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.
The kids knew John was an orphan. When asked how he had come to be alone in the world, he didn’t quite lie to them, but implied that he was abandoned in infancy, knew nothing of his folks, and grew up in a church home for boys. He suspected that all three sensed some tragedy untold, but only Naomi now and then raised the subject, for she assumed, as was her nature, that orphanage life must have been marked by sweet melancholy yet also by grand adventure; if her father’s past might be filled with romance in the classic meaning of the word, she yearned to be told about every thrilling episode.
When Minette turned eighteen, John intended to tell all three kids the truth, but he saw no reason to burden children with such a fearsome and disquieting tale. He knew too well what it was like to make one’s way through adolescence in the shadow of primal horror. He intended – and now hoped – that they would grow up without that abomination seeded in their minds.
When he finished the Scotch, he rinsed the glass, left it in the sink, and went to the adjoining dayroom. Here Walter and Imogene Nash took their lunch, made out their shopping lists, and did their planning related to the maintenance of the house.
He sat at the walnut secretary, on which lay their spiral-bound month-by-month planner. He opened the book where it was paperclipped, to a two-page spread for the month of September.
Serial killers, especially obsessive ritualists who selected their targets with some care, like Blackwood, might kill at any time if the opportunity arose, but their major crimes usually occurred at regular intervals. The periodicity was often related to phases of the moon, though no one knew why, not even the sociopaths themselves.
Alton Turner Blackwood had not been strictly guided by the lunar calendar, but he had not been far off that schedule. The number thirty-three had meant something to him: He had murdered each of the families thirty-three days after murdering the previous one.
Billy Lucas massacred his family on the second of September. Counting from there in the day planner, John determined that the next slaughter, if it transpired, would be on the night of October fifth, only hours less than twenty-seven days from now. The third family would die on the seventh of November.
And if his superstitious expectation was fulfilled, the fourth family – he, Nicky, the children – would be scheduled for extermination on the tenth of December.
He was only mildly surprised when he discovered that the last of the four events fell on the night of Zach’s fourteenth birthday. John had been fourteen when his family had been murdered by Blackwood. The synchronicity confirmed the validity of his dread.
After closing the day planner, he phoned the homicide-division personnel office to leave a message, taking a second sick day. He also called Lionel Timmins, his sometime partner, and left a similar voice mail on his cell phone.
The laundry lay at the farther end of the dayroom from the secretary. John found his attention drawn to that closed door.
He remembered Walter Nash warning him about an “ugly stink” in the laundry room. Perhaps a rat crawled in through the dryer exhaust duct and died in the machine.
Or perhaps not.
It’s just curious how the smell came on so suddenly. One minute the laundry room is fine, and a minute later, it reeks.
In his current state of mind, John Calvino sensed a deadly spider spinning somewhere nearby but out of sight. Every detail of his day seemed to be a silken fiber in an elaborate surrounding web. Nothing could be dismissed as insignificant. Each occurrence related to all others in ways visible and invisible, and soon the spiral and the radial filaments would begin to vibrate as the architect of this ominous filigree circled toward the hub, toward the prey it hoped to trap there.
The longer he stared at the laundry-room door, the more gravity it exerted on him. He felt pulled toward it.
Another development or two, which need not have an obvious supernatural quality, which need only be strange and inexplicable, might snap the remaining threads that tethered him to the mooring mast of logic that was essential to any police investigation, and superstition would cast him adrift as surely as a dirigible was pulled aloft by its swollen helium ballonets. He had chosen a law-enforcement career and then the homicide division as a lifework of atonement for being the sole survivor in his family. He had proved to be a formidable detective in part because he possessed a talent for taking a few threads of evidence and from them reasoning his way to a correct picture of the entire tapestry of a crime. He did not know how he could proceed with confidence if ever reason failed him.
Reluctantly, as if the floor beneath him were a high wire and he an inexperienced aerialist certain of a fall, John rose from the walnut secretary and went to the laundry room. He opened the door and crossed the threshold.
The foul, strong, pervasive stench was that of Billy Lucas’s uniquely repulsive urine, unmistakable in its singularity, which Coleman Hanes, the orderly, had attributed to the boy’s regimen of medications. In his mind’s eye, John saw the dark disgusting yellow-brown stream sheeting down the armored glass.
The ceramic-tile floor appeared spotless. No puddle of urine, not even one drop of filth.
Holding his breath, he looked in the washer and dryer. They had not been fouled.
He opened the cabinet doors on either side of the machines. The shelves were dry.
He looked at the surface-mounted, four-faceted ceiling vent from which warm air flowed. No dark fluid dripped from those angled vanes. Anyway, urine could not be in the heating system, for if it were, the stench would not be confined to this one room.
No urine was present, only the sulfurous stink of it.
Backing out of the laundry room, John closed the door. He switched off the dayroom lights and returned to the kitchen, where he drew deep breaths of clean air.
At the sink, he pumped soap from the dispenser and lathered his hands. Although he had touched nothing that required this sanitizing, he rinsed his hands in the hottest water he could tolerate, for as long as he could endure the sting.
The stench in the laundry room undid the effect of the Scotch. His nerves were tightly wound again. In the deep lake of his mind, schools of dark expectations darted in a frenzy that he must quell not merely to sleep but also to be able to keep his family safe.
He clicked off the stove-hood light and in full darkness went to the French door that offered access to the flagstone terrace and the backyard. He raised the pleated shade that provided privacy and stared out at the rain-smeared lights of distant neighborhoods beyond the wooded ravine.
The threat did not wait in the ravine. Although blinded by the night, John knew that nothing lurked anywhere across the unseen lawn, neither under the deodar cedar nor among its needled branches, nor in the playhouse that its limbs embraced. No enemy watched this house either from Willard’s grave or from within the rose arbor.
He recalled the hard and inexplicable thump that had shuddered through his Ford when he had been parked under the main-entrance portico at the state hospital, when he had started the engine to leave.
Hours later, in the garage under this house, after he hung up his raincoat, three knocks and then three more had issued from the shadows and then from within the plastered ceiling. At the time, he attributed the noises to pockets of air vibrating through a copper water line.
Now intuition, as real as the marrow in his bones, told John Calvino that the knocking was instead an unseen visitor finding its way into a house that was strange to it, much as a blind man might be heard exploring new territory with his white cane.
The enemy did not lurk in the night. The enemy was already in the house.
Although he might be deemed a mental case if he made the claim out loud, John knew that when he came home, he had brought something with him.