In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “But why do you have to buy so many books? Why go through trial and error?”

  “Sometimes, you have to stare at perfection for a long, long time before you see it.” He leaned back over his suitcase, eyes shining, and gave Underhill a good look at the horror in his mouth. “But once you see it, it’s yours forever.”

  Grinning, he pulled the suitcase off the table, stepped back, and saluted Underhill by tapping a finger against his forehead. Then he whirled around and set off for the escalator.

  Underhill watched him go and realized that for a second he had forgotten all about the girl. She stood ten feet away, between her bags, her wrinkled skirt soaked through, her blouse still adhering to her skin. He saw that she was a woman, not a girl, a woman probably in her mid-thirties, though at first glance she appeared to be much younger. Her short hair had been ruffed by the towel. She was extraordinarily good-looking, he thought, though not in any ordinary way. With her slightness, her coltish, slightly androgynous air, she was a true gamine. Then he realized that the red pattern on her blouse was water-soaked blood spatter.

  She took an uncertain step toward him, and the planet seemed to wobble on its course. His stomach dropped to the floor, but the floor wasn’t there anymore. He was floating in midair, with all the hair on his arms sticking straight up. He recognized her, and for a moment the recognition brought him into the purest fear he had known since Vietnam.

  “This can’t be happening,” he said. “Is your name Willy?”

  “I think I need your help,” Willy said. “Do we know each other?”

  22

  Poor Willy—she was looking for an explanation of the strangest experience of her life, and she thought she had come to the right place. Kalpesh Patel had stopped at the corner of 103rd Street and Broadway, helped her get the bags out of his taxi, refused to take any money, and sped off in the general direction of Columbus Avenue and Central Park. She began aimlessly to walk down Broadway, trying to figure out how she could get out of town. New York represented the dual threat of Mitchell’s henchmen and the NYPD, all of whom had probably been shown pictures of her face before being sent out to find its owner. Money was no problem: she could get in a cab and tell the driver to take her to Boston, or Pittsburgh, or any large city where she could hide out until Mitchell got tired of looking for her. But she didn’t trust the driver of her hypothetical taxicab. One night he might tune in to America’s Most Wanted and run straight to the police.

  By the time she reached Ninety-sixth Street, she was thinking about long-distance buses. Buses went everywhere, and no one ever paid any attention to them, basically because they carried poor people from one place to another. If she got to Port Authority, she could pay cash for a ticket and travel anywhere she wanted. Willy did not think you had to keep validating your identity to get on a bus. She wished she had asked Kalpesh Patel to take her to the Port Authority building—the way that man drove, she could be there in minutes.

  Willy moved to the curb and stuck out her right hand. With her left, she kept a good grip on the handle of the white leather bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills and on the rolling case. Traffic flowed past her. The only cabs she saw already had passengers. The air grew darker and cool enough to make her wish she were wearing a jacket. A jacket would conceal the bloodstains, too—she had received a few curious stares. Then she thought of Tom again, and a molten current of panic, guilt, and despair ran through her.

  A cold wind whistled down Broadway, and Willy shivered as she tilted forward to scan the approaching traffic. In the untimely darkness, a yellow light glowing from the top of a cab two blocks up had the brightness of a beacon. A menacing roll of thunder filled the sky, and distant lightning flashed. Willy hoped the cab would arrive in advance of the rain.

  The lights changed again.

  One block away, a pale car that looked exactly like Mitchell Faber’s Mercedes turned the corner into Broadway. It could not be Mitchell’s car. Like Mitchell’s car, however, it seemed to move down the block with the swift, elegant shiver of a predator. A walnut-sized knot of fear located in the middle of her chest dialed up the volume of her general panic. She could not keep standing there as the Mercedes shimmered and shivered toward her.

