Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  I flipped through a couple of pages and saw, “Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men.”

  Goose pimples rose on my arms. Once was chance, twice was design. The Buxton Place houses had been bought under names taken from Lovecraft characters, and their caretaker went by the name of another. Earl Sawyer adored Edward Rinehart because he was Edward Rinehart.

  “Laurie,” I said before I knew what I was going to do, “I think I left something upstairs yesterday.”

  “What?” she called.

  “I’ll be right back.” As though driven by a malign compulsion, I double-jumped the stairs and went into Laurie’s bedroom. While a part of me stood by in horror, I pulled open her dresser drawers and searched through her clothing. I went to her closet and compounded my crime.

  Laurie’s voice came from the bottom of the staircase. “What are you looking for, Ned?”

  “A pair of sunglasses. I just realized they’re gone.”

  “I don’t think they’re here. Dinner in five minutes.”

  I looked under her bed and into her bedside table. I searched the bathroom. When I came out into the hallway, I glanced at Cobbie’s door and moved to Posy’s. I considered taking a look inside, rejected the idea, and turned toward the stairs. Posy Fairbrother was regarding me from the end of the hallway.

  “Thank you for not going into my room,” she said. “Am I to gather you thought I might have taken your sunglasses?”

  “No, Posy, please,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out where the blasted things could be.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear sunglasses,” she said. “Anyhow, we’re ready to eat.”

  I got through dinner by steering the conversation toward cartoons, a subject on which Cobbie had a great many observations, and Haydn’s Theresienmesse, to which I had listened just often enough to fake an expertise. Posy sent me suspicious glances, and Cobbie, for whom dinner with the grown-ups was a special treat, threw in a couple of four-year-old aperçus. (“That music was like very, very, very good food,” and “It’s nice when a bunch of singers don’t make the notes smeary.”) Both women seemed put out with me, and my apologies for fussing over a lost pair of sunglasses and having to leave after dinner did nothing to warm the atmosphere. A puzzled Laurie walked me to the door. I said that I expected to be busy all the next day, but would call if I could. Cobbie rocketed out of the kitchen, and I gathered him up and kissed his cheek. He reared back and said, emphasizing every word, “I—want—to—hear—another—FOOG!”

  107

  I parked a block south of Brennan’s and hurried into narrow Buxton Place. Twilight had begun to sink into real darkness, and moonlight glinted from the windows in the old stables. As I had expected, the doors and windows of the cottages refused to budge. I kicked at cobbles until one dislodged. I wrapped it in my jacket, carried it back to number 2, and stepped up to the window.

  A hand closed on my shoulder. I thought my heart would explode.

  An inch from my ear, Robert’s voice, my voice, said, “Have you lost your mind?”

  I wanted to club him with the stone.

  “You can’t still be angry. I did you a favor.”

  “You ran out on me.”

  “Didn’t you disappear a second after I did?”

  “Did I?”

  He chuckled. “Brother dear, the more you can discover in yourself, the better off we’ll be tomorrow.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Speaking of favors,” he said. “Blueberry Lane.”

  His smirk was unbearable. “Someone had to repair the damage. I apologized for my moodiness. I hadn’t even thanked Laurie and Posy for their lovely dinner, and I hoped they would understand that my mother’s funeral was having a terrible effect on my manners. I found the sunglasses in the car, sorry for letting them become the focus of my anxieties. Blah blah blah. There are things about human beings I don’t understand, I know, but your fondness for that little boy really baffles me. I had to keep peeling him off my leg. If you don’t watch out, you’re going to spoil that child.”

  “You followed me?”

  “No. I had the pleasure of an early supper at Le Madrigal. Julian flirted with me so sweetly that I’m joining him for a drink around one-thirty this morning. The boy is all aquiver.”

  “You’re going to have sex with Julian?”

  “I don’t make pointless distinctions. Now that the ladies of Blueberry Lane have been pacified, tell me why we’re breaking into this hovel.”

  “After we get inside,” I said.

