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

Naomi wasn’t an impetuous girl given to flinging herself into harm’s way. This chanting might be weird but surely it didn’t arise from an ill-intentioned person. Melody wouldn’t have brought her up here if anything were amiss. No doubt the chanting had something to do with the preparations for departure. Magicians were always chanting.

She pushed open the bathroom door, felt for the light switch, and the room brightened.

The most desperate-looking man sat on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs to pull himself into a ball like a pill bug. His tarnished-penny eyes were so wide with terror, they looked as if they might fall out of his sockets. He bobbed his head up and down, up and down. As if trying to convince himself, he muttered, “I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.…”

John with the shotgun, Nicky with the pistol, hurried along the ground-floor hall toward the front stairs, on their way to the children, who should be upstairs.

The doorbell rang.

She said, “Don’t answer it!”

They were just past the foot of the main stairs, with only the foyer between them and the front door, so that John clearly heard the clack of the deadbolt sliding out of the striker plate in the door frame.

“No,” Nicky said, and raised the pistol.

John brought up the shotgun as the front door swung inward. The perimeter alarm had been engaged. The siren should have sounded. It didn’t. A meddling phantom had invaded the system.

The door swung wide, but no one stood on the threshold. A taunt. A lure. Someone might be out there, to the left or the right of the doorway, back pressed to the wall of the house, waiting for John to step into a trap.

There was no music, flute or otherwise, and the breeze barely murmured, but snow whirled as if waltzing on the porch, flung off thin veils that fluttered silently into the foyer, sparkling in the chandelier light.

For eighteen years, John had dreaded this moment without fully recognizing that on an unconscious level he believed implicitly the impossible would happen, that the killer of his family would return from the grave. Two years previously, when Minnie seemed close to death, her illness was so mysterious that John then became conscious of his conviction that Blackwood’s promise to him would be kept. As Minnie lay in delirium, her fever uncontrollable, Blackwood prowled the edges of John’s imagination, and it became easier by the day to believe that a spirit, not a virus, was killing her. Since then, his dread had grown, and now it almost seemed that he’d drawn Blackwood back into the world, that by so often imagining the worst, he had issued an invitation.

Now the open door and the vacant threshold argued for boldness on his part, because he would be the last victim on this killer’s agenda. It wanted him to witness the brutalization of everyone he loved before slitting him open to steam in the winter night. At this moment of the open door, Nicky far more than John was in danger.

“Go upstairs to the kids,” he said. “I’ll check this out.”

“No. I’m with you. Do it fast. Do it now.”

Zach was near the door that he had just closed, Minnie stood beside her brother’s desk, and Willard materialized through the wall.

Always, when Minnie thought about Willard as he had been, she thought about play and fun, laughter and love. Even the sight of Dead Willard could lift her heart, though the truth was that the dog did not come back into the world to play or to make her laugh. He wasn’t scary like the ghost with the blasted face in the convenience store, but you didn’t want to cuddle Dead Willard, either. He wouldn’t feel soft, furry, and warm anymore. You might feel a coldness when you tried to touch him or nothing at all, which would be worse. The sight of Willard scared Minnie now, because he meant trouble was coming.

The dog raced to her, dashed to Zach, disappeared through the door to the hall, and at once returned by the same route.

“What’s wrong with you?” Zach asked Minnie as he watched her watching the ghost dog that he couldn’t see.

Willard barked, barked, but even Minnie couldn’t hear him. She could see only that he was trying to bark out from his reality into theirs.

She said, “Zach, get away from the door.”

“Why?”

“Get away from the door!”

The dog did his best. Nobody could blame good old Willard when the gray-dress woman from twenty days earlier, the woman who might have been a door-to-door Jesus-talker but wasn’t, burst into the room and swung a meat cleaver at Zach.

Roger Hodd was told, with his own voice, to Stay. He finds that he can’t disobey. He is a dog, not a man anymore, just a dog with a master who has him by the short hairs of his mind, and minute by minute his sanity is melting away. As a reporter, he gets to ask the questions, and you either have to tell him the truth, lie, or say “No comment,” and no matter what you say, he can characterize it as either the truth or a lie, as he sees fit. That is his authority, his power, but no longer. He doesn’t get to ask questions here, and this thing that has controlled him like a marionette, that isn’t in him at the moment but that can still make him Stay, is going to do something monstrous with him, then to him.

The girl pushes the door open wider, turns on the lights, and gapes at him from the threshold. She asks if he’s all right, if he needs help. How stupid is the little gash? Of course he needs help, he’s dying here. He wants to tell her that she’s a brain-dead future whore, that she’s dumber than the load she probably has in her pants, but then his rider returns, fully controlling Hodd once more, and he says to the girl, “You are a sweet treat, aren’t you? I want my sweet candy. Give me some tasty candy, you ignorant little bitch.” As abruptly as it mounted him, the rider dismounts, for it has business elsewhere, but Roger Hodd remains on Stay.

Swaddled in the odors of wool coats and fake-fur collars and sheepskin linings, Preston Nash waits in the lightless closet, like a Level 3 threat in a video game, the claw hammer ready in his hand. He remains unafraid. After almost twenty years strung out on drugs and drink, he has so often walked with Death along one brink or another that his capacity for fear is burnt out, until the only things that can at times frighten him are his worst hallucinations. Long-term users of ecstasy—a drug Preston dislikes—lose the ability to know joy naturally because their brains stop producing endorphins. As they must rely on their drug of choice for happiness, he relies on his for terror that the real world—a faded and threadbare place to him—no longer can supply. So he waits for his new and interesting companion, the sharer of his flesh, with pleasant anticipation.

He is idling on a Stay command with nothing to do but think, and he likes what he is thinking. Although not in control of his body, he has the benefit of all his senses when his spirit driver gets behind the wheel and takes him for a spin. Preston’s vision, smell, touch, taste, and hearing remain as sharp as ever, but the intensity of these experiences will be beyond anything he, as a lifelong observer rather than participant, has ever known. He has killed thousands in the virtual worlds of games, but this will be real and intense. He has bedded women, mostly those for whom he’s paid, and he’s seen thousands of women used and roughly abused in adult films, but he has never raped or beaten one. He suspects his spirit driver will inspire him to do things this night that will be more outrageous and thrilling than anything he’s ever seen on film. He hopes he’ll be allowed the wife. But certainly the girls. What lies before him now is the opportunity to play with the real world as he has previously only played with virtual ones.

As Preston listens to John and Nicolette Calvino in the foyer, his spirit companion returns.

John went from the foyer to the porch as he would have cleared a doorway in any murder house where the killer might still be found: low, quick, shotgun tracking with his eyes to the left, right. The porch was deserted. He