What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun)

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.

“You took one too many silly pills this morning, Mouse. How could a moth be in the mirror?”

“It’s not a moth,” Minnie said. “Don’t look at it anymore.”

“What do you mean it’s not a moth? It was like a wing shadow—swoosh!—I saw it clearly this time, it must be a moth.”

“Don’t look at it anymore,” Minnie insisted. She went into the closet and began selecting a change of clothes for herself. “Get what you’ll wear tomorrow, put everything on your desk.”

“Why? What’re you doing?”

“Hurry!”

Although Minnie was a fraidy-cat with some empty space waiting to be filled in her eight-year-old skull, Naomi suddenly had the creepy feeling that her sister’s advice might be worth heeding. She stepped into the closet and quickly put together an outfit for the next day.

“Don’t look at the mirror,” Minnie reminded her.

“I will if I want,” Naomi said, because she was the older of the two and would not allow herself to be bossed around by a sister so young that she could twist spaghetti onto a fork only if she guided it with her fingers. But Naomi did not even glance at the mirror.

After they put the next day’s clothes on their desks, Minnie carried the chair from the play table to the closet. She closed the closet door and braced it shut by tipping the chair backward and wedging its headrail under the doorknob.

“I have to put all these hats away,” Naomi said.

“Not tonight.”

“But we have to go in the closet sometime.”