Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  The doctor turned toward her voice with awful slowness.

  Now she could see the extent to which he had been mutilated—that is what she would have called it—by the disease. His face was only barely recognizable, and shone with a slick white moisture. Flaps of skin folded over his eyes, retracted, fell again. She thought he seemed alarmed. Behind her she could hear Ulick hissing, frantically scratching at his scalp as the spiders began to chew on him.

  “We intend no harm, Doctor,” she said. “Remember me? I’m a patient of yours. Sarah Spry?”

  It was terrible, she thought, that a wonderful old man like Wren Van Horne should have contracted that loathsome disease.

  Van Horne seemed to be smiling at her, and she stepped toward him, meaning to give him any comfort she could. Her shoe sank into a cool wet pool, and when she looked down in surprise, Sarah saw that she had stepped into a small lake of blood.

  “Sarah Spy is a better name for you,” said the grinning man at the bottom of the stairs.

  She almost thought that the palm of a childish hand was pushing up on the bloody sole of her shoe: for a second she felt that pressure, and the disturbed, unhappy image leaped into her mind. She moved back, afraid to look down, and said “What?” to the doctor. His face seemed to be altering, lengthening, the eyes swimming out from under the flaps of moving skin—

  (Spy, whispered the doctor)

  —and when she heard another sound from the stairs and knew that she and Byrne were saved she ran toward the sound and then stopped and backed toward the corner where the lawyer had taken her—it was the last place she had felt safe, and she returned there by instinct. For on the top step of the staircase to Bates Krell’s kitchen she had seen dead little Martin O’Hara staring down at her. His brother, Thomas, stood behind him and looked over Martin’s shoulder with the same indifferent gaze.

  2

  The Fire-Bat

  1

  All the next day, Clark and his mistress drank with a dedicated abandon—as if they were in a contest and expected a prize. They began with beer, cold bottles of Molson’s ale from the refrigerator as Berkeley woozily cut open a package of bacon and slapped the entire slab into a blackened pan, switched to hard liquor around eleven (Jameson’s for Clark, for Berkeley Stolichnaya vodka kept so cold it was treacly); opened a bottle of wine to have with lunch. This was liver sausage on rye bread—even sober, Berkeley Woodhouse thought of cooking as a menial task best done by other people—but the wine was a Napa Valley Chardonnay. Up until a couple of hours after lunch, Tabby thought that his father and Berkeley were handling their drinks a little better than usual, and would probably just pass out watching television. They did that every few days, and Tabby turned off the lights and stepped over their legs to go to bed. He thought, in fact, that they seemed less driven than usual: Berkeley ruffled his hair once or twice, and his father made a joke for the first time since the departure of Sherri Stillwell.

  “Jesus, Clark,” Berkeley said, “I just realized that you were married twice, and I bet you weren’t happy with either one longer than six months.”

  “Happiness can’t buy you money,” Clark said.

  Berkeley barked out a laugh, and Tabby looked up in amazement: the joke disguised a lie, but it was a joke nonetheless, despite its bitterness.

  After lunch even this fragile lightness disappeared.

  Clark and Berkeley went into the bedroom, “for a little nappy-poo,” Berkeley said. The arch euphemism made Clark knot his brows together. “That means for a bump, kid, you get me? ‘Nappy-poo,’ for shit’s sake.” He pushed her toward the door.

  Tabby was familiar with most of the noises that accompanied his father’s lovemaking, and rather than hear this array of snorts and grunts one more time, he went into his own room. Twenty minutes later he was surprised to hear sounds coming from Clark’s bedroom—usually they did not penetrate so far. And the sounds themselves were not the usual barnyard impressions. Tabby thought he could hear his father crying.

  Around two o’clock Clark and Berkeley found their way back into the kitchen, where Tabby sat at the table reading an H. P. Lovecraft novel he had found in the library. Berkeley had large black smudges beneath her eyes, and his father’s hair was mussed. Clark’s mouth was set in an unhappy curl.

