What the Night Knows (15 page)

Crying out, Nicky swiveled to confront him. No one was there.

Shadowy and half-glimpsed in the clerestory light, he had seemed real nonetheless, tall and stoop-shouldered and scarecrow-strange. He could not have fled the bathroom, however, in the split second during which she turned toward him.

She took a deep breath, blew it out, and with it a small nervous laugh, amused that she had spooked herself.

When she turned once more to the mirror, the man was not behind
her, as before, but now appeared—a dark shape, a shadowed face—in the looking glass where Nicky’s reflection should have been.

A rough voice said something that sounded like
Kiss me
, a blast of arctic air slammed into Nicky, the mirror exploded in a thousand shards, and darkness took her.

21

SIX SCREWS IN THE FRAME OF THE FULL-LENGTH MIRROR HELD it to the back of the door in the girls’ closet. On her knees, using a screwdriver, Minette extracted them, starting with the two in the bottom corners.

Naomi had gotten over the scare of the night before. Sister Half-Pint had infected Naomi with spookitis, which was one of the dangers of sharing a room with a sibling who both was colossally immature and yet had Daddy-green eyes that looked right into you and sometimes made you think she was the only third-grader in the world who knew
everything
. Of course Mouse knew only about enough to fill a teaspoon, she was your typical eight-year-old ignoramus, as sweet as a sister could be but tragically naive and dismally unsophisticated. In the clear light of day, Naomi knew, as she had
always
known, even in the grip of the mass panic Minnie had fomented, that no sinister creature had been moving through the mirror, that she had been right to say it was a moth shadow in the room behind her, a moth currently tucked into a corner somewhere and sleeping.

Naomi stared into the mirror now, as her sister worked on the screws, and she saw nothing scary or even unusual. In fact she was pleased to see that she looked rather pretty, maybe even more than merely “rather,” though she would have to do something enormously more stylish with her hair if she hoped ever to enchant a prince, because a prince would have a highly refined taste in all things and would be very discriminating when it came to such matters as his lady’s hairstyle.

“If we have to do anything at all, which I don’t think we do, why don’t we just cover the mirror?” Naomi asked. “This is a lot of work. Just covering it so we can’t see the mirror man and so he can’t see us—the mirror man who probably doesn’t even exist—won’t that be good enough?”

“No,” Minnie said.

“What do you know about it?” Naomi said. “You don’t know beans about it. I’m the one who knows about magic mirrors. I’ve read like sixteen thousand stories about magic mirrors. You’ve never read one.”

“You read one to me that time,” Minnie reminded her. “It was as dumb as scum.”

“It wasn’t as dumb as scum,” Naomi said. “It was literature. You were a second-grader then, you didn’t understand. It was too sophisticated for a second-grader.”

“It was pages and pages and pages of barf,” Minnie insisted, putting aside the first screw. “I thought I’d never want to hear a story again.”

“We could just hang a blanket over this thing.”

“And you’d all the time be lifting it to peek at the mirror.”

“I would not,” Naomi said. “I have plenty of self-control. I am
disciplined.
”

“You’ll all the time be lifting it to peek, and sooner or later the mirror man will be there, and you’ll start yammering at him about whether he’s a prince, and he’ll suck you into the mirror, and you’ll be over there with the dead people forever.”

Naomi let out a long-suffering sigh. “Honestly, dear Mouse, you are going to have to go into fraidy-cat rehab.”

“Don’t call me Mouse,” Minette said, putting aside the second screw. She got to her feet and went to work on the next pair.

Naomi said, “What are Mom and Daddy going to say when they find out the mirror’s missing?”

“They’re going to say, ‘Where’s the mirror?’ ”

“And what are we going to say?”

“I’m thinking about that,” Minnie said.

“You
better
be thinking about that.”

Extracting the third screw, Minnie said, “Why don’t you put your gigantic eleven-year-old brain to work on it?”

“Don’t be sarcastic. Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”

“Anyway, maybe they’ll never know we took the mirror down.”

“How could they not know? They have
eyes.
”

“Who cleans our room?” Minnie asked.

“What do you mean who cleans our room?
We
clean our room. We’re supposed to learn personal responsibility. Personally, I’ve learned enough personal responsibility to last a lifetime, so someone else could clean my room for a while, but
that’s
never going to happen.”

