by Dean Koontz
“Why’d you come here in the first place?” Sharp asked. “How’d you know this thing was on his computer, you should look for it?”
John scrolled down the alphabetized directory—and found no documents with his name as their titles. He scrolled to the top and down again: A, B, C, into the Ds.
“It’s not here. It was right here last night, my name in the title, and now it’s not.”
“A murder scrapbook of your family, and now it’s gone? Where’s it gone?”
In his own voice, John heard how sincerity could sound like slippery evasion. “It’s been deleted. Someone must’ve scrubbed the directory.”
“Who? I mean, Billy sure as hell didn’t come back and scrub it.”
“I don’t know who.” John couldn’t say there had been a ghost in the machine, literally a ghost. “But someone did it.”
Sharp got up from the edge of the desk. His expression was dark, but his face brightened to the high pink of fresh-cut ham.
“Give me the keys you got from the neighbor.”
Instead of fulfilling that request, John exited the directory, switched off the computer, and said, “You’ve got a full backup of the hard drive in the evidence locker. Load it up, look for two documents—Calvino 1 and Calvino 2.”
“John, for God’s sake, what you’ve done is possible criminal trespass, I shouldn’t even be here myself with the investigation closed now. Seems like you’ve got a screw loose about this case, I don’t know why, but it’s my case, mine and Sam’s, and I want those keys.”
As he produced the key ring with the dangling-cat charm and surrendered it to Sharp, John said, “Load the backup. Look for those documents. Do it, all right? Other families are in jeopardy, Ken. Not only mine.”
“For one thing,” Sharp said, pocketing the key, “no one’s ever escaped from the high-security floor of the state hospital.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“For another thing, Billy Lucas is dead.”
The news struck John harder than he might have expected. He recalled the broken boy as he had been only that morning: arms restrained by netting, in a trancelike thrall of grief and despair.
“Dead—when?” he asked.
“Less than an hour ago. I got a call from Coleman Hanes. That’s when I learned about—you.”
“How did he manage to do it?”
“He didn’t. Not suicide. There’ll be an autopsy. Right now it looks like maybe it was a cerebral hemorrhage.”
The past was a weight John Calvino had always carried. Now it was worse than a weight, it was a noose, and he felt the roughness of it around his neck.
“What’s going on with you, John? We don’t run the ball the same way, but we’re on the same team, and you’ve always seemed like you have enough of the right stuff.”
“I’m sorry, Ken. I shouldn’t have tramped your heels like this. I’m in a strange place. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Right now I’ve got some thinking to do.”
He went down through the murder house, and Sharp followed.
On the staircase landing, John paused only briefly to look at Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. The two little girls in white dresses looked happy in the garden with the Chinese lanterns, happy and safe and unaware that Evil walked the world.
From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
The boy and the world would never be in harmony, but the boy and the night became as one. The boy flowed through the woods and meadows of the night, and the night flowed through the boy.
After that first exhilarating excursion, which ended minutes before dawn, he carried a small flashlight with him for those places where moonlight couldn’t reach and for those nights when the sky was moonless or brightened by only the thinnest crescent. He never used the flashlight within sight of the house.
Over the next few years, the boy’s night vision improved to an uncanny degree. The more time he spent out in the world between dusk and dawn, the better he could see even when the sky was overcast and the stars were only legend. He used the flashlight less and less, and his trust of the night was rewarded when the night increasingly, generously opened itself to him.
Once, kneeling at the edge of the deep pond, listening to fish take insects off the surface and wondering whether he might be quick enough with his hand to snatch one of those closest to the bank, he glimpsed his vague reflection in the inky water. But his eyes were not dark as human eyes should have been in such conditions. In them shimmered the faintest gold of animal eye-shine; his eyes drank in the weak glow from a quarter moon and the far twinkle of stars, and magnified them to assist his vision.
