Mr. X (43 page)
Authors: Peter Straub
Sending out waves that would set off a Geiger counter, the book lay on the chair beside Cobbie’s bed. Already yawning, he was hugging the teddy bear. A stuffed black cat and a stuffed white rabbit stood guard at the foot of his bed, and a foot-high
Tyrannosaurus rex
reared on the headboard.
Margaret Wise Brown’s hymn to bedtime seemed almost poisonous. To distract myself, I asked Cobbie how my namesake was getting along. Ned the bear and
Tyrannosaurus rex
had become excellent friends. Was Cobbie ready for his book? Yes, emphatically. Hoping that I was as ready as he, I opened the book, turned sideways and held it out so he could see the pictures, and began to read.
Instantly, my phobia disappeared, and all sense of danger went away. Cobbie’s eyelids reached bottom when I was five pages from the end. I closed the covers and, in the spirit of
Goodnight Moon
, whispered good night to all and sundry. The phobia reasserted itself when I placed the book on the headboard. I turned off the lamp, realizing that I had learned something as mysterious as the original phobia: I was afraid of the jacket, not the book.
In my inner ear, Frank Sinatra belted out a fragment of “Something’s Gotta Give”:
Fight … fight … fight it with … aaaall of your might …
Halfway down the stairs, I met Posy Fairbrother coming up. She was in a rush; she had to do at least four hours of work that
night. All the more beautiful for being attuned to the task ahead, Posy’s face seemed nearly kittenish as she wished me a wonderful evening.
57Laurie Hatch and I were borne along on a tide of conversation that seemed infinitely expandable into realms more and more intimate by grace of a shared understanding. I had not had an evening like it in at least ten years, and none of those soulful interchanges of my twenties had felt so much like real contact.
The conviction that one’s own experience has been
mirrored
by the other’s, that whatever is said will be understood, soon begins to confirm itself out of sheer momentum, and, of course, I did not dare to be as open as I appeared. Neither did Laurie. Of my “attacks,” Mr. X, the weirdness of the Dunstans, and the shadow-double who had saved my life, I said nothing. I never considered being completely honest with Laurie Hatch. She would have been alarmed, taken aback—I did not want to make her think I was crazy.
If conversations like ours did not always contain a degree of falsity, they would not be so profound.
We managed to get through a bottle and a half of wine, and the table was covered with serving dishes. “Why don’t we clear this stuff up?” I said.
“Forget it.” Laurie tilted back in her chair and ran a hand through her hair. “Posy will take care of that.”
“She has hours of work ahead of her. Let’s give her a break.” I carried bowls to the sink and scraped artichoke leaves into the garbage disposal.
Laurie helped me load the dishwasher and filled its soap trays. “I feel like one of the shoemaker’s elves. What were we going to do now, do you remember?”
“Did you want to hear the end of that Rinehart story?”
“The perfect farewell to Mr. Rinehart.” She emptied the last of the wine into our glasses and led me back to the sofa.
* * *
Curled next to me with her head on an outstretched arm, Laurie said, “This is the story you were reading when I showed up?”
“I was almost done.”
She took a sip of wine. “Professor Arbuthnot has discovered a book of the extremest age and rariosity. The three old men murdered in an opium den had been tattooed on their left buttocks with an ancient Arabic curse. On his way to interview a sinister dwarf, our hero catches sight of an infant with yellow eyes and a forked tongue.”
“This one’s a little different,” I said. “The whole first half sounds almost autobiographical.” I condensed Godfrey Demmiman’s early life into a couple of sentences and briefly described his adventures in the village of Markham, the obsession with his ancestral house, his simultaneous flight from and pursuit of the Other, leading to the night when he was drawn to the library on the top floor.
“Carry on, she implored.”
With the conviction that it was on this night that he should encounter the figure so long hidden from view, Demmiman entered the old library and eased the door shut behind him. Immediately, Demmiman became aware that his conviction was no mere fantasy. The Other’s presence etched itself upon the endings of his nerves, and as he took it in, he took in also the state in which he should discover his adversary.
After preparations no less fearful, no less uncertain than his own, the Other awaited his arrival with an equal terror, which served only to chill the blood in Demmiman’s veins. Nonetheless, Godfrey found it within himself to advance forward and cast his eye over the musty vacancy.
“Who are you, unholy figure?” he brought forth.
There came an irresolute, hesitating silence. “Come forth. By all that is within me, I must see you.”
The pressure of the silence about him nearly sent him in flight to the door. At the last moment of his endurance, a footfall sounded from a distant region of the library.
