Late at Night (30 page)

Andrea frowned. “What are friends for, Lynn? Besides, I broke up with that fellow two weeks later.” She smiled at Ernie. “He was a little too dull for my tastes.”

“Anyway,” Lynn continued, “I decided to go ahead with something I’d thought about a long time, ever since I came across it in an old book. It would only work if you had some special, intrinsic power of your own, and I know now that I do, although I was never and will never be as powerful as you, Andrea.”

The psychic smiled sadly. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“I remembered thinking: what if I wake up-after casting the spell—and there’s nothing there, just blankness, or the room has been transformed, taken over by somebody else? Would it mean that I had moved out during the year to come, or that I had died? I was so afraid. But nothing could have stopped me.”

“What were you hoping to see?” Ernie asked quietly.

“Something, anything, some sign that my life was better, happier. Maybe I just wanted to see a man’s clothes in the closet, a man who really loved me lying on the bed. I know that’s silly, pre-feminist thinking, but I’ve been so lonely all my life. Maybe I just wanted to see some sign that my life was a little more interesting than before. Working in an office all these years, I get so scared. Wondering what will become of me. I know we’re supposed to be lucky, those of us who are young, but I think of the future and instead of seeing glorious possibilities, unlimited chances for happiness, I just see years and years of misery instead. Stretching endlessly. One day I’ll be old and what was it for? Who will care? Who will love me? Why bother?”

“We all feel that way sometimes,” Ernie said. “All of us.”

“Do we? Does everyone feel that way? Not everyone, I think. But I wasn’t content with just waiting to see what happened. I wanted to look a year into the future. The spell wouldn’t take me to wherever I might be a year hence, but would move me forward in time—temporarily—while I remained in the same location. I never dreamed it would actually work. But it did.”

“And the book?” Andrea asked. “What about the book?”

Lynn clasped her hands together, and sighed, wondering where to begin. “The book. The book … is my punishment.”

“Punishment? For what?”

“For doing what I did, Andrea. For moving through the barriers of time. For daring to break through the cosmic wall that separates one second from another. I did it, you know. I really did. And for everything, there is a price.”

“Nonsense,” Anton muttered. “You never left your room and you never left your time, you silly twit. You got up, saw nothing, and went back to sleep. Only an idiot like you would think she had traveled to the future.
Lord.”

“Oh shut up, Anton. I don’t care if you believe me or not. But you wanted to know where that impossible novel came from and I’m telling you. I brought it back with me from one year—now about six months—in the future. It was there on the night table, whether you believe it or not.”

Ernie shook his head and tried to understand. “Are you sure, Lynn? I’m trying so hard to accept this, to comprehend it, and if Andrea says it’s possible, I guess it is. But you said you didn’t get a good look at the book. How do we know it’s the same one?”

“Once I returned to my own time,” Lynn said with infinite patience, “I realized that I was still holding the book. I looked at it.
Late at Night,
a suspense story, a horror novel. I was freaked out, because I knew I had never bought that book, knew it hadn’t been on the night table before. Such irony. A whole year would go by and the only significant thing I would do is pick up another paperback novel. I’m ravenous, you know. I read all those horror things, suspense stories, mysteries. It looked just like the sort of thing I
would
buy. But I didn’t read it, didn’t even read the cover copy, or anything inside. It frightened me. It was out of its place, that book, out of the scheme of things.”

“You never went through it, never read a word?”

“No. Imagine what I would have done if I had, if I had discovered it was a novel about
here,
about
us
… if what you say is true. I’m glad I didn’t read it. I was going to hide it, lock it up, but I was hoping that it would just disappear, y’know, go back to its own time, while I was out, or sleeping or something. I didn’t want to hide it away for some reason. I just slipped it in the bookshelf with the rest of my trashy paperbacks. I hoped one afternoon I’d look and it would be gone.”

“Then how did it get here?” Andrea wanted to know.

