by Peter Straub
Bill Byrne, on the other hand, had no problem in accepting his natural bigotry, and during the whole of their years at Holy Sepulchre, Tim had never heard any utterance from his teammate that did not contain a sneer. Was Bill Byrne still alive? Of course, Tim had no proof that Byrne615 was his old adversary of the high school locker room, yet he did want to know what had happened to Byrne. His best friend in Millhaven, the great private investigator Tom Pasmore, could have told him in a minute or less, but Tim did not want to waste his friend’s time on a question like this. Surely he could discover Bill Byrne’s fate by himself.
The name of the one person in the world who could tell him exactly what had become of his high school class, Chester Finnegan, floated into consciousness. Many high school graduating classes contain one person for whom the previous four years represent an idyllic period never to be equaled in adult life, and those persons often take on the role of class secretary. They went to different schools than the rest of their classmates, and in their imaginations they want to stroll through their beloved corridors as often as possible. Chester Finnegan was the self-appointed Class Secretary for Life of Tim’s year at Holy Sepulchre, a man generally to be avoided, but not now.
Information gave him the telephone number, which he promptly dialed. After retiring from State Farm Insurance a couple of years ago, Chester Finnegan had turned to the full-time organization of his Holy Sepulchre “archive.” Tim imagined him sitting at home day after day, screening other people’s home movies of football games and commencement exercises.
(Despite Tim’s attitude, it should be noted here that Finnegan had enjoyed a long career as an insurance executive, a loving marriage of thirty-four years, and was the father of three grown children, two of whom were graduates of excellent medical schools. The third, Seamus, reckoned a failure within the family, had taken the handsome face he had inherited from his father to Los Angeles, where he worked as a massage therapist in between acting jobs. All three children had graduated from Holy Sepulchre. On the other hand, Chester Finnegan talked like this:)
“Hey, Tim! It’s great to hear from you, really great! Gosh, this is like ESP or something, because I was just thinking about you and that stunt you pulled in chemistry class our junior year. I mean, talk about stink! Whoa! Worser’n a family of skunks. So how are things, anyhow? Written any good books lately? You’re probably our most famous alum, you know that? Jeez, I remember seeing you on the Today show, when was that, last year?”
“The year before,” Tim said.
“Cripes, I looked at you and I said to myself, Boy that’s the same guy who damn near asphyxiated Father Locksley. The good father passed away this March, did you see that? I put it in the class newsletter.”
“Oh, yes,” Tim said.
“Eighty-nine, he was, you know, and his health was all shot to hell. But if he caught you talking to Katie Couric, not saying he did of course, I sure know what went through his mind!”
“In a way, that has something to do with the reason I called.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Tim. You missed the memorial. We had ten, twelve of us there. You were mentioned, I can say that. Oh, yes.”
“Actually, I was wondering about Bill Byrne, and it occurred to me that you could probably fill me in.”
Finnegan said nothing for a moment that seemed longer than it was. “The colorful Bill Byrne. I suppose you were wondering about how that happened.”
Tim closed his eyes.
“Tim?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure.”
“The obituary in the Ledger ran only two days ago. What, you saw it online, I guess?”
“Something like that.”
“The Ledger couldn’t say much about how Bill died. Of course, I won’t be able to be much more specific in the online newsletter. You do get those, don’t you?”
Tim assured Finnegan that he received his online newsletter, without mentioning that he always deleted it unread.
“Well, you want to know about old Wild Bill. Well, it was pretty bad. He was in this bar downtown, Izzy’s. A lot of lawyers hang out there, because it’s near the Federal Building and the courthouse. This is about one, two in the morning, Friday night. Leland Rose comes up to Bill and says, ‘I believe you’re messing around with my wife.’ Leland Rose is some fancy financial adviser, big office downtown. Bill tells him he’s crazy, and he completely denies having anything to do with this guy’s wife, who by the way is of the trophy variety and pure trouble from top to bottom.
