Mr. X. Peter Straub
can you say these things? Because I’m new? Because you decided you didn’t like me?’ My anger floated dangerously close to the surface. ‘I should have gone out for football. Then I’d still be your fair-haired boy, and you wouldn’t be blaming me every time one of your prize dumbbells gets a broken bone.’ Before I went any further over the line, I managed to get myself under control. ‘Excuse me, please, sir, that remark was uncalled for. I apologize. But I repeat, I swear on my honor as a pledge –’
‘Halt,’ he said. ‘Stop right there.’
‘But sir, I –’
‘Halt, I said.’ His eyes had darkened with disgust. ‘I have only one more thing to say to you, and I don’t want you fouling the air before I do.’ Captain Squadron gave his jacket a yank and then gripped the flaps of his pockets and yanked again, savagely, as if he were trying to rip them off. ‘I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about your honor as a pledge, because as ridiculous as it must seem to you, I happen to take our code very, very seriously. It takes some transfers a little while to figure out that the code isn’t just empty words, but most of them get it in the end. You never will. You’re like a species of one. You’re a disease.’
I stopped pretending to be shocked and sat on the edge of my cot, watching and listening. The inside of my body, everything from the back of my throat down to below my waist, had become a block of ice.
‘Are we done now, sir?’
‘Affirmative. This conversation is concluded.’ He locked my eyes with his. ‘I’ll be watching you, Pledge. If I catch you stepping an inch out of line, I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks, and you’ll be out of uniform before you know what happened. Is that understood?’
‘Affirmative,’ I said. ‘Sir.’
‘I wish to God your parents had put you into some other military school.’ He gave me a withering glare. ‘I’ll take Artillery Pledge Fletcher’s book with me. I want to see what’s so god-awful important in those stories.’
My heart nearly stopped, like Fletcher’s. ‘Please don’t, sir. I haven’t read it yet.’
He tucked the book under his elbow. ‘Report to my office one week from today, and I’ll give it back. Unless Mr and Mrs Fletcher want it returned to them. That will be all.’
I watched him strut to the door of my room.
What happened next can only be explained by the combination of loathing, terror, and desperation blasting through me. If I had any thoughts, they had to do with the necessity of reclaiming the sacred book, but it would be more truthful to say that I was incapable of anything like thought. Without having moved, I was standing next to Captain Squadron, who was beginning to register the first traces of alarm. I seemed to be twice my actual size, though I believe this to have been an illusion produced by the condition that enables mothers to lift up the fronts of cars posing threats to their infants.
I had no idea of what I was going to do. I certainly had no idea of what I was going to do to Captain Squadron. In fact, I still don’t really know how I did it, since duplication of the feat has resisted me ever since. I don’t suppose any of those mothers ever picked up a car a second time, either. I touched the book and, as if I had done this kind of thing a hundred times before, felt myself flow into his mind and voicelessly command its surrender. With the book safely returned to my hands, I used the same instinctive power to impel him toward the center of the room. The interior of Squadron’s mind reported a sensation akin to that of being blown backward by a great wind.
Captain Squadron remained incapable of speech as I withdrew from his mind. An enormous battery deep within me thrummed into life. At that moment, a certain crucial revelation that was to shape all the rest of my life came to me. I say ‘came to me,’ meaning that it entered me like a clear, silver stream and gave momentary form to the uproar. Once again I had heard the voice from Johnson’s Woods.
Captain Squadron stood in the center of my room, perhaps two yards away from me. I glided toward him as if across an icy pond on a pair of figure skates. I don’t think I touched him. I recall that almost impersonal sensation of emptying that accompanies evacuation. My joints suffered the bone-deep ache associated with arthritis. My head seemed to have been split by an axe. Maybe the mommies who hoist those automobiles off their babies feel the same way, I don’t know. What I do know is that Captain Squadron had vanished from the room. A greenish puddle about four inches in diameter lay on the floor, and a wet, deathly stink hung in the air.
I overcame my agonies long enough to wipe up the captain’s remains with a towel, washed it off in the sink, and fell on the cot to dwell on my revelation.
This was what I had been told a fraction of a second before I reduced Captain Todd Squadron to a half-pint of bile: one day, a day long distant, there would appear in the earthly realm an enemy more serious, more consequential, than Captain Squadron. My enemy would be like a shadow-self or a hidden double self, for when grown to adulthood he would possess the power to inhibit the coming of the Last Days, as certain protagonists in the tales of the Providence Master had frustrated the designs of my true ancestors. This Anti-Christ would be most vulnerable when still a child, yet evil forces would conspire to protect him from destruction at my hands. As my enemy grew to adulthood, he would partake of a portion of my own talents, thereby increasing the difficulty of my task, and for this damnable complication there was an excellent reason. My enemy was also the smoke from the cannon’s mouth – he was going to be a member of the family. In fact, he was going to be my son.
Only a little remains to be told before I lay down my pen for the night. The disappearance of Captain Squadron from the academy excited a brief flurry of renewed attention centered upon the possibility of a connection between the captain’s flight and the death of Artillery Pledge Fletcher. When a rigorous check of his background revealed that the captain had retired from the regular army under suspicion of having molested a small boy in the town of Lawton, Oklahoma, the possibility hardened into a certainty. The subsequent manhunt went on, I believe, for several years, with no more result than the temporary detention of a surprising number of fellows bearing a resemblance to its target. I kept an amused eye on the proceedings throughout the remainder of my career as a pledge and was rewarded for my good behavior by the gift of a summer abroad.
I idled away the happy hours in the fleshpots of Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. My parents may not have wanted me to come home, but my father, as ever good as his word, engineered by means of a hefty donation my acceptance to his alma mater, Yale University. An arrest and imprisonment for the petty crime of breaking and entering soon put an end to that, and after release from prison, I embarked upon my wandering career. I found a convenient way in which to persuade the family of my demise, no doubt a great relief. As a source of funds I turned instinctively to what is known as racketeering. Crime is a form of study akin to calculus or military philosophy, and like them yields itself to the superior intellect. It was not long before my understanding of every variety of criminal endeavor, including the care, feeding, and intimidation of one’s staff, placed me in a position of leadership. Carefully timed use of my powers didn’t hurt, either, especially when it came to intimidation. Your average thug’s carapace of hoodlum detachment covers a deep well of superstition. Before I was thirty, I had become a Lord of Crime and done so, it should be noted, without any of the customary family connections.
Yet I grew weary of the constant obligations attendant upon being a Lord of Crime and began to feel, as do ordinary mortals, the tug of home. Call it a midlife crisis, I could care less, but the truth is that I considered myself an artist as well as a criminal. (If only I had known then what I know now!) Only a handful of writers, none of them worthy, had taken up the challenge of the author of The Dunwich Horror, the Providence Master, and I wanted to prove myself his only true inheritor.
So in my middle years I renounced worldly success and returned to Edgerton, there to pursue my writing while dabbling in whatever I