In the night room Page 0,94
eyes came back into focus.
“Are you okay?”
“I guess.” She swallowed and, acting almost entirely on reflex, pulled a Kit Kat from the duffel and took a bite. She eyed me, and I saw her decide to trust me again. “I was having this horrible dream.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“Did you ever have one of those dreams that keep coming back?”
“A recurring dream? I have three or four, and they keep recycling.” Then I remembered writing Willy’s recurring dream, and I knew what she was going to tell me.
“Mine is about a boy standing in front of an empty house. I’m looking at him from behind. The boy is always wearing one T-shirt on top of another, and he looks sort of graceful. I’m attracted to this boy, I like him a lot, and I know that he looks a lot like me.”
Oh God, I thought, I didn’t even know I was doing that, but she’s right. I gave her Mark’s face!
“This boy, of whom I am very, very fond, takes a step toward the house, and I realize that the house isn’t actually empty—it is, and it isn’t. Something filthy lives in there, and it’s hungry. If the boy goes in there, he’s gone, he’s lost, he’ll never come out again. And the place wants him so badly it’s practically trembling!”
“You’re dreaming about 3323 North Michigan Street,” I told her. “That was Joseph Kalendar’s house.”
“Michigan. Like Michigan Produce. Where I wanted to break in.”
“I didn’t even know what I was doing when I gave you that dream,” I said. “Not consciously, anyhow.”
“Isn’t that a comfort,” Willy said. “According to you, you never knew what you were doing in my book. Anyhow. This dream. It’s like I’m watching everything happen in a snow globe. The air that surrounds the boy is magical air, sacred air, but it won’t do him any good once he walks through the door. I feel such dread that I actually understand the word—like, Oh, yeah, this is dread. And my dread builds up so much, I can’t stand watching that wonderful boy walk toward a horrible doom, and I kind of sail toward him—it’s like we’re connected by a silver cord, and I’m flying down the length of that cord—and just before I hit him I realize that I’m not going to knock him over, I’m going to sail right inside him.”
Willy collapsed against the back of the seat and placed her right hand over her heart. Her eyes and her mouth were wide open. “Oh, no,” she said, and gave me a look in which horror predominated over defiance. She shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s what this is about! I am going to have to walk in there, aren’t I? Like the ending you thought you would write. And guess what, I don’t come out.”
I remembered Cyrax warning me of a terrible terrible thrice-terrible price and knew she was right. But what I said was “I don’t know if that’s true.”
“Is that the best you can do?” she yelled at me. “You DON’T KNOW?” Willy hit my shoulder, hard. “You don’t KNOW? Can’t you do better than that?”
“I’m going in with you,” I said.
At that point, I looked in the rearview mirror and first became conscious that for the past hundred miles I had been seeing a muddy SUV following along behind us. I thought it was a Mercury Mountaineer. The only reason I noticed it was that the Mountaineer always stayed at a distance from us of about six cars.
“I know, I see, I get it. I’m going to go into the real night room.” She looked at me in a kind of disbelieving wonder. “That’s it, that’s the deal. I have to do what I was going to do in your lousy book, where nothing was figured out and you can’t explain why anything happened! I have to go in there. And then what happens? I can’t meet the Lily I used to be, can I? How could I? I didn’t used to be her!”
“Well, actually, we have to look for the real Lily,” I said, sneaking another glance at the mirror. “That’s one of the ways I’m supposed to make things right.”
“Why? I can’t meet the person I was supposed to be!”
“Sure you can. You’re a separate person—you have your own identity, the one I gave you. I’m supposed to find out Lily Kalendar’s real fate—aren’t you interested in that?”
“You want to meet her. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? You