In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “I don’t actually need this now, but I might as well live it up, right?” she said. “While I can?”

  I told her to feel free.

  “At least now I can bring my stash with me when we go places,” she said, hefting the bag. “It’s not as heavy as before, either.”

  Willy fell asleep about an hour after we crossed the Indiana state line, and she stayed that way until the outskirts of Chicago, where she began thrashing around and whimpering. I shook her shoulder, and she came fighting back into wakefulness, thrusting her hands out before her and muttering unintelligible, panic-driven words. After a couple of seconds, she calmed down and looked around, and her eyes came back into focus.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I guess.” She swallowed and, acting almost entirely on reflex, pulled a Kit Kat from the duffel and took a bite. She eyed me, and I saw her decide to trust me again. “I was having this horrible dream.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Did you ever have one of those dreams that keep coming back?”

  “A recurring dream? I have three or four, and they keep recycling.” Then I remembered writing Willy’s recurring dream, and I knew what she was going to tell me.

  “Mine is about a boy standing in front of an empty house. I’m looking at him from behind. The boy is always wearing one T-shirt on top of another, and he looks sort of graceful. I’m attracted to this boy, I like him a lot, and I know that he looks a lot like me.”

  Oh God, I thought, I didn’t even know I was doing that, but she’s right. I gave her Mark’s face!

  “This boy, of whom I am very, very fond, takes a step toward the house, and I realize that the house isn’t actually empty—it is, and it isn’t. Something filthy lives in there, and it’s hungry. If the boy goes in there, he’s gone, he’s lost, he’ll never come out again. And the place wants him so badly it’s practically trembling!”

  “You’re dreaming about 3323 North Michigan Street,” I told her. “That was Joseph Kalendar’s house.”

  “Michigan. Like Michigan Produce. Where I wanted to break in.”

  “I didn’t even know what I was doing when I gave you that dream,” I said. “Not consciously, anyhow.”

  “Isn’t that a comfort,” Willy said. “According to you, you never knew what you were doing in my book. Anyhow. This dream. It’s like I’m watching everything happen in a snow globe. The air that surrounds the boy is magical air, sacred air, but it won’t do him any good once he walks through the door. I feel such dread that I actually understand the word—like, Oh, yeah, this is dread. And my dread builds up so much, I can’t stand watching that wonderful boy walk toward a horrible doom, and I kind of sail toward him—it’s like we’re connected by a silver cord, and I’m flying down the length of that cord—and just before I hit him I realize that I’m not going to knock him over, I’m going to sail right inside him.”

  Willy collapsed against the back of the seat and placed her right hand over her heart. Her eyes and her mouth were wide open. “Oh, no,” she said, and gave me a look in which horror predominated over defiance. She shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s what this is about! I am going to have to walk in there, aren’t I? Like the ending you thought you would write. And guess what, I don’t come out.”

  I remembered Cyrax warning me of a terrible terrible thrice-terrible price and knew she was right. But what I said was “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” she yelled at me. “You DON’T KNOW?” Willy hit my shoulder, hard. “You don’t KNOW? Can’t you do better than that?”

  “I’m going in with you,” I said.

  At that point, I looked in the rearview mirror and first became conscious that for the past hundred miles I had been seeing a muddy SUV following along behind us. I thought it was a Mercury Mountaineer. The only reason I noticed it was that the Mountaineer always stayed at a distance from us of about six cars.

  “I know, I see, I get it. I’m going to go into the real night room.” She looked at me in a kind of disbelieving wonder. “That’s it, that’s the deal. I have to do what I was going to do in your lousy book, where nothing was figured out and you can’t explain why anything happened! I have to go in there. And then what happens? I can’t meet the Lily I used to be, can I? How could I? I didn’t used to be her!”

  “Well, actually, we have to look for the real Lily,” I said, sneaking another glance at the mirror. “That’s one of the ways I’m supposed to make things right.”

  “Why? I can’t meet the person I was supposed to be!”

  “Sure you can. You’re a separate person—you have your own identity, the one I gave you. I’m supposed to find out Lily Kalendar’s real fate—aren’t you interested in that?”

  “You want to meet her. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? You were writing a whole book about Lily Kalendar. Of course you love her.”

  “I think I’m just supposed to see,” I said. “To understand. To see what I got wrong.”

  “That’s going to be a big job.” Now she was sulking again, and I couldn’t blame her.

  “Try not to be afraid,” I told her. “Whatever I’ll see, you’ll see, too.”

  “Some crappy consolation.” Despite her words, she seemed a bit reconciled to whatever her fate might be.

  “We’re going to have be on the lookout for a character named Jasper Dan Kohle—he’s Joseph Kalendar and Mitchell Faber kind of rolled up into one person.”

  The SUV still hung behind us. I thought it would probably trail us all the way to Millhaven.

  Willy jolted me back into engagement with her. “Jasper Dan Kohle isn’t a real name.”

  “Kohle isn’t what you would call a real person.”

  “No, I mean it sounds like a made-up name. Give me a pen.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Pen.”

  I handed it to her. She groped around in the mess at her feet and found a candy wrapper that was blank white on the other side. “Does Kohle start with a K?”

