Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  I knew it was my duty to take a survey of my property, so to speak, before rushing in to stake claim, and I processed around the perimeter of the ruin, observing how weeds had thrust themselves up between the stones, how the fire had charred the scattered bricks to the shade of overdone toast, how swales in the earth marked the former cellars. I saw destruction continuing in the pull of gravity on rotting beams and the erosion of roof tiles. At the front of the building, roof-high courses of joined stone extended some twenty feet from the fireplace wall. Rectangular casings with deep sills marked the third- and second-story windows. Beneath them, at roughly the level of my chin, smooth, arched casements speckled with bird dung gazed out from what had been the parlor. I placed my trembling hands on a gritty sill and looked within.

  Light streamed into a two-sided enclosure three stories high. Dusty particles filtered down to a cement floor littered with plaster, broken pipes, and charred timbers. Here and there, grass struggled up through cracks in the cement. Paw prints dotted the thick, feather-strewn dust. On the other side stood the forest. I jumped, grabbed the far side of the sill with both hands, and squirmed forward until I could get my legs onto the flat stone. Then I lowered myself to the floor and entered my inheritance for the first time.

  Or: my inheritance entered me.

  You who read the words I here inscribe upon the pages of a Boorum & Pease record book or journal with the same dependable Mont Blanc fountain pen used in former days to draft my instructional missives to the world already know the significance of the ruined house to Your Great Race. It was within its sacred enclosure that the Great Old Ones imbued my early torments and humiliations with the salvific Splendor of Preparation. An Elder God spoke, and I learned All. His Voice was low, husky, confiding, weary with age-old authority, yet powerful, commanding. I heard some pleasure in there, too, for my Unearthly Father, whose True Identity I still knew not, was giving me the lowdown on the Mighty Task for which I had been placed upon this Earth. My Role came clear, my Nature given Explanation. Half-human, half-God, I was the Opener of the Way, and my Task was Annihilation. After me, the Apocalypse, the entry through a riven sky of my leathery, winged, beclawed, ravenous Ancestors the Elder Gods, the Destruction of mankind, Your long-awaited repossession of the earthly realm. I advanced through the rubble, added my rump’s outline to the footprints of passing animals and was spoken to. By reason of my own frailty I should be cursed in time with a traitorous shadow it was my responsibility to eliminate. (In the surprisingly congenial surroundings of the Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, PA, I was to hear more of this.) You Great Ones, my Fathers, depended upon my efforts. The mighty Voice said, We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth. I loved that phrase, it spoke to me of that inexorable devastation Given as my Sacred Task. I repeat it to myself, talismanically: We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth. These words sustain me. I was told that my only significant pleasures should be found in the accomplishment of my Task. On the other hand, insignificant pleasures, precisely those of a sort most appealing to a lad like myself, would not be denied. In the midst of the endless sorrow, a great deal of fun was in the offing.

  I could certainly have gotten away scot-free if I had killed Maureen Orth, which was what I had in mind for her once I got the sex part out of the way. The only reason I ran into trouble was that she got home. Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up. I wasn’t going to kill her in the woods, I was going to kill her in the ruins.

  I wanted to see Maureen’s close-set eyes fly open when I looked at some visiting pigeon, stopped its heart, and tumbled it stone-cold dead from its perch. I wished to add to the effect by announcing my intention of floating eight inches off the ground and lingering there for a count of, say, ten, even though the effort would have brought sweat cascading from every pore of my body. I depended on the lassie to declare, That’s a fib, nobody can do that. Then I wanted to see the expression on her homely mug when I proved her wrong. I looked forward to dazzling my pathetic sweetie with a few other tricks, too, before I killed her.

  In the meantime, I couldn’t help myself, I was impulsive, I know, a number of insecure maidens had accompanied me into the woods to end their pointless lives on the floor of my classroom. I did go to the trouble of interring most of the bodies, but I might as well have let them rot. The search parties never came near the ruins. In any case, I had outgrown this sort of exhibitionism by the time I was thrown out of the academy.

