What the Night Knows

28

LATER THAT DAY, LONG AFTER DARKFALL AND DINNER BUT well before midnight, Naomi squirmed so impatiently under the covers that she feared she would wake her sister in the other bed. She wanted to be sure Minnie was sleeping soundly before she risked sneaking out to visit the mirror—and the prince!—in the storage room, but if she delayed another minute, she would positively burst. Most of the time, she was a paragon of patience, which she had to be with a shrimp sister hanging on her skirts all day, but even saints had their limits, and Naomi didn’t claim to be a saint. She wasn’t a monster, either. She was good enough by most standards, and she didn’t expect to spend centuries upon centuries in Purgatory—or even a month—assuming that she ever died.

Since the afternoon math lesson with the nice but interminable Professor Sinyavski, Naomi had been thinking about how to take the initiative with the mirror. Instead of waiting for something in the looking glass to appear or to speak to her, which is what she had done thus far, she should speak to the prince, reach out to him and express her desire to help him save his kingdom from the dark powers by which such kingdoms always seemed to be plagued. Otherwise, she was allowing the dark powers to use the mirror exclusively, like a supernatural BlackBerry or something. She felt that it was extremely perspicacious of her to recognize that she should stop being passive with the mirror and become aggressive.

Finally she turned back the covers, got out of bed, and quietly extracted the flashlight from under her pile of pillows, where she had hidden it earlier and where it had been making her uncomfortable for the past hour. She didn’t switch on the flash nor did she don a robe over her pajamas, for fear that Sister Half-Pint—who sometimes seemed to have the sharp senses of a hyperalert dog—would be torn from sleep by the slightest rustle and come panting after her to spoil everything.

With admirable stealth, Naomi navigated the nearly lightless room without a blunder, eased open the door, stepped barefoot into the hall, and closed the door behind her with only the softest click of the latch. Resorting to the flashlight now, she hurried to the east end of the hallway, regretting that she wasn’t wearing a cape, like those that heroines often wore in Victorian fantasies, because nothing looked more splendidly romantic than a cape billowing out behind a girl racing into the night on a clandestine mission.

In the storage room, she switched on the overhead light, wishing that she had instead a candelabra with a dozen tapers that made light and shadows leap mysteriously across the walls. Three steps from the threshold, she realized that the mirror no longer lay hidden but had been dragged into the open and propped upright against a stack of boxes. Two steps farther, she saw that the looking glass didn’t reflect anything, that it was black—black!—as if it were an open doorway beyond which lay the moonless and starless night of a land oppressed by something … by something … by something too terrible to name.

Naomi marveled at the absolute blackness for a longish moment before she noticed the sheet of stationery on the floor in front of the mirror, a page so creamy and thick that it might have been vellum. On sight, she knew that it must have come from out of the mirror, from the once-happy kingdom that now suffered under the brutal yoke of something … of something unspeakable. No doubt the message would be of earth-shattering importance—or so she assumed until, stooping to pick it up, she recognized Minnie’s neat printing, which ought to have been the childish scrawl of an average eight-year-old but was not. The note said: DEAREST NAOMI, I PAINTED THE MIRROR BLACK. GO BACK TO BED. IT’S OVER NOW. YOUR DEVOTED SISTER, MINETTE.

The first thing Naomi wanted to do, of course, was prepare a bucket of ice water with which to wake the devoted titmouse, but she restrained herself. Because she was on a fast track to adulthood, becoming remarkably more self-possessed and wonderfully mature every day, Naomi realized that by admitting she had found the fingerling’s smarty-pants note, she would be acknowledging the sorry lack of self-control that sent her racing to the mirror in the middle of the night. She could too easily imagine Minnie’s deadpan expression of smug satisfaction—pig fat!—so she vowed right then and there, on her honor and her life, not to give Miss Peewee the pleasure of knowing that the note had been found.

She placed the sheet of creamy paper on the floor precisely as she remembered that it had been, and she silently retreated from the storage room and along the hallway, pleased by her superior cunning. Without benefit of the flashlight, she entered her room, returned to her bed, and lay smiling in the dark. Until she wondered if—and then became convinced that—the occupant of the second bed was no longer Minnie.

