What the Night Knows (16 page)

Inaction began to seem like a loser’s strategy. Maybe this crawlspace guy was a supertuned stealth machine, highly trained in the ancient Asian secrets of silent motion, like a ninja assassin or something. The light-footed bastard might be on the move, closing on his clueless target, yet as hushed as a dandelion puffball drifting on a breeze.

Zach knew a lot about the military strategy that had won many famous battles in numerous wars, but applying military strategy to a one-on-one creep-and-kill in a dark crawlspace quickly turned out to be difficult, maybe even impossible.

To his chagrin, Zach felt his heart beating harder, faster. By the second it became increasingly difficult to maintain the stillness necessary to listen for his adversary. He grew convinced that someone approached him from behind, now from ahead, now from the left, the right. If he remained where he stood, he was essentially dead on his feet, a corpse waiting to happen.

Lightless flashlight and two-pronged fork held in front of him, crouching lower to avoid ceiling-suspended ducts and pipes, he turned and began to inch back the way he’d come. Something brushed the top of his head, but he knew it wasn’t anything alive, and he bumped into a sheet-metal panel on a furnace, which pealed
hollowly like the fake thunder of stage-show sound effects. The flashlight knocked against a wood post. The floor creaked underfoot. The steel tines of the fork stuttered against another metal surface. The harder he tried to be quiet, the noisier he became.

Zach’s heart
boomed
, the loudest noise he made, at least to his own ears, although his breathing wasn’t exactly hushed. He was virtually
snorting
. At the same time that he grew ever more frantic to escape the darkness, he became increasingly mortified by his poor self-control, and he fought against descent into flat-out panic.

Blindly, he felt his way between something and something else, intuitively turned right, into a pitch-black pocket of the maze where not even an LED indicator light relieved the gloom, and the cool air abruptly plunged twenty degrees, maybe thirty, pricking shivers from him. He froze, not as a consequence of the cold air but because he sensed that someone crouched immediately in front of him, that he’d come face-to-face with his unknown adversary. Although he couldn’t see anyone in this blackout, he
knew
a man loomed, a man big and strong and not in the least afraid of him.

No. Get real. Stay cool. Just his imagination running wild. There was nothing in front of him but more darkness, which he could prove easy enough by thrusting fiercely at the void with the fork. The two long tines sank into someone, into a freaking
wall
of meat. No one cried out, no one grunted in pain, and Zach wanted to believe he’d stabbed something inanimate.

That hope was instantly dispelled when a hand, as slick and cold as a dead fish, closed around his wrist,
engulfed
his wrist, as big as the hand that tried to tear his face off in the dream. He couldn’t pull free. He sensed the man seizing the shank of the fork, wrenching the tines out of himself. Zach held desperately to the handle. If he lost control
of the weapon, he’d be stabbed with it—relentlessly stabbed, gouged, torn.

Inches from Zach’s face came a cruel voice speaking in a low hoarse whisper: “
I know you, boy, I know you now.
”

Zach’s cry for help couldn’t press past his lips, but instead fell like a stone into the well of his throat, seeming to block his airway, so he could neither exhale nor inhale.

To Zach’s surprise, the brute knocked him backward, the fork still in his fist, and he fell on his back as the iciness instantly melted from the air. The work lamps brightened, as did the beam from the flashlight still clutched in his left hand, and shadows flew away to farther corners.

Gasping, he sat up, alone in the light, alive and alone, the fork thrust forward defensively in his right hand. The shank of the weapon was bent at a severe angle from the handle, and the two long steel prongs were twined together as if they were ribbons.

23

THE SECOND GREEN GRAPE DROPPED FROM MINNIE’S FINGERS and passed without a sound through the surface of the mirror. Concentric waves lapped outward from the point of impact, but the grape did not bobble to the surface as it would have done in water.

Spooked but also exhilarated, Naomi said, “
Pig fat!
Minnie, we have to show Mom and Daddy, they’ve gotta see this, there’s somewhere else inside the mirror, this is like the biggest big news ever, this is so
huge
.”
Pig fat
was an expression of her own invention, so she wouldn’t always have to rely on her grandmother’s
chestnuts
and
bullcrap
. “It’s not such dumb scum now, is it, huh, is it, when it’s real in front of your face?”

