Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Well, at last it’s over, he thought, moving cautiously nearer to the doctor’s body. Maybe this time the Dragon was dead for good . . . maybe the cycle had been ended. He came nearer, barely attending to Patsy’s whisper of warning, and looked down at the dying man digging his fingers into the pile of his carpet. Dr. Van Horne turned his face so that he could look into Tabby’s face, and the boy was startled by the expression of malicious amusement on the ruined face—it just leaped across the distance between them.

  And then, as if all of this were carried on the doctor’s glance, cacophony burst into the room and Tabby again heard the millions of flies hovering about him and the keening, exultant voices and saw the arms reaching out for him. “No!” Tabby shouted, and went through the crowded air until he stood directly above Dr. Van Horne. He saw white hair fanned across the carpet; the shifting and oddly Neanderthal face of a “leaker”; gleaming, powerful eyes.

  In fury and disgust Tabby shouted something—lost in the turmoil of voices around him—and in a deliberate act of revenge for his father’s death kicked Van Horne’s chest as hard as he could. His foot sank deep into the doctor’s body: it had been like kicking a sandpile. Tabby felt loose soft substances, like pillows, crumbling beneath the pressure of his foot. Before he could pull his foot out of the doctor’s body, white liquid poured across his ankle.

  For perhaps a second the long disordered room fell perfectly silent. Those hallucinatory noises in Tabby’s ears abruptly ceased: he was standing over the now undoubtedly dead body of Dr. Van Horne, and warm white fluid was soaking into his shoe: Patsy’s questioning eyes found his.

  Sunlight glittered on the tall streaky windows.

  Then an explosion much louder and more resonant than the firing of Patsy’s gun shook the room. Tabby put his hands to his ears as he staggered back from the doctor’s corpse—his whole head was still reverberating from the force of the explosion. Someone was screaming, and the room had filled with smoke. Across from him, Patsy was pointing toward the mirror.

  Tabby turned his head, his eyes burning from the smoke, and uncomprehendingly saw that its source was the mirror—greasy blackness boiled through the jagged slivers of glass still adhering to the frame: and within the tumbling clouds, a figure took shape. The screaming behind Tabby raised into a new key and then choked itself off, and still half in a daze from the suddenness with which his triumph had curdled, Tabby turned again and saw what had happened to Bruce Norman.

  As the mirror had exploded, its flying glass had shredded Bruce’s face. Long splinters protruded like quills from his chest and stomach, but the mooning face was no longer recognizable at all—blood spurted and flowed from every bit of sliced, mangled tissue. Bruce’s features had been cut off his face: just as Tabby finally recognized this, Bruce toppled over and hit the floor with a spongy thud.

  A tall thin man with an elongated and pale face stepped forward in the room; drifts and curls of smoke hung about his black clothing.

  “He . . . he stepped out of the mirror,” Tabby heard Patsy say in tones of the utmost disbelief.

  Gideon Winter glided toward Tabby between the bodies of Wren Van Horne and Bruce Norman. Tabby, unable to move, saw the black arms raise above him: then his heart burst and his head burst and his life went elsewhere. Gideon Winter wrapped him in his arms.

  7

  Richard fired both barrels straight toward the dog’s head, and this time he could almost see the wads of pellets fly—a squad of hornets—across the narrowing space between and sizzle into the wide black forehead. A dozen more smoking holes appeared, all of them concentrated around the eyes, and then the animal crashed again into the back of Graham’s house. The window frame slid an inch or two away from the wall, and plaster dust showered onto the floor. Long ragged cracks jumped across the wall. The dog had circled away and was moving toward the back of the yard before it made another run at the house. As Richard ejected the spent shells and dug new ones from his pocket, he could see sparks and flames jumping all across the dog’s crown and muzzle.

  “One more time and he’ll be in here with us,” Graham said, sounding admirably calm. “See if you can shoot his goddamn nose off. I don’t know what else would stop him.”

  “I don’t think anything is going to stop him,” Richard said. “Do you want to try to run for it?”

  He looked up over his shoulder, but Graham was already shaking his head. “Get his nose. Remember how he yelped when I got him with the knife?”

