In the Night Room

25

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Good old 224 took us across the state of Ohio. Ohio is a big state, and we saw mile after mile of farmland. I didn’t see any suspicious-looking cars following us, but neither was I watching with any real degree of care. The police were my main concern, but the state troopers and local cops who had the chance to pull us over blew right on by.

“I still can’t figure out how Mr. Davy managed to create so much damage in so short a time,” Willy said. “You must have a guardian angel, or something.”

Then she started to complain about being ravenous again, and I said I would stop at the nearest thing that looked like a grocery store. “How can you have a grocery store when you don’t have a town? I’ve seen so many fields, I’m sick of the color green. But really, what did that man do?”

“Mr. Davy must have hidden talents,” I said.

“He’s not the only one. How did you know Roman Richard’s arm was in a cast? Tom didn’t tell you, so don’t lie to me about that.”

“Do you think I lie to you, Willy?”

“You’re not perfect, you know. You snore. You refuse to explain things to me. Sometimes you act like you’re my father or something. . . . Explain about the cast.”

I told her I couldn’t, and she went into a sulk. For the next fifteen miles of dead-ahead driving, Willy simply crossed her arms in front of her and stared out the window. It was like being with a grumpy twelve-year-old. I don’t think she paid any attention to the landscape. Of course, the landscape was nothing special. Once, a man on a tractor waved at us. Willy growled. She would rather have put a bullet in his heart than wave back.

“You could explain,” she finally said, “but you won’t.”

“Have it your way.”

“You’re the kind of person who likes secrets,” she said. “I hate secrets. Mitchell Faber loved secrets, so you’re like him.”

“Not really.”

“Okay, have it your way,” she said, and slumped back into angry silence.

Fives miles on, she said, “I can’t believe how hungry I am.” She placed her hands on her stomach. “I’m so hungry, it hurts.” For the first time in about half an hour, she turned her head to look at me. “By the way, although I am talking to you, we are not having a conversation. I am telling you something, and that’s different from having a conversation.”

A gas station appeared in the distance, and she pointed at it and said, “Pull in there. Pull in there. Pull in there.”

“You want me to stop at that gas station?”

Now her eyes were bright with fury. “If you so much as try to drive past that gas station, I’ll murder you, dump your corpse onto the road, and drive over it on my way in.”

I asked her what she thought she was going to get at the gas station.

“Candy bars,” she said. “Oh, God. Just the thought of them . . .”

When we approached the station, she gave me a dead-level look of warning.

“I could use some gas,” I told her, and turned in.

She had her hand on the door handle before I pulled up to the self-serve tanks. By the time I stopped, she already had a leg out the door. I watched her moving toward the low, white, cement-block building, where the attendant sat behind his counter. Willy was walking as fast as she could. As I looked on, she stopped moving so abruptly she almost lost her balance. She appeared to be staring at her right hand, which her body blocked me from seeing. Then she bent over to get a closer look.

This is going to shake things up, I thought.

With the violence of a released force, Willy whirled around, held out her arm, and yelled, “Look!” For a second or two, the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand were transparent, and the last two fingers looked hazy and opaque. Then, without transition, her hand became solid again. Willy lowered it slowly, glancing from it to me—she had seen something in my response, and I would have to account for it—before she turned around again and walked, at nothing like her earlier velocity, into the station.

Gasoline pumped into the Town Car, and the numbers on the dial rolled upward.

In a couple of minutes, Willy popped out of the station empty-handed and came trotting toward me. Panic shone in her eyes. “Can you give me some money, Tim? Like twenty bucks? Please?”

I fished a twenty out of my pants pocket. She took it from me, then leaned forward and in a low, urgent voice said, “We’re going to talk about what happened to my hand. We both saw that, so it wasn’t some kind of optical illusion. Right?” This last word meant: You know something, and you are going to let me know, too.

“Right,” I said.

She sprinted off, no longer able to concern herself with an abstraction like dignity, and I went back to pumping gas. When the tank was full, I moved toward the little white box of the station, expecting to see Willy come through the door carrying a bag containing twenty dollars’ worth of candy bars. She still had not emerged by the time I reached the entrance, and I didn’t see her at the counter when I walked in. The boy at the cash register had H. R. Giger tattoos on his arms and short, dyed-blond hair that he wanted to look artificially colored. Willy was puttering around in the aisles at the back of the store. The boy took his eyes off her to register my entrance.

