What the Night Knows (32 page)

When mortification deepened into shame, he finally found the will to shut off the torrent of words. He lurched to his feet and staggered to the bathroom, where he knelt at the toilet. Instead of words, vomit gushed forth, such a hideous stream that the next day he remembered it had been
black
, although surely it could not have been that dark.

He had not been drunk since that night. Wine with dinner never brought him close to inebriation. Seventeen years of sobriety. Now he stared at the second serving of Chivas Regal—and he emptied the glass into the sink.

With or without Scotch, he would not be able to sleep. He feared that he would dream of the plummeting girl.

He had no idea what he should do next. He felt adrift, unable to imagine how he might make his family safe.

Asking for guidance, he went to the kitchen door and stepped out onto the flagstone terrace at the back of the house. The night chill might clear his head and help him think.

The air was crisp, cold, but not so frigid that it made him uncomfortable. He breathed deeply and exhaled a pale plume.

A few sinuous threads of cloud slowly slithered out of the north. The moon rode deep in the west, sailing toward a far shore, but still softly illuminating the yard.

John wished his family might be saved by the simple expediency of boarding a ship or a plane with them and traveling to some distant
port. But a creature who had taken the long journey back from death would not be daunted by mere mountain ranges or seas, or national borders.

He stepped off the terrace and followed a flagstone path to the rose arbor. The last flowers of the season had wilted, withered, and turned brown. The leaves were dead. The thorny trailers needed to be cut back to encourage a crop of lush blooms the following year. In moonlight, the looping brambles were a black-and-silver tangle of barbed tentacles.

Three steps from the threshold of the arch, John was halted by the sudden perception that the arbor might be dangerous. Unaffected by the night chill, now the hairs on the nape of his neck stirred as he drew near the lattice tunnel. A cold foreboding skittered down his spine, vertebra to vertebra, with quivering centipedal haste.

The interior of the twelve-foot-long arbor was darker than the surrounding night. But John could clearly see the moon-washed lawn at the farther end. No one waited in the tunnel.

After the events at the hospital, John’s nerves were raw, and he felt perpetually under an imminent threat, although Zach’s fourteenth birthday was sixty-six days away. If he allowed himself to be spooked by every dark place, to be suspicious of every closed door and blind corner, he would be worn out and useless when trouble finally came. He must resist the tendency to see Alton Turner Blackwood in every shadow.

He took another step toward the arbor but again halted, alarmed, when something brushed against his legs, not lightly but with force. Low, from right to left. Some animal. He turned, seeking it in the gloom.

Again, it brushed against him, and even as it passed, he looked
down and saw nothing. He felt it against his knees, his shins, yet it remained invisible.

As John backed away from the arbor, fallen leaves rustled and flew up from the grass to his left. They had blown here earlier from the scarlet oak on the south yard. But at the moment, the still air lacked the breath to make leaves tremble, let alone to tumble them and toss them up from the lawn.

The disturbance continued across the deep yard, circled back toward John, looped around him, raced off again, as if a little wind devil were funneling this way and that, except the leaves were not spun up in a vortex but were scattered at random. As he watched, he began to feel that the phenomenon had a frolicsome quality; it wasn’t related to his fear of the arbor, and in fact it seemed to him that this thing that was
not
a wind devil had warned him away from that latticework tunnel.

While he watched, the phenomenon diminished. The whirl of leaves settled, and the night grew still once more.

As the last leaves floated to rest on the grass, John thought he heard a familiar sigh of pleasure, one he hadn’t heard for a long time. If
this
had been a ghost, it had been a blithe spirit. Filled with sudden wonder, remembering their golden retriever that had died two years earlier, John whispered, “Willard?”

39

WHILE SITTING IN HIS CUBICLE AT THE
DAILY POST
, WRITING an account of events at the Woburn house and at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Roger Hodd takes hits from a flask of tequila and lime juice. Long ago, he lost interest in journalism, but the weirdness of this story keeps him more engaged in the writing than usual.

