In the Night Room
Peter Straub
For Gary K. Wolfe
I wanted to write, and just tell you that me and my spirit were fighting this morning. It is’nt known generally, and you must’nt tell anybody.
– EMILY DICKINSON,
letter to Emily Fowler, 1850
The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
– ROGER SCRUTON
Table of Contents
Part One WILLY’S LOSING HER MIND AGAIN/SO IS TIM
Part Two TWO VOICES FROM A CLOUD
Part Three THE ROLE OF TOM HARTLAND
Part Four TIM UNDERHILL SAILS TO BYZANTIUM/SO DOES WILLY
Part Five THE WOMAN GLIMPSED AT THE WINDOW
About 9:45 on a Wednesday morning early in a rain-drenched September, a novelist named Timothy Underhill gave up, in more distress than he cared to acknowledge, on his ruined breakfast and the New York Times crossword puzzle and returned, far behind schedule, to his third-floor loft at 55 Grand Street. Closing his door behind him did nothing to calm his troubled heart. He clanked his streaming umbrella into an upright metal stand, transported a fresh cup of decaffeinated coffee to his desk, parked himself in a flexible mesh chair bristling with controls, double-clicked on Outlook Express’s arrow-swathed envelope, and, with the sense of finally putting most of his problem behind him, called to the surface of his screen the day’s first catch of e-mails, ten in all. Two of them were completely inexplicable. Because the messages seemed to come from strangers (with names unattached to specific domains, he would notice later), bore empty subject lines, and consisted of no more than a couple of disconnected words