As Naomi started toward the door, Minnie said, “Wait,” in that way she sometimes had that was older than eight.

Returning to the mirror, standing over it, Naomi said, “What?”

“We’ll see.”

In addition to the wavelets made by the grapes, rings of ripples appeared continuously from end to end of the mirror, like raindrops
briefly and gently cratering the surface of a pond. Now that phantom-rain activity declined … ceased. The silver surface became calm.

Minnie plucked a third grape from the sprig, held it between thumb and forefinger, hesitated until Naomi began to fidget with impatience, and at last dropped it. The plump fruit hit the mirror, bounced, raised no ripples, rolled across the hard surface, and came to a stop against the frame.

“What happened?” Naomi demanded.

“Nothing happened.”

“Wow, brilliant, I
see
nothing happened, I’ve got two eyes. Why
didn’t
something happen, where did the magic go?”

“You said show Mom and Daddy, and it doesn’t want them to see.”

“What doesn’t want them to see?”

“It.”

“It what?”

“The it-what in the mirror, which could be just about anything, except I don’t think it’s your lah-dee-dah fairy-tale prince.”

Deciding to let the
lah-dee-dah
pass without a withering retort, Naomi said, “Why doesn’t it want them to see the magic?”

Minnie took a slow step back from the mirror and shook her head. “Because the magic isn’t magic, it’s something else, and it’s really, really bad. If Mom and Daddy see, they’ll take the mirror away from us, and the mirror doesn’t want to be taken away from us.”

“The mirror wants to stay with us? Why?”

“Maybe it wants to eat us,” Minnie said.

“That’s
so
big-baby silly. Mirrors don’t eat people.”

“This one ate grapes.”

“It didn’t eat them. They passed
through
it.”

“They passed through it to where it ate them,” Minnie insisted.

“Not all magic is black magic, Miss Gloomy Bloomers.
Most
magic is about wonder and adventure, new horizons and learning how to fly.”

“This isn’t magic,” Minnie insisted. “This is the kind of weird stuff that’s
real.
”

Stooping, Naomi reached for the grape that had failed to penetrate the glass.

“Don’t touch the mirror,” Minnie warned. “Only the grape. You better listen to me, Naomi.”

Naomi snatched up the grape, popped it into her mouth, then gave the mirror a quick pat.

“Don’t be dumb,” Minnie said.

Chewing the grape, swallowing, Naomi again patted the mirror with her fingertips to prove that she did not possess the fraidy-cat gene that made her sister a superstitious basket case, that she was capable of exploring a scientific phenomenon like this with a clear mind and healthy curiosity.

“You make me crazy,” Minnie said.

Grinning, Naomi patted the mirror a third time, longer than before:
pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat
. “Maybe there’s a shark swimming in there, looking for more grapes to eat, and it’ll come up and bite off my fingers.”

“Something a whole lot worse than any shark,” Minnie declared. “It’ll bite off your head, and
then
what am I gonna tell Mommy and Daddy?”

Instead of patting the mirror again, Naomi pressed her right hand flat against the shiny surface and held it there.

Suddenly her hand went cold, and the mirror spoke or something within the mirror spoke, its voice ragged, wet, ferocious, sharp with hatred: “
I know you now, my ignorant little bitch.
”

The words literally stung Naomi, a volley of hot needles lancing out of the mirror, swiftly sewing through her arm, into her shoulder, up her neck, stitching across her scalp. She cried out, snatched her hand away, and fell backward on the floor.

Minnie scrambled to her—“Your hand, your hand!”—certain there must be fingers missing, torn flesh and bristling bones, but Naomi remained whole: no blood, no burn, not even so much as needle pricks stippling the palm of her hand.

The sting was emotional as well as physical, because Naomi had never before been the recipient or the dispenser of such rage and hatred. She loved the world and the world loved her, and all anger was but a momentary irritation, a fleeting exasperation, one petty vexation or another that evaporated soon after being expressed. Until the voice spoke of her with such fury and contempt, she had not fully comprehended that someone might exist who ardently desired that she should suffer humiliation, great pain, and even death. She didn’t need to infer those ill wishes in the voice of the unknown speaker, for they were implicit in the viciousness with which he had spoken.

