What the Night Knows

22

IN HIS BEDROOM CLOSET, ZACH PULLED ON THE ROPE THAT opened the overhead trapdoor, and the ladder unfolded to his feet.

Since finding the ladder in this position the previous night, he’d thought through the possibilities, and he’d decided that the answer to the mystery was entirely mechanical, as he first suspected. A settling house shifted the trap mechanism slightly, and now from time to time it might drop open and the ladder unfold because its own weight could cause it to release spontaneously.

He didn’t need to ask his dad to help him search the service mezzanine between the second and third floors because there wasn’t anyone in the stupid mezzanine to find. The previous night, his nerves had been fried because of the freaking dream in which the big hands had tried to tear off his face and gouge out his eyes, those fingertips as big as soup spoons. He was a little disappointed in himself that he’d been rattled by a moronic dream. A few times over the years, he’d dreamed of being able to fly like a bird, soaring above everyone, above the city, but he’d never taken a dumb-ass leap off a roof to see if he could actually go lighter-than-air, and he never would, because dreams were just dreams.

Now he was going to search the service mezzanine not because a bad guy was lurking around up there, scheming and cackling like some Phantom of the Opera wannabe, but just for the principle of it, to prove to himself that he wasn’t a chickenhearted, gritless jellyfish. He had a flashlight and a whacking big meat fork with a bone handle, and he was ready to explore.

After he’d gotten a sandwich and some fruit from Mrs. Nash and had brought his lunch to his room, he’d waited until he knew that she and Mr. Nash would be in the dayroom, having their lunch, before he returned to the kitchen to sneak a knife. He opened the wrong drawer, one containing meat forks and skewers and serving utensils, and just then he heard Mrs. Nash coming—saying, “It’s no trouble at all, I’ll get it, dear”—so Zach grabbed a killer fork and closed the drawer and split before she saw him. The stupid thing wasn’t a knife, but it had four- or five-inch tines with wickedly sharp points, so even if it wasn’t anything a marine would be issued in combat, it wasn’t a total weenie weapon, either.

Holding the handle of the fork in his teeth with the tines to one side, as if he were an idiot pirate looking for a turkey dinner to carve up, the flashlight in his left hand, he climbed the ladder. At the top, he sat on the frame of the trap opening and switched on the strings of work lights that looped throughout the mezzanine.

This space had a finished floor, particleboard with a laminated Formica surface, so you could either scoot around easy on your butt or knees, or you could shuffle around in a crouch. The ceiling height was five feet, and Zach stood five feet six, probably going to be six feet like his dad, so he had to prowl the place in a stoop.

In addition to the garlands of work lamps and his flashlight, there were screened ventilation cutouts in the walls, to prevent dangerous mold from growing in here—and to allow squirrels to chew their way in now and then if they felt like it. The daylight didn’t exactly pour in through the screens, just more or less dribbled. The flashlight peeled open the darkness wherever the other lamps didn’t reach, but the movement of it also caused shadows to slide and twist and flutter at the periphery of your vision so you felt something was stalking you out there at the edge of things.

The mezzanine contained more machinery and ducting and pipes and valves and conduits than the engine room of a freaking spaceship. A maze, that’s what it was, full of softly humming systems and clicking relays and the rushing-air sound of pressurized natural gas burning in the furnaces. The air smelled of dust, hot-iron gas rings, and aging preventative insecticide sprayed in the corners by the pest-control guy with the cockroach-feeler mustache.

Holding the flashlight in one hand and the fork in the other, Zach was maybe in the middle of the maze when the work lamps blinked off and when he heard the distinctive sound of the trapdoor thumping shut between the mezzanine and his closet. The night before, when his nerves were fried and when he imagined all kinds of things that might happen if he climbed up here to conduct a search, this was not one of the scenarios that occurred to him.

His flashlight died. The beam faded, faded, faded, and then went out altogether.

Zach wasn’t such a complete bonehead that he believed the loss of both sources of light at the same time must be a coincidence. This was mortal trouble, sure enough, and in mortal trouble you needed to stay calm and think. You didn’t survive freaking Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, or the horrors of old Belleau Wood, by screaming for help and running blindly this way and that.

The service mezzanine might be a maze, okay, but every maze had an exit, and he remained pretty sure of his position relative to the trapdoor. The ventilation cutouts didn’t reveal anything, but the faint glow of them at points around the perimeter served as markers to further guide him. Tiny red, green, yellow, and blue indicator LEDs on the furnaces and the humidifiers would also help him find his way back to the trapdoor.

His biggest concern, bigger than the darkness and bigger than the twisty nature of the return route to safety, was that someone must be in the mezzanine with him. Simple gravity might drop open an out-of-plumb, out-of-balance trapdoor, but gravity couldn’t in a million years pull it up and close it again. And gravity didn’t have fingers to switch off the work lamps.

