have sneaked inside and ascended to the mezzanine to hide.
More likely, the settling of the house that brought the closet door out of plumb was also to blame for this. Because of a slight shift in the structure, the weight of the ladder and gravity could have overpowered the spring- loaded closure, causing the trapdoor to drop open and the ladder to unfold on its own.
In fact, that must be exactly what had happened. Any other explanation was stupid kid stuff for gutless bed-wetters.
Before killing the closet light, he studied himself in the full-length mirror. He slept in briefs and a T-shirt. Although not superbuff, he wasn’t by any definition scrawny. Yet he appeared smaller than his image of himself. His legs seemed thin. Pink knees, pale feet. The sword was too big for him, perhaps for any thirteen-year-old. He didn’t look laugh-out-loud, bust-a-gut stupid, but he for sure didn’t look anything like a guy on a recruiting poster, either.
After turning off the closet light, he braced the door shut with his desk chair, although doing so embarrassed him a little.
He placed the sword on his bed and slipped beneath the covers, only his head and right arm exposed. His hand lay lightly on the hilt of the Mameluke.
For a few minutes, he considered the nightstand lamp, but at last he decided that leaving it aglow was what a spineless jellyfish would do, a fully wilted wimp. He had no fear of the dark. Zip, zero, nada. No fear of darkness itself, anyway.
With the lamp out and the gloom relieved only by the pale-gray rectangles of curtained windows and the clock-radio light, Zach became convinced that, as earlier in the night, something had not been right about his reflection. He assumed that he’d lie awake until morning and that before dawn he would figure out what troubled him, but after a while an avalanche of weariness overcame him. As he was carried down into sleep, he saw himself in the mirror, pale feet and pink knees and too-thin legs, all of that quite true and right even if dismaying. Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not gray-blue like his eyes really were, but black instead, as black as soot, as black as sleep.
18
BAREFOOT AND IN A BLUE ROBE, SIPPING SCOTCH TO FOIL insomnia, John paced the kitchen by the light of the stove hood, brooding about the events of the day. Sooner or later, he would have to share his suspicions with Nicky. But considering the bizarre and fantastic nature of what he would be asking her to believe, he wanted to lay out his case only when it seemed ironclad. They were as close as a husband and wife could be, committed to each other, with full trust in each other, but of course he could not tell her that invisible little creatures from Mars were living in the attic and expect her immediate belief even though she couldn’t see them.
So much of what happened during this past day could be dismissed as psychological phenomena arising from the profound emotional trauma of the murders that occurred twenty years before. In any homicide investigation or in a court of law, such evidence would be considered hearsay at best, delusional at worst.
The tiny ringing bells that he heard in the Lucas house could have been an auditory hallucination. Yes, he had found the calla-lily bells in Celine’s room, but no one had been there to ring them. He believed that, sitting at the desk in Billy’s room, he had heard the murderous boy’s cell tone, and he thought he had heard a faint voice say
John knew that he had not imagined the recent call from Billy, and he assumed an investigation of telephone-company records would confirm an incoming call at the time he had received it. But nothing about Billy Lucas was apparently supernatural, nothing that supported the idea tormenting John: the possibility that Alton Turner Blackwood—his spirit or anima, or ghost, or whatever you wanted to call it—must be in the world once more, and must be somehow in the process of restaging the brutal murders he committed twenty years earlier, with the Calvino family as his fourth and final target.
The peculiar things he had seen were either in his peripheral vision or were arguably insignificant. While passing the print of John Singer Sargent’s
Nicolette knew what had happened to John’s family and that he killed their murderer on that same night of monstrous evil. He had told her every detail of the event in order that she might understand the psychology—the anguish, the guilt, the quiet paranoia, the dread that lingered—of the man she intended to marry. He withheld from her only one thing, which he would have to reveal when and if he told her why he now feared for their lives.
The kids knew John was an orphan. When asked how he had come to be alone in the world, he didn’t quite lie to them, but implied that he was abandoned in infancy, knew nothing of his folks, and grew up in a church home for boys. He suspected that all three sensed some tragedy untold, but only Naomi now and then raised the subject, for she assumed, as was her nature, that orphanage life must have been marked by sweet melancholy yet also by grand adventure; if her father’s past might be filled with romance in the classic meaning of the word, she yearned to be told about every thrilling episode.
When Minette turned eighteen, John intended to tell all three kids the truth, but he saw no reason to burden children with such a fearsome and disquieting tale. He knew too well what it was like to make one’s way through adolescence in the shadow of primal horror. He intended—and now hoped—that they would grow up without that abomination seeded in their minds.
When he finished the Scotch, he rinsed the glass, left it in the sink, and went to the adjoining dayroom. Here Walter and Imogene Nash took their lunch, made out their shopping lists, and did their planning related to the maintenance of the house.
He sat at the walnut secretary, on which lay their spiral-bound month-by-month planner. He opened the book where it was paper-clipped, to a two-page spread for the month of September.
Serial killers, especially obsessive ritualists who selected their targets with some care, like Blackwood, might kill at any time if the opportunity arose, but their major crimes usually occurred at regular intervals. The periodicity was often related to phases of the moon, though no one knew why, not even the sociopaths themselves.
Alton Turner Blackwood had not been strictly guided by the lunar calendar, but he had not been far off that schedule. The number thirty-three had meant something to him: He had murdered each of the families thirty-three days after murdering the previous one.
Billy Lucas massacred his family on the second of September. Counting from there in the day planner, John determined that the next slaughter, if it transpired, would be on the night of October fifth, only hours less than twenty-seven days from now. The third family would die on the seventh of November.
And if his superstitious expectation was fulfilled, the fourth family—he, Nicky, the children—would be scheduled for extermination on the tenth of December.
He was only mildly surprised when he discovered that the last of the four events fell on the night of Zach’s fourteenth birthday. John had been fourteen when his family had been murdered by Blackwood. The synchronicity confirmed the validity of his dread.
After closing the day planner, he phoned the homicide-division personnel office to leave a message, taking a second sick day. He also called Lionel Timmins, his sometime partner, and left a similar voice mail on his cell phone.
The laundry lay at the farther end of the dayroom from the secretary. John found his attention drawn to that closed door.
He remembered Walter Nash warning him about an “ugly stink” in the laundry room. Perhaps a rat crawled in through the dryer exhaust duct and died in the machine.
Or perhaps not.
In his current state of mind, John Calvino sensed a deadly spider spinning somewhere nearby but out of sight.
