What the Night Knows (20 page)

He was as unafraid of these unseen but immense presences as he had been of the mountain lion. In fact, they were as he wished one day to be: the true royalty of this world, users and corrupters, the hidden rulers of this troubled Earth, princes of a secret order. They were to all other predators what the mountain lion was to a mere house cat. If the boy could not one day become one of them, he would settle for being used by one of them to wreak the violence and chaos that they cherished
.

For a few weeks following the encounter with the lion, the boy didn’t kill anything. As the desire began to build again, he found the graveyard
.

He was about to learn the one more thing he needed to know—and do the one more thing that must be done—to throw off the mantle of boyhood and become me
.

28

LATER THAT DAY, LONG AFTER DARKFALL AND DINNER BUT well before midnight, Naomi squirmed so impatiently under the covers that she feared she would wake her sister in the other bed. She wanted to be sure Minnie was sleeping soundly before she risked sneaking out to visit the mirror—and the prince!—in the storage room, but if she delayed another minute, she would positively burst. Most of the time, she was a paragon of patience, which she
had
to be with a shrimp sister hanging on her skirts all day, but even saints had their limits, and Naomi didn’t claim to be a saint. She wasn’t a monster, either. She was good enough by most standards, and she didn’t expect to spend centuries upon centuries in Purgatory—or even a month—assuming that she ever died.

Since the afternoon math lesson with the nice but interminable Professor Sinyavski, Naomi had been thinking about how to take the initiative with the mirror. Instead of waiting for something in the looking glass to appear or to speak to her, which is what she had done thus far, she should speak to the prince, reach out to him and express
her desire to help him save his kingdom from the dark powers by which such kingdoms always seemed to be plagued. Otherwise, she was allowing the dark powers to use the mirror exclusively, like a supernatural BlackBerry or something. She felt that it was extremely perspicacious of her to recognize that she should stop being passive with the mirror and become aggressive.

Finally she turned back the covers, got out of bed, and quietly extracted the flashlight from under her pile of pillows, where she had hidden it earlier and where it had been making her uncomfortable for the past hour. She didn’t switch on the flash nor did she don a robe over her pajamas, for fear that Sister Half-Pint—who sometimes seemed to have the sharp senses of a hyperalert dog—would be torn from sleep by the slightest rustle and come panting after her to spoil everything.

With admirable stealth, Naomi navigated the nearly lightless room without a blunder, eased open the door, stepped barefoot into the hall, and closed the door behind her with only the softest click of the latch. Resorting to the flashlight now, she hurried to the east end of the hallway, regretting that she wasn’t wearing a cape, like those that heroines often wore in Victorian fantasies, because nothing looked more splendidly romantic than a cape billowing out behind a girl racing into the night on a clandestine mission.

In the storage room, she switched on the overhead light, wishing that she had instead a candelabra with a dozen tapers that made light and shadows leap mysteriously across the walls. Three steps from the threshold, she realized that the mirror no longer lay hidden but had been dragged into the open and propped upright against a stack of boxes. Two steps farther, she saw that the looking glass didn’t reflect anything, that it was black—
black!
—as if it were an open doorway
beyond which lay the moonless and starless night of a land oppressed by something … by something … by something too terrible to name.

Naomi marveled at the absolute blackness for a longish moment before she noticed the sheet of stationery on the floor in front of the mirror, a page so creamy and thick that it might have been vellum. On sight, she knew that it must have come from out of the mirror, from the once-happy kingdom that now suffered under the brutal yoke of something … of something unspeakable. No doubt the message would be of earth-shattering importance—or so she assumed until, stooping to pick it up, she recognized Minnie’s neat printing, which ought to have been the childish scrawl of an average eight-year-old but was not. The note said: DEAREST NAOMI, I PAINTED THE MIRROR BLACK. GO BACK TO BED. IT’S OVER NOW. YOUR DEVOTED SISTER, MINETTE.

The first thing Naomi wanted to do, of course, was prepare a bucket of ice water with which to wake the devoted titmouse, but she restrained herself. Because she was on a fast track to adulthood, becoming remarkably more self-possessed and wonderfully mature every day, Naomi realized that by admitting she had found the fingerling’s smarty-pants note, she would be acknowledging the sorry lack of self-control that sent her racing to the mirror in the middle of the night. She could too easily imagine Minnie’s deadpan expression of smug satisfaction—
pig fat!
—so she vowed right then and there, on her honor and her life, not to give Miss Peewee the pleasure of knowing that the note had been found.

She placed the sheet of creamy paper on the floor precisely as she remembered that it had been, and she silently retreated from the storage room and along the hallway, pleased by her superior cunning.
Without benefit of the flashlight, she entered her room, returned to her bed, and lay smiling in the dark. Until she wondered if—and then became convinced that—the occupant of the second bed was no longer Minnie.