  Robert filtered through the front door of number 2. As always, it looked like a special effect in a movie. The door swung open, and I dropped the cobblestone and walked in.

  “Make sure the curtains are drawn,” Robert said.

  I tugged the curtains until they overlapped. “Can you see?”

  “Not much better than you.” He felt his way to the central table and fumbled with the lamp. “If Earl Sawyer already gave you the tour, why are we here?”

  “His name isn’t Earl Sawyer,” I said, and told him what I knew.

  For once, Robert seemed dumbfounded. “How can that ugly old man be Edward Rinehart? He doesn’t look anything like us, and he’s supposed to be our father?”

  “Thirty years ago, he probably looked exactly like us. He’s had a lousy life, he’s about fifty pounds overweight, and he eats terrible food. On top of that, he’s as crazy as a shithouse rat, which tends to distort the way you look.”

  “I could have killed him in the blasted Cobden Building.”

  “He didn’t know who you were, either. He never really saw you. But he sure knew who I was when he let me in here this afternoon. He had to.”

  “Why didn’t he try to kill you then?”

  I gave him the only reason that made sense to me. “Because killing only one of us is no good.”

  “You’re wrong, wrong, wrong,” Robert said. “He doesn’t know there are two of us. That’s the reason I’m still alive.”

  “He has to know it now, Robert,” I said. “Maybe he saw us on that night in Hatchtown. He’s waiting until tomorrow, when he’s counting on getting us together. But whatever he tries to do, we have one advantage over him.”

  Robert grasped the point. “He doesn’t know we know.”

  “I hope that’s an advantage. Anyhow, it’s the only one we have.”

  He moved frowning across the floor and switched on the other lights. “Don’t make assumptions about what I’ll be willing to do.”

  “Robert,” I said, “we will do what we have to do.”

  Two parallel lines cut through the dust on top of the table where Earl Sawyer had been standing when he summoned me into the room. One of the lines was about eight inches long, the other no more than two. A picture frame, I thought, propped on its cardboard leg. I pulled out the drawer and found nothing but mouse droppings. Sawyer had taken with him whatever he had hidden from me.

  “Let’s rattle his cage.” Robert was virtually shimmering with excitement. “Let’s make Edward Rinehart so angry he won’t be able to think.”

  “How?”

  Robert looked across to the thirty or forty copies of From Beyond. “I suppose he is amazingly attached to those books.”

  “You have an evil mind,” I said.

  “I have some matches with me, but we’ll need more.”

  “I believe I can help you there,” I said.

  “Then all we need is a metal container thingie about half the size of a bathtub. I want to do this outside, so we don’t set the house on fire.”

  “Hold on.” I went through to number 1, groped into the kitchen, switched on the overhead light, and overturned the washtub I had seen earlier. Garbage showered onto the messy floor. I carried the tub back and found Robert standing outside in a small, bricked-in yard beneath the steadily darkening sky. Robert wheeled around, and I put down the tub and followed him to the shelf filled with cop
ies of From Beyond. It took us three trips to carry them outside. I brought the matches out of my pocket and picked up one of the books.

  “Not yet.” Robert folded back its covers and wrenched the glued pages away from the spine. He separated the wad of pages into halves, then into smaller and smaller sections. I began dismembering another copy. Loose pages fluttered to the cement floor.

  When nearly half of the books had been destroyed, Robert knelt alongside the wreckage. “Now we get to the fun.” He lit a match and held it to the bottom of a quire of pages. Yellow flame traveled up the first of them and spread to the second. Robert turned them over. The flame shrank and lost strength, then crept around the edges and took hold. Robert lowered the burning papers into the tub and held another section of pages over the fire.

  “This is as close as you can get to feeling right about burning books,” I said.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Robert said. Laughter bubbled in his voice.

