What the Night Knows

19

THE RAIN DIMINISHED DURING THE NIGHT AND ENDED AS dawn broke. By the time John turned off the county highway onto the beech-lined approach road that served the state hospital, the cloud cover was worn thin, but it was nowhere threadbare enough to reveal blue sky.

On the hilltop, the institution huddled fortresslike, its parapeted roof resembling battlements, its windows wider than arrow loops in a castle wall but not by much, as though the place had been designed to defend against the sanity of the outside world rather than to keep its disturbed or even insane patients from wreaking havoc beyond its walls.

He parked under the portico again and displayed his POLICE placard on the dashboard.

On the telephone hours earlier, Dennis Mummers, who manned the third-floor security desk during the graveyard shift, said something about Billy Lucas that required this second visit. When John asked about the boy’s reaction to the search of his room, the guard’s response did not at first seem significant. Later, it did.

He didn’t say anything. Something’s happened to him. He kind of cratered. He’s funked out, withdrawn, not talking at all to anyone.

Karen Eisler, smelling of break-time cigarettes and wintermint breath freshener, entered John in the log at the reception desk.

Because he had spoken to Coleman Hanes en route, not more than twenty minutes earlier, the orderly did not have to be paged. He was waiting when John arrived.

In the elevator, Hanes said, “I’d still prefer you saw him in the conference room, like yesterday.”

“If he’s in total withdrawal, a wall of armored glass between us only makes my job harder.”

“I can’t leave anyone alone with him in his room, as much for his protection as for the visitor’s.”

“No problem. Stay with us.”

“We’ve put him in restraints for your visit. I don’t think it’s necessary, the way he is now, but it’s the rule.”

In the security vestibule, John surrendered his service pistol.

Walking the third-floor hall, Hanes said, “He stopped eating last evening. This morning, he’s refused liquids. If this keeps up, we’ll have to force-feed him. That’s an ugly thing.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“It’s still damn ugly.”

Billy’s room—pale-blue walls, white ceiling, white tile floor—contained a safely upholstered chair without tufting or welting and a yard-square molded-plastic table tall enough for dining. A four-foot-wide concrete shelf protruding from a wall served as a bed, made comfortable with a thick foam mattress.

Lying on his back, head propped on two pillows, Billy did not react when they entered.

The restraints consisted of nylon-mesh netting that wrapped his torso, keeping his arms crossed on his chest, and between his ankles a trammeling strap to which the upper-body netting was secured.

John stood over Billy for a moment, hoping not to see what he expected to see, but he saw it at once, and the sight so affected him that his legs grew weak and he sat on the edge of the bed.

Coleman Hanes closed the door and stood with his back to it.

The boy’s once fiery eyes were burnt out, still blue but as without depth as the glass orbs of a cheap doll, lacking their former intensity of feeling, their challenge and arrogance. Billy stared at the ceiling, but perhaps he did not see it. Although he blinked from time to time, he never changed focus, his steady stare like that of a blind man lost in thought.

His face remained as smooth as before. But his fresh-cream complexion had in less than a day curdled into a pallor. A gray tint shadowed the skin in the hollows of his eyes, as if those two fierce flames, now extinguished, had produced a residue of ashes.

His hair looked vaguely damp, perhaps with sweat, and his pale forehead appeared greasy.

“Billy?” John said. “Billy, do you remember me?”

The gaze remained fixed, not on the ceiling but on something in another place, another time.

“Yesterday, the voice was yours, Billy, the voice but not the words.”

The boy’s mouth hung open slightly, as though he had exhaled his final breath and waited with the patience of the dead for a mortician to sew his parted lips together.

“Not the words and not the hatred.”

Body as limp as a cadaver prior to rigor mortis, Billy did not strain whatsoever against the restrictive netting.

“You were just a boy when he … walked in. Now you’re just a boy again. You see? I understand. I know.”

