Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror

by Talbot, Michael

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  I: The House 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  II: The Master 9

  10

  11

  III: The Purpose 12

  EPILOGUE

  This one’s for Mitzi and Pam, with love

  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,

  but against principalities, against powers,

  against the rulers of the darkness....

  —The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians

  PROLOGUE

  New York City, 1870

  When the woman awoke she knew immediately that something was wrong. She did not know what had alerted her to the fact. She had not heard anything. She knew only that one moment she was sleeping soundly and the next moment she was completely awake and alert. Clutching instinctively at the top button of her nightgown, she sat up in bed and stared into the darkness.

  In the moonlight streaming in through the windows the room was ghostly and still. Anxiously she surveyed the shadows, half expecting to see some intruder lurking there. Beside her her husband slept, and in the distance she could hear the ticking of the hallway clock. Nothing seemed amiss, yet she knew that something was terribly wrong. There was an ominous edge to the darkness, a palpable air of danger.

  Quickly she put her slippers on and padded over to the window. The lawns surrounding the great house appeared dreamlike in the bluish glow of the moonlight. In the distance, in the light of the gaslights on Fifth Avenue, she could see the huge wrought-iron fence that surrounded the estate. Her heart pounded.

  She fumbled at her dressing table until she had managed to light a candle and then went into the hall. She knew somehow that if she did not hurry a life would be lost. But whose life? Who was in danger? And then she realized. It was her daughter.

  As she raced toward the nursery she wondered how she could have been so stupid. Who was the most vulnerable member of the family? Whom had she struggled for the past eight years to nurture, to protect, even from her husband? She reached the nursery and flung the door open, hoping against hope it was not true. But she found what she had feared and already known. The sheets had been clumsily cast aside and the bed was empty. Frantically she searched the room, under the bed, in the closet, but the little girl was nowhere to be found. Gasping and already crying, she raced back to the hall and called for help.

  Slowly the household awoke. On the floor above, the light of a gas jet coming on shone like a beacon down the servants’ stairs, and at the far end of the hall her husband stumbled grouchily into the hall wrestling with his robe. His immense mustache, usually so carefully waxed and shaped, jutted out at strange angles, giving him a comical look which belied the anger in his expression.

  “What is it?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Sarah again,” the woman gasped. “She’s gone.” She gestured toward the empty bedroom and then looked back desperately at her husband.

  “This cannot go on,” he said, shaking his head. “I told you something had to be done.”

  “I will not have my daughter put in one of those places.”

  “But she’s sick. She needs to be under the care of doctors.”

  “She is not sick!”

  “Then what is wrong?” he challenged, and her gaze drifted to the floor. She did not know what was wrong with her daughter. At times the little girl appeared completely normal, running and playing as any eight-year-old might. But then there were the other times when she went into strange trances that would last for hours, or had seizures followed by animated descriptions of where she claimed she had been and what she alleged she had seen. And there were other such alarming incidents.

  Something stirred within her, giving her the courage to look back at her husband. He could be selfish. Cold. Concerned only with the intricacies of his business and the power he wielded. She would not let him force her to stop caring, force her to give up her daughter. She met his fiery glare head-on, and something in the erectness of her bearing told him he had better back down.

  He looked at the circle of servants gathered around them. “She’s disappeared again,” he said wearily. “Search the house.”

  The servants dutifully dispersed.

  Taking the hem of her nightgown in hand, the woman rushed toward the staircase to join in the search. When she reached the banister she paused and looked back at her husband. Reluctantly he grunted and followed.

  They searched everywhere, in the cellar, in the attic, even in the laundry and the coalbin of the huge and stately house. Periodically they called out to each other to see if anyone had found any clues, but it was to no avail. It was as if the little girl had vanished. Finally, after exhausting all other possibilities, they returned to the nursery. It was there that the woman discovered what at first only piqued her curiosity, but then quickly filled her with horror as she realized its implications. The latch on the window of the room was unlocked.

  Letting out a cry, she rushed to the window and flung it open. Her heart pounded as she madly surveyed the moonlit grass several stories below and imagined the twisted and inanimate form of her daughter lying on the carefully manicured lawn. But she was not there. Unable to bear it any longer, the woman buried her face in her hands and started to sob.

  She felt the pressure of her husband’s hand upon her shoulder. She sensed the insistence of his grip, even the terror.

  “There,” he said in a hush.

  She looked at him wonderingly and was taken by the stillness of his gaze as he looked out the window.

  “There,” he repeated with even more emphasis and nodding his head.

  Slowly she followed the line of his vision until she too saw what he was looking at, and when she did, her heart stopped. For there, some twenty feet off and standing at the very edge of the roof, was their daughter. She stood as motionless as a statue, gazing raptly off into space.

  “No—!” the woman cried, lunging forward, but her husband pulled her back.

