What the Night Knows

49

AFTER LEAVING NAOMI IN THE THIRD-FLOOR MASTER SUITE, Melody Lane—talented spinner of tall tales about other worlds and cross-time sleighs with billowing sails, the willing and eager servant of Ruin and therefore a kind of spiritual sister to Alton Turner Blackwood—descends the back stairs to the ground floor. As she opens the door between the stairwell and the kitchen, she hears voices, the anxious mother and the father, coming from the nearby dayroom. She remains in the stairwell, behind the door, which she holds ajar, listening. When John and Nicolette hurry away somewhere, Melody enters the kitchen.

They have many handsome and meticulously sharpened knives to choose from: bread knife, butcher knife, turkey carver, pot-roast slicer.… They are good customers of Williams-Sonoma, and they buy the best quality. Though she admires their purchases, she believes they might be consuming more than their fair share. We all have a responsibility. Well, tonight their consuming ends. When she opens a drawer and sees the cleaver with the flat-grind blade, she picks it up and considers her reflection in the polished steel. For a child a year old or younger, Melody prefers drowning in a bathtub. For a child between two and four, smothering or vigorous strangulation. Blunt objects for any age. But for a fit boy of thirteen, who has been made wary by his recent experiences, an edge weapon wielded aggressively seems more advisable.

After closing the knife drawer, while still gripping the drawer pull, she asks for guidance, because she isn’t now being ridden and therefore does not share Ruin’s omniscient awareness of the family members’ whereabouts. The boy is in his room—and in a moment the youngest girl will join him there. The tender girl must be saved for later, and Melody will receive assistance with Minette’s bloodless detention. The boy is hers, and this reward excites her. He will be the oldest child that she has killed to date, and when she drinks his last exhalation, she will lick every wisp of it from the deep recesses of his ripe mouth.

Holding the LEGO wheel-like thing against her chest with her left arm, Minnie rapped on Zach’s door with her right fist. “It’s me and it’s important.”

He invited her in, and she found him sitting at the slantboard on his desk, just closing the cover on his drawing tablet.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Something bad is going to happen.”

“What’ve you done? Did you break something?”

“Not me. I haven’t done anything. It’s in the house.”

“Huh? What’s in the house?”

“Ruin. Its name is Ruin.”

“What kind of name is Ruin? What’s the joke?”

“Don’t you feel it in the house? It’s been here for weeks. It hates us, Zach. I’m scared.”

He had risen from his chair as she talked. Now he walked past her to close the door that she had left ajar.

Turning to her, he said, “I’ve had some … experiences.”

Nodding, she said, “Experiences.”

“I thought I was going freaking nuts.”

“It’s been waiting for the right time.”

“What’s been waiting? Who is this Ruin guy?”

“He’s not people like you and me and Naomi. He … it … whatever, it’s a kind of ghost I think, but also something more, I don’t know what.”

“Ghosts. I’m not so big on ghost stuff, you know. The whole idea seems stupid.”

Minnie could see that he didn’t really think ghosts were as stupid an idea as he might have thought they were back in September or August.

“What’ve you got there?” he asked, pointing to the LEGO wheel-thing she had trapped against her chest with her left arm.

“I built it from a dream, except I don’t remember how I could have put it together.”

Frowning, he said, “You can’t lock LEGOS together like that, not everything round and smooth and layered like that.”

“Well, I did. And we’ve got to keep it with us every minute tonight, ’cause we’re gonna need it bad.”

“Need it for what?” Zach asked.

Minnie shook her head. “Damn if I know.”

He stared at her until she shrugged. Then he said, “Sometimes you’re a little spooky yourself.”

“Don’t I know it,” she agreed.

In John’s study, Nicky had not switched off the computer. A page from the hologrammatic journal of Alton Turner Blackwood waited on the screen. John glanced at it, surprised that an apostle of chaos could have recorded his crimes in such neat handwriting. Of course, evil of the most refined variety had a respect for certain kinds of order—enemy lists, gulags, extermination camps.

From a desk drawer, he retrieved the holster and the pistol that he had put there before he had settled in the armchair for a nap.

As he slipped into the rig, he watched Nicky unlock the tall gun cabinet in the corner. She unclipped a 12-gauge, pistol-grip shotgun from its rack braces and passed it to him.

Most of Nicky’s friends in the art world were wary of cops and afraid of guns. They seemed to like John and assumed she married him because he wasn’t much like other cops, when in fact she was at heart as much a cop as an artist. She did her work not only with emotion but also with intellect, not just intuitively but also analytically, considered it a career but also a duty, and felt above all the need to serve Truth even more than art. He had known many good cops whom he would have trusted to cover his back, but none more so than Nicky.

As she grabbed a box of shells from one of the bottom drawers, she said, “Where are the kids?”

“In their rooms, I think.” He accepted a shell from her and loaded it in the breech. “I told the girls not to go outside again.”

“We’ve got to stay together,” she said, passing him the first of three more shells. “I swear, it wants to keep us apart, that’s what it’s been doing. We’re stronger together. Where in the house is easiest to defend?”

“I’m thinking.” He loaded one, two, three shells in the tube-type magazine. “Give me some spares.”

From the computer speakers came music. A recording of one of Naomi’s flute solos of which she was particularly proud.

John and Nicky turned to the monitor. The page of Blackwood’s journal blinked off the screen. A photo flashed up. The same photo of John’s mother that had been in the file labeled CALVINO1 on Billy Lucas’s computer, which he had gotten from this same serial-killer site. That photo flashed away, and one of John’s father appeared.

Nicky said, “What’s happening?”

John’s dad blinked away. Replaced by his sister Marnie. Then Giselle. Then the faces appeared one at a time in rotation: fast, faster, blindingly fast.

John glanced at the gallery of his children’s birthday pictures, at the familiar furniture, the walls, the ceiling. Their house, their home. Not theirs alone anymore.

The screen blanked. Still the flute music. A new photo. Zach. Now Naomi. Minnie. Nicky. John.

“It’s starting,” he said.

“Screw this. We’ll stop it,” Nicky said almost savagely, and switched off the computer. She put the entire box of shells on the desk. “But how? John, it’s crazy. How can we defend against a thing like this?”

Stuffing four shells in one pants pocket, four in the other, he said, “Abelard told me it can’t really hurt us with the house. It has to get into someone and come at us that way.”

Nicky looked at the pistol in his rig, at the shotgun in his hands, and he could read her thoughts.

Billy Lucas had killed his family. The enemy within.

“I shouldn’t have all the guns.” He handed the pistol to her. “You’re a good shot. It’s double action, just pull through the first resistance. It’s stiffer than you’re used to, but you’ll be fine.”

As she stared at the weapon in her hands, abhorrence distorted her lovely features.

John could read that expression, too. “Nicky, listen, you watch me for any sign, any slightest sign that I’m … not me anymore.”

A tremor softened her mouth. “What if I—”

“You won’t,” he interrupted. “It can’t get in you, not you.”

“If I were to do anything to one of the kids—”

“Not a woman as good as you,” he insisted. “It’s me that I’m not too sure of. I’m the one with a history of … letting the team down.”

“Bullshit. You’re the best man I’ve ever known. And it won’t be the kids. Not our kids. It’ll come at us from somewhere else, in someone from outside.”

“You just watch me for any sign,” he repeated. “Any slightest sign. And don’t hesitate to pull the trigger. It’ll look like me, but it won’t be me anymore. And if it’s in me, it’ll go for you first because you have the other gun.”

She grabbed the back of his neck, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him as if it might be the last time she ever would.

In the past twenty-one days, Lionel Timmins hadn’t been able to find any hinges to open doors on the Woburn investigation. There was the link between Reese Salsetto and Andy Tane, but day by day it seemed to be a link that didn’t connect with this chain of events, just a coincidence. The more he probed into the weirdness on the night of the fourth—culminating in the furious violence at the hospital—the less sense it made.

And day by unnerving day, with increasing seriousness, Lionel reviewed his memory of the curious atmosphere in the Woburn house and the experience with the screen saver that had formed into a blue hand on Davinia’s computer. The repulsive cold squirming against his palm and spread fingers. The sharp nip as if a fang had pierced his skin. His persistent sense of being watched. The sound of doors closing on the deserted second floor, footsteps in empty rooms.

