In the Night Room

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