Mr. X. Peter Straub

       5

      Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.

      I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother’s possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I’d tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I have to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.

      That is:

      I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.

      The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clotheslines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth. Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her black-olive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table and patting people on the back.

      They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can’t remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember – the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday – is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.

      It begins with a sudden awareness of the warmth and color of the light, as if I had never before really noticed how this rich, vibrant substance streamed from above to coat the world like a liquid. I saw the brightness gather in a shining skin on the backs of my mother’s hands. Then the earth opened beneath me, and I plummeted downward and away from the picnic table, too startled to be frightened. I came to rest and found myself in a large, untidy room. Books covered a table and stood in piles on the floor. In the distance, an embittered voice ranted about smoke and gold. My eyes fastened on the mantel, where a fern drooped beside a fox stepping delicately toward the edge of a glass dome. The weights of a brass clock swung this way – that way on the other side of the fox’s confinement. I had been pushed back: I was in the museum of the past.

      It ended so quickly that I did not have time to react. In the space between two halves of a second I had traveled at enormous speed back to my chair at the picnic table, restored to the present. A fraction of a beat ahead of the moment when I had seen the sunlight glowing on my mother’s hands, Uncle James was still telling the same joke to Uncle Clark, Aunt May still smiling at compliments to her fried chicken – I’m inventing these details to suggest the normality of the scene, but all I remember is what I just described. By then, the sensations in my body would have built to an almost unbearable pitch.

      ‘You scrambled off the picnic bench,’ Star told me, not once but many times, retelling this story to help herself deal with it. ‘I asked if anything was wrong, but you just put your hands over your eyes and started running. Toby tried to grab you, but you scooted past him and ran right into that ladder. Down it went, I don’t know how a little thing like you had the strength, the ladder fell smash into the table, right next to my mother. Food went flying straight up in the air. Clarence was pouring Kool-Aid into his cup, and the jug got away from him and landed in the cake.

      ‘After you got past the top of the table, you fell down flat and stiffened up like a board. The spasms hit you so hard you bounced off the ground. Foam was coming out of your mouth. I heard Uncle Clark say something about rabies, and I clouted him on the side of his head without even breaking stride. Some of those people were so busy mopping at themselves and taking care of Momma, they didn’t know what was happening to you! I swear, I was so scared I thought I was going to faint. When I got my arms around you, I couldn’t even hold you still.

      ‘Then you went limp. I picked you up and put you to bed. After a while, Nettie and May came in to feel your forehead and tell me about everybody they ever knew who had fits. I put up with it as long as I could, and then I shooed them out.

      ‘The doctor said it could have been anything. Too much excitement. Dehydration. He picked you up and put you on his lap and said, “Neddie, your mommy says you put your hands over your eyes before all the trouble started. Was that because you saw something you didn’t like?”’

      What age was I, when she slipped that in? Eight?

      ‘Now, that struck me, because I was wondering the same thing. You were too young to answer him, and besides, I don’t think you remembered anything that happened. But, honey, you covered your eyes the next year, too, and you did it again on your fifth birthday. Did you see something that made you unhappy?’

      I never told Star what happened during my ‘attacks.’ For a long time, I would not have known how to describe those visions, and later on I was afraid of sounding crazy. It was bad enough that other people saw me thrashing on the ground – it would have been worse if they had known what was going on inside.

      Even now, writing about this is like trying to reconstruct a half-destroyed mosaic. Many patterns and images seem possible, and even after you think you have identified the design, you cannot be certain that you have not merely imposed it. From the border, men and women attend or not to what is represented in the missing section. Some smile, some appear to be frozen in wonderment or shock. Others look away: have they chosen to ignore the enigmatic event or not yet noticed it?