The Darkest Evening of the Year

by Dean Koontz

  Later, still enthralled by the art, he was startled to feel blood trickle down his face.

  In no pain, puzzled, Billy raised one hand and felt his cheeks, his brow, seeking the wound, which he could not find. When he looked at his fingertips, they glistened with a clear fluid.

  He recognized this substance. These were tears. In his line of work, he sometimes reduced people to tears.

  Billy had not wept in thirty-one years, since he had read a huge novel of such stunning brilliance that it had drained him of his last measures of sadness and sympathy for his fellow human beings. People were nothing but machines of meat. You couldn’t feel sorry for either machines or meat.

  That same novel had made him guffaw so strenuously, for so long, at the folly and bottomless stupidity of humankind that he had also used up his lifetime allotment of tears of laughter.

  These new tears perplexed Billy.

  They amazed and astonished him.

  They also alarmed him.

  Dread made his palms clammy.

  The nanopowder-coated latex gloves were slimy with sweat, which backed up to the cuffs and leaked out at his wrists, dampening his shirt sleeves.

  If his tears were tears of laughter, a preparatory lubricant for gales of giggles, he might have been able to accept them. But he did not feel any laughter building inside him.

  His contempt for humanity remained so pure that he knew these could not be tears inspired by the richly comic horror of the human condition.

  Only one other possibility occurred to him—that these were tears shed for himself, for the life that he had made for himself.

  His alarm escalated into fear.

  Self-pity implied that you felt wronged, that life had not been fair to you. You could only have an expectation of fairness if the universe operated according to some set of principles, some tao, and was at its heart benign.

  Such an idea was an intellectual whirlpool, a black hole that would suck him in and destroy him if he allowed its fearsome gravity to capture him for another moment.

  Billy knew well the power of ideas. “You are what you eat,” the nutritionists endlessly hector fast-food addicts, and you are also what ideas you have consumed.

  With the thirst of an insatiable swillpot, he had poured down the fiction of two generations of deep thinkers, and he was pickled in their ideas, comfortably pickled. At fifty-one, he was too old to be transformed from a dill into a gherkin; he would have been too old at twenty-five.

  He did not know why the drawings had brought him to tears.

  Heart racing, breathing like a man in panic, he resisted the desire to study them further to ascertain the reason for their extraordinary effect on him.

  With his happiness and his future at stake, Billy at once gathered up the drawings, hurried with them into Brian McCarthy’s study, and fed them through a paper shredder that stood beside the desk.

  Half convinced that they wriggled with life in his hands, he packed the tangled mass of quarter-inch ribbons of paper into a dark-green plastic garbage bag that he found in the kitchen. Later, in Santa Barbara, he would burn the shredded drawings.

  By the time he carried the computer brain, the wastebasket full of e-mail files, and the bag of shredded drawings to the Cadillac, where he stowed them in the trunk, his heart rate had subsided almost to normal, and he had regained control of his breathing.

  Behind the wheel of the car, he stripped off the disgustingly slimy latex gloves and tossed them into the backseat.

  He blotted his hands on his slacks, on his sport coat, on his shirt, and then drove away from McCarthy’s den of perils.

  By the time he found the freeway entrance, the flow of tears had stopped, and his cheeks had begun to dry.

  He suspected that to blot from his mind the entire disturbing incident, the best thing that he could do would be to kill a total stranger selected on a whim.

  Sometimes, however, even a random act of murder had to wait for a more propitious moment. Billy was already late setting out for Santa Barbara, and he had to make up for lost time.

  Chapter

  44

  At Amy’s house, Brian measured kibble and treats into plastic Ziploc bags, more than they would need, enough for three days. He packed them in a tote with a food dish, a water dish, and other dog gear, while Nickie politely and successfully begged for nibbles.

  In her bedroom, Amy selected two days’ worth of clothes—jeans and sweaters—and packed them in a carryall with her SIG P245. She included a fully loaded spare magazine.

