by Peter Straub
“I think she’s more like her father than anyone has ever recognized,” he said. “But what she’s done with it is extraordinary.”
“I bet you wish you could have seen her face.”
“To tell you the truth, Willy,” he said, “the thought of looking upon that woman’s face fills me with terror. What do you think about what happened?”
“I’m scared,” Willy said. Her face rippled, and her cheeks turned chalky and white. “I’m lost, and I’m frightened. She was scary, but you are, too.”
His heart and stomach both quivered. “How could I be scary to you?” he asked, fearing that tears would erupt from his eyes, from even his pores.
“You had to see her, didn’t you?” She could bear to look at him for only a second longer.
When they returned to their little suite, Willy went immediately into the bedroom and closed the door.
Tim sat down before Mark’s computer, downloaded his e-mail, and discovered another twenty messages without domain names. Their subject lines said things like Need to Hear from You and Explain What Is Happening! and This Is All Wrong!! These, too, he deleted without remorse or hesitation. These sasha would have to find their way without him. A message from Cyrax remained. When opened, it offered him this rigorous and mocking consolation:
deer buttsecks,
with every step 4-ward, every step up,
something new is lost or forsworn.
this IS a process of loss
reed ’em & weep, LOLOL
(foul & flawed & week tho u r,
u must face yr loss 2 come!)
do not FLINCH! do not QUAIL!
do not BACK AWAY! the PRICE
must bee PAID!!! u have luvd,
now u must looze yr love & bid
gud-bye, old soldier. this 2 is death.
33
Brian Jeckyll had rescheduled all of Tim’s drive-time interviews for 6:30 to noon on Thursday morning, and at 6:00 A.M., Tim reluctantly unpeeled himself from sleeping Willy, rose from their bed, used the bathroom, and, freshly showered, dressed himself in Gap khakis, a blue button-down shirt, and a black, lightweight jacket. With ten minutes to spare, he went downstairs, bought two Danishes and a cup of coffee, and returned to his room. He had polished off the first Danish by the time the telephone rang, right on schedule. Ginnie and Mack were calling from their radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the first thing they wanted to know was if he’d ever had any supernatural experiences.
“I don’t really know how to answer that, Mack,” Tim said. “How about you?”
After Ginnie and Mack came Zack and the MonsterMan of Ithaca, New York, who wondered aloud how weird you would have to be to write a book like lost boy lost girl. “How weird do you have to be to call yourself MonsterMan?” Tim asked. “We’re all in this together.” There was Vinnie the Vinster of Baltimore, Maryland; Paulie’s Playhouse of St. Petersburg, Florida; the Owl and the Fox, otherwise Jim and Randy, of Cleveland, Ohio (“You really want to make us quiver in our jammy-roos, don’t you, Tim?”); and many more, the Bills and Bobs and Jennys of morning talk radio, each with their seven-minute segments in which they chaffed with each other, updated the traffic reports, and handed off to newscasters with stories about mangled children, traffic accidents, municipal graft, and homicidal snipers. Tim ate his second Danish during a run of commercials in St. Louis, Missouri, and by the time he started to get hungry again had arrived in California, where drive time was particularly intense. (“You’re a well-known writer, you live in New York—tell me, what do you think of our governor?” “He’s a peach of a guy,” Tim said.) At seven minutes past 12:00, he finished his session with Ted Witherspoon and Molly Jackson of Ted and Molly’s Good Gettin’ Up Morning Show, broadcast from downtown Bellingham, Washington, and staggered over to the sofa, where Willy was sailing around London with Muriel Spark.
“Are they always like that?” she asked.
“You see why they’re so much fun to do.”
“They always ask the same questions, over and over?”
“It’s more like I give the same answers, over and over.”
“Why do you do that?”
“They’re the only answers I know,” he said. “I have to go back to bed now. I need some sleep.”
“Sleep for half an hour, and I’ll order a room service lunch.”
He looked down at the white bag, into which her right hand was dipping. It seemed to be less than a third full.
Forty-five minutes later, when the waiter rolled his cart into the room, Willy quietly opened the bedroom door and found Tim writing in his journal.
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
During lunch, I tore a page out of my notebook and wrote out, in block caps, WCHWHLLDN, and asked Willy if it meant anything to her. Chewing, she looked over, thought for a second, and said, “Sure. It’s simple.”
“What does it mean, then?”
“Just put in the vowels. I’m not going to do it for you.”
“Is there supposed to be a Y in there?”
“Hah! You decide.” Her mood changed, and her eyes, looking a bit swollen, swung toward me. “I sense that today is a big day for the home team. What are we going to do?”
I took a couple of slow breaths. “Could you stand to look at that house again?”
“The one behind your brother’s, where I had Lily Kalendar’s childhood?”
Willy knew exactly which house I meant. She closed her eyes and made internal judgments I could only guess about. Maybe she measured the spaces in the honeycombs and counted hummingbird wings. Her eyes opened, and she said, “Yes. It’s not going to shock me, this time. Actually, we have to go there. I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“I hope you’re going to tell me. I’ve never really understood what you could do, much less were supposed to do.”