“Hey, dude,” he said. “Is that girl with you?”

“Yes,” I said, and went to the counter to hand over a credit card.

“Planning on a long trip?”

At the back of the store, Willy ducked out of sight. I heard the rustle of bags. Her head popped up above the top shelf, and my heart thumped in my chest at this sudden vision—Willy’s floating head. In spite of everything, all my love for her, which had been a bit subsumed under both concern and a kind of mild irritation, returned to me. She said, “I need more money. Come back here, Tim.” At least I had a name again.

She was trying to keep a grip on about a dozen loose candy bars, individual Reese’s Pieces, a container of Fiddle Faddle, bags of peanut M&M’s, and larger bags of potato chips. My arrival in her aisle caused a lot of Hershey’s bars to slither out of her grasp and land on the floor. Her hands seemed reassuringly solid, but her temperament was sizzling toward hysteria. “Shit!” she whispered to me, once again ducking out of sight of the attendant. “I’m so hungry I can’t hang on to this stuff.”

“Eat one now,” I said. “Save the wrapper, and we’ll pay for it later.” As I spoke, I started unwrapping one of the Hershey’s bars that had fallen to the floor. Before I finished, she tore it from my hands. The end of the bar disappeared into her mouth, and she bit off about three inches of almonds and milk chocolate.

“Oh, boy,” she said. She chewed with her eyes closed, and I could see some of the hysteria leave her. It was like watching her pulse slow down. “Dark chocolate would be better, but this is really, really okay.”

“I’ll get a basket,” I said, and in a moment was back beside her, tossing candy and junk food into a plastic supermarket basket. Willy squatted on her haunches, taking giant, irregular bites out of the Hershey bar almost faster than she could chew.

“Get me two more Score bars,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “Those little deals are wicked, wicked good.”

“We should get some real food in you,” I said.

“Yeah, I need a meal. But for some reason, this crap is what I need most right now. That lightness is beginning to go away.”

“Do you guys need any help?” the boy called out.

Up at the counter, I unloaded the basket under the increasingly skeptical eyes of the tattooed boy. He dug one hand into his bleached hair and shook his head, half-smiling. I signed a MasterCard slip for $73.37, a nice palindromic number.

Willy was looking at me with a stony intensity that promised a serious interrogation as soon as we got back in the car, and I asked the boy about the nearest town that had both a decent restaurant and a library.

“A library?” Willy interrupted the boy’s response.

“Before we can talk, I have to show you something.” I folded the credit card slip into my wallet and picked up our bag.

“In a book?”

“In an atlas.”

“You still want to know about the library?” the boy asked. “Just stay on 224 out there all the way to Willard. Like the rat movie. It has a library, and you could eat at Chicago Station. They’re famous for their pies.”

“Ahh, pies,” Willy said.

Off we go to Willard, which turned out to be a lot nicer than I’d expected. Willard is the sort of place people would retire to, if they had any sense. Like all small cities, it’s on a human scale, and there is more to it than you at first imagine. The streets are spotless, the shop windows shine, and the people say hello to strangers. The only problem in Willard, by which I also mean the drive to Willard, was Willy Patrick. She gobbled down three candy bars in a row—another Hershey’s bar, a Mounds bar, and an Oh Henry!—while all but holding up a finger to let me know I wasn’t getting off the hook this time. Then she tossed the wrappers into the seat well, took out a packet of M&M’s, and while peeling it open said, “Now talk to me, lover boy. No games and no kidding around.”

“I thought that Hershey’s bar at the gas station made you feel better,” I said.

“It did, but it wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. Don’t worry about me getting sick, or anything. I need this gunk, and as soon as I finish these M&M’s, I’ll have had enough. For a while. And then I’ll start feeling light again, and after that, well, I guess, after that . . .”

Her eyes narrowed; she aimed a finger at my chest. “And after that I guess I’LL START TO DISAPPEAR! I GUESS PIECES OF ME WILL SUDDENLY BE TRANSPARENT!”

