In the night room Page 0,18

Grand Street’s uptown lane, trying to make out a figure that was not there. His shoes felt as though they might float off his feet, like little boats.

Tim pushed through a rank of waist-high plastic news boxes, felt something tumble to the sidewalk, and jogged down the pavement, wishing he had grabbed an umbrella. Three people were moving along the sidewalk, two of them coming toward him, and the third, a short, almost dwarfish person who could have been either male or female, heading away, toward Wooster Street. In the thick rain, they looked like wraiths, like phantoms.

Neither of the men drawing near to him was Kohle. The dwarflike creature scuttling off appeared to be picking up steam as he went, in his haste almost hydroplaning across the surface of the pavement. A young man with black hair and furious eyes stood beneath the awning of an entrance to a drugstore, but he was not Kohle, and neither was the girl in jeans and a black tank top hugging her arms over her chest under the next awning down the block.

Rainwater seemed now to pass directly through the fabric of his cap. His raincoat adhered to his shirt, and his shirt adhered to his chest. He no longer understood why he was doing this to himself. Running outside had been a spectacularly bad idea from the first. If he ever saw Kohle staked out on Grand Street again, he would call the police. The man had taken him by surprise; to be honest, Kohle had frightened him, and his fear had flashed into sudden anger, with the ridiculous result that here he was out on the street, asking for pneumonia.

He turned around, thinking only of getting back to his loft. The girl in the tank top gave him a sympathetic smile as he went squelching by. Under the next awning, the boy with furious eyes was peeling off his tight-fitting black shirt. He gave Tim the resentful glare due a voyeur, then bent to take off his boots. After he had tucked the boots under his arm, the boy undid his belt and shoved his pants down to his ankles. He wore no underwear, and his long body was a single streak of shining white. Tim stared at the boy’s smooth, hairless groin, as blank as a Ken doll’s. The young man stepped forward, and Tim stepped back.

That was . . . now, there was some mistake here, he couldn’t see right, the rain was screwing with his vision . . .

With a sound like the crackling of heavy canvas sails, immense wings folded out from the young man’s back. He stepped forward on a beautiful naked foot. Tim thought, I have seen what it is to tread. The being was much taller than he had at first appeared, six-seven or six-eight. Instantly, water ran in shining rivulets down its gleaming and hairless chest. When it glanced at Tim, its eyes, though entirely liquid black, conveyed what Tim’s old Latin teacher would have called “severe displeasure.” Tim had no idea if his heart had gone into overdrive or stopped working altogether. The inside of his mouth tasted like blood and old brass. Creaking, the great wings unfolded another five or six feet and nearly met at their highest point.

The angel was going to kill him, he knew.

Instead of truly stopping his heart, the angel swept past Tim Underhill, turned toward West Broadway, and took two long, muscular strides. The world at large failed to notice this extraordinary event. The traffic crawled by. A man in a parka and a fishing hat ducked out of an apartment building and walked past the angel without a sign of surprise.

Can’t you see that? Tim wanted to yell, then realized, no, he couldn’t see that; he had seen nothing at all.

Two more steps up the street, the angel jettisoned its clothes onto the sidewalk in front of the news boxes, took one more majestic stride forward, raised a knee, and with a great unfolding and unfurling of its wings lifted off the pavement and ascended into the air. Up and up, open-mouthed Tim watched it go, until it dwindled to the size of a white sparrow, and—instantly, as if translated to another realm—disappeared. Tim kept watching the place in the air where it had been, then realized that the man in the fishing hat, who had come almost level with him, was looking at him oddly.

“I thought I saw something unusual up there,” he