In the Night Room

by Peter Straub

  Her stare darkened. She wasn’t blinking now.

  “I hated those gaps. They made me feel that I really was losing my mind.”

  She shoved her plate away, and the waitress, hoping to get us out of her territory very soon, instantly materialized at our booth and asked if we wanted anything else.

  “Pie,” Willy said. “We heard you’re famous for your pies.”

  “Today we have cherry and rhubarb,” the waitress said.

  “I’ll have two slices of each, please.”

  Willy waved her off and pointed a lovely finger at me. “Okay, you, or Merlin L’Duith, deliberately let me notice that these transitions had been left out of my life. But why did you have me leave Hendersonia in the morning and arrive in New York nine hours later? What was the point of that?”

  Willy had turned a crucial corner, though she did not know it. She had already bought what I was selling. I wondered how long it would take her acceptance to catch up with her.

  “You had to get there at night so that it would be night when Tom Hartland came to your room.”

  “Why?”

  “So that he could sleep in the same bed with you. At your invitation. It was the quickest solution—make it night instead of day. Whoops, nine hours gone.”

  “Do you know how disconcerting that is?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted.

  “You wanted Tom Hartland in bed with me because you wanted to be in bed with me. I’m right, aren’t I? If you invented me, you didn’t understand me very well, and no wonder, because you don’t understand yourself, either.”

  “In the way you mean, I do,” I said.

  “If you invented me, you did a BAD JOB!”

  Before scurrying away, the waitress put two plates in front of Willy and, unasked, a cup of coffee. It was as though she had never been there at all.

  “I didn’t want to go to Michigan Produce,” Willy said. “I didn’t want to hear my daughter screaming for help. How could you do that to me?” She levered a big section of cherry pie onto her fork and pushed it into her mouth. “You never understood what kind of person I was. I’m so much better, so much stronger than you thought. All you saw was this weak little woman being pushed around by men.” Her voice wobbled, and she brushed tears away from her eyes. “I suppose I’m not even a writer anymore. I suppose I didn’t have any talent.”

  “Not at all. I gave you a beautiful talent, and an imagination so strong that twice you used it to rescue yourself.”

  “On the Block and then in the Institute, you mean.” For at least a minute and a half, she ate big forkfuls of pie while crying steadily. Then she wiped her eyes again and looked over at me. “Would you care to know why I’m willing to believe all this bullshit of yours?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Do you remember when I went to the bathroom in the Lost Echoes Lodge? After breakfast this morning? It’s nothing out of the ordinary for you, is it? But when I got into the bathroom, it was like I had to tell myself what to do. I couldn’t remember ever using a toilet before in my life. And every time I go to the bathroom now, I marvel at how strange it all seems to me. For the first thirty-eight years of my life, I never used a toilet!”

  It was true. She never had, and I had never thought about that. In all of fiction, probably, urination scenes are specific to men.

  “I have to sit somewhere else for a while,” Willy said. Her cheeks were shiny with tears, and her eyes seemed half again as large. “Whatever you do, don’t bother me.”

  She carried the plate of half-eaten rhubarb pie to the last booth in the line across from the bar. Because just about everybody in the room watched her go, I realized that they had been eyeing us ever since Willy had shouted that I had done a BAD JOB.

  The waitress slipped into Willy’s booth and started talking in that earnest manner people adopt when they think they are telling difficult truths. I thought Willy would get rid of her in about ten seconds. It took five. The waitress came scuttling out of the booth, looking like a hen trying to stay ahead of a fox, and everyone else pretended to ignore the drama we had brought to Chicago Station.

  It took Willy something like twenty minutes to collect herself and make her way back through the tables in a gunfire of glances questioning and dismissive. (Some of those older ladies thought she deserved every bit of the punishment they assumed I was giving her.) She slid in, extended her arms over the table, and let herself tilt limply back against the dark wood behind her. “I give up,” she said in a defeated voice. “I’m a fictional character. There isn’t any other explanation. You created me. I don’t belong in this world, which is the reason I feel this way—the reason I’m in danger of fading away. Fading out. Put me back in the world where I belong, crummy as it was. In that world I was a person, at least.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “That world doesn’t exist anymore. You’re here, and I can’t finish the book.”

