a truck.
The impact knocked me off my feet and sent me flying six feet over the dying meadow of Kalendar’s lawn. I came down with a thump on my side. From the pain that blazed from shoulder to elbow, I thought my arm was broken. I propped myself up on my good arm and watched the menacing angel move up the steps. He got onto the porch and turned around—because I was watching him. He opened his mouth, and again I knew the concentrated terror I had felt when I’d opened the living room door. I understood with absolute certainty that the angel’s voice would ruin my hearing and drive me madder than I had ever been at Austen Riggs. There I had been merely a basket case, not a hell-for-leather, mush-brain lunatic. He chose not to speak. That’s all it was: he didn’t want to waste his time on me.
He spun around and passed through the front door without bothering to open it. Even his boot heels looked pissed off. A moment after he had entered the house, an explosion of light turned all the windows brilliantly white, and his great wings creaked open and penetrated through the walls without breaking them. Glowing, glowering, WCHWHLLDN reared up through the roof and into a wide column of light that now circled the house. Each of his hands held something slithery, shapeless, and dark, from which depended a long, apronlike robe in which I thought I saw a thousand glittering little eyes and a thousand screaming mouths.
I thought I knew what he was carrying—not the evil that had been done in the house but the pain and sorrow of Kalendar’s victims. All along, that was what had made the little house so ugly, so elusive, so avoidable: Kalendar’s real trophies—not the corpses of his victims but what they had felt in his presence. WCHWHLLDN was the night crew; he did the cleaning up and clearing away. The giant angel flew higher and higher, mounting the sky, and the dirty fabric trailing behind him unreeled and unreeled from the house. When the last of it went snapping upward and disappeared, the angel came battering down from the heavens and did the same all over again, repeatedly, bearing away the scraps and residue of that stinking darkness and that sacred charge until the house was cleansed. The burn marks had disappeared from the front of the house.
I think WCHWHLLDN would have made Philip very happy, for in his way the angel followed his wishes to the last degree: he burned down the house, dug a six-foot-deep pit where it had been, filled the pit with gasoline, and set it alight. His job, his task throughout eternity, had been purification, and he had been assigned this case. He cured infection and eliminated pollution. In his eyes, I, along with every other human being, represented a vast irritant. We carried pollution and contamination wherever we went, and we were far too imperfect to be immortal. We didn’t have a chance of understanding what was going on until we reached zamani. (Come to think of it, this is pretty much the way Philip used to feel, back in the days before his rescue by China Beech.)
The light no one could see left the Kalendar house and the star realms above it; the work no one had seen had been concluded. I pushed myself upright and staggered back to my car, bruised and aching and almost too numb to feel.
When I let myself back into what had been our room and now was mine, I felt Willy’s absence the way you feel a phantom limb. She had been amputated from me, and although I had performed the surgery, I wanted her back. I missed her vastly, oceanically. Her face appeared wherever I looked, on the windows, in the wallpaper, in the air above the bed we had shared. The Cleresyte’s touch, and the fall it had given me, still pounded throughout my body. In a funny way, I didn’t mind, because the pain helped take my mind off Willy.
I filled the tub and soaked in a hot bath until my fingertips were wrinkled. Hunger returned to me as I toweled myself off, and with Willy’s voice in my ear, I called room service. Sheer longing tempted me to order two steaks, two orders of onion rings, and a dozen candy bars, but when the waiter answered, I settled for tomato soup and roasted chicken, the kind of meal my mother used to make.
In my mind, I had changed so much that I was surprised my shirts and jackets still fit. When the food came, I took a couple of bites and thought I was going to throw up before I could get to the bathroom, but I did get to the bathroom, and instead of throwing up I stood over the toilet and made gagging noises.
Except, of course, that I could—but before that prospect, I stepped back, shivering, unwilling to tamper with those dear shades and phantoms. About that time, while I wandered toward Mark’s computer, I remembered, I thought I remembered, that I had agreed to a contract with a sleek character made of cobwebs and mouse droppings. That part of the evening had been knocked out of my head by the angel’s bruising touch and the sight of that industrious and furious being at his eternal task: both of these had banged my head against the ground, inducing a mild amnesia.
I sat at the keyboard, clicked on something or other, I know not what, and a familiar blue rectangle claimed the center of my screen. Cyrax had dropped in to make his good-byes and pass on some more of his ominous advice:
underfoot, u hav dun xceeding well & I yr gide now plant a ki55 up-on yr wrinkled brow. 1gnore not yr hart-8rake, u hav earned it, it is yrs! & now u hav another mity task, ol’ buttsecks, 1 to test u to the x-treem of yr fond talent (LOLOL)
oho my deer u must follow yr Dark Man Joseph Kalendar through the lost echoes of his nuit sombre profonde! Yr title shall b—KALENDAR’S REALM. u must not gild that lily nor praise it, wht u wrote abt. his dghter struk hom, it did strike hom & he wants onle justthis. Justthis iz next-dor 2 mercy but another country 2 it! UZ yr hart-brake & u will find the way within.
those 2 u love r in yr ELSEWHERE, which is our EDEN, frum whence they began so long ago. We watch ovr them in their EDEN, self-created & beautiful to behold. u gave them that!
a last word abt the last word (LOL)—u will behold an IDEEL, & u must pass it by. IDEEL will des-troy u 4 u r not red-e 4 it, buttsecks, NOT NOT NOT 4 u r an un-perfect being in a un-perfect world, that is yr strength & yr lode-ston & yr compass 2.
35
At five o’clock in the sunlit afternoon of Friday, the twelfth of September, Timothy Underhill took his seat at the end of the second row of metal folding chairs lined up in a sweet, breezy glade in Flory Park, on the far eastern edges of Millhaven. A professor of religion at Arkham University had once told him that it was one of the most beautiful parks in the country, and he saw no reason to dispute the old man’s claim. Sunlight fell through the leaves overhead and scattered molten coins across the grass. In front of the rows of chairs, filled primarily with teachers and administrators from Philip’s school and congregants from their church, Christ Redeemer, Philip stood a little way before an imposing African-American gentleman wearing a white robe with voluminous sleeves over a shirt with a black banded collar. This was the Reverend Gerald Strongbow, who conducted services at Christ Redeemer and before whom Philip Underhill’s lifelong racism had, apparently, left him, as if by unofficial exorcism.
Tim had developed a great fondness for Reverend Strongbow. In a brief conversation at the edge of the glade, the reverend had told him that he enjoyed his books. The man had a gorgeous voice, resonant and deep, capable of putting topspin on any vowel he chose. After the remark about Tim’s novels, the reverend inclined his head and said, more softly, “Your brother was a tough customer when he first came to us, but I think we managed to slide some good Christian goose grease into his soul.”
A little buzz and rustle of conversation went through the assemblage when China Beech appeared, holding lightly on to her brother’s arm, at the far end of the glade and, in a cream-colored dress, pearls, and a pert little hat with a veil, began to make her way up the aisle. The expression on his dour brother’s face when China Beech joined him in front of the clergyman astounded Tim, for it contained an emotional sumptuousness that would never before have been within crabby Philip’s reach.
Tim thought of Willy Patrick coming toward the signing table at Barnes & Noble, fear, fatigue, and fresh, amazed love shining in her wonderful face; and he thought of Lily Kalendar, stopping his heart as she carried a book and a cup of tea past a Bauhaus window. At that moment, if he could somehow have married both of them, he would have linked arms with his Lilys and joined his brother at Reverend Strongbow’s portable altar.
He thought,
After the ceremony, everyone drove to one of Bill Beech’s old clubs for a reception party in the ballroom, and
