Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  The window frame ignited around the dark shape, illuminating the ruined visage so like and unlike his own. The Other again issued his implacable claim. His hair burst into flame. Behind him, the fire darkened from red to the deep blue once witnessed at the heart of an ancient forest. Demmiman moved from the doorway and into the cobbled street. In the Other’s demand, it came to him with the weight of a majestic paradox, lay an unforeseen fate to which Demmiman’s suddenly exalted spirit gave its full assent.

  He sprinted from cover and plunged into the burning building. An instant later, what remained of the interior gave way, and with a yielding sigh of capitulation the great structure folded in upon itself and shuddered downward upon Godfrey Demmiman’s ecstatic release.

  “He had to rid the world of himself? Not to mention his family house and the little crawly things?”

  “Poor old Godfrey.”

  “We could manage a happier ending than that. Are you interested? Aha. What we have here is a decided show of interest. What did Edward Rinehart know about ecstatic release?”

  58

  The sight of that beautiful, tawny face so close to mine made me feel blessed. Some of the women I had known may have been more passionate than Laurie, but none were more gracefully attuned to the capacity of each individual moment to spread its wings and glide into the next. She also had the gift of what some would call a dirty mind and others inventiveness. The more we explored our bodies and celebrated their abilities, the more unified we seemed to become until at last we seemed to pour into each other and become a single, profoundly interconnected thing. When we swam apart to lie side by side, I felt as though filmy trails of my self were still drifting back into me.

  “Can you even begin to guess how good you make me feel?” Laurie said.

  “I think I’ll build a shrine to you,” I said.

  A few hours later I awakened with the old sense of having to get on my way before trouble found me. Besides that, I was falling in love with Laurie Hatch far too quickly. I had no business falling in love with her at all. In a few days I was going back to New York, and after that I would probably never see her again. What I chiefly represented to Laurie was danger, and I had to protect her from that. I moved her arm off my shoulder and slid out of bed.

  While I was groping for my socks, I bumped into a lamp, and the noise woke her up. Fuzzily, she asked what I was doing. I told her that I had to get back to the boarding house.

  “What time is it?”

  I looked at the green numerals on the digital clock. “One-fifteen.”

  She turned on a low bedside lamp and sat up, rubbing her face. “I’d drive you, but I’m so tired I think I’d go off the road.”

  “I’ll call a taxi,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly. Take Stewart’s car—his other car, the one he left in the garage. We’ll figure out a way to get it back. Because you are definitely coming back here, Ned, there are no two ways about that.”

  I went to the bed and kissed her. The sheet lay rumpled across her waist, and her torso seemed dusky and golden in the dim light.

  “Call me tomorrow.” She switched off the light as soon as I finished dressing.

  Stewart Hatch’s “other” car was an ivory two-seater Mercedes 500SL, a fact that would have amazed me had I not been past all amazement. After I started the ignition, I looked at the controls, put the car into reverse, and nearly backed through the garage door. It took me a moment to learn how to change the headlights from bright to dim, and after I had dialed them back to bright I left the car throbbing in neutral and retrieved my mother’s package from the backseat of Laurie’s car.

  I drove back to central Edgerton in high style, singing along with the jazz on the Albertus radio station, and passed up a spot in front of the rooming house to park around the corner on Harry Street.

  59

  As I went up the stairs I heard the unmistakable noise of a party going on at the far end of my floor. A cluster of young people filled the hallway at the rear of the house. The girls were mostly gleaming legs, the boys wore bristling haircuts and polo shirts, and all of them were holding plastic cups, waving cigarettes, and gabbing. A black-haired girl whose bangs brushed her eyebrows flapped her cigarette at me.

  “Hey, new neighbor! Come to our party!”

  “Thanks, but not tonight,” I said. “Partied out.”

  I waved at her and glanced through the open door across the hall. Most of Otto’s lights had been turned off, and illumination from the television screen flickered over the form slumped in the easy chair. The neck of a Jack Daniel’s bottle protruded from his crotch, and about half an inch of dark brown liquid remained in the glass beside his chair. I wondered if I should turn off his television and help him get to bed. When I took a step toward him, I smelled burning fabric.

