by Peter Straub
“Philip, this room is beautiful,” he said.
“We’re happy with it. Won’t you please sit down? Can I get you a glass of wine or anything?”
Willy asked for a Coca-Cola, and Tim reeled before the evidence that this formerly fanatical teetotaler had alcoholic beverages in his house and was willing to serve them to his guests.
“I’ll have a Coke, too, Philip. We have an appointment for an interview at the Foundlings’ Shelter in about an hour, so it’s better if I don’t drink. But you’re one surprise after another.”
“Pop might have been an alcoholic, but there was no reason I shouldn’t let myself and my guests enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures. Why are you being interviewed at the Foundlings’ Home?”
“I’m not. I’m interviewing someone for a new project.”
“You’ll have to tell me all about it when I get back.” Philip smiled at them, let his gaze linger on Willy for a moment, then smiled again at Tim before he left the room.
Tim smacked his forehead. “That’s not Philip. That’s one of those pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Do you know the shit he used to put me through about drinking?”
“Dimly,” Willy said.
“She got him to change this room,” he said, musing. “That must have required brain surgery and a heart transplant. He would never have done anything to this room.”
“Who is ‘she’?” Willy asked.
Philip, carrying a tray with two glasses filled with ice and Coca-Cola into the room, had heard this question. “She, dear Willy, is China Beech, the woman who rescued me from grief and depression and made a human being of me. I wish she were here now, but she had some business to attend to. You’ll meet her at our wedding, though. I know you’ll love her. Everyone loves China.”
“What kind of business?” Tim asked.
“I’m not too sure. Something to do with one of her buildings, probably.”
“Her buildings?”
“China has buildings here and there, all over town.”
“What do you mean, she has buildings?”
“She owns them. Some are commercial, some are residential, but the apartment buildings are more trouble than they’re worth. I tell her she should cash out, let somebody inherit the worries, but she’s a little sentimental about those apartment buildings. They were where her father started, you know.”
“Your fiancée inherited property from her father?” Tim felt as though he were trying to run uphill through a muddy field.
“Well, yeah, Bill Beech.”
Apparently, land mines dotted the muddy field.
“China’s father was the William Beech?” William Beech had once owned half of downtown Millhaven.
“Didn’t I just tell you that? Willy, how did you and Tim get together? Were you a student of his? That’s how I met China—she was one of our student teachers, and I was, well, her mentor, I guess you could say.”
“We met at a reading of his,” Willy said. “When he learned that I was from Millhaven, too, we decided to drive out here together.”
“You drove?”
“All the way. I thought you told me that your girlfriend was an exotic dancer.”
“That was kind of an in-joke. She’s a tango dancer. So am I, although I’m not nearly as good as she is. She makes me look okay, though. We’re thinking of entering contests one day.”
Philip not only made jokes, he made in-jokes. He danced the tango. He was thinking of entering contests.
“You took me seriously, huh? That’s pretty funny. An exotic dancer is really a stripper, isn’t that right? China’s going to love that. I hope she gets back before you have to go.”
“How long have you known her?”
Philip looked a bit embarrassed. “I met China in September of last year. She helped me deal with my grief. I should say, she helped me to feel my grief.”
He paused. For a short time, it seemed likely that he would start crying. “I never dreamed a woman like that could want to marry me. It’s unbelievable. She let God into my life, and everything has been getting better and better ever since.”
“It seems to have done you no end of good.”
“ ‘No end of good,’ ” Philip said. “ ‘No end of good.’ What a beautiful phrase.” He hesitated. “I don’t suppose you’d like me to talk about my faith, and salvation, and Jesus Christ, and all that?”
“I want you to talk about anything you feel like talking about.”
“I’d like to hear you talk about God,” Willy said. “The god I know never explains anything.”
Philip smiled. “Tim, you’re just being polite. And Willy, one of the main problems with gods is that they seldom feel the need to explain themselves. If you have any genuine interest, ask me about it later. All right?”
“Certainly,” said Tim, impressed by Philip’s display of restraint.
“Now that that bit of awkwardness is over, will you tell me about this project of yours?”
“Yes,” Willy said. “Please be as explicit as possible. I’d love to know more about your project.”
“You’re full of curiosity today,” Tim said. “Unfortunately, I can only describe what I know at the moment. I can’t predict the future.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Philip asked.
“I mean,” Tim said, “that I can’t describe what hasn’t been created yet. No doubt God had the same limitation.”
“All right, describe what has been created.”
“Before he does, could you please get me another glass of Coke? I’m awfully thirsty.”
“Of course, Willy,” Philip said, giving her a slightly curious look, and made the round-trip to the kitchen in less than a minute. He handed her the glass and said, “Please, Tim.”
“Okay,” Tim said. “I hope you won’t object to this, Philip. I’ve been trying to write a book about Joseph Kalendar’s daughter.” Remembering the appalling figure that had glared down at him from the top of the street, Tim felt the necessity to employ a considerable degree of caution in what he said.
“She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s what you said in lost boy lost girl.”
“Your neighbor Omar Hillyard led me to think her father murdered her. Hillyard was just making inferences based on what he saw at the time. But he wasn’t watching the Kalendar house full-time, and he could have missed a lot.”
