In the night room Page 0,124

a flashlight,” she said.

“We’ll see everything we have to see.” Tim advanced into the gray territory between himself and the staircase. A little bit farther ahead and on his right was the door to the living room, firmly closed. Somewhere off to his left, one of Kalendar’s concealed, spiderweb passageways led to a hidden staircase. The rubble on the floor had crumbled off the ceiling and the walls, and a thousand generations of rodents had scampered through it, leaving printed on the dust the graffiti of their passing. The entire structure seemed surprisingly flimsy to him. At the first nudge of the bulldozer, the whole thing would collapse into itself and turn to splinters and plaster dust. If he touched one of those pockmarked walls, here and there bearing tattoolike images of florid roses, he knew the stench of the place would come off on his hand.

“I suppose we go in there,” Willy said, her voice shrunk down to less than a whisper.

“Uh-huh.” Tim was now almost too frightened to speak. “Yeah.” He forced himself to move to the door to the front room. He touched the knob, and his hand shook so violently that he could not grasp it. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Do it for me,” Willy said. Then, more firmly: “For me. I’m just passing through, remember?”

He looked back at his dear creation and saw her left arm flicker into nowhere and jerk back into visibility. Willy looked as though she might faint again. “Okay, Willy,” he said, and wrapped his trembling hand around the brass mushroom of the knob, turned, and pushed. The door swung open on a narrow chamber where a huge bole of black particles and swirling dust like a gigantic hornet’s nest pulsed like a living thing in the middle of the room. In the instant it was revealed, the vicious thing whirled, he was sure, to look at Tim Underhill and take his measure at last; in the next, it dispersed in a silent explosion that sent wisps and rags and shadows of itself to the corners of the room. Underhill’s fear refined itself into a column of mercury stretching from the top of his bowels to the base of his throat.

Beneath the window, an electrical wire that disappeared into the wall writhed and thrashed like a captured snake, shooting out sparks that showered to the floor; it collapsed in loose coils, then whipped back into life and disgorged another fireworks display before dropping again to the floor.

“There’s no electricity in this house,” Tim said.

“He’s telling you to go in,” Willy said. “He’s letting it happen. He’s even making light for you. He knows that guy is out there, and he’s afraid of him.”

“How do you know that?” As he asked his question, Tim crossed the threshold with slow steps and looked into the corners, rubbed smooth with darkness. That he could speak surprised him; that he could walk was an astonishment. Already much greater than in the entry, the stench flared, stinging his eyes and settling on his lips.

“He told me. When he looked at us.”

“In words?”

“Did you hear him say anything?” Willy spun around, seeming to attend to those unheard voices. “This isn’t where it happened, is it? I didn’t meet Mark in this room.”

“He was on the staircase at the back of the entry, waiting to hear you moving down the hidden stairs behind the wall.”

“Where is the night room?”

“On the other side of the kitchen.”

“Will we go there? We will, you don’t have to tell me. We’ll go there and cleanse the room of its crimes, we’ll wash them away.” She gave him the most tender smile he had ever seen. “Because that’s what you’re doing, you old writer. You’re washing away his crimes, and you’re doing it through me.”

“So it seems,” Tim said. He was too frightened to cry. “Why would I want to do that?”

“Oh, you,” she said, with the implication that he had asked a question with an obvious answer. Then she placed her hand on her chest and gazed at him with a wonder entirely unconnected to him. “Those hummingbird wings, whoo, they’re beating faster and getting bigger. . . . This is an amazing, amazing feeling. It’s like I’m going to float right up off the ground.”

“I don’t think it’s going to take long.”

“It can’t. I’m Lily Kalendar—your Lily Kalendar.”

It was precisely the recognition she had been supposed to attain at the end of the book that was