Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  As my eyes adjusted, the trees separated from the darkness and became a series of stationary columns daubed by moonlight. Before us stood a big maple I had seen before, though not in my waking life. I made a croaking sound, and Cordwainer eased the pressure on our neck. “You had something to say, little Robert?”

  “The house is up ahead, about thirty yards to the right.”

  “I could almost believe you.” A wave of river-bottom vapor floated from his pores, his bald head, his mouth. “How much longer are you going to keep up this pretense?”

  Robert was seething. Robert had had enough, and he was ready to explode. My mouth opened, and Robert spoke through me: “Is the fucking truce over, then?”

  “Oh, no,” Cordwainer said. “I haven’t explained Reality yet. Are you admitting that you were lying? Are you ready to listen to the truth?”

  “Let me ask you something in return,” I said. “Are you afraid of what you might see?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “All right, humor me. Take your arm off my neck and give me five more minutes.” To which Robert added, “And if you don’t, I’ll finish what I started in the Cobden Building.”

  “I owe you for that, too,” Cordwainer said. “Five minutes, that’s what you get. Go on, continue the charade.”

  We crossed the open ground and entered the scattering of maples I remembered from my dream. Ahead, the massive oak reared through the canopy. Robert knew this terrain as well I did, although he, too, had never seen it while awake. It occurred to me that after a thousand repetitions we had changed places: now I was the shadow moving toward our destination.

  “I reject the idea that you are capable of moving through time,” Cordwainer said. “It was I who took us back to Wagon Road.”

  “Then who brought us here?” I asked.

  “I have no doubt of your ability to move through space,” Cordwainer said. “That, you inherited from me.”

  “Look to your right. In about ten seconds, you’ll see a lighted window.” We moved through the last of the oaks. Cordwainer chuckled at my attempts to hoodwink him. Two steps later, a yellow glow shone through the trees.

  Cordwainer stopped moving. The triangular outline of a dormer rose above the cloudy heads of the trees. “Think I’ll fall for that?” Cordwainer strode into the meadow. I heard the hissing of his breath. Cordwainer was staring at the portico, the facade slanting across the edge of the forest, the chimneys rearing against the sky.

  “What house is this?”

  “Move closer,” I said. “He can’t hear us, and he can’t see anything but his own reflection.”

  Cordwainer took a couple of paces along the back of the meadow and came to a halt. “I know those walls.” Unwelcome recognition had begun to blossom in his face. “That front window is like the very one I crawled through as an ignorant boy.” He spun to glare at me. “Oh, you are a treacherous, treacherous fiend, but I see your shabby plan. You have brought me to its likeness.”

  “Wait until you see who’s inside,” I said.

  “This is unbearable. It is blasphemy. Within walls like those, my Great Fathers spoke to me. That building was my school.”

  “And your teacher was Howard Dunstan. He’s in the big room on this side. Go on, look in the window. Think of it as a test of your faith.”

  “My faith has been tested my whole life long,” Cordwainer muttered. “And so has my patience, but never as sorely as this.”

  We came to within ten feet of the shining window. Across the shabby room, an expiring Boston fern and a fox strutting to the edge of a glass bell occupied a white mantel. Shiny weights whirled left-right, right-left beneath a brass clock that reported the hour as 11:31 P.M.

  “If anyone is there,” Cordwainer said, “let him show his face.”

  On cue, Howard Dunstan strolled into sight, his face ravaged, his hair and beard white, but still recognizable as the subject of his studio portraits and the man who had driven his family down Wagon Road. He was speaking with the slow, unstoppable rhythm of a hypnotist. I knew who stood just out of sight. Howard’s weary despair concealed a witty, calculating expectancy that had eluded me until this moment. His face was that of a being who had never spoken a straightforward word, committed a spontaneous deed, or revealed more than what was necessary—it was a face poisoned by isolation.

  As if drawn by magnetic attraction, Cordwainer Hatch unwillingly moved forward.

