In the Night Room

29

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

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

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

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

“I bet he’s proud of you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another amazement—Philip had made a joke.

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

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

“Philip, this room is beautiful,” he said.

“We’re happy with it. Won’t you please sit down? Can I get you a glass of wine or anything?”

Willy asked for a Coca-Cola, and Tim reeled before the evidence that this formerly fanatical teetotaler had alcoholic beverages in his house and was willing to serve them to his guests.

“I’ll have a Coke, too, Philip. We have an appointment for an interview at the Foundlings’ Shelter in about an hour, so it’s better if I don’t drink. But you’re one surprise after another.”

“Pop might have been an alcoholic, but there was no reason I shouldn’t let myself and my guests enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures. Why are you being interviewed at the Foundlings’ Home?”

“I’m not. I’m interviewing someone for a new project.”

“You’ll have to tell me all about it when I get back.” Philip smiled at them, let his gaze linger on Willy for a moment, then smiled again at Tim before he left the room.

Tim smacked his forehead. “That’s not Philip. That’s one of those pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Do you know the shit he used to put me through about drinking?”

“Dimly,” Willy said.

“She got him to change this room,” he said, musing. “That must have required brain surgery and a heart transplant. He would never have done anything to this room.”

“Who is ‘she’?” Willy asked.

Philip, carrying a tray with two glasses filled with ice and Coca-Cola into the room, had heard this question. “She, dear Willy, is China Beech, the woman who rescued me from grief and depression and made a human being of me. I wish she were here now, but she had some business to attend to. You’ll meet her at our wedding, though. I know you’ll love her. Everyone loves China.”

“What kind of business?” Tim asked.

“I’m not too sure. Something to do with one of her buildings, probably.”

“Her buildings?”

“China has buildings here and there, all over town.”

“What do you mean, she has buildings?”

“She owns them. Some are commercial, some are residential, but the apartment buildings are more trouble than they’re worth. I tell her she should cash out, let somebody inherit the worries, but she’s a little sentimental about those apartment buildings. They were where her father started, you know.”

“Your fiancée inherited property from her father?” Tim felt as though he were trying to run uphill through a muddy field.

“Well, yeah, Bill Beech.”

Apparently, land mines dotted the muddy field.

“China’s father was the William Beech?” William Beech had once owned half of downtown Millhaven.

“Didn’t I just tell you that? Willy, how did you and Tim get together? Were you a student of his? That’s how I met China—she was one of our student teachers, and I was, well, her mentor, I guess you could say.”

“We met at a reading of his,” Willy said. “When he learned that I was from Millhaven, too, we decided to drive out here together.”

“You drove?”

“All the way. I thought you told me that your girlfriend was an exotic dancer.”

“That was kind of an in-joke. She’s a tango dancer. So am I, although I’m not nearly as good as she is. She makes me look okay, though. We’re thinking of entering contests one day.”

Philip not only made jokes, he made in-jokes. He danced the tango. He was thinking of entering contests.

“You took me seriously, huh? That’s pretty funny. An exotic dancer is really a stripper, isn’t that right? China’s going to love that. I hope she gets back before you have to go.”

“How long have you known her?”

Philip looked a bit embarrassed. “I met China in September of last year. She helped me deal with my grief. I should say, she helped me to feel my grief.”

He paused. For a short time, it seemed likely that he would start crying. “I never dreamed a woman like that could want to marry me. It’s unbelievable. She let God into my life, and everything has been getting better and better ever since.”

“It seems to have done you no end of good.”

“ ‘No end of good,’ ” Philip said. “ ‘No end of good.’ What a beautiful phrase.” He hesitated. “I don’t suppose you’d like me to talk about my faith, and salvation, and Jesus Christ, and all that?”

“I want you to talk about anything you feel like talking about.”

“I’d like to hear you talk about God,” Willy said. “The god I know never explains anything.”

Philip smiled. “Tim, you’re just being polite. And Willy, one of the main problems with gods is that they seldom feel the need to explain themselves. If you have any genuine interest, ask me about it later. All right?”

“Certainly,” said Tim, impressed by Philip’s display of restraint.

“Now that that bit of awkwardness is over, will you tell me about this project of yours?”

