Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  I stopped pretending to be shocked and sat on the edge of my cot, watching and listening. The inside of my body, everything from the back of my throat down to below my waist, had become a block of ice.

  “Are we done now, sir?”

  “Affirmative. This conversation is concluded.” He locked my eyes with his. “I’ll be watching you, Pledge. If I catch you stepping an inch out of line, I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks, and you’ll be out of uniform before you know what happened. Is that understood?”

  “Affirmative,” I said. “Sir.”

  “I wish to God your parents had put you into some other military school.” He gave me a withering glare. “I’ll take Artillery Pledge Fletcher’s book with me. I want to see what’s so god-awful important in those stories.”

  My heart nearly stopped, like Fletcher’s. “Please don’t, sir. I haven’t read it yet.”

  He tucked the book under his elbow. “Report to my office one week from today, and I’ll give it back. Unless Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher want it returned to them. That will be all.”

  I watched him strut to the door of my room.

  What happened next can only be explained by the combination of loathing, terror, and desperation blasting through me. If I had any thoughts, they had to do with the necessity of reclaiming the sacred book, but it would be more truthful to say that I was incapable of anything like thought. Without having moved, I was standing next to Captain Squadron, who was beginning to register the first traces of alarm. I seemed to be twice my actual size, though I believe this to have been an illusion produced by the condition that enables mothers to lift up the fronts of cars posing threats to their infants.

  I had no idea of what I was going to do. I certainly had no idea of what I was going to do to Captain Squadron. In fact, I still don’t really know how I did it, since duplication of the feat has resisted me ever since. I don’t suppose any of those mothers ever picked up a car a second time, either. I touched the book and, as if I had done this kind of thing a hundred times before, felt myself flow into his mind and voicelessly command its surrender. With the book safely returned to my hands, I used the same instinctive power to impel him toward the center of the room. The interior of Squadron’s mind reported a sensation akin to that of being blown backward by a great wind.

  Captain Squadron remained incapable of speech as I withdrew from his mind. An enormous battery deep within me thrummed into life. At that moment, a certain crucial revelation that was to shape all the rest of my life came to me. I say “came to me,” meaning that it entered me like a clear, silver stream and gave momentary form to the uproar. Once again I had heard the voice from Johnson’s Woods.

  Captain Squadron stood in the center of my room, perhaps two yards away from me. I glided toward him as if across an icy pond on a pair of figure skates. I don’t think I touched him. I recall that almost impersonal sensation of emptying that accompanies evacuation. My joints suffered the bone-deep ache associated with arthritis. My head seemed to have been split by an axe. Maybe the mommies who hoist those automobiles off their babies feel the same way, I don’t know. What I do know is that Captain Squadron had vanished from the room. A greenish puddle about four inches in diameter lay on the floor, and a wet, deathly stink hung in the air.

  I overcame my agonies long enough to wipe up the captain’s remains with a towel, washed it off in the sink, and fell on the cot to dwell on my revelation.

  This was what I had been told a fraction of a second before I reduced Captain Todd Squadron to a half-pint of bile: one day, a day long distant, there would appear in the earthly realm an enemy more serious, more consequential, than Captain Squadron. My enemy would be like a shadow-self or a hidden double self, for when grown to adulthood he would possess the power to inhibit the coming of the Last Days, as certain protagonists in the tales of the Providence Master had frustrated the designs of my true ancestors. This Anti-Christ would be most vulnerable when still a child, yet evil forces would conspire to protect him from destruction at my hands. As my enemy grew to adulthood, he would partake of a portion of my own talents, thereby increasing the difficulty of my task, and for this damnable complication there was an excellent reason. My enemy was also the smoke from the cannon’s mouth—he was going to be a member of the family. In fact, he was going to be my son.

