by Peter Straub
“I’m okay,” he said.
The young men snapped their heads forward and began walking a little faster, leaking disdain.
Strange, how normal the world seemed to him now, after Crosby Street. Those young men, what would they say if they knew he was getting e-mail from dead classmates? No more. Underhill was turning his back on all that nonsense. He resolved to concentrate on his work. From here on out, he would delete, unread, all e-mails without domain names. He wanted order and productivity.
He reached this decision with the sense of having established the ground rules for the next six months of his life. He would create a clearing, and in that clearing, free of uncertainty and disorder, he would write his book. Within imagination’s protective confines, he would set his heroine in motion. She was supposed to be in emotional extremity, not he. He needed to get in balance again.
With this resolve in mind, Tim turned the corner of Wooster and Grand, looked through the drizzle to the entrance of his building, and noticed a tall man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt emerging through the open door. Oh, no, he thought, without being entirely certain why he should react this way. Then he looked more closely beneath the edge of the hood and saw what part of him had already registered, the face of Jasper Kohle. Kohle was grinning at him.
Tim stopped moving. For a second or two, Kohle’s face seemed to slide over its bones, and the bones themselves to shift. All that remained steady was the grin. Kohle’s face disappeared when his body turned, and he began to move in a deliberate slow jog toward West Broadway, where a wet young woman with green hair and facial piercings slouched past a steady stream of cars.
“Hey!” Tim shouted. “What are you doing?”
Kohle jogged around the corner, and Tim followed. For a moment he saw Kohle’s back moving purposefully away from him; then it slipped around a group of policemen staring at the entrance of a shop, and was gone. Tim thought of calling out to the cops, but he realized that he had no crime to report.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, hell.” One of the cops turned his head and gave him a look that said, Do you really want to mess up my day?
He spun around and raced back to the entrance of 55 Grand, as if haste could alter whatever he was going to find in his loft. The key jittered in the lock, demanding extra body English before it slid home. Though Tim’s mind was empty of nearly everything but anxiety, he managed to wonder how Kohle had gotten inside without a key. Callers could not be buzzed in: loft holders had to go downstairs and open two sets of doors for their visitors. This reality created a possibility for hope. Maybe Kohle’s visit had been no more than the act of a stalker pushing the envelope.
Tim ran past the elevator and charged up the staircase. His heels rang on the metal steps. He was breathing hard by the time he reached his door, and he had a sharp stitch in his side. He placed his left hand over the pain, with his right inserted his second key into the slot, and the door swung open by itself. Instead of unlocking it, he had almost locked it.
“Bloody hell,” he said, trying to remember if he had locked the door on his way out. The memory would not come. In fact, he could not even remember if he had taken the elevator or walked down the stairs, but he could not imagine forgetting to lock his door when he left the building.
Holding his breath, he pushed the door open, stepped inside, and flattened his back against the wall. From this position, at the end of a long, narrow corridor lined on one side with framed photographs and a row of coat hooks on the other, he could see only a small vertical slice of the loft itself. He realized that he was being absurdly cautious. Tim unpeeled himself from the photographs and called out, “Anybody here?” He moved to the end of the narrow corridor and surveyed his loft. No furniture had been overturned, and nothing seemed to have been destroyed.
Then he noticed that ten to fifteen feet of the floor in front of the wall of books at the rear of his loft was covered with ripped papers. When he moved closer, he saw lines of type on the papers. They were pages ripped from books. He took in that about half of the sheets were scattered throughout a shining yellow pool a half second before he registered the stink of urine.
Underhill walked up to the ruined pages and saw familiar words in familiar sentences. The pages had all been torn from copies of his most recent book. Groaning, he placed his hands on the sides of his head and looked up at the shelves. The five copies of lost boy lost girl still on hand to be given out as gifts were more or less in their proper places, but looked rumpled and hard used. Tim moved gingerly around the pool of urine and pulled down two of the copies. Long runs of pages had been ripped out of each book.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. He went to his phone and dialed Maggie’s number.
“Maggie, did you let someone in the building a little while ago?”
“Funny question. Ask another one.”
“I’m sure you didn’t let anyone into my loft.”
“Uh-oh, this isn’t sounding good.”
“I had a break-in,” he said. “A guy ripped up some books and pissed on the floor.”
“You think I let him in?”
“No, no. It’s possible I even left my door unlocked. I just wondered if you saw anything.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go out and get some cops,” he said.
She laughed. “You going to buy them at the deli?”
“I just saw a bunch of policemen around the corner. I’d rather talk to them than call the station. It’ll work faster.”
“Ride ’em, cowboy,” Maggie said.
Tim ran back down the stairs and discovered that the rain had stopped. The streets had already begun to dry, and damp patches of dark gray lay across the sidewalk. He made an end run around a group of Japanese men and women consulting an astonishing number of guidebooks and trotted around the corner. The policemen were just beginning to disperse. The first one to notice him was the cop who had given him the warning look.
“Officer,” he said. “Excuse me, but I could use your help.”
The plate on the policeman’s uniform said BORCA. “What’s the problem, sir?”
