by Peter Straub
“This is impossible,” she said, without modulating her voice. “It’s absurd. They erased an entire town from these atlases.”
Back in the general part of the library, Willy looked at the computers and said, “Hold on.” She went up to the desk. “May I use one of those computers?”
“Be my guest,” said the librarian. “By law I am required to inform you that using the Internet to violate any state or federal laws is prohibited. Now that I’ve done that, I’ll have to see a driver’s license and have you sign this form.”
It was a limitation of liability form, and I signed it as soon as I produced my driver’s license.
Willy pulled me toward the seat beside the teenaged boy. When she sat down, he gave her a classic double take. Then he noticed me and turned back to the images of severed limbs on his monitor. Willy motioned me closer and whispered, “I know it’s on MapQuest, because I’ve looked at it a couple of times since I moved there.”
“Give it a whirl,” I said.
Willy quickly reached MapQuest.com and typed “Hendersonia” and “NJ” into the address boxes. She clicked on Search. In seconds, the screen displayed a message reading, “Your search for Hendersonia in NJ didn’t match any locations.”
While she was busy being frustrated, I sat down at the computer next to the old man, logged on, and waited only a second before a blue rectangle appeared on my screen. As I’d feared, Cyrax wanted to let me know what was on his mind.
u must tell her what she is & speed to yr Byzantium, 4 u must pay the dredful price in sacrifice of the being u made. CO-RECK yr error & yr crime. it will b terrible & yet it must b done & U MUST DO IT! as I luv u, buttsecks, I cannot ignor the CHAOS u brought to our REALM and yrs & for this U MUST PAY IN KIND—U OPENED THE WEDGE, NOW U MUST CLOSE IT!
oh, what does gentle Cyrax demand of u?
FIND the real Lily Kalendar! See what she is! Understand the deep complexity of her self & her position, so u know what u got WRONG! payment must be made!
I logged off and slumped in the chair. Payment must be made, he said. Wasn’t it being made, in full measure, by the heartbreaking woman at my side?
“No, that’s wrong,” Willy said. I heard real distress in her voice. The boy risked another peek at her. “It was there before!” She shook her head. “What’s happening to me?” She stared at the screen for a moment, then said, “Hold on, hold on, I’m going to try one more thing.”
This time, she typed in “Stockwell” and “MA.” The same “Your search” message appeared on the monitor. “It isn’t there? There’s no Stockwell? Okay, I’m trying one more thing, and then I quit.”
She went to Google and typed in “Charles Bollis, MD,” and told the service to search the Web. What came back was the question “Do you mean Charles Boli’s, MD?” and a link to a site that provided oncology information from somewhere called Charles County.
Her face had turned white.
“Let’s get out of here, Willy,” I said. “You need about three candy bars and a bag of M&M’s, and both of us should have lunch.”
“What were you looking at?” she asked me.
I told her I was checking my messages.
When we got back into the car, Willy dove into the bag and pulled out a handful of candy bars. After she wolfed the first one down and had gone through half of the second, she said, “I’m learning how to handle this condition, whatever you call it, and I can keep it under control. I think.” She demolished the rest of her candy bar, picked up a third—a 100 Grand bar—and removed the wrapper with a single downward stroke. “But I also think it is time for you to let me in on these big secrets of yours, because I really have to know what the HELL is going on.”
I turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll try to explain over lunch. This isn’t going to be easy for either of us, but after what just happened, there’s a chance that you’ll believe me.” I looked at her and started driving back to the center of town, which is where I thought I probably would find the restaurant mentioned by the boy at the gas station. Willy was chewing a cud of chocolate, peanuts, and caramel and regarding me with a mixture of confusion, anger, and hopefulness that I felt penetrate into my viscera, if not my soul. “Because, and this is a promise, you wouldn’t have believed me before this.”
“The town I live in doesn’t exist—at least not in this universe! I remember stuff that you remember! I didn’t go Lawrence Freeman Elementary School, and I didn’t have Mrs. Gross as my second-grade teacher. You did, but I didn’t. What would happen if I tried to call the Institute? It wouldn’t have a number, would it? Because it isn’t there. Just like Dr. Bollis.”
“To look on the bright side, there isn’t any Baltic Group, either.”
“But Giles Coverley and Roman Richard still exist, and I’m sure they’re still trying to find us.”
“I bet they’re running into a lot of problems right about now.”
“I bet they’re scarfing down a lot of sugar right about now. But I guess I don’t have to worry about Mitchell anymore.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not exactly true,” I said.
“Save it. Is this the place?”
A tall, vertical sign outlined in lights spelled out CHICAGO STATION above a long, rectangular building faced with stone. I drove into the lot and parked under the only tree in sight.
“You’re not paying for lunch. I should split everything with you. Do you know how much money is in that bag back there?”
“A hundred thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills.”
Her face went soft and confused, almost wounded. I was afraid she would start to weep.
“Did I tell you that? Don’t answer.”