“Yes,” Willy said. “Please be as explicit as possible. I’d love to know more about your project.”

“You’re full of curiosity today,” Tim said. “Unfortunately, I can only describe what I know at the moment. I can’t predict the future.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Philip asked.

“I mean,” Tim said, “that I can’t describe what hasn’t been created yet. No doubt God had the same limitation.”

“All right, describe what has been created.”

“Before he does, could you please get me another glass of Coke? I’m awfully thirsty.”

“Of course, Willy,” Philip said, giving her a slightly curious look, and made the round-trip to the kitchen in less than a minute. He handed her the glass and said, “Please, Tim.”

“Okay,” Tim said. “I hope you won’t object to this, Philip. I’ve been trying to write a book about Joseph Kalendar’s daughter.” Remembering the appalling figure that had glared down at him from the top of the street, Tim felt the necessity to employ a considerable degree of caution in what he said.

“She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s what you said in lost boy lost girl.”

“Your neighbor Omar Hillyard led me to think her father murdered her. Hillyard was just making inferences based on what he saw at the time. But he wasn’t watching the Kalendar house full-time, and he could have missed a lot.”

“Wait a second. Is this book fact or fiction?”

Willy laughed. “That’s the question I always want to ask him.”

“Philip,” Tim said, not very kindly, “anyone who believes in the virgin birth and the performance of miracles, not to mention walking on water, shouldn’t be so quick to make that distinction.”

Philip immediately retreated. “I suppose that’s an excellent point.” Then he changed the subject. “By the way, you might be interested in hearing that Mr. Hillyard passed away two days before Christmas, last year.” Philip stared at Willy, who was tilting the last of her second drink into her mouth. “Anyhow, Kalendar had a real daughter—you’re sure of that.”

“Oh, I know he had a daughter,” Tim said, failing to mention that his primary source of information was Cyrax, a citizen of Byzantium who had been dead for six hundred years. “I just assumed she was dead, so I never bothered to do any research about her. In my book, she had been killed; that’s all I cared about. In real life, she was taken into the child-care system, and she wound up at the Foundlings’ Shelter. The question is, what can she be today? Is she even still alive? Was she ever put into foster care? Did she ever go to college? Is she in prison? A mental hospital?”

“I bet she never broke into any warehouses,” Willy said, darkly.

“I mean, what kind of life can you have after a childhood like that? How healed can you be?”

Philip shook his head and regarded Tim with what looked a great deal like fond resignation. “You never give up, do you?”

“What do you mean by that?” Tim found himself unreasonably rankled by his brother’s words.

“Childhood, healing, childhood trauma . . . sound familiar?”

“I’m not writing about myself, Philip,” Tim said, irritated.

“I didn’t say you were. But you’re not exactly not writing about yourself, either, are you?”

“You’re not my brother,” Tim said. “My real brother is hiding in the attic.”

“I know why you say that, believe me. I wish I could have been more like this—like the self China let me discover—with Nancy and Mark. Those regrets are astoundingly painful.” Philip seemed to travel inward again, and he clasped his hands and lowered his head, perhaps in prayer. “Yes. They are.” Then he looked back up at Tim. “Did you know the Kalendar place is going to be torn down next Wednesday? The view from my backyard is going to improve by a hundred percent.”

“The Kalendar place is in your backyard?” Willy asked. “He didn’t tell me that.”

“It’s across the alley,” Philip said. “Ever since Ronnie Lloyd-Jones got arrested, people have been coming over here to look at the place. Some of them take souvenirs, can you believe that? Souvenirs! Well, the taxes aren’t being paid anymore, and the neighbors stopped cutting the lawn, and now you get these disaster ghouls wandering around. Because of all that, there was a petition to raze the place, and it went through.”

“How do you feel about that?” Tim asked.

The grim satisfaction visible in Philip a moment earlier hardened into a darker, flintier emotion that had nothing to do with pleasure. His face tightened; his eyes fired darts. Every bit of grief and rage he had been holding down leaped upward within him, and Philip became a little frightening. “You know how I feel about that? I’d like them to demolish that place, turn it into splinters, set the splinters on fire, and shoot the ashes into outer space.”

