What the Night Knows

Minnie sat at her play table, in plain view, and no one in this house ever entered without knocking and announcing themselves, and there had been no knock, yet someone passed behind her, and Naomi spun around to see who it might be, but no one was there.

The open closet. No one in there, either.

Puzzled, she turned to the mirror again, wondering if something was wrong with her eyes, something dreadful and incurable, so that she would be blind by thirteen, a tragic figure, the blind musician, bravely forging on with her lessons until she became magnificently accomplished because of her fierce dedication to her only remaining pleasure, her music. She might become an international sensation, people traveling from all over the world to see her play, because her music would be so pure, the music of the virgin blind girl who performed melancholy passages with such power that even gangsters wept like babies, and always at her side would be her pure-white German shepherd Seeing Eye dog. She played the flute, but she couldn’t conjure an image of a concert hall full of people who had come from all around the world to hear a blind flautist, so perhaps she would need to stop with the flute and take up the piano. Yes, she could see herself at the piano, tossing her head dramatically as the music enraptured her, so tragic, so brilliant, the audience electrified by her playing, the guide dog gazing up adoringly at his mistress as her hands danced across the keys—

The mysterious form flashed behind her again, from left to right this time, a dark blur. Naomi gasped, turned to the closet, where the intruder surely must have gone, but again no one was there.

Minnie had gotten up from the play table. “What’s wrong?” she asked as she came to Naomi.

“I saw someone. A reflection. In the mirror.”

“It’s probably you.”

“I mean besides me, of course. Someone passing behind me.”

“Nobody’s here.”

“Maybe. I guess not. But still … something happened. I saw him in the mirror, sure enough. Real quick. He had to be here in the room with us.”

“You better tell me true, Naomi. You trying to spook me?”

Minnie had her mother’s black hair but her father’s green eyes. As was the case with Daddy, too, this emerald gaze could freeze you in place, like an interrogator’s spotlight in a screamproof room deep in a dungeon where you understood that you would lose a finger every time you told a lie. Naomi knew that neither Daddy nor Minnie would cut off her fingers, but when either of them focused this narrow-eyed green stare on her, she never fudged the truth even the littlest bit.

“You trying to spook me?” Minnie asked again.

“No, no. It wasn’t spooky. Not much. A little spooky. It was mainly just weird. I thought I might have to be a blind pianist.”

“You’re weird,” Minnie said.

“I saw some guy reflected in the mirror,” Naomi insisted.

“Really? Swear on the grave of Willard.”

Willard, their dog, had died two years earlier. Losing him was the hardest ordeal they ever endured. It still hurt to think about him. He was the best, sweetest, noblest dog in the world, and if you swore the truth of something on his grave and you lied, then you were surely going to burn in Hell with nothing to eat for eternity except spiders and maggots and brussels sprouts.

“I swear,” Naomi said, “on the grave of Willard.”

Impressed, Minnie peered in the mirror, talking to her sister’s reflection. “What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. I just … it was … no details … just a blur, superquick, way faster than a person should be, as fast as any animal, but it wasn’t an animal.”

In the mirror, Minnie’s eyes moved from her sister’s eyes to survey the reflection of the room behind them. Naomi also studied it.

“Maybe it wasn’t a guy,” Minnie said, “maybe it was a girl.”

“What girl?”

Minnie shrugged. “Whoever.”

Across the mirror, the thing swooped. Because Naomi was prepared for it this time, she saw it more clearly than before, but there was not anything to see, really, no face, no arms or legs, just a blur and ripple of darkness, here and gone, zoom.

Naomi cried, “Chestnuts!” which was something her grandmother said when she was startled or frustrated, and Minnie said, “Whoa!”

Instead of something, this seemed to have been only the shadow of something, and Naomi looked up at the ceiling light, expecting to see a moth darting about that cut-glass globe, but there was no moth.

When she returned her attention to the mirror, the phantom swooped across the glass again, and she said, “There must be a moth in the room, it keeps flying past the lamp. Help me find it.”

Solemnly, Minnie said, “It’s not a moth. Not in the room. It’s in the mirror.”