  Berkeley went straight to the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, took out the Stolichnaya bottle, slopped several inches into the glass she had used that morning, and then dropped in a handful of ice cubes. “Clark?” she asked in a tentative voice. “You want some Irish?”

  “What else would I want?” he growled.

  Silently she poured his drink.

  Clark gloomily swallowed; grimaced.

  “Don’t have to take my head off,” Berkeley said.

  “Give me two good reasons not to,” Clark muttered.

  Tabby cleared out—he thought that these two miserable people barely noticed his going. When he got back upstairs to his room, he first thought that he could hear his father sobbing again; then that he could hear him shouting. He closed his door; eventually he put his hands over his ears. When the loud shouts ceased, Tabby put a record on his turntable—The Doctor Is In, Ben Sidran—and blotted everything out by cranking the volume up as high as he dared.

  At four he went back down to the kitchen for a Coke. Clark and Berkeley had left the refrigerator and freezer doors open, and Tabby closed them when he had taken his bottle out. Greasy dishes several days old were piled in the sink, and after sipping from his Coke, Tabby squirted soap over them and turned on the hot water. Berkeley thought no more highly of cleaning than she did of cooking. When his father washed dishes, he broke them on purpose. Tabby quickly washed all the dishes in the sink, dried his hands, and wandered into the library. This was one of the four rooms with a fireplace, and a small smoky blaze stuttered in the grate. Tabby saw that whoever had built the fire had merely used newspaper for kindling and had then tossed more folded newspaper onto the feeble flames. The television set blared out a denture-cream commercial to an empty room. Tabby smelled burning paper, whiskey, some fuming and bitter emotion—while he still thought the room was empty, the bitterness of feeling that had been spilled there was as strong as the odor of his father’s Irish whiskey.

  And then for a moment he saw the walls sway and ripple. He had the faintest impression that they were sliding toward him, and he flinched to one side, remembering what had happened to him in the library . . . a man with tea-colored eyes raising a gun as a storm boiled overhead . . .

  You should have gone to Fairlie Hill, boy, with the others.

  His mouth dried; his heart banged.

  If he had not heard his father wetly belch at that second, he might have fainted.

  Tabby spun toward the sound, and saw Clark leaning against the brown curtains covering the window—glaring at him. He precariously held a tumbler filled with brown liquid. His father’s hair had fallen over his forehead. Clark seemed almost to blend backward into the curtains, to be on the verge of invisibility. A pair of flies swooped past his face. Then Tabby saw that Berkeley Woodhouse lay on the couch against the far wall, her skirt rucked up carelessly and her hair fanned half across her face. She too looked almost ghostly—as if the Russian vodka had stolen half her substance.

  “Go,” his father said. His voice was husky, ragged; fractured by emotion.

  Tabby backed out of the room.

  He sat on the stairs for a time, too confused about what was happening to him and his father to know what he ought to do. Twice while he sat there, his arms around his knees, Clark stumbled past the bottom of the staircase, going to the kitchen for fresh drinks and unsteadily bringing them back. The messy little fire backpuffed smoke: Tabby could smell its acrid breath. From the library, the voices on the television set contended with Clark’s drunken ranting.

  “Gutter,” he heard his father say. “Gutter.”

  And “Not my fault,” he heard him say.

  He smelled the sour breath of the
hearth and for the first time thought to wonder why his father had troubled to light a fire on a warm day in August.

  Clark tossed another heap of newspapers on the smoky blaze, and Tabby heard Berkeley moan. “Four Hearths” seemed filled with night; with shadowy intentions that required the blankness of night and drunkenness. Tabby was chiefly sure of one thing: his father was in torment, and would damage anyone who tried to aid or deflect him. Tormented too, Tabby returned to his room. He clamped head-phones over his ears, closed his eyes, and swam as far into his music as he could.

  An hour later he emerged into a hallway that was too hot—the air was dry, so gritty it felt sandblasted. The smell of fire and ash rose toward him from the ground floor. Tabby went toward the top of the stairs.

  “Dad?”

  That drunken, agonized voice went on down there—slowed by the liquor, but inexhaustible. Tabby heard the firescreen in the living room scrape shut.

