The Curious Case of Mr. X and the Gospel of His Own Invention

Now, Mr. X was not a villain in the grand tradition of theatrical malice — no! He was rather the sort of villain who stumbles into his own fraud with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a boy who’s tied wings to his arms and believes himself an angel.

Chapter I: In Which the Puppet-Master Constructs a Marionette (And Is Most Pleased With Himself)

Mr. X, in his earlier and more profitable years, considered himself a maestro of illusion, a connoisseur of imposture. He preferred to act not upon the stage, but behind it — dressing his performers in rags and tinsel, then sending them forth to bewilder the crowd with tales as wild as weathercocks in a storm.

It was thus that he discovered his greatest creation: a coarse, loud, and astonishingly empty-headed provincial man with the expression of a startled carp and the intellect of a child’s boot. This fellow — whom we shall call The Vessel — had but one remarkable quality: he believed anything told to him, especially if he said it first.

He had already fashioned a ludicrous backstory: that he was, of all things, an illegitimate Rothschild (!), based on the possession of a rusted brass pendant, likely plundered from a street bazaar, with a star and a crescent scratched upon it. That was all. No documents. No witnesses. No logic.

Mr. X, being an industrious fraud if nothing else, took this myth and blew into it the breath of theatre. He added espionage, heartbreak, fortune, and political gravitas. Soon, The Vessel became — at least on paper — a secret heir, a Turkish aristocrat, a man of vision and consequence! Naturally, this absurdity attracted both curiosity and capital.

Chapter II: In Which the Imposter Becomes a Prophet (and the Prophet an Institution)

Oh, how they paid him!
The Vessel strutted and bellowed with the insolence only granted to those who truly own nothing. His carelessness was mistaken for confidence. His ignorance, for wisdom born of foreign affairs. When he spoke nonsense, they assumed it was genius in disguise.

And Mr. X, that invisible engineer of madness, collected his share with delicate hands, always remaining one shadow behind. For some years, the scheme thrived like mould on warm bread.

Chapter III: In Which the Author Falls Into His Own Fiction

But — dear reader — as surely as London fog seeps under every windowpane, so too did the lie seep into its maker.

Yes. Mr. X, once so proud of his detachment, began to believe.
Not just in the myth — but in its sacred purpose. He became, in his own eyes, less a schemer and more a seer.
The puppet was no longer his creation — he was his Messiah.

He began to speak of destiny. Of prophecy. Of a grand purpose he alone had glimpsed while scribbling fraudulent birth records on the back of hotel napkins.

Worse — he grew protective.
He defended the lie not as a strategy, but as truth. He surrounded it with documents, diplomatic nods, and invented partnerships. He gave the myth a postcode. A flag. A coat of arms.

He no longer used deception. He dwelt in it. Like a spider who forgets he spun the web, and believes himself trapped by fate.

Chapter IV: The Train Approaches the Wall

And now, dear reader, the play has lost its audience, but not its players. Mr. X wanders the corridors of illusion like a ghost in his own mansion — warning others of storms he conjured himself.

What began as farce has turned tragic.

He cannot stop.
To stop would be to admit the fraud. And to admit the fraud would be to confess — publicly, painfully — that he is no strategist, no sage, no prophet…
But merely a frightened little man who forged another’s biography — and drowned in the ink.

Epilogue

Beware the man who tells lies for a living.
But fear even more the man who begins to believe them.