What the Night Knows

31

BRENDA SALSETTO WOBURN SAT WITH HER TWELVE-YEAR-OLD son, Lenny, on the living-room sofa, watching TV. Lenny liked being with his mom more than he liked being anywhere else, and with Brenda the feeling was mutual. He was her Down syndrome boy, as sweet and true as anyone she had ever known, wise in his way, always surprising her with his observations, which were as clear and thought-provoking as they were uncomplicated.

Davinia, seventeen, was studying in her room, and Jack, Brenda’s husband, worked in the kitchen, testing a recipe for veggie lasagne that, if it turned out well, would be the next night’s dinner. Jack was a parks-department supervisor, a good man who had become a fan of the Food Network. He discovered that he possessed a previously unrecognized culinary talent.

The family movie on TV featured talking dogs, and Lenny giggled frequently. Brenda should have been relaxed; but she was not. For the past five days, she had been preoccupied with how to respond to something her brother had done and something unspeakable that he might have intended to do.

Brenda feared her younger brother, Reese. She knew that after she left home when she was eighteen, Reese molested their sister, Jean, from the time the timid girl was seven years old until she committed suicide at eleven. Brenda had no proof, only something Jean said to her on the phone a few hours before she hung herself, so long ago. She had more reasons to despise her brother than to fear him, but her fear of him was great.

She tried with some success to minimize their contact over the years. But she knew that if she rejected him outright for any reason or without expressing a reason, her repudiation would be a boil in his mind, festering over weeks or months until bitter resentment darkened into anger, anger into rage, rage into fury, and he would be swept to a violent reaction. He wanted everything that he didn’t have and wanted it with a frightening vehemence, not just material possessions but also admiration and respect, which he believed could be gotten with intimidation and brute force as surely as could money.

A few days earlier, Reese came to visit in the early afternoon of a school holiday, when Jack and Brenda were at work. Only Davinia and Lenny were home. He came with comic books and candy for Lenny, a wristwatch set with diamonds for Davinia. Never before had he been alone with the kids and never had he brought them anything. Davinia knew the wristwatch was an inappropriate gift, too expensive, its very value an improper insinuation. Reese played at being a loving uncle, which he had never been before, and found every excuse to press close to Davinia. He held her hand, his touch lingered over her bare arms, admiringly he smoothed her hair away from her face. Instead of kissing her chastely on the cheek, he kissed the corner of her mouth, and his lips would have brushed across hers if she had not pulled away.

Davinia was a bright but inexperienced girl who dated little and then only boys as innocent as she. Her beauty was enchanting, especially because it was a beauty equally of body, mind, and soul—and because in her humility she didn’t understand the power of her appearance. She was capable of finding joy in small things, in the flight of a bird or a cup of tea, and she had told her parents that she might choose a religious life in one sisterhood or another.

Brenda wondered what horror might have occurred during Reese’s unannounced visit if, shortly after his arrival, Jack’s sister Lois had not stopped by unexpectedly. Davinia was his niece, but that relationship meant nothing to a man who considered his little sister to be fair game and drove her to self-destruction. Brenda had seen him watch Davinia with lascivious interest, but she had been in denial of the possibility that he might act on his desire. Davinia was not as delicate as she looked, not emotionally fragile; but rape might do more than devastate her, might destroy her. Brenda was at times physically ill with the thought of it.

She and Jack were currently deciding whether she should give up her job to be sure the kids were never alone in the house. They had taken other steps to prevent the unthinkable. But Reese was clever, cunning, bold, without moral constraints, and unpredictable.

A slight draft motivated Brenda to get another afghan from a chair across the room. As she passed a window, Reese’s Mercedes pulled in to their driveway. He drove too fast, stopping with a bark of brakes.

At once, Brenda suspected her brother intended to cause some kind of trouble. If he didn’t intend it, he would foment it anyway. She shouted toward the kitchen, “Jack, Reese is here!”

She hurried Lenny to his sister’s room and told them to lock the door. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe Reese had come back only to get the diamond wristwatch that he refused to take when Davinia tried to return it to him.