She rammed four or five M&M’s into her mouth and chewed them furiously. A trickle of chocolate drool slipped down the left side of her chin. She smeared it away while keeping her eyes fixed on mine. She swallowed. “I looked at you, and you knew about it. It shocked the hell out of me, but you weren’t even all that surprised. You’d seen it before. So I guess this BIG SECRET of yours turns out to be that I am DISAPPEARING, and now I need an explanation!”

I took a deep breath and hoped we would soon be driving into Willard. “I did see it once before. Back in Restitution, when you were shifting into the front seat. All of a sudden, I could see through the top part of your right hand. I’m pretty sure Mr. Davy saw the same thing a little bit earlier.”

“And you didn’t tell me? You decided you needed another secret?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” I said.

She shook her head in disgust. “I just realized something—you’re weak. That’s why you didn’t tell me. You were afraid.”

“It kind of took me by surprise,” I said.

“Me, too! Don’t you think I would have appreciated being told about something like that? ‘Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like you’re turning into a window, because I just saw right through the top of your right hand’?”

Willy balled up the empty M&M’s packet and threw it into the back seat. “And do you know something? I still want lunch. This isn’t about hunger, it’s about staving off the lightness. It’s like putting gas in the car, that’s what it’s like. Except when I run out of gas, I won’t be there anymore.”

She stared into my eyes with a complicated mixture of fear, bravado, desperation, anger, and trust that filled me with the impossible desire to hold her forever and keep her safe from harm. “How did this happen to me?”

That was her real cry from the heart. Although she was by no means ready for the truth, I had no choice but to answer in a way faithful to her trust.

“Do you remember the bloodstains you had on your shirt when you showed up at my reading?”

“Of course.” Because the blood had been Tom Hartland’s, the question irritated her.

“And you remember what happened to them.”

“They disappeared.”

“Bloodstains don’t just disappear, Willy. Not even bloodstains that go through a downpour.”

“So first the bloodstains, then me? Is that it?” She gazed at me for a moment, thinking. “Are you saying that Giles and Roman Richard are going to start to disappear, too?”

That, at last, gave me an opening I could use. I could have kissed her hand. “Think about this, Willy: why did you ask about them?”

She frowned. “They followed me.”

“Through what? From what, to what?”

Her frown deepened, and her eyes burrowed into mine. She leaned toward me, trying to remember every detail of that strange passage. “Through that thunderstorm. I thought I . . . It sounds crazy. I thought I was flying through a tunnel. Because they were chasing me, they came through the tunnel, too. I guess that’s what happened.”

“And on this side of the tunnel, Willy, do things look the same as they did on the other?”

We passed a little airport on our left, where prop planes sat outside hangars in the sun. I paused at a stop sign, then turned right on Euclid Avenue, waiting for her answer.

“It seems to me that everything’s a little brighter now.”

“Brighter,” I said, stung.

“Hold on. Are you trying to insinuate that . . . No. I won’t even say it.”

She wouldn’t say it, but I knew what it was. The first seed of recognition had just fallen on ground prepared for it by whatever it is you feel when half of your hand disappears and you need six candy bars to bring it back.

“How much brighter?” I asked, unable to let this go.

“Only a little. You want to know the biggest difference? Before I wound up in that bookstore, I had the feeling that someone or something was pulling my strings and making me do things I didn’t actually want to do. And now, I still feel that way, but I know who’s pulling my strings and moving me around. You.”

“Do you like it better this way?”

“Yes. I do like it better this way.” She checked her hands for signs of transparency. “Do you think I’m going to disappear, like the bloodstains?”

“Unless we can fix a mistake I made in Millhaven last year.”

“We’re going to Millhaven to fix something?”

“I know none of this makes sense, Willy, and when it does, if that ever happens, you’re not going to like it much.”

“But why? What are we doing?” Her face began to tremble, and she looked in my eyes for a reassurance she did not find. For about thirty seconds, she fell apart. I would have embraced her, but she fended me off by every now and then removing one of her hands from her eyes and clouting me in the chest. I pulled over to the side of the road.

“I don’t know why I believe you.” Willy wiped her eyes and cleaned her palms by smearing them over the sleeve of my jacket.

