The Darkest Evening of the Year

by Dean Koontz

  Maybe Mother sometimes feels she will fall apart, so she tears a doll apart instead. Something to think about.

  Here’s another way Piggy knows Mother lies to herself: She thinks nothing bad can happen to her.

  Something bad already happened to her. Piggy doesn’t know what bad thing happened to her mother, but you can tell it happened. You can tell.

  Bear knew Mother always lies. But Mother lied to Bear, and Bear believed some of her lies.

  Weird but true.

  Mother and Bear were together to Make Some Money. Everyone needs to Make Some Money.

  Piggy and her mother are always going new places, meeting new friends. All friends, everywhere, talk how to Make Some Money.

  Usually they talk guns when they talk money. You Make Some Money with guns.

  Piggy does not like guns. She will never Make Some Money.

  So Bear wanted to Make Some Money, but he was different. Bear saw Piggy. Mostly they see Piggy but don’t really see her.

  Bear was a mess, but he wasn’t as big a mess as Mother.

  Piggy, I’m a mess, I’m weak and I’m foolish, but I’m not as big a mess as your mother.

  She didn’t like Bear saying bad things about himself. Because she knew Bear didn’t lie to her.

  Mother promised Bear when they had money, then she would give Piggy to child-welfare people.

  Piggy doesn’t know who child-welfare people are. Bear made them sound nice. He made them sound not like the usual friends with guns.

  After they had money, Mother broke her promise. No child-welfare people for Piggy.

  Bear and Mother are laughing, and Mother sits on his lap.

  This was back on the day it happened.

  Mother sits on Bear’s lap, laughing, and takes the big knife out from between sofa cushions, where it never was before.

  Piggy remembers like it’s right now, like it’s not back then.

  Mother makes the knife go all the way through Bear’s neck, front to back.

  Then everything gets very bad, worse than anything ever.

  Let not your heart be troubled.

  Let not your heart be troubled.

  Mother says she didn’t kill him to take his money. She says she killed him because he was Piggy’s friend.

  Mother says, My friends are mine, you fat-faced little freak. My friends aren’t yours. What’s mine is mine. You’re mine, Piggy Pig. You belong to me, Piggy Pig. Nobody takes what’s mine. He’s dead because of you.

  This would make Piggy sad forever if it was true Bear was dead because of her.

  Here’s one way Piggy knows it isn’t true: Mother always lies.

  Let not your heart be troubled.

  Here’s another way Piggy knows it isn’t true: Dying, Bear looks at her, and his eyes aren’t afraid or angry.

  His eyes just say Sorry, Piggy.

  And his eyes say It’s okay, girl, you keep on keepin’ on.

  Piggy can read eyes. She can’t read words, but she reads eyes real good.

  Sometimes when she reads her mother’s eyes, Piggy feels her head might go bang.

  The lock squeaks.

  Piggy doesn’t hide the magazine. She keeps scissoring pictures. She is allowed to cut pictures.

  The magazines are Mother’s, but old ones she doesn’t want.

  Piggy is allowed to cut lots of pictures and paste them together to make bigger pictures. Mother calls the bigger pictures some name Piggy will never read and can’t remember.

  Piggy doesn’t call them any name. She just sees how some pretty things can be put with other pretty things in ways so all the things are even more pretty because of how they’re put together.

  The most pretty things Piggy makes, her mother burns. They go outside, and Mother burns the best put-together pictures.

  This is one of not many things you can say for sure makes her mother happy.

  Here’s another way Piggy knows Mother lies even to herself: She thinks she is always happy.

  The lock squeaks. The door opens. Mother comes in.

  The man stays in the doorway, leaning there, arms crossed.

  Mother and the man have been drinking. You can tell.

  Mother sits on the desk. “What’re you doing, baby?”

  “Makin’ stuff.”

  “My little artist.”

  “Just pictures.”

  Mother has a knife.

  Not the Bear knife, but like the Bear knife.

  She puts it on the desk.

  Piggy thinks maybe she forgot to zip the chair-cushion cover after she put away the Forever Shiny Thing.

  If Mother sees an open chair-cushion cover and finds HOPE on a silver chain, then here come the Big Uglies.

  Piggy glances at the chair. Cover is zipped.

  “Big day coming, Piggy.”

  Cover is zipped, so just keep working the scissors.

  “Your daddy is coming to get you, baby.”

  Piggy makes a mistake. She cuts off a pretty lady’s head. So she pretends she only wants a head, and she cuts the head out very carefully.

  “I’ve told you about your daddy, how you made him sick to his stomach, your stupid fat face embarrassed him, so he dumped you on me and split.”

  “Sure,” Piggy says, but just to say something.

  “Well, he’s got religion all of a sudden, wants to do the right thing, so he’s coming to take you home with him, where the two of you will live happily ever after.”

  This is bad. This is as bad as bad can be.

  Maybe it is a lie her father is coming.

