Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Star clutched my hand. “Do you want to tell me about my father?” I asked.

  Her eyes bore into mine. She opened her mouth and uttered a succession of vowels. She gasped with frustration.

  “Was his name Robert?”

  “Nnnn!”

  “I thought that’s what you were telling me before.”

  She summoned her powers. “Not Rrrr. Bert.” She spent a few seconds concentrating on her breathing. “Edwuh. Edward.”

  “What was his last name?”

  She sipped air and met my eyes with a glance that nearly lifted me off the floor. “Rnnn. T!”

  “Rinnt?”

  Star jerked herself up from the pillow. “Rhine.” A machine clamored. “Hrrrt.”

  A name came to me from the furthest reaches of my childhood. “Rinehart?”

  The night nurse erupted through the curtain and threw me out, but not before I saw her nod.

  Ten feet up the aisle, the aunts were poised at the counter like bird dogs.

  Clark issued a thunderclap snore that jerked him to his feet. He staggered, recovered himself, and joined us. “What’re you gawping at?”

  Nettie said, “The Clyde Prentiss gang is over there. The ones that got away when he almost met his Maker.”

  A scrawny little weasel with a goatee and a black leather jacket twitched out through the curtain, followed by a sturdy blonde wearing a lot of mascara, a brief black leather skirt, and a denim jacket buttoned to her bra. Clark chuckled.

  The blonde looked across the station and said, “Hey, Clark.”

  “You’re lookin’ mighty fine, Cassie,” Clark said. “Sorry about your friend.” The weasel glanced at him and pulled the blonde through the doors.

  The aunts turned to Clark in astonishment. “How do you know trash like that?”

  “Cassie Little isn’t trash. She tends bar down at the Speedway. The shrimpy fellow, Frenchy, I don’t know him but to greet. Seems to me Cassie ought to be able to find a better man than that.”

  I went back inside and said goodbye to Star. Her hands lay at her sides, and her chest rose and fell. I told her I would see her in the morning, said that I loved her, and kissed her cheek.

  Alongside May in the backseat of the Buick, I said that I wanted to talk about something before everybody went to bed.

  Nettie placed herself on the old davenport, thumped her bag on the floor, peeked inside, and folded it shut again. Clark gave me a wary glance from the easy chair. May sat beside Nettie with a deep sigh. I dropped my bags next to the staircase and took the rocking chair. I knit my hands together and leaned forward. The rocker creaked. Multiple doubts, doubts arranged into layers, whirled through my head and stalled my tongue.

  “I saw you wave to Joy,” Nettie said. “If you don’t stop off and see her after escorting May home, her feelings will be wounded. Now I guess you had better tell us what’s on your mind.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how to begin,” I said. “When you were waiting to see Clyde Prentiss’s visitors, my mother wouldn’t let go of my hand. She wanted to give me a name.”

  A beat ahead of the others, Nettie fixed me with a warning glare.

  “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” May said. “Shouldn’t we divide up what’s in Nettie’s bag, so I can go home?”

  “Does Edward Rinehart mean anything to you?”

  My aunts exchanged a glance almost too brief to be seen. May said, “Do you know that name, Nettie?”

  “I do not,” Nettie said.

  “Star moved out of here to live with this man. She and her friends used to visit you, and they scattered cigarette ash all over the porch. Probably Edward Rinehart came with them.”

  “It was just Suki and a couple other mixed-up girls, all jabbering away about Al-Bear Cam-oo,” said Nettie, proving that her memory hadn’t lost any ground.

  “If you can remember Albert Camus, you can hardly have forgotten the name of the man who took my mother away from Cherry Street.”

  “You’d be surprised what you forget when you get to be my age.”

  “What you got in that bag?” Clark asked.

  The seat cushion between my aunts disappeared beneath a mound of pens and pencils, pads of paper, scissors, paperclips, tubes of lip balm and skin moisturizer, cigarette lighters, paperweights, envelopes, desk calendars, coffee mugs, wrapped coils of plastic tubing, light bulbs, antihistamines and nasal steroids in sample packets, cotton balls, a stack of gauze bandages and rolls of tape, stamps, and toilet paper. After a while, my dismay surrendered to amazement, and I had to force myself not to laugh. It was like going to the circus and watching the clowns pile out of the little car.