“John came to my apartment one evening—funny, I did have a new man in my life, but John wasn’t the type to sleep over, to leave his things there. Anyway, he came to take me out to dinner, help me pack up for the weekend. I had bought some new books, put them on my shelf with the others. I asked John to pack them for me, and he did, only he took about twenty novels instead of the six I’d bought, put them all in my little suitcase. When we got here—I saw that
Late at Night
was one of them. I didn’t want it in the room with me, but I didn’t want it to be … alone, I guess. I took the whole pile of books and put them on the bookshelf over there.”

“Where I found it,” Ernie said.

“And read it,” Andrea finished.

“It’s almost as if it had a life of its own,” Lynn suggested, “as if it was meant to be here on this island. And now that I know what the book is about …”

“But that’s the big question,” Ernie argued.
“Why
is that book about us, about Lammerty Island? It still doesn’t make any sense. Your story—and I don’t say I reject it—is, well, preposterous enough, but there’s just too much else that’s inexplicable. I can accept some things. I can accept that you might have bought another book sometime during the year, a book called
Late at Night
with a setting such as this island; I can accept that on that particular afternoon in the future you would have set it down on the night table and that when you stepped into the future, that particular afternoon, you
saw
it on the night table. I can even accept your somehow being able to bring it back with you when you returned to your own time. But—and this is the million-dollar question for which there seems to be no answer—why is that book about us, about what’s happening tonight?”

Andrea didn’t waste any time coming up with an explanation. “I can think of only one reason. One of us must have written it. One of us will write it, if we survive, after we have left the island.”

“And it will be written, sold, published, printed, and distributed to bookstores in the space of six months? Andrea, I’m a writer. Books are hardly ever produced that quickly.”

“But is it
impossible,
Ernie? That’s what I’m asking. Tell me it’s impossible for a book to be written, and everything else you said, in only six months. Publishers rushed out books on Son of Sam and the Jim Jones cult, that Guyana massacre business, in less time than that. Paperback publishers. Is it really impossible?”

“No, I guess not. And Lynn, naturally being curious about it, might well have a copy of it on her night table in Boston six months from now. Yes, yes—I’m beginning to think you may be right.”

“You know,” Andrea said, “in all the hysteria earlier I forgot to mention that I checked the copyright date for
Late at Night.
It was for this year, which it would have to be if it’s supposed to be published in six months time. But it doesn’t really prove anything either way.”

“Did you happen to check the date of first printing?” Ernie asked her. She shook her head no. “Damn! That’s the first thing I should have done, but I was so upset … It would really have told us what was up.”

They heard from Anton after a prolonged silence. “You mean—” he sat down on the sofa, his face turning green. “That book might well come true. All of it. I might actually die … that way?”

“Maybe not,” Ernie said. ”
Late at Night
is fiction, after all. And novelists are known to exaggerate when they base their stories on real life events.”

“We’re being punished, I know it,” Lynn cried out. “I’m being punished. For doing what I did. If I hadn’t interfered, none of this would have happened. That book would have been just a piece of fiction. But now it’s coming true. The forces on this island are making it come true.”

“Not forces,” Andrea argued. “One force. One person. I’ve already established it. I just don’t know who it is.”

“Then I was right,” Lynn said. “I sensed that at least two individuals were trying to find the book psychically. When you stormed into my bedroom I knew you were one of them. I was trying to block the book’s emissions. That’s why I’ve been so confused, so preoccupied since we arrived.”

“Then it was you.”

“Yes, Andrea. But I’m not the one doing those awful things you accused me of. For a moment, I was afraid it might have been
you.”

“Now that I think of it,” Ernie said. “I do remember in the book there was some mention of an evil—what did they call him? No, they referred to it as an ‘it,’ the
necromancer.
An evil person, sex unknown, who was committing all these atrocities on the island.”

Andrea whirled on him. “Who was it? Did you find out?”

“I never got that far.”

“Next time we get our hands on that book we’re going to look at the last page first and work our way backwards. Speaking of which—”

But she was cut off by Anton, who had risen from the couch and was slowly advancing on Lynn, as he had done once before up in her room. “You bitch. You rotten piece of slime. You’re behind this. All of it.
You
wrote that stupid book and now you’re doing everything you can—you and Everson—to make your sleazy horror tale come true. What do you think? You’ll make it sell better if we all conveniently kick the bucket? Well, I’m not playing.”

