Floating Dragon by Peter Straub
“Sue me,” Les said. His rage had evaporated from the front portion of his brain: for the first time in his life, Les experienced his own brain as a thing of layers and segments. The front upper part of his brain was floating in a crystalline calm; his anger still boiled, but it boiled down beneath this floating icy peace. He began to walk toward his car.
Les opened the door of his car and drove toward the bridge. When he looked in his rearview mirror he saw the man and his son standing in the middle of Greenbank Road, staring at him. The boy was waving his fist.
That cheered him up so much he was halfway across Riverfront Avenue and going straight toward the parking lot of Piggy Bindle’s All-Beef Restaurant before he remembered that he had to turn left.
* * *
By the time he found a parking spot on Station Row and had swung in next to the curb, the entire top of his head felt frozen by some kind of tranquilizer. Up there, thoughts floated in an icy realm to which Les could retreat at any time he wished.
Beneath this icy paradise, his rage still burned. If Patsy were a normal wife, he would never have heard the pathetic voice coming from the bush, never have killed that wretched dog. The noises and the smells of a hundred and fifty people jammed into a small bar and grill jumped at him the instant he pushed open the door. It was just before sundown on a Saturday night in summer, and Franco’s was the busiest place in Hampstead.
As soon as he got inside, some tall dude with blow-dried hair and a rugby shirt stepped backward and almost crushed Les’s foot with his Dingos, but Les put his hands on the hips of the dude’s designer jeans and pivoted him sideways. The dude spun around to glare, his beer glass slopping over onto the Dingos, but when he looked at Les’s face he just nodded. Les pushed his way up toward the bar.
He floated up into the cold indifferent realm at the top of his head and grabbed the single empty stool at the bar before some clone of Bobo Farnsworth got it. “Double Glenlivet,” he shouted in the direction of the bartender; when the curly-haired, mustached bartender cocked his head at him, Les shouted it again. “Double Glenlivet!”
“You got it,” the barkeep said. “No need to shout.”
“Hey librarian, listen to this,” Les said when the bartender set down his drink. “You an animal lover? Well, you’ll get a kick out of this. On my way over here, a dog ran into me. You get that? He ran into me. I didn’t even see the little bugger until he was diving straight at me. I tried to turn away from him, but I didn’t have time. Son-of-a-bitch mutt committed suicide.”
“I heard of that,” the bartender said, and turned away.
“You heard of that? What do you mean, you heard of that? I never heard of that.”
“Never heard of lemmings?” The question was from a funny-looking dork one place away at the bar. The dork was definitely not one of the Bobo clones. His glasses were thick and smudgy; his thin hair did not curl, but frizzed. Deep lines crossed his thin forehead. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about the lemmings. Because of something that happened to me today—a lot like your story.” The dork smiled ingratiatingly, and Les shrugged. He was way up inside the icehouse now, and even a pushy dork couldn’t upset him.
“We got this cat,” the dork said. “We call her McIntosh. She’s a Persian, you know? Beautiful long silky hair. We’ve had her ten years—from even before we moved up here from the city. I loved that freaky cat. Well, today my wife was looking out one of the windows on the third floor and she saw McIntosh running across the lawn. She thought the old rascal was going to nail a bird—she’s old, but she can still move when she wants. McIntosh used to get a couple of birds a week, and she’d leave the bloody corpses right on the doorstep where we’d see them first thing when we went out to get the paper.”
The dork swallowed. “But that son of . . . that damned animal wasn’t going after any bird. She was running toward the kids’ wading pool. My wife saw McIntosh run straight up to the pool and dive in—dive in! A cat! McIntosh went right over the side of the wading pool and splashed into the water. My wife just stood there for a second, you know? She couldn’t believe her eyes. She kept waiting for McIntosh to try to get out of the pool. But McIntosh didn’t even try to get out. Her head never even came out of the water. She hit that pool like she meant business, man.” He blinked behind the smudgy lenses. “That’s why I was sitting here thinking about lemmings.”