  15 Mr.X

  Only a little remains to be told before I lay down my pen for the night. The disappearance of Captain Squadron from the academy excited a brief flurry of renewed attention centered upon the possibility of a connection between the captain’s flight and the death of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. When a rigorous check of his background revealed that the captain had retired from the regular army under suspicion of having molested a small boy in the town of Lawton, Oklahoma, the possibility hardened into a certainty. The subsequent manhunt went on, I believe, for several years, with no more result than the temporary detention of a surprising number of fellows bearing a resemblance to its target. I kept an amused eye on the proceedings throughout the remainder of my career as a pledge and was rewarded for my good behavior by the gift of a summer abroad.

  I idled away the happy hours in the fleshpots of Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. My parents may not have wanted me to come home, but my father, as ever good as his word, engineered by means of a hefty donation my acceptance to his alma mater, Yale University. An arrest and imprisonment for the petty crime of breaking and entering soon put an end to that, and after release from prison, I embarked upon my wandering career. I found a convenient way in which to persuade the family of my demise, no doubt a great relief. As a source of funds I turned instinctively to what is known as racketeering. Crime is a form of study akin to calculus or military philosophy, and like them yields itself to the superior intellect. It was not long before my understanding of every variety of criminal endeavor, including the care, feeding, and intimidation of one’s staff, placed me in a position of leadership. Carefully timed use of my powers didn’t hurt, either, especially when it came to intimidation. Your average thug’s carapace of hoodlum detachment covers a deep well of superstition. Before I was thirty, I had become a Lord of Crime and done so, it should be noted, without any of the customary family connections.

  Yet I grew weary of the constant obligations attendant upon being a Lord of Crime and began to feel, as do ordinary mortals, the tug of home. Call it a midlife crisis, I could care less, but the truth is that I considered myself an artist as well as a criminal. (If only I had known then what I know now!) Only a handful of writers, none of them worthy, had taken up the challenge of the author of The Dunwich Horror, the Providence Master, and I wanted to prove myself his only true inheritor.

  So in my middle years I renounced worldly success and returned to Edgerton, there to pursue my writing while dabbling in whatever I found of interest. The local criminal element welcomed me precisely to the extent I wished, meaning that before long I was running whatever I wanted to run from behind the scenes. Less successfully, I wrote my tales—wrote them superbly, thereby inviting the rejection and contumely known to all who will not merely grind out commercial pap. I did my part. I gave mankind the opportunity to discover the truth, and mankind dropped the ball. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will understand my bitterness.

  During this period, I moved through the entertaining demimonde of would-be artists and hangers-on to be found in the vicinity of any college or university. Many were the nights when my abode was the scene of lively discussion nearly overwhelmed by the music from the record player, the fumes of wine and cigarettes legal and illicit, the sexual tension broadcast by bearded boys in turtlenecks and splendid young women wearing what at times appeared to be merely paint. Many were the pneumatic girls whose bodies I rode into eye-rolling spasms of bliss at the ends of these nights. After all, if one of my essential tasks was the murder of my son, I first had to create the little darling.

  And if all of my ewes produced lambie-kins, I was prepared to slaughter every last one, but
I assumed that I would recognize the Anti-Christ when I saw the little turd. I took for granted that when little Mr. Sweet of Face but Nasty of Purpose tumbled from Heather’s, Moongirl’s, Sarah’s, Rachel’s, Nanette’s, Mei-Liu’s, Skunk’s, Avis’s, Subindra’s, Pang’s, Low Rider’s, Arquetta’s, Sujit’s, Tammy’s, Georgy-Porgy’s, Akiko’s, Conchita’s, Suki’s, Sammie’s, Big Indian’s, or Zelda’s womb, the brat would arrive all but surrounded by flashing arrows and neon signs. Despite my inspired exertions, none of these ardent maidens bore fruit. Of all the art-infatuated, experiment-minded dumbbells I bedded during this enchanted period of my life, only Star Dunstan managed to get pregnant.