“It’s no good if the guy comes out, and he’s just another monster,” Laurie said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
* * *
Slowly, with dragging step, an indistinct figure emerged from the shadows. Demmiman found himself unable to breathe. Here was what for either release or surrender he knew he must confront at last. The intensity of his curiosity gave him the dim figure of a man decades older than himself and formed by experiences far beyond his own, experiences before which Demmiman knew his own imagination to fall short.
His dark, formal dress was that of a provincial man of business elevated to a tyrannical success. Scarcely had Demmiman taken in a white, exposed froth of beard than he saw, upon a forward step, that what had made the face indistinct was the pair of raised hands concealing it in—Demmiman felt—a gesture of shame.
He separated his feet and planted himself on the dusty floor.
The figure lifted its head and spread its fingers, seeming to sense his shift of mood. Then, as if in a sudden moment of decision, it dropped its hands and bared its face with an aggression Demmiman knew beyond his own capabilities. Horror held him fast. A thousand sins, a thousand excesses had printed themselves upon that face. It was the record of his secret life, hideous and inescapable, and yet, however coarsened and inflamed, the Other’s features were hideously, inescapably Demmiman’s own.
“Are you all right?”
“Why?”
“It sounded like your throat tightened up. Drink some wine, that’ll help.”
Had all his efforts been designed but to bring him face to face with this monstrous version of himself? Part of Demmiman’s humiliation lay in the recognition that the hideous being’s strength far surpassed his own. The Other stepped forward, blazing with the claim it made upon him, and he could not bear up before the demand for recognition. Godfrey Demmiman turned and ran for his life.
He thought he heard laughter behind him, but the laughter was only an echo of his shame; he thought dragging footsteps
pursued him down the stairs but heard only the pounding of his heart. From half-open doors and shrouded corners, the lithe, misshapen creatures seemed to peer out, awaiting his final surrender.
He would not yield in defeat. He had been born to a great purpose, of which the encounter in the barren room was but the key that opened the lock. His destiny, Demmiman took in, held a majesty he had only begun to comprehend.
Demmiman advanced upon the door to the gallery, thrust it open, and found in his pocket the book of matches he had used to light the tapers in the crypt. The bright flame trembled as he knelt before the first of the long curtains. A small, quivering flame sprang to life and inched upward. Demmiman moved to the next and struck another match. When the second curtain was alight, he ran to the mouldering draperies across the gallery. Then, in the dancing, irregular light, he examined his handiwork.
Rows of flame from the upright columns spread across the floorboards and the ceiling. Scouts and runners had taken another of the rotting panels, and lines of red flame crept along the surface of the wall. The walls opened to the flames as if in welcome; the floor set itself alight in a dozen places. He backed into the smoky hall and let himself out into the night.
On both sides of the narrow street, the dirty brick and blank windows of abandoned buildings took no notice of the red glare visible within their neighbor. The alarm would come long afterward, when flames rose into the dark sky. Demmiman moved into the shelter of a doorway.
The ground-floor windows shattered and released plumes so dark as to obscure the blaze within. With a great rush, the fire took the second floor. Flames surged out and vanished within a massive column of smoke.
The third floor went, and the fourth followed. Above the roar of the conflagration, Demmiman fancied that he heard the high-pitched screams of the creatures trapped at the top of the house, and the thought of their panic caused a savage rejoicing in his breast.
The dark blanket swarming over the front of the building hid from view the topmost windows, and Demmiman sped across the cobblestones to secrete himself in the doorway of an adjacent building, from whence he was able to observe the
final progress of the blaze. No sooner had he cast his eyes upward to glimpse the fifth-floor windows than the first signs of firelight shone behind them, then deepened from yellow to red.
A silhouette moved into the frame of the window nearest and looked out with supernal calm. The entire structure offered a groan of imminent collapse. The figure in the window cast its unseen eyes upon him. In the distance, a siren, then another, came screaming toward the blaze. The eyes hidden within the black silhouette maintained their hold.
The window frame ignited around the dark shape, illuminating the ruined visage so like and unlike his own. The Other again issued his implacable claim. His hair burst into flame. Behind him, the fire darkened from red to the deep blue once witnessed at the heart of an ancient forest. Demmiman moved from the doorway and into the cobbled street. In the Other’s demand, it came to him with the weight of a majestic paradox, lay an unforeseen fate to which Demmiman’s suddenly exalted spirit gave its full assent.
He sprinted from cover and plunged into the burning building. An instant later, what remained of the interior gave way, and with a yielding sigh of capitulation the great structure folded in upon itself and shuddered downward upon Godfrey Demmiman’s ecstatic release.
“He had to rid the world of himself? Not to mention his family house and the little crawly things?”
“Poor old Godfrey.”
“We could manage a happier ending than that. Are you interested? Aha. What we have here is a decided show of interest. What did Edward Rinehart know about ecstatic release?”
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