What the Night Knows (9 page)

He turned the tablet to a clean page, propped it on the slanted drawing board atop his desk, and took his pencils from a drawer. He intended to draw only Laura Leigh Highsmith’s nose. Her nose was a constant challenge to him because of its perfection.

After Zach sharpened his pencils and arranged them, before he began to commit carbon to paper, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move. He swiveled in his chair and sat watching the door to his closet swing slowly open.

Although the door had never done this before, no expectation of danger passed through Zach’s mind. He possessed a good imagination, but it didn’t lead him into bogeyman territory, either of the zombie-vampire-werewolf kind or of the guy-in-a-hockey-mask-with-a-chainsaw kind.

In real life, people who wanted to kill you were one of two varieties, the first being your freaking nutcase true believers who wanted to fly a plane through your window or get their hands on a nuclear weapon to blast you into bone dust. There was nothing you could do about them. They were like earthquakes or tornadoes to an ordinary citizen, so you had to leave them to the marines and not worry about them.

Then you had your everyday criminals who were motivated by envy or greed, or lust, or a desperate need for drugs. They looked so much like law-abiding citizens that more often than not they jammed the muzzle of a gun inside one of your nostrils and demanded your wallet or your booty before you realized they weren’t the kind who ever said “Have a nice day.”

Neither an al-Qaeda operative nor a convenience-store-robbing junkie could have found his way into Zach’s bedroom closet.

When the door drifted to a halt, all the way open, he got up and went to investigate the cause of its movement.

His walk-in closet was deeper than wide, with clothes hanging and shelved along the two longest walls. The overhead light glowed, though he felt certain that he had switched it off earlier.

Toward the back of the closet, a pull-ring on a rope dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling, access to the crawlspace between the second and third floors. If you pulled the trap open, a wooden ladder unfolded from the back of it.

With the ladder down, a draft sometimes blew out of the space above and into the closet, strong enough to move the door if the latch hadn’t been engaged. But now the tightly fitted trap was closed, shutting off the only possible source of a draft.

They didn’t live in earthquake country, but like nearly every place on the planet, this city stood above at least one inactive fault. Although a minor temblor might be unlikely, it couldn’t be ruled out; however, he hadn’t felt the ground move.

Maybe the house had been settling. Houses did that. Maybe it slowly settled in such a way that the closet door no longer hung plumb. Then its own weight might pull it open if it wasn’t latched.

No other explanation presented itself. Case closed.

He switched off the light and stepped out of the closet.

Attached to the back of the door was a full-length mirror. Zach solemnly saluted himself, thinking of the day when on very special occasions he would wear dress blues and carry an officer’s Mameluke sword in a scabbard at his side.

As he closed the door, leaving the mirror to reflect only the dark closet, he listened to the latch click solidly in place. He was then overcome by a vague sense that something about his reflection, as he saluted, had not been right.

Maybe his salute or his at-attention posture had been sloppy. He had practiced them a lot when he was eleven, less when he was twelve, and lately not at all because when you were still
years
away from being a
real
marine, practicing such things too much seemed childish.

He returned to his chair at the desk, in front of the blank page of art paper, and picked up his pencil. He called forth the memory of Laura Leigh Highsmith’s singular and exquisite nose, and contemplated it with the hope of a sudden insight that would precisely define
why
it was so exquisite.

As far as he knew, there were no hairs in her goddess nose. He had never glimpsed any bristling from it, nor had he ever seen a ray of light catch a hair shape in the shadowy ovals encompassed by her porcelain-smooth nares. Of course he never walked right up to her and peered up her nostrils, so he couldn’t be sure they were in fact hairless.

“Idiot,” he said.

She was human, so of course she had hairs in her nose. She would die or something if she didn’t have hairs in her nose. Her nose might be as hairy inside as a freaking gorilla’s armpit. Hair or the lack of it had nothing to do with why her nose was a work of art beyond his talent to depict.

