In the Night Room
Peter Straub

For Gary K. Wolfe

I wanted to write, and just tell you that me and my spirit were fighting this morning. It is’nt known generally, and you must’nt tell anybody.

– EMILY DICKINSON,

letter to Emily Fowler, 1850

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

– ROGER SCRUTON

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One WILLY’S LOSING HER MIND AGAIN/SO IS TIM

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Part Two TWO VOICES FROM A CLOUD

14

15

Part Three THE ROLE OF TOM HARTLAND

16

17

18

19

20

Part Four TIM UNDERHILL SAILS TO BYZANTIUM/SO DOES WILLY

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Part Five THE WOMAN GLIMPSED AT THE WINDOW

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By Peter Straub

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One WILLY’S LOSING HER MIND AGAIN/SO IS TIM

1

About 9:45 on a Wednesday morning early in a rain-drenched September, a novelist named Timothy Underhill gave up, in more distress than he cared to acknowledge, on his ruined breakfast and the New York Times crossword puzzle and returned, far behind schedule, to his third-floor loft at 55 Grand Street. Closing his door behind him did nothing to calm his troubled heart. He clanked his streaming umbrella into an upright metal stand, transported a fresh cup of decaffeinated coffee to his desk, parked himself in a flexible mesh chair bristling with controls, double-clicked on Outlook Express’s arrow-swathed envelope, and, with the sense of finally putting most of his problem behind him, called to the surface of his screen the day’s first catch of e-mails, ten in all. Two of them were completely inexplicable. Because the messages seemed to come from strangers (with names unattached to specific domains, he would notice later), bore empty subject lines, and consisted of no more than a couple of disconnected words each, he promptly deleted them.

As soon as he had done so, he remembered dumping a couple of similar e-mails two days earlier. For a moment, what he had seen from the sidewalk outside the Fireside Diner flared again before him, wrapped in every bit of its old urgency and dread.

2

In a sudden shaft of brightness that fell some twenty miles northwest of Grand Street, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick (soon to be Faber) was turning her slightly dinged little Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice, to drive two and two-tenths miles along Union Street’s increasingly vacant blocks instead of proceeding directly home. When she reached a vast parking lot with two sedans trickling through its exit, she checked her rearview mirror and looked around before driving in. Irregular slicks of water gleamed on the black surface of the lot. The men waiting to drive out of the lot took in the blond, shaggy-haired woman moving through their field of vision at the wheel of a sleek, snubnosed car; one of them thought he was looking at a teenaged boy.

Willy drifted along past the penitentiary-like building that dominated the far end of the parking lot. Her shoulders rode high and tight, and her upper arms seemed taut as cords. Like all serious compulsions, hers seemed both a necessary part of her character and to have been wished upon her by some indifferent deity. Willy pulled in to an empty space and, now at the heart of her problem, regarded what was before her: a long, shabby-looking brick structure, three stories high, with wide metal doors and ranks of filthy windows concealed behind cobwebs of mesh. Around the back, she knew, the dock that led into the loading bays protruded outward, like a pier over the surface of a lake. A row of grimy letters over the topmost row of windows spelled out MICHIGAN PRODUCE.

Somehow, that had been the start of her difficulties: MICHIGAN PRODUCE, the words, not the building, which appeared to be a wholesale fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. Two days earlier, driving along inattentively, in fact in one of her ‘dazes,’ her ‘trances’—Mitchell Faber’s words—Willy had found herself here, on this desolate section of Union Street, and the two words atop the big grimy structure had all but peeled themselves off the warehouse, set themselves on fire, and floated aflame toward her through the slate-colored air.

Willy had the feeling that she had been led here, that her ‘trance’ had been charged with purpose, and that she had been all along meant to come across this building.

She wondered if this kind of thing ever happened to someone else. Almost instantly, Willy dismissed the strange little vision that blazed abruptly in her mind, of a beautiful, darkhaired teenaged boy, skateboard in one hand, standing dumbstruck on a sunlit street before an empty, ordinary-looking building. Her imagination had always been far too willing to leap into service, whether or not at the time imagination was actually useful. That sometimes it had been supremely useful to Willy did not diminish her awareness that her imaginative faculty could also turn on her, savagely. Oh, yes. You never knew which was the case, either, until the dread began to crawl up your arms.

The image of a teenaged boy and an empty house added to the sum of disorder at large in the universe, and she sent it back to the mysterious realm from which it had emerged. Because: hey, what might be in that empty house?

3

The memory of the messages he had seen on Monday awakened Tim Underhill’s curiosity, and before going on to answer the few of the day’s e-mails that required responses, he clicked on Deleted Items, of which he seemed now to have accumulated in excess of two thousand, and looked for the ones that matched those he had just received. There they were, together in the order in which he had deleted them: Huffy and presten, with the blank subject lines that indicated a kind of indifference to protocol he wished he did not find mildly annoying. He clicked on the first message.

From: Huffy

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, September 1, 2003 8:52 AM

Subject:

re member

That was the opposite of dis member, Tim supposed, and dis member was the guy standing next to dat member. He tried the second one.

From: presten

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, September 1, 2003 9:01 AM

Subject:

no helo

Useless, meaningless, a nuisance. Huffy and presten were kids who had figured out how to hide their e-mail addresses. Presumably they had learned his from the website mentioned on the jacket of his latest book. He looked again at the two e-mails he had just dumped.

From: rudderless

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 6:32 AM

Subject:

no time

and

From: loumay

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 6:41 AM

Subject:

there wuz

There wuz, wuz there? All of these enigmatic messages sounded as though their perpetrators were half asleep, or as though their hands had been snatched off the keyboard—maybe by the next customer at some Internet café, since the second messages came only minutes after the first ones.

What were the odds that four people savvy enough to delete the second half of their e-mail addresses would decide, more or less simultaneously, to send early-morning gibberish to the same person? And how much steeper were the odds against one of them writing ‘no helo,’ whatever that meant, and another deciding, with no prior agreement, upon the echo-phrase ‘no time’? Although he thought such a coincidence was impossible, he still felt mildly uneasy as he rejected it.

Because that left only two options, and both raised the ante. Either the four people who’d sent the e-mails to him were acting together in conspiracy, or the e-mails had all been sent by the same person using four names.

The names, Huffy, presten, rudderless, loumay, suggested no pattern. They were not familiar. A moment later, Tim remembered that back in his hometown, Millhaven, Illinois, a boy named Paul Resten had been his teammate on the Holy Sepulchre football team. Paulie Resten had been a chaotic little fireplug with greasy hair, a shoplifting problem, and a tendency toward violence. It seemed profoundly unlikely that after a silence of forty-odd years Paulie would send him a two-word e-mail.

Tim read the messages over again, thought for a second, then rearranged them:

re member

there wuz

no helo

no time

which could just as easily have been

re member

there wuz

no time

no helo

or

there wuz

no time

no helo

re member

Not much of an advance, was it? The possibility that ‘helo’ could be a typo for ‘help’ came to mind. Remember, there was no time, no help. Whatever the hell that was about, it was pretty depressing. Also depressing was the notion that four people had decided to send him that disjointed message. If Tim felt like getting depressed, he had merely to think of his brother, Philip, who, not much more than one year after his wife’s suicide and the disappearance of his son, had announced his impending marriage to one China Beech, a born-again Christian whom Philip had met shortly after her emergence from the chrysalis of an exotic dancer. On the whole, Tim decided, he’d rather think about the inexplicable e-mails.

They had the stale, slightly staid aura of a Sherlock Holmes setup. Faintly, the rusty machinery of a hundred old detective novels could be heard, grinding into what passed for life. Nonetheless, in the twenty-first century any such thing had to be seen as a possible threat. At the very least, a malign hacker could have compromised the security of his system.

When his antivirus program discovered no loathsome substance hidden within his folders and files, Tim procrastinated a little further by calling his computer guru, Myron Dorot-Rivage. Myron looked like a Spaniard, and he spoke with a surprisingly musical German accent. He had rescued Tim and his companions at 55 Grand from multiple catastrophes.

Amazingly, Myron answered his phone on the second ring. ‘So, Tim,’ he said, being equipped with infallible caller ID as well as a headset, ‘tell me your problem. I am booked solid for at least the next three days, but perhaps we can solve it over the phone.’

‘It isn’t exactly a computer problem.’

‘You are calling me about a personal problem, Tim?’

Momentarily, Tim considered telling his computer guru about what had happened that morning on West Broadway. Myron would have no sympathy for any problem that involved a ghost. He said, ‘I’ve been getting weird e-mails,’ and described the four messages. ‘My virus check came up clean, but I’m still a little worried.’

‘You probably won’t get a virus unless you open an attachment. Are you bothered by the anonymity?’

‘Well, yeah. How do they do that, leave out their addresses? Is that legal?’

‘Legal schmegal. I could arrange the same thing for you, if you were willing to pay for it. But what I cannot do is trace such an e-mail back to its source. These people pay their fees for a reason, after all!’

Myron drew in his breath, and Tim heard the clatter of metal against metal. It was like talking to an obstetrician who was delivering a baby.

After hanging up, Tim noticed that three new e-mails had arrived since his last look at his inbox. The first, Monster Oral Sex Week, undoubtedly offered seven days’ free access to a porn site; the second, 300,000 Customers, almost certainly linked to an e-mail database; the third, nayrm, made the skin on his forearms prickle. The Sex and the Customers disappeared unopened into the landfill of deleted mail. As he had dreaded, nayrm proved, when clicked upon, to have arrived without the benefit of a filled-in subject line or identifiable e-mail address. It had been sent at 10:58 A.M. and consisted of three words:

hard death hard

4

Yo, Willy! You with the funny name! Are we interested in another journey back to the antiseptic corridors of western Massachusetts? An hour or two in the Institute’s game room?

No.

Don’t think about what might be hidden in empty buildings, okay?

That was the whole problem: what might be, could possibly be, and according to every variety of internal registration she possessed actually was at that very moment inside the warehouse located two and two-tenths of a mile north of the Union Street Pathmark. What she was thinking, what she unfortunately believed, was completely crazy. Her daughter, Holly, could not possibly be hiding or kept prisoner inside Michigan Produce. Her daughter was dead. Raw though it was, Holly’s death was not actually all that recent. She had been dead for two years and four months. Along with James Patrick, Willy’s husband, Holly had been gunned down in the back of a car, soaked with gasoline, and set on fire. That was that. No matter how deeply they were loved, children who had been shot to death and set on fire did not come back. As a doctor (whose name, Bollis, Willy wouldn’t wish on a two-headed dwarf) in the Berkshires village of Stockwell could explain to any party in need of explanation, the belief that one’s child had returned from the realm of the dead not as a ghost but a living being could be no more than the product of a wish bamboozled into mistaking itself for fact.

Willy took in the produce warehouse, saw the letters pulse above the high row of windows, and knew beyond any possibility of a doubt—apart, of course, from its not being true—that her daughter was in there. Holly cowered at the back of a storeroom, or she was hidden in a closet, or beneath the desk in an empty office. Or in some other clammy bardo from which her mother alone could rescue her.

Willy grasped the car’s door handle, and sweat burst out across her forehead. If she opened the door, out she would go, her shaky control over her actions vanished altogether. Brainless as a falling meteor would she race toward the warehouse, brave little Willy, searching for a way to break in.

If she were ever to give in to this disastrous impulse, she realized, it would happen at night, when the warehouse was empty.

In the night would she pull the curved spoon of the door handle from its recessed pocket, releasing the catch, opening the door, thereby creating a space immediately to be filled by her body. As if scripted in advance, the whole doomed enterprise would follow. Half of her agony lay in its own uselessness; grief led people to do things they understood were hopelessly stupid. Even worse, she knew that should she succumb, her nighttime entry would trigger an alarm. She would attempt to conceal herself, would be discovered and taken to the police station, there to try to explain herself.

After his return from England, or France, or wherever his mysterious errands had taken him, maybe Mitchell Faber could talk her out of custody, but then she would have to face Mitchell. In almost every way, her husband-to-be was more threatening than the local cops.

Willy had no doubt that a brush with the police would have a dire effect on Mitchell. Given his capacity for well-banked fury, it would take her weeks to worm her way back into the sunlight. Unlike her late husband, Mitchell was dark of eye, dark of hair, dark dark dark of character. His darkness protected her, she felt; it was on her side and alert to threat, like a pet wolf. Far better not to attract its dead-level glare. For a person who appeared to wield a great deal of influence, Mitchell Faber refused the limelight and demanded to live in the shadows at the side of the stage.

Willy released the handle and grasped the steering wheel with both hands. This felt like progress, and at the same time like an unimaginable betrayal. Although the temperature had dropped, slick moisture clung to her face like a washcloth. She could all but hear Holly’s clear, high voice, calling out to her. How could she turn her back on her daughter? Her left hand drifted to the handle again. Only a massive effort of will permitted her to pull her hand back to the wheel. For a second or two, she granted herself leave from rationality and howled like an animal stuck in a trap. Then she shut her mouth, forced herself to turn the key, and put the car in reverse. Without looking at the rearview mirror, she backed away from the building. On the lot, the surfaces of all the puddles seemed to shiver in rebuke.

Driving too quickly, she bumped her tires against the curb. When she shot forward, fleeing a sound audible only in her head, the front of her car crashed down onto the road, and she gave the inside of her cheek a quick, sharp bite. The pain in her mouth helped her through the dangerous two and two-tenths miles to the Pathmark. After that, each passing mile brought her a greater degree of clarity. It was as though she had been in a trance, no longer responsible for her thoughts and actions.

Willy drove the rest of the way home in a complicated mixture of relief and bright panicky alarm. Very narrowly, she had escaped craziness.