  14 Mr.X

  In essence, boarding schools are all the same, especially to those who are as smoke from the cannon’s mouth and wind up getting expelled from one tweedy snakepit after another. Actual military school, in my case good old Fortress, of Owlsburg, Pennsylvania, to which my father sent me in a last convulsion of disgust, suited me far better than its civilian imitations. My father had informed me that failure at this last resort would derail the gravy train—no more monthly deposits into my account, no inheritance, no trust fund, finis—thereby compelling me to work at least hard enough to pass the courses. I rather liked my uniform’s chill, fascist pomp. Because I entered in the senior, or Cavalry, year, one of my duties was to bully the students beneath me, those in Artillery, Quartermaster, and especially Infantry, which was packed like sardines with doe-eyed fourteen-year-olds in a desperate sweat to please their overlords. We were supposed to reduce these children to whimpering blobs of panic, and they had to take it without protest or complaint.

  I spent one of the happiest years of my young life in that place. As soon as I understood the deal, I drove out my roommate, a prep-school expellee like myself named Squiers whose babble had exhausted my patience before the end of our first day together. Thereafter, in my palatial single I was free to do as I wished. I did not at all mind the necessity, due to my parents’ refusal to have me come home, of spending the Thanksgiving vacation and Christmas break at school.

  The only sign of impending difficulty occurred early in March, when my calculus instructor and unit commander, Captain Todd Squadron, drew me aside to announce that he would be visiting my quarters at 2100 hours that evening. I found this news alarming. Captain Squadron, a by-the-book regular army type whom I had bluffed into admiration from the day of my arrival, lately had grown cooler, almost dismissive. I feared that he had seen through my performance. I hoped that he had not discussed my “case” with an all-seeing dreadnought named Major Audrey Arndt, whom I had taken considerable pains to avoid. One other possibility was an even greater worry. After his arrival in my room, I discovered that both of these matters, the not so serious and the positively grave, were on his mind.

  I saluted and stood at attention. Captain Squadron growled, “At ease,” and gestured me to my cot. His oddly wary, knowing attitude was laced with the dismissiveness I had lately sensed in him. When I had perched on the cot, Squadron leaned against my dresser and gazed down at me for a long moment transparently intended to unnerve.

  “What is it with you, anyhow, Pledge?”

  I asked what he meant.

  “You’re different, aren’t you?”

  “I hope I might take that as a compliment, sir.”

  “There’s an example of what I mean, right there. After the Infantry intake, most transfers are foul balls.” He pulled at his uniform jacket, automatically aligning it with his trousers. “They got bounced out of so many schools their parents just want to keep them in line. Even though most of them aren’t too swift, they all think they’re smarter than we are. Every last one has a big, big problem with authority.”

  “Not me, sir,” I said. “I respect authority.”

  He gave me a sullen glare. “I cordially suggest that you stop jukin’ with me, Pledge.”

  We were all pledges, no matter what class we were in. I considered saying “Sir, the pledge is not familiar with the term ‘jukin’ with,’ sir,” but kept my mouth shut.

  “It falls to us to straighten up these sorry-ass rebels as best we can. As a general rule, we have about a sixty-fo
rty chance if we get them in their second year. If they come into Artillery, it’s less than fifty-fifty we can pound some sense into their heads. By Cavalry, it’s a lost cause. All we do is, we concentrate on teaching them to stand up straight and how to tell their right foot from the left one so they can manage the drills, and we push them through the course work until they graduate and get the hell out.” He folded at the waist like a puppet, tightened his shoelaces, and snapped upright again. “If it was up to me, we’d refuse to transfer students into Cavalry. Eighteen is too old to adapt to our way of life.”

