Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Then Chief Archer thought he saw something moving in the smoke. Within the blackness, darker shadows darted and flickered. Just before he moved to join the first crew, Archer peered into the writhing, ascending column of smoke. Coming from all eight houses, it braided together twenty feet in the air and rose into the darkness. Birds, he thought, some damn birds got caught in the smoke . . . then he saw the shape of a wing and thought they were bats.

  “Chief?” Yochen asked him.

  Archer saw their necks and their open furious mouths; he saw them hovering in the smoke as bats would never do. Thousands of baby dragons were floating in the smoke, swirling upward, spinning away.

  The first crew of firemen exploded into flame twenty feet from him. The hoses they carried blew apart, and several tons of water instantly flashed into steam. The crew next to them dropped their hoses and ran to the other side of the path, getting away from the scalding steam. Their own hoses must then have turned hot in their hands, because they dropped them an instant before they too blew apart. Now men were screaming, and eight men were outlined in flame, some of them rolling in the baking weeds and setting them alight, some of them crazily running straight into the larger fires. Liquid drops of fire streamed from all the houses and pooled between them.

  “Get those hoses on the men!” Archer screeched at Yochen, and saw the thousands of little dragons spinning out of the smoke over Yochen’s head. As the deputy chief turned to obey him, his arms suddenly flew out to his sides. For an instant Chief Archer saw smoke leaking from Yochen’s sleeves. Then Deputy Chief Yochen’s uniform shirt burst into flame; a fraction of a second later his gray hair frizzed and crisped off his head. His trousers smoked and burned. Archer struggled out of his jacket, in order to wrap Yochen in it and stifle the flames, but the jacket was still hanging from one of his wrists when Harry Yochen uttered a muted, bubbling scream and fell to the ground, completely encased in flame. His skin blackened and shriveled as Archer continued meaninglessly to struggle with his jacket.

  Tony Archer stood there in the midst of the pandemonium with his golf jacket hanging from one wrist, hearing the rushing sound of fire and wondering how things had gone so wrong so fast when white dripping fire flowed out from between the houses and blistered his face, then seared his lungs, and took his life even before his clothes began to burn.

  The fire on Mill Lane burned itself out before it spread into the park, but by dawn the houses of Shrinks’ Row were only eight smoking foundations. The inhabitants were identified by the location of their bones, as were the firemen, all of whom perished in the furnace Mill Lane had become for a few minutes that night.

  One of the fire trucks, the one closest to the bridge, had exploded because of the heat, but the real measure of the temperatures on Mill Lane that Saturday night, said the Wednesday Gazette, was that on Kendall Point, which faced the farthest extremity of the lane across Gravesend Beach and nearly half a mile of water, the ground was still warm the next day and the bark on many of the trees still smoked.

  15

  Richard Allbee had promised himself that he would call Laura that Sunday. He was going to wait until just after breakfast, when she would be sure to be at home; but at eight o’clock he sat down with his drafting paper at the desk in his hotel room and forgot all about food. At noon he ordered a sandwich and a beer from room service, and kept working—he had thought of a way to compromise with Stryker and incorporate a contemporary feeling into the Georgian shapes and dimensions of the rooms. Stryker could have his white walls and even his track lighting, if he insisted, and Richard would smuggle in his period detail. Once he saw how the details would augment the total design, the project came back to life for him again.

  At six o’clock he realized that he was starving, and went down to the hotel’s restaurant for grilled scallops, asparagus, a half-bottle of chilled Puligny-Montrachet, and two cups of coffee; during dinner he made notes, and when he was finished with his coffee he tipped hugely and returned immediately to his room.

  It was eleven-thirty before he thought again of calling home. It was too late—he could not wake her two nights running. Richard gloated momentarily over the amount of work he had accomplished, then took off his clothes and went to bed.

  On Monday he called home at ten in the morning, and got no answer. Laura was probably at Greenblatt’s, he thought. He promised himself to call her before dinner, even if he had to make a collect call from one of Stryker’s terrible restaurants. Richard spent all Monday afternoon at the College Street house, ironing out his plans and making sure of his measurements, and then went back to the hotel before the ritual dinner with Stryker. He called Laura from his room at five-thirty, but again there was no answer. He rang down to the desk, but there was no message for him.