5

hard death hard

More than a little creeped out, Tim stared at the message on his screen. Nayrm had joined in with Huffy, presten, and the others to disrupt a stranger’s day with what was either a joke or a threat. If it was supposed to be a joke, the disruption had been hideously mistimed. A little more than a year earlier, Tim’s nephew, Mark, his brother’s son, had vanished utterly from the face of the earth. Tim still felt the boy’s loss with the original sick, vertiginous sharpness. His grief had only deepened, not lessened. How greatly he had loved Mark he understood only after it was too late to demonstrate that love. Hard death hard, yes, hard on the survivors.

Tim had wanted to bring his nephew to New York City and advance his education by showing him a thousand beautiful things, the Vermeers at the Frick, an opera at the Met, little hidden corners of the Village, the whole rough, lively commerce of the street. He had wanted to be a kind of father to the boy, and if he could have seen Mark enrolled at Columbia or NYU, he would have been a better father than Philip ever was. Instead, after watching his brother almost immediately abandon hope for his son’s survival, Tim had written a novel that permitted Mark the continued life a monster named Ronald Lloyd-Jones had stolen from him—in lost boy lost girl, to be published in a week, Mark Underhill slipped away into an ‘Elsewhere’ with a beautiful phantom named ‘Lucy Cleveland,’ in reality Lily Kalendar, the daughter of a second homicidal monster, Joseph Kalendar. She had almost certainly died at her father’s hands sometime in her fifth or sixth year, although as with Mark, no remains were ever found. In Tim’s imagination, the two of them, the lost boy and the lost girl, had escaped their fates by fleeing into another world altogether, a world with the potentiality of cyberspace, where they ran hand in hand along a tropical beach below a darkening sky, conscious always of the Dark Man hurrying after them. Better that for his dear nephew, better by far, than monstrous Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s attentions.

There had to be a Dark Man, for otherwise nothing in their world would be real, least of all them.

Tim had known about the Dark Man since the day his older sister, April, had been murdered in an alleyway alongside the St Alwyn Hotel and he, dimly seeing it happen and running toward her, was mowed down by a passing car on Livermore Avenue. Before thirty seconds had ticked away, April was dead, and he, too, had passed out of life. He seemed to be following her into a realm where darkness and light inhabited the same dazzling space. Then a sturdy, unexpected cord yanked him back into his mutilated body, and his education really took off.

His brother claimed not to remember anything about April, which may have been the truth. Mom and Pop never spoke of her, though from time to time Tim could see the subject of his sister’s death glide into form between them, like a giant cloud both his parents pretended not to see. Could Philip have missed it altogether, their stifled grief ? April had been nine at the time of her death, Tim seven. Philip had been three, so maybe he really did have no conscious memory of their sister. On the other hand, Philip possessed a massive talent for denial.

If Tim had ever thought he could forget April, her recurring ghost would soon have let him know otherwise. A year after her death, he had seen her seated four rows behind him on the Pulaski Avenue bus, her face turned to a window; three years later, he and his mother bunking off on the Lake Michigan ferry, Tim had looked down and with a gasp of shock and sorrow seen his sister’s blond head tilted over the railing at the squared-off aft end of the lower deck. Later, he had seen her outside a grocery store in Berkeley, where he had been a student; on a truck with a lot of uniformed nurses in Camp Crandall, Vietnam, where he had been a pearl diver on the body squad; twice riding by in taxicabs, in New York, where he lived; and twice again in the first-class sections of airplanes, when he had been having a nice little drink.

On all but one of these occasions, Tim had understood that for a brief moment desire had transformed a convenient female child into his sister; but there had been no little girls in Camp Crandall. In Camp Crandall, the daily task of rummaging through ruined corpses in search of ID had affected Tim’s consciousness in a number of extravagant ways, likewise the enforced proximity to elaborately fucked-up grunts with names like Ratman and Pirate. There he had witnessed what he took to be the only true hallucination of his life.

Until this morning. What he had seen across the street from the Fireside Diner on West Broadway had to be a hallucination, for it could be nothing else. Without benefit of sound effects or a premonitory shift in the lighting, nine-year-old April Underhill had abruptly entered his field of vision. She was wearing an old blue-and-white thing she called her Alice in Wonderland dress. At the time of her death, Tim remembered, April had been obsessed with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and she’d had on that crazy dress because she usually refused to wear anything else. Now she faced him, her stare like a shout in the crowded street. Limp blond hair in need of washing, the bodice of the Alice dress darkened with raindrops, a figure so distant from her proper time she should have been in black and white, or two-dimensional—this apparition struck him like a bolt of lightning and left him sizzling where he stood.

Two stubble-faced boys wearing black swerved to move around him.

For a time he was incapable of speech. He could tell himself, April isn’t really there, I’m hallucinating, but what he was looking at seemed and felt like fact. Long-forgotten things returned laden with the gritty imperfections of the actual person his sister had been. The characteristic note of April’s nine-year-old life had been frustration, he saw: she had the face of a child who, having grown used to being thwarted, was in a furious hurry to reach adulthood.

April’s stubborn face, with its implacable cheekbones and tight mouth, reminded Tim of Pop’s uncomprehending rages at what he perceived as April’s defiance. No wonder she had fled into the mirror world of Alice and the Mad Hatter. A tavern-haunting elevator operator at the St Alwyn Hotel supervised her life, and he found half of the things that ran through her mind unacceptable, irritating, obscurely insulting.

A second and a half later Tim was left with the fact of April’s face, narrower than he remembered, and the smallness of her body, the true childishness of the sister he had lost. All his old love for nine-year-old April Underhill awakened in him—she who had defended him when he needed defending, stuck up for him when he needed a champion, entranced him with the best stories he had ever heard. She, he realized, she should have been the writer! April had been his guide, and to the end. On her last day, she had preceded him into the ultimate Alice-world, the one beyond death, where, unable any longer to follow his best, bravest, and most tender guide all the way to her unimaginable destination, he had yielded to the forces pulling him back.

He wanted to tell her to get out of the rain.

April stepped forward on the crowded sidewalk, and Tim’s heart went cold with terror. His sister had swum back through the mirror to interrupt him on his way to breakfast. He feared that she intended to glide across the street, grasp his hand, and pull him into the SoHo traffic. She reached the edge of the pavement and raised her arms.

Oh no, she’s going to call to me, he thought, and I’ll have to go.

Instead of dragging him through the mirror, April brought her hands to the sides of her mouth, leaned forward, contracted her whole being, and, as loudly as she could, shouted through the megaphone of her hands. All Tim heard were the sounds of the traffic and the scraps of conversation spoken by the people walking past him.

His eyes stung, his vision blurred. By the time he raised his hands to flick away his tears, April had disappeared.

6

Guilderland Road, at the upper end of which lay Mitchell Faber’s expansive, densely wooded property, traversed an area on the southwestern slopes (so to speak) of Alpine, New Jersey, where not long after the Civil War the nearly invisible village of Hendersonia had been surgically detached from the more public borough of Creskill. In all aspects of life save the naming of places, the Hendersons of Hendersonia had presumably cherished obscurity as thoroughly as Mitchell Faber, for they had passed through history leaving behind no more than a scattering of barely legible headstones in the postage-stamp graveyard at the lower end of the road. Farther down the hill, the cement-block bank, an abandoned Presbyterian church, a private house turned into an insurance agency, a video and DVD rental shop, and a bar and grill called Redtop’s made up the center of town. The previous summer, a Foodtown grocery store had taken over an old bowling alley in a paved lot one block south, and Willy promised herself that from now on she would do her shopping there.

She was still finding her way around, still trying to get into a routine. It had been only two weeks since Mitchell had succeeded in persuading her to abandon her cozy one-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-seventh Street for the ‘estate.’ They were to be married in two months, why not start living together now? They were adults of thirty-eight and fifty-two (a young fifty-two), alone in the world. Let’s face it, Mitchell said one night, you need me. She needed him, and he wanted her as extravagantly as someone like Mitchell Faber could ever want anything—dark, frowning Mitchell summoning her into his embrace, promising to make sure the bad things never got close to her again. The ‘estate’ would be perfect for her, he said, a protective realm, as Mitchell himself was a kind of protective realm. And large enough to provide separate offices for both of them, because he wanted to spend more time at home and she needed what all women, especially women who wrote books, needed: A Room of Her Own.

When Willy had met Mitchell Faber, he amazed her by knowing not only that her third YA novel, In the Night Room, had just won the Newbery Medal, but also that its setting, Mill Basin, was based on the city where she had been born, Millhaven, Illinois.

The prize had been announced four days earlier, but the party at Molly Harper’s apartment was not in her honor, and Willy’s triumph was so fresh, as yet still half unreal, that she felt as though it might be revoked. Willy herself, having yet to emerge from mad grieving darkness, would have run from anything as public as a celebration. She felt only barely capable of handling a dinner party. Some of the people present were aware that Willy had just been honored by the Newbery Committee, and some of those came up to congratulate her. Molly’s friends tended to be too rich to be demonstrative; like Molly herself, many of the women were decades younger than their husbands, thereby generally obliged to exercise a kind of behavioral modification akin to the pushing of a ‘Mute’ button. Added to their characteristic restraint was their response to Willy’s appearance, that of a gorgeous lost child. Some women disliked her on sight. Others felt threatened when their husbands wandered, flirtatiously or not, into Willy’s orbit.

Toward the end of the evening, or shortly after ten o’clock, for these silver-haired men and their gleaming wives never stayed up later than eleven, Lankford Harper, Molly’s whispery husband, left the chair to Willy’s left and within seconds was replaced by a sleek, smooth male animal remarkable for being older than most of the women and younger than all of the men. Energy hummed through his thick, shiny black hair and luxuriant black mustache. Black eyes and brilliant white teeth shone at Willy, and a wide, warm dark hand covered hers. That she did not find this intimacy discomfiting amazed her. Whatever was about to happen, would; instead of feeling offended, Willy relaxed.

—I want to congratulate you on your magnificent honor, Mrs Patrick, the man said, leaning in. You must feel as though you’ve won the lottery.

—Hardly that, she said. Do you keep up with children’s books then, Mr…?

—I’m Mitchell Faber. No, I can’t say I’m an expert on children’s books, but the Newbery’s a great accolade, and I have heard wonderful things about your book. Your third, isn’t it?

She opened her mouth.—Yes.

—Good title, In the Night Room, especially for a children’s book.

—It’s probably too close to Maurice Sendak, but he was writing for a younger audience. Why am I explaining myself to this guy? she wondered.

His hand tightened on hers.—Please excuse me for what I’m about to say, Mrs Patrick. I knew your husband. At times, our work brought us into contact. He was a fine, fine man.

For a moment, Willy’s vision went grainy, and her heart hovered between beats. Ordinary conversation hummed on around her. She blinked and raised her napkin to her mouth, buying time.

—I’m sorry, the man said. I did that very badly.

—Not at all. I was just a bit startled. Do you work for the Baltic Group?

—From time to time, they call me in to make murky issues even murkier.

—I’m sure you bring clarity wherever you go, she said, and, in a way she hoped brought the conversation to a neat conclusion, thanked him for having approached her.

Mitchell Faber leaned in and patted her hand.—Mill Basin, the village in your book. Is it based on Millhaven? I understand that’s where you’re from.

Mitchell Faber was chockablock with little astonishments.

Flattered, puzzled, she smiled back at him.—You must know Millhaven very well. Are you from there, too?

The question was absurd: Faber did not look, sound, or behave like a Millhaven native. Nor was he a product of the East Coast privilege-hatcheries responsible for Lankford Harper.

—Sometimes when I’m in Chicago I like to drive up to Millhaven, check in to the Pforzheimer for a night or two, wander along the river walk, have a drink in the old Green Woman. Do you know the Green Woman Taproom?

She had never heard of the Green Woman Taproom.

—Lovely old bar, fascinating history. Ought to be in encyclopedias. It has an interesting connection to criminal lore.

Criminal lore? She had no idea what he was talking about, and no intention of finding out. As far as Willy was concerned, the murders of her husband and daughter were more than enough crime for the rest of her life. The very idea of ‘criminal lore’ struck her as a bad idea.

Mitchell Faber could have struck her the same way, but Willy found that she had not made up her mind so quickly. Calling Molly the next day to thank her, she found herself asking her friend about the man who had spoken to her about the Newbery and Millhaven. Molly knew very little about him.

A day later, Willy called to report that the unknown dinner guest had asked if they might get together for a cup of coffee or a drink, or anything.

—I’d go straight for the anything, Molly told her. What have you got to lose? I thought he was pretty cute. Besides, he isn’t a hundred years old.

—I don’t know anything about him, Willy said. And I don’t think I’m ready to start dating. I’m not even close.

—Willy, how long has it been?

—Two years. That’s nothing.

—So’s a cup of coffee.

—I’d have to tell him everything.

—If he works with Lanky, he knows everything already. These guys can find out whatever they want to, they can dig up anything. Lanky told me they’re better than the CIA, and they should be! They have about ten times the money!

—Ah, Willy said. So that’s how Mr Faber found out about In the Night Room and Millhaven.

—He had Lanky!

—Lanky knows I won the Newbery? Excuse me, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.

Molly was laughing.—Of course Lanky knows. He even read Night Room.

Now Willy was stunned.—Lanky read my book? It’s a YA!

—YA novels are Lanky’s secret passion. When he was twenty-five years old, he read The Greengage Summer, and it changed his life. Now he’s an expert on Rumer Godden.

Willy tried to picture Molly’s gaunt, secretive, gray-haired husband in his blue pin-striped suit and gold watch, bending, in the light of a library lamp, over a copy of Miss Happiness and Miss Flower.

