Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “When Mrs. Fanteen asked me about Clarence’s financial setup, I assured her that my sister and her husband are destitute.”

  “I’d better talk to Creech,” I said.

  “I spoke to Mr. C. Clayton Creech the minute I got off the phone with Mrs. Fanteen,” Nettie said. “His manners may be peculiar, but Mr. Creech is a man who knows what’s what. If you can stir yourself, Mr. Creech wants you to sign a few papers in his office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Which will give you plenty of time to pay our respects to old Toby,” Clark said.

  I looked back at Nettie.

  “Mr. Creech informed me that the burial will take place at ten A.M. tomorrow. We would like you to represent our family.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “I’d like some of that tuna casserole,” Nettie said. “Keep you company.”

  “I could manage a few bites,” May said.

  “Count me in,” Clark said. “Food takes your mind off your sorrows.”

  I brought in plates and forks and watched them eat. “Did you tell me you called Laurie Hatch?”

  “I believe so,” said Nettie. “A lovely young woman. My heart goes out to her, with her husband under suspicion of wrongdoing.”

  “You said you were thinking about calling her. You didn’t mention that you went to the library, too.”

  Nettie rebuked me with a glance. “Mrs. Hatch merely helped my sister and myself try to recover the photographs mislaid by Mr. Coverly, a man who couldn’t point out the sky if he was lying flat on his back in an open field.”

  “Coverdale,” said May. “You Coverdale. He can’t be from around here. People around here don’t name their babies You.”

  “Hugh,” I said. “Hugh Coventry.”

  “An exceptionally nervous man,” said May. “It’s a pity when a man has a nervous disposition.”

  “In my opinion, it was Mrs. Hatch who made him nervous,” said Nettie.

  The faint, almost playful suggestion of an idea came to me, and I said, virtually without thinking, “I don’t suppose Mrs. Hatch mentioned any other photographs.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that,” Nettie said. “We were thinking of having your birthday celebration at eleven A.M. tomorrow, if it suits your crowded schedule.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Mrs. Hatch asked us to give her regards to Neddie. Didn’t I tell you that, Neddie? Your friend asked us to convey her regards.”

  I smiled at May. “You’re telling me you walked out of the library empty-handed?”

  “Goodness, only a fool would pass up an opportunity like that. I found all kinds of useful things in there. A whole box of rubber bands, two boxes of those nice big paper clips, jumbo they call them, and a date stamp where you can change the numbers. We can stamp our own books!”

  “May,” I said, “you don’t have any books.”

  She smiled at me like a cat.

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “Would you mind if I called Rachel Milton?”

  “If you think it necessary,” Nettie said.

  When Rachel got on the phone, I said, “I can’t believe you acted so fast. Thank you.”

  “I took a nap as soon as I got home and had two cups of coffee afterward. Liz Fanteen told me she would work out the details and get everything set up. Liz is a genius at the numbers game. By the way, Grennie raced in about an hour ago, fit to be tied. He locked himself in his study and made a million phone calls. Then he ran out again, shouting about having to see Stewart. For once, I don’t think he was lying. If you hear anything from Laurie, will you let me know? It’d be easier to be supportive if I knew he was going to jail.”

  A few minutes later I went across the street, where Joy hovered in her doorway as I told her about Mount Baldwin. To my relief, Joy was delighted by the news. And did I know? Another wonderful thing had just happened—Toby Kraft dropped dead and left everyone a fortune!

  103

  It was a few minutes past 3:00 P.M. when I walked past the shop windows on Fairground Road and turned into Buxton Place. The sunlight abruptly died. Beneath their Gothic rooftops, the cottages looked like malignant dwarfs. I was beginning to feel as though I had been strapped to a treadmill, and for a moment I thought about going back to my room for a nap.

