Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “Good night now, Mrs. Spry,” said Larry, the pressman, as he walked by. Larry rattled his bundle of keys at her. “You’re the last one, now—be sure you lock up.”

  “I won’t forget, Larry,” she said. “Good night.”

  Larry went out the front door onto Main Street and Sarah faced the empty office and tapped the pencil against the strange desk. Something had happened to her—something had happened to the whole town, but the disability which had visited her could be the instrument that led her to define what had actually hit Hampstead. Muddled writing, she wrote on the pad, or hoped she did. Like dyslexia. What could cause it? Other symptoms: stuffy sensations in head, ringing in ears—one spell of double vision. Tiredness. A disease common to entire town, causing brain disorders?

  Sunspots?

  Nuclear waste—radiation sickness?

  Chemical dumping?

  A chemical spill, perhaps result of road accident?

  She looked over the list she had made on the legal pad, nodded her head, drew two thick lines beneath it, and started another column.

  What about earlier history—history of town.

  Previous mass murders. Any?

  Previous child suicides—any?

  Need conjunctions. Items that provide context for m.m. or c.s.

  Sarah held the legal pad up close to her face and scrutinized every word she had written. For “mass murders” she had put down “mace murders.” She corrected the phrase. All the rest was what she thought she had written: which seemed to prove that writing by hand and writing more slowly for the most part bypassed the problem.

  She decided to spend some time investigating her second set of ideas, and this was characteristic of her: if something upsetting had happened to her writing, she would concentrate on something else until the writing settled down again. She would take a closer look at things: that was the motto of her life. And tonight she was lucky, for the newspaper that employed her had been publishing in Hampstead since 1875—before that there had been a two-page folder, and before that a one-page broadside. (For two years, 1873 and 1874, there had been no newspaper of any kind in Hampstead, though Sarah did not know this.) The earliest issues up through the issue for January 3, 1965, had been put on microfilm, and in 1968 an old compositor named Bill Bixbee had made it his private project to create a giant handwritten index for every issue of the Gazette. Bixbee had worked nights, weekends, and holidays, and probably the project had lengthened his life—after he had retired as compositor, he had still come into the office every day to work on his index. He had taken enormous pride in what he was creating: Sarah could remember him saying that there was more of Hampstead in his index than she or Stan Brockett would ever know, in fact there was more of Hampstead in the index than there had been in the Gazette itself.

  Now there were two copies of Bixbee’s index, one up in Hillhaven at the Patchin Historical Society, and the other back in the newspaper’s records room, on a shelf above the microfilm viewer.

  The index was known as “Bixbee” in the office. If a reporter doing research for an article on marshland preservation wanted to know how the town’s attitude toward its wetlands had evolved, Brockett would tell him to “look it up in ‘Bixbee.’” The old compositor had earned his justification.

  Sarah went into the records office at the back of the building, switched on the light, and took heavy “Bixbee” off its shelf. She lowered it to the counter beside the viewer and flipped it open, and then paged through until she got to M. Then she turned several more pages, looking down the headings column for “Murder.”

  When she found the heading column, she looked under it at the entry column. This at first seemed longer than she had expected, but then Sarah noticed that most of the articles were grouped around a series of three dates. The first of these was in 1898, the second burst of articles was from the autumn of 1924, and the third set of articles was grouped in September of 1952.

  Well, that must have been one of Bill Bixbee’s famous “contributions” to the town, for there had been no murders in Hampstead in 1952. Sometimes the old compositor had used his index to draw conclusions that the newspaper never had. If you looked under “Funds, misappropriation of,” for example, one of the entries directed you to an otherwise straightforward article about the widening of Highway 7 and the huge sum of money this construction was costing the town. Another entry took you to a factual piece of reportage about the construction of the bleachers on the softball field on Rex Road. The same contractor’s name appears in both articles, along with a mention of his being the cousin of a prominent selectman. Another entry points you toward a story about the selectman’s recent purchase of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house. It was in this indirect sort of comment that “Bixbee” contained more of Hampstead than the newspaper itself.

