In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  Willy moaned. “Ooooh, I can’t be sure. How could a car like that be blown through a wind tunnel, anyhow?” She slipped to the floor and kneeled in the seat well, with her arms resting on the cushions. “Tim, I know this isn’t fair, but what we’re doing now makes me feels like a puppet, too. I mean, why am I here, in the back of this limousine—with you? I never met you before tonight, and the second I lay eyes on you, it’s like you’re the most important person in my world. It makes a lot more sense that Giles and Roman Richard should be looking for me than for you to be helping me get away from them. But here I am, and there you are, and we’re about to drive to Millhaven!”

  “Doesn’t that seem the right thing to do?”

  “That’s what’s so screwed up!”

  “That it seems right?”

  “That it seems right because you said it was what we were going to do. It’d be the same thing if you said we were going to, I don’t know, anywhere. Charleston. Kraków. Chicago. My sense of agency seems a lot more doubtful than it should be. And you? You seem to take all this for granted!”

  My sense of agency? I wondered. This is not the sort of expression I ever use.

  “Willy, I have never taken anything, at any time, less for granted. The whole world seems like one vast confusion, and everything is out of place.”

  “Mr. Underhill,” said the driver. “I’m pretty sure that Mercedes you asked me to look for just cut in, about four cars back.”

  “Oh, crap.” Willy grabbed my hand and tried to shrink down into invisibility.

  “Get rid of them,” I said, and the driver squeaked through the last of a yellow traffic light at the next corner and for ten minutes zigzagged from street to street until he came to Ninth Avenue, where he turned south again. He drove with the bravado of a getaway man, shouldering his big car through gaps that did not exist until he created them and shooting through red lights at clear intersections. Every now and then Willy peeked out at our wake, and I kept a steady lookout. The Mercedes ducked into view a couple of times, always in the midst of an awkward spot—caught in gridlock, blocked from a turn by a huge double-jointed bus, stalled by a wave of people moving across the street.

  When we got to Canal Street, the driver said, “I think we’re winning, Mr. Underhill. I haven’t seen them for ten, twelve blocks.”

  Willy thanked her god, and I thanked mine. When we pulled up in front of the Golden Mountain garage, I tipped the driver fifty bucks. A car just like the one we had left came down the ramp, and we got in, and with Willy Bryce Patrick beside me I drove across the Hudson River in a night suddenly glittering with a thousand points of distant illumination.

  I might have seen Mitchell Faber’s sharklike vehicle emerging from a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it is possible that just before she fell asleep, Willy spotted it coming over a hill about half a mile behind us. That’s why I made a quick tour of the parking lot before going back to our room.

  We are in Room 119 of the Lost Echoes Lodge, located nine or ten miles from the freeway in Restitution, Ohio. We’re a long, long way from New York. It would be a miracle if they found us here, and I don’t think they will. There has already been a kind of miracle in the Lost Echoes Lodge, and one is enough.

  I had been going to take two adjoining rooms, but Willy told me there was no sense in throwing money away, and besides, she had no intention of sleeping alone this night. “I want a warm body beside me, and since Tom is dead and we don’t have a golden retriever, you’re elected,” she told me.

  We were still standing outside the lodge, taking in the astonishing structure before us. It looked like an infinitely ramifying Bavarian hunting lodge built in the 1920s for a timber millionaire. Gewgaws and rickrack ornamented the facade, which included complicated turrets and window embrasures. Every inch of the building seemed to be decorated with something, giant ivy sprigs carved from a dark wood, wooden ducks in flight and owls on branches, big clamshells half-embedded in cement. Once every sixty minutes, a giant cuckoo should have popped out of the heavy, cross-braced front door. Warm light shone through most of the windows. Dense trees edged in from the near side of the parking lot and crowded the back and sides of the building.

  When we checked in, the desk clerk (a sweet little man named Roulon Davy, who turned out to be the owner of the Lost Echoes Lodge) nodded at our request for a room overlooking the parking lot, signed us in under the first name that came into my head, accepted a cash payment for one night, and led us up to Room 119.

