In the Night Room

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 in-box. 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