Reese Salsetto—more accurately, the rider that owns him now—raps lightly on one of the four windowpanes in the back door, and waves at Jack, who is doing women’s work in the kitchen, preparing something for the oven. Wiping his hands on his apron, Jack frowns as he approaches the door, but Reese gives him a sheepish grin and tries to look as if he has come to apologize for something, because Jack and Brenda are the kind of self-righteous prigs who at any one time have a thousand reasons why they should receive apologies.

Jack opens the door and says, “Reese, we’ve got to talk about some things,” and Reese says, “No, we don’t,” and shoots him twice with the silencer-equipped pistol. As if the muffled shots require an equally discreet response, Jack drops as quietly as a sack of laundry, and Reese steps over the body, closing the door behind him. This is the Sollenburgs redux, husband and wife and son shot dead, and then the daughter used in ways that she has never comprehended that she might be used. Although the assault begins on the evening of the thirty-second day after the Lucas murders, Reese and his rider will not be done with Davinia Woburn until well into the morning of October fifth, six or eight hours from now.

Brenda, succulent mother of the much-desired piglet, hurries into the kitchen, and Reese, speaking for himself and for his ventriloquist, says, “When I’m done with her, she’ll hang herself like Jean.” But his taunt comes at an unexpected cost when Brenda raises a .38 revolver in a two-hand grip and pops him three times, the third time in the throat. The mount dies under the rider.

Brenda is a good woman who would have rescued her sister, Jean, if she had known what Reese intended, but her failure to save her sister has left her with a settled anger that has simmered in her for all these years. The bitter anger is the stirrup that might allow her to be mounted, and because she curses Reese as she kills him, the way into her is through the mouth.

She feels the rider enter and struggles fiercely to resist, reeling backward against a bank of cabinets, door pulls gouging at her back and buttocks. The rider encourages her anger, for if anger can be raised to fury, and if fury and terror crowd out all other feelings, she can be taken. Unlike many others who do not fully understand the nature of their rider, this woman knows it, not by name but for what it is. She sees at once the consequences of being taken, that it will ride her to her children and force her to abuse, torture, and murder them, and last of all to degrade herself in as many ways as its rich imagination can invent.

Just as her spine begins to feel like an accommodating saddle, she finds another emotion besides rage and terror, and she recalls the prayer of Saint Michael, which she hasn’t said since adolescence.

This sudden vomitous spew of pious words will not repel her new master, because it now rules her spine and will soon have control of her bones down to the marrow. The rider is moments away from using her voice for a cry of triumph when she turns the revolver on herself and squeezes off a round that punches through her chest, past her heart, ricochets off her sternum, off a clavicle, and lodges under her left scapular. White-hot pain magnifies her terror but entirely evaporates her rage. And as she falls to the floor, in the humble recognition of her mortality, she casts off her rider.

Recklessly, the son and the exquisitely ripe daughter respond to the shots, as though even weaponless they can halt the violence, perhaps with—what?—his guileless tears and with her pure heart. They are naive, helpless, the colt and filly, thinking meat machines that think too little. The rider wants the boy, for with the boy, the juicy piglet can still be reduced to a ferociously used, broken, despairing thing. But the boy is only twelve and, more to the point, he has a condition that renders him the next thing to a perpetual innocent, with no corruptions adequate to serve as grips for a mounting. The weeping girl cannot be saddled, either. The rider can only watch with escalating fury as Davinia directs the boy to call 911 and as she kneels beside the fallen mother, competent in spite of her tears, gently elevating the mother’s head to improve her breathing.

No ride exists here, nothing to be taken but the house itself, its fleshless bones a poor substitute for a living host. A haunt is never a fraction as sweet as a possession, but soon other possible hosts will arrive, and there is no danger that this house will become a prison. Furious, the spirit takes the house with such force that a loud boom passes through the walls, windowpanes rattle, draperies flap on rods, glasses and dishes clink and clatter on the kitchen shelves, and two oven doors fall open like gaping mouths.