In the night room Page 0,123

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 giddy.

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?”

“You have no idea.” Most of the inside of my body felt as though I’d swallowed dry ice. My heart had gone into triple time, and my knees, those cowards, trembled violently enough to shake my trousers. I placed my hand on the door and, hoping for some kind of excuse to procrastinate, glanced across the street. I jumped about a foot and a half.

Leaning against a tree in a posture that perfectly expressed his customary mood of bored hostility, WCHWHLLDN was glaring at us through nighttime shades that made him look like an old-school hipster. He lifted one arm and made an impatient, sweeping gesture with his hand.

“Who is that?” Willy asked.

“He’s a Cleresyte, whatever that is,” I said, “and he’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”

More forcefully, the angel repeated his whisk-broom gesture. Before he could slip off his glasses and melt us into grease stains with the force of his gaze, I grasped the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open. The hinges squealed like hungry cats. A seared, unhealthy odor of dust, mold, and tormented lives streamed out of every room, along the corridors, down the staircase, through the entry hall, through the door frame, and outside, coating us with its residue. Holding my breath, I stepped inside, Willy following so close behind that I could feel the charged inch or so of space between us the way I might feel her breath on my neck.

34

The reek of death and abandonment that had enveloped Tim and Willy in its outward journey still hung in the atmosphere. Boldly, Willy moved deeper into the entry and peered up the stairs. Grit and fallen crumbs of plaster crunched under her feet. The staircase ascended into an utter darkness that soon resolved into a fainter darkness surrounding a turn of the banister rail at a landing with a lifeless window.

“We should have brought