Mr. X. Peter Straub

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СКАЧАТЬ I am standing behind the being, and I can do nothing but witness what I cannot understand.

      The man lowers his hands to the ropes and holds them as if making an offering. Slowly, he tries to move the ropes back inside his body.

      The being says, ‘Mr Anscombe, I presume?’ His voice tells me that this, too, amuses him.

      Down the side of the room, blue flames swarm across the wall and form a glowing transparency through which I can see a woman in a nightdress sitting on a bed with a little girl on her lap. She holds a book but has stopped reading to look at the place in the wall where the door must be.

      She can’t see how the man is trying to stay on his feet, stepping a little bit forward, then a little bit back, or how his knees sag until he sinks all the way to the floor, all the time staring at the fat loops falling out of his hands. The being leans down, sets the knife hard against the side of the man’s neck and jerks it across. Black fluid streams over the sweatshirt, and in the center of the stream a bump rises and falls, bump bump bump. The man tilts over his knees and keeps on tilting with the same amazing slowness until his forehead meets the carpet. The being steps back. Beneath the shadow of his hat, a blank pane of darkness ends in a strip of jaw.

      I understand: He is Mr X.

      Luxuriantly, Mr X turns to gaze through the blue veils at the woman and the little girl on the side of the bed.

      The dying man makes an airy sound. The woman pats her little girl’s head.

      In delight, the being moves forward, and the veils reshape themselves into a bright tunnel. Without warning, the wind presses me forward in his wake. A mild, almost weightless resistance like that of a spiderweb yields instantly as I pass through the invisible wall. On all sides, the blue tunnel hums like electricity. Mr X strides ahead, and he, too, hums with his own electricity, which is joy. His next stride carries him into the bedroom, and although his body conceals the woman and child from me I hear a woman’s gasp. The child begins whimpering. They have seen a man in a black coat and hat walk straight through the bedroom wall. The woman scrambles across the bed, and I see bare legs flashing blue-white.

      Clamping the little girl to her chest, the woman spins off the far side of the bed and hits the dresser. They have shiny, dark brown, just-washed hair and immense dark eyes. I step back, and the little girl’s eyes glance in my direction, more as if looking for than at me. When I try to retreat into the tunnel, the pressure slides against my back.

      The girl buries her face in her mother’s chest, and the mother hoists her up. She is as pretty as a movie star. ‘I want you to get out of here right now, whoever you are,’ she says.

      Concealing the knife in the folds of his coat, he moves along the bottom of the bed. She backs against the wall and shouts, ‘Mike!’

      ‘No help from that quarter, Mrs Anscombe,’ he says. ‘Tell me, don’t you find it awfully dull out here in the sticks?’

      ‘My name isn’t Anscombe,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anyone named Anscombe. You’re making a terrible mistake.’

      He comes toward her. ‘Someone did, anyhow.’

      She springs onto the bed. Her legs churn. Mr X wraps a hand around her ankle. The nightdress slides up over her hips when he pulls her toward him. She releases the little girl and shouts, ‘Run, baby! Run outside and hide!’

      He yanks the woman off the bed and kicks her in the stomach. The little girl stares at him. He flicks a hand at her, and she shuffles an inch forward on her knees. ‘Too cold outside for a nice baby,’ he says. ‘Dangerous. Baby might meet a big, bad bear.’

      The woman struggles to her feet and stands with her hands pressed against her stomach. Her eyes are like water. ‘Run, Lisa!’ she hisses. ‘Run away!’

      He waves the knife at the woman, playfully. His teeth glint. ‘Baby Lisa doesn’t like bears,’ he says. ‘Does she, Lisa?’

      Baby Lisa shakes her head.

      ‘Do anything you like to me,’ the woman says. ‘Just don’t hurt my baby. No matter who you are, she doesn’t have anything to do with why you’re here. Please.’

      ‘Oh,’ he says with what sounds like real curiosity, ‘why am I here?’

      She leaps toward him, and he whirls out of her path and knocks her to the floor. He bends down, grabs her hair, hauls her to her feet, and throws her back against the wall. ‘Was there an answer to that question?’ he asks.

      Then the terrible thing happens again. A giant hand seizes me and rips me from my body. I am nothing but a shadow-space that looks out through his eyes. In panic and terror I fight to escape but cannot. This always happened. The clamps knew me, they held me in a knowing accommodation. Through his eyes I see more than I can through my own – it’s true, she is almost as pretty as a movie star, but her face, chipped by too much experience, would look bitter on the screen. An unhappy knowledge moves into her eyes.

      She says, ‘So I guess this is what happened to the Bookers.’

      I gather and flex myself, and the restraints drop away. With no transition, I am back in my body, looking across the bed where the baby named Lisa kneels on the covers.

      ‘Should I know that name?’ asks Mr X. ‘By the way, isn’t there a little boy in the Anscombe family?’

      ‘He’s gone,’ she says.

      He says nothing.

      ‘I don’t know where,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to hurt my baby.’

      ‘I wouldn’t hurt an innocent child.’ He summons the girl. She creeps across the blanket, and he scoops her up. ‘But I often wonder why the very people who should know better think that this is a benign universe.’ He anchors the child in the crook of his elbow, grips the top of her head, and twists. There is an audible snap and the child sags.

      I don’t want to go on, it’s all wrong anyhow, I kept mixing up the details because the actual memory was too painful. That time, the name wasn’t Anscombe. Anscombe came in later.

       8 Mr X

      It took me an absurdly long time to understand who and what I was. You, my Masters, had it easy by comparison, and I beg You to understand the nature of my struggle.

      Until I reached that cataclysm known as adolescence, my impersonation of an ordinary child met with passable success. That in the course of a schoolyard brawl I was sufficiently provoked by a fellow second-grader named Lenny Beech as to batter his blond head against the cement was put down to his remark that I was a piece of dog poo-poo. That I was obliged to repeat the third grade was explained by what the administration described as my ‘daydreaming,’ my ‘inability to pay attention during class,’ and the like, a reference to my habit of completing assignments any old way I felt like, so that when asked to write about My Favorite Christmas I might hand in a page filled with question marks, or in answer to a sheet of subtraction problems, submit a drawing of a monster eating a dog. The word creative came in handy, although it failed to appease the parents of Maureen Orth, a scrawny nonentity with overlapping front teeth whom I talked into letting me strip naked and tie СКАЧАТЬ