In Naomi’s absence, something could have happened to poor little Minnie, and now the thing that had happened to Minnie could be lying in the sweet child’s bed, in her place, patiently waiting for the surviving sister to go to sleep before rising to devour her, as well. Naomi dared not lie lamblike in the blackness, meekly waiting to be eaten alive, yet she dared not switch on her bedside lamp, because the instant she confirmed the presence of the beast, it would even sooner gobble up every last morsel of her. The only thing to do was stay awake until dawn and hope that sunshine would send this creature of the night fleeing to some deep lair.

Half an hour later, Naomi fell asleep, then woke uneaten in morning light. The new day proved less eventful than the previous day, which set a pattern for the following month. The raw-voiced presence—I know you now, my ignorant little bitch—did not appear in the bathroom mirror or the hallway mirror, or anywhere else. No more grapes disappeared through seemingly solid objects.

As day after uneventful day passed, Naomi wondered if her only chance for grand exploits in a fantastic alternate universe had come and gone without her having been able to seize the opportunity.

For compensation, she still had magical stories to read, her flute, the junior orchestra, her unique family, the dazzling autumn leaves in this gorgeous semi-magical world, and her imagination. As the days flew by, the scarier aspects of the recent events seemed less scary in retrospect, and Naomi gradually became aware that she had conducted herself with more valor and intrepidity and dashing style than she had recognized at the time. She stopped worrying that she had botched her one chance for glory, and she knew an occasion would eventually arise in which she could—and would—fulfill her singular potential as an adventurer.

Minnie knew that Naomi found the note. One corner of it was bent. And Naomi had held the thick writing paper so tightly that her fingers dimpled it in a few places.

By herself, Minnie dragged the painted mirror behind the boxes once more. Good riddance.

She folded the note and kept it as a souvenir.

Days passed, and nothing weird happened. Still more days, and still nothing.

The spooky stuff hadn’t come to an end forever. They were in the eye of a hurricane. This calm was misleading; the storm remained all around them.

Minnie possessed some natural knowledge of such things. She seemed to have been born with a sixth sense; and it had always been her little secret.

Since the incident with the mirror, she now and then sensed that she was being watched by something that didn’t have a body, therefore didn’t have eyes, yet could see.

She thought it must be a ghost, but she sensed that it was not an ordinary ghost or maybe not only a ghost. So at first she thought of it as the watcher.

Sometimes the watcher’s stare was almost like a touch, a sliding hand along her neck, along her arm, along her cheek and chin.

Usually but not always, this feeling came over her when she was alone. She tried not to be alone except when she went to the bathroom or took a shower.

The eyeless watcher didn’t prowl just the house. It was outside, too, in certain secluded places.

One day in the backyard, she started to climb the ladder to the playhouse in the branches of the enormous old cedar. Suddenly she knew the watcher waited up there.

She refused to believe that a thing without a body could hurt her. But she didn’t want to be alone with it in that high place, to feel its stare, and to have no way out except the ladder. She might fall and break her neck. And that might be exactly what it wanted.

The arbor was draped with climbing vines, and pooled within it were shadows and the fragrance of roses, the last blooms of the year. Lingering there one afternoon, she felt the watcher enter the tunnel.

Although the day was windless, the roses shuddered, as if the thorny vines winding through the crisscrossed lattice were trying to pull loose and reach for her.

Inside the arbor, with the roses trembling and petals falling, Minnie felt the watcher brush past her, and by that contact she knew that it called itself Ruin. This seemed to be a peculiar name, yet she was certain that it was the right one. Ruin.

For as long as Minette could remember, she had from time to time felt unseen presences that other people didn’t feel. Occasionally she got a glimpse of them. Presences. Spirits. People who weren’t alive anymore.

They weren’t always where you expected them to be. They didn’t hang around graveyards.

Two of them were in a convenience store where Mom stopped now and then. Minnie could feel both of them. She had seen one, a man with part of his face shot off. Something bad happened in the store a long time ago.

Minnie usually stayed in the car.

When she was little, the presences sometimes scared her. But she learned that they were all right if you just ignored them.

If you stared at them too long or if you spoke to them, that was an invitation. If you didn’t invite them, you could go months and months without seeing one.

