The Darkest Evening of the Year

by Dean Koontz

  hydraulic gurney.

  Only the push of a button was required to lower the stainless-steel bed of the gurney until it was two inches from the floor.

  With little difficulty, Billy and Juliette wrestled the corpse facedown onto the stainless steel.

  She pressed the button again, and the bed rose to its usual height, bearing the cadaver.

  “Excellent,” Billy said.

  They rolled the gurney into the crematorium. Juliette adjusted the height of the bed to match the door on the second cremator, and then the bed telescoped forward, carrying Gunny into the furnace.

  Holding a toilet plunger by its long wooden handle, pressing the rubber suction cup against Gunny’s head, Juliette held the body in the crematorium while the telescoping bed retracted into its original position.

  “That’s damn clever,” Billy said, indicating the plunger.

  Hearing this simple praise, Juliette ducked her head almost shyly. “A technique I developed.”

  As the woman closed the door and fired up the furnace, Billy said, “Gunny makes the best rack of lamb. Sorry if it’s overdone.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be perfect. You want to stay for dinner?”

  “I’d love to, but I can’t. My day isn’t done yet.”

  “You work too hard, Billy.”

  “I’m gonna slow down.”

  “How long have you been saying that?”

  “I mean it this time,” he assured her.

  “All you do is work. You don’t take care of yourself.”

  “I’m having a colonoscopy next week.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “No, I’m good. My internist just recommends it at my age.”

  “Maybe he’s some kind of pervert.”

  “No. He doesn’t do the exam. I go to a specialist for that.”

  “Me, I’ve got high cholesterol.”

  “Have an arterial scan. I did. My cholesterol’s high, too, but they didn’t find any plaque.”

  “It’s all about genes, Billy. If you have good genes, you can eat nothing but fried cheese and doughnuts, live to be a hundred.”

  “You look like good genes to me,” he told her.

  From the funeral home, Billy drove the Shumpeter Cadillac to the hotel where he had previously booked luxurious accommodations in the name of Tyrone Slothrop.

  He left the Cadillac with the valet, presented his Slothrop American Express card to the registration clerk, and got his key. He carried the white trash bag to the elevator and went up to his suite.

  Harrow wanted to see everything in the bag, especially the snapshots from Amy Redwing’s previous life. Until Billy could turn the bag over to Harrow, he needed to keep it safe.

  The suite consisted of an immense overfurnished living room, two large overfurnished bedrooms, and two baths. The bathrooms were glittering wonderments of marble and mirror.

  He didn’t need the extra bedroom and bath. He didn’t need to drive a Hummer, either, but his personal collection of vehicles included three of them. He had time-shares in a private jet, and never traveled in scheduled airlines.

  Billy believed in fun. Fun was the central doctrine of his philosophy. For him, having a giant carbon footprint was essential to having fun.

  One of the businesses Billy had a piece of, through Harrow, was selling carbon offsets. He held binding commitments from three tribes in remote parts of Africa, which required them to plant huge numbers of trees and to continue living without running water, electricity, and oil-powered vehicles. The environmental damage they didn’t do could then be sold to movie stars, rock musicians, and others who were committed to reducing pollution but who were required, by the nature of their professions, to have humongous carbon footprints.

  Billy also sold carbon offsets to himself through an elaborate structure of LLPs, LLCs, and trusts that afforded him tremendous tax advantages. Best of all, he didn’t have to share any of the carbon-offset income with the African tribes because they didn’t exist.

  Two locked suitcases awaited him. He had packed them three days earlier and had sent them to the hotel by FedEx.

  Also awaiting him were arrangements of fresh flowers in every room, silver bowls full of perfect fruit, a box of superb chocolates, a bottle of Dom Perignon in an ice bucket—and on the nightstand in the primary bedroom, a just-released hardcover novel by one of his favorite writers, which the concierge had purchased at his request.

  Billy Pilgrim—now passing as Tyrone Slothrop, a name he had waited literally decades to use—should have been in a fine mood, but he was not.

  The events at the funeral home should have been fun. They had not tickled him at all.

  He wasn’t depressed, but he wasn’t elated, either. Emotionally, he had slipped into neutral.

  He had never been in neutral before. As he sat idling in his luxurious suite, the emptiness inside him—the void where fun had been—made him nervous.

  Since the eerie incident with the drawings in Brian McCarthy’s kitchen, fun had eluded him. He had been moving at his usual fast pace, as always capering gaily—figuratively speaking—along the brink of the abyss, committing crimes as insouciantly as ever; but the magic was gone.

  His life was a novel, a black comedy, a rollicking narrative that mocked all authority, an existential lark. He had just hit a bad chapter, that was all. He needed to turn the page, begin a new scene.

  Maybe the new novel on the nightstand would shift him out of neutral. One of the suitcases contained clothes and personal effects, but the other one was packed with weapons; maybe playing with guns for a while would get him in gear.

  He sat in an armchair in the bedroom, alternately staring at the book and at the suitcase filled with lethal devices.