“So they get into an argument and by and by this Leland Rose, this pillar of society, pulls out a gun. Before anybody can stop him, he takes a shot at Bill. Even though he’s about two feet away, he misses Bill completely, only Bill doesn’t know it. He thinks he was shot! He throws a punch at Rose and knocks him out cold. Then he falls down, too. This is pure Bill Byrne. He’s at least as drunk as Rose, and he imagines he’s wounded, which is because in his fall, he smashed the hell out of one of his elbows. Bill got up to about three hundred pounds there toward the end.
“An ambulance shows up and takes both of them to Shady Mount Hospital. They’re strapped onto gurneys. This whole time, Bill is carrying on, trying to get at Rose, who’s still out. They get to Shady Mount and unload Bill first, only he’s rolling around so much that they actually drop him, and that’s the last straw. Poof! Whammo! Massive heart attack, huge heart attack, a heart explosion. No way they could revive him.”
“So he died drunk, on a gurney outside the emergency entrance of Shady Mount.”
“Actually, at that point he wasn’t on the gurney.”
“Was Rose right? Was Byrne having an affair with his wife?”
“That fat little Irishman was always screwing someone else’s wife. Women ate him up, don’t ask me why.”
Tim thought of Phoorow and had the sudden desire to stop talking to Chester Finnegan.
“I was just remembering that day you and I drove up to Random Lake,” Finnegan said. “Remember? Boy, that was one of the best days of my life. Did Turner come with us? Yes, he did, because Dicky Stockwell pushed him off the pier, remember?”
Tim not only failed to remember the great excursion to Random Lake, he had no idea who Turner and Dicky Stockwell were. Unchecked, Finnegan could fill another hour with golden moments only he remembered, and Tim began making noises indicative of the conversation’s end.
Then he remembered that Finnegan could, for once and all, banish the specter that had shimmered into view. “I suppose Byrne was on your newsletter list.”
“Naturally.”
“So you have his e-mail address.”
“Not that I’ll ever use it anymore.”
“Could you please tell me what it was, Ches?”
“Why would you want a thing like that?”
“It has to do with my work,” he said. “I’m ruling out some possibilities.”
“Oh, I see,” said Finnegan. “Hold on, I’ll get my database. . . . All right, here we are. Wild Bill’s e-mail address was Byrne, capital B, 615 at aol.com.”
“Ah,” Tim said. “Yes. Well. How unusual.”
“Not really,” Finnegan told him. “A lot of AOL addresses are like that.”
The specter had come shimmering back into view, and Bill Byrne, who had died of not being shot to death, had a fairness issue on his chest. Besides that, Bill felt lost.
“Ches, if I give you the first part of some e-mail addresses, can you see if they are in your database?”
“You mean the names, right?”
“I’m just testing something out here.”
“Hey, if I help you, I expect a cut of your royalties!”
“Talk to my agent,” Tim said. He went to his e-mail screen. “How about Huffy? Do you have a Huffy? Capital H?”
“I don’t even have to look for that one—Bob Huffman. Huffy at verizon.net. Nice guy. Cancer got him about three months ago. Had two remissions, and then it went nuclear on him. This is a dangerous age, my friend.”
Tim remembered Bob Huffman, a lanky red-haired boy who looked as if he would remain sixteen forever. “Is there a Presten?” He spelled it.
“Presten at mindspring.com, sure. That’s Paul Resten. You have to remember him. Strange story. Paul died right around New Year’s. Gunshot wound. Poor guy, he was an innocent bystander in a liquor store holdup, wrong place, wrong time. Paul was a very successful guy! Every year, he gave a generous contribution to the school.”
The remark contained a quantity of reproach, but Finnegan’s attention had shifted to another point.
“These e-mail addresses are all for dead people, Tim. What’s going on?”
“Someone must be messing with my head. In the past few days, I got some e-mail that was supposedly sent by these people.”
“I’d call that obscene,” Finnegan said. “Using our classmates’ names like that.”
“I just figured out another one,” Tim said. “Rudderless must be Les Rudder. Don’t tell me he’s dead, too.”