“Anton,” Andrea said. “She’s leveled with us. I’m sure she’s not the—what did you call it, Ernie —the necromancer—”

“I’m sure she
is.
She’s the one behind all this. Even if her story is true, it doesn’t clear her of the other charges. Besides, she hasn’t explained what the book was doing taped to the bottom of her mattress.”

“I noticed that the books had been disturbed,” Lynn said. “The books on the shelf over there. I saw that
Late at Night
was missing. I didn’t want anyone to have it. I was afraid they’d be in danger.”

“So you leave it right out in the open where anyone—”

“Please,
please
,” she screamed, holding her hands over her ears. “I feel bad enough about it as it is. While Ernie was in the bathroom I went into the storage room and looked for the book, just on the chance that he had taken it during the night. I couldn’t find it in my room so I knew that John didn’t have it. I would have searched all of your rooms, but I found it right off the bat. And hid it.”

“You’re the one,” Anton ranted. “You’re responsible for everything.”

“I’m not. I’m
not.
Indirectly I am, I admit it. I brought the book back. But these disappearances, these killings you say you read about in the novel—I know nothing about them.”

“Enough, Anton,” Andrea warned, going to her friend’s side, and holding her, trying to calm the woman down. “Leave her alone.”

Lynn huddled in the warmth of the other woman’s arms, her shoulders heaving, tears dripping down her face. “I’m so—ryyy-yyy. I ddddin’t m-mm-mean a-a-any harm. I just, I just—”

Andrea stroked Lynn’s hair. “It’s all right now. Everything will be all right.”

Anton stared at the tender tableau for a few seconds, then turned away in disgust. “Bah! How you two coddle that woman. After all she’s done. She should be horsewhipped, the fool, tarred and feathered, instead of being soothed and hugged and comforted. Disgusting.”

“You’re disgusting, Anton,” Ernie told him. “Why don’t you go in the kitchen and make yourself some coffee? Believe me, you need it.”

“Coffee? Coffee can’t make me regurgitate, Thesinger. I’m perfectly happy the way I am. In fact, I’m so happy I’m going to take a walk outside.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Bah! I can’t believe any of this, this nonsense, trips to the future and paperback novels and—”

“Anton. You read the book yourself.”

“And your girlfriend explained it. One of us—
you
probably, you’re the only
writer
in this crowd, and I wouldn’t get caught dead
reading
such drivel, let alone writing it—will write that novel once we leave the island, fictionalizing most of it, as you yourself suggested. And that, my friend, is that.”

Ernie admitted to himself that this whole “step into the future” story of Lynn’s—as crazy as it was—might be the only thing that would explain how such a book as
Late at Night
could have been written. It mimicked their actions, described each of them and what they did, because it was written
after the fact.
But still …

“Enough of this,” Anton proclaimed with a flourish. “I’m going to see what the rest of this crew is up to. Let’s see, if I hurry I might be able to catch Gloria—or ‘Glo,’ as she prefers to be called—slapping Cynthia again. Or I might sneak up on ‘Cyn’—that’s Cynthia, for the uninitiated— and Jerry as they’re about to reach orgasm. And I mustn’t forget Everson and the two little ’housies‘ in the bushes.”

Lynn’s head shot up. “Stop it, you foul-mouthed, asinine—”

“Keep your head, darling. You may lose it before the night is over.
You
came to no harm,” he said as he took a jaunty, if apprehensive step towards the door. “I’m sure that I, too, shall be perfectly safe. There’s a nip in the air, but this sweater should be enough, don’t you think?”

“Anton,” Ernie warned, “whatever you read in the book. It might come true.”

Anton stopped for a moment, considering Ernie’s words. But he waved his hand back and forth in dismissal. “No. Impossible. It was silly of me to even imagine—oh, well, I’m off. A bit of refreshing air—”

He stumbled out the door, humming at the top of his lungs.