What the Night Knows

by Dean Koontz

  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.

  Before knowing Melody for what she i
s, the rider initially intended to use her only to get back to the Calvino house. But she is so interesting that it decides to stay with her a few hours and also to incorporate her into its mission.

  Melody is pretty but not strikingly beautiful, fresh-faced, with direct brown eyes, an appealing smile. She is demure, almost shy. She seems modest and gentle. Her quiet voice falls pleasantly on the ear, and altogether her manner charms and inspires trust. Such a disguise serves any monster well, but it is especially helpful in avoiding suspicion if you are, like Melody, a murderer of children.

  She may very well be essential to the certain destruction of the Calvino family.

  40

  HAVING GOTTEN NOT ONE MINUTE OF SLEEP DURING THE night, John claimed at breakfast that he felt weary, out of sorts, as if the flu might be coming on, which was true as far as it went. He allowed Nicky to think he had called in sick, but of course he was already on an unpaid leave.

  He retreated to his study on the first floor with an insulated pot of caffeine-free coffee. For a while he stood at a window, gazing at the backyard.

  On the grass blazed the leaves of the scarlet oak, like scales shed by a dragon. Dragon scales sounded totally Naomi, and when John thought of her, he smiled. Maybe she hadn’t inherited all of her fanciful imagination from her mother.

  The scattering of fallen leaves lay undisturbed. In daylight, no spirit, blithe or otherwise, capered through them.

  He didn’t know what to think of the incident with the leaves. In the dark, after a generous serving of Chivas Regal, the presence—first warning, then playful—had seemed as real as the plume of his crystalized breath in that cold air. But now …

  He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.

  With a mug of coffee, he sat in his armchair, put his feet on the footstool, and pretended for a while that he would methodically think through the ticking threat of Alton Turner Blackwood until he understood how to disarm it. But weariness was a sea in which he sank, and thinking became as arduous as walking on the ocean floor with a world of water pressing down relentlessly.

  He dreamed of a surreal journey in a world of falling scarlet leaves, falling girls, falling blades of guillotines, the leaves no longer leaves at all but laminas of blood cast into the air from the severed neck stumps, and then not either laminas of blood or leaves but sheets of paper, pages from a book, and something important on them that he must read, must read, except that they floated away as he tried to pluck them from the air, slipped through his fingers as if they were smoke, just as the girls slipped through his hands as he stood at a cliff’s edge and tried to save them, Davinia and Marnie and Giselle, girls at the brink, turning to smoke in his hands but then suddenly flesh-and-blood girls again as they plunged, plunged, Minette and Naomi, all the girls plunging away from him, down and down through a rain of scarlet leaves and book pages and glittering blades of merciless intent, then no leaves or pages or blades but only snow, girls falling through night snow and slamming into a snow-mantled street—Whump!—with lethal force, girl after girl—Whump! Whump! Whump!—and already on the street, on his back in the snow, staring with the steady eyes of a dead man, staring up at the falling girls, lay Lionel Timmins, the girls plunging to their deaths around him—Whump! Whump!—and heavy snow falling into Lionel’s unblinking, sightless, frozen eyes.

  “John?”

  Someone shook him by the shoulder, and when he opened his eyes, he thought he must still be dreaming, because Lionel Timmins leaned over him.

  “John, we have to talk.”

  The dusting of snow on Lionel’s face was, on second look, white beard stubble. He hadn’t shaved recently.

  Sitting up straighter in his chair, swinging his legs off the footstool, John said, “What’re you doing here? What’s going on, what’s happening?”

  Perching on the stool, Lionel said, “That’s what I need to know, partner. What the hell is going on?”

  John wiped his face with both hands, as if sleep were a cocoon from which he emerged and he were pulling off the gossamer remnants that still clung to him. “When did your beard go white?”

  “Years ago. That’s why I try to shave twice a day. Makes me look like Uncle damn Remus or something. Listen, what is this—you gave Mrs. Fontere your card with all your phone numbers?”

  “Mrs. who?”

  “Fontere. Lois Fontere. Jack Woburn’s sister.”

  “Oh, yeah, all right. Aunt Lois.”

  Filaments of sleep, like threads with a static charge, clung to John, tangling his thoughts. He needed to be wide awake with Lionel.

