Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “Black summer?” Hackley exploded. “Black wings? Jesus, Bixbee, I’m sorry I asked.”

  Bixbee had shrugged, retreating into his usual personality; cupped his cigarette in his hand; faded back into the print room.

  Black summer. Black wings.

  And there had been more—Bixbee had said something else that the intervening twenty-five or more years had stolen from Sarah. Something about Bates Krell, she was sure. . . .

  . . . something about his house?

  That felt right; in fact, Sarah thought, it was why she had suddenly remembered this conversation; it was the link between that day in the office and what Ulick Byrne was doing right now over at Town Hall.

  When Ulick reappeared half an hour later, Sarah already knew what she wanted to do. She had the address written down on a sheet of Hampstead Gazette letterhead.

  “Well, I got the information, but it took twice as long as it should have,” he said, sliding into his seat across the table. “The Green house was easy. It’s been in continuous occupancy for a hundred years or more. A man named John Scully lives in it now, and has for twenty-two years. He’s a publisher in New York. I don’t know, Sarah, but I don’t get the feeling that we’ll learn much about Prince Green if we go to this Scully guy’s house.”

  “I agree,” Sarah said. “But what about the other one?”

  “Well, that’s what took all the time. That place is on Poor Fox Road—you know, that little street that borders the Academy’s land—and all the property there was once owned by the school. They used to keep those houses as residences for the teachers and for the boarders they used to have, back twenty, thirty years ago. Now the fact is, as I eventually worked out, that absolutely no one has lived in the Krell house since the owner died or left town. The town eventually seized it to pay off the back taxes, but it looks like they could never get anyone to take it off their hands. It’s just been sitting there as town property for the past fifty years. For some reason, it was the only building on that street that the school never owned.”

  “I want to go there,” Sarah said.

  “A building empty for fifty years? Probably none too steady to begin with? Have you ever seen those places on Poor Fox Road?”

  “Bates Krell’s house, the way he left it. Could you really pass that up?” Sarah asked, flaming out at him.

  “Not if you really want to go there, Sarah,” Byrne said. “If I’ll take you to New York, I’ll certainly take you to Poor Fox Road.”

  “On the way,” she said, mollified, “I’ll tell you about a conversation I was just remembering.”

  9

  “This is about where the mailman found the body of that gardener, Bobby Fritz,” Ulick said as they went slowly up Poor Fox Road. “He was lying down in those weeds.”

  “Ugh,” Sarah said. “With that crazy poem inside his chest. You know, I’ve lived in Hampstead most of my life, but I don’t think I’ve ever set foot on this street before.” She peered through the window of Byrne’s car at the tangled greenery bunched so thickly beside the road. Behind the wall of vine-choked bushes and trees she could see a tall sagging fence of wire mesh. The grounds of Greenbank Academy lay on the other side of this fence.

  “Hardly anyone ever has. It’s just stuck back here by itself. Sure doesn’t look much like the rest of Greenbank.”

  Sarah was about to agree, for scarcely anything could have been less representative of Greenbank than Poor Fox Road, but then they went around a bend in the road and saw the houses; and Sarah no longer felt like talking. She knew which house was Bates Krell’s, all right.

  “I don’t think anyone is living down here anymore,” Byrne said, but Sarah thought she would have known that anyhow. “The Fritz boy’s parents left their house after his death—I guess the boy more or less kept the family together. There was another neighbor or two, but they’re gone now. I guess this place got a little spooky for them.”

  “Spooky?”

  “A lady at Town Hall saw what I was looking up, and we had a little talk about it. She knew a painter who lived in that one”—Byrne pointed at a two-story frame house beside a lot filled with wrecked cars—”and he apparently moved in closer to town because he kept hearing funny noises at night. Apparently he never quite got over the Fritz boy’s being killed so close by.”

  “Funny noises. Everybody in Hampstead hears funny noises at night.”

  He was pulling off to the side of the road in front of a house which had no number. It needed none.

