Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Richard groaned: all the other things he had seen had led him to this one unbearable sight, his wife getting out of a nondescript black car on her long legs and turning to look at him with a face in which expression seemed too tightly packed to be readable. Her hair moved in the slight breeze from the Sound.

  A man got out on the driver’s side and like Laura turned to stare at Richard. He wore a torn madras jacket; a bright yellow Lacoste polo shirt smeared with mud covered his oaken belly. Another man, older than the driver and with a dull, clay-colored bald head, stepped out from the backseat. The three of them stood mutely beside the black Chevrolet and gazed at Richard. Their faces were alike, he saw: not crowded with conflicting expressions but empty of all expression. Their faces were dead.

  Laura opened her mouth, and Richard instantly reacted out of horrified instinct—he clapped his hands over his ears. Whatever this dead Laura had to say was what he did not want to hear. He took several slow steps backward, and saw the two men begin to move slowly down the sides of the car toward him.

  Richard stepped backward once, twice more, said, “No, go away, get out of here,” and when they kept up their slow progress toward him, turned and ran—flung himself down the road, like the previous day’s leaker. Desperation, extremity, panic.

  Fifteen feet before him was a drive of crushed red rock between brick pillars. Richard wheeled into it and pelted up the drive between a line of maple trees and a tennis court behind a tall chain-link fence. Finally he saw the gray stone mansion at the end of the drive. Behind it, the sea flashed light at him. The downstairs curtains were drawn, and the house had a heavy, brooding, unoccupied look. Richard had no idea what he would say if someone opened the door to his knocking.

  He jumped up the steps and leaned on the bell. In his mind he saw Laura moving inexorably down the road, turning into the dusty red drive . . . Richard kept his finger on the bell.

  Footsteps came toward the other side of the door, paused; a bolt slid into a latch. The door opened an inch or two and a white suspicious face looked at him over a taut length of chain.

  “I live across the street,” Richard said, playing the card that would mean the most on Mount Avenue. “Some people out on the street are . . . uh, I think they’ll kill me.”

  “So you say,” replied the old man behind the door.

  “I’m scared to death,” Richard said.

  “Right now, that’s not too dumb,” the old man said, and unhooked the chain. He raised his right hand and Richard saw that in it was a flat sleek black automatic pistol. “That’s not too dumb at all. So you came up here for help?”

  Richard nodded. “They stopped their car in front of me—in front of the old Smithfield house.”

  “The old Smithfield house.” The man nodded; lowered the pistol. “Yeah, Monty used to live next door there—had the whole family in with him. You suppose they’re still there?”

  Richard nodded.

  “Well, I don’t mind giving you a hand. I’ll just run ‘em off with this thing. She has a full clip in her too, in case we need a little firepower.”

  Richard was so rattled that he never stopped to think: why would a pistol frighten people who were already dead?

  He and the small white-haired man set off down the drive. Richard had to walk fast to keep up with his savior, and as they skirted the tennis court, he learned that the man’s name was Charles Daisy, that he was a widower with six grand-children, a retired lawyer. “Got a little target range down in the basement, that’s why I’m pretty handy with this old girl here, ‘course we all shoot skeet out at the Wampetaug Country Club from November to February, that sharpens up the eyes like you wouldn’t believe . . .” They had reached the end of Daisy’s drive. “Where were they?” the old man asked, looking perkily up and down the avenue. “Where do you suppose they went?”

  Richard was looking right at them—they had not moved since he had turned and run. Laura’s impassive face stared toward him; a thousand familiar but drowned feelings were latent in her flesh. He saw a few delicate bloodstains—feathers of rust—rising up her neck from the top of her blouse.

  “They cut and run, didn’t they?” crowed Charles Daisy. “They were just scum, son, that’s all, scum looking for a soft place to settle. They won’t bother you now.” Daisy looked at him and amazed Richard by winking one of his webbed blue eyes. “I recognize you, you know. Took me a second, but then I had you. You were the boy in that series. Spunky. You were Spunky.”