  “I’m on this all night,” Lionel said, “now I just find out from her you were at the hospital.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s a mess, but she’s alive. John, you were at the hospital just minutes before Andy Tane blew all his fuses.”

  “Was he the one? Tane? The one who jumped with the girl?”

  “He did all of them. Including Mickey Scriver, his partner.”

  “I saw them fall. Walking to my car in the portico, heard the shots, the glass breaking.”

  Lionel’s flat expressionless stare was one that he sometimes used with witnesses and often with suspects, to make them wonder how much he knew. “You saw them fall.”

  “She was a fine girl. A good girl.”

  “You saw them fall and you—what?—just drove away?”

  As John rose from the chair, Lionel got up from the footstool.

  “You want some coffee?” John asked.

  “No.”

  “Something else?”

  “No.”

  John went to the gallery wall on which were hung the birthday photos of the kids. Lionel followed him, but John focused on the photographs.

  “You’re on leave, John. Are you still on leave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are you dogging this case? Why did you want to talk to Brenda Woburn?”

  “I wasn’t there as a cop. It was a personal matter.”

  “After midnight. In the ICU. The woman’s recovering from a gunshot, surgery—and you stop by for a chat? A woman I don’t think you met before that moment?”

  John didn’t reply. He studied a picture of Naomi on her seventh birthday. She wore a tam-o’-shanter. One of her enduring enthusiasms was hats. He cherished Naomi for many reasons, but certainly on his top ten list was the intensity of her love for the world and the passionate delight that she could take in the most mundane things, almost a rejoicing.

  “John, there’s major heat on this. One of our own kills his partner, four other people, then himself. The press is foaming at the mouth. This isn’t my case alone. There’s a little task force. Sharp and Tanner—they’re part of it.”

  John turned from the photographs. “Do they know I was at the hospital?”

  “Not yet. But I might have to tell them. John, why are you on a thirty-day leave?”

  “A family thing. Like I told you.”

  “I wouldn’t think you’d lie to me.”

  John met his stare. “It’s not a lie. It’s just incomplete.”

  “Ken Sharp implied you tried to horn in on the Lucas case.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “Just that if you come back from leave, he won’t work with you on the Tane investigation. He wanted me clear on that.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “All he said was he doesn’t want a repeat of the Lucas house, doesn’t want to go into Tane’s place and find you cooking dinner.”

  The “cooking dinner” reference was a euphemism, a suggestion that John had been cooking the crime scene, planting evidence. Ken might have reached that conclusion after talking to the orderly, Coleman Hanes, at the state hospital, who suspected that, in spite of the boy’s confession, John believed Billy Lucas must be i
nnocent.

  Lionel said, “Were you really in the Lucas house unofficially?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell? Why?”

  John glanced at the hall beyond the open study door. He didn’t want to be overheard. “Let’s go outside.”

  The air was cool, but the day chilled only in the shadows. They sat in the sun, on wrought-iron chairs, at a table on the terrace.

  As succinctly as he had laid out his case for Nelson Burchard, John told Lionel about the Blackwood murders twenty years earlier, about the loss of his family.

  Lionel did not respond with the cloying earnestness of Burchard. He knew that pity could be an insult. He said only “Shit,” and in that one vulgarity, he expressed genuine sympathy and a touching depth of friendship.

  As John listed the uncanny similarities between the recent Lucas murders and the Valdane-family massacre two decades earlier, Lionel listened with interest. But when the discussion turned to the fact that three of the Sollenburgs had been shot, that twenty years later three of the Woburns were shot as well, and when John noted that in each instance the daughter was murdered last, Lionel blinked in confusion until he blinked himself into a frown.

  “You think there’s some link between these cases?”

  “They were thirty-three days apart, like back then. I warned Burchard—thirty-three days.”

  “Thirty-three days could be coincidence.”

  “It isn’t.”

  The sky was pale, the sun a white instead of a yolk, as if a high, finely diffused pollution muted the natural colors.

  Leaning forward, arms on the table, Lionel said, “What’re you trying to tell me? I don’t get it. Help me make the leap.”

  Although he risked sounding like a man seeking a psychiatric-disability pension, John was desperate for an ally. “Thirty-three more days will put us at November seventh. Blackwood’s third family was the Paxtons. Mother, father, two sons, two daughters.”