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

Every detail of his day seemed to be a silken fiber in an elaborate surrounding web. Nothing could be dismissed as insignificant. Each occurrence related to all others in ways visible and invisible, and soon the spiral and the radial filaments would begin to vibrate as the architect of this ominous filigree circled toward the hub, toward the prey it hoped to trap there.

The longer he stared at the laundry-room door, the more gravity it exerted on him. He felt pulled toward it.

Another development or two, which need not have an obvious supernatural quality, which need only be strange and inexplicable, might snap the remaining threads that tethered him to the mooring mast of logic that was essential to any police investigation, and superstition would cast him adrift as surely as a dirigible was pulled aloft by its swollen helium ballonets. He had chosen a law-enforcement career and then the homicide division as a lifework of atonement for being the sole survivor in his family. He had proved to be a formidable detective in part because he possessed a talent for taking a few threads of evidence and from them reasoning his way to a correct picture of the entire tapestry of a crime. He did not know how he could proceed with confidence if ever reason failed him.

Reluctantly, as if the floor beneath him were a high wire and he an inexperienced aerialist certain of a fall, John rose from the walnut secretary and went to the laundry room. He opened the door and crossed the threshold.

The foul, strong, pervasive stench was that of Billy Lucas’s uniquely repulsive urine, unmistakable in its singularity, which Coleman Hanes, the orderly, had attributed to the boy’s regimen of medications. In his mind’s eye, John saw the dark disgusting yellow-brown stream sheeting down the armored glass.

The ceramic-tile floor appeared spotless. No puddle of urine, not even one drop of filth.

Holding his breath, he looked in the washer and dryer. They had not been fouled.

He opened the cabinet doors on either side of the machines. The shelves were dry.

He looked at the surface-mounted, four-faceted ceiling vent from which warm air flowed. No dark fluid dripped from those angled vanes. Anyway, urine could not be in the heating system, for if it were, the stench would not be confined to this one room.

No urine was present, only the sulfurous stink of it.

Backing out of the laundry room, John closed the door. He switched off the dayroom lights and returned to the kitchen, where he drew deep breaths of clean air.

At the sink, he pumped soap from the dispenser and lathered his hands. Although he had touched nothing that required this sanitizing, he rinsed his hands in the hottest water he could tolerate, for as long as he could endure the sting.

The stench in the laundry room undid the effect of the Scotch. His nerves were tightly wound again. In the deep lake of his mind, schools of dark expectations darted in a frenzy that he must quell not merely to sleep but also to be able to keep his family safe.

He clicked off the stove-hood light and in full darkness went to the French door that offered access to the flagstone terrace and the backyard. He raised the pleated shade that provided privacy and stared out at the rain- smeared lights of distant neighborhoods beyond the wooded ravine.

The threat did not wait in the ravine. Although blinded by the night, John knew that nothing lurked anywhere across the unseen lawn, neither under the deodar cedar nor among its needled branches, nor in the playhouse that its limbs embraced. No enemy watched this house either from Willard’s grave or from within the rose arbor.

He recalled the hard and inexplicable thump that had shuddered through his Ford when he had been parked under the main-entrance portico at the state hospital, when he had started the engine to leave.

Hours later, in the garage under this house, after he hung up his raincoat, three knocks and then three more had issued from the shadows and then from within the plastered ceiling. At the time, he attributed the noises to pockets of air vibrating through a copper water line.

Now intuition, as real as the marrow in his bones, told John Calvino that the knocking was instead an unseen visitor finding its way into a house that was strange to it, much as a blind man might be heard exploring new territory with his white cane.

The enemy did not lurk in the night. The enemy was already in the house.

Although he might be deemed a mental case if he made the claim out loud, John knew that when he came home, he had brought something with him.

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

The boy in the round room, high in the stone tower, hid his photograph of the beautiful dead movie star in all her naked glory, and always handled it with care. His one treasure.

He simmered with resentment of the old man, Teejay Blackwood. Of Anita, his mother, who abandoned him to his constrained life at Crown Hill. Of Regina, his mother’s sister, and of young Melissa, Regina’s daughter, who could go where they wished on the estate at any time of day or night, who never spoke to him, who mocked him to servants and laughed at him behind his back.

For the longest time, his resentment didn’t grow into full-blown anger. It remained only a bitter brooding over insults and injuries.

Fear of being beaten restrained his anger. And he dreaded having his few freedoms taken away. There was a subcellar with which he had been threatened more than once, a kingdom of silverfish and spiders.

He also feared what might lie beyond the 280 acres of Crown Hill. The old man often told him that in the world beyond, he would be called a monster, hunted down, and killed. In the early years, when his mother seemed to care about him, she also warned him against yearning for a life outside the estate. “If you leave here, you’ll destroy not only your life but also mine.”

The raven taught him freedom.

One hot June twilight, the boy cranked open all four windows in the tower room to encourage a cross-breeze.

With a flutter, the raven landed in the orange light that bathed the sill of the west window. With one sharp obsidian eye, the bird studied the hard-faced, graceless boy in his armchair with a book.

The bird cocked its head this way, that, the other. It assessed everything. Then it flew across the round room, out the east window, into the purple sky.

The boy believed his winged visitor wasn’t merely a bird. Raven first, but spirit also, an omen, a harbinger.

From a bowl of fruit, he selected three grapes. With a knife he cut each grape in half to free its scent. He put the pieces side by side on the western windowsill.

He suspected that if the bird was more than a bird, it would return for this fleshy offering. As the orange light thickened to red, the raven alighted on the sill.

The boy watched it eat the grapes, and it watched him watching it. When the bird flew across the room once more and out the eastern window, the boy felt they had conducted a wordless conversation. A profound communion had occurred. But what it meant, he didn’t know.

The next day at twilight, the raven appeared again, accepting more grapes. On the following dusk, quartered strawberries.

That third evening, two hours after the berries, the bird returned, the first time it visited after dark.

Sitting in lamplight, the boy stared at the bold raven on the shadowed sill, and the raven stared at the boy, and after a while the boy perceived that the creature had come to offer him something. But what? For half an hour, he waited, wondering, and then he knew. The bird had come to offer him the night.

Before the raven flew across the room, the boy was on his feet, striding toward the east window. An instant after the bird sailed through the open casement, the boy clutched the center post with one hand and leaned out so far that he risked a fall.

As the raven glided down from the tower and away, moonlight glimmered wetly on the glossy