  Willy was bending over to pick up her bags when she looked back up the street at the Mercedes that could not be Mitchell Faber’s and saw, with a terrible clarity, Giles Coverley at the wheel and Roman Richard beside him. Her only thought was to get far enough ahead of them to avoid being seen, and, one bag in each hand, she started running down the sidewalk.

  Under a long barrage of thunder, the sky darkened by another degree. Willy darted across the sidewalk, and when her hand touched the door of a nearby shop, she heard the blasting of horns and the slamming of car doors. Her fear widened its wings and touched her heart. She heard clattering footsteps, looked to her left, and saw Coverley and Roman Richard running toward her through the traffic.

  Willy took off—like an antelope sprinting for its life. Her suitcase weighed little, but the bag of money dragged at her right side. All of the sky split into incandescent, swiftly moving bolts of lightning. Thunder exploded overhead and echoed off the buildings on both sides of Broadway. Everywhere, people began to run.

  Bulletlike rain shattered down. Instantly, Willy was soaked to the skin. Then her right foot skidded out before her, and she felt her balance begin to go. Inevitably and with shocking swiftness came the moment when her body obeyed gravity, not her will. She readied herself for a rough landing. Both of her legs unfolded before her. Instead of hitting the sidewalk, Willy felt herself propelled, supine and feet-first, along the Broadway sidewalk, which had become a canyon of roaring wind and slashing rain. She was passing through the canyon, and what indisputably had been Broadway was no more. Like a cork in rapid water, Willy shot forward, accelerating with every heartbeat. Borne along by a great force, she seemed to cover great distances in her skidding flight down the canyon made of darkness, wind, and rain. An incandescent vibration took hold of her and rattled her until she felt battered and limp. The world darkened and contracted, then expanded into a brief, brilliant burst of light and threw her forward like a rag.

  Then again she was in the world of big buildings with lighted windows, and her feet skidded across solid pavement. She realized she was upright again, her legs beneath her. Momentum staggered her forward through the monsoon downpour toward the brightest window in sight, one of a row on the ground floor of a supersized Barnes & Noble. A great many books hung in the window, as did a modest placard featuring a photograph of an author who was scheduled to read from his work.

  Beneath the photograph was printed:

  TONIGHT 8:00

  TIMOTHY UNDERHILL

  READING FROM LOST BOY LOST GIRL.

  The author she read when depressed seemed almost ridiculously appropriate for her circumstances. She needed to get out of the rain. She needed to sit down and recover, to the extent recovery was possible, from Tom’s murder and her extraordinary flight through the darkness and the wind. Her head felt as though it was literally spinning, and the center of her body seemed still to be traveling at great speed through a kind of cosmic rabbit hole. It was the only time in her life that Willy Bryce Patrick had ever felt she had anything in common with Alice in Wonderland.

  She wobbled to the door, barely able to see through the curtain of water, and realized that she did not know if Coverley and Roman Richard had followed her through that violent passageway. Her final, most comforting thought before getting out of the rain was that a bookstore reading was the last place Mitchell’s henchmen would think to look for her.

  On the other side of the revolving door, a security guard in a blue blazer looked her up and down. Water streamed down her legs and pooled on the carpeted floor.

  Willy said, “The Underhill reading?”

  “Second floor, top of the escalators, turn right. First, though, you might want to go through the children’s section and dry off in the ladies’
room.”

  “Thank you.” Willy smiled at him and stepped backward out of her puddle. Water continued to slide off her hair, her clothes, her legs.

  “Please tell me that’s not blood on your shirt, ma’am.”

  “Just stage blood,” Willy said, forcing a brighter smile, and moved smartly toward the escalator.

  In the bathroom, she peeled off her blouse and rubbed little paper towels over her arms, neck, and torso. Her jeans were so wet that to remove them, she had to yank down and wriggle at the same time. She swabbed her legs with paper towels that turned dark and useless. When she had done as much as she could, she still looked like a drowning victim, but a more recent one. Willy pulled another handful of sheets from the dispenser, gave her face a last blotting, and left the bathroom.

