What the Night Knows

46

THE TWO-STORY YELLOW-BRICK HOUSE STOOD IN A NEIGHBORHOOD once a testimony to middle-class success, now evidence of the stalled dreams of generations, proof of the destructive avarice of a political class that promised prosperity while robbing rich and poor alike. Sidewalks were cracked, canted. Iron lampposts, spotted with rust, were overdue for painting. Street trees, untrimmed for so long that they could never be properly shaped by an arborist, stood leafless and raging at the bleak sky with mutant arms and bristling fists.

The house rose behind a spear-point iron fence from which some weapons had been borrowed. In summer the lawn would be nearly as dead as it was on this October twenty-fifth.

Inside, the rooms and hallways provided narrow passages between cliffs of heavy old furniture. In spite of air stale with years of cigarette smoke, John thought that all seemed scrupulously clean.

Peter Abelard, once a priest, still dressed rather like a cleric: black shoes, black slacks, black shirt, with a dark-gray cardigan. For some reason, he wore a watch on each wrist.

Fifty-six, with a lean ascetic face and ash-gray hair combed back from his pale forehead, he was so thin and dry that it seemed he might subsist entirely on the cigarettes that he lit one after the other, the new from the butt of the old.

The house belonged to his ninety-year-old mother. She was currently in the hospital, dying of terminal cancer. Abelard had lived here since the Church finished with him.

After the meeting with Father Bill on the fourteenth, John spent eight days trying to learn who had been the diocese’s last exorcist and to locate him. The search became complicated because Abelard’s mother lived as Mary Dorn, having remarried after her husband died.

Another three days were required to convince Abelard, by phone and by proxy, to agree to an interview. If he didn’t fear policemen, he at least had developed an aversion to them.

In the kitchen where they conferred, the cabinets were pale green. Yellow Formica counters. The old stove and ovens were heavy, as if inspired by foundry works from the long-gone Soviet Union.

Yellow-and-white-checkered oilcloth covered the table at which they sat. A glass ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, a paperback copy of The Deceiver, by Livio Fanzaga, and a glass mug of dark coffee stood at Abelard’s place. His resting arms had worn the table’s oilcloth where he sat, suggesting he spent little time elsewhere in the house.

He offered John neither coffee nor a smoke. On the phone, he made it clear that this would not be an extended chat.

For the fourth time in less than two months, John told the story of Alton Turner Blackwood. He spared himself nothing, wanting to be certain that Peter Abelard had every fact that might matter.

He spoke also about the recent murders and his investigation, beginning with his first visit to Billy Lucas at the state hospital.

“Blackwood will kill another family in thirteen days. If I can’t stop him, he’ll kill my family December tenth. Twenty years ago this very day, I lost my parents and sisters. Not again. I’ll do anything to save Nicky and the kids. I’ll sell my soul to save them.”

Abelard’s eyes were the same gray as his hair, as if they had once been another color but, like the rest of him, had been steeped in smoke until they paled to this somber shade. They were clouded pools of sorrow and enduring dread.

“Never offer your soul even as a joke or in frustration. You think no one is listening or will make a deal. Someone is—and will.”

“Then you still believe.”

“I failed as a priest and as a man. But even in those days, I believed. Now more than ever. That is the horror of my position.”

He drank some of the inky coffee, drew deeply on his cigarette, and exhaled a cloud of smoke that wreathed his head.

“Father Bill was right about one thing,” Abelard said. “Your true enemy isn’t a ghost. Rarely, a suffering soul in Purgatory might, by divine permission, be allowed to haunt this world to seek an intercession that will shorten his time of purification before he may enter Heaven. But no soul in Hell returns of his own volition.”

Because Abelard’s manner was authoritative but without a trace of pride or pretense, and because his voice seemed to be as haunted by remorse as it was seasoned by tobacco, John offered no argument.

“Blackwood’s ritual tells us by whom you’re truly confronted.”

“There must’ve been a hundred interpretations of the ritual.”