  The sisters began dividing the plunder into two equal piles, now and then adding things to a third, smaller share.

  I could no longer keep from laughing. “No alligator shoes for Uncle Clark? I could use some new underwear and socks.”

  “Medical gentlemen seldom wear alligator,” May said, “and as for the other, you’ll have to wait until the next time I go to Lyall’s.”

  Nettie floated into the kitchen and returned with two grocery bags, one to hold May’s spoils and the other for the smaller pile. “After you see May home, you can drop this off at Joy’s. I’ll leave some lights on.”

  I helped May down the steps. On the other side of the street, Joy’s dark figure peered through a slit in her curtain. The lamps cast circles of thick yellow light onto the pavement and threw the trees into stark relief. The moist night air hovered like fog. May and I stepped down from the curb. “Don’t you ever worry about getting caught?” I asked.

  May shook her head. “Neddie, I’m too good to get caught. Now hush up, because talking brings bad luck.”

  I got her up onto the opposite sidewalk, and we moved into the light of the street lamp. Our shadows blotted the cement. “Hush up about that other thing, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “We’re talking about a man who disappeared thirty-five years ago.”

  “I’ll have to hush up for both of us, then.” She did not say another word until she thanked me for accompanying her home.

  Next door, a bent, osteoporotic Joy accepted her bag of goodies and, in a voice age or unhappiness had ground to semitransparency, so hesitantly asked me in that my refusal came as a relief to us both. The most infirm of the three surviving sisters seemed to exude the same musty, faintly corrupt atmosphere as the barrenness dimly visible behind her. I promised to visit the following afternoon. Inside Nettie’s house, I carried my bags upstairs.

  A lamp burned on a table beside a metal-spring bed opposite a sink with an overhanging mirror and medicine chest. Through the open window at the front of the room, I saw Joy’s house go dark. I put my bags on the linoleum, unzipped the duffel, and took out my blazer, the CD equipment, and my Dopp Kit. The next day’s clothing went on the seat of a rush chair, the blazer over its back.

  The bedsprings yelped when I stretched out. I pulled up the sheet and the thin blanket. A disc of Emma Kirkby singing Monteverdi went into the player, the headphones over my ears. Before I pressed the PLAY button, I noticed my blazer splayed askew over the back of the chair and got up to hang it in the closet. When I lifted it from the chair, the blazer drooped to one side, weighted by something in its right pocket.

  I reached into the pocket and pulled out a thick wad of bills. I fanned the money over the blanket. Three fifties, lots of tens and twenties, a lot more fives and ones—it added up to five hundred and seventy-six dollars. I separated two fives glued together with beer and counted it again. Five hundred and eighty-one dollars. I stared at the money, feeling as though I ought to lock the door. Then I thought I should tear the bills into confetti and flush them down the toilet. In the end, I pushed the money into a front pocket of my knapsack. I went to the mirror and looked at my face without seeing anything all that familiar or all that new. I pushed the knapsack under the bed, switched off the light, and buried my h
ead in the pillow.

  25

  For the first time in years, unconsciousness pulled me into my recurring nightmare. Despite its long absence, each of its details remained as fresh as the images on a reel of film.

  In my earlier years, the dream began with the shadow ripping the seams that connected us and ended with the shadow’s gesture toward the forest. Later, I pursued my shadow through the trees. Monstrous beings launched themselves from overhanging rocks, dug claws into my shoulders, and fastened their jaws around my neck. Years after I ran away from Vermont, a hitherto unexpected dream-capacity kept me from jolting out of sleep. Until that point, my fear, above all the sense that I recognized the monsters, blasted the dream apart. The unexpected capacity I mentioned was the ability to defeat the monsters. When the dream-self had finally come to trust its capacity for survival, the dream went away.