  Sarah took out the first spool of microfilm and threaded it into the viewer. She wound it up until she saw the first page of the first issue of the Hampstead Gazette, tightened down the focus so she could read the dates without squinting, and turned the pages past the viewer until she came to 1898.

  HAMPSTEAD MAN CHARGED WITH WOODVILLE DEATH, she read in the issue specified in “Bixbee.” Three issues later, SECRET LIFE OF GREEN: DISSIPATION AFTER SEMINARY. Six months later, GREEN CONVICTED. The implication running through these articles was that Robertson Green had committed all the murders of prostitutes in Norrington and Woodville.

  The next article concerned a farmer on the Old Sarum border who had killed his wife with an ax. Sarah did not make notes about this case, but switched spools of microfilm and ran the new spool past the viewer. Now she was in the summer of 1924, and the Gazette had become larger and easier to read. There were still advertisements on the front page, but there were graphics too.

  In the issues Bixbee had indexed, the first pages of the Gazette showed photographs and drawings of women—three women, each of them found dead in the marshland on the west side of the Nowhatan River in the first weeks of that summer. WAVE OF DEATH CONTINUES, read the tall black headline for the issue of June 21, 1924. ANOTHER VICTIM? inquired the headline for July 10—beneath was a photograph of a woman named as Mrs. Dell Claybrook. Mrs. Claybrook had vanished from her home sometime during the evening of July 8. AND YET ANOTHER? asked the Gazette on July 21, over a drawing of the pert, snub-nosed face of Mrs. Arthur Fletcher, who had disappeared from her home while her husband tended to his bond business in New York. THE SIXTH VICTIM? the Gazette asked its readers on August 9. Mrs. Claybrook and Mrs. Fletcher were still missing, and a Mr. Horace West had returned home from a business trip to the mills in Fall River to find his wife, Daisy, inexplicably missing. Two days later, Daisy West still absent, Mr. West had gone himself to the police station and confronted Chief Kletzka. Chief Kletzka had found it necessary to use physical restraints on the agitated Mr. West. Neither man had sworn out a complaint against the other.

  Another entry was utterly puzzling, for it had nothing at all to do with murder. It was a small item on page sixteen about the impounding of a fishing boat belonging to a Mr. Bates Krell. Mr. Krell had apparently left Hampstead abruptly: before his creditors could have him jailed, the article seemed to imply.

  Bates Krell? Sarah thought. Now, where . . .?

  Was Bixbee implying that Krell had been the last victim of the unidentified 1924 murderer? Sarah thought he was, but she still could not have said why the fisherman’s name seemed familiar to her.

  When Sarah turned the next spool of microfilm to the issues Bixbee specified for 1952, she found herself looking at the first important story she had ever written for the Gazette. JOHN SAYRE TAKES OWN LIFE. Here were two of the photographs she had taken on that wretched day: Bonnie Sayre crying into the gloved palm of her hand, the rear of the country club and its little stretch of well-mannered beach.

  Yes, but murder? No doubt under “Suicide” Bixbee had a long set of entries—why did he list this obvious case under “Murder”? No one had ever suggested that anyone but John Say
re had taken his life. On impulse, she leafed through Bixbee to “Suicide” and checked the date—yes, there it properly was.

  Sarah looked at her notes. On the far left side of the yellow page, separate from her more detailed observations, she had written:

  1898, R. Green

  1924, second mass killings

  (B. Krell vanishes)

  Now she added:

  1952, J. Sayre (?)

  And beneath it put:

  1980, Friedgood, Goodall, et al.

  And looking at these jottings, she remembered: she remembered standing in John Sayre’s office while his wife and his secretary wept with their arms around each other; remembered going to the lawyer’s desk with Graham Williams and seeing with him the two names scratched in the notepad. Prince Green, Bates Krell. Had she told old Bixbee, and asked him about the names? Sarah could not remember—but Bixbee had put them all together in his index. A killer of prostitutes, a fisherman who had run out of town (or been killed), a respected lawyer. What could possibly be the link between them? And between them and what was going on in Hampstead in 1980?