  If it’s a lie, why say it? Only to make Piggy hope and then, no, it doesn’t happen, but some really really bad thing happens instead.

  And if her father really is coming, they won’t go and be happy ever after. No way.

  What’s mine is mine. You’re mine, Piggy Pig. You belong to me, Piggy Pig. Nobody takes what’s mine.

  Her nice Bear dead and all the blood and her mother whispering You’re mine, Piggy Pig.

  And here on the desk is a knife like the Bear knife.

  If Piggy’s father comes, Mother will kill him.

  She wants Piggy to know what will happen. That’s why the knife on the desk. So Piggy will know.

  Mother wants Piggy to know there is a chance of getting away but, no, not a chance after all, because nobody takes what belongs to Mother. She wants Piggy to have hope, then steals it from her.

  But Mother doesn’t know, whatever happens, Piggy has HOPE Bear gave her on a silver chain.

  “My guy here, Piggy, he wonders why I ever had you in the first place, a little mutant like you.”

  She means the man standing in the doorway. Piggy is afraid of this man more than others who were before him. He makes Mother worse. Mother is much worse since him.

  “There was this big rich guy, he built homes, name was Hisscus. He couldn’t make babies, he had bad seed.”

  Piggy looks her mother in the eyes. She reads Mother’s eyes, and in there with all the scary, Piggy sees some truth.

  So she can’t look at Mother’s eyes anymore, Piggy works the scissors on another picture.

  While she cuts, she listens close, not understanding half, but when Mother tells truth, it’s a big thing because she never does.

  “Hisscus, he wasn’t married, but he wanted a baby in the worst way. Didn’t want it officially. Wanted an unofficial baby.”

  From the corner of her eye, Piggy sees Mother glance toward the man in the doorway.

  “Hisscus knew this doctor who was like him, would deliver the baby at home, no birth certificate, no record.”

  Mother laughs at something the man in the doorway does.

  Piggy keeps her head down.

  “So I had your daddy knock me up,” Mother tells Piggy.

  This doesn’t mean anything to Piggy. She listens closer.

  “Didn’t have an ultrasound scan to determine sex or anything.”

  The closer Piggy listens, the less sense Mother makes
.

  “If I gave him a girl, Hisscus would keep it. If I gave him a boy, he knew people who wanted the same kind of candy he did, but who liked the opposite flavor, so he could trade it to them for a girl.”

  In the doorway, the man whistles very soft and low. He says, “What’s colder than dry ice?”

  “Me, baby,” Mother tells him.

  Neither of them is making any sense. Ice is wet.

  “Hisscus had this second house, cool place, up the coast. I was going to live there, get a big fat paycheck every month, whatever I wanted. When the maid came in to clean, she wouldn’t know about the secret cellar.”

  Piggy doesn’t understand what her mother is telling her, but she knows for sure, without knowing how she knows, that whatever she does right now, she must not look in Mother’s eyes, because what’s in them now is scarier than anything before.

  “Then, Piggy, you pop out of me, stupid fat-faced little Piggy Pig, and the whole deal falls apart. He doesn’t want a little Piggy Pig in his secret cellar, not even if he’s got me, because I wasn’t what he wanted most to begin with.”

  “Blackmail?” says the man in the doorway.

  “That’s why I kept the little bitch,” Mother says. “I tried to play that angle. But I didn’t have proof. He’d been totally clever. He tried paying me off with chump change, and I took it, but I kept pushing for a year—and then it turned out he knew how to push back hard.”

  “After that, why didn’t she end up in a Dumpster?”

  “By then,” Mother says, “I thought old Piggy Pig owed me big-time, and I like to be paid what I’m owed.”

  Mother picks up the knife.

  “Piggy’s been paying me good interest, but it’s about time I get my principal back.”

  Mother gets up from the desk.

  “Piggy, my guy and me just had a bonding moment.” To the man, she says, “Now you know it all, you think I’m too nasty for you?”

  “Never,” he says.

  “So are you nasty enough for me?”

  “I can try to be,” he says.

  She laughs again. Mother has a nice laugh.

  Sometimes, no matter what happens, Mother’s laugh makes you want to smile. Not now.

  They leave and lock the door.

  Piggy alone.

  She doesn’t know what any of it meant. But whatever it meant, it didn’t mean anything good.

  She puts down the scissors.

  She says, “Hey, Bear,” but though Bear will always be with her, he does not answer.

  Mother and the man talking, voices fading. They are going away awhile to do something, she doesn’t know what, but she can tell.

  When Mother comes back, she will have the knife. The knife is going to be with her from now on. Until she uses it.

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

  That’s what Bear said. And Bear knew things. Bear wasn’t dumb like Piggy. But Bear is dead.

  PART THREE

  “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.”

  —ROBERT FROST

  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  Chapter

  51

  The first one out of bed, at a quarter to six, Amy showered and dressed. She fed Nickie and took her for a walk while Brian prepared for the day.