  The windows of 1 Buxton Place showed me no more than my own reflection. The same was true next door. I was wasting my time. The answers I needed were to be found in the present, not the past, and the nap was the best idea I’d had since telling the Reverend Swing about my mother’s taste in music. Something Star said to me long ago, a description of an alto saxophone solo on “These Foolish Things” she had heard at a concert before I was born, came back to me, evoking her with painful clarity. I turned away, took a step toward the brilliant shaft of light at the end of the lane, and a man in a black Kangol cap and a short-sleeved blue shirt turned the corner and walked into the darkness. Moving over the cobbles with the trace of a limp, he began fingering through a crowded key ring. His dark skin had the dead pallor of flesh too long deprived of sunlight.

  “Mr. Sawyer,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  Startled, Earl Sawyer looked up from his keys.

  “I’m Ned Dunstan. I saw you in the ICU at St. Ann’s.”

  “I remember.” He took a slow step forward, then another.

  “How do you feel?”

  Sawyer found the key he wanted. “Fine. Got out of the hospital that night. After a few hours, all I had was a headache. Even the bruises went away. I don’t keep bruises long, never have. What brings you up here?”

  “My mother knew the man who owned these houses.”

  Sawyer tilted his head and waited for more.

  “She died five days ago. I was hoping I might be able to talk to him.”

  His eyes seemed to change shape. “They were close?”

  “Once upon a time,” I said.

  “What was his name, this friend of your mother’s?”

  “Edward Rinehart.”

  “You got the wrong address, sorry to say. I’ve been coming here twice a week for ten, fifteen years, and I never heard of him.”

  “This is the right place,” I said. “Mr. Sawyer, who hired you? The owner?”

  “Could be.”

  “Was his name Wilbur Whateley? Or Charles Dexter Ward?”

  All expression drained from Sawyer’s face, and his eyes momentarily retreated. A shy smile flickered over his mouth. He surveyed the stable doors on either side. “You surprised me with that one, my friend.”

  “So I noticed,” I said.

  He chuckled. “I was thinking, this guy got the address all wrong, and you come up with Charles Dexter Ward.”

  “Do you know Mr. Ward?”

  “Never met him.” Sawyer came up beside me and faced the bottom of the lane, as if to ensure that no one would overhear. “I answered an ad in the Echo. Thirty dollars a week for checking in on these properties, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Now it’s up to fifty a week. I think I’ll stay on. You know? Fifty dollars a week, quick trip on the bus, in and out.”

  His nod said it was better than stealing and twice as easy.

  “How do you report to Mr. Ward?”

  “He calls every Saturday, six P.M. sharp. ‘Any problems?’ he says. ‘No problems, sir,’ I say. Monday afternoon, a kid from Lavender Lane hands me an envelope with five ten-dollar bills. Nolly Wheadle.” Sawyer chuckled at the image of the boy who had led me out of Hatchtown on the night Robert had first shown himself. “One time, years back, I had a rotten cold and missed a Wednesday. Mr. Ward called on the Saturday, and I said, ‘No problem,’ same as always. Mr. Ward—let’s say I learned not to lie to Mr. Ward. My next envelope had only ten dollars in it.”

  “How did he know?”

  “You got me. He comes here two or three times a month, though. There’ll be glasses in the sink at Number One. A different stack of books on the
table in Number Two.”

  “Mr. Sawyer,” I said, “I know I’m asking an enormous favor, but would you let me look inside?”

  He pursed his lips and jiggled his keys. “Your mother was a friend of Mr. Ward’s?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What was her name?”

  I told him. He bounced the keys in his hand and debated with himself. “Just keep your hands off Mr. Ward’s belongings.”

  Sawyer opened the door of number 1 onto a musty, charcoal-colored space shining with ghostly shapes. He slipped away to the left, and I heard the clicking of a switch. An overhead fixture shed reluctant light over the contents of Edward Rinehart’s living room. Empty bookshelves covered the wall to my right. A Fisher amplifier, a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, and an A.R. turntable, stereo components that would have knocked your eyes out in 1957, lined a shelf on the near side of the fireplace. A Spanish bullfight poster and a reproduction of Picasso’s Three Musicians hung over the sound equipment. A shelf lined with LP records bracketed the fireplace on its far side, and past the records was a narrow door. A sofa and three chairs draped in languorous-looking sheets accounted for the ghostly shapes I had seen from the entrance.

