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

This entire state did not have half enough police to mount protective surveillance of every family in the city that might be targeted.

As September became October, the green trees of summer dressed themselves in the spectacle of autumn. Purple beeches became bright copper, and frisia turned even more orange than the yellow buckeye. Silver-leafed poplars paid out a dividend of gold, and the enormous scarlet oak on the south yard of the Calvino property lived up to its name for the first time all year.

Late on the afternoon of October fourth, on the eve of the dreaded date, when John came home early from pretending to work, the house was transformed. He felt the difference the moment that he got out of the car in the basement garage, a freshness to the air, a curious perception that everything was cleaner than it had been, a sense that a pall had been lifted from the place. This feeling only increased as he ascended through the residence.

He had been weighed down by worry and had not realized that an oppressive aura had settled on the house itself. For weeks, the rooms had felt less harmonious in their proportions than before; the lamps and ceiling fixtures had appeared to be dialed down even when all the dimmer switches were at their highest settings; the artworks and the furnishings had seemed tired and in conflict with one another; and although the air had not reeked of Billy Lucas’s urine, it had been stale, like the air in a moldering old museum, thick with dust and history. He realized all of that only in retrospect, now that the house was bright and welcoming once more.

Perhaps no one else felt the change as profoundly as did John, for only he suspected—all right, knew—that something had come home with him from the state hospital twenty-six days earlier. If Nicky and the kids weren’t consciously aware that the house had been under a kind of cloud that had now dissipated, they must have felt the difference because they were all livelier and merrier at dinner than they had been for days. The rapid conversation had its old bounce—from wit to badinage, to persiflage, and back again.

The food tasted better, too, and the wine, not because Walter and Imogene had outdone themselves, for their standards were always high, but because the familiar cheerful atmosphere of the house had been restored, which was an essential spice that, like salt, enhanced the flavor of all things. If something otherworldly had been here the past three and a half weeks, that presence was now inarguably gone.

Once he had convinced himself to embrace the unknown, to accept that a malevolent spirit might find its way back into the world and into his life, John had imagined that the haunting would progress as it did in books and movies. First came subtle moments of strangeness for which reasoned explanations might be fashioned, and then ever more bizarre and fearsome manifestations escalated to the third act, when the terror would reveal its true ferocity and the invaded house would become a hell on Earth. Until now he had not considered that a haunting might peter out between the first and the second acts, that the ties binding the haunter and the haunted might be as vulnerable to weariness and indifference as were so many relationships in which both parties were living.

John entertained this hopeful thought only through the soup and partway through the entree. Long before dessert, he realized the invading spirit had not dissipated or departed forever. By whatever means such entities traveled, whether by magic or by moonlight, or on wheels of sheer malevolence, this one had gone in search of its next Billy Lucas, for the glove in which it would conceal itself to murder another family. With that blood ceremony completed, it would return.

29

MACE VOLKER IS A DELIVERYMAN AND A THIEF. NOW THIRTY, he has delivered flowers for a florist since he was nineteen, and he has been stealing since he was eleven. He has never been caught nor has he even once come under suspicion, for he is blessed with a gentle and open face, a most appealing voice, and a fearless nature, all of which he uses as instruments of deception no less artfully than a concert pianist uses his supple, nimble hands.

Mace shoplifts, picks pockets, burglarizes homes. He doesn’t steal solely or even primarily for financial reasons but mainly for the thrill. Stolen cash and goods have a powerful sensual appeal and feel better to him than the silky skin of a beautiful woman. He can’t achieve climax merely by caressing stolen money, but he can become fiercely aroused by the texture of it, sometimes teasing himself for an hour or more, into a sweat of desire, merely by handling purloined twenties and hundreds. A psychiatrist might say Mace is a fetishist. He has had a few girlfriends, but only to see how much he can steal from them: money and possessions, honor and hope and self- respect. Generally he turns to prostitutes for satisfaction, and the best sex is always when he steals from them the money with which he paid for their services.

