What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

The boy and the world would never be in harmony, but the boy and the night became as one. The boy flowed through the woods and meadows of the night, and the night flowed through the boy.

After that first exhilarating excursion, which ended minutes before dawn, he carried a small flashlight with him for those places where moonlight couldn’t reach and for those nights when the sky was moonless or brightened by only the thinnest crescent. He never used the flashlight within sight of the house.

Over the next few years, the boy’s night vision improved to an uncanny degree. The more time he spent out in the world between dusk and dawn, the better he could see even when the sky was overcast and the stars were only legend. He used the flashlight less and less, and his trust of the night was rewarded when the night increasingly, generously opened itself to him.

Once, kneeling at the edge of the deep pond, listening to fish take insects off the surface and wondering whether he might be quick enough with his hand to snatch one of those closest to the bank, he glimpsed his vague reflection in the inky water. But his eyes were not dark as human eyes should have been in such conditions. In them shimmered the faintest gold of animal eye-shine; his eyes drank in the weak glow from a quarter moon and the far twinkle of stars, and magnified them to assist his vision.

However far the boy went or how late he roamed, the raven stayed with him. He was sure it did. Sometimes he saw it backlit by the moon or detected its silhouette gliding across a star-speckled vault. From time to time, he glimpsed its moonshadow undulating across the land.

And if for periods of time he didn’t see the bird, he always heard it. The flap of pinions. The whoosh of rigid wings in a gliding dive. The disturbance of leaves as it preceded him tree limb to tree limb through the dismal forest. Its low resonant prruck, its baritone brronk, its occasional bell-clear cry.

The raven was his companion, his tutelary, his familiar. The raven taught him about the night, and the boy began to learn what the night knows.

The land welcomed the boy as entirely as the darkness did. The fields, the woods, the stream, the pond, every vale and every hill and every thrusting mass of rock. He could walk any deer trail, make a new trail of his own, thrash through a thicket of any composition, and come to dawn without a burr or thistle in his clothes, without nettle rash or poison ivy. No insect ever bit or stung him, nor any snake. He could ascend steep inclines of loose shale as quietly as he could make his way up slopes of grass. No vine tripped, no bramble snared. He was never lost. He roamed the night land as though he might be some goat-legged, goat-eared, horned god who ruled all wild things.

In time, he began to kill two or three nights a month. Mostly rabbits. They appeared before dusk, coming out of their burrows, into meadows, to nibble on tender grass and flavorful weeds. The boy sat in the meadow to wait for them, sometimes catching the musky smell of them before they arrived. His own scent was by this time familiar to everything that ran or hopped, or crawled, or slithered. He could sit on a rock or log with such perfect stillness and for so long that they feared him no more than they feared the thing on which he sat. When they wandered close, he seized them, either to strangle them or snap their necks, or stab them with his knife.

He dispatched them neither to feed upon them nor to take their pelts for trophies. At first he killed to assert his authority over the land and every living thing that it produced. Later, he killed the animals from time to time because he didn’t yet dare kill people, though he knew the day would come when all warm-blooded creatures would be game to him.

Larger and stronger and quicker than he had once been, the boy also had the power to lure and mesmerize. Deer came to him on narrow trails, at pinch points between steep rocks and phalanxes of trees, their eyes shining brighter than his own—and succumbed to his well-sharpened, furiously swung, and relentless hatchet.

On mornings that followed a lethal spree, as dawn neared, he stripped to wash himself and his killing clothes in the pond. He laid the garments to dry on a shelf of rock above the water, and dressed again in the unstained clothes that he had worn into the woods the previous twilight.

One moon-drenched night in his fourth year under the sign of the raven, when the boy was sixteen, as he sat on a throne of weathered rock in a meadow, resting from violent labor, savoring the rich odor of fresh blood, a mountain lion eased out of the brush into shorter grass, and stared hungrily at him. Of all predators in North America, short of the polar bear that was a ruthless killing machine in its arctic realm, the most deadly were the grizzly bear and the mountain lion.

The confident boy met the big cat’s gaze without fear and with no intention of fleeing from it. He could feel the raven circling in the night overhead. After a lingering assessment, the mountain lion chose to retreat, vanishing into the tall brush from which it had appeared.

He knew then that whether or not he might be the goat-legged god of this land, he was for certain Death with an uppercase D. The cat recognized him as such even though the boy wore no cowled robe and carried no scythe.

One thing he had learned earlier in this fourth year under the sign of the raven was that if you surrendered yourself entirely to the wilderness and to the night, you became aware of things unseen, ancient and immeasurably powerful presences with savage hungers and dark intentions, that roamed ceaselessly, almost dreaming, that were immortal and therefore never impatient, that were content to wait for the unwary to cross their path. He suspected they existed in cities, too, everywhere that humanity had been or was or would be, but were more evident here in the quiet of the wild, to one who had the heart to acknowledge them.

He was as unafraid of these unseen but immense presences as he had been of the mountain lion. In fact, they were as he wished one day to be: the true royalty of this world, users and corrupters, the hidden rulers of this troubled Earth, princes of a secret order. They were to all other predators what the mountain lion was to a mere house cat. If the boy could not one day become one of them, he would settle for being used by one of them to wreak the violence and chaos that they cherished.

For a few weeks following the encounter with the lion, the boy didn’t kill anything. As the desire began to build again, he found the graveyard.

He was about to learn the one more thing he needed to know—and do the one more thing that must be done—to throw off the mantle of boyhood and become me.