Alternately questioning his sanity and assuring himself that he was merely gathering information with which to set John Calvino’s mind at ease, Lionel found his way to the yellow-brick house of the former exorcist late on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. He didn’t call ahead for an appointment, but used his intimidating physique and his badge to batter at Peter Abelard’s resistance to grant an interview. Lionel didn’t look much like a cop in his wool toboggan cap and navy peacoat, but the ex-priest relented.

When he learned that John had been there earlier, Lionel was not surprised. He was amazed, however, to discover that this smoke-saturated man who bore no resemblance to his idea of a priest was nonetheless eerily convincing. The interview chilled him.

In the street outside Peter Abelard’s house, as Lionel stood watching the white sky come apart and drift down in cold crystals, he stuck out his tongue to catch the flakes, as he had done when he was very young, trying to remember what it had been like to be a boy who believed in wonders and in Mystery with a capital M.

Now, in his car, a few blocks from the Calvino house, he still didn’t know if he was aboard the superstition express all the way to the end of the line or if he would get off at the next station. Whatever happened, he owed John Calvino a longer and more serious discussion of the evidence, and he owed it to him now.

Sitting on her parents’ bed, beside the attaché case, watching the glorious snow falling outside, hoping that the hush of the room would seep into her noisy brain and bring her clarity of mind, Naomi thought that she heard a chanting voice, as if from a radio with the volume set low. On the nearest nightstand stood a clock radio, but it wasn’t the source of the rhythmic murmur.

The chanting repeatedly faded, although it never went entirely away. Each time it returned, the volume was never louder than it had been at its previous loudest, and she could not make out the words. Pretty soon, curiosity got the better of Naomi, which was only what curiosity was supposed to do, to her way of thinking, because without curiosity there would be no progress, and humankind would still be living in grotesquely primitive conditions, without iPods, nonfat yogurt, and shopping malls.

She was pretty sure Melody had told her not to move from her perch on the bed. She didn’t want to be one of those graceless people who used her status to justify all kinds of obnoxious behavior, but the inescapable fact seemed to be that if there was royalty from a far world in the house, it was not Melody. She Who Must Be Obeyed was instead a certain eleven-year-old going on twelve. She got up from the bed and followed the sound, turning her head this way and that to get a bead on it.

A short hallway opened off the bedroom, with a walk-in closet on each side. Naomi switched on the hall light. The chanting didn’t arise from either of the closets.

At the end of the hall, the door to the bathroom stood ajar. The room beyond was almost dark at this hour, little of the storm light penetrating the clerestory windows high in the walls.

The rhythmic sound was definitely chanting. A male voice. But she couldn’t quite make out what he was saying.

Naomi wasn’t an impetuous girl given to flinging herself into harm’s way. This chanting might be weird but surely it didn’t arise from an ill-intentioned person. Melody wouldn’t have brought her up here if anything were amiss. No doubt the chanting had something to do with the preparations for departure. Magicians were always chanting.

She pushed open the bathroom door, felt for the light switch, and the room brightened.

The most desperate-looking man sat on the floor, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs to pull himself into a ball like a pill bug. His tarnished-penny eyes were so wide with terror, they looked as if they might fall out of his sockets. He bobbed his head up and down, up and down. As if trying to convince himself, he muttered, “I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.…”

John with the shotgun, Nicky with the pistol, hurried along the ground-floor hall toward the front stairs, on their way to the children, who should be upstairs.

The doorbell rang.

She said, “Don’t answer it!”

They were just past the foot of the main stairs, with only the foyer between them and the front door, so that John clearly heard the clack of the deadbolt sliding out of the striker plate in the door frame.

“No,” Nicky said, and raised the pistol.

John brought up the shotgun as the front door swung inward. The perimeter alarm had been engaged. The siren should have sounded. It didn’t. A meddling phantom had invaded the system.

The door swung wide, but no one stood on the threshold. A taunt. A lure. Someone might be out there, to the left or the right of the doorway, back pressed to the wall of the house, waiting for John to step into a trap.

There was no music, flute or otherwise, and the breeze barely murmured, but snow whirled as if waltzing on the porch, flung off thin veils that fluttered silently into the foyer, sparkling in the chandelier light.

For eighteen years, John had dreaded this moment without fully recognizing that on an unconscious level he believed implicitly the impossible would happen, that the killer of his family would return from the grave. Two years previously, when Minnie seemed close to death, her illness was so mysterious that John then became conscious of his conviction that Blackwood’s promise to him would be kept. As Minnie lay in delirium, her fever uncontrollable, Blackwood prowled the edges of John’s imagination, and it became easier by the day to believe that a spirit, not a virus, was killing her. Since then, his dread had grown, and now it almost seemed that he’d drawn Blackwood back into the world, that by so often imagining the worst, he had issued an invitation.

Now the open door and the vacant threshold argued for boldness on his part, because he would be the last victim on this killer’s agenda. It wanted him to witness the brutalization of everyone he loved before slitting him open to steam in the winter night. At this moment of the open door, Nicky far more than John was in danger.

“Go upstairs to the kids,” he said. “I’ll check this out.”

“No. I’m with you. Do it fast. Do it now.”

Zach was near the door that he had just closed, Minnie stood beside her brother’s desk, and Willard materialized through the wall.

Always, when Minnie thought about Willard as he had been, she thought about play and fun, laughter and love. Even the sight of Dead Willard could lift her heart, though the truth was that the dog did not come back into the world to play or to make her laugh. He wasn’t scary like the ghost with the blasted face in the convenience store, but you didn’t want to cuddle Dead Willard, either. He wouldn’t feel soft, furry, and warm anymore. You might feel a coldness when you tried to touch him or nothing at all, which would be worse. The sight of Willard scared Minnie now, because he meant trouble was coming.

The dog raced to her, dashed to Zach, disappeared through the door to the hall, and at once returned by the same route.

“What’s wrong with you?” Zach asked Minnie as he watched her watching the ghost dog that he couldn’t see.

Willard barked, barked, but even Minnie couldn’t hear him. She could see only that he was trying to bark out from his reality into theirs.

She said, “Zach, get away from the door.”

“Why?”

“Get away from the door!”

The dog did his best. Nobody could blame good old Willard when the gray-dress woman from twenty days earlier, the woman who might have been a door-to-door Jesus-talker but wasn’t, burst into the room and swung a meat cleaver at Zach.

Roger Hodd was told, with his own voice, to Stay. He finds that he can’t disobey. He is a dog, not a man anymore, just a dog with a master who has him by the short hairs of his mind, and minute by minute his sanity is melting away. As a reporter, he gets to ask the questions, and you either have to tell him the truth, lie, or say “No comment,” and no matter what you say, he can characterize it as either the truth or a lie, as he sees fit. That is his authority, his power, but no longer. He doesn’t get to ask questions here, and this thing that has controlled him like a marionette, that isn’t in him at the moment but that can still make him Stay, is going to do something monstrous with him, then to him.

The girl pushes the door open wider, turns on the lights, and gapes at him from the threshold. She asks if he’s all right, if he needs help. How stupid is the little gash? Of course he needs help, he’s dying here. He wants to tell her that she’s a brain-dead future whore, that she’s dumber than the load she probably has in her pants, but then his rider returns, fully controlling Hodd once more, and he says to the girl, “You are a sweet treat, aren’t you? I want my sweet candy. Give me some tasty candy, you ignorant little bitch.” As abruptly as it mounted him, the rider dismounts, for it has business elsewhere, but Roger Hodd remains on Stay.

Swaddled in the odors of wool coats and fake-fur collars and sheepskin linings, Preston Nash waits in the lightless closet, like a Level 3 threat in a video game, the claw hammer ready in his hand. He remains unafraid. After almost twenty years strung out on drugs and drink, he has so often walked with Death along one brink or another that his capacity for fear is burnt out, until the only things that can at times frighten him are his worst hallucinations. Long-term users of ecstasy—a drug Preston dislikes—lose the ability to know joy naturally because their brains stop producing endorphins. As they must rely on their drug of choice for happiness, he relies on his for terror that the real world—a faded and threadbare place to him—no longer can supply. So he waits for his new and interesting companion, the sharer of his flesh, with pleasant anticipation.

