In the night room Page 0,33

through her, ready always to be tapped.

Unfortunately, the spell cast by her soap opera seemed not to have survived the move from East Seventy-seventh Street to Guilderland Road; and Willy spent hours pushing at stubborn sentences that trickled along until they dried up.

That evening, the two glasses of wine she had with dinner put her to sleep somewhere in the middle of the first chapter of The Ambassadors. (Willy typically read English novelists, A. N. Wilson, A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark. When out of sorts, she devoured crime novels; when depressed, she enjoyed Tim Underhill’s books, which were not crime novels, exactly, except that they always had crimes, usually appalling ones, in them; in exceptionally good moods, she picked up nonfiction books with titles like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)

At 11:00 P.M. she came awake and decanted herself into her bed, almost immediately to suffer through one of the worst nightmares of her life.

From a point about eight feet off the ground, she was observing, camera-like, the back of a teenaged boy staring at an abandoned house. He had short, dark hair and wore floppy jeans and layered T-shirts. His posture struck her as oddly poised, even graceful, and she thought he must have a nice-looking face. With the unquestioned conviction of dreams, another thought came to her: the boy’s face would be a more youthful, more masculine, but otherwise virtually identical version of her own. The boy took a tentative step toward the empty house. As soon as he moved forward, Willy understood that the house, which was empty only technically, represented a mortal danger to this boy. If he went through that door, the house would close around him like a trap; the filthy, ravenous spirit that looked out from the front windows would claim him forever. Willy’s consciousness of his danger did not slow the boy in his steady progress toward the door. Inwardly, the entire building trembled to devour him—she could feel the bottomlessness of its hunger. She could not move; she could not speak. Her dread redoubled itself, and the dread deepened her paralysis.

The boy took another step forward on the little broken path leading to the porch and the awaiting door. As if within a snow globe emptied of its snow, the house and the boy stood isolated in a no-place defined entirely by themselves. Within the globe, intolerably to our watching Willy, a sick desire fattened upon itself. As it whispered to the boy, his hesitant footsteps carried him nearer and nearer to the porch. At last she could bear it no longer: the sheer pitch of her dread let her overflow her confinement and fly, out of control, deep into the sacred space. She sped toward the advancing boy as if on a silver rail, and when she was within the minutest possible time fraction of somehow not knocking him over but gliding into his body she jolted into wakefulness, the scream in her throat already fading to a gasp.

For hours that night Willy alternated between pitching back and forth on her sheets and lying still. When she rode into Manhattan the next day, seated in the passenger seat of Mitchell’s car while Giles Coverley chatted about trivia of no interest to either of them, she felt nearly as dislocated and displaced as Tim Underhill on a difficult day. Thanks to Kimberley Todhunter, the helpful young woman conjured up by her fiancé, Bergdorf Goodman folded itself around her like a velvet purse. Under Ms. Todhunter’s guidance, Willy pared down a dozen dazzling choices to a final two, and finally chose the shimmering Prada garment over its counterpart from Oscar de la Renta, then moved on to a pair of terrific sexpot shoes from Jimmy Choo and a number of other accessories previously voted in by her tactful guide. Having spent an astonishing amount of Mitchell Faber’s money, Willy got back into the car and told Giles to take her to the Metropolitan Museum.

Willy meandered through the impressionist rooms, only half-seeing the paintings as she speculated about what Tom Hartland thought was so serious. Coverley had dropped her off at the entrance and driven away to perform sundry mysterious duties. On reflection, Tom’s subject probably had nothing to do with publishing. Tom seldom talked shop with her. It kept occurring to her that Tom had never been entirely supportive about Mitchell Faber, and that it seemed likely that he had arranged this meeting, this date