  Richard knew that he was making a serious mistake, but he could not help himself. He asked, “Can’t you see them?”

  Daisy cocked his head.

  “They’re right there. Right where they were before. Two men and a woman. I could even tell you the license number of the Chevy. It’s TBC 67—”

  “You get the hell out of here,” Daisy said to him. His white little face had turned pink. “You just take off down the road, actor boy, or I’ll put a bullet in your throat. I mean it. Get moving.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Richard said.

  “Thought you’d get old Charley Daisy out here on the road and jump him? Thought you’d get yourself a nice place on Mount Avenue? Is that what you thought? You didn’t know old Charley Daisy very well, did you?” He flourished the gun in Richard’s general direction. Richard saw that if he wanted to, he could just snatch the gun from Daisy’s hand.

  “I just wanted your help, Mr. Daisy,” he said.

  This made the old man even more furious. “Move! Get away from me!” Daisy backed away from Richard and leveled the gun at his chest.

  Richard moved. He dared say no more. He turned his back on the man and walked toward the little group around the car. In agony, he glanced once at Laura’s face. Eyes open, she looked asleep. She was not there, except for him. And she and the others could not take him while furious Charles Daisy watched him go. Either that, or the Dragon had worked out some new trick for him. He got so far off to the right side of the road that his shoulder scraped and rustled in the thick bushes. Old Charley Daisy was still behind him with his fat pistol pointed at his back, but that was not why Richard’s stomach felt knotted tightly as a boot lace. He glanced sideways and down as he went past the car, and saw that the driver, the one with the madras jacket and the polo shirt, wore nothing on his feet, which were plump, white, and crusted with filth. But for the dirt, they were very preppy feet. The skin had peeled itself back over a couple of serious abrasions, but those feet had not bled. The skin had parted, but there had been no pain and no blood.

  He was terrified that Laura would speak to him until he had gone at least thirty yards down the road.

  When he got to the job, John Roehm was sitting on the tailgate of his pickup in the client’s driveway. To his right, extending over the edge of the tailgate, was a stack of white, freshly sawn oak boards. Roehm looked like Santa Claus in a flannel shirt and red suspenders, sitting beside his treasure. “Thought we could begin on those shelves today, after we test the paneling. Happened to find some pretty decent oak yesterday evening. Best I ever seen, to tell you the truth.”

  “If you like, John,” Richard said.

  Roehm tilted his massive head. “Another beautiful day, boss.”

  “I guess it is, John.”

  Looking at him, Roehm saw everything; saw enough, anyhow. “We’ll just take it little by slow, boss. Little by slow.” And meant everything that he said. Richard helped him carry the oak boards into the house.

  2

  As Richard Allbee discovered later, he was right to have run from the three apparitions that climbed out from the nondescript black Chevy; they represented danger, they had meant to kill him; there was no mercy in what was left of his wife. The last two direct victims of Hampstead’s dragon, the fifth and sixth persons to die at the hands of Wren Van Horne, did not have Richard’s luck. They too met apparitions, but they met them unaided; and with the apparitions they met Dr. Van Horne not long before Graham Williams’ old friend endured the second
great alteration of his life. Dr. Van Horne treated them as he had treated his four earlier victims: and so they too, or at least one of them, experienced what we have called the “phantasmal.” But by this time, as General Haugejas would soon see, you could get the whiff of the “phantasmal” simply by moving through the streets of Hampstead.

  The last two people to die directly at the hands of Hampstead’s most respected gynecologist were Franz Holland and his wife, Queenie.

  Queenie Holland owed her first name to her father, a cockney named Albert Martin who had come to America as a young man of not quite twenty and discovered that his accent in an American ear resounded as grandly as a duke’s. Albert found himself a well-paying job at Macy’s in New York, married a woman in the dress department, found time to chase nearly every attractive woman he saw, charmed all with his amoral but practical Londoner’s wit, and eventually saved enough money to buy a woman’s clothing store in Hampstead, Connecticut.

