Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
“All right,” he said when Williams paused, “the descendants of the four original settler families are back in Hampstead—in fact, back in Greenbank. And our ancestors had some kind of trouble from a newcomer named Winter. But I’m afraid that I have to ask, so what?”
“The only reasonable question,” Williams said. “You’re right. Why should we care, really, unless we’re historians? The only reason we should care is that whatever happened back then is still affecting us now. Isn’t that always true of history? If the Normans had prevailed in England, we’d be speaking French today, or something like it. So let’s look at our history here in Hampstead. I’m going to give you three names from three generations in Hampstead, from 1898 to 1952. Robertson Green—he would have been your great-great-uncle, Mr. Allbee—Bates Krell, and John Sayre. Robertson Green was executed by the state in 1898, Bates Krell disappeared from human ken in 1924, and John Sayre killed himself in 1952. I think Gideon Winter was reborn in each of these men, and that only John Sayre had the strength to fight him.”
5
Les McCloud had snatched up his golf clubs as he steamed out of the house, thrown them into the trunk of his Mazda, and driven straight to the Sawtell Country Club after his fight with Patsy. Of course it had not been anything as satisfying as a fight: it had been Patsy needling, needling, needling him, provoking him as only someone who had lived with him for a decade and a half would know how to do. I’m sure there’s food in the refrigerator. A rebellion against the proper order of things. Les did not actually feel much like playing golf, but he could not stand to be in the house a moment longer; golf was the best excuse for a long absence. He would spend four or five hours away, and come back and see if she had seen reason . . . or if she was still using the old needle, needle, needle. And if she was, then she was asking for what she knew she was going to get.
Once at the club, parked out in front of the long white columned building, Les had felt sweaty and dispirited. His forehead and hands paradoxically felt damply cold. He had decided that he could manage nine holes, if he could find some loser of a partner, so he got out of the car, shouldered his heavy bag, and doggedly marched past the front of the club toward the first tee and the pro shop.
“Hey, Les! You looking for a partner?” Ugly Archie Monaghan was smiling brightly at him from beside a display of golf balls. Archie, a second-rate mick lawyer, proved his point about losers. “Ulick Byrne was going to meet me here, and guess what? I just called his house, and he’s down with the flu again. Poor bastard got it twice. I could use a partner, if you want to go around with me.”
“Oh, I’ll go around with you anytime, Archie,” Les said. He smiled at Archie, taking in his red eager face, the yellow knit shirt bulging out over the watermelon belly, and the red-and-green-plaid pants, and said, “Today I’m really only up for nine holes, though. Just got over the flu myself. What do you say?”
“You’ll go around with me anytime, hey,” Archie said. “Nine is great with me, sure.” And Les took in that this garish fool actually preferred to play only half the course with him.
Les opened the door, Archie shook his head and did a No, you first gesture with his hand, and they hovered like that inside the door for a time until Archie grinned and surrendered and went outside before Les. “How’s your wife these days, Les?” Archie asked. “She’s such a pretty little lady.”
“Patsy’s fine.” Les did not want to get into a discussion of his wife, especially not with Archie Monaghan, who had spent hours ogling her at a party last year. Archie, Les remembered, liked to talk about other men’s wives.
“Patsy McCloud, Patsy McCloud,” Archie said as he would lovingly pronounce the name of a movie star, and Les was so irritated that after he won the toss and teed up, his wrists were tight and the ball sliced deeply off the fairway.
“Bad luck, chief,” Archie said. He rolled his belly up to his tee, flexed his arms, and punched the ball in a straight line more than two hundred yards toward the first green.
