Mr. X. Peter Straub

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      ‘I don’t think –’

      He held up a hand like a stop sign. ‘So far this year, six pledges in Infantry have washed out voluntarily. Normally, it’d be two at most. Over at the infirmary? A rash of broken bones. Once or twice in a normal year, a pledge breaks an arm. Now, they’re coming in once a week with broken fingers, broken wrists, broken arms. Concussion. One boy turned out to have internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. How’d he get it? “I twisted my ankle and fell down the stairs.” And then there’s the case of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. You knew him, didn’t you?’

      ‘After a fashion,’ I said, meaning that I had known Artillery Pledge Fletcher in a most specific fashion. This was the serious matter I had hoped Captain Squadron would not bring up. An unassuming, scholarly-looking boy with round, horn-rimmed glasses and a rosebud face, Fletcher had forever enriched my life through an ultimately fatal act of courtesy.

      On the Thursday of the week given over to the examinations before the Christmas break, I had seen him immersed in a book at a long table in the library. The pledges on both sides were also reading books from stacks piled in front of them, and it was not until the second time I looked at them that I noticed what was different about Fletcher. The others were taking notes on the contents of volumes of military history, but Fletcher was perusing, apparently for his own entertainment, a brightly jacketed work of fiction. Moved by an instinct I did not as yet comprehend, I walked past the table and saw that the title of the book was The Dunwich Horror. The combination of the title and the lurid cover illustration instantly struck me with a lesser version of that force which had first drawn me into Johnson’s Woods. I had to have that book. That book was mine. For an hour, I twitched in my seat, taking desultory notes and keeping an eye on Fletcher.

      When he stood up, I collected my things and rushed alongside him. Yes, he said, he would be happy to loan me the book after he had finished reading it. He surrendered it for inspection with the comment that it was ‘really spooky.’ Fletcher had no idea of the accuracy of his description. Emitting a series of pulsations, the little tract shivered in my hands. It was like gripping a hummingbird.

      During the following day, roughly half the pledges, those finished with exams, left campus in wave upon wave of family cars. Fletcher’s last final, chemistry, took place on Saturday at the same hour as mine, military philosophy. However, Fletcher assumed that I had already left school, and at five-thirty on Friday afternoon, while on his way to Mess Hall, entered my room without pausing to knock. He found me in, so to speak.

      Until my delivery into Fortress Military Academy, the struggles to continue my real education had been largely unrewarded. I needed privacy, and even when I managed to secure a safely uninterrupted hour or two, my efforts had advanced me little beyond what I had already attained. Now I see that weary lull largely as a matter of physical maturation. A developmental spurt had added two inches and twenty pounds to my frame before my admission to the world of close-order drills, and by the time Pledge Fletcher charged in with the sacred book, I was making my first baby steps toward Moveless Movement, whatever it’s called, disappearing from one place and turning up in another.

      As ever, a paradox is involved, namely that until it becomes second nature the muscular capacity demanded by this stunt gets in the way of doing it. By Christmas break of that year I had succeeded in shifting myself across the four feet from the edge of my cot to my desk chair by means of a sweaty interlude during which I was neither in one place nor the other but in both, imperfectly. Whatever that looked like while it was happening is what Fletcher saw when he barged into my room. I can’t even guess. My bowels churned, and someone was driving a railroad spike into my head. What I was able to see in the midst of the clamor increased my distress. Two uniformed pledges charged in through two different doors. A swarm of glittering light and my considerable physical distress rendered the invader or invaders visible only in silhouette form as he or they abruptly ceased to move.

      From the the cot, I saw one of them freeze in front of the open door. From the slightly clearer, closer perspective of the chair, I saw a uniformed torso and waist come to rest beside the door’s dark green panel. From both positions I observed the bright dust jacket of the book in my visitor’s hand, and both the me on the cot and the me in the chair experienced a surge of demand. Our attempt at an order commanding the pledge to stay put produced the sibilant hiss of a needle striking the grooves of a 78-rpm record. The pledge couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to – the kid was glued to the floor.

      An endless second later, I was seated beside the immobilized Artillery Pledge Fletcher as glowing sparks fell and died in the air, especially around the end of the cot. I was stark naked and, despite the red-hot agony in my head and the tumult in my guts, brandished the sort of obdurate erection known at Fortress as ‘blue steel.’ Artillery Pledge Fletcher’s mouth hung open, and his eyes were glazed. He stared at me, then at the place where I had been. A smell like that of burning circuitry hung in the room. I bent forward and closed the door with my fingertips.

      Artillery Pledge Fletcher moved his vacant gaze to me, to the cot, then back to me. ‘Uhhh …’ He recalled why he had come to my room. His trembling hand proffered the book. ‘I thought … I wanted to …’ Pledge Fletcher’s eyes landed on my erection.

      I slid the book from his fingers. My groin expanded into what from the standpoint of envious old age I must call remarkable dimensions.

      Fletcher kept his eyes on the prize. ‘Well, I don’t … That is, I didn’t …’ His gaze snapped up to meet mine. ‘Aaah, when I came in I couldn’t really see what was going on. Probably I got dizzy. It’s sort of hot in here.’ He looked down again. ‘Hey, keep the book. I have to get to mess.’

      ‘No, you don’t,’ I said.

      He backed toward the door. I put the book on my desk, stood up, grasped his upper arms, and moved him sideways.

      ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll get a late-for-mess tick, but if you want a Mary, I’ll give you one.’

      A ‘tick’ was a demerit, and ‘Mary’ meant a ‘five-finger Mary,’ school slang for masturbation. He was trying to bargain his way down from whatever else I might have had in mind. I had no idea of what I intended to do, apart from ensuring that he never leave the room alive. My frenum slid up the coarse fabric of his tunic, leaving a transparent glister like the track of a snail.

      ‘Don’t cream all over my uniform.’ He stepped to one side, settled his hand midshaft, and, not untenderly, moved it up and down as if he were milking a cow. I clamped my left arm around his waist, my right hand on his shoulder.

      ‘What was that with the sparks?’

      ‘I’ll explain later,’ I said.

      ‘Nuts to the tick. Do me afterwards.’

      ‘Anything you want,’ I said. Oh, the lies told by randy boys! Oh, the foolish young things who believe them!

      My knees locked and my spine straightened. Ivory gouts flew across ten feet of floor and splatted against the window. Artillery Pledge Fletcher hooted, playfully aimed me at the ceiling and pumped on. A ribbon of melted ice cream hurtled up and struck the plaster. In almost scientific curiosity, he watched gruel stream over his knuckles and plop to the floor. ‘Amazing.’

      I released my grip on him, he his on me. A flush mottled his face. He fumbled with his zipper and groped into his trousers.

      ‘Thanks for the book,’ I said, knowing for the first time since my experiments in the ruined house that I could freeze a human heart, and sent an icicle into his. Hand in his fly, СКАЧАТЬ