In the Night Room

“That’s your idea?”

“No, but this is by far the most efficient way of handling the lightness problem. It just gets in there and does the job. Chocolate tastes a lot better, of course. But this stuff, I can feel it working.”

She gave me a glance that said this, too, was not a conversation, merely a form of Q&A, and crawled over into the back seat and began throwing the useless money out of the white duffel bag. (Willy is wonderful, and I love her, and most of the ways in which she surprises me are far more pleasant than not, but she is a slob, and there’s no way around it.) In seconds, hundred-dollar bills that appeared perfectly legit until you looked at them closely were floating down all over the back seat and onto the little shelf in front of the rear window. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me to shut up. When the bag was empty and fake money lay all over the place, mingling nicely with the spilled sugar, I could hear her transferring the contents of the grocery bags into the duffel. Then she dropped the grocery bags on the floor and tramped them flat, her idea of housekeeping. After that, she climbed back into the front of the car, dragging the white duffel with her, and began pitching into it the loose candy bars and chocolates that were scattered around her. Every now and then she popped a chocolate candy into her mouth.

“I don’t actually need this now, but I might as well live it up, right?” she said. “While I can?”

I told her to feel free.

“At least now I can bring my stash with me when we go places,” she said, hefting the bag. “It’s not as heavy as before, either.”

Willy fell asleep about an hour after we crossed the Indiana state line, and she stayed that way until the outskirts of Chicago, where she began thrashing around and whimpering. I shook her shoulder, and she came fighting back into wakefulness, thrusting her hands out before her and muttering unintelligible, panic-driven words. After a couple of seconds, she calmed down and looked around, and her eyes came back into focus.

“Are you okay?”

“I guess.” She swallowed and, acting almost entirely on reflex, pulled a Kit Kat from the duffel and took a bite. She eyed me, and I saw her decide to trust me again. “I was having this horrible dream.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Did you ever have one of those dreams that keep coming back?”

“A recurring dream? I have three or four, and they keep recycling.” Then I remembered writing Willy’s recurring dream, and I knew what she was going to tell me.

“Mine is about a boy standing in front of an empty house. I’m looking at him from behind. The boy is always wearing one T-shirt on top of another, and he looks sort of graceful. I’m attracted to this boy, I like him a lot, and I know that he looks a lot like me.”

Oh God, I thought, I didn’t even know I was doing that, but she’s right. I gave her Mark’s face!

“This boy, of whom I am very, very fond, takes a step toward the house, and I realize that the house isn’t actually empty—it is, and it isn’t. Something filthy lives in there, and it’s hungry. If the boy goes in there, he’s gone, he’s lost, he’ll never come out again. And the place wants him so badly it’s practically trembling!”

“You’re dreaming about 3323 North Michigan Street,” I told her. “That was Joseph Kalendar’s house.”

“Michigan. Like Michigan Produce. Where I wanted to break in.”

“I didn’t even know what I was doing when I gave you that dream,” I said. “Not consciously, anyhow.”

“Isn’t that a comfort,” Willy said. “According to you, you never knew what you were doing in my book. Anyhow. This dream. It’s like I’m watching everything happen in a snow globe. The air that surrounds the boy is magical air, sacred air, but it won’t do him any good once he walks through the door. I feel such dread that I actually understand the word—like, Oh, yeah, this is dread. And my dread builds up so much, I can’t stand watching that wonderful boy walk toward a horrible doom, and I kind of sail toward him—it’s like we’re connected by a silver cord, and I’m flying down the length of that cord—and just before I hit him I realize that I’m not going to knock him over, I’m going to sail right inside him.”

Willy collapsed against the back of the seat and placed her right hand over her heart. Her eyes and her mouth were wide open. “Oh, no,” she said, and gave me a look in which horror predominated over defiance. She shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s what this is about! I am going to have to walk in there, aren’t I? Like the ending you thought you would write. And guess what, I don’t come out.”

I remembered Cyrax warning me of a terrible terrible thrice-terrible price and knew she was right. But what I said was “I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Is that the best you can do?” she yelled at me. “You DON’T KNOW?” Willy hit my shoulder, hard. “You don’t KNOW? Can’t you do better than that?”

“I’m going in with you,” I said.

At that point, I looked in the rearview mirror and first became conscious that for the past hundred miles I had been seeing a muddy SUV following along behind us. I thought it was a Mercury Mountaineer. The only reason I noticed it was that the Mountaineer always stayed at a distance from us of about six cars.

“I know, I see, I get it. I’m going to go into the real night room.” She looked at me in a kind of disbelieving wonder. “That’s it, that’s the deal. I have to do what I was going to do in your lousy book, where nothing was figured out and you can’t explain why anything happened! I have to go in there. And then what happens? I can’t meet the Lily I used to be, can I? How could I? I didn’t used to be her!”

“Well, actually, we have to look for the real Lily,” I said, sneaking another glance at the mirror. “That’s one of the ways I’m supposed to make things right.”

“Why? I can’t meet the person I was supposed to be!”

“Sure you can. You’re a separate person—you have your own identity, the one I gave you. I’m supposed to find out Lily Kalendar’s real fate—aren’t you interested in that?”

“You want to meet her. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? You were writing a whole book about Lily Kalendar. Of course you love her.”

“I think I’m just supposed to see,” I said. “To understand. To see what I got wrong.”

“That’s going to be a big job.” Now she was sulking again, and I couldn’t blame her.

“Try not to be afraid,” I told her. “Whatever I’ll see, you’ll see, too.”

“Some crappy consolation.” Despite her words, she seemed a bit reconciled to whatever her fate might be.

“We’re going to have be on the lookout for a character named Jasper Dan Kohle—he’s Joseph Kalendar and Mitchell Faber kind of rolled up into one person.”

The SUV still hung behind us. I thought it would probably trail us all the way to Millhaven.

Willy jolted me back into engagement with her. “Jasper Dan Kohle isn’t a real name.”

“Kohle isn’t what you would call a real person.”

“No, I mean it sounds like a made-up name. Give me a pen.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Pen.”

I handed it to her. She groped around in the mess at her feet and found a candy wrapper that was blank white on the other side. “Does Kohle start with a K?”

“Yes.”

She printed JASPER DAN on the wrapper. “That doesn’t even look real,” she said. “Now spell his last name for me.” As I spoke the letters she wrote them down.

“Now watch this, but don’t steer us off the road.” Beneath JASPER DAN KOHLE, Willy printed JOSEPH KALENDAR. “Right?”

“Right,” I said, looking back and forth from the highway to the paper in Willy’s hands. Every now and then I checked the rearview mirror.

With my pen, she drew a line from the J in JASPER to the J in JOSEPH. Then she drew a line from the A in JASPER to the A in KALENDAR. “Do you need more?”

“It’s an anagram,” I said. “His name was an anagram for Joseph Kalendar. And I never saw it.”

“People with verbal sensitivity can always tell when something’s an anagram. There’s something a little off about anagrammed names. It’s like they almost always have the same taste, a little tinny.”

“Okay,” I said. “Enough punishment.”