If some foaming-at-the-mouth maniac had decided to live secretly in the mezzanine, quieter and nuttier than squirrels, he couldn’t be a benign maniac.

Zach continued to grip the dead flashlight tightly in his left hand because it might serve as a secondary weapon, a club with which he might be able to bash an adversary even as he forked him. In the heat of battle, you sometimes ran out of ammunition and your bayonet snapped, and then you had to fight with makeshift weapons. Of course, he’d never possessed a gun with ammunition or a bayonet; he started with makeshift weapons, but the principle still applied.

For a while, Zach stood motionless, waiting for the enemy to reveal his position. The only sounds were the low background noises of the furnaces and the other equipment. The longer he listened, the more those ticks, clicks, and hisses sounded like insects conspiring with one another, as if he were in some kind of godawful hive.

He told himself that the assumption of mortal danger might not be correct, that some joker might be playing games with him. Naomi was capable of trying to frighten him. She might have climbed into the mezzanine to switch off the lights, descended, and put up the ladder. The brother-sister competition to make each other appear to be a geek or an idiot tended to wax and wane, and it had waxed lately, but their pranks were mostly good-humored. This didn’t feel the least bit good-humored. This felt threatening. Besides, if the culprit was Naomi, she would not have been able to contain herself more than ten seconds after closing the trapdoor, she would be down there in his closet, laughing her stupid head off right now, in full loon mode, and he would hear her.

Inaction began to seem like a loser’s strategy. Maybe this crawlspace guy was a supertuned stealth machine, highly trained in the ancient Asian secrets of silent motion, like a ninja assassin or something. The light-footed bastard might be on the move, closing on his clueless target, yet as hushed as a dandelion puffball drifting on a breeze.

Zach knew a lot about the military strategy that had won many famous battles in numerous wars, but applying military strategy to a one-on-one creep-and-kill in a dark crawlspace quickly turned out to be difficult, maybe even impossible.

To his chagrin, Zach felt his heart beating harder, faster. By the second it became increasingly difficult to maintain the stillness necessary to listen for his adversary. He grew convinced that someone approached him from behind, now from ahead, now from the left, the right. If he remained where he stood, he was essentially dead on his feet, a corpse waiting to happen.

Lightless flashlight and two-pronged fork held in front of him, crouching lower to avoid ceiling-suspended ducts and pipes, he turned and began to inch back the way he’d come. Something brushed the top of his head, but he knew it wasn’t anything alive, and he bumped into a sheet-metal panel on a furnace, which pealed hollowly like the fake thunder of stage-show sound effects. The flashlight knocked against a wood post. The floor creaked underfoot. The steel tines of the fork stuttered against another metal surface. The harder he tried to be quiet, the noisier he became.

Zach’s heart boomed, the loudest noise he made, at least to his own ears, although his breathing wasn’t exactly hushed. He was virtually snorting. At the same time that he grew ever more frantic to escape the darkness, he became increasingly mortified by his poor self-control, and he fought against descent into flat-out panic.

Blindly, he felt his way between something and something else, intuitively turned right, into a pitch-black pocket of the maze where not even an LED indicator light relieved the gloom, and the cool air abruptly plunged twenty degrees, maybe thirty, pricking shivers from him. He froze, not as a consequence of the cold air but because he sensed that someone crouched immediately in front of him, that he’d come face-to-face with his unknown adversary. Although he couldn’t see anyone in this blackout, he knew a man loomed, a man big and strong and not in the least afraid of him.

No. Get real. Stay cool. Just his imagination running wild. There was nothing in front of him but more darkness, which he could prove easy enough by thrusting fiercely at the void with the fork. The two long tines sank into someone, into a freaking wall of meat. No one cried out, no one grunted in pain, and Zach wanted to believe he’d stabbed something inanimate.

That hope was instantly dispelled when a hand, as slick and cold as a dead fish, closed around his wrist, engulfed his wrist, as big as the hand that tried to tear his face off in the dream. He couldn’t pull free. He sensed the man seizing the shank of the fork, wrenching the tines out of himself. Zach held desperately to the handle. If he lost control of the weapon, he’d be stabbed with it—relentlessly stabbed, gouged, torn.

Inches from Zach’s face came a cruel voice speaking in a low hoarse whisper: “I know you, boy, I know you now.”

Zach’s cry for help couldn’t press past his lips, but instead fell like a stone into the well of his throat, seeming to block his airway, so he could neither exhale nor inhale.

To Zach’s surprise, the brute knocked him backward, the fork still in his fist, and he fell on his back as the iciness instantly melted from the air. The work lamps brightened, as did the beam from the flashlight still clutched in his left hand, and shadows flew away to farther corners.

Gasping, he sat up, alone in the light, alive and alone, the fork thrust forward defensively in his right hand. The shank of the weapon was bent at a severe angle from the handle, and the two long steel prongs were twined together as if they were ribbons.