Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Let it sink in. Your wife would have no idea she was sleeping with two men instead of one. The time will come, as it does in all marriages, when you’ll find it convenient to leave the house undetected. And we’d be carrying on a family tradition. Our great-great-grandfathers did it all the time.”

  “Right up to the time when Sylvan killed Omar,” I said.

  “You’re kidding. I never heard that.”

  “So it would be in the family tradition for you to kill me and get everything for yourself.”

  “I don’t want it!” Robert said. “Ned, remember who I am. I am not domestic. The idea of living with one woman, tied to a schedule…. I’m not really a human being, after all. I’m pure Dunstan. We weren’t supposed to be like this, we were supposed to be one person, but we were separated in the womb, or on the night we were born, I don’t know, it happened anyhow, and I couldn’t harm you in any way, I can’t. I need you. Besides that, ordinary human life makes me want to puke. How could I want to settle down with Laurie Hatch?”

  “You haven’t needed me so far,” I said, though Robert’s assertion had moved me.

  “Why do you think I came to Star in Naperville and told her you should leave college? When you insisted on going back, why did I make sure someone would look out for you? Or meet Star in front of Nettie’s house and tell her you were in danger?”

  “Maybe you do need me,” I said. “I need you, too, Robert. But I am not going to marry Laurie Hatch so you can buy Armani suits and gold Rolexes. Even if she would agree to marry me, I have no idea who she really is.”

  “Are you going to let a small-town Daddy Warbucks like Stewart Hatch poison your mind? You don’t give a shit about her background. Look at ours! It only means you have more in common with her than you thought.”

  This notion had already occurred to me.

  Robert leaned toward me again. “Ned, you’re already half in love with Laurie Hatch. It’s karma.”

  “If I don’t know what to think about Laurie, I really don’t know what to make of you.”

  “Imagine how I feel about you. Yet in some way we are the same person, after all. And you might stop to consider that my life has been much more difficult than yours.”

  “How would you know anything about my difficulties?”

  “That’s a fair question, but you are more or less human, and I’m scarcely human at all. Do you think that’s been easy for me?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “But aren’t you grateful for what you’ve learned in the past two days? And that we came together like this?”

  I wanted to say, No, all of this sickens me, but the truth spoke itself. “Yes.”

  Robert smiled. “At the right moment, you always say ‘Yes.’ ”

  This unexpected allusion to my recurring dream gave me the beginning of an idea. “You must have paid a visit to New Providence Road.”

  I had taken him unawares. “Where?”

  “Howard Dunstan’s old house. The one Sylvan reconstructed with the original stones from Providence.”

  “That place is bad luck. It’s like black magic, it’ll eat you alive.”

  “It’s where you always wanted me to go,” I said.

  Robert gathered himself before once more regarding me with what appeared to be absolute sincerity. “You’re talking about the dreams you used to have. They were dreams. I wasn’t in charge. You were. That’s how dreams work—you’re saying something to yourself.”

  “How do you know what my dreams were about?”

  “We were supposed to be the same person,” he said. “It’s not surprising that we should have the same dreams now and then.”

  I wondered what would have happened if Robert and I had been born into the same body and felt a disorienting rush of emotions, a kind of swoon made equally of attraction and repulsion. I heard Howard Dunstan say, We flew from the crack in the golden bowl. We are smoke from the cannon’s mouth. We had flown through the flaw in the bowl and been ripped from the pockets of fallen soldiers—it was as good as any other explanation for the joy, equal to but more powerful than the fear that accompanied it, flooding through me.

  “Whatever you are, you’re my brother,” I said. “It’s even more than that. You’re half of me.”

  “I fought this.” Robert shivered in his chair. “You have no idea.” He turned his head away before looking back with a quantity of feeling that equaled mine. “I despised you. You can’t imagine my resentment. I hardly knew our mother. You got to live with her, at least off and on, and when you couldn’t, she visited you. She sent you birthday cards. I didn’t have any of that. Robert was stuck away in the shadows. Star had to protect her little Ned. We only met once.”

