Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  “I’d rather go with you,” Bobo said flatly.

  By the time they had passed the Hillhaven beach, Richard was almost holding Tabby up. Graham and Patsy had their arms around each other and plodded toward Beach Trail with mechanical determination. None of them had responded to Bobo’s distracted attempts at conversation, and they were doing their best to ignore his frequent and darting stares. “We’re getting there, Patsy,” Graham said. Bobo chimed in with “Sure are.” Eventually they came to his patrol car, tucked under the trees by the side of the road. “This son of a bitch,” Bobo said, hitting the roof with the side of his hand. They went another silent, painful twenty yards and Bobo said, “Oh my God. Will you look at that?”

  Monty Smithfield’s old house had thrown itself down the hill behind it and left an odd, busy gap in the landscape. Water jetted from broken pipes; stone pillars stuck up out of the foundation. Dust thick as smoke still hung in the air.

  “Oh my God,” Bobo repeated. “That terrific house. It must be down in the water, right? Those quakes or whatever they were shook it right off the hill. I didn’t think a place that solid would ever . . .” He stepped over the myrtle to get to the fence. “I hope no more of these places went over like that.”

  “This would be the only one,” Graham said.

  “I really have to see what happened down there,” Bobo said. “Maybe someone needs help.” He twisted indecisively against the fence, not wanting to leave them. “You’ll all get home all right, won’t you?”

  “More than likely,” Graham said, and the four of them backed away to walk the last short distance to Beach Trail.

  “Why would only this house go down like that?” Bobo asked.

  “Good-bye, Bobo,” Graham said. “You’re a good fellow. Everything’ll turn out all right.”

  “I saw you—I saw you on Kendall Point,” Bobo blurted out, and it was obvious that he had been worrying at this revelation since he had first come upon them.

  Even Patsy and Tabby looked at him now.

  “I was up high enough to see almost all the way down into that, uh, gully.” Bobo appeared almost ashamed, as if they might accuse him of spying. “What was that thing down there, anyhow? You were fighting it, right? What was it?”

  “What did you see?” Richard asked. Tabby and Graham and Patsy had instinctively stepped closer to him.

  “Some kind of animal, I guess,” Bobo said. “Pretty big. Ah . . . I hate to even say this . . . but, like it had a kind of human face?”

  “I wish I could tell you,” Richard said. “Honest, Bobo—I wish I could.”

  “Yeah,” Bobo said, “I wish you could too.” He paused. “I guess I better take a look at what’s left of this house.” Still he hovered before the iron fence. “You take good care of that lady, now.”

  “See you later,” Graham said, and pulled himself and Patsy around. The four of them did not hear Bobo move away from the fence until they had turned the corner into Beach Trail.

  * * *

  Graham pushed his door open and let the others in. Patsy got just past the door, then leaned against the wall. Her head dropped. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any energy left. None at all.”

  Richard and Tabby jostled together in the narrow book-filled hallway, wanting to help. But it was Graham who put his shoulder under her arm and helped her into the living room. “I just have to lie down for a little bit,” Patsy said.

  Graham took her to the couch and eased her down on her side. Patsy’s eyes were already closing. He moved her legs up on the couch and fetched a plaid blanket from beside his desk. This he shook out and placed over her. Even in sleep, Patsy’s face was drawn and taut—almost angular, pulled so tightly over the bones. “You can sit down, Tabby,” Graham said. “She isn’t going anywhere for a couple of hours.”

  “Me too,” Tabby said, walking away from the couch in the direction of Graham’s desk chair. He paused before he reached it, looked back at Patsy and returned to the head of the couch. Richard too had been unable to go very far from Patsy, and stood facing her from the other side of the coffee table.

  “You guys are like the lions at the library,” Graham said. “Do me a favor and sit down. Nobody’s going anywhere for quite a while—I agree with Tabby.”

  “Good,” Richard said, and moved only as far as the worn leather chair.

  Tabby sat down beside the couch. He was close enough to reach up and stroke her hair.

