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

stopped worrying that she had botched her one chance for glory, and she knew an occasion would eventually arise in which she could—and would—fulfill her singular potential as an adventurer.

Minnie knew that Naomi found the note. One corner of it was bent. And Naomi had held the thick writing paper so tightly that her fingers dimpled it in a few places.

By herself, Minnie dragged the painted mirror behind the boxes once more. Good riddance.

She folded the note and kept it as a souvenir.

Days passed, and nothing weird happened. Still more days, and still nothing.

The spooky stuff hadn’t come to an end forever. They were in the eye of a hurricane. This calm was misleading; the storm remained all around them.

Minnie possessed some natural knowledge of such things. She seemed to have been born with a sixth sense; and it had always been her little secret.

Since the incident with the mirror, she now and then sensed that she was being watched by something that didn’t have a body, therefore didn’t have eyes, yet could see.

She thought it must be a ghost, but she sensed that it was not an ordinary ghost or maybe not only a ghost. So at first she thought of it as the watcher.

Sometimes the watcher’s stare was almost like a touch, a sliding hand along her neck, along her arm, along her cheek and chin.

Usually but not always, this feeling came over her when she was alone. She tried not to be alone except when she went to the bathroom or took a shower.

The eyeless watcher didn’t prowl just the house. It was outside, too, in certain secluded places.

One day in the backyard, she started to climb the ladder to the playhouse in the branches of the enormous old cedar. Suddenly she knew the watcher waited up there.

She refused to believe that a thing without a body could hurt her. But she didn’t want to be alone with it in that high place, to feel its stare, and to have no way out except the ladder. She might fall and break her neck. And that might be exactly what it wanted.

The arbor was draped with climbing vines, and pooled within it were shadows and the fragrance of roses, the last blooms of the year. Lingering there one afternoon, she felt the watcher enter the tunnel.

Although the day was windless, the roses shuddered, as if the thorny vines winding through the crisscrossed lattice were trying to pull loose and reach for her.

Inside the arbor, with the roses trembling and petals falling, Minnie felt the watcher brush past her, and by that contact she knew that it called itself Ruin. This seemed to be a peculiar name, yet she was certain that it was the right one. Ruin.

For as long as Minette could remember, she had from time to time felt unseen presences that other people didn’t feel. Occasionally she got a glimpse of them. Presences. Spirits. People who weren’t alive anymore.

They weren’t always where you expected them to be. They didn’t hang around graveyards.

Two of them were in a convenience store where Mom stopped now and then. Minnie could feel both of them. She had seen one, a man with part of his face shot off. Something bad happened in the store a long time ago.

Minnie usually stayed in the car.

When she was little, the presences sometimes scared her. But she learned that they were all right if you just ignored them.

If you stared at them too long or if you spoke to them, that was an invitation. If you didn’t invite them, you could go months and months without seeing one.

Ruin was the first in years that kind of scared her. Ruin was different somehow.

She was usually alone when she became aware of Ruin watching, but sometimes it watched all of them when they were having dinner or playing games. That was the worst.

Although aware of the presences when they were near, Minnie never knew what they wanted, what they might be thinking or feeling, if they thought or felt anything at all.

In the case of Ruin, however, especially when it watched all of them, she knew exactly what it was feeling. Hatred. Hatred and rage.

Anyway, Ruin was a ghost or some kind of spirit new to her, new but nonetheless a spirit, and spirits could not harm her or anyone else. If she ignored it, if she did nothing to invite it, then it would have to go away.

After math with old Professor Sinyavski, in the late afternoon of the day Zach had encountered something in the service mezzanine that tested his sphincter control—I know you, boy, I know you now—he returned to his room and discovered that the stupid meat fork, which he had hidden under some stuff in a bottom desk drawer, had been restored. Presto! The previously wrecked shank was no longer bent. The tines were straight, not twined together. The polished steel bore no indications of ever having been stressed.

This suggested that of the two explanations for the incident—either supernatural or delusional—the latter was more likely. Nuts. He was nuts. Loony, loco, crackers, screwy, one shoe short of a pair.

Maybe for his own good, he should sign himself into a monkey house, wear one of those monkey jackets with the long sleeves that tied behind your back, and be entertained by stupid freaking monkey thoughts swinging through his empty skull.

Or not.

Being able to consider the idea that he might be insane pretty much ruled out madness. Raving lunatics never wondered if they were lunatics; they believed the other six billion people in the world were lunatics and that they themselves were pillars of reason.

Instead of convincing Zach that what happened in the service mezzanine must have been a delusion, the restored fork ticked him off and made him more determined than ever to learn the truth about what was happening in this house. He knew when he was being jacked around. He wasn’t a dog so dumb that he didn’t see the leash. He wasn’t a naive idiot who would happily chow down on cow pies because someone told him they were chocolate cake.

With insanity off the table, one explanation remained: something supernatural. If a supernatural force could screw up the meat fork, then it was a no-brainer that the same supernatural force could make it right again.

Any alternate theory would now have to identify a human villain, some clown with a self-serving reason for replacing the twisted fork with an identical but undamaged utensil.

Zach gave himself a week to think and to see what might happen next. He thought, all right, but nothing happened. The trapdoor didn’t fall open by itself, and the ladder didn’t self-deploy. Every night, feeling like a wuss, he braced his closet door with a chair, but the knob never rattled and nothing in there turned on the light.

His parents were the high command, and he was a grunt. A grunt didn’t go to the high command with a wild story about a ghost in the service mezzanine unless he had the ghost in chains.

Zach gave himself another week. And then another.

He began to wonder if that one episode was going to be the whole of it. Some half-assed ghost rides in from the hereafter, plays with a stupid light switch and a trapdoor ladder, screws up a meat fork, fixes the fork, gets bored, and splits for some other ghost gig. That scenario seemed even more lame than the usual brain-dead horror movie full of boneheads doing every wrong thing to get themselves killed.

But if it was finished, that would be okay with Zach. He wanted to be a marine, not a ghostbuster.

Dr. Westlake doubted very much that Nicolette’s idiosyncratic adverse reaction to Vicodin could continue to manifest three and a half weeks after she took her last dose. But he wanted to research the issue and get back to her the next day.

She said nothing about the hallucination to John. She hoped to avoid worrying him.

The following day, when Dr. Westlake called, he all but ruled out the possibility that her latest experience could be related to Vicodin; however, he wanted her to have a complete blood workup, just as a precaution.

Nicky never fretted about anything. Brooding about possible calamities seemed to be ingratitude. Her life was bright with family and love, her paintings were acclaimed and sold for excellent prices, and in return her minimum obligation included being happy and giving thanks for her good fortune.

Always, even during darker times, she’d been cheerful, hopeful. Surely life was too short to waste any of it in