  A recognition with the force of a locomotive moved into me.

  “Yes?” Robert said.

  “It was our ninth birthday. Something happened. I got sick the day before.”

  “No kidding,” Robert said.

  “I didn’t get there in time. Wherever it was.”

  “You almost got me killed,” Robert said.

  “I had a fever, and I couldn’t get out of bed. Star came into our room. I thought I was safe, because my seizures usually hit me in the middle of the afternoon. She was standing next to my cot…. Where were you? Where did I go?”

  “That year, it was the Anscombes,” Robert said. “Or so they called themselves. They took me in because their own kid died.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “You were in Boulder.”

  “Until then, I could always feel him sniffing me out in time to get away. That year, you picked the wrong day to get sick, and I didn’t feel anything.”

  Inside my head, Frank Sinatra sang the word Fight at the top of a beat and hung back for a long, stretched-out moment before coming in with:

  fight,

  fight it with aaall of your might …

  and on the downward curve of the phrase, everything I had chosen to forget came flooding back to me.

  “I was you,” I said.

  79

  By 10:00 P.M. of their mutual birthday in 1967, Ned Dunstan and the boy known as “Bobby Anscombe” imagined themselves safe from the annual trial. Ned had spent the previous day and most of this one in a fever that spun him between dehydrated exhaustion and episodes of cinematic delirium. The fever had peaked before sundown, leaving him soaked in sweat, thirsty, and rational enough to think that he had deflected his annual seizure. “Bobby Anscombe” had received none of the signals—a sense of electricity in the air, an intermittent tingle running along both of his arms, sudden glimpses of a scatter of bright blue dots floating at the corners of his vision—that came to him two or three days before his birthday and announced that it was time to surrender again, until his next release into the human world and the care of a couple who would take him in because they would recognize him as family, to the formless void in which most of his ravenous childhood had been spent. “Bobby” was kneeling on the attic floor, wondering how much money would not be missed if he removed it from the leather trunk he had discovered behind an unfinished wall. Another cache of bills was secreted in the kitchen, but “Michael Anscombe” kept his eye on that one. Ned Dunstan lay on Star’s bed, the sweaty sheet thrust aside, while his mother stroked his forehead.

  In the bedroom on Cherry Street, Ned felt a great pressure settling down upon his body, as if the air had doubled in weight. A buzzing sensation he knew too well moved into his chest and traveled along his nerves. When his mother leaned over him, the deep green of her blouse and the black at the center of her eyes blazed and shimmered.

  Something had happened within the house, Robert could not tell what. An unexpected noise, a shift in the air currents, an opened door, a footstep on the attic stairs? If “Mike Anscombe” had checked his bedroom, he would have to invent an excuse for his disobedience, fast. “Mike Anscombe” had no tolerance for disobedience. Robert scuttled toward the attic door, and blue fla
mes shot through the gaps in the floorboards.

  Ned’s body stiffened, twitched upward, and slammed back down on the mattress. Before he plummeted away, he saw Star’s stricken face glide toward him.

  Through walls of blue fire, he was rushing behind Mr. X up an asphalt driveway to a suburban house with a conspicuous new addition on its left side. A bicycle leaned on its kickstand. A flat-faced moon glared down from above a row of mountain peaks unreal as a backdrop. Fir trees scented the chill night air.

  Theatrically, Mr. X pressed the bell. When the door opened, he rammed a knife into the belly of the man before him and walked him backward. The invisible pressure that had blown Ned up the asphalt drive pushed him into the room. From speakers on either side of the fireplace, the voice of Frank Sinatra unrolled a long phrase about an immovable object and an old, irresistible force.

  Robert stood listening at the attic door.

  “Mr. Anscombe, I presume,” said Mr. X.

