What the Night Knows

42

SLEET TAPPING AT THE WINDOW WAS A RAT-CLAW SOUND, sharp bat teeth biting on beetle shells.

Ten days after the massacre of the Woburn family, John Calvino’s mood had grown grim. He seemed powerless to improve it. The return of the oppressive presence in their house, which he did not believe he could be imagining, had by its constant pressure infused him with an expectation of defeat and death that he struggled unsuccessfully to overcome.

Even when he was not at home, as now, the bleak mood persisted. Images of a disturbing nature frequently came to him as they never had before—rats, bats, beetle shells—inspired by things as innocent as sleet ticking on a windowpane.

Here in Father Bill James’s office in the rectory adjacent to St. Henry’s Church, John expected the bleakness to relent if only because of the comparative sanctity of this place. But he remained afflicted by a stubborn foreboding.

He stood at the window, perhaps drawn there particularly because it offered a somber view. Under the stone-slab sky, thin mist drifted like acrid smoke from dying embers. The black trunks and bare limbs of the trees revealed an ugly angular chaos that a drapery of leaves had once concealed.

Father William James arrived with apologies for being five minutes late. About forty, with short brown hair, stocky but fit and quick, Father Bill—as he preferred to be called—looked less like a priest of old than like a physical-education teacher in a high school of any time and place. Now at home, but not always just at home, he wore athletic shoes, gray Dockers, and a blue sweatshirt instead of a cleric’s suit and a Roman collar, which of course he wore when he felt they were appropriate.

He vigorously shook John’s hand and led him to an arrangement of four black-leather Herman Miller chairs—wheeled office furniture but ergonomic, comfortable, and stylish—encircling a round coffee table with a brushed-steel base and a glass top. Another window looked onto more skeletal trees, thin mist, and sleet.

The rectory office was different from what it had been two years earlier, before Father Albright retired. Along with all the Victorian parlor furniture, the quaint paintings and highly figured statuary were gone. Behind the priest’s desk hung an abstract bronze crucifix that looked to John like a rag twisted around an old-fashioned four-arm lug wrench.

Here was a place of serious business. This priest understood that in addition to being the shepherd of his flock, he was equally an overseer of parish assets, a promoter of the public welfare, a manager of the congregation’s energies in the interest of equitable solutions to societal problems, and much more.

Indicating the sleet that clicked against the window, Father Bill said, “I don’t remember an October quite as cold as this.”

John nodded. “They say it’ll be a short autumn, early winter.”

“I suppose weather doesn’t make a difference in your business.”

“Homicide, you mean? The murder rate rises slightly in extreme heat, diminishes slightly in extreme cold. At the end of the year, we’ve been as busy as ever.”

“And busier in hard times like these.”

“Actually, the homicide rate usually falls significantly during hard times, then rises when prosperity returns.”

Frowning, Father Bill said, “That seems counterintuitive.”

“It stumps everyone from the theorists to guys like me in the trenches. But that’s how it is. Recently, of course, the Lucas and Woburn murders have skewed the statistics.”

“Such tragedies. Horrible. They seem inexplicable. Were you assigned to those cases?”

“No,” John said. “But they’re part of the reason I wanted to see you, Father.”

In recent weeks, John had more often retold the story of Alton Turner Blackwood’s crimes than in the past twenty years combined, but repetition made it no easier to tell. As with Nelson Burchard and Lionel Timmins, he recounted the destruction of those four families, including his own, without emotion, with only the essential details, as he might describe a crime scene in a court of law. Nonetheless, as always, the words cut him.

With a compassion so respectful that it didn’t make John uneasy, Father Bill responded from time to time with expressions of sympathy that never smacked of pity, with condolences as elegantly restrained as they were clearly sincere. When John listed similarities between the murders twenty years earlier and these contemporary crimes, Father Bill was fascinated, appalled. He was alarmed, too, at the prospect of the city besieged by an imitator of the long-dead killer.

The last words of Alton Turner Blackwood, the only part of the story that John had withheld from Nicolette, brought a frown of a different quality to the priest’s face. His expression grew more dour as John revealed his fear that Blackwood somehow had been within Andy Tane as he had been within Billy Lucas. John methodically laid out his evidence that an apparent supernatural force might be at work—for the first time to someone disposed to believe him—and Father Bill looked like a football coach whose team was on a losing streak and who disapproved of his players’ negativity.

“What I’m hoping,” John said, “is that I can establish a place of safety for my family to ride out December tenth. If something’s in my house—a presence, a spirit, a ghost, I don’t know what—but if something is there, and I truly believe, Father, that something is there, then I need to know how to get rid of it, how to make the house safe, a fortress. Because I think if we can get through the tenth of December, maybe that will be the end of all this. At least I’ve got to hope so. I don’t know what else to do.”

The priest nodded thoughtfully, swiveled his chair toward the window, and watched the sleet biting at the glass as he brooded about what he had been told.

