Mr. X Read Online Free Page A

sliding, use your momentum.”
    “We need each other,” I said. “We’re the same thing.”
    “You are me, and I am you, yes,” said the shadow. “But only in the sense that we each have qualities the other lacks. Unfortunately, your qualities are boring.”
    “Boring?”
    “Dear me, am I doing the right thing? What do other people think of me? Why don’t they like me?” The shadow flicked its hands in the air, as if to scatter a cloud of gnats. “I don’t give a damn what people think of me.”
    “You’re a shadow,” I said. “People don’t think about you at all.”
    “Then why care about getting me back?”
    I had no answer for that.
    “You won’t even be able to go out by yourself at night for another six or seven years. When do we have our first cigarette? Our first drink? When do we get to have actual sex?” He shook his head in disgust. “I want
darkness
, I want
night
. I want to see a big steak in front of me and a glass of whiskey beside the plate. I want cards in my hand and a cigar in my mouth and a little grown-up fun, and, kid, with you, it’s going to be too much work to get them.”
    “Without me, you can’t get them at all,” I said.
    “On the contrary. Without you, I can do whatever I like. If you catch me, I have to come back, but I won’t be easy to catch, and you’ll be in considerable danger during the pursuit.”
    “What kind of danger?” I asked.
    “That kind, for one.” He swept his arm toward the forest. Imaginary blue fire flickered from branch to branch. My heart went cold and my mind became a stone.
5
    Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.
    I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother’s possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I’d tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I have to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.
    That is:
    I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.
    The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clotheslines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth.Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her blackolive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white