Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Runty cactuses clawed out a life on a sand-and-shale hillside, their spiky shadows creeping eastward as the westering sun sought the distant sea.

“Tell you what,” said Barney-Bobby. “You never tell anyone I changed my name, I’ll stop riding you about Von Longwood.”

“Fair enough.”

“You’re of the old school, I’m of the new,” Bobby said, “but I’ve got a lot of respect for you, Vern.”

That was bullshit, but Vern didn’t care. What people thought of him in his first life was of no concern to him anymore. He had his refuge now, and his wings.

“So what’s the story with the bounce?” Bobby asked.

“She had her own other life before the current one. She’s hiding under the name Redwing. ”

“Hiding from who?”

“I don’t know. But they found her. And they hired me to search for every proof she kept of that life and take it from her.”

“What proof?”

“Documents, snapshots.”

“Why take it from her?”

“You ask too many questions,” Vern said.

“You, me, every good procto has to have curiosity.”

Procto. Vern decided not to ask for a definition. He said, “All I care is, it’s a good payday.”

As Vern had instructed, Bobby turned right on a badly fissured blacktop road so long neglected that weeds sprouted from the cracks in the pavement.

“Are you ironed?” Bobby Onions asked. “You don’t look ironed.”

Squinting down at his shirt and pants, Vern said, “I always buy this wrinkleproof polyester-blend crap. I just let the wrinkles hang out. What the hell do you care anyway?”

Bobby sighed. “‘Are you ironed’ means are you carrying iron, are you packing a gun?”

“You aren’t living in a movie, Bobby. When did you ever hear of a PI getting shot by a client in real life?”

“It could always happen.”

“To the best of your knowledge, has it ever happened?”

“All it takes is once to get yourself dead.” Bobby patted the left side of his sport coat. “I’m packing a real door-buster.”

“I didn’t want to ask,” Vern said, “’cause I thought maybe you had a huge tumor or something.”

“Bullshit. It doesn’t show. It’s in a custom holster, and I had the tailor do some work on the jacket.”

The road topped a rise. A great flat plain opened before them.

In the foreground, still a quarter of a mile distant, stood a series of Quonset huts of different sizes, a few quite large, their ribbed-steel curves so abraded by sand and by time that the sun could not tease a true shine from them, only a soft gray luster.

“What’s this place?” Bobby asked, letting up on the accelerator.

“Something military from a long time ago. Abandoned now. Weapons bunkers off to the left there. Offices, maintenance buildings. This land’s so flat and hard, there’s a natural runway, they didn’t have to pave it.”

Beyond the buildings stood a twin-engine Cessna.

The dry weeds in the fractured roadway whispered against the undercarriage as the Land Rover lost speed, ticked…ticked…ticked like the rubber pointer on a slowing wheel of fortune.

A man stepped out of the open door of one of the Quonset huts.

“That’ll be him,” said Vernon Lesley.

Harrow disengages the deadbolt, steps back to let Moongirl carry the tray through the doorway, and follows her across the threshold.

The exterior storm shutters have been bolted over the three windows. Because they are poorly fitted and cracked with age, some sunshine finds its way around them, between them, and into the room. A blade of golden light cleaves one shadow into two. Another stiletto pricks a clear cut-glass vase, and the beveled edges conduct only the red portion of the spectrum, so it appears almost as if the vase is decorated with a motif of bloody thorns.

Most of the light issues from a brass lamp on the large desk, at which the child sits.

She is in one of her two uniforms: sneakers, gray sweat pants, and a sweatshirt. In very hot weather, she is permitted to exchange the sweatshirt for a T-shirt.

Intent upon her sewing, she does not at once look up.

Moongirl puts the tray on the desk.

Although just ten years old, the child has about her an aura of age, and she possesses a kind of patience that most children do not.

She has enhanced the hem of a small white dress with embroidery, a simple elegant pattern of leaves and roses. Now she is tailoring the garment to the doll for which it has been made.

Her thick tongue is captured between her teeth, not merely an indication of the intensity of her concentration but also evidence of her difference.

In the chair beside the desk sits another doll in a costume of the child’s design. Moongirl puts this doll on the floor and sits in the chair, watching her daughter.

The young seamstress has stubby fingers, and her hands are not nimble with the needle. Yet she creates beautiful embroidery and, with the doll’s dress, accomplishes all that she intends.

Having learned the protocols of these encounters, Harrow sits on the arm of an upholstered chair, near enough to observe the subtlest of details, but at a respectful distance.

“How’re you doing?” Moongirl asks.

“Okay,” says the seamstress.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m doing?”

Still concentrating on the doll’s dress, the child says, “Sure. How you doin’?”

Her voice is thick but not at all difficult to understand, for although her tongue is enlarged, it is not also fissured, as are the tongues of many others with her condition.

“That’s a beautiful doll,” says Moongirl.

“I like her.”

“She has such a pretty mouth.”

“I like her eyes.”

“If she could talk, she’d have a pretty voice.”

“I call her Monique.”

“Where did you hear that name?”

“On TV.”

“Can you spell Monique?”

“Not much.”

“Not at all, huh?”

“No,” the child admits.

“Well, that’s all right.”

In the lamplight, as in any light, the child’s features have the soft, heavy contours associated with mental retardation.

“If her name were Jane,” says Moongirl, “you couldn’t spell that either, could you?”

“Maybe I could learn.”

The sloped brow, the inner epicanthic folds of the eyes, the ears set low on a head too small to be in correct proportion to the body are all signifiers of Down’s syndrome.

“You think you could learn?” Moongirl asks.

“Some, I think.”

“To read and write?”

“Maybe.”

After a few weeks, Harrow had learned to see a gentleness in the daughter’s face, a sweetness that made her seem less alien than she had been to him at first.

“How would you learn?”

“School.”

“Oh, baby,” Moongirl says with feigned sadness.

“I’d try hard.”

“But they don’t want you.”

“I’d be good.”

“Good but dumb, baby.”

The child says nothing.

“They don’t want dumb.”

By the time she came into Harrow ’s life with her mother, the child seemed to be past genuine tears. Her eyes are clear now.

“It’s unfair, isn’t it?” says Moongirl.

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t ask to be dumb.”

Sometimes, lately, Harrow sees in the child’s unfortunate face a quality that is not beauty but that is akin to it. The word that best defines this quality eludes him, so he thinks of it only as the Look.

“Nobody asks to be dumb and ugly.”

Ceaselessly, the child hems the doll’s dress, drawing white thread through white fabric, making a series of precise and identical stitches that brings into Harrow ’s mind the word purity, though he doesn’t know why.