What the Night Knows (12 page)

This
freaking dream had felt as fully real as the room into which he awakened: the cold, greasy hardness of the assaulting hands; the pain of his nose pressed flat, nostrils pinched; the sense of suffocation. Even now, a lingering ache in his eyes suggested that the soup-spoon fingers had been real and would have gouged him blind if he hadn’t thrashed up from sleep.

He switched on the nightstand lamp and sprang out of bed, though not to rush the closet as the idiot Zach had done in the dream. In the corner near his desk stood a replica of a Mameluke sword, which he drew from a highly polished nickel-plated scabbard.

Modern-day Mamelukes were strictly for show, cool badges of rank carried by officers during ceremonies of various kinds. This one was stainless steel, the ricasso engraved, the quillon and the pommel handsomely gilded. And like any ceremonial sword, the edge was dull and useless as a weapon. The point wasn’t battle-sharp, either, but it could still do damage that the edge of the blade couldn’t.

Standing to the side of the closet, Zach threw open the door with his left hand, the Mameluke ready in his right. No assailant flew into the room to test the point of the sword.

The walk-in closet harbored no one, but it did hold a surprise. The ceiling trapdoor had been dropped, the folding ladder unfolded. Between the second and third floors, the dark crawlspace waited for him.

Zach hesitated at the base of the ladder, peering up, listening. He detected only the susurration of the ring burners in the two gas furnaces that heated the second and third floors, a hollow whispery sound like the roar of a waterfall heard from a great distance.

The crawlspace was actually a half floor, a five-foot-high service mezzanine, so you could almost stand erect. It housed the two furnaces, humidifiers, a few hundred feet of flexible ductwork running every which way, copper water lines, both iron and PVC drain pipes, and who the hell knew what. Just the farther side of the trap, you could switch on garlands of work lights, which were used whenever plumbers or electricians needed to go up there to perform periodic maintenance or to make repairs.

Little more than a month before, a geeky exterminator with bug eyes and a long mustache like insect antennae had climbed into the service mezzanine to search for signs of vermin. Instead of rats, he found a nest of squirrels that entered through a torn vent screen.

Nothing as innocent as a pack of squirrels had opened the trap and put down the ladder while Zach slept.

He didn’t lack the courage to search the space above; however, he would have to be the bonehead of all boneheads if he went up there at night with no weapon other than a cool but cumbersome dull-edged sword. He needed a good flashlight, too, because the strings of bare bulbs by which repairmen worked didn’t chase the shadows out of every corner. The following afternoon, after lessons and lunch, he might climb into the service space, have a look, poke around, see what he could see.

Maybe he would tell his father. They could search the mezzanine together.

With his left hand, Zach lifted the bottom of the ladder and folded back the lowest of four hinged sections, whereupon a clever automatic mechanism took over and accordioned the whole thing onto the back of the trapdoor, which swung up into place with a thump.

He stood in the closet for a while, until the pull-ring on the trapdoor rope stopped swinging like a pendulum, and then another minute or two. No one tried to put the ladder down again.

Exterior doors were kept locked even during the day. Dad said bad guys weren’t like vampires, they didn’t hide from the sun, they were up to no good 24/7, so you never did anything to make their work easier. No one could have sneaked inside and ascended to the mezzanine to hide.

More likely, the settling of the house that brought the closet door out of plumb was also to blame for this. Because of a slight shift in the structure, the weight of the ladder and gravity could have overpowered the spring-loaded closure, causing the trapdoor to drop open and the ladder to unfold on its own.

In fact, that must be exactly what had happened. Any other explanation was stupid kid stuff for gutless bed-wetters.

Before killing the closet light, he studied himself in the full-length mirror. He slept in briefs and a T-shirt. Although not superbuff, he wasn’t by any definition scrawny. Yet he appeared smaller than his image of himself. His legs seemed thin. Pink knees, pale feet. The sword was too big for him, perhaps for any thirteen-year-old. He didn’t look laugh-out-loud, bust-a-gut stupid, but he for sure didn’t look anything like a guy on a recruiting poster, either.