—He has a fabulous collection, Molly said. We’re talking about Lankford Harper now, remember. There’s a special vault with huge metal bookshelves. When you push this little button, they revolve. Thousands of books, most of them in great condition. When he gets a new one, he buys a bunch of copies, one to read and the rest to put in the vault. Philip Pullman—you wouldn’t believe how much those Philip Pullmans are worth.

Willy should have known that Lanky Harper’s interest in her fiction was primarily financial.—How many copies of In the Night Room are stashed away in that vault?

—Five. He bought three when it came out, and as soon as the Newbery was announced, he bought two more.

—Five copies? I guess he liked it a lot. Her mind had returned to Mitchell Faber, whose intrusiveness had contained an unexpected quantity of appeal. At least Faber had been unafraid actually to talk to the tragic widow, instead of swaddling her in clichés. Secretly, dark Mitchell Faber rather thrilled Willy Patrick: he was the kind of man for whom everyone else’s rules were merely guidelines.

7

So there he had been, Tim Underhill, in the good old Fireside, trying to act as though his hands weren’t shaking so badly that the mushrooms fell off his fork; and trying to look as absorbed in the crossword puzzle as he was every other morning. The words kept blurring on the page, and none of the clues made sense; above all, Underhill was trying simultaneously to figure out and ignore whatever his murdered nine-year-old sister had been shouting at him from the other side of West Broadway. Contradictory desires were difficult to fulfill, especially when wrapped in such urgency. April bending forward, shouting at him, bellowing, frantic to get her message across…

‘Mr Underhill?’

Tim turned to see the face of an eager black-haired man of forty or so, still boyish, and radiant with what looked like mingled pleasure and bravado. A fan. This kind of thing happened to him maybe three times a year.

‘You got me,’ he said, dropping his hands to his lap to conceal their trembling.

‘Timothy Underhill is right here, right smack in the Fireside. Just like a normal person.’

‘I am a normal person,’ Tim said, stretching a point.

‘I yam what I yam, hah! Didn’t you say that once? In print, I mean?’

He had quoted Popeye? It sounded remotely possible, but possible. Barely.

‘Would you do a big favor for me? I’m a fan, obviously—who else would barge in on your little breakfast, right? But I’d really appreciate it if you signed some books for me. Would you do that, Mr Underhill? Would you sign some books for me, Tim? Is it all right if I call you Tim?’

‘You carry my books around with you?’

‘Hey, that’s funny. You’re a funny guy, Tim! Ever think about going into comedy? No, the books are back in my apartment, I mean, where else would they be? If I had ESP, I’d have them with me, but no such luck, right? But I live right down the street, be back in five minutes, less, four minutes, time me with your watch, check it out, see if I’m wrong. Okay? We got a deal?’

‘Go get the books,’ Tim said.

The fan made a pistol with his hand, pointed it at Tim, and dropped the hammer of his thumb. He whirled away and was out the door. Tim realized that he had never given his name. As fans went, this one seemed slightly off, but Tim wished to preserve an open mind about anyone who bought his books. Anyone who did that had earned his gratitude.

Today’s admirer stretched his patience nearly to the breaking point. After twelve minutes, Tim began to simmer. He liked getting to his desk by ten, and it was already 9:40. If he gave up on the eggs he didn’t want and abandoned the puzzle he couldn’t concentrate on well enough to finish, he could avoid dealing with the fan, who had been overassertive, overintrusive, and was unlikely to be satisfied with merely a couple of signatures. He would want to talk, to swap phone numbers, to find out where Tim lived. He’d escalated from ‘Mr Underhill’ to ‘Tim’ in less than a second. ‘Tim’ did not want to encourage a fan who told him he was a funny guy—it gave him the willies. So did the shooting gesture with which the man had left him.

Again, he saw April before him, cupping her hands and shaping her mouth to shout…

Whistle to us? That could not be right.

Tim let his fork clatter to his plate, signaled the waiter for the check, and returned his pen to his pocket. Rain streamed down the windows of the diner, and when the door swung open, a few drops spattered onto the tiles. Tim sighed. A wet hand swept the sodden hood of a sweatshirt off his admirer’s glowing face. The fan held up a yellow bag bearing the likeness of Charles Dickens.

‘Did you time me?’

Tim looked at his watch. ‘You were gone at least twenty minutes.’

‘No, six, at the outside. I would have been here earlier, but the rain slowed me down.’

The fan pulled the books one by one from the shiny bag and stacked them about an inch north of Tim’s plate. They were copies of lost boy lost girl, as yet unpublished. He had received his box of author’s copies only a short while before. ‘These babies stayed dry, anyhow.’ The fan wiped his face and pushed the moisture back into his thick black hair. ‘Must be a great feeling to sign a book you wrote, huh? Like “This is my baby, get a good look, ’cuz I’m one proud papa,” right?’

Tim wanted to get rid of this character as soon as possible. ‘Where did you get these books?’

The man slid the books nearer to Tim. ‘Why? I bought them, didn’t I?’

Water dripped from his sleeves, and drops landed on the Times crossword puzzle. In a small number of squares, the ink melted into the paper.

‘Okay,’ he said, and sat down in the chair opposite Tim. ‘Sign the first one to Jasper Kohle, that’s Jasper the normal way, and Kohle is K-O-H-L-E. My full name is Jasper Dan Kohle, but I only use my middle name on checks and my driver’s license, ha ha. Inscribe it however you like. Have fun. Use your imagination. You could say, “To Jasper Kohle, I yam what I yam.” ’

The only thing worse than someone ordering you to be inventive when you signed their book was someone telling you exactly what to write. This fan had managed to do both. Tim looked at Jasper Kohle, for the first time actually taking him in, and saw someone whose cheerfulness was laid on like paint. His eyes had no light, and his smile displayed too many teeth, all of them yellow. He was ten to fifteen years older than he had first appeared.

‘You didn’t go to your apartment,’ Tim said. ‘You ran all the way to the bookstore, and then you ran back. I don’t understand it, but that’s what you did. But the real problem is this book hasn’t actually been published yet, and it’s not supposed to be on sale. The copies aren’t even supposed to have shipped to the bookstores.’

‘Come on,’ Kohle said. ‘You must have some kind of problem with trust.’

‘If I looked inside that bag, I bet I’d find a receipt with today’s date on it.’

Kohle glowered at him. ‘Let me ask you a question, Tim. Are you this pricky to all your fans?’

‘No, I’m just interested in your explanation.’

‘I wanted more.’

‘More copies of the same book?’

‘I have four at home. But since you’re here, I thought I should get three more, so I’d have three signed, plus four backup copies. One of ’em I’ve read, but that’s all, just one.’ He nudged the books still closer to Tim. ‘Don’t inscribe the second two, just flat sign them and put down the date. On the title page, please.’

‘You wanted seven copies of lost boy lost girl ?’

Kohle showed his yellow teeth again. ‘If you want to know the truth, I’d like ten, but I’m not a fucking millionaire, am I?’

‘Why would you want ten copies?’

‘I collect books!’

‘I guess you do,’ Tim said. He picked up his pen, opened the topmost book to the title page, and thought for a second before writing:

To Jasper Kohle

a collector’s collector

All Best,

Tim Underhill

After adding the date beneath this inscription, he handed the book, still opened to the title page, to Kohle, who was waiting to receive it like a child, both hands out. Gimme gimme gimme. He yanked the book from Underhill’s hands, turned it around, and dipped his head toward the inscription. Odd, irregular white-gray streaks ran through the thick black pelt on the top of his head. When he snapped his head back up, his eyes held a dull, flat glare, and the skin at the corners of his mouth looked wrinkled and dark with grease.

‘What happened to “I yam what I yam”?’

‘I’m not doing so well this morning, but I don’t think I ever put that in a book,’ Tim said.

‘Oh yes, you did. That cop, Esterhaz, says it in The Divided Man. “I yam what I yam.” Right at the beginning, when he’s hungover and getting out of bed. Just before he sees the dead people marching around.’

At his worst moments, Hal Esterhaz, an alcoholic homicide detective in Tim’s second novel, had seen an army of the dead trudging aimlessly through the streets. He had not once, however, quoted Popeye.

‘I see you don’t believe me,’ Kohle said. ‘No wonder, stupid me—you can’t, because you don’t know. Okay, go ahead, sign the other books, you probably got things you want to do.’

Tim removed the second book from the pile and opened it to the title page. He looked back at Jasper Dan Kohle and found that he could not resist. ‘I don’t know what, exactly?’

‘Mr Underhill,’ Kohle said. ‘Tim. Let me say this, Tim. And I’m saying this although I know that you will have precisely no idea at all what I’m talking about, because that is guaranteed one hundred percent certain. So first let me ask you: do you have any idea at all why a guy like me would want to collect twenty copies of the same book? A hundred copies, if I had all the money in the world, a likely story, thank you very much?’

‘As an investment?’ Tim took his eyes off Kohle long enough to sign the second book and pick up the third.

Kohle went through a savage parody of yawning. ‘I don’t even live in this neighborhood. But I saw you doing your crossword puzzle, and I let my whaddayacallit, my joie de vivre, get the better of me, and the next thing I know, I’m spending a whole lot more money than I should on your new book. Which to tell you the truth is a little lightweight, not to mention kind of rushed at the end.’

‘Glad you liked it,’ Tim said.

‘So why do I want fifteen, twenty copies of a book that isn’t really all that hot, if you don’t mind my saying so?’

‘That was my question, yes.’ Tim pushed the last two books across the table.

‘Listen up now, here it comes.’ He leaned over and cupped his mouth with his hands, as April had done. ‘One of them might be the real book.’

He pulled the three copies of Underhill’s novel into the circle of his arms. ‘What, you ask, is the real book? The one you were supposed to write, only you screwed it up. Authors think every copy of a book is the same, but they’re not. Every time a book goes through the presses, two, three, copies of the real book come out. That’s the one you wanted to write when you started out, with everything perfect, no mistakes, nothing dumb, and all the dialogue and the details exactly right. People like me, that’s what we’re looking for. Investment? Don’t make me laugh. It’s the reverse of an investment. Once you find a real book, sell it to someone? Give me a break.’

‘You’re out of your mind,’ Tim said.

Kohle raised his hands chest-high in exasperation. ‘You guys are all the same. Ninety percent of the time, you’re just making things up. You act like a bunch of lazy, irresponsible gods. It wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t basically deaf and blind, too. You don’t listen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tim asked, unsettled by the sudden reappearance on his mental screen of his sister, April.

‘If you paid more attention, your real books wouldn’t be all that different from the ones you wrote.’

Kohle seemed wetter than he had been earlier. Greasy moisture covered his sunken cheeks. His filthy sweatshirt was on the verge of disintegration.

‘Jasper, I signed your books, and now I’m just about through with this conversation. But if these “real” books exist, how come no one ever showed me one?’

‘Authors can’t see them,’ Kohle said. ‘I can’t imagine what the sight of a real book would do to one of you people—total meltdown, I suppose. Most people never get so much as a glimpse at a real book. The collectors manage to scoop ’em up almost as soon as they come out. Once in a blue moon, a reviewer gets a copy. That can be pretty funny. The reviewer flips out over some book that’s a piece of crap, and everyone wonders if he lost his mind. Come to think of it, that happened to one of your books.’

‘One of my books was an overpraised piece of crap?’

‘Yeah, imagine that.’

Smiling, Jasper Dan Kohle turned his head and watched rain bounce off the roofs of the cars inching down West Broadway.

‘You didn’t happen to look through that window and see me eating breakfast in here. You didn’t just want me to sign a couple of books. Are you even a real collector?’

‘I collect a lot of things,’ Kohle said, amused.

‘Why are you here, Jasper? If that’s your name.’

‘Don’t worry about my name, Mr Big-Time Author. Mr Fifty-five Grand Street.’ In his dark, greasy face, the yellow teeth crowded his mouth. ‘I yam what I yam, and that’s what I yam.’ He pushed the books into the bag, pulled the wet hood over his head, and rushed through the door. Tim watched him vanish into the gray street. This hostile being was walking away with samples of his handwriting. Tim felt a flicker of disquiet, as if his signature bore his DNA.

8

The author of In the Night Room was grateful for the medal it had won and the money it had earned, but she had written her third book as an act of rescue, not a means of achieving recognition. Thanks to James’s various life insurance policies, plus the fortune the Baltic Group had paid him in income and bonuses during his lifetime, money, very much a concern during the writing of Fairy Ring and The Golden Mountain, had ceased to be an issue. Her husband’s death payments had underwritten the months she had spent in western Massachusetts under the care of Dr Bollis and the quiet attendants never less than determined to give their charges what they needed: a comforting book, a comforting hug, or a comforting jab in the upper arm with a needle. Back then, nothing but bloody shreds seemed to remain of the once-familiar Willy. The bloody shreds were usually too limp and wounded to think about reassembling themselves. Her conscious life, the life of her spirit, had been murdered along with her family. For her first two months at the Institute, Willy had groped in darkness at the bottom of a well, grateful for the absence of light, too depleted to commit suicide. She was not wounded, she was a wound.

In Massachusetts, she had no visitors but visiting phantoms.

One day she walked into the dayroom, saw a familiar shape occupying a folding chair, looked more closely as fear moved toward her empty heart, and froze in shock at the reappearance in her life of Tee Tee Rowley, a flinty, sharp-fisted girl who, as ever, held her ground, scowling at Willy.

She had come from the Millhaven Foundlings’ Shelter, established in 1918 and everywhere referred to as either ‘the Children’s Home’ or, as its familiars knew it, ‘the Block.’ All in all, Willy had spent something like two and a half years ‘on the Block.’

