Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Something brushed my mind and instantly faded. I almost turned back. Whatever had touched me was what I did not want to know.

  The two remaining stone walls supported what was left of the roof. Two blackened chimneys reared upward. The right half of the house had collapsed into a soft depression. The old entrance yawned over a mat of vines. I walked up to an empty casement and looked in at a filthy cement floor gradually disappearing beneath the green carpet rolling in from the back of the house.

  I moved to the rear of the house. It was like looking at a photograph from a bombed city—blackened walls and empty space. I stepped back, and my feet met a flat stone surface. When I bent down and parted the grasses, I saw a gray marble slab carved with the legend OMAR DUNSTAN D. 1887. My heart jumped into my throat. Its companion was three feet away. SYLVAN DUNSTAN D. 1900.

  “How about you, Howard?” I said.

  About six feet from Sylvan’s marker was: HOWARD DUNSTAN, OUR DEAR FATHER. 1882–1935. “Better than you deserved,” I said, and noticed an area where the grasses bent over the ground. Before the first of the trees, a flat granite slab lay over the gray-brown mulch. I read the eroded, still legible words:

  ANGELS NOT OF THIS EARTH.

  Altogether, eight other markers lay hidden in the grass. Some of the names had worn away, and none were the kind of names parents give their children. I remember FISHY, SCREAMER, GOSSAMER, SPLITHEAD, BRIGHTNESS, and TONK. Dogs and cats, I told myself, shuddered back as from a terrible recognition, and snagged my foot in a tangle of weeds. I spun around to keep from falling and saw a green carpet rolling into a dim, two-sided room. My foot tore free of the snag, and I went forward over the cushiony pad of the carpet.

  Pigeon feathers stirred in the sun-shot air. Remembered pain pierced my forehead, and I dropped through an empty shaft like a stone.

  69

  I’m not in my time, I thought. Then, Oh, I’m here again.

  On all sides, the scene solidified. A tired fern and a stuffed fox in a glass bell flanked a brass clock on a mantelpiece. Tobacco smoke fouled the air. Across the room, a white-haired man in a dark blue, once-elegant velvet smoking jacket faced the window. He held a cigar in one hand and a glass half-filled with amber liquid in the other. The world was dark. I realized that I knew the man’s name. The hands of the brass clock said the time was 11:40.

  The man facing the window had been expecting me; he was going to speak. These facts declared themselves in the weariness of his posture and the theatrical, even stagy unhappiness in the slouch of his back. Impatient irritation replaced my nausea and pain: Here I was, what did he want? The man at the window raised his glass. He sipped. His shoulders slumped. Finally, he spoke.

  You’re here again, but I don’t care what happens to you. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Do you know who said that?

  “William Butler Yeats,” I said. “Fuck you, too, Howard.”

  The golden bowl is broken, it bears an unseen crack. I hear the roar of cannons everywhere.

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  Once your father had been created, I decided to amuse myself by driving him mad. He was to be the tool of our destruction. Yet since you have found your way to me over and over, perhaps after all you will destroy him instead. The outcome of the game no longer matters to me.

  I called him a wicked, malicious old man—it was the main thing I understood. He chuckled.

  We flew from the crack in the golden bowl. We were stolen from the corpse on the battlefield. We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth. I drove my son mad to hasten our end. Their faith in us died. Everything happens over and over, and each time it means less.

  “You say things, but they don’t make sense. Whose faith? Why am I here?”

  In my great-grandfather’s time, the god Pan was a composer of remarkable accomplishment. In my grandfather’s, he was a pianist who excited the females in his audiences to incomprehensible ecstasies. In mine, he is a drunken poet who writes of nothing but descents to hell and similar degradations. By your time, he will become a mindless addict of alcohol and opiates. If you see him, tell yourself, Here is what remains of Pan and understand why we should be gone from the earth.

  “Pan never existed,” I said. “Not in the real world.”

  What you call the real world never existed, either. It was created over and over by belief. Belief is subject to change. Human beings need stories to make sense of their accident-ridden lives, and their stories refused to let us go. I’m sick of it. They’re always telling one small fragment of the same huge story, and they’ll never get it right.

