In the Night Room (25 page)

“Now, there—see? ‘Merlin L’Duith’ has a perfect tinny flavor. No one in his right mind would mistake that for a real name. You’d know right away it was an anagram.”

Forty miles south of Millhaven, Willy demanded to eat again, and pointed at a billboard depicting a long white structure with ships’ wheels embedded in the plaster and nautical lamps hung beside the entrance. “I want to go to the Captain’s Retreat,” she said. “I’m sick of all this meat. I want to have seafood. Please, Tim. I’m starving again.”

He turned off at the next exit and followed, at a speed of sixty to seventy miles an hour, the directions painted on the billboard, which led him toward Duckvale, a little town he had heard of but never visited. Willy asked him why he was driving so fast, and he said, “I didn’t tell you this before, but I think we’re being followed.”

Willy looked over her shoulder. “That pickup?”

The pickup truck was the only other vehicle on Route 17, the road recommended by the billboard.

“No, it was an SUV, all covered in mud. Just in case it’s our boys, let’s make sure we’ve lost them.”

Tim spent the next twenty minutes dodging down side streets, cutting through vacant lots, and doubling back on himself without so much as glimpsing the Mountaineer. “Of course,” he said, “we don’t know that Coverley was driving the thing. We don’t even know if it was deliberately following us.”

“Take me to the restaurant. Please.”

He managed to find the Captain’s Retreat with only a little difficulty. When he pulled in to the parking lot, he went around to the side, where big concrete planters bordered a narrow rectangular space containing no other cars, and parked next to the building. The planters would hide him from traffic on the street. Willy gathered up her duffel bag, walked in silence beside him, permitted him to open the door for her, and carried the long bag into the restaurant. She steadily devoured candy bars while she read the menu. When the waitress came, Willy asked for blackened redfish, fried clams, a dozen oysters, the shrimp special, and the fried catfish.

“In any order,” she said.

Tim asked for a shrimp cocktail he had to force himself to eat.

After their meal, Willy wandered ahead while Tim was still getting out of his chair, and he watched her heft the white bag as she pushed the door open and walked outside into brilliant sunshine. Through the window in the entrance, he could see her striding off to the side of the building. He went outside and followed, pondering the difficulties of introducing Willy to his brother, which he supposed he would shortly be doing. When he rounded the corner into the side lot, he found Willy staring off into the distance with a vacuous expression on her face. Tim supposed she was thinking about how soon she would need another couple of Score bars, and he opened his mouth to tell her to hurry along.

The sight of the slender young man in a black T-shirt and black jeans leaning against one of the concrete planters froze the words in his throat. Here was the real Mr. Halleden, WCHWHLLDN himself, watching over his charge. He wore sunglasses as black as his shirt, and his hair gleamed in the sun. He appeared to be profoundly irritated, but when had he not?

Tim realized that Willy still stood where she had stopped, and that she had not moved her gaze from the side of the lot. Then he noticed that a conspicuous silence filled the parking lot. Fear sparkling along his nerve endings, he turned and saw Giles Coverley and Roman Richard Spilka standing, in the shadows at the back of the building, on either side of the mud-encrusted Mountaineer. They stepped forward and into the light. Their faces looked pinched and washed out, and even Coverley’s clothes were rumpled and dirty. Both men needed a shave. The nose of the pistol in Roman Richard’s hand twitched like a metronome from Willy to Tim and back again.

“This is just us now,” Coverley said, and Tim realized that he could not see WCHWHLLDN. “Nobody else is going to come around to park here—why would they? And the staff has no reason to wander around to this side of the building. So I want you to know that you will die, both of you. That is the most solemn promise I ever made in my whole life. But before we kill you, you are going to explain what the hell is going on here.”

Willy actually laughed. “Have you had any luck getting in touch with Mitchell? Been getting any assistance from the Baltic Group?”

“It’s not THERE anymore!” Coverley shouted. “And we can’t find Mitchell.”

