In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “No, they’re not,” Tim said, and got to his feet. “In this world, they never were. The bank doesn’t exist, remember?”

  “You still can’t use the police. How the devil could you explain what went on here?” Keening slightly, he bent over to look at his left foot, which faded abruptly into invisibility and sent him toppling to the surface of the parking lot. From his mouth flew a great many inventive curses. The lightness feeling made him utter a high-pitched humming sound while his foot flickered in and out of view for a short time. At last, it reappeared without disappearing again, and he slumped, panting, over his belt, his legs stuck out before him.

  “Throw him a candy bar,” Tim said.

  “Are you kidding?” Willy stepped back toward the duffel bag as though to defend its contents.

  “If you don’t, I will. I don’t like seeing people suffer.”

  With obvious reluctance, Willy retreated to the bag, knelt down to reach in, and plucked out the foil-wrapped disc of a York peppermint pattie. She threw it at Coverley as if skipping a rock across the surface of a lake, and it skimmed straight into the center of his chest. Coverley disrobed the patty and thrust it into his mouth in a single movement. His face relaxed into momentary ecstasy.

  “Do it again,” Tim said.

  Willy picked out an Oh Henry! bar and hurled it at Coverley, who caught it with both hands and shucked the wrapper in the second and a half it took him to carry the bar to his mouth.

  “I shouldn’t blame him,” Willy said. “He was only doing what you made him do.”

  “I have to admit,” said Coverley around a wad of chocolate-peanut mush, “it was pretty difficult to threaten this guy. Basically, all I really wanted to do was work for him instead of Mitchell. But, you know, I had this job. Would you mind if I stood up?”

  “Stand up,” Tim said. He glanced at Willy, who, without complaint, bent down and tossed a Mounds bar at Coverley with an underhand pitch.

  Coverley took more time with the Mounds bar than he had with the others, turning it into more of a meal. “I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me with you.”

  “Sorry,” Tim said.

  “I didn’t think so. Tell me this. Where did Roman Richard go?”

  “He didn’t go anywhere,” Tim said.

  Willy bent down and picked out a candy bar for herself.

  “Are you telling me to go off and kill people to get their money?”

  “God damn,” Tim said. He took three hundred dollars from his wallet, leaving him with two. “No, I can’t do that. Take this money and live on it until you can get a job. Go to Milwaukee and say you’ll wash dishes.”

  Coverley held out his hands like an infant, and Tim placed the bills in their cupped palms. “To tell you the truth,” Coverley said, “we didn’t really kill those people. Roman Richard shot their dog to show them we meant business, but that’s all.”

  “Why did you tell me you killed people, then?”

  “I wanted to scare you. Well, at that point I would have killed you, that’s true. How about another Oh Henry! Could you manage that?”

  “Get out of here,” Tim said, and Coverley dipped the money into his pocket and moved toward the SUV. He would leave it on the street in Milwaukee, and in a day the police would be hearing from its terrified owners.

  The rest of the way to Millhaven, Tim sped along a series of roads and highways he had known all his life. Willy went through candy bars at the rate of approximately one every twenty minutes. Tim thought Willy grew more beautiful, more translucent and lit from within, with every mile, and when he considered what lay before them, his heart hurt for her, and for himself, too.

  She said, “What happened to Roman Richard, that’s what’s going to happen to me, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s hope not,” he said.

  Half an hour from Millhaven, Willy fell asleep beside him, her slender hands limp in her lap, her knees sagging to one side, her head on the seat rest so that he could see only the short blond shag of her hair, which had without his noticing become nearly white-blond and seemed to possess, beneath a healthy shine, its own internal radiance. She uttered a few whiffling sounds that sounded like the lost echoes of unspoken words, then fell again into perfect silence.

