Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Billy Bentley threw up his hands in comic horror. “Mercy! Violence!”

  “We want Tabby’s body,” Richard said.

  “Well, take it. You get two for the price of one, Spunks, best deal all day.” He cocked his head and waved generously at the corpses on the bed. “Before you go, though, there’s someone we want you to meet. Someone you want to meet, Spunks—no lie, man. Really.”

  “I don’t—” Richard began, but the space around him was changing in a manner by now familiar, opening up and elongating, and he understood that what he did or did not want was an irrelevance.

  Far off to his side in a theatrical pool of light a man and a woman were seated at the Jameson dinner table. Both were looking at him warmly: and though he resisted it, Richard felt the honesty of that warmth touch him. The emotion was real, although nothing else may have been. Ruth Branden, the woman at the table, had genuinely loved him. For a time Richard let himself take her in—this was the first time he had seen a living Ruth Branden since he’d been fourteen or fifteen. Her early death had deprived him of knowing his “mother” as an adult. At fourteen Richard had been infatuated with Ruth Branden, and now he fully saw why; she was a beautiful woman, and half of her beauty was the intelligence and generosity that shone in her face. It was a beauty of soul, incapable of being cheapened. The Dragon had done his homework.

  The man across from Ruth Branden was a stranger to Richard, but he proved the same point: proved it more conclusively, for this stocky short man with thick gray hair was a stranger only in the most technical sense. Richard knew instinctively—in his spine, in the pit of his stomach, in his cells—that this was Michael Allbee, who had fathered him. Michael Allbee had kindly though rather blurry features, and looked like a merchant seaman or a bohemian poet with a lot of bottles behind him.

  His father was looking at him with precisely the right mixture of curiosity, sympathy, amusement, and wariness. Oh yes, the Dragon had done his homework perfectly: so perfectly that this twinkling figure before Richard had an immediate and unreasonable power over his emotions. Richard fought it, he understood exactly what was happening to him, but the sight of that raffish gray-haired man across from Ruth Branden hit him like a blow.

  He even understood what the man’s first words would be—these were preordained—but they too rocked him.

  His father stood up and moved around the table. Richard saw that the man was precisely his own height. “Daddy’s here, Richard,” he said. “Daddy’s here now and everything’s all right. I’d like you to put down that silly gun. Empty anyhow, isn’t it?”

  Feeling boiled through Richard, with such immediate force that until he heard himself shouting he had not realized that he was angry or that he was going to say anything. “You left me!” he shouted. “You walked out! Damn you!” And once the words were out, he could not regret them—that rage was still pounding through his system.

  His father smiled and said, “You have my genes, kid, you’re carrying most of me around inside you. That’s what counts.” His eyes sparkled. “And anyhow, we’re together again now.”

  Richard looked away from the twinkling wary face and saw that Ruth Branden was still sitting up and smiling at him in her chair; that she was only a skeleton in a frilly apron and housedress. Her lustrous dark hair had spilled down onto her shoulders and into her lap. Clumps of it lay like punctuation on the floor—commas and apostrophes of dark brown hair.

  Both his father and Billy Bentley were coming slowly toward him. He was only ten years old, Richard realized. His arms and legs were stick-thin and he had to look up to see his father’s face.

  “Put that heavy thing down, Spunks,” Billy was saying. “Hey, kid, don’t you get it? We’re back now—Jesus, we’re back. We can go on forever now.”

  Richard could feel Patsy and Graham plucking at him, trying to pull him away . . . to get him to wake up. “I want Tabby,” he said, but the sentence came out in his high-pitched ten-year-old’s voice and was weightless.

  He tried to raise and aim the gun, but it was too heavy for him—the barrels wavered and dipped. Was it really empty? He looked up and saw his father advancing toward him, beaming as if he were suddenly proud of his little boy.

  “Oh hell, Spunks,” Billy was whispering, “you know what happened to that kid, you saw him on the bed.”

  Tabby really was gone, Richard knew; Tabby was gone and everything was lost. His arms were too short to hold the shotgun the right way, and the recoil would break his shoulder.