  She looked at him imploringly. “What are we going to do?”

  He looked back at their daughter, and his faced filled with dread over the task before him. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. He pushed his hysterical wife into the arms of one of the maids, and he took off his slippers. Looking one last time at the ground far below, he rolled up his sleeves and crawled out the window.

  The little girl became aware of the commotion taking place around her. She even heard the sound of her parents’ voices and realized that they were upset about something, but she paid them no mind. She was too entranced by the swirling shapes before her. It was the first time they had come so clearly. Faces that drifted in and out like the glistening veils of the aurora borealis. She had been visited by the faces before, but never so many as this. Even their voices were clearer, the voices which had first come to her in her dreams, and which had once been little more than a chorus of mumbling. Now they spoke plainly, and although they occasionally sibilated in unison, they told her many amazing things.

  What was strange was that although she knew the voices were saying something important, she was not really sure what they were telling her. It was as if her consciousness were not really present, only some deeper portion of herself, like the person she was in a half-remembered dream. Suddenly the murmuring of the voices intensified as if informed by some unknown urgency. The luminous cloud of being became turbulent as the voices crescendoed, and a flood of images suddenly swirled and tumbled before her. All
at once, in a scintillant burst of energy, the vision vanished as the viselike grip of a hand closed around her arm.

  She turned, and to her astonishment she saw it was her father. Confused, she took a step forward. He cried out, yanking her brusquely toward him. For a moment she thought her arm had been wrenched from her body, and it was only after he had gathered her up in his arms that she understood where she was.

  She began to cry, but instead of comforting her her father only cursed under his breath as he slowly made his way back across the eaves of the house. How had she gotten here? she wondered. What had she been doing on the roof? And then she remembered... the voices... and the swirling light.

  But as her daze evaporated and she drifted slowly back into the stifling logic of reality, she realized two things. First, and quite unexpectedly, she realized she was special, chosen. She had perceived an order of things invisible to most human beings, and to her great surprise she had been allowed to glimpse her role in that order. Second, and most astounding of all, she had been shown a shape. Here her vague understanding of what had happened to her ended. For although the vision still shimmered in her mind, she knew only that she had seen something both possible and impossible: a form never before fathomed by mortal minds.

  I

  And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

  The instruments of darkness tell us truths....

  —Shakespeare, Macbeth

  “Are we almost there?” Lauren asked excitedly as the Porsche shifted gears to negotiate the increasing steepness of the mountain road. The highway they were on was one of the old two-laners, and together with dazzling mountain scenery and the verdant walls of tamaracks and pines that surrounded them, it seemed like a scene right out of a picture postcard.

  “Almost,” Stephen said, grinning from ear to ear and still refusing to tell her anything about the house he had rented for them in the Adirondacks for the summer. He reached out and squeezed her hand lovingly.

  A warm tingle enveloped her as she returned the squeeze and smiled. She still could not believe that she, Lauren Montgomery, had married Stephen Ransom, famous recording star, king of the pop charts for the past three years. Only four short months before he had been merely a celebrity to her, the pop superstar of such megahit albums as Ransom of the Heart and Ransomed for Love. But one afternoon Annie had called her in to say she was giving her the writing assignment of a lifetime: the opportunity to spend an entire week with Ransom, to follow him around and do what Annie called a real meat-and-potatoes piece on the guy.

  What a week that had been, she remembered. When she had first entered Stephen Ransom’s suite of rooms at the Plaza she had been nervous as a schoolgirl. But there was such an instant rapport between them, such a feeling of closeness and uncanny familiarity, that within a half hour’s conversation it was as though they’d known each other for years. To her enormous surprise—for such behavior violated all of her personal and professional standards— they made love their very first evening together. Indeed, from that day on they spent every available moment together, and scarcely two months later, on the morning that her article about him came out in People Beat, he called her up and told her he wanted to marry her. When she giddily asked him why, he said it was because he liked the way she described him in the article as having “impish, boy-next-door good looks with just a hint of something dangerous in his eyes.” They went down to city hall that same day.

  She looked at herself in the car mirror, at her blond hair and delicate features. She had been told that she looked like Julie Christie, but she had never believed it. Until she had met Stephen it had been difficult for Lauren to believe that anything truly good might happen to her.

  It was not that she was a pessimist, really, at least not when it came to the world in general. Whenever the cynical old fogies at People Beat began spewing apocalyptic claptrap about nuclear holocaust or the inevitability of the decline of good journalism it was always she who challenged them, she who argued that there was something inherently good in the human spirit, something that, no matter how dark the world became, would never let it sink into the mire of total moral turpitude.

  And she believed it. She did not know why. Perhaps it was some past-life thing—for she had certainly not been raised in a religious environment in this life. But whatever the cause, there was a deep and abiding conviction in her that there was something akin to grace in the universe, that the cards of fate were stacked ever so slightly on the side of innocence and that good things were just a little more likely to happen than bad.

