What the Night Knows (11 page)

“I’m thinking,” Minnie said.

“You’ve
been
thinking.”

“I’m still thinking.”

“Chestnuts! Why am I waiting for a pathetic eight-year-old to figure out what we should do?”

“We both know why,” Minnie said.

The chair under the knob of the closet door looked less sturdy than Naomi would have liked. “Did you hear something?”

“No.”

“You didn’t hear the doorknob turning?”

“Neither did you,” Minnie said. “Not this time, not the nine times you thought you heard it before.”

“
I’m
not the one who thinks a flock of bats will carry me off to Transylvania.”

“I never said flock or carry off, or Transylvania.”

A disturbing idea rattled Naomi. She eased up from her pillows and whispered, “There’s a gap under the door.”

Minnie whispered, “What door?”

Whisper discarded, Naomi said, “
What
door? The closet door, of course. What if it comes out of the mirror and slips under the door?”

“It can’t come out of the mirror unless you ask it.”

“How do
you
know? You’re in third grade. I’ve been through third grade—the spectacular tedium of it—I finished it in three months, and there was no lesson about shadowy things in mirrors.”

Minnie was silent. Then: “I don’t know how, but I know. One of us needs to invite it.”

Sinking back against her pillows, Naomi said, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”

“You can invite it all kinds of ways.”

“What ways?”

“For one thing, by staring at it too much.”

“Mouse, you’re just making this up.”

“Don’t call me Mouse.”

“Well, you are making it up. You don’t know.”

“Or if you talk to it, ask it a question, that’s another way.”

“I’m not going to ask it beans.”

“You better not.”

The room seemed colder than usual. Naomi pulled the blanket under her chin. “What kind of thing lives in a mirror?”

“It’s a people, not a thing.”

“How do you know?”

“I know in my heart,” Minnie said so solemnly that Naomi shivered. “He’s people.”

“He? How do you know it’s not a she?”

“Do you think it’s a she?”

Naomi resisted the urge to pull the covers over her head. “No. It feels like a he.”

“It’s definitely a he,” Minnie declared.

“But he who?”

“I don’t know he who. And don’t you ask him who, Naomi. That’s an invitation.”

They were silent for a while.

Naomi dared to look away from the closet door. Backlit by a streetlamp, silvery worms of rain squiggled down the windowpanes. The scarlet oak on the south lawn loomed huge, its glossy green leaves here and there reflecting the lamplight as if crusted in ice.

Eventually, Naomi said, “You know what I’ve been wondering?”

“Something weird, I bet.”

“Could he be a prince?”

“You mean Mr. Mirror?”

“Yeah. If he’s a prince, the mirror might be a door to a magical realm, a land of tremendous adventures.”

“No,” Minnie said.

“That’s it?
No
. Just like that?”

“No.”

“But if he lives beyond the mirror, then there’s got to be another world on that side. The fabulous world beyond the mirror. That sounds like a magical but true thing, doesn’t it? It could be like in all
those stories—an heroic quest, high adventure, romance. My destiny might be to live over there.”

“Shut up when you say that,” Minnie said.

“Shut up when you say shut up,” Naomi bristled. “You can’t know my destiny. I might live over there and be queen one day.”

“No one lives over there,” Minnie said solemnly. “Everyone over there is dead.”

16

WEARING A DARK-BLUE ROBE OVER HIS PAJAMA BOTTOMS, John stood before the gallery in his ground-floor study. There were photos of the kids when, as infants, each had come home from the hospital, and others taken on every birthday thereafter, a total of thirty-five pictures. Soon the gallery would be continued on the next wall.

The girls liked to come in now and then to recall favorite birthdays and to make fun of the way each other had looked when younger. Zach was less inclined to enjoy photographs taken when he was a toddler and a grade-schooler because they didn’t comport with his image of himself as a young man in preparation to be a tough marine.

More than he could have expressed even to Nicky, John looked forward to seeing his daughters become women, because he believed that each had a great good heart and would change her small corner of the world for the better. He knew they might surprise him but would always delight him by the way they lived their lives. He knew, as well, that Zach would become anything he wanted to be—and in the end would be a better man than his father.

