In the Night Room

Her fingers dug into my hand.

“Are you scared?”

“Ask a really stupid question, why don’t you?”

“Me, too. My heart’s beating like crazy. I don’t know if I can go in there.”

“Then don’t. It’s my night room, not yours.”

I thought of my night room, the lightless basement of a tenement on Elizabeth Street where madness in the form of a onetime comrade in arms, therefore a kind of brother in the imaginative space, had stabbed Michael Poole and myself. Our survival had made us giddy.

With every bit of energy I had, I hoped that Willy was going to a place I had already established for her; in a sense, I had already placed her there. More than Hendersonia, far more than the baffling world into which she had been propelled, it was where she belonged.

“You’re not leaving me behind,” I said. “Not until the last moment, anyhow.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Willy answered, in the sweetest declaration of love I had ever been given.

A bloated cloud of bad intentions and sick desires swarmed up to the window and hung before us, darker than the darkness behind it.

“So that’s what’s in there,” Willy said. “I always wondered.”

I told her, “It’s not the only thing in there.”

Second by second, the light had been dying around us, and I think that both of us noticed that it had gone altogether as soon as I had spoken what I hoped were words of consolation.

Willy needed no consolation. She simply started moving up to the curb, across the sidewalk, and onto the cracked cement of Kalendar’s walkway. Taken by surprise, I hung back for a second, and realized that she was acting in accordance with the frightening dream an ignorant author had devised for her. Willy was flying on her own silver cord toward the boy who shared her face. I started after her, watching her slender little body move confidently through the darkness toward the terrible house. The front window swirled with a pattern like oil on a huge puddle, and a muted flash of illumination made the colors briefly shine.

Four feet ahead of me, Willy asked, “What’s that light?”

“How the hell should I know?”

She moved up the steps and waited for me. “Do we ring the bell or something?”

“And ask for a cup of sugar?”

Even in the darkness, I could see her frown. “Sorry,” I said, and went up the steps. Willy moved sideways to let me get at the door. “If I had a cup of sugar, I’d throw it away. The lightness is so good now, it’s like having music inside me. I can almost forget how afraid I am. Are you still afraid?”

“You have no idea.” Most of the inside of my body felt as though I’d swallowed dry ice. My heart had gone into triple time, and my knees, those cowards, trembled violently enough to shake my trousers. I placed my hand on the door and, hoping for some kind of excuse to procrastinate, glanced across the street. I jumped about a foot and a half.

Leaning against a tree in a posture that perfectly expressed his customary mood of bored hostility, WCHWHLLDN was glaring at us through nighttime shades that made him look like an old-school hipster. He lifted one arm and made an impatient, sweeping gesture with his hand.

“Who is that?” Willy asked.

“He’s a Cleresyte, whatever that is,” I said, “and he’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”

More forcefully, the angel repeated his whisk-broom gesture. Before he could slip off his glasses and melt us into grease stains with the force of his gaze, I grasped the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open. The hinges squealed like hungry cats. A seared, unhealthy odor of dust, mold, and tormented lives streamed out of every room, along the corridors, down the staircase, through the entry hall, through the door frame, and outside, coating us with its residue. Holding my breath, I stepped inside, Willy following so close behind that I could feel the charged inch or so of space between us the way I might feel her breath on my neck.

34

The reek of death and abandonment that had enveloped Tim and Willy in its outward journey still hung in the atmosphere. Boldly, Willy moved deeper into the entry and peered up the stairs. Grit and fallen crumbs of plaster crunched under her feet. The staircase ascended into an utter darkness that soon resolved into a fainter darkness surrounding a turn of the banister rail at a landing with a lifeless window.

“We should have brought a flashlight,” she said.

“We’ll see everything we have to see.” Tim advanced into the gray territory between himself and the staircase. A little bit farther ahead and on his right was the door to the living room, firmly closed. Somewhere off to his left, one of Kalendar’s concealed, spiderweb passageways led to a hidden staircase. The rubble on the floor had crumbled off the ceiling and the walls, and a thousand generations of rodents had scampered through it, leaving printed on the dust the graffiti of their passing. The entire structure seemed surprisingly flimsy to him. At the first nudge of the bulldozer, the whole thing would collapse into itself and turn to splinters and plaster dust. If he touched one of those pockmarked walls, here and there bearing tattoolike images of florid roses, he knew the stench of the place would come off on his hand.

“I suppose we go in there,” Willy said, her voice shrunk down to less than a whisper.

“Uh-huh.” Tim was now almost too frightened to speak. “Yeah.” He forced himself to move to the door to the front room. He touched the knob, and his hand shook so violently that he could not grasp it. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Do it for me,” Willy said. Then, more firmly: “For me. I’m just passing through, remember?”

He looked back at his dear creation and saw her left arm flicker into nowhere and jerk back into visibility. Willy looked as though she might faint again. “Okay, Willy,” he said, and wrapped his trembling hand around the brass mushroom of the knob, turned, and pushed. The door swung open on a narrow chamber where a huge bole of black particles and swirling dust like a gigantic hornet’s nest pulsed like a living thing in the middle of the room. In the instant it was revealed, the vicious thing whirled, he was sure, to look at Tim Underhill and take his measure at last; in the next, it dispersed in a silent explosion that sent wisps and rags and shadows of itself to the corners of the room. Underhill’s fear refined itself into a column of mercury stretching from the top of his bowels to the base of his throat.

Beneath the window, an electrical wire that disappeared into the wall writhed and thrashed like a captured snake, shooting out sparks that showered to the floor; it collapsed in loose coils, then whipped back into life and disgorged another fireworks display before dropping again to the floor.

“There’s no electricity in this house,” Tim said.

“He’s telling you to go in,” Willy said. “He’s letting it happen. He’s even making light for you. He knows that guy is out there, and he’s afraid of him.”

“How do you know that?” As he asked his question, Tim crossed the threshold with slow steps and looked into the corners, rubbed smooth with darkness. That he could speak surprised him; that he could walk was an astonishment. Already much greater than in the entry, the stench flared, stinging his eyes and settling on his lips.

“He told me. When he looked at us.”

“In words?”

“Did you hear him say anything?” Willy spun around, seeming to attend to those unheard voices. “This isn’t where it happened, is it? I didn’t meet Mark in this room.”

“He was on the staircase at the back of the entry, waiting to hear you moving down the hidden stairs behind the wall.”

“Where is the night room?”

“On the other side of the kitchen.”

“Will we go there? We will, you don’t have to tell me. We’ll go there and cleanse the room of its crimes, we’ll wash them away.” She gave him the most tender smile he had ever seen. “Because that’s what you’re doing, you old writer. You’re washing away his crimes, and you’re doing it through