“I do, Willy,” I said. “Before we get to Millhaven, you will, too, probably. If I explained it to you now, it would be the one thing you would refuse to believe.”

“I couldn’t have anything to do with a mistake you made last year in Millhaven. I never went near Millhaven last year, and I didn’t know you.”

“What did you do last year, Willy? Can you remember a single thing you did in 2002?”

She shook her shoulders and gave me a scowling, insulted glance. “In 2002, I wrote In the Night Room. That’s what I did that year. You probably don’t know this, but I started the book in a place, a psychiatric community you could call it, known as the Institute, in Stockwell, Massachusetts.”

Now she was daring me to find fault with her, and self-doubt turned her confidence brazen. “It’s a wonderful place, and it did me a lot of good. There was this doctor there, Dr. Bollis. I used to call him Dr. Bollocks, but he was great. Because of him, I could write again.”

“In 2001, I went to a psychiatric community that sounds very similar,” I said. “And the treatment I had there was wonderful for me, too. I could sort of put myself back together.”

She grew a shade less defensive. “So you should understand. What was the reason you came unglued, or wasn’t there anything specific?”

“On September 11, I saw people jump from the World Trade Center. And then the ruin and all the death you could feel around you. It brought back too many traumatic things from Vietnam, and I couldn’t cope anymore.”

“Oh, poor Tim,” she said. Tears glittered in her eyes again. “My poor honey.” She shifted sideways and put her arms around me. “I’m sorry I wiped my slimy hands on your beautiful jacket.” She rested her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

“What happened to me was, my family got killed—my husband and my daughter.” She was speaking in a low, soft voice now, and she held one hand cupped against the side of my face. Very faintly, I could feel her pulse beating in the tips of her fingers. “My whole world disappeared. I don’t even remember how I got to the Institute, but it did me a lot of good. It’s funny, you ask about what I remember from 2002, and that’s all there is. Everything else is just darkness, it’s a room I’m locked out of.”

“My place was called the Austen Riggs Center, and it’s in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. My doctor, my main doctor, the one who did me the most good, was named Dr. B——”

She sat up and looked at me in wonder. “That’s almost the same name!”

“And the town, Stockbridge, was home for most of his life to a famous magazine illustrator named—”

“So was Stockwell! I can’t believe this! Our guy was—”

“Norman Rockwell.”

“Norton Postman,” Willy said, and her eyes underwent a subtle change. “This is an amazing coincidence.”

“It certainly is. Norman Rockwell painted hundreds of covers for the Saturday Evening Post, so in a way, you could call him the Post man.”

“But so did Postman,” Willy said. “I didn’t know there were two of these guys.”

“Not to mention two world-famous mental-health facilities in little towns in the Berkshires, and two excellent psychiatrists who practically have the same name.”

Willy tucked her lower lip between her teeth, a gesture that for some reason I would never imagine her making. Maybe I thought it was too girlish for her, but there she was, biting her lower lip, and it didn’t look at all girlish. Willy unpeeled a Mounds bar and began to fend off another attack of lightness.

Ten minutes later, we were walking into the pleasant, air-conditioned space of the Willard Memorial Library, a modern-looking building on West Emerald Street, just two blocks off the main drag. Oh, Emerald Street, I thought, and began to sense the close, hovering presence of my sister. Ever since my stunt in the Barnes & Noble, The Wizard of Oz had been as implicated in her appearances as Alice in Wonderland.

“Atlases?” said the librarian. “Right over there, in our reference room. The atlas shelves are directly to the left of the door as you enter.”

A couple of men read newspapers at a blond wooden desk; two girls in their preteens plowed through copies of the same Harry Potter book in a dead-serious race to the end. Diffuse light filtered in through the high windows and hung evenly throughout the large room. Separated by four empty seats, an old man and a high school student leaned over the keyboards of computers as if listening to voices.

I swung open the glass door to the reference room, and Willy followed me in. To my left, three tall shelves of outsized atlases stretched off to the far wall. We were alone in the room.

“Do you have a favorite atlas?” I asked Willy.

“The Oxford, I guess,” she said. It was the one I used.

I pulled the Oxford Atlas of the World from the lowest of the three shelves and slid it onto the nearest table. “Let’s get one more, for backup.”

“Backup?”

