What the Night Knows

30

ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER FOURTH, ZACH SAT IN HIS room, drawing a nightmare when what he really wanted to be drawing was Laura Leigh Highsmith, especially her lips.

Following the recent weirdness, life had defaulted to normal so completely that Zach had returned the restored meat fork to the kitchen drawer from which he had secretly taken it. Already the edges were worn off the memory of the encounter in the service mezzanine. He abandoned both of his original explanations—supernatural or insanity—and convinced himself that a logical answer would present itself if he just stopped being a bonehead and focused on real things like math, cool military history, and Laura Leigh Highsmith, goddess, and let his subconscious eventually puzzle out the truth of what had happened.

His half-assed expedition into the stupid mezzanine embarrassed him because now he seemed to have been like some little kid playing slay-the-dragon with a trash-can lid for a shield and a fence picket for a sword. That was a game of his when he was an idiot five-year-old. His dad, in a rare but spectacular failure of parenting wisdom, captured slay-the-dragon on stinking video and from time to time, much to Zach’s mortification, reran the whole sordid featurette to the delight of old Naomi and Minnie who, of course, called him Saint George for days afterward. Sometimes Zach wondered just how much humiliation a person could take before he finally stopped thinking that he could ever be a marine.

Anyway, life returned to almost mind-numbing normality until the nights of October second and third, when he dreamed twice about the freaking freak with the ginormous hands. This time the dream didn’t take place in pitch-blackness but at night in a carnival with all the amusement rides ablaze with neon and blinkers, spotlighted show tents, and strings of colored lights festooning the concourse from one end of the midway to the other. Zach saw the shambling monstrosity with the humongous hands this time, and the guy was the kind of ugly that makes ordinary ugly people feel like prom kings and queens.

In the first dream, all the amusement rides were turning and whipping and undulating, but no one was aboard any of them, and the dumb-ass cliché of a nightmare carnival was dead silent, as if it were in a vacuum. The only people anywhere on the grounds were Zach and Ugly Al. He didn’t know how he knew the guy’s name was Al, but that’s what he kept thinking in the dream, and of course Ugly Al chased him all through the stupid carnival, almost nailing him again and again. This dream should have been as basically boring as yogurt, because over the years Zach had been chased in other nightmares by way uglier idiot bogeymen than Ugly Al, but it kept getting scarier until Zach burst into a show tent, hoping to hide, and suddenly there was music.

He was in a sleazy striptease show, and women in G-strings and pasties were on the stage. It was the first time he ever remembered being embarrassed in a nightmare. The strippers weren’t moving in a sexy way, but jerkily, clumsily, and then Zach realized they were dead women, zombie strippers, all women Ugly Al had killed. They had stab wounds and gunshot wounds and worse, and when Zach turned to run from the tent, Ugly Al was right there, maybe three feet away.

The freak was dressed in a khaki shirt and khaki pants with lots of pockets, and he wore black Nazi boots with shiny steel toes, and from one of his pockets he withdrew this knife that was so sharp it could cut you if you just looked at it. The godawful bump-and-grind music was still playing, and Ugly Al spoke in a low voice that made you wish you had quills and could curl up in a ball like a porcupine. He said, “Come here, pretty boy. I’m gonna cut off your peepee and shove it down your throat.” Then Zach woke in a sweat, with a superbad need to go to the bathroom.

The next night, the carnival was the same and silent except for one desperate voice. Ugly Al didn’t chase Zach this time. Naomi was somewhere on the midway, crying out to Zach for help, voice faraway and frightened. Ugly Al hunted Naomi, and Zach wanted to warn her, for God’s sake, to be quiet, but he had no voice of his own. He searched frantically for Naomi around the Tilt-a-Whirl, behind the Whip, around the Tip Top and the Caterpillar, under the silently turning Ferris wheel, past the snow-cone and the cotton-candy stands, in sideshow tents and game arcades, her voice always somewhere that he wasn’t—and then she screamed.

Zach saw Ugly Al dragging Naomi by her hair, dragging her along the sawdust-carpeted concourse, Naomi silent now, doing nothing to resist. Zach almost caught up with them, got close, close enough to see that where Naomi’s eyes should have been there were these coins, quarters, black quarters, and something dark in her mouth, her hands tied together, thumb to thumb, little finger to little finger, with a chicken egg cupped in them. Worst of all—he should have seen it first, but he saw it last—worst of all was the knife, the cut-you-if-you-looked-at-it knife, shoved to the hilt in her throat. Zach tried to scream, couldn’t, and Ugly Al raced away at high speed, dragging dead Naomi. The carnival concourse telescoped out, suddenly going on to infinity, and Ugly Al dragged Naomi away into forever while Zach fell farther and farther behind, screaming soundlessly until he woke up screaming into a pillow.

