In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  At 11:00 P.M. she came awake and decanted herself into her bed, almost immediately to suffer through one of the worst nightmares of her life.

  From a point about eight feet off the ground, she was observing, camera-like, the back of a teenaged boy staring at an abandoned house. He had short, dark hair and wore floppy jeans and layered T-shirts. His posture struck her as oddly poised, even graceful, and she thought he must have a nice-looking face. With the unquestioned conviction of dreams, another thought came to her: the boy’s face would be a more youthful, more masculine, but otherwise virtually identical version of her own. The boy took a tentative step toward the empty house. As soon as he moved forward, Willy understood that the house, which was empty only technically, represented a mortal danger to this boy. If he went through that door, the house would close around him like a trap; the filthy, ravenous spirit that looked out from the front windows would claim him forever. Willy’s consciousness of his danger did not slow the boy in his steady progress toward the door. Inwardly, the entire building trembled to devour him—she could feel the bottomlessness of its hunger. She could not move; she could not speak. Her dread redoubled itself, and the dread deepened her paralysis.

  The boy took another step forward on the little broken path leading to the porch and the awaiting door. As if within a snow globe emptied of its snow, the house and the boy stood isolated in a no-place defined entirely by themselves. Within the globe, intolerably to our watching Willy, a sick desire fattened upon itself. As it whispered to the boy, his hesitant footsteps carried him nearer and nearer to the porch. At last she could bear it no longer: the sheer pitch of her dread let her overflow her confinement and fly, out of control, deep into the sacred space. She sped toward the advancing boy as if on a silver rail, and when she was within the minutest possible time fraction of somehow not knocking him over but gliding into his body she jolted into wakefulness, the scream in her throat already fading to a gasp.

  For hours that night Willy alternated between pitching back and forth on her sheets and lying still. When she rode into Manhattan the next day, seated in the passenger seat of Mitchell’s car while Giles Coverley chatted about trivia of no interest to either of them, she felt nearly as dislocated and displaced as Tim Underhill on a difficult day. Thanks to Kimberley Todhunter, the helpful young woman conjured up by her fiancé, Bergdorf Goodman folded itself around her like a velvet purse. Under Ms. Todhunter’s guidance, Willy pared down a dozen dazzling choices to a final two, and finally chose the shimmering Prada garment over its counterpart from Oscar de la Renta, then moved on to a pair of terrific sexpot shoes from Jimmy Choo and a number of other accessories previously voted in by her tactful guide. Having spent an astonishing amount of Mitchell Faber’s money, Willy got back into the car and told Giles to take her to the Metropolitan Museum.

  Willy meandered through the impressionist rooms, only half-seeing the paintings as she speculated about what Tom Hartland thought was so serious. Coverley had dropped her off at the entrance and driven away to perform sundry mysterious duties. On reflection, Tom’s subject probably had nothing to do with publishing. Tom seldom talked shop with her. It kept occurring to her that Tom had never been entirely supportive about Mitchell Faber, and that it seemed likely that he had arranged this meeting, this date between two old friends, to try to dissuade her from getting married.

  Monet’s views of haystacks and Rouen cathedral, once sources of almost infinite pleasure, today seemed merely pictorial. It was predictable that Tom should have turned against Mitchell, she thought. Not only did they have nothing in common, Tom’s political views automatically made anyone who worked for outfits like the Baltic Group a dupe or a villain. What had Mitchell said, at their first meeting? From time to time, they call me in to make murky issues even murkier. She had thought he was telling her he was a kind of corporate lawyer. (It was, she realized, the first and last time she had heard Mitchell say anything that sounded witty.)