He is idling on a Stay command with nothing to do but think, and he likes what he is thinking. Although not in control of his body, he has the benefit of all his senses when his spirit driver gets behind the wheel and takes him for a spin. Preston’s vision, smell, touch, taste, and hearing remain as sharp as ever, but the intensity of these experiences will be beyond anything he, as a lifelong observer rather than participant, has ever known. He has killed thousands in the virtual worlds of games, but this will be real and intense. He has bedded women, mostly those for whom he’s paid, and he’s seen thousands of women used and roughly abused in adult films, but he has never raped or beaten one. He suspects his spirit driver will inspire him to do things this night that will be more outrageous and thrilling than anything he’s ever seen on film. He hopes he’ll be allowed the wife. But certainly the girls. What lies before him now is the opportunity to play with the real world as he has previously only played with virtual ones.

As Preston listens to John and Nicolette Calvino in the foyer, his spirit companion returns.

John went from the foyer to the porch as he would have cleared a doorway in any murder house where the killer might still be found: low, quick, shotgun tracking with his eyes to the left, right. The porch was deserted. He surveyed the autumn-brown lawn that lay half-concealed under its first coat of winter white, saw no one either there or in the street.

Stepping inside, he looked at Nicky and shook his head. He closed the door, twisted the deadbolt turn, and watched the lock for a moment, waiting for it to disengage.

“The kids,” she said worriedly.

He went to Nicky, peered up the stairs beyond her, and said, “Let me take the lead. Stay a few steps back, so we don’t make one target of ourselves.”

“You think someone’s in the house already?”

“The alarm is set, but it didn’t go off when the door opened. Maybe someone came in earlier and it didn’t go off then, either.”

He had never seen her face this grim. She looked at the pistol in her right hand and said, “There’s no way we can call the police, someone you know.”

“I knew Andy Tane. The only cop you can trust is me—and maybe not me, either. After we’ve got the kids safe with us, we’ll bar the doors or nail them or something—then sweep the house room by room. You with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember—stay behind me. Two targets, not one.”

He climbed three stairs, glanced back, and saw her surveying the foyer ceiling as if this were not her home but instead a cave unknown to her, in which hung bats and other rabid threats.

Ridden again, Preston thrills to the vicious rage of his demon master, a hatred so exhilarating that it’s like an infinite roller coaster without rising inclines, only breathtaking plunges, one after the other, allowing but a moment to shudder in anticipation of the next free-fall into fury.

He quietly opens the closet door, steps into the foyer, and sees John Calvino climbing the stairs, his attention on spaces above, and Nicolette turning away to follow her husband. Just a rich-bitch, tight-assed, art-school phony, vomiting her pretentious swill onto canvas after canvas, a baby machine pumping out more little phonies to live in this oh-so-precious fantasy life of hers. She needs to be taught how the world really is, needs to be brought down and broken and forced to admit she’s just filth like everyone else.

Preston’s rider finesses from him a stealth and swiftness that he—always awkward and so long enervated—has never shown before. The woman doesn’t hear him coming. He raises the hammer as he closes on her, dismayed that he is going to be allowed only to kill her. But the dismay lasts just an instant, because he is in the game, in it as he has never been before, no longer merely a player sitting in an armchair. Although ridden by Death and a demon, Preston feels more alive now than ever before, and he knows that when the claw end of the hammer cracks through the top of her skull and gouges the art out of her brain forever, his pleasure will be an order of magnitude more intense than anything he has felt before, orgasmic.

He swings the hammer down.

If Nicky heard the squeak of a shoe or the rustle of clothing behind her, she didn’t consciously register it, but she smelled bad breath—garlic, beer, rotten teeth—and strong body odor, and she instinctively ducked her head, hunched her shoulders. Something cold and curved brushed along the nape of her neck and apparently hooked in the collar of her blouse. She was jerked backward. Off balance, she fell against her attacker.

“… ignorant little bitch.”

Roger Hodd of the Daily Post didn’t have the voice of the thing who spoke to Naomi from the mirror back in September, but Naomi had no doubt that they were one and the same, that nothing was the way she had thought it was, that she had been less perspicacious than foolish.

She turned to run, in front of her the bathroom door slammed shut, she seized the knob, it wouldn’t budge. Trapped.

When Minnie told Zach to get away from the door, he instead turned toward it, to see what was wrong, and there was the woman.

Minnie screamed as the blade flashed.

Zach dropped, tucked, rolled as the cutting edge sliced the air with a whoosh where he had been. As he sprang to his feet, he heard the cleaver chop into the carpet inches short of him. The freaking maniac had swung it so hard that she cut through to the wood beneath and needed a moment to free the blade, spitting and keening like a rabid weasel or something.

Clutching her LEGO wheel to her chest with both arms, Minnie backed away from the desk toward the hall door, screaming again. Man, he hated to hear his sister screaming, it tore at him. Zach snatched up the desk chair, throwing it at the maniac to buy a few seconds. Struck, the woman stumbled backward, and by the time she regained her balance, Zach had the Mameluke sword.

Lizard-fast in spite of her long dress, the shrieking lunatic came at him before he could draw the sword from the scabbard, came at him in a fury, and he didn’t even know her. He used the sword and sheath defensively, as a cudgel, holding it by both ends and thrusting it forward to meet the descending blade. The cleaver rang off the polished-nickel scabbard, and the force of the blow almost vibrated the Mameluke out of Zach’s hands. She swung left to right, horizontally, under the sword, almost slashing his belly. He danced back, she slashed right to left, and the blade snagged his T-shirt and flashed away with a quiver of light but with none of his blood.

The smooth curved back of the claw slides harmlessly along the nape of the bitch’s neck, and the two sharp talons snare her blouse. Preston jerks, ripping the collar, pulling her against him. With his left arm, he encircles her throat. As her right arm comes up, maybe trying to shoot backward at him, he swings the hammer at her hand. He strikes the gun instead, it flies out of her grip, thuds off the area rug, clatters across the floor.

At the feel of her, the warm delectable body, Preston’s rider wants her, after all, and so does Preston, he wants to take her and kill her with a knife while he’s taking her, which is more extreme than anything he’s seen in the roughest bondage films. Time the killing cut to the moment of his orgasm. This is his rider’s desire, as well, for it believes that Death is the best sex.

The husband is coming down the stairs, the pistol-grip shotgun raised, but he can’t take a shot without killing his rich-bitch baby-making machine. She’s kicking at Preston’s shins, clawing at the arm that encircles her neck, but he feels no pain, he is supernaturally strong. He’s a match for any of the superheroes in all those movies that he has watched repeatedly while rooting for the archvillains.

Using the woman as a shield, he drags her along the hallway, toward the back of the house, grinning at Calvino, who follows them with the shotgun ready, the big tough cop with his door-buster gun, but his badge and his gun don’t matter now.

“Shoot me through her,” Preston taunts. “Go ahead. Blast both of us to Hell. You won’t want her anyway, when I’m done with her. You know what happened to your other hump? That hottie, Cindy Shooner? She committed suicide five years ago, she’s waiting for this bitch in Hell. They can compare notes about what a one-minute wonder you were in bed.”

Preston wants the cop to threaten him, to beg for her, to try some half-assed psychology, because it will be sweet to hear the terror in his voice. But Calvino says nothing, just shows him the muzzle of the 12-gauge and follows, waiting for an opportunity, but he’s not going to get one.

At the study, Preston drags his prize of fresh meat out of the hall, backward across the threshold. The cop quickly closes on them and tries to shoulder through the door, thrusting the shotgun ahead of him. But if the house cannot be used to kill, it can be used to hamper. The door closes hard against Calvino, pinning him to the jamb.

“The house is mine now,” Preston declares, grinding himself against the rich bitch’s tight butt, “and everything in it.”

Although the cop strains to break free, the door is unrelenting, denying him further entrance, squeezing him hard until he will have to retreat. Swinging his right arm past the wifey, Preston strikes at the husband’s face with the hammer, Calvino jukes, the claw gouges a chunk from the door frame.