“I’m sure that’s the truth,” she said, taking up my confession with a kind of forgiving bitterness that lifted me off the hook even as it sank the barbs deeper into me. “You never understood what I was going to do, but you should have. You even wrote it, you idiot.”
“Where?”
“As if I’d tell you. No, it was in what you didn’t write.”
What I didn’t write? This baffled me, but I kept my mouth shut.
Willy knew perfectly well that I had failed to understand: that I had failed her. “Do you remember our conversation in that restaurant in Willard with the nosy waitress?”
“Of course I remember that conversation.”
“Then remember what you told me. I was going to be healed.”
Even more baffled than the first time, I asked, “Did I say that?”
“No. I said it, just now. But it was what you meant.”
And she was right, that was what I had meant—that Willy Patrick was to be healed. I understood it now. Willy had perceived what I had not said about what I was never going to write. That seemed perfect for our situation; it was a kind of summation.
“Only I don’t think it was true,” she said. “It was just what you wanted to believe. You were lying to yourself, because you didn’t want to lie to me. I’m through. I was a mistake to begin with, lucky me, and now I’m going to be turned back in like a counterfeit bill. I’m some kind of price. You made this mistake, and I’m how you pay for it.”
“Maybe it won’t have to be that way,” I said. “My Lily Kalendar went to a place I called Elsewhere. Elsewhere is no distance at all from Hendersonia.”
“I just want you to understand that I’m very, very frightened. It’s worse for me if you’re glib.”
“Let’s drive over there,” I said.
When we pulled over to the side of the road a little way downhill from the house Joseph Kalendar had transformed into a likeness of his own mind, it was as though great plumes and ribbons of darkness streamed from the chimney, the windows, the crack beneath the front door. I could see it that way, as a monstrous wickedness engine, polluting the atmosphere around
it with its own substance.
“It looks like the evil twin of your brother’s house,” said Willy, drawing on the soap operas I had made her enjoy.
“It’s not as different as all that,” I said, thinking of Pop and the wasted hours in the Saracen Lounge, and April’s deep unhappiness.
“Is that a burn mark on the front there, beneath the window? The top steps look scorched, too.”
“Twenty years ago, someone tried to burn it down. I think it was the old man who lived across the street and one house up.”
I explained that after Kalendar’s arrest and incarceration, his neighbors had taken turns mowing the front and side lawns, the parts visible from the street. New arrivals to Michigan Street, unaware of Kalendar’s crimes, had refused to participate, and, like Omar Hillyard and his dog, the custom had died. Now the front lawn looked like a parched meadow where brown, waist-high grasses cooked in the sun.
“And all those hidden corridors and staircases are still there,” she said. “And the stuff in the basement.”
“All of it,” I said. “Until next Wednesday, anyhow.”
We knew that we had to be there; we knew that 3323 North Michigan had been our goal from the moment we’d left the bookstore on Eighty-second and Broadway.
A little girl in a blue-and-white dress peeped out from behind the house, made sure that I had noticed her, and pulled her head back. Or no such thing happened, and I had merely printed an image from my inner world onto the landscape in front of us. When I worked at my desk, installed within the space between, they were more or less the same thing. April’s appearances had always signaled Kalendar’s presence, and I was not about to ignore her now.
“Let’s get out of the car,” I said.
“Is something going to happen?”
“I think so.”
We walked up the street where Mark and his best friend, Jimbo Monaghan, had so often coursed downhill on their skateboards, and with every step, I knew, we entered deeper into Kalendar’s realm. The house watched us with its multiple eyes. It gathered its breath, its heartbeat pulsed, and all the while it pretended to be no more than an empty, unappealing building, a structure almost everyone would walk past without noticing—a building the eyes slid over too fast to see. I felt a subtle pressure pushing us back, keeping us away: that, too, was how Kalendar’s house protected itself.
A car drove past, and a kid on a bicycle, and although Willy and I were walking in the street instead of using the sidewalk, neither the boy nor the woman driving the car bothered to glance our way.
We reached the point on the street where in my imagination Mark had stood in amazement as the Kalendar house had seemed to rear up before him, more or less out of mists, fogs, and suddenly retreating cloud banks. In a common impulse, Willy and I joined our hands.
The broken walkway; the dead grass; the fire-scorched cement steps to the hunched-looking porch beneath the heavy, drooping brow of its roof. The rusty holes next to the door frame where the numerals had been. Someone had supposed that if the number 3323 was pried off the front of the house, its identity would change, its aura would shrink. I had the feeling that those metal numerals had probably been cleaned out of Omar Hillyard’s basement. The front door, heavy, almost deliberately ugly, and a little out of plumb. The living room window, where apparitions had or had not appeared.
“This is an awful place,” Willy said. Her grip tightened on my hand. “I take it back. I changed my mind. I can’t go in there.”
With Willy’s refusal, I understood what she had to do, and how I had prepared her for it. Better than Cyrax, I knew why she was beside me. At least I hoped I did. “You don’t have to, not now. What we have to do I don’t think can be done in daylight. And later on, you won’t really be going into it—you’ll go through it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t,” I said. “It’s just what I think could happen.”
