Floating Dragon

  Again the house made its mysterious moveless tremor.

  “What?” Dicky said.

  “Do I have to repeat myself?” Starbuck asked.

  His flashlight found the mirror where it stood on the wall among the Impressionist paintings.

  Then for a second or less, another oddity occurred in that house, something that really only Dicky Norman would notice, but which would haunt Bruce Norman’s mind in the weeks after his brother’s awful death. Dicky had said, “What?” again, and sounded so stupid Bruce wanted to brain him, but Bruce had turned like Dicky in the direction of the flash. And he had almost seen, or he had thought he had seen, that the mirror did not reflect the light, but took it in and swallowed it. The beam of light (this, he thought, was what had made Dicky speak) fell into the ornate mirror like a stone into a well: as if the mirror were sucking the light out of the flashlight, and would take it all, would drain the batteries dry . . . but then there was a bursting dazzle on the mirror’s surface, and a beam from within the depths of the mirror came up to meet their own.

  13

  As soon as Les McCloud had closed the door of the bar behind him, cutting off the rumble and chatter of the patrons and the bing-bing of the cash register (which had just rung up no sale on the last bill Les would ever fold into his money clip), he inhaled hugely. His stomach had gradually crept back down to its proper place in his body. The alcohol he had taken during the day now was burning like a lump of charcoal somewhere in his gut. Les gulped more air. He did not want to think about what he had just escaped in the men’s room at the back of Franco’s, he wanted only to get home . . . but in his mind he saw that stumpy hand come probing from under the partition, and his stomach tightened and shrank again.

  He wanted to get home, yes. And if Patsy were in the spare bedroom, he would straighten her out. Come to think of it, no matter where she was, he was going to straighten her out.

  Everything came back to Patsy. When he got home he’d back Patsy into a corner of the bedroom and raise a few big purple bruises on her shoulders, then on her sides (and she’d be screeching by then, the big tears would be rolling down her nose), and then he’d pop her one in the gut. . . . Les almost smiled.

  He stepped down onto the sidewalk on Station Row and turned up toward his car. A small black shape dipped out of the sky and twittered past his head.

  Les swung his hand at it, thinking that a bird was attacking him. The shape darted crazily off into the streetlight’s illumination, and he saw that it was a bat at the same time he saw two more bats fluttering toward him over the top of the streetlamp.

  One of the bats swung right at his face. A fishhooklike claw on one of its feet sliced his cheek, and Les screamed with pain and disgust as he hit out at it. A blow like a stone struck his chest. Les opened his eyes, for the first time aware that he had closed them, and saw the second bat clinging to his jacket. Its wings were folded like creaky robes, the little head turned up to his. He furiously swept at it with his hands, but the bat tightened its grip and chattered up at him. He saw loathing in its tiny black eyes. He plucked at the leathery body but its claws were dug far into the fabric of his jacket.

  When he looked up he saw the sky full of chattering particles. Bats swooped over the streetlight and fluttered past the front of the station. Another came diving in toward the side of his head, and Les ducked just in time to see its clawlike toes, the tiny head like a ball of dried snot staring at him. A shimmering flag of bats wheeled toward him.

  Les bolted toward his car. The bat sticking to his jacket bounced as he ran, thudding softly against Les’s chest. One of the oncoming bats thudded against his head; another flapped straight into his face before it fell away. Les put his hands over his face. He felt a sudden sharp pain bloom in his right ear, and a moment later he felt blood dripping down his neck.

  When he at last reached his car, he seemed to be in a cloud of bats, a world of bats. He yanked at the Mazda’s handle.

  The door was locked. One of the bats tangled itself in Les’s hair, and he grunted in disgust as he slapped it away. Another bat fastened on his sleeve, and he slammed its body against the outside of the window. The bat dropped to the road.

  Another of them whapped into the side of his head, and he staggered sideways. They were boiling around his head, and Les clamped his eyes shut after a set of needling claws brushed his forehead.

