Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  The station stank of spilled blood like the Goodall house on that May afternoon, and Bobo went apprehensively toward the desk. When he reached it, he rose up onto his tiptoes and peered over the top. He saw the padded chairs the desk officers used, their telephones and notebooks and cigarettes; and he did not see what he had feared. No bodies lay twisted together on the raised floor behind the desk.

  “Chester! McCone!” he shouted. “Anybody!”

  He ducked into the hallway that led to the offices and the muster room and the interrogation rooms, but he saw no one. Behind him, the shrilling of the telephone continued. Before he went prowling through the rest of the station, Bobo turned around for another look at the entrance. And then Bobo saw, as he had not earlier, that the door between the main part of the station and the six little holding cells was open an inch or two.

  This door was always kept locked, even when no prisoners were being held; it was a rule as conventional and as rigidly kept as the unwritten command that always kept at least one officer at the desk.

  Bobo went slowly back across the white floor. He touched the barred metal door; swung it open. The stench of blood, now combined with the dark unmistakable odor of feces, rushed out toward him. Bobo looked down and saw a red stippling on the floor.

  He was sure that the bodies back in there would be those of Mo Chester, Gance McCone, and any other officer who had been caught in the station.

  Bobo stepped into the corridor and quickly ran down the length of the cells, seeing that there were three bodies. None of them were the bodies of policemen. The cells’ doors were still locked. Behind the bars, the bodies lay disarranged and savaged in their separate cells. Bobo was not breathing now; he was barely thinking. On the floors of the three cells, blood lay in a thick glaze. Behind him the telephone finally stopped ringing. One of the three men—this was Greeley—had been so clawed that his face was only an assemblage of wet ragged strings; Bobo looked hard at the second bloody face and thought it looked almost familiar—as though this man had once been in the newspapers or on the covers of magazines.

  It took him less than thirty seconds to pound downhill across the length of the municipal lot. For one night, the manager of the theater had arranged that the marquee read: WELCOME POLICE OFFICERS OF HAMPSTEAD PRIVATE SHOWING. He raced toward these tall black letters.

  The lobby of the Nutmeg was brilliantly lighted and as empty as the station house. Loud noises echoed through it—from the soundtrack of The Choirboys, Bobo assumed, piped in from the main section of the theater. He identified a biting odor as familiar to him as the fragrance of beer.

  It was cordite—the odor of the firing range in the basement of the police station.

  He trotted past the ticket post and burst through the twin swinging doors into the theater. Cacophony erupted from the speakers: shouts, grunts, bursts of loud and irrelevant music. The beam from the projection booth illuminated the last swirling traces of smoke.

  All the seats seemed empty. Bobo took a few uncertain steps down the sloping aisle, uncertain because his eyes had not yet adjusted. “Hey,” he said, “guys?”

  Then he saw a leg extended into the aisle, draped over an armrest. “Hey, you all drunk?” He heard a groan rising softly from beneath the mad roars and giggles on the soundtrack. Bobo touched the upraised knee; shook it.

  “Where are the lights in this place?” he yelled.

  And then either the screen turned brighter or his eyes adjusted, for he saw wounded and dead men sprawled across their seats in every part of the theater. It looked like some sort of ghastly joke: wherever Bobo looked, ahead or behind, to either side, he saw lolling heads, outstretched arms, bodies pitched over the tops of seats and bodies jammed into the filthy popcorn-strewn aisles between the seats.

  For a couple of seconds Bobo Farnsworth probably lost his mind. He uttered a long wavering scream. He ran down to the first row and saw Mark Johanssen’s body lying faceup in the wide aisle at the front of the theater. Johanssen’s blond hair was laced with a dark substance that resembled chocolate, and his mouth was open. On the stage four feet from Johanssen’s corpse was a thick slime of blood and wet organs, in the midst of which sat a fat human hand like a fleshy spider.

  Bobo thought he was the last policeman left alive in Hampstead.

