Peter Straub - Floating Dragon

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"Straub's effects are quite spectacular... I was fairly awed by some of the more nightmarish scenes in FLOATING DRAGON."

NEW YORK TIMES

"A book that positively bubbles with invention, jammed with characters, color, events, hackle-raising twists of fate, horrific monsters, terrifying nightmares, and a reality that shimmers and shifts as much as the noxious steam from a witch's cauldron."

BOOK WORLD

"Here is a novel guaranteed to double the national nightmare quotient, so watch out!"

COSMOPOLITAN

"A deliciously imaginative story of hauntings and monsters."

-SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

FLOATING DRAGON

Also by Peter Straub

MARRIAGES

JULIA

IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW

GHOST STORY

SHADOWLAND

BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to events, locales, or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

"When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along" by Harry Woods copyright 1926 Callicoon Music (pursuant to sections 304 [c] and 401 |b] of the U.S. Copyright Law)

This Berkley book contains the complete

text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film.

FLOATING DRAGON

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

G P. Putnam's Sons edition / February 1983 Berkley edition / March 1984

All rights reserved. Copyright 1982 by Peter Straub. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-06285-6

A BERKLEY BOOK TM 757,375 Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016. The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOR

EMMA SYDNEY VALLI STRAUB

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Death of Stony Friedgood

Part One: Entry

Part Two: Establishment

Part Three: Dominion

After the Moon

Now time and the land

are identical,

Linked forever.

John Ashbery, Haunted Landscape

The devil is a dumb spirit. All the

devil knows is what you tell him with

your own big fat mouth.

Frederick K. Price

1962-1963

For Stony Baxter Friedgood, her infrequent adulteries were adventurespicking up a man who thought he was picking her up gave her life a sense of drama missing since she had been twenty and a student at Scripps-Claremont. Not only adventures, they were the salvation of her marriage. In college she had juggled four boyfriends, and only one of them, a mathematics graduate student named Leo Friedgood, had known of the existence of the others. Leo had seemed amused by her secretiveness, as he was amused by her private school nickname. Only after several months did Stony realize the extent to which amusement masked arousal.

She married him just after graduationno graduate school for Stony, and no more for Leo, who shaved his beard and bought a suit and took a job with Telpro Corporation, which had an office in Santa Monica.

1969

Tabby Smithfield grew to the age of five in an enormous stone house in Hampstead, Connecticut, with four acres of well-tended ground and a burglar alarm on the front gates. The neighborhood, consisting of sixteen houses along Long Island Sound, was impressive enough to attract its own tourists; perhaps six cars a day trolled down Mount Avenue, the drivers and passengers leaning to glimpse the mansions behind the gates. Locally, Mount Avenue was "The Golden Mile," though it was twice longer than that; it was the original road between Hillhaven, the Victorian suburb of Patchin, and Hampstead. Mount Avenue, the site of the original farm settlements of Hampstead and Hillhaven, had once been the principal coaching road north to New Haven, but its hectic days were long past. Manufacturers with plants in Bridgeport or Woodville, a doctor, and the head of Patchin County's biggest legal practice lived in the impressive houses, along with others like them, older people who wished no excitement in their private lives. Tourists rubbernecking along the Golden Mile rarely saw themthere might be a visiting movie star taking the sea-laden air along the coastal road or a college president pausing for breath before he made his pitch for funds, but the owners of the houses were invisible.

Outside the gray stone house, however, those taking a fast peek through the opened gates in 1969 might have seen a tall dark-haired man in tennis whites playing with a small boy. Perhaps a uniformed nanny would have been hovering on the steps before the front door, her posture inexplicably tense. And perhaps the boy's posture too would have seemed awkward, inhabited by the same tension, as if little Tabby Smithfield were half-aware that he was not supposed to be playing with his father. They make an oddly static and incomplete scene, father and son and nanny. They are badly composed: one figure is missing.

1964

Stony Friedgood's first affair after her marriage was in 1964, with the husband of a friend, a neighbor in their neat row of tract houses: he was unlike Leo, being jovial and blond and easygoing, a very junior banker, and Leo invariably spoke of him with contempt. This affair endured only two months.

Stony's delicate face, which was sharp-featured and framed in shining brown hair, became familiar in galleries and art museums, in certain bars at certain times. Considered from a utilitarian point of view, one neither Stony's nor Leo's parents could have understood, the Friedgoods had a successful marriage. By the time Leo was promoted twice and transferred to Telpro's New York offices, their income had doubled and Stony weighed only a pound more than when she was a student at Scripps. She left behind her yoga classes, a half-completed gourmet-cooking course, four unused tickets to a concert series, the undigested and already vague memories of six or seven men. Leo left nothing at all behindthe company paid to ship east his sailboat and the eight cases he called his "cellar."

1968

Monty Smithfield, his grandfather, was the great figure in Tabby's early childhood. It was Monty who kissed him first when he returned from nursery school, and Monty and his mother took him to his first haircut. Birthdays and Christmases Monty gave him stupefying presents, vast train sets and every possible sort of preschool vehicle from walkers to Big Wheels, even a dwarf pony stabled at a riding school. This was presented with much fanfare at Tabby's third birthday. August, 1968. Monty had provided a party for twenty children, a band playing Beatle songs and tunes from Disney movies, an ice sculpture of a brontosaurusTabby loved dinosaurs then, and only evolution kept Monty Smithfield from buying his grandson a baby monster. "Come on, Clark," called the jubilant old man as the gardener led out the shaggy little pony. "Mount your son on this great beast." But Clark Smithfield had gone inside to his bedroom and was at that moment whacking a tennis ball against the elaborate headboard with a well-worn Spaulding racket, trying to chip the paint off one of the wooden curlicues.