  “I suppose that’ll do,” Graham said. “I’m going to have a drink. At some point I’m going to bed. I feel like I’ve been up for three days. But I trust you will both stay here until we work out other plans.”

  Richard said, “I don’t want any other plans.”

  “Okay,” Graham said, actually smiling. “There’s a lot of room here—there are rooms upstairs I haven’t seen in fifteen years. Okay. I’m glad.”

  “Am I staying here too?” Tabby asked, suddenly looking stricken.

  “If you try to go anywhere else I’ll chain you to my desk,” Graham said. “Good. That’s settled. Anybody else want a drink? I still have some of that gin Patsy liked so much.”

  All three of them looked at her softly breathing beneath the plaid blanket.

  “Sure,” Richard said.

  “I want some too, please,” Tabby said. “If, you know . . .”

  “Today you get anything you want,” Graham said. He moved slowly into the kitchen and began cracking ice into glasses.

  Tabby remembered Berkeley Woodhouse chopping the ice tray against the sink at “Four Hearths,” and pulled up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. “Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s all right to stay here for a while?”

  “Yes.”

  “All together?”

  “All together.”

  “I don’t really want to be anywhere else.”

  “I know. We all feel that way, Tabby.”

  “Do you think that cop Bobo really saw an animal with a human face?”

  Richard slumped back into the chair. “We’re probably going to be talking about Kendall Point for the rest of our lives. Right now is too soon, Tabby. I don’t even know what I think.”

  Graham came toward them with three glasses half-filled with ice and clear liquid. “That’s right, Tabby. It’s too early. I put some water in yours, by the way.” He gave each of them a glass, then removed the one clamped against his chest and put it on the coffee table. “I’ll be right back. There’s something I have to do while I still have the courage.”

  Tabby sipped at his drink and made a face. “You guys think this is good?”

  “We think it’s among the better poisons.”

  Graham’s slow heavy steps went up the stairs.

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “Let’s ask him when he gets back.”

  “I don’t think I can ever leave Patsy,” the boy said.

  “Yeah,” Richard said. “I don’t even think I can ever leave this chair.”

  Graham thumped back down the stairs and reappeared carrying a stack of paper eight inches high. He wordlessly went past them and made his way into the kitchen. A few seconds later Richard and Tabby heard something weighty hit the bottom of a plastic garbage can.

  Graham came back into the living room, a peculiarly light-hearted expression on his face. He limped to the coffee table, picked up his drink and swallowed a third of it, then limped over to his desk chair. “Blisters,” he said. He smiled at his glass, then at sleeping Patsy. “I just set myself free. I spent so much time on that book I couldn’t admit that it died about a year ago. All I was doing was spinning my wheels. I don’t even want to look at it anymore.”

  “You threw your book out?” Tabby asked in amazement.

  “I wrote thirteen novels,” Graham said calmly. “I’ll get to number fourteen before I check out.” He took another big mouthful of the gin, and swished it around before he swallowed. “I think I won’t do anything but help you tw
o take care of Patsy for a while.”

  Then they said nothing for a long time—the silence stretched and stretched, filling up with their thoughts. They all three watched her inhale, exhale beneath the blanket.

  Tabby dipped his head into his knees; his mouth had begun to tremble, and his eyes suddenly stung.

  “That’s okay,” Graham said. “Go ahead.”

  Tabby lifted his face and had to look at her again. “She . . .” he began, and then could not continue. “She, ah . . .” He could not say it.

  “I know,” Richard said. “She married us.”

  Impulsively Tabby got to his knees and kissed Patsy McCloud’s cheek. “Yes,” Richard said, and set his glass on the floor and went around the low table and put his lips against her forehead. Then Graham limped across the room and kissed Patsy somewhere in the vicinity of her left eyebrow. It felt like a ritual; it felt like the sealing of a contract or the acknowledgment of a sacrament, and should have signified some important and immediate transformation. But they stood motionless above her, and Patsy slept on.