Hoping for inspiration, he set to work with his stupid pencil and the stupid blank sheet of paper. As slowly he drew, he thought of Laura Leigh, of course, but he also thought from time to time of the somehow-wrong reflection, and even though the latch had firmly engaged, he half expected the closet door to swing open again.

13

NAOMI HAD A WALK-IN CLOSET LIKE ZACH’S BUT SOMEWHAT bigger, and on the back of the door hung a full-length mirror, a really splendid beveled-edge
looking glass
of such sparkling clarity that she half believed, when the stars were aligned properly, that the mirror might become a doorway between her world and a magical realm into which she could step and pursue fabulous adventures and her true destiny.

This world where she had lived for eleven years was magical, too, in so many ways, if a person was perspicacious enough to notice the numerous wonders of it.
Perspicacious
was her new favorite word. It meant “having keen insight,” an almost uncanny ability to see through—and to comprehend—what is dark and obscure. Unfortunately, there was a terrible shortage of perspicacity these days but veritable oceans of dark and obscure.

Anyway, this world was magical, but just not magical enough for Naomi’s taste. She yearned for wizards, flying horses, talking dogs, rainbows at midnight, and for things she could not even imagine, things that would leave her speechless and her heart swollen, not
swollen in a bad way, like with disease or something, but swollen with awe and delight. If she ever had a chance to pass through a mirror or through a door that suddenly appeared in the trunk of a great oak tree, she would go—though of course she would have to take Minnie and Zach and her parents with her, and they were not as likely to want to go as she would be, so she might have to Taser them or something. They would be angry, but later they would thank her.

As she thought about perspicacity and magical realms and how a girl her age might obtain a Taser, Naomi tried on hats in front of the mirror, making several facial expressions under each one until she felt that with her face she reflected the character of the hat. This was an acting exercise she read about somewhere, and while she doubted she would ever be an actress, she definitely had not ruled out the possibility if, in the next few years, a magical door didn’t appear for her.

While Naomi mugged in front of the mirror, Minnie sat at her play table, building something with LEGO blocks. She was a whiz with LEGOS, she could build just about anything she wanted, but mostly she put together bizarre structures like nothing in the real world, some of them totally weird abstract shapes that ought to have collapsed but did not.

Naomi and Minette shared a room because in a world practically
crawling
with demented, drooling predators, Minette was too young and defenseless to sleep by herself even though Daddy set the perimeter alarm every night before bed. Besides, Minnie got scared sometimes and refused to be alone. Her fears were fraidy-cat stuff, nothing real, but of course she was still a
child
.

A brimless cloche hat with feather trimming on one side inspired Naomi to look mysterious and dangerous, as if she were a woman on a train between Paris and Istanbul, carrying priceless stolen diamonds in the lining of her suitcase. A blue straw hat with an open
crown and a spotted veil said,
I am chic, competent, and have no tolerance for nonsense. I will shoot you with the .32 pistol in my purse, step over your corpse, and mix for myself a positively divine martini
.

Naomi had gotten her collection of hats at vintage-clothing stores while with her mother. Mother enjoyed browsing in such shops, though she never bought anything for herself other than an occasional piece of costume jewelry, which she never wore. She said recycled party and formal-occasion dresses were “hopes and dreams on hangers, moments from lives, delightful and intriguing and terribly sad at the same time.” Naomi couldn’t get her mind around delightful and terribly sad at the same time, but that was okay because gradually she acquired a fabulous collection of vintage hats.

When the strange thing happened, she was wearing a red straw hat with a narrow upturned brim, petersham band, and bow decoration. She thought the correct expression to match the hat ought to be comic or perhaps prim, but she couldn’t find it in her face. She was focused so completely on the hat and her face that the person passing behind her registered only as a quick dark shape that darted from right to left.

Minnie sat at her play table, in plain view, and no one in this house ever entered without knocking and announcing themselves, and there had been no knock, yet someone passed behind her, and Naomi spun around to see who it might be, but no one was there.

The open closet. No one in there, either.