Les did his best to look clearly at the man who had told him this story. He saw that the man wanted him to say something to him, to speak more about the suicidal dog, to join him in the companionship of feeling beings, to talk about lemmings and what would lead an animal to suicide. He saw that at the most primitive level, the man with the thinning frizzy hair and the smudgy glasses wanted consolation: the consolations of alcohol and bar philosophy, perhaps, but more than that the consolation of emotions exchanged and understood. Les leaned forward, smiled, and said, “Get stuffed.”
The dork recoiled. He spun rapidly forward on his stool and pointed his reddening face into his drink.
Les felt infinitely improved: his face did not move, but up at the top of his mind a smile cracked across his frozen paradise. Up there he felt almost warm.
He looked at his watch, and was pleasantly surprised. Somehow it had gotten to be nine-thirty at night. “Get me another Glenlivet,” he called out to the bartender. The short glass filled with ice cubes and dark fragrant liquid was set down on the oiled wood before him. He lifted it and took a sip of the malt whiskey. As he was appreciating its velvety smoothness, however, an uncomfortable thought penetrated his defenses. If he was such a success, why did he get such pleasure from telling a dork to get stuffed?
Also, if he was such a great success, what was he doing in a bar at nine-thirty while his wife sat alone at home?
He had the answer to that one. “Stuff Patsy too,” he muttered to himself, and put away half of the second Glenlivet.
But now some of that whiskey and the gin which had preceded it was clamoring to get out, and Les slid off his stool and pushed his way around the side of the bar and down the corridor past the telephone where a blond was necking with a beefy guy at the same time as she talked on the telephone. “I know the pot roast is in the oven,” he heard her say. The pot roast in the oven and the boyfriend’s hand on her tits.
He climbed back up into the cold region of peace, because his mind had just given him a picture of ridiculously named Johnnie Ray, his skin all blue and puffed out like the casing on a sausage, weeds caught in his hair, dark lines of damp sand trailing over the swollen chest, sitting in the last booth of the country-club lounge.
The entrance to the men’s room was a few feet down the corridor past the telephone. One of the Bobo-clones was standing before the single urinal, and Les squeezed past him and pushed at the door of the stall. It was locked. Les shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor, which was awash in piss. The small white tiles still bore muddy mopstains from the morning, but they had been overprinted with the dirty ridged patterns of boot soles. The man at the urinal sighed and arched his back. Still spraying, he took a glass of beer from the top of the urinal and gulped. Les watched him with fastidious gloom. He could scarcely bear to breathe. The air seemed a mist of urine and antiseptic.
“You’re in the barrel,” the younger man at the urinal said, zipping up and stepping toward the door.
Les grunted. He gratefully unzipped, took himself out, and let go.
Whoever was in the toilet stall clunked something against the metal wall. Not metal: not the belt buckle Les had at first thought. Softer. As if the person in there had struck his hand against the side of the enclosure.
Then the hand slammed again at the side of the stall. Les glanced uneasily sideways.
“Help me,” whoever was in there said.
Both sides of the stall banged, as if the person in there had thrown his fists out blindly.
“I’m lost,” the voice said.
It was the voice of little Johnnie Ray
Les stopped breathing.
“I’m afraid,” the voice said. Ahm affray-ud.
Now Les heard fingernails scrabbling on the door of the stall.
He knew that if he looked sideways and down he would be able to see a few inches under the side of the stall. His flow of urine had dried up in the last few seconds, and his penis had shriveled back toward his trousers. If he looked under the side of the stall, he would see worn small sneakers, the cuff of jeans . . . Les pushed his shrunken penis back inside and zipped up.
“Help me,” the small Texas voice whispered.
The fingernails slithered across the inside of the door.
Les dared to look down at the space between the wall of the toilet enclosure and the grubby, piss-puddled floor.
A fingerless hand attached to a thin bony wrist was probing up on Les’s side of the gray enclosure. The stump of a hand and the bony wrist were encased in wet black mud.