  A winding path through the bookshelves brought her to the reading area, where she collapsed onto an empty chair and peered at Timothy Underhill through the space between the heads of an emaciated hippie boy and a roly-poly hippie girl. Underhill was leaning on the podium and calling for questions. The sight of this middle-aged man at the other end of the reading space had a startling effect on her. Immediately, she felt as though everything that had happened to her during this terrible day had been designed to lead her precisely to this point, and she had somehow come out at the place where she was all along intended now to be. That place—and the utter weirdness of this circumstance can hardly be expressed—was in the proximity of Timothy Underhill, a novelist she liked, pretty much, but whose concerns seemed to speak to her most clearly when she wasn’t feeling all that great. Timothy Underhill, it came to her, had something to give her; he had something to tell her; he would draw a map that she alone could read. What gripped Willy as she peered at Tim Underhill through the gap created by the heads and bodies of the people in front of her was the loony conviction that without this man she would be lost.

  He looked at her—their eyes met without any particular urgency—looked away, and said, “You, sir,” to a bearded man who asked a boring question about getting published. While Timothy Underhill answered the man’s question with a series of anodyne banalities, he glanced back at Willy, this time with real interest and something like recognition in his eyes. A lot of questions followed, and as Underhill answered them, now and then moving his hands through the air, sometimes laughing at himself, he kept glancing back at Willy, as if to reassure himself that she was still there.

  After the question period, a knot of people surrounded Underhill and the podium. Willy stayed pinned to her seat. She did not know what she would say when her time came, but she did know that what she would say had to be private.

  He reminded her of Tom Hartland, she realized. Fifteen to twenty years older than Tom, a little heavier, shaggy hair going gray, Timothy Underhill did not so much look like her friend as suggest him. Much more than Tom, Underhill had the air of having survived something at which she could not even guess.

  Underhill shot her another look, and she thought, No, there’s more to it than being reminded of Tom. It’s him.

  Underhill whispered to the young woman who seemed to be in charge of the event, who then approached her with tactful concern, sat down beside her, and asked if she needed any help.

  Yes, but not from you, Willy said to herself. Aloud, she said, “I got caught in the rain on my way here, and, well, look! I used up all these paper towels and I’m still soaked.”

  “I’ll get you a towel from the back of the store,” the woman said, and went off. When she returned with a big red towel printed with GREAT BEACH READING FROM GLADSTONE BOOKS!, Willy threw it over her head and rubbed her head until both her hair and her scalp felt as though they might at last be dry, mostly. She pulled the towel off her head and ran it over her arms. Her shirt no longer stuck so conspicuously to her body. Like watercolor on wet paper, the blood spatter had softened and fuzzed out, and now had an almost Manet-like quality.

  When the last person in the line had reached the desk, Willy stood up and carried her bags down the row of empty chairs. The woman in charge sauntered up to her and asked if she wanted to have a book signed.

  “Not really,” Willy said. “It’s just that . . . I want to meet that man.”

  A look of concern marred the perfect face. “You’re not going to cause any trouble here, are you?”

  “None at all,” Willy said.

  The wonder held out a small, smooth hand with sparkling nails. “I’m Katherine Hyndman, by the way. Community relations. I’m the person who invited Mr. Underhill here tonight.”

  “Willy Bryce Patrick,” Willy said, expecting to see a spark of surprised recognition. None came. “I write YA novels. One of them won the Newbery Medal. In the Night Room?”

  “In the what?”

  “In the Night Room. That was the title of my book.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I know it. But, I gather you want to speak to Mr. Underhill author to author.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “It looks as though you’ll have your chance fairly soon.” They both looked at the signing table and the disheveled old man standing before it. While stuffing a good many Timothy Underhill books back into an old suitcase that resembled a battered clamshell, he was ranting.