  “Whatever you say, boss.” Richard braced himself again. He watched the dog turn around and lower his head, preparing to charge the window once more.

  Then the dog was flying toward him, and Richard tried to find the dot of blackness which was the nose in the midst of all that other speeding black. He moved the sights in a tight circle, almost getting it, and then he was sure he had it. He began to pull his finger slowly back on the triggers and then blinked. The wall of blackness almost at the wall now was losing shades of intensity: almost instantly it was not black at all but gray, then again almost instantly light gray . . . before he had finished pulling back the triggers he could see that hole in the greenery, still smoldering, through the head of the dog.

  Richard lifted his head and relaxed his finger. “Hey,” Graham was saying above and behind him. Like Billy Bentley’s cat, the giant dog was fading into invisibility, washing away into nothingness, even as it launched itself into the air for its final assault on the window. For a second it was only an outline, a huge shape suspended above the weedy lawn; then it was gone. An almost impalpable gust of warm air gently spent itself against the window.

  Richard sat back on his haunches, breathing not at all.

  “That means it’s over with Tabby and Patsy,” Graham said hoarsely above his head. “Whatever the hell was going on is over. I suppose we’d better get out there and see.”

  “See what? Get out where?” Richard still did not quite trust himself to move.

  “Ah, ask me an easy one,” Graham said, and patted his shoulder with a trembling hand.

  Richard pushed himself up on his feet and looked at Graham. The old man looked slap-happy with relief. “Do you really suppose I could have shot off his nose?” he asked, and was surprised to find himself smiling too.

  “That’s an easy one, but I don’t want to answer it,” Graham said. “Let’s go outside and check the damage.”

  As soon as they went out into the back garden they smelled smoke. Richard assumed it was from the sizzling patches of hair on the dog’s hide, and took a look at Graham’s exterior kitchen wall. The frame was badly cracked, the whole wall bowed in—to Richard’s eye, it looked like about fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

  “Don’t bother with that,” Graham ordered him. “Come around the side and look in the direction of the beach.”

  Richard followed Graham around the side of the house, and did not have to be given any more directions about where to look. A giant column of flame and smoke was erupting out over the Sound, twisting perhaps fifty feet in the air before shredding into falling bits of fire and windblown smoke.

  “What in the name of heaven is that?” Richard asked.

  Graham gave him a look of unhappy compassion. “I think it’s the place of my old friend Wren Van Horne. There isn’t another house right down there. Unless it’s a fire right on the beach.”

  “That doctor’s house? The one right . . .” Richard was remembering the first time he had seen that house, with Laura in Ronnie Riggley’s car—he had asked about its cost. On the heels of this memory came another. Wren Van Horne had been Laura’s doctor.

  “I think our friends went on a dragon hunt,” Graham said. He was already moving toward his car, and Richard hurried after him.

  Richard slid into the passenger seat just as Graham released his clutch and shot backward into Beach Trail. He twisted the wheel, changed gears, and jerked forward. Graham did not stop at the Mount Avenue corner, did not even look; he stepped on his acceler
ator and spun around the corner to the right. “I suppose Wren was your Laura’s doc,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Richard said.

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” the old man said, not knowing that he was about to express something that had occurred to, then eluded, Bobo Farnsworth one night outside the Pennywhistle Café, “but you know, the only people who recognized our killer were the women who opened their doors to him. How many men know what their wives’ gynecologists look like? If they saw him in Franco’s, would they know who he was?”

  “Jesus,” Richard said, but even he would not have known if he was responding to Graham’s suggestion or to the spectacular pyre that they saw commanding the top of the bluff as soon as they had swerved in through Dr. Van Horne’s gates. Nearly all of the long white house was invisible behind leaping yellow flames and billowing smoke. From the bottom of the long hill leading up to the bluff the column of mingling smoke and fire was even more impressive than it had been from Graham’s back garden.

  “Poor Wren,” Graham said. “He wasn’t as strong as Johnny Sayre.”

  “Jesus,” Richard said again.

