What the Night Knows (43 page)

Beyond the computer screen, at the other end of the room, she half saw someone hurry past the window, through the snow, across the back terrace. Maybe Walter and Imogene hadn’t left yet, and he was tending to some final task before heading home to beat the worst of the storm.

A minute later a door closed so quietly that Nicky almost didn’t hear it. Then quick soft footsteps along the hallway.

She looked up, expecting someone to push open the study door, which was three-quarters closed. As the footsteps passed and then receded, she called out, “John?”

Whoever it might be, he evidently hadn’t heard her. He didn’t double back to see if she wanted something.

Although Blackwood’s journal fascinated her in a deeply morbid way, she was spending too much time on the early pages. She could go back later and read with more care if she wished. Now she skimmed through the seemingly endless lines of painstaking penmanship, in search of what the killer had written about his reasons
for switching from single murders to the destruction of entire families.

Preston Nash is sitting alone in his basement apartment, eating corn chips with salsa, drinking beer, and playing Grand Theft Auto, really
living
the action, when suddenly for no reason at all, he says out loud, “Come to me.”

The next thing he knows, he’s got the key to the Calvino house in a pants pocket, and he’s driving his parents’ second car, which he is forbidden to operate even though he’s thirty-six and a grown man. Preston has suffered fugues in the past, when because of drugs or booze he slips into a dissociative state. Then he does things of which he’s less than half aware, hours of activity that later he dimly remembers or can’t recall at all. But he hasn’t chugged enough beer or popped enough pills to be in that condition now.

Besides, this is different from a fugue. Weirder. He’s acutely aware of what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to be doing it, but he can’t stop. He’s compelled to get to the Calvino house. He feels as if his life depends on it, but he doesn’t know why. In spite of the storm, the world around him isn’t blurred and remote. It
is
black-and-white, which has nothing to do with the snow and the bare trees, because all the other vehicles on the road are either black or white, or a shade of gray, as are all the signs for businesses and all the clothes that the pedestrians are wearing. The only color in the world right now seems to be Preston, what he wears, and the car he drives.

He isn’t frightened. He thinks he ought to be in a fear sweat, vibrating like one of those coin-operated massaging beds in a cheesy motel, but something tells him that he should remain calm, that he’s all right. The times he’s ever been afraid, he’s always been sober. This
thing that’s happening to him isn’t like being drunk, yet it’s just
enough
like being drunk to keep the tangles combed out of his nerves.

So he parks a block from the Calvino house. He walks to their place as briskly as a punctual man with an important appointment to keep. He is not a graceful guy. Most of the time, the world seems to Preston to be the deck of a ship in a storm, and he is pleased with himself if he can just stay on his feet and not be washed overboard. But now he strides along the snow-covered sidewalk without a misstep. Onto the lawn and along the north side of the handsome white-brick house. Across the back terrace to a windowless door. It’s locked. He uses his key.

Taken
.

The rider mounts this horse for the first time since the fifth of October, and though it rode Preston secretly back then, it makes itself known to him now. He submits to control instantly, even more obedient to his master than an avatar in a video game is obedient to whoever holds the joystick, and color floods back into the world around him.

Leaving his key in the door, Preston enters the mud room. The girls’ boots stand on a rubber mat that glistens with snowmelt, and their coats hang from wall hooks. Preston closes the door behind him. Along one wall is a utility cabinet with upper doors, drawers below. Preston, who has never been here before, opens exactly the right drawer and removes from it a claw hammer.

Two inner doors lead out of the mud room, one to the kitchen, one to the ground-floor hallway. Preston enters the hall and hurries as quietly as possible toward the front of the house.

As he passes a nearly closed door, Nicolette Calvino calls out, “John?”

He could stride into the study and smash her skull to mush. But he understands that she is a most desirable bitch and therefore must be used first. Later, when she’s begging for death, it might
then
be fun to hammer her face.

Preston has no problem with that if it’s what his rider wants. It’ll just be like one of his porn films crossed with one of the
Saw
movies except that it’ll be fully 3-D and more intimate.

The foyer features a small walk-in closet. Preston steps into it and quietly closes the door behind him.

Using Preston’s voice, the rider tells him “
Stay,
” as if he were a well-trained dog. In this condition, he’s more like a car than like a dog, a reliable Honda left in park with the engine idling. He is just Preston now, not Preston and Alton and Ruin, but he’s Preston in stasis, like a guy in a movie on the TV after the viewer presses the pause button. He knows he’s Preston, and he knows that he’s in a coat closet, and he is aware of holding a claw hammer. He also knows that, whatever happens, he won’t really be responsible for it, more of an observer than a participant, although a keenly interested and easily entertained observer. Preston has been an observer all of his life, rather than a participant, so there is nothing new about his current circumstances, except that he can’t go get a beer anytime he wants one.

