What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

As Melissa flicked the cards facedown across the patio table, Regina gathered up hers not one at a time but only after the full hand had been dealt, and it seemed to the boy, as he stood listening to the story of his mother’s murder, that the beautiful girl had cast his fate in the seven cards and that the beautiful woman held his fate in a fan of numbers and royals.

After giving birth to Melissa, fertile Regina had produced three sons who were now only baby bones in the scattered earth of excavated graves. But after giving birth to the malformed boy, Anita failed to conceive again during the next nine years, though Teejay relentlessly bent her to the task. The old man lost his patience with her, and one night when Anita pressed him too insistently about granting greater privileges to the boy, whom Teejay preferred to keep sequestered, he struck her with the iron poker with which he had been jabbing at the logs in the master-bedroom fireplace. Seeing the damage that he had done to Anita’s face in that moment of unchecked anger, he used the poker to finish her.

So the boy’s mother did not abandon him, after all, and what he had been told about her growing revulsion at his appearance proved to be only another lie in the wilderness of lies that was Crown Hill and the Blackwood family.

With Anita dead and unable to lobby for her child, Teejay might have considered killing the boy at last, but instead he banished his only living son—who in the twisted limbs of the family tree was also his grandson and great-grandson—to the lonely tower room, as a vivid and living reminder to himself that in the quest to refine beauty into perfect beauty by incestuous breeding, the rose can be plucked only at the risk of an occasional thorn.

After drawing a card, Regina took three queens from her hand of eight cards and put them on the table.

“I tell you all this because Melissa and I, each of us, is in her first month with a new child. I’ve come to feel I’ve done enough—more than enough—to earn all that I should have coming to me.”

The awkward boy stood staring at the three queens, and in his mind he saw the cards bearing the faces of his beautiful mother, his beautiful aunt, and his even more beautiful cousin.

Not finished putting meld on the table, Regina revealed two threes that she augmented with a joker.

“While you’re deciding what all this means to you and what if anything you should do about it,” she continued, “you must remember three things. First, that I’m your mother’s sister. Second, that Melissa is not only your mother’s niece but also her half-sister. Third, of everyone at Crown Hill, only I—not even your mother—only I have ever told you the truth.”

Later, the boy understood that she expected him to kill Teejay. Instead, that night, he packed a knapsack that included only what he thought essential—including the photograph of naked Jillian hanging from the rafter. He forced his way into Teejay’s private suite and with a knife demanded money. He had no intention of harming the old man—who was a hardy seventy-three at that time—because to do so would make him a fugitive and ensure that he would be hunted down. He wanted freedom more than revenge. Teejay had twenty-two thousand dollars in a wall safe. The boy also took ten antique coins worth perhaps fifty thousand more.

At midnight, the boy set out along the driveway toward the front gate of Crown Hill. The raven had given him the night, and the night had been his tutor.

The boy now knew everything that the night knew, lessons for the life he would henceforth make for himself. Everyone was born to die. Sex was death. Death was sex. Being a predator was better than being prey. Hell must exist because there was an urgent and abiding need for it. He had no need of Heaven because he would secure a place of honor and privilege in Hell.

Mere minutes after midnight, the boy passed through the main gate, into the world beyond Crown Hill. At that moment, he became me. I am Alton Turner Blackwood, and I am Death.