In The Night Room by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub [Peter Straub]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-26T20:52:12.997000+00:00

TONIGHT 8:00

TIMOTHY UNDERHILL

READING FROM LOST BOY LOST GIRL.

The author she read when depressed seemed almost ridiculously appropriate for her circumstances. She needed to get out of the rain. She needed to sit down and recover, to the extent recovery was possible, from Tom's murder and her extraordinary flight through the darkness and the wind. Her head felt as though it was literally spinning, and the center of her body seemed still to be traveling at great speed through a kind of cosmic rabbit hole. It was the only time in her life that Willy Bryce Patrick had ever felt she had anything in common with Alice in Wonderland.

She wobbled to the door, barely able to see through the curtain of water, and realized that she did not know if Coverley and Roman Richard had followed her through that violent passageway. Her final, most comforting thought before getting out of the rain was that a bookstore reading was the last place Mitchell's henchmen would think to look for her.

On the other side of the revolving door, a security guard in a blue blazer looked her up and down. Water streamed down her legs and pooled on the carpeted floor.

Willy said, 'The Underhill reading?'

'Second floor, top of the escalators, turn right. First, though, you might want to go through the children's section and dry off in the ladies' room.'

'Thank you.' Willy smiled at him and stepped backward out of her puddle. Water continued to slide off her hair, her clothes, her legs.

'Please tell me that's not blood on your shirt, ma'am.'

'Just stage blood,' Willy said, forcing a brighter smile, and moved smartly toward the escalator.

In the bathroom, she peeled off her blouse and rubbed little paper towels over her arms, neck, and torso. Her jeans were so wet that to remove them, she had to yank down and wriggle at the same time. She swabbed her legs with paper towels that turned dark and useless. When she had done as much as she could, she still looked like a drowning victim, but a more recent one. Willy pulled another handful of sheets from the dispenser, gave her face a last blotting, and left the bathroom.

A winding path through the bookshelves brought her to the reading area, where she collapsed onto an empty chair and peered at Timothy Underhill through the space between the heads of an emaciated hippie boy and a roly-poly hippie girl. Underhill was leaning on the podium and calling for questions. The sight of this middle-aged man at the other end of the reading space had a startling effect on her. Immediately, she felt as though everything that had happened to her during this terrible day had been designed to lead her precisely to this point, and she had somehow come out at the place where she was all along intended now to be. That place—and the utter weirdness of this circumstance can hardly be expressed—was in the proximity of Timothy Underhill, a novelist she liked, pretty much, but whose concerns seemed to speak to her most clearly when she wasn't feeling all that great.

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