  “And you know something else, ol’ Spunks?” Billy was saying to him. “Just what you saw there—that’s what should have happened to you, up in Providence. But you got away, and I had to work on your wife instead. Damn old shame, Spunks.”

  The room lurched and spun, and the small boy who was Richard Allbee tottered with the shift in balance: the weight in his arms had doubled. The axis it made with his body, the resistance it gave his muscles, its density, all these had swum imperceptibly into a new dimension, and as the room swung upward and around him he nearly fell over.

  “Didn’t you think?” Billy Bentley whispered, leaning close over Richard with his wised-up face.

  Richard tried to push his sword right through Billy’s pitted cheek, but Billy ducked back.

  It was a sword: he was holding a gleaming double-edged sword twice the weight of the Purdy, and he had somehow understood that before he had known it.

  “Oh, you don’t need that,” his father said in a level kindly voice, “not that heavy old thing,” bending over him. Michael Allbee’s face seemed to be lengthening, and his chest too grew longer and thinner. “Too heavy for a boy, I’m thinking, that old thing.”

  The heavy metal was like ice in Richard’s hand, so cold that it burned into his fingers, seared the skin that touched it. Richard groaned as the sword fell from his hands and thunked onto the floor. Michael Allbee, in the midst of a joyful transformation, reached toward him.

  Richard cried out inarticulately, and Patsy McCloud’s little .22 pistol, in Patsy McCloud’s hand, appeared next to his head. Richard took in, as though he were seeing it in slow motion, that Patsy was going to shoot at his father. Could that really work? He saw Patsy’s index finger slowly depress the trigger.

  The explosion felt as though it took place inside his head.

  A sudden hole had opened out in the middle of Michael Allbee’s chest. Richard knew that Patsy had saved him, and as he saw a curl of smoke and a lick of flame push out of the hole he knew also that he had become an adult again. He was his proper size. A knot of angry flies belched from his father’s chest. Another black curl of smoke pursued them.

  His father screeched in pain and fury. Richard bent down to pick up the sword. As he got his hand around the grip he saw that Michael Allbee had become a towering column of blood, for a moment intact in the air above them. Then the tower of blood shattered down over them, instantly plastering their clothes to their skin, sliding down their necks, burning sourly in their eyes and mouths . . .

  3

  . . . sensations which ceased almost as soon as they began. When Richard opened his eyes he saw Patsy McCloud staring wildly back at him, just lowering her hand from her eyes. Behind Patsy a dozen white spruces dipped long feathery branches down through gray air. The sea hissed against a stony beach almost visible behind the trees; an incoming tide. Richard stood half on an immense gray rock, half on a scurf of yellow weeds. He stepped down off the rock. Patsy now was numbly staring at the pistol in her hand; then she flipped it onto a stony bulge of land, and the little .22 bounced under a thick gathering of nettles and burdock. Richard turned around—against his skin the fresh air was blessedly alive, in motion, perfumed with salt water and green growing things. Burs and damp weeds adhered to his trousers; headless stems drooped from his shoelaces.

  As he turned he saw that behind him lay a deep cut in the earth, too deep for him to see what lay at the bottom of the overgrown slopes. So far back it must have been on the land t
hat led to this promontory, a long white building with an oversize bar window blankly faced them. A beer sign twinkled in an upstairs window.

  Graham Williams was sitting down with his back against a taxicab-sized root which had rucked its way up out of the ground and then dived back under again. Graham’s gaudy clothes had been smeared with dirt, and water had darkened the cuffs of his trousers.

  Richard looked back past Patsy at the white spruces letting their arms gently fall as if in defeat toward the earth. Through them the Sound glinted as it beat toward the stony beach.

  “We’re on Kendall Point,” he said.

  “A plus,” Graham said, wheezing. “Right on the money. And he’s here. Can’t you feel that? Gideon Winter has Tabby, and he’s here. Waiting for us.”

  Patsy tonelessly said, “Tabby’s dead.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Graham said. “Winter wants all four of us to die together—I think he’d really have everything if he did that. That’s why we’re here, right?”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “I suppose.”