Puzzled, she turned to the mirror again, wondering if something was wrong with her eyes, something dreadful and incurable, so that she would be blind by thirteen, a tragic figure, the blind musician, bravely forging on with her lessons until she became magnificently accomplished because of her fierce dedication to her only remaining pleasure, her music. She might become an international sensation,
people traveling from all over the world to see her play, because her music would be so pure, the music of the virgin blind girl who performed melancholy passages with such power that even gangsters wept like babies, and always at her side would be her pure-white German shepherd Seeing Eye dog. She played the flute, but she couldn’t conjure an image of a concert hall full of people who had come from all around the world to hear a blind flautist, so perhaps she would need to stop with the flute and take up the piano. Yes, she could see herself at the piano, tossing her head dramatically as the music enraptured her, so tragic, so brilliant, the audience electrified by her playing, the guide dog gazing up adoringly at his mistress as her hands danced across the keys—

The mysterious form flashed behind her again, from left to right this time, a dark blur. Naomi gasped, turned to the closet, where the intruder surely must have gone, but again no one was there.

Minnie had gotten up from the play table. “What’s wrong?” she asked as she came to Naomi.

“I saw someone. A reflection. In the mirror.”

“It’s probably you.”

“I mean besides me, of course. Someone passing behind me.”

“Nobody’s here.”

“Maybe. I guess not. But still … something happened. I saw him in the mirror, sure enough. Real quick. He had to be here in the room with us.”

“You better tell me true, Naomi. You trying to spook me?”

Minnie had her mother’s black hair but her father’s green eyes. As was the case with Daddy, too, this emerald gaze could freeze you in place, like an interrogator’s spotlight in a screamproof room deep in a dungeon where you understood that you would lose a finger every time you told a lie. Naomi knew that neither Daddy nor Minnie
would cut off her fingers, but when either of them focused this narrow-eyed green stare on her, she never fudged the truth even the littlest bit.

“You trying to spook me?” Minnie asked again.

“No, no. It wasn’t spooky. Not much. A little spooky. It was mainly just weird. I thought I might have to be a blind pianist.”

“
You’re
weird,” Minnie said.

“I saw some guy reflected in the mirror,” Naomi insisted.

“Really? Swear on the grave of Willard.”

Willard, their dog, had died two years earlier. Losing him was the hardest ordeal they ever endured. It still hurt to think about him. He was the best, sweetest, noblest dog in the world, and if you swore the truth of something on his grave and you lied, then you were surely going to burn in Hell with nothing to eat for eternity except spiders and maggots and brussels sprouts.

“I swear,” Naomi said, “on the grave of Willard.”

Impressed, Minnie peered in the mirror, talking to her sister’s reflection. “What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. I just … it was … no details … just a blur, superquick, way faster than a person should be, as fast as any animal, but it wasn’t an animal.”

In the mirror, Minnie’s eyes moved from her sister’s eyes to survey the reflection of the room behind them. Naomi also studied it.

“Maybe it wasn’t a guy,” Minnie said, “maybe it was a girl.”

“What girl?”

Minnie shrugged. “Whoever.”

Across the mirror, the thing swooped. Because Naomi was prepared for it this time, she saw it more clearly than before, but there was not anything to see, really, no face, no arms or legs, just a blur and ripple of darkness, here and gone,
zoom
.

Naomi cried, “Chestnuts!” which was something her grandmother said when she was startled or frustrated, and Minnie said, “Whoa!”

Instead of something, this seemed to have been only the shadow of something, and Naomi looked up at the ceiling light, expecting to see a moth darting about that cut-glass globe, but there was no moth.

When she returned her attention to the mirror, the phantom swooped across the glass again, and she said, “There must be a moth in the room, it keeps flying past the lamp. Help me find it.”

Solemnly, Minnie said, “It’s not a moth. Not in the room.
It’s in the mirror
.”

Minnie was just eight years old, and all eight-year-olds were kind of screwy because their young brains had not yet grown to fill out their skulls or something like that, which was a known scientific fact, so they were likely to say or do anything, sometimes mortifying you, though this was absurd rather than embarrassing.