What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

He could not be sure, but he thought it sounded like Servus .
    John waited another half minute before he terminated the call and returned the phone to the drawer.
    At the door, when he extinguished the bedside lamps with the wall switch, rhythmic strobes of green light drew his attention to the fact that the clock radio, which had been keeping time when he first entered the room, was now flashing 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.…
    When he stepped into the upstairs hallway, where he had left the overhead lights on, a more conventional ringing came from a telephonetoward the back of the house. After a hesitation, John followed the sound, pushed open a door, clicked on a light, and found the former master bedroom, where much of the living-room furniture was now stored. The phone rang and rang.
    He didn’t know what might be happening. He suspected that the worst thing he could do was encourage it, and he switched off the lights, closed the door.
    In the hall, at the head of the stairs, he extinguished the ceiling fixtures—and darkness folded around him like great black wings, the landing window offering no relief.
    His heart beat faster as he fumbled for the flashlight in one of his sport-coat pockets. The LED beam painted coils of light on the walls, made the pattern in the stair runner seem to wriggle with life, and darkled down the polished-mahogany railing.
    Descending past Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose , he was peripherally aware of something new and monstrous about the painting, the Chinese lanterns too bright, their orange color smeared across too much of the canvas, as if one or both of the little girls in white dresses had been set afire, but he refused to look directly.
    The telephones shrilled in the living room, study, and kitchen. The pause between each ring seemed to be shorter than usual, the electronic tones harsher and more urgent.
    He snared his raincoat from the newel post, didn’t pause to put it on. When he threw open the front door, the phones stopped ringing.
    Stepping onto the porch, which lay now in the grip of night, he thought he saw a figure on the padded glider to his left, where Billy Lucas had once sat naked and blood-soaked to wait for the police. But when John swept the glider with the flashlight, it proved to be unoccupied.
    He locked the house, slipped into his raincoat, found his car keys, and hurried into the rain, forgetting to put up his hood. On his head and hands, the downpour felt as cold as ice water.
    In the car, as the engine turned over, he heard himself say, “It’s begun,” which must have been an expression of a subconscious certainty, for he had not meant to speak.
    No. Not certainty. Superstition. Nothing had begun. What he feared would not come to pass. It could not. It was impossible.
    He reversed out of the Lucas driveway, into the street, fence pickets flaring bright and shadows leaping.
    The wipers swept cascades off the windshield, and the rain seemed foul, contaminated.
    In the fullness of the night, John Calvino drove home to his family.

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
I am Alton Turner Blackwood, and I remember.…
The south tower was chiseled stairs and stone walls spiraling up four stories to one round room, fourteen feet in diameter. Four pairs of leaded windows, beveled glass, crank handles to open. A truss-and-beam ceiling. From one of the beams, she hanged herself .
The family’s fortune started from railroads. Maybe it was honest money then. Terrence James Turner Blackwood—Teejay to his closest associates, who were not the same thing as friends—inherited the whole estate. He was only twenty-one, as ambitious as a dung beetle. He grew it bigger by publishing magazines, producing silent films, developing land, buying politicians .
Teejay worshipped one thing. He didn’t worship money, for the same reason a desert dweller doesn’t worship sand. He worshipped beauty .
Teejay built the castle in 1924 when he was twenty-four. He called it a castle, but it