In the night room Page 0,105

you let me know about it.”

“Don’t worry about me. I think I’ll just disappear.”

Tim said that they’d better be going.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Philip said.

Tim looked up, bracing himself for another assault on his character or his morals.

“Would you like to borrow Mark’s laptop? I know you’re an e-mail demon, and I can’t use it—it reminds me too much of Mark. The thing is just sitting up there in its case. Let me get it for you, and you can use it in your room.”

“That’s a great idea, Philip. Thanks.” According to an entry in Tim Underhill’s journal, Mark Underhill’s computer had once shown him a miraculous vision—a vision of Elsewhere—and he loved the idea of once again putting his hands on the object, so imbued with his nephew’s memory, that had given him his treasure.

Philip went upstairs and came back down holding a black computer case by its handle.

“These things are so small, and they hold so much. Mark spent hours on it, sending messages back and forth, looking up I don’t know what . . .” With a dense, compacted facial expression, Philip thrust it at Tim. He was not loaning out his son’s computer, Tim saw; he was getting it out of the house by giving it away.

Philip rubbed his palms on the sides of his trousers. For a moment he looked almost as adolescent and self-conscious as one of his charges. The direct, probing look he gave Willy erased this impression.

“Come with me, Willy. I want to show you something.”

“Show her what?”

Already on her feet, Willy looked from brother to brother.

“Willy ought to see the view from my backyard, don’t you think?”

Tim glanced up at Willy. “I explained to him why you said you were a fictional character of mine. Philip knows you’re Kalendar’s niece. From his backyard, you can see your uncle’s house.”

“I guess I should see it before they tear it down and scorch the soil it rested on,” Willy said.

“Excuse me,” Philip said. “I can’t avoid asking this one question. Did you ever meet your cousin?”

“Never even knew she existed.”

“As sick as he was, he must have wanted to protect her.”

“I think this is going to have an uncomfortable effect on me. Would you mind if I had a candy bar?” Out came a Kit Kat and a Mars bar. After a moment’s contemplation under Philip’s fascinated stare, she shoved the Mars bar back into her pocket, broke the Kit Kat in half, unpeeled one of the halves, and bit into it. She held the other half in her left hand. “Lead on.”

In the moment of uncertainty Willy had brought him to, Philip glanced over at his brother.

“Go ahead,” Tim said. “I’m curious about what the place looks like now.”

“It’s a dump.” Philip turned, strode off into the narrow kitchen, and opened the back door.

Willy and Tim stepped through. Philip joined them at the top of the steps down to his barren backyard. The fence Philip had tried to erect between his property and the cobbled alley still drooped over the patchy lawn. However, on the other side of the alley, nothing remained as it had been. Joseph Kalendar’s massive wall had been bulldozed away, revealing the jungly profusion of his old backyard, from which rose the rear wall of his appalling house. The kitchen door through which Mark Underhill and his friend Jimbo Monaghan had broken in could still be made out through the weeds. The crude, clumsy slanting roof of the added room reared up out of the weeds like a huge animal dangerous to awaken.

Willy inhaled sharply.

“The place seems to get uglier with every passing week.”

Because he was looking across the alley, Philip did not see Willy flicker like a dying lightbulb. Tim had turned to her when that sharp, sudden sound escaped her, and before his eyes Willy’s entire body stuttered in and out of visibility. She slumped against the back of the house. Somehow, he managed to catch her before she slid down onto the worn surface of the yard.

“Eat the rest of that candy bar, fast,” he ordered her. “Philip, do you have any sugar?”

“Sure, I guess. I don’t use sugar much anymore.”

Tim asked him to fill a coffee cup with sugar and bring it outside with a glass of Coke.

“Is she a diabetic? She needs her—”

“Get the sugar, Philip. Now.”

Philip vanished inside in a flurry of elbows and knees. Cupboard doors and cabinets opened and closed. Muttering to himself, he came through the door and handed