In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  “You have no idea.” Most of the inside of my body felt as though I’d swallowed dry ice. My heart had gone into triple time, and my knees, those cowards, trembled violently enough to shake my trousers. I placed my hand on the door and, hoping for some kind of excuse to procrastinate, glanced across the street. I jumped about a foot and a half.

  Leaning against a tree in a posture that perfectly expressed his customary mood of bored hostility, WCHWHLLDN was glaring at us through nighttime shades that made him look like an old-school hipster. He lifted one arm and made an impatient, sweeping gesture with his hand.

  “Who is that?” Willy asked.

  “He’s a Cleresyte, whatever that is,” I said, “and he’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”

  More forcefully, the angel repeated his whisk-broom gesture. Before he could slip off his glasses and melt us into grease stains with the force of his gaze, I grasped the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open. The hinges squealed like hungry cats. A seared, unhealthy odor of dust, mold, and tormented lives streamed out of every room, along the corridors, down the staircase, through the entry hall, through the door frame, and outside, coating us with its residue. Holding my breath, I stepped inside, Willy following so close behind that I could feel the charged inch or so of space between us the way I might feel her breath on my neck.

  34

  The reek of death and abandonment that had enveloped Tim and Willy in its outward journey still hung in the atmosphere. Boldly, Willy moved deeper into the entry and peered up the stairs. Grit and fallen crumbs of plaster crunched under her feet. The staircase ascended into an utter darkness that soon resolved into a fainter darkness surrounding a turn of the banister rail at a landing with a lifeless window.

  “We should have brought a flashlight,” she said.

  “We’ll see everything we have to see.” Tim advanced into the gray territory between himself and the staircase. A little bit farther ahead and on his right was the door to the living room, firmly closed. Somewhere off to his left, one of Kalendar’s concealed, spiderweb passageways led to a hidden staircase. The rubble on the floor had crumbled off the ceiling and the walls, and a thousand generations of rodents had scampered through it, leaving printed on the dust the graffiti of their passing. The entire structure seemed surprisingly flimsy to him. At the first nudge of the bulldozer, the whole thing would collapse into itself and turn to splinters and plaster dust. If he touched one of those pockmarked walls, here and there bearing tattoolike images of florid roses, he knew the stench of the place would come off on his hand.

  “I suppose we go in there,” Willy said, her voice shrunk down to less than a whisper.

  “Uh-huh.” Tim was now almost too frightened to speak. “Yeah.” He forced himself to move to the door to the front room. He touched the knob, and his hand shook so violently that he could not grasp it. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Do it for me,” Willy said. Then, more firmly: “For me. I’m just passing through, remember?”

  He looked back at his dear creation and saw her left arm flicker into nowhere and jerk back into visibility. Willy looked as though she might faint again. “Okay, Willy,” he said, and wrapped his trembling hand around the brass mushroom of the knob, turned, and pushed. The door swung open on a narrow chamber where a huge bole of black particles and swirling dust like a gigantic hornet’s nest pulsed like a living thing in the middle of the room. In the instant it was revealed, the vicious thing whirled, he was sure, to look at Tim Underhill and take his measure at last; in the next, it dispersed in a silent explosion that sent wisps and rags and shadows of itself to the corners of the room. Underhill’s fear refined itself into a column of mercury stretching from the top of his bowels to the base of his throat.

  Beneath the window, an electrical wire that disappeared into the wall writhed and thrashed like a captured snake, shooting out sparks that showered to the floor; it collapsed in loose coils, then whipped back into life and disgorged another fireworks display before dropping again to the floor.

  “There’s no electricity in this house,” Tim said.

  “He’s telling you to go in,” Willy said. “He’s letting it happen. He’s even making light for you. He knows that guy is out there, and he’s afraid of him.”

  “How do you know that?” As he asked his question, Tim crossed the threshold with slow steps and looked into the corners, rubbed smooth with darkness. That he could speak surprised him; that he could walk was an astonishment. Already much greater than in the entry, the stench flared, stinging his eyes and settling on his lips.

