In the night room Page 0,122

“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