Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  The only noise he heard was the hissing of the waves. The breeze gently pushed at his back; the hissing of the waves called him forward. Tabby walked across the sand toward the shingle, the stripe of seaweed-encrusted pebbles at the high-tide mark.

  “Show me,” he said.

  The froth of the waves turned red as it bubbled toward his feet. When he looked out at the seething water, he saw it too was now red—a deep sluggish red that went black in the troughs between the rising waves. The air reeked of blood, and then the first flies appeared.

  They had been awakened by the smell of so much blood, and in seconds it seemed to Tabby that every fly in Hampstead had come to feed at Gravesend Beach. The silence had become a single great buzzing. Tabby frantically waved his hands before his face, trying to keep the flies from his eyes and mouth. Now the shingle and the entire stretch of the beach were a black glistening carpet of flies. He felt them shifting over his feet, weighing on his shoes. Their buzzing grew louder and louder, more rhythmic as hundreds and thousands more of them clustered on the blood-soaked sand.

  “Show me!” Tabby yelled.

  He disgustedly spat out the flies which had entered his mouth and watched a giant red wave swell up in the moonlight. The wave bulged out, layering and layering as it moved toward the shoreline, and growing—Tabby thought—ten feet high. He stepped backward, and felt the flies crushing beneath his feet. They buzzed furiously about his head. Half a dozen or more crawled down his collar inside his shirt. The towering wave arched above Tabby, and he saw his father and Berkeley Woodhouse tossed within it. They were naked and dead, tumbled together inside the wave, and when the red wave shattered on the beach it sent them rolling. Immediately a thousand flies descended. When the next wave rolled them back, the flies’ monotone buzzing scream grew louder and more hypnotic.

  “Show me!” Tabby yelled, and saw another wave far out in the Sound begin to speed toward him, growing more massive with every foot it traveled. The wave rose up fifteen feet into the air and was still growing when it crested at the shoreline. Tabby ran backward over the surging flies, looking up into the arching wave.

  First he saw Graham Williams, his thin arms and legs splayed as he was borne up by the water; then Richard Allbee’s body, not only naked but hacked and mutilated, spun into sight; and then Patsy’s dead nude body revolved as the powerful weight of the wave buffeted her past Richard’s corpse.

  The wave of blood towered up over Tabby, almost seeming to walk up on the sand, and the flies attacked it.

  When it fell, tumbling the bodies of his friends into the sand, it knocked Tabby over. Every inch of him was instantly drenched with the thick heavy fluid. Tabby was carried down the sand as the blood withdrew. For a horrible moment he was looking into the dead eyes of Richard Allbee, whose body swept past his. Tabby dug his fingers into the soaked sand, and scrambled with his legs. He felt dampness cover his hands again, and then saw that where his fingers had clawed into the beach, blood welled out. Richard Allbee’s body slid back into the Sound. He could not see the other bodies. Tabby pulled his hands from the bleeding sand and got to his feet. The wet flies struggled in the pools of blood dotting the sand; thousands of others found Tabby.

  They landed on his eyelids, in his hair, burrowed into his ears. Flies blanketed his hands.

  Tabby slapped his hands against his wet shirt, scattering hundreds of them and killing as many. He wiped at his eyes.

  “Show me!” he screamed. “It’s just water and the flies aren’t even here! Show me what you can really do!”

  For an instant, for a moment so brief it was almost gone before he realized what it meant, Tabby was standing in dry clothes on an ordinary Gravesend Beach; there were no flies.

  Then the world gave a hitch and he was slimed with blood once again, the air stank, and battalions of flies lifted and fell around his head.

  He groaned and staggered back. Then he realized what had happened, and he laughed. He had stopped it for a second; he had startled the Dragon and made the merry-go-round come to a halt, however temporarily. He laughed, and the flies crawled in his mouth, and he kept laughing. Then he shouted again.

  “I won! I won!”

  The flies lifted off him in a buzzing mass and circled out over the shingle, making for some new target. Tabby stood in his blood-soaked shoes, breathing hard. Wherever he looked on the red sand, flies clustered in greedy buzzing knots. “They’re not dead,” he said softly. “My friends aren’t dead.”