The bitch hasn’t stopped tearing at Preston’s left arm. But suddenly she seizes the handle of the hammer, ferociously twists it, so surprises him that she takes the weapon. Trying to snatch it away from her, he unintentionally relaxes the arm around her throat. She starts to slip down and away. He grabs a fistful of her hair to yank her back. For a moment his head is fully exposed.

Face flushed and clenched with the effort to squeeze farther into the room, Calvino gains two inches. He thrusts the shotgun forward, over his wife’s head, into Preston’s face. The flash—

Backed against his desk, Zach desperately blocked every swing of the cleaver with the Marine Corps sword, but was given no opportunity to draw it from its scabbard. The crazed woman chopped high, chopped low, lunging with every slash of the wicked blade, which could probably render an entire chicken in five seconds flat. His heart pounded so hard he could hear it, a hollow ba-boom ba-boom that seemed to enter his ears by a back door, could feel it knocking against his sternum, his ribs.

Minnie had backed away to the hall door. But she seemed frozen in fear.

Zach shouted at her, “Get out! Get help!”

Reminded of Minnie, the whack job with the cleaver relented for a moment, glancing at her, maybe thinking she should chop the easier target first and demoralize Zach by killing his sister. He instantly took advantage of her mistake, didn’t attempt to draw the sword from the stupid scabbard, but just swung the whole thing at her head. The sound of the blow was hugely satisfying, one of the best things ever. Dropping the cleaver, the freaking lunatic collapsed to the floor on her back, possibly dead but probably unconscious.

Zach snatched up her weapon and stowed it in a desk drawer. He dropped onto one knee beside her, pressed fingertips to her throat, and found a pulse. He was relieved. He didn’t want to kill her if he didn’t have to. Maybe she was only crazy, not evil. And he was just thirteen, not ready for this. Maybe he could drag the nutcase into the closet, brace the door shut, and then call the cops.

Only as he pulled open the closet door did he realize that Minnie was gone.

As Minnie stepped into the hallway to shout for help, the LEGO wheel-thing was heavy, at least ten or twelve pounds when it ought to have weighed maybe twelve ounces. And it seemed to be getting heavier by the second. She was terrified for Zach. She loved him, she didn’t want to grow up without him, so her legs were already rubbery. The weight of the weird LEGO thing caused her to totter, but she knew that she should let it out of her hands only if she was in extreme danger, though she didn’t know why.

Exiting Zach’s room, she opened her mouth to shout for help—and saw Professor Sinyavski, his wild hair wilder than ever, lurching out of the storage room at the east end of the hall. But he’d said he was leaving early because of the snow.

With his bushy eyebrows, rubbery nose, and big belly, he usually looked funny in a nice way, but he didn’t look any kind of funny now. His lips were skinned back from his teeth in a snarl, his face was twisted and hateful, and his eyes seemed to be burning and icy at the same time. Maybe Professor Sinyavski was peering out at Minnie from somewhere behind those eyes, but she knew at once, for sure, Ruin looked at her from within the mathematician—and it wanted her.

Voice rough with anger and slurred as if he had been drinking, the professor said, “Piggy pig. Come here, you dirty piggy pig, you dirty pig.” He started toward her, staggering, and for the first time Minnie realized how big the Russian was, not just overweight but big in the chest and shoulders, his neck thick, more muscle under the fat than she had realized before.

This was extreme danger, all right. Reluctantly but without hesitation, she put the LEGO wheel on the floor and ran toward the front stairs.

“I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I’m Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.…”

The inside of the bathroom door had a thumb-turn deadbolt, but that wasn’t holding it shut. No matter how furiously Naomi wrenched at the knob, jerked on it, the door didn’t even rattle against the jamb, as if it was steel and was welded in place.

She glanced back at Roger Hodd, still on the floor, doing his pill-bug imitation. No less terrified, the man now appeared deranged, too. This time, a shaky humorless laugh punctuated “Daily Post,” and Naomi knew that soon, any second—Oh God, Oh God—he would return to the subject of tasty candy, and she shuddered at the thought of his hands on her.

As Minnie reached the stairs, a shotgun boomed on the ground floor. She had intended to go down. Instead she went up to the third-floor landing. Into Mother’s studio. Across the studio to the back stairs. Don’t glance behind. Looking over your shoulder wasted time, slowed you down. She just prayed and ran, hoping God would help her if she helped herself by running her butt off. She had to be faster than big old Professor Sinyavski. She could do the math, he’d taught her to do it. She was eight years old, he was maybe seventy, so she should be almost nine times faster than he was.

The door released John, and Nicky embraced him. She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see faceless Preston Nash or the room fouled by a spray of blood and brains.

“The kids,” she said, and together they hurried once more along the hall toward the front stairs.

A dark primitive part of her despaired that this would never stop, that Nature was a pagan beast that devoured everyone in the end, that the unrelenting idiot evil of Ruin-and-Blackwood had the power to turn the entire world against her family, one person at a time, until finally it got what it wanted. But a more profound part of her, the believer who was an artist and who knew that imagination could create something from nothing, insisted that the world was not a cancerous maze of infinite malignancies, that it arose from an intricate matrix of exquisite design, which made it possible for hope to be fulfilled. If only she and John did the right thing, the smart thing, they could save the kids, all of them, and get out of this damn box.

In the front hall, she retrieved her pistol. John hurried toward the second floor. Nicky followed him, realizing that the nape of her neck still felt cold where the convex curve of the hammer claw had slid along it, and she shivered.

Once, in a true-crime book, while browsing in a bookstore, Naomi saw a picture of a murdered girl. A police photo or something. A girl younger than Naomi. She had been raped. Punched in the face, stabbed. Her eyes in the photo were the worst thing Naomi had ever seen. Wide pretty eyes. They were the worst thing because they were the saddest thing, they brought tears to her own eyes there in the store, and she quickly closed the book and put it back on the shelf and told herself to forget she ever saw that poor face, those eyes. She worked hard to forget it, but it showed up in a dream once in a while, and now as she struggled with the bathroom door, the dead girl’s face haunted her once more.

Breathing raggedly, making strange noises, little whimpers, which frightened her because she sounded like someone wholly different from herself, Naomi figured-hoped-prayed she might be all right as long as Roger Hodd continued to drone about who he was and where he worked, showing no interest in her. But then she heard him moving, and when she turned, she saw him rising to his feet from the floor.

She gave up on the door, she couldn’t get it open anyway, and if Hodd was on the move, she didn’t dare turn her back to him. He swayed as he chanted, not looking at her or at anything in the room, for that matter, but his words had a different rhythm from the way he’d been saying them, and a new tone entered his voice. The self-pitying note and confusion became impatience and petulance, and he emphasized the word am as though arguing with someone: “I AM Roger Hodd of the Daily Post, I AM Roger Hodd of the Daily Post.… ”

Minnie raced down four flights to the landing at the ground floor, where she halted at the door to the kitchen, held her breath, and listened. The stairs were quiet. Professor Sinyavski—or the thing that had once been the professor—wasn’t thundering after her.

She looked down the next flight of stairs. All remained quiet—but then something drip-drip-dripped onto the carpeted treads. Red. Thicker than water. Blood. She glanced at the ceiling above the stairs and saw a long line, a slash in the plaster, like a wound, blood oozing out between the lips of the wound, as if the house were alive.

Her heart fluttered. She told herself that the blood wasn’t real. The only reason she saw it was because Ruin wanted her to see it. This was like a delirium hallucination except that she wasn’t feverish in a hospital bed. Or if it was real, it didn’t come from a body somewhere above the ceiling. It was like the tears of blood that a statue of the Holy Mother might weep during a minor miracle, though this was dark magic. If she allowed herself to be frightened by this, then she would be inviting Ruin to torment her with other visions, maybe with a lot worse than merely visions. But her heart fluttered anyway.

The stairwell lights went off. In the absolute darkness, the drip-drip-dripping of blood became a noisier drizzle, and she could smell the metallic odor of it. She was overwhelmed by a fear that the noise of spilling blood masked the sounds of something approaching from above or below. But this was less her imagination than it was a suggestion pressed upon her by Ruin, and if she succumbed to panic, that also would be an invitation.