  A curl of smoke arose just beyond Otto’s limp hand. From the tip of a half-smoked cigarette, a circle of sparks on the arm of his chair brightened and lengthened into flames.

  I ran into the room and began beating the flames with my hands. Otto’s head jerked up. Two scarlet-threaded eyes looked at me without recognition.

  “Otto,” I said. “You—”

  “Get the heck out!” he yelled. “Dang crook!”

  I saw a big fist traveling across his chest. The fist walloped into my shoulder, and I thumped onto the floor. A blaze roughly the shape and color of an autumn leaf arose from the sleeve of his sweater.

  “Gol-durn robber!”

  Otto planted his left hand in the midst of the flames and rocketed bellowing out of the chair. The Jack Daniel’s bottle bounced to the floor. He staggered forward and noticed that his sweater was on fire.

  I yelled, “The sink, Otto!” and grabbed a sweatshirt from the bottom of his bed, hearing him rip off a series of six-gun curses worthy of Gabby Hayes. Dadgum dangfool tarnation shitfire dadblasted thing is this?

  A crowd of young people filled the doorframe, stubbing cigarettes on the floor and sipping from plastic cups. Otto and I were better than television.

  I flattened the sweatshirt over the arm of the chair and smacked it.

  The black-haired girl with the bangs edged forward. “Mr. Bremen, he isn’t a robber, he’s the guy who moved into Mrs. Frahm’s room.”

  “I know, honey.”

  She smiled at me. “Hey, I’m Roxy Redman, and this is Charlie and Zip and my roommate, Moonbeam Challis.”

  A pretty blond in what looked like a slip that showed her bra straps fluttered her fingers. “My real name’s Audrey, but everybody calls me Moonbeam.”

  “Of course they do,” I said. “My name is Ned, but everybody calls me Ned.”

  Moonbeam tittered, and Charlie or Zip gave me a look that was supposed to make me pee in my pants.

  Otto appeared beside me, holding a glass of water. Footsteps came pounding up the stairs. “Peel her off.” I pulled the sweatshirt away, and Otto emptied the glass onto the blackened mess.

  Invisible behind the throng, Helen Janette announced that the party was over. Mr. Tite’s fedora floated into view. “You heard the lady. Get on home.”

  “Sorry, kid,” Otto said. “Guess the stupid old man got a little fuzzy.” He picked the bottle up off the floor and dropped it in the wastebasket. “Time to eat a hundred miles of you know what.”

  Roxy, Moonbeam, and their friends drifted away in a cloud of muted laughter, allowing me a glimpse of Mr. Tite that explained the mirth. Beneath the fedora, Tite was wearing the mesh T-shirt I had seen that morning and striped boxer shorts stained yellow at the fly.

  Cinched into a pink bathrobe over a nightgown, Helen Janette marched in and established a command post. “I demand an explanation.”

  Otto did his best. He had fallen asleep while smoking, I had startled him, he was sorry for all the excitement. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and it would never happen again.

  Mrs. Janette intensified her air of authority. “I am disgusted.” Mr. Tite moved into position behind her. “Thi
s room reeks of alcohol. You passed out with a cigarette in your hand and almost started a fire. We can have no more of this, Mr. Bremen.”

  “Right,” said the watchdog.

  “This here was a one-time mistake. I’ll take more care in the future.” Otto straightened up. I thought he looked like John Wayne. “Is there anything else you care to say?”

  “Open your windows and let out the stink. This is supposed to be a decent house.”

  “My windows are open already. If you want to run a decent house, you could get rid of Frank Tite. Just my humble advice.”

  Tite lurched forward, and Mrs. Janette halted him with a raised hand. She glared at me. “Mr. Dunstan, I want no further difficulties from you.”

  “I did you a favor,” I said.

  She stamped out.

  Bremen looked at me and shrugged. We heard them march downstairs and close their separate doors. “What’s Tite’s story?” I asked.