  The next time Tim checked his rearview mirror, he almost drove onto the shoulder of the road. In her blue dress and no doubt wearing a pair of red slippers, his sister, April, was looking at him from the center of the back seat. April’s regard had little of the childish in it. The look in her eye, the expression printed into her unsmiling nine-year-old face, spoke of a steady, familiar impatience. As ever, April hungered to be free, to get out, to be on the other side of all this frustration. More than Cyrax, she was his guide. As he watched, April leaned forward, extended a slightly grubby nine-year-old arm, and, with surpassing gentleness, patted his shoulder.

  When Tim Underhill cruised along the overpass from the exit and in the near distance saw the outline of Millhaven rising up, heavy clouds too dark for both the hour and the season hung above the southwest quadrant, far from the granite towers and pillars near the Pforzheimer. He thought, The Dark Man knows I’m home.

  The Woman

  Glimpsed

  at the Window

  PART FIVE

  28

  At the Pforzheimer’s front desk, a young clerk who had fallen in love with Willy the moment he looked at her confirmed that Tim had a fifth-floor junior suite in the old part of the hotel. An hour earlier, a suitcase had arrived for him from New York. Underhill preferred the old wing to the more modern tower on the other side of the hotel. The rooms were warmer in tone, and in the mid-eighties he, Michael Poole, and Maggie Lah had spent three memorable nights on that same fifth floor. Plastered with FedEx labels and strapped shut with yellow tape, the suitcase was produced in the care of an old friend and schoolmate of Tim’s, a five-foot-two bellman named Charlie Pelz.

  In the ascending elevator, Charlie Pelz smiled at Willy and said, “Welcome to the Pforzheimer, miss. We hope you enjoy your stay with us.” Having dispensed with the preliminaries, he turned to his old acquaintance and said, “Peddling another book, huh? I see this time, your title’s all lowercase, like some beatnik wrote it. You gonna give me a copy, or do I have to buy one?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to read this one, Charlie,” Tim said. “Hardly anybody gets killed in it.”

  “You must be outta your mind,” Charlie said. “Who wants to read something like that? You should write a book about me. I got stories, they’d make what hair you got left fall out.”

  Charlie Pelz escorted them down the wide ocher corridors and over the rose-patterned carpet and around a corner to Room 511. Tim experienced a rush of nostalgia he explained to Willy only after Charlie had been pacified with a ten-dollar bill and sent back to his station.

  “In 1983, I wrote about four pages of the book I was working on in this room.”

  “Which book?”

  “Mysteries.”

  “I liked that one,” Willy said. “Can you remember which pages?”

  “Of course.” Yes, he could remember what he had written in this room. And he could remember what he had seen while writing them: a dark lake ringed with expensive lodges, and a boy walking through dying sunlight to a clubhouse overlooking the water. He remembered how he had felt at each moment of the boy’s progress.

  “Good. You should remember them.”

  “In the next room down, my friends Michael Poole and Maggie Lah went to bed together for the first time, and they’ve been together ever since. They love each other. It’s marvelous to be with them. They don’t exclude you; you’re part of the circle.”

  “We love each other,” Willy said. Then, heartbreakingly: “Don’t we?”

  “Oh, Willy,” Tim said, and put his arms around her. A wave of emotion ignited by the mingled losses and gains of both the past and the present blazed through him, and he was not sure that in the end it might not be more than he could really handle. For
a moment it was exactly that, and he wept, shamelessly, holding her, also weeping, as closely as he could.

  It was Willy who returned them to a state in which they could do things other than cry and hold on to each other. She moved a fraction of an inch away, ran a hand beneath her nose, and for all time proved the immensity of her worth by saying, “You should write books that Charlie Pelz wants to read, or your career’s down the drain.”

  “From now on, I’ll send Charlie everything I write, so he can give me his critical opinion.”

  “Actually,” Willy said, “nuts to Charlie Pelz. Could we go to bed now? I know it’s not very late, but I feel sort of wrung out and exhausted. And I want to be with you.”