Abelard blew twin plumes from his nose. “Only one interpretation is correct. The rest are the theories of psychologists. The quarters were symbolic payment to Death for ferrying the souls of Blackwood’s victims to Hell, where he intended one day to follow them. The disc of feces was a mockery of the Eucharist, to solicit the favor of his satanic master. Each egg symbolizes the soul of the victim. The eggs contain the Latin word for ‘servant,’ because Blackwood was sending his victims to Hell to serve him there later. They’re supposed to be his retinue, his entourage, his slaves for eternity.”

John’s voice thickened. “My parents and sisters aren’t in Hell.”

“I didn’t say they were. Blackwood’s ritual was his delusion. However, no doubt he was in Hell an instant after you killed him.”

Homicide investigation was a career in madness. Sometimes John wondered if by association with so many murderous mad ones, he might one day come unhinged.

“What about the three bells he carried?”

Abelard said, “They tell us the identity of your true enemy. It has brought Blackwood with it, but it’s the sole entity of power in this game. Do you believe in demons, Mr. Calvino?”

“Three months ago, I probably would have said no.”

“You’ve been one of that ‘wretched generation of enlightened men,’ as Eliot called it. But now?”

“My life is all about evidence—knowing when it’s true and when it’s false, how it will play in court. I’m good at knowing all that. The evidence of Blackwood’s return—I’d take that into court.”

With the dexterity of long habituation, Abelard finessed a new cigarette from the pack one-handed, rolled it across his fingers in the manner of a magician manipulating a coin, brought it to his lips, and lit it from the glowing butt that then he crushed in the ashtray.

“The names of the important demons come from the Bible or have been handed down to us by tradition. Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Belial, Lucifer, Mephisto, Meridian, Zebulun … But often in an exorcism, when the exorcist demands and eventually succeeds in getting the malevolent spirit to identify itself, the name is also its purpose or the sin that it most particularly advocates—names like Discord, Envy, Jealousy or like Perdition, Disease, Ruin.”

“Ruin,” John said. “The word etched on Blackwood’s bells.”

“He sought the intercession of the demon Ruin to ensure that the souls of his victims were received for him in Hell. Most likely, the only soul he sent there was his own, but perhaps Blackwood’s life of murder and nihilism pleased this entity called Ruin, and now perhaps it wishes to see the killer keep his promise to you.”

“Why?”

“Why not? Evil doesn’t exist to justify itself. It exists for the pleasure of corruption and the destruction of the innocent. Your children are the primary lure. Young and tender.”

John half felt as if he were sinking in the smoky air like a drowner weighed down by lungs full of water. He breathed deeper, more often, to keep his mind clear.

“This thing, this Ruin, is in my house. I know it is. Can it be forced out with an exorcism?”

“Sometimes a residence or other buildings are exorcised, but not often. A demonic presence in a house can do little real harm. Noises in the night. Footsteps. Doors opening, closing. Foul smells. At worst, poltergeist phenomena—levitating furniture and that sort of thing. A demon isn’t long satisfied with such simple play.”

Gesturing, the hand with the cigarette was as pale as a ghost’s hand except for two nicotine-stained fingers that were the singular greenish-yellow hue of the tissue of a corpse in a particular early stage of decomposition.

Peter Abelard said, “When it’s in the flesh, however, the entity can do unlimited damage, both to the one possessed and to others. If this demon has brought Alton Blackwood’s spirit from out of time into time once more, to keep the killer’s promise, then it won’t kill your family using the house, Mr. Calvino. It will kill the family using someone in the house whom it has possessed.”

John wanted to get up from the table and step out of this soiled atmosphere, onto the porch. A cold front as hard as ice itself had come in from the north the day before. Although the sky hung as dark as iron, the air was polished bright, invigorating. But a desperate hope kept him in his chair.

“Who is at risk of possession?” he asked.

“Anyone,” said Abelard. “Perhaps not one who lives in a truly saintly state. Though even if I knew such people, I wouldn’t need all my fingers to count them.”

“But it must be easier to control a corrupt man like Andy Tane, to force him to commit murder and even suicide.”

“You’re speaking now of two different things. When the intention of possession is for the corruption and destruction of the one who is possessed, one weakness of character or another is enough to open the door to the entity.”