Minnie stood in her room, beside her play table, staring at the LEGO thing. White, about three inches thick, six inches in diameter, it resembled a big rice cake, except smooth, and stood on edge like a coin. It shouldn’t hold together. It should spill apart into a bunch of pieces, but it didn’t.

For two years, she had been doing this LEGO thing; she didn’t know why. It started when she got home from the hospital after being so sick everyone thought she was dying.

Well, in a way, it started while she was in the hospital.…

She had a high fever that the usual drugs couldn’t lower. Fever but also chills, drenching sweats, terrible headaches. The thirst was almost the worst of it. Sometimes she was so thirsty, as though she’d eaten a pound of salt, and she couldn’t get enough water. Most of the time, they were giving her fluids through a needle stuck in a vein in her arm, but that didn’t relieve the thirst. They had to monitor her water intake because sometimes she would drink until her belly bloated painfully, and in spite of the pain, she desperately wanted to drink still more—even in her dreams.

She had a lot of strange dreams in the intensive-care unit, some of them while she was awake. Before she went into the hospital, she didn’t know what the word
delirium
meant, but she sure could define it by the time she got well and came home. The dreams, whether she was awake or asleep, often had to do with thirst: deserts where every promise of water turned out to be a mirage; pitchers and spigots from which poured only sand; being chased by some kind of monster on a hot day along dry riverbeds; a forest of parched dead trees surrounding a dusty clearing where brittle bones were scattered in the withered grass, where the only water was pooled at the bottom of an open grave, but when she scrambled into the grave,
that
water proved to be a mirage, as well, and something started shoveling spadefuls of chalky dirt onto her, the same half-seen monster who had chased her along the waterless river.

Delirium was funny, not ha-ha funny, but weird funny. Delirious, you were sure that not only were monsters trying to kill you but so were some people who were actually trying to help you, like Kaylin
Amhurst, the intensive-care nurse. In Minnie’s hallucinations and nightmares, while in the ICU, she thought Nurse Amhurst was trying to poison her.

Sometimes, usually near the end of Minnie’s worst nightmares and hallucinations, Father Albright appeared. She loved Father Albright very much. He was the super-best person she knew besides Mom, Daddy, Naomi, and Zach. He retired not long before Minnie became ill, and Father Bill took his place, so maybe she gave Father Albright a role in her fever dreams because it was the only way she could see him anymore. He was the one good thing in the dreams. He always gave her water, and it never turned out to be salt or sand.

That was a bad year, not just because of her illness. A month before Father Albright retired and went away, Willard died. Daddy and Lionel Timmins were almost killed by a bad guy, too, and though they got an award for valor, Daddy was nevertheless nearly killed, which scared Minnie for a long time. Maybe the only good thing that year was Zach deciding he just
had
to become a marine.

Minnie didn’t know whether the LEGO shapes were a good or a bad thing. She first saw them in her fever dreams, except they weren’t made of LEGO blocks. They were just shapes seen from a distance; then she found herself walking around on them, as if they were buildings, and eventually she was walking around inside of them. On these tours, she knew that she had shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, until she was the tiniest thing in all of creation, and that the strange shapes she explored were what lay at the bottom of the universe, holding it up.

Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. Of the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or
bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret. Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real. Walking inside the shapes in her delirium dreams, Minnie knew they were the ideas from which everything had started, although she didn’t know then—or now—what that
meant
. After all, she was only eight.

Turning away from the LEGO construction, she went to the window and watched the snow falling through the bare limbs of the scarlet oak. The weather forecast was wrong. They would get more than a foot of snow, not six inches. She didn’t know from where this certainty came, but she was confident about her prediction. It was just one of those things she knew.

Since shortly after coming in from the snow with Naomi, Minnie had been in a spooky mood. This was one of those times she sensed unseen presences so strongly that she knew sooner rather than later, they would become visible to her, like at the convenience store, the guy with half his face shot off. This time would be worse than that.

Something moved on the south lawn, at first partly screened by the branches of the oak. Then it came into the open, and she saw that it was Willard. He looked up at her in the window.

“Good old dog,” she whispered. “Good old Willard.”

Willard stood looking up through the falling snow for a long moment, and then he approached the house.

Minnie lost sight of him. She wondered if he had come inside.