What the Night Knows

38

RETURNING HOME AT 2:46 A.M., JOHN USED HIS CELL PHONE to call the home-security computer and switch off the alarm as he arrived at his garage door.

When he got out of the car in that subterranean space, the house still felt free of the oppressive presence that for weeks had been in residence. But with the Woburn family dead, the hateful spirit would soon find its way back here.

Spirit. He arrived at his conclusion logically, and the evidence of its accuracy appeared irrefutable now. Yet sometimes he rebelled against it. Spirit. Ghost. He wanted to think of it in other terms. Corruption. Infection. Disease. Or turn to psychologists for answers that would persuade him to deny what he knew to be true.

And that was the most remarkable thing about this rebellion: A part of him would have preferred the comfort of psychiatric theory and jargon to the truth, not only because the truth put before him an enemy who might be impossible to defeat, but also because truth in this instance was an embarrassment to the modern mind. In this age, faith remained acceptable, but recognizing a dark supernatural aspect to life could make a rational man feel foolish and gullible. The Evil of all evils thrived on the denial of its existence.

The last time he tried Scotch to settle his nerves, the night of the first day that he had gone to the state hospital to see Billy Lucas, the whiskey had not helped him. Nevertheless, he went up to the kitchen and poured a double shot over ice. His hand shook, and the neck of the Chivas bottle rattled against the rim of the glass.

In thirty-three days, another family would be destroyed. There was no way to determine the target or in what person the spirit would be concealed when it attacked.

Brenda Woburn felt it trying to take possession of her. Cold and crawling, slithering … Everywhere in my body … Skin to bones. She had been able to resist it—but only by extreme measures.

Evidently, the spirit had been unable to invade either Lenny or Davinia. Otherwise, it would have used one of the kids against the other, probably Lenny against his sister.

The factor that inoculated for possession was not youth. Billy Lucas had been only fourteen but vulnerable.

John doubted that Lenny’s limited mental capacity vaccinated him against possession. Davinia was highly intelligent—yet inaccessible.

Not having met the boy, having spoken with the girl too briefly, John did not know what qualities brother and sister had in common. He suspected innocence must be one. The girl seemed exceptional, gentle, kind. Perhaps the boy had been equally so.

With his Scotch, John walked the perimeter of the ground floor. He stood at windows in dark or dimly lighted rooms, searching the night, though he knew that he would find nothing suspicious. No more killing for a while. No killing here for the next sixty-five days.

Yet the compulsion to patrol was irresistible. He would be a watchdog for the rest of his life, as he had been since the night that, because of his foolishness, he facilitated the massacre of his family. His penance was eternal vigilance; never again would he know the peace of the blameless.

Minette, Naomi, and Zach seemed innocent to John, basically good kids, not morally immaculate but free from serious weaknesses. He not only loved his children, he was also proud of them. He could never credit the possibility that any of them might be a glove to hide the hand of Alton Turner Blackwood.

Perhaps no adult was innocent. But Nicolette was as virtuous as anyone he knew, charitable and kind. She was strong enough and tough-minded enough to be as resistant to possession as Brenda Woburn.

The weakest link in the Calvino chain was John himself. That assessment seemed to him as true as it was terrifying.

In the kitchen again, he poured two more ounces of Scotch.

Between leaving St. Christopher’s Home and School when he was seventeen and meeting Nicky a year later, he had spent a few months drinking most lunches and dinners: Seagram’s shooters chased with beer, an efficient route to oblivion. Without the emotional support of the staff at the school, without family or friends, he turned to the kind of spiritualism in which the spirits came in bottles sealed with tax stamps. He had an inheritance—his parents’ life-insurance, equity from the house—but it seemed like blood money. He saw an ironic kind of justice in spending it on his self-destruction, glass by glass. He wasn’t old enough to buy his own poison, but there were hobos to buy it as his agents, for a generous commission. He called them his kindly executioners, and if they had been able to purchase cyanide, he might have added it to the shopping list he gave them.

Fortunately, he made a lousy drunk because he had no practice at it and no heart for it. Oblivion was not as easy to attain as he expected. Drunk, he became grotesquely melancholy, more focused on his loss than when sober. Shooters and beer proved to be not a fast track away from memory but instead a direct route to the obsessive and vivid recollection of every wrenching experience he wanted to erase from his mind.

Alone in his apartment, in the depths of intoxication, whether sitting at the kitchen table or collapsed in a living-room recliner, he became garrulous, talking to beloved ghosts and to himself. At a certain point, when the floor ceased to be safely horizontal, when it canted like the deck of a ship, when the shapes of things no longer appeared to be right—walls curving inward toward the top, ceiling swelling down like a distended belly—and when the tall curved spout at the kitchen sink seemed as sinister as a cobra poised to strike, young John talked to God.

