Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  From beyond his window the wounded animal screamed again. But it was not an animal, he recognized; that was the cry of a woman.

  The face before him evaporated down into itself and wavered in the air like a wisp of smoke. Then it twisted into nothingness, leaving only a bitter smell in the air.

  Shaking, Tabby left his bed—now he registered that his room was filled not only with darkness but also with smoke. He reached the window just as another pitiful scream carried toward him through the night. When he looked down toward the front lawn of “Four Hearths,” he saw two people struggling in smoke and night. He had seen many such scenes over the past weeks; everyone in Hampstead had seen these obscure but passionate battles; and that may be why it took Tabby a moment or two to identify the two people fighting on his front lawn.

  But even when he had seen an unmistakable arrangement of features, even when he saw a familiar blur of lipstick, he did not want to identify these brawling people: his mind fought to reject their identities. His father; Berkeley Woodhouse.

  Clark seemed infused with glee, strong enough to fell an oak with the flat of his hand; so even after Tabby had admitted that the man down there was his father, he found himself doubting it. Clark had not demonstrated such energy, such physical confidence, since the barely remembered days of his tennis victories. One of the first things Tabby saw was that his father had not had such a good time in years.

  And then he saw that Berkeley’s symmetrical face was blurred with blood, not lipstick.

  Clark’s back muscles laughed again, and his fist smashed her nose to a squashy pulp. As Berkeley’s hands came up to her face, Clark kicked her legs out from under her. As soon as his mistress struck the ground, Clark kicked her with joyous accuracy in the ribs. Another of her terrible wails rose toward Tabby. Clark did an impatient, jittering jig—adjusting his stance—and then kicked her squarely in the head. Berkeley moaned, and Clark jigged down the grass toward her midriff. Her long legs were trembling, flailing against the grass. Clark aimed a particularly forceful kick at her belly; her body was thrown back a foot.

  Berkeley convulsed again—a coil of white smoke momentarily erasing her face—and Clark was able to smash at her face without the inconvenience of moving. Tabby saw Clark’s leg move twice, pistonlike, and immediately after saw the grass at his father’s feet take on an added sheen, an extra darkness. Red dots spattered Clark’s trousers. The white drift of smoke lazed off, and Tabby saw what had become of Berkeley Woodhouse’s face. Then he could move.

  Tabby threw up the window, leaned out into gritty warmth. “Dad! Dad! Stop!”

  Clark turned around and looked up at his son. His face was as joyous as Tabby had feared it would be, unconsciously radiant.

  “Turn around, Tabby,” Clark said. “It’s your turn now.”

  “Dad,” Tabby breathed out. “I’m going to call for the ambulance.”

  “Look around you, Tabby,” Clark said in a lightly teasing voice. His father smiled at him—a smile that seemed somehow not Clark’s at all, but sweeter and more formal—and walked back toward the house, leaving Berkeley’s body carelessly behind him on the shiny black grass.

  Clark disappeared beneath the roof of the porch. Tabby heard the door slam shut. He glanced in agony at the still form of Berkeley Woodhouse, hoping that she would groan or move . . . he knew that she was dead.

  An inner door slammed—the library door.

  Tabby turned around, and it was as if all of “Four Hearths” laughed.

  The room was not his. It was smaller, more crowded with things: he saw skis leaning against a closet door, a trombone case beside the bed, a music stand before the window opposite. Tabby did not ski or play the trombone; he could not read music; and there was no window in that wall. The ARHOOLIE pennant he had seen before, the harbinger of all this change, glowed down at him from its place over the bed.

  Still he could smell the pervasive woodsmoke, though he could no longer see it.

  Tabby went cautiously across the unfamiliar room to the window. What he saw when he looked out was not Greenbank. He was looking down on a longer lawn, ending not in a slope to the road but at a white fence. Across the street were modest frame and ranch houses, much closer together than the houses in Hampstead. The trees were different—they reminded Tabby of the trees he had known in northern Florida. Black lines of tar wetly streaked the road. Down at a corner—a corner that did not exist—a street sign was visible on its tall pole. Tabby squinted to read it. MAPLE LANE.