  He worried that if he tried the book and it didn’t lift him out of his funk, and then if he disassembled and reassembled the weapons with no improvement of mood, he would be at an impasse.

  An impasse was a terrible place to be, a dead end, but in a truly existential life, it should be an impossible place to be. Since only he made the rules by which he lived, he could make new rules if the old ones began to bore him, and off he would go again, zipping along, having fun.

  He was thinking too much, making himself nervous.

  All that mattered were the motion and the act, not any meaning in the motion nor any consequences to the act. No meaning existed; no consequences were important.

  He tried the book. That was his first mistake.

  Chapter

  48

  At a few minutes past two in the morning, Amy woke from a dream full of the sound of wings. Her breath caught in her throat, and for a moment she did not recognize her surroundings.

  An end-table lamp draped with a towel served as a night-light.

  Santa Barbara. The motel. They had found accommodations that accepted dogs, one room that had not been taken for the night.

  Brian had finally gotten her into bed; but it was her own bed, one of two in the room. And a watchdog slept with her.

  As she had shaken off sleep, she had thought that the thrumming of wings was in the room, not in the dream. That could not be true because both Brian in the other bed and Nickie beside her remained asleep.

  She remembered nothing of the dream, only the sound of pinions plying the air. In sleep, she must have returned to Connecticut, and the gulls must have been startled into flight yet again.

  According to psychologists and sleep specialists, you could never see yourself die in a dream. You might be in prolonged high jeopardy, but at the penultimate moment, you would wake. Even in dreams, they claimed, the human ego remained too stubborn to admit to its mortality.

  Amy, however, had seen herself die in dreams. Several times, always in that Connecticut night.

  Perhaps subconsciously she had a death wish. That didn’t surprise her.

  On that winter night almost nine years before, she had fought for her life and survived. Then for a while, ironically, she’d had
no compelling reason to live.

  In the days immediately after, she wondered why she had fought back. Death would have been easier than living. The pain that nearly tore her apart could have been avoided by submitting to the knife.

  Even in her darkest moments, she would never have committed suicide. Murder included self-destruction.

  Her faith got her through, but not faith alone. Her ability to see patterns in chaos, when others saw more chaos, served her well.

  Patterns implied meaning. No matter how inscrutable the meaning might seem, no matter that an understanding of it might forever elude her, she was encouraged by the perception that meaning existed.

  She read the patterns in life the way other people might read tea leaves and palms and crystal balls. But her interpretation wasn’t guided by a code of superstitions.

  Intuition alone determined for her what the patterns meant and what they suggested she should do. To her way of thinking, intuition was a word for perceptions that were received on a level far below the subconscious. Intuition was seeing with the soul.

  Plugged in and charging on the nightstand, her phone rang. She disliked all the musical tones and the cartoon-voice tones and the raucous sounds with which phones “rang” these days. Hers just burred quietly.

  Surprised to get a call at this hour, she snatched up the phone before it could wake Brian, and said softly, “Hello?”

  No one responded.

  Although Brian continued to sleep, Nickie had awakened. She raised her head to watch Amy.

  “Hello?” she repeated.

  “Oh. Is that you, dear? Well, yes, of course it is.”

  The sweet, high-pitched voice was unmistakable. Amy almost said Sister Mouse, caught herself, and said, “Sister Jacinta.”

  “You’ve been in my thoughts so much lately, Amy.”

  Amy hesitated. She thought of the slippers. She felt now as she had felt then, when Nickie insisted she take the slippers. “Sister…You too. You’ve been in my thoughts.”

  Sister Jacinta said, “You’re always in my heart of course, you were one of my very favorites, but lately you’re in my thoughts all the time, all the time, so I thought I better speak to you.”

  Emotion tied a knot in Amy’s vocal cords.

  “Dear? Are you all right with me—I mean, the middle of the night like this?”

  Speaking hardly above a whisper, Amy said, “Just tonight I told Brian, a friend…told Brian about back then, our mascot Nickie.”

  “That wonderful, wonderful dog.”

  “And the locket you gave me.”

  “Which you still wear.”

  “Yes.” With her forefinger, she traced the contours of the canine cameo.

  “This friend, dear, do you love him?”

  “Sister, I’m sorry, but I’m kind of…struggling here.”

  “Well, love is or it isn’t. You must know.”

  Amy merely murmured now. “Yes. I love him.”

  “Have you told him?”

  “Yes. That I love him. Yes.”

  “I meant have you told him all of it?”

  “No. I guess you know. I haven’t yet.”

  “He needs to know.”

  “It’s so hard, Sister.”

  “The truth won’t diminish you in his eyes.”

  She could barely speak. “It diminishes me in my own.”

  “I’m proud you were one of my girls. I say, ‘See her, she was one of my Mother of Mercy girls, see how she shines?’”

  Amy had come to tears again, quiet tears this time. “If only I could believe that was true.”

  “Remember to whom you’re talking, dear. Of course it’s true.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just tell him. He very much needs to know. It is imperative. Now get some sleep, child, get some sleep.”

  Although Amy heard no change in line tone, she sensed that they had been disconnected. “Sister Jacinta?”