He perceived these monologues as rants of theological genius, as challenges to the wisdom of the Maker of the universe, as brilliant prosecutorials that demolished the very concept of a benign Creator, as jeremiads so logically argued that God could make no satisfactory response.

One night, although he was no less drunk than usual, he suddenly heard himself as an impartial witness might have heard him, and he was humiliated not only by the mush-mouthed and rambling nature of his screed but also by the sophomoric character of his arguments and accusations. He put a hand to his mouth to silence himself, but the hand fell away from his lips in an angry gesture. He kept talking, now with even less intelligence and coherence. His rant became so tedious, repetitious, and petty that his humiliation thickened into mortification. Yet still he chattered on, as though his tongue owed no obedience to him; he could not halt the insane gush of words. In every expression of grief, he heard a total self-absorption that made him cringe. In every whiny lament, he recognized the voice of a self-pitying wretch. Every tiresome accusation revealed the immaturity of a useless boy who lacked the courage to accept the blame for his own actions, who did not possess the fortitude to carry his guilt like a man.

When mortification deepened into shame, he finally found the will to shut off the torrent of words. He lurched to his feet and staggered to the bathroom, where he knelt at the toilet. Instead of words, vomit gushed forth, such a hideous stream that the next day he remembered it had been black, although surely it could not have been that dark.

He had not been drunk since that night. Wine with dinner never brought him close to inebriation. Seventeen years of sobriety. Now he stared at the second serving of Chivas Regal—and he emptied the glass into the sink.

With or without Scotch, he would not be able to sleep. He feared that he would dream of the plummeting girl.

He had no idea what he should do next. He felt adrift, unable to imagine how he might make his family safe.

Asking for guidance, he went to the kitchen door and stepped out onto the flagstone terrace at the back of the house. The night chill might clear his head and help him think.

The air was crisp, cold, but not so frigid that it made him uncomfortable. He breathed deeply and exhaled a pale plume.

A few sinuous threads of cloud slowly slithered out of the north. The moon rode deep in the west, sailing toward a far shore, but still softly illuminating the yard.

John wished his family might be saved by the simple expediency of boarding a ship or a plane with them and traveling to some distant port. But a creature who had taken the long journey back from death would not be daunted by mere mountain ranges or seas, or national borders.

He stepped off the terrace and followed a flagstone path to the rose arbor. The last flowers of the season had wilted, withered, and turned brown. The leaves were dead. The thorny trailers needed to be cut back to encourage a crop of lush blooms the following year. In moonlight, the looping brambles were a black-and-silver tangle of barbed tentacles.

Three steps from the threshold of the arch, John was halted by the sudden perception that the arbor might be dangerous. Unaffected by the night chill, now the hairs on the nape of his neck stirred as he drew near the lattice tunnel. A cold foreboding skittered down his spine, vertebra to vertebra, with quivering centipedal haste.

The interior of the twelve-foot-long arbor was darker than the surrounding night. But John could clearly see the moon-washed lawn at the farther end. No one waited in the tunnel.

After the events at the hospital, John’s nerves were raw, and he felt perpetually under an imminent threat, although Zach’s fourteenth birthday was sixty-six days away. If he allowed himself to be spooked by every dark place, to be suspicious of every closed door and blind corner, he would be worn out and useless when trouble finally came. He must resist the tendency to see Alton Turner Blackwood in every shadow.

He took another step toward the arbor but again halted, alarmed, when something brushed against his legs, not lightly but with force. Low, from right to left. Some animal. He turned, seeking it in the gloom.

Again, it brushed against him, and even as it passed, he looked down and saw nothing. He felt it against his knees, his shins, yet it remained invisible.

As John backed away from the arbor, fallen leaves rustled and flew up from the grass to his left. They had blown here earlier from the scarlet oak on the south yard. But at the moment, the still air lacked the breath to make leaves tremble, let alone to tumble them and toss them up from the lawn.

The disturbance continued across the deep yard, circled back toward John, looped around him, raced off again, as if a little wind devil were funneling this way and that, except the leaves were not spun up in a vortex but were scattered at random. As he watched, he began to feel that the phenomenon had a frolicsome quality; it wasn’t related to his fear of the arbor, and in fact it seemed to him that this thing that was not a wind devil had warned him away from that latticework tunnel.

While he watched, the phenomenon diminished. The whirl of leaves settled, and the night grew still once more.

As the last leaves floated to rest on the grass, John thought he heard a familiar sigh of pleasure, one he hadn’t heard for a long time. If this had been a ghost, it had been a blithe spirit. Filled with sudden wonder, remembering their golden retriever that had died two years earlier, John whispered, “Willard?”