  “The door goes into Number Two,” Sawyer told me.

  Here, Rinehart had conducted his parties and unofficial seminars. He had posed in front of the fireplace and read passages of his work. He had draped himself across the sofa and murmured provocations. Albertus students, poor damned Erwin “Pipey” Leake, and people like Donald Messmer had streamed up Buxton Place and brought their various passions through the front door.

  Earl Sawyer walked to the far end of the room and into the kitchen, where garbage overflowed from a metal washtub. We went upstairs and looked into a room with a bare double bed, an oak dresser and table. “Any of this interest you?” Sawyer asked.

  “All of it interests me,” I said. I had probably been conceived on that bed. Robert seemed to flicker into being alongside me—I felt his demanding presence—and disappeared without having been any more than an illusion.

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “These places make noises by themselves,” Sawyer said.

  Downstairs, he opened the door beside the record shelf. The room beyond gaped like the mouth of an abandoned mine. “Wait a second. I’ll get the lights.”

  Sawyer walked into the darkness and became a thick shadow. I heard a thump and the sound of wood sliding over wood, then another thump, like the opening and closing of a drawer. “I always hit that damn table.”

  He turned on a lamp atop a side table. A book-lined wall came into view. Sawyer moved to a larger table in the middle of the room and switched on a lamp surrounded by mounds of yellowed newspapers and empty food containers. Tall bookshelves took shape on all sides. “Come on in.”

  Rinehart had turned the cottage into a library. The shelves extended upward to the roof and all the way to the back of the house. An iron ladder curved up to a railed catwalk. There were thousands of books in that room. I looked at the spines: H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft. I moved to the ladder and went up a couple of rungs. Multiple copies of every edition of each of Lovecraft’s books lined the shelves, followed by their translations into what looked like every possible foreign language. First editions, paperbacks, trade paperbacks, collections, library editions. Some of the books looked almost new, others as though they had been picked up in paperback exchange stores. Rinehart had spent time and money buying rare copies, but he had also purchased almost every Lovecraft volume he had seen, whether or not he already owned it. “I think I know the name of his favorite writer,” I said.

  “Mr. Ward thinks H. P. Lovecraft was the greatest writer who ever lived.” Sawyer scanned the shelves with mute, secondhand pride. “Years back, I started reading a couple stories when I finished my job. Mr. Lovecraft put a lot in them, but not everything he knew. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this subject.”

  This was the source of his pride—his theories about Lovecraft.

  “You know what a parable is, I hope.”

  “I went to Sunday school,” I said.

  His smile vanished before the significance of what he had to say. “A parable is a story with a concealed meaning. You might not see it, but it’s there.”

  “Some parables seem to have lots of meanings,” I said. “The more you think about them, the less you can be sure what they say.”

  “No, you’re reading them all wrong, they wouldn’t be any good that way. A parable has only one meaning, but the trick is, you have to look for it. Mr. Lovecraft’s stories are the same. They can teach you a lot, if you’re strong enough to accept the truth.”

  I had seen the same kind of pleasure in the faces of men devoted to theoretical, Hydra-headed conspiracies that connected the Kennedy assassinations, the FBI, organized crime, the military-industrial complex, and Satanic cabals. The stink of craziness always enveloped these people.

  “Look there.” Sawyer pointed at a shelf filled with copies of From Beyond. “A friend of his wrote that book. Mr. Ward said it ought to be famous, and he’s right. It’s a great book. Maybe my favorite.”

  His eyes met mine. “So were you telling me that Mr. Ward and Edward Rinehart are the same? Rinehart is what they call a pseudonym?”

  He wanted to display his knowledge of the word.

  “So is Charles Ward.”

