What the Night Knows (51 page)

Bells. Elsewhere in the house. Eerie, silvery bells.

John and Nicky were entering the front stairs at the second floor, not sure whether to search upstairs or down first, when they heard the bells. Upstairs.

The horror of the past was now the horror of the moment, and John was in two places at once, in his house now and in his parents’ house that night, racing up the stairs to the third floor but also following the shadowy hallway toward his parents’ bedroom, pushing through the door to this master suite but also peering through another door at his murdered parents in a bed of blood, hearing the killer ringing the bells in his dead sisters’ room but also hearing Naomi cry out in the master bath.

The bathroom door was locked. Nicky shouted, “
Shotgun, shotgun!
” He was bringing the weapon to bear on the lock even as she urged him to blow it out. Two shells dissolved the lock and the wood around it, but the door wouldn’t open. It didn’t even rattle in the frame, it was as solid as a concrete block in a wall of concrete blocks. More than a lock held it in place: the fury of Blackwood, the power of Ruin. In the bathroom, Naomi screamed, the worst sound John had
ever heard, ever, and here in the hallway, Nicky screamed, too, an even more terrible sound, as much grief as terror, and she clawed at the blasted hole in the door, clawed so ferociously that her fingernails tore and bled.

Zach reached the entrance to the lattice arbor as old Sinyavski staggered three or four steps inside and fell, trapping Minnie under him. Zach had the butcher knife, but when he hurried to the fallen professor, he saw that he wouldn’t need it. Last year’s roses had been cut back to stumps, the trailers removed from the structure, so even in the fading light and shadows, he could see the staring eyes and the slackness in the face. Whatever had killed him, maybe a heart attack, Sinyavski was no longer a danger to anyone.

Minnie struggled, half under the heavy body, and when Zach freed her, she threw her arms around him and held him very tight. “I love you, Zach, I love you.” He told her that he loved her, too. With one hand flattened on her back, he could feel her heart pounding hard as a bass drum, and it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever felt, the
thud-thud, thud-thud
of her heart.

A dry-as-bone, rasping-crackling-snapping noise drew their attention to opposite ends of the arbor, where the lattice appeared to come alive, like scores of flat white snakes, undulating to some music only they could hear. In maybe four seconds the lattice wove shut both exits from the structure, imprisoning Zach and Minnie with the corpse of Professor Sinyavski.

In the second-floor hallway, the wheel stands on edge. Once made of a child’s building blocks, it is now something entirely different, transformed,
as ordinary things are always transubstantiated when the supernatural enters them from outside of time, in the way that bread and wine become body and blood—or, less exaltedly, in the way that Frodo’s Ring of Power is not just a ring made in Mordor, the way that the Ark of the Covenant is not just a wooden box. Making the wheel, Minnie was in the thrall of a higher power, just as the Light ensured that Frodo should be the one Ring-bearer. Minnie is the Frodo in this family, the innocent who sees what others don’t, loves others always more than self, and can be a bush that burns without being consumed, a conduit. Here and now, the moment of transubstantiation arrives. The wheel is white, but as it rolls along the second-floor hallway, it becomes golden, so heavy that it leaves a lasting impression in the carpet. Descending the stairs, it makes a more solid sound than might a two-hundred-pound man leaping downward. Along the lower hallway, wood flooring creaks and cracks under it.

Driven to the edge of madness by Naomi’s screams, John threw himself against the door once, twice, without effect, and he knew he could break his shoulder without gaining entrance. Beyond rage, beyond fury, in the iron grip of wrath, he flattened his hands on the door and shouted, “This is
my
house, you degenerate sonofabitch, you worm, you filth, this is my house,
not yours, THIS IS MY HOUSE
!” The door rattled in the frame, and suddenly he was able to push it open.

