What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

After spending the night disinterring skeletons from unmarked graves in the pine-circled clearing, the boy returned to his tower room before dawn and spent the morning and the afternoon brooding about his discoveries.

An hour before twilight, when he was still expected to remain discreet and to refrain from inflicting his unappealing presence on either the family or the estate staff, he went to the guest house. In half of this very comfortable residence, he once lived with his mother, Anita, where now his mother’s sister, Regina, resided alone with her daughter, Melissa.

The boy went with no intention of committing violence. He wanted only to learn the truth. But if necessary, he would use terror and pain to extract the truth from them.

In killing the rabbits and the deer, he had learned there was pleasure to be had in ripping the life from pretty things.

Aunt Regina and Cousin Melissa were sitting at a table on their back patio, in the shade of a mammoth maidenhair tree, playing cards. They were annoyed but not apprehensive when the boy suddenly loomed over them.

Some on the house staff were disturbed by his malformed face and his misproportioned body, were even afraid of him though he had harmed no human being to that point. Regina, however, had never shown the slightest fear of him, nor had Melissa except when she was very young. Fourteen now, the girl regarded him with the distaste and the contempt that she learned from her mother.

Having killed animals, having been acknowledged by a mountain lion as Death personified, he saw things through a new and clearer lens. As a boy more naive than he was now, he had thought that Regina and Melissa were smug, fearless, and uncongenial because they were beautiful. He thought beauty was not only their power but also their armor, that if you were as beautiful as they were, then you respected and feared nothing because you were privileged by natural right and were indestructible. Now he realized that their superior airs, their contempt, and their fearlessness were based also on secret knowledge, on something they knew that he did not know. He was an outsider at Crown Hill not just because of his grotesque appearance but also because of his ignorance.

When he told Regina that he had excavated his mother’s skeleton from an unmarked grave, he expected her to express shock or grief or anger that her sister had come to such a fate. Instead she remained seated at her card game, unimpressed with his grisly news. She told him that he had been a stupid boy, that he would regret digging like a dog for a bone.

Realizing that the truth concealed from him was even bigger than he might have imagined, he expected that he would have to choke it or cut it or beat it from Regina. But though she kept him standing, she did not deny him the truth as she denied him a chair. She spelled it out for him with a cold, acidic glee, and the longer she spoke, the more the boy realized that she was insane.

Melissa, smiling and playing cards throughout the revelations, proved to be no less insane than her mother. Teejay, Terrence James Turner Blackwood, patriarch of the clan, surely must be the maddest of them all.

Having inherited great wealth and built an even larger fortune, Teejay didn’t worship money. He was a singularly handsome man, vain about his looks. He worshipped beauty, which in part was also self-worship.

He worshipped beauty but didn’t know how to create it, as his films and his faux castle amply proved. He was still a teenager when his preoccupation with beauty became a burning obsession with—and an unnatural passion for—his younger sister, Alissa, one year his junior. Regina could only guess when he seduced Alissa, but at what cost to Alissa’s sanity eventually became clear.

In time, young Alissa achieved fame as a silent-film star under the name Jillian Hathaway. In those days, movies were considered as much of a low-class business as carnivals and burlesque shows. Some early actresses worked under noms de cinema, and swore to embrace invented biographies written for them by the studios that had them under contract.

Jillian supposedly married Teejay in 1926, in a glamorous ceremony in Acapulco, when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-six. They were never wed, however, because they were brother and sister and couldn’t document otherwise.

As Regina shuffled her deck of cards and made this revelation to the looming scarecrow of a boy, he didn’t at once see why this long-ago depravity, a wicked union occurring thirty-one years before his birth, should have sealed his fate and guaranteed his life of loneliness, bitterness, and violence.

During the dealing of a new hand of 500 rummy, Regina explained that of course Teejay and Jillian’s only child—Marjorie—born in 1929, was a product of incest. Her father was also her uncle. Her mother was also her aunt.

The girl grew to be even more beautiful than her mother—which confirmed Teejay’s theory that greater beauty could be distilled from lesser beauty. He believed that a particular human lineage could be improved and refined just as a line of dogs could be tightly bred to emphasize their most eye-pleasing characteristics. Preventing the introduction of lesser genes, restricting mating to specimens with the same desirable qualities, a family might in time produce individuals of such breathtaking beauty that the world would never previously have seen their equal.

Fourteen years after giving birth to Marjorie, when Jillian learned that her daughter was pregnant with Teejay’s child, she hung herself in the room at the top of the south tower. To Teejay, this suicide was not entirely unwelcome, as it meant that his efforts to further concentrate his seed would not be complicated by the need to service a wife.

In 1942, when Teejay was forty-two, young Marjorie gave birth to Anita and Regina, fraternal rather than identical twins—whose father was also their grandfather and their great-uncle. The twins grew to be even lovelier than their mother, which Teejay took to be absolute justification of his actions and proof of his theory.

“You would not be born for another fifteen years,” Regina told the unwelcome boy on her patio, as she laid the jack, queen, and king of clubs on the table. “And because of you, I and mine will be the only heirs to Crown Hill, to everything.”

The boy began to understand the inevitability of his birth in the condition that he must endure. He was on the brink of discovering what he must become and what he must do with his life. The boy was only hours away from becoming me.