“The only person we can find is you,” said Roman Richard, who looked confused and furious. Both of them had the hollowed-out, slightly spectral appearance of the seriously hungry. “But we sure are good at that. We could find you anywhere, because we just know where to go. How does that happen, you asshole? What did you do to us?”

“How come your face is on our money?” Coverley screamed. “How come I think I went to school in Millhaven and my second-grade teacher was Mrs. Gross? I’m
English
!”

“Why do I know all this shit about jazz and poetry?” yelled Roman Richard. “I hate jazz and poetry! I don’t like that shit, I like . . . well, whatever it is I like.” He thought about it for a second. “The Ramones. That’s what I like.”

“How did you pay for your lunch, you asshole?” Coverley asked. “Does your money work here?”

“I put it on a credit card.” Tim glanced back over his shoulder, and WCHWHLLDN was still leaning against the planter with his arms crossed. He looked as furious as Roman Richard, but a lot more bored.

“Our credit cards get turned down, because there is no Continental Trust of New Jersey. And there’s no HENDERSONIA!”

“Would you like a candy bar?” Willy sweetly asked them.

“Christ, we’ve been stealing those things,” Coverley said. “Candy bars are too expensive to pay for, the way we have to get money. I’m not killing people for candy bars anymore.”

“I’m crazy about your scruples,” Tim said, watching Coverley and Roman Richard stare at Willy’s bag.

She knelt down and partially unzipped it. As if they could smell the chocolate, the two men stepped closer. “Do you really want to know what the secret is?” she asked.

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll blow your damn head off,” said Roman Richard, aiming the pistol at her. Tim moved up between them.

“Get away, or I’ll shoot you first.” Roman Richard stepped sideways and kept the pistol aimed at Willy.

“The secret is,” Willy said, “you’re in a book. You used to be in a book, and I did too, but something happened, and now we’re here. Where we don’t belong. And you know why you can always find him? Because he’s the author.” She looked over at Tim. “What happens to them if they kill you?”

“I think they’d stay here, in this world, until they disappeared. After that, there’s nothing left of them. From the looks of you guys, disappearance isn’t all that far away.”

“This morning, my left foot disappeared for about five seconds,” Coverley said. “Did you do that to me?”

“Reality’s eating you alive,” Tim said.

“Shove the bag over here, and stay put,” said Roman Richard. “Do it. Do it.”

Willy gave the bag a halfhearted shove. Unable to control his hunger, Roman Richard moved toward it, his eyes fixed on the heap of candy bars visible through the opening Willy had created. He began to make a strange, guttural humming sound deep in his throat.

“Roman—” Coverley said.

Roman Richard bent down and thrust a hand into the bag, and Tim found himself hurtling toward the man’s body before he was aware that he had made a decision to attack. The big man grunted in surprise and was still trying to get his gun hand into position when Tim barreled into him. The force of his impact and Roman Richard’s awkward stance sent them both thudding, in a sprawling collapse that included the snapping of Roman Richard’s plaster cast, onto the asphalt, where their arms and legs waved like the limbs of a spider tossed into a low flame. Tim was on top of his opponent when they hit the ground, and he instantly reached for the pistol. Roman Richard punched him in the side of the head. It was like being hit by an anvil.

His vision fuzzy, Tim closed his hands around the barrel of the pistol. A big, brutal hand swam toward him. Coarse black hairs sprouted beneath the knuckles. The hand battered his skull again and retreated, giving him a good view of Roman Richard’s meaty, stubbled jowl. The pistol twisted in his hand. After the next blow, Tim drove his fist into Roman Richard’s neck and yanked at the pistol, and it came out of his enemy’s grip as easily as a flower is plucked from a country garden.