One of two windows in the study provided a view of the flagstone terrace and the deep backyard, which now lay in absolute darkness. Their house stood on a cul-de-sac, on a street that was a peninsula between two converging ravines, quiet and sequestered for an urban home. Beyond their back fence, the land dropped off steeply, into brush-choked woods. On the farther side of the ravine, the lights of other neighborhoods were smeared and faded by the rain. Between the study window and that distant glow, nothing could be seen: not the terrace or the lawn; not the arbor twined with climbing roses; not the great deodar cedar, its boughs drooping gracefully.

Although not remote, the house was sufficiently secluded to allow a rapist-murderer, hot with need and icy with determination, to come and play and go with little risk of being seen by neighbors.

Also out there in the dark lay Willard’s grave. City ordinances forbade the interment of animals on a residential lot unless they were cremated. An urn containing their beloved golden retriever’s ashes was buried under a black-granite plaque beyond the rose arbor.

The girls had suffered such grief at the loss that they remained reluctant to risk losing another. But perhaps the time had come to bring a new dog into their lives. Not a golden retriever who counted everyone his friend, but instead a breed with a greater reputation for aggressively protecting its family. Maybe a German shepherd.

At his desk, John switched on his computer and sat in thought for a minute before keying in the number for the state hospital. The voice-mail system offered options, although the reception desk and various offices were closed until eight in the morning. He pressed the number for psychiatric-ward security.

A man answered on the second ring.

John pictured the stark security vestibule on the third floor, where
Coleman Hanes had taken him just the previous afternoon. He identified himself, learned that he was speaking with Dennis Mummers, and inquired if Billy Lucas had escaped.

“Where did you get that idea?” Mummers asked. “Nobody’s ever walked away from here, and I’d bet a year’s wages nobody ever will.”

“I assumed he didn’t have a phone. But I got a call from him.”

“Phone in his room? Of course he doesn’t.”

“If legal counsel wants to talk to him without coming out there, how is it done?”

“He’s fitted with restraints and taken to an obcon room that has a no-hands phone.”

“What’s obcon?”

“Observed-conference room. We watch him through a window, but it’s a privileged conversation, so we can’t hear what he’s saying. He’s in restraints and he’s watched to be sure he doesn’t pry anything out of the phone, anything sharp that might be a weapon.”

“He called me a little more than ten minutes ago,” John said. “On my home-office line. He must have gotten possession of a phone.”

Mummers was silent for a moment. Then: “What’s your number?”

John gave it to him.

“We’ll have to toss his room,” Mummers said. “Can I get back to you in half an hour?”

“I’ll be here.”

While he waited to hear from Dennis Mummers, John went online to a series of dot-gov sites, accessing information available to the public, but also restricted information that he could view only with his police pass code.

The need had arisen to confirm that Coleman Hanes was the man he appeared to be. John had given the state-hospital orderly the unlisted
number that Billy Lucas had called, and he could think of no other way that the killer could have obtained it.

In minutes, he ascertained that the Marine Corps emblem tattooed on the palm of Hanes’s right hand was not in support of a fraudulent persona. The orderly served admirably in the Marine Corps, was decorated and honorably discharged.

Hanes had no criminal history in this state or in any state with which it shared information. Even his driving record was without a blemish.

The truth of military service and the lack of a police record did not clear him of having colluded with Billy Lucas, but it made the possibility less likely than it otherwise might have been.

When Dennis Mummers called back, he said, “Billy doesn’t have a phone. Are you certain it was him?”

“His voice was unmistakable.”

“It is distinct,” Mummers acknowledged. “But how often have you spoken with him before your visit here?”

Deflecting the question, John said, “He mentioned something to me that only he could know, related to my interview with him.”

“Did he threaten you?”

If John confirmed the threat, they would expect him to file a report, and if he did so, they would learn that he had no authority to involve himself in the Lucas case.