Having fully unburdened himself, having bared his deepest and strangest fears to an audience capable of taking them seriously, John was relieved more than he had expected to be. He wasn’t free of worry but the sense of utter helplessness lifted from him, the helplessness that was the pivot point on which he had been turned to his recent bleak mood.

Swiveling his chair toward John, Father Bill said, “Roosevelt was right when he said we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And our fear can only consume us when we face it alone. I can help you with this, John.”

Grateful for that commitment, John said, “Thank you, Father. I don’t know how it should be done. It’s a house, not a person. A ghost, I guess, not something demonic. So maybe it’s not an exorcism in the classic sense.… ”

Father Bill shook his head. “If we believe in the Magisterium of the Church and its interpretations in this area, we don’t believe in ghosts. Souls of the deceased can’t linger in this world. They pass to God or Purgatory, and they can’t return here in any case. Séances and the like are transgressive, unhealthy, dangerous to the mind and soul.”

“Yes, I understand, I really do, but if the devil is the prince of this world, as the Church says he is … couldn’t he perhaps free a soul from Hell to finish something that it started here during its lifetime?”

Father Bill’s expression was pained, and his eyes seemed to be full of sorrow. But though he still spoke with compassionate concern, his voice contained the faintest note of impatience. “We’ve come a long way in the past hundred years, and further with every passing decade. But the full flowering of the faith in our time is delayed by medieval ideas that make the Church seem hopelessly credulous. Faith isn’t superstition, John. Superstition is a stain on faith, a perversion of the religious impulse and possibly a fatal corruption of it.”

The priest’s words didn’t fully confuse John but bewildered him. He sought to clarify what must be a misunderstanding. “I assure you, Father, I don’t bury statues of Saint Anthony upside down in the yard to attract a buyer for a house that’s been hard to sell or anything of that kind. I know some people mix a little voodoo with the faith and don’t realize what they’re doing. But if ever a man lived who would earn the admiration and assistance of demons, then Alton Blackwood was that man. He was—”

Not with impatience now but in a tone of utmost good-humored reason, Father Bill said, “In an age of nuclear weapons, we don’t need Hell and demons, succubi and incubi and hungry vampires on the doorstep. We need food banks, John, thrift shops, homeless shelters, and the courage to express our faith in social action. There was a time when every diocese was directed to have a priest trained in the Ritual for Exorcisms. We haven’t had one in this diocese for eight years, and that poor lost soul isn’t even a priest anymore.”

The light in the rectory office fell in such a way that John didn’t cast a reflection in the glass table.

He said, “But Father, can’t we have food banks and Hell?”

The priest laughed. He sounded relieved when he said, “If you can laugh about this, you can deal with it.”

John had asked the question seriously, with no intention of a joke. “You said you could help me. What did that mean?”

“You’ve lived with this fear of Blackwood’s return for twenty years. The trauma of your family’s murder and then your face-to-face confrontation with him was so harrowing that it was psychologically formative. When these recent murders occurred, with the coincidental similarities to this monster’s crimes, you were virtually programmed to see signs and portents in even the most ordinary things. Like air knocking in a water pipe. A bad smell in the laundry room.”

Searching his wallet as he talked, Father Bill found a business card. He dealt it across the table as if a game of poker had begun.

“This is a good man, John. Absolutely first rate. I’ve had many occasions to recommend him and never one occasion to regret that I did.”

On the pale-yellow card were the name, address, and phone number of a psychiatrist named Dr. M. Duchamp.

Prior to this meeting, John had thought the most embarrassing thing that might happen would be Father Bill pointedly asking why Zach and Naomi and Minnie were not as involved with parish activities as they had once been, and why the Calvinos attended Mass about twice a month when they used to receive the Eucharist every week.

This parenting failure arose after Father Albright’s retirement, and John wondered at it and worried over it from time to time. But he had continued to procrastinate about getting the kids in a pew more often, and he had been unable to put his finger on a reason for this less diligent commitment to attendance. Now he understood.

Being pressed about more regular appearances at Mass would not have been half as embarrassing as this, as being gently and kindly counseled against hysterical superstition and being referred to a psychiatrist. John was not embarrassed at all for himself, but for Father Bill.

Somehow they were chatting about the weather again, and then about the latest oil crisis and the cost of gasoline.

Soon John was shepherded out of the office, along the hallway, to the front door in a cloud of earnest sophisms, sincere platitudes, and heartfelt encouragements.

Alone on the front porch, he stood at the head of the steps, buttoning the collar of his raincoat and putting up the hood.

A jacket of sleet had begun to encase some of the black limbs of the bare trees, the ice like the ivory shell in a bone scan, the bark like malignant matter in the marrow.

Sleet slanting through the day added no glitter to the scene, as if the ice pellets had formed from dark water.

Just twenty-three days until November seventh. Just fifty-six days until December tenth.