Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “Take care,” Clark said. “There’s not but a few of us left, now Mousie’s in his grave.”

  134

  The sky had disappeared above Cherry Street. A wet, silvery mist coated my windshield. I sent the wipers back and forth and cleared two transparent semicircles onto a street visible enough for driving.

  Back in my room, I charged a seat on a 6:00 P.M. flight from St. Louis to New York, giving me more than enough time to lose my way and find it again. After that, I called the rental agency to say that I would be returning their car to the airport in St. Louis with a damaged rear end. A supervisor with the manners of a prison guard put me on hold while he wrangled with the office in St. Louis, then came back on the line and said, “You’ll get away with it this time, Mr. Dunstan. When you drop off the keys, leave the details of the accident, the name, address, and telephone number of the other party and the name of his or her insurance carrier.”

  “You can get that information from Stewart Hatch,” I said. “He got drunk and backed his Mercedes into the rear end of your Taurus.”

  “The surcharge for nonlocal return will be fifty dollars,” he said, and hung up.

  I called the airline and upgraded my reservation to first class. According to C. Clayton Creech, I had at least ten million dollars, and what was good enough for Grennie Milton was good enough for me. My companions in first class were going to love my pink jacket, and they give you an extra bag of pretzels up there at the front of the plane.

  135

  A few ghostlike relics wandered through the fog thickening on Word Street. The neon stripe of HôTE PARIS tinted the cobbles a soft, slippery red. I threw my bags onto the backseat and got behind the wheel. At Chester Street I turned north, thinking that eventually I would see a sign to a bridge across the Mississippi and the highway to St. Louis. Before I reached College Park, the buildings on either side had retreated into vague backdrops, and the headlights of oncoming cars were like cats’ eyes. I remembered Mousie’s teeth rising into the pillow, and I saw inky flak bursting within the bands of deep red glowing across his abbreviated body. The dirty spiderweb that body had become, the bowling-ball weight of his head in the pillowcase. The empty expanse of the Albertus campus slid past my car on what seemed the wrong side. I kept driving. I had not turned, therefore I was still going north and following the river as it wound toward St. Louis.

  Then I remembered that Chester Street became Fairground Road when it crossed into College Park, and Fairground Road did not go past Albertus, it came to an end at the southern boundary of the campus. Somehow, I had managed to circle around and drive south on an unknown street. Albertus had not shifted its geography, I had shifted mine. Fortunately, I still had hours to get to St. Louis. All I had to do was turn around.

  Mousie’s pillowcase landed softly, although not softly enough, at the bottom of the hole in Joy’s neglected garden. I heard it hit the ground, and thought about the words I had spoken over Mousie’s grave. They had not been the right words. Mousie deserved better from his murderer. Mousie had been one of the real Dunstans—Clark had told me that I was turning into a real Dunstan, but I was nothing compared to Mousie. Mousie was up there with Brightness and Screamer. What leaked from the cannon’s mouth and the crack in the golden bowl was a being like Mousie. Howard had known it, and the knowledge had poisoned him.

  I could not see where I was, and I could not tell where I was going. Looking for a familiar name, I bent over the wheel and peered through the windshield. Ten feet beyond the front of my car, the green banner of a road sign materialized out of the opacity and advanced toward me. A runic scrawl slipped behind me a moment before it would have become decipherable. No matter, I thought: I was still going south when I wanted to go north, so all I had to do was turn right, or west, on the next street, then right, or north, at the one after that.

  Two more indecipherable road signs floated past, and I was headed north, moving parallel to the river. In my mind, I could see a map of the Mississippi and the towns in Missouri and Illinois on either side. I was looking for Jonesboro, Murphysboro, and Crystal City. North of Crystal City lay Belleville, only a little way from East St. Louis. The fog would lift; even if it did not, eventually I would drive into clear air. As long as I kept moving, I was making progress.

  At ten miles an hour, at five, I followed my headlights through a yielding gray wall. When I could see nothing but the headlights, I stopped, put on the emergency lights, and waited for the boundaries of the road to reform before continuing. If headlights came toward me, as they sometimes did, I pulled over and slowed to a pace that would have let a jogger swing past. An hour crawled by. The fog parted and thinned, and I saw two-dimensional houses set close together on narrow lawns. I had come to Jonesboro, I thought. The fog drew in to erase the houses. Half an hour later, I drove into a gleaming mist widening out over open fields on both sides of the road. It gathered itself into a melting darkness and forced me back down to five miles an hour.

  Then I slammed my foot on the brake pedal. The blue plastic of the steering wheel seemed to be rising through my hands as they faded from view. I felt a tingle at the back of my neck and became aware of a presence behind me. I shouted Robert’s name and twisted my head to look at the empty backseat. I spoke his name again. Hostility swept toward me like a winter wind.

  “Robert, I have to …” His invisible presence had left, and I was alone in the car.

  “Where are you?” My voice bounced off the fog and died. I held up my hands and saw them restored and solid.

  I have to talk to you? I have to know what you want from me?

  I remembered the face burning from the end of a lane across Veal Yard. He wants everything, I thought.