Easing open the landing door, she surveyed the kitchen, saw no one. She stepped out of the stairs, quietly closing the door behind her.

First, find Mom and Daddy, get help for Zach. Minnie wouldn’t think about Zach being hurt, let alone dead. Nothing good could come from worrying about that. Zach was smart and quick and strong; he would take care of the crazy cleaver woman.

Whether or not Minnie found her parents, she could help Zachary if she had a weapon, and she could protect herself, too. She slipped across the kitchen to the drawers in which the cutlery was kept. She chose a butcher knife. She couldn’t imagine using it as a weapon, but neither could she imagine just letting someone hack her to pieces with a cleaver and not fighting back.

She closed the drawer, turned, and Professor Sinyavski seized the knife, took it away from her, threw it across the room, scooped her off her feet. She tried to fight back, but he was stronger than an old fat mathematician ought to be. He held her tight under his left arm and clamped his right hand over her mouth to silence her. “My little pretty pig. Pretty little dirty piggy.” Minnie’s scream stifled by his meaty hand, he hurried with her toward the door to the terrace and the backyard.

In Zach’s room, John and Nicky found pencils, erasers, and a couple of large drawing tablets scattered on the floor, as if they had been swept off the desk during a struggle. One of the tablets had fallen open, and John picked it up, stunned by the portrait of Alton Turner Blackwood.

From the description of the killer that John had given fifteen years previously, Nicky recognized the subject. She took the tablet from him, paged through it, her shaky hands rattling the paper as she found Blackwood again, again, and yet again.

“What’s been going on here?” John worried.

“It’s not Zach,” she said adamantly. “It’s not in our Zachary. He’d never let it have him.”

John didn’t think it would get into Zach, but it was in someone, moved on to someone after Preston’s head was blown half off, and it was loose in the house. In the house and hunting down the kids.

From the closet came a voice. “Hello? Is somebody there?”

The door was braced shut with a chair.

“Somebody? Could you let me out of here, please? Hello?”

“That’s not one of ours,” John said.

“No,” Nicky agreed.

“Let her out?”

“Hell no.”

They hurried to the girls’ room. No one. So quiet. Snow at the window. The whole house was quiet. Dead quiet.

Nicky said “Library,” and they rushed to the library. The lesson tables. The reading corner. Between the stacks. No one. Snow beating soundlessly against the windowpanes.

Stay cool. No one screaming. That was good. No screaming was good. Of course they couldn’t scream if they were dead, not if they were all dead, all dead and gutted, servus and two servae.

Guest room. The closet. The attached bath. No one. The quiet, the snow whirling at the windows, Nicky’s purple eyes so bright in her suddenly pale face.

Quicker, quicker. Storage room. Hall bath. Linen closet. No one, no one, no one.

Zach entered the kitchen by the back stairs, far past anxious and halfway to frantic, searching for Minnie, for Naomi, for his parents. He saw the door standing open, old Sinyavski in the sheeting snow with Minnie, carrying her across the terrace toward the yard in the colorless twilight. Zach didn’t know what that was about, but it couldn’t be good, even if the professor had always before seemed like a right type, never a hint that he was a god-awful freaking maniac.

On the floor lay a butcher knife. Zach picked it up. It wasn’t a pistol, but it was better than bare hands. He hurried to the open door.

With her back to the door that wouldn’t open, Naomi watched with increasing fear as Roger Hodd pulled out drawer after drawer in the master-bathroom cabinets. He still chanted, louder and more angrily with each repetition, the emphasis now on two words: “I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST, I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST.…” His back was to her, but Naomi could see his face in the mirror as he moved along the granite counter, and he looked insane, as if at any moment he would start shrieking like a chimpanzee and come at her snapping his teeth in a biting frenzy.

In the next-to-last drawer, he found what he apparently wanted. Scissors. He held them by the handles, the blades shut, as if he were gripping a knife to plunge it into something.

Clutching the scissors, he returned along the counter, staring at his reflection in the mirror as if furious with himself—“I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST, I’m Roger HODD of the Daily POST”—slamming shut the drawers that he previously opened. At the end of the counter, near Naomi again, he picked up a rectangular box that she hadn’t noticed before because it was dark green, sitting on the black granite, against the black backsplash. He took off the lid and set it aside. From the box he withdrew a silvery something that she could not immediately identify until they tinkled, and then she saw they were three bells. Three bells shaped like flowers.

Leonid Sinyavski is in chains, not his body but his mind, imprisoned. For the last forty years, he has tried to live a good life, to redeem himself for certain things he did in the old Soviet Union before he fled to the West. As a young mathematician working on military projects in a time of deep restiveness among Russian intellectuals, he informed on some of his colleagues who wanted to see Communism fall. They went to gulags, and some most likely never returned. Now his own body is a gulag, and as he carries Minnie toward the arbor, he is shocked by the things he says to her, the threats he makes, and is sickened by the images that flash from his rider’s mind through his, the cruelties and indignities that he is intended to perpetrate, the mutilation and murder. The chambers of his heart slam, slam against one another, slam like doors, and though his rider tries to calm him, Leonid can’t be calmed when he knows for what he is being used. He tries to rebel, to rear up, and the chains around his mind stretch taut, as if the links might break, and again he rears, resists, and his rider bears down harder upon him as they reach the entrance to the arbor. Entering, he gathers all his mental strength, his courage, his righteousness hard-won over forty years, and says within, No, never, no, no, never! And on the second never, his slamming heart slams one last time and stilled blood pools in its chambers even as he collapses.

As he examined the calla-lily bells, Roger Hodd abruptly stopped hectoring himself about his name and occupation. For a moment, Naomi was relieved, but then the silence seemed worse than the chanting, especially when she shifted her attention from the silver bells to his reflection in the mirror and saw that he was watching her. A few times, she had seen men look at women this way when they didn’t know Naomi saw them, but no man ever before turned such eyes on her, and no man ever should watch a young girl her age like this. It was a hungry look, starving, and furious, and violent.

Grinning at her reflection in the mirror, Hodd rang the bells loudly once, twice, three times. “You ignorant little bitch. Are you ready? Are you ready to meet your aunts, Marnie and Giselle? You don’t even know about them, but they’re waiting for you. They’re waiting for you in Hell.”

He put the bells in the box from which he had taken them, and he turned to her, the scissors in his fist.

Naomi yanked at the bathroom door again, but it was as immovable as before. With a cry of terror, she dodged past Hodd, darted to the farther end of the bathroom. There was nowhere to go except into the shower stall, pulling the door shut behind her. A glass door. Even if she could hold it shut, which she wouldn’t be able to do because he was stronger than she was, but even if she could hold it shut, it was only a glass door.

Bells. Elsewhere in the house. Eerie, silvery bells.

John and Nicky were entering the front stairs at the second floor, not sure whether to search upstairs or down first, when they heard the bells. Upstairs.

The horror of the past was now the horror of the moment, and John was in two places at once, in his house now and in his parents’ house that night, racing up the stairs to the third floor but also following the shadowy hallway toward his parents’ bedroom, pushing through the door to this master suite but also peering through another door at his murdered parents in a bed of blood, hearing the killer ringing the bells in his dead sisters’ room but also hearing Naomi cry out in the master bath.

The bathroom door was locked. Nicky shouted, “Shotgun, shotgun!” He was bringing the weapon to bear on the lock even as she urged him to blow it out. Two shells dissolved the lock and the wood around it, but the door wouldn’t open. It didn’t even rattle in the frame, it was as solid as a concrete block in a wall of concrete blocks. More than a lock held it in place: the fury of Blackwood, the power of Ruin. In the bathroom, Naomi screamed, the worst sound John had ever heard, ever, and here in the hallway, Nicky screamed, too, an even more terrible sound, as much grief as terror, and she clawed at the blasted hole in the door, clawed so ferociously that her fingernails tore and bled.

Zach reached the entrance to the lattice arbor as old Sinyavski staggered three or four steps inside and fell, trapping Minnie under him. Zach had the butcher knife, but when he hurried to the fallen professor, he saw that he wouldn’t need it. Last year’s roses had been cut back to stumps, the trailers removed from the structure, so even in the fading light and shadows, he could see the staring eyes and the slackness in the face. Whatever had killed him, maybe a heart attack, Sinyavski was no longer a danger to anyone.