  Les swirled his hands up in the air and connected with his left, brushing one of the small bodies away. He had to get his car keys out of his pocket, and he hunched his back and turned away from the majority of the bats while he waved his left hand in front of his face and dug in his pants pocket with his right.

  A bat settled on the waving hand and extended its wings. He could feel the needle claws settling into his skin. As long as they don’t bite, went through his mind. His fingers found his car keys.

  The bat on his head sank its teeth into his skin; the face, half a baby’s, half a dog’s, swiveled toward him.

  Les bellowed and flapped his hand, dislodging the bat, which hovered two feet before his face and looked at him with implacable hatred. Les wanted to kill this bat—he wanted to toss it to the ground and jump on it, cracking its ribs and shredding its filthy wings. The other bats momentarily separated before him, and he saw the one that had bitten him skitter six inches up into the light from the station lamp. Les jumped forward and swung, but the bat skittered away again. The bat still clinging to his jacket bumped against his chest when he landed. Les swung out again at the bat that had bitten him, and saw that the back of his right hand was bloody. He could feel the blood dripping down his forehead and soaking into his eyebrow, and now his collar was wet with it. Les groaned and trotted back to his car.

  He twisted the key in the lock, cracked the door, and slid quickly in, banging his head on the frame. He slammed the door shut after him.

  A small clutching body stirred near his heart.

  Les uttered an inarticulate roar of panic and disgust. He looked down at the bat still clinging to his jacket, and the bat’s eyes locked on his.

  “Uh . . . uh . . . uh,” Les grunted, tearing at his jacket. The bat continued to fix him with its small eyes. At last Les got one arm out of its sleeve and whipped the jacket around the back of his head, almost weeping with disgust and fury. In a second the jacket was a ball of material before him on his lap, the sleeves dangling from either side of the ball like elephants’ trunks. Les threw it on the dash and began battering it with both fists. He felt the animal inside the jacket struggle and tremble, fighting to claw its way out, but he banged it and banged it with his fists until it was still. Les was drooling. Blood and sweat plastered his hair to his head. He raised both fists and battered the limp thing in the jacket again. He lifted his fists and dropped them weakly on the pulpy remains. “Got you,” he breathed.

  Then he saw that his windshield was blanketed with small furry bodies.

  Les gunned his car forward and almost instantly caromed off the steering wheel as the Mazda slammed into the car in front. His mouth wide open but no sounds coming from it, he backed hard into the car behind him, then hauled at the wheel and shot out of his parking spot. A section of bats near the edge of his side of the windshield tumbled away.

  As he turned right at the end of the block, he remembered to turn on his lights; one of them seemed to work.

  Les turned left at the next corner, blasting through as the light changed from amber to red. From what he could see through the corner of the windshield where he had visibility, his was the only car on the road. He twisted the Mazda into the ramp for the east-bound side of I-95.

  Here there were no toll stations until Stratford, twenty minutes up the road. Les floored the accelerator, and saw the bats flatten out against the windshield: two or three at the farthest edges flipped into the airstream.

  He rocked the car sharply to the left, then to the right, and back again. He never heard them, but other drivers blasted their horns behind him.
r />   His maneuvers had cleared the windshield of all but half a dozen bats. Their red eyes glared in at him, their tiny mouths worked, and he knew they were screeching at him. Les could see their mouths working in an almost human way. Whatever they were saying slipped backward in the breeze.

  Les looked at his speedometer and saw that he was going just under ninety miles an hour. Another one of the bats flapped upward and peeled off the windshield like a black leaf.

  Les emitted a trembling, high-pitched giggle and for the first time felt his shoulders loosen. He lifted his foot from the accelerator. The lights flowing by on the west-bound lane seemed reassuringly ordinary: people going somewhere.

  Then Les became aware of another presence in the car. Some small dark shape was in the other bucket seat. Les unconsciously said, “Hey,” and looked toward it. What looked like a nine- or ten-year-old boy made completely of mud slumped against the black fabric of the seat. Water dripped from the mud-boy and pooled on the cushion.

  A lung-searing blast of foulness struck Les, the odor he had caught on the golf course magnified a hundred times. The odor formed a hot brick in Les’s chest. The boy opened his eyes.