  Beyond the window, a regal figure in a dashiki of gold, ink-black, and bloodred emerged from the swirling fog. I cranked down the window, and chill, damp fog seeped into the car. Walter Bernstein nodded like a king granting a benediction.

  “Walter, where is he?” I asked. “Where did he go?”

  “Can’t no one tell you that, but you’re on the right road. As right as you can make it, anyhow.” He faded back into the purple fog.

  I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, opened a nimbus of hazy light deep enough to enter, and pushed myself off the seat. At the front of the car, the headlights picked out the shadowy pole of a road sign. Robert hovered beside me, behind, I could not tell which.

  “Show yourself,” I said. “You owe me that much.”

  Robert thought he owed me nothing. Robert was like Mousie, he had leaked from the crack in the golden bowl, he had trickled from the mouth of the cannon. Moi aussi. I went up to the shadowy road sign, stood on tiptoe, peered at the white marks on the green metal, and laughed out loud. I had come back to New Providence Road.

  I walked past the sign. Because my life depended upon movement, I kept moving. Quiet footsteps ticked from behind, and I whirled around to see no more than two blurry yellow eyes and the glow spilling from the open door. Profound silence rang in the gray air. “This is where we are, Robert,” I said. “Do your best.”

  A hesitant footfall, then another, sounded from behind me. I did what I had to do and went forward. The ground rose to meet my step, and I felt the release of a crazy sense of joy. Where we were was the place we all along had been fighting to reach. Footsteps ticked through the shining fog. I did the one thing my furious double could not and slid thirty-five years down my gullet.

  On the seventeenth day of October in the year 1958, I was standing at the rear of a densely crowded Albertus University auditorium. Sweatered girls, still innocently “co-eds,” and boys in sports jackets filled the pitched rows of seats facing the stage, on which a drummer with thick glasses and close-cropped blond hair, a smiling bassist who could have been Walter Bernstein’s cousin, and an intense-looking piano player were hammering their way toward the end of what sounded like “Take the A Train.” Hands folded over the body of his alto saxophone, a storklike man with retreating hair,
black glasses, and a wide, expressive mouth leaned into the curve of the piano and attended to the sounds coming from his fellow musicians. His mingled detachment and involvement reminded me of Laurie Hatch.

  Looking down over the audience, I went toward the top of the wide central aisle. Crew cuts; ponytails; daffodil flips; French twists; sleek, short hair with definitive partings. A few measures before the conclusion of “A Train,” I caught sight of my mother’s dark, unmistakable head. There she was, the eighteen-year-old Star Dunstan, seated ten or twelve rows back from the stage, one seat in from the aisle. The angle of her neck said that she had heard enough of this concert. I moved across the aisle until I had a good view of her companion. The piano player nailed down a chord, the drummer announced a conclusion. The man sitting next to my mother raised his hands and applauded. His profile looked too much like mine.

  The piano player turned to the audience and said, “We’d like to do a ballad … called ‘These Foolish Things.’ ” He looked up at the saxophonist and sketched a few bars of the melody. The saxophonist pushed himself off the piano, approached a microphone at the front of the stage, and settled his fingers on the keys. He closed his eyes, already in a trance of concentration. When the introduction came to an end, he fastened his mouth to his horn and repeated the fragment of melody just played as if it were newly minted. Then he floated above the line of the song and blew a liquid phrase that said, You know the song, but do you know this story?

  Star’s head snapped up. Listening without hearing, Edward Rinehart lounged in his seat and concealed his disdain.

  At the start of his second chorus, the alto player said, That was just the beginning. An ascending arc of melody streamed from the bell of his horn and printed itself upon the air. The melody expanded, and the alto player said, We are on a journey. As he settled into his story, it opened into interior stories, and variations led to other, completely unexpected, variations. The alto player climbed to passionate resolutions, let them subside, and ascended further.

  Star shifted in her seat, opened her mouth, and leaned forward. I felt tears slide down my cheeks.

  It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me…. He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer …

  That alto player never moved anything but his fingers. He stood with his feet pointed out, his eyes closed, his shoulders in a negligent slouch. In its grip on the reed of his horn, his mouth looked like a flexible sea creature. Note after note, the tremendous story and all of its details soared into the reaches of the auditorium, building on the structure it distilled from its own meaning. The drummer tilted his head and plied his brushes over the crisp drumheads; the smiling bass player set in place the familiar harmonies; the piano player breathed a soft “Yeah, Paul.” It seemed effortless, natural, inevitable, like the long unfolding of a landscape seen from the top of a mountain, and it went on and on for what might as well have been a thousand choruses.

  In another time, my own, fog swarmed across a road where two sets of footsteps advanced toward whatever was to come. I put my shoulders against the wall and listened for as long as I could—the whole world opened up in front of me.

  136

  What? Ah, you want to know what happened to Robert? I’m sorry, that has already been answered—answered as well as it can be, anyhow. Step after step, through the long transitional passages of airports, down the corridors between the glowing lobbies and welcoming bars of resplendent hotels, along the pavements of every city I inhabit for a week or two in my endless flight, the ticking of Robert’s footsteps sounds in my awaiting ear.

