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

eyes shining brighter than his own—and succumbed to his well-sharpened, furiously swung, and relentless hatchet.

On mornings that followed a lethal spree, as dawn neared, he stripped to wash himself and his killing clothes in the pond. He laid the garments to dry on a shelf of rock above the water, and dressed again in the unstained clothes that he had worn into the woods the previous twilight.

One moon-drenched night in his fourth year under the sign of the raven, when the boy was sixteen, as he sat on a throne of weathered rock in a meadow, resting from violent labor, savoring the rich odor of fresh blood, a mountain lion eased out of the brush into shorter grass, and stared hungrily at him. Of all predators in North America, short of the polar bear that was a ruthless killing machine in its arctic realm, the most deadly were the grizzly bear and the mountain lion.

The confident boy met the big cat’s gaze without fear and with no intention of fleeing from it. He could feel the raven circling in the night overhead. After a lingering assessment, the mountain lion chose to retreat, vanishing into the tall brush from which it had appeared.

He knew then that whether or not he might be the goat-legged god of this land, he was for certain Death with an uppercase D. The cat recognized him as such even though the boy wore no cowled robe and carried no scythe.

One thing he had learned earlier in this fourth year under the sign of the raven was that if you surrendered yourself entirely to the wilderness and to the night, you became aware of things unseen, ancient and immeasurably powerful presences with savage hungers and dark intentions, that roamed ceaselessly, almost dreaming, that were immortal and therefore never impatient, that were content to wait for the unwary to cross their path. He suspected they existed in cities, too, everywhere that humanity had been or was or would be, but were more evident here in the quiet of the wild, to one who had the heart to acknowledge them.

He was as unafraid of these unseen but immense presences as he had been of the mountain lion. In fact, they were as he wished one day to be: the true royalty of this world, users and corrupters, the hidden rulers of this troubled Earth, princes of a secret order. They were to all other predators what the mountain lion was to a mere house cat. If the boy could not one day become one of them, he would settle for being used by one of them to wreak the violence and chaos that they cherished.

For a few weeks following the encounter with the lion, the boy didn’t kill anything. As the desire began to build again, he found the graveyard.

He was about to learn the one more thing he needed to know—and do the one more thing that must be done—to throw off the mantle of boyhood and become me.

28

LATER THAT DAY, LONG AFTER DARKFALL AND DINNER BUT well before midnight, Naomi squirmed so impatiently under the covers that she feared she would wake her sister in the other bed. She wanted to be sure Minnie was sleeping soundly before she risked sneaking out to visit the mirror—and the prince!—in the storage room, but if she delayed another minute, she would positively burst. Most of the time, she was a paragon of patience, which she had to be with a shrimp sister hanging on her skirts all day, but even saints had their limits, and Naomi didn’t claim to be a saint. She wasn’t a monster, either. She was good enough by most standards, and she didn’t expect to spend centuries upon centuries in Purgatory—or even a month—assuming that she ever died.

Since the afternoon math lesson with the nice but interminable Professor Sinyavski, Naomi had been thinking about how to take the initiative with the mirror. Instead of waiting for something in the looking glass to appear or to speak to her, which is what she had done thus far, she should speak to the prince, reach out to him and express her desire to help him save his kingdom from the dark powers by which such kingdoms always seemed to be plagued. Otherwise, she was allowing the dark powers to use the mirror exclusively, like a supernatural BlackBerry or something. She felt that it was extremely perspicacious of her to recognize that she should stop being passive with the mirror and become aggressive.

Finally she turned back the covers, got out of bed, and quietly extracted the flashlight from under her pile of pillows, where she had hidden it earlier and where it had been making her uncomfortable for the past hour. She didn’t switch on the flash nor did she don a robe over her pajamas, for fear that Sister Half-Pint—who sometimes seemed to have the sharp senses of a hyperalert dog—would be torn from sleep by the slightest rustle and come panting after her to spoil everything.