* * *
By the time they met again on the fifth green, Les had realized that Archie had deliberately thrown him off by saying his wife’s name in that way, and he made himself stay loose and calm as he putted to stay three over par. Already he was having a bad day, but there was no need to make it worse. The only consolation was that Archie too was three over par, and likely to stay that way, unless he could make a thirty-foot putt. Archie seemed not to care. “I’ve been studying this a long time, Les, and I have come to the decision that there are two kinds of women. There’s the kind that looks as though she enjoys it, and the kind that looks like they don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? In this town, at least eighty percent of the women are in the second category. They might have three kids, but to look at them they never broke sweat. Nice one.” This was for Les, who had made his putt. Archie set his ball in place and waggled his club speculatively. “I was talking to Ulick about this once, and he named eight or nine right off the bat—you’d think the Women’s Art League and their tennis game was the most important thing on earth. Lime-green skirts or those real baggy khaki shorts, right? You know the kind I’m talking about? Ultimate prep. Little bit of a drawl in their voice.” Archie lined himself up, cocked the club back, and made his shot. The ball obeyed Les’s silent prayers and rolled to a stop three feet short of the hole.
“Ho ho. I know, Les, you want to give me this one, but I insist on making the shot.” Archie perkily strode up to the ball, paused, and stroked it neatly into the hole. He winked at Les. “You go out on the terrace of the club, you’ll see about three hundred of them. Eating their salads and talking about their hairdressers. Is that what they talk about, do you suppose? Or do they talk about the same boring shit that we do?”
“What’s your point, Archie?” Les hefted his heavy golf bag: he was sweating, but he felt chilly. His forehead had a block of ice strapped to it.
“My point is this. If the waitresses out there on the terrace are the only ones who look like they enjoy it, I’m glad I married a waitress. I said this to Ulick, see. And he said, Archie, your real theory is that all women are secret waitresses. Guess what? Around Ulick I gotta keep on my toes.”
Les turned away toward the next tee. He understood two things, both of which were faintly surprising. Archie Monaghan liked him no more than he did Archie—that crack about “ultimate prep” had not been accidental. And Archie missed Ulick Byrne; Archie wished he were playing with the young lawyer instead of Les. Archie was in his fifties, Les was forty. Surely the two of them, whatever their feelings about each other, had more in common with one another than Archie could ever have with Byrne, who was still under thirty. “I guess Byrne is a sharp guy,” he said.
“Sharp? Baby, if he was in a corporation, he’d already be vice-president and they’d be measuring him for the throne. How about we put a little money on the next hole, chief?”
“Hundred a stroke,” Les said, but Archie did not wince. He grinned.
* * *
By the ninth hole, Les owed Archie three hundred dollars, and was about to go down a hundred more. The yellow shirt and hideous plaid trousers were a long way closer to the green. Down three hundred dollars to Archie Monaghan! Les had assumed that the size of the bet would rattle Archie, and now Archie was a chip shot from the green and he was sweating about three hundred dollars.
Les lined up his shot, pictured it in his mind, waggled the head of his wood beside the ball, and settled himself. He could not stop himself from thinking that if this ball went where he wanted it to go, the size of his debt would go down to two hundred dollars. The minute the head of the club met the ball, he knew that he had checked it: he had muffed the shot.
Then it was only a matter of watching it go wrong. The ball sailed up, looking like the best shot in the world, and kept on sailing; but where it should have soared between the trees, it dropped. Les watched as the treacherous ball fell like a stone into the pocket of trees.
“Wanna borr
Les fumed toward the trees, deliberately not looking at his partner. He did not want to see Archie grinning at him. If he could get any backswing, he could still match Archie on this hole: he’d been in those trees before, and they didn’t have to hold you back. This was a par four, and if the lie gave him half a chance, he could still make it in four; and there was always the chance that Archie would lean too hard on his chip shot. Les stepped under a branch, and began to look around for his ball. He was breathing a little hard. Sweat dripped into his collar.
Archie was just lining up for his shot, and Les paused to watch him. Archie sighted down his line again, waggled his club and his rump. He brought the club back, then around . . . and hit the ball too hard. Les silently applauded. He knew what was going to happen. “Now make a joke about your fucking compass,” Les said to himself.