  “He told me. When he looked at us.”

  “In words?”

  “Did you hear him say anything?” Willy spun around, seeming to attend to those unheard voices. “This isn’t where it happened, is it? I didn’t meet Mark in this room.”

  “He was on the staircase at the back of the entry, waiting to hear you moving down the hidden stairs behind the wall.”

  “Where is the night room?”

  “On the other side of the kitchen.”

  “Will we go there? We will, you don’t have to tell me. We’ll go there and cleanse the room of its crimes, we’ll wash them away.” She gave him the most tender smile he had ever seen. “Because that’s what you’re doing, you old writer. You’re washing away his crimes, and you’re doing it through me.”

  “So it seems,” Tim said. He was too frightened to cry. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Oh, you,” she said, with the implication that he had asked a question with an obvious answer. Then she placed her hand on her chest and gazed at him with a wonder entirely unconnected to him. “Those hummingbird wings, whoo, they’re beating faster and getting bigger. . . . This is an amazing, amazing feeling. It’s like I’m going to float right up off the ground.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to take long.”

  “It can’t. I’m Lily Kalendar—your Lily Kalendar.”

  It was precisely the recognition she had been supposed to attain at the end of the book that was her book. As soon as she had spoken, the lunatic electrical wire beneath the window spouted fiery apostrophes and commas, and it seemed to Tim Underhill that the fabric of reality, already sorely strained, rippled around them.

  The overtone of a sound too distant or quiet to be identified entered and hung in the air, a single note that had been played on an upright bass, plucked a moment before by the bassist’s finger—

  There came the burning metallic hum of a thousand cicadas, greedy, intrusive—

  Somewhere above, a door softly opened and closed. Light footsteps on the stairs sounded hush hush hush. Tim Underhill’s blood seemed to stop moving through his veins. A boy with Willy’s face entered by something that was not a door, smiled at him lovingly, then without pause moved toward Willy, who took his hand. They were already, instantly, in the roles he had given them, and he could not follow, he could watch them no more. Where Willy went, she went for him.

  Clamorous, swiftly moving spirits spun, gyrated, sailed through the night air, even in Millhaven.

  He was alone in the room, but for the presence that had offered him illumination in the form of a wire thrashing like a nerve. His Lily had joined his Mark, and one day, if he was lucky, he would glimpse them, as he had glimpsed the world’s glorious, disastrous Lily Kalendar, through a car window. On these glimpses he would live; on the hope of them he would do the work of the rest of his career.

  A kind of tragedian’s wonder had filled him during the previous few minutes, and, as specks of plaster and broken bits of wood and charcoal-gray mats of dust and tissues of flesh like old spiderwebs began to rustle and twirl in various parts of the room, his fear returned. It seemed as jittery and unstable as the wire, now firing sparks and beating its head on the floorboards as it squirmed. The filthy material within the room twirled itself together, piece by piece, hair by hair, speck by speck, and elongated its substance to a height well above six
feet.

  The shivery column of mercury again grew up through the center of Tim’s body, and his knees began their merry jig. Even his heart seemed to tremble. To the extent that he could think, he thought: I hate being this afraid, I hate it, it’s humiliating, I never want to feel this way again . . .

  The Dark Man began to emerge out of the fabric of his unclean substance, first a great brooding bearded head with eyes the color of lead, then black-clad arms meshing into a bull-like chest, the long, dirty coat, and legs that swelled and lengthened into heavy black boots planted on the floor. He held his wide-brimmed black hat in one black-gloved hand to demonstrate his anger. Kalendar wanted Timothy Underhill to see his eyes. Insane fury steamed from his body, as did a pure and concentrated version of the stink that flowed through the front door. Commanded to look, Tim looked. He saw the murderous rage of the grievously wounded.

