Dean Koontz: What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun)

All was quiet and dark when, at nine forty-five, Howie dressed and went silently downstairs. He damped the beam of his flashlight by pressing two fingers over the lens. The house smelled of furniture polish, faintly of lemon-scented air freshener, and here and there even more faintly of potpourri that his mom made herself from flowers she grew and from kitchen spices. Mr. Blackwood would like the quiet, good-smelling house if he agreed to come visit and look at the apartment. If he could wait until Saturday, when Mom was off work, maybe he could have dinner with them. Howie’s mother was a great cook, and being a dinner guest in the main house now and then was another advantage of renting the apartment.

Howie left the house by the back door, locked it behind him, and stuffed the key in a pocket of his jeans. He switched off the Eveready because the full moon frosted everything.

He walked rapidly toward St. Anthony’s graveyard, but he didn’t run. Running could get you killed because it fanned the flames. He wasn’t on fire, of course; but for a long time he had not been able to run also because of the skin grafts, which were delicate. Scars were tougher tissue than ordinary skin, and here and there, where scars and skin met, sudden extreme stretching, like what occurred when you ran flat-out, could cause dermal cracking and maybe a deadly infection.

Mr. Blackwood said he would probably sleep until nine o’clock. Howie didn’t want to risk waking him, so it was a few minutes before ten when, in the alley behind the old Boswell building, he knocked on the door through which Ron Bleeker had earlier attacked him. The first thing Howie would do was apologize for not being able to wait until breakfast. He was usually very patient. Having to recover from serious burns taught you patience. But if Mr. Blackwood had dreamed a decision about the apartment, Howie just had to know. If the big man stayed in town for a couple months, above their garage, it would be the second biggest thing that had ever happened in Howie’s life, and certainly the best.

Mr. Blackwood didn’t respond to the knock, so Howie rapped his knuckles harder against the door and said, “It’s me, sir, it’s Howie Dugley.”

Maybe Mr. Blackwood was sleeping deeply. Maybe he had gone out for a walk or for a late dinner from some take-out place.

Howie tried the door. It was locked.

He walked back and forth in the moon-washed alleyway, trying to decide what he should do next. Going into the building without an invitation from Mr. Blackwood didn’t seem right. On the other hand, it wasn’t Mr. Blackwood’s building, even if he was camping out there. Besides, that morning, Howie entered without an invitation and encountered his new friend on the roof; and that had gone well. Mr. Blackwood had been glad to see him.

The corroded piano hinge protested, but the basement window pushed inward, and Howie slid feetfirst into that darkness. He switched on the Eveready and made his way toward the stairs, calling out as he went, “Hello? Mr. Blackwood? Are you here? Hello? It’s me, it’s Howie.”

When he reached the ground floor, the large room with all its columns felt bigger at night than in the daytime, immense, vast, as though the darkness stretched on for miles in every direction. Even with the light of the full moon, the dust-covered high windows were barely visible, and looking up at their pale panes, Howie felt as if he were in a dungeon.

His small flashlight didn’t penetrate far into the pitch-black realm of the former department store. In fact it was less effective than usual because its batteries had lost some of their charge, which he had been too excited to notice until now. The beam was less white than yellow, no longer crisp but fuzzy.

“Mr. Blackwood? I’m sorry to bother you. It’s me, Howie.”

His voice wasn’t right, so changed that it almost might have been the voice of another boy. It seemed smaller now than earlier, thinner, and it echoed off the distant walls differently from the way that it sounded in this same space before.

Because Mr. Blackwood had said he kept his gear near the back door, Howie moved in that direction. He no longer called out to his friend because the smallness of his voice made him uneasy.

He found the gear a few steps to the right of the back door. A sleeping bag rolled tight and secured with straps. A backpack with the top-pocket flap unzipped and standing open. Two fat, half-melted candles were fixed to the floor in puddles of hardened yellow wax.

Beside the candles were the photographs that Howie had brought from home earlier in the day. The photo of the house and the one of the garage shaded by the ancient beech tree had each been torn into four pieces.

Only the picture of Howie’s mother and sister remained intact, and it lay next to the extinguished candles, as if Mr. Blackwood had been studying it in the flickering light. Howie picked it up. He slipped it into a hip pocket of his jeans.

He wasn’t a snoop. He respected other people’s privacy, but he couldn’t help noticing that the top pocket of the backpack, from which the flap was peeled back, contained packets of photographs held together with rubber bands. They were those thick, white-bordered snapshots taken with an old Polaroid.

In a half-trance similar to the one that had overcome him when he had stepped through the nearby door into the alley, leaving Ron Bleeker to learn the new rules from Mr. Blackwood, Howie reached for one of the groups of photos. Strangely, the hand with which he picked up a packet of Polaroids did not look like his hand: It seemed thin, insubstantial, like the ectoplasmic hand of a ghost in one of those stories about séances that Mrs. Norris, their tenant, had liked to tell. Howie felt as if maybe he were dead already and just didn’t know it, the way that haunting spirits sometimes didn’t realize they were ghosts.

He stripped the rubber band from the Polaroids. In the jiggling beam of the flashlight, he saw that the top picture was of a pretty girl with blond hair and green eyes. She looked very unhappy. No. Not unhappy. She looked frightened.

The second photo was the same girl wearing scary makeup for Halloween. Her face was supposed to look as if it had been slashed several times, and the makeup was convincing.

In the third picture, a pretty girl with brown hair looked scared, too. The fourth shot was of the same girl stripped naked and lying on her back. Things had been done to her body that were not makeup.

The loose photos slithered through Howie’s fingers and spilled across the backpack. The flashlight shook loose of his hand and struck the floor with a hard, cold sound.

An instant later, he thought he heard something elsewhere on the ground floor, off in the gloom, a metallic sound, perhaps the steel toe of a boot scraping across a floor tile.

Heart knocking hard against his breastbone, breath caught in his throat, Howie snatched up the flashlight and backed away from where he thought the sound might have arisen. But sound was tricky in such a big dark space, and after he took a few steps, he thought maybe he had misjudged the source. He changed direction—and within a few steps, he bumped into something, someone, spun around. With the flashlight, he found Ron Bleeker’s body suspended from a huge knife that pierced his throat and pinned him to the wall, his chin held high by the handle. Something had been jammed into his mouth, something big enough to make his cheeks bulge grotesquely. Duct tape pressed his lips shut. His eyes were open wide, he still had his eyes, but his ears were missing.

In memory, Howie heard his voice and then Mr. Blackwood’s:

You had surgeries?

Nope. Don’t want any, either. I’ve got a thing about knives .

You’re scared of being cut on?