  “Most of our folks want a forest view,” he said, marching past the enormous bed to reach the set of windows at the far end of the room, “but if you fancy a prospect of the parking lot, here it is.” He pulled aside the heavy brocade curtains and let us look out. Over the tops of the trees, we could see the back half of the lot. Beyond it, thousands of trees blanketed the side of a steep hill.

  Willy yawned. “Sorry. I can’t stay awake much longer.”

  The little man twinkled to the middle of the room—there is no other way to describe his retreat. It looked like tap dancing, but his feet barely touched the floor. “Then, Mr. and Mrs. Halleden, I beg you to enjoy the perfection of your bed, the pleasures of your dreams, and the company of one another.”

  He saluted us and was gone before I could offer him a tip.

  “Methinks our gracious host is of the fairy folk,” Willy said.

  “No,” I said, “I’m of the fairy folk.”

  “Then let’s get in bed and be brother and sister.” She yawned again, and stretched her back. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever seen. “You want to go in the bathroom first? You can use my toothbrush, if you like.”

  I went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush; then she went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush. There was no top sheet on the bed, only a soft, daisy-patterned comforter that seemed to tuck itself around my shoulders. The bed felt cool, slightly yielding, unconnected to anything as solid as the floor.

  Willy’s head poked out of the bathroom door, and she laughed at the sight of me. “You look pretty good, for an old dude. Or shouldn’t I say that?”

  “Keep talking. Everything you say surprises me.”

  “Lights out.”

  The switch for the overhead light was between the bathroom and the door, and I saw a bare arm and a bare leg emerge into the room as she reached out. Her hand found the switch, and the room filled with purple shadows and silver moonlight. A small, pale body with white strips across its chest and beneath its smooth belly slid through the bright darkness and slipped into the bed.

  “Oh, I love this bed,” Willy said. “I think this is the perfect bed, the one all other beds aspire to be. I’m too tired to think about agency and too fuzzy to contemplate the imponderables of our situation. Here I am, in a bed with Timothy Underhill. Everything is crazy, and nothing makes any sense, not even the slightest, faintest trace. At least I had a complete day, with no parts skipped over.”

  She scooted a bit toward me, and I a bit toward her.

  “You’ll hold me, won’t you? I think that would be heavenly, and I’m not even going to question why. I’m too bushed. But one thing I will say: in about an hour and a half I’m going to get up and prowl around the parking lot to see if that miserable fucking car is anywhere in sight.”

  Her head fell gently on my chest, and I put my arms around her. I stroked her back, her shoulder, the cool, soft, silken length of the arm lying across my torso. Her slim straight leg nestled against my leg, and we lay like that for what seemed an eternity built up of one second after another. My hand moved to the small of her back and stroked the cool skin there. She did not feel like a fictional character; she felt like a lovely human being with a boy’s hips and a woman’s soft, duck-tail bottom, only smaller than most. It had been a long, long time since I had been in bed with a woman, and that had been nothing like this. I wanted to touch every inch of Willy Patrick, to slide into Willy Patrick’s tender body, and I w
anted that with a depth of passion I had probably not felt since my twenties.

  Her hand slipped down to the band of my undershorts, and my leg moved between hers.

  “Oh, God,” she said, and I said, “I know. This is so odd.”

  “Where are you?” she said. “Are you there? Ah, I see, you are there. My goodness. Don’t you think you should sort of wiggle out of that stupid thing you’re wearing? You’re so huge, you’re going to strangle yourself.”