  The voice of revelation was not kidding around when it informed me that my adversary would prove elusive. Foolish me, I thought I had it all sewn up. After Star discovered that she was pregnant, I countered the usual whines about “commitment” even an airy-fairy type like Star could not keep from uttering by suggesting the next best thing, that she move in with me. Star was so grateful I didn’t order her to an abortionist that almost anything I proposed would have made her happy. She could not have known that the whole point of rogering her had been to get her pregnant. I wanted a good, healthy birth. A few days after Mommy and Cherub returned from the maternity ward, I would press Cherub’s face into his pillow until he went limp. It was a flawless plan, but as the voice had promised, it blew up in my face, not through any fault of my own.

  I forced myself to utter the nauseating endearments expected by a female with an expanding belly. For a couple of months, I made cutesy-poo faces and uttered lies about the golden future. Yet there came a night when I went out on a ramble and returned to an empty house. Empty, that is, of my bloated companion and her possessions. She had scarpered—taken flight. I suspected a new boyfriend. I still think I was right, but because I could not find her in spite of looking under every rock within a fifty-mile radius, I had no proof. In desperation, I sought the help of Johnson’s Woods and learned that, having spoken, the Voice was now eternally silent. A month later, I heard from Erwin “Pipey” Leake, at the time still clinging to his position at Albertus, that my beloved had turned up back in Edgerton and given birth. Wearing a cheap wedding band, she was presently ensconced in one of her aunts’ houses on Cherry Street.

  Fine, I thought: a few tentative visits accompanied by bouquets of flowers and boxes of chocolate, a statement of total forgiveness, a show of infant adoration, and she’d be back in an eye blink, the precious lad clamped to a handsome mammary. Then I could suffocate my only-begotten darling. A few hours later, the arrival on my doorstep of two blueboys instructed me that someone had “dropped,” as they say, “the dime” on my participation in a number of illegal activities. A speedy trial led to a second imprisonment, this one in the state facility known as Greenhaven.

  I brought with me a reputation guaranteed to ensure respect, obedience, power, and the considerable degree of comfort to be obtained in such quarters. Whatever I desired, but for the opportunity to rid the world of Star’s spawn, was provided on the double.

  I took this deprivation with a lighter heart than I would have those of an adequate suite with a private bathroom and telephone line, decent meals, sexual encounters with female visitors, the various books and magazines important to my researches, including those relevant to the life and works of the Providence Master (then experiencing something of a revival), and enlightening conversation with amusing companions, all of which I had in spades. The little darling was still advancing from diapers to the potty, from baby-babble to his first lisping excursions into English, and could not for decades pose a threat to my destiny as Herald of the Apocalypse. That I had been told my task would be arduous reinforced my faith in the wisdom of my inhuman ancestors. I could kill the little beast when I got out, and I positively looked forward to the hunt. In the meantime, a good deal of my research dealt with the shape and direction of the coming pursuit.

  Just at the time I grew tired of pampered confinement, a prison riot enabled me simultaneously to exit Greenhaven and guarantee my anonymity, never mind how. Let us say, a mild exercise of my powers enabled me to inter my official identity in the safest of repositories and walk free. I returned to my hometown, there to live in seclusion as I carried out the search that continues to this day.

  The years have been long and frustrating. The adversary proved as slippery as promised, and there were times when he escaped my grasp just as it seemed to be closing around his miserable little neck. However, the year I escaped from prison I found that I had been granted one final, annually bestowed, ancestral boon, and this gift, which each year thereafter I anticipate with a savage, ferociously tender eagerness still capable of quickening my step and heartbeat alike, has sustained and nourished me throughout the bleak decades. By the indulgence of the Ancient Gods, a shadow’s shadow who was Star Dunstan’s son became present to me each year on his birthday.

  He has one more birthday left to him, his last. And wherever he is now, whether he slinks and skulks through the hospital corridors, the old houses on Cherry Street, or the Hatchtown taverns, whether he hides himself or walks unknowing through Edgerton’s avenues, streets, and hidden lanes, that day arrives in exactly one week.