  He turned to face the mirror over my dresser and gave the jacket another series of precise tugs. He lifted his chin and examined the effect. “The little clowns come in laughing, and I have to waste a hellacious amount of time convincing them with all the means at my disposal, which are many, that we are not to be sneered at.” He caught my eyes in the mirror. “I believe I can claim a one hundred percent success rate at carrying out that particular mission. Maybe those feebs were a long way from being soldiers when they walked through the gate for the last time, but I guarantee you this much, they were believers.” He was still holding my eyes.

  “I became a believer as soon as I got here,” I said. “Sir.”

  Squadron turned around and leaned against the dresser without bending. His wide, blunt face was distorted by a broken nose that would have made him look like a fighter had it not been the size of the nose on a shrunken head. “I’ll give you this much, you had me fooled.”

  “Sir?”

  “You had me thinking, this pledge is going to change your mind about admissions policy, Captain. In a couple of days, he snaps off a salute could shatter a brick. Trims his uniform like a West Point grad. In a week, memorized the Reg Book and Lore and Traditions. Respectful and well prepared in class. Okay, he had a little problem with his roommate, but these things happen. Fact is, Pledge Squiers is an unrelenting motormouth who should have been paired with a deaf-mute. This new pledge fit in from the moment his shoe leather hit Pershing Quad and is a fine asset to his class. Look at the way he braces those squirts in Infantry! He’s a goddamned natural! You know what that young man is?” He pushed himself off the dresser, raised his arms at his sides and gazed upward. “That young man is officer material!”

  “I do my best,” I said.

  Captain Squadron canted backward against the dresser and pushed his hands into his pockets. In the mirror, the clean line of a fresh haircut curved above the starched collar of his tan shirt. The dark stubble on his head and his tiny, dented nose made him look like a gas station attendant. “You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you?” He smiled exactly as if he had just decided to punch someone in the face.

  “I don’t follow you, sir,” I said.

  “How many friends have you made here? Who are your pals, your asshole buddies?”

  I named three or four dullards in my class.

  “When was the last time you and one or more of your buddies took the bus into town, caught a movie, had a few burgers, that kind of thing?”

  The question meant that he already knew the answer. When we left the grounds we had to sign out in groups. I had taken the bus into Owlsburg once, looked around at the dreary streets, and returned immediately. “I tend to devote my weekends to study.”

  He rocked back and smiled again. “I’m inclined to think that you have no friends and zero interest in making any. Didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, did we? Or over Christmas break.”

  “You know I didn’t, sir,” I said, beginning to get irritated with the captain’s theatrics.

  “Christmas is a major, major holiday. It’s a rare pledge who doesn’t get home for Christmas.”

  “I explained that,” I said. “My folks invited me to go to Barbados with them, but I wanted to spend the vacation studying for the finals.”

  He grinned like a wolf. “Should we go down the hall and call your parents, ask them a few questions?”

  Again, he already knew the truth. Squadron had checked on my story. “Okay,” I said, cursing myself for having succumbed to the temptation of a colorful lie. “If I got along with my family, would I be here in the first place? It isn’t easy to say that your parents hate you so much they won’t even let you come for Christmas!”

  “Why would they hate their own kid like that?”

  “We had misunderstandings,” I said.

  He looked up at the ceiling. “I was so impressed by your conduct that I started to wonder why a young man like yourself had been asked to leave all those boarding schools. Five of them, to be exact. Didn’t mesh with what I was seeing. So I looked into your files.” He smiled at me with his smug challenge. “Damned if I could find anything there but smoke.”

  “Smoke, sir?”

  “Evasions. ‘Bad influence on the school.’ ‘Antagonistic behavior.’ ‘Considered threatening.’ None of these dildos was willing to get down to the nitty-gritty. You know what that told me?”

  “I’m sorry to admit it, but I probably acted like a bully,” I said.

  He pretended not to have heard. “Two things. Put on record, your infractions would bar you from admission anywhere except the state pen. But they couldn’t pin anything on you, so they took the easy way out and passed you along.”

