not a moth,” Minnie said. “Don’t look at it anymore.”
“What do you mean it’s not a moth? It was like a wing shadow – swoosh! – I saw it clearly this time, it must be a moth.”
“Don’t look at it anymore,” Minnie insisted. She went into the closet and began selecting a change of clothes for herself. “Get what you’ll wear tomorrow, put everything on your desk.”
“Why? What’re you doing?”
“Hurry!”
Although Minnie was a fraidy-cat with some empty space waiting to be filled in her eight-year-old skull, Naomi suddenly had the creepy feeling that her sister’s advice might be worth heeding. She stepped into the closet and quickly put together an outfit for the next day.
“Don’t look at the mirror,” Minnie reminded her.
“I will if I want,” Naomi said, because she was the older of the two and would not allow herself to be bossed around by a sister so young that she could twist spaghetti onto a fork only if she guided it with her fingers. But Naomi did not even glance at the mirror.
After they put the next day’s clothes on their desks, Minnie carried the chair from the play table to the closet. She closed the closet door and braced it shut by tipping the chair backward and wedging its headrail under the doorknob.
“I have to put all these hats away,” Naomi said.
“Not tonight.”
“But we have to go in the closet sometime.”
“After we figure what to do with the mirror,” Minnie said.
“What do you want to do with the mirror?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“We need to have a mirror.”
“We don’t need that one,” Minnie declared.
In their third-floor suite, she shifted his gears as she had promised, but he shifted hers as well. Their lovemaking didn’t have the character of a race toward pleasure but was instead an easy and familiar journey, full of affection and tenderness, fueled less by need than by devotion, and the final stretch a long sweet coast to the finish and the flag thrown down, and joy.
Until he met Nicolette, John had been incapable of a sexual relationship or at least incapable of pursuing one. The killing of everyone in his family by Alton Blackwood, rapist and murderer, had knotted sex and violence in young John’s mind, so that it seemed to him that all desire was savage lust, that the gentlest longing for connection and release was in fact a sublimation of the urge to destroy. Blackwood’s sexual satisfaction had been a prelude to murder; and for years John felt that his own ecstasy would be an affront to the memory of his mother and his sisters, that a climax reduced him to brotherhood with their killer. His ecstasy would inevitably remind him of their humiliation and agony, and he could no more find pleasure in climax than in stabbing or shooting himself as they had been stabbed or shot.
If Nicolette had not come along, John might have traded his police uniform for a monk’s habit long before he achieved the rank of detective. She restored to him the understanding that desire is corrupt only if the soul is corrupt, that the body and the soul can both be elevated by giving pleasure in a spirit of love, and that an act of procreation is in its essence always a grace.
After the events of the afternoon, he expected to pass the night awake and restless, but in the shared warmth of the sheets, lying on his back, her hand still in his, he listened to her breathing change as she found sleep, and soon he, too, slept.
In the dream, he visited the city morgue as he had visited it many times in real life, though now the corridors and rooms lay in an eerie blue half-light, and he was – or so it appeared – the only living person in this ceramic-tiled, air-conditioned catacomb. The offices and file rooms and hallways were hushed, his footsteps as soundless as they would have been in a vacuum. He entered a chamber where the walls were lined with the gleaming faces of steel drawers, refrigerated body drawers in which the recently deceased awaited identification and autopsy. He thought that he belonged here, that he had come home, that one of the drawers would roll open, chilled and empty, and that he would feel compelled to climb into it and let Death kiss away the last breath in his lungs. Now the stillness relented to a single sound: the solid hammer strike of his heartbeat.
Retreating to the door by which he’d entered, he discovered that it no longer existed. Turning in a circle, he saw no other exit, but in the center of the room stood something that had not been there before: a slanted autopsy table with blood gutters and reservoirs. On the table lay a corpse under a sheet, a corpse with motivation and intention. A hand appeared from out of the white shroud, and by its great size, by its long spatulate fingers, by its knobby wrist as graceless as the gears of a nineteenth-century machine, the identity of the cadaver was revealed. Alton Turner Blackwood pulled the sheet off himself and cast it to the floor. He sat up and then descended from the table, standing fully six feet five, lean and bony yet powerful, his malformed bat-wing shoulder blades straining at the yoke of his shirt, subtly insectile, as if they were features of a bug’s exoskeleton. John’s heart beat harder than before, harder than fast, a stone pestle pounding a stone mortar, steadily hammering his courage into dust.
Blackwood wore what he had worn on the night he invaded the Calvino house: black steel-toed boots similar to ice-climbing boots with the sole crampons removed, khaki pants with four front pockets, and a khaki shirt. He lacked the wounds that had killed him, and appeared in the condition that John had first encountered him on that night.
His face was not so deformed as to be freakish, but he suffered from the degree of ugliness that, in most people, evoked pity but without tenderness. On the heels of pity, discomfort arose at the thought of inadvertently offending by staring or by an ill-considered word, followed by a distaste that compelled people to turn guiltily away, an antipathy that was intuitive rather than considered.
Snarls of greasy dark hair lay close to his scalp, his eyebrows bristled, but his face appeared beardless. His skin was pale where it wasn’t pink, as smooth as the flesh of a baby doll yet unhealthy and not at all an asset, seemingly without pores and therefore unnatural. The proportions of Blackwood’s long face were wrong in ways John could not fully define, beginning with a slab of brow that beetled over deep-set eyes. His hatchet nose, elongated ears reminiscent of the goatish ears of a satyr, jawbones as flat and hard as chisel blades, too-thin upper lip and too-thick lower one, sharpened his countenance to a spade of a chin that he raised in the haughty manner of Mussolini, as if at any moment he might chop at you with his face.
His eyes were so black that no differentiation existed between pupils and irises. Sometimes it seemed that only the whites of his eyes glistened and had substance, that the black must not be color but instead absence, holes in the eyes that led back into the cold and lightless hell of his mind.
Blackwood took three steps away from the autopsy table, and John retreated three steps, until he backed into a wall of body drawers. The killer’s yellow-toothed grin, a wolfish sneer, seemed to be the prelude to a bite.
He spoke, his deep raspy voice transforming ordinary words into obscenities: “Your wife is sweet, your children sweeter. I want my candy.”
Around the room, the big drawers flew open, and the dead came forth, legions in the service of Alton Blackwood, who reached for John’s face as if to tear it off—
He woke, sat up, stood up, damp with sweat, his heart knocking hard enough to shake him. He felt certain that the house had been violated.
Two indicator lights shone on the security keypad – one yellow, one red. The first meant that the system was functioning, the second that the perimeter alarm – but not the interior motion detectors – was engaged. No one could have entered without triggering the alarm.
His