In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  Willy was drawing the towel over first one hand, then the other, staring at the moving towel, as if she expected something to slip out from beneath it. She glanced at Tom.

  “I figured it was about some accounting rigamarole, because we got the American Express cards through a service division of his company. It was like we got reduced rates, or something like that.”

  “Did the bills come through the company, or directly to you?”

  “They came straight to us. I used to write the checks. But like I said, we almost never used those cards.” She stopped moving the towel across her hands. “That wasn’t an idle question, was it?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “You think he was trying to protect me.”

  “I think he was probably covering his ass.”

  “My ass, you mean.” Willy flipped the towel into the bathroom. “He knew something was wrong. Damn him. What kind of company are they, anyhow? Oh, as if that hasn’t become transparently clear. But Jim was such a nice man, and such a smart man, too—he was kind, you know? Do you suppose he had Holly with him to keep her safe? To protect her from being kidnapped?”

  Tom was looking straight at her, giving nothing away.

  “All this stuff is going through my head! Did I tell you that I almost broke into a produce warehouse because I was sure Holly was imprisoned inside it? I could hear her calling for me! I knew my daughter was dead, but I couldn’t stop myself—I got out of the car, fully intending to break a window and climb in. I swear to you, Tom, sometimes it feels as though I am being made to do things. Like I’m a marionette, and someone else is pulling the strings.”

  Wild-eyed again, she held her arms straight up and wiggled them as though they were controlled by puppet strings. Tom stood up, hesitated, then saw from the tragic expression on her face that she was close to losing herself again. He moved across the room and pulled her to his chest.

  “I think you should have a little vodka,” he said. “While you’re at it, I’ll have one, too.”

  He opened the minibar, removed two miniature bottles of Absolut, took two lowball glasses from the top of the cabinet, set them down on the table, and told Willy he would be back in a minute with some ice. “You’re like Superman,” she said. “No, I think you are Superman.”

  He returned almost as quickly as he had promised, and in another minute they were seated across from each other, Willy on the side of the bed and Tom back in the nubbly chair, raising glasses filled with ice cubes and a clear liquid.

  “To you,” Willy said. “My anchorage, my port in the storm.”

  “To us,” Tom said. “We’ll go crazy together.”

  Willy took a sip of the vodka, winced, and shook her head. “My port in the storm has a terrible effect on my character. I hardly ever drink, except for when I’m with you. Then there’s the swearing. What’s next, we take up smoking?”

  He took a swallow. “What’s next is, we figure out a way to go to the police. What would Teddy Barton do? We need proof that you’re being followed, assuming that you are. Good old Teddy would round up a little band of boys, and some of them would create a diversion while another one takes a picture of the bad guys. We can’t organize the little band, but there’s a cheap little camera in the minibar. If someone’s following you, I could take a photograph of them and we could take it to the police. And just to be safe, you ought to leave this hotel in the morning and check in somewhere else. Somewhere a little obscure, like the Mayflower.”

  “The Mayflower?”

  “It’s a nice little hotel near the foot of Central Park West. What time did you get here, anyhow?”

  “About nine-thirty.”

  “And when did you leave Hendersonia?”

  “Something like ten in the morning. You know, I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. This vodka is going to do me in.” She placed her glass on the bedside table.

  “And the time in between ten in the morning and nine at night?”

  “Gone, mainly. I can remember driving across the G.W. bridge, but that’s it. It was daytime, and then it was night. I was on the bridge, I was parked in front of this hotel. It’s not that I forgot the time in between, it’s that it never happened. Those hours happened in your life, but they didn’t in mine.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  “Then don’t say anything. I want to order some room service. Are you hungry? Could you eat anything?”

  “No, but please order something, Willy. You have to eat.”

  She called room service and ordered a hamburger without French fries and a Diet Coke. “I guess I can start to relax now, sort of. It’s strange, I don’t have the faintest beginning of a plan of what to do next, but for some reason I’m not really worried about it. I think the next thing will happen, and then the thing after that, and I’ll find out where I’m going when I get there.”

  She collapsed back on the bed and gave him a look of flat inquiry. “Didn’t you have something you were going to say to me?”

  “I did, yes,” Tom said. “But I’m going to hold off. This isn’t the time to bring it up.”

  “ ‘Bring it up’? Uh-oh. This is pretty serious, isn’t it, pretty grim.”

  “Well, it’s serious. Tomorrow, maybe. If you want to see me tomorrow, that is.”

  “Want to see you tomorrow? I don’t want you to leave, Tom. I want you to spend the night here. With me. Please.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “No, you won’t,” Willy said. “You’re going to sleep in this bed, right alongside me. That way, if time gets taken away again, it’ll happen to you, too.”

  17

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  Before I deal with my unhappiness with what I’ve been doing in my new book, I really have to write about what has been going on around here. In the midst of all this stuff I’m about to describe, I somehow feel a kind of gathering clarity—the sense is not that I’m beginning to understand it all, because I’m not, rather that one day I am going to understand it, and that feels like enough. Enough, certainly, to keep me from another visit to the Austen Riggs therapeutic community in Stockbridge, Mass., and kindly Dr. B., although after 9/11/01, I was entirely grateful to spend sixty days in their care.