  But, hundreds of times before I seemed free of my nightmare, the shadow appeared before me, leaning against a tree trunk or perching on a low-hanging branch. Sometimes it sprawled in midair, head propped on one hand.

  “You keep on coming, don’t you?” it said. “Haven’t you ever wondered where this is going to end?”

  “I’m going to catch you,” I said.

  “What did I ask: where this will end, or how?”

  “It’ll end here.” Even as I indicated the forest, I doubted what I had said.

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “I don’t give a damn where it happens.”

  “Ding-dong,” the shadow said. “Would you give a damn if our conclusion were to take place in Jones’s Woods, just outside the town of Middlemount, in Vermont?”

  “No.” A chill radiated upward from the pit of my stomach.

  “Ding-dong. We’d think twice about going back to Jones’s Woods, wouldn’t we?”

  “This isn’t Jones’s Woods.”

  “Ding. A half-lie. Remember what is going on. You are dreaming. For all you know, we could be smack-dab in the middle of that forest where you nearly shuffled off the old mortal coil.” The invisible smile lengthened on the invisible face, another impossibility, but there you are.

  “Jones’s Woods didn’t look anything like this.” The cold threading up from my stomach brushed my lungs.

  “Ding.” He sighed. “Isn’t it your impression that dreams turn one thing into another and exaggerate like crazy? That they display a tendency toward the surreal?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “We are getting closer to something you used to be able to see.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Ding-dong. You do too.”

  I remembered peaks and gables rising above the trees.

  “Not very fond of old houses in the woods, are we?”

  “You’re not scaring me.”

  “Ding-dong, ding-dong! The last time, you were looking in the wrong place. If ever you come upon the right one, you’ll be in danger of finding out who you are.”

  I fell back on an old conviction. “There is no right place.”

  “The right place is where you least want to go. When you get there, it’s where you least want to be. If you answer a question of mine, I’ll answer one of yours.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “All your life, you have felt the loss of something extraordinarily important. If you found it, could you live with the consequences?”

  No one with half a brain would answer a question like that. Cracker-barrel mottoes about wooden nickels and pigs in pokes suggested themselves. Yet what came out was “Yes,” and it was too late to say, Ask me another.

  “Now it’s my turn,” I said.

  “I changed my mind,” the shadow said. “You don’t get a turn, sorry.” It flew on ahead.

  As if I were twenty again, I followed the shadow through a deep wood. The insolent shadow floated above the ground, and we had the ding-dongs, the bit about surrealism, the allusions to houses in wooded areas, the paradoxes about real right places, the question, the shadow’s flight. Like a dope, I wondered: So is that all? There isn’t any more?

  I took two or three steps deeper into the forest and froze in my tracks, stunned by vivid sensory reality.

  Sunlight filtered through the canopy swishing in a mild breeze and printed glowing coins on the spongy floor. Spicy, process-laden fragrances sifted in the warm air. I could not be asleep, because I was not dreaming. The air darkened to silver-gray. I glimpsed muddy clouds sliding across the open spaces between treetops.

  A sparse rain patted onto the leaves overhead, and I took shelter beneath a big maple. Twenty or thirty yards away, the woods ended in a wall of thick oaks marking the boundary of a meadow. A thunderclap boomed, then another, and the air filled with the sound of wingbeats. Half the distance to the edge of the forest stood an enormous oak. Vertical sheets of water hurtled out of the sky. I took off and scrambled into the shelter of the oak. A drift of wind precise as an atomizer coated me with a film of mist.

  A jagged branch of lightning tore through the sky and illuminated the landscape. In the few seconds of brightness, I saw that I had come nearer the border of the woods than I had imagined. Twenty feet of woodland and half as many trees stood between me and a broad field ending at a road. Something tucked into a bend in the woods registered in the corner of my eye, then disappeared back into streaming darkness. The road on the other side of the field would get me back to Edgerton, but I was worried about Star, and the storm was going to delay my return to the hospital. I wondered if what I had seen was a house. A house was exactly what I needed. If its owners let me in, I could telephone Clark and ask him to pick me up before he drove Nettie and May to St. Ann’s.