Tee Tee Rowley, who stood five feet tall and weighed perhaps eighty pounds, responded to challenges by squaring up to them and suggesting her readiness to do anything necessary to instill respect in her challenger. Unlike some of her peers, Tee Tee did not default to crazed violence at the first sign of difficulty, but the willingness to employ craziness and destruction spoke from her posture, her eyes, the set of her mouth.

That of all her acquaintances from the Block the one to pay a phantom call should have been Tee Tee made perfect sense to Willy. It was to Tee Tee that Willy, who had begun to enjoy a small reputation as a storyteller, had told the best story of her young life.

From the first, Willy Bryce half-sensed, halfsuspected, and, she hoped, half-understood that she had not fully explored the dimensions of the inner life awakened by the books she devoured in the Block’s library: that it contained some element, some enigmatic quality that was of immense importance to her. Deep within, this unknown element shone.

Willy’s discovery of what the unknown element contained had led Tee Tee’s shade to appear. Willy had discovered how to save her own life.

This was how it happened: one day, tough, ten-year-old Tee Tee Rowley materialized before eight-year-old Willy Bryce in the second-floor lounge and asked her what the fuck she thought she was doing there anyhow, you fucking piece of shit. Instead of backing away and slinking off, Willy said, Listen to this, Tee Tee. And told her a story that almost instantly drew half a dozen other girls to that side of the lounge.

If she had stopped to think about what she was doing, doing it would have been impossible. But she did not have to think about the odd little tale. It spun itself out of the unknown element and gave her the right words, one after the other. She launched into the first real story of her life.

—When Little Howie Small stood before the ancient wizard and wiped the tears from his eyes, the first thing he noticed was that a sharp-eyed bird was peering out at him from within the wizard’s enormous beard.

And an entire adventure followed, a story involving an eagle and a bear and a furious river and a prince who rescued his princess-to-be with the aid of a walnut discovered by the bird who had been hiding in the wizard’s beard. The whole thing just rolled off Willy’s tongue as if it had all been written out in advance. Whenever she needed some new information or a fresh development, the perfect thing arrived at the proper moment to be inserted into a blank space exactly its size and shape.

—That was a real good story, said an astonished Tee Tee. You got any more like that?

—Tomorrow, Willy said.

Tomorrow came, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, and on each of them, day after day until she walked out of the Block for good, Willy entertained the Tee Tees and Raylettes and Georginas with episodes from the adventurous life of Little Howie Small. As far as she knew, the little person within her who had come into her own, the secret Willy, always told the truth. She was like Scheherazade, except at the time she was not fighting for her life.

That came twenty-nine years later, after her companion on the Block began calling on her in Massachusetts.

—You’re writing again, Willy? asked Dr Bollis. I think that’s excellent news. Is it a story, or is it about yourself ?

—You don’t know anything about fiction, Willy told him.

Dr Bollis smiled at her.—I do know how important it is to you. Will this one be like your others, or are you going to try something new?

Dr Bollis had let her believe that he had read her books. Willy thought he had probably read perhaps half of both of them.

—Something new, she said.

Her doctor gave her a look of careful neutrality.

—It’ll be good for me. It already is.

—Can you tell me what it’s about?

She frowned.

—Who’s the main character?

—A brave little person named Howie, she said, and immediately burst into tears. Willy had never told Dr Bollis that when her daughter, Holly, was first beginning to speak, and then for a long time after, she spoke of herself as ‘Howie.’ In fact, Willy tried never to speak of Holly to Dr Bollis.

Willy could remember writing very little of her third and most successful book. Much of what happened in the Institute had been a blur of smeary voices nattering on and on; the same blurriness took over when she thought about the beginning of her book, except that the incessant voices had been those of her characters. After she seemed to have recovered sufficiently from the shock of her great loss, she returned to New York feeling like an unpeeled egg. She settled herself back in her little apartment, where In the Night Room amplified itself into a kind of fever dream from which she awoke, dripping with sweat, pulse rocketing, only long enough to order Chinese food, do the crossword puzzle, or collapse into sleep. Once, on a slow day for both of them, she played Scrabble with her old, amusing college friend Tom Hartland, who wrote detective books for boys, and crushed him, pulverized him, left him gasping and bleeding on the board. She had met with her dead husband’s lawyers and discovered that she was, by almost anybody’s standards, wealthy; two or three times in that period, she had lunches or dinners with Molly Harper and Tom. (He had once told her that his greatest problem was keeping his boy hero from having sex with the other boys he met in the course of his investigations.) An utterly kind man, Tom came around four or five times to make sure Willy was eating—actually, he used his concern about her diet as his way of making sure she could keep herself together. And she was, largely due to her furious obsession with her book. Willy knew she was using the book as a kind of therapy, also as a way of shutting out the world, but it was as though she had no choice as to how these months were to be spent. In the Night Room had taken her over, demanding to be written. When people praised it to her, Willy felt as though she were being given credit for someone else’s accomplishment.

During one of their lunches, Tom Hartland told her, I wish I could write a book that way sometime.

—No you don’t, she said.

Tom knew nothing about Willy’s background. The facts of her childhood would have horrified him. The facts of her childhood would have horrified most of the people she called her friends. But not all of Willy’s childhood had been harsh and difficult: although the years from birth to the age of six, during which she had been a child living with her parents, had passed entirely from her memory, they had left behind a shimmer of warmth and vanished, never-to-be-replaced pleasure. Before her parents had been killed in an automobile accident, they had loved their daughter, they had cherished her. Willy knew this. As far as she was concerned, this shimmer—the glow of her earliest childhood—explained why, during the worst of her many wretched times, she had escaped descending into despair or madness.

9

Tim Underhill was like a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories to save his life. Fiction gave him entry into the worst and darkest places of his life, and that entry put the pain and fear and anger right in his own hands, where he could transform them into pleasure. In his youth he had been without direction, reckless, too loud, a real pain in the neck. After he let himself get drafted into Vietnam at the age of twenty-two, he reinvented himself based on the more obnoxious aspects of his character and became louder, profane, open to violence. He made a point of taking as his lovers slight, girlish young Vietnamese boys of eighteen or nineteen, whom he referred to as his ‘flowers,’ daring anyone to call him on it. He used drugs whenever they were available, and the drugs gave him the toxic gift of addiction. In these years, he told stories, but he never wrote them down. Salvation came after Vietnam, when he was living above the flower market in Bangkok and there began writing the dialogues with himself that eventually turned into stories and novels. And bit by bit the fiction let him straighten out his life. It allowed him to live many lives at once, all in the peace and seclusion of his little apartment.

After he had published half a dozen books and felt more or less healed, he left Thailand and moved to New York City. He had turned into a person for whom his younger self would have felt as much contempt as envy. He lived quietly and loved his friends, his nephew, his city. What this settled character felt for the desperate young man he had been was a mixture of pity, admiration, and regret so sharp it could nearly have drawn blood.

Throughout the war, Underhill’s belief in his ability to tell a story that would knock the eyes out of his audience’s heads had shaped his ambitions, and he had developed this talent in an ongoing tale he called ‘The Running Grunt.’ The characters of ‘The Running Grunt’ had populated many otherwise boring hours in the tents and various wastelands of Camp Crandall. But his storytelling career had been born not in Vietnam, he knew, but in Millhaven, rather, and in completely mundane circumstances.

He had been a senior at Holy Sepulchre, eighteen years old, wasting time one evening in the house of a good-looking, lively neighbor, Esti Woodbridge, whom he liked because she read a lot of books and attracted mean-spirited gossip about which she cared not a whit. He liked her six-year-old daughter, Marin, too. Marin Woodbridge was a seriously cool kid. Esti had something going in the kitchen that required unblinking attention, and Marin, left alone in the living room with Tim, wandered up to him and said, ‘If you could tell me a story, I bet it’d be pretty good.’ He heard Marin’s mother in the kitchen, laughing. ‘Well, let’s give it a try,’ he said, and opened his mouth—and what came out amazed him at every step, a lengthy, complicated story about a prince and a magic horse and a girl with long golden hair. Everything fell into place; nothing was left over or unresolved at the end. When he was finished, Marin grinned at him and Esti popped out of the kitchen to say, ‘Wow! Great story, Tim!’ Wow was what he thought, too. Where in the world had that come from?

Now he wondered if he would ever again know that surprised satisfaction. A great part of the reason Tim was wasting time on a lunatic book collector and fussing around with e-mails and virus protection had to do with avoiding actual work. Not only did he not feel comfortable with what he was writing, he was beginning to dislike it. Over the next few weeks, he hoped, this situation would change. When he found that he disliked what he was writing, he was writing the wrong things. He would be increasingly depressed until his story told him where it wanted to go.

He called up his document, but before a fresh sentence spoke itself in his mind, he saw Jasper Kohle seated across the table in the Fireside, saying, You don’t listen.

Listen to what?

He shook off the question and began to advance words across his screen.

10

The big house behind the gated wall at the end of Guilderland Road had required significant repairs at the time of purchase, mainly to the roof and the wraparound porch, and Mitchell’s current business trip had seemed to all parties an advantageous period in which to get as much done as possible. Perhaps rashly, Willy had supported this schedule, thinking that she would be able to keep an eye on things while she got a feel for the house she was going to share with her new husband. Now, as she drove through the gate to what might almost have been a construction site, Willy wished she had never agreed to camp out in the house while Mitchell cruised around Europe.

Two pickup trucks bristling with ladders and lengths of lumber stood on the patchy, soon-to-be-revitalized grass near the curving gravel drive. Short rows of roofing tiles lay near a tall ladder leaning against the left side of the house. A lot more lumber had been piled up on the far side of the house, and men with carpenter’s belts roamed across the roof and beneath the porch, hammering as they went. The branches of a Japanese maple half-obscured a third pickup. It belonged to the Santolini brothers, whom Mitchell had hired to doctor his property’s extensive trees, initially by hacking away the thick foliage that had grown up around them. Unlike Dellray Contractors—whose small army of worker ants had arrived in the other pickups—the Santolini brothers had only two employees, themselves. The day before, Willy had glanced out the kitchen window just in time to see Rocky Santolini smashing Vincent Santolini’s head into the trunk of the oak tree that dominated the great sweep of lawn to the right of the house. The Santolinis did that sort of thing all the time, it turned out; they got some kind of horrible pleasure from bloodying each other’s faces. Willy derived none from the sight of it. The idea that it might be her responsibility to terminate their brawls made her feel doomed and twitchy.

Entering the scene through the open garage door at the moment Willy rolled up alongside one of the Dellray pickups came scowling Roman Richard Spilka, Mitchell’s number two right-hand man, right behind lizardlike Giles Coverley. Spilka served as a sometime bodyguard and general—what was the word?—factotum. In his dark suits and T-shirts, Roman Richard looked as massive and sour as a bouncer at a Russian nightclub. The permanent three-day whiskers on his pasty jowls, his louring eyes, communicated intense moral authority. (Roman Richard had pulled the Santolinis apart within seconds.)

‘Put your car in the garage,’ Spilka said. ‘It’s gonna rain again. What were you doing, anyhow?’

I was going to liberate my dead daughter from a produce warehouse out on Union Street, she thought of saying. Then she considered telling him to mind his own business. Unfortunately, it had become clear that, in Roman Richard Spilka’s mind, monitoring Willy’s actions was one of his professional functions.

‘I went shopping,’ she said. ‘Would you care to inspect my bags?’

‘You should park in the garage,’ he said.

Willy drove past him and into the garage. Roman Richard watched as she got out of her car and moved around to the trunk to remove the grocery bags. For an awkward and uncomfortable moment, she imagined that he was going to offer to help her, but no, he was just having a Testosterone Moment. Roman Richard often glanced at her chest when he thought she wouldn’t notice, usually with a puzzled air she understood all too well. Roman Richard was wondering how Mitchell could be attracted to a woman with such an unremarkable chest.

To put him in his place, she asked, ‘Heard anything from the boss lately?’

‘He called while you were out. There’s probably a voice mail on your line.’

Shortly after buying the house, Mitchell had installed a complicated new telephone system. Willy had her own private line; they shared a joint line; Mitchell’s assistant, Giles Coverley, had a line that rang in his office; and a fourth line that was dedicated to Mitchell’s business calls rang everywhere in the house but Willy’s office. She was forbidden to use this line, as she was forbidden to enter Mitchell’s office, which took up most of the third floor. In the glimpse she had once been granted through a half-open door, the office looked old-fashioned, opulent in a leather-and-rosewood manner. That made perfect sense to Willy. If Mitchell Faber, who had the taste of someone who fears that he has no taste at all, were to redesign the world, he would make it look like one vast Polo advertisement.

Willy wasn’t sure how she felt about being forbidden entry to her future husband’s home office. Mitchell offered three excellent reasons for the prohibition, but the motive beneath two of the reasons sometimes troubled her. She did not want to be troubled by Mitchell. And all three reasons he had given her spoke to the protective role he had so willingly taken on. She might move papers around, thereby creating disorder; he did not want women in there at all, because women were distractions; having lived alone all his life, he needed some corner of the house that would be his alone. Without a private lair, he feared he might grow restless, irritable, on edge. So the first and third reasons had to do with shielding Willy from the consequences of neglecting Mitchell’s need for a single-occupancy foxhole, and the second was supposed to flatter her.

He had lived alone for his entire adult life, without parents, siblings, ex-wives, or children. Mitchell had invited only a small number of working colleagues to their wedding, plus, of course, Roman Richard and Giles Coverley. To Willy, his life seemed bizarrely empty. Mitchell had no friends, in the conventional sense. Maybe you could not be as paranoid as Mitchell was and maintain actual friendships.

