Mr. X (14 page)

When he stood up, I collected my things and rushed alongside him. Yes, he said, he would be happy to loan me the book after he had finished reading it. He surrendered it for inspection with the comment that it was “really spooky.” Fletcher had no idea of the accuracy of his description. Emitting a series of pulsations, the little tract shivered in my hands. It was like gripping a hummingbird.

During the following day, roughly half the pledges, those finished with exams, left campus in wave upon wave of family cars. Fletcher’s last final, chemistry, took place on Saturday at the same hour as mine, military philosophy. However, Fletcher assumed that I had already left school, and at five-thirty on Friday afternoon, while on his way to Mess Hall, entered my room without pausing to knock. He found me in, so to speak.

Until my delivery into Fortress Military Academy, the struggles to continue my real education had been largely unrewarded. I needed privacy, and even when I managed to secure a safely uninterrupted hour or two, my efforts had advanced me little beyond what I had already attained. Now I see that weary lull largely as a matter of physical maturation. A developmental spurt had added two inches and twenty pounds to my frame before my
admission to the world of close-order drills, and by the time Pledge Fletcher charged in with the sacred book, I was making my first baby steps toward Moveless Movement, whatever it’s called, disappearing from one place and turning up in another.

As ever, a paradox is involved, namely that until it becomes second nature the muscular capacity demanded by this stunt gets in the way of doing it. By Christmas break of that year I had succeeded in shifting myself across the four feet from the edge of my cot to my desk chair by means of a sweaty interlude during which I was neither in one place or the other but in both, imperfectly. Whatever that looked like while it was happening is what Fletcher saw when he barged into my room. I can’t even guess. My bowels churned, and someone was driving a railroad spike into my head. What I was able to see in the midst of the clamor increased my distress. Two uniformed pledges charged in through two different doors. A swarm of glittering light and my considerable physical distress rendered the invader or invaders visible only in silhouette form as he or they abruptly ceased to move.

From the cot, I saw one of them freeze in front of the open door. From the slightly clearer, closer perspective of the chair, I saw a uniformed torso and waist come to rest beside the door’s dark green panel. From both positions I observed the bright dust jacket of the book in my visitor’s hand, and both the me on the cot and the me in the chair experienced a surge of demand. Our attempt at an order commanding the pledge to stay put produced the sibilant hiss of a needle striking the grooves of a 78-rpm record. The pledge couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to—the kid was glued to the floor.

An endless second later, I was seated beside the immobilized Artillery Pledge Fletcher as glowing sparks fell and died in the air, especially around the end of the cot. I was stark naked and, despite the red-hot agony in my head and the tumult in my guts, brandished the sort of obdurate erection known at Fortress as “blue steel.” Artillery Pledge Fletcher’s mouth hung open, and his eyes were glazed. He stared at me, then at the place where I had been. A smell like that of burning circuitry hung in the room. I bent forward and closed the door with my fingertips.

Artillery Pledge Fletcher moved his vacant gaze to me, to the cot, then back to me. “Uhhh …” He recalled why he had come to my room. His trembling hand proffered the book. “I
thought … I wanted to …” Pledge Fletcher’s eyes landed on my erection.

I slid the book from his fingers. My groin expanded into what from the standpoint of envious old age I must call remarkable dimensions.

Fletcher kept his eyes on the prize. “Well. I don’t…. That is, I didn’t …” His gaze snapped up to meet mine. “Aaah, when I came in I couldn’t really see what was going on. Probably I got dizzy. It’s sort of hot in here.” He looked down again. “Hey, keep the book. I have to get to mess.”

“No, you don’t,” I said.

He backed toward the door. I put the book on my desk, stood up, grasped his upper arms, and moved him sideways.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Look, I’ll get a late-for-mess tick, but if you want a Mary, I’ll give you one.”

A “tick” was a demerit, and “Mary” meant a “five-finger Mary,” school slang for masturbation. He was trying to bargain his way down from whatever else I might have had in mind. I had no idea of what I intended to do, apart from ensuring that he never leave the room alive. My frenum slid up the coarse fabric of his tunic, leaving a transparent glister like the track of a snail.

“Don’t cream all over my uniform.” He stepped to one side, settled his hand midshaft, and, not untenderly, moved it up and down as if he were milking a cow. I clamped my left arm around his waist, my right hand on his shoulder.

“What was that with the sparks?”

“I’ll explain later,” I said.

“Nuts to the tick. Do me afterwards.”

“Anything you want,” I said. Oh, the lies told by randy boys! Oh, the foolish young things who believe them!

My knees locked and my spine straightened. Ivory gouts flew across ten feet of floor and splatted against the window. Artillery Pledge Fletcher hooted, playfully aimed me at the ceiling and pumped on. A ribbon of melted ice cream hurtled up and struck the plaster. In almost scientific curiosity, he watched gruel stream over his knuckles and plop to the floor. “Amazing.”

I released my grip on him, he his on me. A flush mottled his face. He fumbled with his zipper and groped into his trousers.

“Thanks for the book,” I said, knowing for the first time since my experiments in the ruined house that I could freeze a
human heart, and sent an icicle into his. Hand in his fly, Fletcher tumbled dead to the floor.

Whatever I decided to do with his body would have to wait until after curfew. I shoved him under the bed and dressed in my uniform, then used a towel to wipe the mess off the floor and the window. I stood on a chair and swabbed the ceiling. Then I settled down to read.

I might as well say: to experience an ecstasy more profound than sexual release. To witness the most hidden aspects of what I knew to be true about the world and myself laid bare in lines of type running across the receptive page. More than that, to learn that this sage, this prophet (a resident of Providence, Rhode Island, according to the infuriatingly cursory paragraph on the flap) had penetrated the Mystery far more deeply than I. Certain allowances had to be made due to the sage’s decision to present his knowledge in fictional form, but he confirmed the origins of my Mission and the nature of my Ancestors. He uttered their mighty names: Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, great Cthulhu.