“You’re going to want a second opinion.”

After a little searching I found the National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World and placed it beside the Oxford. Balanced on one hip, Willy watched me with her hands behind her back, seeming to glow with the light of her own curiosity.

I gestured to the chair placed before the books, and she sat down and tilted her head to look up. The expression on her face made me feel as though I was just about to strangle a puppy. I leaned over the table and pushed the National Geographic toward the center of the table, leaving the Oxford Atlas of the World in front of her.

I asked Willy where she had been living before she fled to New York.

“Hendersonia, New Jersey.”

“See if you can find it.”

Giving me a suspicious glance, she flipped to the index on the last pages of the atlas. I saw her trace her finger down the long list of the H’s, going from Hampshire, UK, quickly down to the place names beginning with He. And here were Henderson, AR, Henderson, GA, Henderson, KY, and Henderson, NV. Where Hendersonia should have been, she found only Hendersonville, TN, and its namesake in North Carolina.

She frowned at me. “It must be too small to put in the index.”

“Oh,” I said.

She held up a finger, this time telling me that inspiration had struck, and flipped backward to the A’s. Her finger went down the list to Alpine, NJ, and when she had the page and coordinates she turned more pages until she came to the one she wanted and moved her finger along the lettered squares until it intersected with the proper numerical one.

“It’ll be in here,” she said, and motioned me forward.

I put a hand on her shoulder and bent down. Willy’s finger circled around until it hit upon Alpine, from whence she drew it in a southerly direction, apparently without any significant success. She leaned over, put her face an inch from the complex, colorful map, and scoured it with her eyes.

Willy looked back around at me and pulled down the corners of her mouth. “This is nuts. Give me another one of those books.”

I slid the National Geographic in front of her.

“That first atlas was stupid. It’ll be in here.” Her eyes skittered over my face, looking for clues. “Won’t it?”

“Do you think I’d ask you to look if I thought it would be?”

She pulled back her head and frowned. With the same expression on her face, she opened the book at the index and flipped pages until she came to the H’s. The frown increased as she once again had the experience of moving from Henderson to Hendersonville with no stop at a place called Hendersonia.

“This is impossible,” she said, without modulating her voice. “It’s absurd. They erased an entire town from these atlases.”

Back in the general part of the library, Willy looked at the computers and said, “Hold on.” She went up to the desk. “May I use one of those computers?”

“Be my guest,” said the librarian. “By law I am required to inform you that using the Internet to violate any state or federal laws is prohibited. Now that I’ve done that, I’ll have to see a driver’s license and have you sign this form.”

It was a limitation of liability form, and I signed it as soon as I produced my driver’s license.

Willy pulled me toward the seat beside the teenaged boy. When she sat down, he gave her a classic double take. Then he noticed me and turned back to the images of severed limbs on his monitor. Willy motioned me closer and whispered, “I know it’s on MapQuest, because I’ve looked at it a couple of times since I moved there.”

“Give it a whirl,” I said.

Willy quickly reached MapQuest.com and typed “Hendersonia” and “NJ” into the address boxes. She clicked on Search. In seconds, the screen displayed a message reading, “Your search for Hendersonia in NJ didn’t match any locations.”

While she was busy being frustrated, I sat down at the computer next to the old man, logged on, and waited only a second before a blue rectangle appeared on my screen. As I’d feared, Cyrax wanted to let me know what was on his mind.

u must tell her what she is & speed to yr Byzantium, 4 u must pay the dredful price in sacrifice of the being u made. CO-RECK yr error & yr crime. it will b terrible & yet it must b done & U MUST DO IT! as I luv u, buttsecks, I cannot ignor the CHAOS u brought to our REALM and yrs & for this U MUST PAY IN KIND—U OPENED THE WEDGE, NOW U MUST CLOSE IT!

oh, what does gentle Cyrax demand of u?

FIND the real Lily Kalendar! See what she is! Understand the deep complexity of her self & her position, so u know what u got WRONG! payment must be made!

I logged off and slumped in the chair. Payment must be made, he said. Wasn’t it being made, in full measure, by the heartbreaking woman at my side?

