In the night room Page 0,27

for loumay and nayrm, Lou Mayer and Mike Ryan. Ryan died in Ireland last year, and Lou Mayer drowned in a sailing accident off Cape Cod.”

“Oh, Christ,” Tim said.

“I hear he was a lousy sailor. What was that last name?”

“Cyrax.”

“He doesn’t seem to be here. Nope. So maybe that one’s real.”

“He said he wanted to be my guide.”

“That’s your joker, right there.” Finnegan’s voice rose. “Here’s the guy who’s sending you this crap. It has to be someone we went to school with. Who else would know about these people? He’s picking the names of people you cared about.”

Except I didn’t, Tim thought. “That crossed my mind, too.”

“There has to be someone who can pin down this creep.”

“I know a couple of people who might be able to do something,” Tim said. “Thank you for your help.”

Now his computer seemed like a hostile entity, exuding toxins as it crouched atop his desk. If Cyrax was sending him e-mails using the Internet names of dead classmates because Cyrax had been a classmate himself, how did he know about Philip Footler? No one in Tim’s life was familiar with both his life in high school and his Vietnam tour. The one and only intersection on earth of Bill Byrne and Phoorow was Timothy Underhill.

He went back and started over. Someone calling himself Cyrax had been rooting through his past and using what he found there to send these crazy e-mails. Tim could see no other explanation. Cyrax had already appointed himself as guide, so let him make the next move. Since without full addresses these e-mail conversations could be only one-way, he would make the next move anyhow. When Cyrax showed himself again, Tim would decide how he wanted to respond. He could always start deleting any e-mail that came without an @ sign and domain name.

He remembered the astonishing sight of his sister, a little Alice in Wonderland girl leaning forward to hurl the words Listen to us at him, and for the first time connected April’s command with the e-mails. An uncontrollable shiver went through his body. Helplessly, he looked at the computer, squatting on his desk like a sleek black toad. From below it, the voices of the dead bubbled up to print their inchoate words on the screen, one after another, emerging from a bottomless well.

He had to get outside.

But when Tim Underhill left his building to walk aimlessly down Grand, then turn left on Wooster Street, then right on Broome, his hands in the pockets of his still-damp Burberry, his head covered by his still-damp WBGO cap, he felt no release from the phantoms that had driven him into the streets. In the passing cars, the drivers scowled like the officers of the secret police in a totalitarian state; on the sidewalks, the people who passed gazed downward, sloping along mute and alone.

Down Crosby he went, that street of cobblestones and sudden windy spaces, now as empty as it had been twenty years before, when he had first moved into the neighborhood. Loneliness suddenly bit into him, and he welcomed it back, for the loneliness was a true part of him, real, not a fearful phantom.

A few days before, Tim had been leafing through his volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters, and for some reason a phrase from one of the “Master” letters—written to a man never identified—came into his head: I used to think when I died—I could see you—so I died as fast as I could. It had been a long time since he had loved someone that way. This gloomy recognition came to him wrapped in the unhappiness that seemed to leak from every blank window and closed door on the street. Underhill tried to reject it and the unhappiness both. Because he thought he would fail, he failed, and loneliness and sorrow thickened around him.

Something set him off, and after that he was, for all purposes, back in his generation’s war. Phoorow, phoorow, Private Philip Footler had been the trigger. Gliding toward him, shifting back, sliding under his defenses, a particularly unhappy vision had flooded Tim’s mind, whether or not he could actually see it at any given moment. Tim Underhill had been something like six feet from Phoorow’s grotesque separation from himself. It had been granted him to witness every one of the four or five seconds it had taken the boy to die—reaching down to pull his body back into connection, his mouth opening and closing like that of an infant seeking