What the Night Knows (37 page)

Father William James arrived with apologies for being five minutes late. About forty, with short brown hair, stocky but fit and quick, Father Bill—as he preferred to be called—looked less like a priest of old than like a physical-education teacher in a high school of any time and place. Now at home, but not always
just
at home, he wore athletic shoes, gray Dockers, and a blue sweatshirt instead of a cleric’s suit and a Roman collar, which of course he wore when he felt they were appropriate.

He vigorously shook John’s hand and led him to an arrangement of four black-leather Herman Miller chairs—wheeled office furniture but ergonomic, comfortable, and stylish—encircling a round coffee table with a brushed-steel base and a glass top. Another window looked onto more skeletal trees, thin mist, and sleet.

The rectory office was different from what it had been two years earlier, before Father Albright retired. Along with all the Victorian parlor furniture, the quaint paintings and highly figured statuary were gone. Behind the priest’s desk hung an abstract bronze crucifix that looked to John like a rag twisted around an old-fashioned four-arm lug wrench.

Here was a place of serious business. This priest understood that in addition to being the shepherd of his flock, he was equally an overseer of parish assets, a promoter of the public welfare, a manager of the congregation’s energies in the interest of equitable solutions to societal problems, and much more.

Indicating the sleet that clicked against the window, Father Bill said, “I don’t remember an October quite as cold as this.”

John nodded. “They say it’ll be a short autumn, early winter.”

“I suppose weather doesn’t make a difference in your business.”

“Homicide, you mean? The murder rate rises slightly in extreme heat, diminishes slightly in extreme cold. At the end of the year, we’ve been as busy as ever.”

“And busier in hard times like these.”

“Actually, the homicide rate usually falls significantly during hard times, then rises when prosperity returns.”

Frowning, Father Bill said, “That seems counterintuitive.”

“It stumps everyone from the theorists to guys like me in the trenches. But that’s how it is. Recently, of course, the Lucas and Woburn murders have skewed the statistics.”

“Such tragedies. Horrible. They seem inexplicable. Were you assigned to those cases?”

“No,” John said. “But they’re part of the reason I wanted to see you, Father.”

In recent weeks, John had more often retold the story of Alton Turner Blackwood’s crimes than in the past twenty years combined, but repetition made it no easier to tell. As with Nelson Burchard and Lionel Timmins, he recounted the destruction of those four families, including his own, without emotion, with only the essential details, as he might describe a crime scene in a court of law. Nonetheless, as always, the words cut him.

With a compassion so respectful that it didn’t make John uneasy, Father Bill responded from time to time with expressions of sympathy that never smacked of pity, with condolences as elegantly restrained as they were clearly sincere. When John listed similarities between the murders twenty years earlier and these contemporary crimes, Father Bill was fascinated, appalled. He was alarmed, too, at
the prospect of the city besieged by an imitator of the long-dead killer.

The last words of Alton Turner Blackwood, the only part of the story that John had withheld from Nicolette, brought a frown of a different quality to the priest’s face. His expression grew more dour as John revealed his fear that Blackwood somehow had been
within
Andy Tane as he had been within Billy Lucas. John methodically laid out his evidence that an apparent supernatural force might be at work—for the first time to someone disposed to believe him—and Father Bill looked like a football coach whose team was on a losing streak and who disapproved of his players’ negativity.

“What I’m hoping,” John said, “is that I can establish a place of safety for my family to ride out December tenth. If something’s in my house—a presence, a spirit, a ghost, I don’t know what—but if something is there, and I truly believe, Father, that something
is
there, then I need to know how to get rid of it, how to make the house safe, a fortress. Because I think if we can get through the tenth of December, maybe that will be the end of all this. At least I’ve got to hope so. I don’t know what else to do.”

The priest nodded thoughtfully, swiveled his chair toward the window, and watched the sleet biting at the glass as he brooded about what he had been told.

Having fully unburdened himself, having bared his deepest and strangest fears to an audience capable of taking them seriously, John was relieved more than he had expected to be. He wasn’t free of worry but the sense of utter helplessness lifted from him, the helplessness that was the pivot point on which he had been turned to his recent bleak mood.