  Not yet, hissed the red froth on the shingle.

  The flies which had left him lighted on another body cast up on the red shingle. Their sound intensified and reached that rhythmic food-frenzy he had heard before. At first Tabby thought it was Patsy’s body they were swarming upon, and he squashed across the sand to drive them away.

  But the body seemed too large to be Patsy’s as he got closer to it, and then he noticed that it had been hacked and cut as Richard’s had been . . . yet it was a woman’s body. Tabby froze a few feet from the body. He had seen that the belly was savagely cut open, and a small lump of flesh that must have been an unborn child rested beside the woman’s body. On the fetus too the flies lifted and crawled. Tabby saw its unbelievably tiny fingers clenched in a fist. Then he knew who the dead woman was. She was Laura Allbee, Richard’s wife. He began to shake—after all he had been through, it was the sight of the unborn child’s clenched fingers that affected him most.

  The red water began to hiss louder and louder, and a viscous wave slapped down on Laura and the fetus. Tabby began to walk backward, unable to take his eyes off the linked bodies. He heard the water beginning to slap and roar, as it did during a storm.

  Clouds scudded together, blotting the moon. Off to the right, the redness in the night air was unmistakable—houses were burning. Tabby could smell smoke now, as well as another, graver odor underlying the pervasive stench of blood. The waves were pounding toward the shore, whipped by the wind across the water. Red foam boiled on each successive series of waves and was tossed into the air like bloody rags.

  Another body washed up on the shingle. Laura Allbee and the tiny fetus were gone, sucked back into the bloody Sound, and a more massive body now lay half-submerged in the rolling, violent waves. The flies streamed between it and Tabby in a buzzing knotty veil. The bulky body surged forward on a large incoming wave, and then it reached forward and elbowed itself out of the water.

  A bolt of lightning cracked down out of the sky and screwed itself visibly into the sand to Tabby’s left.

  The body at the edge of the water was getting to its knees. One shoulder looked like an auto wreck—a red-stained bone protruded from ragged flesh.

  Tabby backed away toward the retaining wall and the parking lot at the end of the drive. The body was trying to stand, but it had difficulty rising from its crouch. Tabby saw Dicky Norman’s face above the body. Another brilliant stroke of lightning sizzled above the Sound. Dicky finally got to his feet. Long neat autopsy scars divided his forehead and his chest. His mouth sagged open, and blood from the Sound leaked down over his chin. Dicky started moving toward Tabby.

  Now the wind, which had pushed Tabby here, pushed him back toward the beach. From the direction of the fire, sparks rose and floated in the twisting currents of air.

  “No, Dicky,” Tabby said.

  Dicky Norman gnashed his teeth at the sound of Tabby’s voice.

  “You’re not real,” Tabby said, hitting the concrete retaining wall with the back of his thighs.

  The wind tore the words away and broke them into nonsense syllables. Dicky was now halfway across the beach, clawing forward with his one arm, leaning into the wind. Blood-soaked sand flew and scattered. A white McDonald’s bag spun out of the parking lot, struck the sand in a series of skittering hops that stained it irregularly red, and went sailing into the seething water.

  “Dicky, go back,” Tabby said noiselessly.

  Dicky’s jaw worked; more red fluid drooled from the corner of his mouth
. To Tabby it looked almost as if Dicky Norman’s torn corpse had muttered I’m tired.

  For no reason other than it was an instinctive grasping for safety, Tabby let his mind say Patsy? Patsy?

  Dicky Norman took another step into the bruising wind. Tabby felt his mind groping for Patsy’s and in a growing panic failing to find her. For a moment Tabby felt his mind falling toward a great vacuum, some psychic black hole, and Dicky canted his head over toward his shredded shoulder and beamed at him as if he had just told a joke.

  Patsy!

  He felt a circling fuzzy response, as faint as the signal of a Tennessee Bible station on a car radio.

  Patsy! Trouble!

  Patsy was asleep. Dicky took another step toward him, still gleaming at him. The warm response he’d had was dwindling to a pinpoint. Patsy! Help me!