  Just before his professionalism released him from his shock, Bobo heard a mingled subtonal whisper coming up, it seemed, from the ground, from beneath the floor. The noises on the soundtrack ceased as if cut off by a knife. The whispering sounds resolved into groans.

  Not all of the men were dead.

  Bobo ran, slipping on blood, back up the aisle. When he reached the rear of the auditorium again, just before he went to the telephone and called the state police, and then the ambulance services in Hampstead, Old Sarum, and King George, he took one look back into the theater.

  * * *

  And the screen claimed him, took him in.

  * * *

  “I saw something crazy,” Bobo told Graham Williams months later. “It was hard to see, because the screen was all torn up and most of the picture was being projected on this wall behind it and that kind of threw the focus off a little bit.

  They were in Graham’s house, and Bobo nervously stood up and jammed his hands in his trouser pockets. “You had that girl living here with you for a while, didn’t you? That Patsy McCloud?”

  “Yes, she was here,” Graham said.

  “Not anymore?”

  Graham shook his head.

  “Well, the reason I bring it up is—this won’t make sense to you, Graham, but I’ll tell you anyhow. The reason I bring that up is that when I was standing there looking at the screen I suddenly thought of her. I saw her face, thought of her face I mean. And I wanted to see her. Like she could help me. I really did want to see her.”

  “That makes sense to me,” Graham said. “You don’t know how much sense that makes.”

  Bobo gave him a gloomy, almost sour look. “Maybe it does. Yeah, I remember that day—that day down on Kendall Point. I’ll never forget that, I promise you. The way I thought Ronnie was dead, and what I thought was down there in that gulley . . . and that girl Patsy there with you and the other guys. You know what? You all looked beautiful. Beautiful. Even now, you humpbacked old monkey.”

  “Since Patsy is about ten or fifteen years older than you, maybe you should stop calling her a girl,” Graham said. “And I don’t have a hump on my back.”

  “Neither did that bell-ringer at Notre Dame,” Bobo said, pronouncing it like the university in Indiana.

  “Do you know we have a complete force again? It didn’t even take a month and a half—we had kids applying from all over to get on our force. I thought it would take a year. More.” Bobo wrapped his arms over his chest and took a couple of steps toward the typewriter table. “Anyhow, I sort of fell in love with Patsy then, just looking at her. And you know how worried about Ronnie I was. But that girl—pardon me, that woman—she just knocked me flat. I would have died for her.”

  “Let’s get back to the Nutmeg Theater,” Graham said.

  Bobo stopped perambulating aimlessly between the couch and the typing table and went back to sit across from Graham. “Yeah. That’s what you want to know about, isn’t it? And the funny thing is, I promised myself I’d never tell anyone about the stuff I thought I saw on that ripped-up screen. I didn’t want to sound like a candidate for the booby hatch.”

  “Most of the men there made the same promise to themselves.”

  “And broke it to you.”

  “Some of them.”

  Bobo laughed. “Well, to hell with you. I never would, except for that day I found you on Kendall Point. That’s the only reason—and I still don’t know what really happened there.”

  Graham merely kept his gaze fixed on Bobo.

  “Okay. Fine. I’ll tell you. Remember, I’ve only been standing by the door for a few seconds now—and the whole thing only took a couple of seconds. It just went bang, ban
g, bang, like I said.” He inhaled loudly and opened his eyes again. “Anyhow, what I saw was Ronnie.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets again, and Graham saw sudden deep strain on his face. The hands in those pockets would have been clenched, and part of the strain would have been the effort of not giving in to whatever powerful impulse ran through him at that moment—to weep, to scream, to begin shaking uncontrollably. “Just for a couple of seconds, if that long, but it was enough.”

  “You don’t have to—” Graham began, but Bobo cut him off brusquely.