  “I’m lost,” he croaked. “I’m afraid.”

  Les came down on his accelerator with all his weight. He was screaming, but he did not know it. He was traveling at just over a hundred and fifteen miles an hour when he rammed into the side of another car a quarter-mile up I-95, a Toyota Celica belonging to Mr. Harvey Pilbrow of West Haven, Connecticut, and killed Mr. Pilbrow’s eighteen-year-old son, Daniel, and his girlfriend, Molly Witt, also eighteen and of West Haven. Les McCloud died only an instant after the two young people; their cars sent up a plume of flame fifty feet high.

  14

  Patsy opened her eyes. “Something’s happened,” she said, then realized that she was lying down on the couch in Graham Williams’ living room.

  “How do you feel?” the old man asked.

  “Something happened,” she repeated.

  “You’re right, something happened,” Richard Allbee said, coming into her field of vision. He took her hand, and warmth seemed to spread out from his touch. “You passed out after the book stopped moving.”

  “Oh,” Patsy said. “The book.”

  “Are you all right?” Williams asked.

  “Help me sit up,” she said, and Richard pulled her upright on the couch while she swung her legs down. Her head was as light as if it held only bubbles. She realized that she could not stand. “I’ll be okay pretty soon.”

  “Remember the book?” Richard asked. He was still holding her hand, and knelt on the floor before her, looking into her eyes with an expression of total concern.

  “I do, but that’s not what I mean,” she said. Richard let her hand go, and went back a few feet to hear her out.

  Patsy did not know how much she could say. Already she feared to sound crazy, even to these people, who knew so much about her. She had had a fit of some kind, she supposed; she remembered the Marilyn-sensation, and the head of the dragon rising up from the book—that much she would tell. But the fit made her feel guilty and ashamed for her lack of control. It also made her feel dirty. That she’d passed out in the midst of it somehow connected itself in her mind with her husband, with Les; with her failed marriage.

  And that was the part she could not discuss with these men, as much as she already cared for them. Before she had awakened, she had seen a column of fire and had understood that her marriage was being cleansed in that fire. Real destruction, real cleansing. In this was a danger as present as that intended by the dragon. What had gone through her mind in the instant before she had awakened was that Tabby Smithfield was very near to death.

  But did that mean that Tabby was in the column of fire? And if he was in that pyre or going toward it, then . . .

  “Just relax, Patsy,” Graham Williams was saying.

  . . . how did that connect to her marriage? She did not see how it was possible, but what was happening to Tabby was going to echo through her future with Les McCloud, whatever that was to be. She wished the boy were there before her now, so that she could hug him with all her strength. She looked straight into Richard Allbee and thought, I’d like to hug you too.

  “Oh, I don’t know what I mean,” she said, and saw a line of worry furrow between Richard’s eyebrows. “But I guess the two of you didn’t see it, did you? The dragon’s head?”—it was such an extraordinary sentence to utter.

  The line between his eyebrows grew deeper.

  “It came up out of the book. It was looking at me.”

  She remembered that black eye shot with the wandering pattern of bright green—like a stone.

  “We didn’t see it,” Graham said. He looked as shaken as she by what she had said. “But I believe that you saw it, Patsy. And you know what it means, don’t you? It means . . .”

  “He was warning us,” Richard said.

  “Gideon Winter was turning his attention to us,” Williams said. “That’s what it means. In that sense, it’s a warning.” He snatched up the book, and then looked at Patsy with wide eyes. “It’s hot.”

  Richard reached over to touch the book; he glanced again at Patsy after his fingers had rested on the page. He nodded.

  “I don’t want to touch it,” Patsy said.

  “No, but I want you to look at the page,” Williams said, and held up the book with the pages spread out before her. She saw the black lines burned into the paper. There were more of them than she had remembered. A few of the burn marks were just dark squiggles over the lines of print. These reminded her suddenly of bats, and just as that occurred to her, she thought she saw one of the bat-squiggles move, one of the wings flap in a broken and unhealthy way. Les, she thought, and a second later: Tabby.