  (oh, dear Tabby, what . . . ? Tabby . . . ?)

  It was not much, no more than a moment of dim contact, but Dicky Norman fell to his knees six feet from Tabby. Tabby groped again for Patsy with his mind, but found only a dwindling spot of warmth. Dicky was struggling to turn around, flat on his stomach on the bloody sand. The wind had died, and the flies returned, first to Dicky’s shoulder, then to the puddles in the sand, then to Tabby. He waved them away from his face. Now Dicky’s torn shoulder was black with them. Dicky’s feet dug into the sand and pushed, his hips shifted from side to side. Freshets of oozing blood opened where Dicky’s feet scratched beneath the surface. Like a damaged tractor Dicky toiled back toward the Sound.

  Tabby had not won, he knew, but at least it had been a draw. Because of Patsy McCloud’s almost unconscious help, he had done that much. Now Tabby could clearly smell the fires burning along the side of the Millpond.

  Dicky Norman reached the shingle and crawled into the shallow water. As Tabby watched, the Sound lost several degrees of redness, declining to a dusky pink, then altered to violet, and then became inky blue once more.

  He was dry. There were no flies, no bloodstains on his clothes or the sand. On the shingle the meek waves deposited a white froth. Tabby ran up the steps to the changing rooms and the public telephone.

  14

  Very late that Saturday night, three events of varying importance took place which were related to the fears of Richard Allbee and Tabby Smithfield, and which pointed the direction things would go now the threshold had been breached. On that Saturday night, Hampstead was irrevocably into the second stage of its destruction.

  The first of these events was that Richard Allbee telephoned Laura at eleven-thirty, just about the time that Tabby Smithfield awoke in the grip of an inexplicable urgency. He was out of sorts after a long evening of listening to Morris Stryker destroy his initial plans for the College Street house—Stryker, incredibly, wanted a Bauhaus interior—and he was drunk enough to be slurring his words. Stryker had insisted on putting a bottle of fifty-year-old cognac on the table and having Toby Chambers pour out for all of them. Chambers himself was excused from drinking, but Stryker made it clear that Hagen and Richard had to have as much of the cognac as he did.

  Laura answered the phone on the eighth ring, and he suddenly felt much better. “Oh, thank God,” he said. “I know it’s late to be calling, but I was worried.”

  “Worried about what?” Laura said.

  “About . . . you know what. The client just told me that there’d been another murder in Hampstead. He read about it in the paper. I think the client’s a mobster. He thought it was a barrel of laughs.”

  “Are you drunk?” Laura asked.

  “Of course I’m drunk. I’ve been out with Morris Stryker, and the penalty of not getting drunk is being roasted over a slow fire. I couldn’t risk it. Really, Stryker’s a mobster. Every night, men rush up to him in restaurants and give him padded envelopes.”

  “Oh, dear,” Laura said. “You’re not having a very good time, are you?”

  “I’m having a terrible time. Being roasted might be a ball, compared to this. But tell me what happened. Who was killed?”

  “Nobody we know. The gardener who works around here. I think I’ve seen him a couple of times.”

  “Sure you’ve seen him. He’s always working. That’s who was killed? Where? When?”

  “I’m not sure. The body was only found yesterday. He’d been dead a couple of days, I gather. Richard, I’m very tired. You woke me up, and I don’t want to talk about this now. I just want you to come home.”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “I’m going to have to redo a lot of my work, so I’ll probably have to be here another couple of days. Please be safe.”

  “I’ll be safe,” she said. “Next time, call at a regular hour. I’m going back to bed.”

  Richard said, “I’ll call tomorrow, whenever I can get away from Ivan the Terrible.”

  “Love you.”

  “And I love you. Why aren’t you here with me?”

  “You went away,” she said.

  Some short time after that, Patsy McCloud stirred in her sleep. Her in-laws had just left that evening to return to Phoenix, and Patsy had not been able to keep her eyes open past ten o’clock.

