What the Night Knows (39 page)

Gazing at the fading sky, Minnie said, “There’s everything to be scared of.”

“Sometimes it looks that way when you’re eight. But when you’re eleven, you have a whole different perspective.”

44

FOR A WHILE, EVERYTHING MOTORED ALONG ON CRUISE CONTROL, not exactly normal but not in-your-face bizarre, and then Zach began to dream about Ugly Al again—though with a difference. These new mind movies were megatons worse than nightmares. They were so radically real that Zach woke up to throw up more than once, barely making it to the bathroom in time.

The dumb-ass cliché carnival wasn’t a locale anymore. These dreams were set in their house or outside on their property, and though they were horror-movie stuff, they didn’t have a bonehead horror-movie feel. They felt like documentaries.

In the first of them, Zach climbed into the stupid playhouse high in the stupid cedar, where he
never
went in real life because it was a girl’s kind of place. Snow was falling, rungs on the ladder jacketed with ice, and he was bare-chested and barefoot in jeans. He could feel the snow spitting against his face, the slippery ice under his feet, feel it cracking and hear brittle chunks of it clinking and rattling down through the dark branches. Never before had he felt things so intensely
in dreams: the texture of everything, the cold, his feet numb yet
stinging
from prolonged contact with the ice.

He could smell everything too, which never happened in other dreams. He smelled the cedar as he ascended through its boughs. He smelled the wet wood of the playhouse—and the blood when he went inside.

In throbbing lantern light, Naomi’s severed head stood in a puddle on the playhouse table. Stepping out of shadows, Ugly Al said, “I have lots of uses for her fine little body, but I didn’t need her head. You can have the little slut’s head.” Zach tried to back away, couldn’t. Ugly Al shoved the head into his hands. Zach could feel the slickness and fading warmth of the blood, her hair tickling his wrists. All this did worse than terrify him. He was grief-stricken, such anguish, he was sobbing, his throat felt raw from sobbing. His sister was
dead
. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad if it was only terrifying, but Naomi was
dead
, and a stake through Zach’s chest couldn’t have hurt as much as this loss. He wanted to put the precious head somewhere safe and cover it so that no one could see brilliant Naomi like this, beautiful Naomi reduced to this, but Ugly Al gripped Zach’s hands and forced him to bring the head closer to his face, closer, saying, “Give her a nice wet kiss.”

The dreams got a lot worse after that.

Zach knew that he should tell his parents, because the dreams were so godawful intense and so strange that maybe he had a freaking brain tumor the size of an orange or something. He intended to tell them, but then the dreams got sick in a different way from how they had been, still violent but also way perverse. Disgusting, demented syphilitic-monkey things happened in these supercharged nightmares, things Zach could never in a million years tell anyone about because they would think that he must be a walking pus bag,
that he must be rabid-bat deranged if he could even imagine such grotesque stuff. In fact, he didn’t think he was imagining any of it, he felt like he was
receiving
this filth, as if it were being downloaded into his brain like a movie from the Internet, but he knew he’d never sell
that
idea to the psychiatrists.

On the night of October eighteenth, any lingering thought he had of sharing his nightmares with his father and mother was vaporized like a teaspoon of water at ground zero in a nuclear blast. Something happened that so shamed him, he had no option but silently to endure this torment until it either stopped or he went into full brain melt.

In the dream, Ugly Al tried to force Zach to do something so evil and repulsive that even Hell wouldn’t let him in if he did it. When he refused, Ugly Al produced a meat cleaver and chopped once, twice, three times at Zach’s crotch.

Screaming in a dry breathless whisper, he sat up in bed with a lap full of warm blood. After desperately, interminably fumbling for the lamp switch, he discovered that of course he wasn’t emasculated for real, only symbolically: He had wet the stupid bed. He had
never
been a sleep piddler as a little kid. Now nearly fourteen, he had turned his bed into a freaking
lake
.

