In the night room Page 0,127

I propped myself up on my good arm and watched the menacing angel move up the steps. He got onto the porch and turned around—because I was watching him. He opened his mouth, and again I knew the concentrated terror I had felt when I’d opened the living room door. I understood with absolute certainty that the angel’s voice would ruin my hearing and drive me madder than I had ever been at Austen Riggs. There I had been merely a basket case, not a hell-for-leather, mush-brain lunatic. He chose not to speak. That’s all it was: he didn’t want to waste his time on me.

He spun around and passed through the front door without bothering to open it. Even his boot heels looked pissed off. A moment after he had entered the house, an explosion of light turned all the windows brilliantly white, and his great wings creaked open and penetrated through the walls without breaking them. Glowing, glowering, WCHWHLLDN reared up through the roof and into a wide column of light that now circled the house. Each of his hands held something slithery, shapeless, and dark, from which depended a long, apronlike robe in which I thought I saw a thousand glittering little eyes and a thousand screaming mouths.

I thought I knew what he was carrying—not the evil that had been done in the house but the pain and sorrow of Kalendar’s victims. All along, that was what had made the little house so ugly, so elusive, so avoidable: Kalendar’s real trophies—not the corpses of his victims but what they had felt in his presence. WCHWHLLDN was the night crew; he did the cleaning up and clearing away. The giant angel flew higher and higher, mounting the sky, and the dirty fabric trailing behind him unreeled and unreeled from the house. When the last of it went snapping upward and disappeared, the angel came battering down from the heavens and did the same all over again, repeatedly, bearing away the scraps and residue of that stinking darkness and that sacred charge until the house was cleansed. The burn marks had disappeared from the front of the house.

I think WCHWHLLDN would have made Philip very happy, for in his way the angel followed his wishes to the last degree: he burned down the house, dug a six-foot-deep pit where it had been, filled the pit with gasoline, and set it alight. His job, his task throughout eternity, had been purification, and he had been assigned this case. He cured infection and eliminated pollution. In his eyes, I, along with every other human being, represented a vast irritant. We carried pollution and contamination wherever we went, and we were far too imperfect to be immortal. We didn’t have a chance of understanding what was going on until we reached zamani. (Come to think of it, this is pretty much the way Philip used to feel, back in the days before his rescue by China Beech.)

The light no one could see left the Kalendar house and the star realms above it; the work no one had seen had been concluded. I pushed myself upright and staggered back to my car, bruised and aching and almost too numb to feel.

When I let myself back into what had been our room and now was mine, I felt Willy’s absence the way you feel a phantom limb. She had been amputated from me, and although I had performed the surgery, I wanted her back. I missed her vastly, oceanically. Her face appeared wherever I looked, on the windows, in the wallpaper, in the air above the bed we had shared. The Cleresyte’s touch, and the fall it had given me, still pounded throughout my body. In a funny way, I didn’t mind, because the pain helped take my mind off Willy.

I filled the tub and soaked in a hot bath until my fingertips were wrinkled. Hunger returned to me as I toweled myself off, and with Willy’s voice in my ear, I called room service. Sheer longing tempted me to order two steaks, two orders of onion rings, and a dozen candy bars, but when the waiter answered, I settled for tomato soup and roasted chicken, the kind of meal my mother used to make.

In my mind, I had changed so much that I was surprised my shirts and jackets still fit. When the food came, I took a couple of bites and thought I was going to throw up before I could get