Ruin was the first in years that kind of scared her. Ruin was different somehow.

She was usually alone when she became aware of Ruin watching, but sometimes it watched all of them when they were having dinner or playing games. That was the worst.

Although aware of the presences when they were near, Minnie never knew what they wanted, what they might be thinking or feeling, if they thought or felt anything at all.

In the case of Ruin, however, especially when it watched all of them, she knew exactly what it was feeling. Hatred. Hatred and rage.

Anyway, Ruin was a ghost or some kind of spirit new to her, new but nonetheless a spirit, and spirits could not harm her or anyone else. If she ignored it, if she did nothing to invite it, then it would have to go away.

After math with old Professor Sinyavski, in the late afternoon of the day Zach had encountered something in the service mezzanine that tested his sphincter control—I know you, boy, I know you now—he returned to his room and discovered that the stupid meat fork, which he had hidden under some stuff in a bottom desk drawer, had been restored. Presto! The previously wrecked shank was no longer bent. The tines were straight, not twined together. The polished steel bore no indications of ever having been stressed.

This suggested that of the two explanations for the incident—either supernatural or delusional—the latter was more likely. Nuts. He was nuts. Loony, loco, crackers, screwy, one shoe short of a pair.

Maybe for his own good, he should sign himself into a monkey house, wear one of those monkey jackets with the long sleeves that tied behind your back, and be entertained by stupid freaking monkey thoughts swinging through his empty skull.

Or not.

Being able to consider the idea that he might be insane pretty much ruled out madness. Raving lunatics never wondered if they were lunatics; they believed the other six billion people in the world were lunatics and that they themselves were pillars of reason.

Instead of convincing Zach that what happened in the service mezzanine must have been a delusion, the restored fork ticked him off and made him more determined than ever to learn the truth about what was happening in this house. He knew when he was being jacked around. He wasn’t a dog so dumb that he didn’t see the leash. He wasn’t a naive idiot who would happily chow down on cow pies because someone told him they were chocolate cake.

With insanity off the table, one explanation remained: something supernatural. If a supernatural force could screw up the meat fork, then it was a no-brainer that the same supernatural force could make it right again.

Any alternate theory would now have to identify a human villain, some clown with a self-serving reason for replacing the twisted fork with an identical but undamaged utensil.

Zach gave himself a week to think and to see what might happen next. He thought, all right, but nothing happened. The trapdoor didn’t fall open by itself, and the ladder didn’t self-deploy. Every night, feeling like a wuss, he braced his closet door with a chair, but the knob never rattled and nothing in there turned on the light.

His parents were the high command, and he was a grunt. A grunt didn’t go to the high command with a wild story about a ghost in the service mezzanine unless he had the ghost in chains.

Zach gave himself another week. And then another.

He began to wonder if that one episode was going to be the whole of it. Some half-assed ghost rides in from the hereafter, plays with a stupid light switch and a trapdoor ladder, screws up a meat fork, fixes the fork, gets bored, and splits for some other ghost gig. That scenario seemed even more lame than the usual brain-dead horror movie full of boneheads doing every wrong thing to get themselves killed.

But if it was finished, that would be okay with Zach. He wanted to be a marine, not a ghostbuster.

Dr. Westlake doubted very much that Nicolette’s idiosyncratic adverse reaction to Vicodin could continue to manifest three and a half weeks after she took her last dose. But he wanted to research the issue and get back to her the next day.

She said nothing about the hallucination to John. She hoped to avoid worrying him.

The following day, when Dr. Westlake called, he all but ruled out the possibility that her latest experience could be related to Vicodin; however, he wanted her to have a complete blood workup, just as a precaution.

Nicky never fretted about anything. Brooding about possible calamities seemed to be ingratitude. Her life was bright with family and love, her paintings were acclaimed and sold for excellent prices, and in return her minimum obligation included being happy and giving thanks for her good fortune.

Always, even during darker times, she’d been cheerful, hopeful. Surely life was too short to waste any of it in the expectation of disaster. Even when Minnie had been ill and the malady difficult to diagnose, Nicolette prayed but didn’t dwell for a moment on darker possibilities, on any possibility except Minnie’s complete recovery.

