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

Worriedly, Naomi said, “It seems all can be lost so easily.”

“So easily, m’lady. So very easily. Your doubt could kill us all. Find the courage to believe. Now go quickly before your coachman endures the indignity of a citation from some gendarme.”

Coachman, indignity, citation, and gendarme gave Naomi shivers just as attache had done. Of all the fabulous qualities that set magical beings apart from ordinary humanity, their vocabulary and unusual phrasing were almost as thrilling to Naomi as their special powers.

“One question,” Naomi said. “When do we fly between the worlds?”

“All I dare say is soon, m’lady.”

And then Melody did a most disconcerting thing. Their heads were close because they were speaking conspiratorially. A strange look came into the woman’s eyes, and she kissed Naomi on the lips.

The kiss was light, not a massive lip-mashing experience, but instead like the brush of a butterfly. It wasn’t merely a kiss, but also something else for which Naomi had no name. Having just inhaled before being startled by this intimacy, Naomi exhaled in surprise—and felt Melody suck in her exhalation, seemingly with intent, like a hummingbird sipping the nectar from a flower.

Melody’s stare compelled Naomi to meet it, to sink into those molasses-brown eyes as if into dark waters. Just when it seemed that something shocking and even terrible might happen, the woman said, “My sweet lady, go quickly now. The frost is on the briar rose, and the coming twilight is no friend of ours. Quickly, go!”

Naomi hurried out of the auditorium and across the lobby, where only a few young musicians lingered.

Opening one of the outer lobby doors, Naomi glanced back, but Melody apparently remained in the auditorium.

At the red curb, Walter Nash waited with Mother’s SUV. Naomi often rode in the front passenger seat, to chat with Mr. Nash, but this time she climbed in back because she didn’t want to talk. She desperately needed silence and privacy to consider and reconsider what had just transpired.

The frost is on the briar rose, and the coming twilight is no friend of ours.

Naomi had no idea what those words meant, but it seemed as if they must mean everything. It was a perfectly fabulous thing to have said to you by someone, especially by someone mysterious who could fly between worlds.

The kiss had been bizarre, even freaky, and the look in Melody’s eyes had been so intense you half expected it might set your face on fire. But in retrospect Naomi realized that she couldn’t interpret the meaning of the kiss- and-sip or of the stare by the standards of this world. Melody came from another world altogether, from a place of psychic and magical powers. The culture of that world must be as different from this one as this one was different from the culture of a tribe of red-haired dwarf cannibals in a remote South American jungle, supposing there were any red-haired dwarf cannibals. Over in Melody’s world, a lady-in-waiting might pay her deepest respect to her princess by just such a kiss-and-sip as Naomi had received.

The ride home seemed as slow as if they had been dragged in a sledge over dry ground by half-dead horses.

Once there, carrying her flute case and her small purse and the magnificent attache, Naomi flew from the SUV, raced up the back stairs to the second floor, and hurried along the hall toward her room. At her door, she realized she might burst in upon Minnie, and if old Mouse was indeed there, she would be curious about the attache case and its contents.

Naomi took a detour to the guest room, where she put her purse and flute on the carpet. She quietly closed and locked the door. She placed the attache on one end of the deep window seat and knelt on the floor in front of it.

The case appeared to be covered in some kind of snake skin or maybe alligator. Of course it might have been crafted not in this world but in the world of her kingdom, where a dragon might have provided the hide.

Even though she was now several days closer to twelve than to eleven, and even though she was precocious, Naomi found herself for once in a situation where her galloping imagination seemed tethered, pawing at the ground with its hooves, stirring up nothing but dust. She had no slightest idea what “items of a most magical nature” might be in the attache case, and she couldn’t fantasize anything.

She popped the latches. Opened the case. Within rested a four-inch-deep white box that filled most of the attache, cushioned all around with crumpled tissue paper.

Handling the box as if it contained a treasure both sacred and of immeasurable value, she lifted it out and set it beside the case. Four pieces of Scotch tape fixed the lid in place. She slit them one at a time with a fingernail and opened the box.

Within were ten coins in a small Ziploc bag. Quarters. They had been painted black.

Nestled in soft cushioning paper stood a little glass jar that might once have contained olives. It currently held five dry, round, brown discs only slightly larger than—and approximately twice as thick as—the black quarters. They rested on a bed of cotton balls.

She had been sternly warned not to open the jar. The contents must not come into contact with air until the very moment they were needed.

Otherwise, all will be lost.

In a second Ziploc bag were a tube of epoxy, a ball of string, and a pair of scissors. These things looked suspiciously ordinary. Naomi wondered if they might have been included by mistake, although Melody didn’t seem like a person who would accidentally include such things instead of, say, a wizard’s monocle that revealed the future.

The final items were the most interesting and quite mysterious. Cushioned in nests of tissue paper were five chicken eggs. Each bore a name printed with a red felt-tip pen: JOHN, NICOLETTE, ZACHARY, NAOMI, MINETTE.

Picking up the egg bearing her name, Naomi discovered that it was light, empty. Each end featured a small hole. The yolk and white had been drained from the shell.

When she turned the egg, a whispery sound arose within. Holding it to her ear, she listened intently, but she couldn’t identify the contents, though it sounded rather like a loose scrap of paper—or maybe a dead insect with brittle wings.

To what purpose these objects might be put and what spectacular effects they might create, Naomi couldn’t guess. But they were for sure magical. It seemed to her that at any moment they would begin to crackle and glow with eldritch energy. Eldritch meant eerie, weird, and spooky all in one. It had been her favorite new word back when she was about to turn eleven and leave the unspeakable awkwardness of ten behind her forever. She hadn’t used it in a while, but it seemed the perfect word now.

Reluctantly, she returned the items to the box, exactly as she had found them. She put the box in the attache case, which she closed and latched.

Melody had explicitly warned that these magical items must be hidden away until the night that she would lead the Calvino family to a new world. Naomi considered a dozen places to conceal the attache in the guest room, but none of them seemed safe enough.

Even when the room wasn’t in use, Mr. and Mrs. Nash cleaned it once a week. They were so thorough that if they had served some Egyptian pharaoh, his mummy would be in perfect condition three thousand years later. They would find the case.

Finally, in the walk-in closet, Naomi climbed a stepstool and placed the precious item of luggage flat on a high shelf. She buried it under spare blankets that were wrapped in plastic to prevent dust from collecting on them when they weren’t in use.

No one was scheduled to visit in the near future. Mr. and Mrs. Nash wouldn’t disturb the blankets until they needed them for an overnight guest.

Near the door to the second-floor hallway, as she picked up her flute and her purse from the carpet, she thought again of the strange kiss and of the penetrating stare that went so deep into her eyes that she could almost feel it frying her gray matter somewhere around midbrain.

Doubt began to creep into Naomi’s mind again, even though all would be lost if she doubted. But then she remembered the cryptic warning—The frost is on the briar rose, and the coming twilight is no friend of ours—and she thought of her levitating book and of the green grapes disappearing into the mirror, and