Billy’s silence and stillness signified not mere indifference, but instead a mortal apathy born of despair, a retreat from all feeling and all hope.

“You were the glove. He was the hand. He has no further use for you. He never will.”

How strange it felt to say these things, almost stranger than believing them.

“I wish I knew why you instead of someone else. What made you vulnerable?”

Even if one shiny fragment of the boy remained among the crazed ruins on the dark floor of his mind, even if one day he cared to live and if he spoke again coherently, he might not know why or how he had become an instrument of destruction in the service of the thing—all right, say it, the corrupted spirit—that had once been Alton Turner Blackwood.

“If you, why not anyone?” John wondered, thinking forward to the tenth of December, three months hence, when he might need to defend his family against the entire world. Anyone he encountered might be the glove in which the monstrous hand was next concealed. “If you … why not me?”

His biggest fear was not that something otherworldly had come home with him the previous day.

His biggest fear was that some flaw or weakness in himself would prove to be a door through which he might be entered as easily as a murderer, with a glass cutter, could enter a locked house.

To Billy he said, “You must be very broken now. He wouldn’t leave you whole. One good boy in a million pieces.”

John put one hand on Billy’s forehead, expecting to find him feverish. But though greasy with a scrim of sweat, the pale skin felt cold.

“If you find a way to talk and if you want to talk, tell them to call me,” John said, without much hope that it would happen. “I’ll come back. I’ll come back right away.”

He could see himself reflected in the boy’s flat blue eyes, seeming to be transparent as he floated upon those irises, as if he were a man who had two spirits and was engaged in a double haunting.

Smoothing the lank hair away from Billy’s brow, he whispered, “God help you. God help me.”

In the third-floor corridor, after Coleman Hanes closed the door to the room, he said, “What the hell was that about?”

Heading toward the security vestibule, John said, “How long has he been like that?”

“Since late yesterday afternoon. What’s this glove and hand business?”

“He became like that immediately after I left? An hour after, two hours?” John pressed.

“Soon after. What is this, what did you want in there?”

“Like twenty minutes after, ten after, five?” John rapped on the window in the security-vestibule door.

Hanes said, “Right after, I guess. I don’t know to the minute. Are you going to tell me what you were doing in there?”

As the guard buzzed them into the vestibule, John said, “I don’t talk about evidence in an open case.”

“This is an open-and-shut case.”

“It’s technically open.”

Hanes’s usually pleasant face became a storm warning. He kept the pending thunder out of his voice, making a conscious effort to speak more softly. “Nine times he stabbed his sister.”

John retrieved his pistol from the guard and holstered it. “If he comes out of the trance or whatever it is, if he wants to talk to me, I’ll come back.”

Hanes loomed, intimidating. “He doesn’t belong out there. Not ever.”

“That’s not what this is about,” John said as he pushed the elevator-call button.

“It sure sounded like that’s what it’s about.”

“Well, it’s not. Call me if he comes around. Call me whether he asks for me or not.” The elevator door slid open, and John stepped into the cab. “I can find my way out.”

“That’s not the rules,” the big man said, staying close behind him, crowding him. “I have to escort you.”

After a silence, between the second and the ground floors, John said, “My son wants to be a marine. Any advice for him?”

“You remember her picture?” Hanes asked.

“Your sister? I do. I remember.”

“I don’t guess you’d remember her name?”

“I remember all their names. She was Angela, Angela Denise.”

John’s memory and his words clearly did not allay the orderly’s suspicion.

In the lobby, as they walked past the reception desk toward the main entrance, Hanes said, “Twenty-two years, she’s still dead—and the guy who did her, he’s got this woman admirer, she writes a blog about him. He’s got followers.”

“Billy Lucas is never going to have followers.”

“Oh, yes, he will. They all do. Every last sick damn one of them.”

Hanes spoke the truth.

John said, “I can only tell you that isn’t what this is about. I’m not his champion. He’ll never be freed either from these walls or from what he saw himself do.”