  She received no reply.

  “Oh, Sister Mouse, sweet Sister Mouse.”

  She placed the phone on the nightstand.

  She turned on her side, toward Nickie. Face to face, Amy put one arm around the dog. Those eyes.

  Amy shuddered, not because of the call itself, but because the call must mean that something terrible was coming.

  Sister Jacinta, Sister Mouse, had been dead for ten years.

  Chapter

  49

  A writer who had never failed to excite Billy Pilgrim’s contempt for humanity, who had reliably made him laugh uproariously at those cretins who believed in human exceptionalism, had this time failed him utterly and had raised in him not one giggle in forty pages of text.

  Billy twice studied the photograph on the back of the jacket, but the face was familiar. The piercing eyes that challenged you to read the savage truth between these covers. The slight sneer that said If you don’t laugh at this poisonous satire, you’re a self-deluded fool who will never be invited to the best parties.

  The writer had changed publishing houses, but that could not account for the collapse of his standards, the loss of his narrative voice. This publisher had released a number of books that Billy had found enormously appealing. It was a highly credible house.

  No publisher hit home runs all the time or even the majority of the time, but this colophon on the spine had always previously been a mark of quality.

  As Billy stared at the colophon, a chill prickled at the crown of his head and spread outward in concentric shivers, to the limits of his receding hairline and beyond, down his unsmiling face, down the back of his neck, to the base of his spine, to the pit of his gut.

  A stylized sprinting dog served as the colophon. Although not a golden retriever, it was a dog nonetheless.

  He had seen this colophon a thousand times, and it had never unnerved him before. It unnerved him now.

  He was tempted to click on the gas-log fireplace and consign the book to the flames. Instead, he put it in the nightstand and closed the drawer.

  The memory of the tears that he had shed in McCarthy’s kitchen remained vivid, mortifying and frightening. In his line of work, if you started weeping for no reason—or even for a good reason—you were on a slippery slope.

  In the living room, he opened the Dom Perignon and poured the champagne not into one of the handsome flutes but instead into a drinking glass. He selected a miniature bottle of fine cognac from the honor bar, opened it, and spiked the champagne.

  Pacing through the wonderfully cavernous suite, he sucked at his drink, but by the time he had drained the glass, he felt no better.

  Because he would be seeing Harrow in the afternoon and could not afford a hangover, he dared not risk a series of such concoctions.

  The only other solace at hand were the weapons in the second suitcase. They were new purchases, gifts to himself. Other men indulged themselves with golf clubs, but Billy didn’t golf.

  He returned to the bedroom and put the suitcase on the bed. With the smallest key on his chain, he disengaged the locks.

  When he opened the case, the firearm and accessories were there in the left half, as he had packed them.

  In his current mood, he had half expected that the always before reliable FedEx had confused his bag with an identical one belonging to, say, a vacationing Mormon dentist or a Bible salesman, and that the contents would give him no fun at all.

  The right half of the case contained a second gun, but on top lay a sheaf of papers. The first was McCarthy’s pencil drawing of the golden retriever.

  Billy didn’t remember exploding out of the bedroom, but in the living room, the bottle of champagne rattled against the rim of the glass as he poured.

  He needed ten minutes to decide that he had to go back into the bedroom and examine the drawings—which, damn it, he had shredded in McCarthy’s office, bagged, and later tossed into the cremator at the funeral home.

  If the drawings could survive the cremator and show up in his luggage, there was n
o argument against the possibility that Gunny Schloss, shot ten times and consigned to the fire, might be waiting in the bathroom when Billy went in there to piss.

  He approached the open suitcase with caution—and discovered that the sheaf of papers were not torn from McCarthy’s art tablet. They were the pages of a monthly tabloid-format newspaper published for hunters, target shooters, and other gun aficionados. He had packed the publication himself three days previously.

  The reappearance of the drawing had been entirely the work of his imagination. This discovery was an enormous relief. And then it wasn’t. A man with Billy Pilgrim’s responsibilities—and with his associates—could not survive long if he lost his nerve.

  Chapter

  50

  Piggy sits at the desk with magazines. Piggy likes pictures. She cuts them out of magazines.

  She can’t have words.

  Mother says Piggy is too dumb to read words. Reading words is for people with brains in their heads.

  Piggy, poor baby, if you try to learn to read, your fat funny little head will explode.

  Piggy can read hope when she sees it. She can read other words, a few.

  Her head is okay. Maybe it will go bang with one more word. Probably not.

  Mother lies. A lot.

  Mother lives to lie, and she lies to live. Bear said so.

  Piggy, your mom doesn’t just lie to you and everybody else. She also lies to herself.

  This is true. Weird but true.

  Here’s one way Piggy knows it’s true: Being told lies makes you unhappy. Her mother is always unhappy.

  Lying to herself gets your mom through the day. If she ever faced the truth, she’d fall apart.

  Sometimes on a star, sometimes no star, Piggy wishes Mother wouldn’t lie.

  But she doesn’t want her mother to fall apart, either.