  “Yes.”

  She printed JASPER DAN on the wrapper. “That doesn’t even look real,” she said. “Now spell his last name for me.” As I spoke the letters she wrote them down.

  “Now watch this, but don’t steer us off the road.” Beneath JASPER DAN KOHLE, Willy printed JOSEPH KALENDAR. “Right?”

  “Right,” I said, looking back and forth from the highway to the paper in Willy’s hands. Every now and then I checked the rearview mirror.

  With my pen, she drew a line from the J in JASPER to the J in JOSEPH. Then she drew a line from the A in JASPER to the A in KALENDAR. “Do you need more?”

  “It’s an anagram,” I said. “His name was an anagram for Joseph Kalendar. And I never saw it.”

  “People with verbal sensitivity can always tell when something’s an anagram. There’s something a little off about anagrammed names. It’s like they almost always have the same taste, a little tinny.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Enough punishment.”

  “But you should have seen it.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I should have seen it. I was feeling so clever about inventing Merlin L’Duith, too.”

  “Now, there—see? ‘Merlin L’Duith’ has a perfect tinny flavor. No one in his right mind would mistake that for a real name. You’d know right away it was an anagram.”

  Forty miles south of Millhaven, Willy demanded to eat again, and pointed at a billboard depicting a long white structure with ships’ wheels embedded in the plaster and nautical lamps hung beside the entrance. “I want to go to the Captain’s Retreat,” she said. “I’m sick of all this meat. I want to have seafood. Please, Tim. I’m starving again.”

  He turned off at the next exit and followed, at a speed of sixty to seventy miles an hour, the directions painted on the billboard, which led him toward Duckvale, a little town he had heard of but never visited. Willy asked him why he was driving so fast, and he said, “I didn’t tell you this before,
but I think we’re being followed.”

  Willy looked over her shoulder. “That pickup?”

  The pickup truck was the only other vehicle on Route 17, the road recommended by the billboard.

  “No, it was an SUV, all covered in mud. Just in case it’s our boys, let’s make sure we’ve lost them.”

  Tim spent the next twenty minutes dodging down side streets, cutting through vacant lots, and doubling back on himself without so much as glimpsing the Mountaineer. “Of course,” he said, “we don’t know that Coverley was driving the thing. We don’t even know if it was deliberately following us.”

  “Take me to the restaurant. Please.”

  He managed to find the Captain’s Retreat with only a little difficulty. When he pulled in to the parking lot, he went around to the side, where big concrete planters bordered a narrow rectangular space containing no other cars, and parked next to the building. The planters would hide him from traffic on the street. Willy gathered up her duffel bag, walked in silence beside him, permitted him to open the door for her, and carried the long bag into the restaurant. She steadily devoured candy bars while she read the menu. When the waitress came, Willy asked for blackened redfish, fried clams, a dozen oysters, the shrimp special, and the fried catfish.

  “In any order,” she said.

  Tim asked for a shrimp cocktail he had to force himself to eat.

  After their meal, Willy wandered ahead while Tim was still getting out of his chair, and he watched her heft the white bag as she pushed the door open and walked outside into brilliant sunshine. Through the window in the entrance, he could see her striding off to the side of the building. He went outside and followed, pondering the difficulties of introducing Willy to his brother, which he supposed he would shortly be doing. When he rounded the corner into the side lot, he found Willy staring off into the distance with a vacuous expression on her face. Tim supposed she was thinking about how soon she would need another couple of Score bars, and he opened his mouth to tell her to hurry along.

  The sight of the slender young man in a black T-shirt and black jeans leaning against one of the concrete planters froze the words in his throat. Here was the real Mr. Halleden, WCHWHLLDN himself, watching over his charge. He wore sunglasses as black as his shirt, and his hair gleamed in the sun. He appeared to be profoundly irritated, but when had he not?

  Tim realized that Willy still stood where she had stopped, and that she had not moved her gaze from the side of the lot. Then he noticed that a conspicuous silence filled the parking lot. Fear sparkling along his nerve endings, he turned and saw Giles Coverley and Roman Richard Spilka standing, in the shadows at the back of the building, on either side of the mud-encrusted Mountaineer. They stepped forward and into the light. Their faces looked pinched and washed out, and even Coverley’s clothes were rumpled and dirty. Both men needed a shave. The nose of the pistol in Roman Richard’s hand twitched like a metronome from Willy to Tim and back again.

  “This is just us now,” Coverley said, and Tim realized that he could not see WCHWHLLDN. “Nobody else is going to come around to park here—why would they? And the staff has no reason to wander around to this side of the building. So I want you to know that you will die, both of you. That is the most solemn promise I ever made in my whole life. But before we kill you, you are going to explain what the hell is going on here.”

  Willy actually laughed. “Have you had any luck getting in touch with Mitchell? Been getting any assistance from the Baltic Group?”

  “It’s not THERE anymore!” Coverley shouted. “And we can’t find Mitchell.”

  “The only person we can find is you,” said Roman Richard, who looked confused and furious. Both of them had the hollowed-out, slightly spectral appearance of the seriously hungry. “But we sure are good at that. We could find you anywhere, because we just know where to go. How does that happen, you asshole? What did you do to us?”