Still unappeased, Hanes followed John through the front doors, jostling him—perhaps unintentionally—when he fished his car keys from a sport-coat pocket.

The dropped keys rang off the pavement, and Hanes snatched them up. He held them in a clenched fist.

The orderly’s eyes narrowed in his bleak brown face. “ ‘What he saw himself do’? That’s a strange choice of words.”

John met the other man’s stare but only shrugged.

“The way you were with him in there,” Hanes said.

“What way was that?”

“Sad. No. Not sad. Almost … tender.”

John stared at the fist that held the keys, the fist of a man who had been to war and no doubt killed in self-defense.

Then he looked at his own hands, with which he had killed Alton Turner Blackwood twenty years earlier, with which he had wounded two men and killed another during his years of police work.

He said, “There was a brilliant artist, Caravaggio, he died back in 1610, when he was only thirty-nine years old. In his time, he was arguably the greatest painter in the world.”

“What’s he to me?”

“What are you to me or me to you? Caravaggio led a troubled life, brought to trial eleven times. He murdered a man, had to go on the run. Yet he was profoundly religious. He painted masterpiece after masterpiece on Christian themes, among other things.”

“A hypocrite,” the orderly said.

“No. He knew his faults, despised them. He was a tormented man. Maybe because he was tormented, he rejected the classical idealism of Michelangelo that other painters still embraced. He portrayed the human body and the human condition with a realism no one before him ever dared. The figures in his religious paintings aren’t ethereal and idealized. They’re deeply human, their suffering explicit.”

“What’s the point of this?” Hanes asked impatiently.

“I need my car keys. I’m explaining why you should give them back to me. One of Caravaggio’s paintings is called The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Peter is shown as a post-middle-aged man with a thick body and a worn face. There’s Peter nailed to a cross, three men lifting it, hauling it erect. There’s darkness and menace in the picture, such violence. The expression on Peter’s face is complex, compelling, you can’t stop staring at it. A man like you or me … we should see that painting for the first time alone, no one watching. Study it, give it an hour, and Caravaggio will show you the horror of what we are but the glory of what we could be, he’ll take you from despair to hope and back again. If you let him … he’ll reduce you to tears.”

“Maybe not,” Hanes said.

“Maybe not. But maybe so. Here’s the thing. I admire Caravaggio’s talent, the genius and hard work he brought to it. I admire the faith he tried—and often failed—to live by. But if I’d been a cop in his time, I would’ve chased him from one end of Europe to the other till I caught him, and I’d have seen him hanged. A hundred works of genius aren’t compensation for the murder of a single innocent.”

Hanes had a searchlight stare, and after a silent assessment, he relinquished the keys.

John rounded the car to the driver’s door.

The orderly said, “Your son, he wants to be a marine—what’s his name?”

“Zachary. Zach.”

“Tell him, it’ll be the best thing he’ll ever do.”

“I will.”

“Tell him, he’ll never regret one moment of it, except maybe the moment he retires from it. And one more thing.”

John waited at the open car door.

“Someday I’d like to know what that was about in there.”

“If I’m around at Christmas, come have dinner with us.”

“Deal. How do you spell ‘Caravaggio’?”

After spelling it, John got in the car and drove away.

In a few weeks, the purple beeches in the median strip between the two lanes would change to a rich shade of copper.

By Christmas, these trees would be bare.

He remembered other purple beeches in a park, their copper-leafed limbs draped with an early snow, a dazzling display.

Willard had been alive then, romping in a foot of white powder with the kids. The retriever and the trees had been the same shade of copper.

Again, he brooded about getting a German shepherd or another protective breed. But then he realized that perhaps an animal, as easily as a human being, could be the glove in which the hand of Alton Turner Blackwood might be hidden.

Weary from too little sleep, John wondered what condition he would be in by the tenth of December, Zach’s birthday, when and if a dead man came to visit.