  Torchlights wobbling toward us appeared in the window. Overhead, I heard a scurry of wings and claws.

  You were to come here with another. Perhaps you and he are here, but elsewhere. We shall see, you and I. My toy, my game, is ending. Mistake upon mistake. What wretched lives we were given.

  My eyes darkened. My joints sang with pain, and someone banged me on the head with a mallet. When my vision cleared I was on my knees, drooling vomit into the tall grass behind the ruin.

  70

  Helen Janette was stationed in front of her door. “I hope you’re prepared for what I have to say, Mr. Dunstan.”

  The door behind me clicked open. Mr. Tite had joined the party.

  “This morning, two detectives and an officer in uniform came knocking at my door.”

  “Plus Stewart Hatch,” I said. “Didn’t you feel honored?”

  “Stewart Hatch should hang himself from the nearest tree.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You have half an hour to pack your things. No refund on your charges.”

  I stamped upstairs. Resonant snores came through Otto’s door. When I came back down, they were posted on opposite sides of the entry like Swiss guards. “I wish I knew why you’re so afraid of cops.”

  Helen Janette held out her hand. “My key.”

  The bitter satisfaction I saw in her face as I surrendered the key gave me my answer. “Excuse me, Mrs. Janette.”

  “We have nothing to say to each other.”

  “Did your name used to be Hazel Jansky?”

  I heard Mr. Tite breathing through his mouth.

  “You went to prison,” I said. “That’s why you don’t like cops.”

  “Get out of here.” Mr. Tite jabbed my shoulder with an index finger that felt like a lead pipe.

  I moved out of range and kept my eyes on her.

  “My name is Helen Janette.”

  “You were the midwife at my birth—the twenty-fifth of June, 1958. St. Ann’s was struck by lightning. The power went out.”

  Her face filled with grim pleasure. “Mr. Tite, assist the gentleman outside.”

  Tite gripped my shoulders with both hands. His sick breath enveloped me. I twisted to one side and knocked him off balance with the duffel bag. He stumbled a half step away and cocked his right fist.

  I lifted my hands. “I’m going. It’s all over.”

  They watched me wrestle the duffel through the door.

  I turned into Word Street and found my way to Veal Yard and the Brazen Head Hotel. A clerk with purple bags under his eyes informed me that I could have a second-floor room with a bath for sixty-five dollars a night or one with a bathroom down the hall on the fourth floor for fifty. I took the second-floor room. He pointed to the stairs. “Elevator tends to be slow,” he said. “Tends to stall, too.”

  Room 215 at the Brazen Head, directly across from the staircase, was twice the size of my accommodations at Helen Janette’s. The bed jutted out into the room, pointing toward a desk and two wooden chairs in front of a dusty window looking out onto Veal Yard. A sign taped to the mirror advised guests to use the bottled water in the minibar instead of drinking the tap water. The bottled water was free of charge.

  For a while, I drank Poland Spring water and tried to make sense of what had happened to me. Had I traveled back to 1935 and called on Howard Dunstan?

  I wasn’t that crazy. On the other
hand, neither did I believe that I had been hallucinating. The Dunstans were not an average American family, though we could match dysfunctions with the best of them. Maybe I was a late bloomer, and time-travel had come down to me from an eighteenth-century slave trader resident in Rhode Island. Maybe I was having another breakdown and would spend the next few weeks in a padded room. But this did not feel like a breakdown. If I was sane, then I had traveled back to 1935 and met my great-grandfather.

  The god Pan lived on as an Edgerton derelict? We were stories whose time had ended? I put this stuff out of my mind and considered Helen Janette–Hazel Jansky. Almost certainly, they were the same person, but I doubted that I could get her to admit to abducting the infant Robert, if she had abducted him. Then I began wondering about the coincidence of my having taken a room in Hazel Jansky’s rooming house and remembered that Toby Kraft had sent me there. Toby and Helen-Hazel had a relationship. Of what kind? Toby’s predilection for women with pretty faces and beachball breasts eliminated the obvious answer. It was another brick wall.