  But since you have put a question to me, I can ask one in return. Are you sure—really sure—you know who told you this story?

  Author’s Note

  The dedicated Lovecraftian will have noted the liberties I have taken with the publication history of “The Dunwich Horror.” The story’s first appearance between hard covers was in the collection The Outsider and Others, edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei and published by Arkham House in 1939, some years prior to Mr. X’s enthralled discovery at the Fortress Military Academy of the tale within a fictitious book bearing its name. The collection entitled The Dunwich Horror and Others, edited by Derleth for Arkham House, was not published until 1963.

  S. T. Joshi’s definitive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, makes brief mention of “a very strange individual from Buffalo, New York,” named William Lumley, who took Lovecraft’s mythology of Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, now commonly referred to as “the Cthulhu Mythos,” as literal fact and clung to this belief in the face of all denials by the writer and his circle of colleagues and friends. Joshi quotes Lovecraft’s ironic summary of Lumley’s position from a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith in 1933: “We may think we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry.”

  I wish to thank Bradford Morrow, Warren Vaché, Ralph Vicinanza, David Gernert, Dr. Lila Kalinich, Sheldon Jaffrey, Hap Beasely, my editor, Deb Futter, and my wife, Susan Straub, for their suggestions, support, and assistance during the writing of Mr. X.

  Peter Straub

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  MR. CLUBB AND MR. CUFF

  1

  I never intended to go astray, nor did I know what that meant. My journey began in an isolated hamlet notable for the piety of its inhabitants, and when I vowed to escape New Covenant I assumed that the values instilled within me there would forever be my guide. And so, with a depth of paradox I still only begin to comprehend, they have been. My journey, so triumphant, also so excruciating, is both from my native village and of it. For all its splendor, my life has been that of a child of New Covenant.

  When in my limousine I scanned the Wall Street Journal, when in the private elevator I ascended to the rosewood-paneled office with harbor views, when in the partners’ dining room I ordered squab on a mesclun bed from a prison-rescued waiter known to me alone as Charlie-Charlie, also when I navigated for my clients the complex waters of financial planning, above all when before her seduction by my enemy Graham Leeson I returned homeward to luxuriate in the attentions of my stunning Marguerite, when transported within the embraces of my wife, even then I carried within the frame houses dropped like afterthoughts down the streets of New Covenant, the stiff faces and suspicious eyes, the stony cordialities before and after services in the grim great Temple—the blank storefronts along Harmony Street—tattooed within me was the ugly, enigmatic beauty of my birthplace. Therefore I believe that when I strayed, and stray I did, make no mistake, it was but to come home, for I claim that the two strange gentlemen who beckoned me into error were the night of its night, the dust of its dust. In the period of my life’s greatest turmoil—the month of my exposure to Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, “Private Detectives Extraordinaire,” as their business card described them—in the midst of the uproar I felt that I saw the contradictory dimensions of ….

  of….

  I felt I saw … had seen, had at least glimpsed … what a wiser man might call … try to imagine the sheer difficulty of actually writing these words … the Meaning of Tragedy. You smirk, I don’t blame you, in your place I’d do the same, but I assure you I saw something.

  I must sketch in the few details necessary to understand my story. A day’s walk from New York state’s Canadian border, New Covenant was (and still is, still is) a town of just under a thousand inhabitants united by the puritanical Protestantism of the Church of the New Covenant, whose founders had broken away
from the even more puritanical Saints of the Covenant. (The Saints had proscribed sexual congress in the hope of hastening The Second Coming.) The village flourished during the end of the nineteenth century, and settled into its permanent form around 1920.

  To wit: Temple Square, where the Temple of the New Covenant and its bell tower, flanked left and right by the Youth Bible Study Center and the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School, dominate a modest greensward. Southerly stand the shop fronts of Harmony Street, the bank, also the modest placards indicating the locations of New Covenant’s doctor, lawyer, and dentist; south of Harmony Street lie the two streets of frame houses sheltering the town’s clerks and artisans, beyond these the farms of the rural faithful, beyond the farmland deep forest. North of Temple Square is Scripture Street, two blocks lined with the residences of the Reverend and his Board of Brethren, the aforementioned doctor, dentist and lawyer, the President and Vice-President of the bank, also the families of some few wealthy converts devoted to Temple affairs. North of Scripture Street are more farms, then the resumption of the great forest in which our village described a sort of clearing.

  My father was New Covenant’s lawyer, and to Scripture Street was I born. Sunday I spent in the Youth Bible Study Center, weekdays in the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School. New Covenant was my world, its people all I knew of the world. Three-fourths of all mankind consisted of gaunt, bony, blond-haired individuals with chiseled features and blazing blue eyes, the men six feet or taller in height, the women some inches shorter—the remaining fourth being the Racketts, Mudges, and Blunts, our farm families, who after generations of intermarriage had coalesced into a tribe of squat, black-haired, gap-toothed, moon-faced males and females seldom taller than five feet, four or five inches. Until I went to college I thought that all people were divided into the races of town and barn, fair and dark, the spotless and the mud-spattered, the reverential and the sly.