  “So I’m just going to eat a hundred candy bars every day until unreality finally catches up with me and I disappear.”

  I signaled for the check. The waitress moved up to the booth with the deliberation of an ocean liner coming into a narrow port. She slapped the slip of paper down on the table and backed away. I looked at the total and started counting out bills.

  “I trust that we have dealt with the big secret,” Willy said. “And I have to admit, it’s a doozy. What’s the little one, the one Tom didn’t want to tell me?”

  “Brace yourself,” I said. “Tom knew something that made him worried and unhappy every time you mentioned your daughter. He didn’t want to tell it to you because he thought you’d hate him, or fall apart, or both. He was on the verge of suggesting that you see a good psychiatrist.”

  “I’m waiting.” And she was: under the limpness and the weariness she was communicating enough tension to make the air crackle.

  “Remember that Holly wasn’t in that photograph of your husband’s body you found in Mitchell’s office?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s a good reason Holly wasn’t in the photograph. You didn’t have a daughter. You and Jim were childless.”

  Willy looked for signs that this preposterous chain of sentences was somehow supposed to be funny, or a trick, or anything but a statement of fact. When she saw no such sign, she got angry with me.

  “That’s unspeakable. It’s obscene.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t love you anymore. I never did—how could I love someone capable of saying that to me?”

  “What was Holly’s birthday?”

  “What difference does that make?” Willy started to scramble out of the booth, and I caught her arm.

  “Tell me about her birth. What was it like? Did you have a doctor or a midwife? Home birth, or hospital?”

  In her suddenly colorless face, her eyes blazed at me. She stopped trying to fight her way out of the booth. “She was born . . .” Her eyes went out of focus; softly, her mouth opened. “I know this, of course I know it.” She closed her eyes, and I let go of her arm. “Doesn’t my life, this existence of mine, seem pretty stressful to you? When I feel like this, I really can’t remember everything. If you give me a second, it’ll come back to me.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let it come back to you.”

  Willy opened her eyes, tilted her neck, and looked at various spots on the ceiling, as if hunting for the answer she needed. “Okay. Holly was born in a hospital.”

  “Which one?”

  She let her eyes drift down to my face. “Roosevelt.”

  “Willy, you got that from me. That’s the hospital my doctor sends me to. How much did your baby weigh?”

  She went back to searching the ceiling. A couple of seconds later, she licked her lips. “She weighed a normal amount, for a baby.”

  “You don’t have any idea of how much that would be, do you?”

  She made a rapid, inaccurate calculation. “Ten pounds.”

  “Way too much
, Willy. Don’t you think it’s odd that you can’t remember giving birth?”

  “But I did give birth, I had a daughter.”

  “Willy, the little girl who was murdered was a version of your childhood self. She was you. Do you know why you’re named Willy?”

  She shook her head.

  “In my book, your real name was Lily—Lily Kalendar. You couldn’t pronounce the letter L, so you called yourself Wiwwy, and people thought you were saying Willy. And the name of your hero, your incredibly brave, smart, inventive boy, was Howie Small. Howie equals Holly the way Willy equals Lily. That’s how I got these names—from a little girl’s lisp.”

  “My father’s name was Kalendar. You said that was someone’s name. What was his first name?”

  “Joseph.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “If you look into what you already know, Willy, you’ll find everything you need to know. Lately, Joseph Kalendar has been in my thoughts a great deal.”

  “I don’t know anything . . .” She began to protest, but her voice died away. Whatever surfaced in her mind, on loan from mine, disturbed her greatly. The initial look of shock on her face gradually melted into sorrow, and tears filled her eyes again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “How many women did he kill?”

  “Six or seven, I can’t remember which.”

  “And my brother. And my mother.”

  “Probably. No one ever found her body.”

  “Can we get out of here now?” Willy asked.

