Read Online Mr. X by Peter Straub - Free Book Online

protruding breasts, and a bloated penis. For a second, Simone Feigenbaum revolved her lush little body above me, and I thought:
Hey, that happened!
I opened a blue book to a fresh page and in neat block letters wrote, THE MAIN CAUSE OF PROBLEMS IS SOLUTIONS. I remembered tossing my test papers on the professor’s desk and watching, many hours later, a stiff, disapproving bartender swiping a cloth over five inches of polished mahogany and setting down a glass crowned with foam. I realized where I was and what I had done. It was the Saturday after final exams, and the campus was filled with parents picking up their sons and daughters. Other students, myself supposedly among them, were taking the bus to the airport.
    The universe in which people could pack bags and climb into their fathers’ cars seemed unbridgeably distant from mine. I huddled in bed until the window was dark and the last car had driven away.
    By tradition, our instructors posted exam grades in a glass-encased bulletin board on the quad before the college mailed them out. After the break, the board would be surrounded by students looking up other people’s grades. I expected to see my English and French results on the coming Monday, history no later than Tuesday, chemistry on Tuesday or Wednesday. I had extravagant hopes for chemistry. Calculus, the one that terrified me, probably would not show up until Wednesday.
    The Grants expected me to come into O’Hare on Sunday afternoon. I was to call them Saturday to confirm, and my ticket was already waiting at the airport. When I felt capable of rational speech, I put in a collect call to Naperville and spoke an escalating series of whoppers about an invitation to join a friend in Barbados, and if they didn’t mind…. My friend’s sister had backed out, so I’d be taking her place, the tickets were already paid for, and the family didn’t mind because I’d bunk with my friend and save them the price of a room …
    The Grants said they’d be sorry not to see me, but spring vacation wasn’t far away. Phil asked if my friend might happen to be of the female variety. I said, no, he was Clark Darkmund, the name of a cherubic, porn-obsessed Minnesotan who had been rotated into the single next to mine after disagreeing about the merits of the philosophy expressed in
Mein Kampf
with his former roommate, Steven Glucksman of Great Neck, Long Island. Yes, I said, Clark was an interesting character. Great conversationalist, too.
    “How did the finals go?” Phil asked.
    “We’ll see.”
    “I know my Ned,” Phil told me. “You’re going to surprise yourself.”
    After dinner in a student bar, I walked back to the campus. When I turned onto the path to my dorm, a German exchange student named Horst who looked like an
Esquire
model hastened up out of nowhere and appeared beside me. Had he been cherubic, Horst would have resembled Clark Darkmund, but there was nothing cherubic about him. He smiled at me. “Here we are again, alone in this desolate place. Now that you aresober, let us go to my room and undress each other very, very slowly.”
    His proposition deepened my gloom, and my response surprised me even more than it did Horst. “I have a knife in my pocket,” I said. “Unless you disappear right away, your guts will freeze before you know you’re cut.”
    “Ned.” He looked stricken. “Didn’t we have an understanding?”
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll count to three. Here goes. One.”
    He summoned a charming smile. “That object in your trousers is undoubtedly far more magnificent than a knife.”
    “Two.”
    “You do not remember our conversation of last night?”
    I shoved my hand into my pocket and closed it around the remnant of a roll of Life Savers.
    Horst slid into the darkness with a regretful moue.
    The next morning, transparent sunlight streamed down from a sky of clear, hard azure. The crisp shadows of leafless poplars stretched out across the bright snow.
    Accompanied by my