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

about the rampaging cop and the murdered family, and had been unable to stop thinking about it. In the silent studio, the photo of Davinia Woburn, shown on TV, kept coalescing in Nicky’s mind like the visage of a ghost materializing from a cloud of ectoplasm. She programmed a few hours of Connie Dover CDs, haunting Celtic music to distract her mind from the haunting face of that tragic child.

In spite of the news and the disturbing painting of the kids, the mood of the house remained felicitous. As inexplicable as it had been persistent, the oppressive pall of recent days, which lifted the previous afternoon, was gone—until ten minutes past two o’clock.

As Nicky refined a third iteration of the preliminary sketch, the atmosphere in the house changed so distinctly and suddenly that she glanced at her watch as she might have done to mark the exact moment of a car crash in the street or the first note of a doomed airliner’s shrieking descent.

She started to get up from the draftsman’s table, as though some urgent situation demanded her attention, but then she hesitated and sat down again. She’d heard no alarming noise. No screams. No anxious shouts. The house sailed on as calmly now as it had at 2:09.

On reconsideration, she acknowledged that the mood shift surely must be hers, internal. A house couldn’t change moods any more than it could change its mind.

Nevertheless, the suddenness of the transformation seemed strange. Nicky wasn’t a manic-depressive. She didn’t abruptly drop off cliffs of emotion or feel her heart soar like a helium balloon.

Instead of picking up her pencil, she sat listening to Connie Dover sing “The Holly and the Ivy,” which charmed her bar by bar. When she began to draw again, however, she couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that somewhere in the house, something wasn’t right.

After Lionel Timmins left, John thought he wouldn’t be able to nap anymore. When he sat with the Daily Post in the armchair in his study, however, he soon put the paper aside.

In sleep, he walked vast subterranean chambers and endless corridors of cold stone, climbed and descended chiseled staircases that curved like Mobius strips: an exitless architecture that said, Your quest is hopeless, your strength inadequate, your escape plan useless. He trudged alone except for one moment when a cruel voice spoke to him out of the labyrinth: “Ruin.” It was as intimate as Lionel’s voice when he had leaned over the armchair to shake John’s shoulder, and it woke him, but only briefly, long enough to blink at the clock on the desk. He had been asleep less than an hour. It was 2:10 in the afternoon. He dropped once more into the maze that was carved from a mountain of tombstone granite.

Because that afternoon there would be neither a math session with old Sinyavski nor an out-of-house art class with Laura Leigh Highsmith and her radically perfect mouth, Zach went down to the small gym on the garage level to work out with free weights. Although more buff than most thirteen-year-olds, he would be fourteen in two months, signing up for the marines in maybe three and a half years, so he couldn’t slack off. He needed to jam the freaking weights like a starving monkey in an experiment pumping a handle for treats.

Weights were stupid, but lots of things were stupid that you had to do to get where you wanted. He shifted his brain to Neanderthal, where he could concentrate narrowly on dumbbells, on barbells, and on trying to avoid torsion of the testicles during certain exercises. He recently read about torsion of the testicles, and it sounded like about as much fun as being circumcised with hedge clippers.

For about forty minutes, he rocked great, pumped like a starving but careful monkey, until he was soaked with a godawful lather of reeking sweat, his motion smooth and rhythmic, his form correct. The humiliating and fully weird Rubber Boy moment came when he was lying on the bench, pressing the weights high, arms extended straight up and locked in the eighth repetition in a set of ten. He began to bring the bar down toward his chest, and suddenly it seemed to weigh three times what it should. His arms quivered, he couldn’t control the barbell, he strained harder, his arms seemed to turn to rubber, and the bar came down on his freaking throat instead of on his chest, right on his Adam’s apple. Wimp.

Zach had for totally damn sure not put too much weight on the stupid bar. He didn’t do bonehead things like that. He increased the weight only when his dad was there to spot him, to help if the new poundage overwhelmed. He felt as if some superfreak was pushing down on the bar, like a reverse spotter who wanted to crush his windpipe. He could half hear this crazy wicked laughter inside his head, not his laughter, a mean ugly laugh. The thing in the service mezzanine—I know you, boy, I know you now—would have a laugh like this.