With ashen eyes, Abelard watched as he tapped the burnt end from his Marlboro into the glass ashtray.

He continued: “The demon can exert such total control as you suggest only in those who have turned away from grace and isolated themselves from redemption.”

“Billy Lucas was a fourteen-year-old boy. And not a bad boy, judging by the evidence.”

“According to the law,” Abelard said, “how old must a murderer be to stand trial as an adult?”

“In most jurisdictions, children are generally presumed to have the capacity to form criminal intent by the time they’re fourteen.”

“Then let’s suppose they haven’t fully developed the capacity to make sound moral judgments until that age, either. And even then, if they received no previous spiritual guidance, might they not be as vulnerable to total control as this Andy Tane you mentioned?”

“But surely an innocent child—”

“Most children may be innocent. Not all. You must have known or heard of a murderer even younger than Billy Lucas.”

“This case several years ago. He was eleven.”

“Who did he kill?”

“A ten-year-old playmate. And brutally.”

With thumb and forefinger, Abelard plucked from his tongue a shred of tobacco that was stuck to it. He flicked it in the ashtray.

“You mentioned Mrs. Lucas’s belief in the healing power of herbs and obelisks and geodes. There might be medicinal value in certain herbs but not in crystal animals and the rest. How passionately did she believe in this?”

John shrugged. “I don’t know. She bought a lot of that stuff.”

“Some of it voodoo.”

“No. I didn’t see any evidence of really bizarre stuff like that.”

“Didn’t you say the shop sold High John the Conqueror and wonder-of-the-world root?”

“They sold hundreds of herbs and powdered weeds. Those names stuck with me because they were unusual.”

“They’re both voodoo powders. Oh, I’m sure the shop isn’t a nest of wild-eyed voodooists and that its proprietor has no malevolent intent. Sounds as if they sell the golden calf in a large variety of forms, and no doubt with the sincere conviction that they’re doing good.”

Events of the past few weeks had in a sense broken the world as John knew it into colorful fragments that, like the bits of glass at the bottom of a kaleidoscope, kept shifting to form an increasingly complex reality.

Abelard said, “But if Mrs. Lucas had true, deep faith in the efficacy of these things, perhaps her son came to share that faith.”

“Maybe he did,” John said. “He had several of these things in his room, but neither his sister nor his grandmother did. Why does it matter?”

For a long moment, Abelard watched a ribbon of smoke serpentine from the end of his cigarette, as if it might take form the way that the vapor from a magic lamp morphed into a genie.

Finally he said, “Have you ever heard that using a Ouija board is dangerous because in trying to communicate with spirits, you can open the door to dark forces?”

“I’ve heard it often. I thought it might even be a warning on the Ouija-board box.”

Abelard smiled thinly. “I don’t believe the government’s gone so far yet as to require that. There are many ways to open the door to that waiting darkness. And there are things we do that both open the door and also leave us vulnerable not merely to possession but also to loss of control. This Reese somebody you mentioned …”

“Reese Salsetto.”

“He worshipped money and power,” Abelard said. “That opened the door but also made him vulnerable to full enslavement. Likewise, an obsessive blind faith in material things—crystals, herbs, geodes, powdered weeds—can sometimes be like consulting a Ouija board. And if you believe only an obelisk and wonder-of-the-world root can save you, if you insist on attributing supernatural powers to objects that of course do not embody them, then you’re not merely vulnerable. You are utterly without defenses.”

As if so much talk of doors had opened one in the sky, a sudden wind blew down into the yard, conscripted an army of dead leaves into its service, and assaulted the nearby window with them, so that John startled, though Abelard did not. The wind’s second breath was less ferocious than its previous one, and as the leaves fluttered away, the first snowflakes of the season flurried against the glass. They were as large as silver dollars and as intricate as lace mantillas.

John said, “If I unknowingly invited it, could I be possessed?”

Watching the snow at the window, Abelard murmured, “That’s not the question you really want most to ask.”

After a silence that drew the ex-priest’s stare to him, John said, “If I was possessed, could I be controlled so completely that I might be used … to kill even the people I love the most?”