Deeper inside the enclosure Les saw two black stumpy things that must have been feet.
Les’s stomach moved upward, getting smaller as it went, so that by the time it climbed into his throat it was the size of one of his golf balls. Now he was conscious of the terrible smell in the toilet, the stink so bad it was like a loud noise, the sound of an explosion.
The mud-blackened thing in the stall fell to its knees.
Les backed toward the door, afraid to turn his face away from the stall. When he felt the aluminum handle strike the band of muscle beside his spine, he whirled around and tore open the door. He jumped through the opening and slammed the door.
His stomach was still tightly gathered in his throat. He thought he could hear a slap-slap from the other side of the door, the noise of something soft and damp striking a hard surface. Les’s ears were roaring. He plunged past the bar into the thickest part of the crowd and stumbled toward the door. His second Glenlivet sat next to a ten-dollar bill on the bar, but he never noticed them.
11
Graham Williams was leaning forward on his elbows and saying, “Of course what I had to do was find out what had happened in 1873. And believe me, I had to dig for it. Dorothy Bach, who was fixated on what she thought she knew about the Dragon, wasn’t going to say anything to me. And nobody else . . .”
The pages of the heavy blue-bound book were riffling, leafing themselves over so rapidly they seemed transparent. She felt herself invaded by a sensation she knew to be alien, but for some reason instantly familiar: as the smell of a specific cologne or perfume could evoke the feelings of a memory without revealing the memory itself.
The pages flew past. “No,” Patsy said, and this time the two men looked at her.
Richard Allbee merely looked curious: he looked as if he were just working out that she probably had a headache and was wondering if Williams had any Bufferin in his medicine chest. But the old man looked more than politely concerned. He had opened his mouth and was gazing at her very intently. Neither one of them had noticed the book.
She looked back at the book and saw that the pages had stopped moving. “It . . .” she started to say to Graham Williams, who was boring into her with his eyes. Williams nodded. “It moved,” she said. The old man’s eyes, she noticed for the first time, were a fine blue. The right eye had a single fleck of gold near the iris. “Moved. In my hand.” Then the eyes which were gently pressing her to go on, to say more, to let them know what was happening, were not the old man’s anymore—they were Marilyn Foreman’s eyes.
And the alien but familiar sensation was from all those years ago; it was the Marilyn-sensation. This is why I saw her on the street, Patsy thought. They were going to take my will away and make me see things again. She did not know who they were; they were an alignment of vast universal forces.
One more page flipped over in front of Patsy.
“I saw it happen,” Richard said. “It happened.” He sounded stunned.
Patsy felt just as she had before she’d had the vision of Bates Krell murdering the woman in the silk dress: a terrible thing was coming, but it was her terrible thing, and she could not stop it from unreeling before her. . . .
Something was moving within the open book. The white pages swirled with black. Black lines, lines where the pages were about to burst into flame, flew randomly over the lines of print. Grayish smoke curled just above them.
A green pointed thing broke through the surface of the page.
The green spike continued to rise. A malevolent black eye four inches across came up after it and immediately fixed on Patsy’s eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Patsy heard Richard say. She realized that he could not see the dragon’s head emerging from the pages of the book.
The dragon’s eye seemed to be made of black stone shot with an iridescent wavering pattern of green. As the snout pushed up out of the book, the eye held her fast.
Then the long wrinkled snout was free, and the dragon swung its head sharply and hungrily toward Patsy. The long mouth opened, the malevolent pupilless eyes held hers.
“Patsy?” she heard Richard ask. “Are you all right?”
You’re good, a good man, she thought at a level far too deep for ordinary rational process.
There was the head of a dragon; incredibly, there it was. The hard green spikes on its head were crusty with black and peeling skin. The black eyes were encased in circles of bone. It was a reptilian head, old and strong. Green-black scales lapped away from the eyes and marched down the length of the snout. The crude mouth hung like a gate on a hinge. Patsy’s insides had turned to white powder, to something utterly insubstantial and weightless.
