems that would keep him in Providence was his client, for when there were problems it was usually the client who caused them. Laura would have known that, and Laura had seen her husband cope successfully with clients who could not make up their minds, who changed their minds in the middle of the job, who thought that they could do the job better themselves. Richard had not made friends with all of his clients, but he had at least been friendly with all of them. Laura knew these things, but Laura had not met Morris Stryker. Morris Stryker defeated most of Richard’s expectations, and Richard had begun to fear by Friday night that Stryker would defeat him too.

  They had begun badly, and maybe the beginning underlay all the subsequent troubles. Richard’s first impression of Morris Stryker was that he was a great deal like the truck driver who had left a mountain of rubble in the middle of his driveway. Stryker was large and flabby and nursed a cigar with his lips; Stryker was a bully who had terrorized his secretary and cowed the contractor on the job, Mike Hagen, into agreeing with everything he said. And for his part, Stryker thought he was a fraud—Stryker had expected him to be English.

  Richard had discovered that three days before, when he had driven up to the job for the first time. He had come into Providence on I-95, checked into his hotel, washed and changed his clothes, and driven to College Street. Stryker and Mike Hagen were already there, sitting in the backseat of Stryker’s Cadillac. When Richard left his car and walked across the street, his eyes on the lovely but dilapidated eighteenth-century mansion he was supposed to restore, Stryker and Hagen emerged from the Cadillac to meet him. He had immediately known which of them was the contractor and which the client, for Stryker wore a powder-blue suit, a navy-blue shirt, white shoes, and a gold chain around his neck. Contractors, in Richard’s experience, usually dressed in a way that made them look at home in their pickup trucks. “Allbee?” the massive Stryker said. “Mr. Allbee?”

  “Yes, nice to meet you, Mr. Stryker,” Richard said. “This is a lovely Georgian house we have to work on.”

/>   “I want it to look like the most expensive house on the block,” Stryker said, and looked at him a little oddly. “This is Mike Hagen, he’s doing the work. Mike and I went to school together, right here in Providence.”

  “Hiya,” Hagen said. He stood in back of Stryker, hands in his pockets.

  “Well, Mr. Stryker,” Richard had said, “this is going to be an interesting project. I can see plenty of opportunities to use contemporary techniques, for example in the paints.” Richard was revving up, thinking about the pigments he could use to get the brightness and clarity of an eighteenth-century interior.

  “Hey, you’re not English,” Stryker unexpectedly said. “You’re supposed to be English, aren’t you?”

  “I was born in Connecticut,” Richard said. “My wife and I lived in London for about twelve years, and that was where I started doing restoration work. That’s probably where you got the impression I was English.”

  “Toby,” Stryker shouted, turning back to the Cadillac. “Toby, get out here right now.”

  A colorless blond man opened the front passenger door and stood up nervously beside the car.

  “He’s not an Englishman, Toby,” Stryker said in a lowering voice.

  “He’s not?” Toby squeaked. “I thought he was. I mean . . . he’s from London, isn’t he?”

  “Mr. Allbee just worked there, Toby. He is from Connecticut, which you should have found out about, don’t you think, Toby?”

  “Yessir,” Toby said.

  Mike Hagen just stood with his hands in his pockets, not looking at anybody or anything. He’d had a long experience of Morris Stryker.

  Stryker shook his head, then leaned over and spat out his cigar. “You worked in England though, huh?” he asked Richard.

  “Until now all of my work was in England.”

  Stryker shook his head again. “Well, we might as well go inside.” He glared at Richard. “I thought, you know, you were English, and you just came over to Connecticut so you could work in this country. I wanted somebody English.”

  “We can make the house look as English as you like,” Richard had said, and that had been a mistake.

  13

  This was Saturday, the fourteenth of June, a week after the attempted burglary at the Van Horne house, and Tabby Smithfield awoke in the middle of the night confused and feeling somehow that time was escaping him. He had to hurry, he had to rush, he did not know where. Gasping, he got out of bed and felt for his clothes. He was late for school . . . he was late for an appointment with his grandfather. He slid into his jeans and pulled the day’s shirt over his head. In the dark he laced his running shoes. He knew that he could not make any noise—his father was in the room downstairs with Berkeley Woodhouse, and he would be furious if Tabby disturbed him.

  Berkeley Woodhouse was the woman Tabby had seen with his father just before he’d had the series of visions in the library. Clark had invited her to “Four Hearths” for dinner, and she had given Tabby a kiss that left lipstick on his cheek. Clark and Berkeley were drunk when they had arrived back at the house, and got drunker during dinner. She talked about her divorced husband, he talked about Sherri. Berkeley had kept reaching across the table to grasp Tabby’s hand. Immediately after dinner Clark had switched on the television set and taken Berkeley upstairs. The orders were clear.

  But now Tabby had to get out of the house, he had to get on his way. His grandfather was waiting, and Dicky Norman was waiting, and Gary Starbuck too.

  Tabby eased out his bedroom door, aware that something was wrong with these thoughts, but in too much of a hurry and still too fogged with sleep to know what it was. He went quickly down the stairs. The house was completely dark. He opened the front door and walked out into the brightest moonlight he had ever seen in his life.

  His grandfather was waiting. No, someone else was waiting.