Minnie was just eight years old, and all eight-year-olds were kind of screwy because their young brains had not yet grown to fill out their skulls or something like that, which was a known scientific fact, so they were likely to say or do anything, sometimes mortifying you, though this was absurd rather than embarrassing.

“You took one too many silly pills this morning, Mouse. How could a moth be in the mirror?”

“It’s not a moth,” Minnie said. “Don’t look at it anymore.”

“What do you mean it’s not a moth? It was like a wing shadow – swoosh! – I saw it clearly this time, it must be a moth.”

“Don’t look at it anymore,” Minnie insisted. She went into the closet and began selecting a change of clothes for herself. “Get what you’ll wear tomorrow, put everything on your desk.”

“Why? What’re you doing?”

“Hurry!”

Although Minnie was a fraidy-cat with some empty space waiting to be filled in her eight-year-old skull, Naomi suddenly had the creepy feeling that her sister’s advice might be worth heeding. She stepped into the closet and quickly put together an outfit for the next day.

“Don’t look at the mirror,” Minnie reminded her.

“I will if I want,” Naomi said, because she was the older of the two and would not allow herself to be bossed around by a sister so young that she could twist spaghetti onto a fork only if she guided it with her fingers. But Naomi did not even glance at the mirror.

After they put the next day’s clothes on their desks, Minnie carried the chair from the play table to the closet. She closed the closet door and braced it shut by tipping the chair backward and wedging its headrail under the doorknob.

“I have to put all these hats away,” Naomi said.

“Not tonight.”

“But we have to go in the closet sometime.”

“After we figure what to do with the mirror,” Minnie said.

“What do you want to do with the mirror?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“We need to have a mirror.”

“We don’t need that one,” Minnie declared.

Chapter 14

In their third-floor suite, she shifted his gears as she had promised, but he shifted hers as well. Their lovemaking didn’t have the character of a race toward pleasure but was instead an easy and familiar journey, full of affection and tenderness, fueled less by need than by devotion, and the final stretch a long sweet coast to the finish and the flag thrown down, and joy.

Until he met Nicolette, John had been incapable of a sexual relationship or at least incapable of pursuing one. The killing of everyone in his family by Alton Blackwood, rapist and murderer, had knotted sex and violence in young John’s mind, so that it seemed to him that all desire was savage lust, that the gentlest longing for connection and release was in fact a sublimation of the urge to destroy. Blackwood’s sexual satisfaction had been a prelude to murder; and for years John felt that his own ecstasy would be an affront to the memory of his mother and his sisters, that a climax reduced him to brotherhood with their killer. His ecstasy would inevitably remind him of their humiliation and agony, and he could no more find pleasure in climax than in stabbing or shooting himself as they had been stabbed or shot.

If Nicolette had not come along, John might have traded his police uniform for a monk’s habit long before he achieved the rank of detective. She restored to him the understanding that desire is corrupt only if the soul is corrupt, that the body and the soul can both be elevated by giving pleasure in a spirit of love, and that an act of procreation is in its essence always a grace.

After the events of the afternoon, he expected to pass the night awake and restless, but in the shared warmth of the sheets, lying on his back, her hand still in his, he listened to her breathing change as she found sleep, and soon he, too, slept.

In the dream, he visited the city morgue as he had visited it many times in real life, though now the corridors and rooms lay in an eerie blue half-light, and he was – or so it appeared – the only living person in this ceramic-tiled, air-conditioned catacomb. The offices and file rooms and hallways were hushed, his footsteps as soundless as they would have been in a vacuum. He entered a chamber where the walls were lined with the gleaming faces of steel drawers, refrigerated body drawers in which the recently deceased awaited identification and autopsy. He thought that he belonged here, that he had come home, that one of the drawers would roll open, chilled and empty, and that he would feel compelled to climb into it and let Death kiss away the last breath in his lungs. Now the stillness relented to a single sound: the solid hammer strike of his heartbeat.