Mitchell trusted no one absolutely, and the amount of provisional trust he was willing to extend did not go far. This, she suspected, was the real reason his re-creation of a men’s club lounge was closed to her. He did not trust her not to violate whatever confidentialities he kept in there, and his suspicion of her underlay the way in which he had concluded their single conversation about the matter.

He had intended to answer her still-lingering surprise at the prohibition with an inarguable case.

‘Do you print out hard copies of your writing as you go along?’ he asked.

‘Every day,’ she said.

‘Suppose you’re working on a new book, and the manuscript is on your desk. Suppose I happen to walk in and discover that you’re not there. How would you feel if I picked up the manuscript and started to read it?’

Knowing exactly what she would feel, she said nothing.

‘I can see it in your face. You’d hate it.’

‘I don’t know if “hate” is the word I’d use.’

‘We understand each other,’ Mitchell said. ‘This topic is now closed. Giles, would you please make some tea for my bride-to-be and myself ? We’ll take it on the porch.’

When the tea was steaming in the cups borne on the tray his assistant was carrying to the front door, Mitchell remembered that he had to field an important telephone call. He left her sitting on the porch by herself, the mistress of the wicker chair, a front yard festooned with pickup trucks, and two hot cups of English breakfast she had not wanted in the first place. Alone, she picked up the Times and blazed through the crossword in twenty minutes.

From the window in her second-floor office, Willy saw Roman Richard lumbering across the driveway to speak to one of the Dellray men, a carpenter with a beach-ball gut, a red mullet, and intricate tattoos on his arms. Soon they were laughing at a remark of Roman Richard’s. Willy had a strong, unpleasant impression that the remark concerned her. The two men glanced upward at her window. When they saw her looking down, they turned their backs.

Mitchell’s voice came through her voice mail, sounding a little weary, a little dutiful.

‘Hi, this is me. Sorry you aren’t picking up. Giles told me you’re home, so I was expecting to talk to you.

‘Let’s see, what can I tell you? I’m in Nanterre, just west of Paris. From the way things are going, I’ll be here another three, four days. The only thing that might keep me away is a development in Toledo. Spain, unfortunately, not Ohio. So, let’s see—if you need me, I’m at the Hôtel Mercure Paris La Défense Parc, and if I have to go to Toledo, I’ll be at the Hotel Domenico.

‘I talked to Giles about this, but I’ll mention it to you too. The Santolini brothers were making noises about taking a couple of limbs off the oak tree at the side of the house. I don’t want them to touch that tree until I get home. Okay, Willy? They’re just making work to drive up their fee. Giles knows what to do, but I want you to back him up on this, okay? That oak is one of the reasons I bought the estate in the first place.

‘And honey, listen, don’t worry about the wedding, hear me? I know it’s only two months away, but everything’s taken care of, all you have to do is shop for something pretty to wear. I set up an appointment for you at Bergdorf’s the day after tomorrow. Just drive into town, meet the lady, the personal shopper, buy whatever you like. Giles will give you all the details. Let him drive you in, if you feel like it. Enjoy yourself, Willy! Give yourself a treat.’

She heard a low voice in the background. It sounded self-consciously confidential, as if the speaker regretted breaking into Mitchell’s monologue. Against her wisest instincts, Willy suffered a brief mental vision of Mitchell Faber sitting up naked in bed while a good-looking woman, also naked, whispered in his ear.

‘Okay, look, I have to go. Talk to you soon, baby. Stay beautiful for me. Lots of love, bye.’

‘Bye,’ she said into the phone.

It was the longest message she had ever received from Mitchell, and at the sound of his voice she had experienced a peculiar range of emotions. Warmth was the first of these—Mitchell Faber aroused a flush of warmth at the center of her body. He had turned out to be a tireless, inventive lover. And with beautiful timing, the sense of safety Mitchell brought to her came obediently into play. Where there was Mitchell, MICHIGAN PRODUCE offered no threat; the mere sound of his voice banished craziness, which he would not tolerate. Also, the chaos of workmen, their tools and vehicles, no longer seemed a threat to her inner balance. Before the wedding, all this would pass; the Dellray men and the Santolini brothers would finish their work and depart.

But along with these positive feelings came darker ones, and they were no less powerful. Among them was her old irritation at Mitchell’s deliberate mystifications. He had told her he was in Nanterre, but not what he was doing there, nor why he might have to go to Spain. He had left the date of his return completely open, apart from mentioning that it might occur in four or five days, which could easily mean eight or nine. And making an appointment for her at Bergdorf’s seemed unreasonably dictatorial, even for Mitchell. Willy knew he thought he was being helpful, but suppose she didn’t want to buy her wedding dress at Bergdorf’s? And all those little bullying interrogatives at the ends of his sentences, okay? That’s an annoying habit, okay?

Willy supposed that throughout her life to come, the life with Mitchell, she would feel much the way she did at this moment. As long as warmth and gratitude outweighed irritation, she would enjoy a happy enough marriage. For Willy, ‘happy enough’ sounded paradisal. It wasn’t a phrase like ‘not all that rainy,’ which contradicted itself; in describing a situation one could easily live with, it was a good deal more like ‘fairly sunny.’ On the whole, did she feel fairly sunny? Yes, on the whole she did.

Also, Mitchell Faber frightened her, a little bit. Willy wanted her prospective husband never to know this, but at times, when regarding the smooth breadth of his back or the sheer weightiness of his hands, she experienced a little eroticized thrill of fear.

11

They marched across his screen, all right, the words, but he could not help feeling that, about half the time, in crucial ways, they were the wrong words. His bizarre admirer had thrown him farther off course than his visit from April.

Underhill shoved back his chair, groaned, and stood up. Habit brought him leaning back over the keyboard to save the dubious new paragraphs to his hard drive. When he released the mouse, he saw his hand execute a real aspen-leaf-in-the-wind flutter. His left hand was trembling, too. He registered his slightly elevated heartbeat and realized that the morning’s adventures had touched him, so lightly he had not noticed until this moment, with fear. Funny—under his gaze, his hands ceased to tremble, but he could feel the remainder of his fear prickle his lungs. For the hundredth time, Timothy Underhill observed that fear was a cold phenomenon.

Now that he was on his feet, he needed a diversion that might restore his concentration. He walked across the loft to his refrigerator, but the thought of putting food in his mouth made him queasy. Underhill wandered to one of the big windows and looked down on Grand Street. A huddle of stationary umbrellas at the corner of West Broadway belonged to people waiting for a break in the traffic. Then he noticed that one figure, a man in loose, dark clothing, had turned his back on the crowd to gaze across the street at Underhill’s building. The oval blur of his face gleamed white beneath the hood of his sweatshirt. When the umbrellas began to drift across the street, the man moved down into the shelter of the corner building, keeping his eyes on the entrance to 55 Grand. Tim thought he was waiting for someone to come out of the Vietnamese restaurant on the ground floor. Then the figure shifted position, and his identity snapped into focus.

Hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, a bright plastic bag clamped under one arm—Jasper Kohle had not, after all, left the neighborhood; he had circled around from wherever he had gone, and he was keeping watch on Tim’s building. What was he doing out there, and what were his motives? Hunched and utterly still, he had the pure attentiveness of a hawk on a telephone pole. He made no effort to shelter himself from the rain, although he could easily have moved to an awning fifteen feet down the block.

Unless he wanted to spend the next few days hiding in his loft, Tim realized, he would have to deal with this character.

Abruptly, Kohle straightened his spine and swept the hood off his head. Any hopes that Tim might have been mistaken disappeared with the exposure of the man’s face. Streaming with water, his dark hair flattened to seaweed on his forehead, Kohle’s head pointed like a compass needle to the door at 55 Grand. Strange to remember now that when Tim had first seen him in the diner, Kohle had struck him as youthful, fresh, almost innocent. That freshness had been the first thing to go; with it had vanished the illusion of youth. Thinking back, Tim thought he remembered that Kohle’s face had subtly darkened as the man’s tone had changed from adulation to confrontation.

It happened so quietly that Tim had only barely noticed the deepening of the lines across the forehead, the spreading of a web of wrinkles around the man’s eyes and mouth. The process he had noted in the diner had continued. The patient being beneath Tim Underhill’s third-floor window looked like nothing so much as an implacable ex-con in the grip of a really lousy scheme. An embattled history of brutal triumphs and bitter defeats spoke from his unblinking acceptance of the rain streaming down his face, the set of his mouth.

Why me? Underhill thought. How did I attract the Charlie Manson of fandom?

The instant this thought appeared in Tim’s head, Jasper Kohle stepped forward, raised his head, and with a sizzling glance found Tim’s eyes across fifty feet of rainy space. Tim jumped back. He felt as though he’d just been exposed in the commission of a sordid crime. Jasper Dan Kohle continued to stare up. The situation brought back in roaring sound and color April’s flashing out at him from the crowd on West Broadway. He saw the hands bracketing her mouth, her dear small body bending forward to hurl her message across the street. This time he could read her lips. April had not shouted some nonsense about whistling. Instead, she had bellowed, Listen to us!

When the memory-vision of bellowing April receded, Jasper Kohle no longer glared up at the Grand Street building; he was gone. No, he was going, for Tim saw his drenched, unhooded figure backing slowly down the sidewalk in the direction of Wooster Street, still looking up but no longer quite managing to hold Tim’s eyes with his own. Enough, Tim thought, and gestured sharply three times with a down-pointing index finger. He had no idea what he intended to say to Kohle, but he would start by demanding an explanation.

Kohle looked away and thrust his hands in his pockets. He still appeared brutal and crazy, but also a little bored, as if he were waiting for some petty functionary to unlock his office and get to business. On his way out of the loft, Tim grabbed a WBGO cap and a raincoat and windmilled himself into them as he bypassed the elevator and trotted down the stairs. He charged through the big door at the bottom and felt bulletlike raindrops pummel the top and the bill of his cap. The shoulders of his ancient Burberry were instantly soaked.

Down on the street, rain spattered and sprayed from every surface, creating a mist in which reflected points of light swam and flashed. In a fume of yellow headlights, Tim thought he saw Kohle’s thick dark figure standing motionless twenty or thirty feet down on the other side of the street. He had moved on, but not very far. His body seemed to shimmer in the haze, and for a second it seemed almost to inflate, as if Tim’s odd admirer had grown two inches and added twenty pounds.

In the few seconds Tim had been on the staircase, the rain had intensified into one of those New York downpours that reminded him of Vietnam. Water battered down in sheets and bounced off everything it struck. Before he had gone three feet, water had penetrated his cap and made a rag of his raincoat. The frayed threads at the ends of his sleeves wound over his wrists like hair. On Grand Street, the traffic crept along at five miles an hour, and the conical headlights illuminated thick slashes of rain.

When Tim stepped off the curb, his foot descended into a fast-moving streamlet of ice water. A taxi horn jeered at him. For a moment or two, he was forced to take his eyes off Kohle’s gauzy form and concentrate on weaving through the slow-moving cars without getting injured. When next he looked up the block, he made out a few men and women trotting along beneath their umbrellas, but Kohle had disappeared. Another car honked, and another driver yelled. Underhill was standing still as a post in Grand Street’s uptown lane, trying to make out a figure that was not there. His shoes felt as though they might float off his feet, like little boats.

Tim pushed through a rank of waist-high plastic news boxes, felt something tumble to the sidewalk, and jogged down the pavement, wishing he had g rabbed an umbrella. Three people were moving along the sidewalk, two of them coming toward him, and the third, a short, almost dwarfish person who could have been either male or female, heading away, toward Wooster Street. In the thick rain, they looked like wraiths, like phantoms.

Neither of the men drawing near to him was Kohle. The dwarflike creature scuttling off appeared to be picking up steam as he went, in his haste almost hydroplaning across the surface of the pavement. A young man with black hair and furious eyes stood beneath the awning of an entrance to a drugstore, but he was not Kohle, and neither was the girl in jeans and a black tank top hugging her arms over her chest under the next awning down the block.

Rainwater seemed now to pass directly through the fabric of his cap. His raincoat adhered to his shirt, and his shirt adhered to his chest. He no longer understood why he was doing this to himself. Running outside had been a spectacularly bad idea from the first. If he ever saw Kohle staked out on Grand Street again, he would call the police. The man had taken him by surprise; to be honest, Kohle had frightened him, and his fear had flashed into sudden anger, with the ridiculous result that here he was out on the street, asking for pneumonia.

He turned around, thinking only of getting back to his loft. The girl in the tank top gave him a sympathetic smile as he went squelching by. Under the next awning, the boy with furious eyes was peeling off his tight-fitting black shirt. He gave Tim the resentful glare due a voyeur, then bent to take off his boots. After he had tucked the boots under his arm, the boy undid his belt and shoved his pants down to his ankles. He wore no underwear, and his long body was a single streak of shining white. Tim stared at the boy’s smooth, hairless groin, as blank as a Ken doll’s. The young man stepped forward, and Tim stepped back.

That was…now, there was some mistake here, he couldn’t see right, the rain was screwing with his vision…

With a sound like the crackling of heavy canvas sails, immense wings folded out from the young man’s back. He stepped forward on a beautiful naked foot. Tim thought, I have seen what it is to tread. The being was much taller than he had at first appeared, six-seven or six-eight. Instantly, water ran in shining rivulets down its gleaming and hairless chest. When it glanced at Tim, its eyes, though entirely liquid black, conveyed what Tim’s old Latin teacher would have called ‘severe displeasure.’ Tim had no idea if his heart had gone into overdrive or stopped working altogether. The inside of his mouth tasted like blood and old brass. Creaking, the great wings unfolded another five or six feet and nearly met at their highest point.

The angel was going to kill him, he knew.

