Peter Straub - In the Night Room

Giles held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Willy, please. I don’t want you to feel obliged to do anything. I just want things to go as smoothly as possible. That’s my job.’ He nodded his head, letting her see that his job was a serious matter. ‘Anything else you’d like from me?’

‘Do you know where Mitchell is right now?’

Coverley tilted forward and looked at her over the top of an imaginary pair of glasses. ‘Right now? As in, this moment?’

Willy nodded.

Giles continued to stare at her, without blinking, over the tops of his imaginary glasses. A couple of seconds went by.

‘From the information I have, Mitchell is in France today. And is expected to stay there for perhaps three more days. To be more specific, he’s in a suburb of Paris called Nanterre.’

‘He told my voice mail he was in Nanterre.’

‘I thought he might have done, you see. That is why your question rather took me by surprise.’

The reason your question sounded so stupid was what she thought he meant.

‘He said he was staying at the Hôtel Mercure Paris something-or-other Parc.’

‘Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.’

‘That’s it, yes. I called them as soon as I listened to his message, and the man I talked to said Mitchell checked out almost seven hours earlier. That’s like five in the morning here.’

‘Well, then, he checked out without telling me. He’ll be in touch later today or tomorrow, I’m sure.’

‘But he told me he was still checked into that hotel.’ For a moment, their eyes met again. Coverley did not blink. ‘You can see why I would be a little concerned.’

Coverley pressed the fingers of one hand to his lips and, without any change of expression, lifted his head and gazed at the ceiling. Then he looked back down at Willy. ‘Let us clarify this situation. I’ll get the hotel’s telephone number.’

‘I already talked to them,’ Willy said.

‘It never hurts to get a second opinion.’

For a little while Coverley moved his mouse around and watched what was happening on his screen. ‘All right,’ he said at last, and punched in numbers on his keypad. Then he held up an index finger, telling her to wait. The finger came down. ‘Bonjour,’ he said. Then came a long sentence she did not understand that ended with the word Fay-bear.

Pause.

‘Oui,’ he said.

Pause.

‘Je comprends.’

Pause.

‘Très bien, monsieur.’ Then, in English: ‘Would you please repeat that in English, sir? Mr Fay-bear’s wife asked me to inquire about his status at the hotel.’

He clicked a button or flipped a switch, Willy could not tell which.

Through the speakers on either side of the monitor came a heavily accented male voice saying, ‘Mrs Fay-bear, can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ Willy said. ‘Are you the man I spoke to earlier?’

‘Madame, I have never spoken to you before we do it now. You were inquiring about your husband’s residence in our hotel?’

‘Yes,’ Willy said.

‘Mr Fay-bear is still registered as a guest. He arrived three days ago and is expected to remain with us yet two days.’

‘Somebody else just told me he checked out at ten this morning.’

‘But you see, he is very much still here. His room is 437, if you would care to speak to him. No—excuse me, he is not in his room at this time.’

‘He’s there.’

‘No, madame, as I explained—’

‘He’s staying in your hotel, I mean.’

‘As I have said, madame.’

‘Is he…’ Willy could not finish this sentence in the presence of Giles Coverley. ‘Thank you.’

‘À bientôt.’

Coverley raised his hands and shrugged. ‘All right?’

‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘You got through to some other hotel with a similar name, Willy. It’s the only explanation.’

‘I should have asked to leave a message.’

‘Would you like me to call him back? It would be no trouble at all.’ ‘

No, Giles, thanks,’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll wait for him to call me back. Or I’ll try again tomorrow.’

‘You do that,’ Coverley said.

That night, again in the grip of her compulsion, Willy drove back to Union Street. All the way she asked herself why she was doing it and told herself to turn back. But she knew why she was doing it, and she could not turn back. Already she could hear her daughter’s cries.

Her headlights picked out the entrance to the parking lot and the huge dark ascent of the warehouse’s facade, and without intending to do so, she swerved into the lot. Her heart fluttered, bird-like, behind the wall of her chest.

She had known what she was going to do ever since she had realized that she really was backing her little car out onto Guilderland Road. She was going to break into the warehouse.

Holly’s high, clear, penetrating voice pealed out from behind the massive brick wall. Sweating with impatience, Willy drove around to the back of the building. Her headlights stretched out across the asphalt. A voice in her head said, This is a mistake.

‘I still have to do it,’ she said.

A high-pitched wail of despair like that of a princess imprisoned in a tower sailed out from the wall and passed directly through Willy’s body, leaving behind a ghostly electrical tremble. In her haste, Willy struggled with the handle until muscle memory came to her aid. Her body seemed to flow out of the car by itself, and she took her first steps toward the loading dock in the haze of light that spilled through the open door. Her headlights cast a theatrical brightness over the loading bay.

There it was again: Holly’s song of despair, the wail of a child lost and without hope. Willy’s feet stuck to the asphalt; her legs could no longer move.

The long platform emerged from a wide, concrete-floored bay that opened up the back of the building like an arcade. At the rear of the bay, a series of doors and padlocked metal gates led into the building itself.

I can’t deal with the fact that she’s dead right now, Willy thought. First I have to get her out of this damned building.

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.