The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  As suddenly as her room had vanished, it reappeared. The blackness was there and then it wasn’t. The sound was there and then gone, taking with it the pleasant smell of early rain and the soft touch of a baby’s curls.

  She was in her bed in her room as she had been before everything vanished. Princess Buttercup was gone. Andi reached over and felt the sheets next to where Ossy was sleeping. They were cold, not warm like somebody’d been sitting there. In fact, there was not even a break in the movie playing on the iPad in her hand. It was like the scene in the air had shown up in a space between time, between one second and the next, so the world didn’t even know it’d been there, didn’t miss the time it took to see it.

  Andi pushed “pause” on the movie and turned the iPad off, plunging the room into darkness since the only light in the room had come from the iPad screen. Then she sat holding the iPad in her lap, staring into the space at the foot of her bed where it was plain old dark now, like she’d seen every night of her life.

  Whatever it was she’d seen, Andi was certain it was important. Princess Buttercup had told her to watch carefully. It had come from the place where she’d been when Uncle Jack had called out to her, and she had been shown the same thing three times for a reason.

  She needed to tell Mommy and Daddy about it right now.

  Andi hopped out of bed, leaving Ossy asleep behind her, slipped her feet into her house shoes, padded down the hall and then down the stairs, not intending to sneak up on anybody, just quiet because it was hard to make noise when you were wearing house shoes on carpet.

  When she got half way down the stairs, she heard her mother’s voice.

  ‘“There’s enough turmoil in that child’s life and we can’t add to it. Right now is not the time for her parents to decide to get a divorce and go their separate ways.”

  Divorce?

  Andi knew what that word meant. Sara Henry’s parents had gotten one and now Sara only saw her daddy on weekends and her mother was sad and cried all the time and Sara had to drop out of piano lessons because her mother couldn’t afford to pay for them anymore.

  Could…would her parents get a divorce?

  Andi sat down hard on the carpeted stairs because she couldn’t stand up anymore, and besides she was afraid she was about to be sick. Why would they do a thing like that—get a divorce? Sara had said her parents stopped loving each other and that’s why they did it. Had Mommy and Daddy stopped loving each other? And if they had, had they stopped loving her, too?

  She was suddenly as frightened as she had been in the school that day, looking through the crack as the bad man shot Miss Lund and Mr. Bishop. Tears sprang into her eyes, she put her head in her hands and started to cry.

  * * *

  Emily ran across the room and up the few steps to where Andi sat, her heart in her throat.

  Had she heard? Did she actually listen to her parents discuss getting a divorce?

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” she asked and gathered the sobbing child into her arms. But Andi said nothing, merely cried harder.

  What had she done? The hole in Emily’s belly was so deep and painful it felt like the whole bottom portion of her body had fallen away. Not Andi. What she and Jeff were doing was never supposed to hurt her precious child.

  And Andi was precious to Emily, had come at great cost and sacrifice.

  Hers had been more than a difficult pregnancy. It had been high risk from the beginning, when her blood pressure shot through the roof at three months and refused to budge downwards. By six months, she was hospitalized in full bore pre-eclampsia, with her doctors—and Dan!—weighing every day the risk to mother and baby that allowing the pregnancy to continue presented. Every day she carried Andi, she put her own life in lethal danger. And every additional day Andi stayed in Emily’s womb increased the chances that she would survive.

  The nightmare of Andi’s birth began when the infant monitors suddenly showed a baby in distress. Not beeps getting slower and slower as the other monitor—she couldn’t even think about that—but racing, the heartbeat getting faster and faster, like the frantic heartbeat of some fettered bird. An emergency Caesarian section followed, along with hemorrhaging the doctors only barely controlled.

  Andi was Emily’s miracle, and she had blocked out of her mind any possibility that her relationship with Jeff might hurt the child.

  Had she heard?

  Please, God, no.