She got out of the car and opened the back door. The long white bag lay across the seat, and she pulled it toward her and unzipped the top. Curious about what all that money looked like, I stood behind her as she reached in and lifted a neat, banded bundle of bills out of the bag. “Let’s just take two of them,” she said. “You carry them.”
Willy tugged two of the hundreds out of the pack and handed them to me. She leaned back into the car to replace the rest of the bundle, and I looked at the topmost bill in my hand. What I saw made me gasp. For a hideous moment it struck me as funny. It was a hundred-dollar bill of the usual size, color, and texture. The numbers were all in the right places. Just left of the center, in the big oval frame where Benjamin Franklin should have been, was what looked like an old-fashioned steel engraving of me, in three-quarter profile, from the top of my head to the base of my neck. I did not look anything like as clever as Franklin, and I appeared to be wearing my old blazer and a button-down shirt with a frayed collar. The little scroll beneath the portrait gave my name as L’Duith.
“Your money’s no good in this town,” I said, settling at the end for a cheap joke. “Take a look.”
Willy stared at the front of the bill, glanced up at me, then back at the bill. “That’s your picture on there.”
“So it seems,” I said.
Now she was so dumbfounded she seemed hypnotized. “How did that happen? How did you do that?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Let’s go into the restaurant and get some real food in you.”
Willy took my arm like a wounded child. “Look, do I actually exist?”
26
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
“Of course you exist,” I told her. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
Willy leaned out of our booth and waved to a waitress taking orders at one of the tables in the middle of the room.
“But as you have noticed, you don’t quite exist in the normal way.”
“How come the town I live in and the Institute I went to aren’t real anymore, when they used to be? How come the stuff I remember seems to come from you? What the hell happened, did you make me up or something?”
The waitress appeared at our booth and gave us each a laminated menu. “Oh, aren’t those cute?” she said, pointing at
the hundred-dollar bills Willy had left on the table. “They almost look real. Can I pick one up?”
“You can keep it, if you like,” Willy said. “I gather they’re not exactly—what’s the word?—fungible. I want a hamburger, medium. With fries. Make that two hamburgers, with fries.”
The waitress said, “Wow, it even feels real. So your name is L’Duith? What is that, French?” She was a comfortable woman in her mid-forties who looked as though she had been born wearing a hairnet.
“It’s part of an anagram,” I said. Willy was staring at me intently. “I’ll have a medium burger, too. And a Diet Coke.”
The waitress went off to the kitchen, and Willy focused on me in a way I found extravagantly painful.
I looked down at my hands, then back at her. Her eyes concentrated on mine, and I knew she was watching for signs of evasiveness or duplicity. She would have spotted a lie or a deliberate ambiguity before the words left my mouth.
“Right after we sat down, you asked me if I made you up. I don’t suppose you were being completely serious, but you hit the truth right bang on the head. Everything you know and everything that ever happened to you—in fact, everything you ever did before you showed up at that reading—came out of my head. As far as you’re concerned, I might as well be God.”
“You know, when I first saw you, I did think you were kind of godlike. I worshipped you. And you were certainly pretty godlike in bed!”
The waitress chose that moment to place two glasses of water on our table. Her face made it clear that she’d heard Willy’s last remark and had interpreted it to mean that I was a lecherous pig. She wheeled away.
“Oops,” Willy said.
“I worship you, too,” I said. “These simple words, all this deep feeling. I hope this is what God feels for his creatures.”
I moved my hand to the center of the table, and she placed hers in it. We were both on the verge of tears.
“Say more,” Willy said. “This is going to be the bad part, I know, but you have to tell me. Don’t be weak now. How could you make me up?”
She was right. I had to tell her the truth. “Before you showed up, I was writing a book. Its first sentence was something like, ’In a sudden shaft of brightness, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick turned her slightly dinged Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the temptation’— no, it was ‘compulsion’—’having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice,’ I forget what comes next, something about driving a little more than two miles on Union Street, which I also happened to make up.”
“Your first sentence was about me.”
“You didn’t exist until I wrote that sentence. That’s where you were born. Hendersonia was born then, too, and Michigan Produce, and the Baltic Group, and everything else.”
“That’s nuts. I was born in Millhaven.”
“Should we call the Births and Deaths office, or whatever it’s called, and ask them to find your birth certificate?”
She looked uncomfortable.
“Willy, the reason you couldn’t find Hendersonia in the atlases is that Hendersonia only exists in the book I was writing. I named it after a book about Fletcher Henderson.”
“In your book, you named a town after another book?”
“The name of the book is Hendersonia. A man named Walter C. Allen wrote it. It’s a wonderful book, if you’re obsessively interested in Fletcher Henderson. Do you know who he was?”
“A great bandleader and arranger. In the twenties, he hired Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. Big influence on Benny Goodman.”
“See? You’re not a geeky jazz fan, Willy. You know that because I know it. Stuff from my head, at least the kind of stuff I think is important, gets into yours. Your memory is really my memory.”
“This is . . . Even with the things that have been happening, it’s still hard for me to believe that . . .” She removed her hand from mine and made a vague shape in the air.