Zach strained so hard he could feel his pulse hammering in his temples, eyes bugging out, throat swollen with his effort, so like in maybe two minutes he would die from a crushed airway or from a stupid artery popping in his idiot brain. Couldn’t take the stress longer than that. He checked the wall clock for his time of death—2:10 now. If he held out two minutes, he’d die at 2:12, because this wasn’t San Quentin, the freaking governor wouldn’t call the warden at the last minute like in those dumb-ass prison movies. Zach was crying, damn-damn-damn, not with fear or self-pity, really, but because he was straining so freaking hard that tears popped from his eyes like sweat popped from his pores.

When the clock of doom ticked from 2:10 to 2:11, the weight of the barbell abruptly returned to normal. Zach thrust it off his throat, racked it with a clang, and sat up on the edge of the bench, gasping, shaking. When he wiped his surprisingly cold hands across his face to slough off the sweat, he discovered he had strained so hard that his nose was bleeding.

Sometimes Naomi enjoyed reading in the queen’s eyrie. That was what she called the second-floor window seat in the guest bedroom. The space was about eight feet long and almost three feet deep, with plush cushions and piles of comfy decorative pillows, which allowed her to recline elegantly, regally, as if she were the queen of France in a chaise longue, taking a much-deserved respite from the rigors of being a benevolent ruler to adoring subjects. Three French windows looked into the massive oak and down on the south lawn, which the tree had recently begun to carpet with scarlet leaves. Tres belle.

Only eighty pages remained in the novel about the cultivated dragon who was tasked with civilizing a savage young girl and turning her into a Joan of Arc who would save an imperiled kingdom. Naomi was eager to finish the tale and begin the sequel. The story was kind of like My Fair Lady but with sword fights and derring-do and wizards, and instead of Professor Higgins, you had a dragon named Drumblezorn, which made the whole thing just fabulously more interesting without sacrificing literary quality.

Immersed in the story, Naomi was rudely yanked back to reality by a sudden burst of wind that thrashed the oak and rattled a storm of leaves, like scarlet bats, against the windows. Startled, she peered out into the red chaos, half expecting to see a funnel cloud. The whirling leaves clicked and hissed and tap-tap-tapped across the glass for at least a minute, such a beautiful spectacle but also a bit disquieting. This was one of those moments that wise Drumblezorn called is-but-is-nots, when ordinary objects and forces—leaves and wind—created an effect that appeared to be entirely ordinary but was not, when the hidden reality beneath the apparent reality of our world rose almost into sight.

In front of the window seat stood a tea table and two chairs, creating a charming conversation area where Minnie Half-Pint always steadfastly refused to play ladies-at-tea and improvise worldly dialogues. The whirling wind died as suddenly as it arose, and when the leaves fell away from the windows, Naomi turned her attention once more to her book—and from the corner of her eye saw a woman sitting in one of the nearby chairs. Startled but not alarmed, Naomi gasped and leaned forward from the bank of decorative pillows.

The stranger wore what might have been antique clothing: a simple ankle-length tunic dress with bishop sleeves, a high round neckline, gray with blue piping. She was pretty, but she did nothing to accentuate her attributes. She wore no makeup, no lipstick, no nail polish, and her unstyled brown hair hung straight and drab, as though she might be some kind of Shaker or Amish person.

In a soft, gentle, and magically musical voice that mesmerized Naomi, the woman said, “I am embarrassed and greatly sorry if I startled you, m’lady.”

M’lady. Whoa! Naomi knew instantly, even more instanter than instantly, that this was beyond a mere is-but-is-not moment, that here was Something Big unfolding just when she thought she might never experience any adventure outside of what she found in books.

“I would have preferred not to come to you by way of the wind and the tree, with so much drama. But the mirror was painted over, m’lady, leaving me with no other door.”