What the Night Knows

35

OFFICER TANE, WHIPPED AND SPURRED BY HIS SECRET RIDER, half carries and half drags the pepper-sprayed and gasping girl up two flights of concrete stairs toward the last floor in the building. Up there are not merely the administrative offices but also the corporate offices of the parent company and two conference rooms. The rider has learned this not from Andy Candy but from Kaylin Amhurst, the one-nurse death panel and Jack Kevorkian acolyte.

The upper door opens into a windowless, wood-paneled receiving vestibule containing no furniture. Only three elevators come to this final floor. Opposite the fire exit are double doors to a reception lounge. It’s locked at this hour. Corporate officers don’t work the graveyard shift. Andy draws his pistol. Fires two rounds not into the door that features the lock assembly, but into the one that receives the deadbolt. Chunks, chips, splinters of wood explode. The mahogany disintegrates around the bolt. He kicks the door open.

Startled by the shots and backspray of debris, the girl screams. She has no volume, but the effort exacerbates her breathing. She’s wheezing, choking, gagging at the same time—and still struggling, but weakly.

An alarm sounds, not a siren—this is a hospital, after all—but a soft beep-beep-beep followed by a recorded voice: “You have violated a restricted area. Leave at once. The police have been called.”

With his left arm still around the girl’s neck, Andy forces her through the doorway, into the reception lounge. Big desk with a granite top. Chairs. Coffee table with magazines. Large posters of impressionist paintings.

Two closed doors lead out of the room. The one to the left will open on a hallway that serves the rest of the eleventh floor. The one straight ahead is to a conference room. He manhandles Davinia through the second door.

The recorded voice continues to warn him of the seriousness of his trespass.

Andy Tane is figuratively and literally a horse, as strong as one, but his rider brings to him the additional supernatural strength of a furious and obsessed spirit. Once in the conference room, Andy throws the girl aside, out of his way. She hits the floor, tumbles, knocks her head against the wall.

Andy switches on the lights, slams the door, twists the thumb-turn that drives home the deadbolt. He says, “Now she’s ours, Andy Candy. Now she’s all ours.”

John stepped out of the elevator and crossed the deserted lobby, which was hushed in the fluorescent half-light. The faint squeak of his shoes on the polished travertine sounded like the plaintive whimpers of a wounded animal.

He glanced at a few high-placed cameras, certain that primary public spaces of the hospital were monitored around the clock by guards at a central station. He understood the need for security in a world gone as wrong as this one, but the prospect of an oncoming universal surveillance dismayed him. He suspected that, ironically, society would be less safe under such a regime.

The automatic doors slid open. He stepped out, into the portico, and stood for a moment, breathing deeply of the cool night air, which seemed country-fresh to him in his current mood.

The restaging of the Sollenburg killings with the Woburn family had been thwarted by a quick-thinking woman skilled with a handgun. This bane, this ordained threat, this curse, whatever it should be called, was not a fate set in stone. If the Woburn family could be saved, so could the Calvinos. In fact, the disruption of the new cycle of crimes might have already broken the spell. The best-laid plans of men most often failed or withered short of fulfillment, and a curse was indeed a kind of plan.

A police car was parked in the outer of the two lanes, between the portico columns. John’s Ford stood in front of the cruiser, which had not been there when he arrived.

The hospital driveway continued straight along the front of the building, beyond the portico. At both ends, it curved out toward the street.

The building faced east. The ER entrance lay on the west side. Maybe that farther entrance bustled with activity, but here in the east, long after visiting hours, the night was uncannily quiet, not just the hospital but also the light-stippled buildings of the city beyond, rising toward a moon-ruled sky.

He stood there, enjoying the coolness and the quiet city.

Blinking to clear her stinging eyes, weeping copiously, breathing slightly better but not easily, spitting out the bitter hotness of the capsaicinoids administered by the aerosol projector, Davinia crawls past the long conference table. She frantically paws at the chairs, trying to find the end of them and something else, maybe something she can use as a weapon.

Andy Tane doesn’t need to find a weapon. He’s a walking weapon: his fists, his teeth, the singular viciousness of his rider. Besides, he possesses two deadly weapons. One is the pistol. On his braided utility belt are the swivel holster with the gun, two leather pouches each holding a spare magazine, a Mace holder, a handcuff case, a key strap from which also dangles a gleaming nickel-plated whistle, and a flap-covered holder with two sleeves for pens. He carries one pen and, in the second sleeve, a slim switchblade knife. The blade isn’t issued by the department. It’s not even legal. It’s a drop knife that he can plant on a suspect to explain an otherwise unjustifiable shooting.