  They undressed; like newlyweds, they brushed their teeth side by side before the sink; they went into the bedroom and, first naked Willy, then enchanted Tim, mounted the three wooden steps that, as in a fairy tale, led them upward to the surface of the bed, into which they fell, open-armed and open-hearted. Locked in motionless embrace, great figures on stone friezes gazed down through a tangle of vines; a panther’s eye gleamed, and wing beats troubled the air. They had passed over, Tim felt, into another realm altogether, where miracles were commonplace but fleeting, leaving behind echoes of things lost and half-remembered.

  At six o’clock in the morning, Willy said, “I feel different. Something’s happening.” She could not be more specific.

  Later that morning, showered, dressed, and still feeling enveloped in the atmosphere of Willy Patrick, Tim called his brother. After a little thought, he made a second telephone call, to the Millhaven Foundling’s Shelter. Soon he found himself speaking to Mercedes Romola, the shelter’s matron, who confirmed the idea that had entered his head a moment before: that the real Lily Kalendar had probably passed into the same hands and endured the same process as his dear Lily. Both Philip and Ms. Romola invited him to visit them that afternoon.

  29

  Willy had swallowed something like half a pound of confectioner’s sugar and washed it down with a nice, sugary soft drink while Tim made his calls, and as they drove south and west through the city, she was in a relatively unruffled frame of mind. Tim, however, seemed to grow darker and more troubled the closer they came to his old neighborhood. By the time he turned on to Teutonia Avenue and homed in on Sherman Park, he was actually driving with one hand and propping up his chin with the other, as if he were leaning on a bar.

  “What’s wrong?” Willy asked him. “Are you upset with your brother, or are you ashamed to introduce me to him?”

  “No, of course I’m not ashamed. But I am always upset with Philip,” Tim said, considerably shading the truth. He did have wildly conflicting feelings about introducing Willy to his brother. In some ways, it seemed like the worst idea in the world.

  “That I’m always upset with him is what makes us a family. I think he’s comically selfish, way too cautious, and unbelievably hidebound, and he thinks I’m a flashy spendthrift who turned his back on him.”

  “I bet he’s proud of you.”

  “Somewhere down in that grudging heart of his, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” Tim removed his hand from his chin and reverted to driving an automobile instead of a bar. He wished not to continue this particular conversation, and he was getting dangerously near Philip’s house. The tidy green space of Sherman Park floated by on his left; the unhappy little house at 3324 North Superior Street filled with his parents’ shabby old furniture lay only two blocks away. He regretted bringing Willy into the former Pigtown. Some disaster would inevitably occur. Also, he dreaded the possibility of meeting China Beech. She was a catastrophe that had already happened.

  Tim found a parking space two doors down from his brother’s house. He and Willy left the car simultaneously, and Willy immediately reached back in to pick up half a dozen Baby Ruths.

  As she ducked into the car, Tim looked idly up toward the next corner, which was located on a little rise, and saw something he first took for mere eccentricity. A large man built like a plow horse and wearing a long black coat that fell past his knees stood up there, silhouetted against the pale blue sky and staring down at him. He was the sort of man who looks like an assault weapon, and he appeared to be holding his hands over his face in an ugly, complicated pattern that allowed him to see through his fingers while concealing his face.

  The knowledge of this bizarre figure’s identity came to him almost immediately, and Tim was never sure if his sense that the world had stopped moving began with him seeing the apparition or at the moment he realized it was Joseph Kalendar. Either way, the world froze in place: birds hung motionless in the sky, men turned to statues in midstride, a pot falling from a mantel stopped in midair, and a frozen cat watched it not fall. Willy’s head and torso hung motionlessly over the front seat. Kalendar was playing his new book back to him, as he had done on Crosby Street, and the old monster had all the success he could have wished for. In life, Joseph Kalendar had gotten a great deal of pleasure out of frightening people; he must have been immensely pleased at how thoroughly he had succeeded in scaring Timothy Underhill.

