In the night room Page 0,41

on yore cayuse, hit the trail & go west 2 yr own Byzantium & the beginnings of this story. To Lily Kalendar’s real fate, which has been much on yr mind, after all.

& as if by magick, are u not being sent out very soon to perform the odd & self-referential act u call “Readings”? & is not 1 “Reading” in yr own Byzantium? & is not yr brother to wed beauteous China Beech? GO! ATTEND yr brother’s nuptials! Have u lost all civility and kindness along with yr poor VVits?

& deer buttsecks, if you do, u will have a chance of achieving something extraordinary & incestuous & ravishing unto heart-melt & impossible for every crack-brain author but u!

& know this also: a terrible terrible thrice-terrible price must be paid & paid by u—a great sacrifice, as if the heart were to be torn from yr body & yr brain crackt & yr spirit engulfed. yrs wuz the crime, yrs will be the punishment.

4 now I say no mor.

The Role of

Tom Hartland

PART THREE

16

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Tom,” Willy said. “I don’t even know if I’m thinking straight. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. The only thing I do know, did know, was that I had to get out of that house, and in a hurry. You know, you’re the only person I swear in front of, but when I talk to you, I swear all the time. I wonder why that is?”

“You’re swearing because you’re angry. You’re not used to that, so you barely know how to act.”

“No, no, no,” she said. “I’m too shook up to be angry.”

Willy had called Tom Hartland as soon as she had locked the door behind the departing bellman. It had been one of those moments when her life felt pathetic and insubstantial, for whom could she have called but Tom? By some dire, remote-control variety of magic, Mitchell Faber seemed to have driven away most of the people she had once thought of as her friends. Her isolation made her feel like locking herself in the bathroom and weeping. What had kept her from giving in to self-pity was the thought that if Tom Hartland was the one person whom she could telephone at such a moment, at least he was one of her oldest and dearest friends.

“It’s more like shock than anger,” she said. “The only way you and Molly went wrong was, you were too easy on him!”

“Are your hands trembling?”

“Like crazy. I don’t know how I managed to drive across the bridge.”

“You’re way past anger, Willy. Sure you’re in shock, but on top of that, you’re furious.”

“I HAVE A RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS! THAT CREEP KILLED MY HUSBAND AND MY DAUGHTER!” She held the phone out at arm’s length and discovered that, by means of tiny internal adjustments, she could graduate from mere yelling to gorgeous, all-stops-out screaming. “HE TALKED ME INTO ALMOST GETTING MARRIED TO HIM! THAT PSYCHO FUCK WAS SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT SAFETY!”

Willy gripped the receiver as if trying to choke it to death. Although she had not known that she was crying, tears covered her face. Her body seemed to be breathing by itself in great ragged inhalations and exhalations. She sagged over, letting it go on. Her hot, sparkly face felt as if it had been electrified. Tom’s voice leaked from the phone, but Willy could not make out his words. In every important sense, her life seemed over. She had nowhere to go. Pretty soon, an evil creep who had been intimate with every part of her body was going to be hunting for her. Willy felt irredeemably contaminated. After a little while she became aware that she was, after all, still breathing. She straightened up and brought the receiver to her ear.

“Okay, you’re right on the money,” she said. “I’d like to kill Mitchell Faber. But the problem is, I think he’ll probably want to do the same to me.”

“Willy, you’re going to have to explain all this stuff about killing people. What makes you think he killed your husband? Why would he want to kill you?”

“God, there’s so much you don’t know.” Willy told him about the storm, and the tree limb crashing through the office window. “When I went inside there, I sort of started to clean things up, and I saw all these photographs lying on the floor. Right next to them was this upside-down ornamental wooden box, like a fancy cigar box, that must have been knocked