Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  He held up his hand and stepped off the curb. Horns blasted, the cars began to stack up on either side of the road. Turtle stepped between two cars and glared at a weedy bald-headed idiot leaning on his horn. On the other side of the yellow line, right-turning cars from the Post Road cruised by unstoppably. Turtle stuck his arm out again and blew a piercing command on his whistle: two more cars went by, and finally the third, a Jaguar driven by a blonde with short upturned hair, stopped. Turtle stepped in front of it, and the car crept forward another five inches and touched Turtle’s knee. He blasted the whistle loud enough to shatter the windsheld, and then took the whistle from his mouth and with a beet-red face yelled, “What’s the big idea, lady? You tryna—”

  Another car making a right turn from the Post Road crumped into the woman’s car. Turtle felt a sharp pain in his knee as the Jaguar’s bumper struck it, and he bellowed, “Out! Out of the cars! Both of you!”

  Savagely he hit the switch inside the junction box, and through the furor of the horns heard the loud click as the light changed.

  “Now get those cars moving and settle your problems!” Turtle bellowed, not sure why he’d tied up traffic by making the blonde and the man behind her leave their cars . . . through his headache floated an image of his whipping both of them with his stick, flattening the man’s nose and breaking the woman’s jaw, scattering teeth and blood . . . He glared at them with such peculiar intensity that they each hurriedly got into their cars and drove on until they could pull into a parking lot to swap insurance cards.

  Turtle ground his teeth and stepped down off the curb again to limp across to his station. His bowels stirred, and in a very few minutes he would have to be back in Abrazzi’s stinking three-foot square toilet. He wondered what would happen to him if he used his nightstick to crack open the windshield of the next expensive piece of foreign tin that went past—he guessed that the pleasure of it would far outweigh whatever punishment the department gave him.

  Now he had to contend with the left-turners from the other side of the Post Road. He stuck out his hand and put his foot across the yellow line. A car ignored his signals and rushed right past him, the rear window passing no more than two feet from his face. Turtle never noticed who was driving—except that he had a dim, uneasy sense that no one was driving—but when he looked furiously through the rear window he saw the torn and scarred face of Dicky Norman staring back at him.

  It seemed to hang in front of his eyes for an impossibly long time. Dicky’s face was that fishy white of all dead skin, except for the black lines where a surgeon’s knife had cut through his forehead and scalp. His eyes were faintly yellow around the pupils and as lifeless as the face. Dicky’s tongue moved thickly as Turtle peered into the rear window—Dicky was struggling to speak. Then the apparition flew past him: the car was gone, already moving through the intersection.

  Turtle stumbled blindly into the traffic, holding his hand out without looking to see if he was stopping any cars. The whistle hung slackly from his lips.

  He made it safely to the curb and went up the steps into Abrazzi’s without even looking back at the traffic. Mike Abrazzi, the old man behind the sloping counter, said, “You sure got the runs, huh, Turtle?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Turtle growled, and rushed into the little toilet and got his pants down just in time. He kept trying to blot out the picture of Dicky Norman’s face.

  When he came out, trailing some of the odors from the little room at the back of the liquor store, he saw that the traffic was for once streaming past normally, and he looked up the Post Road—up past the bridge, going toward the near end of Main Street, he saw a little group of people that took his attention by its incongruity. He first recognized Graham Williams, a man for whom he had only scorn—Williams had run out on his country instead of trying to help it. Then he recognized Richard Allbee, the husband of the last victim; and beside Allbee was Patsy McCloud. Turtle had seen her grow up in Hampstead, and he knew she’d married that football player from J. S. Mill, Les McCloud, who had creamed himself on the highway a week or so ago. Patsy was a pretty girl, with those big eyes and that long hair. With these three went a teenager, some boy Turtle did not recognize. For an instant before turning his attention back to the traffic, Turtle watched these four make their way in the sunlight toward Main Street—and the second oddest thing of the day happened to Turtle Turk.

  He envied those four people. It went through him with a peculiar, poignant sharpness that they were a kind of family, so great was their affection for each other. For a moment in which he was surprised by the clarity with which he saw these four—as if they were outlined in bright sunlight. He wanted to be with them, to be a part of that closeness. And in that second he permitted himself to feel envy.

