Free Mrs. God by Peter Straub

lighted window in a Popham apartment house, a drawn shade behind which two people, one of them a faithless wife and the other a faithless friend, clawed at one another in bed. Wall was looking at him inquisitively, and he added, “Jean is pregnant—expecting in two months.”
    â€œSo we’d better get you home safe and sound before that, hadn’t we?”
    Standish nodded vaguely.
    They turned right again, past the reaching boy.
    â€œIn any case, this is what you’ve come all this way to see. Let us try this puzzling door.”
    They stood before the tall narrow wooden door. Wall’s face was a shadow beneath his handsome gray hair—entirely unwillingly, Standish saw Jean folding herself into Wall’s arms, rubbing her face fiercely against his chest. Jean often made a fool of herself with handsome men.
    â€œSeems to work normally.” Wall turned his shadowy face toward Standish. “Perhaps you turned the knob the wrong way.”
    He had not turned the knob the wrong way. For an instant it was as if Jean, or her shade, had witnessed his humiliation, and Standish felt a ferocious blush leap across his face like a rash.
    Wall stepped inside and flicked a switch. Warm bright light filled the doorway. “Come in, Mr. Standish.”
    Standish followed him into an enormous room which seemed at first to contain a disappointingly small number of books. Most of the room consisted of vast empty space. Bright white Corinthian columns shining with gold leaf at top and bottom stood before curved recesses ranked with books. Books spanned the library beneath classical murals. Almost immediately he realized that there were thousands and thousands of books, books on shelves all around the massive room, books reaching nearly to the barrel-vaulted ceiling as ornate as a Wedgwood china pattern, books and manuscript boxes everywhere, in every molded, flowing section of the huge room. Chairs and chaises of red plush with gilded arms stood at intervals alone the walls, and a massive chair sat before a wooden writing desk in the middle of the room, on the center rosette of a vast peach-colored Oriental carpet. Over the mantel of the marble fireplace on the left side of the library hung a large portrait of a gentleman in eighteenth-century clothes and white wig looking up from a folio propped on the library’s writing desk. The library’s walls, and the section of the high-vaulted ceiling not covered with ornate plaster palmettes, husks, arabesques, and scrolls, were painted a cool, almost edible color hovering between green and gray that seemed lit from within. The entire space of the library was filled with radiant light that came from no visible source. Standish had spent much of his life in libraries without seeing one like this. He wondered if he really could walk through it—it seemed too good to use, like some delicate clockwork toy or Fabergé egg.
    â€œRather good, isn’t it?” Robert Wall was leaning back against one of the pillars, his arms crossed over his chest. “It’s a Robert Adam room, of course. One of his most successful, we think.”
    â€œWhat are those columns made of? I thought they were painted, but—”
    â€œAlabaster. Striking, isn’t it? As good as anything at Saltram House. They look freshly painted until you see those delicate veins in the stone.” In his ambiguous face was a full understanding of just what Standish was feeling.
    Wall pushed himself forward and stood up. “Now I must take you through the main entrance and point you up the staircase. It’s a little late to creep through the servants’ corridor. Though I daresay in the old days the servants’ corridor saw a great deal of surreptitious movement.”
    Standish smiled before he understood what Wall meant. Wall led him out through an archway set between two of the alabaster columns, then through a pair of ornately carved wooden doors and into