IT WAS COMING ON NINE next morning by the time he’d fully woken up. Pipes were hissing, radios were playing and a singer was practicing her scales as he lumbered along the corridors in search of a washroom. The place he found was in much the sort of state he’d have expected. Hopeful damp-furred notices about tenants showing respect for others. The ledge of a dusty window lined with rusting tins of Drano and jars of Sal Hepatica Laxative. Someone’s socks and underthings left to marinate in the corroded lion’s claw bath. A day or so longer here, and he’d be doing the same. But he knew it couldn’t last. He cleaned his teeth using his finger and someone else’s tin of Pepsodent. He cleared a space on the mirror glass with a wet hand and thought how odd the guy on the other side of it now looked without his glasses.
Barbara had fixed him coffee and a bowl of Cream of Wheat by the time he’d dressed. He sat down in her room and lit a Lucky Strike and thought again of Peg’s worried face—and the way she had fled from him last night—as this pretty Jewish broad, who was scarcely old enough to be a woman, went on and on about some huge Goddamn conspiracy. Not that he didn’t doubt that she was right, but couldn’t she see that they were an ant’s squeak away from becoming its next casualties?
The room soon hazed with his cigarette smoke and Barbara went to the window and pulled back the sash. She stood there for a while as the sunlit haze drifted around her like an aura. Then she turned and picked up something strange and dark.
“And there was something else I found.”
He almost cringed when it she flapped it toward him.
“Although you might need a mirror to look…”
It was that piece of carbon paper with that same word stamped through into it on about fifteen hundred times.
“Yes. I know. It says Thrasis. I saw it a while back.”
“And you didn’t think to mention it?”
“Jesus, Barbara! How much crap have we had flying around here?”
“That word is there repeatedly on that weird toilet sheet draft that you found stuffed in the wastecan at that pine lodge.” She was looking at him more intently now. “Or did you know that as well?”
“Not exactly. But I can’t say I’m totally surprised. You see, Howard Hughes said it to me. Like it was some kind of full stop on everything. Like he couldn’t help saying it even though it was the last thing on earth he ever wanted to say.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me that either?”
“Take me out and shoot me, Barbara. It’s a word written down backwards that someone has also said to me. What the hell else can I say?”
“Only it isn’t a word.” She nodded toward her bookshelves, which were lined with encyclopedias and dictionaries. “I’ve just looked it up. It isn’t listed. But it’s somehow important, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. For a moment, he heard a weird hissing sound, and sensed a faint return of the presence he had glimpsed before. “I guess it probably is.”