  “How come your face is on our money?” Coverley screamed. “How come I think I went to school in Millhaven and my second-grade teacher was Mrs. Gross? I’m English!”

  “Why do I know all this shit about jazz and poetry?” yelled Roman Richard. “I hate jazz and poetry! I don’t like that shit, I like . . . well, whatever it is I like.” He thought about it for a second. “The Ramones. That’s what I like.”

  “How did you pay for your lunch, you asshole?” Coverley asked. “Does your money work here?”

  “I put it on a credit card.” Tim glanced back over his shoulder, and WCHWHLLDN was still leaning against the planter with his arms crossed. He looked as furious as Roman Richard, but a lot more bored.

  “Our credit cards get turned down, because there is no Continental Trust of New Jersey. And there’s no HENDERSONIA!”

  “Would you like a candy bar?” Willy sweetly asked them.

  “Christ, we’ve been stealing those things,” Coverley said. “Candy bars are too expensive to pay for, the way we have to get money. I’m not killing people for candy bars anymore.”

  “I’m crazy about your scruples,” Tim said, watching Coverley and Roman Richard stare at Willy’s bag.

  She knelt down and partially unzipped it. As if they could smell the chocolate, the two men stepped closer. “Do you really want to know what the secret is?” she asked.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll blow your damn head off,” said Roman Richard, aiming the pistol at her. Tim moved up between them.

  “Get away, or I’ll shoot you first.” Roman Richard stepped sideways and kept the pistol aimed at Willy.

  “The secret is,” Willy said, “you’re in a book. You used to be in a book, and I did too, but something happened, and now we’re here. Where we don’t belong. And you know why you can always find him? Because he’s the author.” She looked over at Tim. “What happens to them if they kill you?”

  “I think they’d stay here, in this world, until they disappeared. After that, there’s nothing left of them. From the looks of you guys, disappearance isn’t all that far away.”

  “This morning, my left foot disappeared for about five seconds,” Coverley said. “Did you do that to me?”

  “Reality’s eating you alive,” Tim said.

  “Shove the bag over here, and stay put,” said Roman Richard. “Do it. Do it.”

  Willy gave the bag a halfhearted shove. Unable to control his hunger, Roman Richard moved toward it, his eyes fixed on the heap of candy bars visible through the opening Willy had created. He began to make a strange, guttural humming sound deep in his throat.

  “Roman—” Coverley said.

  Roman Richard bent down and thrust a hand into the bag, and Tim found himself hurtling toward the man’s body before he was aware that he had made a decision to attack. The big man grunted in surprise and was still trying to get his gun hand into position when Tim barreled into him. The force of his impact and Roman Richard’s awkward stance sent them both thudding, in a sprawling collapse that included the snapping of Roman Richard’s plaster cast, onto the asphalt, where their arms and legs waved like the limbs of a spider tossed into a low flame. Tim was on top of his opponent when they hit the ground, and he instantly reached for the pistol. Roman Richard punched him in the side of the head. It was like being hit by an anvil.

  His vision fuzzy, Tim closed his hands around the barrel of the pistol. A big, brutal hand swam toward him. Coarse black hairs sprouted beneath the knuckles. The hand battered his skull again and retreated, giving him a good view of Roman Richard’s meaty, stubbled jowl. The pistol twisted in his hand. After the next blow, Tim drove his fist into Roman Richard’s neck and yanked at the pistol, and it came out of his enemy’s grip as easily as a flower is plucked from a country garden.

  Tim could hear Coverley bellowing; he felt a sharp, absurdly painful kick in his back. Aware that Coverley was bending over to snatch his prize from him, Tim rolled away and clutched the weapon tight against his chest, like a football player protecting the ball. Coverley kicked him in the side, again
with amazingly painful results, and Tim got the grip in his hand and his finger on the trigger. Roman Richard swarmed over him, roaring like a bull. As if by itself, Tim’s finger tightened on the small, curved bit of metal beneath it.

  Then he understood that, in something like contemptuous boredom, WCHWHLLDN had opened Roman Richard’s hand.

  His index finger completed the gesture it had begun. The unforgiving object in Tim’s hand flew up with the force of the explosion, and Tim saw that the man he had shot had vanished. Big Roman Richard, who had been immediately before him, looming like a wall equipped with hair-encrusted hands, was no more. From behind him came a high-pitched sound of desperation.

  Thinking that the sound came from Willy, Tim got to his knees and spun around. Willy was standing about three feet in front of her duffel, looking down at him with a complicated expression on her face. Giles Coverley had stopped moving. Tim guessed that he had lowered his foot about a second before. The expression on Coverley’s face was not at all difficult to read. He’d had enough, this was over-the-top too much, he surrendered, hoping only for due process and treatment under the Geneva Convention.

  “Back up,” Tim said.

  Coverley stepped backward. He held up his hands, his palms out. “Look,” he said. “Forget the explanations. What are you going to do now? You can’t call the police, you know. They’re still after her.” His tone made it clear that he blamed Willy for his baffling series of misfortunes.