  Graham grunted, and returned to his typing chair. Tabby sat back down on the floor. Richard leaned into the ancient leather chair. They did not speak. Graham finished his drink, revolved the cracked old glass in his hand, and was visited by a flawless joy. His chest hurt, his feet burned, five minutes ago he had junked as many years of work (and even now was thinking if some of those pages might not be rescued from the garbage), he was at the near edge of a hallucinatory fatigue, but for an unmeasurable time he was thoughtlessly, blessedly happy. Each one of the three people in his living room glowed with a unique and necessary essence—glowed like the sword in Richard’s hand out on Kendall Point. Had that scene actually played itself out, in that place and in that way? It did not matter, not for these few seconds. He was happier than at any other time in his life; he had gone beyond happiness, he thought, and imagined that he sensed realms beyond realms—the sun-drenched worlds where gods played. His eyes started open and he rescued himself from dropping his glass. Richard and Tabby both slept, as innocently as Patsy McCloud. Graham pushed himself out of his chair, took his glass into the kitchen, and retrieved the most plausible chapters from the tall plastic garbage can. Then he went upstairs, leaving his living room filled with the breathing, the soft in-takings and subtle relaxations, of his sleeping friends.

  After the Moon

  After the moon had risen and set a score of times, Hampstead had gone a long way toward emerging from its fevers and comas; the visions which had peeped out of closets, tapped at doors and finally run freely through the streets faded back into the mind’s most tightly buttoned pockets; Hampstead began to add up its losses and mourn its dead—it was ready to rejoin the world. And the world, for better or worse, was not only willing to accept Hampstead back, it rushed to embrace the town with its dazzling, intrusive attentions. Hampstead, like all the affected towns, was pale and thin, but now it could walk: and its voice was sane again. It was not a threat, but a gallant victim. The roadblocks came down, and the reporters and feature writers and television cameras flocked in.

  Eventually most people in Hampstead had either spoken to a reporter themselves or been standing next to someone who did, and the four people in Graham Williams’ house were no exceptions. During this period when life seemed more to be imitating normality than actually to have attained it, Patsy and Richard and the old man and the boy often considered that what was happening to them was as strange as anything that had occurred earlier.

  At first there was the matter of what Richard called their “stardom.” For a period slightly longer than a week they could not leave Graham’s house without picking up a little following. Most often the following was quiet and passive: if Richard stood on the corner of Main Street and waited for the light to change, the two or three other people waiting with him would begin to turn toward him. Depending on their temperaments, they would stare forthrightly or discreetly; they wanted to talk, but did not. They were not quite sure that they knew what to say. At least some of them would shyly dog him down Main Street, pretending to window-shop.

  Once while Patsy shopped in the still-depleted Greenblatt’s, an elderly woman with heavy gold bracelets tremblingly stroked her arm on the pretext of admiring her blouse. Another, younger woman hugged Tabby Smithfield in the municipal parking lot behind Anhalt’s. Richard said, “I think I’m beginning to understand Frank Sinatra,” but what he thought was that these people had a chip of the same talent Patsy and Tabby had: enough of it to put a kind of spotlight on the four of them. Even the press seemed to circle in toward these four whenever they could.

  They did not like going out. All they really wanted was each other’s company. But when they were forced to leave the house, someone with a notepad and a pen or someone with a microphone was likely to appear, asking questions. The difficulty was in giving answers that would not brand them as hopelessly insane. They could not allude to themselves and Gideon Winter, the only subject that occupied them in these days, and so tried to give responses as flat and banal as possible—everybody else was excited about the lawsuits and the court cases against the Telpro Corporation and the investigations into the Defense Department, but as yet Richard Allbee and the others had not moved so far out of themselves.

  “Oh, I think this town is getting back on its feet,” Richard told CBS. “It’s funny, but most of us have trouble even remembering what went on here this summer.”

  “I’m afraid that I’ve just been concentrating on my own affairs, which I kind of neglected over the summer,” Patsy told Newsweek. “I have no plans to sue anybody.”