  I gulped Poland Spring and wondered why the Brazen Head did not trust Hatchtown’s water. Then I recapped the bottle and set off for City Hall.

  71

  No lights burned in the vast lobby, and I rapped on the monumental door with a sense of comic hopelessness. Upstairs in a closed office, Coventry might as well have been in another building. I pounded the glass again, felt even sillier, and walked back through the row of columns. When I reached the top of the stairs, the door clanked open and Coventry called out, “Ned, hold on!”

  Smiling, he held the door and beckoned me in. “I had to run down all those stairs!” His rolled-up sleeves, bow tie, and khakis made him look like an aged schoolboy. “I’m glad to see you!” Coventry glanced past me, then to both sides.

  “She’s not here,” I said. “It’s nice to see you, too.” I went in and waited while he locked the door. “How did you hear me?”

  “I was kind of waiting for you. How goes the research?”

  “I’m making progress,” I said. “Do you have time to look up some property records?”

  “No problem.” He smiled at me again, almost apologetically. “Too bad Laurie couldn’t join you. She really brightens up the day, don’t you think?”

  “You’re fond of her,” I said.

  “Whenever I see Laurie, I feel better about everything. She has a sort of gift.”

  “I suppose Laurie has all kinds of gifts,” I said.

  “Odd you should say that. I have the same feeling. Extraordinary, I must say.” He tilted his head and smiled at the ceiling, remote and all but invisible in the darkness. “That you should sense it, too, I mean. You’re a sensitive man.” Coventry’s chin snapped down. “I’m sorry. Did that sound condescending?”

  “Maybe a little,” I said.

  “Dear me. I meant, you must be more perceptive than most men. You know what I mean, don’t you? Of course you do.” He pressed his fingertips to his forehead. “Do I seem to be making sense?”

  “Indirectly.”

  Coventry guffawed and ducked his head. He was a nice, sweet guy. “When most men look at Laurie, all they see is … well, the obvious. You and I see someone with a brilliant mind, a wonderful soul, and a whole range of abilities she’s only begun to tap.”

  “She must value your friendship,” I said.

  He gave me a quick glance. “The two of you are fast friends, and all that?”

  “I enjoy her company,” I said. “But I’m not going to be in Edgerton very long.”

  Coventry bounded up the stairs. I had lightened his spirits. When he reached the landing, he turned around and propped a hand on a marble upright. His eyes were glowing. “Did she tell you about her background?”

  “She said a lot about her father.”

  Coventry restrained himself to keep pace with me. He wanted to take the stairs three at a time. “He had a tremendous influence on her, tremendous.”

  On the second floor, he snapped on the fluorescent lights over a counter in front of two cluttered desks and rows of filing cabinets. “I confess I still haven’t turned up Mrs. Rutledge’s photographs, but I promise you, they will be found.” He went behind the counter. “What properties were you interested in?”

  “The first one is a tract of land near the woods on New Providence Road.”

  Coventry disappeared into the rows of cabinets and came back with a thick file.

  In 1883, Sylvan Dunstan had purchased from Joseph Johnson ten thousand acres that included Johnson’s Woods. Howard Dunstan had inherited the property, and in 1936 Carpenter Hatch bought it from his daughters for a surprising sum. I thought that my aunts must have invested the money and lived on it ever since.

  “What else?”

  “Have you heard the term ‘the Shunned House’? Someone mentioned it today, and I can’t figure out why it sounds familiar.”

  “Isn’t that from H. P. Lovecraft? I read a lot of Lovecraft when I was a kid. I think he based the Shunned House on a building in Providence. He spent most of his life there.”

  Lovecraft was the writer of whom Edward Rinehart’s stories had reminded me.

  “Weren’t you interested in some other properties?”

  “Yes,” I said. “One was a little street in College Park. I can’t remember the name, damn it.”

  “It’ll come to you in a second. Fascinating area, College Park. Do you know it was the site of the old Hatch Brothers Fairground?”

  “The Hatches owned the fairground?”

