Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
“Josephine Tayler could never tell when her family or her friends were going to die,” Graham told her. “Only strangers and people she did not know well. But thanks anyhow.”
* * *
Richard drove up to Rhode Island for his first appointment with Morris Stryker the following morning. He and Laura had parted with a long embrace after their first night in their new house; and with a promise to see Patsy McCloud after he returned.
9
Two nights later, while Richard Allbee was beginning to admit that he could not stand his client and that Morris Stryker very likely had little affection for his restorationist, Bobby Fritz was still agonizing to Bobo Farnsworth and Ronnie Riggley about the loss of his best customer. The three of them sat in the side booth just past the bar in the Pennywhistle Café, and two empty pitchers joined handles in the middle of the wet table. Ronnie kept drawing circles in the spilled beer, and Bobby knew—as he had known or suspected many times in the past—that Ronnie was bored by him: she thought he was immature or stupid, she thought he was a hick, not good enough to be a friend of Bobo’s. Bobo had not come into the Pennywhistle, Bobby’s favorite bar in Hampstead and at one time Bobo’s, more than three or four times since he had gotten serious about Ronnie. And two of those times had been while Bobo was on duty.
“He fired me, man,” he said, even though he knew he had said it not five minutes before.
“Do you think you could ask him to give you the job back?” Ronnie asked, still drawing circles in the puddled beer.
Ronnie Riggley, he considered, was one of the best-looking women he had ever seen. If not an outright 10, she was at least a good solid 8 1⁄2. It didn’t matter a damn that she was about a decade older than Bobo and himself. It didn’t even matter that Ronnie did not particularly try to look young. She did not have to. Even when she looked kind of tired and draggy, the way she did tonight, Bobby wanted to get his hands on her; the more beer he drank, the more he wanted it. He was afraid that she would laugh right in his face if he ever tried anything.
“I can’t beg, Ronnie, the man fired me,” he explained. “But I just hate to go by there in my truck and see what’s happening to his lawn. All the weeds are getting in there, he’s got timothy and wild grass all over the place, and pretty soon he’s gonna get that broom grass from outta the marsh. . . . I don’t even want to think about what’s happening to his garden.”
“I think Ronnie’s right,” Bobo said, putting his arm around her and causing Bobby exquisite pain. “Just go up and ring his bell. Tell him how much you care about it. Maybe you can work out some kind of deal.”
“Deal, huh,” Bobby said. “If I walked up to his house he’d probably shoot me stone dead. Jesus. He must be pretty good with that gun, huh? He shot that Starbuck guy with the gun right in his hand, didn’t he?”
“That’s how we found him,” Bobo said. “The gun right in his hand.” In fact, though Bobo did not want to say this, Dr. Van Horne had become a minor celebrity around the Hampstead police headquarters; Turtle Turk ragged younger men by telling them they should take shooting lessons from Van Horne.
“But those murders are over now, aren’t they?” Bobby said.
Ronnie was nodding her head; but Bobo said, “Starbuck was a housebreaker, he wasn’t a maniac. Too many people think we’re out of the woods. There’ll be another murder one of these days. Wait and see.”
“You say,” Bobby said. “I say they’re done. That’s part of the reason the other cops are so fucking happy, right?” He slapped his hand against his forehead. “I’m sorry, Ronnie, I should watch my mouth. I just don’t feel right tonight.”
“You did have a lot of beer,” Ronnie said. “I’m not blaming you, but you drank most of those pitchers by yourself, and now you’re working on a third one.”
“Hell, I’m not drunk.” He sounded belligerent to himself; he saw himself through what he thought were Ronnie Riggley’s eyes. Immature, none too bright, drunk on beer.
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Bobby said. “If I ever see him, I mean Dr. Van Horne, I’ll talk to him real nice” (Ronnie was smiling at him, and Bobby suddenly felt this was possible, that he could put things back together again) “and I’ll bullshit a little bit and all that, and then I’ll tell him that I’ll do his lawn free. Twice a month. Free lawn service. Because I can’t stand to see it go to hell that way. And then what do you bet he takes me back? That’s what he’ll do. He’ll take me back.”
“You’re blasted, you dope,” Bobo said, reaching across the table to pat Bobby’s head. “Ronnie and I will drive you home.”
“I’ll do it for free. Don’t you see how totally brilliant that is? Then he’ll have to hire me back!”
“Come on,” Bobo said.
“Only if I get to sit in front next to Ronnie,” Bobby said. “How’d you ever get a woman like this, anyhow?”
The look on Bobo’s face told him that maybe he was drunk, after all.
