Peter Straub - Mr. X

Furthermore, Professor Flagship states that on the evening of the examination you appeared in his office to beg for the return of your blue books, a grade of Incomplete in Introductory Calculus, and an opportunity to repeat the course. Following his refusal of these extraordinary requests, you responded to his efforts to secure the blue books, which he had as yet not read, by pushing him back into his chair and then fleeing. He attributed your behavior to hysterical panic and chose not to bring it to my attention. The contents of the blue books decided him otherwise.

After thoughtful consideration, also after factoring in the other matters before us, I ask you to report to our January 20 meeting at the originally designated time of 7:30 A.M. with any records, along with evidence of previous psychiatric treatment, which might assist me in protecting your position here at Middlemount College.

To facilitate the search for your records, I am sending a copy of this letter to your guardians, Mr and Mrs Philip Grant of Naperville, Illinois.

Sincerely yours,

Clive Macanudo

Dean of Student Affairs

I blew my nose on Clive’s letter and pitched it into the waste-basket, more disturbed by his sending it to the Grants than by my imminent expulsion. Phil and Laura would understand that what I was doing was vastly more important than the pablum dished out in my classes.

On my way back to the center of the universe I thought I caught a glimpse of a green loden coat and a flash of bright hair in the midst of the row of trees bordering the western end of the campus. The lovesick stalker vanished the instant I looked again, and I put him out of my mind.

After an hour’s silent meditation had permitted me to hear the music in the air, after another hour of adding my part to it, a gathering sense of being as yet not absolutely in the right place caused me to get back on my feet and move deeper into the woods until I came upon the ruins of a cottage. I creaked open the door and beheld the rotted wooden walls, the single broken window, the litter of feathers, tiny skeletons, and dried animal feces on the dirty floor, and knew that here it was at last, the right place . It, too, was an instrument. Steady music flowed through the cottage, produced by the wind hissing through the gaps in the timbers and the patter of squirrels in the crawl space overhead. I enjoyed a blissful hour of adding a modest accompaniment and, just before dark, ran to my room for blankets and provisions and hurried back while I still had light enough to see.

The cottage emerged from the surrounding darkness like a tall shadow in the sacred woods. Faint strains of the music within called to me, and I rushed over the snow and opened the creaking door. When I entered, I seemed instantly to plummet through the rotting floor. I fell; I saw nothing; I did not fear. A long, shabby, once-handsome room took shape before me. Out of my range of vision, a man spoke of smoke and gold and corpses on a battlefield. My head pounded, and my stomach was afflicted. On the mantel over the fireplace stood a dying Boston fern, a stuffed fox advancing within a glass bell, and a brass clock with weights revolving left-right, right-left, left-right. This was backward , it was past , and I had been here before. I fell to my knees on the worn Oriental carpet. Before I vomited, the world melted and restored itself, and the contents of my stomach drizzled onto the ruined floor. Home , I thought.

While still presentable enough to go into town, I stocked up on canned food and camping equipment. I got a sleeping bag and a battery-powered lamp. After I realized that I could make use of the fireplace, I bought bags of charcoal briquettes, a hatchet, lots of fire starter, a grate, and packages of frozen meat I buried in the snow and thawed out over flames coaxed from lumps of charcoal and chopped-up deadwood. Some nights, raccoons climbed through gaps in the flooring and fell asleep like dogs in front of the dwindling fire. Toward the end of my forty-five days in the cottage, when going into town would have invited arrest or hospitalization, I dropped into my old meal-job kitchen late at night and stole whatever I couldn’t gobble on the spot. Forest-music, nature-music, planet-music took up the rest of my time. My cold turned into pneumonia, and I took the fevers, sweats, and exhaustion for signs of grace.

Everyone else feared that the loss of my scholarship had driven me to suicide. Phil and Laura flew to Middlemount and participated in the search for my hypothetical remains. A livid Clark Darkmund declared that not only had he not invited me on a family vacation to Barbados, his winter break had been spent entirely in Hibbing, Minnesota. The police searched the college grounds, with no result. The town of Middlemount was canvassed, with next to no result. The winsome senior photo in my high school yearbook reminded one Main Street shopowner of a recent customer, but he had no idea of where the customer might have gone after leaving the store. After stapling posters all over town and campus, the Grants returned to Naperville.

Horst never bothered to look at the posters. He assumed that I had been ducking him. When he did finally happen to notice the resemblance between the photograph and myself, he reported to Dean Macanudo. Within the hour, he was leading a deputation of local police and emergency medical technicians into Jones’s Woods. They found me slumped over my warped guitar and picking at its two remaining strings, and unceremoniously rolled me onto a stretcher.

Seeing a dream-Horst peering down at me from within the upturned collar of his loden coat, I asked, ‘Why do I think you’re following me, Horst?’

‘You told me to watch out for you,’ said the figment.

I looked around at the crumbling walls and the mess of blankets on the floor in an unwelcome return of sanity. It had all been a gigantic error. Horst was real after all, and I had been wrong. This had never been the right place for which I had mistaken it.

The first person to visit me in Middlemount’s Tri-Community Hospital was Dean Clive Macanudo, a glossy diplomat whose pencil mustache and Sen-Sen breath could not entirely conceal his terror of any actions I or my guardians might see fit to take against the college. It never occurred to me to sue Middlemount, nor did it occur to Laura, who walked into my room on the second day of my hospitalization. Phil had been denied permission to leave work, or so she said, and although his absence meant that we could speak more freely, the weight of my guilt made her stricken presence a torment. Two days later, Laura went back to the Middlemount Inn for a nap, and I checked out of the hospital, went into the middle of town, passed the inn, turned into the bus station, and vamoosed.

From then on, I kept moving. I had jobs in grocery stores, in bars and shoe stores, jobs where I strapped on headsets and tried to persuade strangers to buy things they didn’t need. I lived in Chapel Hill, Gainesville, Boulder, Madison, Beaverton, Sequim, Evanston, and little towns you wouldn’t know unless you were from Wisconsin or Ohio. (Rice Lake, anyone? Azure?) I spent about a year in Chicago, but never went to either Edgerton or Naperville. After I’d been living at the same address long enough to get a telephone listing, Star surprised me a couple of times by phoning me or sending a card. Three or four times a year, I called the Grants and tried to convince them that my life had not dwindled into failure. In 1984, Phil, a lifelong nonsmoker, died of lung cancer. I went to his funeral and spent a couple of days in my old room, staying up late and talking with Laura. She seemed more beautiful than ever before. Sometimes we clung together and wept for everything that could not be undone. Two years later, Laura told me that she was remarrying and moving to Hawaii. Her new husband was a retired lawyer with a lot of land on Maui.