“Wait a second. Is this book fact or fiction?”
Willy laughed. “That’s the question I always want to ask him.”
“Philip,” Tim said, not very kindly, “anyone who believes in the virgin birth and the performance of miracles, not to mention walking on water, shouldn’t be so quick to make that distinction.”
Philip immediately retreated. “I suppose that’s an excellent point.” Then he changed the subject. “By the way, you might be interested in hearing that Mr. Hillyard passed away two days before Christmas, last year.” Philip stared at Willy, who was tilting the last of her second drink into her mouth. “Anyhow, Kalendar had a real daughter—you’re sure of that.”
“Oh, I know he had a daughter,” Tim said, failing to mention that his primary source of information was Cyrax, a citizen of Byzantium who had been dead for six hundred years. “I just assumed she was dead, so I never bothered to do any research about her. In my book, she had been killed; that’s all I cared about. In real life, she was taken into the child-care system, and she wound up at the Foundlings’ Shelter. The question is, what can she be today? Is she even still alive? Was she ever put into foster care? Did she ever go to college? Is she in prison? A mental hospital?”
“I bet she never broke into any warehouses,” Willy said, darkly.
“I mean, what kind of life can you have after a childhood like that? How healed can you be?”
Philip shook his head and regarded Tim with what looked a great deal like fond resignation. “You never give up, do you?”
“What do you mean by that?” Tim found himself unreasonably r
ankled by his brother’s words.
“Childhood, healing, childhood trauma . . . sound familiar?”
“I’m not writing about myself, Philip,” Tim said, irritated.
“I didn’t say you were. But you’re not exactly not writing about yourself, either, are you?”
“You’re not my brother,” Tim said. “My real brother is hiding in the attic.”
“I know why you say that, believe me. I wish I could have been more like this—like the self China let me discover—with Nancy and Mark. Those regrets are astoundingly painful.” Philip seemed to travel inward again, and he clasped his hands and lowered his head, perhaps in prayer. “Yes. They are.” Then he looked back up at Tim. “Did you know the Kalendar place is going to be torn down next Wednesday? The view from my backyard is going to improve by a hundred percent.”
“The Kalendar place is in your backyard?” Willy asked. “He didn’t tell me that.”
“It’s across the alley,” Philip said. “Ever since Ronnie Lloyd-Jones got arrested, people have been coming over here to look at the place. Some of them take souvenirs, can you believe that? Souvenirs! Well, the taxes aren’t being paid anymore, and the neighbors stopped cutting the lawn, and now you get these disaster ghouls wandering around. Because of all that, there was a petition to raze the place, and it went through.”
“How do you feel about that?” Tim asked.
The grim satisfaction visible in Philip a moment earlier hardened into a darker, flintier emotion that had nothing to do with pleasure. His face tightened; his eyes fired darts. Every bit of grief and rage he had been holding down leaped upward within him, and Philip became a little frightening. “You know how I feel about that? I’d like them to demolish that place, turn it into splinters, set the splinters on fire, and shoot the ashes into outer space.”
He glared at Tim as if awaiting a challenge.
“After that, I’d like guys with shovels and nets to dig up every inch of ground over there and sift through it, just in case they might have missed anything. They’d dig right down to the subsoil, six feet, eight feet, and sample everything. Then you’d have this big rectangular hole in the ground. It would look like a mass grave, which is exactly what it would be. I’d fill it with gasoline and set fire to it, that’s what I’d do. I’d have a big, purifying fire, a tremendous blaze. When it burned out, I wouldn’t care anymore—they could bulldoze all the earth back into the scorched hole and turn it into a gerbil farm.”
Philip stood extremely still for a moment, contending with the emotions he had just unleashed. A little stiffly, he turned to Willy. “Excuse me, young lady. My son’s body was never found. It might have been buried over there. It probably wasn’t, but it might have been. God is helping me through this time, but every now and then the situation gets the better of me.”
“I’m so sorry about your son,” Willy said. “I thought I lost a child, too, so I have some idea of what you have been going through.”
“Your child was returned to you?” Philip asked, his interest engaged. “Unharmed?”
“Yes,” Tim quickly said. “Willy was very lucky.”
“My god wasn’t very helpful,” she said. “My god seemed to make things worse.” She patted the pocket where she had stuffed the candy bars. “Is there a bathroom on this floor?”
Philip told her how to get to the bathroom next to the kitchen. When she had left the room, he turned to Tim with an expression that seemed poised between appreciation and accusation. “Tim, how old is that girl, really?”
“Thirty-eight,” Tim said.
“That can’t be true. She’s somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five.”
“That’s how she looks. She’s still thirty-eight.”
Philip appeared ready to dispute this assertion, but he let it go. “You met at a reading? And you volunteered to drive her here? You don’t do things like that. What did she say to you?”
“It wasn’t anything she said, Philip. Call it a whim.” Tim regretted bringing Willy to Superior Street. He had known introducing her to his brother was a terrible idea, yet he had done exactly that, and now he had to deal with the results.