  Queenie was intense and practical, but grew up loving the ideal of the gentleman, of which class she mistakenly took her father to be a representative. With Franz Holland, the son of the funeral director, she was closer to the mark. Even as a teenager, Franz was stuffy, but inside the affected social manner he was gentle and kind; and Queenie, who had part of her father’s calculation, knew that he was growing up in a business where the customers would never stop coming. It was like making toilet tissue, Franz once told her in all seriousness, people would always need his product. If Queenie said shit and death, you bet, to herself, she gave no sign of it to Franz. They were married two years out of high school. Very quickly Queenie made herself indispensable to the firm of Bornley and Holland, doing the correspondence and working on the books. Her practicality, her best inheritance from Albert Martin, had found a worthwhile outlet.

  So by 1980, when they had been married better than thirty years, Franz Holland could not separate the running of the funeral home from what his wife did in her office all day. And that was what made Queenie’s recent behavior even more troubling than it would have been otherwise. He could have done the books by himself, though it would have taken him twice the time it did his wife; but he had no idea anymore how she did the ordering—he barely remembered where they kept the catalogs.

  For thirteen days Queenie had done nothing but watch television. She did not even bother to dress. She got out of bed, brushed her teeth, and switched on the old Sylvania in the bedroom. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and went crazy—that was how it looked to Franz, anyhow. She had started, thirteen days ago, by talking to Tom Brokaw, she sulked when Jane Pauley took over the screen, and then brightened up again when Gene Shalit came on. She had conversations with the people she saw on television—Queenie did not just talk at Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel and all the other men whose faces filled the Sylvania’s screen all day, she talked with them. When the host of the Today show said, “Many people today are caught in a financial bind in part because of tuition rates at our nation’s colleges and universities,” Queenie chimed in with, “Oh, don’t I know it, Tom! Why, I’m beginning to wonder if college is only for the wealthy these days!” She went on like that all day. At first Franz had assumed that Queenie was making fun of him for some reason—Franz was in the habit of telling commercials that they were rubbish—but as she had kept on he had realized that his wife had lost her mind. What else could you call it when someone thought those moving faces in there were real people?

  Queenie would not even eat. He had to bring her sandwiches, carry them into the bedroom from the little kitchen on the second floor of the funeral home, watch her distractedly swing her eyes toward him and say, “Thank you, dear,” and then turn back to her conversation with Robert Reed on The Brady Bunch or Carter Oldfield in Daddy’s Here. The sandwich gradually dried and curled during the day, and when he brought in her soup at six o’clock he took it out with him and threw it away. She did drink—Tab or Mello Yello or whatever was being advertised. These sickly soft drinks were what was keeping her alive, he supposed.

  So Queenie sat upstairs hypnotized and perky before the television, and Franz worriedly dealt with the bereaved—more of those than ever, now—and the salesman from the supply houses and the mail and the bookkeeping. Often as he moved through the public rooms downstairs, which were much grander than their shabby rooms on the second floor, he could hear the theme songs of the programs Queenie would soon be joining. A forties-style swing band pumping out a rhythmic version of “When the Red, Red Robin Goes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” meant that in sixty seconds Queenie would be deep in serious discussion with Carter Oldfield; an equally familiar da da da, da da DUM de dum indicated that it was time for I Love Lucy and Queenie’s reflections on the present state of Cuba with Desi Arnaz. He had never before realized that the sounds from their living quarters were audible downstairs. This had come to his attention shortly after the morgue drivers had delivered the body of Desmond O’Hara to his back entrance—they had loaded the cyanotic body on the table in the preparation room, Franz had signed the forms and was walking the men back toward the rear door, and the unmistakable sounds of “When the Red, Red Robin” had drifted down the stairs. One of the drivers had burst out laughing; the other one looked startled but pleased, and said, “Hey, that’s Daddy’s Here. You watch that too?”