Leaping out of bed as if it were a skillet full of sizzling-hot oil, he peeled out of his saturated underwear and threw them on the bedclothes. He stripped the bed fast, before the mattress sustained damage, and piled everything on his desk after sweeping the blotter and his drawing tablet to the floor. He would have preferred to heap the reeking bundle on his desk chair; but because he had become a godawful paranoid dumb-ass, the chair was bracing shut the closet door.

At 2:20 A.M., in fresh underwear and jeans, operating in super-stealth mode, not daring to turn on the hallway or stairwell lights, he
carried the soiled sheets and clothes to the laundry room on the ground floor. There he had to turn on the lights to figure out how to load the stupid washer and get it going.

This being the totally wired twenty-first century when every third-world hellhole had nuclear weapons and your cell phone was able to do everything but read minds, you would think a load of laundry could be washed in a minute and tumbled dry in two, but no. He had to sit on the laundry-room floor forever, waiting to be discovered and humiliated—a thirteen-year-old, would-be-marine bed-wetter.

45

ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER NINETEENTH, COMPLAINING about recent bouts of insomnia, John revealed that he had called Dr. Neimeyer, their internist, to request a prescription for Lunesta. He took one and retired early.

Recently Nicolette had been worried about him. He seemed to be preoccupied by his current case to an even greater extent than he had been by previous homicides. He didn’t have his usual appetite, either. She was sure he had lost weight, at least five pounds, but he claimed that he felt fit and that his weight was the same as ever.

When he first mentioned having trouble sleeping, she suggested he see Isaac Neimeyer, but for a full checkup, not to obtain pills. Usually he was averse to being medicated. His insomnia must be worse than he had told her.

With John off to bed early and with the kids absorbed in their interests, Nicky returned to her studio. She intended to spend two or three hours with the problematic picture of Naomi, Zach, and Minnie.

As she was laying out her brushes and paints, she realized that the
time of year might have something to do with John’s condition. His parents and sisters had been murdered on October twenty-fifth, which was just six days away. Every year, he became pensive around that date, somewhat withdrawn. Although John never marked the dark anniversary by talking about it, Nicky knew it lay heavy on his mind. Perhaps he was more deeply troubled this time because of the twenty-year milestone. Time didn’t, as advertised, heal all wounds. Although the wrenching immediacy of grief eventually passed, the settled sorrow that replaced it might in its own way be even more intense.

As Nicky completed preparations to paint, her younger sister, Stephanie, called from Boston. Stephie had just gotten home early from her sous-chef job at the restaurant. In this economy, business was off, as it had been for some time. Nicky sat on her high stool with the swiveling seat, turned toward the vase of peach-colored humility roses, and worried with her sister about various economic catastrophes in the news, talked about food, and swapped stories about their children.

Neither of them had ever been awkward with the other, but Nicky sensed her sister circling around a subject that she hesitated to raise. This perception proved correct when Stephie finally said, “Maybe you’ll think I’m flaky when I tell you this.…”

“Honey,” Nicky said, “you’ve
always
seemed as flaky to me as one of your pie crusts. What’s on your mind?”

“The thing is—you do have a really good alarm system there, don’t you?”

“A house alarm? Yes. Surely you remember accidentally setting it off during your last visit.”

“So you didn’t take it out or anything. You’re sure it’s working like it should?”

“The perimeter doors and windows—they’re armed right now. John has a zero-tolerance policy about forgetting the alarm at night. It’s a cop thing.”

“So then I guess—what?—does your alarm company test the system regularly?”

“Stephie, what is this? All the creepy murders here in the news lately?”

“No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Last night I had this dream about you guys. You and John, and the kids.”

“What dream?”

“It was gross. I’ve never had a dream so gross, and I never want to have another one. I don’t want to repeat the gory details, all right?”

“I can probably do without hearing them.”

“This terrible thing happened, I think partly because your alarm wasn’t working.”

“It’s working.”

“The panic button,” Stephie said. “Your system has one of those panic buttons, doesn’t it?”

“On every keypad and every phone, too.”

“The panic button wasn’t working. Isn’t that a strange detail for a dream? So specific?”

Nicky swiveled on her stool to look at the painting of Naomi, Zach, and Minnie. Their unfinished faces.