  Like the contents of the room, this too was unfamiliar, yet somehow known; as if met in a dream.

  Downstairs his father roared like a beast—Tabby’s chest tightened when he recognized the sound as laughter.

  Maple Lane. A room with ivied wallpaper and skis leaning against a closet door. Arhoolie. He thought he almost knew what he would find beyond the door. He wondered: if he went to the telephone, would he get the Hampstead police station? Or the police of whatever invented world this was?

  Outside the room was a hallway thick with invisible smoke. It rubbed sandpaper against Tabby’s eyes, threw salt in his lungs. “Help!” he called. “Dad!”

  “You want something?” his father’s voice asked calmly from behind him. Tabby whirled around, so frightened he wanted to pee.

  His father’s voice, but not his father. A slim, much younger man separated himself from the wall. His face was pitted with small acne scars; he looked to Tabby like someone who would have sought out the Norman twins—he looked criminal. He wore a cap on his head and what Tabby only now recognized as a gray tweed suit that belonged to his father. Tabby stepped backward.

  “Get back in your room, Spunks,” this creature said. “I got a whole plate of cookies for you.” He smiled at Tabby, and the smile froze the boy. “Whole plate, my little buddy.”

  “Dad,” Tabby said.

  “Daddy’s here,” the creature said in his father’s voice, and began to glide toward Tabby.

  Tabby turned around and ran for the staircase he mysteriously knew was at the end of this corridor. Behind him, the creature with his father’s voice started to laugh.

  The heat intensified as he rushed down the stairs. He could hear, but not see, the fires in the living room and library . . . noise of kindling, snapping flames taking all the food they could. He hit the bottom stair and ran into a living room decorated with a chintz couch and frilly curtains on the windows. A grandfather clock stood on a hooked rug beside a stone fireplace. The room seemed hot enough to burst by itself into flame. Wooden Dutch doors separated this room from the big kitchen, and Tabby ran through them, wanting only to get outside—to the real outside, to Greenbank.

  A woman who had been standing at the sink turned to smile at him. And that was when he realized for the first time where he was. In a modest brown dress with a white Peter Pan collar, Grace Jameson—Grace Jameson with his real mother’s face—was greeting him in the kitchen of Daddy’s Here, where so many confrontations and accommodations had been met. Along with the simple, primitive smell of fire he caught the odor of pot roast. He stopped moving; stopped breathing.

  “Oh, darling,” his mother said. “Here you are. We’ve been waiting such a long time. Dinner’s almost ready. Shouldn’t you go back up to your room and wash up? Your daddy’s waiting for you, you know.”

  “Billy Bentley,” he breathed out, his eyes avidly on the face of Jean Smithfield—she looked just as she had on the day of her death ten years before. She was different from the way he remembered her: his memories had been indelibly shaped by photographs Clark had saved, and now he saw that for photographs she had pursed her mouth, had generally tightened up. Aged twenty-nine, his mother was shorter than he had realized, sweeter, more fragile.

  “Now you’re just being silly,” she said. “Back upstairs with you, young man.”

  “Mom,” he said.

  Jean Smithfield stepped toward Tabby, an expression of profound love mixed with reproach for a difficult child printed on her
face. Then she smiled, and playfully reached out for his shoulder.

  Tabby looked at her and wanted to run into her arms. But a wave of hot air as from a blast furnace—air that seemed hot enough to melt iron—flowed toward him, and he stepped back, startled.

  His mother was still smiling at him, but her hands were the centers of twin balls of flame; in an instant, the flames had coursed up her arms and leaped into her hair. Beneath the smiling face, Tabby saw white glowing bone. He jerked backward again, and his mother tottered toward him, the flames spreading across her face and down her chest.

  Not looking, Tabby held out a hand to one side and felt it encounter the intense heat of an invisible fire: he screamed at the pain, and his mind nearly balked like an overloaded machine. The house was burning around him, and he could not see the flames.