“Let me tell you some things about yourself that I couldn’t have learned from Tom Hartland, who was, by the way, another fictional character of mine.”
Willy sat back in the booth, her hands in her lap, looking like a schoolgirl about to enter the principal’s office.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember what I had written about her. The events of the previous two days had made some of the details recede. “You almost broke into a produce warehouse, but the thought of Mitchell Faber snapped you back into the real world. You realized that Mitchell Faber and your daughter couldn’t exist in the same world because your daughter was dead, so she couldn’t possibly be in that building.”
Her eyes widened.
“And it’s a good thing you changed your mind, because shortly after you got back into your car, a young policeman drove up behind you. He didn’t believe how old you were until you showed him your driver’s license. He told you that you couldn’t have too many worries—to look so young, he meant. And when he saw your address on Guilderland Road, he knew your house right away. When you tried to thank him, he told you to thank Mitchell Faber instead.”
“How do you know that?”
“I wrote it. I put that part in to indicate that the police were not going to be very helpful later on, when you escaped into Manhattan. In this book, you were supposed to be hunted by the police as well as Faber’s goons. Which is exactly the situation you’re in now, except I’m with you.”
“What was the name of this book?”
“In the Night Room.”
She absorbed that silently.
“There is a real night room,” I said with a sudden recognition. “It’s in Millhaven.”
“A real night room. I don’t even know what that means.”
“It’s a room where it is always night. Because of the terrible things that happened there.” I took a leap into the dark. “To you.”
“When was this supposed to happen?”
“In your early childhood—the years you can’t remember. You don’t really remember anything that happened before you were sent to the Block. All you have of your first six or seven years is the sense that your parents loved you. That is a fantasy, a false memory. You use it to conceal what your life was actually like in those years.”
“That’s a goddamn lie.”
“Willy, none of this happened in real life. I made it all up. It’s fiction, and I know what I wrote—I don’t blame you for not believing me, and I can’t blame you for getting angry, but I know your history better than you do.”
She took that, too, in silence. For the first time in our conversation, I had used the word “fiction.”
“What else can I tell you? When you started to rearrange things in the house on Guilderland Road, sometimes an expression on Coverley’s face reminded you of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca.”
She was concentrating so hard that she didn’t notice the arrival of our waitress, who to get her attention had to say, “Excuse me, miss, your hamburgers are ready.” The woman put the plates on the table, and the glasses, and a bottle of ketchup, and Willy did not take her eyes from me for a second.
When the waitress had left, Willy immediately picked up one of her hamburgers and took an enormous bite out of it. She groaned with pleasure. Then she glanced at me and spoke a mushy, “Sorry.”
I watched her eat for a time, unwilling to make further demands on her attention. It was like watching a wolf devour a lamb. Every now and then she pushed French fries into her mouth; every now and then she sipped at her Coke.
After vaporizing the first hamburger, Willy wiped her mouth with her napkin and said, “You can’t imagine how much I needed that. I need this one, too.”
“How’s the lightness?”
“I don’t think I’m going to start disappearing anytime soon. We’re just talking about hunger now, basic hunger.” She attacked another batch of French fries. “Look. Part of me thinks it’s really creepy that you know these things about me. It’s like yo
u went around peering through the windows and rummaging through the drawers, like you listened to my phone calls. I don’t like it. But another part of me, the part that loves you, is thrilled that you know so much.”
She bit into the second hamburger. Chewing, she said, “You shouldn’t know these things. But your face shouldn’t be on that money, either, and there it is.” She leveled a French fry at my handsome portrait. “What’s this L’Duith business, anyhow? You said it was part of an anagram.”
“The full version is Merlin L’Duith. Can you figure that out? You’re very good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles, so it should be easy for you.”
Willy popped the french fry into her mouth and stared at the altered banknote. “Um. Two L’s. An N and a D-E-R. That’s easy. It’s an anagram for Tim Underhill.”
“I started Part Two of my book with a message from Merlin L’Duith, in other words myself, who said that he was the god of your part of the world, plus Millhaven. Merlin, who’s a magician, wanted to speed the plot along, so he summarized the day you met Tom Hartland at the King Cole Bar.”
“Why is your face on that money?”
“Probably because I didn’t bother to say anything about Benjamin Franklin, and when the bills came through, there I was.”
She pondered that.
“Merlin did something a little strange in his section. He let you notice the bits that he dropped out of your life. The lost hours, the transitions that never happened. He’s a god and a magician—he can do anything he likes.”
Willy stopped eating and, in an almost belligerent way, stared at me for a couple of beats. She resumed chewing. She swallowed; she sucked Coke into her system. “That was in your book? You did that? Hiding behind this Merlin anagram.”
“I had you notice the gaps that people in novels can never be aware of, because if they did, they’d begin to realize that they are fictional characters. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing it, I just thought it would be interesting. I wanted to see what would happen. As it turned out, that was probably one of the things that let you leave the book and wind up in my life.”