  “I know,” Byrne said. “This damn town is turning into a funhouse. Well, this, obviously, is it. The house that Krell built.”

  Small, one story high, with its once-brown clapboards split and jagged like broken teeth, the house could have seemed either bereft or sinister. The two little windows on either side of the door had long ago been broken in, and the roofline sagged. Whatever grass had once grown outside that door had years ago given up, yellowed, and died under the thick pelt of weeds crowding what should have been the short front lawn. Just an abandoned cottage by now almost too far gone to be repaired, the house should have seemed pathetic—a place too shabby even for memories. But to Sarah it did not seem so. The little house was decidedly sinister, and precisely because its memories had never left it.

  Ulick Byrne must have felt something similar, for he said, “Are you sure the old guy isn’t still hiding out in there? About ninety years old, and still, shall we say, aggressive?”

  Sarah did not want to leave the safe asphalt of the roadbed to step onto the overgrown path; she did not want to get any nearer that house than she already was.

  “There isn’t going to be much in there, you know,” Ulick said off to her side. “Not much besides that wonderful atmosphere.”

  “Let’s have a look,” Sarah said, wondering why she always had to be braver than whatever man she was with. “It’s just an old house. We’ll scare all the mice.”

  “I think I understand those mice,” Ulick said, but he followed her small vehement body up the path.

  She waited for him beside the flimsy-looking door. “What if it’s locked?” he said. He sounded almost hopeful.

  “I think you could break it down, Ulick.”

  She wanted him to open the door, and she could feel his resistance; then she felt him give in. He reached for the doorknob, which was pocked and darkened, but of solid bronze. Mr. Krell wanted to be able to lock his door, she thought; closing this door and keeping it closed was important to him.

  This impression lifted off the serious and anomalous brass knob and spoke directly to her—an impression like music trapped in the grooves of a record. And when it came to her, another thing came to her with it.

  It was not about the house, though. She had remembered that Bixbee had won so many of the office pools—at least three-fourths of them—that people had stopped betting on them.

  Byrne’s hand touched the knob. He glanced questioningly at Sarah, twisted it, and pushed: the door creaked open.

  “Come on, Galahad,” Sarah said, and stepped over the threshold.

  She was standing in a small dusty room only dimly illuminated by the two broken windows. A window at the rear of the room had been covered over with yellowed newspaper taped to the wall. The cheap pine flooring, buckled up here and there like overlapping teeth, had never been truly straight, and now ran noticeably downhill to the far wall, thus adding to the slightly false perspective given by any empty room: it was like one of those curved backdrops into which people can seem to run for miles, an optical illusion. The walls and ceiling had been darkened by the relief maps drawn by generations of water stains.

  “Oh, yes,” Sarah said. The house was, very simply, bad, and she could feel its badness: it rejected her as it had rejected all for the past fifty years, it was like a wound that wanted only to close around itself: but Sarah felt a paradoxical relief. She was here, inside this place, and she could handle it.

  “Completely empty,” Byrne needlessly pointed out.
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  “In a way,” she said.

  Byrne shot her a dour look and began to knead his stomach with his right hand. “Place makes me feel worse,” he said. “How seriously do you want to inspect it? There isn’t anything to see, really.” He advanced a few steps farther than she into the room, as if to demonstrate his courage.

  “I want to see the whole thing.”

  Sarah wordlessly set out toward the gaping doorway to the left, taking care to skirt the most jagged places in the floor. What she entered was another, smaller room, also completely bare. A light cord dangled from the ceiling. The window here had been papered over like the window in the living room, and in the darkness the roils of dust on the floor seemed solid, almost bulky.

  “Where Bates lay his sleepy head to rest, I suppose,” Byrne said from immediately behind her.

  “The kitchen must be on the other side.” Sarah turned around, ducked under Byrne’s outstretched arm, and marched back across the living room.

