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

need a door, and I know there must be a door, I believe in a door, please give me a door, God, please, I want a door, please God, please give me a damn door.”

Zach shouted, “Dad! He’s on his feet! He’s coming!”

As the last of the twilight slid westward through the icy sky, as a light arose within the enormous golden wheel, Zach cried out. John leaned his shotgun against the arbor and grabbed the lattice with both hands.

Nicky had seen him try to rip it loose before. He couldn’t do it then, couldn’t do it now.

She knew the shotgun was useless. She wanted to use it anyway, do something, anything. But what?

In the dark arbor, Zach was taunting Sinyavski, trying to keep him—it—away from Minnie. “Over here, bonehead. Over here, you freaking freak.”

Fingers trembling against Nicky’s fingers, with the lattice barrier separating them, Minnie whispered desperately, “It’s gonna kill Zach.”

The luminous wheel changed from gold to red and acquired a greater dimension, revealing within itself numerous spiraling masses reminiscent of the sky-filling whorls in van Gogh’s Starry Night. It began to throb, and in the ominous arterial pulses of swirling light and shadow, the falling crystals of snow glittered like sparks.

John shouted something into the arbor, and Nicky didn’t at first understand what he meant: “Take me. Take me. Take ME!”

Abruptly the wheel flared brighter, projecting galactic spirals of shadow and scarlet light across the rose arbor, across the yard, across the falling snow, which descended so heavily that it curtained the night.

“Take ME!” Breaking off a six-inch piece of lattice, making a hole large enough to thrust his hand through, John shouted, “Here, damn you, here I am, here, take ME!”

He thought he knew what needed to be done, and if he didn’t do it, there would never be an end to the threat. There could be only one reason that some benign force had used Minnie to make the wheel, which was the embodied idea of a portal between time and eternity. The door was for him to use, him and no one else. He started this, he must end it. If a door was provided, he must use it and by using it offer himself as penance.

In the arbor, from out of the shadows, revealed by the whirligig glow of the wheel, the Sinyavski thing loomed, a hulk in a dark suit. The face was familiar yet as John had never seen the professor’s face before: twisted with a soured and festered malignity, almost deformed with rage. His eyes were pools of distilled hatred, glistening with malevolence, sharp with resentment.

“It’s me you really want, just me,” John said. “I’m the one who got away.”

Rising from where she had knelt to confront Minnie, Nicky said, “What’re you doing? John, no, not this.”

“Do you trust me?” he asked her.

“Don’t.” Her misery grew with each repetition: “Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t.”

He said, “I trust Minnie, and I trust whoever … possessed her to make the door. Trust me, Nicky.”

“With everything?” Anguish strained her voice. “Everything?”

“Haven’t you always? For fifteen years?”

“It’s too strong for even you.”

She had once told him that sometimes he was all cop when half cop would be tough enough.

He said, “This isn’t a half-cop night. It’s all-cop or nothing.”

Through the lattice, to the thing using Sinyavski’s body, John said, “Take me. Tear me apart from the inside out. And maybe you can totally control me. Won’t it be fun, using me to kill them? To use them and cut them and kill them? Won’t it be fun, Alton? Ruin?”

He heard Nicky say, “Naomi, get behind me.”

“Why settle for less than using me?” John asked the thing in the dead professor. “You can’t be afraid of me. I killed you, Alton, but you can’t be killed again. I’m flesh and weak. You’re strong and everlasting. Or are you?”

The professor thing smiled at him through the lattice, a sly and venomous sneer. His eyes were iron-dark and not his own.

John’s hand was palm-up, and Sinyavski’s hand pressed upon it palm-down. Something cold and eager squirmed against John’s skin. He almost recoiled. With effort, he relaxed, offered no resistance. He felt a gelid, twitching presence not against his hand any longer but within it, slithering as far as his wrist … but then no farther.

He turned out of his mind any thought of his parents and his sisters, and for the first time in twenty years, he allowed himself to think about Cindy Shooner as he had not dared to think of her since that night. He pictured her naked, her lovely body, her full breasts, and he tried to summon the memory of how she felt under him, the silken rhythms, her deep warmth, the way she rose to meet him, her mouth, her abandon, her insatiable need, her thrilling appetite.

Ruin took him.

Within the arbor, the dead man fell in a heap.

With poltergeist-like power, the lattice at the ends of the arbor unlaced, raveling back into the walls of the structure, freeing Zach and Minnie. As if from a distance, John heard Nicky urgently calling them to her.

Colder than the night, John’s mind flooded with hideous images of Marnie and Giselle being brutalized before they died. His sanity was assaulted by those eternal memories of Alton Turner Blackwood. Anguish slammed him, grief wrung him with a cruel fist. He tried to scream, but he could not make a sound.

In the whirling crimson snow, John saw himself picking up the 12-gauge. As he turned toward Nicky, he became aware of his finger tightening on the trigger.

He felt as if he were under an immense weight of earth, buried in his living body, buried as surely as his dead family, and his terror swelled.

Nicky held her pistol in a two-hand grip, sighting lower to ensure a chest hit on the upkick.

John moved toward her without hesitation, and she told him to drop the shotgun, but he kept moving until the muzzle of the 12-gauge pressed into her abdomen.

An arm’s length apart, they stared into each other’s eyes, and despairingly he thought that he had surely done the wrong thing again. Twenty years to the day, had he done the very thing that would cost him this family just as his weakness and selfishness then had cost him?

Behind her, the kids were gathered. Judging by their stricken expressions, whatever they saw in John’s face, they saw nothing of their father.

Tears welled in Nicky’s eyes. “I can’t.”

Killing him might be her only chance. He had brought them to a precipice above a longer drop than he had intended.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you. I can’t.”

She lowered the pistol.

“I am Death,” he heard himself say to her. “You’ve never had sex with Death before.”

As his finger tightened on the trigger, John suddenly rose out of his living grave, throwing off the weight of evil that pressed him down. He sensed Ruin begin to realize that its host had hidden his most private thoughts, and enticed it into him with a pretense of weakness. Before the demon understood that John might have sufficient strength to evict it, he threw aside the shotgun, rushed past Nicky and the kids, toward the glowing crimson wheel, which was not a wheel but a portal, as it had always been a portal waiting to be named.

Racing through snow as bright as blood spray, John saw nothing within the portal except wheels of red light in a red haze. As far as he knew, he might fall through eternity forever, but he sprang across the threshold without hesitation—

—and is in the dark bedroom of his boyhood, only an instant after quietly lowering the bottom sash of the window. The smells of Cindy Shooner are still on him—her perfume and the faint musky scent of sex.

He sees his dark form in the mirror above the dresser, but there is something wrong with it. He steps close enough to see his face as he looked at fourteen.

This is neither a dream nor a vision. It has not one quality of hallucination, but affronts him with the grim texture of horrifying reality. This is the real place, the momentous night, the silence heavy with the weight of