He saw his ball almost instantly. The little flash of white sat about two feet from the mossy side of the largest oak. He was still in the match. Les moved toward the tree and heard a rustling in the bush on the other side of his ball. A squirrel. Les got around the oak and took a good look toward the green. Archie was standing in the bunker looking a lot less cheerful. Then from behind him Les heard the unmistakable sound of a child weeping. He whirled around and saw nothing. As he turned to face the ball, the sound came again. He turned and heard a scurrying in the bush. “Hey, get on out of there, kid,” he said.
The child sobbed quietly.
Les propped his club against the oak and put his hands on his hips. “Everything’s okay. Come on out.”
The bush was still.
“Come on. I’m trying to play golf here. No one’s going to hurt you. Get on out of the bush.”
When nothing happened, Les picked up his club again. As if the child in the bush could see him and was afraid of being hit with the club, the bush rustled again—the boy was going deeper into it. It must have been a child of four or five, Les thought: a child any older would be too large to move around like that in the bush.
He could not make his shot with the bush rattling and rustling in that way. Then the quiet weeping started up again. Les put the club on the ground. “Do you want help, sonny?” There was no answer, and Les walked over toward the bush and bent down to peer through the dense leaves. “Come on out and I’ll help you.”
He heard a tiny voice say, “I’m lost.”
“All right, I’ll help you,” he said a little abruptly, and parted the leaves of the bush with his hands. “How did you get here, anyhow? Did your daddy. . . ?” He took his hands away from the bush. A vise had gripped his head with astounding pressure. For a second his vision had gone black. He straightened up and blinked.
The tiny voice said, “I’m lost. I’m afraid.”
“Okay, okay,” Les said, and bent forward again. His hands went toward the bush. They stopped just short of touching the long pointed green leaves. Somehow a feeling of wrongness emanated from the bush, of the bush harboring a thing that could not come out into the light. Les thought he caught a curling odor of wet mud, of sewage, of stinking weeds.
The child wept again, but Les was afraid to touch the bush. Wrongness. There was something wrong in there. The ripe acrid odor curled toward him again.
He knew that if he touched the bush, the vise would close again around his head, his eyes would go black. The thing in the bush wept bitterly. Les peered into the leaves and saw only more leaves, leaves rustling against other leaves, leaves touched by sunlight and leaves shining greenly in the dark.
“Your ball lost that bad?” Les whirled around and saw Archie Monaghan’s plaid pants and bulging yellow belly.
“I heard something,” Les said, straightening up. “My ball’s not lost, I heard something. There was a kid in this bush. He was crying.”
Archie’s eyebrows went up.
“He just stopped,” Les said. “I can’t see him anywhere in there.”
“Let old Archie have a look,” Archie said, and bent forward and parted the bush with his hands. Just for a second Les caught that odor of wet mud and sewage. He was aware of the perspiration standing on his forehead: his whole body felt so odd, so light, that he was afraid he would fall down. Archie Monaghan thrust his whole upper body into the bush, and Les was left staring at his wide plaid bottom.
“Well, guess what?” Archie said, pulling himself out of the bush. “Nobody’s at home. You sure you heard a kid in there?”
“I heard him crying.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I talked to him. He said he was lost.”
“Well, it’s damn funny. There’s nothing in there now. He must have run away.” Archie scratched under his arms and looked vaguely at the trees. His face lightened. “Hey, there’s your ball, and not too bad a lie. You can come out of this smelling like a rose.”
Les put out of his mind everything having to do with lost children and bushes that could squeeze your head and blind you. He picked up his club from its bed of pine needles, straightened up before the ball, and smacked it home.
And that’s how you get to be a vice-president in the corporate jungle, buster.
* * *
A little more than two and a half hours later, he was saying, “You might as well let me buy you a drink,” to Archie Monaghan. He was feeling a curious mixture of bitterness and relief: relief because he had ended the match only one stroke behind Archie, bitterness because he had not smashed the fat little bog-trotter. He supposed it was the lingering effects of the flu that had spoiled some of his shots; but he still remembered the way that bush in the spot of rough had rustled, and how the child’s voice had come from it. Before Archie had jammed his head and shoulders into the bush, Les had wanted to pull him back, yank him to the ground to keep him away from the bush . . . but of course, nothing had happened to Archie. There had been no lost child in the bush.