In Naomi’s absence, something could have happened to poor little Minnie, and now the thing that had happened to Minnie could be lying in the sweet child’s bed, in her place, patiently waiting for the surviving sister to go to sleep before rising to devour her, as well. Naomi dared not lie lamblike in the blackness, meekly waiting to be eaten alive, yet she dared not switch on her bedside lamp, because the instant she confirmed the presence of the beast, it would even sooner gobble up every last morsel of her. The only thing to do was stay awake until dawn and hope that sunshine would send this creature of the night fleeing to some deep lair.

Half an hour later, Naomi fell asleep, then woke uneaten in morning light. The new day proved less eventful than the previous day, which set a pattern for the following month. The raw-voiced presence—
I know you now, my ignorant little bitch
—did not appear in the bathroom mirror or the hallway mirror, or anywhere else. No more grapes disappeared through seemingly solid objects.

As day after uneventful day passed, Naomi wondered if her only chance for grand exploits in a fantastic alternate universe had come and gone without her having been able to seize the opportunity.

For compensation, she still had magical stories to read, her flute, the junior orchestra, her unique family, the dazzling autumn leaves in this gorgeous semi-magical world, and her imagination. As the days flew by, the scarier aspects of the recent events seemed less scary in retrospect, and Naomi gradually became aware that she had conducted herself with more valor and intrepidity and dashing style than she had recognized at the time. She stopped worrying that she had
botched her one chance for glory, and she knew an occasion would eventually arise in which she could—and would—fulfill her singular potential as an adventurer.

Minnie knew that Naomi found the note. One corner of it was bent. And Naomi had held the thick writing paper so tightly that her fingers dimpled it in a few places.

By herself, Minnie dragged the painted mirror behind the boxes once more. Good riddance.

She folded the note and kept it as a souvenir.

Days passed, and nothing weird happened. Still more days, and still nothing.

The spooky stuff hadn’t come to an end forever. They were in the eye of a hurricane. This calm was misleading; the storm remained all around them.

Minnie possessed some natural knowledge of such things. She seemed to have been born with a sixth sense; and it had always been her little secret.

Since the incident with the mirror, she now and then sensed that she was being watched by something that didn’t have a body, therefore didn’t have eyes, yet could see.

She thought it must be a ghost, but she sensed that it was not an ordinary ghost or maybe not
only
a ghost. So at first she thought of it as the watcher.

Sometimes the watcher’s stare was almost like a touch, a sliding hand along her neck, along her arm, along her cheek and chin.

Usually but not always, this feeling came over her when she was alone. She tried not to be alone except when she went to the bathroom or took a shower.

The eyeless watcher didn’t prowl just the house. It was outside, too, in certain secluded places.

One day in the backyard, she started to climb the ladder to the playhouse in the branches of the enormous old cedar. Suddenly she knew the watcher waited up there.

She refused to believe that a thing without a body could hurt her. But she didn’t want to be alone with it in that high place, to feel its stare, and to have no way out except the ladder. She might fall and break her neck. And that might be exactly what it wanted.

The arbor was draped with climbing vines, and pooled within it were shadows and the fragrance of roses, the last blooms of the year. Lingering there one afternoon, she felt the watcher enter the tunnel.

Although the day was windless, the roses shuddered, as if the thorny vines winding through the crisscrossed lattice were trying to pull loose and reach for her.

Inside the arbor, with the roses trembling and petals falling, Minnie felt the watcher brush past her, and by that contact she knew that it called itself Ruin. This seemed to be a peculiar name, yet she was certain that it was the right one. Ruin.

For as long as Minette could remember, she had from time to time felt unseen presences that other people didn’t feel. Occasionally she got a glimpse of them. Presences. Spirits. People who weren’t alive anymore.

They weren’t always where you expected them to be. They didn’t hang around graveyards.

Two of them were in a convenience store where Mom stopped now and then. Minnie could feel both of them. She had seen one, a man with part of his face shot off. Something bad happened in the store a long time ago.

Minnie usually stayed in the car.

When she was little, the presences sometimes scared her. But she learned that they were all right if you just ignored them.

If you stared at them too long or if you spoke to them, that was an invitation. If you didn’t invite them, you could go months and months without seeing one.

Ruin was the first in years that kind of scared her. Ruin was different somehow.

She was usually alone when she became aware of Ruin watching, but sometimes it watched all of them when they were having dinner or playing games. That was the worst.

Although aware of the presences when they were near, Minnie never knew what they wanted, what they might be thinking or feeling, if they thought or felt anything at all.

In the case of Ruin, however, especially when it watched all of them, she knew exactly what it was feeling. Hatred. Hatred and rage.

Anyway, Ruin was a ghost or some kind of spirit new to her, new but nonetheless a spirit, and spirits could not harm her or anyone else. If she ignored it, if she did nothing to invite it, then it would have to go away.

After math with old Professor Sinyavski, in the late afternoon of the day Zach had encountered something in the service mezzanine that tested his sphincter control—
I know you, boy, I know you now
—he returned to his room and discovered that the stupid meat fork, which he had hidden under some stuff in a bottom desk drawer, had been restored.
Presto!
The previously wrecked shank was no longer bent. The tines were straight, not twined together. The polished steel bore no indications of ever having been stressed.