He hoped he wouldn’t dream of the freak three nights in a row.

The mood in the house had changed this afternoon. Dinner was the best time they had in a while, everyone with something interesting to say, quick and funny. Zach knew the rest of them felt it too, as if for weeks the air was thick with a pending thunderstorm and everyone waiting for lightning, and this afternoon the weather changed.

Now, alone in his room, he finished his fourth half-assed pencil portrait of old Ugly Al. Each of the four looked somewhat different from the others, and none caught the full-on weirdness of the guy. When you were drawing from a dream, you were working with less even than a memory, so Zachary couldn’t beat himself up too much for getting it only three-quarters right.

He sprayed the portrait with fixative, tore it out of the tablet, and started to draw Laura Leigh Highsmith’s lips, the full purse of the mouth from the philtrum to the suggestion of the chin muscles. He worked from memory now, not just from a dream, and in this case his memory was as sharp as if he had been drawing from real life.

Reading a book in bed, Naomi sat propped against a sumptuous pile of pillows so feathery they seemed capable of levitating like great slow birds and carrying her aloft with them. Until recently, when she read in bed, she wore mere pajamas, pathetic childwear, but not anymore. Now she sat attired in a Vietnamese ao dai, a flowing tunic-and-pants ensemble made of colorful silk, which she discovered during an all-girls shopping afternoon with her mother and Minette. This exotic garment—deliriously glamorous and drop-dead chic—was infinitely more appropriate for her than were kiddie pajamas, now that she was closer to twelve than to eleven. The ao dai served as day and evening wear, it was not for sleeping, but she intended to sleep in it anyway, and in the two others now in her wardrobe. A mere child sleeps in a wrinkled mess of cotton, drooling, hair disarrayed, but a young lady strives to look her best even when unconscious.

Minnie, who would be an exasperating child for years yet, sat at her play table, bagged in a typically dumpy pair of jammies with, of all things, a precious teddy-bear pattern. She worked intently on one of her bizarre LEGO-block structures, all strange angles and cantilevered sections that should have collapsed but didn’t.

“What is that funky thing?” Naomi asked.

“I don’t know. I saw it in a dream.”

“That’s where they come from? Buildings you see in dreams?”

“Not the other ones. Just this. But it’s not a building. It’s something. I don’t know what. And I don’t have it right, either.”

“Don’t you ever dream about unicorns and flying carpets and wishing lamps?”

“No.”

Naomi sighed. “Sometimes I worry myself sick about you, Mouse.”

“I’m good. I’m fine. Don’t call me Mouse.”

“You know what? I could be your dream coach! I could teach you how to dream right, with golden palaces and crystal castles and a fabulously colorful tent city around a desert oasis, wise old talking turtles, geese that fly underwater but swim through the air, and ice skating in the moonlight with the handsomest boy ever but he turns out to be a kind of griffin except all lion and just the wings of an eagle, and he flies over a shining city with you riding on his back.”

“No,” Minnie said, concentrating on the LEGO thing.

“I’d be a great dream coach!”

“Aren’t you reading a book?”

“It’s a great book. It’s about this very cultivated dragon who teaches this savage girl how to be civilized because she’s got to become a Joan of Arc to her people. Should I read it out loud?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want? Sometimes, dear child, you are quite inscrutable.”

“I want some silence so I can think about this thing.”

“Yes, of course, being a whiz at LEGOS is just like being a chess master, such profound strategy requires absolute silence.”

“Absolute,” Minnie agreed.

Ensconced in her lavish mound of pillows, Naomi returned her attention to the book, wondering why on earth she even tried to be a responsible older sister, why she struggled to lift this benighted little squirt out of the sandbox when, clearly, not even a cultivated dragon could have done the job.

The new mood in the house encouraged Nicolette, but around a tiny grain of frustration, her mind began to secrete a black pearl of worry. Intuition, intense but unspecific, warned her that the children were in some way at risk. Curiously, this concern began with a difficulty she was having with her current painting.

She seldom returned to work in her studio following the post-dinner family time, but this evening she wanted to study the canvas that was in progress, perhaps for a couple of hours.

John was understanding, as always. He said that he would read in the library and that she shouldn’t be concerned if he came to bed late, as he felt so wide-awake he might be in the grip of insomnia.

She took a snifter of brandy to her studio, though she rarely had anything to drink except wine at dinner, and though she had never previously wanted—or needed—brandy to assist her in the evaluation of a problem painting. She put the snifter on the tall table with the yellow roses that had been arranged by Imogene a few hours earlier.