  “Oh, I want to. Yes, Graham, I do. Isn’t that what I’m here for? I saw her buried, I saw Ronnie in her coffin, and I saw things eating on her. Rats. Big white worms as long as snakes. Taking chunks out of her. But she wasn’t dead yet, and she was screaming, Graham, she was screaming her lungs out. And she was going to go on until she died.” Bobo bent over, grimacing, as if his stomach hurt him. “And I’ll tell you what I realized as I went away from that horrible sight toward the phone in the lobby. That I was just looking into my own mind. Okay? You follow that? Part of me wanted Ronnie to die that night, Graham. Part of me was sick and tired of taking care of her. So I put her in her coffin, Graham, and I buried her deep. And because she was still alive, she was down there screaming to get out.”

  Graham opened his mouth to say something fatuous, but Bobo cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t. Just don’t. You don’t know the rest. Ronnie fell asleep that night all right, but do you know what she dreamed about? Can’t you guess what she dreamed about that night? It went from my mind right onto the screen, or what was left of the screen, and straight into her mind. And that was nearly it for her—because she knew, all right, she knew where that horrible torture came from. She never admitted it, but she knew. And that almost killed her, Graham. When I got back to her house, she had fallen on the floor and puked all over herself and her skin was so dry she felt like a goddamned desert. I bet she had a fever of a hundred and two or three. I know she did. She almost died that night. And if she had died, it would have been because I killed her.”

  “No,” Graham said, but he knew that what Bobo said was at least half of the truth. And that Ronnie had at least half-known of this truth, for Bobo was no longer living with her. Between them had come Gideon Winter, with his dragonish insights into the ambiguities of human affection.

  8

  “You know,” Sarah said to her new partner, “I’m getting a funny feeling.”

  “I’ve had a funny feeling for a week and a half now,” Ulick Byrne said. “I can hardly eat.”

  “Oh, poor baby.” She dryly patted his hand. “An Irishman who can’t eat. It must be agony for you.”

  “My gut’s gone all sour. So what’s this idea of yours, to use the proper word?”

  Ulick had walked over to the newspaper office after sending his secretary home an hour early; now he and Sarah were back in the records room, and everyone else had gone home. “Bixbee” lay open on the long table between them, open to the entries on Murder.

  “Well, you noticed the dates for these stories. About every thirty years, something awful happens in Hampstead—and we’re assuming that Telpro is behind the latest events in the cycle.”

  “We know Telpro is behind them,” Ulick said irritably. “I must have called Haugejas’ office five times today, and all I’ve heard is the silky sound of that Chinese powerhouse telling me that the General is still in conference. They’re planning something. Besides, we’ve got that picture of Leo Friedgood.”

  “Was Telpro behind the murder of Stony Friedgood? Is that what we’re saying, Ulick?”

  He pursed his lips. “No. I don’t think we are saying that.”

  “But it is behind the other deaths.”

  “All the deaths on the eighteenth of May, yes. All the deaths of children, yes. I’m not sure we can blame those homicides at the start of the summer on good old Telpro.”

  “Well, I think we can. Anyhow, I’m sure that all the troubles are connected—in fact, I think that everything is connected. Everything that’s happening is part of the same cycle. I think Leo Friedgood is connected to this stuff about Bates Krell and Prince Green. John Sayre thought he was connected to those two. I’m sure I told old Bixbee about seeing those names on Sayre’s telephone pad, and that’s how his name wound up in this column.”

  “I don’t see quite where this line of thought takes you.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t either, Ulick. Maybe we have to work on it a little more.”

  “Oh, don’t take my head off, Sarah. I grant you, in the twenties there was a series of murders much like the ones we’ve just had. Bates Krell disappears. The murders stop. In 1980, Leo Friedgood disappears. But the killings don’t stop, do they? We don’t really know when Leo vanished. Do you think Leo killed his own wife?”

  “We know he didn’t. He was at Woodville Solvent all day.”

  “Oh, crap. My mind’s going, along with my stomach.”