Swiveling his chair toward John, Father Bill said, “Roosevelt was
right when he said we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And our fear can only consume us when we face it alone. I can help you with this, John.”

Grateful for that commitment, John said, “Thank you, Father. I don’t know how it should be done. It’s a house, not a person. A ghost, I guess, not something demonic. So maybe it’s not an exorcism in the classic sense.… ”

Father Bill shook his head. “If we believe in the Magisterium of the Church and its interpretations in this area, we don’t believe in ghosts. Souls of the deceased can’t linger in this world. They pass to God or Purgatory, and they can’t return here in any case. Séances and the like are transgressive, unhealthy, dangerous to the mind and soul.”

“Yes, I understand, I really do, but if the devil is the prince of this world, as the Church says he is … couldn’t he perhaps free a soul from Hell to finish something that it started here during its lifetime?”

Father Bill’s expression was pained, and his eyes seemed to be full of sorrow. But though he still spoke with compassionate concern, his voice contained the faintest note of impatience. “We’ve come a long way in the past hundred years, and further with every passing decade. But the full flowering of the faith in our time is delayed by medieval ideas that make the Church seem hopelessly credulous. Faith isn’t superstition, John. Superstition is a stain on faith, a perversion of the religious impulse and possibly a fatal corruption of it.”

The priest’s words didn’t fully confuse John but bewildered him. He sought to clarify what must be a misunderstanding. “I assure you, Father, I don’t bury statues of Saint Anthony upside down in the yard to attract a buyer for a house that’s been hard to sell or anything of
that kind. I know some people mix a little voodoo with the faith and don’t realize what they’re doing. But if ever a man lived who would earn the admiration and assistance of demons, then Alton Blackwood was that man. He was—”

Not with impatience now but in a tone of utmost good-humored reason, Father Bill said, “In an age of nuclear weapons, we don’t need Hell and demons, succubi and incubi and hungry vampires on the doorstep. We need food banks, John, thrift shops, homeless shelters, and the courage to express our faith in social action. There was a time when every diocese was directed to have a priest trained in the Ritual for Exorcisms. We haven’t had one in this diocese for eight years, and that poor lost soul isn’t even a priest anymore.”

The light in the rectory office fell in such a way that John didn’t cast a reflection in the glass table.

He said, “But Father, can’t we have food banks
and
Hell?”

The priest laughed. He sounded relieved when he said, “If you can laugh about this, you can deal with it.”

John had asked the question seriously, with no intention of a joke. “You said you could help me. What did that mean?”

“You’ve lived with this fear of Blackwood’s return for twenty years. The trauma of your family’s murder and then your face-to-face confrontation with him was so harrowing that it was psychologically formative. When these recent murders occurred, with the coincidental similarities to this monster’s crimes, you were virtually programmed to see signs and portents in even the most ordinary things. Like air knocking in a water pipe. A bad smell in the laundry room.”

Searching his wallet as he talked, Father Bill found a business card. He dealt it across the table as if a game of poker had begun.

“This is a good man, John. Absolutely first rate. I’ve had many occasions to recommend him and never one occasion to regret that I did.”

On the pale-yellow card were the name, address, and phone number of a psychiatrist named Dr. M. Duchamp.

Prior to this meeting, John had thought the most embarrassing thing that might happen would be Father Bill pointedly asking why Zach and Naomi and Minnie were not as involved with parish activities as they had once been, and why the Calvinos attended Mass about twice a month when they used to receive the Eucharist every week.

This parenting failure arose after Father Albright’s retirement, and John wondered at it and worried over it from time to time. But he had continued to procrastinate about getting the kids in a pew more often, and he had been unable to put his finger on a reason for this less diligent commitment to attendance. Now he understood.

Being pressed about more regular appearances at Mass would not have been half as embarrassing as
this
, as being gently and kindly counseled against hysterical superstition and being referred to a psychiatrist. John was not embarrassed at all for himself, but for Father Bill.

Somehow they were chatting about the weather again, and then about the latest oil crisis and the cost of gasoline.

