Free Mr. X by Peter Straub Page A

blue books, a grade of Incomplete in Introductory Calculus, and an opportunity to repeat the course. Following his refusal of these extraordinary requests, you responded to his efforts to secure the blue books, which he had as yet not read, by pushing him back into his chair and then fleeing. He attributed your behavior to hysterical panic and chose not to bring it to my attention. The contents of the blue books decided him otherwise.
    After thoughtful consideration, also after factoring in the other matters before us, I ask you to report to our January 20 meeting at the originally designated time of 7:30 A.M. with any records, along with evidence of previous psychiatric treatment, which might assist me in protecting your position here at Middlemount College.
    To facilitate the search for your records, I am sending a copy of this letter to your guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Philip Grant of Naperville, Illinois.
    Sincerely yours,
    Clive Macanudo
    Dean of Student Affairs
    I blew my nose on Clive’s letter and pitched it into the wastebasket, more disturbed by his sending it to the Grants than by my imminent expulsion. Phil and Laura would understand that what I was doing was vastly more important than the pablum dished out in my classes.
    On my way back to the center of the universe I thought I caught a glimpse of a green loden coat and a flash of bright hair in the midst of the row of trees bordering the western end of the campus. The lovesick stalker vanished the instant I looked again, and I put him out of my mind.
    After an hour’s silent meditation had permitted me to hear the music in the air, after another hour of adding my part to it, a gathering sense of being as yet not absolutely in
the right place
caused me to get back on my feet and move deeper into the woods until I came upon the ruins of a cottage. I creaked open the door and beheld the rotted wooden walls, the single broken window, the litter of feathers, tiny skeletons, and dried animal feces on the dirty floor, and knew that here it was at last,
the right place
. It, too, was an instrument. Steady music flowed through the cottage, produced by the wind hissing through the gaps in the timbers and the patter of squirrels in the crawl space overhead. I enjoyed a blissful hour of adding a modest accompaniment and, just before dark, ran to my room for blankets and provisions and hurried back while I still had light enough to see.
    The cottage emerged from the surrounding darkness like a tall shadow in the sacred woods. Faint strains of the music withincalled to me, and I rushed over the snow and opened the creaking door. When I entered, I seemed instantly to plummet through the rotting floor. I fell; I saw nothing; I did not fear. A long, shabby, once-handsome room took shape before me. Out of my range of vision, a man spoke of smoke and gold and corpses on a battlefield. My head pounded, and my stomach was afflicted. On the mantel over the fireplace stood a dying Boston fern, a stuffed fox advancing within a glass bell, and a brass clock with weights revolving left-right, right-left, left-right. This was
backward
, it was
past
, and I had been here before. I fell to my knees on the worn Oriental carpet. Before I vomited, the world melted and restored itself, and the contents of my stomach drizzled onto the ruined floor.
Home
, I thought.
11
    While still presentable enough to go into town, I stocked up on canned food and camping equipment. I got a sleeping bag and a battery-powered lamp. After I realized that I could make use of the fireplace, I bought bags of charcoal briquettes, a hatchet, lots of fire starter, a grate, and packages of frozen meat I buried in the snow and thawed out over flames coaxed from lumps of charcoal and chopped-up deadwood. Some nights, raccoons climbed through gaps in the flooring and fell asleep like dogs in front of the dwindling fire. Toward the end of my forty-five days in the cottage, when going into town would have invited arrest or