Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  Thick padlocks hung from the doors of the old stables. Beneath their dusty windows, stenciled letters spelled out ALBERTUS UNIVERSITY STORAGE FACILITY. Edward Rinehart’s houses stood side by side, separated by a common wall. Each had two windows up and down and a fanlight over an arched doorway. Narrow chimneys pierced the slanting tiled roofs, and iron crestings ran along the gutters. They looked distorted, diminished, as if squeezed down from some larger, original size. The windows reflected my cupped hands and the dark, indistinct oval of my face. I hurried back into the sunlight.

  With eight minutes in which to accomplish a fifteen-minute drive, I whirled into an illegal U-turn and sped south on Fairground Road. A traffic light flashed yellow, and I bumped the accelerator and shot through the intersection a moment before it turned red. Robert, who had abruptly appeared next to me in the passenger seat, applauded. “Dash! Verve!”

  I almost drove into a parked car.

  “Did I startle you? Please accept my apologies. I trust that our documents are now in Toby Kraft’s safe.”

  “Go to hell. Yes, they’re in Toby’s safe.”

  “Do we have plans for the evening?”

  “I’m having dinner with Nettie and May.”

  “Do you know, I have never enjoyed a meal in the company of our great-aunts?”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” I said. “Their conversation tends to be repetitious.”

  “Let me relieve you of the tedium. I’ll take your place.”

  “No.”

  “After the tedious dinner, were you thinking of driving to Ellendale?”

  “Stay away from Laurie Hatch,” I said.

  “If you insist. For the time being, anyhow.”

  “Robert,” I said, but I was talking to an empty seat.

  86

  From her station in the window, Aunt Joy pointed at Nettie’s house, then herself, telling me that I was to come over after dinner. I nodded. Joy and I had a lot to talk about.

  The aunts smiled up from the sofa as I came into the living room. Clark granted me the indulgent sneer of a man fresh from an appearance at the Speedway Lounge. He was arrayed in pearl-gray trousers, the jacket of a purple suit, and a wide necktie with yellow polka dots on a red background. “I guess you got a vehicle now.”

  “Just a rental,” I said. I kissed my aunts, and May handed me a brown paper bag.

  “I hope I got the sizes right.”

  In the bag were two three-packs of Calvin Klein briefs, size 34, and six pairs of black over-the-calf wool socks, size 10–12. After the aunts had divided up the loot from the ICU, I had jokingly asked May to get me underwear and socks, and she had taken me at my word. “The sizes are perfect,” I said. “I don’t really approve of this, but thanks, Aunt May. I can use them.”

  “Is that blazer your only coat, Neddie? I can get you a new one from Lyall’s. They have some beautiful coats in their men’s department.”

  “No, no,” I said hurriedly, “I have all the jackets I need.”

  “Have any this color?” Clark asked, almost belligerently.

  “No, but it’s very pretty.”

  “What would you call this particular color?”

  “Purple?”

  “I hate to see a young man make a fool of himself.”

  “Midnight purple?”

  “The true name for this shade is aubergine. Now you don’t have to walk around in ignorance.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ve been walking around in ignorance most of my life.”

  Nettie said, “I think we had better get into the kitchen. Do you still like fried chicken, Ned?”

  “Do I ever.”

  The table had been set with bowls of mashed potatoes and string beans and a pitcher of iced tea. Nettie peeled aluminum foil off the top of a platter of fried chicken. May hobbled up to distribute the chicken onto our plates. Uncle Clark lowered himself into a chair, and I poured him a glass of iced tea. “How’s your friend Cassie?”

  He took in just enough liquid to extinguish a match. “The girl didn’t show up for work today. Bruce McMicken was rough around the edges.”

  May settled into the chair across from me while Nettie brought out gravy and biscuits. I poured iced tea into the other three glasses. Nettie thanked me, formally. In silence, we helped ourselves to the potatoes and beans.

  “This is a wonderful dinner, Aunt Nettie,” I said.

  “When you were a child, you were fond of fried chicken.”

  “Nobody makes it better than you,” I said.