Minnie struggled, half under the heavy body, and when Zach freed her, she threw her arms around him and held him very tight. “I love you, Zach, I love you.” He told her that he loved her, too. With one hand flattened on her back, he could feel her heart pounding hard as a bass drum, and it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever felt, the thud-thud, thud-thud of her heart.

A dry-as-bone, rasping-crackling-snapping noise drew their attention to opposite ends of the arbor, where the lattice appeared to come alive, like scores of flat white snakes, undulating to some music only they could hear. In maybe four seconds the lattice wove shut both exits from the structure, imprisoning Zach and Minnie with the corpse of Professor Sinyavski.

In the second-floor hallway, the wheel stands on edge. Once made of a child’s building blocks, it is now something entirely different, transformed, as ordinary things are always transubstantiated when the supernatural enters them from outside of time, in the way that bread and wine become body and blood—or, less exaltedly, in the way that Frodo’s Ring of Power is not just a ring made in Mordor, the way that the Ark of the Covenant is not just a wooden box. Making the wheel, Minnie was in the thrall of a higher power, just as the Light ensured that Frodo should be the one Ring-bearer. Minnie is the Frodo in this family, the innocent who sees what others don’t, loves others always more than self, and can be a bush that burns without being consumed, a conduit. Here and now, the moment of transubstantiation arrives. The wheel is white, but as it rolls along the second-floor hallway, it becomes golden, so heavy that it leaves a lasting impression in the carpet. Descending the stairs, it makes a more solid sound than might a two-hundred-pound man leaping downward. Along the lower hallway, wood flooring creaks and cracks under it.

Driven to the edge of madness by Naomi’s screams, John threw himself against the door once, twice, without effect, and he knew he could break his shoulder without gaining entrance. Beyond rage, beyond fury, in the iron grip of wrath, he flattened his hands on the door and shouted, “This is my house, you degenerate sonofabitch, you worm, you filth, this is my house, not yours, THIS IS MY HOUSE!” The door rattled in the frame, and suddenly he was able to push it open.

He grabbed his shotgun and crossed the threshold as the clear safety-glass door of the shower stall shattered into frosted veils and shimmered to the floor. A man was stepping into the shower stall with scissors held high to stab. John got him by the belt and yanked him off the raised threshold. The guy turned, slashing wildly with the scissors, and it was Roger Hodd, a reporter to whom John had given interviews, regarding homicide cases, on several occasions. He was Hodd, but his eyes were not Hodd’s eyes, they were deep pits of implacable hatred. John dodged the scissors, shoved Hodd against the wall to the left of the shower stall, shouted to Naomi—“Don’t look!”—jammed the shotgun into the possessed man’s abdomen, and scrambled his internal organs with buckshot.

Zach hooked his fingers through the new-grown lattice and pulled hard, but it was as firm a part of the structure as the walls and the arched roof. The twisted tines of the meat fork no longer seemed like a big deal, not compared to this, and he wondered if next the arbor would sprout spiky wooden teeth on all sides and chew them up as if it were a shark and they were chum.

As though she could read his thoughts, Minnie said, “It can’t hurt us with things like the arbor, it can only confuse us and scare us with things. It needs to have a person it can use to hurt us.”

Zach heard something move behind them, and when he turned, he saw Professor Sinyavski’s dead body roll onto its back and sit up in the gloom. “Pretty piggy,” old Sinyavski said in a voice as hard as gravel and as thick as mud. “My pretty Minnie pig.”

To Minnie, Zach said, “A dead body is a thing. It’s not a person anymore. It’s a thing just like lattice is a thing.”

The professor clutched the lattice wall with one hand, trying to pull himself to his feet. “Pretty piggy, I’m gonna chew your sweet tongue out of your mouth.”

Clutching her mother’s arm, shaken and tearful but recovering her emotional equilibrium quicker than John would have predicted, Naomi came with them, down through the house, as he called out to Minnie and Zach, neither of whom answered.

Earlier, he had thought that perhaps he’d drawn Blackwood—and his master, Ruin—back into the world by worrying, especially since Minnie’s illness, that the killer’s promise would be kept. Had he, by his obsession, invited the spirit to haunt him? Had he felt that he deserved to be haunted, to be hell-hounded unto death for having been the sole survivor of his murdered family? After the incident at the bathroom door, when he gained entrance merely by the assertion of his ownership, he suspected that indeed he was only as vulnerable as he allowed himself to be, which suggested that if a door had been opened between this world and another, he himself might have swung it wide, even if unwittingly. If he opened a door to the twined entities of demon and ghost, he could close it, close it once and for all. The one thing that scared him now was that he would close it too late, only after a devastating loss—Minnie, Zachary, maybe both of them, maybe still all of them.

At the foot of the stairs, where the front hall met the foyer, he experienced again the sensation of a phantom presence brushing against his legs, eager and ebullient. This was what he had felt a few weeks before in the backyard, at night, when the fallen leaves of the scarlet oak whirled and tumbled as though a dog were at play in them. Willard.

“He wants us to go this way,” John said, leading them along the hall toward the kitchen.

“Who wants?” Nicky asked.

“I’ll explain later. Zach and Minnie must be this way.”

The three of them hurried across the kitchen and through the open door onto the terrace, where they encountered a strange sight; and considering recent events, John’s threshold for determining anything to be strange was far higher than it had been two months earlier.

In the snowy half-light, a golden wheel, mysteriously powered and as large as that from a Peterbilt, rolled slowly across the snow-covered terrace, leaving a wake of clear dry flagstones. Rolling with a deep rumble more ominous than an earthquake, as though it weighed far more than its size suggested, the wheel seemed to charge the air merely by its presence, and the snow crackled around it as if the flakes became electric particles under its influence. The flagstones cracked and splintered under the wheel, and through the soles of his shoes, John could feel the vibrations from its progress shuddering through the concrete slab on which the stones were laid.

The golden enigma held their attention only until they heard Zach and Minnie shouting for help.

The dead horse offers the rider a clumsy weapon more difficult to use with each degree of heat lost from the cooling brain. But it is a human cadaver and thus still has some capacity for the extreme violence that is one of the key signifiers of the species. It might be an instrument of considerable destruction even for as long as an hour or two, until early rigor mortis sets in, stiffening it beyond easy function. The rider spurs the corpse to drag itself erect by clawing at the lattice wall. The boy steps forward, between the professor and his sister, knife ready, but he will find that the knife is useless, for a corpse cannot be killed with either a slash across the carotid artery or a hundred stab wounds.

In Zachary’s room, the securing pivot pins rise out of the barrel hinges on the closet door and tumble to the floor.

By contact with the door, Melody knows what has been done to assist her, and she strains against that barrier until the knuckles of the hinge barrels separate from one another. One side of the door sags an inch away from the jamb, and now there is enough play in it to work it until the bracing chair slides out from under the knob.

The door falls, and Melody enters the boy’s room. She goes to his desk, opens the drawer where he put the cleaver, and recovers that fine piece of cutlery.

The wheel rolled to a stop on the snow-mantled lawn, near the arbor, having grown as immense as the tire on a giant earthmoving machine, maybe seven feet in diameter. Its weight must have been enormous, because it pressed an eight- or ten-inch-deep trench in the frozen yard.

The new-woven straps of wood on the ends of the arbor would not unweave at John’s declaration of his ownership, which had caused the bathroom door to relent. Judging by the look of the lattice, he would need a chainsaw to cut through, assuming wood didn’t magically heal behind the wound made by a high-speed chain. If he wasn’t in downtown Twilight Zone anymore, he was still in the suburbs.

Fingers hooked in the gaps, Minnie pressed her sweet face to the lattice and screamed, “The professor died, but he’s still after us!”

Spirit-ridden, the dead professor lumbers forward, the boy lunges, the knife goes deep, but hands that once signed declarations of treason against several young men of promise serve just as well to grab the boy’s knife hand and force him to drop the blade. He also grabs the boy’s throat to lift him and slam him backward into the farther wall of lattice so hard that the entire arbor clatters, and the girl screams. The dead man is strong but with poor coordination, while the boy is clever and agile and fiercely determined. The boy wrenches his right hand out of Sinyavski’s grip, kicks and squirms, thrashes furiously, breaks loose. The dead man turns, grabbing at him, stumbles, almost falls, and lurches two steps into the wall. The lattice cracks, the structure shudders, Sinyavski drops to his knees.

