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

backyard, at night, when the fallen leaves of the scarlet oak whirled and tumbled as though a dog were at play in them. Willard.

“He wants us to go this way,” John said, leading them along the hall toward the kitchen.

“Who wants?” Nicky asked.

“I’ll explain later. Zach and Minnie must be this way.”

The three of them hurried across the kitchen and through the open door onto the terrace, where they encountered a strange sight; and considering recent events, John’s threshold for determining anything to be strange was far higher than it had been two months earlier.

In the snowy half-light, a golden wheel, mysteriously powered and as large as that from a Peterbilt, rolled slowly across the snow-covered terrace, leaving a wake of clear dry flagstones. Rolling with a deep rumble more ominous than an earthquake, as though it weighed far more than its size suggested, the wheel seemed to charge the air merely by its presence, and the snow crackled around it as if the flakes became electric particles under its influence. The flagstones cracked and splintered under the wheel, and through the soles of his shoes, John could feel the vibrations from its progress shuddering through the concrete slab on which the stones were laid.

The golden enigma held their attention only until they heard Zach and Minnie shouting for help.

The dead horse offers the rider a clumsy weapon more difficult to use with each degree of heat lost from the cooling brain. But it is a human cadaver and thus still has some capacity for the extreme violence that is one of the key signifiers of the species. It might be an instrument of considerable destruction even for as long as an hour or two, until early rigor mortis sets in, stiffening it beyond easy function. The rider spurs the corpse to drag itself erect by clawing at the lattice wall. The boy steps forward, between the professor and his sister, knife ready, but he will find that the knife is useless, for a corpse cannot be killed with either a slash across the carotid artery or a hundred stab wounds.

In Zachary’s room, the securing pivot pins rise out of the barrel hinges on the closet door and tumble to the floor.

By contact with the door, Melody knows what has been done to assist her, and she strains against that barrier until the knuckles of the hinge barrels separate from one another. One side of the door sags an inch away from the jamb, and now there is enough play in it to work it until the bracing chair slides out from under the knob.

The door falls, and Melody enters the boy’s room. She goes to his desk, opens the drawer where he put the cleaver, and recovers that fine piece of cutlery.

The wheel rolled to a stop on the snow-mantled lawn, near the arbor, having grown as immense as the tire on a giant earthmoving machine, maybe seven feet in diameter. Its weight must have been enormous, because it pressed an eight- or ten-inch-deep trench in the frozen yard.

The new-woven straps of wood on the ends of the arbor would not unweave at John’s declaration of his ownership, which had caused the bathroom door to relent. Judging by the look of the lattice, he would need a chainsaw to cut through, assuming wood didn’t magically heal behind the wound made by a high-speed chain. If he wasn’t in downtown Twilight Zone anymore, he was still in the suburbs.

Fingers hooked in the gaps, Minnie pressed her sweet face to the lattice and screamed, “The professor died, but he’s still after us!”

Spirit-ridden, the dead professor lumbers forward, the boy lunges, the knife goes deep, but hands that once signed declarations of treason against several young men of promise serve just as well to grab the boy’s knife hand and force him to drop the blade. He also grabs the boy’s throat to lift him and slam him backward into the farther wall of lattice so hard that the entire arbor clatters, and the girl screams. The dead man is strong but with poor coordination, while the boy is clever and agile and fiercely determined. The boy wrenches his right hand out of Sinyavski’s grip, kicks and squirms, thrashes furiously, breaks loose. The dead man turns, grabbing at him, stumbles, almost falls, and lurches two steps into the wall. The lattice cracks, the structure shudders, Sinyavski drops to his knees.

Heart in his throat, breath so hot it didn’t just plume from him but gushed out like pressurized steam from a leak in a boiler, John ran back and forth along the structure, trying to understand what was happening in there, as the bad light rapidly got worse. When he thought he saw Zach escape Sinyavski, John thrust the barrel of the shotgun through one of the two-inch-square gaps in the arbor, but the bracketing lattice allowed no lateral shift, he could only shoot straight ahead. No way to take down Sinyavski unless the professor stepped directly in front of the muzzle. And where was Zach? Gloom, moving shadows, chaos, too much risk of hitting Zach.

Minnie shouted, “He’s already dead! He can’t be killed twice!”

“He’s clumsy, Dad,” Zach said. “Dead-guy clumsy. But there’s not much room in here.”

“Use the thing!” Minnie urged.

On their knees in the snow, face-to-face with Minnie, Nicky and Naomi held fast to the small fingers that the girl hooked through the lattice, Naomi crying. Nicky said, “What thing, baby? What thing?”

“The wheel-thing.”

John pleaded: “What is it, Minnie, how do I use it?”

“It’s an idea.”

“Idea? What idea?”

“The idea, the idea behind everything. Daddy, it’s the drinking glass with the black stuff in it, the stray dog that healed a guy.”

Stunned that she referred to Peter Abelard, to a conversation she had never heard, John said, “How do you know about that?”

Zach shouted, “Dad, I’ve got the knife again.”

“Stay away from him! Where is he?”

“On his knees but trying to get up,” Zach said.

“How do you know about the glass, the dog?” John asked Minnie.

“I don’t know how, but I know.”

John heard Abelard in memory: I think the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.… When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.

Whatever it might be, the huge wheel wasn’t exactly discreet, but John said, “What is it, Minnie? Tell me as clear as you can, what is the wheel?”

“It says it’s the power that makes a highway through a sea.”

“What do you mean it says?”

“I hear it now,” Minnie declared. “It’s the power that makes a highway through a sea, and wakes the dead. It’s whatever you need it to be when you need it, and what you need is a door. Isn’t what you need a door, Daddy?”

John had extended an invitation, letting an evil back into the world. Only he could evict it. They wouldn’t send an exorcist. They were embarrassed by the old-fashioned idea of absolute Evil, of Evil personified, but the answer to this wasn’t a food bank, he would not save his family and himself by throwing food at this thing, not by giving it a cot in a homeless shelter, not by social action, what he needed here was some really effective antisocial action or else what was once called a miracle, which these days maybe only a child, like Minnie, had the imagination to envision and the faith to pursue. So be as a child. Put aside pride and vanity. Have the humility of a child who is weak and knows his weakness. Admit fear in the face of the void. Admit ignorance in the presence of the unknowable. A child believes in mysteries within mysteries and seeks wonder, which should be easy, considering that here in this yard, this very moment, John was adrift in a sea of mystery, in a storm of wonder. What the heart knows, the mind has forgotten, and what the heart knows is the truth. “I need a door,” John said, becoming as a child, “I