  I ripped books apart while Robert fed pages into the fire, laying in each new section like wood on a hearth and spreading the fire across the whole of the washtub. Scraps lifted burning into the air and floated toward the walls. In flight, some pages consumed themselves entirely, leaving behind not even ash. Some shrank to traveling dots of light, to fireflies; others blazed into flaming birds. A few burned on as they ascended, whirling far up into the night sky on the wind of their own destruction. Flames sent abrupt shadows capering along the walls.

  As Robert bent over the washtub, erratic flickers of red and orange illuminated his face. It seemed almost ideal, no more like my own than mine was like Michelangelo’s David. Robert’s crisp eyebrows were streaks of black paint, the same smooth thickness all along their length. His eyes were clear and lustrous, his nose so perfect it might have been shaped by a godlike chisel. Deep shadows emphasized the cut of his cheekbones and the broad, well-defined mouth. The entire face spoke of quickness, assurance, grace, vitality—also, as he watched the fireflies and blazing birds dance upward, of the pure hunger that made him rejoice in destruction.

  “Your turn.” Robert jumped up to chase a soaring yellow wing.

  I squatted beside the washtub and eased in pages, snatching back my hand from sudden flares. Beneath the body of the fire, lines of type seethed and coiled. Robert danced after his skittering yellow wing until it shrank to a glowing constellation of red sparks, then whirled to chase another flaming bird toward the back wall. He looked like the follower of some ancient god, his hair tied with ropes of golden grasshoppers, ecstatic in the performance of a sacrifice. Then I thought Robert looked not like a follower, but like a god himself, a god rejoicing in conflagration and disorder.

  He danced back to hold a binding over the flames until a yellow tongue unfurled across the green board. My sense of the incomprehensible depth of his experience disappeared into, was erased by, the awareness that his insatiability, the intensity of his deprivations, had forever trapped him within childhood. Suddenly, Robert seemed stunted by the weight of all he needed, and for the first time I understood that he was imprisoned in a halflife from which only I could rescue him. Robert needed me more crucially, more centrally, than I had always needed him. Within whatever jealous, smoke-filled chamber that passed for his soul, Robert knew this, too, and pretended he did not.

  His beautiful face darkened when he noticed me looking at him.

  “I was thinking how we look exactly alike in one way, and not at all in another,” I said, and received another edgy glance.

  We went back to business until every copy of Edward Rinehart’s book had turned into ashes and a few, half-burned bindings at the bottom of a washtub. The yard smelled like the remains of Helen Janette’s rooming house. Black, charred black leaves littered the ground. Robert kicked one into fragments. “Let’s trash some of his Lovecraft, too.”

  “I’m not burning any good books,” I said, “but that gives me an idea.” I went inside and saw that my hands were smeared with ashes. I supposed the same was true of my face. Already distant, Robert stood in the doorway. Unlike me, he was immaculate. I used my handkerchief to slide The Dunwich Horror from its shelf. “I think this is the first Lovecraft he ever read. I bet it’s his bible.”

  Robert displayed a trace of interest.

  “He’ll do anything to get it back.”

  “In that case, we’ll make him jump through hoops.” He looked at his watch. “Clean yourself up. You’re a mess.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Our adventures usually begin around three or four in the afternoon. I’ll see you before that, wherever you are. In the meantime, don’t do anything stupid.”

  “You, too.”

  Robert smiled at me. “Ned has a trick up his sleeve. Ned is not laying all his cards on the table. Let me ask this. He doesn’t know that we know that he knows there are two of us. Would you spell out how we’re going to use that against him?”

  “The way we did in Boulder,” I said. I had no intention of telling him the rest.

  “I refuse.”

  “You won’t have any choice. It’s all we have.”

  Robert glared at me, trapped between what he knew to be true and what he did not want to admit. “I’m not agreeing to anything.”

  I walked to the table from which I thought Earl Sawyer had removed a framed photograph of his younger self. “Come here.” Robert moved unwillingly across the room. “Hold your hand under the light.”

  “If you must.” He thrust his right hand, palm up and fingers extended, beneath the lamp. No creases divided his palm, and there were no ridges on his fingertips. His hand could have been made of a remarkably lifelike plastic.

