In the Night Room: A Novel - Softcover

Straub, Peter

 
9780593975916: In the Night Room: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059397591X ISBN 13: 9780593975916
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

WINNER OF THE BRAM STOKER AWARD • After a grotesque accident, a famous author discovers that her reality is not what it seems in this “imaginative, intricate, and electrifying” (Associated Press) horror novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story.

“A powerful and arresting foray into the dark fantastic.”—The Washington Post Book World

Willy Patrick, respected author of the award-winning young adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind. She is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse, knowing somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building. But this is impossible—Willy’s daughter is dead.

On that same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented emails from people he knew in his youth—people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Tim meet, the frightening parallels between Willy’s tragic loss and the story in Tim’s manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Straub

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1


About 9:45 on a Wednesday morning early in a rain-drenched September, a novelist named Timothy Underhill gave up, in more distress than he cared to acknowledge, on his ruined breakfast and the New York Times crossword puzzle and returned, far behind schedule, to his third-floor loft at 55 Grand Street. Closing his door behind him did nothing to calm his troubled heart. He clanked his streaming umbrella into an upright metal stand, transported a fresh cup of decaffeinated coffee to his desk, parked himself in a flexi- ble mesh chair bristling with controls, double-clicked on Outlook
Express’s arrow-swathed envelope, and, with the sense of finally putting most of his problem behind him, called to the surface of his screen the day’s first catch of e-mails, ten in all. Two of them were completely inexplicable. Because the messages seemed to come from strangers (with names unattached to specific domains, he would notice later), bore empty subject lines, and consisted of no more than a couple of disconnected words each, he promptly deleted them.

As soon as he had done so, he remembered dumping a couple of similar e-mails two days earlier. For a moment, what he had seen from the sidewalk outside the Fireside Diner flared again before him, wrapped in every bit of its old urgency and dread.

2


In a sudden shaft of brightness that fell some twenty miles northwest of Grand Street, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick (soon to be Faber) was turning her slightly dinged little Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice, to drive two and two-tenths miles along Union Street’s increasingly vacant blocks instead of proceeding directly home. When she reached a vast parking lot with two sedans trickling through its exit, she checked her rearview mirror and looked around before driving in. Irregular slicks of water gleamed on the black surface of the lot. The men waiting to drive out of the lot took in the blond, shaggy-haired woman moving through their field of vision at the wheel of a sleek, snub-nosed car; one of them thought he was looking at a teenaged boy.

Willy drifted along past the penitentiary-like building that dominated the far end of the parking lot. Her shoulders rode high and tight, and her upper arms seemed taut as cords. Like all serious compulsions, hers seemed both a necessary part of her character and to have been wished upon her by some indifferent deity. Willy pulled in to an empty space and, now at the heart of her problem, regarded what was before her: a long, shabby-looking brick structure, three stories high, with wide metal doors and ranks of filthy windows concealed behind cobwebs of mesh. Around the back, she knew, the dock that led into the loading bays protruded outward, like a pier over the surface of a lake. A row of grimy letters over the topmost row of windows spelled out michigan produce.

Somehow, that had been the start of her difficulties: michigan produce, the words, not the building, which appeared to be a wholesale fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. Two days earlier, driving along inattentively, in fact in one of her “dazes,” her “trances”–Mitchell Faber’s words–Willy had found herself here, on this desolate section of Union Street, and the two words atop the big grimy structure had all but peeled themselves off the warehouse, set themselves on fire, and floated aflame toward her through the slate-colored air.

Willy had the feeling that she had been led here, that her “trance” had been charged with purpose, and that she had been all along meant to come across this building.

She wondered if this kind of thing ever happened to someone else. Almost instantly, Willy dismissed the strange little vision that blazed abruptly in her mind, of a beautiful, dark-haired teenaged boy, skateboard in one hand, standing dumbstruck on a sunlit street before an empty, ordinary-looking building. Her imagination had always been far too willing to leap into service, whether or not at the time imagination was actually useful. That sometimes it had been supremely useful to Willy did not diminish her awareness that her imaginative faculty could also turn on her, savagely. Oh, yes. You never knew which was the case, either, until the dread began to crawl up your arms.

The image of a teenaged boy and an empty house added to the sum of disorder at large in the universe, and she sent it back to
the mysterious realm from which it had emerged. Because: hey, what might be in that empty house?


3


The memory of the messages he had seen on Monday awakened Tim Underhill’s curiosity, and before going on to answer the few of the day’s e-mails that required responses, he clicked on Deleted
Items, of which he seemed now to have accumulated in excess of two thousand, and looked for the ones that matched those he had just received. There they were, together in the order in which he had deleted them: Huffy and presten, with the blank subject lines that indicated a kind of indifference to protocol he wished he did not find mildly annoying. He clicked on the first message.
From: Huffy

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, September 1, 2003 8:52 AM

Subject:

re member

That was the opposite of dis member, Tim supposed, and dis member was the guy standing next to dat member. He tried the second one.

From: presten

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, September 1, 2003 9:01 AM

Subject:

no helo

Useless, meaningless, a nuisance. Huffy and presten were kids who had figured out how to hide their e-mail addresses. Presumably they had learned his from the website mentioned on the jacket of his latest book. He looked again at the two e-mails he had just dumped.

From: rudderless

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 6:32 AM

Subject:

no time

and

From: loumay

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 6:41 AM

Subject:

there wuz

There wuz, wuz there? All of these enigmatic messages sounded as though their perpetrators were half asleep, or as though their hands had been snatched off the keyboard–maybe by the next customer at some Internet café, since the second messages came only minutes after the first ones.

What were the odds that four people savvy enough to delete the second half of their e-mail addresses would decide, more or less simultaneously, to send early-morning gibberish to the same person? And how much steeper were the odds against one of them writing “no helo,” whatever that meant, and another deciding, with no prior agreement, upon the echo-phrase “no time”? Although he thought such a coincidence was impossible, he still felt mildly uneasy as he rejected it.

Because that left only two options, and both raised the ante. Either the four people who’d sent the e-mails to him were acting
together in conspiracy, or the e-mails had all been sent by the same person using four names.

The names, Huffy, presten, rudderless, loumay, suggested no pattern. They were not familiar. A moment later, Tim remembered that back in his hometown, Millhaven, Illinois, a boy named Paul Resten had been his teammate on the Holy Sepulchre football team. Paulie Resten had been a chaotic little fireplug with greasy hair, a shoplifting problem, and a tendency toward violence. It seemed profoundly unlikely that after a silence of forty-odd years Paulie would send him a two-word e-mail. Tim read the messages over again, thought for a second, then rearranged
them:

re member

there wuz

no helo

no time

which could just as easily...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059397591X
ISBN 13 
9780593975916
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
337
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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