What the Night Knows

What the Night Knows Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: What the Night Knows Read Online Free PDF
Author: Dean Koontz
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Horror
no hint of dementia.
    Celine, the sister, had a face made for mirrors and a smile of suchinnocence that she looked as if she knew nothing of death and everything of eternity. In a swimsuit at the shore, surf breaking around her ankles, she seemed to be a sprite spun from spray and sunlight. John couldn’t bear to look at her.
    A taped outline on the carpet marked the position in which the grandmother’s body was found. In his confession, Billy had described punching her out as she sat in bed watching TV, dragging her to the floor, and waiting for her to revive before killing her face-to-face.
    Staring at the taped outline, John expected to hear desperate sounds of death by strangulation—but he heard instead the silvery tintinnabulation of tiny bells, clear and icy. The tinkling lasted longer than before, perhaps two or even three seconds, and he knew this time the bells were real, not imagined.
    In the subsequent brittle silence, he stepped into the hallway and switched on the ceiling fixture. The beveled-glass bowl speared that space with blue-edged blades of light.
    Directly across from the grandmother’s quarters, the door to the sister’s room stood ajar. Darkness beyond.
    Again, the bells. Two seconds, three.
    He pocketed the extinguished flashlight and drew the pistol from his shoulder rig.

7
    CLEARING A DOORWAY UNDER THREAT WAS ALWAYS THE worst. He pushed through fast, found the switch, pistol in one hand but then in both as light bloomed in a pair of bedside lamps. Left to right, head and gun tracking as one, registering few details of the room, focusing instead on target identification and places where someone might be concealed.
    A closet offered the only possibility. Two sliding mirrored doors. Approaching himself and the black bore of his weapon, gun in one hand again, reaching toward the door, toward his own reaching reflection, sliding his second self aside. He found only hanging clothes, shoes, boxes on a high shelf.
    He still believed the silvery ringing had been real.
    He slid the door shut and looked past his reflection at the room behind him, which seemed to be filled by the deathbed, by the evil of it, the mattress like the altar of an abattoir religion.
    Celine had been sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent and her foot on the mattress, painting her toenails. Listening to musicthrough the earphones of her iPod, she could not have heard the struggle in her grandmother’s room.
    Before throwing open the door and attacking, Billy had stripped out of his clothes and tossed them on the hallway floor. Naked, knife in hand, hot with the thrill of having garroted his grandmother with a tightly twisted red silk scarf, he burst into his sister’s room and overwhelmed her. Pain, shock, and terror robbed her of the ability to resist effectively.
    The mirror image of the bed filled John Calvino with revulsion, and he heard himself breathing through his open mouth to avoid the coppery smell of the blood-soaked mattress batting that had not yet dried and would not for a long time. But the humid air had a coppery taste—or he imagined it did—that offended worse than the smell, and he clenched his teeth, his nostrils flaring.
    Holstering his pistol, he turned to face the abomination, which was immeasurably more terrible than the reflection of it. His disgust was twined now with anger and pity, three threads on a needle sewing this moment into his memory, not only the moment, the scene, but also the raw emotion of it.
    Then he could hear Celine, the Celine of his quasi-clairvoyant imagination: crying out in pain and terror, weeping with the shame of violation, pleading for her life, beseeching God to save her, receiving no mercy from the beast who was her brother, receiving no grace until at last, at last, the final thrust of the knife put an end to her misery.
    Shaking uncontrollably, hands covering his ears without effect, John turned from the hateful bed, returned to the hallway, leaned his back
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