In the Night Room

“Let me tell you some things about yourself that I couldn’t have learned from Tom Hartland, who was, by the way, another fictional character of mine.”

Willy sat back in the booth, her hands in her lap, looking like a schoolgirl about to enter the principal’s office.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I had written about her. The events of the previous two days had made some of the details recede. “You almost broke into a produce warehouse, but the thought of Mitchell Faber snapped you back into the real world. You realized that Mitchell Faber and your daughter couldn’t exist in the same world because your daughter was dead, so she couldn’t possibly be in that building.”

Her eyes widened.

“And it’s a good thing you changed your mind, because shortly after you got back into your car, a young policeman drove up behind you. He didn’t believe how old you were until you showed him your driver’s license. He told you that you couldn’t have too many worries—to look so young, he meant. And when he saw your address on Guilderland Road, he knew your house right away. When you tried to thank him, he told you to thank Mitchell Faber instead.”

“How do you know that?”

“I wrote it. I put that part in to indicate that the police were not going to be very helpful later on, when you escaped into Manhattan. In this book, you were supposed to be hunted by the police as well as Faber’s goons. Which is exactly the situation you’re in now, except I’m with you.”

“What was the name of this book?”

“In the Night Room.”

She absorbed that silently.

“There is a real night room,” I said with a sudden recognition. “It’s in Millhaven.”

“A real night room. I don’t even know what that means.”

“It’s a room where it is always night. Because of the terrible things that happened there.” I took a leap into the dark. “To you.”

“When was this supposed to happen?”

“In your early childhood—the years you can’t remember. You don’t really remember anything that happened before you were sent to the Block. All you have of your first six or seven years is the sense that your parents loved you. That is a fantasy, a false memory. You use it to conceal what your life was actually like in those years.”

“That’s a goddamn lie.”

“Willy, none of this happened in real life. I made it all up. It’s fiction, and I know what I wrote—I don’t blame you for not believing me, and I can’t blame you for getting angry, but I know your history better than you do.”

She took that, too, in silence. For the first time in our conversation, I had used the word “fiction.”

“What else can I tell you? When you started to rearrange things in the house on Guilderland Road, sometimes an expression on Coverley’s face reminded you of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca.”

She was concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice the arrival of our waitress, who to get her attention had to say, “Excuse me, miss, your hamburgers are ready.” The woman put the plates on the table, and the glasses, and a bottle of ketchup, and Willy did not take her eyes from me for a second.

When the waitress had left, Willy immediately picked up one of her hamburgers and took an enormous bite out of it. She groaned with pleasure. Then she glanced at me and spoke a mushy, “Sorry.”

I watched her eat for a time, unwilling to make further demands on her attention. It was like watching a wolf devour a lamb. Every now and then she pushed French fries into her mouth; every now and then she sipped at her Coke.

After vaporizing the first hamburger, Willy wiped her mouth with her napkin and said, “You can’t imagine how much I needed that. I need this one, too.”

“How’s the lightness?”

“I don’t think I’m going to start disappearing anytime soon. We’re just talking about hunger now, basic hunger.” She attacked another batch of French fries. “Look. Part of me thinks it’s really creepy that you know these things about me. It’s like you went around peering through the windows and rummaging through the drawers, like you listened to my phone calls. I don’t like it. But another part of me, the part that loves you, is thrilled that you know so much.”

She bit into the second hamburger. Chewing, she said, “You shouldn’t know these things. But your face shouldn’t be on that money, either, and there it is.” She leveled a French fry at my handsome portrait. “What’s this L’Duith business, anyhow? You said it was part of an anagram.”

“The full version is Merlin L’Duith. Can you figure that out? You’re very good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles, so it should be easy for you.”

Willy popped the french fry into her mouth and stared at the altered banknote. “Um. Two L’s. An N and a D-E-R. That’s easy. It’s an anagram for Tim Underhill.”

“I started Part Two of my book with a message from Merlin L’Duith, in other words myself, who said that he was the god of your part of the world, plus Millhaven. Merlin, who’s a magician, wanted to speed the plot along, so he summarized the day you met Tom Hartland at the King Cole Bar.”

“Why is your face on that money?”

“Probably because I didn’t bother to say anything about Benjamin Franklin, and when the bills came through, there I was.”

She pondered that.

“Merlin did something a little strange in his section. He let you notice the bits that he dropped out of your life. The lost hours, the transitions that never happened. He’s a god and a magician—he can do anything he likes.”

Willy stopped eating and, in an almost belligerent way, stared at me for a couple of beats. She resumed chewing. She swallowed; she sucked Coke into her system. “That was in your book? You did that? Hiding behind this Merlin anagram.”

“I had you notice the gaps that people in novels can never be aware of, because if they did, they’d begin to realize that they are fictional characters. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing it, I just thought it would be interesting. I wanted to see what would happen. As it turned out, that was probably one of the things that let you leave the book and wind up in my life.”

Her stare darkened. She wasn’t blinking now.

“I hated those gaps. They made me feel that I really was losing my mind.”

She shoved her plate away, and the waitress, hoping to get us out of her territory very soon, instantly materialized at our booth and asked if we wanted anything else.

“Pie,” Willy said. “We heard you’re famous for your pies.”

“Today we have cherry and rhubarb,” the waitress said.

“I’ll have two slices of each, please.”

Willy waved her off and pointed a lovely finger at me. “Okay, you, or Merlin L’Duith, deliberately let me notice that these transitions had been left out of my life. But why did you have me leave Hendersonia in the morning and arrive in New York nine hours later? What was the point of that?”

Willy had turned a crucial corner, though she did not know it. She had already bought what I was selling. I wondered how long it would take her acceptance to catch up with her.

“You had to get there at night so that it would be night when Tom Hartland came to your room.”

“Why?”

“So that he could sleep in the same bed with you. At your invitation. It was the quickest solution—make it night instead of day. Whoops, nine hours gone.”

“Do you know how disconcerting that is?”

“Probably not,” I admitted.

“You wanted Tom Hartland in bed with me because you wanted to be in bed with me. I’m right, aren’t I? If you invented me, you didn’t understand me very well, and no wonder, because you don’t understand yourself, either.”

“In the way you mean, I do,” I said.

“If you invented me, you did a BAD JOB!”

Before scurrying away, the waitress put two plates in front of Willy and, unasked, a cup of coffee. It was as