In the Night Room

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?’