  “I saw the burn marks before,” she said. “They came just before . . . just before it did.”

  “I don’t mean the burn marks,” Williams said. “Look at the dates on the tops of the pages.”

  Patsy looked. At the tops of the pages were a pair of dates, the same for both of the facing pages. 1873–1875. She shook her head. Williams held the book toward Richard and let him see the dates.

  “1873–1875,” Richard said. “Don’t tell me. More roasted children.”

  “Not quite,” Williams said. “But you’re on the right track. It’s the next date in the cycle. In 1811, the entire congregation of the Greenbank Congregational Church was killed by a freak accident on Kendall Point. By the way, and this is important, there were two Williamses among those who fell into the fissures, and two Taylers, a father and daughter, and four Greens. And an old man named Smyth. Mrs. Bach didn’t tell me that—she didn’t want to tell me that—but I looked it up in the newspapers. The Kendall Point accident nearly wiped out all our families. After that, all our families weren’t in Greenbank proper for a long time. My relatives lived in Patchin, as did the surviving Greens. They were members of the Patchin Congregational Church, and so they survived the day. In 1841, Rustum Tayler went crazy, went crazy all the way instead of the half-crazy he’d been all his life, and killed those two children and ate most of them before Anthony Jennings led a posse that found him sitting at the top of his roasting pit.”

  “Ate them,” Patsy said. She closed her eyes and caught a dimming afterimage of the column of flame. Tabby. Where was he?

  “Ate them. Mrs. Bach didn’t feel that the last days of a half-wit Tayler were worthy of being in her book, but she read the same newspapers I did, and she knew about it. And she had walked through that old Greenbank Cemetery on the Greenbank Road, about two miles from here, and she had seen the headstones for the children Rustum Tayler killed. The headstones are still there. Sarah Allen, 1835–1841. Taken Cruelly from Us. And Thomas Kirby McCauley Moorman, 1834–1841. ‘Little Tom.’” Graham Williams put down the book. “It’s cooling down now. Yes, she knew about those children all right, but she didn’t write about their deaths any more than she wanted to write about what happen
ed in 1873, and for the same reason. I’m not even sure she was conscious of it, but she wanted to hide Gideon Winter behind the most day-to-day view of things.”

  Williams looked sharply at Patsy. “Do you want to rest, Patsy?”

  “I’m going to be fine,” Patsy said in a faraway voice.

  “Well, what did happen in 1873?” Richard asked.

  “One person from each of our families died in a fire at a mill,” Williams said. “But so did forty-one other people. July and August of 1873 were called ‘The Black Summer’ for two decades—it was more than a year before strangers began coming through Hampstead again. Oh, they came through on the coaches, but they came through fast and they didn’t stop, they just rolled on until they got to Hillhaven. The reason I know that is that in 1874 a new coach inn called the Halfway House was put up in Hillhaven. There had always been a Halfway House in Hampstead, right on the Greenbank Road in fact, but after 1873 it just seems to have fallen in on itself . . . it went out of business and slipped right out of the records. After the Black Summer people seemed to avoid Hampstead. I’ve looked at the logs of ships that docked in Hampstead harbor—now that’s where the yacht club is—for years, right on up from the 1860’s, and seen that starting in 1873, they went the couple miles farther up the coast to the Hillhaven harbor. After about 1875, they came back here again. But I’ll tell you something Dorothy Bach didn’t keep out of her book. Before the Black Summer, the town population of Hampstead was 1,045. Two years later, in 1875, the Town Council held its own census. The population of Hampstead was 537.”

  “Half of them died?” Richard asked incredulously. “I thought you said only forty-five people died that summer.”

  “Well, a lot of them probably moved out,” Williams said. “They could have gone just up the road into Hillhaven or Patchin, or as far as they had to go in order to think they were safe, and I think a couple hundred of them probably did just that. They were betting that later they could come back and find their houses pretty much the way they’d left them. You find a real flurry of livestock transfers during and just after the Black Summer. People selling up and getting out.”