By the lightest touch of the inset button on the mother-of-pearl handle, the blade springs out. Five razor-edged inches. A point keen enough to pierce animal hide.

The question is time. There’s not enough precious time both to deflower her and to cut her up alive. One or the other. Debauchment or disembowelment. Ravish or butcher. Either will be a pleasure for the rider. The recorded voice of the alarm is still hectoring. The police are coming. The hospital security guards will be here even sooner, in minutes, and they also will be armed. Rape or cut. The object is to terrorize. Break her spirit. Reduce her to a godless despair.

Cut is the answer. Of all the many things you are, the face—unconcealed, unconcealable—is the foremost. Your face is what other people first think of when they think of you, whether your face is fit for a freak show or you possess angelic beauty. Cut apart her face to cut away her sense of self, to cut away her hope. Cut away this exquisite face that by its very existence mocks all faces less beautiful, and by the cutting make a mockery of all beauty, of all that is fair or fine or full of grace, of all creation.

Having reached the last chair, the end of the long table, the crawling girl finds empty floor and then a console, where she pulls herself to her feet. As Davinia rises, Andy Candy Tane and his rider approach her with the knife and with an order of disfigurement in mind: first the ears, then the nose, the lips and then the eyes.

The pounding at the locked door comes sooner than he expects, and the pounding at once escalates to kicking. The rider has assumed a few minutes will be devoted to one-sided hostage negotiation. But perhaps the three murdered Woburns and the gun-battered aunt on lower floors have disabused these authorities of their modern preference for discussion, concession, and business as usual. Andy can’t win a shootout with them, so his options no longer include either rape or cut. There is now nothing but to kill, and by killing fulfill this phase of the Promise.

Only a step from the girl, he throws away the knife, draws his pistol, and turns toward the floor-to-ceiling-view windows that offer a panoramic city scene. One, two, three shots. A giant pane dissolves outward, and a night breeze shivers in through the exploding glass.

He turns toward lovely Davinia as she swings toward him. In her game of blind-girl’s bluff, on the console she has found a slender two-foot-high bronze sculpture of a caduceus, which has long been an emblem of the medical profession: the staff of Mercury, who was the messenger of the gods. Unable to see Andy but sensing him near, she swings the caduceus, surely hoping for his head, but bludgeoning his right arm instead. His hand spasms and the gun flies from it.

His fractured arm would fail him now if he were just Andy Tane. But he is also something else, and his rider overrides his pain. The girl swings again, the caduceus cuts the air, but Andy ducks. He goes in low, jams her against the console, seizes her wrist, the slender wonder of her supple wrist, and forces her to drop the bronze.

The sound of wood splintering. The boom of impact and the wood splintering. They are breaking down the door. The thirty-third day is barely an hour old, the work is nearly finished, and they are breaking down the door.

Andy takes the girl in his arms, the sobbing girl, all the sweetness of her in his arms. Pulls her close. Lifts her a few inches off the floor. With both hands, she pummels his face, her fists as light as feathers. He says, “My bride in Hell,” and rushes with her toward the shattered window, staggers toward the window and the city and the night, toward a darkness beyond the night where no stars shine and where no moon has ever risen.

As John unlocked his car, he heard a muffled report simultaneous with the brittle crack-and-jingle of a bursting window, followed by two louder sounds that were definitely gunshots. He looked toward the south end of the hospital, perhaps two hundred feet away, as a rain of glass glimmered down the lighted facade of the building from the highest floor. Instinct and training prompted him to run toward the trouble even as the glass fell, and he kept moving when the debris shattered further on impact, becoming icy puddles on the driveway.

Almost halfway to the scene, shock halted him when two people leaped from the opening where the enormous window had been, as if confident of their ability to fly. In the first instant of the fall, however, John realized the girl was the captive of the man, fighting to escape him even as ruthless gravity ensured that her struggle to survive would be futile. Upon his first glimpse of her high in the night, he knew her by her long blond hair, by her yellow blouse and blue jeans. He had seen many terrible things in his life, but this plunge was as much an abomination as any. For a fraction of their plummet, the flywheel of time seemed to cycle more slowly than usual, and they appeared to come down with an eerie grace. It was possible to think, to pray, that because of some fluke in the laws of physics, they would sink like a stone through water, not like a stone through air, and touch down in the manner of circus aerialists, en pointe and with flourishes. This brief illusion was dispelled by an acceleration that John could clearly see. When they met the pavement, the sound resembled a distant detonation, the whump of a mortar round shaking the earth just beyond a hill.

