Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “This is the only place for decent brushes and paints in a hundred miles, but I can’t afford the inventory I should have,” she said. “Everything costs so much money! The roof needs fixing. I could use a new oil burner. Twenty grand would solve all my problems, but I can hardly pay my two part-time assistants. They stay on because I cook them dinner and act like Mom.”

  In her living room, abstract and representational paintings hung alongside shelves of clay pots and blown glass. “All this work is by artists I show in the gallery, except for that painting on your left.”

  A dirgelike complication of muddy, red-spattered browns occupied a fourth of the wall.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’d have to look at it for a while,” I said.

  “It’s hopeless, and you know it. Rachel Milton gave me that painting years ago, and I never had the heart to get rid of it. Can I give you some tea?”

  Suki came back with two cups of herbal tea and sat next to me on the yielding cushions. “I shouldn’t be bitchy about Rachel. At least she kept in touch with Star, or vice versa. She might even come to the funeral.”

  Suki’s glowing corona glided forward, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I leaned into her aura of mint and sandalwood. She kissed my cheek. The golden haze of her face swam two or three inches back from mine. Her eyes shimmered, intensifying their deep jade green and shining turquoise. “Tell me. You know what I mean, just tell me.”

  I swallowed ginseng-flavored tea and described my mother’s last day and night. At the mention of Rinehart’s name, Suki gave me a glance of uncomplicated acknowledgment. Without saying anything more, I told her about Donald Messmer’s appearance on the marriage license and my birth certificate.

  “It’s like I’m walking through a fog. My aunts and uncles act as though they’re guarding atomic secrets.” A tide of feeling surged through me, and everything else shrank before its necessity.

  “I have to get out of the fog. I want to know who Rinehart was, and how this Messmer came into the picture.”

  She patted my hand and released it.

  “He was my father, wasn’t he?”

  “You look so much like him, it’s eerie.”

  I remembered Max Edison’s subtle relaxation when I said that I had come on a family matter. He had known instantly whose son I was. “Tell me,” I said, echoing her words. “Please, just tell me.”

  Suki Teeter leaned back into her cushions.

  51

  In the autumn of 1957, the more adventurous students of arts and literature at Albertus noted the frequent late-night presence at a rear table in the Blue Onion Coffeehouse of a man whose strikingly compelling face, at once pallid and dark, was framed by his black hair as he bent in concentration, one hand holding a papier maïs Gitane cigarette and the other a hovering pencil, over what appeared to be a typewritten manuscript. This was Edward Rinehart. An awed fascination gathered about him.

  Slowly, Rinehart’s barriers relaxed. Yes, he was a writer; he had come to College Park to enjoy good bookstores and congenial companionship; if he wished for anything more, it was access to the Albertus Library, of course superior to its civic counterparts. Erwin Leake, a young English instructor among the earliest to establish a beachhead of acquaintanceship, soon found a mechanism, an only slightly dubious mechanism, granting Rinehart entry to the college library. Thereafter, Rinehart could often be discovered laboring over his art at one of the desks beneath the rotunda of the Reading Room. He was perhaps thirty-five, perhaps slightly older; his physical attractiveness was magnified, though it needed no magnification, by a kind of lawlessness. The Rinehart era had begun.

  He became the intellectual and social focus of a select cadre of students, available for consultation at all hours. At the end of Buxton Place, an obscure cul-de-sac otherwise owned by the college, Rinehart had purchased two adjacent cottages as studio and living quarters. The elect, the chosen, the most passionate and promising of the Albertus population, congregated within his residence—the studio, being sacred, was off-limits. In Rinehart’s house, someone was always talking, generally Rinehart. A perpetual sound track, usually jazz, drifted from the speakers. An unending supply of wine, beer, and other beverages magically replenished itself. Rinehart provided marijuana, uppers, and downers, the drugs of the period. His parties went on for two or three days in which the favorites wandered in and out, talked and drank until they could talk and drink no more, listened to readings, mostly by the host, and had frequent sex, mostly with the host.