He glared at Tim as if awaiting a challenge.

“After that, I’d like guys with shovels and nets to dig up every inch of ground over there and sift through it, just in case they might have missed anything. They’d dig right down to the subsoil, six feet, eight feet, and sample everything. Then you’d have this big rectangular hole in the ground. It would look like a mass grave, which is exactly what it would be. I’d fill it with gasoline and set fire to it, that’s what I’d do. I’d have a big, purifying fire, a tremendous blaze. When it burned out, I wouldn’t care anymore—they could bulldoze all the earth back into the scorched hole and turn it into a gerbil farm.”

Philip stood extremely still for a moment, contending with the emotions he had just unleashed. A little stiffly, he turned to Willy. “Excuse me, young lady. My son’s body was never found. It might have been buried over there. It probably wasn’t, but it might have been. God is helping me through this time, but every now and then the situation gets the better of me.”

“I’m so sorry about your son,” Willy said. “I thought I lost a child, too, so I have some idea of what you have been going through.”

“Your child was returned to you?” Philip asked, his interest engaged. “Unharmed?”

“Yes,” Tim quickly said. “Willy was very lucky.”

“My god wasn’t very helpful,” she said. “My god seemed to make things worse.” She patted the pocket where she had stuffed the candy bars. “Is there a bathroom on this floor?”

Philip told her how to get to the bathroom next to the kitchen. When she had left the room, he turned to Tim with an expression that seemed poised between appreciation and accusation. “Tim, how old is that girl, really?”

“Thirty-eight,” Tim said.

“That can’t be true. She’s somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five.”

“That’s how she looks. She’s still thirty-eight.”

Philip appeared ready to dispute this assertion, but he let it go. “You met at a reading? And you volunteered to drive her here? You don’t do things like that. What did she say to you?”

“It wasn’t anything she said, Philip. Call it a whim.” Tim regretted bringing Willy to Superior Street. He had known introducing her to his brother was a terrible idea, yet he had done exactly that, and now he had to deal with the results.

“I can’t ignore the evidence of my senses. You show up here with this stunning young woman who acts like a kitten around you, and with whom you, supposedly a middle-aged gay man, obviously have some kind of erotic connection, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”

Tim improvised. “Okay. Willy is Joseph Kalendar’s niece—she was his brother’s daughter. That’s why she went to my reading. And I thought I should bring her here for a lot of reasons. Something happened, and we clicked. Right away, there was this great attraction between us.”

“You’re actually sleeping with her?”

Tim could not tell if Philip was aghast or thrilled. “Philip, in all honesty, this is none of your business.”

Philip was not to be deflected. “I work with teenagers. I can tell when people have been going to bed together. You’re having sex with Joseph Kalendar’s niece. You and Willy, you remind me of teenagers.”

“We’re very fond of each other.”

“I’ll say,” said Philip.

Both of them heard the closing of the bathroom door. “Have you any idea of what you intend to do with this relationship?”

“I wish I did.”

Entering the room, Willy sensed a measure of the intensity that had just flared. “Hey, guys, what’s going on?”

“I was just telling my brother that he’d better take good care of you,” Philip said. “If he doesn’t, you let me know about it.”

“Don’t worry about me. I think I’ll just disappear.”

Tim said that they’d better be going.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Philip said.

Tim looked up, bracing himself for another assault on his character or his morals.

“Would you like to borrow Mark’s laptop? I know you’re an e-mail demon, and I can’t use it—it reminds me too much of Mark. The thing is just sitting up there in its case. Let me get it for you, and you can use it in your room.”

“That’s a great idea, Philip. Thanks.” According to an entry in Tim Underhill’s journal, Mark Underhill’s computer had once shown him a miraculous vision—a vision of Elsewhere—and he loved the idea of once again putting his hands on the object, so imbued with his nephew’s memory, that had given him his treasure.

Philip went upstairs and came back down holding a black computer case by its handle.

“These things are so small, and they hold so much. Mark spent hours on it, sending messages back and forth, looking up I don’t know what . . .” With a dense, compacted facial expression, Philip thrust it at Tim. He was not loaning out his son’s computer, Tim saw; he was getting it out of the house by giving it away.