Through the haze of cigarette smoke, Abelard searched John’s eyes and offered his own for searching. “I don’t really know you that well, Mr. Calvino. I don’t know you well enough to say.”

“On December tenth, when I believe we’re all at risk …”

“Yes?”

“Will you spend those twenty-four hours with us. In our home?”

“Eight years ago, I was unfrocked. Not excommunicated, but stripped of my priesthood and all authority.”

“You still know the rituals of exorcism.”

“I know them, but it would be a sacrilege for me to say them in my present condition.”

With the nimble fingers of his free hand, Abelard extracted a fresh cigarette from the pack on the table, conveyed it to his lips, and lit it from the butt he was discarding.

John listened to himself talking as if listening to a third man at the table. “I’m terrified that I might be as defenseless as Billy Lucas. As defenseless as Andy Tane leaping from that window with Davinia. What if I feel it clawing into me … and I don’t have the clarity of mind to do what Brenda Woburn did, the clarity to kill myself before it can take me and … use me?”

Peter Abelard savored his new Marlboro, blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. Then he leaned forward in his chair, forearms on the table where the oilcloth was worn, and at last said, “You aren’t alone. Remember, the forces of darkness are balanced by the light.”

“I pray,” John said.

“Good for you, Mr. Calvino. So do I. But beyond that—don’t let fear blind you to every saving grace you’re offered.”

“Such as?”

“Such as any that may be.”

“Please, for God’s sake, I need more than riddles.”

Abelard considered him for a long time, his eyes seeming more steely now than ashen. At last he said, “The vast majority of people who think they need an exorcism or who appear to need one—they’re suffering only psychological illnesses of one kind or another.”

“This isn’t just psychological.”

“I didn’t say it was, Mr. Calvino. I’ve done many exorcisms over the years where the demonic presence was real. And there were times when the demon was so powerful and so firmly embedded in its victim that no matter how often I performed the Ritual, no matter how very profound the prayers I employed, regardless of repeated blessings with the sacramentals—water, oil, salt—I failed utterly to force the possessing presence to depart. But then …”

His voice had grown quieter as he spoke, until his last two words were a whisper. And his stare drifted down from John’s eyes to the smoke curling off his cigarette.

“But then?” John pressed.

“In each of those instances, when all seemed lost, I witnessed a divine visitation that expelled the demon from the afflicted. Divine visitations, Mr. Calvino. Is your willingness to believe so elastic that it can stretch that far?”

“I’ve seen the demonic. If it’s real, so is its opposite.”

Abelard said, “We don’t live in Biblical times. God doesn’t appear in burning bushes and the like. Angels no longer materialize in all their winged glory. I think the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore. In my experience, when the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.”

John waited as another smoky silence unraveled with Abelard lost in thought, but at last said, “Tell me, please.”

“With the Ritual, I repeatedly failed to evict the presence in a twenty-year-old man whose possessor had caused him both terrible physical maladies and deep depression. Then a neighbor boy knocked on the door and insisted he could help, though the parents of the afflicted twenty-year-old had never breathed a word to anyone about my visits to their home or my purpose. This child was only five—but had a tremendous presence. He brought with him a hush, a sense of peace I can’t convey with words—and he brought an ordinary drinking glass. He went to the bed and pressed the open end of the glass to the chest of the afflicted young man and said simply, ‘Come out.’ I watched a darkness rise out of the young man’s chest and fill that glass, not like smoke or like anything but itself. The boy turned the glass over, and the darkness rose from the glass and hung in the air half a minute, less, before dissipating. The victim instantly cast off his long depression, and the horrible impetigo sores that antibiotics couldn’t cure healed in minutes as I watched. In another case, a beautiful stray dog that no one had ever seen before wandered into the house and lay beside the afflicted, its head on his chest, and a similar cure was effected.”

When after another silence Abelard made eye contact again, John said, “And your point?”

“Don’t let your fear blind you to every saving grace you’re offered,” Abelard repeated. “Look to the children around you, animals if you have any. One of them may be an avatar of the divine.”

As if Abelard had been unnerved by recalling these incidents, his hand trembled when he brought his Marlboro to his mouth.

