In the night room Page 0,126
enough to make Tim start to shake all over again. Kalendar’s hands clutched at his face and pulled at the skin that was not skin. A transformation began to occur over the width and breadth of Kalendar’s body, which became shorter and trimmer, more glossy. It grew a handsome tuxedo and a starched white formal shirt and a black bow tie before its hair and features consolidated, but by that time Tim had long known the name of the figure taking shape before him. It was the second time Mitchell Faber had materialized out of Joseph Kalendar’s raw materials.
Closer to Faber than he had been the first time, he was able to see how dramatically he had gotten his villain wrong, too, how greatly he had underestimated this creature’s capacities, as well as Willy’s. By a considerable margin, Mitchell Faber was the scariest, the most frightening, of these apparitions. Faber had produced himself out of his own most savage impulses, and the result was crazier and more feral than his author had understood. At least Tim had not permitted this shiny predator to marry Willy Patrick. This man would willingly rip a foe apart with only his teeth. After he had washed off the blood, he would slip into his tuxedo and proceed to charm the wives and widows of his monomaniacal employers. (He was what you got when you asked for James Bond, Tim realized—you got a beast like this.)
“It’s no good if I tell you what you have to do, you miserable turd.” Faber grinned in a way that Willy had undoubtedly once found winning. “You have to come up with it by yourself. Let me say this: it should be obvious, even to you.”
“I’m too scared to think,” Tim said.
“You have to make amends. What do you have to offer, you moron? How can you make amends? Let’s see, how did you wrong me in the first place?”
“Oh,” Tim said, realizing what was being asked, and that it was exactly what Willy had proposed for him. “I can’t do that.”
Faber slid an inch nearer. His teeth gleamed, and so did the whites of his eyes. He had the most perfect mustache humankind had ever seen. “But isn’t that exactly what you do? And you must realize that if you refuse, our friend Mr. Kohle will make your life an utter horror for the brief period of time you will have left to you. That is certain. And all we ask is that you do a good job, the best you can manage.”
“I can’t restore your reputation,” Tim said.
“Of course you can’t. I have exactly the reputation I earned. What I want you to do—what you are going to do, if you want you and your precious friends on Grand Street to go on enjoying your lives—is to do justice to my case.”
He stepped forward again, crushing pellets of plaster beneath his gleaming shoes. “We’re through. Get out of here. And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone. I’m just as good as he is.”
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
Mitchell Faber/Joseph Kalendar snapped out of visibility with a contemptuous abruptness, leaving me alone in the filthy room. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to learn what a Cleresyte is, and that, as with artists and detectives, its identity is inseparable from what it does.
When he saw me coming out of the house, WCHWHLLDN pushed himself off the tree and straightened up. By the time I got to the bottom of the steps, he was already striding along the walkway. The black lenses of his sunglasses gleamed silver with moonlight, and under his tight black T-shirt, his muscles stood out like an anatomy lesson. He looked like pure purpose encased in pure impatience. As I drew nearer, I felt the coldness of his disdain and thought, He hates me because I’m not pure! I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it was right. When we passed, I took a half step to the right, expecting him to do the same. Instead, he deliberately shifted with me, and for the briefest of moments, his right shoulder brushed my left. I felt as though I’d been hit by a truck.
The impact knocked me off my feet and sent me flying six feet over the dying meadow of Kalendar’s lawn. I came down with a thump on my side. From the pain that blazed from shoulder to elbow, I thought my arm was broken.