  Since moving to California, she had not used the weapon.

  She had no clear reason to suppose that she would need it on this trip. Vanessa was evidently a disturbed, petty, and vindictive woman—even cruel, judging by the evidence of her e-mails—but that did not make her homicidal.

  In fact, she seemed too selfish to do anything that would put her liberty—and therefore her pleasures—at risk. To secure a life of luxury and privilege with the wealthy man who evidently thought more with his little head than with his big one, she had good reason to expedite this transferral of custody without a hitch.

  Besides, although Vanessa might have been a bad mother, might have been resentful of and mean toward her daughter, she had neither abandoned the girl nor strangled her in infancy. Judging by the news these days, more babies than puppies ended up discarded in Dumpsters. A decade spent looking after the girl, no matter how reluctantly, seemed to argue that at least a faint flame of accountability still lit the final chamber in the otherwise dark nautilus of her heart.

  Abandoned in a church at the age of two, with a name pinned to her shirt, Amy could never say for certain who she was or that her birth parents had found her any less repulsive than Vanessa found the girl whom she called Piggy.

  By the age of three, she’d been adopted from Mater Misericordiæ Orphanage by a childless couple, Walter and Darlene Harkinson. She had legally taken their name.

  She retained only vague memories of them because, just a year and a half later, their car had been hit by a cement truck. Walter and Darlene had perished instantly, but Amy had survived unscathed.

  At four and a half, twice traumatized—once by cold rejection, once by loss—Amy had returned to the orphanage, where she lived until shortly after her eighteenth birthday.

  Young Amy Harkinson might have been emotionally fragile and even psychologically damaged for life if not for the wisdom and kindness of the nuns. The nuns alone, however, could not have restored her.

  No less important had been the golden retriever who had come limping toward her across an autumn meadow, filthy and half starved, only a month after her return to Mater Misericordiæ.

  With its charm, the golden earned itself permanent residence as the orphanage dog. And because of its mysterious inclination, it had bonded to Amy above all others and had become no less than a sister to her and the foremost healer of her heart.

  Curiously, what now inspired Amy to include the pistol in her bag was not the e-mail witch who had tormented Brian, but this new golden retriever that, less than a day previously, had come into her life with an air of mystery and with a direct stare that reminded her so powerfully of the dog who, long ago, had given her life meaning and who perhaps had even saved her.

  She had known terror, loss, and chaos, but always she had found at least a fragile peace after terror, hope after loss, and pattern in the wake of chaos. In fact, it was her eye for pattern that made it possible for her to go on living.

  The directness of Nickie’s eyes, Theresa’s beautiful but bruised purple eyes, Brian’s drawings of the dog’s eyes, his grandmother’s vivid wink in the dream, the bright eye of the lighthouse repeatedly flaring into her memory after all these years, blind Marco in the Philippines (real or not), blind Daisy at the side of three-legged Mortimer: Eyes, eyes, open your eyes, the pattern said.

  The only physical danger she had faced recently had been from Carl Brockman and his tire iron, and that threat had passed. Yet she
read the pattern of these eyes as having urgent and dire meaning.

  Among other recent patterns, there were several incidents of strange effects of light and shadow, reminding her that there are both things seen and unseen.

  In the scene as now set, something unseen waited.

  Until her eyes were fully open or until the patterns proved to be benign and her interpretation proved to be misguided, she believed that packing the pistol and the spare magazine in the carryall was only prudent.

  She had told Brian she would bring the gun. He had merely nodded as if to say Why wouldn’t you?

  Likewise, neither of them had questioned the wisdom of bringing Nickie. Of all the patterns in the current web, the one that wove through all the others was dogs, and this dog in particular.

  Although they were using Amy’s Expedition, Brian drove because he’d more recently gotten sleep, even if it had been troubled by a tornado, and because Amy wanted to think without the distraction of traffic.

  They had put down both rows of backseats, allowing Nickie to lie immediately behind them in the now spacious cargo area.