  As they came nearer to the huge body of fire up the drive, Richard finally saw Patsy McCloud on the front lawn—Patsy was trembling from her shoulders to her feet, shaking uncontrollably like a fever victim, and when he jumped out of the car and ran toward her he saw that she was weeping.

  5

  Graham Through the Looking Glass

  1

  Now I want to talk to you in my own voice again, because what happened right after Richard Allbee and I piled out of my old heap and ran toward Patsy has to be told that way: my faith in the exact old relationship between myself and the rest of the world was tipped over on its head. We went—the three of us, Patsy and Richard and I—into mirror-land, and nothing was real but everything could have killed us anyhow. So these events are like the giant dog, it seems to me, and when Richard Allbee asked me if I really thought that all of us were just out of our minds on DRG I said “Nope,” but it was never as simple as that.

  All I can do is tell you what I saw with my own eyes—what I thought I saw, was sure I saw. That way I stay honest, and if you want to brood about “reality” you do it on your own time.

  * * *

  While Richard was comforting Patsy and trying to get her to tell him if Tabby managed to get out of the house in time, I was looking at that house, trying to accept that my old friend and fellow widower had been our enemy. Wren Van Horne—that was a blow, one I could hardly begin to come to terms with. He’d been even more a part of Hampstead than myself, one of those men who carry out their duties with the light-hearted grace that illuminates what it touches. He had always been jaunty, and old age has taught me that that’s a spiritual quality—hanging onto it beyond the age of twenty certainly takes spirit. His patients had respected and loved him, he had been one of those people who instinctively know how to live well, but most important, Wren Van Horne had been one of my people, my people. And the Dragon had turned him into garbage. I thought of my admired old friend knocking on women’s doors in town, of him picking up Stony Friedgood at Franco’s, of all the things the Dragon had made him do, and felt a terrible mixture of emotions.

  Richard was still trying to get Patsy to unlock herself from the paralysis of whatever had happened to her, and I walked up to them and put a hand on one of her shoulders. The house before me was rushing into nothingness, consuming itself with an awesome single-mindedness. The rented houses on Mill Lane must have burned down that way—and the Royal Cotton Mill, I realized with a start. The flames had marched straight down the facade of Wren’s house and completely hidden it. From somewhere now not far above the top of the first-floor windows the building was solid flame, shooting and twisting far up into the air, and through the windows I saw that the downstairs rooms were a swirl of fire. I heard or imagined that I heard the screams of a score of lost voices from inside the house. Then I looked up to where the smoke and flames were boiling and twisting together so far overhead, and just as Patsy finally found words I saw what I never had seen before this moment, though I have described it to you a couple of times. It was a great bat made of fire, and it spread its enormous wings up in the smoky confusion. Patsy McCloud’s dear shoulder jumped beneath my touch, blood surged and pounded in her skin or mine, and I realized that my hand was trembling too. “I think Tabby’s dead,” Patsy sobbed. “Gideon Winter took him away. And now I can’t reach him at all. . . .” Her face strained toward mine, twisting to see me over Richard’s shoulder. “I always could,” she said. “Always. But now . . . now there’s just this terrible coldness where Tabby ought to be.”

  When I looked up again the fire-bat was gone.

  “It’s all cold,” Patsy said, and both Richard and I heard the despair in her voice. Her shoulder was calming down, but my hand wasn’t—I lifted it off so I wouldn’t actually start shaking her. “There’s nothing else . . . there’s no Tabby there. . . .”

  Richard and I looked at each other, and then walked Patsy a few yards down the long lawn away from the fire. I saw in his face that he was no more in control of himself, faced with the likelihood of Tabby Smithfield’s death, than I.

  “You said that Gideon Winter took Tabby away,” I said to Patsy. She wore a dizzied, glazed expression that made me want to scream out loud or smash something. “Does that mean that Tabby got out of the house?”

  She nodded, blinking, and I felt at least a fraction more optimism—I’d been thinking of the husk I had seen on a flat rock at the start of Kendall Point. “Tell us exactly what happened, Patsy,” I said. “We’ll never see Tabby again unless you help us now.”

  “Tabby is dead,” she said flatly.