“No, that’s wrong,” Willy said. I heard real distress in her voice. The boy risked another peek at her. “It was there before!” She shook her head. “What’s happening to me?” She stared at the screen for a moment, then said, “Hold on, hold on, I’m going to try one more thing.”

This time, she typed in “Stockwell” and “MA.” The same “Your search” message appeared on the monitor. “It isn’t there? There’s no Stockwell? Okay, I’m trying one more thing, and then I quit.”

She went to Google and typed in “Charles Bollis, MD,” and told the service to search the Web. What came back was the question “Do you mean Charles Boli’s, MD?” and a link to a site that provided oncology information from somewhere called Charles County.

Her face had turned white.

“Let’s get out of here, Willy,” I said. “You need about three candy bars and a bag of M&M’s, and both of us should have lunch.”

“What were you looking at?” she asked me.

I told her I was checking my messages.

When we got back into the car, Willy dove into the bag and pulled out a handful of candy bars. After she wolfed the first one down and had gone through half of the second, she said, “I’m learning how to handle this condition, whatever you call it, and I can keep it under control. I think.” She demolished the rest of her candy bar, picked up a third—a 100 Grand bar—and removed the wrapper with a single downward stroke. “But I also think it is time for you to let me in on these big secrets of yours, because I really have to know what the HELL is going on.”

I turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll try to explain over lunch. This isn’t going to be easy for either of us, but after what just happened, there’s a chance that you’ll believe me.” I looked at her and started driving back to the center of town, which is where I thought I probably would find the restaurant mentioned by the boy at the gas station. Willy was chewing a cud of chocolate, peanuts, and caramel and regarding me with a mixture of confusion, anger, and hopefulness that I felt penetrate into my viscera, if not my soul. “Because, and this is a promise, you wouldn’t have believed me before this.”

“The town I live in doesn’t exist—at least not in this universe! I remember stuff that you remember! I didn’t go Lawrence Freeman Elementary School, and I didn’t have Mrs. Gross as my second-grade teacher. You did, but I didn’t. What would happen if I tried to call the Institute? It wouldn’t have a number, would it? Because it isn’t there. Just like Dr. Bollis.”

“To look on the bright side, there isn’t any Baltic Group, either.”

“But Giles Coverley and Roman Richard still exist, and I’m sure they’re still trying to find us.”

“I bet they’re running into a lot of problems right about now.”

“I bet they’re scarfing down a lot of sugar right about now. But I guess I don’t have to worry about Mitchell anymore.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not exactly true,” I said.

“Save it. Is this the place?”

A tall, vertical sign outlined in lights spelled out CHICAGO STATION above a long, rectangular building faced with stone. I drove into the lot and parked under the only tree in sight.

“You’re not paying for lunch. I should split everything with you. Do you know how much money is in that bag back there?”

“A hundred thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills.”

Her face went soft and confused, almost wounded. I was afraid she would start to weep.

“Did I tell you that? Don’t answer.”

She got out of the car and opened the back door. The long white bag lay across the seat, and she pulled it toward her and unzipped the top. Curious about what all that money looked like, I stood behind her as she reached in and lifted a neat, banded bundle of bills out of the bag. “Let’s just take two of them,” she said. “You carry them.”

Willy tugged two of the hundreds out of the pack and handed them to me. She leaned back into the car to replace the rest of the bundle, and I looked at the topmost bill in my hand. What I saw made me gasp. For a hideous moment it struck me as funny. It was a hundred-dollar bill of the usual size, color, and texture. The numbers were all in the right places. Just left of the center, in the big oval frame where Benjamin Franklin should have been, was what looked like an old-fashioned steel engraving of me, in three-quarter profile, from the top of my head to the base of my neck. I did not look anything like as clever as Franklin, and I appeared to be wearing my old blazer and a button-down shirt with a frayed collar. The little scroll beneath the portrait gave my name as L’Duith.

“Your money’s no good in this town,” I said, settling at the end for a cheap joke. “Take a look.”

Willy stared at the front of the bill, glanced up at me, then back at the bill. “That’s your picture on there.”

“So it seems,” I said.

Now she was so dumbfounded she seemed hypnotized. “How did that happen? How did you do that?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Let’s go into the restaurant and get some real food in you.”

Willy took my arm like a wounded child. “Look, do I actually exist?”