  Stryker called him at six and gave him directions to a restaurant named Pickman’s. The restaurant turned out to be twenty minutes away, on the city’s north side; almost in the country. It was a converted Victorian house, easily the handsomest of all the restaurants Stryker had chosen. The valet took Richard’s car, he went inside to a series of rooms as handsome as the exterior. Red leather chairs, vibrant flowers, sparkling glasses and shining silver: Richard put his plans under his elbow and felt better than he had since his first meeting with his client.

  Stryker, Mike Hagen and Toby Chambers appeared fifteen minutes late. Stryker barely nodded at Richard before he called the headwaiter over and began complaining about the table. It was too central, there was too much traffic around it, didn’t anybody here remember what Morris Stryker liked in a table? In the middle of his tirade, Stryker lit a huge cigar and exhaled smoke over the rejected table. The headwaiter made suggestions; Stryker settled on a table in the end room, in a far corner. “Don’t give us lousy service there, just because we’re outta the way,” he said.

  Amid much fussing, they were seated at the back table. Stryker himself sat facing out, his back to the wall. “Ah, this place is so full of crap, it gives me a headache to come here,” he complained to Richard.

  “Then why do you come here?”

  “A change, it’s a change. Toby likes this kind of shit.” Stryker puffed at his cigar, then leaned over and said to Toby, “Why don’t you get that little weasel out here so I can talk to him, that banjo player? Hey? Call him up and get him out here.” Toby scurried off to find the telephone. Mike Hagen smiled at the ceiling.

  “Do you ever go out with your wife, Morris?” Richard asked, and Mike Hagen’s eyes drifted away from the ceiling toward Richard.

  “What the hell is it to you?” Stryker asked loudly. “Dinner is part of work with me—part work, part relaxation. Get it?”

  The waiter brought their drinks. Stryker, a water buffalo, leaned massively forward. “So what you been doing?” he asked Richard. “You were at the house today? Yeah? Great. What you do Sunday? I was gonna call you, take you out to the golf course, but something came up. This banjo player, that’s what came up. We’re gonna straighten his head out for him.”

  “I worked all Sunday,” Richard said, taking up the sheaf of papers from beside him. “I really think I came up with something we can use. I want to show you how we can handle the downstairs rooms.”

  “Save it,” Stryker said. “I don’t want that kind of stuff now. I just don’t want it.”

  “Well, I really would like your opinion on it,” Richard said. “I’ve put in a lot of time, and I have to get back to Connecticut soon.”

  “I told you to can it, didn’t I?” Stryker bellowed. “Don’t you have ears? I don’t give a damn about how hard you worked, I don’t give a rat’s ass about how soon you have to get home, I don’t want that kind of crap tonight. Just sit here and lap up the goodies. That’s all you have to do tonight.”

  At that moment Richard came as close to quitting as he could without actually doing it. If he had been five years younger, if Laura had not been pregnant, he would have done so immediately; but he was still thinking about it when Toby Chambers’ skin
ny form slid back into his chair. “Nine-thirty,” Chambers said.

  Stryker grunted. He rolled his eyes and puffed out a cloud of reeking gray smoke. “Call him back. That’s too soon, I don’t want to see his greasy face when I’m supposed to be having fun. Tell him eleven. We’ll still be here.”

  Chambers uncoiled from his chair and streaked off again.

  I need this job, Richard told himself. Morris Stryker isn’t just a crude bully, he’s ten thousand dollars closer to being about to put Lump through college. He swallowed half of his drink, and then unclenched his left hand.

  “Have another one,” Stryker said. “That’s what you’re here for, right? The goodies.”

  That night Richard did not get back to his hotel until ten minutes past twelve. He called home, and heard a busy signal. Richard dialed his number five more times between midnight and one o’clock, and heard the busy signal each time. He spoke to the operator, who suggested that the party had left her telephone off the hook.