However far the boy went or how late he roamed, the raven stayed with him. He was sure it did. Sometimes he saw it backlit by the moon or detected its silhouette gliding across a star-speckled vault. From time to time, he glimpsed its moonshadow undulating across the land.
And if for periods of time he didn’t see the bird, he always heard it. The flap of pinions. The whoosh of rigid wings in a gliding dive. The disturbance of leaves as it preceded him tree limb to tree limb through the dismal forest. Its low resonant prruck, its baritone brronk, its occasional bell-clear cry.
The raven was his companion, his tutelary, his familiar. The raven taught him about the night, and the boy began to learn what the night knows.
The land welcomed the boy as entirely as the darkness did. The fields, the woods, the stream, the pond, every vale and every hill and every thrusting mass of rock. He could walk any deer trail, make a new trail of his own, thrash through a thicket of any composition, and come to dawn without a burr or thistle in his clothes, without nettle rash or poison ivy. No insect ever bit or stung him, nor any snake. He could ascend steep inclines of loose shale as quietly as he could make his way up slopes of grass. No vine tripped, no bramble snared. He was never lost. He roamed the night land as though he might be some goat-legged, goat-eared, horned god who ruled all wild things.
In time, he began to kill two or three nights a month. Mostly rabbits. They appeared before dusk, coming out of their burrows, into meadows, to nibble on tender grass and flavorful weeds. The boy sat in the meadow to wait for them, sometimes catching the musky smell of them before they arrived. His own scent was by this time familiar to everything that ran or hopped, or crawled, or slithered. He could sit on a rock or log with such perfect stillness and for so long that they feared him no more than they feared the thing on which he sat. When they wandered close, he seized them, either to strangle them or snap their necks, or stab them with his knife.
He dispatched them neither to feed upon them nor to take their pelts for trophies. At first he killed to assert his authority over the land and every living thing that it produced. Later, he killed the animals from time to time because he didn’t yet dare kill people, though he knew the day would come when all warm-blooded creatures would be game to him.
Larger and stronger and quicker than he had once been, the boy also had the power to lure and mesmerize. Deer came to him on narrow trails, at pinch points between steep rocks and phalanxes of trees, their eyes shining brighter than his own—and succumbed to his well-sharpened, furiously swung, and relentless hatchet.
On mornings that followed a lethal spree, as dawn neared, he stripped to wash himself and his killing clothes in the pond. He laid the garments to dry on a shelf of rock above the water, and dressed again in the unstained clothes that he had worn into the woods the previous twilight.
One moon-drenched night in his fourth year under the sign of the raven, when the boy was sixteen, as he sat on a throne of weathered rock in a meadow, resting from violent labor, savoring the rich odor of fresh blood, a mountain lion eased out of the brush into shorter grass, and stared hungrily at him. Of all predators in North America, short of the polar bear that was a ruthless killing machine in its arctic realm, the most deadly were the grizzly bear and the mountain lion.
The confident boy met the big cat’s gaze without fear and with no intention of f
leeing from it. He could feel the raven circling in the night overhead. After a lingering assessment, the mountain lion chose to retreat, vanishing into the tall brush from which it had appeared.
He knew then that whether or not he might be the goat-legged god of this land, he was for certain Death with an uppercase D. The cat recognized him as such even though the boy wore no cowled robe and carried no scythe.
One thing he had learned earlier in this fourth year under the sign of the raven was that if you surrendered yourself entirely to the wilderness and to the night, you became aware of things unseen, ancient and immeasurably powerful presences with savage hungers and dark intentions, that roamed ceaselessly, almost dreaming, that were immortal and therefore never impatient, that were content to wait for the unwary to cross their path. He suspected they existed in cities, too, everywhere that humanity had been or was or would be, but were more evident here in the quiet of the wild, to one who had the heart to acknowledge them.
