Mr. X

asked about Mrs. Landon, Midwife Jansky's other patient, the doctor said that Mrs. Landon's infant had been stillborn.

 •Suki had stayed with Star until early the following evening, by which time the Fire Department had pumped the floodwater from the basement and ground floor of the hospital. Crews labored to clean away the sticky, foul- smelling layer of mud deposited by the Mississippi. While Star finished a lily-white dinner of chicken, mashed potatoes, and cauliflower, Nettie, Clark, and May swept in. The aunts pelted her with questions. Was it a normal baby? Could she be sure the hospital was not concealing something from her?

    Nettie collared a hapless nurse and demanded that Infant Dunstan be removed from the nursery. Blissfully asleep within the confines of a bassinet, Infant Dunstan was wheeled in, snatched up, momentarily cuddled, unwrapped, and subjected to a brisk examination. Nettie passed the wailing child to its mother for rewrapping. Some abnormalities did not show themselves immediately, was Star aware of that?

    Suki's indignation boiled over: what kind of late-blooming abnormality did Nettie have in mind, exactly?

    Nettie turned and smiled. Isuppose her boy could wind up with different-colored eyes.

    Suki fled as if pursued by Gorgons.

    Thereafter, Star maintained a resolute silence about her pregnancy and marriage. Suki had seen the child develop into a four-year-old, a five-year-old, a six-year-old, and ideas of his paternity had come to her, but she never spoke of them. The boy's face declared it for her. Around the time Star began placing her son into foster care, Suki experimentally married a harpsichord player in the Albertus Music Department and moved to Popham, Ohio, where her husband had been appointed artist in residence at an obscure liberal arts college.

    The Albertus circle had exploded into disconnected fragments, some to teaching positions, some to nine- to-five jobs, to mental hospitals,Europe, communes, death in Vietnam, law practices, jail terms, other fates. Edward Rinehart had been killed in a prison riot. Rachel Newborn had redesigned herself in a manner that dismissed Suki Teeter. Of her old friends, only Star Dunstan could still be seen, and Star returned to Edgerton only infrequently.

 •Suki took me in the golden haze of her embrace and apologized for talking so much.

    “I'm glad you did,' I said.

    Suki patted my cheek and said that maybe we could have lunch together after my mother's funeral. “I'd like that,' I said, and a question came to mo. 'Suki, it was obvious to you that Rinehart was my lather, but what about my aunts? Did Nettie and May ever meet him?' 'Huh,' she said. 'Not when I was around, anyhow.'

 •53

 •Otto Bremen swiveled his chair in my direction. One hand held a glass of bourbon, a cigarette burned in the other, and he was grinning like a Halloween pumpkin. 'Come in and watch the Braves get the tar beat out of 'em. It's a beautiful sight.'

    I might have gone across the hall and spent the next ninety minutes helping Otto Bremen trounce the Atlanta Braves by drinking them to death, but Edward Rinehart's book tempted me more. After I tookFrom Beyond out of my knapsack, I flopped on the bed to read until Laurie Hatch showed up.

    Torn between turning immediately to 'Blue Fire' and avoiding it altogether, I took the easy way out and started at the beginning.

    In 'Professor Pendant's Inheritance,' a retired professor of Middle Eastern studies moves to an eighteenth-century fishing village where a former colleague had unexpectedly bequeathed him an old house and a vast, legendary library. The retired professor plans to complete his study of Arabic folklore with the aid of this great resource. Forced into a pub during a downpour, the professor overhears a rumor oddly similar to a tale in one of his benefactor's rarest volumes; soon after, he discovers a twelfth-century manuscript of dire incantations. ... At the story's end, Professor Pendant is devoured by the ancient god, one-third octopus, one-third snake, and one-third indescribable but hideous all the same, summoned by the manuscript.

    'Recent Events in Rural Massachusetts' described the visit to a bleak hamlet of a young scholar who falls prey to a race of stunted beings produced by sexual congress between primitive hominids and a ravenous deity from beyond the membrane of our universe.

    'Darkness over Ephraim's Landing' ended with this sentence: Asthe bells of St. Arnulf's chimed, I burst into the sacrosanct chamber and by the flickering light of my upraised candle glimpsed the frothing monstrosity which once had been Fulton Chambers crawl, with hideous alacrity, into the drain!

    All of this, even the exclamation point, reminded me of something I had read at thirteen or fourteen, but could not place.

    As prepared as I would ever he, I began reading 'Blue Fire.' Half an hour later, I carried the book to the window and went on reading. 'Blue Fire' was a novella about the life of one Godfrey Demmiman, whose experiences sometimes resembled nightmare versions of my own, and for all my fascination I had to struggle against the impulse to set the book on fire and toss it into the sink.

    The child Demmiman receives a summons from an 'ancient wood' at the edge of town. After he enters the woods, an inhuman voice informs him that he is the son of an Elder God, a new Jesus who shall bring about the Apocalypse by giving entry to his unearthly fathers. Through the agency of a sacred blue fire, he is granted unnatural powers. He displays these powers to local girls and kills them. Exiled to a military school, he drifts into madness under the influence of a sacred text.

    In his early thirties, Demmiman moves to the city beloved of the text's author and is drawn to a forbidding manse. He imagines himself stalked by furtive beings connected to both himself and the house, breaks in and discovers the crypt of eighteenth-century Demmimans— it is his ancestral home. Returning night after night, he senses a presence, an Other, which searches for him but flees at his approach. Once, carrying a candle through the dusty ballroom, he glances into a mirror and catches sight of a dark figure behind him—he whirls around—the figure has vanished. Two nights later, a darkening of the atmosphere suggests that the Other will at last permit himself to be seen. The sound of footsteps padding through distant rooms brings him to the library at the top of the house.

    At the sound of a car pulling up in front of the rooming house, I looked up and saw the Mountaineer backing intoa parking space. I jammed the book in my pocket, opened my door, and extended a foot through the frame. I could go no further. Like an X-ray, a sharp pain pierced my head from back to front.

    Instead of Helen Janette's hallway and Otto Bremen beckoning from his easy chair, before me lay the room I had seen as a child and in the midst of my breakdown at Middlemount. A dying fern, a stuffed fox under a glass bell, and a brass clock occupied a mantelpiece. Somewhere out of sight, a man muttered an indistinct stream of words. All of this had existed long before my own time on earth. I lurched backward, and the scene dissolved.

    The old man across the hall was looking at me. 'Kid, you okay?'

     'Dizzy spell.' I ran downstairs toward Laurie Hatch.

 54 •Mr. X

 •   O Great Ones, O cruel Masters, Your long-suffering but faithful Servant bends once again to the pages of his Journal. I wish to make a confession.

 •   Of late, my tales have much occupied my mind, one in particular. It was my longest, my best and most regretted. While writing it, I feltgodlike and fearful. My pen flew across the page, and for the first and only time in my life I wrote what I knew not that I knew until it was written—I knocked at the door of the Temple and wasadmitted —my life became adark wood, amaze, amystery —it was then first I entered theriver-bankish state—