  “Dad? What’s going on?”

  “Huh,” he heard Clark say. Loud footsteps came toward the bottom of the stairs; then his father appeared, clutching the green neck of his whiskey bottle with one blackened hand, streaks of ash dividing his face. “Making fires, that’s what. Fires in the fireplaces of ‘Four Hearths,’ that’s what. To get this place warm again. You going to help?”

  “How can I help?” Tabby asked.

  “Get more wood from the pile outside—lots of it. Berkeley just threw papers on the goddamn fires, that’s not how you do it. Go on out and bring some more wood back in.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “Not anymore,” Clark said. “I think I just about got it right.”

  His eyes were glassy—they looked like painted shells. The streaks of ash seemed to be hardening on his face; whatever emotion surged through Clark hardened there too. “Do you feel all right, Dad?” Tabby asked.

  “Are you going to get that wood inside or do I have to make you do it?” The armored face with its stony, painted eyes stared up at him.

  Tabby moved swiftly down the stairs and past his father; he dared not look at him.

  Prudent Monty Smithfield had bought three cords of wood every winter, and every winter burned just less than two in the fireplaces of “Four Hearths.” Now split and sawn lengths of wood were stacked against the long back fence—enough for at least three extravagant winters. Some of it was so dry that the bark had lifted away from the gray wood, peeled back like a rolled-up shirt. Tabby remembered to take the carrying sling from the hook beside the back door, and went out onto the shaggy grass. He smelled woodsmoke from the chimneys, and looked up to see it coiling over the house. Black rags that must have been newspaper ash sifted down.

  Tabby laid the sling on the ground and stacked as many pieces of the oldest and driest wood as he could lift within its webbing. Breathing hard, he lugged the heavy sling back through the door, banging it against the frame.

  “Okay,” his father said, glowering at him out of his ash-striped face. “Get that stuff into the fire in the library.”

  “All of it?”

  “Then go out and get more. About as much as you have there. And put it in the living-room fireplace.”

  “Dad—”

  “We need it, Tabby,” Clark said. He took a pull from his bottle.

  Tabby effortfully lifted the sling and, using both arms, carried it before him into the library.

  The room was hot as a sauna. He set down the sling, pushed back the firescreen, and began lifting pieces of the wood off the little heap and setting them atop the sputtering fire.

  A cat’s tongue of flame curled through a chink in the piled-up wood; an arm of flame, red and muscular, followed it. The dry wood ignited like a bonfire of dead leaves. Tabby recoiled from the sudden intensification of the heat and painfully struck his back against the brass edging on a coffee table. He stood up, rubbing his back.

  Behind him, Berkeley Woodhouse groaned on the couch. Tabby whirled to look at her, having almost forgotten she was in the room. She was holding out a lipstick-blotched glass, and Tabby moved quickly to her side and took it from her.

  “Fix me one more, will you, sweetie?” she asked: Tabby was certain for a moment that she took him for his father.

  But then Clark was looming up behind him, and Berkeley blinked, and her face shuttered: she had known who he was.

  “The boy has work to do, and he’s going to do it,” Clark said, and roughly took the glass from Tabby’s hand. “I’ll get you another drink, if that’s what you think you need.”

  “Why are you . . . ? Why are . . . ?” Berkeley struggled with the sentence for a moment, but flopped back against the couch, letting it go unfinished.

  “Move,” Clark ordered Tabby. “Wood, remember? You’re not the bartender around here.” Misery still seemed to flow from Clark, but now it was an aggressive misery.

  “You want more wood,” Tabby said flatly. “For the living-room fireplace. Then for the kitchen fireplace. Then the one in your bedroom.”

  Clark simply continued to stare at him.

  “Well, sure,” Tabby said. “If that’s what you want.”

  “What I want,” Clark said. “That’s it. You and this dumb bitch remember that.” He grinned fiercely at Tabby, and then swung the hand gripping the green Jameson’s bottle at a pair of flies that had circled in toward his mouth.