The Dunwich Horror
became my Genesis, my Gospels, my gnosis. In wonder and joy, I read through it twice, interrupted only by Artillery Pledge Fletcher’s roommates, pop-eyed future Rotarians named Woodlett and Bartland who burst in without bothering to knock and burst out again ten seconds later to go baying around the courtyard. Before beginning to devour the book a third time, I looked up and noticed the darkness beyond the window. The time was 3:00
A.M.
I reluctantly closed the book, dragged the corpse from beneath my cot, transported it to a colonnade overlooking the dormitory courtyard, and dumped it over the side. It was a four-story drop onto the concrete, good enough, I thought. In my haste, I neglected to remove Fletcher’s hand from his fly.

This was the matter I had hoped the captain would leave unmentioned.

“After a fashion,” Squadron said. “He wasn’t a friend of yours.”

“I don’t have friends, remember?”

“You and he never passed the time of day, chewed the fat, anything like that.”

“Not that I recall,” I said.

“Artillery Pledge Fletcher brought us a great deal of unwelcome attention.”

The apparent suicide of a Fortress pledge had attracted national attention, and, although what appeared to be its autoerotic aspect was never officially announced, that Fletcher’s right hand had been in the “Mary” position at the time of death had spread rapidly through the school and its surrounding community, arousing a mixture of shock, distaste, and ribaldry. He had jumped to his death doing
that
?

The autopsy deepened the mystery. Fletcher had died as the result of a massive heart attack, not the fractures sustained by his fall from the colonnade. Not only had he been dead before his body struck the ground, the death had taken place between six and twelve hours before one or more people had dropped him onto the courtyard. Once again, police and reporters invaded the school. Everyone who had been present on the Friday evening before Christmas break, myself included, was questioned and requestioned in an attempt to determine where Fletcher had been at the time of his death, where his body had been hidden during the missing hours, and who had pitched it into the courtyard. A trace of semen belatedly discovered on his tunic led to the widely reported theory that the cadet had died in the midst of a “sex party,” and that his guilty partners had secreted the body until it could be disposed of in a manner they hoped to be taken for suicide.

The Fortress administration thundered that sexual misconduct was specifically forbidden by the Reg Book’s honor code. The administration’s final attempt at dampening the scandal was to announce that a depraved outsider had accosted Artillery Pledge Fletcher on the way to mess hall and had forced him into a remote area of the campus, where the fiend’s immoral advances had induced a heart attack, whereupon the fiend had lain in wait until he could so deal with the body as to place suspicion on the innocent. Artillery Pledge Fletcher had submitted to death rather than dishonor, and the school would inaugurate a Valor Cup in his name to be presented at each year’s awards convocation to the Artillery Pledge Who Most Typifies the Values Expressed in the Honor Code. I found it hardly unwelcome when this bilge carried the day. The story had long ago dropped out of the papers, and we had not seen a cop or reporter for at least a month. The only significant result of the investigations had been
the expulsion of a notorious, much-missed Cavalry femme who, as if measuring fish he had caught, separated his hands by varying distances when other cadets’ names were mentioned.

“It’s interesting that you might have been the last person to see the pledge before he died,” Squadron said.

I shook my head in a display of wondering disbelief.

“The pledge tells his roommates he’s going to mess, and oh, on the way he might as well go up to your room to drop off this book you wanted to borrow, otherwise he might forget, he’ll see them at dinner, goodbye. He waltzes into your room, finds out you’re still here, and gives you the book. Right?”

“It was thoughtful of him,” I said. “He wanted to be sure I’d have it when I got back.” I smoothed my blanket with the palm of my hand.

“You couldn’t get this book from the library?”

All the times I had been questioned, no one had ever thought to ask about the book. The notion of showing it to Captain Squadron seemed filled with danger. “We don’t have it in the library. It was a collection of stories.”

“Like short stories?”

I smoothed another nonexistent wrinkle.

“What kind of stories?”

“I don’t know what you’d call them.”

“Let me have a look at it.”

I went to my desk and opened the top drawer. The hideous image of Squadron’s fingerprints contaminating the sacred text filled my mind. I held it up and gave him a look at the cover. He narrowed his eyes. “I never heard of the guy.”

“Me neither.” I put the book on my desk, relief at escaping what seemed like both pollution and danger making my heart thump. When I looked back at Squadron, he was frowning and holding out his hand.

“I thought you wanted …”

He waggled his fingers.

I surrendered the treasure to his waiting paw.

“You kids think these stupid tricks bamboozle everybody, but we’ve seen it all before.” He opened the book and flipped forward. When he failed to find pictures of naked women, he riffled the pages with his thumb. He folded back the cover and looked at the front binding. “You’re too jumpy. Something’s funny here.”
Holding both covers, he upended the book and shook it. Nothing fell out of the pages.

Squadron tossed the book onto the dresser and leaned back again. “You didn’t go to the mess that night.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“Kids your age are hungry all the time, but let that pass. What do you think happened to Artillery Pledge Fletcher?”

“The commandant hit the nail on the head, sir. Some outsider jumped him between here and mess hall, and the pledge got so scared he dropped dead. I wish I’d gone with Pledge Fletcher. He wouldn’t have attacked the two of us.” I made the mistake of glancing at the treasure. Squadron saw my eyes move. Grinning, he slid the book to the edge of the dresser.

“No outsider has ever, and I mean ever, managed to sneak in here without being seen. It’s almost impossible to get in or out without passing a guard station. Breaking into the dorms, you have to set that up in advance, don’t you? Get a buddy to crack a window for you, talk him into hanging around a fire door?”