  Ever since “Cyrax” filled the mysterious blue box on my screen with page after page of instruction, advice, and what he thought of as explanations, events have been conspiring to make me imagine, very much against my will, that some of what he told me might be true. And if I can feel part of a larger pattern, a huge pattern, incorporating a multiplicity of worlds filled with entities like sasha, zamani, and towering angels with names like WCHWHLLDN, the individual events themselves become less inexplicable. Hardly less threatening, though, because I am about 90% sure that yesterday afternoon, while I was taking a long, slow walk back from Ground Zero after my first visit there, Jasper Kohle tried to murder me.

  I eventually noticed that I had wandered over to West Broadway. As always, it was crowded with people young, middle-aged, and old hastening up and down the sidewalks, crossing the street in the middle of the block, lingering in the doorways of shops, and haranguing someone just out of sight. Great vivid balloons of color sparked and floated by, advertisements, the sides of buses, neon flashing, an unforgettable face seen through a taxi window, all the usual riot south of Canal Street. As ever, Manhattan seemed to have produced an inexplicable number of men whose jobs involved surging along the pavement and yelling into mobile phones. I was glowering at one of these Masters of the Universe when I caught a quick, furtive movement reflected in the window of the little Thai restaurant behind him. Whatever it was, it seemed wrong—a sudden, sneaky dodge into concealment, a movement that had no real beginning and no real end, only an abrupt lateral shift from one obscurity into another. Then the asshole shouting into his hand moved on, and the restaurant window reflected only the kids from NYU and a homeless guy and the bright t
axis rushing down West Broadway. When I stepped forward, so did the homeless guy, and with a flash of shock I realized that I was looking at myself. Evidently, I hadn’t paid much attention to what I was wearing when I left home. My old gray sweatshirt looked all wrong under the blazer I had wrestled myself into on my way out the door. The blazer itself appeared to have come from some charitable agency. The blue jeans, the sweatshirt, and the soft, almost shapeless loafers on my feet were the most comfortable clothes I owned, and on days when I wanted to get through a lot of work, they sort of slipped onto my body by mutual agreement, as if they, too, had a job to do. When the shock of recognition faded, I looked again for what was wrong, but it had concealed itself within the scene around me.

  It seemed probable that Jasper Dan Kohle was still intent on punishing me for failing to write “I yam what I yam” in his book, or for the flaws in my writing, or whatever was bugging him. I kept glancing over my shoulder and looking at the reflections in plate-glass windows as I proceeded up the street. To draw him out of cover, I turned corners and crossed streets in the middle of the block.

  I turned off Sixth Avenue at Thompson Street, still with the feeling that someone was following me. I quickened my pace. At my back, it seemed, an unclean spirit capered along, dancing, jigging, bopping in its glee at having me so close at hand. Not looking over my shoulder was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. When I could, I shot brief glances into the ghostly mirrors provided by windows, and saw only the ordinary street traffic of the Village. Mothers pushed strollers that looked like either phaetons or Jetsons vehicles, fiftyish New York frizz-heads waved their hands in conversation as they ambled along, a few underfed kids lip-synched to their iPods. The feeling of being shadowed clung to me as I hastened toward home.

  At Grand Street I turned right and moved toward West Broadway. More people filled the sidewalks, and all of them looked as though they had been born to appear on Grand Street at precisely that moment. I mean, they looked at home in a way I knew I did not. I realized that I no longer had the feeling of being followed, but neither did I feel at ease.

  Before I reached the corner, a slash of the blue of a Wedgwood plate—a mild English blue, an Adams blue, an Alice blue!—caught my eye, and my heart surged into my throat even before I realized that I was looking across the street at my sister, gorgeous unbeautiful April. Fists on her hips, she stood glaring at me within a small circular space of her own making. The people who approached her made an unconscious adjustment at about four feet away and swerved to pass behind her. She was a little blue fire, a blaze of blue and yellow. If you got too close, she’d singe your eyebrows off. I stopped moving so abruptly that a woman with a nose ring, a sleeveless black leather jacket that showed a lot of tattoos, and Paki-basher boots bumped against my back. She called me an ignorant turd and tried to dust me off the pavement with her fingertips. Without taking my eyes from April, I said, “Sorry.” Acting on an impulse I neither understood nor questioned, I placed my hand just above her hip and pushed her away. She flailed back, swearing at me.

  April was on the verge of spitting out lightning bolts. She took her right hand from her hip, held it out fingers extended, and swept it two decisive feet to her left, telling me to move backward. After I had taken two steps back, then another, April returned her hand to her hip and lifted her chin. She appeared to be gazing at the sky above my side of the street.

  I looked up and saw a speck tumbling through the air. The speck got bigger as it fell. Far overhead, a dark little head peered down from the top of the nearest building. I staggered backward another couple of steps and yelled, “Look out!” Six feet away, the woman with the nose ring whirled around and opened her mouth to screech something at me. An object moving too fast to be identified cut through the air between us and smacked into the pavement with a hard, flat, ringing sound over a dull undertone faintly like cannon fire. Stony chips flew upward in a gritty haze.