  “Book collectors,” said Katherine Hyndman. “When they come out of the woodwork, you never know what to expect. We’ve seen some of the strangest people, I mean really the oddest people.”

  She smiled at Willy. “I’m surprised that I don’t know your name. We do a great YA business in this store, and I do my best to keep up with all the authors. You know what? If you won the Newbery, we have multiple copies of your books. Would you mind signing some of them? I’ll just run over to the children’s section and bring you a nice little stack, all right?”

  Willy had been fearing that her new friend Katherine would intrude herself into the conversation she had to have with Tim Underhill, and she embraced the opportunity of sending her off to another part of the store.

  “Sure,” she said. “Take as long as you like.”

  Katherine Hyndman strode off.

  Willy watched Underhill stare at the receding back of the peculiar book collector and wished that he would look instead at her. As if she had touched his mind with hers, Underhill turned slowly in his chair and gazed at her in a way that combined close observation with appreciation. He seemed to measure and weigh her, to calculate her age, nearly to count her teeth. His warmth and good humor turned what could have been objectionable or even insulting into a kind of affectionate, observant approval. It seemed to Willy that being looked at in exactly this way was one of the things she truly needed, and he had given it to her unasked.

  Then she saw him take in the blurry bloodstains on her shirt. He understood what they were, and that final detail seemed to lock some other understanding into place. Willy moved forward, now beyond wondering what she might say to him, and saw an amazing series of expressions flow across his face: disbelief, shock, love, fear, and total recognition. He said, This can’t be happening. Is your name Willy?

  He knew her name. By extraordinary, unrepeatable means, Willy had found her way to the one person who could both make sense of her life and save it, and when she spoke, it was from the center of her soul. “I think I need your help. Do we know each other?”

  23

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  Cyrax told me yr gr8 moment comes 2nite, but he never said that it would scare me silly. Well, he added that I would have to do rite & b strong & brave, so I guess he knew what he was talking about. Two completely contradictory impulses fought for control of my body: I wanted to put my arms around her, and I wanted to scram, to get out of there as fast as possible. Then Reason intervened to inform me that I was being ridiculous. This, Reason insisted, was merely a coincidence, albeit a coincidence of a very high order. Willy, this Willy, if that in fact was her name, had slipped into the room at the same moment that “Lucy Cleveland” slipped into the pages of my book.
And because I had never imagined my heroine’s face in specific detail, this woman’s resemblance to fictional Willy Bryce Patrick was all in my head.

  Reason, of course, had no idea what it was talking about.

  It’s 4:30 in the morning. Willy finally fell asleep about half an hour ago. As far as I can tell, we’re safe here. A discreet look around the motel’s parking lot found not a trace of Faber’s silver-gray Mercedes. (About this, more later.)

  To go back to the bookstore: after our first words, Willy said, “You seem like someone I’ve known for a long time. It’s the strangest thing—as soon as I saw you, I felt that you were of enormous importance to me.”

  This did nothing to support my shaky belief that her appearance, in both senses, was no more than a kind of coincidence.

  “You know my name,” she said. “Willy. You said it.”

  “Is that really your name?”

  “Maybe you know me from my work?” she said. Her next words demolished all hope that the world was still ticking on in the old manner. “Willy Patrick. Willy Bryce Patrick?”

  She looked utterly charming, which made things much worse. I could just about feel the earth separating beneath me. In a second I was going to be in free fall.

  “This is very embarrassing,” she said, and hesitated. “I don’t usually go up to other authors and say crazy things to them. Actually, I hardly ever meet other authors. Except, well, for . . .”

  Instead of a name, what came out of her mouth was a muffled whisper. “I’m sorry,” she said in a voice only slightly more intelligible, and raised her clasped hands to her eyes.

  I guess that was my moment of decision, right then—when she stopped talking and let that name hang in silence before both of us. I could say what I did say, or I could have pretended that I didn’t know what she was talking about. In the end, though, I had no choice at all.