  Suki, Star, Rachel Newborn, and the other young women had fallen under Rinehart’s spell. He was a charismatic, unpredictable man who encouraged their aspirations while seeming to embody them: unlike the boys who claimed to be writers, Rinehart had actually published a book, one they had no difficulty accepting as too fine and daring for the blockheads in charge of the publishing world. Of course the book was dangerous—Rinehart exuded danger. He had secrets past and present, and there were days when without explanation the house on Buxton Place stood locked and empty. At times, one or another of his harem glimpsed Rinehart getting into or out of a Cadillac parked at a Hatchtown curb. An overexcitable dual major in fine arts and philosophy named Polly Heffer discovered a loaded revolver in a bedside drawer and screeched loudly enough to bring Suki in from the living room at the moment a naked Rinehart entered disgusted from the bathroom. Rinehart silenced Polly with a growl, said that he kept the revolver for self-protection, and invited Suki to make up a threesome.

  Did she join in?

  “You think I turned him down?”

  Now and then, Rinehart’s devotees would come upon him in conference with men clearly unconnected to Albertus. These men drew him whispering into a corner, Rinehart sometimes laying an arm across a burly shoulder. The younger, more presentable of these outsiders surfaced during the whirlpools of long parties, and the students included them in their circle. One of these men was Donald Messmer, who lived in the Hotel Paris on Word Street and did whatever came to hand.

  “Don Messmer wasn’t a criminal,” Suki said. “Basically, Don was this very easygoing guy who just sort of hung out. To us, he was like Dean Moriarty in On the Road, but more laid-back. And he was crazy about your mother. The guy probably never read a book in his life, and all of a sudden he’s walking around with novels sticking out of his back pocket because he wants to impress Star Dunstan. I used to hear her talking to him about, you know, Cézanne and Kerouac and Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker—Don Messmer!—but he didn’t have a chance, she was in love with Edward Rinehart, along with the rest of us.”

  “How did his name wind up on her marriage license?”

  “Hold on,” Suki said, “let me tell you what I know.”

  At the end of the semester, Suki transferred to Wheeler College in Wheeler, Ohio, ostensibly to continue training under a lithographer who had spent the previous year at Albertus. She had lost faith in Edward Rinehart and wanted to escape his sphere of influence. Erwin Leake, once a worthwhile English teacher, had become a drunken phantom; some of the boys Rinehart had declared artists of great promise were turning into drug addicts interested only in another handful of pills; her female friends thought of nothing but Rinehart and his satisfactions. Suki wanted out.

  Late in the winter of the following year, Star Dunstan appeared in Wheeler, pregnant, exhausted, and in need of a safe place to stay. Suki relinquished half of her bed. For the next few days, Star said only that she had to hide, to conceal herself. Suki let her sleep and smuggled in food from her waitressing job. Star told her that she had married a man, but that the marriage had been a mistake. She trembled at the ringing of the telephone. When someone knocked at the door, she disappeared into the bedroom. After two weeks, Star recovered sufficiently to get a job at Suki’s restaurant. After another month, she began auditing arts courses at Wheeler. Eventually, she told Suki that her husband had abandoned her when a doctor told her that she might be carrying twins. At the next appointment, t
he doctor informed her that she might be carrying only one child after all, but this news could not bring back the vanished husband.

  An obstetrician in Wheeler pronounced Star fit and healthy and predicted that she would deliver twins, although the evidence was not as conclusive as he would like. She packed her things and left for Cherry Street.

  At the end of the school term, Suki drove to Edgerton, found a new apartment, and moved in hours before the descent of a powerful storm. She called Nettie, without response. Perhaps the Cherry Street telephone lines were out. She called Toby Kraft and got through. Toby told her that Star had been admitted to St. Ann’s Community Hospital and was about to give birth. He was beside himself with worry. The river had overflowed its banks, and cables had blown down everywhere. Suki belted herself into her rain slicker, snatched up her umbrella, and went outside. Instantly, the umbrella flipped inside out and tore out of her hands.

  52

  Floodwater sluicing around the low wall of sandbags rose over her ankles. Under the slicker, her clothing was soaked. Suki climbed over the barricade and waded toward the hospital’s entrance. The lobby looked like Calcutta. In the confusion, she managed to buttonhole a nurse, who focused on her long enough to tell her that only two expectant mothers, a Mrs. Landon and a Mrs. Dunstan, were up on the fourth floor in obstetrics. She advised Suki to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

  Suki ran up to the cacophony of the obstetrics department. Babies shrieked from bassinets in the nursery. A nurse frowned at her muddy boots and said that her friend was in delivery room B, attended by Midwife Hazel Jansky. Suki grabbed her arm and demanded details.