Over the years, John had investigated several suicides that might have been murders, and two were jumpers. They had dispatched themselves from heights less than this, ninety feet in one case, a hundred in the other, but this must be 130 feet or more. In each case, the cadaver was recognizably human but not recognizable as the person whom it had once been. Depending on angle of impact, the skeleton snapped and folded—or bloomed—in unpredictable ways. The cracked pelvis could be compressed into the rib cage. The spinal column might become a pike, piercing the head instead of supporting it. For an instant, breaking bones became clashing swords. Even if the jumper did not land on his head, the stress of impact translated upward through the compacting body, reconfiguring the facial bones until the structural incongruity could be greater than that in a portrait by Picasso.

Had the pair fallen eleven stories into sandy earth or into dense feathery shrubs, they might have had one chance in a thousand of surviving. But at such velocity, stopping abruptly on concrete, they were as doomed as bugs encountering the windshield of a speeding car. The presence of skilled medical personnel mere steps from the point of impact mattered no more than the sea of air that torn lungs could not process.

Although no aid could resuscitate the dead, John’s reaction to the whump at the end of the fall surprised him. Over a hundred feet from the impact site, less than a hundred from his Ford, he turned and sprinted toward the car. He wasn’t fleeing from the intolerable fact of Davinia’s death or from the horror of looking upon her and her equally pulverized assassin. Neither was he concerned about the ramifications of his presence here when he was supposedly on unpaid leave and removed from all police work. He had never before in his life run from anything.

He didn’t fully comprehend the reason for his flight until he was behind the wheel, turning the key in the ignition. The kamikaze who killed himself in order to murder Davinia, the jumper, must have been in the condition of Billy Lucas when the boy wasted his family. A puppet. A glove in which the hand of Alton Blackwood was concealed. In the fall or at the moment of death, the controlling spirit might become disembodied once more. John did not know how it traveled, what rules limited its journeying in this world, if any. He had brought it home from the state hospital without, as far as he knew, hosting it in his body. It seemed to be able to attach itself to a place—a hospital, a car, a house—as readily as it could enter and conquer a person. Or some people. The previous afternoon, he felt its absence in his home, an elevation of mood, the return of the former sense of harmony. If he could escape the hospital grounds without bringing the spirit, it might find its way to his home without hitching itself to him, but at least he wouldn’t be responsible for its return.

Madness. Running from a ghost though he would never run from a man with a gun.

He popped the hand brake. Shifted gears. Tramped the accelerator hard. The car shot north along St. Joseph’s driveway. Bounced through a drainage swale. The street. No traffic. He hung a hard left, tires squealing.

Terror and pity speared his heart. All reason abandoned, he was in the fevered grip of savage superstition.

Or maybe modern society was a cave of noise and frantic motion, in which primitives congratulated themselves on their knowledge and reason, when in fact they had forgotten more truth than they learned, had abandoned true sophistication for the lighter burden of studied ignorance, trading reason for the cold comfort of ideology, for the promise that the sound and fury of life signified nothing.

Even for this late hour, the avenues seemed strangely still, as if the entire populace had perished. No moving vehicles in sight. No pedestrians. Not a single homeless insomniac pushing a shopping cart full of junk possessions toward some hallucinated shelter. Nothing moved except steam rising from the slots in a manhole cover, numbers changing on a digital clock above the entrance to a bank, a flying saucer spinning on a giant automated billboard, a cat slinking along the sidewalk and vanishing into an alleyway, and the Ford racing away from what could not be escaped.…

They must all be dead, not just Davinia. Jack, Brenda, Lenny, perhaps even the aunt. In retrospect, John realized that the jumper, who carried the girl to her death, had been wearing a uniform. The patrol car parked in the portico. Perhaps one of the responders to the original call from the Woburn house had become a vehicle for Blackwood after Reese Salsetto failed him.

Two families slaughtered. Two more marked for destruction. Sixty-six days to prepare to defend his wife and his children against an irresistible force.

Easing up on the accelerator, he pulled to a stop at the curb and parked on a street of pricey shops and posh restaurants.

Suddenly the sedan seemed confining. He threw open the driver’s door, got out. He walked a few steps forward from the car and leaned against a parking meter.

In memory, Davinia Woburn stood before him in the ICU visitors’ lounge, and he tried to hold fast to that radiant image of the girl. Inevitably, the lounge dissolved into a memory of the rain of glass and the plummeting pair, Davinia’s hair unfurling like a pale flag, the brutal impact and the bodies seeming to spill like a viscous oil across the pavement.

Holding the parking meter with one hand, he leaned forward and vomited into the gutter. He could purge his stomach, but he could not expel from memory the image of the girl plunging to her death.