In the Night Room

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: [e-mail]

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: [e-mail]

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: [e-mail]

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

Subject:

no time

and

From: loumay

To: [e-mail]

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.