  Without seeming to change in any obvious way moment by moment, and certainly without moving so much as a finger, Kalendar then demonstrated that Cyrax had known what was coming. Inch by inch, cell by cell, and hair by hair, Kalendar mutated into a sleek, smooth black-haired man with a gambler’s mustache and extremely white teeth. Kalendar hated showing his face, and good old Tim had kindly stepped in to provide a handsome alternative. Faber was wearing a tuxedo, but he looked nothing like a headwaiter. Grinning like a dog, Mitchell Faber took a step toward Underhill, whose foremost response was the impulse to turn and run. Make haste make haste . . . the Dark Man cometh, he had written in his last book, and here he was, a literally Dark Man. Against Faber’s burnished, olive-complected skin his onyx eyebrows shone, the whites of his eyes gleamed. He looked purely carnivorous. In his wake floated many more corpses than Joseph Kalendar had created. If you gave Faber fifteen more years, a run of bad luck, and a stretch in prison, he would wind up looking a lot like Jasper Dan Kohle.

  Tim refused to give him what he wanted, a show of fear, although fear now occupied the entire center of his body. He was incapable of speech. Faber advanced another gliding step and then was gone, leaving an insolent vacancy where he had been. The air moved again. Willy came up from out of the car and closed the door. When she saw his face, she said, “You really don’t want to do this, do you?”

  Tim ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I was a little dizzy. Let’s meet the groom.”

  With a sudden desire for a show of ceremony, he took Willy’s arm and escorted her down the sidewalk to his brother’s house. The attention made her happy, and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

  A second after Tim rang the bell, the door flew open upon a transformed Philip Underhill. In place of a boxy suit, cheap white shirt, and deliberately nondescript necktie, a uniform Philip had worn nearly every day of the past twenty-five years, he had on a blue button-down shirt and khakis—hardly a revolutionary getup, but pretty radical for Philip. The rimless glasses had been replaced by tortoiseshell frames; his thinning hair was parted on the left and had grown long enough to touch the tops of his ears. He had lost at least thirty pounds. Most amazing of all was that he appeared to be smiling.

  Although Tim had been prepared in advance by their recent telephone conversation, his first response to this transformation was to think, That woman ruined my brother! His second reflection was that the effects of ruination had been entirely beneficial. The immediate result of these changes in style had been to make Philip Underhill look more intelligent. He also appeared to be a good deal friendlier than his earlier incarnation.

  “Boy,” Tim said, holding out a hand. “You aren’t even recognizable.”

  Philip grasped his forearm and pulled him into an embrace. Well past the sort of phenomenon described as “astonishing,” this verged upon the miraculous. So did his gr
eeting.

  “Good, I don’t want to be recognizable. I’m so glad you’re here! That’s the perfect wedding present, Tim.”

  “I’ll come to all your weddings,” Tim said.

  Philip drew him into the house and demanded to be introduced to “this beautiful companion of yours.”

  Tim’s efforts to think of some way to account for Willy disintegrated when he took in what had happened to the living room. “You changed everything. Where’s the old furniture?”

  “Goodwill or the junk heap. China helped me pick out this new stuff. I want to know what you think, but, please, first introduce me to your friend.”

  Tim pronounced Willy’s name and stalled, unable to think of what to say next.

  “I’m one of your brother’s fictional characters,” Willy said, shaking Philip’s hand. “It’s a wonderful job, full of excitement, but the money’s no good.”

  “My brother should pay you just for spending time with him.”

  Another amazement—Philip had made a joke.

  “Oh, he’s easy to spend time with. I’m quite attached to him.”

  As Philip dealt with the possibilities suggested by Willy’s statement, Tim let his initial impression of the living room separate itself out into the details of what had stunned him. The transformation was so great that Philip might as well have moved to a different house. Prints and framed photographs hung on the walls. The floor had been sanded and waxed and polished to a warm gleam shared by the pretty little table before the window and the curving arms of several chairs. There were low lamps beside a soft, patterned sofa, a handsome leather chair of remarkable depth with a matching footstool, stacks of books, and vases with cut flowers.