The piano player turned to the audience and said, "We'd like to do a ballad . . . called 'These Foolish Things.' " He looked up at the saxophonist and sketched a few bars of the melody. The saxophonist pushed himself off the piano, approached a microphone at the front of the stage, and settled his fingers on the keys. He closed his eyes, already in a trance of concentration. When the introduction came to an end, he fastened his mouth to his horn and repeated the fragment of melody just played as if it were newly minted. Then he floated above the line of the song and blew a liquid phrase that said,You know the song, but do you know this story?
Star's head snapped up. Listening without hearing, Edward Rinehart lounged in his seat and concealed his disdain.
At the start of his second chorus, the alto player said,That was just the beginning. An ascending arc of melody streamed from the bell of his horn and printed itself upon the air. The melody expanded, and the alto player said,We are on a journey. As he settled into his story, it opened into interior stories, and variations led to other, completely unexpected, variations. The alto player climbed to passionate resolutions, let them subside, and ascended further.
Star shifted in her seat, opened her mouth, and leaned forward. I felt tears slide down my cheeks.
It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. . . . He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer. . .
That alto player never moved anything but his fingers. He stood with his feet pointed out, his eyes closed, his shoulders in a negligent slouch. In its grip on the reed of his horn, his mouth looked like a flexible sea creature. Note after note, the tremendous story and all of its details soared into the reaches of the auditorium, building on the structure it distilled from its own meaning. The drummer tilted his head and plied his brushes over the crisp drumheads; the smiling bass player set in place the familiar harmonies; the piano player breathed a soft "Yeah, Paul." It seemed effortless, natural, inevitable, like the long unfolding of a landscape seen from the top of a mountain, and it went on and on for what might as well have been a thousand choruses.
In another time, my own, fog swarmed across a road where two sets of footsteps advanced toward whatever was to come. I put my shoulders against the wall and listened for as long as I could—the whole world opened up in front of me.
•136
•What? Ah, you want to know what happened to Robert? I'm sorry, that has already been answered—answered as well as it can be, anyhow. Step after step, through the long transitional passages of airports, down the corridors between the glowing lobbies and welcoming bars of resplendent hotels, along the pavements of every city I inhabit for a week or two in my endless flight, the ticking of Robert's footsteps sounds in my awaiting ear.
But since you have put a question to me, I can ask one in return. Are you sure—really sure—you know who told you this story?
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The dedicated Lovecraftian will have noted the liberties I have taken with the publication history of "The Dunwich Horror." The story's first appearance between hard covers was in the collection The Outsider and Others, edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei and published by Arkham House in 1939, some years prior to Mr. X's enthralled discovery at the Fortress Military Academy of the tale within a fictitious book bearing its name. The collection entitled The Dunwich Horror and Others, edited by Derleth for Arkham House, was not published until 1963.
S. T. Joshi's definitive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, makes brief mention of "a very strange individual from Buffalo, New York," named William Lumley, who took Lovecraft's mythology of Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, now commonly referred to as "the Cthulhu Mythos," as literal fact and clung to this belief in the face of all denials by the writer and his circle of colleagues and friends. Joshi quotes Lovecraft's ironic summary of Lumley's position from a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith in 1933: "We maythink we're writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry."
I wish to thank Bradford Morrow, Warren Vache, Ralph Vicinanza, David Gernert, Dr. Lila Kalinich, Sheldon Jaffrey, Hap Beasely, my editor, Deb Futter, and my wife, Susan Straub, for their suggestions, support, and assistance during the writing ofMr. X.
Peter Straub
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
peter straubis the author of fourteen novels and one collection of shorter fiction. His work has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel, the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. In 1998 he was named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention. His books have been translated into twenty-one foreign languages. He lives in New York City.
ABOUT THE TYPE
This book was set in Fairfield, the first typeface from the hand of the distinguished American artist and engraver Rudolph Ruzicka (1883—1978). Rudolph Ruzicka was born in Bohemia and came to America in 1894. He set up his own shop, devoted to wood engraving and printing, in New York in 1913 after a varied career working as a wood engraver, in photo-engraving and banknote printing plants, and as an art director and freelance artist. He designed and illustrated many books, and was the creator of a considerable list of individual prints—wood engravings, line engravings on copper, and aquatints.