  Silence descended again. My remark about being raised in ignorance had spoiled the fun.

  Nettie, for whom even a pointed silence was an unendurable challenge, said, “What have you been doing all this time? Touring the town in your new car?”

  “Or playing cards?” May asked. “Mountry trash is on the lookout for you. And one of them is dead. That is no great loss to the world.”

  Nettie sent me one of her thousand-pound glances. “I guess the police didn’t give you much trouble.” She paused. “Unless you’re not saying.”

  “They let me go right away,” I said. “It’s a strange thing, but there’s a man in town who looks a lot like me.”

  “So that’s your story,” Clark said, maneuvering a tiny portion of mashed potato into the gravy.

  “It’s not a story,” I said. “Yesterday, when I was coming out of City Hall, he was standing at the far end of Town Square. I tried to follow him, but he got away.”

  Clark fixed me with a disapproving glare. “City Hall gets locked up on Sundays. What business would you have there, anyhow?”

  “A friend of Laurie Hatch’s volunteers at City Hall on the weekends. He’s been giving me some help.”

  “Mrs. Hatch introduces you to her friends?” Nettie asked.

  I explained about meeting Laurie at Le Madrigal. “I wanted to get some information about Edward Rinehart, and she introduced me to Hugh Coventry, her friend who helps out at City Hall.”

  “Hugh Coventry?” Nettie asked. “He’s the man who lost our pictures. If Mrs. Hatch is such a good friend of yours, she could help us get them back.”

  “There’s no need to trouble Mrs. Hatch with our affairs.”

  “You already involved Mrs. Hatch in our personal affairs,” Nettie said.

  “In mine, yes,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, I didn’t learn much about Rinehart at City Hall. He bought two little alleyway houses in College Park. And he was a criminal. Supposedly, he died in prison.”

  “Then stop rooting in the dirt,” Nettie said.

  Rooting in the dirt. I saw myself kneeling on the carpet of grass behind Howard Dunstan’s ruined house—I remembered falling through a trap door and hearing a theatrical phantom say, Once your father had been created, I decided to amuse myself by driving him mad…. Perhaps you will destroy him instead. The outcome of the game no longer matters to me.

  Sudden, stupendous understanding took my breath away.

  All three of them were looking at me as if they had seen my understanding come into being, but they really had seen no more than the expression on my face at the moment of comprehension. Howard had told me what I most needed to know. Telling me what I needed to know helped to keep him amused.

  “But Edward Rinehart didn’t die at Greenhaven,” I said. “He’s living in Edgerton. From what I hear, he sounds a lot like a Dunstan.”

  Nettie’s chin sank to her chest, and May found a need to gaze at the stove. Clark dissected a string bean.

  “Never in all my life,” Nettie finally said.

  “A lot of things about our family were hidden from me.”

  Nettie glared. “You’ve been listening to gossip.”

  “If you wanted me to think that the Dunstans were a normal family, you should have kept me away from Aunt Joy,” I said.

  “Joy lives in a world of her own,” Nettie said. “Put it out of your mind.”

  “You want me to forget the way she waggled a finger at Uncle Clarence
and floated him through the air?”

  “Joy was never a happy person like you and me, Nettie,” May said. “She blamed Daddy for her troubles.”

  “We’re not talking about her troubles,” Nettie growled. “We’re talking about what she did.”

  “We’re talking about the Dunstans,” I said. “Aunt Nettie, you’re not all that different from Joy, are you?”

  She cast me another thunder-and-lightning glare. “I’m a Dunstan, if that’s what you mean. Would you like to see proof of that?”

  Before I could answer, Nettie tucked her hands into her armpits and frowned at the table. The pitcher of tea rose up and wafted down the table to refill my glass. It coasted to May, who said, “No, thank you, I’ve had enough.” The pitcher landed with a tinkling of ice cubes.

  Nettie turned her head to Clark. An alarmed look crossed his face. “No! I don’t—”

  He ascended three feet above his chair and sailed toward the stove like a man on a magic carpet. “Put me down, Nettie!”