  The man gaped at the purple ropes sliding out of his body. In an unexpected atmospheric shift that returned to him the odd memory of a stuffed fox lifting its paw within a glass bell, Ned took advantage of Mr. X’s pleasure in his task and stepped backward until he struck the door. Veils of blue fire drifted over the walls, and Frank Sinatra insisted that someone had to be kissed.

  Gleeful Mr. X opened “Michael Anscombe’s” throat.

  Ned glanced to his left and through an intervening wall caught a snapshot-like vision of a heavy woman with tangled blond hair lying in bed reading Goodnight Moon. With the vision came certain unhappy information: the woman on the bed had given birth to a dead child who had been horribly, appallingly wrong.

  Ned raced into a brief hallway ending at a closed door. Before him, uncarpeted stairs led to another, narrower doorway.

  Robert pressed his hands against the wood and focused on what was going on beneath him. Transparent blue flames licked in past his feet and traveled in bright, ambitious lines across the attic floor. The faint sounds from below told Robert that “Michael Anscombe” had been slit open by a joyous being finally within reach of its quarry. Robert’s life depended upon his capacity to evade this predatory being’s annual descents into this strange, transitory existence.

  Footsteps of an unearthly softness, lighter than a child’s and completely inexplicable, glided toward him from the bottom of the staircase.

  Ned moved half of the way up the stairs and froze where he stood. With the ease of a figure in a dream, a boy identical to himself was emerging through the unopened door.

  * * *

  Robert looked down in amazed relief at the goggling figure of his overprivileged, sheltered brother and understood that here before him was the means of his survival. He pressed a finger to his lips and pointed down. His brother retreated, and Robert floated noiselessly to the ground floor.

  Ned moved away from the bottom of the stairs. His astonishing double pointed to the end of the hallway. Ned went to the door and attempted to open it. His hand melted through the doorknob and closed upon itself.

  He glanced over his shoulder and, past the figure of his enraged double, looked through a transparent wall to see Mr. X striding away from the triangular hump of “Michael Anscombe’s” body to invade a room stacked with cardboard boxes. The woman with tangled hair shuffled forward, holding Goodnight Moon to her chest like a talisman.

  Robert saw the double’s fingers pass through the knob of his bedroom door and knew that he was not real. The real Ned Dunstan dreamed on in Edgerton, and what had been sent to Boulder was an illusory replica. For the first time in his peculiar life, Robert found himself capable of setting resentment aside long enough to grasp that although his mother’s darling was not physically present, some aspect of Ned Dunstan had been delivered to him, and that this figment, this duplicate, was what he needed to get out of this house.

  Robert spun on his heel to observe exactly what his brother had seen a moment before.

  A second after Robert took off down the hall, Ned followed, expecting his double to dash into the living room and melt through the front door. Robert reached the end of the hallway and disappeared. Baffled, Ned moved a few steps forward and saw the woman still plodding across the bedroom. Mr. X plunged on into the new addition. “Michael Anscombe’s” corpse bent over its knees in a widening pool of blood. Frank Sinatra was making clear his intention to kiss those lips that he adored. Ned looked across the living room and, on the other side of the half partition that separated it from the kitchen, saw Robert glaring at him. He raced out of the hallway.

  * * *

  Robert couldn’t believe it. His brother—his brother’s replica—was gawking like a tourist at the Grand Canyon. Just when Robert had begun to think he would have to throw the toaster at the kid to get his attention, Ned looked into the kitchen and saw him. Come on, Robert urged, and his brother started to move at last. Robert went to the sink, squatted down, pushed aside bottles of cleaning supplies, and opened a secret compartment some previous owner had installed to hide his wife’s jewelry. His hand closed around the edges of a metal box.

  Ned couldn’t believe what he was seeing. With his back to the opening in the wall, his double was kneeling in front of the sink and rooting around in the washing supplies. In about a second and a half, either the woman or Mr. X, or both of them, would come into the living room.

  “Stop messing around,” he whispered.

