Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “It was slapping against the pilings. The smell of the water seemed to be much stronger than during the day, but maybe that was because my senses were so . . . so refined. Every little detail went through me like a knife—I remember that in the moonlight the pattern of the grain on the boards of the dock seemed to ripple, to flow down the dock. . . .

  “Bates Krell’s boat was lifting and subsiding with the movements of the water, rubbing itself up against the dock like a big old dog. All I had to do was jump on board. There wasn’t another person in sight. The boat almost seemed to be welcoming me, inviting me on board, with those little sighing lifts and bumps. But I hesitated—was I really going to bite the apple? Commit a crime? I rested my hand on the rough wood of the boat—up and down, up and down . . . and then I mentally said to hell with it, and vaulted onto the deck of the Fancy.

  “My shoes raised a cloud of dust. I could smell fish and mold. When I took my hand off the railing, it came away black—Krell’s boat was one of the filthiest things I’ve ever seen. I crouched down below the level of the railing, just in case anybody might happen to be looking my way, and sort of duck-walked across the deck. I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly, but I guess I had the idea that maybe Krell had kept souvenirs of his deeds. My fantasy was that I’d open a little locker somewhere on the Fancy and find a cache of women’s handbags or shoes.

  “The trouble was, I couldn’t seem to find this locker anywhere on the deck. I made a complete circuit, crouched over like that, and all I got was a backache and smudgy marks on my clothes wherever I’d brushed up against anything. I’d found nothing at all in the wheelhouse. The only place left to look was the hold, and there were two reasons why I was reluctant to go down there—I’d smell of fish and lobsters for days, and once I was down there, I wouldn’t be able to tell if someone was coming. The last thing I wanted was to be caught on board the Fancy! Then, almost by accident, I saw something I’d missed before.

  “The moonlight was touching a small brass handle just a little bit farther down the deck from me—it was about six inches beneath the railing. I thought I could see a kind of a shadow-line beside the handle. It looked just like a secret cabinet Krell had built into the side of his boat. This was it! I knew what was going to happen: I’d slide that door open, and all sorts of necklaces and rings would spill out onto the deck. I was going to find treasure, real treasure, and to get rid of Bates Krell all I’d have to do was take a few baubles to Kletzka—the murderer would be salted away before the sun came up.

  “I scuttled over to that gleaming handle and shoved it to one side—that sliding door moved like it was greased. My eyes must have been like dinner plates. By now I was convinced that I was going to see not just a heap of women’s shoes, but a fortune in jewelry.

  “But that little cabinet Krell had built into the side of the Fancy was almost empty. There was a stained old coffee cup in there. And beside it was a wineglass. That was all. A cup and a wineglass. I didn’t understand—not at all. I took out the wineglass and looked at it. The crystal was etched with leaves and blossoms and was about as heavy as a square inch of air. It caught the moonlight; it sparkled. This fancy damn glass spooked me a little bit, surrounded by the filth of that boat. It was like holding a flashlight. I put it back in the secret cabinet and slid the door back. Now there was only one more place to check. The hold. I decided I’d just look down there; not actually climb in.

  “You opened the hold on the Fancy by using a polished length of wood maybe eight inches long: you slid it into a catch, and then used the piece of wood to lever up one of the big doors. I worked this out when I saw the wood hanging by a thong on an upright next to the hold doors. I lifted the wooden lever off its peg, pushed it into the catch, and swung hard on the door. It opened; and I almost fainted and fell in.

  “What I saw down there was a lake of blood—that’s right, just what the rest of you have been seeing. It looked like it was rising, coming right up to the top of the hold and the doors. It was seething, and for a crazy second it looked somehow conscious. I wobbled on my feet, and only just managed to drop the door before I blacked out and fell in.

  “Then of course I had to be sure that I’d seen it. As soon as I was steady enough, I pulled the door open a bit—but this time I smelled only the old odors of fish. There was no smell of blood at all. I opened it farther, and saw that I was looking down into an empty hold. That was it for me. I got off that boat as fast as I could, and I wasn’t breathing normally again until I was back on the bridge, going home.