“No,” he lied. “No threat. What did Billy say when you searched his room for a phone?”

“He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.”

“Is there a chance maybe someone on the staff might have allowed him to use their cell phone?”

“Depending on the circumstances,” Dennis Mummers said, “that could be a reason for dismissal. No one would risk it.”

“In this work, Officer Mummers, I’ve learned some people will risk everything,
everything
, for the most trivial of reasons. But thank you for your assistance.”

After he hung up, John went to the kitchen, where he turned on just the light in the exhaust hood over the cooktop.

Most of their friends drank wine, but for the few with a taste for something stronger, they kept a small bar in a kitchen cabinet. Certain that he could get back to sleep only with assistance, he poured a double Scotch over ice.

He was disturbed less by the threat Billy Lucas had made than by the last words the murderous boy had spoken on the phone.

To the best of his recollection, John had never shared with the police any of what the murderer of his parents and sisters, Alton Turner Blackwood, had said before he died. John had been mute with grief and terror, but Blackwood had tried to distract him with talk.

The next-to-last thing Blackwood said on that long-ago night was word for word the last thing Billy said on the phone less than an hour earlier:
Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts
.

17

ZACH DREAMED THAT HE WOKE IN HIS DARK BEDROOM AND saw a blade of amber radiance slicing out of the closet, under the door. In the dream, he lay staring at this narrow brightness, trying to remember if he had extinguished the closet light before going to bed, and he decided that, yes, he had turned it off.

He switched on his nightstand lamp, which left most of the room still in shadows, and he got up from the bed and slowly approached the closet, behaving exactly like your typical bonehead in a brain-dead horror movie where everyone dies because everyone is terminally stupid. When he put his hand on the doorknob, the light in the closet went out.

Someone or some godawful
thing
had to be in there to operate the switch, so the worst of all dumb-ass moves would be to open the closet without having a weapon. Nevertheless, Zach watched his hand rotate the knob, as though he had no control over it, as though this also must be one of those movies in which a clueless dork undergoes a hand transplant and the hand has a mind of its own.

This was when he began to realize he was dreaming—because his
hands were the same pair with which he’d been born, and they always did only what he intended them to do. With that fluid transitional dissolve common to dreams, he never opened the door, yet abruptly it stood wide, and he was poised on the threshold of the pitch-black closet.

Out of that lightless hole, enormous hands seized him, one by the throat, the other gripping his face, meaty palm crushing his nose, stoppering his mouth, his scream, his breath.

He seized the hand that cupped his face, frantic to break free, the wrist as massive as a horse’s hock, hard gnarl of bones, thick tendons. Cold, greasy fingertips bigger than soup spoons digging at his eyes, and no breath, no breath—

Sucking breath at last, Zach startled up in bed, the nightmare bursting away like a shattering shell.

The thunder of his heart pealed through him, but even as his dream fear quickly subsided from its peak, he saw that the fright-flick scenario of his sleep played out also in the waking world. In the true darkness of the real room, the blade of amber light knifed through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.

Earlier, when the door swung open on its own, he dismissed it as the house settling, the door out of plumb and moved by gravity. When it seemed, as an afterthought, that something had been wrong with his reflection when he saluted himself in the mirror, he didn’t dwell on it, didn’t hurry back to take a second look, because he recognized who were the actual-factual, sure-enough villains in the world and didn’t need bogeymen to distract him from worrying about
real
evil.

Some quality of the just-ended dream changed him. Suddenly he knew a kind of fear he hadn’t felt before, or maybe it was a kind that
hadn’t rocked him in so long that his memory of it faded the same way that his memory of infancy had receded beyond recall.

Most nightmares were less ordeals than they were entertainments, infrequent rides through a funhouse of the mind. You drifted in your stupid gondola past one weird tableau after another until one of the horrors turned out to be real and the totally improbable chase was on. After a brief terror, you woke, and if you were able to remember the details, they were usually ridiculous and they made you laugh, just a brainless spookshow no scarier than the kind of half-assed monsters you’d find in a TV cartoon for little kids.