  Willy found herself before a painting by Corot. She had always loved this painting. About the size of a window, it depicted the onset of a storm in a rural landscape. The air was a luminous gray and, like everything else in the painting, hummed with anticipation. Beneath a great tree on the banks of a river, a cowherd huddled beside his charge. Overshadowing the cow, its attendant, and the riverbank, claiming center stage, the enormous tree—a linden, Willy thought—threw up its arms in the gathering wind. Its hands shook, and the leaves were blown backward on their stems. That was the painting’s center, its heart. The undersides of the leaves gleamed gray-green, beautiful to behold. Undoubtedly they rattled as they shook. Something sacred, an inhuman force deep within and beneath the rind of the physical world, spoke from the flipped-over, gleaming, vibrant leaves. They had been seen, those leaves, and in the midst of her turmoil Willy was able to think, I, too, have seen you, leaves, and feel the onset of the storm.

  Later, she thought the painting had driven her from the museum. The storm it promised to the French countryside had arrived in New York City, and Willy’s body had known it before she reached the top of the immense staircase and looked down to the tide of wet jackets and umbrellas streaming in past the guards. The Dellray men scrambling across the roof, the Santolinis and their concerns about the oak tree . . . it seemed wrong to keep Giles Coverley from his job, and she nearly decided to cancel her drinks date with Tom Hartland. But if any problems came up, Roman Richard had only to use his cell phone for a consultation; and she found herself unwilling to give up her hour with Tom.

  The interval between the Met and the St. Regis seemed to pass in an instant, and when Willy, who had arrived in advance of her friend, took her seat on the banquette and waved away the hovering waiter, it was with literally no memory of how this period had been spent. Two and a half hours had gone by, leaving not even the memory of rain bouncing off the windshield of Giles Coverley’s car. She could, just, remember leaving the car and moving toward the hotel’s marquee under the shelter of a uniformed doorman’s immense black umbrella. Even that had the slightly dreamy, black-and-white quality of something remembered from an old movie.

  It was true, she was going crazy. How could all that time have disappeared? The missing hours felt as though they had been carved from her body like Shylock’s pound of flesh. Looking back to what remained in her memory from the museum, Willy came across another inexplicable lapse. She retained a clear picture of three paintings only: a Monet haystack, a Monet rendering of the Rouen cathedral, and the Corot. On either side of all three of these pictures hung fuzzy daubs like paintings seen through a layer of Vaseline—this gauzy stuff had filled whole galleries. The only real paintings in the Met had been the ones she had paused to look at.

  A familiar voice inquired why Willy was looking so incredibly grim, and she looked up to see handsome, kind Tom Hartland bending down toward her. As her heart surprised her by knocking in her chest, Willy resolved to keep these indications of mental chaos to herself. Instead, she blurted, Oh, Tom, please don’t tell me you wanted me to come here so you could say terrible things about Mitchell. Then she apologized for this outburst; then tears flew from her eyes, and an ugly sound of distress escaped her lips. The nearest patrons of the King Cole Bar slid a few inches away on the banquette.

  Tom Hartland conjured up a glass of white wine and a vodka martini, and under his tactful guidance Willy tried to describe the afternoon’s bizarre experiences.

  —Well, Tom said, it sounds like a kind of temporary, stress-related amnesia. You’re not going crazy, Willy. You’ve just been drifting along, letting other people tell you what to do, and now that you are coming to an irrevocable moment in your life, part of you is starting to rebel. I think that is a very positive sign.

  —Oh no, Willy said. I was right, and you want to talk me out of getting married. This is so unsupportive of you. Can’t you be happy for me?

  —I wish I could, Tom said. Look, people who write detective books, even ones for boys, learn how to get all kinds o
f information. Because I was worried about you, I did some research into Mitchell Faber and the Baltic Group. What I found out distressed me, and I have to at least discuss it with you.

  —You’re a snoop. You went prying around into corners and you found some dirt. Very noble of you.

  —Willy, please shut up and listen to me. Let’s begin with the wedding, okay? Don’t you want to spend more time deciding what to wear? And what about the flowers, the food, the music? Where was this hypothetical wedding going to take place, anyhow?

  Mitchell had arranged for a private ceremony on the grounds of a magnificent estate, like a country house, a Brideshead kind of place, called Blackwoods, she thought, somewhere up around New Paltz, or maybe Woodstock, but in the mountains, anyhow. If it rained, the ceremony would be held in the library, which was supposed to be gorgeous.