  But then they turned the corner, he could see the hump in old man Williams’ back, and they were just ordinary civilians again. Turtle stabbed at the button again, and again it stuck. He started to swear, and then again was assailed by the sight of Dicky Norman’s face looking blankly at him through the car window. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and pushed the button gently with his index finger. The lights changed with a loud decisive click. Turtle opened his eyes again, tingling with relief. Christ, for a second there he’d almost believed . . . He scowled at the cars gunning through the intersection. For something like that, they could take his pension away.

  * * *

  Richard Allbee would have talked about what he thought he had seen: indeed, as Turtle watched him turn into Main Street with his friends, Richard was ignoring the tears that slid down his cheeks and telling the other three about his days’ long fantasy about Laura and his child, and before the end of the day he would be telling them about Billy Bentley and the dream of making the earth spout blood. Even Les McCloud would have found someone at a bar—not Patsy—to amuse with his crazy story of seeing a dead face through a car window. But when Turtle’s eight hours were up, he reported back to the station and laboriously typed up his report on the fender-bender, changed out of his uniform, and went home to his Winnebago. There he drank five beers and fell asleep while watching a ballgame on television.

  At eight o’clock Turtle awoke, muttering “catch up” to himself. He went into the camper’s little toilet—smaller than Abrazzi’s but not much cleaner—relieved his bladder, shaved, splashed water under his armpits. He left the camper to drive up the Post Road to Billy O’s.

  Billy O’s was a bar in a section of Bridgeport mostly inhabited by black people, but no black person ever went into Billy O’s. It was a cop bar. The owner, Billy O’Meara, had been on the Old Sarum force for twenty years before a kid in a stolen car had run into him and broken his pelvis into toothpicks. Now he limped from one end of his bar to the other, endlessly explaining that most human beings were good for shit, but especially kids, Jews, Protestants, Dagos, Puerto Ricans, women, and most especially jungle bunnies. If a black man had dared poke his head into Billy O’s, Billy O’Meara would probably have dropped dead on the spot of racist’s apoplexy.

  When Turtle walked in, the six or seven guys at the bar glanced at him and immediately stopped talking. That meant, Turtle knew, that they had been talking about Royce Griffen. The only policeman in this part of the state to have shot himself in the past ten years, Griffen was the subject of a lot of conversation in cop bars and department locker rooms. Turtle was sick of it: it seemed to him that a bunch of loaded cops talking about Royce Griffen was even more boring than Billy O’Meara talking about how many black guys had tried to break into his storeroom.

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “Are you fuckin’ guys exhuming Roycie again? Let the little bastard get a little sleep, will ya? He ate his gun, he ate his gun, nattata nattata nattata. Give it a rest.”

  A Bridgeport police sergeant named Danny Salgo said, “Word is you rode him pretty hard, Turtle.”

  “Sure I rode him hard,” Turtle said. “Everybody rode him hard. What the hell you trying to say?”

  “Nothing, Turtle,�
� Salgo quickly said.

  “It better be nothing. A department gets one foul ball who freaks out, and everybody for a hundred miles around starts doin’ a ten-year post-mortem.” Billy O’Meara put a glass of beer and a short glass of Jack Daniels over ice down in front of Turtle; Turtle sipped the bourbon, then took a long draught of the beer.

  “Gimme some good news, Turtle,” Billy O’Meara said. “With these other guys, all I get is the bad. So-and-so flunked the captain’s test, some other dumbbell totaled his car, blah blah blah. Johanssen down the end there, he’s so full a gripes he’s goin’ to Los Angeles next month, take the tests to get onto the force there.”

  “Los Angeles?” Salgo said incredulously. Johanssen was a twenty-four-year-old policeman in Hampstead. “They takin’ babies out there now? Why the hell you wanna go all the way out there just to meet a lot more spics? You’re a little puppy, Johanssen—they’ll take you apart out there.”

