What the Night Knows. Dean Koontz

drain pipes, and who the hell knew what. Just the farther side of the trap, you could switch on garlands of work lights, which were used whenever plumbers or electricians needed to go up there to perform periodic maintenance or to make repairs.

      Little more than a month before, a geeky exterminator with bug eyes and a long mustache like insect antennae had climbed into the service mezzanine to search for signs of vermin. Instead of rats, he found a nest of squirrels that entered through a torn vent screen.

      Nothing as innocent as a pack of squirrels had opened the trap and put down the ladder while Zach slept.

      He didn’t lack the courage to search the space above; however, he would have to be the bonehead of all boneheads if he went up there at night with no weapon other than a cool but cumbersome dull-edged sword. He needed a good flashlight, too, because the strings of bare bulbs by which repairmen worked didn’t chase the shadows out of every corner. The following afternoon, after lessons and lunch, he might climb into the service space, have a look, poke around, see what he could see.

      Maybe he would tell his father. They could search the mezzanine together.

      With his left hand, Zach lifted the bottom of the ladder and folded back the lowest of four hinged sections, whereupon a clever automatic mechanism took over and accordioned the whole thing onto the back of the trapdoor, which swung up into place with a thump.

      He stood in the closet for a while, until the pull-ring on the trapdoor rope stopped swinging like a pendulum, and then another minute or two. No one tried to put the ladder down again.

      Exterior doors were kept locked even during the day. Dad said bad guys weren’t like vampires, they didn’t hide from the sun, they were up to no good 24/7, so you never did anything to make their work easier. No one could have sneaked inside and ascended to the mezzanine to hide.

      More likely, the settling of the house that brought the closet door out of plumb was also to blame for this. Because of a slight shift in the structure, the weight of the ladder and gravity could have overpowered the spring-loaded closure, causing the trapdoor to drop open and the ladder to unfold on its own.

      In fact, that must be exactly what had happened. Any other explanation was stupid kid stuff for gutless bed-wetters.

      Before killing the closet light, he studied himself in the full-length mirror. He slept in briefs and a T-shirt. Although not superbuff, he wasn’t by any definition scrawny. Yet he appeared smaller than his image of himself. His legs seemed thin. Pink knees, pale feet. The sword was too big for him, perhaps for any thirteen-year-old. He didn’t look laugh-out-loud, bust-a-gut stupid, but he for sure didn’t look anything like a guy on a recruiting poster, either.

      After turning off the closet light, he braced the door shut with his desk chair, although doing so embarrassed him a little.

      He placed the sword on his bed and slipped beneath the covers, only his head and right arm exposed. His hand lay lightly on the hilt of the Mameluke.

      For a few minutes, he considered the nightstand lamp, but at last he decided that leaving it aglow was what a spineless jellyfish would do, a fully wilted wimp. He had no fear of the dark. Zip, zero, nada. No fear of darkness itself, anyway.

      With the lamp out and the gloom relieved only by the pale-gray rectangles of curtained windows and the clock-radio light, Zach became convinced that, as earlier in the night, something had not been right about his reflection. He assumed that he’d lie awake until morning and that before dawn he would figure out what troubled him, but after a while an avalanche of weariness overcame him. As he was carried down into sleep, he saw himself in the mirror, pale feet and pink knees and too-thin legs, all of that quite true and right even if dismaying. Then he realized that the eyes in his reflection were not gray-blue like his eyes really were, but black instead, as black as soot, as black as sleep.

       Chapter 18

      Barefoot and in a blue robe, sipping Scotch to foil insomnia, John paced the kitchen by the light of the stove hood, brooding about the events of the day. Sooner or later, he would have to share his suspicions with Nicky. But considering the bizarre and fantastic nature of what he would be asking her to believe, he wanted to lay out his case only when it seemed ironclad. They were as close as a husband and wife could be, committed to each other, with full trust in each other, but of course he could not tell her that invisible little creatures from Mars were living in the attic and expect her immediate belief even though she couldn’t see them.

      So much of what happened during this past day could be dismissed as psychological phenomena arising from the profound emotional trauma of the murders that occurred twenty years before. In any homicide investigation or in a court of law, such evidence would be considered hearsay at best, delusional at worst.

      The tiny ringing bells that he heard in the Lucas house could have been an auditory hallucination. Yes, he had found the calla-lily bells in Celine’s room, but no one had been there to ring them. He believed that, sitting at the desk in Billy’s room, he had heard the murderous boy’s cell tone, and he thought he had heard a faint voice say Servus, but without a witness to corroborate these experiences, they could have been auditory hallucinations, as well.

      John knew that he had not imagined the recent call from Billy, and he assumed an investigation of telephone-company records would confirm an incoming call at the time he had received it. But nothing about Billy Lucas was apparently supernatural, nothing that supported the idea tormenting John: the possibility that Alton Turner Blackwood – his spirit or anima, or ghost, or whatever you wanted to call it – must be in the world once more, and must be somehow in the process of restaging the brutal murders he committed twenty years earlier, with the Calvino family as his fourth and final target.

      The peculiar things he had seen were either in his peripheral vision or were arguably insignificant. While passing the print of John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose on the staircase landing in the Lucas residence, he glimpsed – or thought he did – one of the little girls in the painting sprayed with blood, the next time set afire. He had to acknowledge that in his agitated state of mind, he could have imagined those manifestations in the image. And the digital clocks in the Lucas kitchen and in Billy’s room, suddenly flashing high noon or high midnight, were not irrefutable evidence that an entity from outside of time had been present; they were not evidence of anything.

      Nicolette knew what had happened to John’s family and that he killed their murderer on that same night of monstrous evil. He had told her every detail of the event in order that she might understand the psychology – the anguish, the guilt, the quiet paranoia, the dread that lingered – of the man she intended to marry. He withheld from her only one thing, which he would have to reveal when and if he told her why he now feared for their lives.