  “I made a mistake,” he said, somehow managing to keep his voice from trembling. “I thought she was dead. I didn’t know you had saved her.”

  The rage came toward him unabated.

  “You loved her. You still do. She is very much worth loving,” Tim said. “I made a lot of mistakes. I’m still making them. It’s almost impossible to write the real book, the perfect book.”

  The voice that Willy had heard spoke in his head, not in words but a crude rush and surge of twisted feelings.

  “Because no one knew she was alive. Almost no one knew that she’d ever existed at all.”

  Another ragged bombardment of rage blasted into him.

  “Except the ones who did know, yes. And I could have called the shelter, that’s right. But I was writing a novel! In my book, your daughter was dead. If she’d been alive, she would have ruined the book—she was just a fantasy, anyhow, a reward I gave my nephew.” He stared back at Kalendar, a little stronger for having spoken.

  The next wave of emotion tones nearly knocked him over. They seemed to struggle within his head and body, like bats, before dissolving. Tim waved his hands in front of his face, reeling with shock and disgust. “What do you want, anyhow?”

  He braced himself for another onslaught, but Kalendar held his hands before his face and glared at him through his fingers long enough to make Tim start to shake all over again. Kalendar’s hands clutched at his face and pulled at the skin that was not skin. A transformation began to occur over the width and breadth of Kalendar’s body, which became shorter and trimmer, more glossy. It grew a handsome tuxedo and a starched white formal shirt and a black bow tie before its hair and features consolidated, but by that time Tim had long known the name of the figure taking shape before him. It was the second time Mitchell Faber had materialized out of Joseph Kalendar’s raw materials.

  Closer to Faber than he had been the first time, he was able to see how dramatically he had gotten his villain wrong, too, how greatly he had underestimated this creature’s capacities, as well as Willy’s. By a considerable margin, Mitchell Faber was the scariest, the most frightening, of these apparitions. Faber had produced himself out of his own most savage impulses, and the result was crazier and more feral than his author had understood. At least Tim had not permitted this shiny predator to marry Willy Patrick. This man would willingly rip a foe apart with only his teeth. After he had washed off the blood, he would slip into his tuxedo and proceed to charm the wives and widows of his monomaniacal employers. (He was what you got when you asked for James Bond, Tim realized—you got a beast like this.)

  “It’s no good if I tell you what you have to do, you miserable turd.” Faber grinned in a way that Willy had undoubtedly once found winning. “You have to come up with it by yourself. Let me say this: it should be obvious, even to you.”

  “I’m too scared to think,” Tim said.

  “You have to make amends. What do you have to offer, you moron? How can you make amends? Let’s see, how did you wrong me in the first place?”

  “Oh,” Tim said, realizing what was being asked, and that it was exactly what Willy had proposed for him. “I can’t do that.”

  Faber slid an inch nearer. His teeth gleamed, and so did the whites of his eyes. He had the most perfect mustache humankind had ever seen. “But isn’t that exactly what you do? And you must realize that if you refuse, our friend Mr. Kohle will make your life an utter horror for the brief period of time you will have left to you. That is certain. And all we ask is that you do a good job, the best you can manage.”

  “I can’t restore your reputation,” Tim said.

  “Of course you can’t. I have exactly the reputation I earned. What I want you to do—what you are going to do, if you want you and your precious friends on Grand Street to go on enjoying your lives—is to do justice to my case.”

  He stepped forward again, crushing pellets of plaster beneath his gleaming shoes. “We’re through. Get out of here. And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone. I’m just as good as he is.”

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  Mitchell Faber/Joseph Kalendar snapped out of visibility with a contemptuous abruptness, leaving me alone in the filthy room. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to learn what a Cleresyte is, and that, as with artists and detectives, its identity is inseparable from what it does.