  Hugh Coventry’s smile contained more than a hint of complicity. “You’d never guess, would you? Mr. Hatch doesn’t want you to, either. He made it clear that we were to underplay his family’s earlier endeavors, but the fairground was a money-spinner for years. That was how they were able to buy up the area that came to be known as Hatchtown.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did they sell it to Albertus?”

  “An unbelievable bit of luck. The Hatches moved up in the world, and by the 1890s they were just leasing the land. It was pretty seedy. Strippers and freak shows, bootleggers and prostitutes thrown in. The houses for the fairground workers were put up higgledy-piggledy. There were a couple of shady doctors, too. A Dr. Hightower peddled drugs to his patients, and the other one, Dr. Drears, was, I’m afraid, the archetypal backstreet abortionist. Infected or killed half of his patients.”

  “So Hatch wants to sweep this part of the family history under the rug?”

  “I can’t blame him,” Coventry said. “After all, they just owned the property. By the mid-twenties, it was nothing but vacant land and empty houses. Then the Albertus people came along and bought the whole shebang. Before long, enrollment went up, merchants moved in, and the area took off. What street did you want to check?”

  “Buxton Place,” I said, naming Edward Rinehart’s old address as if I had remembered it from the start.

  Coventry disappeared into the files again and returned with a bound journal about two feet high and a yard wide. “This is a curiosity.” He thumped the journal onto the counter, turned it sideways so that we could both see the pages, and opened it. A hand-drawn map of four or five streets divided along property lines took up the right-hand page. The page on the left recorded the sales of the buildings and lots, with a numbered key referring to the map. “What a gorgeous artifact,” Coventry said. “You hate to replace a thing like this with entries in a data base.”

  I asked him how to find Buxton Place in the gorgeous artifact.

  “With luck, there’ll be an index.” He turned to the last pages. “Oh, these people were great. So, Buxton Place …” He ran his finger down a handwritten column and flipped back through the pages. “Here we are.” Coventry squinted down and tapped his finger on a tiny lane. “It’s a cul-de-sac. What was on it? What used to be stables, mostly. And two houses, probably for the grooms and stable hands. Let’s see the ownership records for lots 60448 and 60449.”

  We went down the list of nu
mbers on the facing page.

  “Here, 60448,” Coventry said. “Owned originally by Hatch Brothers Fairground, as of 1882, anyhow. What do you know?” He started to laugh. “In 1902, sold to Prosper Hightower, M.D.”

  I looked at him.

  “Hightower. The drug doctor, remember? Then what? Acquired by Edgerton Township, 1922. Sold to Charles Dexter Ward, 1950. So what about its next-door neighbor? Lot 60449. Hatch Brothers Fairground. Purchased in 1903, Coleman Drears, M.D. Incredible! Here is our abortionist. They lived next door to each other! And I bet I know why—Buxton Place was more a back alley than a street. No neighbors watching their patients come and go. What happened when Drears took off? Acquired by the township in 1924, sold to a Wilbur Whately in 1950.” His head jerked up. “Weren’t we just talking about H. P. Lovecraft?”

  I nodded.

  Coventry giggled and shook his head in a transport of disbelief.

  “What?”

  “Lovecraft wrote a novel called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Wilbur Whately is a character in ‘The Dunwich Horror,’ one of his stories. I am truly happy. I’ll have to mark the day on my calendar. Never before have I come across a literary allusion in City Hall.”

  “Would you mind looking up one more?”

  “After that? Of course not.”

  I gave him the address of the rooming house on Chester Street. In less than a minute Coventry was back at the counter with a manila folder. “How far do you want to go with this one?”

  “Who’s the present owner?”

  Coventry took the last page from the folder and slid it toward me. Helen Janette’s building had been purchased by a company on Lanyard Street in August of 1967. “T.K. Holding Company. Does that tell you what you want to know?”

  “It tells me something I should have known,” I said.

  Toby had bought the rooming house one month before Hazel Jansky was due for release. By present standards, $27,000 wasn’t much of a down payment, but after twenty-six years it still represented an impressive gift.