Читать книгу What the Night Knows - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 24

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.