  His mother sank to her knees, still reaching out for him. Tabby dodged away from the side where he had met the flames, but could not take his eyes off his mother. She was a shapeless mound of fire from which protruded two upraised arms.

  His burned hand pulsed and fluttered with pain. Even before he looked at it he knew that it was blistering, turning red.

  His father started to laugh behind him, and Tabby whirled around, bracing himself to see Billy Bentley. But it was his father, dressed in the gray suit, holding a tumbler full of Irish whiskey. When Clark splashed some of the glass’s contents on the floor, little fingers of fire snatched the whiskey away as soon as it struck.

  “Ain’t this lovely?” Clark said. “All of us together again for the very last time—and on television, too!” Clark staggered to one side, wiped the sweat from his face. He was grinning like a dog, mindlessly. “Upstairs, your mother said—you heard her, kiddo. You get on up there and get ready for dinner.”

  Fibers on the left sleeve of his jacket had begun to smoke and darken.

  Within the twitching mound of fire that had consumed Jean Smithfield, a form Tabby had seen twice before was struggling to be born—stretching itself, finding its wings. Heat roared around Tabby’s head.

  “A whole plate of fire,” Clark said reflectively. “That was it, wasn’t it? ‘A whole plate of fire.’ I can remember you saying that so many times. Right here in this kitchen.”

  Richard: this was about Richard Allbee, not him. The Dragon was telling him that Richard too was going to die tonight; the Dragon wanted him to know that.

  “I’ll help you get upstairs, Spunky,” his father said, faltering toward him. Tabby moved another step away from the hottest part of the room and glanced again at the yawning blaze in the middle of the kitchen floor. Almost, he could see the head with its wide empty eyes—eyes filled with night—rising up. Then another movement took his attention, and he looked across the stretching flames and saw Billy Bentley leaning against a blazing wall, gently smiling at him from the depths of his pitted face. Billy uncrossed his arms, brought down a hand, and produced an extended middle finger like a rabbit from a hat.

  “We gotta get going,” Clark said uneasily. “Time . . . there isn’t much time . . .”

  Tabby was retreating, not knowing where he was going but wanting only to get away from the almost solid-looking moving pyre in the middle of the kitchen. He felt his eyebrows crisping, the small hairs in his nose threatening to burn. Billy Bentley was still giving him the finger while leaning on a burning wall.

  “Is this the end of the series?” Clark asked, blinking. Billy’s mouth opened in a noiseless shout of laughter.

  He was going to die. The house was burning, and he and his father were so trapped in this hallucination about Daddy’s Here that they could not even find the way out. Tabby backed farther away, now seeing the head of the fire-bat lift out of the pyre, scanning toward him with its empty eye-holes. Once the fire-bat saw him, he would die—the whole kitchen, the whole house, would explode like the Death Star in Star Wars.

  “Hey, kid,” Clark asked. “What the shit happened to Berkeley? Jesus, why’s this damn drink so hot?”

  “Dad,” Tabby said. “Get out! Out of the house!”

  The head of the fire-bat turned hungrily toward Clark; one great wing crackled out of the flames and unfurled across the width of the kitchen, slamming his father into the sink and instantly covering him in flame. Tabby saw Clark’s drink ignite; then saw his clothes fly off his body. His father screeched in agony as his skin began to fry.

  “Noooo!” Tabby shouted, helplessly seeing his father die.

  Another huge wing crackled out of the flames.

  With a hopeless desperation, Tabby whirled around, sobbing, and ran away from the heat—he did not know where he was going in the real house that lay concealed beneath this vision of the house from Daddy’s Here, but the temperature of the air told him where the fires were weakest.

  His fingers touched a hot wall. He heard the crackling of enormous wings behind him. He slid his fingers along the wall, hoping that he was wrong and knowing that he was not.

  A wooden molding slipped beneath his moving fingers. He found the edge of a door and tore at it, scarcely believing that it was there—cool air rushed up at him, and he threw himself through the opening.