Instead of truly stopping his heart, the angel swept past Tim Underhill, turned toward West Broadway, and took two long, muscular strides. The world at large failed to notice this extraordinary event. The traffic crawled by. A man in a parka and a fishing hat ducked out of an apartment building and walked past the angel without a sign of surprise.

Can’t you see that? Tim wanted to yell, then realized, no, he couldn’t see that; he had seen nothing at all.

Two more steps up the street, the angel jetti-soned its clothes onto the sidewalk in front of the news boxes, took one more majestic stride forward, raised a knee, and with a great unfolding and unfurling of its wings lifted off the pavement and ascended into the air. Up and up, openmouthed Tim watched it go, until it dwindled to the size of a white sparrow, and—instantly, as if translated to another realm—disappeared. Tim kept watching the place in the air where it had been, then realized that the man in the fishing hat, who had come almost level with him, was looking at him oddly.

‘I thought I saw something unusual up there,’ he said.

‘Get any more water in your mouth, you’ll drown.’ The man shook his head and moved on.

Tim squelched over to the rack of news boxes and saw, between the Village Voice and the New York Press, a yellow plastic bag bearing a cartoonlike caricature of Charles Dickens. The angel’s clothing had, like its owner, traveled elsewhere.

With the half-conscious sense that the bag seemed familiar, he bent down and picked it up. Cold and slippery to the touch, it contained a number of books. Tim’s first impulse was to protect the books, then to see if he might somehow be able to return them to their owner. Carrying the bag, he waited a moment for a break in the traffic, and when one came he moved down off the curb and remembered where he had seen such a bag earlier that morning.

Tim reached the other side of the street and opened the top of the bag as he trotted toward the entrance to his building. When he peered in, a small amount of rain fell through the opening and beaded on the glossy jacket of lost boy lost girl. Two other copies were stacked beneath it.

Tim stepped inside the entry of 55 Grand. Too small to be called a lobby, it held only a row of metal mailboxes, a cracked marble floor, a hanging light fixture that worked half of the time, and, to one side of the stairs, a wooden school chair. This was one of the light fixture’s off days. Tim spun around to prop the door open a couple of inches so that he would be better able to see the condition of the books.

He opened the cover, turned to the front matter, and gasped at what he saw. In spiky, slashing letters three inches high, Kohle had printed FRAUD and LIES all over the page. Tim’s inscription had been crossed out and covered over with UNTRUE AND OUTRAGEOUS. Tim slid the book back into the bag and removed the next. He discovered the same furious graffiti scrawled over the front matter. In the text, individual phrases and paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, had been x-ed out.

A fast-moving thread of water slipped from the bill of his cap onto a violated page, and the R in FRAUD softened and ran into the adjacent letters on both sides. The book seemed to be dissolving in his hands. In horror, Tim slammed it shut, making a soft splatting sound, as if some big insect had been squashed between the pages. The books went back into the shiny bag, and he trotted out into the fierce rain and, with a swooping gesture of his right arm, threw the bag into a garbage bin.

12

In Hendersonia, the rain predicted by Roman Richard Spilka came and went in under an hour, never amounting to much more than a sprinkle. (There was something suspiciously overdetermined about that storm over SoHo.) The sun shone the entire time it rained. The workmen who wore shirts shed them to enjoy the sensation of mild, warm rain falling on their upper bodies. Willy envied them. She wished she could strip naked to the waist and stroll through the sun-gilded rain.

Suddenly, she felt like talking to Mitchell, not just listening to his voice on the answering machine. Mitchell disliked intrusions of his personal life into his work world, and probably wouldn’t like being called back. He especially wouldn’t like it if he were in bed with some woman who worked for the Baltic Group. The thought of her husband-to-be in the embrace of one of his female colleagues gave Willy an entirely unwelcome pang. Sometimes she wondered why he had chosen her, Willy Bryce, Willy Patrick, with her funny little gamine body and clementine breasts. Gently, in a series of little nibbles, despair attempted to draw her downward through a psychic drain. She really did want to talk to Mitchell, and at first hand, not through an exchange of recorded messages.

The Internet soon found the telephone number of the hotel in Nanterre. She dialed for what seemed a frustratingly long time, but was then rewarded with a series of rings that sounded like the wake-up signal of a portable alarm clock. A male, wonderfully clear French voice said something she had no hope of understanding.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but do you speak English?’

‘Of course, madame. How may I help you?’

‘I’d like to speak to one of your guests, please, a Mr Mitchell Faber.’

‘Moment.’ Soon he was back on the line. ‘I am sorry, madame, Monsieur Fay-bear is no longer a guest of the Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.’

‘I must have just missed him. When did he check out?’

‘Monsieur Fay-bear checked out this morning, madame.’

‘He couldn’t have,’ Willy said. ‘He just left a message on my voice mail, and he was speaking from your hotel.’

‘There is some mistake. Unless he called you from a telephone in the lobby?’

‘He said he was in his room.’ She hesitated. ‘You said he checked out this morning? What time was that?’

‘Shortly before ten, madame.’

‘And what time is it there now?’

‘It is 4:45 P.M., madame.’

Mitchell had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier. Willy hesitated again, then asked, ‘I’m calling from New York with a message for his wife. Was Mrs Faber with him, or did she go ahead to Toledo?’

‘We have no record of a Mrs Faber.’

She thanked him and hung up. Back to the Internet for more information, then back to the telephone to dial another endless series of numbers. When she was connected to the Hotel Domenico in Toledo, she had trouble communicating with the man on the other end of the line, and finally succeeded in replacing him with a hotel employee whose English was less like Spanish.

‘Mr Faber? No, no Mr Faber is registered here. I am sorry.’

‘What time do you expect him?’

‘There is no record of a Mr Faber reserving a room in this hotel, I regret.’

She thanked him, hung up, and pushed the intercom button that connected her to Giles Coverley’s telephone. His bland drawl asked, ‘Can I help you with something, Willy?’ A light on his phone told him where the intercom message had originated. ‘Hold on there, Giles,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right in.’

‘I believe the boss left a message for you. Did you hear it?’

‘Roman Richard told me as soon as I drove in, and yes, I did hear it. You two don’t want me to miss anything, do you?’

‘We want Mitchell to have whatever he pleases, you could put it that way. And you, too, of course. Did he mention a trip into the city?’

‘I’ll be there in a second, Giles.’

That last-minute bit of diplomacy was typical of Coverley. From Willy’s first meeting with her future husband’s assistant, she had understood that Giles Coverley would always be delighted to perform any tasks she might assign him, as long as they coincided with his employer’s desires. Occasionally, as she had begun to settle into the house and arrange a few insignificant things to her liking, a taut, short-lived expression on Giles Coverley’s smooth face had reminded Willy of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca.

Giles’s office, a long narrow alcove Mitchell had partitioned off what he called the ‘morning room,’ was only slightly more familiar to Willy than her husband’s office upstairs, but she had far less curiosity about what it contained. Her presence in his lair tended to make Coverley speak even more slowly than usual and consider his words with greater care. This deliberation struck Willy as both self-protective and pretentious. Giles always dressed in loose, elegant overshirts and collared tops, handsomely draped trousers, and beautiful shoes. As far as Willy knew, he had no sexual interest at all in either gender. Giles seemed perfectly self-sufficient, like a spoiled cat neutered early in kittenhood.

The door to the alcove stood half open; Willy assumed Giles had positioned it like that, in an ambiguous gesture of welcome. As she approached, he offered the therapeutic smile of a man behind a complaints counter. Giles’s desk was extraordinarily neat, as it had been on every other occasion when Willy had stood before it. His flat-screen monitor looked like a modernist sculpture. Instead of using a telephone, Giles wore a headset and spoke into a little button.

‘Good morning, Willy. I didn’t realize you’d gone out. Didn’t get you into any difficulty, I hope, did I?’

‘I went out for groceries, Giles, I didn’t run off with anybody.’

‘Of course, of course, it’s just…well, you know. If Mitchell thinks somebody’s going to be there, he can get a little heated when they’re not.’

‘Then you’ll be happy to hear that Mitchell seemed perfectly rational.’

‘Yes. In the future, we might do ourselves a favor by keeping in better communication about your comings and goings. Is that something you’d be willing to think about?’

‘I’m willing to think about anything, Giles, but I’m not sure I want to feel obliged to tell you every time I go to Pathmark or Foodtown.’

Giles held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Willy, please. I don’t want you to feel obliged to do anything. I just want things to go as smoothly as possible. That’s my job.’ He nodded his head, letting her see that his job was a serious matter. ‘Anything else you’d like from me?’

‘Do you know where Mitchell is right now?’

Coverley tilted forward and looked at her over the top of an imaginary pair of glasses. ‘Right now? As in, this moment?’

Willy nodded.

Giles continued to stare at her, without blinking, over the tops of his imaginary glasses. A couple of seconds went by.

‘From the information I have, Mitchell is in France today. And is expected to stay there for perhaps three more days. To be more specific, he’s in a suburb of Paris called Nanterre.’

‘He told my voice mail he was in Nanterre.’

‘I thought he might have done, you see. That is why your question rather took me by surprise.’

The reason your question sounded so stupid was what she thought he meant.

‘He said he was staying at the Hôtel Mercure Paris something-or-other Parc.’

‘Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.’

‘That’s it, yes. I called them as soon as I listened to his message, and the man I talked to said Mitchell checked out almost seven hours earlier. That’s like five in the morning here.’

‘Well, then, he checked out without telling me. He’ll be in touch later today or tomorrow, I’m sure.’

‘But he told me he was still checked into that hotel.’ For a moment, their eyes met again. Coverley did not blink. ‘You can see why I would be a little concerned.’

Coverley pressed the fingers of one hand to his lips and, without any change of expression, lifted his head and gazed at the ceiling. Then he looked back down at Willy. ‘Let us clarify this situation. I’ll get the hotel’s telephone number.’

‘I already talked to them,’ Willy said.

‘It never hurts to get a second opinion.’

For a little while Coverley moved his mouse around and watched what was happening on his screen. ‘All right,’ he said at last, and punched in numbers on his keypad. Then he held up an index finger, telling her to wait. The finger came down. ‘Bonjour,’ he said. Then came a long sentence she did not understand that ended with the word Fay-bear.

Pause.

‘Oui,’ he said.

Pause.

‘Je comprends.’

Pause.

‘Très bien, monsieur.’ Then, in English: ‘Would you please repeat that in English, sir? Mr Fay-bear’s wife asked me to inquire about his status at the hotel.’

He clicked a button or flipped a switch, Willy could not tell which.

Through the speakers on either side of the monitor came a heavily accented male voice saying, ‘Mrs Fay-bear, can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ Willy said. ‘Are you the man I spoke to earlier?’

‘Madame, I have never spoken to you before we do it now. You were inquiring about your husband’s residence in our hotel?’

‘Yes,’ Willy said.

‘Mr Fay-bear is still registered as a guest. He arrived three days ago and is expected to remain with us yet two days.’

‘Somebody else just told me he checked out at ten this morning.’

‘But you see, he is very much still here. His room is 437, if you would care to speak to him. No—excuse me, he is not in his room at this time.’

‘He’s there.’

‘No, madame, as I explained—’

‘He’s staying in your hotel, I mean.’

‘As I have said, madame.’

‘Is he…’ Willy could not finish this sentence in the presence of Giles Coverley. ‘Thank you.’

‘À bientôt.’

Coverley raised his hands and shrugged. ‘All right?’

‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘You got through to some other hotel with a similar name, Willy. It’s the only explanation.’

‘I should have asked to leave a message.’

‘Would you like me to call him back? It would be no trouble at all.’ ‘

No, Giles, thanks,’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll wait for him to call me back. Or I’ll try again tomorrow.’

‘You do that,’ Coverley said.

That night, again in the grip of her compulsion, Willy drove back to Union Street. All the way she asked herself why she was doing it and told herself to turn back. But she knew why she was doing it, and she could not turn back. Already she could hear her daughter’s cries.

Her headlights picked out the entrance to the parking lot and the huge dark ascent of the warehouse’s facade, and without intending to do so, she swerved into the lot. Her heart fluttered, bird-like, behind the wall of her chest.

She had known what she was going to do ever since she had realized that she really was backing her little car out onto Guilderland Road. She was going to break into the warehouse.

Holly’s high, clear, penetrating voice pealed out from behind the massive brick wall. Sweating with impatience, Willy drove around to the back of the building. Her headlights stretched out across the asphalt. A voice in her head said, This is a mistake.

‘I still have to do it,’ she said.

A high-pitched wail of despair like that of a princess imprisoned in a tower sailed out from the wall and passed directly through Willy’s body, leaving behind a ghostly electrical tremble. In her haste, Willy struggled with the handle until muscle memory came to her aid. Her body seemed to flow out of the car by itself, and she took her first steps toward the loading dock in the haze of light that spilled through the open door. Her headlights cast a theatrical brightness over the loading bay.

There it was again: Holly’s song of despair, the wail of a child lost and without hope. Willy’s feet stuck to the asphalt; her legs could no longer move.

The long platform emerged from a wide, concrete-floored bay that opened up the back of the building like an arcade. At the rear of the bay, a series of doors and padlocked metal gates led into the building itself.

I can’t deal with the fact that she’s dead right now, Willy thought. First I have to get her out of this damned building.

Holly screamed again.