After turning off the closet light, he braced the door shut with his desk chair, although doing so embarrassed him a little.

He placed the sword on his bed and slipped beneath the covers, only his head and right arm exposed. His hand lay lightly on the hilt of the Mameluke.

For a few minutes, he considered the nightstand lamp, but at last he decided that leaving it aglow was what a spineless jellyfish would do, a fully wilted wimp. He had no fear of the dark. Zip, zero, nada. No fear of darkness itself, anyway.

With the lamp out and the gloom relieved only by the pale-gray rectangles of curtained windows and the clock-radio light, Zach became convinced that, as earlier in the night, something had not been right about his reflection. He assumed that he’d lie awake until morning and that before dawn he would figure out what troubled him, but after a while an avalanche of weariness overcame him. As he was carried down into sleep, he saw himself in the mirror, pale feet and pink knees and too-thin legs, all of that quite true and right even if dismaying. Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not gray-blue like his eyes really were, but black instead, as black as soot, as black as sleep.

18

BAREFOOT AND IN A BLUE ROBE, SIPPING SCOTCH TO FOIL insomnia, John paced the kitchen by the light of the stove hood, brooding about the events of the day. Sooner or later, he would have to share his suspicions with Nicky. But considering the bizarre and fantastic nature of what he would be asking her to believe, he wanted to lay out his case only when it seemed ironclad. They were as close as a husband and wife could be, committed to each other, with full trust in each other, but of course he could not tell her that invisible little creatures from Mars were living in the attic and expect her immediate belief even though she couldn’t see them.

So much of what happened during this past day could be dismissed as psychological phenomena arising from the profound emotional trauma of the murders that occurred twenty years before. In any homicide investigation or in a court of law, such evidence would be considered hearsay at best, delusional at worst.

The tiny ringing bells that he heard in the Lucas house could have been an auditory hallucination. Yes, he had found the calla-lily bells in Celine’s room, but no one had been there to ring them. He believed
that, sitting at the desk in Billy’s room, he had heard the murderous boy’s cell tone, and he thought he had heard a faint voice say
Servus
, but without a witness to corroborate these experiences, they could have been auditory hallucinations, as well.

John knew that he had not imagined the recent call from Billy, and he assumed an investigation of telephone-company records would confirm an incoming call at the time he had received it. But nothing about Billy Lucas was apparently supernatural, nothing that supported the idea tormenting John: the possibility that Alton Turner Blackwood—his spirit or anima, or ghost, or whatever you wanted to call it—must be in the world once more, and must be somehow in the process of restaging the brutal murders he committed twenty years earlier, with the Calvino family as his fourth and final target.

The peculiar things he had seen were either in his peripheral vision or were arguably insignificant. While passing the print of John Singer Sargent’s
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
on the staircase landing in the Lucas residence, he glimpsed—or thought he did—one of the little girls in the painting sprayed with blood, the next time set afire. He had to acknowledge that in his agitated state of mind, he could have imagined those manifestations in the image. And the digital clocks in the Lucas kitchen and in Billy’s room, suddenly flashing high noon or high midnight, were not irrefutable evidence that an entity from outside of time had been present; they were not evidence of
anything
.

Nicolette knew what had happened to John’s family and that he killed their murderer on that same night of monstrous evil. He had told her every detail of the event in order that she might understand the psychology—the anguish, the guilt, the quiet paranoia, the dread that lingered—of the man she intended to marry. He withheld from her only one thing, which he would have to reveal when and if he told her why he now feared for their lives.

The kids knew John was an orphan. When asked how he had come to be alone in the world, he didn’t quite lie to them, but implied that he was abandoned in infancy, knew nothing of his folks, and grew up in a church home for boys. He suspected that all three sensed some tragedy untold, but only Naomi now and then raised the subject, for she assumed, as was her nature, that orphanage life must have been marked by sweet melancholy yet also by grand adventure; if her father’s past might be filled with romance in the classic meaning of the word, she yearned to be told about every thrilling episode.