  Sawyer’s unhealthy face turned sullen.

  I moved down rows of books and saw lodged at the end of a shelf what looked like a first edition of The Dunwich Horror. I pulled it out and saw penciled on the flyleaf W. Wilson Fletcher, Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, Pennsylvania, 1941.

  Earl Sawyer materialized at my side like an angry djinn and snatched the book from my hands. “I’m sorry, I should have said.” He nudged the book back into place. “Mr. Ward told me not to touch that particular book. It’s sacred, you could say.”

  Sawyer cut off my apology. “You have to leave. I made a mistake.”

  104

  A tingling like the piercing by needles too small to be seen came over my hands when I drove through the southern fringe of College Park. I looked down and saw the steering wheel waver beneath two hand-shaped blurs.

  A voice from the backseat said, “How do you do that?”

  “You do it!” I yelled.

  “Don’t be paranoid,” Robert said. “It’s over. Look.”

  My utterly visible hands gripped the wheel.

  “I could explain it, but you wouldn’t understand.” He patted my shoulder. “What were you up to in College Park? And what’s the latest on the Joe Staggers front?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I can’t keep up with everything.” Robert folded his arms on top of the passenger seat. “Talk to me.”

  “You can forget about Joe Staggers,” I said, and described going through the Buxton Place cottages with Earl Sawyer.

  “That gives me an idea. In the meantime, point us toward Ellendale. I think Stewart Hatch is hiding something we want.”

  The mystery of Robert’s limitations faded before the suggestion that Hatch himself had walked off with his family photographs.

  “He isn’t at home,” Robert said. “Stewart had troubling news today. He and Grenville Milton are deep in conference with their lawyer.”

  “I’m not going to break into his house.”

  “You won’t have to. I’ll go in and open the door.”

  “You don’t need me to ransack Hatch’s house,” I said.

  “Who knows? You might learn something about Laurie. In the meantime, explain why I should forget about Joe Staggers.”

  I told him that he wouldn’t understand.

  105

  One leg planted on the driveway, a knee bent into the Mountaineer, Posy Fairbrother was leaning through the rear door to strap Cobbie into his seat. She looked like an idealized figure on a frieze.

  Robert sigh
ed. “Pity that Posy’s too straitlaced to mess around with her employer’s lover. Turn left, here’s Bayberry.”

  Stewart’s angular, contemporary house stood on two treeless acres at the end of the first street off Blueberry. I drove past it and parked around the corner on Loganberry.

  In a hot, green emptiness, Robert and I cut across the lawn and climbed the steps to the gray wooden deck. “Momentito,” Robert said. He glided through the back door and, after a pause longer than I had expected, opened it. “Stewart didn’t install an alarm system. I guess there’s nothing worth stealing.”

  I looked around at the kitchen. “Not unless you have a forklift.” A gas range faced a twelve-foot marble counter that extended past a double-doored refrigerator and a glass-fronted wine vault. On the shelves beside the wine vault were ranked a half dozen bottles of single-malt Scotch and a couple bottles of Belvedere vodka, undoubtedly awaiting their turn in the freezer.

  A partition separated the dining room from what people like Stewart Hatch called a “great room.” The furniture marooned in the vast space had been picked up at a Scandinavian furniture outlet in the local mall.

  Upstairs in the master bedroom, a monumental television set faced the bottom of an unmade king-sized bed. Polo shirts and khaki trousers were strewn across a sofa. Robert opened the closet doors. I went through a rolltop desk and found boxes of canceled checks, flyers from Caribbean resorts, and two videotapes, labeled Kinky Bondage, USA and Love in Chains.

  A book titled Management Secrets of the Ancient Chinese Warlords lay on the bedside table; in the drawer underneath was a box of steel-tipped cartridges and a nine-millimeter pistol. The next drawer down contained a jumble of handcuffs, leather thongs and straps, lengths of rope, metal-studded wristbands, and a couple of things I neither recognized nor wanted to think about.