* * *
The little house where Bobby lived with his parents was on Poor Fox Road, which one long-ago selectman had called “Hampstead’s Appalachia.” The road ambled along the bank of a tidal estuary and gave up just before it would have butted into the Greenbank railroad station. Who the Poor Fox was and what had happened to him, human or canine, had been forgotten long ago, but the name still had its former appropriateness. Poor Fox Road was the only street in Greenbank to be hidden, since to get to it you had to take an unlikely narrow road off Mount Avenue across the street from the entrance to Gravesend Beach, and then follow along the estuary until you came to a series of crumbling frame houses. Once these had been faculty houses for Greenbank Academy, but the school had sold them after World War II. Now a cranky and reclusive painter lived in one, a young man who worked at a body shop on Riverfront Avenue rented another, one particularly sinister house had been empty for at least fifty years, and the last belonged to the Fritz family.
As they turned onto Greenbank Road, Bobby found himself thinking more and more obsessively about putting his hand on Ronnie’s thigh. He could not stop himself from imagining what it would be like to fondle Ronnie Riggley, what she would feel like. And if he gave in to this powerful yearning, he knew, two things would happen: Ronnie would have her most demeaning vision of him confirmed; and Bobo would throw him out of the car and never speak to him again.
So he said, “Hey, Bobo, just let me out where you’d turn, okay?”
“You want the exercise, Bobby?” Bobo asked him.
“Yeah, I want to clear my head before I get home.”
“Good idea,” Bobo said, and pulled Ronnie’s car over to the side of the road as soon as he entered Mount Avenue. “That’s where it happened,” he said, nodding toward the lights of the Van Horne house, which were visible through the trees.
“Good for him,” Bobby said. “I mean it. Good for him.” He got out of the car and waved as Bobo drove off up Mount Avenue.
Bobby realized how drunk he was as soon as he started walking. The edges of Poor Fox Road seemed to tangle and twine, and within a few feet of the entrance he was up to his knees in weeds. “Oh, lonesome me,” he said, and backed out onto the road’s surface again. His feet took him all the way to the other side of the road, and then he straightened up and made himself go in a more or less straight line toward his house. For a moment he saw two moons overhead, two roads before him, but he squinted and brought the images together. Two and a half pitchers of beer hummed in his blood, two and a half pitchers of beer muffled his head.
With terrific suddenness he had to urinate. “Lordy, lordy, lordy,” he sang, and turned into the weeds along the side of the road, unzipped himself, and barely got himself out in time. His piss splattered in a wide arc across weeds and tree trunks. On his right leg he felt a spreading damp spot. “Shitzky.” Finished, he zipped up again and faced Poor Fox Road.
The moon seemed twice as large as it should have been. It was a bloated, rotting sphere leaning down toward him. Chill light
The moonlight seemed to crackle against his skin. Poor Fox Road was supernaturally bright. Bobby saw the perpendicular shadows thrown by pebbles on the road. Then he saw that there was a face in the moon. The face was sneering and coarse, inhumanly cruel. Bobby threw out his hands, as if they could protect him from the terror this awful face promised, and saw that in the light they looked covered with silver fur.
The moon leaned right up to his own face and whispered, Look down.
Bobby looked down; screamed. Blood was flowing down the road in a sluggish tide, lapping over his shoes. Its smell enveloped him—the road stank like a butcher’s shop. Because the cynical moon was so close now, the slow-moving tide of blood was black.
Look up, the moon whispered in the black-and-white world, and Bobby jerked his head up. He saw silvery trees, black leaves, a silver-and-black bend in the road.
He’s coming, the moon blew toward him on a foul wind, and opened its bloated mouth and grinned.
Bobby heard footsteps splashing through the tide of blood. He tried to step backward, and a blood-soaked creeper whipped out of the side of the road and grasped his ankle and dumped him into the cold, slow-moving tide.
Coming, the moon whispered into the back of his neck, and Bobby struggled back up on his feet. His hands were black with blood; his jeans adhered to his legs.
He could not move in this black-and-white, this silvery world. The crazy idea that all this blood on the road was really his own jumped into his mind—he was dead, it just hadn’t happened yet.
He knew that something awful was coming toward him, and he stepped toward it, raising his fists.
He was almost disappointed when nothing more frightening than a man came around the silvery corner. The moon rode hugely behind him, and Bobby could not see his face.
“Stay away,” Bobby said. His voice sounded small and high.
A familiar voice said, “You’re all right, boy. Why, you’ve just had too much fun.”
The black figure stepped forward again, and Bobby saw that there was no river of blood washing down the road. His own urine stuck his jeans to his leg. In the moonlight, his hands were once again painted with silver, not black. The man advancing toward him was someone he trusted.
“Had a lot of beer tonight, didn’t you, Bobby?” the man asked, and then he lifted his head and Bobby saw the white hair and civilized face of Dr. Wren Van Horne.
“Oh, I was just talking about you, Doctor,” Bobby sang out, his relief making his voice louder than it needed to be. “No kidding—I was! You know what I said about you? Good for him, that’s what I said, good for him, and I meant it too.”
“Thank you.” The doctor came slowly toward Bobby in the streaming moonlight.
“No birds,” Bobby said. “You notice? No bird sounds. Usually if you come down here at night, you hear an owl or two.”
“Oh, the owls are dead now,” Dr. Van Horne said as he came toward Bobby weaving in the middle of the narrow moonlit road.