Tim could hear Coverley bellowing; he felt a sharp, absurdly painful kick in his back. Aware that Coverley was bending over to snatch his prize from him, Tim rolled away and clutched the weapon tight against his chest, like a football player protecting the ball. Coverley kicked him in the side, again with amazingly painful results, and Tim got the grip in his hand and his finger on the trigger. Roman Richard swarmed over him, roaring like a bull. As if by itself, Tim’s finger tightened on the small, curved bit of metal beneath it.

Then he understood that, in something like contemptuous boredom, WCHWHLLDN had opened Roman Richard’s hand.

His index finger completed the gesture it had begun. The unforgiving object in Tim’s hand flew up with the force of the explosion, and Tim saw that the man he had shot had vanished. Big Roman Richard, who had been immediately before him, looming like a wall equipped with hair-encrusted hands, was no more. From behind him came a high-pitched sound of desperation.

Thinking that the sound came from Willy, Tim got to his knees and spun around. Willy was standing about three feet in front of her duffel, looking down at him with a complicated expression on her face. Giles Coverley had stopped moving. Tim guessed that he had lowered his foot about a second before. The expression on Coverley’s face was not at all difficult to read. He’d had enough, this was over-the-top too much, he surrendered, hoping only for due process and treatment under the Geneva Convention.

“Back up,” Tim said.

Coverley stepped backward. He held up his hands, his palms out. “Look,” he said. “Forget the explanations. What are you going to do now? You can’t call the police, you know. They’re still after her.” His tone made it clear that he blamed Willy for his baffling series of misfortunes.

“No, they’re not,” Tim said, and got to his feet. “In this world, they never were. The bank doesn’t exist, remember?”

“You still can’t use the police. How the devil could you explain what went on here?” Keening slightly, he bent over to look at his left foot, which faded abruptly into invisibility and sent him toppling to the surface of the parking lot. From his mouth flew a great many inventive curses. The lightness feeling made him utter a high-pitched humming sound while his foot flickered in and out of view for a short time. At last, it reappeared without disappearing again, and he slumped, panting, over his belt, his legs stuck out before him.

“Throw him a candy bar,” Tim said.

“Are you kidding?” Willy stepped back toward the duffel bag as though to defend its contents.

“If you don’t, I will. I don’t like seeing people suffer.”

With obvious reluctance, Willy retreated to the bag, knelt down to reach in, and plucked out the foil-wrapped disc of a York peppermint pattie. She threw it at Coverley as if skipping a rock across the surface of a lake, and it skimmed straight into the center of his chest. Coverley disrobed the patty and thrust it into his mouth in a single movement. His face relaxed into momentary ecstasy.

“Do it again,” Tim said.

Willy picked out an Oh Henry! bar and hurled it at Coverley, who caught it with both hands and shucked the wrapper in the second and a half it took him to carry the bar to his mouth.

“I shouldn’t blame him,” Willy said. “He was only doing what you made him do.”

“I have to admit,” said Coverley around a wad of chocolate-peanut mush, “it was pretty difficult to threaten this guy. Basically, all I really wanted to do was work for him instead of Mitchell. But, you know, I had this job. Would you mind if I stood up?”

“Stand up,” Tim said. He glanced at Willy, who, without complaint, bent down and tossed a Mounds bar at Coverley with an underhand pitch.

Coverley took more time with the Mounds bar than he had with the others, turning it into more of a meal. “I don’t suppose you’d consider taking me with you.”

“Sorry,” Tim said.

“I didn’t think so. Tell me this. Where did Roman Richard go?”

“He didn’t go anywhere,” Tim said.

Willy bent down and picked out a candy bar for herself.

“Are you telling me to go off and kill people to get their money?”

“God damn,” Tim said. He took three hundred dollars from his wallet, leaving him with two. “No, I can’t do that. Take this money and live on it until you can get a job. Go to Milwaukee and say you’ll wash dishes.”

Coverley held out his hands like an infant, and Tim placed the bills in their cupped palms. “To tell you the truth,” Coverley said, “we didn’t really kill those people. Roman Richard shot their dog to show them we meant business, but that’s all.”

“Why did you tell me you killed people, then?”