  The words brought Emily up short. It was a prayer, and she hadn’t prayed since…she hadn’t even prayed when the doctor told them to tell Andi goodbye. She had been in such terror and shock then she couldn’t have formulated words if she’d tried.

  But she was praying now. Please, God, don’t let her have heard.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” she pleaded with the sobbing child. “Tell Mommy.”

  “Did you have a bad dream?” Dan asked her.

  The child looked up into his face, then turned to her mother, the tears a smear down both cheeks. For a moment, an odd, unreadable look skittered across her features.

  “Uh huh...I had a bad dream.”

  She was trying hard to get herself under control.

  “Tell me about it, Honey,” Dan said. He sat beside Emily and lifted Andi out of her arms into his lap and cradled her tenderly there. It struck Emily that it had been a long time since she’d realized what a good father Dan was.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Andi said. “Can I go back to bed now?”

  “Not until you tell us what frightened you,” he said.

  Again, Andi turned to look into Emily’s face, then back at her father. She sighed, then, appeared to make a decision.

  “I wasn’t crying because I had a bad dream,” she said.

  “Then why were you crying?” Emily asked.

  She reached up and tried to dry her cheeks and Dan magically produced a clean handkerchief for her to use. When she spoke again, she was calmer, seemed to be trying hard to concentrate.

  “It wasn’t a dream and it didn’t scare me. It was…” She paused. “First, the room went away. It was dark, but light showed through the dark. And it smelled and sounded and felt like it did the day I went into the light and then came back when Uncle Jack called me.”

  Emily felt her stomach heave. No, not this. Please…

  “And then I saw the same thing three times.”

  “Saw what?” Dan asked. His voice sounded as insubstantial as a reflection on a windowpane.

  “Splashes of color—first red, then purple, then green, then blue—like paint splatters, only made out of light. And after the color came the shapes.”

  Andi closed her eyes, visualizing the images as she described them.

  “There were shapes—eight of them. They tumbled over and over. Right side up, then upside down, doing summersaults. A square, two circles, a triangle, two capital T’s, the little one in front of the big one—kinda like a telephone pole. Then a bell, a cross that was pointed at the top and a line—is that a shape?—just straight up and down.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “The square and the T’s were beside each other. They were black and the square had little feet, kinda. The two circles were silver, the triangle was red and the line was brown.”

  She stopped and smiled tentatively, as if she was proud that she remembered it all and described it correctly.

  “And the sky was on fire, too, sort of. Sparks were flying everywhere around where the fire was, a big fire with black smoke.

  Then Andi began to cry again, not hard this time, not a frightened cry. Emily recognized the sound, a sad cry. Andi must be remembering the teacher and the old black man she had loved, who’d been gunned down before her eyes. That’s why she was sad. It was, wasn’t it?

  She put her arms around Andi and Dan, held both of them close.

  “It’s Ok, now baby. You’re here, safe with us. Mommy and Daddy are here and we won’t let any bad things get you, ever.”

  “Both of you?” s
he asked.

  Why would she ask that unless she’d heard? Emily didn’t drop a beat.

  “Of course, both of us. We’ll be here together to protect you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Jack’s investigation was definitely off the grid, skating on ice so thin he could see down through it, could see images there he didn’t want to look at. But Crock had told him to nose around, so he’d been doing his job when he’d asked to meet with Daniel and Theresa Washington to see if the three-heads-are-better-than-one rule applied. Daniel had invited the other two to his home, said Emily and Andi would be attending the Mother-Daughter banquet at the church all evening and they’d have privacy to talk.

  Jack looked up over the coffee Daniel had poured for him into a cup way too dainty for his big hands, and thought that Daniel didn’t look well at all.

  “Daniel, you don’t look good,” Theresa said. A big Calico cat rubbed against Theresa’s leg and she reached down and petted it. “Sit yourself down and stop making nice. I want more coffee, I can get it my own self.”

  Jack smiled at that. The more time Jack spent with Theresa Washington, the better he liked her.