With a start, Patsy realized that through the head of the dragon she could still see Graham Williams. Behind the black eyes floated his sunken blue ones—she could even read his concern in them. Patsy watched as the ugly head retreated into invisibility. The air hissed at her ears. Those few feet of air before her had grown as hot as a glowing slab of iron.
12
“Kitchen,” Gary Starbuck said.
He was playing his flash around the white entry Royce Griffen had stood in the day before his suicide. Finally the beam of the flash settled on the last door off the long corridor. Starbuck moved the light up and down, and after a momentary hesitation, Dicky and Bruce began to move toward the door.
Dicky pushed the door open, then stepped aside for Starbuck to enter. Nearly invisible in his blue clothes, the thief rapidly swept the flash over the counters. He glided through the dark kitchen and opened two drawers, then another. He flashed the light inside them, but took nothing. Bruce Norman saw him shake his head and begin to look around silently and certainly, shooting the light in different directions. Bruce thought he resembled an animal in a forest, a badger or a mole, sniffing out its way.
Starbuck began to move quickly toward a tall door on the far side of the kitchen. This had no knob or handle, and swung freely on its hinges. The three of them crowded into the tiny chamber on the other side of the door. Immediately opposite them was another swinging door—to the dining room, as Starbuck knew.
He played the light over the tall cabinet door in this narrow room. He chose one randomly, it seemed to Bruce. The flash picked out shelves stocked with bottles. On the shelf beneath were jars of nuts. Starbuck moved on to a lower cabinet.
He shone the light inside, and Bruce saw his shoulders hitch. Quickly Starbuck opened two more of the lower cabinet drawers. “Oh boy,” he sighed happily.
Bruce leaned forward to peer into the opened cabinets. Starbuck had taken something from his bag and was pushing it into his hands. This was a green plastic bag—the kind Bobby Fritz used to stuff leaves into when he was clearing a lawn. “Get all of it,” Starbuck said. The thief stood up and shone the light down on an array of silver utensils. The display of silver seemed at least six feet long to Bruce. Every piece was slotted into a kind of holster in a long soft cloth. Bruce and Dicky began sliding the silverware out of the felt pockets and dumping it in the bag. “Take out t
Once the silver was in the plastic bag, Starbuck led them out into the dining room. Here on a sideboard were several ornate silver trays, and these too went into the bag.
From the dining room Starbuck led them into the high-ceilinged living room. As soon as they noticed the wall of windows, the sky shattered: shafts of light ran across the deep blue and zigzagged through the clouds. The light flickered into the living room, and Bruce thought weirdly that he had seen right through his brother’s body—that he had seen Dicky’s heavy bones, and the individual cells of Dicky’s blood sifting in his veins.
The house seemed to shift itself without moving: like an animal’s dream of running.
“What?” Dicky said.
“The piano,” Starbuck said, and flashed the light down to the far end of the room. But they could all see it anyhow, with the weak moonlight layering in through the window wall. The piano was fifteen feet long, every inch of it handmade and shaped; the body was built up of nearly twenty layers of wood bent and curved under precise degrees of tension; the shine on the surface looked as deep as a pool. It was nearly fifty years old. It was a special-order Bösendorfer grand, and Gary Starbuck had a customer in New York City who had wanted one like it for at least a decade. He would pay Gary twenty thousand dollars for it, which was about a fifth of its real value.
“Can we get that monster in the van?” Bruce whispered.
“Just,” Starbuck said. “For now, you two get it out on the patio.” He strode across the room and unlocked the windowed doors in the long wall.
Dicky put his hands under the keyboard and experimentally tried to lift the front of the piano. His upper arms bulged; his jaws worked. He managed to pick it up perhaps half an inch.
“For Christ’s sake, not that way,” Starbuck whispered. “You want to get a hernia? You want to rack yourself up? Get under it. Get your backs under it and lift it with your legs.”