Free What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz Page B

feeling. Sometimes the sight of her left him breathless, and sometimes when he was drawing her from memory, his throat grew so tight that he couldn’t swallow, and when at last he did swallow, though it was just spit, he sounded as if he were a pig takingdown an entire apple. Surely only girls—and boys turning into girls—were swept away by their emotions like this.
    He turned the tablet to a clean page, propped it on the slanted drawing board atop his desk, and took his pencils from a drawer. He intended to draw only Laura Leigh Highsmith’s nose. Her nose was a constant challenge to him because of its perfection.
    After Zach sharpened his pencils and arranged them, before he began to commit carbon to paper, from the corner of his eye, he saw something move. He swiveled in his chair and sat watching the door to his closet swing slowly open.
    Although the door had never done this before, no expectation of danger passed through Zach’s mind. He possessed a good imagination, but it didn’t lead him into bogeyman territory, either of the zombie-vampire-werewolf kind or of the guy-in-a-hockey-mask-with-a-chainsaw kind.
    In real life, people who wanted to kill you were one of two varieties, the first being your freaking nutcase true believers who wanted to fly a plane through your window or get their hands on a nuclear weapon to blast you into bone dust. There was nothing you could do about them. They were like earthquakes or tornadoes to an ordinary citizen, so you had to leave them to the marines and not worry about them.
    Then you had your everyday criminals who were motivated by envy or greed, or lust, or a desperate need for drugs. They looked so much like law-abiding citizens that more often than not they jammed the muzzle of a gun inside one of your nostrils and demanded your wallet or your booty before you realized they weren’t the kind who ever said “Have a nice day.”
    Neither an al-Qaeda operative nor a convenience-store-robbing junkie could have found his way into Zach’s bedroom closet.
    When the door drifted to a halt, all the way open, he got up and went to investigate the cause of its movement.
    His walk-in closet was deeper than wide, with clothes hanging and shelved along the two longest walls. The overhead light glowed, though he felt certain that he had switched it off earlier.
    Toward the back of the closet, a pull-ring on a rope dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling, access to the crawlspace between the second and third floors. If you pulled the trap open, a wooden ladder unfolded from the back of it.
    With the ladder down, a draft sometimes blew out of the space above and into the closet, strong enough to move the door if the latch hadn’t been engaged. But now the tightly fitted trap was closed, shutting off the only possible source of a draft.
    They didn’t live in earthquake country, but like nearly every place on the planet, this city stood above at least one inactive fault. Although a minor temblor might be unlikely, it couldn’t be ruled out; however, he hadn’t felt the ground move.
    Maybe the house had been settling. Houses did that. Maybe it slowly settled in such a way that the closet door no longer hung plumb. Then its own weight might pull it open if it wasn’t latched.
    No other explanation presented itself. Case closed.
    He switched off the light and stepped out of the closet.
    Attached to the back of the door was a full-length mirror. Zach solemnly saluted himself, thinking of the day when on very special occasions he would wear dress blues and carry an officer’s Mameluke sword in a scabbard at his side.
    As he closed the door, leaving the mirror to reflect only the dark closet, he listened to the latch click solidly in place. He was then overcome by a vague sense that something about his reflection, as he saluted, had not been right.
    Maybe his salute or his at-attention posture had been sloppy. He had practiced them a lot when he was eleven, less when he was twelve, and