  Mrs. Dunstan had been in labor five hours. There were no complications. Since this was a first delivery, the process was expected to go on for hours more. Midwife Jansky was assisting at both of the night’s deliveries. The nurse peeled Suki’s hand from her arm and moved on.

  Suki retreated into the waiting room. Behind the blurred reflection of her pale face suspended above a bright yellow slicker, the long windows revealed only a vertical black wall pierced by the lamp posts in the parking lot. Suki put her face against the glass, shielded her eyes, and looked out upon another black wall, this one stretched over the landscape and streaked with incandescent ripples. A dark, linear form she hoped was a tree trunk bobbed along in the wake of an automobile.

  Some time later, a younger nurse ducked in to tell her that Mrs. Dunstan was making progress, but if her baby had any sense it would pull the emergency brake and stay where it was for another twelve hours. The next time Suki cupped her face to look out the window, the lamps in the parking lot had died, and objects too small to identify were swirling downstream, like toys. She lowered herself onto the sofa and fell asleep.

  A muffled explosion, followed by women’s screams, woke her up. The lights failed, and the screams lengthened into bright flags of sound. Suki groped toward the hallway and saw flashlight beams cutting through the darkness. She took off in search of Star.

  Her hands discovered a wide seam in the wall. Suki felt her way sideways, pushed open a door, and charged into a dead-black chamber where an invisible woman wept and moaned.

  “Star?”

  A strange voice cursed at her.

  Suki backed out. Further down, she came to the door of the second delivery room, which knocked her backward as it burst open. A figure put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her to the side. Suki groped forward and caught the door on its backswing. She stumbled in. Whoever was in the room whimpered. Suki bumped against a metal rail and reached down. She touched a wet, bare leg.

  Star gasped and pulled her into an embrace. “Suki, they took my babies away.”

  As abruptly as it had failed, the electricity jumped back into life. Star shielded her eyes. Thick brush strokes and random spatters of blood smeared her thighs. Suki cradled Star’s head and stroked her hair.

  The midwife bustled in and placed in Star’s hands a doll-like infant tightly wrapped in a blue blanket. Star protested—she had delivered two children, one that felt like giving birth to a watermelon, and another who had his bags packed and his passport ready. The midwife told her that what she had mistaken for a second child was the placenta.

  Hours later, a harried doctor came in to reassure Star that she had delivered a single healthy child. When asked about Mrs. Landon, Midwife Jansky’s other patient, the doctor said that Mrs. Landon’s infant had been stillborn.

  Suki had stayed with Star until early the following evening, by which time the Fire Department had pumped the floodwater from the basement and ground floor of the hospital. Crews labored to clean away the sticky, foul-smelling layer of mud deposited by the Mississippi. While Star finished a lily-white dinner of chicken, mashed potatoes, and cauliflower, Nettie, Clark, and May swept in. The aunts pelted her with questions. Was it a normal baby? Could she be sure the hospital was not concealing something from her?

  Nettie collared a hapless nurse and demanded that Infant Dunstan be removed from the nursery. Blissfully asleep within the confines of a bassinet, Infant Dunstan was wheeled in, snatched up, momentarily cuddled, unwrapped, and subjected to a brisk examination. Nettie passed the wailing child to its mother for rewrapping. Some abnormalities did not show themselves immediately, was Star aware of that?

  Suki’s indignation boiled over: what kind of late-blooming abnormality did Nettie have in mind, exactly?

  Nettie turned and smiled. I suppose her boy could wind up with different-colored eyes.

  Suki fled as if pursued by Gorgons.

  Thereafter, Star maintained a resolute silence about her pregnancy and marriage. Suki had seen the child develop into a four-year-old, a five-year-old, a six-year-old, and ideas of his paternity had come to her, but she never spoke of them. The boy’s face declared it for her. Around the time Star began placing her son into foster care, Suki experimentally married a harpsichord player in the Albertus Music Department and moved to Popham, Ohio, where her husband had been appointed artist in residence at an obscure liberal arts college.