  The sun hadn’t appeared with the dawn. Gray clouds smeared the sky. They looked greasy.

  In the oceanside park, the immense old palm trees barely stirred in a breeze as languid as the ocean off which it came. As if wounded, colorless waves crawled to shore and expired on sand ribboned with rotting seaweed.

  When you believe life has meaning and can glimpse patterns that seem to suggest design, you risk seeking signs instead of waiting to receive them as a grace. Omens seem to be scattered as extravagantly as litter in the wake of a wind storm, and in the rain of reckless imagination, portents spring up in mushroom clusters.

  After the telephone call from Sister Jacinta, Amy did not trust herself, for the time being, to recognize the difference between a true pattern and a fancy, between a significance and an iffiness. The coincidence of Nickie’s name, her behavior, the business with the slippers, Theresa’s reference to wind and chimes—all of that had been peculiar, suggestive, but not clearly evidence of otherworldly forces at work. A phone call from a dead nun, however, qualified as a higher order of the fantastic, and you tended thereafter to see portentous messages in every face that Nature turned toward you.

  Movement drew her eye to a rat that scurried up the bole of a great phoenix palm and disappeared into the fringe of folded dead fronds beneath the green crown.

  A rat was a symbol of filth, decay, death.

  Here, on the sidewalk, a large black beetle lay on its back, legs stiff, and swarming ants fed on the leakage from it.

  And here, beside a trash can with a gated top so loose that it creaked even in the sea’s faint exhalation, lay an empty bottle of hot sauce with a skull and crossbones on the label.

  On the other hand, three white doves arrowed across the sky, and seven pennies were arranged on the rim of a drinking fountain, and on a bench lay a discarded paperback titled Your Bright Future.

  She decided to let Nickie’s instincts guide her. The dog sniffed everything, fixated on nothing, and exhibited no suspicion. By the golden’s example, Amy found her way to a less fevered interpretation of every shape and shadow, and then to a disinterest in signs.

  In fact, skepticism crept over her, and she began to question whether the conversation with Sister Jacinta had actually occurred. She could have dreamed it.

  She thought she had awakened from a nightmare of wings moments before the phone rang, but maybe she only moved from a dream of Connecticut to a dream of a dialogue with a ghost.

  After the call, she had faced Nickie, put her arm around the dog, and had gone to sleep again. They had awakened together in that cuddle. If the call only happened in a dream, she had merely turned to Nickie in her sleep.

  By the time Amy returned to the motel room, she had decided not to tell Brian about Sister Mouse. At least not yet. Maybe when they were on the road.

  Before he had gone to bed the previous night, Brian had sent an e-mail to Vanessa. While Amy had been walking Nickie, Vanessa sent a reply.

  She gave the address of a restaurant in Monterey at which she wanted Amy and Brian to have lunch.

  They grabbed breakfast at a fast-food joint and ate on the move again, northbound on Highway 101. They should be in Monterey by noon.

  For the first three hours, Brian drove. He said little, and most of the time he stared at the road ahead with a grim expression.

  Although he was eager to gain custody of his daughter, he must be worried about the condition in which he would find her and about how much she might hold him responsible for her suffering.

  Amy tried more than once to lure him out of the glum currents of his thoughts, but he rose to the conversation only briefly each time, and then swam down again into brooding silence.

  Forced by his introspection into some self-analysis of her own, she admitted to herself that skepticism had not been the real reason she hesitated to tell Brian about the telephone call from Sister Jacinta. Her dismissal of the visitation as just a dream had been insincere.

  The truth was that relating the content of her conversation with the nun would require her to tell Brian the rest of the story she had been too exhausted and too emotionally drained—too gnawed by guilt—to finish the previous night. She had broken off that narrative with the death of Nickie at Mater Misericordiæ she tried to summon the courage to tell the rest of it.

  After they parked in a lay-by to stretch their legs and to give Nickie a potty break, Amy drove the last two hours to Monterey. She had to keep her eyes on the road now. She had reason not to look at him directly while she talked, and this gave her co
nfidence to return to the past.

  Nevertheless, she could still only approach the monstrous event obliquely, and in steps. She began with the lighthouse.

  “Did I ever tell you, I lived in a lighthouse for a few years?”

  “Wonderful architecture in most lighthouses,” he said. “I would have remembered your lighthouse years.”

  His tone implied that he knew she also would have remembered having told him, and that he recognized the false casualness of her revelation.

  “With satellite navigation, many lighthouses aren’t in service anymore. Others have been automated—electricity instead of an oil brazier.”

  “Some are bed-and-breakfast inns.”

  “Yeah. They renovate the caretaker’s house. Some even offer a room or two in the lighthouse itself.”

  This lighthouse had stood on a rocky promontory in Connecticut. She had been twenty when she moved there, twenty-four when she left.