Retreating to the door by which he’d entered, he discovered that it no longer existed. Turning in a circle, he saw no other exit, but in the center of the room stood something that had not been there before: a slanted autopsy table with blood gutters and reservoirs. On the table lay a corpse under a sheet, a corpse with motivation and intention. A hand appeared from out of the white shroud, and by its great size, by its long spatulate fingers, by its knobby wrist as graceless as the gears of a nineteenth-century machine, the identity of the cadaver was revealed. Alton Turner Blackwood pulled the sheet off himself and cast it to the floor. He sat up and then descended from the table, standing fully six feet five, lean and bony yet powerful, his malformed bat-wing shoulder blades straining at the yoke of his shirt, subtly insectile, as if they were features of a bug’s exoskeleton. John’s heart beat harder than before, harder than fast, a stone pestle pounding a stone mortar, steadily hammering his courage into dust.

Blackwood wore what he had worn on the night he invaded the Calvino house: black steel-toed boots similar to ice-climbing boots with the sole crampons removed, khaki pants with four front pockets, and a khaki shirt. He lacked the wounds that had killed him, and appeared in the condition that John had first encountered him on that night.

His face was not so deformed as to be freakish, but he suffered from the degree of ugliness that, in most people, evoked pity but without tenderness. On the heels of pity, discomfort arose at the thought of inadvertently offending by staring or by an ill-considered word, followed by a distaste that compelled people to turn guiltily away, an antipathy that was intuitive rather than considered.

Snarls of greasy dark hair lay close to his scalp, his eyebrows bristled, but his face appeared beardless. His skin was pale where it wasn’t pink, as smooth as the flesh of a baby doll yet unhealthy and not at all an asset, seemingly without pores and therefore unnatural. The proportions of Blackwood’s long face were wrong in ways John could not fully define, beginning with a slab of brow that beetled over deep-set eyes. His hatchet nose, elongated ears reminiscent of the goatish ears of a satyr, jawbones as flat and hard as chisel blades, too-thin upper lip and too-thick lower one, sharpened his countenance to a spade of a chin that he raised in the haughty manner of Mussolini, as if at any moment he might chop at you with his face.

His eyes were so black that no differentiation existed between pupils and irises. Sometimes it seemed that only the whites of his eyes glistened and had substance, that the black must not be color but instead absence, holes in the eyes that led back into the cold and lightless hell of his mind.

Blackwood took three steps away from the autopsy table, and John retreated three steps, until he backed into a wall of body drawers. The killer’s yellow-toothed grin, a wolfish sneer, seemed to be the prelude to a bite.

He spoke, his deep raspy voice transforming ordinary words into obscenities: “Your wife is sweet, your children sweeter. I want my candy.”

Around the room, the big drawers flew open, and the dead came forth, legions in the service of Alton Blackwood, who reached for John’s face as if to tear it off—

He woke, sat up, stood up, damp with sweat, his heart knocking hard enough to shake him. He felt certain that the house had been violated.

Two indicator lights shone on the security keypad – one yellow, one red. The first meant that the system was functioning, the second that the perimeter alarm – but not the interior motion detectors – was engaged. No one could have entered without triggering the alarm.

His sense of imminent danger was nothing more than a remnant of his nightmare.

In the glow of Nicky’s clock radio, John could just make out her shape beneath the sheets. She did not stir. He had not awakened her.

Near the door to the adjoining bathroom, a night-light fanned the floor, and tiny variations in the wool yarn of the tufted pile stippled the illuminated carpet with nubby shadows.

He had fallen asleep naked. He found his pajama bottoms on the floor beside the bed, and pulled them on.

The door to the master bathroom opened onto a short hallway flanked by their walk-in closets. Quietly, he closed the door behind him before clicking the wall switch.

He needed light. He sat on Nicky’s vanity bench and let the fluorescents fade his memory of Alton Turner Blackwood’s double-barrel stare.

When he glanced at the mirror, he saw not only a worried man but also the boy who he had been twenty years earlier, the boy whose world imploded under him and who might never have found the fortitude and resolution to make a new world for himself if he had not met Nicky when he was eighteen.