  Graham settled his shoulders against the monstrous root behind him. “Well, I wish he’d come out and do his stuff.” He looked from side to side as if he expected Gideon Winter to come walking toward him out of the Sound. “I have a little less respect for him than I did once. He only uses what we give him, have you noticed that? He doesn’t know anything except what we tell him. HUAC. Patsy sees dead people, so he shows her a sort of Waldorf-Astoria of dead people. You and Daddy’s Here. For all his power, he still seems limited, doesn’t he?”

  “Limited? Is that what you think?” The voice came from behind Patsy, from under the tall spruces. It was not a human voice, Richard thought, not at all. Too thick, too oily; and so resonant it might have been fed by a microphone to a loud-speaker. “My dear children.”

  Graham had struggled to his feet as soon as he heard the first words, and he and Patsy and Richard were all looking now at a big dark form lazing quietly in the shade of the tallest spruce. Then the form shifted itself, and they saw what sort of being had spoken to them.

  Did this happen? Could this have happened? It was as impossible as everything else that had happened to them: but the three of them were now in a real landscape, in the middle of a real day. First they saw its face, at least twice the size of a human face and grotesquely exaggerated in its features—on the human scale, the features would almost have suggested handsomeness. So large, they looked like a roadmap to vice. The ears were long and drooping, the eyes brilliantly black; the creature’s nose was strong and hooked, its chin thick and pointed. A long meaty tongue licked out of the curling lips.

  The creature shifted itself forward, and an odor of shit and sweat and filthy skin drifted off it. At its waist began muscular goat legs and hindquarters. Tabby Smithfield was slung over this monster’s shoulder. It laughed at the expressions on their faces, stood up, and cocked one of its legs. A ropy jet of steaming liquid shot onto the ground, where it began running in rivulets down the dry grass. A lot of little active things were swimming in the creature’s urine, but Richard did not want to look at them—he could not take his eyes off Tabby’s body, in any case.

  At Richard’s side Patsy McCloud despairingly sent out (Tabby? Tabby?) and met only the dead cold emptiness she had both expected and feared.

  “Give him to us!” Graham suddenly roared out.

  The devil-creature leered at Graham, hitched Tabby’s body off his shoulder, and needed only one hand to toss the limp boy onto a brown little hill at their side. “Whatever you say.” The devil smirked, and started to walk toward them.

  Instantly it was dark again, just as when they had set their feet on Poor Fox Road. The creature moving toward them chuckled, and Graham and Patsy and Richard scrambled away toward inert Tabby. Off to their side, the water rose up in tall waves and breakers and hurled itself at Kendall Point’s rocky beach. The devil’s huge misshapen form slouched past them, outlined in the moonlight descending everywhere. Richard checked in his jacket pockets for shotgun shells, but found he had none left: the shells must have fallen out somewhere in the tunnel. Hoping for magic, for whatever had happened to him in front of Billy Bentley, he held up the Purdy. The Purdy stubbornly refused to turn into a Boy Scout knife, much less a sword.

  Patsy and Graham knelt on either side of Tabby. Delicately Graham rolled the boy onto his back.

  When Patsy probed again she met a faint

  (. . . . .)

  “Oh my God, he’s alive,” Patsy uttered so rapidly it sounded like one long word, and then sobbed wetly, gracelessly—a sound made up wholly of emotion.

  “’Course he is,” Graham said, but his eyes looked wet too.

  “Look,” Richard said urgently. “Look at what’s happening.”

  The clumsy silhouette of the creature was changing in the moonlight. The goatish body was growing, stretching out; the suggestion of a massive tail lashed through the dark weeds. Even Patsy looked up, having had another small flare of life from Tabby, and momentarily saw the creature in clear moonlight as it began to descend into the deep slash in the land at the inland edge of the Point. A head with a long lethal jaw, pointed spikes down the length of the reptilian snout, malevolent eyes encased in bone . . . she had seen that head lift up out of Dorothy Bach’s History of Patchin in Graham’s living room.

  dragon? what . . . dragon? Patsy?