  2 HOW I LEARNED ABOUT

  RIVER-BOTTOM

  16

  Nettie’s running shoes slapped against the hard red tiles, and a carpet-weave bag the size of a suitcase bounced against her hip. Most of the nurses and technicians inside the oval of the central station raised their heads. They wore loose green scrub suits like pajamas, and my state of mind gave them ash-blond hair and Nordic eyes. The combination suggested science fiction and alien abductions, an effect heightened by the space-station glow of their realm.

  Far down the room, Aunt May turned to the nearest crew member and announced, “That’s my niece’s son, Ned. He has fits.”

  Nettie pulled me into an embrace. Through the fabric of her bag I felt the hard shapes of bottles and jars. “When I called your place this morning, the phone rang and rang, and I said to May, ‘The boy’s on his way home,’ didn’t I, May?” She looked over her shoulder without releasing me, and the bag knocked into my ribs.

  “The Lord is my witness,” May said.

  “Please,” said Nurse Zwick. “I shouldn’t have to remind you people that this is an intensive care unit.”

  Nettie dropped her arms and stepped back. “Zwick, when you call us ‘you people,’ what does that mean?”

  For a moment Nurse Zwick savored the pleasures to be had from explaining the meaning of the term “you people.” Then she swung her chair toward the counter. “I was merely asking you to speak more softly.”

  The nurses and technicians had returned to their desks and private conversations. One of the men inside the station was an Indian or a Pakistani and one of the women was black, but to me, they still all looked alike. “Nettie, what happened?” I asked. “How bad is it?”

  Her broad face was nearly unlined, but the misleading air of serenity given Nettie by smooth cheeks and a youthful forehead had been eroded by worry. “It’s bad,” she said.

  Aunt May came toward us, supporting herself on a shiny metal cane. “It does me good to see this boy back in Edgerton.” Both sisters wore the loose print dresses they had always favored, but where Nettie filled out hers with a columnar massivity, Aunt May’s hung like a sack. The cords of her neck stood out beside a deep hollow. When I got close enough for a hug, she lifted the cane, and I took all of her weight.

  “Oof,” she said. I held her up until she could get the cane back into position. “I’m not as bad off as I look, so don’t go feeling sorry for me.” Her whisper could have been heard across the room. “Ever since I got sick last year, I can’t walk like I used to. If I could put on some weight I’d be fine, only it seems like I have to force myself to eat.”

  We moved toward cubicle 15.

  “Is the doctor with her?”

  “We were waiting for him to come out when I
saw you,” Nettie said. “A mighty weight went off my shoulders.”

  I looked at the curtain in front of the cubicle. “What happened to her?”

  May leaned toward me. “It was this morning! Dropped down and hit the floor! Clark jumped up and called 911.”

  Nettie said, “Young as she is, your mother had a stroke.”

  Aunt May brushed the backs of her fingers against my blazer. “I bet this coat came from a fine New York store, like that Saks on Fifth Avenue.” She raised her eyes to mine, and her voice grew thinner and sharper. “When did you get back home?”

  “About a minute ago,” I said. “I hitchhiked. I’m still carrying my bags.” I pointed at the knapsack and the duffel on the floor beside the entrance.

  Aunt Nettie was regarding me in frowning consideration. She might as well have been wearing a black robe. “Maybe you should have saved up your money for travel, instead of throwing it all over Fifth Avenue. I guess you were lucky, to get here so fast.”

  A trim little man in a white jacket bustled out through the curtain. His blond hair receded from a bulging head accentuated by oversized, black-framed glasses. The doctor shot me a noncommittal glance, and my aunts braced themselves for whatever he had to say.

  “You’re …” He looked at his clipboard. “Ned, Valerie Dunstan’s son?”

  I said, “Yes, I am.”

  “Dr. Barnhill,” he said, and pursed his lips. His head seemed to bulge because it was out of proportion to his body and his vanishing fair hair exposed so much scalp. Short bald men are balder than tall ones. He gave me a brief, dry handshake. “Earlier this morning, your mother suffered an extensive stroke. Her condition remains grave. I wish I could give you better news.” Dr. Barnhill held his clipboard to his chest as if he feared we would try to read his secrets. “Do you know what is involved in a stroke?”