Holly screamed again.
Willy opened her trunk, rooted around the concealed well, and discovered a crowbar Mitchell had forgotten to remove. She picked it up and went toward the stairs. Again she was halted in midstride, but by nothing more alarming than a meandering thought. With the memory of Mitchell borrowing her car had come the strange recognition that while she had imagined him bailing her out of jail, she had never considered his reaction to being presented with his fiancée’s living daughter. Holly and Mitchell seemed to inhabit separate universes—
For the first time in her life, Willy saw literal stars. She seemed on the verge of falling backward into a limitless darkness. What she was doing was crazy. Mitchell and Holly could not be thought of in the same room because they did live in different universes, those of the living and the dead. Even in his absence, the sheer irrefutability of Mitchell’s physical presence pushed Holly back into the past, the only country where she could still be alive.
Willy felt like a death-row inmate given a last-minute reprieve. A cruel madness had left her, driven away by the appearance within its boundaries of Mitchell Faber.
She went back to the car, dropped the crowbar in the trunk, slammed the lid, and collapsed into the driver’s seat. During the last few minutes, she felt, her life had changed, and she had moved into clarity for the first time since her tragedy. And the agent of that change had not been herself, but Mitchell. His sleek, brooding image had led her out of the shadows. She felt a wave of love and longing for him. That there had been a mix-up at some hotel in a Parisian suburb meant nothing. A serious question remained, however: what had convinced her, against all she knew, that her daughter was crying out for her in the ugly old building? At some point in the future, that would have to be thought about, deeply considered, probably with professional help.
Light exploded from her rearview mirror, and there came the peremptory bip! of a siren announcing its presence. Startled, Willy looked over her shoulder and saw the headlights of a police car immediately behind her. Guilt washed through her body, and even after she realized that she had done nothing criminal, its residue affected her demeanor when the officer came up to her window.
‘Identification?’ He held the flashlight on her face.
She fished around for her wallet and produced her license.
‘This is your name, Willy?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I see you live in Manhattan, Willy. What are you doing parked in a warehouse lot in New Jersey at this time of night?’
She tried to smile. ‘I moved here about two weeks ago, and I haven’t done anything about my license yet. Sorry.’
He ignored her apology. The flashlight shone directly onto her face. ‘How old are you, Willy?’
‘Thirty-eight,’ she said.
‘You’ve gotta be kidding me.’ The officer played the light on her driver’s license, checking the date of her birth. ‘Yep, born in 1965. You must have very few worries, Willy. What is your new address, please?’
She gave him the number on Guilderland Road.
The policeman lowered the flashlight, appearing to be occupied by his own thoughts. He was a decade younger than she. ‘That’s the big house with the gate. And all those trees.’
‘You got it.’
He smiled at her. ‘Brighten up my evening and tell me why you’re sitting here in this parking lot.’
‘I had something to think about,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I know it must look suspicious.’
The officer looked away, still smiling, and rapped the flashlight against his thigh. ‘Willy, I recommend that you start up this gorgeous little vehicle and get yourself back to Guilderland Road.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He moved back, holding his eyes on her face. ‘Don’t thank me, Willy, thank Mr Faber.’
‘What? Do you know Mitchell?’
The young officer turned away. ‘Have a nice night, Willy.’
For Tim Underhill that night, periods of unhappy wakefulness alternated with alarming dreams in which everything around him, including the ground he stood on, proved, when scrutinized, to be a collection of CGI effects. He fled across fields, he wandered through vast empty buildings, he walked slowly through a haunted city, but all of it was as unreal as a mirage. The cobbles and mosaics beneath his feet, the long slope of the hill, the sconces and the walls on which they hung were shiny, cartoonlike computer effects.
He got out of bed feeling worse than when he had climbed in. A shower, usually an infallible cure for the disorders that afflicted him on arising, left him feeling only partially restored. Groaning, he toweled himself dry, pulled clothes out of various drawers, and sat on the edge of his bed. At that entirely ordinary moment, his memory finally delivered to him the events of the previous morning.
He was holding open a sock with both hands. The sock made no sense at all. It was only a tube of cloth. The angel’s foot had come down on the sidewalk, and that foot had been astonishingly beautiful. And he had seen that smooth passage of white flesh at the groin, the giant wings creaking open, the bright and powerful ascent. Sudden, stinging tears leaped to the surface of Underhill’s eyes. When he had tugged the sock onto his foot, he ran to the windows on Grand Street and looked down. Between rain showers on a dark gray morning, people holding folded or upright umbrellas hurried this way and that on the pavement. He saw no lurking angel, no feral Jasper Kohle. A glimpse of yellow in the refuse bin on the corner reminded him of Kohle’s discarded books.
I couldn’t have seen all that, he told himself. He knew what had happened: Jasper Kohle had affected him more than he had known. Soaked through, anxious, angrier than he had wanted to be, Tim had let his mind pull him into the surreal. No wonder he had dreamed of wandering lost through slippery landscapes made entirely of illusion. Tim wanted to think that yesterday’s vision of an angel was the product of an overdeveloped imagination.
He decided to eat breakfast at home for once, and to avoid looking out the window.
But when he sat down before his computer, he immediately found himself in trouble. On the preceding day, he had needed the amnesia produced by concentrated absorption in his story and covered page after page with his heroine’s difficulties. Now his language had turned leaden and clumsy, and her problems seemed contrived.
Abandoning the struggle, he brought up his e-mail. By now, this was a dubious act, akin to talking to shiny-eyed fans who metamorphosed into aging, unclean madmen. As he’d feared, a number of letters without return addresses had appeared in his electronic mailbox. Tim deleted the spam, read his real e-mail, answered what had to be answered, and only then retrieved the messages from Nowhere.
Byrne615 wished to communicate the following:
not rite, not fair, you pansy
i dont know where i AM
Sorry, but I know less than you do, Tim thought. (But something about Byrne615 snagged in his mind.)
Cyrax told him:
b patient. u will know all soon.
watch listn. i wl b yr gide.
And kalicokitty weighed in with:
breth was taken frum my bodee
I see only veils of fog or smok
with sounds of greatr engines