  “Well, all I’m really saying is that we might start looking for ideas about what’s happening now in what happened way back then. If there really is a thirty-year cycle, maybe we ought to be paying more attention to what happened on the earlier turns of the wheel. We can’t really do much with the 1952 occurrence—I was there, and not much really happened. A man blew his brains out. But he pointed backward for us, and I think it’s about time I took the hint.”

  “I still don’t see how that helps us nail Telpro.”

  “I think it probably won’t. But it might help us see how Telpro fits into the picture in the first place. The cycle—the pattern—was there before Telpro was ever thought of.”

  Ulick shrugged. “We can’t exactly call up this Bates Krell and ask him what went on. Or drop in unexpectedly on Robertson Green and hope to surprise him into telling us something.”

  “No,” Sarah said. She was smiling, and Ulick knew that he had fallen right into whatever scheme she had concocted. “It’s true, we can’t call them up or drop in on them. But we could see where they lived. We could take a look at their houses. Who knows, Ulick? We might learn something.”

  “You have their addresses, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. The Gazette printed them.”

  “So you want to drive around and have a look? That’s fine with me.”

  “Well . . .” She tilted her head. “So that we don’t waste our time, I was wondering if a certain young attorney would mind taking the addresses over to Town Hall and seeing if there’s anybody in these houses now, or if the houses even still exist.”

  “Oh hell, give them to me,” Ulick said. “But how did I ever get to be your flunky?”

  “You had such pretty eyes,” Sarah said.

  * * *

  She stayed with the outsized, now almost mysterious pages of “Bixbee” while Byrne walked the few blocks to Town Hall. Had she told the old man about seeing those names in John Sayre’s office? There would have been no reason for her to have done so. Sarah could remember asking the editor of those days, a fat happy loafer named Phil Hackley, about the names; the editor had assured her that they could not be important. Had Bixbee overheard? The compositor had been a wraithlike, unsatisfied-looking man, thin and gray—he’d had the personality of a tired old hound. Few had taken notice of him, even when he came in to work in the records room after his retirement. Sarah had perhaps had four or five conversations with Bixbee during the fifteen or so years they worked in the same offices. Only one of these had been even faintly memorable—and that was because of an odd thing the old compositor had said. He had wandered in out of the print room on a cigarette break, and Sarah had been talking with Hackley about the town council’s seeming indifference to development on the Post Road and Riverfront Avenue: at the time, twenty-five years ago or more, these major streets were just beginning their slide into ugliness—fast-food franchises next to dry cleaner’s next to supermarkets, bars and body shops jumbled up in a litter of neon signs. “Well, what do you think about it, Bi
xbee?” Hackley had asked, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head and a superior smile on his face. Bixbee’s thin gray face had contorted; for a second Sarah had feared that he was going to spit on the editor’s carpet. “I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference,” Bixbee had said, and Hackley’s eyes had narrowed in enjoyment—get this old Yankee swamp rat, he seemed to be beaming toward Sarah. “No difference at all. Nothing can save this town.”

  “Save?” Hackley had asked.

  “Nothing,” Bixbee insisted. “Hampstead’s always been rotten as a bucket of month-old oysters. Those roads’ll get so they look like a dog’s breakfast. And nobody is really going to notice. You look into your history, Mr. Hackley. You’ll see.”

  “Why, I didn’t know you cared so much, Bixbee,” the editor had said, barely able to keep from laughing.

  “I suppose there’s a lot you don’t know,” Bixbee shot back at him. “You don’t know your history, Mr. Hackley.”

  The editor raised his eyebrows, no longer quite so amused.

  Then Bixbee had saved his job—saved it by showing in effect that he was crazy. And he had mentioned Bates Krell! Sarah sat up straight at the table in the records room, remembering this conversation more than twenty-five years after the fact. “I bet you never heard of a man named Krell, Mr. Hackley, a man named Bates Krell. He took bites out of this town—big ones. He had black wings, Mr. Hackley.” Bixbee’s mouth had twisted into something like a smile. “You tell me, Mr. Hackley, if we’re ever going to have another black summer in Hampstead.”