Mr. X (50 page)

“Life wouldn’t be complete without it.”

“No one but Sylvan ever saw the so-called gunman who shot his brother and rode off down the street. My father thought Sylvan made him up because he killed Omar. By then, Omar was turning into a respectable citizen. He owned half the properties on Commercial Avenue. My father said Sylvan didn’t give a damn about respectability. And he was tired of sharing Omar’s wife.”

“I heard about their arrangement,” I said.

“Sylvan shipped these stones from Rhode Island and brought out a crew of Portuguese workmen he put up out here in shacks. He said he wanted the house restored to its original condition, and the local guys didn’t know enough about the detail work. People in town thought he didn’t want them to know what his house was like.”

“There were rumors,” I said.

“Chains attached to beds in the attic. Concealed hideaways. Weird stuff. You know what small towns are like. Sylvan could have let people in, showed them around, but instead he holed up and fended people off. When he came into town, he carried a
gun. His kids grew up like animals. Some of them ran off, no one knows where. A couple got killed swimming in the river and fighting in taverns. Howard, your grandfather, stayed on the plantation, even though he hated his old man. Supposedly, Sylvan shot himself cleaning a gun, but some said your grandfather did it for him. Sounds like poetic justice to me.” Hatch’s voice came from a long way away.

“People who talk about poetic justice don’t know anything about poetry.”

“Cute. I’ll have to remember that. Anyhow, Howard buried his father behind the house. Then he had Omar’s coffin moved from Little Ridge and buried next to it. Then he went the same way as Sylvan and screwed every woman he could get his hands on. If his wife didn’t run off, he killed her, too. Ran the bank into the ground, threw away his money. You know what people used to say about him when I was a kid?”

“That he could be in two places at once,” I said. “Go through doors without opening them. Read your mind and predict the future. Float off the ground and hang in the air.”

Hatch gave me a surprised disgruntled look—I was not supposed to know about Howard Dunstan. “It’s a good thing his daughters moved back to Cherry Street, because one night the house burned up around him.”

“How did that happen?”

“This part’s extremely interesting,” Hatch said. I could scarcely hear him over the tumult from where I least wanted to go. “My father told me that on the night of the fire his father, Carpenter Hatch, locked himself in the library with Sylvester Milton, Grennie’s father, and a little guy named Pee Wee La Chapelle, who used to do odd jobs for them. He saw them go out, and late that night he heard them come back. Do you suppose
they
burned the place down?”

“Stewart,” I said, “I don’t care who burned it down.”

“These bones turned up. Not human, but not from any known animal, either. We’re talking 1935, remember, practically the Dark Ages. Who knows what they were? Howard’s daughters got the insurance money, and that was that.”

I barely felt him putting his hand on my shoulder.

“No matter what my wife says, Stewart Hatch is not a bad guy.” He patted my cheek. “Out of the kindness of my heart, I am presenting you with certain facts.”

“Mighty white of you,” I said.

“You turned down my offer. Fine. It’s time to go back where you belong.”

“I can’t believe you were in a band with Goat Gridwell,” I said.

He laughed. His teeth were marvels of dentistry, his eyes shone with a companionable gleam, the blazer clung to the back of his neck like a tape.

“Stewart, you can be completely charming, but you belong in jail. It would be a tragedy if you got custody of your son.”

He jerked his hands out of his pockets. “If you want a lift back to town, try the pay phone down the road.”

I turned my back on him, stepped across the dusty verge and moved like a sleepwalker into the dense growth covering the field. An engine whirred into life, and gravel flew like buckshot from beneath squealing tires.

68

Darkness and nightmare boomed from the ruined house and the trees behind it. My dream-shadow had told me,
All your life, you have felt the loss of something extraordinarily important. If you found it, could you live with the consequences?
I had answered
Yes
, and in spite of my fear and nausea, in spite of my desire
not to know
, now my response was the same.

Something brushed my mind and instantly faded. I almost turned back. Whatever had touched me was what I did not want to know.

The two remaining stone walls supported what was left of the roof. Two blackened chimneys reared upward. The right half of the house had collapsed into a soft depression. The old entrance yawned over a mat of vines. I walked up to an empty casement and looked in at a filthy cement floor gradually disappearing beneath the green carpet rolling in from the back of the house.