His rider, of which Hodd remains unaware, inspires certain turns of phrase and clever edits that lift the piece above the reporter’s usual fare. The rider wants its work to be well described, although this isn’t the reason it took possession of Hodd.

Shortly after dawn, when the copy has been filed, Hodd goes home to his third wife, Georgia. She is an odd combination: an incurable romantic and a rehabilitation therapist specializing in recovery from addiction. Having all her life idealized and romanticized newspaper reporters, Georgia married Roger Hodd knowing he was a heavy drinker, because she believed that she—and she alone—could cure him of his addiction and inspire him to write stories that would bring him a Pulitzer.

Hodd has always known that she would fail in this quest, and now
she knows it, as well. Only after the wedding did she discover that Hodd would win a gold medal in narcissism if it were an Olympic sport and that he is not just a drunk but also a mean one. The violence that he perpetrates is psychological and verbal rather than physical. Georgia is particularly galled that she, with all her education and background in psychology, is so vulnerable to his torment. She has cried herself to sleep many nights and has lost eleven pounds since they were married ten months previously.

Sometimes she fears that she might be addicted to this abuse if not to Hodd himself, a fact the rider learns as Hodd wakes Georgia with a sour-tequila kiss. The reporter paws clumsily at his wife in a pretense of lust when in truth he is too intoxicated to perform. She is repulsed by his condition, as he knows full well, which is why he continues to fumble at her pajama tops, trying to bare her breasts.

Hodd thinks Georgia will soon seek a divorce, but the rider knows everything about her from the kiss, including that she has spent less time thinking about a divorce than about ways of killing her husband that will not bring suspicion upon her. Georgia is an easy mount, and the rider changes horses during a sloppy kiss. It encourages Hodd to pass out as it leaves him, and it also implants in his mind a come-to-me curse.

Georgia is as incognizant of her rider as was her husband. She showers, dresses, eats breakfast, and sets out for her office at New Hope Rehabilitation Hospital. She has a series of scheduled sessions with patients, but because she is more than an hour early, she has time to write a discharge letter for one of them, releasing him three days before he concludes the thirty-day course of treatment to which he committed himself. The decision to release this patient is her rider’s idea. Georgia is easily manipulated into believing that the decision originates with her and that it is the correct thing to do.

When she proceeds to the patient’s room to present him with his discharge, Preston Nash is surprised to hear that his addiction to prescription medications is entirely psychological and that he is cured of it. When, in gratitude, he clasps both of Georgia’s hands in his, the rider
knows
him. Preston is eager to return to the basement apartment in his parents’ home, call his dealer, and once more climb aboard the pill train. Preston listens attentively, however, as Georgia gives him post-discharge instructions, her twenty-four-hour contact number, and her best wishes for a clean-and-sober life.

The rider encourages Georgia to offer her hand to Preston, and on this second shake, it transfers from the mare to its new mount, leaving her with a come-to-me curse. Preston packs and calls a taxi. Unaware that he now shares his body with another, he smiles all the way home.

By the time he arrives, his parents—Walter and Imogene—have left for work at the Calvino residence. Preston is annoyed to find that they have aggressively cleaned his two rooms and bath in the basement. He is capable of cleaning his own quarters. The fact that he has never done so only means that he doesn’t share their neurotic obsession with maintaining an antiseptic living space. Antibacterial cleaning solutions, which eventually wind up in sewers and dumps and storm drains—and ultimately in the water table—are polluting the earth. Besides, if you are constantly cleaning and using Purell and avoiding contact with microbes, you aren’t building immunity to them, and you are certain to be in the first wave of mass deaths when the inevitable plague strikes.

Preston expects the plague will be first, followed by the death of the oceans. Then the nuclear war arising from a vicious conflict over the shrinking food supply, and finally the asteroid impact. His hope
is to survive as many catastrophes as possible, assuming that prescription medications and electricity remain available.

He is eager to return to his video games, pornography, and drug cocktails. But his rider has a task for him first.

