What the Night Knows (36 page)

Minnie had just gotten a bottle of juice from the refrigerator and was twisting off the cap when she turned toward the French door between the kitchen and the terrace—and saw the golden retriever peering in at her from outside.

Willard had been dead for two years, but she still remembered
exactly
what he looked like. This was Willard, all right, or rather it was Willard’s spirit, just like those ghosts at the convenience store except that half of Willard’s face wasn’t shot off.

He was beautiful, like he had been in life, the best dog ever. Minnie’s heart swelled—it actually felt as if it were swelling like a balloon in her chest—at the sight of him. She could feel her heart ballooning all the way up into her throat.

But then she realized that Willard hadn’t come back from Heaven to play or to wring tears from her, but to show her something. He was pawing at the glass, not making any noise, but pawing at it anyway. His tail wasn’t wagging, as it would be if he wanted to chase a ball or beg for a treat. And the expression in his eyes, in the lift of his upper
lip on the left side, meant what it had meant back in the good old days when he was alive:
I’m trying to tell you a thing here. It’s so obvious even a cat would get it. Will you please, please, please pay attention?

Minnie put her juice on the kitchen island and hurried to the door. Willard scampered away as she approached, and when she pushed through the door and stepped onto the patio, the dog was waiting for her on the north lawn.

Willard’s forelegs were splayed, his head thrust forward and slightly down, in that partial play bow that meant
Chase me, chase me! You can try, but you can’t catch me! I’m a dog, I’m faster than the wind!

She ran toward him, and he sprinted out of sight along the north side of the house, toward the street. When she turned the corner, she saw him standing on the front yard, looking back at her.

As she raced toward Willard, the retriever faded: first red-gold and beautiful, then gold and beautiful, then white and beautiful, then semitransparent and still beautiful, but then gone. Minnie felt her heart swelling again, and she just wanted to drop to her knees and cry. But she kept going until she stood on the very grass where Willard had last been visible.

On the public sidewalk, as though she had just stepped off the flagstone front walk that led from the porch, a woman in a long gray dress moved toward a car at the curb. She looked like she had come to talk someone’s ears off about Jesus, but she didn’t have magazines or pamphlets, or even a purse. Apparently she heard Minnie running to the spot on the lawn where Willard vanished, because she stopped and turned to face her.

They were only about twelve or fifteen feet apart. Minnie could clearly see the woman’s face. It was pleasant enough but seemed not quite
done
, as if it lacked the final details that would allow you to remember it ten minutes later, a face like one of those in Mom’s paintings
that was still a stage away from being finished. The woman was smiling sort of absentmindedly, as though she saw Minnie but was thinking about something else and didn’t want to be distracted from that.

They stared at each other maybe fifteen seconds, an eerily long time without saying anything. Minnie didn’t know why the woman kept staring at her, but she kept staring at the woman because she sensed something not right about her. Minnie kept thinking she was going to figure it out, figure out the not-right something, but it eluded her.

Finally the woman said, “I like your pink shoes.”

This statement baffled Minnie for a moment, because she didn’t own any pink shoes. If anyone ever gave her pink shoes, she wouldn’t even risk saying,
I’ll wear them when Hell freezes over
, because you never knew what to expect of the weather. She didn’t want to be a marine, like Zach, but unlike Naomi, she didn’t swoon about wearing tiaras and diamond-studded capes and pink glass slippers for the rest of her life.

Belatedly registering the stranger’s meaning, Minnie looked down at her feet, at her sneakers, which were deep coral, not pink at all. She realized the woman must be color challenged.

“You remind me of a little girl I used to have,” the woman said. “She was very sweet.”

Minnie was taught never to be rude, and being polite included speaking when spoken to. But in this case, she kept silent. For one thing, she didn’t know what to say. More important, she sensed that speaking to this woman would be a mistake for the same reason that speaking to a spirit was a bad idea: Just responding with a single word would be an invitation.

The stranger didn’t appear to be a spirit, but she had something in common with spirits that Minnie sensed but couldn’t quite name.

After another, shorter silence, the woman in gray took a step toward Minnie, but then halted.

Although they were in a public place, Minnie began to feel alone and dangerously isolated. No traffic passed in the nearby street. No pedestrians were in sight. No kids were at play on any of the front lawns. The sky was pale, the air still, the trees limp, so it seemed as if time had stopped for everyone in the world except the two of them.

Minnie wished Willard hadn’t done a fade. She wished he would reappear, not just to her but also to the woman. When alive, the dog had a totally phony but threatening growl, and his spirit still had big teeth even if it couldn’t bite anyone.

The woman’s dreamy smile, which had been nice enough, now seemed like the fixed smile of a snake, which wasn’t a smile at all but only the
shape
of a smile.

Just when Minnie was about to spin away and run for all she was worth, the woman turned from her and went to the car at the curb. She glanced back as she got into the vehicle, but then she pulled the door shut and drove away.

As she watched the car dwindle along the street, Minnie finally realized what the woman in gray had in common with ghosts. Death. They were both about death.

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

After spending the night disinterring skeletons from unmarked graves in the pine-circled clearing, the boy returned to his tower room before dawn and spent the morning and the afternoon brooding about his discoveries
.

An hour before twilight, when he was still expected to remain discreet and to refrain from inflicting his unappealing presence on either the family or the estate staff, he went to the guest house. In half of this very comfortable residence, he once lived with his mother, Anita, where now his mother’s sister, Regina, resided alone with her daughter, Melissa
.

The boy went with no intention of committing violence. He wanted only to learn the truth. But if necessary, he would use terror and pain to extract the truth from them
.

In killing the rabbits and the deer, he had learned there was pleasure to be had in ripping the life from pretty things
.

