What the Night Knows (46 page)

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.