What the Night Knows

7

CLEARING A DOORWAY UNDER THREAT WAS ALWAYS THE worst. He pushed through fast, found the switch, pistol in one hand but then in both as light bloomed in a pair of bedside lamps. Left to right, head and gun tracking as one, registering few details of the room, focusing instead on target identification and places where someone might be concealed.

A closet offered the only possibility. Two sliding mirrored doors. Approaching himself and the black bore of his weapon, gun in one hand again, reaching toward the door, toward his own reaching reflection, sliding his second self aside. He found only hanging clothes, shoes, boxes on a high shelf.

He still believed the silvery ringing had been real.

He slid the door shut and looked past his reflection at the room behind him, which seemed to be filled by the deathbed, by the evil of it, the mattress like the altar of an abattoir religion.

Celine had been sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent and her foot on the mattress, painting her toenails. Listening to music through the earphones of her iPod, she could not have heard the struggle in her grandmother’s room.

Before throwing open the door and attacking, Billy had stripped out of his clothes and tossed them on the hallway floor. Naked, knife in hand, hot with the thrill of having garroted his grandmother with a tightly twisted red silk scarf, he burst into his sister’s room and overwhelmed her. Pain, shock, and terror robbed her of the ability to resist effectively.

The mirror image of the bed filled John Calvino with revulsion, and he heard himself breathing through his open mouth to avoid the coppery smell of the blood-soaked mattress batting that had not yet dried and would not for a long time. But the humid air had a coppery taste—or he imagined it did—that offended worse than the smell, and he clenched his teeth, his nostrils flaring.

Holstering his pistol, he turned to face the abomination, which was immeasurably more terrible than the reflection of it. His disgust was twined now with anger and pity, three threads on a needle sewing this moment into his memory, not only the moment, the scene, but also the raw emotion of it.

Then he could hear Celine, the Celine of his quasi-clairvoyant imagination: crying out in pain and terror, weeping with the shame of violation, pleading for her life, beseeching God to save her, receiving no mercy from the beast who was her brother, receiving no grace until at last, at last, the final thrust of the knife put an end to her misery.

Shaking uncontrollably, hands covering his ears without effect, John turned from the hateful bed, returned to the hallway, leaned his back against the wall, and slid down to sit on the floor. He was in three places simultaneously: this present hallway, this hallway on the murder night, and another house in a distant city twenty years in the past.

Because his father and mother had been artists and art teachers, he had perpetual access to a memory museum of renowned images. Now, before his mind’s eye rose a painting by Goya, the chilling and despair-filled Saturn Devouring His Children.

John had to sit in silence for a while, letting time past wash out of time present. The horrors of the past and of the present were unredeemable, but he held fast to a hope—wild and unreasoned in its character, but ardent—that the future could be shaped so that it would never need redemption.

Although he would have preferred to switch off the lights in Celine’s room and retreat from the house, he eventually got to his feet and crossed her threshold once more. He did not, however, look again at the dead girl’s bed.

Across her desk spilled glossy magazines published for teenagers and, by way of implausible contrast, a paperback of The Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton.

Display shelves held an eclectic collection of things pleasing to Celine. Twenty ceramic mice, the largest no more than two inches tall. Seashells. Glass paperweights. A snow globe containing a quaint cottage.

Bells. Behind the mice, between two plush-toy bunnies in white bonnets and gingham dresses, on a green box in which they evidently had come, lay three miniature silver calla lilies all sprouting from one silver stem. The spathes were exquisitely shaped, but instead of a yellow spike, each enclosed a tiny silver clapper.

The stem, by which the bells could be rung, was dark with dried blood and with tarnish the blood encouraged. If the criminalists had noticed the bells, they would have bagged and taken them.

From a box of Kleenex on the desk, John plucked a tissue. He folded it into a pad and gripped the silver stem, not to preserve evidence—too late for that—but to avoid touching the blood.

On the lid of the green box under the calla lilies, in silver script, were the words Piper’s Gallery.

Shaken, the bells produced the crisp, cold ringing that he had heard three times since entering the house.

Unable to suppress a tremor in his hands, he placed the bells and the Kleenex in the box, tucked the box in a sport-coat pocket.

Back in the day, Alton Turner Blackwood had carried with him three silver bells, each the size of a thimble, clustered at the end of a handle. They were not shaped like flowers and were not as finely made as those on Celine’s shelf of small treasures.

Blackwood had been a psychopathic ritualist with an elaborate post-homicide ceremony that suggested both a strange belief system and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. When everyone in his target family was dead, he returned to the victims in the order the killings occurred and arranged them on their backs. With a drop of epoxy, he glued coins on the cadaver’s eyes: quarters that he’d painted black, always with the eagle facing up. In the mouth, on the tongue, he placed a brown disc that the crime lab identified as dried excrement.

Then the killer folded the corpse’s hands at the groin, around a chicken egg. To be sure the hands would not release the egg, he tied thumb to thumb and little finger to little finger with string.

Days prior to a slaughter, he prepared the eggs by drilling two tiny holes in each to drain the contents. Then he inserted a tightly rolled slip of paper through a hole into the well-dried, hollow shell. If the body was male, the paper carried the hand-printed word servus; if female, serva. They were the masculine and feminine forms of the Latin noun that meant “slave.”

After the cadavers had been accessorized to suit him, Blackwood had stood over each, ringing his triune bells.

Billy Lucas had not rearranged his four victims but had left them lying as they died. He didn’t conduct a ritual using black quarters, dried excrement, or hollow eggs. Evidently, however, he rang the tiny bells.

The delicate silver calla lilies featured no engraving.

On each of Blackwood’s bells had been the word RUIN.

John clearly remembered Billy with the almost wistful smile, standing on the farther side of the glass partition.

You mean—what was my motive?

You haven’t said why.

The why is easy.

Then why?

Ruin.

John switched off the lights in Celine’s room and left the door ajar as he had found it.

In the hallway, he stood listening to the house. No floorboards protested, no hinges creaked. No shadow moved.

He went to Billy’s room.