  A searing line stroked across his back, as if he had been grazed by a flaming sword, and he was falling into darkness, out of control, his head and arms and back thumping, cracking against hard wood . . . he rolled over and struck the bottom. His face was wet, cold. He thought he was bleeding: his head throbbed in a dozen places where he had struck it, and his lip was swelling. The air seemed frigid. He opened his eyes cautiously and saw only darkness.

  Gradually he realized that he was in the cellar. The wetness on his face was perspiration, not blood—the cellar felt like an icebox after the intense heat of the house. He pushed himself back from the foot of the stairs, afraid that the thing upstairs would send flames shooting down after him. His legs and arms complained, but moved: he had not broken anything in his tumble down the stairs. Tabby made himself stand; for a moment he simply stood, waving his burned hand gently in the air, breathing slowly. He walked backward into a wall and propped himself against it. He felt more than knew that he was crying.

  Tabby walked himself along the wall, keeping his shoulders against the concrete block, moving into the area of greatest darkness. From the floor above him came noises of war and tumult—he could hear the fire gaining strength, claiming more and more of the house. And in the midst of that noise, he heard an undercurrent of voices calling out an indistinguishable sound that must have been his name.

  He inhaled and held the breath, trying to stop his pointless crying. He wiped his face with his undamaged hand.

  Tabby moved as far from the staircase as he could get.

  A single voice called out, “Come up here, son.” It was his father’s voice. Tabby saw Clark jigging down on the lawn, kicking the life out of Berkeley.

  “Get up here. Now.”

  Tabby turned around and pressed his bruised face into the hard cool concrete block. It was gritty, and sent needles into his skin. Tabby hugged this uncomfortable wall, shaking.

  A roaring entered the cellar, and a cloud of heat—Tabby turned his head away, but not before he had seen a wall of fire come blasting down the stairs. He flattened himself against the wall.

  He heard the fire take the staircase and begin sucking at the ground.

  Tabby looked up and saw the burning earth reflected in one of the little cellar windows.

  2

  Nine hours earlier, Graham Williams had been glaring in exasperation at a young man in a red-striped shirt, bow tie, and blue blazer who was seated at an antique desk in an elegant bow-fronted Georgian building on the Old Post Road in Hillhaven. The building housed the Hampstead-Patchin Historical Society, and the young man—the only person in the building apart from Graham—was one of the graduate students on its staff. Though momentarily flustered, the young man seemed utterly at home in the Historical Society, and this was a part of Graham’s annoyance—this squirt acted like he’d
been born back in the reference stacks.

  “You have more problems than you know, kid,” Graham said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy trousers and hunching over even farther than usually to nail the boy to his leather chair with a scowl. “Forget about this new so-called rule you just invented. Forget—”

  “I told you. The director insisted on it. We can’t allow the public back into the stacks anymore. We had too many problems this summer—you wouldn’t begin to believe some of the—”

  “And don’t interrupt me, buster. You have a real problem, if you call yourself a historian. You’re ignorant. You never even heard of the Black Summer. One of the most crucial periods in the history of this region, and to you it’s only a blank page.”

  The boy sighed, leaned sideways in his opulent chair, as if he wanted to get out from under Graham’s gaze. “I’m in European History. You’re talking about regional interest here—I don’t feel you’re qualified to attack me as a historian anyhow—”

  “I’ve seen more history than you’ve read about!”

  “Mr. Williams. We’re not getting anywhere. I have in fact heard of the so-called Black Summer, though it is true that I’m not really up on what happened then, and if you would be seated at one of the tables, I’ll go back into the stacks and dig up everything that seems even faintly relevant to it. Is that good enough for you?”

  “I’ll settle for it, but the answer is no.” Williams took a step backward and ceased trying to murder the boy with black looks.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” The boy stood up, buttoning his blazer. He looked smug, a little prissy to Graham; he made his way around the desk with an almost invisible smile of self-congratulation on his lips. “If you’ll seat yourself in the reading room, Mr. Williams . . . ?”

  Graham scowled at him again. “You’ve heard of it, you say. What have you heard?”

  The boy tossed his head. “I’ll try to remember when I’m getting your books from the stacks.”