That boy had never grown up. During a few minutes of horror, an adult John Calvino had been formed, and the boy had been left behind, his emotional maturation arrested forever at fourteen. He had not evolved gradually from boy into man, the way other men experienced their passage out of adolescence; instead, in crisis, the man had leaped from the boy. In a sense, the boy, so abruptly left behind, remained in the man almost as a separate entity. It seemed to him now that this part of himself, this unevolved boy, must be the source of his adolescent fear. Fear that the similarities between the Valdane and the Lucas murders, twenty years apart, could not be explained by police work and cool reason. The inner boy, as imaginative and as thrilled by the supernatural as were all fourteen-year-olds, insisted that the explanation must lie beyond the power of reason and must be otherworldly.

A homicide detective could not entertain such ideas and still do his work. Logic, deductive reasoning, and an understanding of the human capacity for evil were his tools, the only ones he needed.

The nightmare from which he had awakened was not that of a grown man. Boys dreamed such comic-book scenarios, boys with their newfound fear of death that came with hormonal changes as surely as did an interest in girls.

John’s and Nicky’s cell phones lay on the granite top of the vanity, recharging in a duplex plug. His cell rang.

Infrequently, he was called out at night on a murder. But the summons usually came on the third line of the four-line house phone, which was his private number. Charging, the cell phone should have been switched off. No caller ID appeared on the screen.

“Hello?”

His mellifluous church-choir voice at once recognizable, Billy Lucas said, “Did you have to throw away your shoes?”

John’s first thought was that the boy must have escaped from the state hospital.

He put his second thought into words: “Where did you get this number?”

“Next time we meet, there won’t be armored glass between us. While you’re dying, I’ll piss in your face.”

Conversation would serve only Billy; he was not likely to answer what he was asked. John did not respond.

“I remember them soft against my tongue. I liked the taste,” Billy said. “After so long, I still remember the sweet and slightly salty taste of them.”

John stared at the cream-colored marble floor with its diamond inlays of black granite.

“Your lovely sister, your Giselle. She had such pretty little training-bra breasts.”

John closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and swallowed hard to quell his rising gorge.

He listened to the killer waiting, to a gloating silence, and after a while he seemed to be listening to a dead line.

When he attempted to ring back his caller with *69, he had no success.

Chapter 15

The wide nightstand between their beds accommodated two reading lamps. Minnie left hers on the lower of two settings, the goose neck straight, so that the cone shade directed soft light at the ceiling. One of the little fraidy-cat’s dreads that sometimes tested Naomi’s saintlike patience was bats, specifically the possibility that a bat might get tangled in her hair, not only clawing and chewing open her scalp but also driving her insane so that she would have to pass the rest of her life in an asylum where they never served dessert. In this case, Minnie probably wasn’t worrying about bats, even though she had adjusted the lamp to the bat-banishing angle.

They were both reclining against piles of pillows, a position from which they could see the closet door and the barricading chair.

Although their parents expected a great many things of the Calvino brood, going to bed at an established hour was not one of them. They were permitted to stay up as late as they wished, for any purpose except to watch TV or play video games; however, they must be showered, dressed, and ready for breakfast with their mother and father promptly at 7:00 A.M. and alert during their home-schooling, which began at seven forty-five.

This coming Saturday, like every glorious Saturday, they would be allowed to sleep in as late as they wished, and breakfast would be an individual responsibility. Of course, if the shadowy thing swooping through the mirror was as hostile as Minnie seemed to think it must be, they might not survive until Saturday, in which case Saturday breakfast would be moot.

“Maybe we should tell Mom and Daddy,” Naomi said.

“Tell them what?”

“Something’s living in our mirror.”

“You tell them. Hope you like the nuthouse.”

“They’ll believe us when they see it.”

“They won’t see it,” Minnie predicted.

“Why won’t they see it?”

“Because it won’t want them to see it.”

“That’s the way it would be in a story, not in real life.”

“Real life’s a story, too,” Minnie said.

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean nothing. It just is.”

“But what are we going to do?”

“I’m thinking,” Minnie said.