  A second later, something penetrated her dream with the force of a blow, and she shook her head, still not really awake. She saw Tabby Smithfield before her, a Tabby who needed her in some pressing but unspecified way—it was as though Tabby were her child, and the fact of maternity had told her that he needed her. She saw him not wounded but in some awful and potential danger, as if she were to see him drink half a fifth of gin and then get behind the wheel of a fast car—and she sent out to this troubled Tabby as much fragmented concern as she could call up. For a second her eyes fluttered. Through her open window she smelled smoke. Then Patsy’s body relaxed, and the odor melted into a dream-picture of herself as a witch on the edge of a forest boiling something in a huge black pot, and then this image too melted into a ceaseless flow.

  The Hampstead fire department had already received two calls about the fire on Mill Lane (the official name of Shrinks’ Row) by the time Tabby Smithfield telephoned them from the pay phone above Gravesend Beach. Two trucks had gone out from the Riverfront Avenue fire station, then two more had followed from the central station in back of Main Street. When the extent of the damage was reported by the first men to arrive, Hampstead requested two trucks from Old Sarum to augment the other four.

  Mill Lane could be reached only by traversing a narrow bridge across the Millpond, and of course the trucks could not get across the bridge. The first two trucks arrived at the Millpond parking lot at the same time as the deputy chief, Harry Yochen, pulled up in his car. While Harry went across the bridge to see how many of the houses were going up, the two Main Street trucks pulled into the lot; a minute later, the fire chief, Tony Archer, followed the trucks in. Archer jumped out of his car and started ordering the men to link up their hoses—he could feel the heat blasting at him from all the way over across the bridge and up the path, and he fatalistically knew that most of the little houses would be lost. Harry Yochen came panting back across the bridge a moment later, and he confirmed it: all of the houses were burning.

  “All?” Archer asked. “How the hell could they all be going so soon?”

  “And here’s something else,” Yochen said, wiping at his face: Chief Archer knew then what Yochen was going to say, and knew why he was hesitating. His deputy was sure that an arsonist had set the fires. Yochen blinked. “There’s a uniform burn rate.”

  “On all eight houses?”

  Yochen nodded. “All the houses started up at the same time.”

  “You talk to anybody?” The crews were now pounding across the bridge with their hoses.

  Yochen shook his head. “They’re inside. All of them.”

  “Jesus wept,” Archer said, and then began bellowing orders as he and the deputy chief ran across the bridge with the second crew.

  As soon as he was on the little path on the other side of the bridge, Chief Archer saw what had made Yochen suspicious. The
flames, which had started on the roofs of the frame buildings, had reached a parallel point in all eight houses, just above the doorframes. Someone had ignited these houses. And that person had killed the people inside them. In these houses, the bedrooms were on the second floor, just under the roofs. The smoke would have gotten them first; then the fire had taken them as they lay unconscious in their beds. As smoke poured from the dying buildings, the crews were playing their hoses on the two nearest houses.

  Archer and Yochen and all the firemen squinted against the searing, blasting heat. The lawns began to burn, and a maple tree across the path from the yellow house Dr. Harvey Blau had rented suddenly shot into flame. Archer directed the Old Sarum crews to the far end of the path, to keep the fire from spreading into the wooded parkland which separated the Millpond from Gravesend Beach. He could smell the stink of burning fabric and baking greenery, and the roaring snapping elementally destructive noises of the fire—sucking in air like an animal crouching to spring—filled his ears.

  They’re all dead, he thought, thinking of the people who had been asleep in those upstairs rooms. Who would do a thing like this? Hampstead, Chief Archer’s home for the past twenty years, seemed to have dipped into savagery and lunacy this summer, to have turned dark and crazy. Children drowning themselves . . . he had known the little Sherbourne boy, and what had happened to him just didn’t make sense, no more than someone spilling liquid paraffin along the roofs of seven houses and then setting them alight . . . more than ever the fires sounded to him like living things.

  He looked up at the smoke pouring from the roofs of the burning houses. A line of flame was dripping down the roofline, letting small orbs of fire fall to the grass like drops of water. The drops of flame hit the ground and split apart. For a moment the chief reflected that these moving flames seemed almost alive, the way they moved so rapidly across the dry grass. The mass of black smoke also seemed live, twisting and writhing upward.