Willy opened her trunk, rooted around the concealed well, and discovered a crowbar Mitchell had forgotten to remove. She picked it up and went toward the stairs. Again she was halted in midstride, but by nothing more alarming than a meandering thought. With the memory of Mitchell borrowing her car had come the strange recognition that while she had imagined him bailing her out of jail, she had never considered his reaction to being presented with his fiancée’s living daughter. Holly and Mitchell seemed to inhabit separate universes—

For the first time in her life, Willy saw literal stars. She seemed on the verge of falling backward into a limitless darkness. What she was doing was crazy. Mitchell and Holly could not be thought of in the same room because they did live in different universes, those of the living and the dead. Even in his absence, the sheer irrefutability of Mitchell’s physical presence pushed Holly back into the past, the only country where she could still be alive.

Willy felt like a death-row inmate given a last-minute reprieve. A cruel madness had left her, driven away by the appearance within its boundaries of Mitchell Faber.

She went back to the car, dropped the crowbar in the trunk, slammed the lid, and collapsed into the driver’s seat. During the last few minutes, she felt, her life had changed, and she had moved into clarity for the first time since her tragedy. And the agent of that change had not been herself, but Mitchell. His sleek, brooding image had led her out of the shadows. She felt a wave of love and longing for him. That there had been a mix-up at some hotel in a Parisian suburb meant nothing. A serious question remained, however: what had convinced her, against all she knew, that her daughter was crying out for her in the ugly old building? At some point in the future, that would have to be thought about, deeply considered, probably with professional help.

Light exploded from her rearview mirror, and there came the peremptory bip! of a siren announcing its presence. Startled, Willy looked over her shoulder and saw the headlights of a police car immediately behind her. Guilt washed through her body, and even after she realized that she had done nothing criminal, its residue affected her demeanor when the officer came up to her window.

‘Identification?’ He held the flashlight on her face.

She fished around for her wallet and produced her license.

‘This is your name, Willy?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I see you live in Manhattan, Willy. What are you doing parked in a warehouse lot in New Jersey at this time of night?’

She tried to smile. ‘I moved here about two weeks ago, and I haven’t done anything about my license yet. Sorry.’

He ignored her apology. The flashlight shone directly onto her face. ‘How old are you, Willy?’

‘Thirty-eight,’ she said.

‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’ The officer played the light on her driver’s license, checking the date of her birth. ‘Yep, born in 1965. You must have very few worries, Willy. What is your new address, please?’

She gave him the number on Guilderland Road.

The policeman lowered the flashlight, appearing to be occupied by his own thoughts. He was a decade younger than she. ‘That’s the big house with the gate. And all those trees.’

‘You got it.’

He smiled at her. ‘Brighten up my evening and tell me why you’re sitting here in this parking lot.’

‘I had something to think about,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I know it must look suspicious.’

The officer looked away, still smiling, and rapped the flashlight against his thigh. ‘Willy, I recommend that you start up this gorgeous little vehicle and get yourself back to Guilderland Road.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

He moved back, holding his eyes on her face. ‘Don’t thank me, Willy, thank Mr Faber.’

‘What? Do you know Mitchell?’

The young officer turned away. ‘Have a nice night, Willy.’

13

For Tim Underhill that night, periods of unhappy wakefulness alternated with alarming dreams in which everything around him, including the ground he stood on, proved, when scrutinized, to be a collection of CGI effects. He fled across fields, he wandered through vast empty buildings, he walked slowly through a haunted city, but all of it was as unreal as a mirage. The cobbles and mosaics beneath his feet, the long slope of the hill, the sconces and the walls on which they hung were shiny, cartoonlike computer effects.

He got out of bed feeling worse than when he had climbed in. A shower, usually an infallible cure for the disorders that afflicted him on arising, left him feeling only partially restored. Groaning, he toweled himself dry, pulled clothes out of various drawers, and sat on the edge of his bed. At that entirely ordinary moment, his memory finally delivered to him the events of the previous morning.

He was holding open a sock with both hands. The sock made no sense at all. It was only a tube of cloth. The angel’s foot had come down on the sidewalk, and that foot had been astonishingly beautiful. And he had seen that smooth passage of white flesh at the groin, the giant wings creaking open, the bright and powerful ascent. Sudden, stinging tears leaped to the surface of Underhill’s eyes. When he had tugged the sock onto his foot, he ran to the windows on Grand Street and looked down. Between rain showers on a dark gray morning, people holding folded or upright umbrellas hurried this way and that on the pavement. He saw no lurking angel, no feral Jasper Kohle. A glimpse of yellow in the refuse bin on the corner reminded him of Kohle’s discarded books.

I couldn’t have seen all that, he told himself. He knew what had happened: Jasper Kohle had affected him more than he had known. Soaked through, anxious, angrier than he had wanted to be, Tim had let his mind pull him into the surreal. No wonder he had dreamed of wandering lost through slippery landscapes made entirely of illusion. Tim wanted to think that yesterday’s vision of an angel was the product of an overdeveloped imagination.

He decided to eat breakfast at home for once, and to avoid looking out the window.

But when he sat down before his computer, he immediately found himself in trouble. On the preceding day, he had needed the amnesia produced by concentrated absorption in his story and covered page after page with his heroine’s difficulties. Now his language had turned leaden and clumsy, and her problems seemed contrived.

Abandoning the struggle, he brought up his e-mail. By now, this was a dubious act, akin to talking to shiny-eyed fans who metamorphosed into aging, unclean madmen. As he’d feared, a number of letters without return addresses had appeared in his electronic mailbox. Tim deleted the spam, read his real e-mail, answered what had to be answered, and only then retrieved the messages from Nowhere.

Byrne615 wished to communicate the following:

not rite, not fair, you pansy

i dont know where i AM

Sorry, but I know less than you do, Tim thought. (But something about Byrne615 snagged in his mind.)

Cyrax told him:

b patient. u will know all soon.

watch listn. i wl b yr gide.

And kalicokitty weighed in with:

breth was taken frum my bodee

I see only veils of fog or smok

with sounds of greatr engines

som never liked u

I did

The last message, in some way the most disturbing, came from phoorow:

u aint soch

bastrd no

mor ha ha

‘Phoorow’—how many Phoorows could there be? The only one Underhill had ever known had been a fellow grunt in Lieutenant Beevers’s band of merry men, his real name being Philip Footler, but known everywhere as Phoorow, a sweet-faced young redneck who had participated in Lieutenant Beevers’s second-greatest fuckup, a military exercise that took place in Dragon Valley, or down in Dragon Valley, as they used to say, them what was there. Phoorow had disliked Tim, but having seen what Tim did to a very few others who objected to his ‘flowers,’ he kept his objections to himself. Maybe he had been a bastard, Tim allowed. For sure he had been a loudmouth show-off, and a country boy like Phoorow would never have met anyone like him.

Unfortunately for him at the time, and unfortunately now for Tim Underhill, Phoorow had been cut in half, literally, by machine-gun fire during their platoon’s sixth or seventh hour under fire down in Dragon Valley.

Tim stood up, a number of internal organs trembling slightly, and walked from his desk to his fake fireplace with a gas fixture capable of making it look exactly like a real fireplace, should he ever turn it on, and thence to the handsome bookcases to its right. There he drew comfort from the rows of familiar titles and names. Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis. Raymond Chandler, Stephen King. Hermann Broch, Muriel Spark, Robert Musil. A couple of yards of the black Library of America volumes. Then more fiction, imperfectly alphabetized: Crowley, Connelly, Lehane, Lethem, Erickson, Oates, Iris Murdoch. Iris was dead; so were Kingsley Amis, Chandler, and Hermann Broch. Dawn Powell, you’re gone, too. Are you folks going to start getting in touch? Where Phoorow rushes in, will you fear to tread?

He moved to the window and gazed, unseeing, down. How could the Phoorow of today be the barely remembered Phoorow of 1968? He couldn’t.

In the hitherto semipeaceable kingdom of Timothy Underhill, things appeared to be falling apart. Yesterday he had hallucinated seeing his sister and a gigantic, pissed-off angel; yesterday he had been rattled by a crazed stalker posing as a fan; today a dead man had sent him an e-mail. Down on the street, cars and trucks crawled eastward through rain as vertical as a plumb line.

There could actually be another person called Phoorow, he supposed. According to the person called Cyrax, Tim would know what was going on fairly soon. Cyrax, it could be, had orchestrated all these messages. Tim could not persuade himself that this Cyrax was capable of arranging everything that had happened in the Fireside and on the street, but undoubtedly a single, deeply misguided individual could send out tons of bizarre e-mails under a variety of names.

Tim had largely succeeded in calming himself down, and as he returned to his desk he remembered what had struck him about the first of today’s crop of mystery e-mails. The center on the Holy Sepulchre football team had been one Bill Byrne, a 250-pound sociopath who from time to time had referred to Tim Underhill in the terms of today’s e-mail. ‘Pansy,’ ‘queer,’ all of that. At seventeen, Underhill had not known himself well enough to be angry; instead, he had felt embarrassed, filled with an incoherent sense of shame. He had not wanted to be those things. Acceptance had come only after his first experience of sex, with, as it happened, the spookily sophisticated, Japanese-American seventeen-year-old Yukio Eto, who had become the template for the ‘flowers.’ After Yukio, he had done his best to feel guilty and ashamed, but the effort had been doomed from the start. The experience had been so joyous that Tim was totally incapable of convincing himself of its wickedness.

Bill Byrne, on the other hand, had no problem in accepting his natural bigotry, and during the whole of their years at Holy Sepulchre, Tim had never heard any utterance from his teammate that did not contain a sneer. Was Bill Byrne still alive? Of course, Tim had no proof that Byrne615 was his old adversary of the high school locker room, yet he did want to know what had happened to Byrne. His best friend in Millhaven, the great private investigator Tom Pasmore, could have told him in a minute or less, but Tim did not want to waste his friend’s time on a question like this. Surely he could discover Bill Byrne’s fate by himself.

The name of the one person in the world who could tell him exactly what had become of his high school class, Chester Finnegan, floated into consciousness. Many high school graduating classes contain one person for whom the previous four years represent an idyllic period never to be equaled in adult life, and those persons often take on the role of class secretary. They went to different schools than the rest of their classmates, and in their imaginations they want to stroll through their beloved corridors as often as possible. Chester Finnegan was the self-appointed Class Secretary for Life of Tim’s year at Holy Sepulchre, a man generally to be avoided, but not now.

Information gave him the telephone number, which he promptly dialed. After retiring from State Farm Insurance a couple of years ago, Chester Finnegan had turned to the full-time organization of his Holy Sepulchre ‘archive.’ Tim imagined him sitting at home day after day, screening other people’s home movies of football games and commencement exercises.

(Despite Tim’s attitude, it should be noted here that Finnegan had enjoyed a long career as an insurance executive, a loving marriage of thirty-four years, and was the father of three grown children, two of whom were graduates of excellent medical schools. The third, Seamus, reckoned a failure within the family, had taken the handsome face he had inherited from his father to Los Angeles, where he worked as a massage therapist in between acting jobs. All three children had graduated from Holy Sepulchre. On the other hand, Chester Finnegan talked like this:)

‘Hey, Tim! It’s great to hear from you, really great! Gosh, this is like ESP or something, because I was just thinking about you and that stunt you pulled in chemistry class our junior year. I mean, talk about stink! Whoa! Worser’n a family of skunks. So how are things, anyhow? Written any good books lately? You’re probably our most famous alum, you know that? Jeez, I remember seeing you on the Today show, when was that, last year?’

‘The year before,’ Tim said.

‘Cripes, I looked at you and I said to myself, Boy that’s the same guy who damn near asphyxiated Father Locksley. The good father passed away this March, did you see that? I put it in the class newsletter.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Tim said.

‘Eighty-nine, he was, you know, and his health was all shot to hell. But if he caught you talking to Katie Couric, not saying he did of course, I sure know what went through his mind!’

‘In a way, that has something to do with the reason I called.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Tim. You missed the memorial. We had ten, twelve of us there. You were mentioned, I can say that. Oh, yes.’

‘Actually, I was wondering about Bill Byrne, and it occurred to me that you could probably fill me in.’

Finnegan said nothing for a moment that seemed longer than it was. ‘The colorful Bill Byrne. I suppose you were wondering about how that happened.’

Tim closed his eyes.

‘Tim?’

‘Well, I wasn’t sure.’

‘The obituary in the Ledger ran only two days ago. What, you saw it online, I guess?’

‘Something like that.’

‘The Ledger couldn’t say much about how Bill died. Of course, I won’t be able to be much more specific in the online newsletter. You do get those, don’t you?’

Tim assured Finnegan that he received his online newsletter, without mentioning that he always deleted it unread.

‘Well, you want to know about old Wild Bill. Well, it was pretty bad. He was in this bar downtown, Izzy’s. A lot of lawyers hang out there, because it’s near the Federal Building and the court-house. This is about one, two in the morning, Friday night. Leland Rose comes up to Bill and says, “I believe you’re messing around with my wife.” Leland Rose is some fancy financial adviser, big office downtown. Bill tells him he’s crazy, and he completely denies having anything to do with this guy’s wife, who by the way is of the trophy variety and pure trouble from top to bottom.

‘So they get into an argument and by and by this Leland Rose, this pillar of society, pulls out a gun. Before anybody can stop him, he takes a shot at Bill. Even though he’s about two feet away, he misses Bill completely, only Bill doesn’t know it. He thinks he was shot! He throws a punch at Rose and knocks him out cold. Then he falls down, too. This is pure Bill Byrne. He’s at least as drunk as Rose, and he imagines he’s wounded, which is because in his fall, he smashed the hell out of one of his elbows. Bill got up to about three hundred pounds there toward the end.

‘An ambulance shows up and takes both of them to Shady Mount Hospital. They’re strapped onto gurneys. This whole time, Bill is carrying on, trying to get at Rose, who’s still out. They get to Shady Mount and unload Bill first, only he’s rolling around so much that they actually drop him, and that’s the last straw. Poof! Whammo! Massive heart attack, huge heart attack, a heart explosion. No way they could revive him.’

