What the Night Knows

25

NICOLETTE WOKE FROM A DEEP DARKNESS IN WHICH LESSER darknesses moved, and she found herself alone at the bottom of a well, light high overhead but shadows here, and cold stone for a bed.

As her disorientation passed, she realized the light came from the clerestory windows that faced away from the westering sun of the afternoon. She remembered the exploding bathroom mirror.

Wary of the danger of shattered glass, she moved circumspectly, anticipating the brittle notes of shards falling from her onto the limestone floor. There was no such glassy music, and when she touched her face, she found no embedded splinters, no wounds, no blood.

No debris crackled underfoot as Nicky rose. She discovered the mirror intact.

The undiminished memory of the looming figure, the strange and shadowed face where her reflection should have been, chilled her now just as the blast of arctic air, out of the disintegrating mirror, chilled her then.

On the black-granite counter lay the loop of waxed floss with which she had cleaned her teeth, and beside it stood the tumbler of water with which she had rinsed her mouth. The scarecrow figure had seemed as real as these everyday objects.

She switched on the lights. In the clear depths of the mirror, she was the sole presence.

When she consulted her wristwatch, she realized that she had been lying on the floor for longer than an hour.

Such a period of unconsciousness suggested a serious knock on the head, the danger of concussion. She did not feel concussed—no dizziness, no blurred vision, no nausea—and when she explored her skull with her fingertips, she found no tender spot.

Brooding about what had happened, she rinsed the drinking glass and dried it with paper towels. She returned it to the drawer from which she had gotten it earlier.

As she threw the paper towels and the length of floss in the small trash can, her tongue found the hole from which the first molar on the lower left side had been extracted a month earlier. She knew at once a possible explanation for the man in the mirror and the exploding glass.

The oral surgery had taken a few hours because every speck of the fused roots of the broken-off tooth had to be drilled out of the jawbone. Her periodontist, Dr. Westlake, prescribed Vicodin for the post-operative pain, which was sharp and persistent. Nicky took the drug only twice before experiencing a serious adverse effect, a rare idiosyncratic reaction: frightening hallucinations.

Those visions were different in substance but akin in feeling to the apparition in the mirror. She had not taken Vicodin in twenty-six days, but it must somehow be the culprit in this case.

She would have to call Dr. Westlake to inquire if a flashback hallucination was possible after so much time. She knew that some drugs remained in the body, at least in trace amounts, weeks after being taken. Such a possibility disquieted her.

In the library, Zach and Naomi and Minnie sat at different tables, and Leonid Sinyavski cycled from one to the other, providing different levels of instruction, yet making them feel as though they were a class of equals.

Math was a sport to Zachary. The problems were games to be won. And good math skills would be crucial if he became a marine sniper targeting bad guys at two thousand yards. Even if he didn’t qualify for sniper training or if he decided against it, military strategy was intellectually demanding, and knowledge of higher mathematics would always be super-useful no matter what his specialty.

He liked Professor Sinyavski: the cartoony white hair bristling every which way, those bizarro eyebrows like huge furry caterpillars predicting a hard winter, the rubbery face and the exaggerated expressions meant to drive a point home, the way he made you feel smart even when you were stuck in stupid. But this time Zach couldn’t concentrate on geometry. He wished away the two-hour session with such intensity that of course it crawled past like twenty hours.

All that he could think about was the encounter in the service mezzanine. The bent shank of the fork. The braided tines. The low, hoarse whisper: I know you, boy, I know you now.

The incident either happened or it didn’t.

If it happened, some godawful supernatural presence lurked in the mezzanine. No real person could be stabbed and not bleed. No real person could twist the stainless-steel prongs of a big old meat fork as if they were blades of grass.

If it didn’t happen, then Zach must be mentally ill.

He didn’t believe he could be flat-out insane. He didn’t wear an aluminum-foil hat to prevent telepathic aliens from reading his thoughts, he didn’t eat live bugs—or dead ones, either—and he didn’t think God was talking to him and telling him to kill everyone he saw who wore blue socks or something. At worst, he might be having delusions, moments of delirium, like because of some stupid blood-chemistry imbalance. If that was true, he wasn’t really even halfway nuts, he was just the screwed-up victim of a medical condition, and no danger to anyone except maybe to himself.