  “Fucking hell!” the woman yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

  I looked across the street at the place where April had been, then up at the edge of the roof, where the dark little head was pulling back out of sight. On the sidewalk, a broken concrete block rested in the pothole it had made on impact. Cracks and fractures crazed the entire section of pavement where the block had fallen.

  “Did you actually hear that?” the woman shouted at me.

  I said nothing.

  “Did you? Is that why you pushed me away?” For the first time I realized that she had an English accent.

  “Something like that,” I said. People had started to crowd in, pointing at the sidewalk, pointing at the sky.

  She pulled a cell phone from a zippered pocket. “I’m calling 911. We’d be dead now, if you didn’t have ears like a fucking bat.”

  An hour later, a bored police lieutenant named McMenamin was telling me Jasper Dan Kohle had never served in the armed forces, never voted, never taken out a library card, never bought property or contracted to use the services of a telephone company. He had no passport or driver’s license. He didn’t have an address or any credit cards. He didn’t own a car. He’d never been arrested, or even fingerprinted. It also appeared that he had never been born. With that, Lieutenant McMenamin ordered me out of his station.

  18

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  Yesterday I spent so much time on an entry about what happened after I left Ground Zero that I never got around to what I thought was going to be my principal topic, what’s happening with my work. Today I am determined to put some of this down on paper, because doing that should help me think about what I’m doing—really, what my protagonist is doing, and how I am handling it—but before I get to the main subject, I ought to describe my recent dealings with my brother.

  My brother’s reaction to his son’s disappearance damn near drove me crazy. At the earliest possible moment, he gave up all hope. He resigned himself to the supposition that Mark was dead. In another person, that might have been realistic; for Philip, the murder of hope was self-protective. He couldn’t bear to live with anxiety and uncertainty, so he willingly embraced devastation, thereby killing his son in his own heart. I couldn’t take that, I hated it. It felt like a betrayal. Philip chose to give up on the boy, and I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive him for the sheer lazy selfishness of his choice. I certainly had no interest in talking to him or spending time with him during the months when my grief was at its peak. The two times he called me—amazingly, for I can’t remember his ever doing this before—instead of talking about anything personal, he wanted to tell me about certain errors and inconsistencies he had discovered in the bound galleys of my new book. Maybe for him that was personal.

  Then came the news that in mid-September, he was going to marry a woman named China Beech, a born-again Christian behind whose previous job description of “exotic dancer” I was sure I discerned a stripper. In a way, it was touching. This tedious, pot-bellied, fifty-three-year-old man with thinning hair and a boring job had been so hypnotized by his tawdry girlfriend that he wanted to seize happiness with both hands and clasp it to his intoxicated breast. What erotic feats China Beech must have inspired in him, what unexplored territories must have opened up before him, all moist, yielding, ready to be conquered! For these services, Ms. Beech would be compensated with the use of an unspectacular but sturdy little house, access to a vice principal’s salary, and the kind of respectability valued by the newly Born-Again.

  I had always liked and respected Nancy, Mark’s mother. Her suicide had felt like a wound. My brother should have taken more time before deciding to remarry. In typical Philip fashion, he had wrapped up his grief in resentment and tossed the whole package overboard. With the onset of China Beech, nice, kind, loyal Nancy Underhill had been escorted deeper into the Underworld, a kind of premature zamani. In fact, I thought this was exactly what Pop had done after April was killed. He wanted to forget her, to erase her traces from his life, and after the funeral, he nev
er spoke her name or acknowledged that she had existed.

  My book tour brings me to Millhaven right around the time of Philip’s wedding, September 12, and if I am to attend the ceremony, as I suppose I must, I have only to extend my stay there a couple of days, but I cannot say that I feel particularly well-disposed toward the bride and groom.

  The first of my telephone calls from Philip came three days ago, that is, about a month after the receipt of the typo-riddled e-mail that announced his upcoming marriage. The message from Cyrax berating me for having lost all civility and kindness had prompted me to think about calling my brother, in fact to gaze at the telephone for extended periods when I should have been working, and when I picked up the receiver and heard his voice speaking my name I had a second’s worth of resentment that he had beaten me to the punch.

  “Hey, Tim,” he said. “How are you doing? I just wanted to check in. How’s the new book coming along?”

  With these harmless words, Philip broke two lifelong traditions: he spontaneously inquired about my well-being, and he displayed or at least feigned an interest in my work. It threw me so far off balance that my first response was to suspect that he wanted to ask me for money. Philip has never asked me for money, not once, not even in the years when my income must have been ten times his.

  I mumbled something innocuous.

  “Yesterday I saw your name in print. New Leaf Books sends out a newsletter once a month, and they have you down for a reading two days before the wedding. China and I sure hope you’ll be able to come see us get hitched.”

  Come see us get hitched? Who was this stranger? My brother didn’t talk like that.

  “Of course I’ll be there. I changed my tickets so I fly out the day after the ceremony.” When the moment had come, I discovered myself incapable of saying “your wedding.” “I thought you already knew.”