  “There weren’t enough fingerprints to go around,” Robert said. “I can’t say I miss them.”

  Missing them causes you more pain than you can afford to admit, I thought.

  He pulled his hand from the pool of light. “You have a lot to learn.”

  “At least I learned that much,” I said. Robert was already gone.

  108

  A ragged boy squatted in front of the warehouse on Lavender Lane, his hands between his knees, a cigarette drooping from the fingers. His shoulders twitched, the cigarette rose, his mouth captured it. He had memorized every gesture ever made by Frenchy La Chapelle. When I came toward him, the boy shot to his feet and slithered around the door. A bolt slammed home.

  I put my hands on the door and whispered. “I want to see Nolly Wheadle.”

  The words passed into silence.

  “Nolly? You helped me out of Hatchtown last Friday night. I want to talk to you.” These words, too, met a waiting silence. “There’s five bucks in it for you.”

  I heard a scuffle of feet. A wised-up little voice said, “Ten.”

  “You got it,” I said.

  “Push it under the door,” the voice said.

  “Let me hear you slide the bolt.”

  “First the money.”

  I pushed a bill under the door. The bolt moved out of its clip, and the door rattled a foot sideways. I slipped inside. At my back, the door closed on utter blackness. Not to me, Nolly whispered, “Get away.” Small, bare feet retreated over the earthen floor. My eyes began to adjust, and I saw dim outlines arranging themselves against the wall, like birds settling in for the night.

  Nolly’s vague figure moved toward the side of the warehouse. “Keep your voice down.”

  “You remember me.”

  “Aye,” Nolly said.

  “Two men were following us.”

  “People say you took care of one of them.” His voice sounded like air leaking from a punctured tire.

  “Somebody did,” I said. Nolly made a hissing sound that I realized was a chuckle. “I think another person was there, too. Someone who saw us but was never seen. Someone you know. A man who pays you to do favors for him.”

  “We does favors,” Nolly said. “It don’t mean nothing.”

  “I met him today. He said his name was Earl Sawyer.” W
hispers came from the rear of the old warehouse. “I think he sometimes wears a black coat and hat.”

  Nolly’s shadowy form went rigid.

  A voice from the back of the warehouse said, Black Death.

  Nolly hissed, “Shut yer traps!”

  “You call him Black Death?” I whispered.

  A small voice said, Into the Knacker with ’im, Nolly, into the Knacker.

  He leaned toward me. “You’re not supposed to have heard of him, someone like you, and besides, you’re mixed up in the head. You’re putting together two different fellows who aren’t the same.”

  “The Knacker?” I asked Nolly.

  “Where they go when they go permanent,” Nolly whispered. “Not only horses, neither.”

  He backed away, and I grabbed the tail of his shirt and pulled him deeper into the corner. Nolly submitted with a glum, heartbreaking passivity. I knelt down and put another five-dollar bill in his hand. “I know you’re scared. I am, too. This is important to me.”

  “Life-or-death important?”

  “Life-or-death important.”

  So softly that I could barely hear him, Nolly whispered, “There’s a name you can’t say, because he can hear through walls. Those that see him when he doesn’t want to be seen are taught to be sorry. That is B.D. You know what I mean by that name?”

  “Yes,” I whispered back.

  “He lives at night, and he has always been here. B.D. is not a true human being. Most of those back there, they see him as a vampire. I say, he’s not a vampire but a demon from hell.”

  “He’s always been here?”

  “He was made when Hatchtown was made. B.D. is Hatchtown, as I think. That’s why things are this way.”

  “Which way?” I asked.

  Nolly made a contemptuous noise. “Water’s bad, sewers don’t work. Every time the river floods, we’re underwater and covered in mud. This is Hatchtown. B.D., he’s like us, except he’s a demon. If there is a Mr. Hatch, I reckon he made B.D. but I wish he hadn’t.”

  I leaned back against the wall and put my hands over my face.

  Nolly bent closer. “Earl Sawyer will be another five dollars.” I gave him the bill.