Mr. X (82 page)

Robert said,
Let’s put his eyes out. Let’s make him squeal
.

He’s going to squeal, all right
, I said back.
The worst moments of his entire life are about to happen
.

“Looks like I guessed wrong,” I said to Cordwainer. “You were supposed to get so angry you wouldn’t be able to function.”

“Oh, you
angered
me. And I’ll grant you this, you’re stronger than I imagined. But there’s no sense continuing this discussion without your brother. You’ve lost whatever surprise factor you were counting on, so bring him in.”

“I eliminated my brother this morning. He was a useless impediment. Since you’re willing to listen to my fantasy, as you call it, I want to show you a few things.”

Cordwainer gave me a wary scrutiny. Whatever he saw must have persuaded him that I was telling the truth. “Congratulations. Why don’t you begin by telling me what you find significant about a few ancient collisions on Wagon Road?”

At that moment, I felt very much like Robert. “Instead, why don’t you begin by telling me about the house on the edge of Johnson’s Woods?”

Cordwainer’s face twisted into a smug, ghastly smile. “You wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t.”

“Then I’ll give you some information you probably don’t know. Carpenter Hatch bought that property from Howard Dunstan’s daughters. It was where Howard spent his whole life, and when it burned down, he died in the fire.”

He moved alongside the table, settled his hand on the back of a chair, and gazed at the ceiling. Cordwainer had decided to humor me. “Really, this is completely absurd. The man I thought of as my father bought that land to build houses for what he called the rising scum. The Dunstans never had any connection to the property. They swarmed into Cherry Street like roaches, and they never left.”

The same crazy triumph with which he had told me about secret messages in H. P. Lovecraft irradiated him. “That house was the residence of a god.”

“Howard Dunstan was a sort of Elder God,” I said. “That’s what is so interesting about what he did to you.”

Cordwainer’s mouth opened in soundless hilarity.

“You’re amused,” I said.

“I’m in awe. Your mother filled you with the most amazing nonsense.”

I took the photograph of Howard in his wing collar and high-buttoned waistcoat from the folder and slid it toward him. He smiled at it in negligent disdain. “You’re looking at Howard Dunstan,” I said. “Your real father.”

“Did you make this up all by yourself, or was Star crazy, too?”

I moved a photograph of Carpenter Hatch alongside the first. “Which one of these men would you say was your biological father?”

Cordwainer barely glanced at the photographs. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but my true fathers were not of this earth.”

“Let me tell you about your half-sister Queenie,” I said. “The first of Howard’s four daughters. Queenie could read people’s minds and go from one place to another in an eye-blink. She didn’t walk, she didn’t bother to open doors or climb stairs, she just
went
. It’s a Dunstan talent, like walking through walls, and she got it from Howard. When May Dunstan, her sister, was a young woman, a boyfriend tried to rape her. She turned him into a green puddle.”

Cordwainer’s face twitched. His eyes rose to meet ours.

“May caused that scene on Wagon Road. The instant she saw you, she knew you were Howard’s son. You looked too much like him to be anything else. Look at his picture, Cordwainer. Whatever abilities you and I have, we inherited from Howard Dunstan.”

“She reduced a man to a green puddle?” Cordwainer was staring from the far edge of the table. “You know that for a fact?”

“I hardly know what a fact is anymore,” I said. “Neither one of us ever had much contact with facts. Only instead of H. P. Lovecraft, I had you.”

His mouth tucked in at the corners, and his eyes shifted. Once again, I saw a remnant of Edward Rinehart momentarily surface in his face. “What was my mistake? Calling myself Earl Sawyer? I didn’t think anyone would catch that.”

“I almost missed it,” I said.

Cordwainer moved the photographs closer to him. “You want me to talk about Wagon Road? I remember that girl staring at me from the rumble seat. I had no idea who she was. Then our windshield blew up, and everything went crazy. My father—my legal father—drove home as if nothing had happened.”

“How did your father treat you?” I sorted through the pictures
until I found a seven- or eight-year-old Howard posed in front of a seated, blazing-eyed Sylvan.