Aunt Regina and Cousin Melissa were sitting at a table on their back patio, in the shade of a mammoth maidenhair tree, playing cards. They were annoyed but not apprehensive when the boy suddenly loomed over them
.

Some on the house staff were disturbed by his malformed face and his misproportioned body, were even afraid of him though he had harmed no human being to that point. Regina, however, had never shown the slightest fear of him, nor had Melissa except when she was very young. Fourteen now, the girl regarded him with the distaste and the contempt that she learned from her mother
.

Having killed animals, having been acknowledged by a mountain lion as Death personified, he saw things through a new and clearer lens. As a boy more naive than he was now, he had thought that Regina and Melissa were smug, fearless, and uncongenial because they were beautiful. He thought beauty was not only their power but also their armor, that if you were as beautiful as they were, then you respected and feared nothing because you were privileged by natural right and were indestructible. Now he realized that their superior airs, their contempt, and their fearlessness were based also on secret knowledge, on something they knew that he did not know. He was an outsider at Crown Hill not just because of his grotesque appearance but also because of his ignorance
.

When he told Regina that he had excavated his mother’s skeleton from an unmarked grave, he expected her to express shock or grief or anger that her sister had come to such a fate. Instead she remained seated at her card game, unimpressed with his grisly news. She told him that he had been a stupid boy, that he would regret digging like a dog for a bone
.

Realizing that the truth concealed from him was even bigger than he might have imagined, he expected that he would have to choke it or cut it or beat it from Regina. But though she kept him standing, she did not deny him the truth as she denied him a chair. She spelled it out for him with a cold, acidic glee, and the longer she spoke, the more the boy realized that she was insane
.

Melissa, smiling and playing cards throughout the revelations, proved to be no less insane than her mother. Teejay, Terrence James Turner Blackwood, patriarch of the clan, surely must be the maddest of them all
.

Having inherited great wealth and built an even larger fortune, Teejay didn’t worship money. He was a singularly handsome man, vain about his looks. He worshipped beauty, which in part was also self-worship
.

He worshipped beauty but didn’t know how to create it, as his films and his faux castle amply proved. He was still a teenager when his preoccupation with beauty became a burning obsession with—and an unnatural passion for—his younger sister, Alissa, one year his junior. Regina could only guess when he seduced Alissa, but at what cost to Alissa’s sanity eventually became clear
.

In time, young Alissa achieved fame as a silent-film star under the name Jillian Hathaway. In those days, movies were considered as much of a low-class business as carnivals and burlesque shows. Some early actresses worked under noms de cinema, and swore to embrace invented biographies written for them by the studios that had them under contract
.

Jillian supposedly married Teejay in 1926, in a glamorous ceremony in Acapulco, when she was twenty-five and he was twenty-six. They were never wed, however, because they were brother and sister and couldn’t document otherwise
.

As Regina shuffled her deck of cards and made this revelation to the looming scarecrow of a boy, he didn’t at once see why this long-ago depravity, a wicked union occurring thirty-one years before his birth, should have sealed his fate and guaranteed his life of loneliness, bitterness, and violence
.

During the dealing of a new hand of 500 rummy, Regina explained that of course Teejay and Jillian’s only child—Marjorie—born in 1929, was a product of incest. Her father was also her uncle. Her mother was also her aunt
.

The girl grew to be even more beautiful than her mother—which confirmed Teejay’s theory that greater beauty could be distilled from lesser beauty. He believed that a particular human lineage could be improved and refined just as a line of dogs could be tightly bred to emphasize their most eye-pleasing characteristics. Preventing the introduction of lesser genes, restricting mating to specimens with the same desirable qualities, a family might in time produce individuals of such breathtaking beauty that the world would never previously have seen their equal
.

Fourteen years after giving birth to Marjorie, when Jillian learned that her daughter was pregnant with Teejay’s child, she hung herself in the room at the top of the south tower. To Teejay, this suicide was not entirely unwelcome, as it meant that his efforts to further concentrate his seed would not be complicated by the need to service a wife
.

In 1942, when Teejay was forty-two, young Marjorie gave birth to Anita and Regina, fraternal rather than identical twins—whose father was also their grandfather and their great-uncle. The twins grew to be even lovelier than their mother, which Teejay took to be absolute justification of his actions and proof of his theory
.

“
You would not be born for another fifteen years,” Regina told the unwelcome boy on her patio, as she laid the jack, queen, and king of clubs on the table. “And because of you, I and mine will be the only heirs to Crown Hill, to everything.
”

The boy began to understand the inevitability of his birth in the condition that he must endure. He was on the brink of discovering what he must become and what he must do with his life. The boy was only hours away from becoming me
.

42

SLEET TAPPING AT THE WINDOW WAS A RAT-CLAW SOUND, sharp bat teeth biting on beetle shells.

Ten days after the massacre of the Woburn family, John Calvino’s mood had grown grim. He seemed powerless to improve it. The return of the oppressive presence in their house, which he did not believe he could be imagining, had by its constant pressure infused him with an expectation of defeat and death that he struggled unsuccessfully to overcome.

Even when he was not at home, as now, the bleak mood persisted. Images of a disturbing nature frequently came to him as they never had before—rats, bats, beetle shells—inspired by things as innocent as sleet ticking on a windowpane.

Here in Father Bill James’s office in the rectory adjacent to St. Henry’s Church, John expected the bleakness to relent if only because of the comparative sanctity of this place. But he remained afflicted by a stubborn foreboding.

He stood at the window, perhaps drawn there particularly because it offered a somber view. Under the stone-slab sky, thin mist drifted
like acrid smoke from dying embers. The black trunks and bare limbs of the trees revealed an ugly angular chaos that a drapery of leaves had once concealed.