  * * *

  On Tuesday morning Richard tried to call home as soon as he had showered: with the towel around his waist and his hair dripping, he sat on the bed and dialed his number. He endured a long delay during which he first knew that there would be another busy signal, then that the phone would ring. Neither of these happened. The delay stretched on until Richard was ready to hang up and dial again, then the line clicked twice and the dial tone buzzed in his ear. Richard tried again, with the same result. A long pause, two clicks, the dial tone. He dialed the operator and asked her to try his number. When the operator could not get the number, she conferred with a Connecticut operator and came back to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Allbee, but that number has a fault on the line and is temporarily out of service.”

  “But that’s my number!” Richard said.

  “It is temporarily out of service, but the fault has been reported,” the operator said. “Try again later.”

  Richard hung up, dried his hair with a towel, dressed. He ordered breakfast from room service, then canceled it five minutes later. He could not stay in his room, he was too restless for that. A fault on the line? What did that mean?

  In minutes he was outside on the sidewalk, aimlessly moving. He was due to meet Stryker and Hagen at the College Street house at eleven-thirty; that gave him three hours to kill. The air was warm and clear, huge with the sounds of construction. Near Richard’s hotel an old building had been demolished, clearing an entire block of the city; now a scaffolding rose like a gallows over a pitted wasteland. Through smoke and dust Richard could see men stripped to the waist, goggles shielding their eyes. Sparks jumped in the boiling dust, hammers rang against metal. Dimly Richard heard a foreman swearing rhythmically and passionlessly.

  For minutes Richard stared into the construction site as if he had been hypnotized. A man lifted and dropped a sledge-hammer, lifted it and swung it down, lifted it again; another worked a heavy drill, the muscles jumping in his arms. Periodically a cloud of dust enveloped them. Behind them a yellow crane swung lazily about, performing some invisible function.

  Richard felt his mouth go dry, and did not know why. He was shaking, and he did not know why. The little fires flared in the boiling smoke and dust. It was a look into a small hell.

  He looked up at the crane and saw Billy Bentley running along the machine’s long arm, running up slick yellow metal at a forty-degree angle. LORAINE, read the black lettering Billy scampered over. Billy ran up to the end of the crane, ignorant of gravity, and waved at Richard far below him.

  Richard astounded himself—he threw up. His stomach had flipped inside out almost before he had known it was going to happen, and now he was left with a sharp but diminishing pain in his gut and a pink spatter on the dirty sidewalk. He stepped away from it, looked up, and saw Billy Bentley climbing hand over hand down the cable attached to the crane.

  He turned and ran. Hell stank and snarled behind, and from it Billy Bentley pursued him. Richard turned into the next corner and pounded down the street.

  Gritty Providence spread out around him. At his back he still could hear the banging and pounding from the construction site. Billy Bentley waved to him from a doorway across the street, and pretended to be counting out money. The smell of death and rot drifted in the sunny air.

  Richard turned around and crossed the street in the opposite direction. Horns blared, a man yelled. The traffic light had not changed, and cars sped by him. Richard feared that he would fall over from dizziness in the middle of the street and be killed beneath the wheels of a truck.

  He made it to the other side of the street. Brown University hugged the hill above him. The city seemed full of sunlight, dust, and smoke. Old-fashioned streetlamps marched up the hill toward the university. Behind them eighteenth-century houses kept their own counsel in the high clear air.

  Billy had climbed out of hell on LORAINE the crane and now hell was everywhere—Richard had to return to Hampstead, to Greenbank and Beach Trail.

  He turned back to his hotel. He saw Beach Trail, saw the old Sayre house with its lights blazing, saw Laura opening the door . . . “I’m going to be checking out in about fifteen minutes,” Richard told the desk clerk. “Please have my bill ready.”