She wasn’t a Pollyanna. She knew terrible things happened to the best of people, to people far better than she would ever be, even to people as good and as innocent as Minette. But she also knew that the power of the imagination could shape reality. Every day she made real on canvas the scenes that would be otherwise confined forever to her mind; therefore, it seemed a half step in logic to believe that the imagination might directly influence reality, without the physical intervention of the artist, that what was feared obsessively might manifest in the real world. Worry wasn’t worth the risk of worry’s possible consequences.

Returning to her painting with enthusiasm, she finished the triptych during the week she waited to learn the results of the blood workup. The painting turned out well, perhaps as good as anything she’d done to date, and the laboratory tests confirmed that she was in good health.

She started another picture. A second week passed, a third, and she experienced no more hallucinations. Happy with her work, Nicky became convinced that regardless of what Dr. Westlake said, the weird episode in the bathroom indeed had been related to Vicodin, one last spasm of its influence in her system, and that she would be troubled no further.

Although aware of a persistent tension in John, she had seen its like before. She assumed that when at last he nailed the killer of the schoolteacher and closed his current case, his stress would be relieved.

As September waned and then October dawned, the beautiful autumn revealed no blemish except for Nicky’s dream. She woke from it nearly every night, with no memory of its characters or story, yet certain that it was always the same dream. Because she never woke in fear and routinely returned to sleep without difficulty, she didn’t believe this dream qualified as a nightmare, but sometimes it left her with an unclean feeling so that she rose to wash her face and hands.

She had a vague recollection of being the object of desire in the dream, of being wanted desperately by someone whom she did not want in return. The intensity and persistence of whoever wanted her and her unrelenting resistance left Nicky exhausted when she woke, which is perhaps why she never had trouble falling asleep again.

When he arrived home after relinquishing the key to the Lucas house, John learned from Walter Nash that the stench in the laundry room had relented as abruptly as it had arisen. “Doesn’t seem to be any reason to dismantle the dryer,” Walter said. “Whatever the stink was, it must not have been a decomposing rat. It’s a mystery for the moment, but I’ll keep thinking on it.”

Over dinner, Nicky and the kids seemed subdued, but John thought his own mental state must be the damper on the evening. Billy Lucas was gone and with him any hope that he might one day answer further questions. Worse, John was found in the Lucas house without a valid reason, and he revealed his concern that his family might be targeted for murder, a fear that must have appeared irrational to Ken Sharp. He could not predict how the day’s events would affect his ability to protect Nicky and the kids, but he knew his options would be fewer.

The following morning, he returned to work and to the case of Edward Hartman, the high-school teacher who had been beaten to death in his lakeside home. Lionel Timmins, the partner with whom he shared responsibility for the investigation, had been chasing leads during John’s two sick days; over coffee in an unused interrogation room, Lionel brought him up to date.

Timmins was black, fourteen years older than John, three inches shorter, forty pounds heavier, and so broad in the upper torso that some other cops called him the Walking Chest. He had been married, but his obsessive commitment to his job led to a divorce before any kids came along. His elderly mother and her two spinster sisters lived with him; and although he was devoted to those ladies, no one with a healthy survival instinct would ever call Lionel a mama’s boy.

In countless ways, John and Lionel were different from each other, but in one way they were more alike than any other two detectives in the division: Homicide investigation was less a job to them than it was a sacred calling. As a sixteen-year-old, Lionel had been charged with the brutal murder of a woman named Andrea Solano, during the course of a burglary. The state tried him as an adult, the jury convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. While he was in prison, his beloved father died. After Lionel spent six years in a high-security cell, the real burglar-murderer was arrested in another case and tied to the Solano killing by evidence in his possession; eventually, he confessed. Without that lucky break, Lionel would have rotted in prison. Released, the crime expunged from his record, he became a cop and eventually a detective with two compelling goals: first, to put murderers behind bars, on death row if they deserved it; second, to be sure that, at least on his watch, no one hung a murder conviction around the neck of an innocent man.