When Minette turned eighteen, John intended to tell all three kids the truth, but he saw no reason to burden children with such a fearsome and disquieting tale. He knew too well what it was like to make one’s way through adolescence in the shadow of primal horror. He intended—and now hoped—that they would grow up without that abomination seeded in their minds.

When he finished the Scotch, he rinsed the glass, left it in the sink, and went to the adjoining dayroom. Here Walter and Imogene Nash took their lunch, made out their shopping lists, and did their planning related to the maintenance of the house.

He sat at the walnut secretary, on which lay their spiral-bound month-by-month planner. He opened the book where it was paper-clipped, to a two-page spread for the month of September.

Serial killers, especially obsessive ritualists who selected their targets with some care, like Blackwood, might kill at any time if the opportunity arose, but their major crimes usually occurred at regular intervals. The periodicity was often related to phases of the moon, though no one knew why, not even the sociopaths themselves.

Alton Turner Blackwood had not been strictly guided by the lunar calendar, but he had not been far off that schedule. The number
thirty-three had meant something to him: He had murdered each of the families thirty-three days after murdering the previous one.

Billy Lucas massacred his family on the second of September. Counting from there in the day planner, John determined that the next slaughter, if it transpired, would be on the night of October fifth, only hours less than twenty-seven days from now. The third family would die on the seventh of November.

And if his superstitious expectation was fulfilled, the fourth family—he, Nicky, the children—would be scheduled for extermination on the tenth of December.

He was only mildly surprised when he discovered that the last of the four events fell on the night of Zach’s fourteenth birthday. John had been fourteen when his family had been murdered by Blackwood. The synchronicity confirmed the validity of his dread.

After closing the day planner, he phoned the homicide-division personnel office to leave a message, taking a second sick day. He also called Lionel Timmins, his sometime partner, and left a similar voice mail on his cell phone.

The laundry lay at the farther end of the dayroom from the secretary. John found his attention drawn to that closed door.

He remembered Walter Nash warning him about an “ugly stink” in the laundry room. Perhaps a rat crawled in through the dryer exhaust duct and died in the machine.

Or perhaps not.

It’s just curious how the smell came on so suddenly. One minute the laundry room is fine, and a minute later, it reeks
.

In his current state of mind, John Calvino sensed a deadly spider spinning somewhere nearby but out of sight. Every detail of his day seemed to be a silken fiber in an elaborate surrounding web. Nothing could be dismissed as insignificant. Each occurrence related to all
others in ways visible and invisible, and soon the spiral and the radial filaments would begin to vibrate as the architect of this ominous filigree circled toward the hub, toward the prey it hoped to trap there.

The longer he stared at the laundry-room door, the more gravity it exerted on him. He felt pulled toward it.

Another development or two, which need not have an obvious supernatural quality, which need only be strange and inexplicable, might snap the remaining threads that tethered him to the mooring mast of logic that was essential to any police investigation, and superstition would cast him adrift as surely as a dirigible was pulled aloft by its swollen helium ballonets. He had chosen a law-enforcement career and then the homicide division as a lifework of atonement for being the sole survivor in his family. He had proved to be a formidable detective in part because he possessed a talent for taking a few threads of evidence and from them reasoning his way to a correct picture of the entire tapestry of a crime. He did not know how he could proceed with confidence if ever reason failed him.

Reluctantly, as if the floor beneath him were a high wire and he an inexperienced aerialist certain of a fall, John rose from the walnut secretary and went to the laundry room. He opened the door and crossed the threshold.

The foul, strong, pervasive stench was that of Billy Lucas’s uniquely repulsive urine, unmistakable in its singularity, which Coleman Hanes, the orderly, had attributed to the boy’s regimen of medications. In his mind’s eye, John saw the dark disgusting yellow-brown stream sheeting down the armored glass.

The ceramic-tile floor appeared spotless. No puddle of urine, not even one drop of filth.