Suddenly Preston is inspired to prepare for the day when his parents might attempt to control him financially by scheming to have his SSI disability checks taken away from him. Someone out there is probably foolish enough to employ a thirty-six-year-old man with no skills, but Preston isn’t so foolish as to accept a job. Life is too short for work. Especially with the planet-wide plague coming. One way to replace that lost SSI income would be to steal it. Indeed, theft is the only course of action that makes sense to him.

The homes of prosperous people contain a variety of valuables. Preston’s father and mother manage the household—whatever the hell that means—for a prosperous artist and her husband. They carry keys to their employers’ home.

To this point, even though he has been without drugs and booze for twenty-seven days, Preston is sufficiently clear-minded to follow the sequence of thoughts through which his secret rider guides him. But he arrives at an insoluble dilemma and is so deeply disappointed that he wants only to get wasted and play video games until his eyes bleed. The hitch: There is no way to get at his parents’ keys to the artist’s house. They guard the Calvino keys more closely than they guard those to their own home, and carry them at all times. Walter and Imogene are as obsessive about responsibility and duty as they are about cleanliness. They are so neurotic that an entire thousand-page psychology textbook could be devoted to them. They’re sick, they really are, they make Preston nuts.

This is the problem with life. Nothing is easy. It’s just one damn
thing after another. The line between where you are and where you want to be is never straight and simple to follow. There are always walls you have to get around, fences you have to climb over, and when you go around and over all of them, then there’s suddenly a damn ravine in front of you, a canyon, an
abyss
.

Because Walter and Imogene touched many surfaces in the Calvino house while the rider inhabited the place, it knows them to their core. It knows they keep a spare Calvino key taped to the underside of a dresser drawer in the master bedroom of this house. Although Preston doesn’t have any knowledge of this key, his rider induces in him a dim memory of it, and with renewed excitement, Preston ventures upstairs to find this treasure.

With key in hand, Preston sets out for the nearest locksmith to have it copied. He’s not permitted to drive his parents’ second car, but neither he nor his rider hesitates to do so. Because Mrs. Nash’s boy is sober at the moment and because his rider gently represses Preston’s impulse to speed, to run stoplights, and to gesture rudely at other drivers, no cars are struck and no pedestrians are run down.

Although his parents would not be easy mounts, their son is no harder to control than a child’s rocking horse.

After Preston returns to the house, replaces the key that he stole, and hides his three copies in his apartment, he telephones his pill guy, Dr. Charles Burton Glock, who has several medical degrees under different names from a variety of third-world countries. He orders prescriptions for his three favorite mood elevators. Dr. Glock is delighted to hear Preston is safely home from rehab. He generously offers free delivery on this initial order.

Preston’s relationship with Dr. Glock is the most meaningful of his life. His disability caseworker gave him the doctor’s name and number,
the doctor certified his disability; and now the doctor assures his freedom from phantom pain and all worry.

Dr. Glock has interests in a few pharmacies around the city, and delivery is faster than you can get a pizza, though of course, the pharmacist doesn’t have to bake anything.

The primly dressed young woman who brings the order looks like a door-to-door witness for an outreach religion, but when the rider conspires to have Preston touch her hand when paying for his order, it finds she will be easy to occupy. Her name is Melody Lane, but there is no melody in her heart, only a thrilling dissonance, and the rider realizes that she will be more than just a means of transport.

At the rider’s direction, Preston asks Melody to wait a moment. He returns to his apartment and retrieves one of the three keys to the Calvino house. Upon returning to the woman, he holds out the key to her.

As it departs one horse to mount the next, the rider leaves a come-to-me curse, but Preston is aware neither of the curse nor of having been ridden.

With genuine bewilderment, as the woman takes the key from him, Preston says, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

“I do,” Melody says as she pockets the key. “Surely it’s not the first thing you’ve ever done that seems to make no sense.”

“You’re right about that.”

“I’ll be seeing you,” she says, and leaves the house, closing the door after herself.