As partners, they were friends but not best buddies, largely because they spent less time together than other paired detectives. They worked as a team, but they did not ride in tandem. Both were devoted family men when at home, which they preferred to the world beyond those walls, but at work they were loners, each with his unique style of investigation, each impatient with the accommodations that same-car partners inevitably had to make for each other. They divvied up leads, accomplished twice as much as they would if yoked together, backed up each other when the task required that, compared notes at the end of every day, and had the highest case-closed record in Robbery-Homicide.

The Hartman assignment should have been engaging; the victim was a teacher, as John’s murdered parents had been. But he was not able to focus as sharply as necessary. He was distracted by thoughts of the Lucas murders and by fear of October fifth, which would be the date of the next killings if the crimes of Alton Turner Blackwood were indeed being replayed. The Hartman investigation swiftly became the poorest effort of his career.

Six days after returning to work, he received a summons to the office of Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives. Ken Sharp had filed a report about John’s visits to Billy at the hospital, the illegal entries at the Lucas house, and their conversation in Billy’s room.

Burchard employed a wise-old-uncle managerial style and rarely raised his voice. As a disciplinarian, he preferred to approach the situation as alternately a caring surrogate father, an understanding colleague, and a therapist. He was stout within the physical limits of the department, white-haired, with a face made for dinner-theater comedies about twinkly-eyed older men who were assumed to be a bit daft because they claimed to be Santa Claus or angels who needed to earn their wings.

In order to explain his actions, John had to reveal what had happened to his family when he was fourteen. The story earned him Nelson Burchard’s pity, which he didn’t want and which seemed both genuine yet unctuous. The man’s cloying earnestness made John’s revelations even harder to disclose than he expected.

As caring as he might have been, Burchard also saw at once that an experience of such horror at a young age might seed psychological problems that could make a career in Robbery-Homicide particularly taxing, problems that might not sprout and ripen until they were, so to speak, fertilized by a case disturbingly reminiscent of the long-ago trauma.

“I understand your concern that Billy was imitating Blackwood. But he did turn himself in. If he intended to kill again, he wouldn’t have done that.” Burchard leaned forward in one of the armchairs in the counseling corner of his office. “Did you really worry that he might escape the state hospital?”

“No. I don’t know. Maybe.” Although John could not have avoided telling Burchard about what happened twenty years earlier, he found it impossible to raise the theory that a murderous spirit might have operated through Billy Lucas. Possession was not a word any defense lawyer would ever use or any judge ever countenance. “The striking similarities between the Valdane and Lucas massacres wasn’t something I could ignore. I just … I had to know.… I’m not entirely sure why, but I had to know if Blackwood inspired Billy.”

“You told Ken Sharp there were documents on the boy’s computer—they indicated your family was one of his targets.”

“There were. I saw them the first time I was in the house. But someone deleted them.”

Burchard’s jolly face remained in a Christmas Eve expression, though his eyes now twinkled less with goodwill than with the glint of a forensic surgeon’s scalpel. “Ken reviewed the backup CDs made of the computer’s hard drive. There aren’t any documents about your family on those, either.”

The armchair seemed like an execution-chamber chair. John wanted to get up and move around. He remained seated and said nothing.

“The backup CDs were secure in the evidence locker,” Burchard said. “You don’t think someone could have gotten to them?”

“No. I don’t. Not in the locker. I can’t explain it, sir. But I stand by what I said that I saw.”

As if it pained him to look at John just then, Burchard turned his attention to a window and the steel-gray sky. “Whatever the boy’s intentions might have been, he’s dead. There’ll be no more killing of families now.”

“October fifth,” John said. “That’s the day. Or would have been if his murders were an homage. Blackwood’s homicidal periodicity was precise. Thirty-three days.”

When he looked at John again, Burchard said, “But he’s dead.”

“What if he didn’t do it alone?”

“But he did. There’s no evidence anyone else was in that house when it all went down.”

“I’m just wondering if—”

“It’s not your case,” Burchard interrupted. “How’s the Hartman job coming along?”

After a hesitation, John said, “I’m sure Lionel’s making progress.”

“But you?”

John shrugged.

“You’re my Thoroughbreds, you and Lionel. But … presenting yourself at the state hospital as the case detective. Trespassing twice in the Lucas house. Maybe all this has knocked you off your stride. Would you say it has?”

