In the Night Room

me.”

“So it seems,” Tim said. He was too frightened to cry. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Oh, you,” she said, with the implication that he had asked a question with an obvious answer. Then she placed her hand on her chest and gazed at him with a wonder entirely unconnected to him. “Those hummingbird wings, whoo, they’re beating faster and getting bigger. . . . This is an amazing, amazing feeling. It’s like I’m going to float right up off the ground.”

“I don’t think it’s going to take long.”

“It can’t. I’m Lily Kalendar—your Lily Kalendar.”

It was precisely the recognition she had been supposed to attain at the end of the book that was her book. As soon as she had spoken, the lunatic electrical wire beneath the window spouted fiery apostrophes and commas, and it seemed to Tim Underhill that the fabric of reality, already sorely strained, rippled around them.

The overtone of a sound too distant or quiet to be identified entered and hung in the air, a single note that had been played on an upright bass, plucked a moment before by the bassist’s finger—

There came the burning metallic hum of a thousand cicadas, greedy, intrusive—

Somewhere above, a door softly opened and closed. Light footsteps on the stairs sounded hush hush hush. Tim Underhill’s blood seemed to stop moving through his veins. A boy with Willy’s face entered by something that was not a door, smiled at him lovingly, then without pause moved toward Willy, who took his hand. They were already, instantly, in the roles he had given them, and he could not follow, he could watch them no more. Where Willy went, she went for him.

Clamorous, swiftly moving spirits spun, gyrated, sailed through the night air, even in Millhaven.

He was alone in the room, but for the presence that had offered him illumination in the form of a wire thrashing like a nerve. His Lily had joined his Mark, and one day, if he was lucky, he would glimpse them, as he had glimpsed the world’s glorious, disastrous Lily Kalendar, through a car window. On these glimpses he would live; on the hope of them he would do the work of the rest of his career.

A kind of tragedian’s wonder had filled him during the previous few minutes, and, as specks of plaster and broken bits of wood and charcoal-gray mats of dust and tissues of flesh like old spiderwebs began to rustle and twirl in various parts of the room, his fear returned. It seemed as jittery and unstable as the wire, now firing sparks and beating its head on the floorboards as it squirmed. The filthy material within the room twirled itself together, piece by piece, hair by hair, speck by speck, and elongated its substance to a height well above six feet.

The shivery column of mercury again grew up through the center of Tim’s body, and his knees began their merry jig. Even his heart seemed to tremble. To the extent that he could think, he thought: I hate being this afraid, I hate it, it’s humiliating, I never want to feel this way again . . .

The Dark Man began to emerge out of the fabric of his unclean substance, first a great brooding bearded head with eyes the color of lead, then black-clad arms meshing into a bull-like chest, the long, dirty coat, and legs that swelled and lengthened into heavy black boots planted on the floor. He held his wide-brimmed black hat in one black-gloved hand to demonstrate his anger. Kalendar wanted Timothy Underhill to see his eyes. Insane fury steamed from his body, as did a pure and concentrated version of the stink that flowed through the front door. Commanded to look, Tim looked. He saw the murderous rage of the grievously wounded.

“I made a mistake,” he said, somehow managing to keep his voice from trembling. “I thought she was dead. I didn’t know you had saved her.”

The rage came toward him unabated.

“You loved her. You still do. She is very much worth loving,” Tim said. “I made a lot of mistakes. I’m still making them. It’s almost impossible to write the real book, the perfect book.”

The voice that Willy had heard spoke in his head, not in words but a crude rush and surge of twisted feelings.

“Because no one knew she was alive. Almost no one knew that she’d ever existed at all.”

Another ragged bombardment of rage blasted into him.

“Except the ones who did know, yes. And I could have called the shelter, that’s right. But I was writing a novel! In my book, your daughter was dead. If she’d been alive, she would have ruined the book—she was just a fantasy, anyhow, a reward I gave my nephew.” He stared back at Kalendar, a little stronger for having spoken.

The next wave of emotion tones nearly knocked him over. They seemed to struggle within his head and body, like bats, before dissolving. Tim waved his hands in front of his face, reeling with shock and disgust. “What do you want, anyhow?”

He braced himself for another onslaught, but Kalendar held his hands before his face and glared at him through his fingers long enough to make Tim start to shake all over again. Kalendar’s hands clutched at his face and pulled at the skin that was not skin. A transformation began to occur over the width and breadth of Kalendar’s body, which became shorter and trimmer, more glossy. It grew a handsome tuxedo and a starched white formal shirt and a black bow tie before its hair and features consolidated, but by that time Tim had long known the name of the figure taking shape before him. It was the second time Mitchell Faber had materialized out of Joseph Kalendar’s raw materials.

Closer to Faber than he had been the first time, he was able to see how dramatically he had gotten his villain wrong, too, how greatly he had underestimated this creature’s capacities, as well as Willy’s. By a considerable margin, Mitchell Faber was the scariest, the most frightening, of these apparitions. Faber had produced himself out of his own most savage impulses, and the result was crazier and more feral than his author had understood. At least Tim had not permitted this shiny predator to marry Willy Patrick. This man would willingly rip a foe apart with only his teeth. After he had washed off the blood, he would slip into his tuxedo and proceed to charm the wives and widows of his monomaniacal employers. (He was what you got when you asked for James Bond, Tim realized—you got a beast like this.)

“It’s no good if I tell you what you have to do, you miserable turd.” Faber grinned in a way that Willy had undoubtedly once found winning. “You have to come up with it by yourself. Let me say this: it should be obvious, even to you.”

“I’m too scared to think,” Tim said.

“You have to make amends. What do you have to offer, you moron? How can you make amends? Let’s see, how did you wrong me in the first place?”

“Oh,” Tim said, realizing what was being asked, and that it was exactly what Willy had proposed for him. “I can’t do that.”

Faber slid an inch nearer. His teeth gleamed, and so did the whites of his eyes. He had the most perfect mustache humankind had ever seen. “But isn’t that exactly what you do? And you must realize that if you refuse, our friend Mr. Kohle will make your life an utter horror for the brief period of time you will have left to you. That is certain. And all we ask is that you do a good job, the best you can manage.”

“I can’t restore your reputation,” Tim said.

“Of course you can’t. I have exactly the reputation I earned. What I want you to do—what you are going to do, if you want you and your precious friends on Grand Street to go on enjoying your lives—is to do justice to my case.”

He stepped forward again, crushing pellets of plaster beneath his gleaming shoes. “We’re through. Get out of here. And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone. I’m just as good as he is.”

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Mitchell Faber/Joseph Kalendar snapped out of visibility with a contemptuous abruptness, leaving me alone in the filthy room. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to learn what a Cleresyte is, and that, as with artists and detectives, its identity is inseparable from what it does.

When he saw me coming out of the house, WCHWHLLDN pushed himself off the tree and straightened up. By the time I got to the bottom of the steps, he was already striding along the walkway. The black lenses of his sunglasses gleamed silver with moonlight, and under his tight black T-shirt, his muscles stood out like an anatomy lesson. He looked like pure purpose encased in pure impatience. As I drew nearer, I felt the coldness of his disdain and thought, He hates me because I’m not pure! I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was right. When we passed, I took a half step to the right, expecting him to do the same. Instead, he deliberately shifted with me, and for the briefest of moments, his right shoulder brushed my left. I felt as though I’d been hit by