  He took a breath, might as well get to it. He’d heard a phrase once—couldn’t recall where—that had become one of the guiding principles in his life: If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it too long. And if you have to eat two frogs, eat the big one first.

  “Like I said on the phone, I’ve been assigned the unenviable task of explaining the phenomena of the 1985 Bradford’s Ridge Little League team and its sterling membership.” He held up his hand and began to tick them off his fingers. “Which included a school shooter, a police officer, a minister and…” He’d been holding up three fingers. Then he paused for a beat before gulping down the big frog. Slowly, he opened his hand, palm out. “Two mass murderers.”

  “Mass-murderers!” Theresa cried.

  “Wannabe mass murders,” Jack amended. “Two guys, Walter Stephenson and Roger Willingham tried, but they didn’t manage to kill anybody but themselves.” He smiled a half smile. “Struck out, so to speak. Needed better coaching.”

  Theresa, who was still rattled by what Jack had said, merely mumbled, “He done the best he could.”

  “Who did?” Jack asked.

  “Bishop.”

  She smiled a little then at what must have been twin looks of confusion on his and Daniel’s faces. “Uh, huh. My Bishop was the coach of yore Little League team.”

  “You’re from Bradford’s Ridge, too?” Daniel was incredulous.

  For Jack, the first tumbler in a big combination lock clicked into place. “That’s how you know us.” Jack put his head in his hands. “Am I the only one here who hears the theme song from the Twilight Zone?”

  Theresa made a humph sound in her throat. “Twilight Zone’s made-up magic stuff and what’s happening here’s real. That demon Andi and Bishop seen was real. It come to the school so’s it could threaten them kids to get Bishop to tell it what it wanted to know.”

  Daniel sighed out the words. “Which was the location of ‘the three who stood with the light’ and Becca. That’s what Andi heard the demon say.” Daniel ran his hands through his hair. “I can’t believe I just said that, talked about what my little girl heard a demon say as casually as ‘I got tickets to the Reds game Saturday—wanna go?’”

  “Actually that thing wasn’t looking for the three,” Theresa corrected. “Just Becca.”

  Daniel got to his feet and began to pace, and the way he fell so easily into the rhythm of it gave Jack the impression pacing was a regular activity.

  “I don’t know what to do with a thing like that—seeing demons.”

  “What you do with it is the same thing the disciples done with it when Jesus sent them demons packing out of that man wandering around naked in the cemetery.”

  “And that is…?” Daniel said.

  “What they didn’t do was say there wasn’t no such thing as demons ’cause they couldn’t see them with they own eyes. They knew they was demons working because they could see what the demons was doin’. You don’t have to see the wind to know it’s blowin’ when it knocks your house down around your head.”

  She paused.

  “And they believed what Jesus said about demons, just like you got to b’lieve what Andi says ’cause she knows.”

  “So what’s the connection between a…” it took a physical effort for Jack to force the next word past his lips, “demon looking for Becca, the wack-job he rode in on, ‘three who stood with the light’ and your husband…your late husband? And where do those lines intersect with the shooter’s and his crazy chums on a Little League Team with Daniel and me twenty-five years ago?”

  “That’s easy,” Theresa said. “You and Daniel is the three. Well, two of them anyway.”

  If there had ever, in all of human history, been a conversation stopper, that was it.

  Jack heard a great roaring sound in his head, Niagara Falls released between his ears. But even that sound couldn’t smother the omnipresent heart-monitor buzz. He opened his mouth to speak, but words flat out refused to walk out onto the end of his tongue and jump.

  “Jack and I are…the demon was looking for us?”

  Daniel’s words were barely audible through the rumble in Jack’s head. It took a huge command of will to silence the noise—at least turn down the volume enough for Jack to spit words out into the room. “What for? What’d we do to piss off a demon?”

  Theresa started to respond, but the wires suddenly connected in Daniel’s head, and with a blink the pinball machine turned on.

  “Jack and I are two, and the third was—”

  “Becca,” Jack said.