Cordwainer put it alongside the others. “When he wasn’t lecturing me, he tuned me out. I depressed him. Of course, he had Cobden, the apple of his eye. Cobden could do no wrong, the little prig.”

“And Cobden looked like him.”

“This is so interesting.” Cordwainer was still staring down at the photographs. “I’m not saying you’re right, but it would explain a great deal about my childhood. Neither of my parents ever showed me much warmth, but they doted on my brother.”

“Carpenter probably never really admitted the truth to himself. It would have been too disgraceful.”

“I could almost believe it.” He smiled down at the photographs. “You know, I think I do believe it. My mother must have been more adventurous than I ever imagined.” He looked up. “And it would explain where my looks came from. I was always a handsome devil, like you. But the identity of my earthly parents … really, that’s all the same to me.”

“Howard Dunstan manipulated you. He led you into the woods and brought you to what was left of his house. He
showed
you things. He made sure you came across a certain book and primed you with fantasies about H. P. Lovecraft. All along, he was just amusing himself. It was a game.”

Cordwainer glanced at the photographs again, then turned his poached eyes and lifeless face back to us. “All nature spoke. The Old Ones spoke.”

“Haven’t you ever had doubts? Weren’t there times when you realized that everything you believed came from short stories written by a man who never pretended they were anything but fiction?”

“I have had my doubts.” Cordwainer spoke with undeniable dignity, and, unlike Robert, I felt a spasm of pity. “I have known the Dark Night of the Soul.”

“Now and then, even false Messiahs probably have their bad days.”

“I am not
false
!” Cordwainer thundered.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re a real Dunstan. Everything your father made you believe was half true. Howard settled in to watch you try to eliminate me. He doesn’t care how the game turns out.”

“Evidently, my fathers have toyed with you,” Cordwainer said. “They are merciless, I can testify to that.”

“What happened to a Fortress Academy pledge named W. Wilson Fletcher?”

Cordwainer eyed us. “Busy little bee, aren’t you?”

“You were startled that May Dunstan turned a man into a puddle of bile,” I said.

I had guessed right: his face turned to lard.

“Maybe Fletcher showed you a certain book. Or maybe you saw him reading it one day. But something happened to you. You needed that book, didn’t you?”

I pulled
The Dunwich Horror
from my pocket. Cordwainer’s eyes fastened on the cover. (
Got him
, Robert said.
Landed. Flopping on the deck
.)

A bolt of feeling ran through his stolid face. “You stole that book from me, and I demand its return. You have no idea of its meaning.”

“I’ll give it back after we visit Howard Dunstan. He’s been waiting for us.” I set the book down. When Cordwainer lunged across the table, I wrapped my fingers around his wrist.

119

Resistlessly, we fell into the dense, darkly teeming world, half Hansel and Gretel and half unknowable mystery, of a forest at night. I hoped it was late evening, June 25, 1935.

Cordwainer seized our arm and yanked us to his side. “I don’t recognize this. Where are we?”

“Johnson’s Woods, about sixty years ago,” I said. “On this night, you’re a little boy asleep in a house on Manor Street.”

“I rarely slept in those days,” Cordwainer said. “Human life was a torment, and I preferred to bellow. I also wet the bed, deliberately. Compared to mine, your childhood was straight out of Mother Goose.” In the darkness, his cannonball head loomed over his black coat, as if hanging in midair. “All right, make a fool of yourself. Where’s the house?”

“Not far away,” I said, without any idea of where in Johnson’s Woods we were.

Cordwainer jerked us off balance, clamped an arm around our neck, and held us against his body. He was much stronger than I had expected. His arm tightened on our windpipe, and the twin stenches of mania and river-bottom invaded our nostrils. His mind probed at the perimeters of mine, like Aunt Nettie’s before she had lifted me off her kitchen chair. I slammed my mental gates, and Cordwainer chuckled. His arm closed in and cut off our air. “Funny, I don’t see a house. I don’t see any lights.”

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.”