  Tom informed Willy that she was talking about a gigantic Baltic Group property called Nightwood, stuck up in the mountains halfway between Woodstock and New Paltz. It was used for top-secret, hush-hush conferences. Cigars, single-malt whiskeys, business suits.

  —So the problem is what, exactly?

  Well, this wasn’t the sort of place usually used for weddings, that was all. But wedding invitations usually got sent out right about this time—what about hers? And had Mitchell obtained the marriage license and hired the clergyman, or the judge, or whatever? She didn’t know, she didn’t care, she was a passive partner in her own wedding!

  She couldn’t think of anything better, Willy said. Who wanted to worry about table settings and flowers and invitations anyhow? She was going to show up at her wedding and get married. Besides, the only person she was inviting was Tom. Why get bent out of shape over details Mitchell could handle better than any wedding planner ever born? Passivity was underrated.

  —So Mitchell makes it possible for you to avoid thinking much about this wedding you’re about to have.

  If he wanted to see it that way, sure, he should go right ahead. Mitchell made it possible for her to concentrate on her work.

  —Is your work going well?

  Well, no. It wasn’t going at all, unfortunately. Kind of a settling-in period. Getting used to the new house, adjusting to the idea of being married again, that sort of thing.

  —Sometimes I get the feeling, Tom said, that I’ll be lucky to see you again after the happy day.

  Willy shook her head in vehement denial. How could Tom say that?

  —What does this boyfriend of yours do for a living?

  —Mitchell works for the Baltic Group.

  —And what does the Baltic Group do? Was Willy up on their happy little empire?

  They make money all over the world, that was what they did. How should she know? What was she, a financial journalist?

  —Are you aware that you sound a little defensive?

  All right, all right. She was smiling at him. Tom Hartland had the gift of telling her the truth in a way that improved her mood. Which meant he was a gift. For a moment Willy wondered if she should not marry someone like Tom Hartland instead. Being married to Tom would be fun, apart, of course, from the absence of sex. But maybe they could improvise something. Whoops, I’m out of wine already!

  As Willy ordered a second glass for herself, Tom explained what he knew about the Baltic Group: a vast, multifarious development company with headquarters in Switzerland, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Washington, D.C., and the Bahamas. Tied to governments all over the world and staffed by ex-ministers, ex-senators, ex-generals, retired statesmen. Its banking division propped up dictatorships in half a dozen countries. When big overseas contracts were to be awarded, Baltic accepted most of them as if by sacred right.

  Okay, he didn’t like them. We already knew this. But what, she wanted to know, did he actually make of them?

  —Maybe I’m a paranoid left-wing conspiracy junkie, but companies like that are my definition of evil. They interfere with politics wherever they want to gain advantage, they buy cooperation, they ruin the environment, they get up to dirty deals all over the world. You should consider, Willy, that your first husband might have been murdered because of his connection to Baltic.

  For a second, Willy heard the ghostly wail of her daughter’s voice. The loss of her husband and daughter swarmed over her, and she began to shake. —Thanks very much, she said. This is hardly news. Whose side are you on, anyhow?

  —I’m on your side, but I am concerned about you. No, hold on, don’t get all worked up, Willy.

  So what did he want to tell her about Mitchell? It was the reason they were there, he might as well get it out.

  —Nobody wants to see you drift into a marriage with a man who isn’t right for you. And that is what you seem to be doing, at least to me. Because, forgive me for what I’m about to say, but you don’t really know this man very well, and even worse, what he represents is absolutely counter to your values.

  My values?

  —Your boyfriend was in Special Forces before being taken on by the CIA, and when he blotted his copybook there, the Baltic Group was more than willing to snap him up. Are you hearing me? Mitchell Faber did something so bad that he had to be drummed out of the CIA. They’re really not talking about whatever he did, but it was something special, that’s for sure. Like a massacre, Willy, and I’m not exaggerating. To be buried so deep, it had to be something like that. Now he’s a kind of mercenary, except he has only one client and he gets paid really well.