Stephanie didn’t know anything about the tragedy John endured twenty years earlier, but after another hesitation, she said, “Is John doing okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“At work, you know. His health. And, like, things between you—everything good?”

“Stephie, things have always been great between us. John is the dearest man.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that. I love John, I really do. I meant … I don’t know. It’s the damn dream, Nicky. Been thinking about it all day. Trying to make sense of it. You know how dreams are. They don’t make sense, you’re not quite sure what you saw.”

Nicolette looked past all the kids in the painting, to the half-seen mirror in the dark background. She had not included the shadowy figure that appeared in five of the photographic studies; but she half expected to see it in the portrait.

“I’ll call the alarm company first thing in the morning,” she said. “I’ll have them come out and test the system. Will that make you feel better?”

“It will, yeah,” Stephie said. “It’s just a dream. This is so silly. But I’ll feel better.”

“I will, too, now that you’ve dropped this centipede down my blouse.”

“I’m sorry, Nicky. I didn’t mean to spook you. Or I guess maybe I did a little. That dream really walloped me. Don’t be angry with me, will you?”

“I couldn’t be, Stephie. I love you to death.”

“Jeez Louise, don’t put it that way.”

“Sorry. How’s Harry?” He was Stephanie’s husband. “Is he still wearing his mother’s dresses?”

“His what?”

“His mother’s dresses—and then stabbing sexy blondes in their showers?”

“Oh, I get it. Payback for John. I deserve it. No, Harry’s still wearing his mother’s dresses, but at least he’s over the stabbing thing.”

A few minutes later, after they hung up, Nicky sat staring at the
unfinished painting of her children. John Singer Sargent was an impossible act to follow. Maybe that was the only problem. She put away her paints and brushes.

In the master bedroom, she stood beside the bed, watching her husband sleep, his face in the penumbra of the lamplight. He looked at peace. The Lunesta had done its job.

They hadn’t made love enough lately. If the mood was wrong, you had to change it.

Using the front stairs, she went down to the second floor. She knocked at Zach’s door, and then at Naomi and Minnie’s. The kids were safe, doing their homework, though they all seemed more subdued than usual.

Although John would have walked the house, checking doors and the operable windows, Nicky toured the perimeter. She found nothing amiss.

In the living room, she stood for a while in front of the tall mirror in the baroque frame. Her reflection was considerably smaller than the shadowy form in the photographs.

The house had felt odd to her for so long that she had adjusted to the new atmosphere and didn’t feel it as strongly as before. But the difference remained. Nicky couldn’t have described the change to anyone; it was something you simply
felt
, for which all words were inadequate.

Suddenly she thought the oddest thing of all was that she hadn’t mentioned this sense of wrongness to John, no matter how resistant to description it might be. It was as though the house, employing some strange power that no inanimate object should possess, schemed to isolate them, one from another, within its rooms.

46

THE TWO-STORY YELLOW-BRICK HOUSE STOOD IN A NEIGHBORHOOD once a testimony to middle-class success, now evidence of the stalled dreams of generations, proof of the destructive avarice of a political class that promised prosperity while robbing rich and poor alike. Sidewalks were cracked, canted. Iron lampposts, spotted with rust, were overdue for painting. Street trees, untrimmed for so long that they could never be properly shaped by an arborist, stood leafless and raging at the bleak sky with mutant arms and bristling fists.

The house rose behind a spear-point iron fence from which some weapons had been borrowed. In summer the lawn would be nearly as dead as it was on this October twenty-fifth.

Inside, the rooms and hallways provided narrow passages between cliffs of heavy old furniture. In spite of air stale with years of cigarette smoke, John thought that all seemed scrupulously clean.

Peter Abelard, once a priest, still dressed rather like a cleric: black shoes, black slacks, black shirt, with a dark-gray cardigan. For some reason, he wore a watch on each wrist.

Fifty-six, with a lean ascetic face and ash-gray hair combed back
from his pale forehead, he was so thin and dry that it seemed he might subsist entirely on the cigarettes that he lit one after the other, the new from the butt of the old.