  When he saw me coming out of the house, WCHWHLLDN pushed himself off the tree and straightened up. By the time I got to the bottom of the steps, he was already striding along the walkway. The black lenses of his sunglasses gleamed silver with moonlight, and under his tight black T-shirt, his muscles stood out like an anatomy lesson. He looked like pure purpose encased in pure impatience. As I drew nearer, I felt the coldness of his disdain and thought, He hates me because I’m not pure! I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was right. When we passed, I took a half step to the right, expecting him to do the same. Instead, he deliberately shifted with me, and for the briefest of moments, his right shoulder brushed my left. I felt as though I’d been hit by a truck.

  The impact knocked me off my feet and sent me flying six feet over the dying meadow of Kalendar’s lawn. I came down with a thump on my side. From the pain that blazed from shoulder to elbow, I thought my arm was broken. I propped myself up on my good arm and watched the menacing angel move up the steps. He got onto the porch and turned around—because I was watching him. He opened his mouth, and again I knew the concentrated terror I had felt when I’d opened the living room door. I understood with absolute certainty that the angel’s voice would ruin my hearing and drive me madder than I had ever been at Austen Riggs. There I had been merely a basket case, not a hell-for-leather, mush-brain lunatic. He chose not to speak. That’s all it was: he didn’t want to waste his time on me.

  He spun around and passed through the front door without bothering to open it. Even his boot heels looked pissed off. A moment after he had entered the house, an explosion of light turned all the windows brilliantly white, and his great wings creaked open and penetrated through the walls without breaking them. Glowing, glowering, WCHWHLLDN reared up through the roof and into a wide column of light that now circled the house. Each of his hands held something slithery, shapeless, and dark, from which depended a long, apronlike robe in which I thought I saw a thousand glittering little eyes and a thousand screaming mouths.

  I thought I knew what he was carrying—not the evil that had been done in the house but the pain and sorrow of Kalendar’s victims. All along, that was what had made the little house so ugly, so elusive, so avoidable: Kalendar’s real trophies—not the corpses of his victims but what they had felt in his presence. WCHWHLLDN was the night crew; he did the cleaning up and clearing away. The giant angel flew higher and higher, mounting the sky, and the dirty fabric trailing behind him unreeled and unreeled from the house. When the last of it went snapping upward and disappeared, the angel came battering down from the heavens and did the same all over again, repeatedly, bearing away the scraps and residue of that stinking darkness and that sacred charge until the house was cleansed. The bu
rn marks had disappeared from the front of the house.

  I think WCHWHLLDN would have made Philip very happy, for in his way the angel followed his wishes to the last degree: he burned down the house, dug a six-foot-deep pit where it had been, filled the pit with gasoline, and set it alight. His job, his task throughout eternity, had been purification, and he had been assigned this case. He cured infection and eliminated pollution. In his eyes, I, along with every other human being, represented a vast irritant. We carried pollution and contamination wherever we went, and we were far too imperfect to be immortal. We didn’t have a chance of understanding what was going on until we reached zamani. (Come to think of it, this is pretty much the way Philip used to feel, back in the days before his rescue by China Beech.)

  The light no one could see left the Kalendar house and the star realms above it; the work no one had seen had been concluded. I pushed myself upright and staggered back to my car, bruised and aching and almost too numb to feel.

  When I let myself back into what had been our room and now was mine, I felt Willy’s absence the way you feel a phantom limb. She had been amputated from me, and although I had performed the surgery, I wanted her back. I missed her vastly, oceanically. Her face appeared wherever I looked, on the windows, in the wallpaper, in the air above the bed we had shared. The Cleresyte’s touch, and the fall it had given me, still pounded throughout my body. In a funny way, I didn’t mind, because the pain helped take my mind off Willy.

  I filled the tub and soaked in a hot bath until my fingertips were wrinkled. Hunger returned to me as I toweled myself off, and with Willy’s voice in my ear, I called room service. Sheer longing tempted me to order two steaks, two orders of onion rings, and a dozen candy bars, but when the waiter answered, I settled for tomato soup and roasted chicken, the kind of meal my mother used to make.