“Someone broke into my loft and did some damage. He pissed on the floor. I know who did it, I can tell you his name. He was leaving the building when I came up.”
“This is another resident at your building?”
“No, it’s someone I barely know.”
Borca motioned to an officer who looked much too fat to be effective, and the man waddled up to him. Tim always wondered where policemen like that bought their uniforms. “Your name, sir?” Borca asked.
Tim told him his name.
“This is my partner, Officer Beck. Let’s go have a look.”
After making the call to the precinct, Beck produced a battered little notebook and wrote down various details on the walk back to 55 Grand.
“K-O-H-L-E,” Tim said, “and no, he isn’t a friend of mine. I’m not sure what he is.”
“How did he get in the building?” Borca asked.
“You got me.”
Inside, Tim automatically went to the staircase. When he put his foot on the first step, Officer Beck asked him, “What floor are you on?”
“Three.”
“We’re taking the elevator,” Beck said. He pushed the button.
The three men stood in silence until the elevator arrived and the doors opened. They stepped in.
“What’s your relationship to this Kohle?” Borca asked.
“I’m a writer. Kohle presented himself as a fan. He brought some books for me to sign. That was the same book he ripped up and urinated on.”
Simultaneously, Borca said, “I guess he didn’t think much of your writing,” and Beck said, “Everybody’s a critic.” They were still laughing at each other’s wit when the elevator doors opened to reveal Maggie Lah standing in the darkness of the hallway, her weight balanced on one leg and her arms folded in front of her. Both officers fell silent.
“How bad is it?�
�� she asked.
“Mostly, it’s embarrassing,” Tim said.
The policemen were staring at Maggie. She said, “At least we have these handsome officers to keep us safe from riffraff.”
Borca switched his gaze to Tim. “You’re a writer, huh? My wife reads books. Would she know your name?”
“It’s not impossible,” Tim said. He unlocked the door.
“You can smell it, all right,” Borca said. “Actually, it stinks pretty good.”
“Like tiger piss,” Beck said.
Tim led them down the corridor.
“I remember that smell from the zoo when I was a kid,” Beck said, walking sideways to avoid rubbing against the coat hooks.
The odor had doubled and redoubled upon itself in the past few minutes; now it had become so intense that it stung the eyes.
Maggie groaned when she saw the damage.
Borca and Beck strolled around the loft, writing in their notebooks, examining the books, looking at everything they found curious.
“Don’t worry,” Maggie said. “I know a great cleaning service. They practically specialize in tiger piss.”
Borca had been eyeing her. “Where are you from, anyway?”
“Where do you think I’m from?” Maggie asked.
“Well, not from here. China or Japan, some Oriental country. Asian, you’re supposed to say now.”
“Actually, I was born in a small town in rural France.”
Borca was nonplussed by this information. “Uhhh . . . do you have any idea who might have done this? Did you see anyone enter or leave the building?”
“Mais non,” she said.
He turned to Tim. “Presumably, you can give us a description.”
“I can try. White male, about six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds. I have no idea how old he is. The guy kept getting older every time I looked at him.”
The policemen exchanged glances.
“Can you remember what he was wearing?”
“A gray sweatshirt with a hood. Blue jeans. Sneakers, I guess.”
“What do you mean, sir, he kept getting older every time you looked at him?” Beck asked.
“In the beginning, I thought he was a young guy, in his early forties, say.”
Beck and Borca, who were in their early thirties, glanced at each other again.
“But every time I looked at him after that, he seemed to be older. I mean, I saw wrinkles I hadn’t seen before.”
“We have his name,” Borca said. “Mr. Kohle won’t be hard to find.” He handed Tim a card, paused for a second, and gave another to Maggie. “Give me a call if you think of anything else. We’ll be back in touch when we locate your perp. He didn’t steal anything, did he?”
“Apart from my peace of mind?” Tim said.
“Look, it’s not so bad. Get a cleaning company in here, you’ll be good as new. All you lost was a couple of your own books.”
“But how did he get in?” Tim asked.
“When we find your guy, we’ll ask him,” Beck said.
“You should be hearing from us soon,” Borca said.
“Not to make any promises,” said Beck. “But this sort of stuff usually gets cleared up in a day or two.” Like Borca, he was having trouble not staring at beautiful little Maggie. Unlike his partner, he was no longer struggling with the impulse.
The elevator doors closed, and before Tim could say anything, Maggie said, “If I were Mrs. Officer Beck, I could live out on Long Island and give French lessons.”
“Marriage might not be what he had in mind,” Tim said.
“Dommage,” Maggie said. “Now let’s get up as much of that stuff as we can, okay?”
They mopped up what they could with paper towels, and when they ran out, they went to the deli for more. When eight rolls of Bounty and Brawny had been stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag, and the bag sealed up to keep in the stink, they brought out a mop and a bucket and washed the floor in front of the bookshelves, over and over, for half an hour. Tim sprinkled white wine and baking soda—an anodyne of his own invention—over the infected area and scrubbed that into the wood before rinsing it off. The ruined books went into another black bag.
“What do you think?” Maggie asked.
“I can still smell it.”
“Should I call the super-duper-A1 cleaning service?”