  “Frank Tite’s a bum who got thrown off the police force, that’s his story.” He pulled off his sweater and tossed it in the direction of the wastebasket. “There’s another bottle of sour mash around here somewheres. Join me in a nightcap?”

  I got out with a promise to visit him soon. Rinehart’s book and the package from the safety-deposit box had been kicked into the corner near the window. I carried the package to my table and stripped off layers of brown paper until I uncovered a large, old-fashioned scrapbook in a quilted forest-green binding. Taped to its front cover was a notecard inscribed with my mother’s handwriting: For Ned.

  60

  I flipped through the pages of Laurie’s Russian doll, my last, secret gift from my mother, growing more and more baffled. Glued front and back to more than half of its thick pages were … newspaper clippings about crimes? A few of them came from the Edgerton Echo, but most of the articles had been clipped from out-of-town papers. Nearly all the stories reported unsolved violent deaths, none of which seemed to have any connection to Star or me. Disturbed, I began going through the scrapbook more methodically, and a name I had heard from both Hugh Coventry and Suki Teeter jumped out at me from the first few articles.

  The headline above the first clipping read MIDWIFE ACCUSED OF BABY-SNATCHING, ADMITS CHARGES. Hazel Jansky, a local midwife, had come under suspicion when an administrator at St. Ann’s Community Hospital noted that over the previous decade she had been present at nine stillbirths. Jansky had given plausible accounts of the incidents, but the hospital had asked nurses to monitor her performance. Two weeks later, one of the nurses learned that a patient of Jansky’s had delivered a dead child moments before. A hospital maintenance man told her that he had seen the midwife rushing down the service stairs. Inspired, the nurse took the staff elevator to the basement, there to find Hazel Jansky trotting toward a flight of steps leading to a back door. She caught up with her outside the door and saw a waiting car speed off. The nurse conducted Jansky to the administrator’s office, where the infant was discovered concealed inside her coat, bathed, swaddled, and unquestionably alive. At Police Headquarters, Jansky admitted participation in four transactions involving the sale of newborn infants to couples unable or unwilling to go through the normal adoption process. She denied having an accomplice or accomplices.

  The story was dated March 3, 1965. Four months before my seventh birthday, my mother had opened the morning paper and discovered what she considered proof that she had delivered not a single child, but twins.

  A day later, the Echo announced BABY-SNATCHER MIDWIFE CONFESSES, DEFENDS ACTIONS. Hazel Jansky had identified the four “black-market babies” and claimed to have acted in their interests by rescuing them from unfit mothers. Jansky had also named their purchasers, but efforts to trace the new parents had not been successful, “which,” reported the Echo, “has led to speculations that the purchases were made under false names.”

  Her trial began in May and lasted three weeks. Of the four mothers whose children had been abducted and sold, one had been killed in a tavern brawl; another died in a drunken traffic accident that took two other lives; one disappeared without a trace; after hearing that her son was alive, the fourth complained that the defendant kept the money for herself instead of splitting it fifty-fifty.

  The jury found Jansky guilty and recommended mercy. A week later, the judge spoke. Although the illegality of the defendant’s actions could not be overlooked, neither should it be forgotten that Midwife Jansky had chosen infants whose mothers’ conduct put them at risk. The judge wished also to take into account her record of service to the community. Therefore, he accepted the recommendations of the jury and sentenced the defendant to three years at Greenhaven Penitentiary, with possibility of parole after eighteen months.

  She stole four children and told their mothers they were dead, this Hazel Jansky. Because a judge and jury found that she had acted in the interests of the stolen children, she spent only eighteen months in jail. Hazel Jansky’s photographs did not depict a person to whom one would entrust social policy. A compact blond in her mid-thirties, she glowered from the pages of the Echo with the irascibility of one who had learned that unrelenting crabbiness served her far better than cheerfulness and was not about to forget it.

  I thought the court had shared her contempt for her victims. If Hazel Jansky had sold the babies of middle-class mothers, she would still be in jail. And I wondered if the murdered woman and the one killed while driving drunk would have turned out differently had they not been told that their babies were stillborn.