  * * *

  “The next day I worked out another strategy. Two damn peculiar things had happened to me, and I wasn’t about to quit—if anything, I was even more positive now that Mr. Krell had killed all those women. And that for some reason, I was meant to bring him down. It was my job, mine. So I worked out another plan.

  “I was sure that he’d had assistants—all those lobstermen did. No man, no matter how strong, could do the job by himself. Usually their sons helped them, or they hired the boys who hung around the docks. In later years, you always saw teenage boys fooling around in gas stations: hoping for jobs, most of them. In those days, in this part of the world, the same kind of boy haunted the docks. I was sure that I could learn something if I could find one or two of Bates Krell’s old deckhands. Well, it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

  “I asked questions around the docks, and I asked questions in the little speaks down along the river. The Blue Tern—that was one of them, and it’s still there. I made up some elaborate story; maybe it didn’t fool anyone. Maybe they just didn’t want to talk about Bates Krell. One old river rat I cornered in the Blue Tern finally told me, after I poured about a gallon of rye down his scrawny throat, that Krell abused his deckhands. ‘They runs away on ‘im,’ he said. ‘They clears out in the middle of the night, and so would I. You can be hard and a boy will respect you, but no boy today will stick out bein’ half-kilt. When I was that age you took what you got and was grateful for it.’

  “I asked him if he knew where any of those boys were now, and he said he imagined that they’d gone upstate, getting as far away from Krell as they could.

  “‘All of them?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t one of his old hands still in town?’

  “He chewed on it for a bit, and I poured more rye into his glass. Rye is what they called it anyhow—I think it had been in a barrel just long enough to lose the chemical smell. ‘Might be one,’ he finally said. ‘Boy named Burgess. Pitt Burgess, he called himself. A funny one. He quit on Krell—brave like a crazy dog can be. Never came around the docks after that, and nobody missed him. Never took to him, d’ya see. None of us here ever took to him.’

  “‘Where does this Burgess boy live?’ I asked.

  “‘In the marshes,’ he told me. There was an evil old glint in his eye, too.

  “Now there are no more shacks down on the marshes, but in the twenties—right through the Depression, in fact—there were people who lived in tarpaper houses on that swampy ground just inland from Gravesend Beach. Lone men, mainly, who lived on the shellfish they caught at low tide. So I knew where to look, though I wasn’t very happy about it. I was going to ruin another pair of boots. And those shacks on the marshes . . . well, nobody in his right mind would relish the thought of going down there. Those few crazy loners were a law unto themselves. But I thought this Burgess boy was probably my last chance to find out about Krell. So the next afternoon I hiked down Greenbank Road to the entrance to the beach and jumped over the little tidal estuary there. Then I squished off through the marsh and went toward the shacks—there were six or seven of them, strung out from the waterline back toward the direction of the Millpond.

  “I wouldn’t have known which one to approach first except that I saw a tall skinny kid with dirty-blond hair messing around outside one of the most distant shacks. The kid saw me, and didn’t think twice—he just ducked inside his door. My boy, I thought. I plodded over the we
t ground to that hovel and knocked on the door . . .”

  3

  . . . and a frightened-looking boy pulled the door open and blinked at Graham. He was no more than seventeen. His eyes seemed froggy: Graham finally noticed that he had absolutely no eyelashes. “Get away,” he said. “You got no business with me.”

  “I need your help,” Graham said quickly. “I’ll pay for it. Look—I brought you some food.” He thrust forward the wrapped package in his hands: in it were cans of beans, some sliced meat, and three bottles of beer. The boy reluctantly accepted the package, and began prodding and fondling it with his hands. They, like his pinched face, were gray with dirt. “You’re Pitt Burgess, aren’t you?”

  The boy glanced up at his face as a convict does at a guard’s, then nodded. “This is food?”

  “I tried to figure out what you might need.”

  The boy nodded again, and looked almost stupefied. Graham realized sinkingly that he was semiretarded, on the bottom edge of a normal intelligence or beneath it.

  “Some beer, too,” Graham said.