He was as unafraid of these unseen but immense presences as he had been of the mountain lion. In fact, they were as he wished one day to be: the true royalty of this world, users and corrupters, the hidden rulers of this troubled Earth, princes of a secret order. They were to all other predators what the mountain lion was to a mere house cat. If the boy could not one day become one of them, he would settle for being used by one of them to wreak the violence and chaos that they cherished.
For a few weeks following the encounter with the lion, the boy didn’t kill anything. As the desire began to build again, he found the graveyard.
He was about to learn the one more thing he needed to know—and do the one more thing that must be done—to throw off the mantle of boyhood and become me.
28
LATER THAT DAY, LONG AFTER DARKFALL AND DINNER BUT well before midnight, Naomi squirmed so impatiently under the covers that she feared she would wake her sister in the other bed. She wanted to be sure Minnie was sleeping soundly before she risked sneaking out to visit the mirror—and the prince!—in the storage room, but if she delayed another minute, she would positively burst. Most of the time, she was a paragon of patience, which she had to be with a shrimp sister hanging on her skirts all day, but even saints had their limits, and Naomi didn’t claim to be a saint. She wasn’t a monster, either. She was good enough by most standards, and she didn’t expect to spend centuries upon centuries in Purgatory—or even a month—assuming that she ever died.
Since the afternoon math lesson with the nice but interminable Professor Sinyavski, Naomi had been thinking about how to take the initiative with the mirror. Instead of waiting for something in the looking glass to appear or to speak to her, which is what she had done thus far, she should speak to the prince, reach out to him and express her desire to help him save his kingdom from the dark powers by which such kingdoms always seemed to be plagued. Otherwise, she was allowing the dark powers to use the mirror exclusively, like a supernatural BlackBerry or something. She felt that it was extremely perspicacious of her to recognize that she should stop being passive with the mirror and become aggressive.
Finally she turned back the covers, got out of bed, and quietly extracted the flashlight from under her pile of pillows, where she had hidden it earlier and where it had been making her uncomfortable for the past hour. She didn’t switch on the flash nor did she don a robe over her pajamas, for fear that Sister Half-Pint—who sometimes seemed to have the sharp senses of a hyperalert dog—would be torn from sleep by the slightest rustle and come panting after her to spoil everything.
With admirable stealth, Naomi navigated the nearly lightless room without a blunder, eased open the door, stepped barefoot into the hall, and closed the door behind her with only the softest click of the latch. Resorting to the flashlight now, she hurried to the east end of the hallway, regretting that she wasn’t wearing a cape, like those that heroines often wore in Victorian fantasies, because nothing looked more splendidly romantic than a cape billowing out behind a girl racing into the night on a clandestine mission.
In the storage room, she switched on the overhead light, wishing that she had instead a candelabra with a dozen tapers that made light and shadows leap mysteriously across the walls. Three steps from the threshold, she realized that the mirror no longer lay hidden but had been dragged into the open and propped upright against a stack of boxes. Two steps farther, she saw that the looking glass didn’t reflect anything, that it was black—black!—as if it were an open doorway beyond which lay the moonless and starless night of a land oppressed by something … by something … by something too terrible to name.
Naomi marveled at the absolute blackness for a longish moment before she noticed the sheet of stationery on the floor in front of the mirror, a page so creamy and thick that it might have been vellum. On sight, she knew that it must have come from out of the mirror, from the once-happy kingdom that now suffered under the brutal yoke of something … of something unspeakable. No doubt the message would be of earth-shattering importance—or so she assumed until, stooping to pick it up, she recognized Minnie’s neat printing, which ought to have been the childish scrawl of an average eight-year-old but was not. The note said: DEAREST NAOMI, I PAINTED THE MIRROR BLACK. GO BACK TO BED. IT’S OVER NOW. YOUR DEVOTED SISTER, MINETTE.
