In the night room Page 0,69
the Pforzheimer Hotel, which was where I always stayed when I was in my hometown.
Willy was staring at me the way a new immigrant stares at the Statue of Liberty. I opened my arms, let her step into me, and closed them around her. Nestled against me, her head resting on my breastbone, her arms embracing me light as foam, hair fluffed by the towel, shirt still damp enough to print dark stains on my own, was a person to whom I had given life. No matter how impossible the situation, here she was, as predicted by Cyrax, and I had to deal with her.
So I have these questions: can fictional characters live out ordinary human lives, or does their existence have a term of some kind? What happens when they die? Does their entry into our world mean that their histories are now part of our history? (What happened in the bookstore indicates that it doesn’t. Willy’s name isn’t in Books in Print, and her only Newbery Medal is the one I gave her.) And according to Cyrax, I have to take her back to Millhaven, but what am I supposed to do with her when I get there? Cyrax also said something about a great sacrifice—I don’t like this. It seems obvious, but I can’t stand the conclusion Cyrax seems to be leading me toward.
And my God, do I introduce Willy to Philip?
What else did Cyrax tell me? From what I remember, that I had created a second Dark Man and merged him with Kalendar—true enough, since I thought of Mitchell Faber as a sort of more presentable, less psychotic Kalendar.
My biggest question, though, was how I was to let Willy know exactly what she was. If she’d understood our relationship, her appearance in my life would have been even scarier and more unsettling than it was. As things are, I have to take care of her while slowly letting her figure things out.
“It’s uncanny, how much you remind me of Tom,” she said as we stood wrapped together to the right of the escalator on the ground floor.
“We had a lot in common,” I said.
“Look, Mr. Underhill, you have to tell me how you knew he was dead. You have to. It’s scary—can’t you understand that?”
“I sort of figured it out when I saw you.”
And she stepped in and abetted the lie I had just told her. “Oh, you were expecting him. No wonder you looked so dumbfounded. If you recognized me right away, he must have talked about me a lot.” A tremendous range of expressions crossed her face. “I’m still in such shock. I saw these two men who work for my fiancé, his name is Mitchell Faber—I saw these men, Giles Coverley and Roman Richard Spilka, running down the street, and Roman Richard had a gun, and right after I got into the taxi, he shot Tom. Tom’s blood got on my shirt. The cab took off, took off, it took off like a rocket . . .” She started to sob.
“I bet it did,” I said, and held her more tightly. My heart hurt for her; I felt like weeping, too.
“It just feels like I can trust you with everything . . . with anything. . . . You make me feel so much safer.”
“Good,” I said. “I want you to feel safe with me.” At that moment, I would have run into a burning building to rescue Willy Patrick.
“My fiancé killed my husband,” she said. “And he killed my little girl, too. How’s that for a nasty surprise? Mitchell Faber. Did Tom ever mention him to you?”
“Once or twice. But please tell me this, Willy: how did you get from . . .” I realized that I could not say 103rd Street, not now. “From wherever you were with your cab driver to here? It happened during that storm, didn’t it?”
“What happened doesn’t make any sense. They were chasing me, Giles and Roman Richard—they got out of Mitchell’s car and started running down the street—I got blown over, and I flew through the wind—and my feet hit the sidewalk right in front of your poster.”
That was the best answer I was likely to get: she was blown out of one world and into another. It must have happened when that gigantic thunderclap sounded—right after I did my dumb stunt and had everyone click their heels together. It occurred to me that April had somehow opened a space for Willy, and that she