“Not so that I can’t regain my footing.”

“You drive every case hard, John. Maybe you need time to rest and think. Time to put this behind you.” As John began to protest, Burchard raised a hand to halt him. “I’m not talking about a formal suspension. Nothing that’ll wind up on your ten card. You just ask for a thirty-day leave without pay, I’ll authorize it right now.”

“If I don’t want a thirty-day leave?”

“I’d have to pass Sharp’s report upstairs to Parker Moss.”

Moss was the Area 1 commander, a good enough cop but at times a by-the-book sonofabitch.

“And then what?” John asked.

“Maybe a review-board hearing, but probably not. For sure, he’ll want mandatory psychological counseling and an evaluation. Because of the undisclosed childhood trauma.”

“I’m not coming unwrapped.”

“I don’t believe you are. Which is why I’d prefer dealing with it this way. But if it gets to Moss, he’ll follow protocols.”

“You want my tin and my piece?”

“No. On unpaid leave you still follow off-duty rules. You carry at all times, you’re plainclothes auxiliary.”

Under the circumstances, it was important to John to be able legally to continue carrying a concealed weapon.

“All right,” he conceded. “But what’ll you tell Lionel?”

“That’s up to you.”

“Family matters,” John decided.

“He’ll want to know more than that.”

“Yeah. But we never pry at each other.”

“Then it’s family matters,” Burchard said.

“It has the virtue of being true.”

“You’d be uncomfortable lying to him?”

“Couldn’t do it,” John said.

On unpaid leave, he had little more to do than to anticipate October fifth. That he became increasingly restless and apprehensive day by day was no surprise.

Determined to spare Nicolette and the kids needless anxiety, he avoided telling them about his thirty-day leave. He left in the morning as if for work, killed time at movies that didn’t entertain him, at libraries where he learned nothing he needed to know, on ten-mile walks that failed to tire him.

He no longer entertained any doubts about the supernatural nature of the threat if only because nothing else could explain how Billy had known the next-to-last thing that Alton Turner Blackwood said before John killed him: Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.

Nevertheless, he harbored a small hope that he kept afloat with prayer and with his long-embraced belief that the concept of fate had no validity. With the proper exercise of free will, he could see his wife and children safely through this troubled time. Such conviction, even if tenuous, was essential to hold fast to sanity.

If October fifth passed without murders to match Blackwood’s second slaughter, if the pattern of the past changed, John would never need to tell the kids—though perhaps one day he would tell Nicky—that he had endured thirty-three days of gut-twisting dread.

If instead the murders occurred, he would share everything with Nicky and together they would decide what to do. But if the ghost of a homicidal psychopath really could return from the grave and use a human being as a puppet, there seemed to be no weapon that any man or woman could employ against it.

Walking the grid blocks of the city, rambling the lakeside park, and during movies that he only half saw, John was gnawed by a sense of helplessness not only in regard to the defense of his loved ones but also because he could do nothing to warn whatever family might be the second in this current killing spree.

Twenty years earlier, after the Valdanes, the Sollenburgs had been Blackwood’s next target.

Their master suite lay at the farther end of the house from other bedrooms, the main living spaces intervening: convenient for a murderer who planned to kill his targets in a certain order and who hoped not to alert the fourth and final victim when executing the first three.

The parents, Louis and Rhoda, had been murdered in their bed, beginning with the husband. Louis was shot once in the head while sleeping. The presence of steel-wool fibers in the wound indicated that the killer had fashioned a homemade silencer for his 9-mm pistol.

Perhaps the muffled gunfire woke Rhoda or perhaps she woke when Blackwood switched on the light. He shot her twice as she sprang off the bed, and she died on the floor.

With no scream from either victim and the gunfire adequately muffled, Blackwood was able to make his way across the house at his leisure, taking the time to savor the murders he had just committed and to anticipate with dark delight the brutalities soon to come.

The homemade silencer deteriorated quickly. He carried a pillow from the parents’ bedroom to further suppress the sound of the shot with which he killed Eric, the fifteen-year-old son, in his bed.

With three dead, Blackwood was alone with seventeen-year-old Sharon Sollenburg. Subsequently, the medical examiner estimated that she had been shot more than four hours after her brother was killed.

