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

carpeted treads. Red. Thicker than water. Blood. She glanced at the ceiling above the stairs and saw a long line, a slash in the plaster, like a wound, blood oozing out between the lips of the wound, as if the house were alive.

Her heart fluttered. She told herself that the blood wasn’t real. The only reason she saw it was because Ruin wanted her to see it. This was like a delirium hallucination except that she wasn’t feverish in a hospital bed. Or if it was real, it didn’t come from a body somewhere above the ceiling. It was like the tears of blood that a statue of the Holy Mother might weep during a minor miracle, though this was dark magic. If she allowed herself to be frightened by this, then she would be inviting Ruin to torment her with other visions, maybe with a lot worse than merely visions. But her heart fluttered anyway.

The stairwell lights went off. In the absolute darkness, the drip-drip-dripping of blood became a noisier drizzle, and she could smell the metallic odor of it. She was overwhelmed by a fear that the noise of spilling blood masked the sounds of something approaching from above or below. But this was less her imagination than it was a suggestion pressed upon her by Ruin, and if she succumbed to panic, that also would be an invitation.

Easing open the landing door, she surveyed the kitchen, saw no one. She stepped out of the stairs, quietly closing the door behind her.

First, find Mom and Daddy, get help for Zach. Minnie wouldn’t think about Zach being hurt, let alone dead. Nothing good could come from worrying about that. Zach was smart and quick and strong; he would take care of the crazy cleaver woman.

Whether or not Minnie found her parents, she could help Zachary if she had a weapon, and she could protect herself, too. She slipped across the kitchen to the drawers in which the cutlery was kept. She chose a butcher knife. She couldn’t imagine using it as a weapon, but neither could she imagine just letting someone hack her to pieces with a cleaver and not fighting back.

She closed the drawer, turned, and Professor Sinyavski seized the knife, took it away from her, threw it across the room, scooped her off her feet. She tried to fight back, but he was stronger than an old fat mathematician ought to be. He held her tight under his left arm and clamped his right hand over her mouth to silence her. “My little pretty pig. Pretty little dirty piggy.” Minnie’s scream stifled by his meaty hand, he hurried with her toward the door to the terrace and the backyard.

In Zach’s room, John and Nicky found pencils, erasers, and a couple of large drawing tablets scattered on the floor, as if they had been swept off the desk during a struggle. One of the tablets had fallen open, and John picked it up, stunned by the portrait of Alton Turner Blackwood.

From the description of the killer that John had given fifteen years previously, Nicky recognized the subject. She took the tablet from him, paged through it, her shaky hands rattling the paper as she found Blackwood again, again, and yet again.

“What’s been going on here?” John worried.

“It’s not Zach,” she said adamantly. “It’s not in our Zachary. He’d never let it have him.”

John didn’t think it would get into Zach, but it was in someone, moved on to someone after Preston’s head was blown half off, and it was loose in the house. In the house and hunting down the kids.

From the closet came a voice. “Hello? Is somebody there?”

The door was braced shut with a chair.

“Somebody? Could you let me out of here, please? Hello?”

“That’s not one of ours,” John said.

“No,” Nicky agreed.

“Let her out?”

“Hell no.”

They hurried to the girls’ room. No one. So quiet. Snow at the window. The whole house was quiet. Dead quiet.

Nicky said “Library,” and they rushed to the library. The lesson tables. The reading corner. Between the stacks. No one. Snow beating soundlessly against the windowpanes.

Stay cool. No one screaming. That was good. No screaming was good. Of course they couldn’t scream if they were dead, not if they were all dead, all dead and gutted, servus and two servae.

Guest room. The closet. The attached bath. No one. The quiet, the snow whirling at the windows, Nicky’s purple eyes so bright in her suddenly pale face.

Quicker, quicker. Storage room. Hall bath. Linen closet. No one, no one, no one.

Zach entered the kitchen by the back stairs, far past anxious and halfway to frantic, searching for Minnie, for Naomi, for his parents. He saw the door standing open, old Sinyavski in the sheeting snow with Minnie, carrying her across the terrace toward the yard in the colorless twilight. Zach didn’t know what that was about, but it couldn’t be good, even if the professor had always before seemed like a right type, never a hint that he was a god-awful freaking maniac.

On the floor lay a butcher knife. Zach picked it up. It wasn’t a pistol, but it was better than bare hands. He hurried to the open door.

With her back to the door that wouldn’t open, Naomi watched with increasing fear as Roger Hodd pulled out drawer after drawer in the master-bathroom cabinets. He still chanted, louder and more angrily with each repetition, the emphasis now on two words: “I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST, I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST.…” His back was to her, but Naomi could see his face in the mirror as he moved along the granite counter, and he looked insane, as if at any moment he would start shrieking like a chimpanzee and come at her snapping his teeth in a biting frenzy.

In the next-to-last drawer, he found what he apparently wanted. Scissors. He held them by the handles, the blades shut, as if he were gripping a knife to plunge it into something.

Clutching the scissors, he returned along the counter, staring at his reflection in the mirror as if furious with himself—“I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST, I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST”—slamming shut the drawers that he previously opened. At the end of the counter, near Naomi again, he picked up a rectangular box that she hadn’t noticed before because it was dark green, sitting on the black granite, against the black backsplash. He took off the lid and set it aside. From the box he withdrew a silvery something that she could not immediately identify until they tinkled, and then she saw they were three bells. Three bells shaped like flowers.

Leonid Sinyavski is in chains, not his body but his mind, imprisoned. For the last forty years, he has tried to live a good life, to redeem himself for certain things he did in the old Soviet Union before he fled to the West. As a young mathematician working on military projects in a time of deep restiveness among Russian intellectuals, he informed on some of his colleagues who wanted to see Communism fall. They went to gulags, and some most likely never returned. Now his own body is a gulag, and as he carries Minnie toward the arbor, he is shocked by the things he says to her, the threats he makes, and is sickened by the images that flash from his rider’s mind through his, the cruelties and indignities that he is intended to perpetrate, the mutilation and murder. The chambers of his heart slam, slam against one another, slam like doors, and though his rider tries to calm him, Leonid can’t be calmed when he knows for what he is being used. He tries to rebel, to rear up, and the chains around his mind stretch taut, as if the links might break, and again he rears, resists, and his rider bears down harder upon him as they reach the entrance to the arbor. Entering, he gathers all his mental strength, his courage, his righteousness hard-won over forty years, and says within, No, never, no, no, never! And on the second never, his slamming heart slams one last time and stilled blood pools in its chambers even as he collapses.

As he examined the calla-lily bells, Roger Hodd abruptly stopped hectoring himself about his name and occupation. For a moment, Naomi was relieved, but then the silence seemed worse than the chanting, especially when she shifted her attention from the silver bells to his reflection in the mirror and saw that he was watching her.