What the Night Knows

17

ZACH DREAMED THAT HE WOKE IN HIS DARK BEDROOM AND saw a blade of amber radiance slicing out of the closet, under the door. In the dream, he lay staring at this narrow brightness, trying to remember if he had extinguished the closet light before going to bed, and he decided that, yes, he had turned it off.

He switched on his nightstand lamp, which left most of the room still in shadows, and he got up from the bed and slowly approached the closet, behaving exactly like your typical bonehead in a brain-dead horror movie where everyone dies because everyone is terminally stupid. When he put his hand on the doorknob, the light in the closet went out.

Someone or some godawful thing had to be in there to operate the switch, so the worst of all dumb-ass moves would be to open the closet without having a weapon. Nevertheless, Zach watched his hand rotate the knob, as though he had no control over it, as though this also must be one of those movies in which a clueless dork undergoes a hand transplant and the hand has a mind of its own.

This was when he began to realize he was dreaming—because his hands were the same pair with which he’d been born, and they always did only what he intended them to do. With that fluid transitional dissolve common to dreams, he never opened the door, yet abruptly it stood wide, and he was poised on the threshold of the pitch-black closet.

Out of that lightless hole, enormous hands seized him, one by the throat, the other gripping his face, meaty palm crushing his nose, stoppering his mouth, his scream, his breath.

He seized the hand that cupped his face, frantic to break free, the wrist as massive as a horse’s hock, hard gnarl of bones, thick tendons. Cold, greasy fingertips bigger than soup spoons digging at his eyes, and no breath, no breath—

Sucking breath at last, Zach startled up in bed, the nightmare bursting away like a shattering shell.

The thunder of his heart pealed through him, but even as his dream fear quickly subsided from its peak, he saw that the fright-flick scenario of his sleep played out also in the waking world. In the true darkness of the real room, the blade of amber light knifed through the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.

Earlier, when the door swung open on its own, he dismissed it as the house settling, the door out of plumb and moved by gravity. When it seemed, as an afterthought, that something had been wrong with his reflection when he saluted himself in the mirror, he didn’t dwell on it, didn’t hurry back to take a second look, because he recognized who were the actual-factual, sure-enough villains in the world and didn’t need bogeymen to distract him from worrying about real evil.

Some quality of the just-ended dream changed him. Suddenly he knew a kind of fear he hadn’t felt before, or maybe it was a kind that hadn’t rocked him in so long that his memory of it faded the same way that his memory of infancy had receded beyond recall.

Most nightmares were less ordeals than they were entertainments, infrequent rides through a funhouse of the mind. You drifted in your stupid gondola past one weird tableau after another until one of the horrors turned out to be real and the totally improbable chase was on. After a brief terror, you woke, and if you were able to remember the details, they were usually ridiculous and they made you laugh, just a brainless spookshow no scarier than the kind of half-assed monsters you’d find in a TV cartoon for little kids.

This freaking dream had felt as fully real as the room into which he awakened: the cold, greasy hardness of the assaulting hands; the pain of his nose pressed flat, nostrils pinched; the sense of suffocation. Even now, a lingering ache in his eyes suggested that the soup-spoon fingers had been real and would have gouged him blind if he hadn’t thrashed up from sleep.

He switched on the nightstand lamp and sprang out of bed, though not to rush the closet as the idiot Zach had done in the dream. In the corner near his desk stood a replica of a Mameluke sword, which he drew from a highly polished nickel-plated scabbard.

Modern-day Mamelukes were strictly for show, cool badges of rank carried by officers during ceremonies of various kinds. This one was stainless steel, the ricasso engraved, the quillon and the pommel handsomely gilded. And like any ceremonial sword, the edge was dull and useless as a weapon. The point wasn’t battle-sharp, either, but it could still do damage that the edge of the blade couldn’t.

Standing to the side of the closet, Zach threw open the door with his left hand, the Mameluke ready in his right. No assailant flew into the room to test the point of the sword.