“I can’t ignore the evidence of my senses. You show up here with this stunning young woman who acts like a kitten around you, and with whom you, supposedly a middle-aged gay man, obviously have some kind of erotic connection, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”
Tim improvised. “Okay. Willy is Joseph Kalendar’s niece—she was his brother’s daughter. That’s why she went to my reading. And I thought I should bring her here for a lot of reasons. Something happened, and we clicked. Right away, there was this great attraction between us.”
“You’re actually sleeping with her?”
Tim could not tell if Philip was aghast or thrilled. “Philip, in all honesty, this is none of your business.”
Philip was not to be deflected. “I work with teenagers. I can tell when people have been going to bed together. You’re having sex with Joseph Kalendar’s niece. You and Willy, you remind me of teenagers.”
“We’re very fond of each other.”
“I’ll say,” said Philip.
Both of them heard the closing of the bathroom door. “Have you any idea of what you intend to do with this relationship?”
“I wish I did.”
Entering the room, Willy sensed a measure of the intensity that had just flared. “Hey, guys, what’s going on?”
“I was just telling my brother that he’d better take good care of you,” Philip said. “If he doesn’t, you let me know about it.”
“Don’t worry about me. I think I’ll just disappear.”
Tim said that they’d better be going.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Philip said.
Tim looked up, bracing himself for another assault on his character or his morals.
“Would you like to borrow Mark’s laptop? I know you’re an e-mail demon, and I can’t use it—it reminds me too much of Mark. The thing is just sitting up there in its case. Let me get it for you, and you can use it in your room.”
“That’s a great idea, Philip. Thanks.” According to an entry in Tim Underhill’s journal, Mark Underhill’s computer had once shown him a miraculous vision—a vision of Elsewhere—and he loved the idea of once again putting his hands on the object, so imbued with his nephew’s memory, that had given him his treasure.
Philip went upstairs and came back down holding a black computer case by its handle.
“These things are so small, and they hold so much. Mark spent hours on it, sending messages back and forth, looking up I don’t know what . . .” With a dense, compacted facial expression, Philip thrust it at Tim. He was not loaning out his son’s computer, Tim saw; he was getting it out of the house by giving it away.
Philip rubbed his palms on the sides of his trousers. For a moment he looked almost as adolescent and self-conscious as one of his charges. The direct, probing look he gave Willy erased this impression.
“Come with me, Willy. I want to show you something.”
“Show her what?”
Already on her feet, Willy looked from brother to brother.
“Willy ought to see the view from my backyard, don’t you think?”
Tim glanced up at Willy. “I explained to him why you said you were a fictional character of mine. Philip knows you’re Kalendar’s niece. From his backyard, you can see your uncle’s house.”
“I guess I should see it before they tear it down and scorch the soil it rested on,” Willy said.
“Excuse me,” Philip said. “I can’t avoid asking this one question. Did you ever meet your cousin?”
“Never even knew she existed.”
“As sick as he was, he must have wanted to protect her.”
“I think this is going to have an uncomfortable effect on me. Would you mind if I had a candy bar?” Out came a Kit Kat and a Mars bar. After a moment’s contemplation under Philip’s fascinated stare, she shoved the Mars bar back int
o her pocket, broke the Kit Kat in half, unpeeled one of the halves, and bit into it. She held the other half in her left hand. “Lead on.”
In the moment of uncertainty Willy had brought him to, Philip glanced over at his brother.
“Go ahead,” Tim said. “I’m curious about what the place looks like now.”
“It’s a dump.” Philip turned, strode off into the narrow kitchen, and opened the back door.
Willy and Tim stepped through. Philip joined them at the top of the steps down to his barren backyard. The fence Philip had tried to erect between his property and the cobbled alley still drooped over the patchy lawn. However, on the other side of the alley, nothing remained as it had been. Joseph Kalendar’s massive wall had been bulldozed away, revealing the jungly profusion of his old backyard, from which rose the rear wall of his appalling house. The kitchen door through which Mark Underhill and his friend Jimbo Monaghan had broken in could still be made out through the weeds. The crude, clumsy slanting roof of the added room reared up out of the weeds like a huge animal dangerous to awaken.
Willy inhaled sharply.
“The place seems to get uglier with every passing week.”
Because he was looking across the alley, Philip did not see Willy flicker like a dying lightbulb. Tim had turned to her when that sharp, sudden sound escaped her, and before his eyes Willy’s entire body stuttered in and out of visibility. She slumped against the back of the house. Somehow, he managed to catch her before she slid down onto the worn surface of the yard.
“Eat the rest of that candy bar, fast,” he ordered her. “Philip, do you have any sugar?”
“Sure, I guess. I don’t use sugar much anymore.”
Tim asked him to fill a coffee cup with sugar and bring it outside with a glass of Coke.
“Is she a diabetic? She needs her—”
“Get the sugar, Philip. Now.”
Philip vanished inside in a flurry of elbows and knees. Cupboard doors and cabinets opened and closed. Muttering to himself, he came through the door and handed Tim a cup filled with sugar.
“Aren’t you likely to throw her into some . . .”
Tim was seated on the ground, his arm around Willy, pouring sugar into her mouth.