Soon John was shepherded out of the office, along the hallway, to the front door in a cloud of earnest sophisms, sincere platitudes, and heartfelt encouragements.

Alone on the front porch, he stood at the head of the steps, buttoning the collar of his raincoat and putting up the hood.

A jacket of sleet had begun to encase some of the black limbs of the
bare trees, the ice like the ivory shell in a bone scan, the bark like malignant matter in the marrow.

Sleet slanting through the day added no glitter to the scene, as if the ice pellets had formed from dark water.

Just twenty-three days until November seventh. Just fifty-six days until December tenth.

43

AS THE DAYS PASSED FOLLOWING THE ENCOUNTER IN THE guest bedroom, Naomi’s secret gradually lost some of its luster, though she polished it with her imagination so regularly and so vigorously that it should have been as bright as a bejeweled diadem. Over and over, she relived the incident, sometimes with fabulous elaborations and with such hot excitement that the memory melted like a buttery candle, dissolved into a scintillating puddle of incoherent fantasy and pure delight. At other times, in the reliving, the events in and around the window seat struck her as too pat, almost scripted, wooden, even goofball on close examination.

But wasn’t it shamelessly ungrateful to wish all her life for a moment of magical revelation and then to doubt its validity when at long last the wish was granted? By worrying that the assassins-of-the-Apocalypse-and-the-imperiled-kingdom rap seemed just a smidgen trite, wasn’t she calling Melody a liar? And when you began asking yourself questions like this, as though you were both the detective and the suspect, wasn’t that a sure sign that you already knew the answers and didn’t much like them? Well, wasn’t it? Well?

By the morning of October sixteenth, twelve
exhausting
secret-keeping days after Melody’s visit, Naomi realized that all her doubts sprang from a single source: the acts of magic that Melody performed. When you thought hard about them, the opening-and-closing drawers and the flying book weren’t so fall-down-in-amazement magical.

Indeed, they were not magical at all. Turning a pumpkin into an elegant horse-drawn coach was magic. Transforming a chameleon into a tiny human being with a seven-word spell was magic. The events in the guest bedroom were mere
phenomena
. Paranormal, yes. Magical, no. Like dowsing successfully for water was a phenomenon but not magic.

Melody was no Merlin or Gandalf. She certainly possessed some kind of power, you couldn’t deny that, but it wasn’t a talent for magic so fabulous that recruiters from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would ever be beating down her door. The business with the dresser drawers and the violence with which the book flew across the guest room and slammed into the wall—that seemed to be more like the work of a poltergeist. Paranormal phenomena lacked the charm and the
finesse
of real magic.

By the afternoon of the sixteenth, when Walter Nash drove Naomi to junior-orchestra practice at the civic auditorium, she was a mess. Not physically, of course. Whether or not she might be destined to inherit a kingdom of magic, she would always brush her hair a hundred strokes every day, maintain clean teeth, and that kind of stuff. Her clothes weren’t a mess. She wore a blue skirt and matching blazer with a crisp white blouse and a smashing blue beret with a furry red pompon, so she felt stylish but not overdressed. She believed that she looked very much like a first-chair flautist, which
was in fact her position in the junior orchestra. She was a mess
mentally
because she couldn’t stop tearing apart the story Melody told her, examining it critically piece by piece, even though she
wanted
to believe.

Practice went well enough, but Naomi didn’t feel the music all the way down in her bones as she usually did. In one piece, she had a modest solo passage, and the conductor, Mr. Hummelstein, praised her performance. But Mr. Hummelstein was old, and while there wasn’t anything wildly wrong with being old, he was one of those old men with absolute
forests
of hair bristling from his ears. So when he complimented your playing, you couldn’t bask in the praise because you couldn’t be sure that he had heard you clearly.

During a twenty-minute break between two fifty-minute practice sessions, the young musicians always socialized. Naomi was usually a fiend for socializing. She could spin through a chattering crowd with all the energy of—but with far more refined social graces than—a whirling dervish. On this occasion, however, she was subdued, as distracted by her Melody dilemma as she was when participating in the orchestra rehearsal.