  I wiggled out of the stupid thing, my panting organ even harder for having been so blatantly flattered, and she shed her bra and her little tighty-whity with what seemed one fluid motion, and after that a kind of paradise opened before us. When I entered her, it was like entering paradise. Within her, I felt miraculously, blissfully at home—in the perfect place at last. I fell in love—that’s the corniest, most banal, and truest way to say it. Before, I had felt as though I was falling in love, and now I had completed the journey. I was there. I wanted to hold her, cherish her, celebrate her for the rest of my life. It happened that quickly: I felt cleaved to Willy Patrick, as if we had one soul. We were like the gods depicted in erotic transport on half-ruined temples lost in the middle of great jungles. In the end, we seemed to flow together, to wear each other’s skin and find ecstatic release as one four-legged, four-armed, two-headed organism.

  “God,” Willy breathed. “You’re the author I want when I’m depressed, all right. I’m going to stop fretting about agency. I don’t care, I’ve never been fucked like that before, and I want more of it.”

  “I have no idea how this is going to work out,” I said, and kissed the palm of her hand, “but I don’t ever want to lose you.”

  “Why should you lose me?” Willy asked. “I’m yours, aren’t I?”

  Soon after, she fell asleep. I slipped into my shirt and trousers and went the back way down to the parking lot, where something like a dozen cars, none of them silver Mercedes sedans, slept under the shelter of the looming trees.

  What happened in this room is what Cyrax meant when he sent across my monitor in his Arial ten-point font u will have a chance of achieving something extraordinary & incestuous & ravishing unto heart-melt & impossible for every crack-brain author but u!

  Now, ravishing unto heart-melt, Willy is raising her head and groping the pillow beside hers, and this crack-brain author is going to put down his pen and let her find me.

  24

  Willy kneeling on the bed, rummaging in smiling concentration through her bag and offering various items of clothing for his contemplation: she had crammed a lot of stuff into that bag. Blouses, shirts, sweaters, underwear, dresses, skirts, and jeans were displayed to him for comment, then placed beside the suitcase on the bed. “I should wear something comfortable,” she said. “Especially since we’re going to spend all day in the car. How about this sweater and a pair of shorts?” She held up for his approval a little cream-colored cotton-and-silk sweater with long sleeves and a boat neck. It probably weighed as much as a packet of stamps.

  “I’d love to see you wear that,” he said, and offered her a fragment of the mosaic she would eventually have to assemble. “Where’s it from?”

  “Hmmm.” She held out the sweater, glanced puzzled at Tim, then checked the back of the collar for a label. “I don’t remember where I got it. The label says ‘Grand Street,’ but that must be the brand name. I don’t know of any shop called Grand Street.”

  She could not remember where she bought the sweater because it had come into existence only at the moment she had opened her closet and pulled it from a shelf.

  “I don’t either,” he said, “and I live on Grand Street.”

  “In a loft?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s nice. I always wanted to live in a loft. If Mitchell Faber hadn’t scooped me up, I think I would probably have left the apartment I had on East Seventy-seventh and looked for a nice loft space downtown.” She began putting her clothes back into her case.

  “Would you?” In a way that was quickly becoming familiar, she had surprised him. The woman who had appeared in his life exhibited certain subtle differences from her representation on the page. His Willy would never have thought to leave her Upper East Side apartment, but only because he had not understood her well enough. As he had seen in the bookstore, he had underrated his heroine.

  “Sure, as long as I felt stable enough to move,” Willy said. “But I was feeling pretty well put together before Mitchell relocated me to Hendersonia. I mean, on the night I met him, I wasn’t all that secure, but in general I was recovering pretty well. Once I got to Hendersonia, though, wow, it was like I was in some weird slow-motion dream. I thought I needed Mitchell to protect me, and look how that turned out.”

  “We’re going to have to keep an eye out for Mitchell,” Tim said, remembering again that Cyrax had written of a 2ble peril created by Kalendar’s merging with a 2nd Dark Man, a dark dark villain almost instantly to b in pursuit of yr lovely gamine.

  “How much do you know about all that?” Willy asked him. “Mitchell, and Hendersonia, and Roman Richard and Giles, and the Baltic Group.”

  “A surprising amount, considering that we’d never met until last night. Tom kept me pretty well filled in.”

  “Boy, I never realized what a gossip he was,” Willy said.

