Mr. X (96 page)

At ten miles an hour, at five, I followed my headlights through a yielding gray wall. When I could see nothing but the headlights, I stopped, put on the emergency lights, and waited for the boundaries of the road to reform before continuing. If headlights came toward me, as they sometimes did, I pulled over and slowed to a pace that would have let a jogger swing past. An hour crawled by. The fog parted and thinned, and I saw two-dimensional houses set close together on narrow lawns. I had come to Jonesboro, I thought. The fog drew in to erase the houses. Half an hour later, I drove into a gleaming mist widening out over open fields on both sides of the road. It gathered itself into a melting darkness and forced me back down to five miles an hour.

Then I slammed my foot on the brake pedal. The blue plastic of the steering wheel seemed to be rising through my hands as they faded from view. I felt a tingle at the back of my neck and became aware of a presence behind me. I shouted Robert’s name and twisted my head to look at the empty backseat. I spoke his name again. Hostility swept toward me like a winter wind.

“Robert, I have to …” His invisible presence had left, and I was alone in the car.

“Where are you?” My voice bounced off the fog and died. I held up my hands and saw them restored and solid.

I have to talk to you? I have to know what you want from me?

I remembered the face burning from the end of a lane across Veal Yard.
He wants everything
, I thought.

Beyond the window, a regal figure in a dashiki of gold, ink-black, and bloodred emerged from the swirling fog. I cranked down the window, and chill, damp fog seeped into the car. Walter Bernstein nodded like a king granting a benediction.

“Walter, where is he?” I asked. “Where did he go?”

“Can’t no one tell you that, but you’re on the right road. As right as you can make it, anyhow.” He faded back into the purple fog.

I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, opened a nimbus of hazy light deep enough to enter, and pushed myself off the seat. At the front of the car, the headlights picked out the shadowy pole of a road sign. Robert hovered beside me, behind, I could not tell which.

“Show yourself,” I said. “You owe me that much.”

Robert thought he owed me nothing. Robert was like Mousie, he had leaked from the crack in the golden bowl, he had trickled from the mouth of the cannon.
Moi aussi
. I went up to the shadowy road sign, stood on tiptoe, peered at the white marks on the green metal, and laughed out loud. I had come back to New Providence Road.

I walked past the sign. Because my life depended upon movement, I kept moving. Quiet footsteps ticked from behind, and I whirled around to see no more than two blurry yellow eyes and the glow spilling from the open door. Profound silence rang in the gray air. “This is where we are, Robert,” I said. “Do your best.”

A hesitant footfall, then another, sounded from behind me. I did what I had to do and went forward. The ground rose to meet my step, and I felt the release of a crazy sense of joy.
Where we were
was the place we all along had been fighting to reach. Footsteps ticked through the shining fog. I did the one thing my furious double could not and slid thirty-five years down my gullet.

On the seventeenth day of October in the year 1958, I was standing at the rear of a densely crowded Albertus University auditorium. Sweatered girls, still innocently “co-eds,” and boys
in sports jackets filled the pitched rows of seats facing the stage, on which a drummer with thick glasses and close-cropped blond hair, a smiling bassist who could have been Walter Bernstein’s cousin, and an intense-looking piano player were hammering their way toward the end of what sounded like “Take the A Train.” Hands folded over the body of his alto saxophone, a storklike man with retreating hair, black glasses, and a wide, expressive mouth leaned into the curve of the piano and attended to the sounds coming from his fellow musicians. His mingled detachment and involvement reminded me of Laurie Hatch.

Looking down over the audience, I went toward the top of the wide central aisle. Crew cuts; ponytails; daffodil flips; French twists; sleek, short hair with definitive partings. A few measures before the conclusion of “A Train,” I caught sight of my mother’s dark, unmistakable head. There she was, the eighteen-year-old Star Dunstan, seated ten or twelve rows back from the stage, one seat in from the aisle. The angle of her neck said that she had heard enough of this concert. I moved across the aisle until I had a good view of her companion. The piano player nailed down a chord, the drummer announced a conclusion. The man sitting next to my mother raised his hands and applauded. His profile looked too much like mine.

The piano player turned to the audience and said, “We’d like to do a ballad … called ‘These Foolish Things.’ ” He looked up at the saxophonist and sketched a few bars of the melody. The saxophonist pushed himself off the piano, approached a microphone at the front of the stage, and settled his fingers on the keys. He closed his eyes, already in a trance of concentration. When the introduction came to an end, he fastened his mouth to his horn and repeated the fragment of melody just played as if it were newly minted. Then he floated above the line of the song and blew a liquid phrase that said,
You know the song, but do you know this story?

Star’s head snapped up. Listening without hearing, Edward Rinehart lounged in his seat and concealed his disdain.

At the start of his second chorus, the alto player said,
That was just the beginning
. An ascending arc of melody streamed from the bell of his horn and printed itself upon the air. The melody expanded, and the alto player said,
We are on a journey
. As he settled into his story, it opened into interior stories, and variations led to other, completely unexpected, variations. The alto
player climbed to passionate resolutions, let them subside, and ascended further.

Star shifted in her seat, opened her mouth, and leaned forward. I felt tears slide down my cheeks.

It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me…. He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer …

That alto player never moved anything but his fingers. He stood with his feet pointed out, his eyes closed, his shoulders in a negligent slouch. In its grip on the reed of his horn, his mouth looked like a flexible sea creature. Note after note, the tremendous story and all of its details soared into the reaches of the auditorium, building on the structure it distilled from its own meaning. The drummer tilted his head and plied his brushes over the crisp drumheads; the smiling bass player set in place the familiar harmonies; the piano player breathed a soft “Yeah, Paul.” It seemed effortless, natural, inevitable, like the long unfolding of a landscape seen from the top of a mountain, and it went on and on for what might as well have been a thousand choruses.

In another time, my own, fog swarmed across a road where two sets of footsteps advanced toward whatever was to come. I put my shoulders against the wall and listened for as long as I could—the whole world opened up in front of me.

136

What? Ah, you want to know what happened to Robert? I’m sorry, that has already been answered—answered as well as it can be, anyhow. Step after step, through the long transitional passages of airports, down the corridors between the glowing lobbies and welcoming bars of resplendent hotels, along the pavements of every city I inhabit for a week or two in my endless flight, the ticking of Robert’s footsteps sounds in my awaiting ear.

But since you have put a question to me, I can ask one in return. Are you sure—really sure—you know who told you this story?

The dedicated Lovecraftian will have noted the liberties I have taken with the publication history of “The Dunwich Horror.” The story’s first appearance between hard covers was in the collection
The Outsider and Others
, edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei and published by Arkham House in 1939, some years prior to Mr. X’s enthralled discovery at the Fortress Military Academy of the tale within a fictitious book bearing its name. The collection entitled
The Dunwich Horror and Others
, edited by Derleth for Arkham House, was not published until 1963.

S. T. Joshi’s definitive biography,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
, makes brief mention of “a very strange individual from Buffalo, New York,” named William Lumley, who took Lovecraft’s mythology of Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, now commonly referred to as “the Cthulhu Mythos,” as literal fact and clung to this belief in the face of all denials by the writer and his circle of colleagues and friends. Joshi quotes Lovecraft’s ironic summary of Lumley’s position from a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith in 1933: “We may
think
we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry.”

I wish to thank Bradford Morrow, Warren Vaché, Ralph Vicinanza, David Gernert, Dr. Lila Kalinich, Sheldon Jaffrey, Hap Beasely, my editor, Deb Futter, and my wife, Susan Straub, for their suggestions, support, and assistance during the writing of
Mr. X
.

Peter Straub

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