  We stepped outside into strong sunlight and moved slowly toward the car. It was like walking someone out of a hospital. She looked at my face. “This is what you know about my father.”

  I nodded. Before Willy got into the car, she said, “He built secret hallways and staircases into our house.” She was still stunned. Her face was all but immobile. “And he built . . .” She stared at the fact she had just conjured and could not speak.

  “He built an extra room at the back of the house. Get in now, Willy.”

  Like a child, she climbed in. Her eyes were glazed. “He built that extra room. It had a slanting roof that came right down to the ground. It had a huge big wooden bed in it. My father did things there, things I can’t remember. And that was the real night room.”

  I closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. Despite the shade I had found, you could practically have cooked a pot roast in the interior of the car.

  “There were no lights in that room. And it didn’t have any windows.”

  Willy was doing nothing more than parroting what she found in our shared memories. She wasn’t even close to responding to them, for they were not yet part of her emotional life. She had been overloaded with information, and what she had learned had exhausted and numbed her.

  Her next question surprised me. “What were you going to do with me at the end of your book?” A little wall-eyed, her head back against the cushion, she spoke as though about someone in whom she had once taken an interest.

  “You were going to walk into your old house at 3323 North Michigan Street, in Millhaven. That’s where Joseph Kalendar lived. You were going to go into the night room, meet the Lily who became Willy, and understand that she was the child you wanted to rescue. Or something like that. I was still working it out. The only reason you wanted to break into that warehouse was that it had MICHIGAN painted on its facade. What really drew you in was the part of your childhood you had blotted out.”

  I started the car and turned up the A/C. Cool air streamed from the vents, lowering the temperature layer by layer, from the floor mats up.

  “Was it going to be beautiful, your ending?”

  “I think it was, yes.” I backed out of our space beneath the tree and headed toward the exit. “When I thought about it, it seemed very beautiful.”

  “And I screwed it up for both of us.”

  “No, I did,” I told her. “In the book that’s just about to be published, I implied that Joseph Kalendar had killed his daughter. His spirit, or whatever you want to call it, has been after me ever since he found out. He’s enraged.”

  “What does my father want? What is he looking for?”

  I got us back on the road out of Willard and moving toward 224. What did Joseph Kalendar want from me? I remembered the name of the little Ohio town where Willy and I had stumbled across Mr. Davy’s splendid Lodge and within Room 119, overlooking the parking lot, first fallen into each other’s arms. “Restitution,” I said. “That’s what the old madman is looking for.”

  “Well, I want it too. What was the story about my husband’s murder? Did Mitchell kill him?”

  “I’m not absolutely sure. I hadn’t worked it out yet.”

  “Well, did Mitchell take those pictures?”

  “Probably.”

  “How come a man at that hotel in Nanterre told me he was checked out, and ten minutes later another man said he was still there?”

  “I was going to figure that out later.”

  “Would a banker really ever transfer money like that, without a signature?”

  “Probably only in Hendersonia,” I said.

  Neither one of us noticed the mud-slathered Mercury Mountaineer that had been trailing us, always six or seven cars back, since we’d left the restaurant.

  27

  From Timothy Underhill’s journal

  About an hour east of the Indiana border, an enormous building surrounded by acres of parking lot loomed up on the right side of the highway. We could see it coming long before we got close enough even to make out any details. I took it for an enclosed shopping mall until I noticed that the building was a giant box with no ornamentation but a sign that read SUPERSAVER KOSTKLUB.

  “This is it, Willy,” I said to the silent, drooping woman beside me. We were down to our last half dozen candy bars. “We can buy enough candy here to see you through to Christmas.” The huge store would have ATM machines, too.

  Willy said nothing. She had not spoken since I’d answered her question about the banker. I knew she was reacting to everything she had learned in the restaurant, all that overwhelming information that had descended upon her after she’d made her great, shining leap into the dark. It must have felt like the single greatest capitulation of her life, for in effect her surrender had been to absolute and unknowable mystery. And after that I had taken her child from her, and in its place presented her with one of the darkest, most painful childhoods ever endured. The fact was, though, that Willy had endured it, because her father had not, after all, murdered her—Joseph Kalendar had loved his daughter at least enough to let her go on breathing. To that extent, Willy had been right about her earliest years: righter than I had been willing to admit.