  As Brian pulled away from her bungalow, Amy thought that she glimpsed Theresa’s small pale face at a window in Lottie Augustine’s house.

  She said, “Wait, stop.”

  Brian braked, but when Amy looked back, a curtain fell across the glass, and the face was gone.

  After a hesitation, she said, “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  Block after block, street after street, and up the freeway ramp, she kept checking the side mirror and leaning between the seats to get a better view through the tailgate window.

  “No one’s following us,” he said.

  “But she told you we’d be watched.”

  “They don’t need to watch us now. They know we’re going to Santa Barbara. They can put a tail on us there.”

  Rush hour had long passed. Northbound traffic remained heavy, but it moved fast, the freeway a loom ceaselessly weaving from the warp and woof of speeding vehicles a fabric of red and white light.

  “Do you think, as bitter and troubled as she is, she really could manipulate some very wealthy man into this, and into marriage?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “If he was unfortunate enough for their lives to intersect, Vanessa could turn him off his path and onto hers. It’s not just how she looks. She has an instinct for your weaknesses, for finding the buttons that open the door to your dark side.”

  “You? Even young and stupid, as you described yourself then? I don’t think you have a dark side.”

  “I think most of us do,” he disagreed. “Maybe all of us. And the most important thing we can ever do is keep the door shut to it, keep the door shut and locked tight.”

  Chapter

  45

  Piggy can’t keep them out. They can keep her in, but she can’t keep them out.

  She never knows when the door will open. This is scary.

  Let not your heart be troubled.

  Sometimes she hears footsteps. But sometimes they make no sound, like your shadow makes no sound when it runs down steps behind you, and they come in quick.

  She must never be caught doing the thing she does sometimes, so whenever she is doing the Worst Thing She Can Do, she always listens really hard for the lock squeak.

  She cleans up potato salad, all Mother’s mess. She bags trash. She washes dirty cleaning rags in her bathroom sink.

  Then she goes to the door to listen. Voices. They are far away, maybe as far as the kitchen.

  Mother and the man stay awake all through the dark. They sleep when the sun happens.

  Doing the Worst Thing She Can Do is safer when they sleep. But right now she wants to do it so bad.

  She wishes she had a window she could see out. Sometimes, they live where she can see sky.

  Her windows have wood over them now. Sun comes through some cracks, but she can’t see out.

  If she could see sky, she could wait to do the Worst Thing. Sky makes her feel better.

  Sky is best when the dark comes out. It gets deeper. You can see then, and you think what Bear said.

  She misses Bear. She misses him worse than all the windows there will ever be or never be. She will always miss Bear.

  She will never forget him, never, the way she makes herself forget some things.

  She likes moon. She likes stars. She likes shooting stars you can wish on.

  If she could see a shooting star, she would wish for a window. But first she has to have a window to wish from.

  Bear taught her how star wishing works. Bear knew everything. He wasn’t dumb like her.

  Let not your heart be troubled, Piggy.

  Bear said that a lot.

  And he said All things work out for the best, hard as that is to believe.

  You just have to wait. Wait for a sandwich without a dead bug or live worm or nail in it. You wait and sometimes a good sandwich comes. Wait for a window. Wait.

  The kitchen voices are still kitchen voices, you can’t hear the words from this far. Maybe she is safe.

  The big chair has a cushion. The cushion has a cover. The cover has a zipper.

  Inside the cover, under the cushion, the Forever Shiny Thing is hidden.

  Forever means all the days there are ever going to be, and then that many more. Bear explained it.

  Forever means no start and no finish. Forever means every good thing can happen to you, every good thing you can think of, because there’s time for all of it.

  If there’s time for every good thing you can think of to happen, is there time for every bad thing you can think of to happen?

  She asked Bear her question, and he said no, it doesn’t work that way.

  Piggy herself is forever. Bear said so.

  As soon as she has the Forever Shiny Thing in her hand, Piggy feels better. She feels not alone.