  He looked back up at the place where the moon should have been and saw the face of Gary Starbuck looming down toward him. Run! Starbuck ordered him, pushing his great white face through millions of miles of empty air. Run! Starbuck’s face was dead—dead as moon rocks, the color of white cheese.

  Tabby ran from the moon with Starbuck’s face in it.

  He pounded out of Hermitage Road and turned the corner into the long descending slope of Beach Trail. Momentum carried him forward, and for a heart-stopping few seconds he seemed to be traveling above the ground as if he had shot off a ski jump. Then his feet found the surface of the road again and held to it, and he was racing down Beach Trail. It seemed to go straight down, and be made not of asphalt but of slick mud. When one of his feet struck the road, it slid crazily along and he had to fight for his balance until he could get the other foot out in front of him, and the whole process began all over again.

  As he sped toward Graham Williams’ house, he saw it enveloped by a red glow. He raced forward and down, the hill much steeper than he knew it was. There was an enormous scorched circle on the lawn where he had thrown Starbuck’s two-way radio seven days before, and from the black circle a line of singed and burning grass led straight to the front door. Tabby drew closer and closer to the old man’s house, unable to stop or get off Beach Trail, and saw the glow surrounding the house flicker redly.

  Behind him the Starbuck-moon blew toward him and almost knocked him over with its breath.

  Now he could see right into the glowing house, he could see every room. Books were circling lazily as sparrow hawks in the living room, and a comic-book devil was strangling Graham Williams in the upstairs bedroom. As Tabby sped by, truly unable to stop, the devil, who was red and horned and had a thick saurian tail, tightened his grip on Graham’s neck and turned sideways to face Tabby. He was grinning. His face was enormous, and a flickering tongue the size of a baseball bat curled and danced out of his mouth. His massive penis was split into two erect twitching forks. The devil twisted Graham’s head and then lifted the body to show Tabby how limp it was.

  Tabby screamed, but the scream slipped out behind him and he was careening into Mount Avenue, struggling to stay on his feet. The dead breath of the moon slammed into his back and lifted him along down Mount Avenue.

  When he sped past the historical marker before the walls of Greenbank Academy, it swung up from the ground like a gravestone on hinges and the fire-bat flapped up out of the ground. The fire-bat circled over speeding Tabby Smithfield, looked down at him with its empty eyes, and then lifted up. Tabby saw it move quickly away, even its fire whitened by the frozen silver light streaming from the moon. The fire-bat dipped its wings at the Van Horne house and then sailed over the water. Tabby watched it flying toward the Millpond.

  Of course he could not see the Millpond: that was a mile away, and trees and houses intervened: but as Tabby jumped or was blown over the fence across the short road to Gravesend Beach, he was aware of two areas which glowed as if they burned. These areas were roughly equidistant from him, and neither one was normally visible. Far off to his right, the fire-bat was settling down on the spit of land known as “Shrinks’ Row,” and far off to his right, jutting out into the Sound like Shrinks’ Row, Kendall Point shone red too. Tabby looked right and saw the bat’s wings brush the tops of the pretty frame houses, saw flames spring up under the eaves; looked left and saw all of Kendall Point glowing a poker’s angry red.

  Then he was walking down the road to the beach in ordinary moonlight. The sky showed a trace of red over the tops of the trees to his right, but he could see no flames.

  It seemed to him that he had been moving for the past ten minutes in a crazy dream. He looked uneasily up at the moon, which looked nothing like Gary Starbuck. He stopped still on the narrow road to the beach. The air around him stopped too. The ground was solid. The redness over the tops of the trees between him and Shrinks’ Row could have been from a police car, he thought.

  He did not believe that those houses were burning any more than he believed that an enormous bat made of fire had climbed up out of the ground beneath that slab of a
monument.

  Tabby looked once more at the redness, daring it to show him an actual flame, and then continued up the road to the beach. Wait a second, he thought. Why am I going this way? Why not just go home?

  “Do you really think you could sleep?” he asked himself out loud. Not for about a week, no. Besides I have to . . .

  Have to what?

  . . . go up to the water.

  What for?

  To see it.

  He had to walk up to the Sound and look into the water. Simple, really, wasn’t it? And all the rest of what had happened, Gary Starbuck and the devil and Graham Williams and the fire-bat, had been the little sideshows and inducements to bring him this far, so that he had only another twenty yards to go before he could walk out on the sand and take a good look at the sea.

  From where he stood he could see a long black line of water. He did not want to get any closer to it.

  Please.

  The wind pushed him forward, scurrying at his back.

  Please.

  Please yourself.

  A part of him did want to see what was going to happen up there; part of him wanted to find out what would be the last act of the night’s performance.

  He stepped forward, and the wind teased his hair, fluttered his shirt. His stomach ground in upon itself, and he was afraid for a second that he would throw up. He stepped forward again, then determinedly strode all the way up to the retaining wall at the end of the parking lot, jumped over the wall, and landed on the sand with both feet. Now he was on the Dragon’s territory.

  Tabby looked up. The moon had retreated and the world was safe. Away to his right, the sky above the trees showed a persistent tinge of red. To his left was the curve of the beach, then the series of little private beaches, each marked off by a row of upended slabs like headstones. The last of these, sweeping out into the water beneath a wooded hill, was the beach which had once been his grandfather’s. Small dark waves spattered into froth at the edge of the sand.