Taped to the upright of the easel, above the current canvas, was a photograph of Zach, Naomi, and Minnie, taken two weeks earlier. For the photo, Nicky had carefully posed them framed by the living-room archway, and this group portrait was the subject of her latest work.

She had planned a painting informed by John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit: light in the foreground fading to deep shadow, depth of field, and spatial mystery against which the clarity of the children’s character would be explicit.

In the painting as in the photo, the kids stood in an unexpected order, not in ascending age and not girls together. Naomi was in the hall, in the foreground, arms crossed and feet planted apart, a power stance, challenging the artist, the world. Behind and to the right of Naomi, Zach posed casually in the archway, hands in his pockets, self-possessed. Farthest from the artist, within the living room, stood Minette in a white dress, luminous in shadow, entirely clear.

The spaces and the details of the clothing were nearly complete, and the quality of light was almost as Nicky wanted it, though she had not yet done the fine work on the faces, which were currently just cranial structures and muscle masses, otherwise eerily blank. She had come to a halt because the painting wasn’t saying what she intended that it should say.

Among other things, she meant to show personality expressing itself powerfully regardless of distance from the viewer or the nature of the lighting. Each child should be known equally well for the person—for the grace—that she or he was. Nicky intended the painting to be a quiet but moving celebration of individuality.

Instead, it felt like a painting about loss. As if she were re-creating her children not from a photograph but from her memory of them after they were dead.

This perception at first annoyed her, then disturbed her, and finally filled her with an abiding disquiet. She told herself that the unfinished faces were the cause of her uneasiness, those blank bone and muscle masses, but she knew better. She had worked in this manner before, toward a culmination in faces, without any problem.

For the past three days, the painting increasingly projected the theme of loss until she could not study it long before disquiet escalated into a gnawing anxiety. In the brushstrokes she had laid down, she could see—could feel—the less acute but more enduring grief that is called sorrow, as if she had done this work years after some unthinkable tragedy.

She had never labored on the canvas while in a somber mood. She approached the picture with enthusiasm, affection, and love. At all times, she worked with pleasure, which often rose to a condition of delight. Yet the piece appeared despairing, as though an artist with a darker set of mind had come in every night to rework the portrait.

The photograph, a computer printout on a full sheet of paper, was different in many ways from the canvas because she never had any intention of merely reproducing it in paint. Now she peeled it off the upright of the easel to inspect it closely.

She had instructed the kids to remain deadpan, because she did not want to paint from a shot in which they were mugging for the camera; she intended to supply each with his or her most signature expression. Maybe they subtly defied her instructions, assuming just enough expression to influence her subconsciously. But, no, each was as deadpan as could be.

Then she noticed the shadowy figure.

The photo had been taken in the evening, with overhead light in the hallway but only one table lamp aglow in a corner of the living room beyond the archway. Behind Minnie, everything faded to darkness, and the only thing to be seen in that gloom was a tall mirror on the farther wall, which was expressed only as a pale shimmer of reflected light, its baroque frame invisible. In that dim rectangle loomed a dark figure that could not be any of the kids or Nicky because none of them was positioned to reflect in the mirror.

She carried the printout of the photo to the slanted draftsman’s table in one corner of the studio. A large lighted magnifying lens, fixed to the table on a swing arm, brought the mysterious figure into fuller view. The silhouette lacked features, but it appeared to be a tall, stoop-shouldered man.

No one but she and the kids had been present. No one had watched from the hallway, and no one other than Minette had actually been in the living room. Zach, the nearest to Minnie, stood in the archway, on the threshold of the chamber.

Nicky’s uneasiness grew the longer she studied the silhouette. She cautioned herself that what she saw might not be a person but a trick of lighting or a reflection of some item of furniture in the living room.

At the time, she had taken five other shots that she deemed less desirable than the one she used at the easel. She retrieved printouts of them from her desk and brought them to the draftsman’s table to study each under the big magnifying lens.

In four of the five photos, the figure appeared as a shadow in the mirror. It could not be a reflection of an inanimate object that happened to resemble the silhouette of a tall man, because from shot to shot it subtly changed position.

Nicky thought back to the imagined murky presence in the master bathroom and the shattering mirror that hadn’t really shattered, the hallucination that she persisted in attributing to an adverse reaction to Vicodin. She sensed that the first figure and this one in the living-room mirror must be related, but she could not see how. The first had been a moment of delirium, but this one could be seen in five of six photographs, as real in its way as any of the three children, yet no one had been there.

After reviewing the photos again under the magnifier, Nicolette remained baffled, but her intuition bored with a sharper bit, drilled deep, and worry welled up.