  “She had long blonde hair that hung all the way down her back to her waist,” Daniel said, and you could hear the wonder in his voice. “And a white light beside her you couldn’t look at.”

  A light. The three who stood with the light!

  “She had a dog, a mixed-breed mutt named—” Daniel began.

  “McDougal,” Jack would have sworn he said the word a second before he thought it. “McDo, Dougal Dog.”

  “The skinny kid named Victor wrung her dog’s neck that day in the woods,” Daniel said.

  “They called us ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly.’ Why would they say that? She was beautiful,” Jack said.

  “You had a crush on her,” Daniel said.

  “So did you.” Jack paused, breathless. “Why would a demon be looking for the three of us?” Jack heard the words come out of his mouth and checked back out again.

  Jack Carpenter was a simple, garden-variety man. He drank a little too much sometimes, needed to get out more, liked to watch old black-and-white movies, eat Ethiopian food, cheer for the Cincinnati Reds, and he had started training to do the Iron Man competition in Oahu, Hawaii in the fall. The only thing that set him apart from the masses was that he was probably the only human being on the planet who had never seen a Star Wars movie—any of them—and had believed for years a light saber was a sword that wasn’t heavy.

  People like Jack Carpenter didn’t see demons, didn’t talk about demons. This was lunacy. Things like this only happened in the movies.

  Grab the popcorn, folks, show starts in five minutes.

  People like Jack didn’t have demons trying to find them to…to what? Yeah, to what? Probably not to sell him Girl Scout cookies.

  “What does it want us for?” Jack asked.

  “It ain’t looking for the two of you ’cause it already knows where you is, and apparently it don’t know where Becca is,” Theresa responded. “As for what it wants…I can’t say what that’d be.”

  Yes, you can.

  You didn’t get to be a police sergeant without learning how to tell when somebody was tippy-toeing around the truth, and Theresa Washington wasn’t exactly an accomplished liar. But he didn’t press it. He turned his attention to Daniel. “I thought your whole childhood was a fog—now you say you remember Be
cca?”

  Daniel told him, then Jack shared his memory—an edited version. He didn’t include the parts he’d obviously made up. When both men said they’d felt like the memories had been catapulted out of their minds by force, Theresa shook her head.

  “Appears to me they’s somebody bigger than demons working real hard to get you men to remember something.”

  “Bigger than a demon…like what?” Jack felt that whirling sensation again, like he was about to fall off a high place into a dark hole that had no bottom. Theresa must have read the look because she smiled.

  “If they’s demons fighting a war, Sugar, who you think they’s fighting against—Sponge Bob Square Pants?”

  “Ok, so what does this…” He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t say the word “angel” out loud. “What is it we’re supposed to remember?”

  Theresa looked uncomfortable. “Can’t answer that, neither,” she said,

  No, won’t answer that.

  Theresa picked up the Calico that had taken a fancy to her, set it in her lap and smoothed its mottled fur.

  “It’s about that summer when we were twelve,” Daniel said, his voice soft. “The summer that’s just gone, when we played on that team, you knew us then, didn’t you, Theresa?”

  “I knew the two boys who grew up to be you two. But I don’t know you ‘cause you ain’t the men I ’spected those boys to grow into.”

  Jack decided he didn’t want to know what she meant by that.

  “And this Becca. You knew her, too, right?”

  “You and Daniel moved away from Bradford’s Ridge before school started in 1985. One day you’s there and the next you’s gone. Just like that.” She paused and looked tenderly at Daniel. “After what happened to your little sister, didn’t surprise nobody that your daddy took you and your mama and left.”

  Jack saw Daniel flinch. He seemed to curl into himself, wouldn’t look at Jack or Theresa.

  Theresa turned from Daniel to Jack. “I didn’t know your grandmother’d come and got you ’til you’s already gone.” You could hear the hurt in her voice when she continued softly, “Didn’t neither one of you come over to say goodbye.”