‘So he died drunk, on a gurney outside the emergency entrance of Shady Mount.’

‘Actually, at that point he wasn’t on the gurney.’

‘Was Rose right? Was Byrne having an affair with his wife?’

‘That fat little Irishman was always screwing someone else’s wife. Women ate him up, don’t ask me why.’

Tim thought of Phoorow and had the sudden desire to stop talking to Chester Finnegan.

‘I was just remembering that day you and I drove up to Random Lake,’ Finnegan said. ‘Remember? Boy, that was one of the best days of my life. Did Turner come with us? Yes, he did, because Dicky Stockwell pushed him off the pier, remember?’

Tim not only failed to remember the great excursion to Random Lake, he had no idea who Turner and Dicky Stockwell were. Unchecked, Finnegan could fill another hour with golden moments only he remembered, and Tim began making noises indicative of the conversation’s end.

Then he remembered that Finnegan could, for once and all, banish the specter that had shimmered into view. ‘I suppose Byrne was on your newsletter list.’

‘Naturally.’

‘So you have his e-mail address.’

‘Not that I’ll ever use it anymore.’

‘Could you please tell me what it was, Ches?’

‘Why would you want a thing like that?’

‘It has to do with my work,’ he said. ‘I’m ruling out some possibilities.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Finnegan. ‘Hold on, I’ll get my database…All right, here we are. Wild Bill’s e-mail address was Byrne, capital B, 615 at aol.com.’

‘Ah,’ Tim said. ‘Yes. Well. How unusual.’

‘Not really,’ Finnegan told him. ‘A lot of AOL addresses are like that.’

The specter had come shimmering back into view, and Bill Byrne, who had died of not being shot to death, had a fairness issue on his chest. Besides that, Bill felt lost.

‘Ches, if I give you the first part of some e-mail addresses, can you see if they are in your database?’

‘You mean the names, right?’

‘I’m just testing something out here.’

‘Hey, if I help you, I expect a cut of your royalties!’

‘Talk to my agent,’ Tim said. He went to his e-mail screen. ‘How about Huffy? Do you have a Huffy? Capital H?’

‘I don’t even have to look for that one—Bob Huffman. Huffy at verizon.net. Nice guy. Cancer got him about three months ago. Had two remissions, and then it went nuclear on him. This is a dangerous age, my friend.’

Tim remembered Bob Huffman, a lanky red-haired boy who looked as if he would remain sixteen forever. ‘Is there a Presten?’ He spelled it.

‘Presten at mindspring.com, sure. That’s Paul Resten. You have to remember him. Strange story. Paul died right around New Year’s. Gunshot wound. Poor guy, he was an innocent bystander in a liquor store holdup, wrong place, wrong time. Paul was a very successful guy! Every year, he gave a generous contribution to the school.’

The remark contained a quantity of reproach, but Finnegan’s attention had shifted to another point.

‘These e-mail addresses are all for dead people, Tim. What’s going on?’

‘Someone must be messing with my head. In the past few days, I got some e-mail that was supposedly sent by these people.’

‘I’d call that obscene,’ Finnegan said. ‘Using our classmates’ names like that.’

‘I just figured out another one,’ Tim said. ‘Rudderless must be Les Rudder. Don’t tell me he’s dead, too.’

‘Les died in a car crash on September 11, 2001. I’m not surprised you never heard about that one. Anyone else?’

‘Loumay, nayrm, kalicokitty, and someone called Cyrax.’

‘I know two of those right off, but let me look up…Okay. This guy’s a real bastard, whoever he is. Kalicokitty was Katie Finucan, year behind us, remember? Cutest little thing you ever saw. God, I used to have the hots for Katie Finucan. Better not let my wife hear me say that, hey? Katie died in a fire last February. She was visiting her grandkids in New Jersey, and no one knows what happened. Everyone got out but her. Smoke inhalation, I’d say, but hey, I was in the insurance business, what do I know?’

Tim was appalled by the ease with which death had moved through the ranks of his classmates at a mediocre little Catholic school in Millhaven.

‘Okay, same deal goes for loumay and nayrm, Lou Mayer and Mike Ryan. Ryan died in Ireland last year, and Lou Mayer drowned in a sailing accident off Cape Cod.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Tim said.

‘I hear he was a lousy sailor. What was that last name?’

‘Cyrax.’

‘He doesn’t seem to be here. Nope. So maybe that one’s real.’

‘He said he wanted to be my guide.’

‘That’s your joker, right there.’ Finnegan’s voice rose. ‘Here’s the guy who’s sending you this crap. It has to be someone we went to school with. Who else would know about these people? He’s picking the names of people you cared about.’

Except I didn’t, Tim thought. ‘That crossed my mind, too.’

‘There has to be someone who can pin down this creep.’

‘I know a couple of people who might be able to do something,’ Tim said. ‘Thank you for your help.’

Now his computer seemed like a hostile entity, exuding toxins as it crouched atop his desk. If Cyrax was sending him e-mails using the Internet names of dead classmates because Cyrax had been a classmate himself, how did he know about Philip Footler? No one in Tim’s life was familiar with both his life in high school and his Vietnam tour. The one and only intersection on earth of Bill Byrne and Phoorow was Timothy Underhill.

He went back and started over. Someone calling himself Cyrax had been rooting through his past and using what he found there to send these crazy e-mails. Tim could see no other explanation. Cyrax had already appointed himself as guide, so let him make the next move. Since without full addresses these e-mail conversations could be only one-way, he would make the next move anyhow. When Cyrax showed himself again, Tim would decide how he wanted to respond. He could always start deleting any e-mail that came without an @ sign and domain name.

He remembered the astonishing sight of his sister, a little Alice in Wonderland girl leaning forward to hurl the words Listen to us at him, and for the first time connected April’s command with the e-mails. An uncontrollable shiver went through his body. Helplessly, he looked at the computer, squatting on his desk like a sleek black toad. From below it, the voices of the dead bubbled up to print their inchoate words on the screen, one after another, emerging from a bottomless well.

He had to get outside.

But when Tim Underhill left his building to walk aimlessly down Grand, then turn left on Wooster Street, then right on Broome, his hands in the pockets of his still-damp Burberry, his head covered by his still-damp WBGO cap, he felt no release from the phantoms that had driven him into the streets. In the passing cars, the drivers scowled like the officers of the secret police in a totalitarian state; on the sidewalks, the people who passed gazed downward, sloping along mute and alone.

Down Crosby he went, that street of cobblestones and sudden windy spaces, now as empty as it had been twenty years before, when he had first moved into the neighborhood. Loneliness suddenly bit into him, and he welcomed it back, for the loneliness was a true part of him, real, not a fearful phantom.

A few days before, Tim had been leafing through his volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters, and for some reason a phrase from one of the ‘Master’ letters—written to a man never identified—came into his head: I used to think when I died—I could see you—so I died as fast as I could. It had been a long time since he had loved someone that way. This gloomy recognition came to him wrapped in the unhappiness that seemed to leak from every blank window and closed door on the street. Underhill tried to reject it and the unhappiness both. Because he thought he would fail, he failed, and loneliness and sorrow thickened around him.

Something set him off, and after that he was, for all purposes, back in his generation’s war. Phoorow, phoorow, Private Philip Footler had been the trigger. Gliding toward him, shifting back, sliding under his defenses, a particularly unhappy vision had flooded Tim’s mind, whether or not he could actually see it at any given moment. Tim Underhill had been something like six feet from Phoorow’s grotesque separation from himself. It had been granted him to witness every one of the four or five seconds it had taken the boy to die—reaching down to pull his body back into connection, his mouth opening and closing like that of an infant seeking the nipple. Tim was grateful not to have seen Phoorow’s eyes.

He longed for the reassuring sound of other people’s voices. He could have gone to the Fireside—okay, not the Fireside, but any one of the little bars and restaurants scattered throughout his village: for over the previous two decades that was what the territory bounded by West Broadway, Broome Street, Broadway, and Canal Street had inevitably become: his hometown, the one place where he felt truly comfortable.

He turned around, and a hint of movement caught his eye. On a street where only he was in motion, the idea of movement seemed a little spooky. Tim Underhill turned back, then spun his head again, scanning the sidewalks and the anonymous facades. It was as if the street had been evacuated, specifically for the purpose of stranding him in it.

Thin, foggy, impenetrable veils hung like sheets of cloud-colored iron at both ends of the block. The ordinary sounds of the city were muted and distant, walled out. If he looked hard at the cobblestones, he thought, he would see unreality’s slick, cartoonish sheen. Everything that had happened to him over the past two days had been designed to get him here, to this empty block on a false Crosby Street.

Now it had happened for real, Tim thought. His mind had rolled past its own edge. Even the gray air seemed to resist him as he turned around once again to face north: uptown, the direction that would take him back to Broome Street. And as he turned, he thought he detected a hint of movement closer to him than the first time. Tim scanned the storefronts and windows and this time really noticed that every one of them was dark. The hypothetical movement had been off to his right and behind the large plate-glass window of a vanished art gallery. He looked more closely at the window and saw only the murk of an empty room.

Once, the gallery had been dedicated to minimalist installations that featured simulated body parts, piles of dirt, and reams of text. Behind the scrim of the dirty enormous window, the bare walls receded into darkness. When he shifted his glance to the cloud-gate at the top end of Crosby, something in the gloom at the rear of the empty gallery revealed itself, then slid back into invisibility. Whatever it was had been looking at him. He snapped his head back and stared into the window. Then he moved forward across the sidewalk, bringing more of the interior into view.

At the far end of the room, a dim shape materialized out of the darkness and seemed to move forward, matching his movements.

Jeez, he thought, stung by a recollection, didn’t I write this somewhere?

He took another reluctant step forward. In either mockery or challenge, the figure inside matched him again. In the darkness and obscurity at the back of the immense room, its shape, which was not human, seemed to waver, swelling and shifting like smoke. A long, wide body lowered itself a few inches, as if crouching. There was the suggestion of ears. A silvery pair of eyes swam into view and focused intently on him. A kind of blunt force streamed toward him. Tim gasped and stepped back. He felt as though he had been pinned by a pair of flashlights. Unrelenting and soulless, made entirely of will and antipathy, the creature’s eyes hung in the gloomy air.

He found himself moving backward and off the sidewalk, into the middle of the cobbled street. It seemed important not to turn his back.

Knowing that his terror was ridiculous did nothing to tame it. He continued to move across the street, eyes locked with the creature’s, pushed himself up onto the far sidewalk, and whirled to sprint north toward Broome Street. Around him, the atmosphere tingled and snapped. He once again became aware of the rain. Before he had taken two long strides, a door opened in what had seemed a blank wall, and a couple emerged from a tall iron-fronted building. The world around him had solidified into its old unreliable self. He reached Broome with the sense of having broken through an invisible but palpable barrier.

Because the people who had reappeared on the sidewalk were staring at him, he slowed his pace. By the time he was crossing Broadway, he had brought himself down to a walk. His heart was knocking in his chest, and he could hear his own ragged breathing. A pair of shiny young men with rain-resistant hair turned their heads to see how much trouble he was in.

‘I’m okay,’ he said.

The young men snapped their heads forward and began walking a little faster, leaking disdain.

Strange, how normal the world seemed to him now, after Crosby Street. Those young men, what would they say if they knew he was getting e-mail from dead classmates? No more. Underhill was turning his back on all that nonsense. He resolved to concentrate on his work. From here on out, he would delete, unread, all e-mails without domain names. He wanted order and productivity.

He reached this decision with the sense of having established the ground rules for the next six months of his life. He would create a clearing, and in that clearing, free of uncertainty and disorder, he would write his book. Within imagination’s protective confines, he would set his heroine in motion. She was supposed to be in emotional extremity, not he. He needed to get in balance again.

With this resolve in mind, Tim turned the corner of Wooster and Grand, looked through the drizzle to the entrance of his building, and noticed a tall man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt emerging through the open door. Oh, no, he thought, without being entirely certain why he should react this way. Then he looked more closely beneath the edge of the hood and saw what part of him had already registered, the face of Jasper Kohle. Kohle was grinning at him.

Tim stopped moving. For a second or two, Kohle’s face seemed to slide over its bones, and the bones themselves to shift. All that remained steady was the grin. Kohle’s face disappeared when his body turned, and he began to move in a deliberate slow jog toward West Broadway, where a wet young woman with green hair and facial piercings slouched past a steady stream of cars.

‘Hey!’ Tim shouted. ‘What are you doing?’

Kohle jogged around the corner, and Tim followed. For a moment he saw Kohle’s back moving purposefully away from him; then it slipped around a group of policemen staring at the entrance of a shop, and was gone. Tim thought of calling out to the cops, but he realized that he had no crime to report.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘Oh, hell.’ One of the cops turned his head and gave him a look that said, Do you really want to mess up my day?

He spun around and raced back to the entrance of 55 Grand, as if haste could alter whatever he was going to find in his loft. The key jittered in the lock, demanding extra body English before it slid home. Though Tim’s mind was empty of nearly everything but anxiety, he managed to wonder how Kohle had gotten inside without a key. Callers could not be buzzed in: loft holders had to go downstairs and open two sets of doors for their visitors. This reality created a possibility for hope. Maybe Kohle’s visit had been no more than the act of a stalker pushing the envelope.

Tim ran past the elevator and charged up the staircase. His heels rang on the metal steps. He was breathing hard by the time he reached his door, and he had a sharp stitch in his side. He placed his left hand over the pain, with his right inserted his second key into the slot, and the door swung open by itself. Instead of unlocking it, he had almost locked it.

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