John tried once more: “Even if you couldn’t perform an exorcism or anything, if you could stay with us that day just to provide … your counsel.”

As he smoked, Peter Abelard held John’s stare again, this time as if daring him to look away. Eventually he said, “So … do you know why I was defrocked, Detective Calvino?”

“Yes,” John said, and with dismay he realized that although he meant to manage his expression, a trace of disgust surely could be read in his face by anyone as perceptive as Abelard.

“That I broke my vow of chastity is bad enough. That I was drawn so strongly to teenagers is perhaps the more damning factor. Boys or girls—it didn’t matter.”

John looked at the window. The first fluffy wheels of snow had spun away, and smaller flakes drove through the day.

When he could look at Abelard again, he said, “It’s just that, I’ve nowhere else to turn.”

“The watch on my right wrist,” Abelard said, “keeps perfect time. The day in the date window is correct. The watch on my left wrist has no batteries.”

He extended his left arm for John to look at the dead watch on his thin wrist.

“The date in the window has to be reset from time to time. You see now—it’s set eight weeks and three days ago. I reset it every time I fall. It’s my reminder of how weak I am. It shows the date on which I last had sex with a teenager.”

Colder than the day beyond the window, John said, “Eight weeks, not eight years.”

“That’s right. I no longer get what I want by manipulation and by the betrayal of trust. I pay for it. I struggle to resist. I pray and fast and subject myself to pain, needles acutely placed, trying to force my mind off the path I am about to follow. Sometimes, I succeed. Sometimes not.”

The pain in Peter Abelard’s voice was exceeded only by the self-loathing. John could hardly bear to meet the man’s bleak eyes as he listened to his confession, but he knew too well how anguishing it was to despise oneself, and he could not look away.

“Then I go to those parts of the city where men go for this,” Abelard continued. “You know the places I mean. Any policeman must. I seek out the young ones, the runaways. Boys or girls, it still doesn’t matter. They’re already selling themselves, so I haven’t taken their innocence. I’ve just corrupted them further, as if that matters much in the ledgers of Hell.”

John slid his chair back from the table. He didn’t quite have the strength to get up at once.

“No demon rides me, Mr. Calvino. There’s only me in me. I seek redemption so imperfectly. You have a boy of thirteen. My eyes roam over what they wish, as if I’ve no control of them. Does your eleven-year-old look a bit more mature than her years? There’s no demon in me, but God help you, Mr. Calvino, you don’t want me in your house.”

John got to his feet.

Abelard breathed dragon plumes upon the table and said, “Can you find your own way out?”

“Yes.”

As John reached the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, Abelard said, “If you really pray—”

“Yes, I’ll pray for you.”

“Not for me,” Abelard said. “For my mother suffering with the cancer. Pray for her. Surely it’ll mean more coming from you than from me.”

As John followed the canyons of the crowded house, the looming furniture seemed more Gothic than before, hulking and dire, and the scent of cigarette smoke on the air seemed now as bitter as ipecac on the tongue.

Outside, the frozen sky, the freezing air in brisk motion. The cleansing sluice of falling snow. The black arachnid limbs of dormant trees in falling snow. Barren yard and battered fence and broken concrete and falling snow.

At the curb, he stood beside his car, reluctant to get in behind the wheel. The cold pinched his face, and snow lasted on his lashes until he blinked.

Twenty years to the day.

Twenty years and counting.

Breathing in snow, breathing out the stale scent of cigarettes, he could not at once get rid of the smell of smoke.

Overhead, wind whispered through the naked limbs and shook the younger branches, rattling them like the fragile bones of small dead things.

Twenty years to the day.

And he had nowhere to turn for help.

The time had come to sit with Nicolette, to share with her his once irrational-seeming fear that Alton Turner Blackwood was in the world again, to tell her the one thing he had withheld from her about his confrontation with the killer on that long-ago night. The time had come to make some plan for the tenth of December, if any plan could possibly be made.

He got in the car, started the engine, drove into the street.

This evening, he would pray for Peter Abelard’s mother, for Abelard as well. He would pray for his lost family, for his family still alive, for himself, for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.