An oily cloud seemed to gather and thicken behind the window, then disperse into shadow and darkness.
“What are we supposed to do now?”
“We’re going to stay together as long as we can,” I said. “I can’t bear the thought of letting you go.”
As the afternoon moved toward evening, an odd, flickering life seemed to take place on the other side of the big, dusty window. I had not known what to expect, only that it was necessary for us to be where we were, and I was glad for any confirmation of my belief. Probably anyone who does what we did then—stand thirty feet from a dirty window and stare at it for five or six hours—will be likely to dream up a thing or two to make the task more interesting, and it’s possible that’s what happened to us. And I say five or six hours, but actually I have no idea how long Willy and I stood there. Time contracted and expanded at the same time. It felt more like thirty minutes; in that thirty minutes, afternoon gave way to evening.
Most of the time, Willy Patrick and I saw the same things.
An indefinite figure seemed to melt forward from the rear of the room, take us in, and fade back again. The dark, oily haze assembled itself before us now and again, and I thought that, no less than the hovering figure, it had eyes. Once, before the air began to darken, Willy and I both saw a dim, phosphorescent glow stutter like a firefly from a position beneath the windowsill. Another figure, much larger than the first and obviously male, swelled into half visibility and advanced nearly far enough to display the features I knew he had, the beard, the hands held crooked before his face, the long hair and black coat. Before I could register the terror he caused in me, the Dark Man, Joseph Kalendar, vanished into the grit and dust he had roused floating through the empty room.
Much of what we saw amounted to no more than animated shadows, shadows that sometimes barely moved, like Morton Feldman’s music, offering one tiny variation only after an endless series of repetitions. A darker patch creeping over or out of a distant wall, itself barely visible, then creeping back was riveting, because what animated it had no connection with anything that existed outside that room. What gave it life was the raw hunger that Willy had sensed in her dream.
People walked past without looking. Cars veered around us without honking, moving as if their drivers had accidentally twitched the wheel. We went beyond hunger without ever experiencing it. When it first began to get dark, I noticed that Willy had not so much as taken a bite out of one of her candy bars in over half an hour, and I asked, “Don’t you need them anymore?”
“I like feeling this way.” In demonstration of exactly how she felt, she took two Clark bars from her pocket and threw them at the porch. “Feed the animal,” she said. I thought she had given it an offering.
Then the cars turned on their headlights, and the windows of the other houses on the block lit up and cast yellow light onto their lawns. Something enormous moved toward the other side of Kalendar’s window.
“I didn’t know until we got here,” I told Willy. “I’m still not sure.”
“It’s not important. It was all in your mind, somewhere.”
“You’re not being sacrificed,” I said. “It’s just that I have to pay for what I did.”
“This is what I was created for. I came into your life exactly at the moment in the book when the girl shows herself in that house. Anyhow, my whole life is a sacrifice. I don’t mind. I’m not angry anymore.” She let her head drop and half-mumbled, “If I wanted to make you pay for something, I’d make you write a book.”
Her fingers dug into my hand.
“Are you scared?”
“Ask a really stupid question, why don’t you?”
“Me, too. My heart’s beating like crazy. I don’t know if I can go in there.”
“Then don’t. It’s my night room, not yours.”
I thought of my night room, the lightless basement of a tenement on Elizabeth Street where madness in the form of a onetime comrade in arms, therefore a kind of brother in the imaginative space, had stabbed Michael Poole and myself. Our survival had made us gid
dy.
With every bit of energy I had, I hoped that Willy was going to a place I had already established for her; in a sense, I had already placed her there. More than Hendersonia, far more than the baffling world into which she had been propelled, it was where she belonged.
“You’re not leaving me behind,” I said. “Not until the last moment, anyhow.”
“You’re so full of shit,” Willy answered, in the sweetest declaration of love I had ever been given.
A bloated cloud of bad intentions and sick desires swarmed up to the window and hung before us, darker than the darkness behind it.
“So that’s what’s in there,” Willy said. “I always wondered.”
I told her, “It’s not the only thing in there.”
Second by second, the light had been dying around us, and I think that both of us noticed that it had gone altogether as soon as I had spoken what I hoped were words of consolation.
Willy needed no consolation. She simply started moving up to the curb, across the sidewalk, and onto the cracked cement of Kalendar’s walkway. Taken by surprise, I hung back for a second, and realized that she was acting in accordance with the frightening dream an ignorant author had devised for her. Willy was flying on her own silver cord toward the boy who shared her face. I started after her, watching her slender little body move confidently through the darkness toward the terrible house. The front window swirled with a pattern like oil on a huge puddle, and a muted flash of illumination made the colors briefly shine.
Four feet ahead of me, Willy asked, “What’s that light?”
“How the hell should I know?”
She moved up the steps and waited for me. “Do we ring the bell or something?”
“And ask for a cup of sugar?”
Even in the darkness, I could see her frown. “Sorry,” I said, and went up the steps. Willy moved sideways to let me get at the door. “If I had a cup of sugar, I’d throw it away. The lightness is so good now, it’s like having music inside me. I can almost forget how afraid I am. Are you still afraid?”