But he’d had an image . . . something with its jaws locked around Archie’s trunk. Yet nothing had happened to Archie; he had put his head and chest in that wrong place and seen and felt nothing.
But there had been that smell. Rotting weeds, damp earth, and beneath these not necessarily unpleasant odors, another odor, headier, more biting.
Archie was accepting his offer of a drink and looking at him oddly. “Oh, I’m good for the debt,” Les said. “Here, let me give it to you now.” Archie started to smile and shake his head, but Les took his money clip out of his pocket and counted out two fifties. “There. Now you can take a trip to Dublin, Archie.”
Archie pocketed the bills. “Actually, I just got back from Dublin last week.”
* * *
Archie Monaghan led the way into the club’s lounge. Old bugles and hunting horns shone from the walls, along with prints of red-coated men on horses. Archie bounced along the rows of booths, nodding and saying hello, going toward the bar. Les followed. Archie was now banging his palm against the back of a man on a barstool and laughing at some remark made by the man on his other side. When Les got closer, he recognized the foursome before himself and Archie. They seemed to be part of a group which included one or two executives like Les, a contractor he knew only by sight, and Archie’s partner, Tom Flynn. Flynn was huge and jowly, about Les’s age, and wore a madras jacket the size of an elephant’s blanket. “You guys all know Les McCloud, don’t you?” Archie asked.
“Nice to meet you, Les,” the contractor said, and the others nodded and mumbled some kind of assent.
“I just lost a hundred clams to Monaghan here, let me set up a round,” Les said. “The truth is, he played a terrible game. I just played a worse game.” He took out his money clip and laid two twenties on the bar. “Hey, barkeep! Give these guys more of the same. And I’ll have a martini. On the rocks, twist.”
“Bottle of Bud for me,” Archie said.
Les swallowed his drink and said, “Arch, what’s your favorite pub in Dublin?”
Archie was talking to Tom Flynn and ignored him.
“There was a lost kid out by the ninth green,” Les said. “He was hiding in a bush. You ever hear of anything like that before?”
“Les hears voices,” Archie said. “The Joan of Arc of Sawtell C.C.”
Les grinned hard through the laughter.
An hour and two martinis later, Les debated calling Patsy; the trouble was, he didn’t want to leave the group. He was sure they would talk about him the second he left the room. To hell with Patsy, he decided.
He thought of his wife sitting in her little spare room with her book and her television. That was where she would be at this minute. She had probably eaten nothing. She was engrossed in a book or in her diary, and she had forgotten all about him.
Archie’s name glinted at him from a plaque of former winners of the club trophy; the air conditioning seemed to freeze his sinuses. He touched his forehead, and it felt like wax. There was another brimming martini before him, and he lifted it and drank. “That kid out there was from another species,” he said, and was gratified and surprised to hear laughter. “No kidding. I felt something really strange out there.”
Archie whispered something to Flynn, and Flynn’s eyes flashed at him.
Then he saw something he could not believe. A man sitting in the corner booth up at the top end of the bar was wearing raw steaks around his neck. The raw meat was a kind of necklace, the way it was spread out against the man’s skin. “Hey,” Les said (and “Hey,” Flynn echoed).
Les stared in fascination at the necklace of raw meat until he saw that it was not a necklace at all. The raw meat was the man’s chest and shoulders. His skin had been peeled back in big scallops. Les caught again the odor of wet earth and ripe sewage. The man in the booth was dead—he had been flayed, and now he was dead.
“Guess what?” Archie said. He muttered something, and the other men laughed.
Les stared at the dead man. That was what had happened out by the ninth green. The lost boy had been dead: he was dead, and he had been looking for Les McCloud. He felt the heavy martini glass slip out of his fingers.