  Johanssen shook his blond head, wisely keeping his temper. “I just got sour on this place,” he said. “Even Bobo’s thinking of going out there, I hear. You make about three times as much money, for one thing.”

  “Bobo Farnsworth, the world’s only tee-total cop,” Salgo said. “A coke-sucker.”

  Turtle suddenly felt weary. “Bobo’s a good cop,” he said.

  “So’s Johanssen down there. He’s a kid, but he’s a good cop.” Then Turtle laughed. “You want to hear the good news, O’Meara? Hey, Johanssen. You comin’ to The Choirboys next week?”

  Johanssen nodded into his beer glass.

  “There’s your good news, Billy. Another midnight special for the Hampstead and Old Sarum boys. This one is gonna really be wild. You’ll be lucky to have a bar left.”

  O’Meara was already laughing—he was remembering, as all the men in the bar knew, what had happened after the First Annual Midnight All-Police Movie at the Nutmeg Theater behind Main Street. The movie had been Klute, and about a hundred and fifty Hampstead and Old Sarum police officers had attended. For three dollars apiece, they had had all the beer they could drink and about six pounds of popcorn each. By the time the movie was over, the theater was full of crushed popcorn and flattened beercans, and the more boyish of the boys—who had screamed and shouted for an hour and a half—were ready to have a little serious fun. A bunch of cops had taken a short detour on the way to Billy O’s, and at two o’clock, the little bar locked its doors on nineteen drunken cops and three local working girls. By four o’clock the place smelled like a high-school locker-room; by five, the girls stopped charging, having made about two months’ worth of money; by six, everyone but Billy was on the floor, all the girls naked and most of the men, too. Heaps of wet five- and ten-dollar bills lay here and there, stuck together with spilled beer. At six-thirty Billy gave everyone a free drink and kicked them out. Two or three of the men, among them Johanssen, had driven straight to the police station to work out on the firing range before their shift began.

  “Hey, I’d like to make it to that,” Salgo said.

  “I don’t think they’re inviting firemen this year, Danny,” Turtle said—an old police joke.

  Turtle and the others settled into the familiar rituals of a night’s drinking; and no one said anything he had not said many times before; but in the middle of the night in the bar, Turtle felt as though maybe he did have whatever he had envied in the little group of Patsy McCloud and Graham Williams and the other two that morning—had as much of it as he wanted anyhow, as much closeness as he could stand, and the little cop’s bar in a Bridgeport ghetto gave it to him.

  “I had enough,” he said at ten minutes past one. “I’m seeing things. Gotta get home. Pretty soon I’ll be like that old Josephine Tayler. Saw her grand-daughter today. Argument for rape. Goodbye.”

  * * *

  At one-thirty Turtle got out of his car and began to push himself up the weedy bank that separated his camper’s site from the road. The Winnebago sat on a half acre of cleared ground Turtle had bought from the town in 1941. Next to Turtle’s land was a run-down grocery store that doubled as a gas station, behind it was another half acre of trees. When Turtle was half way up the bank, he heard somebody moving around in back of his camper—loud footsteps from somewhere in front of him. “Pardner,” he whispered to himself, and fumbled getting his gun out of its holster. Someone was trying to break into the Winnebago: that was his first thought.

  “Come on out where I can see you,” he shouted, thinking that it was probably a couple of kids who would cut and run for the trees. “Get out here, you scum.”

  Panting, he reached the top of the bank. He crouched over and waddled as quickly as he could to the white fence on the other side of his property from the store. From there he could see the front of the Winnebago. No one was hiding there, flattened up against the camper’s stamped metal. “Come on out,” he shouted. No one responded. Turtle ran across the back of the camper and circled up around the far side. Now he was sweating and breathing hard enough to strain his belly against his belt. Despite what he had heard, there were no kids larking around his camper.

  Then he heard the sound again—a heavy body moving. It came from the trees behind his land.

  Turtle wiped his forehead with his sleeve. The sounds still came toward him from the trees. “What the hell are you doin’ in there?” he screamed. “Is this supposed to be a game?”

  Turtle thought of what he had seen that morning. Dicky Norman’s awful face—

  but of course he had not seen it.

