In the night room Page 0,100

Locked in motionless embrace, great figures on stone friezes gazed down through a tangle of vines; a panther’s eye gleamed, and wing beats troubled the air. They had passed over, Tim felt, into another realm altogether, where miracles were commonplace but fleeting, leaving behind echoes of things lost and half-remembered.

At six o’clock in the morning, Willy said, “I feel different. Something’s happening.” She could not be more specific.

Later that morning, showered, dressed, and still feeling enveloped in the atmosphere of Willy Patrick, Tim called his brother. After a little thought, he made a second telephone call, to the Millhaven Foundling’s Shelter. Soon he found himself speaking to Mercedes Romola, the shelter’s matron, who confirmed the idea that had entered his head a moment before: that the real Lily Kalendar had probably passed into the same hands and endured the same process as his dear Lily. Both Philip and Ms. Romola invited him to visit them that afternoon.

29

Willy had swallowed something like half a pound of confectioner’s sugar and washed it down with a nice, sugary soft drink while Tim made his calls, and as they drove south and west through the city, she was in a relatively unruffled frame of mind. Tim, however, seemed to grow darker and more troubled the closer they came to his old neighborhood. By the time he turned on to Teutonia Avenue and homed in on Sherman Park, he was actually driving with one hand and propping up his chin with the other, as if he were leaning on a bar.

“What’s wrong?” Willy asked him. “Are you upset with your brother, or are you ashamed to introduce me to him?”

“No, of course I’m not ashamed. But I am always upset with Philip,” Tim said, considerably shading the truth. He did have wildly conflicting feelings about introducing Willy to his brother. In some ways, it seemed like the worst idea in the world.

“That I’m always upset with him is what makes us a family. I think he’s comically selfish, way too cautious, and unbelievably hidebound, and he thinks I’m a flashy spendthrift who turned his back on him.”

“I bet he’s proud of you.”

“Somewhere down in that grudging heart of his, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” Tim removed his hand from his chin and reverted to driving an automobile instead of a bar. He wished not to continue this particular conversation, and he was getting dangerously near Philip’s house. The tidy green space of Sherman Park floated by on his left; the unhappy little house at 3324 North Superior Street filled with his parents’ shabby old furniture lay only two blocks away. He regretted bringing Willy into the former Pigtown. Some disaster would inevitably occur. Also, he dreaded the possibility of meeting China Beech. She was a catastrophe that had already happened.

Tim found a parking space two doors down from his brother’s house. He and Willy left the car simultaneously, and Willy immediately reached back in to pick up half a dozen Baby Ruths.

As she ducked into the car, Tim looked idly up toward the next corner, which was located on a little rise, and saw something he first took for mere eccentricity. A large man built like a plow horse and wearing a long black coat that fell past his knees stood up there, silhouetted against the pale blue sky and staring down at him. He was the sort of man who looks like an assault weapon, and he appeared to be holding his hands over his face in an ugly, complicated pattern that allowed him to see through his fingers while concealing his face.

The knowledge of this bizarre figure’s identity came to him almost immediately, and Tim was never sure if his sense that the world had stopped moving began with him seeing the apparition or at the moment he realized it was Joseph Kalendar. Either way, the world froze in place: birds hung motionless in the sky, men turned to statues in midstride, a pot falling from a mantel stopped in midair, and a frozen cat watched it not fall. Willy’s head and torso hung motionlessly over the front seat. Kalendar was playing his new book back to him, as he had done on Crosby Street, and the old monster had all the success he could have wished for. In life, Joseph Kalendar had gotten a great deal of pleasure out of frightening people; he must have been immensely pleased at how thoroughly he had succeeded in scaring Timothy Underhill.

Without seeming to