  * * *

  As the sunlight faded, the rooms in “Four Hearths” reddened with the fires; Tabby kept moving from the rear door to the woodpile and back again, and as it grew darker he saw the downstairs rooms and his father’s bedroom become almost unrecognizable—the jumping flames altered the dimensions of the rooms they colored, pulling in one red wall and pushing out another, more shadowy wall. Throughout the house Tabby could hear the insistent sucking sound of air rushing up the chimney stacks; he was slick with sweat, and his face, like Clark’s, was smudged with ash and soot. As the hours went past, Tabby ceased to wonder why his father insisted on turning the house into an oven—it was another drunken notion, necessarily bad, and by the next day it would be forgotten—and concentrated instead on making Clark happy in his obsession. His arms ached, his head throbbed; after stoking his father’s fires for several hours, Tabby could scarcely remember his name. He was half-conscious of Berkeley Woodhouse weaving through the house, ignored by his father. And he thought on one of his returns into the house with the sling filled with eighty pounds of firewood that he had heard his father weeping again, saying, “Jean? Jean?”—as if he were seeing his late wife’s ghost. But that was impossible, and anyhow Tabby was by then so exhausted that he scarcely recognized his mother’s name.

  Berkeley eventually banged open the refrigerator door and took out an ancient summer sausage from Greenblatt’s, on which she began to gnaw; the heat and the ache in his muscles killed Tabby’s hunger. He went upstairs finally to wash his face and hands—too tired for more elaborate cleaning—and left his father downstairs grinning into the blasting red flames.

  On the wall of a room that he assumed was his he saw an unfamiliar pennant—a college or high-school pennant. He stared at it as he staggered toward his bed. ARHOOLIE. Arhoolie? This too he could not identify. As he fell into bed the room seemed to distend, to warp about him. His skin felt as though he’d been broiled under a grill.

  “A whole plate of fire!” he heard Clark screech just before he fell into numbed sleep.

  * * *

  He dreamed, vividly, of traveling toward a great forest. Huge trees fanned across a plain, their shadows darkening the land before them. Their leafy heads fanned too; bent toward walking Tabby, shook at him. He should run, he knew, he should turn tail and run like hell—even the trees were telling him so. From the great forest came a wave of bitterness, of evil—of what felt like evil to the boy because of the strength of the bitterness. He should have run away, but he had to get nearer, had to see what lay hidden between, beneath those reaching trees. As he drew nearer, he gradually began to hear the noises of animals—of an
imals in pain, screaming or whimpering in terror and agony. Accompanying these terrible sounds of pain and death were the violent noises of the battles still going on: bodies cracking against trees, the earth shredded by claws and hooves. Some animal screamed out in a woman’s voice, high-pitched and fearful. In the forest the animals had turned against themselves; and if Tabby took one step between the thick leaning trees, they would leap upon him and rip his heart from his body. That scream like a woman’s unfurled over his head.

  When he opened his eyes, his hands gripping the warm top edge of a sheet, he saw a glimmering, twisting pool of white light in the middle of his dark room. He had seen this earlier, he could not remember where. And then he remembered his father seated drunkenly at the kitchen table a few days before, this same light playing behind his head.

  Tabby’s bedroom had become stiflingly hot. The smell of woodsmoke, prickly but comfortable, filled the room.

  The twisting pane of light just past the end of his bed was drawing into itself, concentrating. All those mad animals in the forest . . . Tabby shrank down into his bed, aware for the first time of how his perspiration had dampened the sheets.

  The shifting pane of white drew into itself, twisted down into a characterless face. Tabby’s body tightened on the damp bed, and he inhaled a great gulp of smoke-perfumed air. The white face before him, still changing, was blank and babyish: but the forehead tilted back and erupted into bulges over the eyes, the chin grew out like a spade, the ears lapped over. The face before Tabby hardened into itself and grinned.

  It was the face of Gideon Winter, the true face beneath the one he had shown the world.

  Gideon Winter’s white face leaned toward him as had the brutal trees in his dream. Tabby was faintly conscious of black clothing imbued with the pervasive smell of woodsmoke. The huge mouth opened: pointed teeth. A tongue like a long snake coiled obscenely out toward Tabby.