“No shit. I see a lot of dead birds on my lawns, you know? A couple more every day—I hate to run the big mower over ‘em, you know? It makes a terrible noise.” Then a connection formed itself in Bobby’s mind, and he said, “Now, that reminds me of what I was gonna say to you. Dr. Van Horne, I just can’t stand seeing your lawn go to rack and ruin the way it is. What I want to do is, you let me come work on it for free for a little while.”
Now Dr. Van Horne was standing only a foot or two in front of Bobby on the narrow road. Bobby could see an aureole of silvery hair standing out against the still-enormous sphere of the moon, but the doctor’s face was again a sheet of black in which floated denser patches of black.
“What do you say?” he asked, and then recoiled, for the foul stink of sewage and rot had opened around him, and it was worse than that, it was the smell of something that has died in a cover of weeds and weeks later is struck by the shovel, and spills out this almost liquid smell.
“You want to work for me?” Dr. Van Horne asked him.
Bobby stepped backward, and felt the tide of blood lapping at his ankles. Dr. Van Horne held out his hand, and in it was a small curved blade. Before Bobby could react, the blade slipped through the air and punched into his neck just below his left ear. The doctor drew the blade quickly down and across, and a huge bubble of blood burst from Bobby’s neck.
Bobby fell to his knees. He felt no pain at all—all he could feel was the warmth and wetness of the blood rushing down his neck and chest. All that life, rushing to get out of him! Dr. Van Horne swung down at him again, and this time there was a great flare of pain, for the doctor had sliced off most of his left ear. Bobby held up his hand, almost not believing that all of this was happening to him, and the little curved scalpel came down between his second and third fingers and split open his hand. The little scalpel went away again, and Bobby’s heart obediently pumped out another gout of blood, and he lost consciousness just before Dr. Van Horne sliced off his left cheek.
Bobby Fritz, Greenbank’s excellent gardener, toppled forward into a vast blackness; Dr. Van Horne rolled his body over, sliced off his shirt, and then began to rearrange what was beneath it. He cut through Bobby’s chest, exposed the ribs and snapped them back, sliced away the matter surrounding the heart, and lifted it out. He set the heart in the hand he had split open. Then he opened Bobby’s belt, unsnapped his jeans, and pulled them down. After that he sliced off the penis and testicles and put them in Bobby’s right hand.
All of this was similar to what he had done twice before, and would do three times more. They would not go forward, his victims.
He dragged Bobby’s scarcely recognizable body into the weedy ditch beside Poor Fox Road. When it was out of sight he took a sheet of paper from his hip pocket and put it inside Bobby’s chest. The sheet of paper, and the poem lettered on it in writing so anonymous it might have come from a computer’s printing station, were not discovered until several hours after the body was found. This was two days later, on the thirteenth of June.
10
It was a mailman who found Bobby Fritz. Roger Slyke drove a blue-and-white mail van over most of Greenbank every morning, and then spent most of the afternoons back in the central Hampstead postal station sorting mail. For two or three days Roger had been feeling oddly disoriented—his teeth hurt, and there was a more or less constant noise in his ears, and sometimes he caught himself at the point of putting someone’s mail in the wrong box. He wondered how many times he had done it, in these past two days, without noticing. On Wednesday morning, when he should have been turning into Charleston Road, he had found himself way off his route, all the way over to the Old Sarum Road, without any idea of how he had got there.
At noon on Friday, the thirteenth of June, Roger Slyke had driven all the way up to the end of Poor Fox Road just to deliver a letter from the Bush-for-President campaign to Harold Fritz, who was a lifelong Democrat and would never get out of bed to vote again anyhow. On the way back, his head had started to swim, and he had gotten a bad feeling, a really bad feeling in his heart, of being sick scared wrong, as he sometimes did when he looked at that empty house between the Fritz house and that place where the boy had all those wrecked cars. Roger had let the mail van coast to a halt. He had caught an awful smell. For a second Roger Slyke was certain he had seen the daytime moon leaning up toward him and grinning at him; then he stopped the van and jumped out and held his head, which felt as though it wanted to explode.
Roger had not set the brake on the mail van, and while he was holding his thundering head, the van slid forward a few inches and then rolled on into the ditch. It promptly pitched onto its side and dumped hundreds of letters into the weeds.
Roger looked up with bloodshot eyes and said, “Nah.” He walked over to the ditch and looked down, shaking his head. He stepped into the ditch after making sure it was not filled with poison ivy—Roger was wearing short
The state police did not recognize the poem, nor did anyone on the Hampstead force.
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade;
All things to end are made;
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die—
Lord have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die—
Lord have mercy on us!
Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate;
Earth still holds ope her gate;
Come, come! the bells do cry;
I am sick, I must die—
Lord, have mercy on us!
Nobody could identify this poem until Bobo Farnsworth thought to call his former English teacher, Miss Threadgill, who was now the head of the English department at J. S. Mill. “Are you developing an interest in English poetry, Bobo?” she asked him.