  “I’m a cop and I’m armed!” Turtle yelled.

  Then he could see the body coming out through the last of the trees.

  Too much Jack Daniels and too much beer. The body, now emerging onto the cleared land, was Dicky Norman’s, and it was naked and so white it seemed to reflect back the moonlight.

  “I don’t know what you are, but you better leave me alone,” Turtle said, aiming his pistol at Dicky’s chest.

  As soon as Dicky took another step, Turtle could smell him. It was the smell, unforgettable, that Turtle had been subjected to as a young cop when they had discovered the body of a hunter locked in his car out behind the Rinker Brothers’ icehouse in the late forties. The hunter had got lost in a snowstorm, and the cold froze him to death in mid-January: it was April when they found him. Turtle had opened the door of the hunter’s car, and he’d thought that he would puke for an hour.

  Dicky said something that was lost in the buzzing of a thousand flies. He took another step toward Turtle.

  8

  Two hours after the death of Turtle Turk, Mikki Zaber O’Hara dreamed again that she was sleeping with her son Tommy. She cradled his thin cold nine-year-old body, peeled the wet strands of weed from his forehead, kissed his cold wet cheeks. She rubbed her hands over his back, sleepily trying to warm him. Oh, she loved Tommy! Her hands pressed his shoulders into her, and beneath her hip she felt grit: she unthinkingly knew it was sand. Her husband snored on behind her, and Mikki ran her hand lovingly down her son’s cold flank. Mud slowed her fingers, slimed against her palm. Gradually, still sleepily, Mikki understood that she was not dreaming. She was awake, and Tommy was miraculously beside her. She cradled his face; Tommy’s eyes fluttered.

  The boy had given her a chance to join him: all she wanted was to join him.

  In the morning both their bodies were gone. Hampstead had crossed another threshold, and now stood—as Mikki Zaber O’Hara had for a phantasmal, lyric moment—on the border beween life and death.

  PART THREE

  Dominion

  Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty

  heart

  Dare the unpastured dragon in his den?

  —Shelley

  1

  The Belly of the Whale

  1

  Lyric; phantasmal; such words mean only that there was a disorder in the very stuff of reality, and that this disorder affected people in various ways, some of them surprisingly pl
easant. Reality was on a bender, and if what the bender led to was a theater of horrors in the basement of an abandoned house on Poor Fox Road, only three people were present to see them: metaphorically, most other people in Hampstead had their eyes sewn shut, and the peculiar visions that danced across the inside of their eyelids sometimes delighted or lulled them, as absurdities can delight or calm a drunken man. Otto Bruckner had foreseen that about eight weeks after the accident at Woodville Solvent, Hampstead and Patchin would be held squirming in the grip of his invention—that horrors like those that lived in Bates Krell’s basement would pour out through the streets—but of course he had no idea that his invention would shake hands with an enigmatic colonist named Gideon or Gidyon Winter. He just knew his thinking cloud, and that was enough; he did not have to know any more to find the next world preferable to this one. But people in Hampstead did not have his foresight, they had no idea that they were crossing a border: what they, including our four friends, mostly knew was that it became more and more difficult to separate what was actually happening in the world from what was going on in the mind. The thinking cloud had settled over them too. So what Patsy and Tabby saw together, what Graham and Richard and Patsy saw as they struggled to save Tabby’s life at the bottom of a mirror, in the world’s bowel, had to be taken as it came: to be met on its own terms, however bizarre those terms appeared.

  Desmond O’Hara, who had flown back from Australia to bury his sons, met those terms when he awakened to find his wife gone from their bed. He searched all through his house, chill with the thought that she too had gone down to Gravesend Beach in the middle of the night. He still had jet lag, and found himself falling asleep in the middle of that day, as scared as he was, and imagining that Mikki was talking to him, asking him about the price of opals in Coober Pedy, laughing at him! When he woke up at midnight, totally disoriented, he imagined that he could still hear his wife’s voice. Crazy, he thought, and when he checked through the house to see if she had come home, thought he was crazier yet when he saw or imagined he saw her looking at him out of a long mirror in their dining room.