The damaged meat fork seemed to disprove the delusion theory. Unless he imagined the fork along with everything else.

To accept the supernatural explanation would be to acknowledge that there were things you couldn’t deal with no matter how strong and smart and brave and well-trained in the art of self-defense you might become. Zach loathed admitting such a thing.

But to accept the mental-illness explanation, he would have to admit a similar and even more distressing fact: that no matter how smart and courageous and well-intentioned you were, there was always a chance that you would not become the person you envisioned yourself being, because your own mind or body could fail you.

In either case, a supernatural invasion of the service mezzanine or some half-assed madness, sooner or later he would need to have a conversation with his parents about the situation, which was dead sure to be almost as just-kill-me-now mortifying as the conversation he had with his dad about sex a year or so previously.

Before he sat down with his folks to reveal that he was either a superstitious idiot or a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic in the making, Zach wanted to think further about what had happened. Maybe he would arrive at a third explanation that would obviously be the correct one and that would spare him embarrassment.

To make a point, Professor Sinyavski pulled a small red ball from Minnie’s left ear, turned it into a trio of green balls in front of their eyes, and juggled the three until somehow they all became yellow without anyone noticing when it happened.

To Zachary, this kind of prestidigitation no longer qualified as magic. His world had changed a little while earlier; and now reality encompassed things that once seemed impossible.

Naomi doubted that any human being really understood math, they simply all pretended to have it down pat, when in truth they were every bit as confused by it as she was. Math was nothing but a giant hoax, and everyone participated in it, everyone faked a belief in math so they could be done with the hideous classes and the drudgery of the hateful homework and get on with life. The sun came up every morning, so the sun was real, and every time you inhaled you got the air you needed, so the atmosphere was obviously real, but half the time when you tried to use math to solve the simplest problem, the math absolutely would not work, which meant that it couldn’t be real like the sun and the atmosphere. Math was a waste of time.

Not only was math a waste of time, it was also immensely boring, so she pretended to understand what dear Professor Sinyavski prattled on about, and she pretended actually to listen to the sweet man. Mostly she had him bamboozled, which suggested a future as an actress might indeed be in her cards. While she handily deceived the genius Russian into believing he had her attention, Naomi actually thought about the enchanted mirror they had secreted in the storage room, and she wondered if they had been too hasty about removing it from their bedroom.

I know you now, my ignorant little bitch.

In memory, as clear as anything on a CD, she could hear the creepy voice that had spoken to her and to her alone, and it still scared her. But she realized now that she should not have judged the nature of the entire vast and fabulous land beyond the mirror from evidence consisting of merely eight words spoken by a perhaps evil but certainly rude individual. There were many rude people on this side of the looking glass, too, and evil ones, but this entire world wasn’t rude and evil. If a magic kingdom truly waited beyond the mirror—a real magic kingdom, not just another Disney World—it would be populated by all kinds of people, good and bad. She had probably heard the voice of a wicked wizard, perhaps the sworn archenemy of the kingdom’s good and noble prince, in which case he had probably spoken to her with the sole intention of scaring her off, chasing her away from the prince, who needed her at his side, and from her glorious destiny.

For more years than she could remember, for eons, Naomi dreamed of finding a doorway to a more magical world than this one, and now that she finally discovered precisely such a portal, she allowed a typical eight-year-old booby with a still-developing brain to spook her from pursuing the adventure for which she’d been born. You had to be so careful with peewee siblings. In spite of their laughable big-baby ways, they could be so convincing that they infected you with fraidy-cat flu before you realized it was contagious.

Later, this evening, after Minnie went to sleep and could no longer spread her plague of panic, Naomi would return to the storage room to investigate the mirror further. She wouldn’t try to step into it or reach through it. She wouldn’t even touch it. But she owed it to herself, to her future, to see if she could contact the prince who might wait for her in the world beyond. The wizard—or whatever he might be—had essentially phoned her through the mirror, and she had received his call. Maybe if she placed the call, if she faced the mirror and asked for the prince, for the rightful ruler of that land, he would speak to her, and her life of great magic would begin.

Minnie could see that Naomi schemed at something. She could tell that Zach worried about something.

Some kind of big trouble was coming. Minnie wished that good old Willard, the best dog ever, were still alive.