The humiliations and cruelties that the girl suffered during those four hours, as reported in the autopsy, sickened even homicide detectives who thought they had seen everything but discovered now a more savage and inventive monster than they had known before.

Her suffering did not end when Blackwood shot her. The ratio of high serotonin to lower free histamine levels in the wound indicated that she had taken at least half an hour to die.

Torn candy wrappers and smears of chocolate on the upholstery suggested that her murderer sat in an armchair and ate three Almond Joy bars while he watched life fade from her. Blood on the wrappers indicated that he had not washed his hands between his games with the girl and his snack.

Like the victims at the Valdane house, all four Sollenburgs were left with black quarters epoxied to their eyelids, carefully shaped coins of dried feces on their tongues, and specially prepared hollow eggs in their bound hands.

Twenty years later, in this great city, there must be thousands of families consisting of father, mother, son, and daughter. There was no way to know who might be marked for death.

Furthermore, it could be wrong to assume the killer would not seek a family of five instead of four, one with two or three girls instead of a single daughter. After all, the widowed aunt who was part of the Valdane family, two decades ago, was a grandmother at the Lucas house in the here and now, and the ages of one set of victims were not identical to the ages of the other. The methods of murder and certain other details were the same, but the scenarios were not in every aspect identical.

This entire state did not have half enough police to mount protective surveillance of every family in the city that might be targeted.

As September became October, the green trees of summer dressed themselves in the spectacle of autumn. Purple beeches became bright copper, and frisia turned even more orange than the yellow buckeye. Silver-leafed poplars paid out a dividend of gold, and the enormous scarlet oak on the south yard of the Calvino property lived up to its name for the first time all year.

Late on the afternoon of October fourth, on the eve of the dreaded date, when John came home early from pretending to work, the house was transformed. He felt the difference the moment that he got out of the car in the basement garage, a freshness to the air, a curious perception that everything was cleaner than it had been, a sense that a pall had been lifted from the place. This feeling only increased as he ascended through the residence.

He had been weighed down by worry and had not realized that an oppressive aura had settled on the house itself. For weeks, the rooms had felt less harmonious in their proportions than before; the lamps and ceiling fixtures had appeared to be dialed down even when all the dimmer switches were at their highest settings; the artworks and the furnishings had seemed tired and in conflict with one another; and although the air had not reeked of Billy Lucas’s urine, it had been stale, like the air in a moldering old museum, thick with dust and history. He realized all of that only in retrospect, now that the house was bright and welcoming once more.

Perhaps no one else felt the change as profoundly as did John, for only he suspected—all right, knew—that something had come home with him from the state hospital twenty-six days earlier. If Nicky and the kids weren’t consciously aware that the house had been under a kind of cloud that had now dissipated, they must have felt the difference because they were all livelier and merrier at dinner than they had been for days. The rapid conversation had its old bounce—from wit to badinage, to persiflage, and back again.

The food tasted better, too, and the wine, not because Walter and Imogene had outdone themselves, for their standards were always high, but because the familiar cheerful atmosphere of the house had been restored, which was an essential spice that, like salt, enhanced the flavor of all things. If something otherworldly had been here the past three and a half weeks, that presence was now inarguably gone.

Once he had convinced himself to embrace the unknown, to accept that a malevolent spirit might find its way back into the world and into his life, John had imagined that the haunting would progress as it did in books and movies. First came subtle moments of strangeness for which reasoned explanations might be fashioned, and then ever more bizarre and fearsome manifestations escalated to the third act, when the terror would reveal its true ferocity and the invaded house would become a hell on Earth. Until now he had not considered that a haunting might peter out between the first and the second acts, that the ties binding the haunter and the haunted might be as vulnerable to weariness and indifference as were so many relationships in which both parties were living.

John entertained this hopeful thought only through the soup and partway through the entrée. Long before dessert, he realized the invading spirit had not dissipated or departed forever. By whatever means such entities traveled, whether by magic or by moonlight, or on wheels of sheer malevolence, this one had gone in search of its next Billy Lucas, for the glove in which it would conceal itself to murder another family. With that blood ceremony completed, it would return.