  “He knew I was getting very fond of you.”

  “You were? Just from hearing about me?” She smiled at him, then closed her repacked suitcase and swung her legs down on his side of the bed. “How nice. What do you think, do I come up to your expectations?”

  “You surpass my expectations,” he said.

  “I do?” She slid off the bed, moved quickly across the gleaming dark floorboards, and slipped into his lap. Her body felt as if she were made of balsa wood and foam. She kissed him. “I don’t know about you, but what happened between us last night was extraordinary. People talk about out-of-body experiences, but I think my body left me. Talk about surpassing expectations! It was like some kind of religious experience.”

  “Maybe it was a religious experience.”

  “My whole body feels so light—really, I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  For a time, he held her with the fierce protectiveness that came from the knowledge that he was going to lose her—as if in her lightness she would float away from him on the spot.

  “You must have had thousands of women,” she said.

  “Not really.” He smiled, although she could not see it. “Tom Hartland and I have a number of things in common. I haven’t had thousands of anything, but the people I have gone to bed with tended to be men.”

  She was already looking up at him with a mixture of disbelief and astonishment. “You? But you—you’re not kidding, are you? You’re actually gay? You can’t be that gay, though. If you weren’t incredibly turned on, I have no idea of what’s going on, anywhere. You were like, I don’t know, like Zeus coming down in a shower of gold.”

  She slid around on his lap, straddled him, and moved her head close to his and looked deep into his eyes.

  “I thought so, too,” he said. “It was exactly like that. I’m astoundingly attached to you.” He spoke with all the frankness the moment would allow. “There’s a reason for all this, Willy, and you’re going to find out what it is.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  She had taken his remark as an attempt at general encouragement. He said, “I’m not speaking loosely, Willy. You do have something to find out, and it’s extremely important.”

  She pulled her head back. “Is this whatever Tom kept saying he had to tell me, only the time was never right?”

  “No. They’re related, but what Tom was talking about is something else.”

  “And you know what that was, that secret, or whatever.”

  He nodded.

  “So he told you, but he didn’t tell me?”

  “Not exactly.”

  She cocked her head. “What does that mean? Either he
told you, or he didn’t. Which one was it?”

  “He didn’t, Willy. It’s just something I know.”

  “So this is like general knowledge? If I put in the right terms, I could look it up on Google?”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “But now there are two big secrets. I don’t like this. It’s skeevy.”

  Skeevy? Tim thought. Like agency, it was a word he would never use.

  “What makes Timothy Underhill willing to risk injury, death, and imprisonment on behalf of a woman he just met? Why would he even consider driving her halfway across the country?”

  “Timothy doesn’t feel he has much choice.”

  He put his arms around her, and the moment of tension passed. They clung to each other as if they were stranded on a rock. Tim kissed her forehead, and she sighed and tightened her grip.

  “Do you want anything to eat?” he asked.

  “I guess.” She nestled into him, pressed the side of her head to his chest, drew in her legs. She weighed nothing, and her bones seemed made of water. “Will we get to Millhaven today?”

  “I think so, yes. We’ll get to Indiana, then drive north. I want to get there in time to do a couple of things before the reading.” Also, Tim could feel Cyrax as though he were present in the room, and he was saying, Get to Millhaven, buttsecks, and do yr job! You caused this mess, now you SOLVE it! It was time for another fragment of the mosaic: Willy had to understand everything before they got to Millhaven.

  “What was the name of your second-grade teacher?”

  “Who cares?” She unhooked the bra she was wearing and tossed it toward her suitcase. “I don’t even think I remember.”

  “Mine was named Mrs. Gross. I remember that, and I’m a lot older than you are. You should be able to remember her name, Willy.”

  Willy closed her eyes and put her hands on the sides of her head. Her face tightened into a grimace. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think my second-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Gross, too. Maybe we had the same one. Did you go to . . .” Again, she squinched up her face and pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “Ahhh . . . Freeman? Lawrence Freeman Elementary School?”