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

trying to kill you but so were some people who were actually trying to help you, like Kaylin Amhurst, the intensive- care nurse. In Minnie’s hallucinations and nightmares, while in the ICU, she thought Nurse Amhurst was trying to poison her.

Sometimes, usually near the end of Minnie’s worst nightmares and hallucinations, Father Albright appeared. She loved Father Albright very much. He was the super-best person she knew besides Mom, Daddy, Naomi, and Zach. He retired not long before Minnie became ill, and Father Bill took his place, so maybe she gave Father Albright a role in her fever dreams because it was the only way she could see him anymore. He was the one good thing in the dreams. He always gave her water, and it never turned out to be salt or sand.

That was a bad year, not just because of her illness. A month before Father Albright retired and went away, Willard died. Daddy and Lionel Timmins were almost killed by a bad guy, too, and though they got an award for valor, Daddy was nevertheless nearly killed, which scared Minnie for a long time. Maybe the only good thing that year was Zach deciding he just had to become a marine.

Minnie didn’t know whether the LEGO shapes were a good or a bad thing. She first saw them in her fever dreams, except they weren’t made of LEGO blocks. They were just shapes seen from a distance; then she found herself walking around on them, as if they were buildings, and eventually she was walking around inside of them. On these tours, she knew that she had shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, until she was the tiniest thing in all of creation, and that the strange shapes she explored were what lay at the bottom of the universe, holding it up.

Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. Of the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret. Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real. Walking inside the shapes in her delirium dreams, Minnie knew they were the ideas from which everything had started, although she didn’t know then—or now—what that meant. After all, she was only eight.

Turning away from the LEGO construction, she went to the window and watched the snow falling through the bare limbs of the scarlet oak. The weather forecast was wrong. They would get more than a foot of snow, not six inches. She didn’t know from where this certainty came, but she was confident about her prediction. It was just one of those things she knew.

Since shortly after coming in from the snow with Naomi, Minnie had been in a spooky mood. This was one of those times she sensed unseen presences so strongly that she knew sooner rather than later, they would become visible to her, like at the convenience store, the guy with half his face shot off. This time would be worse than that.

Something moved on the south lawn, at first partly screened by the branches of the oak. Then it came into the open, and she saw that it was Willard. He looked up at her in the window.

“Good old dog,” she whispered. “Good old Willard.”

Willard stood looking up through the falling snow for a long moment, and then he approached the house.

Minnie lost sight of him. She wondered if he had come inside.

Roger Hodd, reporter for the Daily Post, has a date to meet his wife, Georgia, for dinner after she gets off work. She has suggested his favorite restaurant, though it isn’t a place she particularly likes. From this, Hodd infers that she intends to ask for a divorce over dessert. She has long desired her freedom from him. Because of his temper and caustic wit, she hopes that she will be less verbally abused in a public place than in a private one. She won’t be abused at all because Hodd is going to let her sit in the restaurant alone until she realizes she’s been stood up. He’ll give her a divorce, but only after he’s made her desperate for it.

He’s in a hotel room with a hooker, whom he’s paid in advance, and he’s undressed only so far as unbuttoning one cuff of his shirt, when he says, “Come to me.” The girl on the bed is wearing nothing but her panties, and she says with all the seductive allure of Miss Piggy the Muppet, “Why don’t you come to me? I’m really ready.” He’s already buttoned his cuff and snatched his heavy leather coat off the armchair. He says, “I’ve just discovered I’ve got a lower tolerance for ugly than I thought,” and she curses him as he leaves the room.

He’s hurrying along the hotel corridor before he fully realizes what he has just done, and he has no idea why he did it. She wasn’t ugly. And even if she was, he’s got a reasonably high tolerance for ugly if the rest of the package is okay. He’s been drinking since eleven this morning, but not heavily. Sipping. He’s not drunk. He’s been drinking so long that he hardly ever gets drunk anymore, not that he realizes.

By the time he’s in his car, piloting through billowing waves of snow, he feels like Richard Dreyfuss in that old science-fiction movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He’s obsessed with getting somewhere, not to some remote butte in Wyoming where the mother ship is going to land, but somewhere he can’t name. He ought to be afraid, but he’s not. For one thing, he’s never afraid. He’s one tough sonofabitch. Anyway, he’s been trying to slow-kill himself with booze and neurotic women for years, which is a far more gruesome way to go than setting yourself on fire. For another thing, every time the weirdness of this compulsion makes him breathe fast and his heart races, this soothing voice in his head sort of croons a wordless lullaby, and he grows calm once more.

He parks in an upscale neighborhood, near a white-brick house, which is apparently his destination. He walks around the back of the place, through the snow-covered yard, across a terrace to a door in which a key sticks out of the deadbolt lock. As he opens the door and extracts the key from the lock, a cold black something slams into his head, or at least that’s how it feels. Then it’s inside his head but his skull is intact. He screams, but it’s a silent scream because he doesn’t control his own voice anymore.

As he steps into a mud room and closes the door behind him, he keeps trying to scream, because he’s terrified as he never was during the trip here. Fright overwhelms him as he proceeds out of the mud room into a kitchen, through a dining room, toward the front of the house, and a cold sea of horror rises over him because he’s not hard-assed Roger Hodd anymore, he’s now somebody’s bitch.

Naomi stepped out of the walk-in closet in the guest bedroom and offered the attache case to Melody. “You’ll see everything’s exactly the same as when you gave it to me. So the eggs—what’re they about, with our names on them? And there’s something in them, I couldn’t figure what it is. Eggs are very symbolic, they can symbolize about a thousand things. Are these symbolic? What’s magic about them, how do they work? Is the frost still on the briar rose, and what does that mean, anyway?”

“M’lady, all your questions will be answered soon. Tonight we travel on the storm.”

“On the storm?” Naomi said, liking the sound of that—travelers on the storm.

Melody’s pretty-enough face was so animated now that she became truly beautiful, much more full of life than she’d been before. Her molasses eyes were amazing, bright and quick, as if shining with an inner light. And her voice, always captivating, always musical and positively dripping with mystery, sounded more enchanting than ever:

“This is not a natural storm, m’lady. This is a conjured snow that falls hereabout but also accumulates in the lonely space between worlds, drifting sideways across time until it bridges this place to your kingdom, so we can glide home as smoothly as oil on glass, as quick as quicksilver.”

Naomi thrilled to every word but one. “Glide? I thought we were going to fly between the worlds?”

“We do both at once, m’lady, as you’ll understand when you see the cross-time sleigh with all its great sails filled and taut with the winds of time.”

Naomi was so dizzy with language and fantasy and possibilities that she couldn’t speak. Then she remembered a word that a kind of witless girl in The Tale of Despereaux often said when bewildered, and it amused Naomi to use it to express her stupefaction: “Gar!”

“Now you must accompany me at once to the top of the house to make further preparations, m’lady. Come, let’s go, while there is no cat afoot to espy our destination.”

Melody flew to the guest-bedroom door, and Naomi hurried after her, wondering if she would ever be able to speak as fabulously as did, apparently, all the people of her kingdom.

They dashed along the second-floor hallway to the back stairs, hastened to the third floor, breezed across