  Richard dumped his things in his suitcase, closed it, walked out of his room and pushed the button for the elevator. He waited in the dark plum-colored hallway and listened to the humming of the wires behind the big metal doors. Then the light over the doors flashed, a bell dinged, and the doors opened onto a roomy coffin. A smell with the weight of a truck rolled out and nearly knocked Richard over. Billy Bentley sat in a corner of the elevator cross-legged, a guitar on his lap. He gave Richard a bright consoling smile. Now the flesh seemed to be sliding off his bones, but Billy’s expression was so animated that his corpse looked particularly gallant, sitting cross-legged on the elevator’s carpeted floor.

  Richard could not get in that traveling coffin. Once the doors closed, the smell alone would be fatal. He lifted his bag and waited for the doors to close again, which they obediently did. Then he went to the staircase and opened the door. He carried his suitcase down ten floors to the lobby.

  * * *

  At eleven-thirty he was sitting in his car on College Street, as he had been for twenty minutes. The doors were locked and the windows were up. The radio pumped out Rickie Lee Jones. Stryker was not in the house and the Cadillac was nowhere in sight. From one of the upstairs windows Billy Bentley looked down, leaning on his elbows. At twelve o’clock Richard and Billy were still in their places, but the college radio station was playing Phoebe Snow’s “Poetry Man.”

  By one o’clock Richard was starving and half-crazy with frustration; he had to drive back to Connecticut, but he could not—he could not allow himself to do it—leave without speaking to Morris Stryker. He glanced up at the window, and Billy shook his head at him.

  At one-thirty the Cadillac rolled up across the street and Toby Chambers jumped out of the passenger seat to run around the back and open the door for Stryker. Stryker was wearing black sunglasses, shiny black boots, a gray suit of some exquisitely soft material, and a dark gray shirt with a rolled collar. For once he did not have a cigar in his mouth. Looking relaxed and expansive—Richard realized that he’d just had lunch—Stryker pushed his belly across the street toward him. “Got hung up,” Stryker said. “I got time for your plans now. Let’s get inside and take a look at what you got, okay?”

  “I’ve been here better than two hours,” Richard said. “Is ‘Got hung up’ all you’re going to say to me about it?”

  Stryker cocked his head and looked at him coldly. “I got hung up. I was gonna have one appointment in the restaurant, instead I had five or six. It goes like that sometimes. You want me to kiss your hand?”

  “I want you to kiss my ass, Morris,” Richard said. “I can’t spend any more time in Providence. I’m quitting this job as of right now. I’m giving up and going home. You wouldn’t understand why, so I won’t bore you with exp
lanations.” Richard opened the door of his car, and Stryker said, “You’re outta your mind or something. Toby! Toby!”

  Toby Chambers sprinted across the street from where he had been talking with Mike Hagen. Stryker ambled away into the middle of the street and stood looking up with a bored expression on his face.

  “I’m quitting, Toby,” Richard said. “I’m worried about my wife, and I have to get back to Connecticut. Besides that, I can’t take my client anymore. He’s one of the worst human beings I’ve ever met, and as much as I wish I could, I just can’t work for him. I couldn’t take another week of sitting in those restaurants and inhaling his cigar smoke. Good-bye.”

  “Mr. Stryker can see that you never get another job,” Toby said, speaking very slowly. “Mr. Stryker might even decide that you need to be disciplined. Look. I’m trying to help you, Mr. Allbee.”

  “I’m a lot more disciplined than Mr. Stryker,” Richard said. “Now, get out of my way, Toby.”

  Richard got into his car and closed the door. Stryker spat on the ground and ambled toward the sidewalk—finally. Richard saw that the client was giving him the finger.

  It was Tuesday, the seventeenth of June, and Richard Allbee found his way back to the interstate highway shortly after two o’clock.

  16

  Late that evening, Patsy McCloud was seated on the worn leather chair in Graham Williams’ living room. She held a tall glass half-filled with a watery drink on the top of which floated three slivers of melting ice. Graham Williams, in his PAL T-shirt and Yankee cap, sat on the couch. Like Patsy, he too was sweating lightly. On the table between them a bottle of Bombay gin stood next to a half-full six-pack of eight-ounce bottles of tonic and a plastic ice bucket one-quarter filled with cold water. Patsy did not know it, but she was mourning Les, and mourning him more satisfactorily than she had ever done alone or with his parents.