Philip rubbed his palms on the sides of his trousers. For a moment he looked almost as adolescent and self-conscious as one of his charges. The direct, probing look he gave Willy erased this impression.

“Come with me, Willy. I want to show you something.”

“Show her what?”

Already on her feet, Willy looked from brother to brother.

“Willy ought to see the view from my backyard, don’t you think?”

Tim glanced up at Willy. “I explained to him why you said you were a fictional character of mine. Philip knows you’re Kalendar’s niece. From his backyard, you can see your uncle’s house.”

“I guess I should see it before they tear it down and scorch the soil it rested on,” Willy said.

“Excuse me,” Philip said. “I can’t avoid asking this one question. Did you ever meet your cousin?”

“Never even knew she existed.”

“As sick as he was, he must have wanted to protect her.”

“I think this is going to have an uncomfortable effect on me. Would you mind if I had a candy bar?” Out came a Kit Kat and a Mars bar. After a moment’s contemplation under Philip’s fascinated stare, she shoved the Mars bar back into her pocket, broke the Kit Kat in half, unpeeled one of the halves, and bit into it. She held the other half in her left hand. “Lead on.”

In the moment of uncertainty Willy had brought him to, Philip glanced over at his brother.

“Go ahead,” Tim said. “I’m curious about what the place looks like now.”

“It’s a dump.” Philip turned, strode off into the narrow kitchen, and opened the back door.

Willy and Tim stepped through. Philip joined them at the top of the steps down to his barren backyard. The fence Philip had tried to erect between his property and the cobbled alley still drooped over the patchy lawn. However, on the other side of the alley, nothing remained as it had been. Joseph Kalendar’s massive wall had been bulldozed away, revealing the jungly profusion of his old backyard, from which rose the rear wall of his appalling house. The kitchen door through which Mark Underhill and his friend Jimbo Monaghan had broken in could still be made out through the weeds. The crude, clumsy slanting roof of the added room reared up out of the weeds like a huge animal dangerous to awaken.

Willy inhaled sharply.

“The place seems to get uglier with every passing week.”

Because he was looking across the alley, Philip did not see Willy flicker like a dying lightbulb. Tim had turned to her when that sharp, sudden sound escaped her, and before his eyes Willy’s entire body stuttered in and out of visibility. She slumped against the back of the house. Somehow, he managed to catch her before she slid down onto the worn surface of the yard.

“Eat the rest of that candy bar, fast,” he ordered her. “Philip, do you have any sugar?”

“Sure, I guess. I don’t use sugar much anymore.”

Tim asked him to fill a coffee cup with sugar and bring it outside with a glass of Coke.

“Is she a diabetic? She needs her—”

“Get the sugar, Philip. Now.”

Philip vanished inside in a flurry of elbows and knees. Cupboard doors and cabinets opened and closed. Muttering to himself, he came through the door and handed Tim a cup filled with sugar.

“Aren’t you likely to throw her into some . . .”

Tim was seated on the ground, his arm around Willy, pouring sugar into her mouth.

“We had this girl go into insulin shock last year, and—”

“She’s not diabetic, Philip. She has a very unusual condition.”

With a flash of his old, mean-spirited self, Philip said, “Must be restricted to fictional characters, I guess.” Then, seeing Willy take the cup into her own hands and wash another mouthful down with the soft drink, he added, “Seems to be working, anyhow. Should we get her to the hospital?”

“No hospital,” Willy said, a little thickly.

“Tim. You know she belongs in an E.R. Please.”

“I know she does not. Back off, Philip.”

He did so, literally, holding up his hands in conspicuous surrender. A few seconds later, Willy stood up and, knowing what was required of her, did her best to look abashed. Gently, almost convincingly, she told Philip that her “condition” could not be treated in an emergency room and that she was grateful for his concern.

“Well, if you say you’re okay . . .” Baffled, he looked back and forth between them, half-understanding that he had missed something important and explanatory.

“We’re on our way,” Tim said. Philip did not acknowledge him. His gaze had settled on Willy, and he looked as though he was capable of standing there for the next couple of hours.

Willy thanked him for the sugar.

“I’ll see you at the reading,” Philip said, without taking his eyes from her.