With admirable stealth, Naomi navigated the nearly lightless room without a blunder, eased open the door, stepped barefoot into the hall, and closed the door behind her with only the softest click of the latch. Resorting to the flashlight now, she hurried to the east end of the hallway, regretting that she wasn’t wearing a cape, like those that heroines often wore in Victorian fantasies, because nothing looked more splendidly romantic than a cape billowing out behind a girl racing into the night on a clandestine mission.

In the storage room, she switched on the overhead light, wishing that she had instead a candelabra with a dozen tapers that made light and shadows leap mysteriously across the walls. Three steps from the threshold, she realized that the mirror no longer lay hidden but had been dragged into the open and propped upright against a stack of boxes. Two steps farther, she saw that the looking glass didn’t reflect anything, that it was black— black!—as if it were an open doorway beyond which lay the moonless and starless night of a land oppressed by something … by something … by something too terrible to name.

Naomi marveled at the absolute blackness for a longish moment before she noticed the sheet of stationery on the floor in front of the mirror, a page so creamy and thick that it might have been vellum. On sight, she knew that it must have come from out of the mirror, from the once-happy kingdom that now suffered under the brutal yoke of something … of something unspeakable. No doubt the message would be of earth-shattering importance—or so she assumed until, stooping to pick it up, she recognized Minnie’s neat printing, which ought to have been the childish scrawl of an average eight-year-old but was not. The note said: DEAREST NAOMI, I PAINTED THE MIRROR BLACK. GO BACK TO BED. IT’S OVER NOW. YOUR DEVOTED SISTER, MINETTE.

The first thing Naomi wanted to do, of course, was prepare a bucket of ice water with which to wake the devoted titmouse, but she restrained herself. Because she was on a fast track to adulthood, becoming remarkably more self-possessed and wonderfully mature every day, Naomi realized that by admitting she had found the fingerling’s smarty-pants note, she would be acknowledging the sorry lack of self-control that sent her racing to the mirror in the middle of the night. She could too easily imagine Minnie’s deadpan expression of smug satisfaction— pig fat!—so she vowed right then and there, on her honor and her life, not to give Miss Peewee the pleasure of knowing that the note had been found.

She placed the sheet of creamy paper on the floor precisely as she remembered that it had been, and she silently retreated from the storage room and along the hallway, pleased by her superior cunning. Without benefit of the flashlight, she entered her room, returned to her bed, and lay smiling in the dark. Until she wondered if—and then became convinced that—the occupant of the second bed was no longer Minnie.

In Naomi’s absence, something could have happened to poor little Minnie, and now the thing that had happened to Minnie could be lying in the sweet child’s bed, in her place, patiently waiting for the surviving sister to go to sleep before rising to devour her, as well. Naomi dared not lie lamblike in the blackness, meekly waiting to be eaten alive, yet she dared not switch on her bedside lamp, because the instant she confirmed the presence of the beast, it would even sooner gobble up every last morsel of her. The only thing to do was stay awake until dawn and hope that sunshine would send this creature of the night fleeing to some deep lair.

Half an hour later, Naomi fell asleep, then woke uneaten in morning light. The new day proved less eventful than the previous day, which set a pattern for the following month. The raw-voiced presence—I know you now, my ignorant little bitch—did not appear in the bathroom mirror or the hallway mirror, or anywhere else. No more grapes disappeared through seemingly solid objects.

As day after uneventful day passed, Naomi wondered if her only chance for grand exploits in a fantastic alternate universe had come and gone without her having been able to seize the opportunity.

For compensation, she still had magical stories to read, her flute, the junior orchestra, her unique family, the dazzling autumn leaves in this gorgeous semi-magical world, and her imagination. As the days flew by, the scarier aspects of the recent events seemed less scary in retrospect, and Naomi gradually became aware that she had conducted herself with more valor and intrepidity and dashing style than she had recognized at the time. She