  The next clipping, from the Milwaukee Journal and headed DOUBLE MURDER IN SUBURBIA, introduced the unsolved homicides. Milwaukee County pathologists had discovered that Mr. and Mrs. William McClure, previously thought to be victims of the fire that had destroyed their house on Salisbury Road in the suburb of Elm Grove, had died as a result of multiple stab wounds. Their three-year-old daughter, Lisa McClure, had not, as originally supposed, perished from asphyxiation but from traumatic injury to the neck. Resident in Elm Grove for only six months, the couple had remained largely unknown to their neighbors, one of whom told the Journal reporter that Mr. McClure claimed to have moved from St. Louis for business reasons. Missing from the scene was eight-year-old Robert McClure, Mr. McClure’s nephew, who had been enrolled in the coming term’s third-grade class at Elm Grove Elementary School. While not ruling out the possibility that the boy had been abducted by the assailants, police held out hope that he had escaped before his presence was noted. Efforts to reach the boy’s parents had not been successful, but Elm Grove’s chief of police, Thorston Lund, expressed confidence that they would soon be heard from.

  The next clipping was headed MYSTERY OF SLAIN COUPLE.

  The investigation into Wednesday’s brutal triple murder and arson in Elm Grove took a surprising turn this morning with the announcement that two of the victims, William and Sally McClure, may have been living under assumed names. According to a confidential source in the Elm Grove Police Department, a routine background check has revealed that on at least two previous occasions the couple had given fictitious addresses.

  When purchasing the Salisbury Road property and again when enrolling eight-year-old Robert McClure, Mr. McClure’s missing nephew, in Elm Grove Elementary School, the McClures listed their previous residence as 1650 Miraflores, San Juan, Puerto Rico, a nonexistent address. On Robert McClure’s enrollment form, his previous school was given as St. Louis Country Day School, which has no record of his attendance.

  A high-ranking officer in the Elm Grove Police Department reports that the McClures purchased the Salisbury Road residence through the Statler Real Estate Agency by means of a cash payment. Thomas Statler, the president of the agency, says that a cash sale is unusual but not unprecedented in the Elm Grove area.

  One local resident described Mr. McClure as “swarthy,” but with no trace of a Puerto Rican accent. Sally McClure is said to speak with a “New York” accent. “Mr. McClure wasn’t like the normal person from around here. He tried to b
e polite, but you wouldn’t call him a friendly man.”

  In a statement issued today, Elm Grove’s chief of police, Thorston Lund, speculated that the murders could be connected to Mr. McClure’s past.

  The child claimed to be the couple’s nephew, eight-year-old Robert McClure, remains missing.

  On the next page, the Journal announced SLAIN ELM GROVE COUPLE HAD CRIMINAL BACKGROUND.

  At a press conference yesterday evening, police departments of Milwaukee and Elm Grove announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified William and Sally McClure, slain last Wednesday in their exclusive Salisbury Road residence, as Sylvan Booker and his common-law wife, Marilyn Felt, fugitives from criminal justice. Their two-year-old daughter, Lisa Booker, was identified as the third victim.

  Agent Charles Twomey of the FBI’s Milwaukee office announced that Booker and Felt had been under intensive investigation in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area. “Arrests were expected imminently,” said Agent Twomey. “It is our speculation that they were tipped off. They tried to run, but the wrong people caught up with them.”

  Agent Twomey could not account for the presence of eight-year-old “Robert McClure” in the household, and said, “We continue to see the boy as a valuable source of information.”

  In the next story, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported the murders in their Hennepin Avenue apartment of Philip and Leonida Dunbar, a retired couple described as “private” by their neighbors. Police expressed confidence that the guilty party would swiftly be apprehended.

  POLICE STATION ENIGMA, from Ottumwa, Iowa, described another sort of mystery. A police officer named Boyd Burns had noticed a boy of eleven or twelve loitering on the local fairgrounds and suspected him of being a runaway. When approached, the boy refused to give his name or home address. “He didn’t act like the normal runaway,” Burns said. “If anything, he acted cocky. I took him to the station house, sat him down, and told him his parents had to be worried half to death about him.”