  “We’re a pretty spunky bunch,” Graham said to NBC. “No [bleep] gas can slow us down for long.”

  “Did we have a summer this year?” Tabby asked Eyewitness News.

  After a week, they noticed that the stares and questions had become fewer; after two weeks they were again anonymous citizens, and for that they were grateful.

  The Conrail trains again stopped at the stations in Hillhaven and Greenbank and Hampstead. Greenblatt’s and the other grocery stores gradually filled up with fresh produce and cuts of meat as the warehousers and dispatchers were informed that Hampstead no longer meant danger to their trucks. By the third week in September all of the windows along Main Street had been replaced. A week after that, while Graham and Richard worked outside repairing the broken window frame and fractured boards beneath it, Graham saw a sparrow dart out of the trees at the end of his lot. A few days after that, birds of every kind seemed to have returned to Hampstead—gulls, cardinals, robins, finches, thrushes, and big thuggish crows.

  All sorts of wandering birds came back. One morning Graham and Patsy met Evelyn Hughardt as they were taking a walk down to the beach. She was getting out of her car, and when Graham said, “Hello, Evvy, it’s nice to see you again,” she looked at her watch, glanced at him and said, “Is it?” and walked up the path to her door. “Now I know things are getting back to normal,” Graham said.

  Charlie Antolini hired a painter and took out of his house all the furniture he had daubed pink and piled it next to the curb. The television set, two couches, a rack of chairs, a big dining-room table: all sizzled with Charlie’s happy pink paint. Seeing that pathetic but somehow hopeful-looking furniture brought back to Graham the precise sensations of the summer. He remembered the smell of Norm Hughardt’s mouth-wash when he rolled his body over; he tasted the saltiness of sleeping Patsy’s temple when he had kissed her. Twenty minutes later, a Goodwill truck drove the furniture away.

  Sometimes—for long after—the sight of a misprint in the Hampstead Gazette could give Graham that sense of total recall of what it felt like to live through a time when all the rules and conventions were suspended; but in fact there were no more misprints now than ever before. The only difference between the Gazette in September and the same paper the preceding April or May was that it had no social and gossip column. Sarah Spry had not been a great writer, but she had pr
oved to be an irreplaceable one.

  Those who had been among the saddest victims of the summer, Dr. Chaney’s patients, had all died by mid-October—by then they bore no resemblance any longer to human beings, and when one by one they ceased to register life signs, even Chaney was relieved. He had a book to write.

  * * *

  Five weeks after the night Graham Williams went up to bed and left his friends asleep in his living room, Richard and Tabby moved across the street to Richard’s house. Part of the reason for this split—which they regretted only slightly less than they understood its necessity—was that Graham’s house was not suitable for three or four adult inhabitants. The unused rooms upstairs baked in warm weather, froze in cold: Patsy spent every night on the couch, and Tabby eventually made a bed in a cramped little room next to the kitchen. If Graham had been willing to move out of his house, they would very likely have all gone across the street—and stayed together for another few weeks of increasing discomfort. Graham missed his solitude, Richard Allbee wanted either to attend to his house or to sell it; that obsessive need to be together always had diminished. Reality, the world of other people, called them to itself, and they had started to respond to the call. Tabby was back in school, and Richard wanted to make sure he had a quiet place to study; he also wanted to get back to work regularly and stop leaning on John Roehm. Maybe Graham was sometimes dictatorial, maybe Richard sometimes felt impatient. Fathers; sons.

  The old man had never expected Richard to sell his house, and felt no disappointment when Richard told him he had decided after all to keep it. “Are you going to adopt Tabby?” Graham asked. “I’d like to do that,” Richard said, for the first time acknowledging it consciously. “That’s right,” Graham said—he had no reason to ask the younger man about Patsy. They all loved her, but in a way that mysteriously but firmly forbade the physical expression of love. Graham did not understand why, but what Patsy had done for them on Kendall Point had sealed that door forever.