Mr. X (30 page)

“Can you help me find my way out of here?”

They glanced at each other.

“For a buck,” I said.

Nolly extended a grubby hand, and I surrendered another
dollar. So quickly that I scarcely saw him go, he set off down Lavender in the direction opposite to that taken by my pursuer. I followed him through passages called Shoelace, Musk, and Pineapple.

“Where do we come out?”

I would see when we got there.

We turned off Pineapple into Honey, a six-foot passage with a lamp burning at its far end. Plodding footsteps reached us from an adjoining lane. Nolly hesitated. A second later came the overlapping sound of leather soles ticking against stone cobbles. Nolly darted down the length of Honey. I ran after him, all too aware that the men could hear me as well as I heard them. We came out into a pocket court called White Mouse Yard, and Nolly pointed across to a dim opening. “Take Silk,” he said. “Go Silk, Glass, Beer, and you’re out.” He raced into an adjacent lane.

The approaching footsteps grew louder.

I ran into Silk. The heavy steps came toward me, and I stopped and looked back. The sound swung around through the narrow lane and appeared to come from before me. I moved ahead and heard the lighter, ticking footfalls from somewhere on either side. At the bottom of the lane I turned blindly into what I hoped was Glass, jogged toward the lamp at the next crossing of the lanes, and realized that the only steps I heard were my own. Cursing, I wrenched off my loafers.

In front of me, a broad figure shifted around the corner and filled the center of the lane beneath the lamp. The figure raised a baseball bat and charged.

At that moment, someone grabbed my collar, spun me aside, and pushed me onto the cobbles. When I raised my head, I saw him
pounce
—stride forward and leap like a tiger upon the man in front of me. I groped for my shoes. The baseball bat scraped against the side of the passage, flashed upward, and swung down. I heard a squashy, battered-watermelon noise. The bat landed with a heavier, softer impact. I moved back from the carnage, and the bat skittered toward me over the cobbles.

Overhead, a man leaned through a bright square of window. In the faint light, a ponderous corpse sprawled over the cobblestones. A slim figure in a blue suit sauntered to the far end of Glass and paused. A dreamlike terror made half of anticipation arose in me.

The man at the crossing of the lanes took an unhurried step into the light and turned to face me. What he was going to say made him smile. No longer dreamlike but imported in every particular from an actual dream, terror glued me to the cobbles. The thought of what he would say filled me with horror.

“Ned, never turn down a lady’s invitation.” His voice was mine and not mine.

My obscene double glimmered at me in affectionate, mocking contempt. For a fragment of a second, I caught in his face an echo of the sense of recognition that had vaulted me out of my nightmare. At the moment he vanished down the gauzy lane, I realized that Star had given me his name.

I felt like fainting, like falling down and weeping for a grief lodged at the center of my heart, like ascending two feet off the ground and detonating into bloody scraps. Robert had shown himself to me. Helplessly, as if to follow, I stepped forward, then turned and ran.

39
Mr.X

What
comes over
me? What demon undoes me with visitations of the river-bankish state?

I bow my head in disgrace, that I questioned my Master and his Works. Who am I? Who was my true father?
Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left!

(While transcribing these lovely words, I was gripped by a tide of laughter from which I only now begin to recover. I wipe away joyous tears and continue.)

I here record my Breakthroughs in the order they were granted.

The depression evident in the previous entry had discouraged me from night-time rambles. As a result, I collapsed into bed before midnight and arose at wretched sunrise. Seated before the unsullied section of my dining table, I was searching through the rubble for a half-eaten cruller deposited there no more than a week ago, when my hand closed around the stony cruller, and
a great light shone upon me from the dark, dark heavens, and an invisible orchestra released a giant chord, complete with kettledrums. The arrival of this radiant, light-filled (darkness-filled) harmony spoke of one thing only. That instant, Star Dunstan had ceased to be and given up the ghost, farewell, goombye, ta ta, amen.