“Please do.”
Maggie floated away to the loft she shared with Michael Poole, leaving him attempting to ignore the lingering odor of feline urine, now compounded with the aroma of spilled chardonnay, while he summoned the courage to face his computer. He made himself a cup of peppermint tea. He removed a low-carb no-fat cookie from a container of puritan design and took both to his desk. A flashing little icon at the lower-right-hand corner of his screen informed him that he had received one or more e-mails. Not now, thanks, nope. Dutifully, he evoked his document, clicked to the last page he had written, and did his best to continue. His heroine was about to reach a great turning point in both the book and her life, and to discover the details that would bring breath, air, and light to the scene, Tim had to work with unalloyed concentration.
Over the next hour and a half, he succeeded in writing two paragraphs. The unseen e-mails ticked away at the back of his consciousness, interfering with the process of magical detail discovery. All right, he thought, I give up. He minimized his document and called up the day’s eight new arrivals. Two were from writer-editors inviting him to contribute to theme anthologies. Three were spam; he deleted these. He also deleted the three e-mails from encoded strangers that had arrived bereft of subject lines and domain names. One new e-mail remained in his in-box. Also absent subject line and domain name, it had nonetheless been sent by Cyrax, the most authoritative of all his phantom correspondents. Tim clicked it open and read Cyrax’s message:
now are u ready 2 listn
2 yr gide?
Experimentally, he moved his cursor to Reply and clicked on it. Instead of the conventional e-mail reply form, a large blank rectangle, pale blue in color, appeared at the center of his screen. It reminded Tim of the instant-message windows he had seen on other people’s computers.
All right, he said to himself, let’s give it a whirl. Within the blue box he typed “yes.”
In less than a second these words appeared beneath his acceptance:
Cyrax: good deshizn, student myn, u stpd buttsecks!
(LOLOL!) ok. let me tell u abt deth, fax u will need 2—
or, to speak YOUR language, little buddy, and your language is a bit closer to what mine used to be, it’s time you learned a few facts about death!
Two Voices from a Cloud
PART TWO
14
Merlin L’Duith:
Minor deity though I may be, I am nonetheless the god of Millhaven, Illinois, the god of Hendersonia, New Jersey, and the god of all points in between. Where my gaze happens to fall, there I make the rules. It is I who decides who ends their days on silken sheets surrounded by a competent medical staff, and who expires in a cell, miserable, starving, and alone. And my name is not Merlin L’Duith; rather, within Merlin L’Duith I confine myself.
It is my pleasure now to recount certain latter-day episodes in the life of Willy Patrick, the better to advance the dear girl’s progress toward her great challenge, which is of recognition.
On the day of her appointment at Bergdorf Goodman, Willy spoke to Tom Hartland, her writer friend, and agreed to meet him for a glass of wine at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. Tom sounded unusually serious when he suggested their get-together and told her that he had been thinking hard about something that concerned her. Willy assumed that it had to do with her agent or her publisher. When, like his boss’s obedient girlfriend, she informed Giles Coverley of this appointment, he suggested that he do the driving for this excursion. One glass of wine could easily lead to two, and there was no sense in courting trouble. In the end, she gave in.
The previous day, the Santolini
Brothers had informed her that they really felt they ought to amputate the limb of the big oak tree at the side of the house. Damage suffered years ago could bring it down any day, causing injury to the house—how much they could not say, nor could they guarantee that the limb would fall, but still. Lady, you wanna save money I can’t blame you, but it could wind up costing you a whole lot more later. Is all I’m saying. Following the boss’s orders, Willy deflected them, and off they sloped, shrugging as they went.
She went over and looked at the oak after the Santolinis had wandered away, and although she could not, in fact, see all of it, the long, sculptural limb extending toward, then curving away from the roof of Mitchell’s office did not look damaged to her. Probably Mitchell was right about the Santolinis.
With the feeling that Faber had once again proved his worth in absentia, Willy prepared a light, nearly gravity-free lunch of two tablespoons of tuna salad smoothed along a piece of crispbread, half an heirloom tomato cut into tiny wedges, and a can of caffeine-free Diet Coke. She dined upon this feast while watching One Life to Live on the little TV from her former apartment, now installed on the kitchen counter. To a narrative-drenched mind, One Life to Live presented an astonishing banquet. Each new course was richer and more florid than the last; and the banquet went on forever, endlessly, at the rate of one hour per day. In the past, the day’s installment had often returned Willy to her desk with the sense that a river of story flowed through her, ready always to be tapped.
Unfortunately, the spell cast by her soap opera seemed not to have survived the move from East Seventy-seventh Street to Guilderland Road; and Willy spent hours pushing at stubborn sentences that trickled along until they dried up.
That evening, the two glasses of wine she had with dinner put her to sleep somewhere in the middle of the first chapter of The Ambassadors. (Willy typically read English novelists, A. N. Wilson, A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark. When out of sorts, she devoured crime novels; when depressed, she enjoyed Tim Underhill’s books, which were not crime novels, exactly, except that they always had crimes, usually appalling ones, in them; in exceptionally good moods, she picked up nonfiction books with titles like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)