  She had almost made it to the arch on the other side of the room when a peculiar sensation overtook her. The pitched floor seemed very slightly to sway, to roll against its slope as if to straighten itself, and Sarah stopped moving. The floor gently swung back to its original position. “Ulick,” she began, “did you just . . .” She lost the sentence. The little room appeared to be extending itself around her, multiplying its length: for a second it was as if she stood in a vast vaulted cavern.

  “Did I just what?” Ulick said from behind her.

  Bates Krell’s house had its tricks, she saw, its own once-powerful concentrations and plans; these were the distillations of the memories she had sensed when she had first seen the house. It was good that Byrne was here with her: the tricks may have lost much of their potency, but Sarah knew that if she were in the Krell house by herself, these three rooms and a basement could grow into a maze.

  “Did I just what, Sarah?”

  The room was folding back into itself—she lost the feeling of being a speck in a vast and terrible space.

  Sarah knew that, whatever Telpro’s role had been, this house was crucial to everything that was happening in Hampstead: she did not yet understand how the parts fit together, but Bates Krell’s sinister little house was one of the largest; eventually she would understand. Old Bixbee, who had a gift for picking winning numbers, had understood before her, and she would go through his index the way Billy Graham went through the Bible.

  “Sarah?”

  “Excuse me, Ulick. I had an odd sensation just now. I wondered if you felt anything.”

  “An intense desire to get out of this place.”

  “One more room and then the basement. I think we really have to see it all.” She continued on her way toward Bates Krell’s kitchen.

  Here the window had not been covered, and harsh light revealed the jagged tears in the crusty linoleum, the webby constructions of dust and hair which floated up a bit in the air they disturbed as they entered. A gray metal sink the size of a washtub bolted to the exterior wall; rusty pipes ran along the floor beneath it.

  “Where Krell made his renowned Krellburgers,” Byrne said. “We dare not ask of what.”

  He went forward, bent at the waist, and peered out the window. Two rusting cars with shattered windshields grazed in tall yellow weeds. “I bet we could get this place cheap,” he said. “Do you suppose the pipes still work?”

  Sarah shook her head, but Byrne was already twisting one of the spigots over the metal sink. A pipe banged against the wall, and a wad of dust shot out of the spigot and puffed into nothingness against the sink. The pipe thumped the wall again. “I think there’s still water coming here,” Byrne marveled.

  The spigot shook atop the sink, vibrating with a drumming, gathering intensity.

  “Turn it off,” Sarah said, but Byrne merely glanced at her.

  In the next instant the handle exploded off the spigot and a thick yellowish substance sprayed into the room, spattering both of them. “Hey!” Byrne shouted, jumping back. A fat stream of the yellow fluid was still jetting across the room, but in seconds it subsided to a sluggish steady flow from the spigot into the sink. The fluid stank—it smelled like illness to Sarah, like something drained from a dying man. Already it was halfway up the side of the gray sink. Where the fluid had hit the floor it lay in congealing puddles, like cloudy Jell-O. The smell of it filled the kitchen.

  “There’s no way to turn that thing off,” Ulick said, half in a panic. “My God, what is that stuff? It’s going to run out on the floor any minute.”

  “I think it’s the secret ingredient in Krellburgers,” she said, paying him back a little. She inspected a fat wad of the stuff which had landed on her skirt and now clung there. Sarah took a tissue from her bag and dislodged it.

  The pipes still roared: Sarah could see them moving beneath the sink, jittering into each other, knocking between the floor and the wall. The whole house seemed affected by this agitation, to tremble in rhythm with the loud pipes.

  “Let’s get out of here, Sarah,” Byrne said. “I’m covered with this stinking goo, and I really think we can do without the basement.”

  There was only one more door in the little kitchen, and Sarah pulled it open. The hinges squealed; behind the door was musty blackness. “Bingo,” Sarah said.

  “I think we should go.”

  “You go, then. I’m taking a look at the basement.”