He grabbed his shotgun and crossed the threshold as the clear safety-glass door of the shower stall shattered into frosted veils and shimmered to the floor. A man was stepping into the shower stall
with scissors held high to stab. John got him by the belt and yanked him off the raised threshold. The guy turned, slashing wildly with the scissors, and it was Roger Hodd, a reporter to whom John had given interviews, regarding homicide cases, on several occasions. He was Hodd, but his eyes were not Hodd’s eyes, they were deep pits of implacable hatred. John dodged the scissors, shoved Hodd against the wall to the left of the shower stall, shouted to Naomi
—“Don’t look!”—
jammed the shotgun into the possessed man’s abdomen, and scrambled his internal organs with buckshot.

Zach hooked his fingers through the new-grown lattice and pulled hard, but it was as firm a part of the structure as the walls and the arched roof. The twisted tines of the meat fork no longer seemed like a big deal, not compared to this, and he wondered if next the arbor would sprout spiky wooden teeth on all sides and chew them up as if it were a shark and they were chum.

As though she could read his thoughts, Minnie said, “It can’t hurt us with things like the arbor, it can only confuse us and scare us with things. It needs to have a
person
it can use to hurt us.”

Zach heard something move behind them, and when he turned, he saw Professor Sinyavski’s dead body roll onto its back and sit up in the gloom. “Pretty piggy,” old Sinyavski said in a voice as hard as gravel and as thick as mud. “My pretty Minnie pig.”

To Minnie, Zach said, “A dead body is a
thing
. It’s not a person anymore. It’s a thing just like lattice is a
thing
.”

The professor clutched the lattice wall with one hand, trying to pull himself to his feet. “Pretty piggy, I’m gonna chew your sweet tongue out of your mouth.”

Clutching her mother’s arm, shaken and tearful but recovering her emotional equilibrium quicker than John would have predicted, Naomi came with them, down through the house, as he called out to Minnie and Zach, neither of whom answered.

Earlier, he had thought that perhaps he’d
drawn
Blackwood—and his master, Ruin—back into the world by worrying, especially since Minnie’s illness, that the killer’s promise would be kept. Had he, by his obsession,
invited
the spirit to haunt him? Had he felt that he
deserved
to be haunted, to be hell-hounded unto death for having been the sole survivor of his murdered family? After the incident at the bathroom door, when he gained entrance merely by the assertion of his ownership, he suspected that indeed he was only as vulnerable as he allowed himself to be, which suggested that if a door had been opened between this world and another, he himself might have swung it wide, even if unwittingly. If he opened a door to the twined entities of demon and ghost, he could close it, close it once and for all. The one thing that scared him now was that he would close it too late, only after a devastating loss—Minnie, Zachary, maybe both of them, maybe still
all
of them.

At the foot of the stairs, where the front hall met the foyer, he experienced again the sensation of a phantom presence brushing against his legs, eager and ebullient. This was what he had felt a few weeks before in the backyard, at night, when the fallen leaves of the scarlet oak whirled and tumbled as though a dog were at play in them. Willard.

“He wants us to go this way,” John said, leading them along the hall toward the kitchen.

“Who wants?” Nicky asked.

“I’ll explain later. Zach and Minnie must be this way.”

The three of them hurried across the kitchen and through the open door onto the terrace, where they encountered a strange sight; and considering recent events, John’s threshold for determining anything to be strange was far higher than it had been two months earlier.

In the snowy half-light, a golden wheel, mysteriously powered and as large as that from a Peterbilt, rolled slowly across the snow-covered terrace, leaving a wake of clear dry flagstones. Rolling with a deep rumble more ominous than an earthquake, as though it weighed far more than its size suggested, the wheel seemed to charge the air merely by its presence, and the snow crackled around it as if the flakes became electric particles under its influence. The flagstones cracked and splintered under the wheel, and through the soles of his shoes, John could feel the vibrations from its progress shuddering through the concrete slab on which the stones were laid.

The golden enigma held their attention only until they heard Zach and Minnie shouting for help.