  I saw myself walk into the shining frame and the year 1935 from an afternoon on which Stewart Hatch had gestured across an overgrown field and more than hinted that his grandfather and Sylvester Milton had destroyed the building in front of us. Now I knew that Stewart had it all wrong: Cordwainer had already given me the real story. I also knew that two earlier versions of Ned Dunstan, aged three and eighteen, had minutes or seconds before momentarily flickered into view and disappeared again because they had come too early, and they had come alone. I looked dazed but irate enough to take care of myself. When I said something to Howard, he kept talking, and I tried to interrupt his flow by asking, What are we?

  Howard shook his head and mouthed, We are what flew from the crack in the golden bowl, then something I could not lip-read. Beside me, Cordwainer gasped. All the air seemed to leave his body. Howard moved down the room and out of sight. I thought: He knows we are out here, he’s playing to both of his audiences, every last lousy flourish is in place—

  Cordwainer took a quick backward step, stumbled around, and dove into the woods with surprising speed. I went after the bulky form dodging through the trees. He stopped running when he reached the maple grove. His face was an unreadable blur.

  “Still think it’s some kind of trick?” I asked.

  “Did he say, We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth?” He might have been talking in his sleep.

  “I think so, yes. I remember that.”

  Cordwainer made the phlegmy, guttural sound of someone attempting to expel a foreign substance from his lungs. “I was watching his lips. He said something about a golden bowl. Then he said, We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth.”

  “Have you heard that before?”

  “Oh, yes. I have, yes. I have heard it on a number of occasions.” His voice was wet. “During my boyhood.”

  Heavy footsteps came toward us from the center of the woods. Cordwainer turned around with a stiff, grave immobility, as though his neck had fused to his spinal column. A dancing glimmer of light bobbed toward us out of the darkness. “Men from town,” I said. “They’re coming to burn him out. About a hundred and fifty years before this, the same thing happened in Providence.”

  “Howard Dunstan never lived in Providence.”

  “One of his ancestors built a place people called the Shunned House. Sylvan Dunstan moved it here brick by brick.”

  The light separated into three torches advancing through the trees. Cordwainer yanked me behind the shelter of a pair of maples.

  120

  Torchlight surrounded them with a uniform glow traveling through the forest like a spotlight. Occasionally, a cluster of leaves popped into brief flame. Cordwainer plunged deeper into the woods. He paid no attention to me—he no longer cared if I existed.

  The man in the lead was Carpenter Hatch, older and heavier than when seen on Wagon Road. Apart from the torch in his hand and the vindictive expression on his face, he looked precisely like the affluent small-town stuffed shirt he had always intended to become. Three feet behind him and side by side marched a pair of men separated as much by mutual distaste as by social standing. The grim, balding man at least ten years older and nearly a foot taller than Carpenter Hatch had to be Sylvester Milton. Ferrety Pee Wee La Chapelle hustled along beside him.

  Cordwainer and I moved behind an oak twenty feet in front of them. Breathing hard, he watched the man he had thought was his father march toward us, his torch upright and his face blazing with hatred. Milton’s torch ignited another low-hanging cluster of leaves.

  “
Watch that, Mr. Milton,” said La Chapelle.

  “Shut up, Pee Wee,” Milton said.

  Cordwainer jumped into their path. The three men halted, confronted by what must have looked for at least a couple of seconds like the sudden appearance of a severed head.

  Carpenter Hatch recovered from his shock and said, “Clear off. This business does not concern you.”

  “He’s seen us,” Milton said.

  “Stop quaking, Sylvester, and take a good look at that old man,” Hatch said. “He’s a degenerate half-wit.” In a ringing voice, he said, “Listen to me, old fellow. You no longer work for Mr. Dunstan. He is a wicked man and must be punished. I have fifty dollars in my pocket. That’s a lot of money, I know, but it will be yours if you take off now and keep your mouth shut afterwards.”