She and Minnie sat on the floor, hugging each other, reassuring each other that they were all right, untouched and undaunted, and only gradually did Naomi come to realize that her sister hadn’t heard the voice. The man spoke only to her, through her contact with the mirror, and somehow the
intimacy
of this communication made it worse, creepier, more threatening.

Minnie expressed no doubt that the voice had been real or that it had said to Naomi exactly what she reported that it said. For her part, Naomi no longer questioned that the mirror must be a portal to some kind of hell rather than a door to Narnia, and she was as eager as Minnie to get it out of their room. In the rush of daily life, they were eight and eleven years old, they were as different from each other as
salt from pepper, but in either a pinch or a serious crisis, they were sisters first and last.

Again Naomi wanted to tell their folks, but Minnie said, “It’ll sound like a big steaming bowl of the usual Naomi. Besides, I’ve got my own reason for not running around yelling about ghosts and stuff.”

Naomi was about to take offense, but the second thing Minnie said was more interesting. “What reason?”

“You can’t waterboard it out of me. And you
know
that’s true.”

The mirror had a smooth wooden back, and the girls agreed to lay it flat and slide it along the carpet rather than carry it, in part because it was heavy but also because they could push it with the toes of their shoes, with less need to touch it.

When they got to the storage room, however, they would have to lift it in order to tuck it away behind a bunch of other junk, where no one would notice it. They had no work gloves, but they did have white gloves for special occasions, like church at Easter, and they put those on before proceeding with the task, to avoid accidentally touching bare fingers to the mirror.

Daddy was at work. Mom was in her studio. Mr. and Mrs. Nash were finishing their lunch or cleaning up the kitchen.

Only Zach might step out of his room and see them toeing the mirror along the hallway, but Naomi was confident they could handle Zach with one fib or another. Fibbing wasn’t like telling whoppers that could land you in Hell. Fibbing was lying lite, sort of like the caffeine-free diet cola of lying, so your soul didn’t gain any serious weight of sin from it. They would have to fib, because Zach would never believe that grapes had fallen through a mirror or that something in the mirror had threatened Naomi. Zach liked to keep things real; now and then, when Naomi was particularly enthralled with some fabulous new idea or possibility, when she was compelled to
share every detail of it with everyone, Zach sometimes said, “Let’s keep it real, Naomi, let’s get it earthbound.”

After Minnie opened the door, scoped the hallway, and found it deserted, they slid the mirror out of their room. Using only their feet, they worked it quickly to the east end—the back—of the house. The reflection of the ceiling sliding ahead of them made Naomi a bit dizzy. Minnie said, “Don’t look at it.” But Naomi continued to look, because the more she thought about the voice from the mirror—
I know you now, my ignorant little bitch
—the more she worried that by pressing her hand to the looking glass and defying Minnie’s plea to be cautious, she had
invited
the mirror man to cross over from his side to theirs, that now he might rise out of the silvery glass.

She had thought of herself as a girl absolutely
loaded
with perspicacity; but now it didn’t seem very perspicacious of her to have done what she had done.

The storage room was the smaller of two guest bedrooms. It was three-quarters full of boxes and small items of furniture in rows with passageways between them. The end tables and chairs and chests and lamps, used in a previous house, were out of style in this one, but Mother was reluctant to dispose of them because they were still things that she liked and about which she was nostalgic.

They stood the long mirror on its side. Naomi pulling, Minnie pushing, hands protected by Easter Sunday church gloves, they slid this door-to-a-not-so-magical-kingdom past all the other junk and hid it behind the final row of boxes.

Mission accomplished, they returned to their room, examined their gloves to be sure they weren’t soiled, and put them away.

Professor Sinyavski would arrive in little more than an hour to torture them with math.

“I’m too emotionally wrung out for math,” Naomi declared. “I’m
exhausted
, the strain has just been too severe, my strength has been utterly consumed. I’m
fatigued
, there’s nothing left in me for math.”