  “Shhh,” the double whispered back.

  Ned moved into an alcove for a washer and dryer next to the back door and watched Robert emerge from the sink cabinet holding a flat metal box. He opened the lid and took out two stacks of bills. He reached into the box again, and his body tensed. His head snapped to the side.

  They were going to die. That was it. The double’s greed had killed them.

  Robert watched “Alice Anscombe” stumble into view and swing her head toward the kitchen. Her eyes went flat with shock. “Shit on a shingle,” she said.

  “Alice” dreamily turned her head to the hallway, smiled, and said, “Who the hell are you, Bob Hope?”

  Robert and Ned felt the atmosphere about them intensify and mysteriously seem to brighten. The only other living being in the house had heard “Alice Anscombe’s” words.

  A voice in Ned’s mind said, I can’t be killed, I’m not here, but he can, and he stepped out of the alcove. The instant he did so, Ned at last understood his baffling double to be precisely that which he had missed and yearned for all his life. He was looking at his brother.

  * * *

  Robert jumped to his feet, thrusting wads of bills into his pockets. “Alice” waded into the lake of blood, came bemused to a halt, and looked down. Robert thought he saw the corners of her mouth lift when she took in her husband’s body, but the smile, if it was a smile, faded. The book fell from her hands, and blood splashed over the tops of her feet. “Alice” turned her head to the empty hallway.

  Frank Sinatra sang:

  Fight …

  fight …

  fight it with aaall of your might …

  and Ned felt himself begin to fade out of existence with the abruptness of a raindrop on a hot sidewalk. He held out his hands and through their hazy, lightly tinted fabric saw the tiles of the kitchen floor.

  The madwoman in the living room shouted, “Why are you doing this? Don’t you understand I’m already in hell?”

  A dry male voice said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Anscombe. You will be taken care of soon enough.”

  Robert and Ned stared into their identical faces and seemed to glide toward each other without any sort of conscious movement. Ned’s being trembled with the awareness that his brother’s survival, and in some sense his own, depended upon an extraordinary act of surrender.

  They heard the woman shout, Shit, I really am in hell, only the son of a bitch isn’t RED, it’s BLUE!

  Gliding toward Robert, Ned experienced a new sort of terror, which was focused on the awareness that he was on the threshold of a chang
e that he could neither control nor foresee. The terror became exquisite when he realized that part of his being was already stretching out its arms in yearning.

  * * *

  A rational, self-protective portion of Robert also welcomed the coming mystery, for it recognized a chance of survival. The part of Robert that was chaotic and irrational resisted in a terror greater than Ned’s. He felt despair and revulsion at having been swindled into a destructive bargain.

  Irresistibly, Robert and Ned sailed toward each other, met, and melted together, each with his own fears, doubts, and resentments, and for a moment their psyches tangled and rebelled, one aghast at the other’s depth of rage and violence, the other repelled by what seemed the unbearable narrowness and smallness of his confinement, therefore burning to mutiny, to lay waste—

  No sooner than registered, this ambivalence dissolved into a resolution and harmony, a wholeness shot through with the perception of an even greater, more roomy wholeness, equal to the possession of a kind of magnificence, withheld from them only by the fact of Ned’s actual absence. Such depth of personal surrender accompanied this sense of possibility that both instantly drew back, but in one mind and body they soared together through the kitchen wall with what their Ned-half experienced from his inextricable other self as an acknowledgment of a compounding sweetness and satisfaction equal to his own.

  Together they fled into the fir-scented night, and their Roberthalf seized control and sped them away. Ned felt as though pedaling uphill on a leaden bicycle, then as though swimming underwater against a strong current. His muscles ached, his lungs strained for oxygen. Mile after blurry mile slipped by. With no transition, they came to rest in a vacant lot where Queen Anne’s lace trembled about them. Robert peeled him off like a dirty shirt. Millions of stars gleamed down from the night sky. It’s too much, Ned thought, way too much.