Willy had perceived what I had not said about what I was never going to write. That seemed perfect for our situation; it was a kind of summation.
“Only I don’t think it was true,” she said. “It was just what you wanted to believe. You were lying to yourself, because you didn’t want to lie to me. I’m through. I was a mistake to begin with, lucky me, and now I’m going to be turned back in like a counterfeit bill. I’m some kind of
“Maybe it won’t have to be that way,” I said. “
“I just want you to understand that I’m very, very frightened. It’s worse for me if you’re glib.”
“Let’s drive over there,” I said.
When we pulled over to the side of the road a little way downhill from the house Joseph Kalendar had transformed into a likeness of his own mind, it was as though great plumes and ribbons of darkness streamed from the chimney, the windows, the crack beneath the front door. I could see it that way, as a monstrous wickedness engine, polluting the atmosphere around it with its own substance.
“It looks like the evil twin of your brother’s house,” said Willy, drawing on the soap operas I had made her enjoy.
“It’s not as different as all that,” I said, thinking of Pop and the wasted hours in the Saracen Lounge, and April’s deep unhappiness.
“Is that a burn mark on the front there, beneath the window? The top steps look scorched, too.”
“Twenty years ago, someone tried to burn it down. I think it was the old man who lived across the street and one house up.”
I explained that after Kalendar’s arrest and incarceration, his neighbors had taken turns mowing the front and side lawns, the parts visible from the street. New arrivals to Michigan Street, unaware of Kalendar’s crimes, had refused to participate, and, like Omar Hillyard and his dog, the custom had died. Now the front lawn looked like a parched meadow where brown, waist-high grasses cooked in the sun.
“And all those hidden corridors and staircases are still there,” she said. “And the stuff in the basement.”
“All of it,” I said. “Until next Wednesday, anyhow.”
We knew that we had to be there; we knew that 3323 North Michigan had been our goal from the moment we’d left the bookstore on Eighty-second and Broadway.
A little girl in a blue-and-white dress peeped out from behind the house, made sure that I had noticed her, and pulled her head back. Or no such thing happened, and I had merely printed an image from my inner world onto the landscape in front of us. When I worked at my desk, installed within the space between, they were more or less the same thing. April’s appearances had always signaled Kalendar’s presence, and I was not about to ignore her now.
“Let’s get out of the car,” I said.
“Is something going to happen?”
“I think so.”
We walked up the street where Mark and his best friend, Jimbo Monaghan, had so often coursed downhill on their skateboards, and with every step, I knew, we entered deeper into Kalendar’s realm. The house watched us with its multiple eyes. It gathered its breath, its heartbeat pulsed, and all the while it pretended to be no more than an empty, unappealing building, a structure almost everyone would walk past without noticing—a building the eyes slid over too fast to see. I felt a subtle pressure pushing us back, keeping us away: that, too, was how Kalendar’s house protected itself.
A car drove past, and a kid on a bicycle, and although Willy and I were walking in the street instead of using the sidewalk, neither the boy nor the woman driving the car bothered to glance our way.
We reached the point on the street where in my imagination Mark had stood in amazement as the Kalendar house had seemed to rear up before him, more or less out of mists, fogs, and suddenly retreating cloud banks. In a common impulse, Willy and I joined our hands.
The broken walkway; the dead grass; the fire-scorched cement steps to the hunched-looking porch beneath the heavy, drooping brow of its roof. The rusty holes next to the door frame where the numerals had been. Someone had supposed that if the number 3323 was pried off the front of the house, its identity would change, its aura would shrink. I had the feeling that those metal numerals had probably been cleaned out of Omar Hillyard’s basement. The front door, heavy, almost deliberately ugly, and a little out of plumb. The living room window, where apparitions had or had not appeared.
“This is an awful place,” Willy said. Her grip tightened on my hand. “I take it back. I changed my mind. I can’t go in there.”
With Willy’s refusal, I understood what she had to do, and how I had prepared her for it. Better than Cyrax, I knew why she was beside me. At least I hoped I did. “You don’t have to, not now. What we have to do I don’t think can be done in daylight. And later on, you won’t really be going into it—you’ll go through it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t,” I said. “It’s just what I think could happen.”
An oily cloud seemed to gather and thicken behind the window, then disperse into shadow and darkness.
“What are we supposed to do now?”
“We’re going to stay together as long as we can,” I said. “I can’t bear the thought of letting you go.”
As the afternoon moved toward evening, an odd, flickering life seemed to take place on the other side of the big, dusty window. I had not known what to expect, only that it was necessary for us to be where we were, and I was glad for any confirmation of my belief. Probably anyone who does what we did then—stand thirty feet from a dirty window and stare at it for five or six hours—will be likely to dream up a thing or two to make the task more interesting, and it’s possible that’s what happened to us. And I say five or six hours, but actually I have no idea how long Willy and I stood there. Time contracted and expanded at the same time. It felt more like thirty minutes; in that thirty minutes, afternoon gave way to evening.
Most of the time, Willy Patrick and I saw the same things.
An indefinite figure seemed to melt forward from the rear of the room, take us in, and fade back again. The dark, oily haze assembled itself before us now and again, and I thought that, no less than the hovering figure, it had eyes. Once, before the air began to darken, Willy and I both saw a dim, phosphorescent glow stutter like a firefly from a position beneath the windowsill. Another figure, much larger than the first and obviously male, swelled into half visibility and advanced nearly far enough to display the features I knew he had, the beard, the hands held crooked before his face, the long hair and black coat. Before I could register the terror he caused in me, the Dark Man, Joseph Kalendar, vanished into the grit and dust he had roused floating through the empty room.
Much of what we saw amounted to no more than animated shadows, shadows that sometimes barely moved, like Morton Feldman’s music, offering one tiny variation only after an endless series of repetitions. A darker patch creeping over or out of a distant wall, itself barely visible, then creeping back was riveting, because what animated it had no connection with anything that existed outside that room. What gave it life was the raw hunger that Willy had sensed in her dream.
People walked past without looking. Cars veered around us without honking, moving as if their drivers had accidentally twitched the wheel. We went beyond hunger without ever experiencing it. When it first began to get dark, I noticed that Willy had not so much as taken a bite out of one of her candy bars in over half an hour, and I asked, “Don’t you need them anymore?”
“I like feeling this way.” In demonstration of exactly how she felt, she took two Clark bars from her pocket and threw them at the porch. “Feed the animal,” she said. I thought she had given it an offering.
Then the cars turned on their headlights, and the windows of the other houses on the block lit up and cast yellow light onto their lawns. Something enormous moved toward the other side of Kalendar’s window.
“I didn’t know until we got here,” I told Willy. “I’m still not sure.”
“It’s not important. It was all in your mind, somewhere.”
“You’re not being sacrificed,” I said. “It’s just that I have to pay for what I did.”
“This is what I was created for. I came into your life exactly at the moment in the book when the girl shows herself in that house. Anyhow, my whole life is a sacrifice. I don’t mind. I’m not angry anymore.” She let her head drop and half-mumbled, “If I wanted to make you pay for something, I’d make you write a book.”
