Mr. X (56 page)

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 flames 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.