Putting the fourth screw with the first three, Minnie said, “After Mrs. Nash washes and irons our clothes, who brings them up here and puts them away? Who makes our beds every day?”

“We do. What’s your point? Oh. You mean, if we keep the closet
door shut, then it’ll be a century before they realize the mirror’s gone.”

“Or at least a couple months,” Minnie said as she placed the stepstool in front of the mirror. “When I take out the next screw, the mirror’s gonna slip. Hold it tight for me.” She climbed onto the stool. “Hold it tight.”

Holding the mirror, staring into it, Naomi said, “What are we going to do with it when we take it down?”

“We’re gonna carry it along the hall to the storage room where Mom and Daddy keep all that junk, and we’ll put it behind some of the junk so nobody won’t even see it.”

“Or we could save a lot of work and instead put it mirror-side down under your bed.”

“I don’t want the mirror man under my bed,” Minnie said. “And I don’t want him under your bed, ’cause you’ll crawl under there to talk to him, and he’ll come out of the mirror into our room. We’ll be toast. One screw left. You holding it with both hands?”

“Yes, yes. Hurry up.”

“Be careful it doesn’t fall and break. If it breaks, maybe that lets him out of the mirror.”

The sixth screw came loose, Naomi didn’t let the mirror fall, Minnie put the stepstool away, and together they lowered the long pane of glass onto the bedroom carpet.

As Minnie closed the closet door, Naomi stood over the face-up looking glass, peering down into the reflected ceiling, intrigued by her face seen from this unusual angle.

The mirror dimpled like water dimpled when you dropped a pebble into it. Concentric circles spread outward across the silver surface.

“Bullcrap!” Naomi exclaimed, which was something her grandmother
rarely said when the word
chestnuts
wasn’t emphatic enough. “Minnie, look at this!”

Gazing down at the mirror, Minnie watched two, three, five new dimples and sets of concentric rings form, as if the glass were a pool and rain were falling into it.

“Not good,” Minnie said, and went to the play table where her lunch sandwich waited on a plate with a sprig of sweet green grapes.

“You can’t just go away and
eat
,” Naomi protested. “Big weird stuff is happening here.”

Minnie returned with the sprig. She plucked one of the grapes, held it over the mirror, hesitated, and dropped it.

The plump green fruit plopped through the mirror as it would have sunk through the surface of a pond, and disappeared.

22

IN HIS BEDROOM CLOSET, ZACH PULLED ON THE ROPE THAT opened the overhead trapdoor, and the ladder unfolded to his feet.

Since finding the ladder in this position the previous night, he’d thought through the possibilities, and he’d decided that the answer to the mystery was entirely mechanical, as he first suspected. A settling house shifted the trap mechanism slightly, and now from time to time it might drop open and the ladder unfold because its own weight could cause it to release spontaneously.

He didn’t need to ask his dad to help him search the service mezzanine between the second and third floors because there wasn’t anyone in the stupid mezzanine to find. The previous night, his nerves had been fried because of the freaking dream in which the big hands had tried to tear off his face and gouge out his eyes, those fingertips as big as soup spoons. He was a little disappointed in himself that he’d been rattled by a moronic dream. A few times over the years, he’d dreamed of being able to fly like a bird, soaring above everyone, above the city, but he’d never taken a dumb-ass leap off a roof to see
if he could actually go lighter-than-air, and he never would, because dreams were just dreams.

Now he was going to search the service mezzanine not because a bad guy was lurking around up there, scheming and cackling like some Phantom of the Opera wannabe, but just for the principle of it, to prove to himself that he wasn’t a chickenhearted, gritless jellyfish. He had a flashlight and a whacking big meat fork with a bone handle, and he was ready to explore.

After he’d gotten a sandwich and some fruit from Mrs. Nash and had brought his lunch to his room, he’d waited until he knew that she and Mr. Nash would be in the dayroom, having
their
lunch, before he returned to the kitchen to sneak a knife. He opened the wrong drawer, one containing meat forks and skewers and serving utensils, and just then he heard Mrs. Nash coming—saying, “It’s no trouble at all, I’ll get it, dear”—so Zach grabbed a killer fork and closed the drawer and split before she saw him. The stupid thing wasn’t a knife, but it had four- or five-inch tines with wickedly sharp points, so even if it wasn’t anything a marine would be issued in combat, it wasn’t a total weenie weapon, either.