“Les died in a car crash on September 11, 2001. I’m not surprised you never heard about that one. Anyone else?”
“Loumay, nayrm, kalicokitty, and someone called Cyrax.”
“I know two of those right off, but let me look up. . . . Okay. This guy’s a real bastard, whoever he is. Kalicokitty was Katie Finucan, year behind us, remember? Cutest little thing you ever saw. God, I used to have the hots for Katie Finucan. Better not let my wife hear me say that, hey? Katie died in a fire last February. She was visiting her grandkids in New Jersey, and no one knows what happened. Everyone got out but her. Smoke inhalation, I’d say, but hey, I was in the insurance business, what do I know?”
Tim was appalled by the ease with which death had moved through the ranks of his classmates at a mediocre little Catholic school in Millhaven.
“Okay, same deal goes for loumay and nayrm, Lou Mayer and Mike Ryan. Ryan died in Ireland last year, and Lou Mayer drowned in a sailing accident off Cape Cod.”
“Oh, Christ,” Tim said.
“I hear he was a lousy sailor. What was that last name?”
“Cyrax.”
“He doesn’t seem to be here. Nope. So maybe that one’s real.”
“He said he wanted to be my guide.”
“That’s your joker, right there.” Finnegan’s voice rose. “Here’s the guy who’s sending you this crap. It has to be someone we went to school with. Who else would know about these people? He’s picking the names of people you cared about.”
Except I didn’t, Tim thought. “That crossed my mind, too.”
“There has to be someone who can pin down this creep.”
“I know a couple of people who might be able to do something,” Tim said. “Thank you for your help.”
Now his computer seemed like a hostile entity, exuding toxins as it crouched atop his desk. If Cyrax was sending him e-mails using the Internet names of dead classmates because Cyrax had been a classmate himself, how did he know about Philip Footler? No one in Tim’s life was familiar with both his life in high school and his Vietnam tour. The one and only intersection on earth of Bill Byrne and Phoorow was Timothy Underhill.
He went back and started over. Someone calling himself Cyrax had been rooting through his past and using what he found there to send these crazy e-mails. Tim could see no other explanation. Cyrax had already appointed himself as guide, so let him make the next move. Since without full addresses these e-mail conversations could be only one-way, he would make the next move anyhow. When Cyrax showed himself again, Tim would decide how he wanted to respond. He could always start deleting any e-mail that came without an @ sign and domain name.
He remembered the astonishing sight of his sister, a little Alice in Wonderland girl leaning forward to hurl the words Listen to us at him, and for the first time connected April’s command with the e-mails. An uncontrollable shiver went through his body. Helplessly, he looked at the computer, squatting on his desk like a sleek black toad. From below it, the voices of the dead bubbled up to print their inchoate words on the screen, one after another, emerging from a bottomless well.
He had to get outside.
But when Tim Underhill left his building to walk aimlessly down Grand, then turn left on Wooster Street, then right on Broome, his hands in the pockets of his still-damp Burberry, his head covered by his still-damp WBGO cap, he felt no release from the phantoms that had driven him into the streets. In the passing cars, the drivers scowled like the officers of the secret police in a totalitarian state; on the sidewalks, the people who passed gazed downward, sloping along mute and alone.
Down Crosby he went, that street of cobblestones and sudden windy spaces, now as empty as it had been twenty years before, when he had first moved into the neighborhood. Loneliness suddenly bit into him, and he welcomed it back, for the loneliness was a true part of him, real, not a fearful phantom.
A few days before, Tim had been leafing through his volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters, and for some reason a phrase from one of the “Master” letters—written to a man never identified—came into his head: I used to think when I died—I could see you—so I died as fast as I could. It had been a long time since he had loved someone that way. This gloomy recognition came to him wrapped in the unhappiness that seemed to leak from every blank window and closed door on the street. Underhill tried to reject it and the unhappiness both. Because he thought he would fail, he failed, and loneliness and sorrow thickened around him.