Apart from the sense of revenge given me by the Star-sow’s passing, my instantaneous knowledge of the event whisked the doomy clouds from the internal skies. Here, here, was proof that all was not illusion, that my Mission endured. My ferocious fathers smiled down, to the extent that such Beings can be said to smile. I tossed the fossilized cruller in the direction of the garbage pail, anyhow toward the glistening mound where the pail used to be, and leaped up to pace the open bits of floor until sufficient time had passed for the body to be discovered. After perhaps ten minutes, I dialed Edgerton’s second-best hospital and experienced an uneasy moment in which my call was transferred to the intensive care unit. Even worse, one Nurse Zwick announced that although ICU patients could not receive telephone calls directly, my message would be passed on to the patient in question. I identified the patient in question. The admirable Zwick hesitated no more than a half second before telling me in businesslike tones that Ms. Valerie Dunstan had but moments ago expired.

Even when anticipated
, an event such as this blows away the cobwebs.

Revived, I spent the day perusing the Providence Master’s Sacred Texts, in the process noting a hundred speaking touches in tales I had once discounted, for instance, to give but one instance, although I had read “Pickman’s Model” countless times, until this very day I had not taken in the relevance of these lines:

At a guess I’ll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys … that aren’t suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them…. These ancient places are … overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace….

The Providence Master was describing Hatchtown!

I once again propose—
envision
—a Valhalla-like Museum of the Elder Gods. The Record of my adventures, opened to this
very page of the Boorum & Pease journal, lies installed upon a likeness of my table alongside a replica of my Mont Blanc (medium-point) pen in a diorama-like affair a few steps or slithers beyond a representation of the Master’s own desk and writing implements. An animated representation of myself rises from the desk and paces to the sink, there to stand in a speaking pose, perhaps even actually to speak some poignant lines from this Record. It would be fitting, after all …

The sympathetic reader will understand my tears.

The Sage had turned his flat, almond-shaped eye upon me and
winked
. My tears were those of long-withheld, healing resolution. The word
ecstasy
would not be out of place.

So it was that later I seized the opportunity of a thirty-minute “break” or surcease in that humble occupation which enables me to pay the rent and keep body and soul together to slip out and partake of the night air. I was ready for anything, and with the Master’s confirming periods ringing in my inner ear I went adventuring through Hatchtown’s byways and hidden courts.

40
Mr.X

I faded through the bands of tourists, sticking to the shadows out of habit, even though most of those idiots would have had trouble seeing me if I stood under a lamp post and played “Lady of Spain” on an accordion.

In my progress up Word Street, I noticed four middle-aged ruffians skulking out of Purse Lane. Three of the four carried baseball bats, and their glances up and down the street, their investigations through the open doors of taverns, declared them hounds sniffing for a coon. Mountry’s rough, backwoods atmosphere enveloped them like a fog. All hills and vales strung together with muddy roads disfigured by shacks whose weedy front yards sprouted old cars, broken appliances, and now and then a few pigs, Mountry had provided an unending supply of brutal dumbbells back in my days of art and crime. I did not suppose it had changed much over the years. I wandered unseen
toward the bully-boys, and the ripest of plums dropped straight into my astonished hand.

The plum’s descent began with the sight of Frenchy La Chapelle bopping on the balls of his feet as he kept a wary eye on the hound pack. He
knew
about them; they made him nervous. Although alike in breaking every law they could at every opportunity, Frenchy and the Mountry boys were of different species and as instinctively natural enemies as the cobra and the mongoose. Their antithetical physical types increased the instinctive hostility, the Frenchys tending toward a rodentlike sleekness and the rednecks sharing an inclination to potato-sack bellies and beefsteak faces.

I sauntered invisible alongside the bully-boys. Their commander muttered this heavenly imprecation: “Dunstan’s around somewhere. Check out the alleys and meet me back at the Speedway.”