  Queenie directed only two personal remarks to him during this period. The first came at the end of her first day of madness. She left the bed, set her untouched bowl of soup on the floor, said to Johnny Carson, “Oh, I know that’s right, Johnny, those Hollywood people are just a big bunch of dingbats,” and switched off the set. Then she went back to the bed and climbed in beside her trembling husband. “Oh, Franz,” she said, “I’ve had so much fun today.” The second remark came in the fourth day of her madness, and after Franz had pondered it for a day or so he thought it might be the explanation for Queenie’s breakdown. He had come in with her sandwich—tuna salad on white bread—and a can of Tab. She was raptly talking about feminism with some glossy-mustached soap-opera actor Franz did not recognize. Queenie sipped from the Tab. She said, “I know you don’t care what a mere woman has to say, Amory,” to the television, and then disturbed Franz by locking his eyes with her own. Her face trembled for a moment—it looked like a face seen through a veil of water. “I’m glad now that we never had children,” she said in her real voice. “All those poor dear children drowning . . . all those little corpses. I’m glad we’re childless.”

  Franz Holland thought that he might be following his wife into madness. It seemed to him that ever since Patsy McCloud had suffered her peculiar fit in his casket showroom everything had been getting dark, dark, dark . . . all those firemen had died and then everything went somehow wrong, every day there were more new funerals to plan and schedule—it was like Jonestown! Exactly. Every funeral director he knew, including himself, was fascinated with Jonestown and the technical problem it presented, and here he was, Franz Holland, trying to solve these problems all by himself in Hampstead.

  He could still remember that pretty Tayler girl, Patsy McCloud as she was now, dropping her mouth open and getting that scared crazy look in her eyes and yelling “Don’t touch me!” at him as if he had just turned into something loathsome. His feelings had curdled. Franz Holland was a man extremely self-conscious of the way he looked, and Patsy’s shouting like that at him—the very expression of her eyes—had been like a knife in his gut. And ever since that day, ever since he’d been made to hide out of sight around the corner in the casket showroom while she called her friends, he had begun to fret even more than usually about vandalism and break-ins downstairs.

  Queenie might have been the bookkeeper, but Franz knew that most of his investment, which is to say most of his money, was in the public rooms. In the vestibule were antique tables his father had bought just before the First World War, massive Chinese vases now worth so much Franz’s heart stopped whenever he dusted them, and a little Oriental rug, also bought by F
ranz’s father, which was above insurability the way some characters in a detective novel are above suspicion. In the room beyond the vestibule was an enormous Kirman rug. All of these costly worldly things haunted Franz as he lay in bed at night. He heard scratches at the door, soft thumps against the big downstairs windows. Since Patsy Tayler McCloud had twisted the knife of his ugliness in his gut, Franz had known that some wild kid was going to break in and piss all over the Kirman; snub out a cigarette on the antique table. Lying in bed, he could actually hear this going on. The door thumped, glass discreetly broke, footsteps entered. Splash, splash on the big rug, those lustrous fibers eagerly drinking up the fluid. Some nights he could almost hear the zipper raspily sliding down just before the kid ruined the rug.

  And voices—there were voices too, from down there. He did not want to hear them, but they drifted up the stairs, whispery and hot. The first few nights, he had gone down to investigate, but of course had seen nothing. There had been no scratching at the door, no subtle chiming of broken glass, no unsteady footsteps across the irreplaceable rug. The grand empty rooms had greeted him like a reproach. All those invasive noises had happened only in his head. Two or three nights running, Franz had wearily trailed through the waiting rooms, the chapel, and the showrooms and seen only his inventory. And when he got back upstairs and stretched out beside gently whiffling Queenie, he heard the voices all over again—the hot, teasing voices. Franz? Franz? Didn’t see us, did you? Try again—try again, ugly Franz . . .

  Ugly little Franz . . .

  Shortly before midnight on the day that Richard Allbee was allowed to walk past his wife’s specter unharmed, Franz heard the entire sequence of noises yet again: the soft sounds against the door, the quiet breaking of glass, the footsteps across the vestibule. Can you find us, ugly boy . . . ?

  Someone chuckled. Splash, splash—the urine pounded into the carpet.