Mr. X. Peter Straub

       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 to a birch tree in Johnson’s Woods when we were in the eighth grade. Maureen had been grateful for my attentions until I reminded her that wild Indians, one of which I was pretending to be, customarily tortured their captives, one of which she was pretending to be. The pathetic screams induced by the sight of my penknife led me to untie her, and she would not listen to my avowals that I never intended to cause her any actual harm.

      In the end, my father wrote Mr Orth a check for a thousand dollars, and that was that, apart from the grumbling.

      My father cut my allowance in half, ‘for,’ as he put it, ‘encouraging that creature’s attentions,’ and my mother wiped her eyes and forbade me ever again to go into Johnson’s Woods.

      Of course I had no intention of obeying. Thirty acres so thick with pines, birches, maples, and hickory that sunlight pierced their canopy only in shimmering, coin-shaped spangles and containing, like an emerald hidden in a bowl of pennies, the mysterious ruins into which I would have dragged Maureen Orth had she been up to snuff, Johnson’s Woods was sacred ground to me.

      All that was left of property which otherwise had been transformed into streets lined with houses for the people my father called ‘the rising scum,’ the woods were mine not because they belonged to my family, but because they had spoken to me the first time I really looked at them.

      I must have been transported past Johnson’s Woods hundreds of times before I looked through the rear window of the bus delivering Edgerton Academy’s sixth grade to Pioneer Village and felt a fishhook strike my heart as a voice out there or inside my head boomed Come to me. Words of that order. You need me, You are mine, Be with me, whatever. The fishhook tried to pull me through the window, and I turned around and pushed against the glass. My heart pounded, my face blazed. The driver yelled an order to sit down. In justifiable expectation of fireworks, my classmates snickered, but fell silent as soon as I obeyed. The astonished teacher thanked me for my cooperation. I wasn’t being cooperative. I wasn’t strong enough to push out the window.

      Pioneer Village was two streets lined with log cabins and the Meeting House, the Place of Worship, the Trading Post, and the Smithy. Women in frilly caps cooked in big pots hung over fireplaces, and men in coonskin caps and gunnysack shirts shot rabbits with muskets. These people grew vegetables and made their own soap. Their hair was stiff with grease, and nobody looked too clean. I believe they were adepts of some punitive faith.

      Rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, I stumbled through the day and got back on the bus ahead of everybody else. When we passed the woods on the way home, I twisted sideways on my seat and waited for that tug at my inmost being and the booming voice I alone would hear. Instead, I felt only a warm, powerful pulsation – it was enough.

      Blessedly, the next day was Saturday. I arose with the sun and idled around the house until my mother appeared to make breakfast. My father took off on a business errand, which was what he did on Saturdays. With premature cunning, I told my mother that I thought I’d ride my bike for a while. On my usual Saturdays, I wandered down Manor Street in a black, bored rage, scratching the sides of our neighbors’ cars and crouching under a bush to shoot passing dogs with my BB gun. That I wanted to do something as conventional as ride my bike filled my mother with a pleasure tainted only mildly with suspicion. I promised not to get into trouble. Because I had no choice, I also promised to come home for lunch. I could see her consider giving me a hug, and, to our mutual relief, veto the notion. I pedaled down the driveway in a flawless impersonation of a kid with nothing special on his mind. The second I got out of sight, I stood up on the pedals and made that clunker fly.

      At the place in the road where I had felt the tug and heard the wondrous voice, I dragged the bike behind a tree and stood up straight, knowing I was in the right place, the place I was supposed to be. I stepped forward, trembling with anticipation. Nothing happened. In a manner of speaking. Nothing happened except for the subtly intensifying awareness of having arrived within that space in the world most connected to the secret sources of all that made my life a furious misery, therefore the space most necessary to me and for the same reasons the most terrifying.

      At that moment, I realized that I had already chosen knowledge over ignorance, whatever the consequences. My heart calmed, and I began to take in what was around me.

      The trunks of many trees filled my vision, brown, gray, silver, some almost black, their hides varied from wrinkled corrugations to perfect shining smoothness. Trembling pools of light lay across the gray-green floor. The air was a floating, silvery gray. Far off loomed the wooden mountain of a deadfall. Overhead, leafy crowns knitted together, and squirrels’ nests sat on upper branches like ragged bolls.

      Then, as if they had come into being all at once, I could see the squirrels everywhere, leaping from branches, landing on twiggy shoots, and swaying downward to rocket up again in an endless chase. Birds of all descriptions crisscrossed the gauzy air. A fox materialized within a cube of empty air, pricked up its ears, and stopped moving with one paw still raised.

      On the last Sunday before summer vacation, when coincidentally or not Canon Reed had spent the morning vainly attempting to take the sting out of Luke 12:49, I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would have it that it were already kindled!, I saw the first faint traces of the blue fire and knew that the summer would be a time of wonders.

      Intermittent, vertical strips of pale green appeared and coalesced between the more distant trees. When I came nearer, I saw that I was approaching a clearing. I reached the last of the trees. Before me was a grassy oval, unnervingly quiet. Unobstructed sun beat down upon a pad of yellow-green grasses.

      As soon as I moved out from beneath the canopy, the temperature heated up but good. I could hardly see, in all that brightness. At the center of the clearing, I sat down with my eyes just above the top of the grass. A flattened trail arrowed toward me. I wiped my forehead and blinked against the dazzle of the sun. When I breathed in, the clearing breathed with me. An electric current ran up my arms and into my chest.

      I knew awe and pleasure. I knew more was to come. Within the me within the clearing sat a me who needed time to get used to his surroundings. We sat together in our different realms and adjusted to our new conditions. There would be more, but the nature of the more could not as yet be imagined.

      A bluebird ventured out of the woods, and I tracked its arrogant, overhead loop.

      Within, my newborn self spoke, and I sent a thought flying to the bluebird. As quick as anything, that bluebird crumpled its wings and fell, lifeless as an