I moved to the rear of the house. It was like looking at a photograph
from a bombed city—blackened walls and empty space. I stepped back, and my feet met a flat stone surface. When I bent down and parted the grasses, I saw a gray marble slab carved with the legend
OMAR DUNSTAN D.
1887. My heart jumped into my throat. Its companion was three feet away.
SYLVAN DUNSTAN D.
1900.

“How about you, Howard?” I said.

About six feet from Sylvan’s marker was:
HOWARD DUNSTAN, OUR DEAR FATHER.
1882–1935. “Better than you deserved,” I said, and noticed an area where the grasses bent over the ground. Before the first of the trees, a flat granite slab lay over the gray-brown mulch. I read the eroded, still legible words:

ANGELS NOT OF THIS EARTH
.

Altogether, eight other markers lay hidden in the grass. Some of the names had worn away, and none were the kind of names parents give their children. I remember
FISHY
,
SCREAMER
,
GOSSAMER
,
SPLITHEAD
,
BRIGHTNESS
, and
TONK
.
Dogs and cats
, I told myself, shuddered back as from a terrible recognition, and snagged my foot in a tangle of weeds. I spun around to keep from falling and saw a green carpet rolling into a dim, two-sided room. My foot tore free of the snag, and I went forward over the cushiony pad of the carpet.

Pigeon feathers stirred in the sun-shot air. Remembered pain pierced my forehead, and I dropped through an empty shaft like a stone.

69

I’m not in my time
, I thought. Then,
Oh, I’m here again
.

On all sides, the scene solidified. A tired fern and a stuffed fox in a glass bell flanked a brass clock on a mantelpiece. Tobacco smoke fouled the air. Across the room, a white-haired man in a dark blue, once-elegant velvet smoking jacket faced the window. He held a cigar in one hand and a glass half-filled with amber liquid in the other. The world was dark. I realized that I knew the
man’s name. The hands of the brass clock said the time was 11:40.

The man facing the window had been expecting me; he was going to speak. These facts declared themselves in the weariness of his posture and the theatrical, even stagy unhappiness in the slouch of his back. Impatient irritation replaced my nausea and pain: Here I was, what did he want? The man at the window raised his glass. He sipped. His shoulders slumped. Finally, he spoke.

You’re here again, but I don’t care what happens to you. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Do you know who said that?

“William Butler Yeats,” I said. “Fuck you, too, Howard.”

The golden bowl is broken, it bears an unseen crack. I hear the roar of cannons everywhere
.

“What are you trying to tell me?”

Once your father had been created, I decided to amuse myself by driving him mad. He was to be the tool of our destruction. Yet since you have found your way to me over and over, perhaps after all you will destroy him instead. The outcome of the game no longer matters to me
.

I called him a wicked, malicious old man—it was the main thing I understood. He chuckled.

We flew from the crack in the golden bowl. We were stolen from the corpse on the battlefield. We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth. I drove my son mad to hasten our end. Their faith in us died. Everything happens over and over, and each time it means less
.

“You say things, but they don’t make sense. Whose faith? Why am I here?”

In my great-grandfather’s time, the god Pan was a composer of remarkable accomplishment. In my grandfather’s, he was a pianist who excited the females in his audiences to incomprehensible ecstasies. In mine, he is a drunken poet who writes of nothing but descents to hell and similar degradations. By your time, he will become a mindless addict of alcohol and opiates. If you see him, tell yourself, Here is what remains of Pan and understand why we should be gone from the earth
.

“Pan never existed,” I said. “Not in the real world.”

What you call the real world never existed, either. It was created over and over by belief. Belief is subject to change. Human beings need stories to make sense of their accident-ridden lives
,
and their stories refused to let us go. I’m sick of it. They’re always telling one small fragment of the same huge story, and they’ll never get it right
.

Torchlights wobbling toward us appeared in the window. Overhead, I heard a scurry of wings and claws.

You were to come here with another. Perhaps you and he are here, but elsewhere. We shall see, you and I. My toy, my game, is ending. Mistake upon mistake. What wretched lives we were given
.

My eyes darkened. My joints sang with pain, and someone banged me on the head with a mallet. When my vision cleared I was on my knees, drooling vomit into the tall grass behind the ruin.

70