  Burgess licked his lips and smiled at Graham. “What kind of help you say you need?”

  “Just some questions.”

  “You ain’t gettin’ any of the beer.”

  “It’s for you.”

  Burgess nervously backed away from the door, and Graham went into the dingy single room. It was stiflingly hot, and as dirty as the boy himself. While Burgess clawed at the package and opened one of the bottles of beer, Graham noticed how beads of water adhered to the inside walls and the rungs of the two cane chairs. Moisture had instantly appeared on the side of the boy’s beer bottle. The plywood floor was furry with mold. A picture of a Marmon coupé torn from a magazine was tacked to one of the walls. “Beer’s good,” Burgess told him. “Guess you can sit, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” Graham said. He did not want to alarm Pitt Burgess. The boy still seemed as nervous and liable to bolt as a doe in the woods. “Do you mind answering some questions?”

  “You ask and I’ll see.”

  He watched the boy take another swallow of beer.

  “When was the last time you worked?”

  Burgess squinted at him and washed beer around the inside of his mouth. “Who sent you, anyhow?”

  “Nobody sent me, Pitt. I told you: I need some help you can give me.”

  Suspiciously the boy cocked his head. “Okay. I was working about four, five months ago. That was the last time.”

  “What was the job?”

  “Deckhand on a fishing boat.”

  “Why were you fired?”

  “Hey, mister—I quit. Nobody ever fired me. I quit. You hear I got fired? Is that what you heard?”

  “Why did you quit, then?”

  Now the boy seemed even more nervous than usual. His unprotected eyes could not remain still. “Wasn’t treated right,” he muttered.

  “Did he beat you? Did Krell beat you?”

  Then nothing changed in the room, but everything was different. Beneath his layer of grayish dirt, the boy had gone the color of curdled milk: even the slow drops of water sliding down the wall seemed to stop and tremble where they were.

  “I have nothing to do with him,” Graham said. “I’ve really only seen him once or twice.”

  “He hit me,” Pitt Burgess said softly. He was relaxing from the outside in, in concentric circles. “Yeah. That’s why I quit.”

  He still would not look at Graham, so Graham stayed quiet—cannily—winning the boy’s confidence the way he would a dog’s. He looked at the picture of the Marmon and did not move.

  “He hit me a lot,” the boy finally said.

  Another long pause. Graham was afraid he would fly apart from sheer muscular tension.

  Then Pitt Burgess said softly, “And he began to look younger, didn’t he? Younger. Sure he did. Handsome.”

  “Did you think he was handsome, Pitt?” Graham whispered.

  The boy nodded, and his Adam’s apple jerked in his throat. Then the boy’s naked eyes for the first time in thirty minutes found Graham’s face. “He was. He was awful handsome. Sometimes you don’t mind things s’much, y’know, if . . .”

  A vein in Graham’s head began to pound. He was getting a headache. “I see,” he said.

  “You’re nice, bringing me food,” the boy said. He paused, as if giving Graham room to express something he did not trust himself or the situation enough to say.

  “That’s all right,” Graham said, horribly embarrassed now.

  “I was ascairt of him when he got s’handsome,” Burgess said after another of his pauses. “I was thinking about what he done.”

  “To look younger?” Graham asked.

  “What he done before he started to look younger. He had boys before me, mister.” Pitt Burgess stared at Graham with a new expression in his eyes—there was calculation in it, and shame, and bravado, and some mysterious thing that made Graham want to run from the shack.

  “And he beat those boys, too. How many were there? Three or four?”

  The boy cleared his throat. “About so many. Three. Four. He took them home with him. I wouldn’t let him take me home. He made me ascairt.”

  “Pitt,” Graham asked, “I’m not even sure what I’m asking, but did you ever see anything funny on board the Fancy?”

  The boy had coiled up inside himself again, and his eyes looked reptilian.

  “Look,” Graham said, “it sounds strange as hell, but did you ever see anything like a lot of blood?”

  Pitt shook his head.

  “Did you ever see anything that wasn’t normal?”