The walk-in closet harbored no one, but it did hold a surprise. The ceiling trapdoor had been dropped, the folding ladder unfolded. Between the second and third floors, the dark crawlspace waited for him.

Zach hesitated at the base of the ladder, peering up, listening. He detected only the susurration of the ring burners in the two gas furnaces that heated the second and third floors, a hollow whispery sound like the roar of a waterfall heard from a great distance.

The crawlspace was actually a half floor, a five-foot-high service mezzanine, so you could almost stand erect. It housed the two furnaces, humidifiers, a few hundred feet of flexible ductwork running every which way, copper water lines, both iron and PVC drain pipes, and who the hell knew what. Just the farther side of the trap, you could switch on garlands of work lights, which were used whenever plumbers or electricians needed to go up there to perform periodic maintenance or to make repairs.

Little more than a month before, a geeky exterminator with bug eyes and a long mustache like insect antennae had climbed into the service mezzanine to search for signs of vermin. Instead of rats, he found a nest of squirrels that entered through a torn vent screen.

Nothing as innocent as a pack of squirrels had opened the trap and put down the ladder while Zach slept.

He didn’t lack the courage to search the space above; however, he would have to be the bonehead of all boneheads if he went up there at night with no weapon other than a cool but cumbersome dull-edged sword. He needed a good flashlight, too, because the strings of bare bulbs by which repairmen worked didn’t chase the shadows out of every corner. The following afternoon, after lessons and lunch, he might climb into the service space, have a look, poke around, see what he could see.

Maybe he would tell his father. They could search the mezzanine together.

With his left hand, Zach lifted the bottom of the ladder and folded back the lowest of four hinged sections, whereupon a clever automatic mechanism took over and accordioned the whole thing onto the back of the trapdoor, which swung up into place with a thump.

He stood in the closet for a while, until the pull-ring on the trapdoor rope stopped swinging like a pendulum, and then another minute or two. No one tried to put the ladder down again.

Exterior doors were kept locked even during the day. Dad said bad guys weren’t like vampires, they didn’t hide from the sun, they were up to no good 24/7, so you never did anything to make their work easier. No one could have sneaked inside and ascended to the mezzanine to hide.

More likely, the settling of the house that brought the closet door out of plumb was also to blame for this. Because of a slight shift in the structure, the weight of the ladder and gravity could have overpowered the spring-loaded closure, causing the trapdoor to drop open and the ladder to unfold on its own.

In fact, that must be exactly what had happened. Any other explanation was stupid kid stuff for gutless bed-wetters.

Before killing the closet light, he studied himself in the full-length mirror. He slept in briefs and a T-shirt. Although not superbuff, he wasn’t by any definition scrawny. Yet he appeared smaller than his image of himself. His legs seemed thin. Pink knees, pale feet. The sword was too big for him, perhaps for any thirteen-year-old. He didn’t look laugh-out-loud, bust-a-gut stupid, but he for sure didn’t look anything like a guy on a recruiting poster, either.

After turning off the closet light, he braced the door shut with his desk chair, although doing so embarrassed him a little.

He placed the sword on his bed and slipped beneath the covers, only his head and right arm exposed. His hand lay lightly on the hilt of the Mameluke.

For a few minutes, he considered the nightstand lamp, but at last he decided that leaving it aglow was what a spineless jellyfish would do, a fully wilted wimp. He had no fear of the dark. Zip, zero, nada. No fear of darkness itself, anyway.

With the lamp out and the gloom relieved only by the pale-gray rectangles of curtained windows and the clock-radio light, Zach became convinced that, as earlier in the night, something had not been right about his reflection. He assumed that he’d lie awake until morning and that before dawn he would figure out what troubled him, but after a while an avalanche of weariness overcame him. As he was carried down into sleep, he saw himself in the mirror, pale feet and pink knees and too-thin legs, all of that quite true and right even if dismaying. Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not gray-blue like his eyes really were, but black instead, as black as soot, as black as sleep.