“You’ve been thinking.”

“I’m still thinking.”

“Chestnuts! Why am I waiting for a pathetic eight-year-old to figure out what we should do?”

“We both know why,” Minnie said.

The chair under the knob of the closet door looked less sturdy than Naomi would have liked. “Did you hear something?”

“No.”

“You didn’t hear the doorknob turning?”

“Neither did you,” Minnie said. “Not this time, not the nine times you thought you heard it before.”

“I’m not the one who thinks a flock of bats will carry me off to Transylvania.”

“I never said flock or carry off, or Transylvania.”

A disturbing idea rattled Naomi. She eased up from her pillows and whispered, “There’s a gap under the door.”

Minnie whispered, “What door?”

Whisper discarded, Naomi said, “What door? The closet door, of course. What if it comes out of the mirror and slips under the door?”

“It can’t come out of the mirror unless you ask it.”

“How do you know? You’re in third grade. I’ve been through third grade – the spectacular tedium of it – I finished it in three months, and there was no lesson about shadowy things in mirrors.”

Minnie was silent. Then: “I don’t know how, but I know. One of us needs to invite it.”

Sinking back against her pillows, Naomi said, “Well, that’s never going to happen.”

“You can invite it all kinds of ways.”

“What ways?”

“For one thing, by staring at it too much.”

“Mouse, you’re just making this up.”

“Don’t call me Mouse.”

“Well, you are making it up. You don’t know.”

“Or if you talk to it, ask it a question, that’s another way.”

“I’m not going to ask it beans.”

“You better not.”

The room seemed colder than usual. Naomi pulled the blanket under her chin. “What kind of thing lives in a mirror?”

“It’s a people, not a thing.”

“How do you know?”

“I know in my heart,” Minnie said so solemnly that Naomi shivered. “He’s people.”

“He? How do you know it’s not a she?”

“Do you think it’s a she?”

Naomi resisted the urge to pull the covers over her head. “No. It feels like a he.”

“It’s definitely a he,” Minnie declared.

“But he who?”

“I don’t know he who. And don’t you ask him who, Naomi. That’s an invitation.”

They were silent for a while.

Naomi dared to look away from the closet door. Backlit by a streetlamp, silvery worms of rain squiggled down the windowpanes. The scarlet oak on the south lawn loomed huge, its glossy green leaves here and there reflecting the lamplight as if crusted in ice.

Eventually, Naomi said, “You know what I’ve been wondering?”

“Something weird, I bet.”

“Could he be a prince?”

“You mean Mr. Mirror?”

“Yeah. If he’s a prince, the mirror might be a door to a magical realm, a land of tremendous adventures.”

“No,” Minnie said.

“That’s it? No. Just like that?”

“No.”

“But if he lives beyond the mirror, then there’s got to be another world on that side. The fabulous world beyond the mirror. That sounds like a magical but true thing, doesn’t it? It could be like in all those stories – an heroic quest, high adventure, romance. My destiny might be to live over there.”

“Shut up when you say that,” Minnie said.

“Shut up when you say shut up,” Naomi bristled. “You can’t know my destiny. I might live over there and be queen one day.”

“No one lives over there,” Minnie said solemnly. “Everyone over there is dead.”

Chapter 16

Wearing a dark-blue robe over his pajama bottoms, John stood before the gallery in his ground-floor study. There were photos of the kids when, as infants, each had come home from the hospital, and others taken on every birthday thereafter, a total of thirty-five pictures. Soon the gallery would be continued on the next wall.

The girls liked to come in now and then to recall favorite birthdays and to make fun of the way each other had looked when younger. Zach was less inclined to enjoy photographs taken when he was a toddler and a grade-schooler because they didn’t comport with his image of himself as a young man in preparation to be a tough marine.

More than he could have expressed even to Nicky, John looked forward to seeing his daughters become women, because he believed that each had a great good heart and would change her small corner of the world for the better. He knew they might surprise him but would always delight him by the way they lived their lives. He knew, as well, that Zach would become anything he wanted to be – and in the end would be a better man than his father.