  Was he actually saying that Mitchell was responsible for the deaths of her husband and daughter? Was that what he was trying to tell her?

  —Maybe indirectly, yes.

  Now, to her horror, Tom’s life opened before her as a series of broad, sunlit avenues, while hers looked to be spiraling down into a cave, a cell, a speck.

  She became aware that Tom had stopped talking. He was looking at her through narrowed eyes, and beneath his well-mannered blond hair his forehead looked corrugated.

  —Willy, did you hear any of what I just said?

  Everything important, yes.

  —Because when you start telling me things about your daughter, I know you need professional assistance.

  Willy shot to her feet in a flutter of limbs and other people’s scarves and jackets. It was time to get back, she had things to do on the estate, and the roads would be terrible. Could she call Tom for advice, or for help . . . ?

  —I want you to call, he said. Willy?

  She was already maneuvering through the crowd between the bar and the tables.

  Then it was if she had fallen asleep the instant she entered Giles Coverley’s car, for without transition she went from running through a downpour toward the open back seat to the recognition that she was standing beneath an umbrella held by Rocky Santolini, as he pointed, in the torrential rain battering down on Hendersonia, to a messy obscurity of branches and limbs where the gable over Mitchell’s office window should have been. Beneath his own, double-sized, plaid umbrella, Giles was staring up at the same place, swearing with an astonishing eloquence. The Dellray men stood huddled at the front of the garage. Unprotected from the deluge, Roman Richard was yelling at Vincent Santolini. With his soaked clothing and streaming hair, he looked like a manatee. Willy thought she was going to faint, then that she would scream. She wanted to scream: screaming would make what was happening to her everyone else’s problem instead of hers. She flattened her hands over her mouth.

  —We told you this could happen, Rocky said. He thought her horror had been caused by damage to her house.

  Roman Richard swung his body sideways, extended an arm, and bellowed something at Rocky.

  —I can’t deal with that guy. This is the deal. Out of respect for your husband, we could go up to that room, clear out the wreckage, and staple a sheet of plastic over the opening. Maybe we could save the carpet and whatever else in there ain’t already ruined. Only we need the key, on account of that room is locked right now.

  Willy could barely hear him. She was still reeling
from the hours subtracted from her day. Everything else was an irrelevance, a minor problem. Hours had not been taken from her; she had lost them, because she was cuckoo, bats, looney tunes.

  Giles had wandered over. Mud was spattered across his beautiful shoes. —And it’s locked for a reason, Santolini. Mr. Faber values his privacy very highly. Can’t you do something from the outside?

  —What, you want me to pull that shit out? Sorry, missus.

  —Go in and open the door, Giles, Willy said, wanting to put an end to all this blather.

  —I’m sorry, but I can’t do that without authorization from Mr. Faber.

  —Mr. Faber won’t be very happy with you if you let his office get wrecked any more than it already is. Let’s get out of the rain.

  —This is on your head, Willy.

  He spun around and proceeded toward the garage with Willy immediately behind him. Rocky and Vince Santolini trotted off to pick up power saws and rolls of plastic sheeting.

  Willy whispered, Did I fall asleep in the car?

  —How would I know? Ask yourself how much you had to drink.

  Expressing his opinion of the enterprise by leaving muddy footprints on the carpets, Coverley refused to say any more as he marched up the big central staircase, wheeled across the landing, took the next, narrower flight up, and positioned himself in front of the office door. Through its thick, dark wood came the sound of a high wind and the rattling of leaves. He pulled a baseball-sized key ring from his coat pocket, selected a key, held it up in front of Willy, and challenged her with a glare.

  —I take no responsibility for this. Coverley inserted the key into the lock and twisted it. The door flung itself open on a blast of wind and struck the startled Coverley full in the face. Rainwater and torn leaves flew past him.