  She spun him around and brought him back to his chair. Clark put his hands on his chest and took a couple of noisy breaths. “You know I don’t like it when you do that.”

  “You married me,” Nettie said.

  “I like it,” May chirped. “I always liked it.”

  Nettie wiped her forehead and stared at her sister. Giggling, May shot out of her chair, made a circuit of the table, and came to rest.

  Nettie looked angrily at me. “You want some, too?”

  What came out of my mouth was “Yes.”

  She beetled her brows, gazing not so much at me as at my position in the room. A drop of sweat rolled out of her hairline. The tingle that predicted my “attacks” bloomed in my chest. I felt my being grasped up and held within a firmly accommodating restraint precisely like Mr. X’s confinement. With the same sense of powerlessness before an irresistible pressure, I lifted off my chair. A great wall of wind pushed me into the living room. The wind shifted on its axis, hurtled me back into the kitchen, and tumbled me head over heels a moment before I struck the wall. A shout of glee burst from my throat. I floated to the table and saw Nettie gazing at nothing, her eyebrows contracted and her face damp with sweat. I moved over my chair, swayed right-left, then left-right, and, like a helicopter, settled back on earth.

  “You like that more than I do,” Clark said.

  “Ned’s a Dunstan.” Nettie wiped her face with a napkin. “You get old, your batteries run down.”

  “Nettie,” I said, “I drove out to your old house yesterday. Something happened to me there. I can’t explain it, but I can tell you what it was. I got dizzy, and pretty soon I was standing in a room with a stuffed fox next to a brass clock on the mantelpiece.”

  My eyes on Nettie, I only dimly saw May lean forward and clasp her hands before her chest. Nettie touched the napkin to her temple.

  “Your father was in that room,” I said. “He was wearing a velvet smoking jacket, and he had a cigar in one hand.”

  “How did our father look?” May asked me.

  “Tired. But like he was acting, too.”

  “I don’t recognize that description,” May said. “My father was all too energetic.”

  “I recognize it,” Nettie said. “Joy would, too.”

  “He spoke to me,” I said.

  “Joy used to say Daddy talked to her, out at our old house.” May looked warmly at me. “It seems your Dunstan share came out strong late in life, to make up for lost time.”

  “What did he say when he spoke to you?” Nettie demanded.

  “That he created my father. I think his son called himself Edward Rinehart when he came back to Edgerton from wherever he was in the meantime. What I’m wondering is, who was his mother?”

  “You’re looking for a woman who might have fooled around with Howard?” Clark said. “There is no shortage of candidates.”

  “Our mother used to say, some of those fine ladies are not what they pretend to be,” May said. “Daddy told her, None of them are.”

  “Fine ladies,” I said.

  “Those people sent their sons to boarding schools,” Nettie said. “To make the right connections. And you know, May, we seldom got into town when we were little girls. Out tutors came to us.”

  “There were many things our daddy did not wish us to encounter.”

  I said, “He didn’t protect you from whatever made you blow out windshields and power lines up and down Wagon Road.”

  May stiffened in her chair. “I got mad. That’s all that happened. Our father was very angry, but I couldn’t help what I did, I just did it.”

  “You saw two girls making fun of you?”

  “Mainly, I remember Daddy shouting at me in his big, loud voice. I cried all the way home.”

  “Let’s talk about something pleasant, for a change,” Nettie said. “Our grandnephew’s birthday is the day after our niece’s funeral. Would you like to have a party on your birthday, Ned? I could make a sweet-potato pie.”

  “That’s very generous,” I said. “But you know what happens on my birthdays. I wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun.”

  “Your fits?” May asked. “We’ve seen that before.”

  Nettie said, “We’ll have the party early in the day. If you feel your trouble coming on, go to your mother’s old room until it passes. You know how to handle it after all this time, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do,” I said. “Sure, let’s celebrate everything we can.”

  I escorted May down the steps. “Is that your car, Neddie? Did it cost a lot of money?”

  “It’s a rental,” I said.