There are ten doors into Mace Volker: his sensitive and thieving fingertips.

Twice a week, he delivers flowers to the Calvino house, roses for Nicolette’s studio, and occasionally a dining-table arrangement. This fourth of October, shortly before five o’clock, he has three dozen long-stemmed yellow roses for the artist, each dozen in its own plastic sleeve. He is not taken when he rings the doorbell, but by his index finger on the button, he is known and wanted.

Walter Nash signs for the flowers. Because Walter’s arms are filled with the bundled roses and the greens that come with them, Mace assists him, upon leaving, by pulling the front door shut from outside. Taken. Mace isn’t aware that he is no longer alone, that he is now a horse with a rider that might in time dismount without ever making itself known to him—or that might choose instead to ride him to death.

Deliveries concluded, Mace returns the van to the florist’s shop where he works. Ellie Shaw, the owner, is behind the cashier’s counter, totaling out the register, and Mace hands in his clipboard manifest, with the signatures of those customers who received the flowers. Ellie is in her late thirties and quite pretty, but Mace has never really seen her as a woman because she is his boss and, therefore, he can’t use her and steal from her without serious consequences. As they talk briefly about the day, Mace imagines her naked, which he has never done before—other women, never Ellie—but to his surprise and alarm he also vividly envisions her strangled with a striped necktie, her swollen grayish tongue protruding from her mouth and her dead eyes wide in the final look of terror with which she rewarded her enthusiastic murderer. This fantasy pumps him rigid with desire.

Rattled by this vision and afraid that Ellie will notice his condition, he mentions a nonexistent engagement with a young lady and flees to his car in the employee parking lot. Behind the wheel and on the move, wondering at his savage flight of imagination, Mace stops at a traffic light where a young woman and a girl of about ten stand hand in hand, waiting to cross the intersection. With graphic detail and an intensity that rocks Mace, he suddenly sees them both naked, stepping into the street—but then bound to chairs in a rough room, raw and red and carved like scrimshaw.

So as not to alarm the horse unnecessarily, the rider reins in its tendency to envision objects of its desire in conditions of total subjugation and physical ruin. In truth, Mace Volker is shocked by his hallucinatory episodes but not entirely repelled. He is, after all, a thief who is thrilled by the act of stealing rather than by the gain received from what is stolen; and he will realize now that the ultimate act of theft is the taking of a life. This realization may have an interesting effect upon the deliveryman’s future criminal career.

Having burglarized a house during his lunch hour and having taken some good diamond jewelry that he hopes will bring him as much as twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, Mace drives now to a tavern he knows in a part of the city that was once on the skids but is being gentrified. This is the kind of neighborhood in which a white-collar bar isn’t a dive and serves as a respectable front for a fence who, paying hard cash for stolen merchandise, also finds the streets safe enough that he doesn’t need to worry about being hijacked when coming or going. The tavern has a black-granite and mahogany facade. Inside, the booths and bar stools are occupied by more upwardly mobile young couples than young loners.

Mace gets a bottle of Heineken, no glass, from the bartender, who knows him and who uses the house phone to seek permission for him to go to the back office. After receiving the bartender’s thumbs-up, Mace pushes through the swinging door into the small kitchen, which produces only sandwiches, French fries, and onion rings. A door at the farther end of the fragrant room leads to a narrow staircase with a ceiling-mounted camera at the top that covers his ascent. On the upper landing, he waits for a moment at a steel door before it opens and he is ushered inside.

This is the reception room. The office of Barry Quist, tavern owner and fence (among other things), is through an inner door. Here in the first room is a table on one edge of which sits a beefy man in shirtsleeves, his shoulder rig and pistol in plain sight. Another guy in shirtsleeves, equally solid and well-armed, has opened the door for Mace. He closes it and, though he knows Mace doesn’t carry, he pats him down for a weapon before he returns