Holding the handle of the fork in his teeth with the tines to one side, as if he were an idiot pirate looking for a turkey dinner to carve up, the flashlight in his left hand, he climbed the ladder. At the top, he sat on the frame of the trap opening and switched on the strings of work lights that looped throughout the mezzanine.

This space had a finished floor, particleboard with a laminated Formica surface, so you could either scoot around easy on your butt or knees, or you could shuffle around in a crouch. The ceiling height was five feet, and Zach stood five feet six, probably going to be six feet like his dad, so he had to prowl the place in a stoop.

In addition to the garlands of work lamps and his flashlight, there
were screened ventilation cutouts in the walls, to prevent dangerous mold from growing in here—and to allow squirrels to chew their way in now and then if they felt like it. The daylight didn’t exactly pour in through the screens, just more or less dribbled. The flashlight peeled open the darkness wherever the other lamps didn’t reach, but the movement of it also caused shadows to slide and twist and flutter at the periphery of your vision so you felt something was stalking you out there at the edge of things.

The mezzanine contained more machinery and ducting and pipes and valves and conduits than the engine room of a freaking spaceship. A maze, that’s what it was, full of softly humming systems and clicking relays and the rushing-air sound of pressurized natural gas burning in the furnaces. The air smelled of dust, hot-iron gas rings, and aging preventative insecticide sprayed in the corners by the pest-control guy with the cockroach-feeler mustache.

Holding the flashlight in one hand and the fork in the other, Zach was maybe in the middle of the maze when the work lamps blinked off and when he heard the distinctive sound of the trapdoor thumping shut between the mezzanine and his closet. The night before, when his nerves were fried and when he imagined all kinds of things that might happen if he climbed up here to conduct a search, this was not one of the scenarios that occurred to him.

His flashlight died. The beam faded, faded, faded, and then went out altogether.

Zach wasn’t such a complete bonehead that he believed the loss of both sources of light at the same time must be a coincidence. This was mortal trouble, sure enough, and in mortal trouble you needed to stay calm and
think
. You didn’t survive freaking Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, or the horrors of old Belleau Wood, by screaming for help and running blindly this way and that.

The service mezzanine might be a maze, okay, but every maze had an exit, and he remained pretty sure of his position relative to the trapdoor. The ventilation cutouts didn’t reveal anything, but the faint glow of them at points around the perimeter served as markers to further guide him. Tiny red, green, yellow, and blue indicator LEDs on the furnaces and the humidifiers would also help him find his way back to the trapdoor.

His biggest concern, bigger than the darkness and bigger than the twisty nature of the return route to safety, was that someone must be in the mezzanine with him. Simple gravity might drop open an out-of-plumb, out-of-balance trapdoor, but gravity couldn’t in a million years pull it up and close it again. And gravity didn’t have fingers to switch off the work lamps.

If some foaming-at-the-mouth maniac had decided to live secretly in the mezzanine, quieter and nuttier than squirrels, he couldn’t be a
benign
maniac.

Zach continued to grip the dead flashlight tightly in his left hand because it might serve as a secondary weapon, a club with which he might be able to bash an adversary even as he forked him. In the heat of battle, you sometimes ran out of ammunition and your bayonet snapped, and then you had to fight with makeshift weapons. Of course, he’d never possessed a gun with ammunition or a bayonet; he
started
with makeshift weapons, but the principle still applied.

For a while, Zach stood motionless, waiting for the enemy to reveal his position. The only sounds were the low background noises of the furnaces and the other equipment. The longer he listened, the more those ticks, clicks, and hisses sounded like insects conspiring with one another, as if he were in some kind of godawful hive.

He told himself that the assumption of mortal danger might not be correct, that some joker might be playing games with him. Naomi
was capable of trying to frighten him. She might have climbed into the mezzanine to switch off the lights, descended, and put up the ladder. The brother-sister competition to make each other appear to be a geek or an idiot tended to wax and wane, and it had waxed lately, but their pranks were mostly good-humored. This didn’t feel the least bit good-humored. This felt threatening. Besides, if the culprit was Naomi, she would not have been able to contain herself more than ten seconds after closing the trapdoor, she would be down there in his closet, laughing her stupid head off right now, in full loon mode, and he would hear her.