  She turned toward the rotting steps which led down into the blackness, and as she knew he would, Ulick said, “Then you’d better let me go first.” He was brushing at his jacket with a noticeably unsanitary handkerchief. He balled this object into his pocket and went around her to feel his way down the stairs.

  “There’s some light at the bottom,” he called up to her, and as she stepped onto the packed earth of the basement floor she saw why. The stairs ended just before a stone foundation wall, and when Sarah walked around to the side of the staircase she noticed the glass bricks set at the topmost level around the perimeter of the basement, two on each side. Less transparent than the usual basement windows, they at least admitted a cloudy light.

  Sarah’s skin shriveled on her back, her scalp, her hands. As soon as she had stepped into the main area of the basement, she felt intensely uncomfortable—it looked much more like an ordinary basement than the house like an ordinary house, but it was not ordinary. Here was where the memories were strongest, most concentrated. When evil had taken root in this house, it had grown here first.

  Ulick Byrne must have felt it too, for he said, “My God Sarah, this is a terrible place.”

  She looked at him curiously. Then she looked straight and strong at the basement: it was merely a wide-open area bounded by irregular stone walls, floored with dirt. Unclean light showed them a long flat wooden table at the far end—once it might have been a workbench. Even where they stood, they could see the dents and scars on its edges. Every cell of this place, every atom, shrieked against her nerves.

  Byrne said, “You know, before I started concentrating on real estate, I spent a lot of time in courtrooms and I saw my share of jails too. I know when I’m somewhere where people have been scared and miserable. You can feel how trapped the people were. But Jesus, Sarah, this is the worst one I’ve ever known. I don’t even want to know what used to happen down here.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

  Byrne sighed with relief, and the two of them turned back toward the staircase.

  Upstairs, a door slammed shut.

  Sarah and Byrne froze. Footsteps traversed the living room, entered the kitchen. They looked at each other with wild fear: the footsteps were going directly toward the stairs. Perhaps both of them imagined that Bates Krell had returned and was bent on slaughtering them—it would have been almost an inevitable thought, in their circumstance: but Sarah recovered a fraction of a second before Ulick and whispered, “It’s some kid. It must be.”

  Ulick nodded, but with little convict
ion. When the door at the top of the stairs creaked open, he took Sarah’s arm and pulled her toward a corner from where they could see whoever was coming down the stairs before they themselves were seen.

  He pulled her in next to him, backed against the wall, and then recoiled. The wall had been furry and it had been in motion. Ulick gasped and turned his head to look at the treacherous wall. He nearly screeched. Blanketing the wall were thousands of small red spiders. He felt a sharp stabbing pain in his hand and saw that one of the spiders had just bitten him. He bit down on the pain and flicked the spider away.

  The person coming down the stairs was no child. The steps were slow and cautious, the weight behind them that of an adult.

  The head came into view. Silvery hair. Both Sarah and Byrne relaxed by an unconscious fraction. Then the face turned unknowingly in their direction, and their relaxation froze again. The man’s face was a grotesque parody of humanity. Nearly dead white, it was puffy and ridged with excess flesh. The forehead seemed swollen and bulbous, the chin dewlapped.

  Again Sarah was there first: she suddenly realized that the man was what the children called a “leaker” and that he must be using this abandoned house as a hideout. He was only a week or two away from the stage of the disease which would require him to bandage himself—at that point he would need a safe place to hide, where he could tend himself away from the threat of destruction.

  A wad of flesh on the man’s cheek slid toward his dewlapped chin, and Sarah’s heart moved for the man.

  “Leaker,” Ulick whispered in her ear; she glanced at him in annoyance, and just as she saw that a small colony of spiders was burrowing into his thick woolly hair, she realized that she had recognized the leaker.

  The man who had just crept down into Bates Krell’s terrible basement was her gynecologist.

  “Your hair,” she hissed to Byrne. “Your hair—spiders,” and then she stepped away from the corner and said in an almost normal tone of voice, “Dr. Van Horne? Please don’t be alarmed. It’s me, Sarah Spry.”