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

murder.

He waits, anticipating silvery bells, and the bells ring.

John moves to the door, and the bells ring again.

Eases the door open. Steps into the hall. Light radiates from his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms.

On the floor, the black satchel. Beside it, the pistol fitted with the homemade silencer.

This is not memory. This is the moment. This is the past that made his future.

He doesn’t understand why he is here. The bells suggest that they’re all dead, as before. Therefore, he isn’t here to save them.

And if he could save them, he would change his future, perhaps to one in which he never met Nicky, in which his own children were never born.

More terrified now than then, he stoops, picks up the handgun, removes the silencer.

The open door to his parents’ room. In there—the blood-soaked bed, the empty eggs in pale dead hands.

As the bells ring again, his frantic heart knocks hard against its cage.

He sidles along the hallway, pistol in front of him, his hands sweaty as they had not been on that night. He hesitates a step short of the girls’ room, hears the bells once more.

He steps into the doorway, into the hateful light that reveals the beloved dead.

Blackwood crouches like a feeding raptor, like a sharp-beaked raven over the torn bodies of songbirds. Mouth red and wet and cruel.

The black-hole eyes shift from the tender victims to John in the doorway. The graveyard voice speaks the same words as before: “This little girl said you were gone to Grandma’s for a week.”

John realizes he is here to do something different from what he did the first time that he lived this night. But what? For God’s sake, what?

Like some prehistoric missing link between ancient reptile and humankind, Blackwood rises from the girl, the girl forever lost, and says, “Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”

Heart slamming, pistol sight jumping on the target, hoping to buy time to think, John says in the trembling voice of a boy, “Come out of there, get away from them.”

Blackwood towers over the blessed ruins, humpbacked Death with a bloody grin.

“Get away from them now, you sonofabitch!”

Blackwood takes a step forward, John backs out of the doorway, and Blackwood follows him into the hall.

Without knowing how he knows, John knows that if he dies here at Blackwood’s hands, he dies for real, and all the life he lived hereafter will never have happened. Nicky will marry someone else. Children other than Zach and Naomi and Minnie will be born. All is at risk and there is no room for error.

The dead can’t be resurrected by a mere man. What he’s being offered is not the past undone, but instead a chance to disinvite the spirit whose return he encouraged by his guilt, obsession, and ceaseless worry.

Grinning, Blackwood seems not to fear the gun, but approaches, forcing John to back along the hallway as he tries desperately to imagine what he must do.

“Listen to me, boy. You’ll be a daddy someday,” Blackwood says—

—and John knows in the instant that what he must prevent is the Promise that inflamed his imagination, that haunted him, obsessed him, and made him vulnerable to the undying fury of this implacable spirit and to the thing called Ruin.

He shouts, “Shut up!”

Blackwood steps forward, John backward, Blackwood forward, John backward onto the killer’s satchel. He stumbles, falls. Blackwood rushes, looms.

John fires up, it’s a wild shot that shouldn’t score, but score it does, a gut shot. Blackwood staggers forward and falls atop John, a weight of greasy flesh and deformed bones.

Eye to eye, Blackwood says in a rough whisper, his breath hot on John’s mouth: “You’ll be a daddy someday—”

The pistol is between them, still clutched in John’s hand, he can’t guess which of them will take the bullet, but he squeezes the trigger. The muffled shot widens Alton Blackwood’s fierce eyes, and suddenly he seems twice as heavy as before.

Gasping, making wordless sounds of terror and revulsion, John rolls Blackwood off him, scrambles to his feet, looks down, and in the dim light sees life still shining in those dreadful eyes, and the lips moving to form the next words.

John empties the magazine of the pistol, and Blackwood’s face dissolves from one kind of horror to another.

As John backs away from the corpse, the shade of Alton Turner Blackwood rises from it, a transparent image in a silent rage—which folds in upon itself and is gone. A second entity arises from the corpse, far more abhorrent than Blackwood. Asymmetrical, twisted, crookbacked, yellow-eyed, this abomination named Ruin hovers for an instant—then follows Blackwood’s shade into oblivion.

The Promise was a curse. The curse is lifted now and forever.

The house is hushed. What was lost is still lost, though not forever, and something has been gained. What the heart knows trumps what the night knows.

John drops the gun, turns away, and as on that long-remembered night, he hurries down the stairs. Back then, he was compelled to find another gun, load it, and kill himself. But now … as he comes off the bottom step, he plunges not into the lower hall but through the portal, into a night streaming with crimson snow.

Before him waited his safe and living family. He had done the right thing, after all, sacrificing himself for them, an act of atonement that at last gave meaning to the past twenty years of his life.

Behind him, the eldritch light faded until the portal vanished. The wheel from which it had formed was gone. In days of old, when angels visited or when a bush burned without being consumed, no video cameras existed to record the moments. Likewise, nothing remained to prove the wheel had ever existed—except for the trench through the yard and the cracked flagstones. Machina ex Deo.

A flood of joy swept fear away, and the sight of his precious family blurred before him. He started toward them, and they toward him. At the same time, from out of the night and the cascading snow, in a toboggan hat and a navy peacoat, came Lionel Timmins, wide-eyed and speechless. He found himself at the center of the converging Calvinos, which was at that moment a magical, emotional, freaking perspicacious place to be.

Entering the kitchen with the meat cleaver, with a headache caused by the blow to her head, and with bad intentions, Melody Lane halted when she felt the thread snap. The ethereal line between her and the entity that had once ridden her, that she served even when not ridden, was disconnected. She waited for it to be reestablished, for she was looking forward to drinking life from the dying boy. But after a minute, she put down the cleaver and departed the house by the front door, because without the protection and guidance of the spirit rider, this place was too dangerous.

Melody trudged through the storm to her parked car, started the engine, switched on the wipers to sweep the snow from the windshield. As she drove into the street, she decided to move on to a new place. There were tens of thousands of cities and towns out there, in which millions of children were at this very moment breathing when they shouldn’t be. Melody had a responsibility not to future generations but to eliminate future generations. We all have a responsibility. Some shirked it, but not she.

As she drove, Melody delighted in the magical scenes through which she passed, the city gowned and jeweled in snow. Her sweet and gentle voice matched the moment when she began to sing “Winter Wonderland.”

50

FOR FIVE MONTHS AFTER JOHN DISPATCHED ALTON TURNER Blackwood to Hell for the second time, the Calvinos lived in a rented residence while the interior of their house was repaired, painted, carpeted, and cleaned