  Sarah drew circles around the names and dates, then sat up straight in her chair before the microfilm viewer. She had seen that there was roughly thirty years between each of these incidents. With the exception of the period 1950–52, there had been a series of murders in Hampstead every thirty years. No, she caught herself—Robertson Green’s killings had been done in Norrington. Killings, then, in or around Hampstead, once in every generation. . . .

  The Gazette office suddenly seemed dark and cold to Sarah. She switched off the viewer. Already she knew that if she looked back into the records she would find the pattern repeating and repeating itself, going back as far as the records themselves went. . . and before that, in a time when man did not inhabit the Connecticut coast, did the animals insanely attack and kill one another, bear against bear and wolf against wolf, every thirty years?

  Sarah wanted to hide: that was her first, instinctive response to what she thought she had discovered. She felt like turning off all the lights and crouching in a corner until it was safe to come out again. Being Sarah, instead of that she reached for the telephone.

  3

  At the same time that Sarah Spry was reaching for her telephone—just after seven o’clock—a man unseasonably dressed in an overcoat and tweed hat ducked out of a porno theater on West Forty-second Street in New York. The man looked both ways and then continued east on the street, going toward the Avenue of the Americas. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of the overcoat, but a flash of white from beneath a rucked-up sleeve showed that his hands and arms were bandaged, as was his face. When he thought that one of the street’s regulars—one of the threatening men who spend all day on Forty-second Street—seemed to be paying too much attention to him, he slipped past a teenage girl with peroxided hair and tight satin shorts who whispered, “Wanna go out? Wanna go out?” and entered another building that had once been a movie theater.

  In most towns or cities, a gentleman bandaged up like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man and wearing an overcoat and hat in the middle of June might reasonably attract a sort of following; in most towns and cities, there would be stares and questions, there would be gasps and pointing fingers. This, however, was Forty-second Street, and most of those who saw Leo Friedgood in pursuit of sexual satisfaction assumed that he was just another lunatic. A man named Grover Spelvin leaning against a marquee saw Leo dart into the converted theater and nudged the nodding man next to him, saying, “Hey, Junior, you just missed the Mummy, man.”

  “Fuh,” Junior commented.

  Leo, who was now what people in Patchin County would learn to call a “leaker,” knew that his foray into the sleaziest neighborhood in New York was dangerous, but had correctly assumed that if he looked weird and confident, he would be reasonably safe; to look weird and weak would be to invite attack. Of course he was still in danger—anything that split his web of bandages would kill him—and that made him more furtive than he would have been otherwise, but Leo’s arrogance was still his best armor. He assumed here especially that if you could pay for what you wanted, it was yours.

  But besides all that, he simply could not stay away. Leo Friedgood had always been a voyeur. For the most intense sexual pleasure, Leo had to see or imagine other people making love: when he made love to Stony, he had fantasized about the other men he had encouraged her to meet. The encouragement had been subtle—Leo had never directly spoken to Stony about the other men—but it had been pervasive. After Stony’s death, Leo had imagined that his sexual life was dead too. He could still feel the humiliation that Turtle Turk had caused him, and that humiliation seemed the tombstone set upon his sex life. The discovery of the white spots on his body and their slow but inexorable growth should also have contributed to the end of Leo’s desire—but oddly, perversely, the more the white spots covered of his body, the more obsessively he thought about sex. He could not perform anymore, but performance had always been of secondary importance to Leo. Leo had cut himself off from Telpro and General Haugejas—no one at Telpro knew what had happened to him—but in the end it had become impossible for him to cut himself away from his deepest fantasies. And these had led him back to Forty-second Street.

