What the Night Knows (49 page)

Backed against his desk, Zach desperately blocked every swing of the cleaver with the Marine Corps sword, but was given no opportunity to draw it from its scabbard. The crazed woman chopped high, chopped low, lunging with every slash of the wicked blade, which could probably render an entire chicken in five seconds flat. His heart pounded so hard he could hear it, a hollow
ba-boom ba-boom
that seemed to enter his ears by a back door, could feel it knocking against his sternum, his ribs.

Minnie had backed away to the hall door. But she seemed frozen in fear.

Zach shouted at her, “Get out! Get help!”

Reminded of Minnie, the whack job with the cleaver relented for a moment, glancing at her, maybe thinking she should chop the easier target first and demoralize Zach by killing his sister. He instantly took advantage of her mistake, didn’t attempt to draw the sword from the stupid scabbard, but just swung the whole thing at her head. The sound of the blow was hugely satisfying, one of the best things ever. Dropping the cleaver, the freaking lunatic collapsed to the floor on her back, possibly dead but probably unconscious.

Zach snatched up her weapon and stowed it in a desk drawer. He dropped onto one knee beside her, pressed fingertips to her throat, and found a pulse. He was relieved. He didn’t want to kill her if he didn’t have to. Maybe she was only crazy, not evil. And he was just thirteen, not ready for this. Maybe he could drag the nutcase into the closet, brace the door shut, and then call the cops.

Only as he pulled open the closet door did he realize that Minnie was gone.

As Minnie stepped into the hallway to shout for help, the LEGO wheel-thing was heavy, at least ten or twelve pounds when it ought to have weighed maybe twelve
ounces
. And it seemed to be getting heavier by the second. She was terrified for Zach. She loved him, she didn’t want to grow up without him, so her legs were already rubbery. The weight of the weird LEGO thing caused her to totter, but she knew that she should let it out of her hands only if she was in extreme danger, though she didn’t know
why
.

Exiting Zach’s room, she opened her mouth to shout for help—and saw Professor Sinyavski, his wild hair wilder than ever, lurching out of the storage room at the east end of the hall. But he’d said he was leaving early because of the snow.

With his bushy eyebrows, rubbery nose, and big belly, he usually looked funny in a nice way, but he didn’t look any kind of funny now. His lips were skinned back from his teeth in a snarl, his face was twisted and hateful, and his eyes seemed to be burning and icy at the same time. Maybe Professor Sinyavski was peering out at Minnie from somewhere behind those eyes, but she knew at once, for sure, Ruin looked at her from within the mathematician—and it wanted her.

Voice rough with anger and slurred as if he had been drinking, the professor said, “Piggy pig. Come here, you dirty piggy pig, you dirty pig.” He started toward her, staggering, and for the first time Minnie realized how big the Russian was, not just overweight but big in the chest and shoulders, his neck thick, more muscle under the fat than she had realized before.

This was extreme danger, all right. Reluctantly but without hesitation, she put the LEGO wheel on the floor and ran toward the front stairs.

“I’m Roger Hodd of the
Daily Post
, I’m Roger Hodd of the
Daily Post.…
”

The inside of the bathroom door had a thumb-turn deadbolt, but that wasn’t holding it shut. No matter how furiously Naomi wrenched at the knob, jerked on it, the door didn’t even rattle against the jamb, as if it was steel and was welded in place.

She glanced back at Roger Hodd, still on the floor, doing his pill-bug imitation. No less terrified, the man now appeared deranged, too. This time, a shaky humorless laugh punctuated “
Daily Post,
” and Naomi knew that soon, any second—
Oh God, Oh God
—he would return to the subject of tasty candy, and she shuddered at the thought of his hands on her.

As Minnie reached the stairs, a shotgun boomed on the ground floor. She had intended to go down. Instead she went up to the third-floor landing. Into Mother’s studio. Across the studio to the back stairs. Don’t glance behind. Looking over your shoulder wasted time, slowed you down. She just prayed and ran, hoping God would help her if she helped herself by running her butt off. She had to be faster than big old Professor Sinyavski. She could do the math, he’d taught her to do it. She was eight years old, he was maybe seventy, so she should be almost nine times faster than he was.

The door released John, and Nicky embraced him. She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see faceless Preston Nash or the room fouled by a spray of blood and brains.

“The kids,” she said, and together they hurried once more along the hall toward the front stairs.

A dark primitive part of her despaired that this would never stop, that Nature was a pagan beast that devoured everyone in the end, that the unrelenting idiot evil of Ruin-and-Blackwood had the power to turn the entire world against her family, one person at a time, until finally it got what it wanted. But a more profound part of her, the believer who was an artist and who
knew
that imagination could create something from nothing, insisted that the world was not a cancerous maze of infinite malignancies, that it arose from an intricate matrix of exquisite design, which made it possible for hope to be fulfilled. If only she and John did the right thing, the smart thing, they could save the kids, all of them, and get out of this damn box.

In the front hall, she retrieved her pistol. John hurried toward the second floor. Nicky followed him, realizing that the nape of her neck still felt cold where the convex curve of the hammer claw had slid along it, and she shivered.

Once, in a true-crime book, while browsing in a bookstore, Naomi saw a picture of a murdered girl. A police photo or something. A girl younger than Naomi. She had been raped. Punched in the face, stabbed. Her eyes in the photo were the worst thing Naomi had ever seen. Wide pretty eyes. They were the worst thing because they were the saddest thing, they brought tears to her own eyes there in the store, and she quickly closed the book and put it back on the shelf and told herself to forget she ever saw that poor face, those eyes. She
worked hard to forget it, but it showed up in a dream once in a while, and now as she struggled with the bathroom door, the dead girl’s face haunted her once more.

Breathing raggedly, making strange noises, little whimpers, which frightened her because she sounded like someone wholly different from herself, Naomi figured-hoped-prayed she might be all right as long as Roger Hodd continued to drone about who he was and where he worked, showing no interest in her. But then she heard him moving, and when she turned, she saw him rising to his feet from the floor.

She gave up on the door, she couldn’t get it open anyway, and if Hodd was on the move, she didn’t dare turn her back to him. He swayed as he chanted, not looking at her or at anything in the room, for that matter, but his words had a different rhythm from the way he’d been saying them, and a new tone entered his voice. The self-pitying note and confusion became impatience and petulance, and he emphasized the word
am
as though arguing with someone: “I AM Roger Hodd of the
Daily Post
, I AM Roger Hodd of the
Daily Post
.… ”

Minnie raced down four flights to the landing at the ground floor, where she halted at the door to the kitchen, held her breath, and listened. The stairs were quiet. Professor Sinyavski—or the thing that had once been the professor—wasn’t thundering after her.

She looked down the next flight of stairs. All remained quiet—but then something drip-drip-dripped onto the carpeted treads. Red. Thicker than water. Blood. She glanced at the ceiling above the stairs and saw a long line, a slash in the plaster, like a wound, blood oozing out between the lips of the wound, as if the house were alive.

Her heart fluttered. She told herself that the blood wasn’t real. The only reason she saw it was because Ruin wanted her to see it. This was like a delirium hallucination except that she wasn’t feverish in a hospital bed. Or if it was real, it didn’t come from a body somewhere above the ceiling. It was like the tears of blood that a statue of the Holy Mother might weep during a minor miracle, though this was dark magic. If she allowed herself to be frightened by this, then she would be
inviting
Ruin to torment her with other visions, maybe with a lot worse than merely visions. But her heart fluttered anyway.