Mr. X Read Online Free PDF

silver rope emerges. Another rope slides out. I feel a relaxation around me and break free.
    Then I am standing behind the being, and I can do nothing but witness what I cannot understand.
    The man lowers his hands to the ropes and holds them as if making an offering. Slowly, he tries to move the ropes back inside his body.
    The being says, “Mr. Anscombe, I presume?” His voice tells me that this, too, amuses him.
    Down the side of the room, blue flames swarm across the wall and form a glowing transparency through which I can see a woman in a nightdress sitting on a bed with a little girl on her lap. She holds a book but has stopped reading to look at the place in the wall where the door must be.
    She can’t see how the man is trying to stay on his feet, stepping a little bit forward, then a little bit back, or how his knees sag until he sinks all the way to the floor, all the time staring at the fat loops falling out of his hands. The being leans down, sets the knife hard against the side of the man’s neck and jerks it across. Black fluid streams over the sweatshirt, and in the center of the stream a bump rises and falls, bump bump bump. The man tilts over his knees and keeps on tilting with the same amazing slowness until his forehead meets the carpet. The being steps back. Beneath the shadow of his hat, a blank pane of darkness ends in a strip of jaw.
    I understand: He is Mr. X.
    Luxuriantly, Mr. X turns to gaze through the blue veils at the woman and the little girl on the side of the bed.
    The dying man makes an airy sound. The woman pats her little girl’s head.
    In delight, the being moves forward, and the veils reshape themselves into a bright tunnel. Without warning, the wind presses me forward in his wake. A mild, almost weightless resistance like that of a spiderweb yields instantly as I pass through the invisible wall. On all sides, the blue tunnel hums like electricity. Mr. X strides ahead, and he, too, hums with his own electricity, which is joy. His next stride carries him into the bedroom, and although his body conceals the woman and child from me I hear a woman’s gasp. The child begins whimpering. They have seen a man in a black coat and hat walk straight through the bedroom wall. The woman scrambles across the bed, and I see bare legs flashing blue-white.
    Clamping the little girl to her chest, the woman spins off the far side of the bed and hits the dresser. They have shiny, dark brown, just-washed hair and immense dark eyes. I step back, and the little girl’s eyes glance in my direction, more as if looking for than at me. When I try to retreat into the tunnel, the pressure slides against my back.
    The girl buries her face in her mother’s chest, and the mother hoists her up. She is as pretty as a movie star. “I want you to get out of here right now, whoever you are,” she says.
    Concealing the knife in the folds of his coat, he moves along the bottom of the bed. She backs against the wall and shouts, “Mike!”
    “No help from that quarter, Mrs. Anscombe,” he says. “Tell me, don’t you find it awfully dull out here in the sticks?”
    “My name isn’t Anscombe,” she says. “I don’t know anyone named Anscombe. You’re making a terrible mistake.”
    He comes toward her. “Someone did, anyhow.”
    She springs onto the bed. Her legs churn. Mr. X wraps a hand around her ankle. The nightdress slides up over her hips when he pulls her toward him. She releases the little girl and shouts, “Run, baby! Run outside and hide!”
    He yanks the woman off the bed and kicks her in the stomach.
    The little girl stares at him. He flicks a hand at her, and she shuffles an inch forward on her knees. “Too cold outside for a nice baby,” he says. “Dangerous. Baby might meet a big, bad bear.”
    The woman struggles to her feet and stands with her hands pressed against her stomach. Her eyes are like water. “Run, Lisa!” she hisses. “Run away!”
    He waves the knife at the woman, playfully.