  Cordwainer let out a howl and charged them. Milton and La Chapelle dropped their torches and ran. Carpenter Hatch glanced over his shoulder, jumped back, and hurled his torch at Cordwainer. Before Cordwainer snatched it out of the air, Carpenter was already in flight. I sprinted from cover, picked up the fallen torches, and stamped out the advancing flames. Cordwainer held his torch over his head, listening to the panicky sounds of their retreat. His shoulders rose and fell like pistons. I couldn’t tell if he was sobbing or just breathing hard.

  He spun around and hurtled toward the house. Over his head, leaves sputtered into flame.

  When I ran out of the woods, Cordwainer was plunging up and down the side of the house, keening. Tears shone on his face. I came to within six feet of him, and his face went slack with shock, then flared in a kind of recognition. An anguished bellow erupted from the flap of his mouth. “Do you know what he did to me?”

  “He lied,” I said.

  Gripping the torch like a lance, Cordwainer ran to the edge of the meadow and circled away, circled back. Because I did not understand that he was looking for something, I thought he had passed into pure animal craziness. On his second circuit, he fell to his knees and unearthed a long, flat, dirt-encrusted rock. He picked up the torch with his left hand and plunged back to the building. The rock sailed like a discus toward the window and smashed through it in a glittering shower of broken glass. With another wide swing, he lobbed the torch through the broken window.

  Cordwainer whirled around, uttering squeals of excitement and agony. All he saw of me were the torches he ripped from my hands before he took off for the front of the house.

  The portico light switched on. A bolt slid into its catch with a tremendous metallic clank, and the front door swung open on an empty hallway leading to a room where flames mounted between piles of books.

  Cordwainer screamed, “Where is he?”

  Through the lighted front windows, I saw Howard’s white-haired figure slipping into a doorway at the far end of the room in which Cordwainer had received his tutorials in lunacy. From the back of the house, feeble light appeared in the window above the portico. I heard, or imagined I heard, batlike squeals. Streamers of fire moved across the floor of the study, fattened on the night air, and billowed into the hallway. “He’s going to the attic,” I said.

  Cordwainer turned a furious glare upon me.

  “Where the others are. You must have heard Carpenter and Ellie whispering about them.”

  Cordwainer’s strangled voice said, “A octopus, centipede, spider kind o’thing.”

  We stepped back and looked upward. The attic windows turned soft yellow.

  What Cordwainer did next, when I was expecting him to fulfill his own prophecy and run into the burning house, astounded me—he uttered a scarcely human sound that expressed condescension and mirth by wrapping them in lunacy. I needed a second to realize that he was giggling.

  “Robert! It’s a shame you didn’t have the wit, the courtesy to read my stories before destroying them. Had you done so, you would comprehend our position. All is written! We brought each other to this place.”

  I tried to find Robert, but Robert had departed. “Written?” I said, now really playing for time. “How?”

  “By grace …” An ecstatic smile widened across his face. “By grace, I am delighted to say, of my genius. What a fool I was. I rejected my masterpiece.” Cordwainer started laughing in high-pitched, ecstatic scoops of sound.

  This evidence that his humiliation had ascended nearly without transition into euphoria scared me more than anything that had happened earlier, and I moved away, furious with Robert for having abandoned me again. “Are you saying you wrote about Howard Dunstan?”

  “I wrote of an Other, whose name I knew not. He betrayed me, Robert—you were absolutely, wonderfully right!”

  “So join him,” I said. “If that’s what you wrote, get in there before it’s too late.”

  “How is it possible you don’t comprehend?” Cordwainer shouted. “Both of us are meant to join him.”

  In a repetition of the worst moments from my childhood, a force like a giant hand lifted me off my feet and muscled me in the direction of the open door. Exalted, his feet inches above the ground, Cordwainer sped toward me. I flew back at least ten feet, the fire seeming to stretch out its arms behind me, before I summoned the strength to resist him. It was as though—looking back, I remember, it seemed as though—I managed to draw upon some lingering portion of Robert’s being. When I slammed to a halt at the edge of the portico, the heat curled against my back like a huge animal and threatened to ignite my clothes through sheer proximity. Cordwainer stopped, too. From a couple of yards away, he blasted out the same dictatorial energy that once had held me helplessly in thrall, and I found I could stand fast. Hairs crisped in my nose. I didn’t move.