  I turned in to the huge parking lot and drove down the aisles, looking for an empty spot. She surprised me by breaking into my thoughts and saying, “Get me some good dark chocolate. With lots of cocoa in it, and not so sweet. The usual stuff, too, because that works better, although I don’t like it as much. And get a couple of boxes of confectioner’s sugar, some Coke, in the really big bottles, and some plastic glasses.”

  I pulled in to a parking place that seemed about a quarter mile from the building and made the mistake of asking her how she felt.

  “How are fictional characters supposed to feel? The hummingbird wings are beating away like crazy, and I think I have about half an hour before parts of me start to flicker out. This sucks. This is a really crappy deal. I was happier before you explained everything to me.”

  I tried to say something that would have ended up leaking a soupy, self-conscious semiprofundity. Willy saved us both by speaking over me.

  “Go on, get me my chocolate. I’ll wait here and brood about how miserable and uncertain my life is. I’m not real, I’m a fantasy of yours.”

  “Who says my fantasies aren’t real?”

  With a feebleness that was only partially feigned, she raised one hand. Then she let it drop back into her lap and wilted her upper body against the do
or, her head leaning on the window. Cool air flowing through a vent ruffled the bottom of her sweater. “Just go, Tim. I’ll be all right.”

  A geezer with a red vest and a name tag directed me down through the vast space to aisle 14, where I loaded my shopping cart with boxes of Mounds bars, boxes of almond M&M’s, boxes of Hershey’s and Kit Kat and 100 Grand bars. A little farther along I encountered trays of dark French and Belgian chocolate, and I pretty much filled the rest of the cart with boxes of French, Italian, and Belgian chocolates—Droste, Perugina, Valrhona, Callebaut. On the way back to the front of the store, I circled around the back of the bakery section, cut through aisles piled to the ceiling with cake mixes and vats of frosting, and discovered six shelves and whole flats devoted to sugar. I tossed four boxes of confectioner’s sugar onto the candies and proceeded to the rank of ATM machines at the back of the building, where I withdrew five hundred dollars.

  Willy started digging into the bags as soon as I got them in the car, and in minutes candy bars littered her lap and the seat well in front of her. “Oh, my God. Perugina and Valrhona dark chocolate. And here’s some Belgian!” Her head snapped up, and she stared straight ahead. Her clean, breathtaking profile should have been on a coin. “I have an idea. By the way, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to myself.”

  She took a box of sugar out of a bag, placed it her lap, and ripped two plastic glasses out of their container. Then she half-filled one of the glasses with confectioner’s sugar and filled the other with Coca-Cola from a two-liter bottle. First she dumped sugar into her mouth, then she washed it down with Coke. She repeated the process a couple of times. Powdered sugar lay scattered over her lap and across the seat.

  “That’s your idea?”

  “No, but this is by far the most efficient way of handling the lightness problem. It just gets in there and does the job. Chocolate tastes a lot better, of course. But this stuff, I can feel it working.”

  She gave me a glance that said this, too, was not a conversation, merely a form of Q&A, and crawled over into the back seat and began throwing the useless money out of the white duffel bag. (Willy is wonderful, and I love her, and most of the ways in which she surprises me are far more pleasant than not, but she is a slob, and there’s no way around it.) In seconds, hundred-dollar bills that appeared perfectly legit until you looked at them closely were floating down all over the back seat and onto the little shelf in front of the rear window. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me to shut up. When the bag was empty and fake money lay all over the place, mingling nicely with the spilled sugar, I could hear her transferring the contents of the grocery bags into the duffel. Then she dropped the grocery bags on the floor and tramped them flat, her idea of housekeeping. After that, she climbed back into the front of the car, dragging the white duffel with her, and began pitching into it the loose candy bars and chocolates that were scattered around her. Every now and then she popped a chocolate candy into her mouth.