What the Night Knows

36

THE RIDER INTENTLY WATCHES DAVINIA’S TERROR-STRICKEN face on the way down from the eleventh floor and dismounts Officer Andy Tane a fraction of a second before impact. It reels back along the line of their fall like a yo-yo coming home on its string, returning through the missing window. Three hospital security guards, having broken down the conference-room door, stand paralyzed by shock, astonished that the patrolman has leaped to his death with the girl in his arms.

No human structure in this world provides a solid barrier to the rider. All made by man is porous and accommodating. The rider enters the conference-room floor and travels swiftly through the walls and ceilings, through pipes and cables and conduits, wherever it wishes. Anything ever built by human hands is sufficiently infused with human spirit to sustain a haunting presence, to anchor the spirit to this world. This rider in particular feeds on the human spirit. Now the hospital is its surrogate body until it selects another man or woman, every steel beam a bone, Sheetrock its flesh. Without a horse, it has no eyes but still sees, has no ears but nevertheless hears. It watches, listens, learns, and prowls, an immaterial ghoul in a material world, with the numerous hungers of corrupted human nature but with other and more ferocious hungers of its own.

A patient pushes a call button for the nurse—and is known. A nurse closes the door to a pharmacy closet—and is known. An orderly opens the door to a supply room, a maintenance man wipes a bathroom mirror, a weary resident internist in the ER sits in a chair and leans his head back against the wall, a night-shift systems engineer taps a gauge on a basement boiler—and they are known better than anyone else in this world knows them, more completely than they will ever know themselves.

Some of these people are not vulnerable, cannot be taken and ridden. Others have enough weaknesses—or one weakness so profound—that they can be mounted. None of them appeals to the rider. The police swarm the building, and some are interesting. TV, radio, and newspaper reporters gather in the portico, a potential pool of fine horses.

The hospital administrator, Dr. Harvey Leopold, arrives with one objective, to ensure the reputation of St. Joseph’s isn’t damaged by the murders. A public-relations whiz, Leopold doesn’t keep the press waiting in the cold night, but instructs hospital security to welcome them into the lobby for a press conference. Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives, participates in this event only because he can’t persuade Dr. Leopold to delay it an hour in order that the facts of the case can be more fully ascertained and marshaled.

During the remarks by the two men and during the question-and-answer session that follows, the rider cruises the city press corps, seeking opportunities to know them. It samples quite a few before settling on Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.

Hodd is an alcoholic with a mean streak, a narcissist, and a woman-hater. He has alienated his adult children. His first two wives despise and revile him, and the feeling is mutual. He expects his current wife to file for divorce soon. He is most easily entered by the mouth. Taken.

The rider has a use for Hodd, but at this time it is not a cruel use. It rides him lightly. The reporter does not even realize that he is no longer alone in his skin.