Free In the Night Room by Peter Straub

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.”

13

    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