  Another lightning bolt shattered the sky and divided into sections that turned the air white as they sizzled toward the woods. I leaned forward and made out a tall portico and a stone facade with shuttered windows. About a hundred feet behind me, a glowing electric arrow shot into the forest. I heard a series of loud cracks, like the breaking of giant bones.

  Then another sizzle, another stupendous crack. Rays of lightning darted across the sky, cutting off from a central bolt that executed a left-face over the meadow, stretched out, and angled for the woods. I smelled ozone even before the shaft came slicing down over the top of the oak and hammered into my old friend the maple. It split apart and burst into flame.

  A vertical column of lightning erased the darkness. It sped in the direction of the house, executed a right-hand turn, and began working back toward my part of the woods. For lightning, it moved slowly, almost deliberately, and the entire fork remained in place as its business end winged down, carving Z-shapes in the air. I jumped away from the oak and tore through the tail end of the woods. A missile the size of a freight train brushed close enough to heat up my back. All the oxygen was sucked out of the air. I charged onto open ground, and a wall of water sent me stumbling for balance as the missile exploded against the oak tree. I kept running until I reached the stone slab beneath the portico.

  Rainwater streamed from my ruined clothes and puddled on the stone. I wrapped my hand around the metal knocker and slammed it down. I waited; I raised the knocker for another blow.

  A lock clicked; a bolt slid into a casing. Soft light spilled out.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said to the person invisible behind the door. “I was caught in the rain, and I wondered …”

  Behind the figure who held one hand against the door lay a gallery lined with glowing porcelain vases on delicate side tables. In the middle distance, a chandelier like a great ship made of light cast brilliant illumination that turned the man in front of me into a silhouette. A white cuff fastened with a golden link protruded from the sleeve of his gray suit. His fingernails gleamed.

  “… if I could use your telephone.”

  He leaned into the darkness to hold the door, and I stepped across the threshold. As soon as I entered, I experienced a recurrence of the sense of familiarity that had always shocked me out of my n
ightmares. The door slammed shut. A lock resoundingly clicked.

  My host’s almost entirely familiar eyes shone in triumph; his almost entirely familiar mouth opened in a smile. He offered an ironic bow. Although the utterly striking handsomeness of the man before me in no way resembled the way I looked, his individual features, taken one by one, mysteriously replicated my own. In combination, all resemblance vanished. His forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth fused with the modeling of his jaw and cheekbones to create an extraordinary physical beauty. It was like seeing what I might have looked like if I had hit the genetic jackpot. But more than his good fortune separated this man from me—thousands of miles of experience lay between us. He had gone further, survived more, risked more, won more—simply, nakedly, taken more, and done so with an instinctive, passionate rage beyond any emotion I had ever known.

  Surrounded by the vulgar splendor of his domain, odious to the core, the shadow stood before me and laughed at my helplessness. I cried out and shuddered awake.

  26 Mr.X

  Listen to me, You Star-Flung Entities, this isn’t easy. It never has been, if You want to know the truth.

  No one not born into my condition, in other words no one, except He of whom it now occurs to me You may have never heard, can understand the agonies of uncertainty I have endured. Great Ones, should You exist at all, I hereby request a degree of Recognition commensurate to my Service. Unless my life has been wasted, I deserve an honored Immortality. This Account of my Travails should be displayed in a Great Museum of the Elder Gods. Call it, say, the Patriot’s Museum, or the Museum of Triumphs. I ought to have, if I may make a suggestion, a diorama reconstructing these humble chambers. The present Journal would be installed upon a replica of my desk. I also see a model of myself, animated if possible, now deep in thought over the page, now standing in a contemplative pose by the sink. A descriptive plaque or framed text of not less than eight hundred words would fill the bill. I am being modest. Remember, if You will, that the Nazarene has been represented in works of art all over the world, and his Image hangs in every Christian house of worship.