The first thing Naomi wanted to do, of course, was prepare a bucket of ice water with which to wake the devoted titmouse, but she restrained herself. Because she was on a fast track to adulthood, becoming remarkably more self-possessed and wonderfully mature every day, Naomi realized that by admitting she had found the fingerling’s smarty-pants note, she would be acknowledging the sorry lack of self-control that sent her racing to the mirror in the middle of the night. She could too easily imagine Minnie’s deadpan expression of smug satisfaction—pig fat!—so she vowed right then and there, on her honor and her life, not to give Miss Peewee the pleasure of knowing that the note had been found.
She placed the sheet of creamy paper on the floor precisely as she remembered that it had been, and she silently retreated from the storage room and along the hallway, pleased by her superior cunning. Without benefit of the flashlight, she entered her room, returned to her bed, and lay smiling in the dark. Until she wondered if—and then became convinced that—the occupant of the second bed was no longer Minnie.
In Naomi’s absence, something could have happened to poor little Minnie, and now the thing that had happened to Minnie could be lying in the sweet child’s bed, in her place, patiently waiting for the surviving sister to go to sleep before rising to devour her, as well. Naomi dared not lie lamblike in the blackness, meekly waiting to be eaten alive, yet she dared not switch on her bedside lamp, because the instant she confirmed the presence of the beast, it would even sooner gobble up every last morsel of her. The only thing to do was stay awake until dawn and hope that sunshine would send this creature of the night fleeing to some deep lair.
Half an hour later, Naomi fell asleep, then woke uneaten in morning light. The new day proved less eventful than the previous day, which set a pattern for the following month. The raw-voiced presence—I know you now, my ignorant little bitch—did not appear in the bathroom mirror or the hallway mirror, or anywhere else. No more grapes disappeared through seemingly solid objects.
As day after uneventful day passed, Naomi wondered if her only chance for grand exploits in a fantastic alternate universe had come and gone without her having been able to seize the opportunity.
For compensation, she still had magical stories to read, her flute, the junior orchestra, her unique family, the dazzling autumn leaves in this gorgeous semi-magical world, and her imagination. As the days flew by, the scarier aspects of the recent events seemed less scary in retrospect, and Naomi gradually became aware that she had conducted herself with more valor and intrepidity and dashing style than she had recognized at the time. She stopped worrying that she had botched her one chance for glory, and she knew an occasion would eventually arise in which she could—and would�
�fulfill her singular potential as an adventurer.
Minnie knew that Naomi found the note. One corner of it was bent. And Naomi had held the thick writing paper so tightly that her fingers dimpled it in a few places.
By herself, Minnie dragged the painted mirror behind the boxes once more. Good riddance.
She folded the note and kept it as a souvenir.
Days passed, and nothing weird happened. Still more days, and still nothing.
The spooky stuff hadn’t come to an end forever. They were in the eye of a hurricane. This calm was misleading; the storm remained all around them.
Minnie possessed some natural knowledge of such things. She seemed to have been born with a sixth sense; and it had always been her little secret.
Since the incident with the mirror, she now and then sensed that she was being watched by something that didn’t have a body, therefore didn’t have eyes, yet could see.
She thought it must be a ghost, but she sensed that it was not an ordinary ghost or maybe not only a ghost. So at first she thought of it as the watcher.
Sometimes the watcher’s stare was almost like a touch, a sliding hand along her neck, along her arm, along her cheek and chin.
Usually but not always, this feeling came over her when she was alone. She tried not to be alone except when she went to the bathroom or took a shower.
The eyeless watcher didn’t prowl just the house. It was outside, too, in certain secluded places.
One day in the backyard, she started to climb the ladder to the playhouse in the branches of the enormous old cedar. Suddenly she knew the watcher waited up there.
She refused to believe that a thing without a body could hurt her. But she didn’t want to be alone with it in that high place, to feel its stare, and to have no way out except the ladder. She might fall and break her neck. And that might be exactly what it wanted.
The arbor was draped with climbing vines, and pooled within it were shadows and the fragrance of roses, the last blooms of the year. Lingering there one afternoon, she felt the watcher enter the tunnel.