Heart in his throat, breath so hot it didn’t just plume from him but gushed out like pressurized steam from a leak in a boiler, John ran back and forth along the structure, trying to understand what was happening in there, as the bad light rapidly got worse. When he thought he saw Zach escape Sinyavski, John thrust the barrel of the shotgun through one of the two-inch-square gaps in the arbor, but the bracketing lattice allowed no lateral shift, he could only shoot straight ahead. No way to take down Sinyavski unless the professor stepped directly in front of the muzzle. And where was Zach? Gloom, moving shadows, chaos, too much risk of hitting Zach.

Minnie shouted, “He’s already dead! He can’t be killed twice!”

“He’s clumsy, Dad,” Zach said. “Dead-guy clumsy. But there’s not much room in here.”

“Use the thing!” Minnie urged.

On their knees in the snow, face-to-face with Minnie, Nicky and Naomi held fast to the small fingers that the girl hooked through the lattice, Naomi crying. Nicky said, “What thing, baby? What thing?”

“The wheel-thing.”

John pleaded: “What is it, Minnie, how do I use it?”

“It’s an idea.”

“Idea? What idea?”

“The idea, the idea behind everything. Daddy, it’s the drinking glass with the black stuff in it, the stray dog that healed a guy.”

Stunned that she referred to Peter Abelard, to a conversation she had never heard, John said, “How do you know about that?”

Zach shouted, “Dad, I’ve got the knife again.”

“Stay away from him! Where is he?”

“On his knees but trying to get up,” Zach said.

“How do you know about the glass, the dog?” John asked Minnie.

“I don’t know how, but I know.”

John heard Abelard in memory: 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.… When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.

Whatever it might be, the huge wheel wasn’t exactly discreet, but John said, “What is it, Minnie? Tell me as clear as you can, what is the wheel?”

“It says it’s the power that makes a highway through a sea.”

“What do you mean it says?”

“I hear it now,” Minnie declared. “It’s the power that makes a highway through a sea, and wakes the dead. It’s whatever you need it to be when you need it, and what you need is a door. Isn’t what you need a door, Daddy?”

John had extended an invitation, letting an evil back into the world. Only he could evict it. They wouldn’t send an exorcist. They were embarrassed by the old-fashioned idea of absolute Evil, of Evil personified, but the answer to this wasn’t a food bank, he would not save his family and himself by throwing food at this thing, not by giving it a cot in a homeless shelter, not by social action, what he needed here was some really effective antisocial action or else what was once called a miracle, which these days maybe only a child, like Minnie, had the imagination to envision and the faith to pursue. So be as a child. Put aside pride and vanity. Have the humility of a child who is weak and knows his weakness. Admit fear in the face of the void. Admit ignorance in the presence of the unknowable. A child believes in mysteries within mysteries and seeks wonder, which should be easy, considering that here in this yard, this very moment, John was adrift in a sea of mystery, in a storm of wonder. What the heart knows, the mind has forgotten, and what the heart knows is the truth. “I need a door,” John said, becoming as a child, “I need a door, and I know there must be a door, I believe in a door, please give me a door, God, please, I want a door, please God, please give me a damn door.”

Zach shouted, “Dad! He’s on his feet! He’s coming!”

As the last of the twilight slid westward through the icy sky, as a light arose within the enormous golden wheel, Zach cried out. John leaned his shotgun against the arbor and grabbed the lattice with both hands.

Nicky had seen him try to rip it loose before. He couldn’t do it then, couldn’t do it now.

She knew the shotgun was useless. She wanted to use it anyway, do something, anything. But what?

In the dark arbor, Zach was taunting Sinyavski, trying to keep him—it—away from Minnie. “Over here, bonehead. Over here, you freaking freak.”

Fingers trembling against Nicky’s fingers, with the lattice barrier separating them, Minnie whispered desperately, “It’s gonna kill Zach.”

The luminous wheel changed from gold to red and acquired a greater dimension, revealing within itself numerous spiraling masses reminiscent of the sky-filling whorls in van Gogh’s Starry Night. It began to throb, and in the ominous arterial pulses of swirling light and shadow, the falling crystals of snow glittered like sparks.

John shouted something into the arbor, and Nicky didn’t at first understand what he meant: “Take me. Take me. Take ME!”

Abruptly the wheel flared brighter, projecting galactic spirals of shadow and scarlet light across the rose arbor, across the yard, across the falling snow, which descended so heavily that it curtained the night.

“Take ME!” Breaking off a six-inch piece of lattice, making a hole large enough to thrust his hand through, John shouted, “Here, damn you, here I am, here, take ME!”

He thought he knew what needed to be done, and if he didn’t do it, there would never be an end to the threat. There could be only one reason that some benign force had used Minnie to make the wheel, which was the embodied idea of a portal between time and eternity. The door was for him to use, him and no one else. He started this, he must end it. If a door was provided, he must use it and by using it offer himself as penance.

In the arbor, from out of the shadows, revealed by the whirligig glow of the wheel, the Sinyavski thing loomed, a hulk in a dark suit. The face was familiar yet as John had never seen the professor’s face before: twisted with a soured and festered malignity, almost deformed with rage. His eyes were pools of distilled hatred, glistening with malevolence, sharp with resentment.

“It’s me you really want, just me,” John said. “I’m the one who got away.”

Rising from where she had knelt to confront Minnie, Nicky said, “What’re you doing? John, no, not this.”

“Do you trust me?” he asked her.

“Don’t.” Her misery grew with each repetition: “Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t.”

He said, “I trust Minnie, and I trust whoever … possessed her to make the door. Trust me, Nicky.”

“With everything?” Anguish strained her voice. “Everything?”

“Haven’t you always? For fifteen years?”

“It’s too strong for even you.”

She had once told him that sometimes he was all cop when half cop would be tough enough.

He said, “This isn’t a half-cop night. It’s all-cop or nothing.”

Through the lattice, to the thing using Sinyavski’s body, John said, “Take me. Tear me apart from the inside out. And maybe you can totally control me. Won’t it be fun, using me to kill them? To use them and cut them and kill them? Won’t it be fun, Alton? Ruin?”

He heard Nicky say, “Naomi, get behind me.”

“Why settle for less than using me?” John asked the thing in the dead professor. “You can’t be afraid of me. I killed you, Alton, but you can’t be killed again. I’m flesh and weak. You’re strong and everlasting. Or are you?”

The professor thing smiled at him through the lattice, a sly and venomous sneer. His eyes were iron-dark and not his own.

John’s hand was palm-up, and Sinyavski’s hand pressed upon it palm-down. Something cold and eager squirmed against John’s skin. He almost recoiled. With effort, he relaxed, offered no resistance. He felt a gelid, twitching presence not against his hand any longer but within it, slithering as far as his wrist … but then no farther.

He turned out of his mind any thought of his parents and his sisters, and for the first time in twenty years, he allowed himself to think about Cindy Shooner as he had not dared to think of her since that night. He pictured her naked, her lovely body, her full breasts, and he tried to summon the memory of how she felt under him, the silken rhythms, her deep warmth, the way she rose to meet him, her mouth, her abandon, her insatiable need, her thrilling appetite.

Ruin took him.

Within the arbor, the dead man fell in a heap.

With poltergeist-like power, the lattice at the ends of the arbor unlaced, raveling back into the walls of the structure, freeing Zach and Minnie. As if from a distance, John heard Nicky urgently calling them to her.

Colder than the night, John’s mind flooded with hideous images of Marnie and Giselle being brutalized before they died. His sanity was assaulted by those eternal memories of Alton Turner Blackwood. Anguish slammed him, grief wrung him with a cruel fist. He tried to scream, but he could not make a sound.

In the whirling crimson snow, John saw himself picking up the 12-gauge. As he turned toward Nicky, he became aware of his finger tightening on the trigger.

He felt as if he were under an immense weight of earth, buried in his living body, buried as surely as his dead family, and his terror swelled.