Something set him off, and after that he was, for all purposes, back in his generation’s war. Phoorow, phoorow, Private Philip Footler had been the trigger. Gliding toward him, shifting back, sliding under his defenses, a particularly unhappy vision had flooded Tim’s mind, whether or not he could actually see it at any given moment. Tim Underhill had been something like six feet from Phoorow’s grotesque separation from himself. It had been granted him to witness every one of the four or five seconds it had taken the boy to die—reaching down to pull his body back into connection, his mouth opening and closing like that of an infant seeking the nipple. Tim was grateful not to have seen Phoorow’s eyes.
He longed for the reassuring sound of other people’s voices. He could have gone to the Fireside—okay, not the Fireside, but any one of the little bars and restaurants scattered throughout his village: for over the previous two decades that was what the territory bounded by West Broadway, Broome Street, Broadway, and Canal Street had inevitably become: his hometown, the one place where he felt truly comfortable.
He turned around, and a hint of movement caught his eye. On a street where only he was in motion, the idea of movement seemed a little spooky. Tim Underhill turned back, then spun his head again, scanning the sidewalks and the anonymous facades. It was as if the street had been evacuated, specifically for the purpose of stranding him in it.
Thin, foggy, impenetrable veils hung like sheets of cloud-colored iron at both ends of the block. The ordinary sounds of the city were muted and distant, walled out. If he looked hard at the cobblestones, he thought, he would see unreality’s slick, cartoonish sheen. Everything that had happened to him over the past two days had been designed to get him here, to this empty block on a false Crosby Street.
Now it had happened for real, Tim thought. His mind had rolled past its own edge. Even the gray air seemed to resist him as he turned around once again to face north: uptown, the direction that would take him back to Broome Street. And as he turned, he thought he detected a hint of movement closer to him than the first time. Tim scanned the storefronts and windows and this time really noticed that every one of them was dark. The hypothetical movement had been off to his right and behind the large plate-glass windows of a vanished art gallery. He looked more closely at the window and saw only the murk of an empty room.
Once, the gallery had been dedicated to minimalist installations that featured simulated body parts, piles of dirt, and reams of text. Behind the scrim of the dirty enormous window, the bare walls receded into darkness. When
he shifted his glance to the cloud-gate at the top end of Crosby, something in the gloom at the rear of the empty gallery revealed itself, then slid back into invisibility. Whatever it was had been looking at him. He snapped his head back and stared into the window. Then he moved forward across the sidewalk, bringing more of the interior into view.
At the far end of the room, a dim shape materialized out of the darkness and seemed to move forward, matching his movements.
Jeez, he thought, stung by a recollection, didn’t I write this somewhere?
He took another reluctant step forward. In either mockery or challenge, the figure inside matched him again. In the darkness and obscurity at the back of the immense room, its shape, which was not human, seemed to waver, swelling and shifting like smoke. A long, wide body lowered itself a few inches, as if crouching. There was the suggestion of ears. A silvery pair of eyes swam into view and focused intently on him. A kind of blunt force streamed toward him. Tim gasped and stepped back. He felt as though he had been pinned by a pair of flashlights. Unrelenting and soulless, made entirely of will and antipathy, the creature’s eyes hung in the gloomy air.
He found himself moving backward and off the sidewalk, into the middle of the cobbled street. It seemed important not to turn his back.
Knowing that his terror was ridiculous did nothing to tame it. He continued to move across the street, eyes locked with the creature’s, pushed himself up onto the far sidewalk, and whirled to sprint north toward Broome Street. Around him, the atmosphere tingled and snapped. He once again became aware of the rain. Before he had taken two long strides, a door opened in what had seemed a blank wall, and a couple emerged from a tall iron-fronted building. The world around him had solidified into its old unreliable self. He reached Broome with the sense of having broken through an invisible but palpable barrier.
Because the people who had reappeared on the sidewalk were staring at him, he slowed his pace. By the time he was crossing Broadway, he had brought himself down to a walk. His heart was knocking in his chest, and he could hear his own ragged breathing. A pair of shiny young men with rain-resistant hair turned their heads to see how much trouble he was in.