  Except when it came to her.

  Her reasons for excluding herself from this mantle of grace were deep, lost in the painful fragments of her childhood, but she knew that one of the fragments was her father. Her earliest memories of her father were of a proud man, handsome, outgoing, and always in command of the situation. Born to parents who had emigrated from the south side of London to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, he had risen from poverty to ownership of his own tool-and-die business and by the time Lauren was born had purchased quite a nice home for her and her mother in the Forest Hills section of Queens.

  Lauren’s memories of those early years were rapturously happy, and although she did not see her father much, she remembered the brief stretches of time she was able to spend with him as almost luminous, they were so qualitatively different from the rest of her life. She could still remember the brands of candy he would bring her when he came home from work, and how she would endlessly trace and retrace the design in the kitchen linoleum as she waited for him to finish showering in the basement—her mother never let him come into the house proper until he had showered and changed out of his work clothes—and come upstairs at the end of the day.

  It had nearly killed her when one day he didn’t come home and for weeks her mother refused to tell her anything. When she was seven and after nearly six months had passed, her mother finally explained to her the meaning of the word “divorce” and told her that her father would never be coming home again. As for why, Lauren was given only sketchy fragments about there being another woman involved and about how her father had decided to live with her instead of them. But because these fragments were beyond the comprehension of a seven-year-old, Lauren could only imagine that somehow the divorce had to do with her, with something she had done. And perhaps also with some secondary and less consequential crime committed by her mother.

  In time Lauren became convinced that if only she could see her father she might be able to make amends for whatever it was she had done, but her mother told her that after the divorce her father had moved out West and had left no forwarding address. Her relationship with her mother had never been good, and after the divorce it too got worse. Although Lauren recognized now that her mother’s increasing inability to cope with Lauren or with even the most trifling of everyday events was due to her own devastation over the divorce, it only intensified Lauren’s feeling that somehow she was the victim of some terrible mistake, that if only she could locate her father she might be able lift the horrible curse that had befallen her.

  Her feeling that she was the victim of some dark spell increased when she was eight and her mother was confined to a wheelchair with severe rheumatoid arthritis. From that point on until Lauren went away to college at the age of seventeen, she was her mother’s chattel and slave—a nurse when her mother became too ill to take care of herself, and a punching bag when her mother recovered enough to recall the pain and bitterness that had placed her in the wheelchair in the first place.

  It wasn’t until Lauren was in her early twenties and had landed her first job—as an assistant to a staff writer at the Village Voice—that her mother accidentally let drop that her father had not moved out West but was living in Westchester. At first she was furious at her mother for withholding the information from her for so long, and they had a terrible argument. But then afterward Lauren was ecstatic and her dream of reclaiming some of the lost happiness of her youth was rekindled.


  Another year passed before she finally reestablished contact with her father. Perhaps because it was a moment she had looked forward to for so long, she just didn’t want to rush into it. Or perhaps she wanted to wait until she had a more impressive job (and she did, for by that time she had become a staff writer at People Beat). Whatever the case, it was with both joy and profound nervousness that she visited her father’s spacious home in Westchester.

  The meeting was anticlimactic to say the least. Far from being the luminous and larger-than-life figure she remembered, her father was short and paunchy. In fact, he was exactly the sort of man she usually detested—perfectly coiffed hair (stiff with hair spray and carefully combed in a large wavy sheet to conceal a burgeoning bald spot), shiny and manicured nails, oppressive cologne. And of course there was the cigar, a Dunhill Montecristo No. 1.

  Nor was he even the warm and affectionate man she remembered, let alone the knight to wipe clean all the ruinous memories of her childhood. He was stiff and ill at ease. Rather than being impressed at her successes, he seemed resentful of them. They spent an uncomfortable afternoon together, and when it was over Lauren was appalled to realize that she had felt more relaxed with his wife, a darkly tanned and vaguely blowsy redhead named Tiffany, than she had with him.

  Her father was not the only man with whom she had had an ill-fated relationship. About six months after the Westchester fiasco a girlfriend invited her to go to a gallery opening, and there, while looking at sculptures created by placing bundles of multicolored wire beneath the wheels of subways and while drinking white wine out of a clear plastic wine goblet, she met the the man who was to become the second significant male figure in her life, a Hungarian painter named Miklos.

  As with Stephen, her attraction to Miklos had been immediate. Miklos was not as handsome as Stephen was, but he possessed a certain panache. Tall, thin, and given to wearing only the newest Italian fashions, he cut a most striking figure. He was also one of the best-read human beings she had ever met, and what with his intoxicating accent and her discovery that he was a staggeringly talented painter, her heart was quickly lost to him.