Nicky held her pistol in a two-hand grip, sighting lower to ensure a chest hit on the upkick.

John moved toward her without hesitation, and she told him to drop the shotgun, but he kept moving until the muzzle of the 12-gauge pressed into her abdomen.

An arm’s length apart, they stared into each other’s eyes, and despairingly he thought that he had surely done the wrong thing again. Twenty years to the day, had he done the very thing that would cost him this family just as his weakness and selfishness then had cost him?

Behind her, the kids were gathered. Judging by their stricken expressions, whatever they saw in John’s face, they saw nothing of their father.

Tears welled in Nicky’s eyes. “I can’t.”

Killing him might be her only chance. He had brought them to a precipice above a longer drop than he had intended.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you. I can’t.”

She lowered the pistol.

“I am Death,” he heard himself say to her. “You’ve never had sex with Death before.”

As his finger tightened on the trigger, John suddenly rose out of his living grave, throwing off the weight of evil that pressed him down. He sensed Ruin begin to realize that its host had hidden his most private thoughts, and enticed it into him with a pretense of weakness. Before the demon understood that John might have sufficient strength to evict it, he threw aside the shotgun, rushed past Nicky and the kids, toward the glowing crimson wheel, which was not a wheel but a portal, as it had always been a portal waiting to be named.

Racing through snow as bright as blood spray, John saw nothing within the portal except wheels of red light in a red haze. As far as he knew, he might fall through eternity forever, but he sprang across the threshold without hesitation—

—and is in the dark bedroom of his boyhood, only an instant after quietly lowering the bottom sash of the window. The smells of Cindy Shooner are still on him—her perfume and the faint musky scent of sex.

He sees his dark form in the mirror above the dresser, but there is something wrong with it. He steps close enough to see his face as he looked at fourteen.

This is neither a dream nor a vision. It has not one quality of hallucination, but affronts him with the grim texture of horrifying reality. This is the real place, the momentous night, the silence heavy with the weight of murder.

He waits, anticipating silvery bells, and the bells ring.

John moves to the door, and the bells ring again.

Eases the door open. Steps into the hall. Light radiates from his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms.

On the floor, the black satchel. Beside it, the pistol fitted with the homemade silencer.

This is not memory. This is the moment. This is the past that made his future.

He doesn’t understand why he is here. The bells suggest that they’re all dead, as before. Therefore, he isn’t here to save them.

And if he could save them, he would change his future, perhaps to one in which he never met Nicky, in which his own children were never born.

More terrified now than then, he stoops, picks up the handgun, removes the silencer.

The open door to his parents’ room. In there—the blood-soaked bed, the empty eggs in pale dead hands.

As the bells ring again, his frantic heart knocks hard against its cage.

He sidles along the hallway, pistol in front of him, his hands sweaty as they had not been on that night. He hesitates a step short of the girls’ room, hears the bells once more.

He steps into the doorway, into the hateful light that reveals the beloved dead.

Blackwood crouches like a feeding raptor, like a sharp-beaked raven over the torn bodies of songbirds. Mouth red and wet and cruel.

The black-hole eyes shift from the tender victims to John in the doorway. The graveyard voice speaks the same words as before: “This little girl said you were gone to Grandma’s for a week.”

John realizes he is here to do something different from what he did the first time that he lived this night. But what? For God’s sake, what?

Like some prehistoric missing link between ancient reptile and humankind, Blackwood rises from the girl, the girl forever lost, and says, “Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”

Heart slamming, pistol sight jumping on the target, hoping to buy time to think, John says in the trembling voice of a boy, “Come out of there, get away from them.”

Blackwood towers over the blessed ruins, humpbacked Death with a bloody grin.

“Get away from them now, you sonofabitch!”

Blackwood takes a step forward, John backs out of the doorway, and Blackwood follows him into the hall.

Without knowing how he knows, John knows that if he dies here at Blackwood’s hands, he dies for real, and all the life he lived hereafter will never have happened. Nicky will marry someone else. Children other than Zach and Naomi and Minnie will be born. All is at risk and there is no room for error.

The dead can’t be resurrected by a mere man. What he’s being offered is not the past undone, but instead a chance to disinvite the spirit whose return he encouraged by his guilt, obsession, and ceaseless worry.

Grinning, Blackwood seems not to fear the gun, but approaches, forcing John to back along the hallway as he tries desperately to imagine what he must do.

“Listen to me, boy. You’ll be a daddy someday,” Blackwood says—

—and John knows in the instant that what he must prevent is the Promise that inflamed his imagination, that haunted him, obsessed him, and made him vulnerable to the undying fury of this implacable spirit and to the thing called Ruin.

He shouts, “Shut up!”

Blackwood steps forward, John backward, Blackwood forward, John backward onto the killer’s satchel. He stumbles, falls. Blackwood rushes, looms.

John fires up, it’s a wild shot that shouldn’t score, but score it does, a gut shot. Blackwood staggers forward and falls atop John, a weight of greasy flesh and deformed bones.

Eye to eye, Blackwood says in a rough whisper, his breath hot on John’s mouth: “You’ll be a daddy someday—”

The pistol is between them, still clutched in John’s hand, he can’t guess which of them will take the bullet, but he squeezes the trigger. The muffled shot widens Alton Blackwood’s fierce eyes, and suddenly he seems twice as heavy as before.

Gasping, making wordless sounds of terror and revulsion, John rolls Blackwood off him, scrambles to his feet, looks down, and in the dim light sees life still shining in those dreadful eyes, and the lips moving to form the next words.

John empties the magazine of the pistol, and Blackwood’s face dissolves from one kind of horror to another.

As John backs away from the corpse, the shade of Alton Turner Blackwood rises from it, a transparent image in a silent rage—which folds in upon itself and is gone. A second entity arises from the corpse, far more abhorrent than Blackwood. Asymmetrical, twisted, crookbacked, yellow-eyed, this abomination named Ruin hovers for an instant—then follows Blackwood’s shade into oblivion.

The Promise was a curse. The curse is lifted now and forever.

The house is hushed. What was lost is still lost, though not forever, and something has been gained. What the heart knows trumps what the night knows.

John drops the gun, turns away, and as on that long-remembered night, he hurries down the stairs. Back then, he was compelled to find another gun, load it, and kill himself. But now … as he comes off the bottom step, he plunges not into the lower hall but through the portal, into a night streaming with crimson snow.

Before him waited his safe and living family. He had done the right thing, after all, sacrificing himself for them, an act of atonement that at last gave meaning to the past twenty years of his life.

Behind him, the eldritch light faded until the portal vanished. The wheel from which it had formed was gone. In days of old, when angels visited or when a bush burned without being consumed, no video cameras existed to record the moments. Likewise, nothing remained to prove the wheel had ever existed—except for the trench through the yard and the cracked flagstones. Machina ex Deo.

A flood of joy swept fear away, and the sight of his precious family blurred before him. He started toward them, and they toward him. At the same time, from out of the night and the cascading snow, in a toboggan hat and a navy peacoat, came Lionel Timmins, wide-eyed and speechless. He found himself at the center of the converging Calvinos, which was at that moment a magical, emotional, freaking perspicacious place to be.

Entering the kitchen with the meat cleaver, with a headache caused by the blow to her head, and with bad intentions, Melody Lane halted when she felt the thread snap. The ethereal line between her and the entity that had once ridden her, that she served even when not ridden, was disconnected. She waited for it to be reestablished, for she was looking forward to drinking life from the dying boy. But after a minute, she put down the cleaver and departed the house by the front door, because without the protection and guidance of the spirit rider, this place was too dangerous.

Melody trudged through the storm to her parked car, started the engine, switched on the wipers to sweep the snow from the windshield. As she drove into the street, she decided to move on to a new place. There were tens of thousands of cities and towns out there, in which millions of children were at this very moment breathing when they shouldn’t be. Melody had a responsibility not to future generations but to eliminate future generations. We all have a responsibility. Some shirked it, but not she.

As she drove, Melody delighted in the magical scenes through which she passed, the city gowned and jeweled in snow. Her sweet and gentle voice matched the moment when she began to sing “Winter Wonderland.”