  Cordwainer howled in frustration.

  We faced each other, locked in a stalemate that would endure until one of us weakened. Without Robert, I felt handicapped, doomed. Then a secret door opened in my mind, and from the great, dark, unknown space beyond it Star Dunstan said, Like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. With a sense of yielding to that which all my life I had most feared and distrusted, I passed through the door—I can’t put it any other way. In terrified, necessary surrender, I moved into an elemental darkness, I passed through. Forces and powers I had never known I possessed and never wanted to command streamed out from the center of my being and went prowling through Cordwainer’s psychic hurricane.

  “You must go inside!” Cordwainer bellowed. “Don’t you understand? Move!”

  “It was your story, not mine,” I said, took a step away from the portico, and wrapped him in the terrible glamours I had inherited from Howard Dunstan. My old enemy, Edward Rinehart, Mr. X, Cordwainer Hatch, opened his mouth and screamed like a rabbit that had just felt the trap bite into its leg. I felt like screaming, too. Instead, I propelled him howling past me and into our blazing ancestral house.

  Somewhere within, timbers crashed down. The attic windows flickered red, then an incandescent blue. I moved back from the conflagration and softly, stupidly, spoke Robert’s name. The fire drowned my voice. Another beam thundered toward the basement. Flames erupting through the roof vanished into the sheet of darkness welling behind them, and I sent myself back to the Brazen Head.

  121

  My body shook from the inside out, and the smell of smoke clung to my clothes. I flattened my hands on the table. When they stopped trembling, I tugged Cordwainer Hatch’s bible out of my pocket. Like my clothes, it stank of destruction. I opened it at random and read the first sentence to meet my eye:

  “… It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o’thing, but they was a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, and …”

  I threw the book on the table.

  Feeble lamplight shone on the fountain in Veal Yard. Perhaps two hours of my time had brought me into the ordinary world’s night. I scrubbed my hands and face, shoved the photographs into their folders, and went down to the lobby.

  The night clerk pretended not to smirk at my jacket. “Message for you, Mr. Dunstan. I was about to send it up this very second.”
>
  “Read it to me,” I said.

  Raising his eyebrows, he reached under the desk and unfolded a slip of paper. “ ‘Happy Birthday. I called Nettie to see if you were there, and she spilled the beans. Want a nice present? Come to my house. Laurie.’ ” The clerk managed to make every word sound obscene. He refolded the paper and offered it to me with elaborately ironic courtesy. “Would you care to keep this lovely memento, sir?”

  Stewart Hatch’s 500SL slanted over the edge of Laurie’s driveway with its front wheels on the lawn. I swung around it, trotted to the front door, and let myself in.

  Posy Fairbrother was holding Cobbie in her arms at the bottom of the staircase. He looked as rigid as a flagpole. Stewart shouted in the kitchen, but I could not make out his words. Cobbie reached for me, and I pulled him to my chest. I could feel his heart beating.

  “Should I call 911?” Posy whispered.

  A plate smashed against the kitchen wall. Stewart let out a drunken bellow. Another plate exploded. Cobbie began to cry. “I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Cobbie, can you go back to Posy?” His head nodded against my neck. “Here we go.” Posy folded him into an embrace and moved up the stairs.

  I walked into the kitchen. Standing at the counter next to the alcove, Laurie looked at me and communicated that she was frightened but in charge of herself. Fragments of broken plates covered the floor between her and Stewart Hatch, who was beside the gaping china cabinets, his feet planted wide to keep himself steady. He had perspired through the back of a nice small-check Italian shirt. “Don’t you ever get sick of lying?” Stewart yelled. He grabbed another plate and fired it against the wall five feet to her left. Laurie glanced at me again, and Stewart turned to look over his shoulder. Sweat glued his executive hair to his forehead, and the whites of his eyes were blotched with red.

  “Get the hell out of my house.” Then he brought his legs together and put his back against the counter, smiling. “Jesus, Dunstan, even you ought to know better than to wear a jacket like that.”