  The Albertus circle had exploded into disconnected fragments, some to teaching positions, some to nine-to-five jobs, to mental hospitals, Europe, communes, death in Vietnam, law practices, jail terms, other fates. Edward Rinehart had been killed in a prison riot. Rachel Newborn had redesigned herself in a manner that dismissed Suki Teeter. Of her old friends, only Star Dunstan could still be seen, and Star returned to Edgerton only infrequently.

  Suki took me in the golden haze of her embrace and apologized for talking so much.

  “I’m glad you did,” I said.

  Suki patted my cheek and said that maybe we could have lunch together after my mother’s funeral. “I’d like that,” I said, and a question came to me. “Suki, it was obvious to you that Rinehart was my father, but what about my aunts? Did Nettie and May ever meet him?”

  “Huh,” she said. “Not when I was around, anyhow.”

  53

  Otto Bremen swiveled his chair in my direction. One hand held a glass of bourbon, a cigarette burned in the other, and he was grinning like a Halloween pumpkin. “Come in and watch the Braves get the tar beat out of ’em. It’s a beautiful sight.”

  I might have gone across the hall and spent the next ninety minutes helping Otto Bremen trounce the Atlanta Braves by drinking them to death, but Edward Rinehart’s book tempted me more. After I took From Beyond out of my knapsack, I flopped on the bed to read until Laurie Hatch showed up.

  Torn between turning immediately to “Blue Fire” and avoiding it altogether, I took the easy way out and started at the beginning.

  In “Professor Pendant’s Inheritance,” a retired professor of Middle Eastern studies moves to an eighteenth-century fishing village where a former colleague had unexpectedly bequeathed him an old house and a vast, legendary library. The retired professor plans to complete his study of Arabic folklore with the aid of this great resource. Forced into a pub during a downpour, the professor overhears a rumor oddly similar t
o a tale in one of his benefactor’s rarest volumes; soon after, he discovers a twelfth-century manuscript of dire incantations…. At the story’s end, Professor Pendant is devoured by the ancient god, one-third octopus, one-third snake, and one-third indescribable but hideous all the same, summoned by the manuscript.

  “Recent Events in Rural Massachusetts” described the visit to a bleak hamlet of a young scholar who falls prey to a race of stunted beings produced by sexual congress between primitive hominids and a ravenous deity from beyond the membrane of our universe.

  “Darkness over Ephraim’s Landing” ended with this sentence: As the bells of St. Arnulf’s chimed, I burst into the sacrosanct chamber and by the flickering light of my upraised candle glimpsed the frothing monstrosity which once had been Fulton Chambers crawl, with hideous alacrity, into the drain!

  All of this, even the exclamation point, reminded me of something I had read at thirteen or fourteen, but could not place.

  As prepared as I would ever be, I began reading “Blue Fire.” Half an hour later, I carried the book to the window and went on reading. “Blue Fire” was a novella about the life of one Godfrey Demmiman, whose experiences sometimes resembled nightmare versions of my own, and for all my fascination I had to struggle against the impulse to set the book on fire and toss it into the sink.

  The child Demmiman receives a summons from an “ancient wood” at the edge of town. After he enters the woods, an inhuman voice informs him that he is the son of an Elder God, a new Jesus who shall bring about the Apocalypse by giving entry to his unearthly fathers. Through the agency of a sacred blue fire, he is granted unnatural powers. He displays these powers to local girls and kills them. Exiled to a military school, he drifts into madness under the influence of a sacred text.

  In his early thirties, Demmiman moves to the city beloved of the text’s author and is drawn to a forbidding manse. He imagines himself stalked by furtive beings connected to both himself and the house, breaks in and discovers the crypt of eighteenth-century Demmimans—it is his ancestral home. Returning night after night, he senses a presence, an Other, which searches for him but flees at his approach. Once, carrying a candle through the dusty ballroom, he glances into a mirror and catches sight of a dark figure behind him—he whirls around—the figure has vanished. Two nights later, a darkening of the atmosphere suggests that the Other will at last permit himself to be seen. The sound of footsteps padding through distant rooms brings him to the library at the top of the house.