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

Sometimes Zach wondered just how much humiliation a person could take before he finally stopped thinking that he could ever be a marine.

Anyway, life returned to almost mind-numbing normality until the nights of October second and third, when he dreamed twice about the freaking freak with the ginormous hands. This time the dream didn’t take place in pitch-blackness but at night in a carnival with all the amusement rides ablaze with neon and blinkers, spotlighted show tents, and strings of colored lights festooning the concourse from one end of the midway to the other. Zach saw the shambling monstrosity with the humongous hands this time, and the guy was the kind of ugly that makes ordinary ugly people feel like prom kings and queens.

In the first dream, all the amusement rides were turning and whipping and undulating, but no one was aboard any of them, and the dumb-ass cliche of a nightmare carnival was dead silent, as if it were in a vacuum. The only people anywhere on the grounds were Zach and Ugly Al. He didn’t know how he knew the guy’s name was Al, but that’s what he kept thinking in the dream, and of course Ugly Al chased him all through the stupid carnival, almost nailing him again and again. This dream should have been as basically boring as yogurt, because over the years Zach had been chased in other nightmares by way uglier idiot bogeymen than Ugly Al, but it kept getting scarier until Zach burst into a show tent, hoping to hide, and suddenly there was music.

He was in a sleazy striptease show, and women in G-strings and pasties were on the stage. It was the first time he ever remembered being embarrassed in a nightmare. The strippers weren’t moving in a sexy way, but jerkily, clumsily, and then Zach realized they were dead women, zombie strippers, all women Ugly Al had killed. They had stab wounds and gunshot wounds and worse, and when Zach turned to run from the tent, Ugly Al was right there, maybe three feet away.

The freak was dressed in a khaki shirt and khaki pants with lots of pockets, and he wore black Nazi boots with shiny steel toes, and from one of his pockets he withdrew this knife that was so sharp it could cut you if you just looked at it. The godawful bump-and-grind music was still playing, and Ugly Al spoke in a low voice that made you wish you had quills and could curl up in a ball like a porcupine. He said, “Come here, pretty boy. I’m gonna cut off your peepee and shove it down your throat.” Then Zach woke in a sweat, with a superbad need to go to the bathroom.

The next night, the carnival was the same and silent except for one desperate voice. Ugly Al didn’t chase Zach this time. Naomi was somewhere on the midway, crying out to Zach for help, voice faraway and frightened. Ugly Al hunted Naomi, and Zach wanted to warn her, for God’s sake, to be quiet, but he had no voice of his own. He searched frantically for Naomi around the Tilt-a-Whirl, behind the Whip, around the Tip Top and the Caterpillar, under the silently turning Ferris wheel, past the snow-cone and the cotton-candy stands, in sideshow tents and game arcades, her voice always somewhere that he wasn’t—and then she screamed.

Zach saw Ugly Al dragging Naomi by her hair, dragging her along the sawdust-carpeted concourse, Naomi silent now, doing nothing to resist. Zach almost caught up with them, got close, close enough to see that where Naomi’s eyes should have been there were these coins, quarters, black quarters, and something dark in her mouth, her hands tied together, thumb to thumb, little finger to little finger, with a chicken egg cupped in them. Worst of all—he should have seen it first, but he saw it last—worst of all was the knife, the cut-you-if-you-looked-at-it knife, shoved to the hilt in her throat. Zach tried to scream, couldn’t, and Ugly Al raced away at high speed, dragging dead Naomi. The carnival concourse telescoped out, suddenly going on to infinity, and Ugly Al dragged Naomi away into forever while Zach fell farther and farther behind, screaming soundlessly until he woke up screaming into a pillow.

He hoped he wouldn’t dream of the freak three nights in a row.

The mood in the house had changed this afternoon. Dinner was the best time they had in a while, everyone with something interesting to say, quick and funny. Zach knew the rest of them felt it too, as if for weeks the air was thick with a pending thunderstorm and everyone waiting for lightning, and this afternoon the weather changed.

Now, alone in his room, he finished his fourth half-assed pencil portrait of old Ugly Al. Each of the four looked somewhat different from the others, and none caught the full-on weirdness of the guy. When you were drawing from a dream, you were working with less even than a memory, so Zachary couldn’t beat himself up too much for getting it only three-quarters right.

He sprayed the portrait with fixative, tore it out of the tablet, and started to draw Laura Leigh Highsmith’s lips, the full purse of the mouth from the philtrum to the suggestion of the chin muscles. He worked from memory now, not just from a dream, and in this case his memory was as sharp as if he had been drawing from real life.

Reading a book in bed, Naomi sat propped against a sumptuous pile of pillows so feathery they seemed capable of levitating like great slow birds and carrying her aloft with them. Until recently, when she read in bed, she wore mere pajamas, pathetic childwear, but not anymore. Now she sat attired in a Vietnamese ao dai, a flowing tunic-and-pants ensemble made of colorful silk, which she discovered during an all-girls shopping afternoon with her mother and Minette. This exotic garment—deliriously glamorous and drop-dead chic— was infinitely more appropriate for her than were kiddie pajamas, now that she was closer to twelve than to eleven. The ao dai served as day and evening wear, it was not for sleeping, but she intended to sleep in it anyway, and in the two others now in her wardrobe. A mere child sleeps in a wrinkled mess of cotton, drooling, hair disarrayed, but a young lady strives to look her best even when unconscious.

Minnie, who would be an exasperating child for years yet, sat at her play table, bagged in a typically dumpy pair of jammies with, of all things, a precious teddy-bear pattern. She worked intently on one of her bizarre LEGO-block structures, all strange angles and cantilevered sections that should have collapsed but didn’t.

“What is that funky thing?” Naomi asked.

“I don’t know. I saw it in a dream.”

“That’s where they come from? Buildings you see in dreams?”

“Not the other ones. Just this. But it’s not a building. It’s something. I don’t know what. And I don’t have it right, either.”

“Don’t you ever dream about unicorns and flying carpets and wishing lamps?”

“No.”

Naomi sighed. “Sometimes I worry myself sick about you, Mouse.”

“I’m good. I’m fine. Don’t call me Mouse.”

“You know what? I could be your dream coach! I could teach you how to dream right, with golden palaces and crystal castles and a fabulously colorful tent city around a desert oasis, wise old talking turtles, geese that fly underwater but swim through the air, and ice skating in the moonlight with the handsomest boy ever but he turns out to be a kind of griffin except all lion and just the wings of an eagle, and he flies over a shining city with you riding on his back.”

“No,” Minnie said, concentrating on the LEGO thing.

“I’d be a great dream coach!”

“Aren’t you reading a book?”

“It’s a great book. It’s about this very cultivated dragon who teaches this savage girl how to be civilized because she’s got to become a Joan of Arc to her people. Should I read it out loud?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want? Sometimes, dear child, you are quite inscrutable.”

“I want some silence so I can think about this thing.”

“Yes, of course, being a whiz at LEGOS is just like being a chess master, such profound strategy requires absolute silence.”

“Absolute,” Minnie agreed.

Ensconced in her lavish mound of pillows, Naomi returned her attention to the book, wondering why on earth she even tried to be a responsible older sister, why she struggled to lift this benighted little squirt out of the sandbox when, clearly, not even a cultivated dragon could have done the job.

The new mood in the house encouraged Nicolette, but around a tiny grain of frustration, her mind began to