  “I don’t think—”

  He held up a hand like a stop sign. “So far this year, six pledges in Infantry have washed out voluntarily. Normally, it’d be two at most. Over at the infirmary? A rash of broken bones. Once or twice in a normal year, a pledge breaks an arm. Now, they’re coming in once a week with broken fingers, broken wrists, broken arms. Concussion. One boy turned out to have internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. How’d he get it? ‘I twisted my ankle and fell down the stairs.’ And then there’s the case of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. You knew him, didn’t you?”

  “After a fashion,” I said, meaning that I had known Artillery Pledge Fletcher in a most specific fashion. This was the serious matter I had hoped Captain Squadron would not bring up. An unassuming, scholarly-looking boy with round, horn-rimmed glasses and a rosebud face, Fletcher had forever enriched my life through an ultimately fatal act of courtesy.

  On the Thursday of the week given over to the examinations before the Christmas break, I had seen him immersed in a book at a long table in the library. The pledges on both sides were also reading books from stacks piled in front of them, and it was not until the second time I looked at them that I noticed what was different about Fletcher. The others were taking notes on the contents of volumes of military history, but Fletcher was perusing, apparently for his own entertainment, a brightly jacketed work of fiction. Moved by an instinct I did not as yet comprehend, I walked past the table and saw that the title of the book was The Dunwich Horror. The combination of the title and the lurid cover illustration instantly struck me with a lesser version of that force which had first drawn me into Johnson’s Woods. I had to have that book. That book was mine. For an hour, I twitched in my seat, taking desultory notes and keeping an eye on Fletcher.

  When he stood up, I collected my things and rushed alongside him. Yes, he said, he would be happy to loan me the book after he had finished reading it. He surrendered it for inspection with the comment that it was “really spooky.” Fletcher had no idea of the accuracy of his description. Emitting a series of pulsations, the little tract shivered in my hands. It was like gripping a hummingbird.

  During the following day, roughly half the pledges, those finished with exams, left campus in wave upon wave of family cars. Fletcher’s last final, chemistry, took place on Saturday at the same hour as mine, military philosophy. However, Fletcher assumed that I had already left school, and at five-thirty on Friday afternoon, while on his way to Mess Hall, entered my room without pausing to knock. He found me in, so to speak.

  Until my delivery into Fortress Military Academy, the struggles to continue my real education had been largely unrewarded. I needed privacy, and even when I managed to secure a safely uninterrup
ted hour or two, my efforts had advanced me little beyond what I had already attained. Now I see that weary lull largely as a matter of physical maturation. A developmental spurt had added two inches and twenty pounds to my frame before my admission to the world of close-order drills, and by the time Pledge Fletcher charged in with the sacred book, I was making my first baby steps toward Moveless Movement, whatever it’s called, disappearing from one place and turning up in another.

  As ever, a paradox is involved, namely that until it becomes second nature the muscular capacity demanded by this stunt gets in the way of doing it. By Christmas break of that year I had succeeded in shifting myself across the four feet from the edge of my cot to my desk chair by means of a sweaty interlude during which I was neither in one place or the other but in both, imperfectly. Whatever that looked like while it was happening is what Fletcher saw when he barged into my room. I can’t even guess. My bowels churned, and someone was driving a railroad spike into my head. What I was able to see in the midst of the clamor increased my distress. Two uniformed pledges charged in through two different doors. A swarm of glittering light and my considerable physical distress rendered the invader or invaders visible only in silhouette form as he or they abruptly ceased to move.

  From the cot, I saw one of them freeze in front of the open door. From the slightly clearer, closer perspective of the chair, I saw a uniformed torso and waist come to rest beside the door’s dark green panel. From both positions I observed the bright dust jacket of the book in my visitor’s hand, and both the me on the cot and the me in the chair experienced a surge of demand. Our attempt at an order commanding the pledge to stay put produced the sibilant hiss of a needle striking the grooves of a 78-rpm record. The pledge couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to—the kid was glued to the floor.