  Tabby’s chest expanded as the boy took in air, and his eyes opened a crack so tiny that only Patsy noticed.

  whatwhat?

  “A dragon,” Richard said, as if he had heard the messages flying toward Patsy McCloud. “What the hell . . .”

  One of the great spruces behind them fell over—the trunk splintered as if the hand of an invisible giant had broken it. When the tree struck the ground, the earth seemed to bounce.

  “Let’s move,” Richard said. The earth trembled as another of the spruces crashed down. He knelt and got his arms beneath Tabby; braced himself; picked the boy up.

  Tabby said, “Uh.”

  A wide slash came ripping through the land, announcing itself first in the whispery sound of loose earth falling into its crevice, then in the bone-snapping roots. Richard Allbee saw a big round-headed wild rhododendron bush fifteen feet from him heel over sideways and go rattling down a precipitous slope . . . “Jump!” Graham bellowed at him, and he finally understood what was happening just before the ground opened up beneath him. Holding Tabby in his arms, Richard crouched down and took the longest standing broad jump of his life.

  His feet connected with solid ground, but his balance was still back where he had taken off. Richard staggered, then sprawled forward, dumping both himself and Tabby onto a rocky tuft of land. He turned his head and saw the jagged scar in the earth take both of the fallen spruces. A huge root-ball thumped down after the severed trunks.

  Tabby whispered, “You trying to kill me, Richard?”

  Richard hugged him close.

  From the deep slash in the earth ahead of them a long arrow of flame ripped through the tall grasses, incinerating whatever it touched. Tabby’s eyes were closed again, but he drew up his body like a child in a crib, resting his head on Richard’s chest.

  He heard noises rustling toward him, then saw Patsy and Graham slipping through the dark, skirting the multiple little fires which had sprung up after the withdrawal of the dragon’s breath. Graham sat down next to him, and Patsy eased Tabby out of his arms and into her own. Something cold and hard fitted into the palm of Richard’s hand, and he took his eyes off Tabby’s slack face and saw that Graham had given him the Purdy shotgun again.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” the old man said. “But you know what we have to do if we ever want to get out of here.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Richard said, feeling not at all adequate. “We have to kill that thing. We have to go down into that valley and destroy it. But how the hell do we do that?”

  “I thought I asked you for an easy one,” Graham said
.

  Richard thought of standing up and walking toward the dragon’s little valley; of brandishing the shotgun. He would not live more than five seconds. The dragon would breathe on him, and first his skin would turn red and then it would turn black and all his hair would be gone and his eyes would burst. And then the dragon would emerge and do the same thing to Patsy and Graham and Tabby. It would provide interesting obituaries in the New York Times, Richard thought, except that if we’re killed nobody on the Times will ever know it.

  “I don’t mind doing it, I just want to know how,” Richard said.

  Graham nodded.

  “Damn,” Richard said. At last he said, “How is Tabby?”

  Patsy had been rocking him back and forth against her. “He’s getting better.” Richard saw a smile illuminate her face, and for a second was jealous of Tabby Smithfield—he would not have minded being in those arms himself, nor having caused that smile. Patsy’s eyes flicked at him, and he sensed a complicated mixture of amusement and annoyance and pleasure and wondered if she had heard his thoughts in the way she could hear the boy’s. Patsy had returned her glance back to Tabby with an almost deliberate lack of haste.

  “Well, what do we do?” Richard asked.

  The fire-bat sailed overhead again, igniting another of the spruces.

  “I think it’s no good if Tabby is asleep,” Richard said.

  “I’m going to try something,” Patsy said. “I think I’ll ask him to sing.”

  “Sing? Sing what?” Graham asked.

  “Anything he thinks of.”

  The burning spruce popped and sizzled behind them. Richard could almost catch an unheard familiar song.

  “Why not?” he said: and for a moment inexplicably felt the heaviness of that double-edged sword pulling against his muscles. “Yes, try it,” he said. “Try it, Patsy.”

  Patsy bent her mouth to Tabby’s ear and whispered, “Sing to us, Tabby. Sing us the first song you think of—and we’ll help you sing it.”