  “Then I want to give him a burial. But I want to know for sure. And I want to kill the Dragon, Patsy. I want to break him into a million pieces.”

  That startled her into taking another internal stride forward. Her eyes widened and she lifted her head and began to tell us about meeting Tabby in front of his grandfather’s old house; about everything that followed. She finished by saying, “Tabby just crumpled when that . . . that thing touched him. He turned white. Then they were gone . . . and I tried to find Tabby but I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t find anything but cold cold cold . . .”

  “They were gone?” Richard asked her.

  “They just weren’t there anymore. Then the fire started up all around me. I ran. I got outside, and you were coming.”

  “They just weren’t there anymore?” Richard asked, looking first at Patsy and then at me. “What’s that mean? Graham, did they kill him or not? And I thought that if someone destroyed our Dragon the way you destroyed Krell, that it was over. What the hell is going on here?”

  “I think it always was like that,” I said and tried to work out what we were going to have to do next. “It looks like Gideon Winter isn’t ready to give up yet.”

  “You think it was Gideon Winter?”

  “I hate to say it, but I’m sure of it,” I said. “He really is stronger now than he ever has been, strong enough to survive the death of the body he selected.” I inhaled a long trembling breath. “The ante’s been raised. That’s what it is. He took Tabby with him because he wants us to come after him. This time he wants us together and he wants to get us all at once.” Those two people who were half of the only real family I had left moved even closer together. “He would have killed Patsy, otherwise,” I said. “He wanted us to hear her story, and he wanted, he wants, us to come after him.”

  “If we knew where to go,” Richard said.

  “Well, I think I do know where to go,” I told them. “Patsy isn’t going to like it much.”

  She stiffened, her eyes darting over my face—she understood, and I was right, she was instinctively resisting.

  “Oh,” Richard said, and tightened his arm around her. “I see.” He was nodding.

  “Where several boys were murdered. And both he and I know it. Bates Krell’s hou
se.”

  I turned away from Patsy’s desperate face and looked out at the Sound. The water, which should have been calm, churned and boiled, throwing itself forward in a way that had nothing to do with tides.

  I jerked my gaze back to Richard and Patsy. She was still trembling, but I saw her strength returning to her and said, “It won’t be like going there alone,” though I was suddenly as uncertain of that as of everything else. “Well, I’m going anyhow,” I said, “I have to. I think Tabby’s still alive. He’s the bait.”

  I started walking down the long sloping lawn, at first for-getting completely about my car and then thinking to hell with it. I didn’t want to drive to that house; I wanted to go on foot, the way I had in 1924. They could come with me or not. I took a couple of misleadingly determined-looking steps, knowing that nothing on earth could save me if I went into that house alone. This was not 1924, and the game had changed. I took another lonely step, mentally seeing Long Island Sound writhe against the shingle. Then I heard soft footsteps behind me, and an arm took each of mine.

  “Cranky old bastard,” Richard said. “After all this, did you think you were going anywhere by yourself?”

  I looked from Richard on one side of me to Patsy on the other, and thought we were like the three incomplete companions in The Wizard of Oz. “I think it’s going to be quite a ride,” I said.

  2

  It wasn’t until we were going through the gates and back out onto Mount Avenue that I saw Richard checking the shells in his jacket pockets and realized that he was still carrying my shotgun. As usual, at least when he was not tearing bricks out of a cornice or stripping paint off masonry, he was dressed up, which is to say in the way everybody used to dress way back when, even me, in a jacket and real pants—not jeans. Also real shoes instead of those pedigree running shoes guys in Hampstead wear even when they never run as far as the length of their driveway. Anyhow, the point of this is that when I noticed him still carrying my shotgun it somehow seemed a part of him—Richard and the old Purdy and those businessman clothes were strangely cohesive, like Magritte and his bowler hat. The sight of him there at my side as we walked into Mount Avenue gave me a quick boost of confidence. Or at least of willingness to really play out the thread now, to accept everything that was going to happen, as if Richard and his good clothes and the Purdy could give all three of us an irrational amount of protection. Richard Allbee with the gun in his hand had that much authority, and in that second I felt younger than he.