  Alone is better than with Mother and the man.

  But alone is hard.

  Alone is very hard.

  Alone is mostly what she ever remembers. She didn’t know how bad alone was until Bear.

  She had Bear, and then she didn’t, and after there was no more Bear, she knew for the first time how hard alone was.

  She feels close to Bear when she holds the Forever Shiny Thing in her hand. She holds it now very tight.

  Bear gave it to her. A secret. Mother can never know. If Mother finds out, she will get the Big Uglies.

  Right here at the chair, where she can quick shove the Forever Shiny Thing into the cushion cover, Piggy does the Worst Thing She Can Do.

  Maybe she will be caught, so she is scared. Then not scared.

  The Worst Thing always makes her not scared. For a while.

  She has to be careful about time. She is not good about time. Sometimes no time at all seems like a lot. Sometimes a lot of time goes by like nothing.

  If she forgets about time, she will Drift Away, like she does, and then she’ll forget about listening for the lock squeak, too.

  She is quiet for a while but says what is in her heart.

  Always say what is in your heart, Piggy. That’s the best you can do.

  She is done. She feels not so alone as before.

  “Oh, Bear,” she says.

  Now and then Piggy thinks if she says his name out loud, he’ll answer. He never does. She still tries sometimes.

  Bear is dead. But he could still answer.

  Bear is dead but Bear is forever, too.

  He will always be with her. He promised.

  No matter what happens, Piggy, I’ll always be with you.

  Mother killed him. Piggy saw it happen.

  Piggy wanted to be killed, too.

  For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.

  The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret.

  Now, before shoving it inside the cushion cover, Piggy looks at it one more time.

  Silver. Bear said it is
made of silver.

  It is a word, one of just a few words she can read when she sees it. The word hangs on a silver chain. The word is HOPE.

  Chapter

  46

  They drove through an In-N-Out for cheeseburgers, fries, and soft drinks, and they ate on the road, paper napkins tucked in their shirt collars, more napkins layered on their laps.

  Thrusting her head between the seats, licking her chops to take back the drool before it dripped, Nickie suckered Amy into giving her three morsels of hamburger and four fries. She withdrew her head and obediently settled down behind Amy’s seat when firmly told “No more, nada, no.”

  Every road has romance, especially at night, and eating on the fly appeals to the delight in journeying that abides in the human heart. There is an illusion of safety in movement, the half-formed idea that the Fates cannot find us, that they stand on the doorstep of the place from which we recently departed, knocking to deliver a twist or turn that, while on rolling wheels, we will not have to receive.

  This false but welcome dream of safety, coupled with the comfort of delicious unhealthy food, put Amy in a mood that made disclosure more imaginable than it would have been elsewhere.

  When they had eaten and she had stuffed all their napkins and debris into the In-N-Out bag, she said, “I told you about being abandoned at the orphanage, about the adoption and cement truck and the orphanage again…but I never told you about my first dog.”

  After the accident and the return to Mater Misericordiæ, she had been reduced by her experiences to frequent silences that concerned the nuns, to a poverty of smiles though previously she had been rich in them, and to a desire for distance from others.

  One sunny afternoon in October, a month after her return, she had sneaked off alone to the farther end of the play yard from the church, abbey, school, and residence, the buildings that embraced Mater Misericordiæ’s quadrangle. The big play yard was on high land, and from it a meadow sloped gently to the valley where the town rose and the river ran and the highway receded.

  She sat on the mown green grass just where it ended at the brow of the hill, beneath the spreading boughs of immense old oak trees. After a searing Indian summer, the tall grass of the descending meadow had faded to the color of the sunshine that had stolen the green from it.

  The shadows of the oaks began to spill down the slope in early morning, but they seeped uphill once more as noon approached. By this hour, the shadows of other trees at the foot of the meadow steadily inked toward the crest.

  Through the shadows, young Amy saw something golden coming, and then through