  “Little thing like that wouldn’t be hard to appropriate.” Sudden inspiration brought her to a halt. She turned to me with a brilliant smile. “Would you like a new car for your birthday?”

  “No, thank you, Aunt May. It’s too hard to find a parking space in New York.”

  “A parking space is something that cannot be stolen,” she said. “I’ll get you something else. But seeing that car …” She shook her head. “You mentioned Wagon Road? Daddy was so mad at me, that day. I knew why, too. He was mad because I was mad. At him.”

  Joy raised a silhouetted hand, and I waved back. May saw nothing but Wagon Road. “You mentioned those girls—you know, I remember them! They were laughing at us. I wanted to die. So I turned my head, pretending I was too proud to notice, and …” She shook her head. “The upshot was, I did something I didn’t know I could do! I had as much Dunstan in me as my sisters, no matter what they thought. You never saw such a hubbub! Glass exploding all over everywhere, wires falling, the poor horses so frightened. And that was me! Scared me worse than Daddy’s yelling.”

  We reached the other side of the street and moved toward her house. “The girls were laughing at you, and you turned away. That was when you got angry. It wasn’t the girls, was it? You saw something else.”

  “A little girl has eyes, too, that’s all I can say.” She tightened her grip on my arm, and we went up the steps to her porch.

  “What was it? What did you see?”

  May released my arm and opened her door. “Oh, Neddie, you don’t know anything at all.”

  87

  Joy’s hunched figure toiled down a lightless tunnel and through the entrance to a cave. As the living room took shape around me, the stench increased. Clarence had been teleported elsewhere.

  “I want to talk to you! Would you like a glass of sherry?”

  “Thank you. Where is Clarence?”

  “He’s sleeping in the closet.” Joy moved back and regarded me, her eyes gleaming. “You saw Daddy, didn’t you? He told me you would. I bet my sisters are so jealous they could spit. They could never see him. Nettie and May think they know everything, but they don’t, not by a long shot.” She put the tips of her fingers to her mouth, almost dancing in her glee. She waved me toward a chair. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  Faint rustles and thuds came from another region of the house. Clarence
had awakened, I thought, and he objected to the closet. Joy returned with two glasses the size of thimbles. I took one of them and said, “Maybe Clarence wants to be let out.”

  “He’s sound asleep. That noise is the wind in the attic.” She perched on the other chair and tilted the contents of the thimble into her mouth. I did the same. The sherry, which was not sherry, burned down my throat like kerosene.

  “Homemade,” Joy said. “According to my bad, mad daddy’s recipe. I don’t have but a little bit left, but I wanted you to have some.”

  “The ambrosia of the Dunstans,” I said. “I guess you’ve seen him, too.”

  “So what did my sisters say? That I made it all up? I didn’t, though. My daddy, Howard Dunstan, stood right in front of me, same as he did with you. Wasn’t he funny? Wasn’t he all impressive and unhappy?”

  “He didn’t seem to think he had any reason to go on living,” I said.

  “According to Daddy, we were washed up a long time ago. He appeared to me because I was a true Dunstan, like him, but he didn’t enjoy the condition. He wanted us all to go away.”

  “He told you I would see him, too?”

  “Because you were a vrai Dunstan, like me. He didn’t like you, though. Daddy didn’t like anybody, especially Dunstans. He didn’t even like his daughters, because they reminded him of his futility. That is the conclusion I have come to.”

  “Aunt Joy,” I said, “how could you and I talk to your father? It wasn’t like seeing a ghost, it was like being there with him.”

  “My daddy couldn’t be a ghost,” Joy said, amused. “Someone like that could never be an ordinary old fantôme. Time made that happen.”

  “Time?”

  “It’s all around us. You can use time, if you’re able. I don’t see why you’re so stupide about it. According to my daddy, you keep on bothering him over and over. That’s what he said.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What do you mean, use it?”

  “You saw my daddy, didn’t you? You were in his study, and he was alive, he had to be alive, because he could talk to you.”

  I realized what she meant. “Oh.”

  “You went into his time, that’s all,” Joy said. “C’est simple.”