  From the oddly intelligent (because ironic) look on the boy’s face, Graham knew that nothing aboard the Fancy had been entirely normal. “Maybe I’m not asking the question the right way,” he added miserably.

  “I know,” the boy said. “I know what you want. Something he wouldn’t like me to say. But I’ll say it—to you. One time I heard this terrible noise. I looked at the wheelhouse. I couldn’t believe it. The whole wheelhouse was filled up with flies. Maybe a million of ‘em in there. But I knew something—I knew they weren’t really there. He hit me because he knew I saw ‘em, though. He liked to hit me.” This last sentence was almost flirtatious.

  “Oh,” Graham said.

  “He took the other boys home with him,” Burgess said. “I don’t know what else he done, but he took them boys home with him. And nobody ever noticed.”

  “Noticed?”

  “Those boys went off upstate, I guess. Looked for jobs on the New Haven docks, I guess. I guess nobody ever saw them again.”

  “Oh, my God,” Graham said, finally understanding.

  “Nobody,” Pitt Burgess said, half-smiling at Graham. “And nobody cared. They was just nobodies from nowhere. So I quits him and slides off up here to the marshes, and I never have seen my handsome Mr. Krell since that day.”

  Flirtation—this was a flirtation.

  Graham stood up, having learned both less and more than he had come for; uttered a conventional and inappropriate and panicked leave-taking; got out as quickly as he could. As he squelched back across the marshes, he could feel Pitt Burgess standing in the door of his squalid shack, watching him go. With what emotion, he could not have said.

  4

  At home Graham took a long bath—he felt as though the greasy, damp atmosphere of Pitt Burgess’ shack had sunk into his skin, and he scrubbed himself with the loofah until he thought he’d blister. He had never before felt real moral revulsion, and never before had he met anyone he had considered degraded: but Pitt Burgess was degraded, and Bates Krell was responsible. Graham felt as though he had seen down deep into a pit, and had escaped with his life—one more step, one more second, would have seen him fall into it.

  Very likely that was the reason for his nightmares. Three nights running, Graham’s nights were troubled, feverish. He dreamed he was sleeping in a coffin in a room curtained with black velvet. His hands, his mouth, w
ere stained red. He wanted to fly, to rise out of the coffin and sail through the night sky. The following two nights, the dream altered: he slept beside a pit in a deep wood. He thrashed, moaned in his sleep. At the bottom of the pit was something awesome and powerful, an object or group of objects that called and called to him. He could not look; he would not be able to endure it if he were to crawl to the edge of the pit and stare downward.

  These second two mornings Graham awoke with the distinct, particular feeling of having looked backward in time. He found himself unable to speak to his parents. When he looked into their kind, successful and blinkered faces he felt himself an outcast: he wanted to cry, or to run away. He ran. He locked himself in his room. He was polite when they came to his door, but he would not leave his room. If they left food outside his door, he would eat. If not, not. After a very short time, he could feel his parents’ misery lapping at him—could feel their questions scratching at his locked door. This period of madness-in-effect, Graham’s mini-breakdown, lasted four days. On the fifth day he awoke feeling shaky but himself again: there had been no nightmares for two nights. He had lost the sense of some monstrous self heaving beneath his own skin.

  He came down for breakfast and apologized to his parents for his behavior. He implied that he had been working too hard on his book. And as soon as he was done with his breakfast he gave in to obsession and walked all the way down Greenbank Road, crossed over the bridge, turned up Riverfront Avenue and went back to the docks.

  * * *

  The Fancy was in its slip—Graham hadn’t quite expected this. In coveralls and a blue knit cap tugged down over his head, Bates Krell staggered back and forth from a disorderly pile of lobster traps, throwing them on the deck of his ship. When Graham saw him this time, instinctive and unreasoning fear leaped out at him from his own heart: he thought of those three or four boys Krell had taken home with him, and who had never been seen again. Graham was unable to take his eyes off Krell, but he did not want the man to see him. He went slowly backward until he was in the narrow alleyway between the fish market and the Blue Tern. And there he hovered, mutely watching Krell load the traps onto his boat.