  Leo went unnoticed past a row of booths showing reels of pornographic films for a quarter every two-minute segment, shoved a five-dollar bill at a bald man in a cage who did a double-take at Leo’s bandages but pushed across five dollars in quarters. Then Leo ducked into a cubicle and spent a dollar watching four high-school girls rape a skinny dark-haired man with a pronounced curve in his penis. Then he left the booth and went to the back of the old theater and beneath an arch reading NAKED LIVE GIRLS 25ȼ. A row of doors like lockers stood closed in a hemisphere. Leo opened a door above which there was no red light, stepped into blackness, and inserted a quarter into a slot before him. A window in the front of his cubicle was gradually revealed as a black metal plate ascended.

  Leo was looking into a round well-lighted space with a fake tiger rug on the floor and a ripped plastic-covered sofa at the far right end. Across from him was a series of windows like his, about half of them exposed by the raising of their own metal plates. Visible in these exposed windows were men’s faces as vivid as portraits from hell—tinted sizzling red—all turned to the body of the woman dancing to a Bruce Springsteen tape in the middle of the round space. She was a beautiful little Puerto Rican girl, Leo saw when she gyrated around and lifted her bush toward his window, no more than seventeen. A black man in a window across from Leo’s grinned crazily and waggled his tongue at the naked girl. The girl looked in Leo’s window and did not miss a hitch of her hips after noticing his bandages; her reflective, almost pouting face did not alter in the least. Not a furrow appeared in her sweet forehead, not a trace of interest in her huge quiet eyes. Her right shoulder rolled back, the right hand rose, a small brown breast rolled back too, and a molded hip revolved and spun the perfect little body around. Leo feasted on her lithe back, earthy bottom, and the graceful backs of her thighs. When the metal plate began to descend over his window, he quickly put another quarter in the slot.

  The girl was moving lazily around the circle of windows, bending backward as if she were trying to limbo beneath a bar. Leo was breathing slowly, half in a trance: he was imagining this girl, obviously a hooker and probably a junkie, beneath a succession of men, twining and untwining, pumping that round little bottom, locking those molded legs around one man after another. Leo could take this only for the duration of another quarter, and by then the little Puerto Rican teenager was putting on a robe and a tall Dust Bowl redhead with stretch marks had begun to snap her fingers and move before the windows. Leo pulled his hat farther down on his bandages, turned up the collar of his overcoat, and went back out past the rows of booths.

  “Sex show, sex show,” a black man whispered to him as he left the building and turned west.

  Well, that was just what he had i
n mind, but the real thing, not a hasty facsimile. Leo hurried down the street, now and then hearing a black voice behind him calling out Mummy, hey Mummy babes. He was going to a club he knew just up from Seventh Avenue. This “club” was a place he had discovered in 1975, the year the Friedgoods had moved east—it consisted chiefly of two rooms with a pane of one-way glass between them, and it catered to people who shared Leo’s tastes.

  “Shit, he ain’t no Mummy,” Junior Bangs said to Grover Spelvin as they watched Leo’s form disappear up a stairway just inside a door next to a theater showing horror pictures twenty-four hours a day. “That mother’s goin’ up to the Look-Show. Fuh. He ain’t no Mummy—ain’t no real Mummy.”

  “We’ll see him when he drags his dick downstairs, Junior,” said Grover, putting his hands in the pockets of his frayed jeans and preparing to wait.

  Leo was at the top of the stairs. He opened a door marked EZ STUDIOS, and a black girl with a blond wig smiled at him and said, “Have you been to our club before?”

  Leo nodded.

  “You get burned?” the girl asked. “I mean, I had a friend, and she got all messed up. Wore them bandages for two months straight. Uh, that’s thirty-five dollars.”

  Leo extracted bills from his coat pocket and counted the money onto the desk.

  “Fine,” the girl said. She showed him an acre of gleaming pink gum, stood up and led him through a door where half a dozen middle-aged men, some in jeans and sweatshirts and others in suits, sat on metal chairs in front of a six-foot-square window. Rock music was piped in, but all the men seemed to be consciously ignoring it. On the other side of the window was a smaller room where a rumpled bed stood on a bare floor. The girl pressed a button in the wall and said, “The performance is beginning, gentlemen. Each performance lasts fifteen minutes. If you stay through to the next performance, a second payment will be collected. If you stay, you must pay.”