Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Their storm cellar was twenty yards from the house, and Cora, who had experience of these things back in Wichita, urged them to forget the car, to run for the shelter.

If Angela was going to deliver the baby in the storm cellar, John wanted clean towels, rubbing alcohol to sterilize the knife with which he would cut the cord, and other items. Cora argued against his returning to the house, but he said he’d be a minute, less than a minute, no time at all.

Brian said, “I ran with Mom and Grandma to an embankment. The grass was slick underfoot, not like in a dream. Intensely real, Amy. Sound, color, texture, smell. There was an open stone vestibule built into the slope. The shelter door stood at the back of it.”

Brian had turned to look toward the house, and surprisingly the windows had been still bright with light.

Suddenly lightning broke not in bolts but in cascades, did not step jaggedly down the night as usual, but lashed through the dark like broad undulant whips of chain mail.

Those celestial flares revealed the twister immediately beyond the house, towering over it, the immense black wall churning, like a living beast, as amorphous as any monster in myth, rising up and up and still up, so high into the night that the top of it could not be glimpsed.

All the windows burst at once. The house disintegrated. The funnel seemed to suck up every shard of glass, every scrap of wood, every nail, and John McCarthy, whose body would never be found.

“My mother and grandmother had gone into the cellar and closed the door,” Brian said. “I was outside, watching a tree being pulled up by the roots-such a sound that made, a creaking scream-and then I was somehow inside the shelter with them.”

At the last moment, Cora had looked back, had seen the house taken and no sign of her son-in-law. She had closed out the chaos and had driven home the six thick bolts that held every edge of the door to the header, jamb, and threshold.

Wind married thunder, birthing ten thousand clamorous off-spring. Previously Brian had heard a sound like a score of trains, but now all the trains in the world were converging on a single intersection of tracks directly over their bunker.

In that small refuge, brightened by one flashlight, the ceiling and the walls transmitted vibrations from the punished earth above, and dust sifted down, and the hordes of Hell howled at the door and tested the bolts that held it.

Perhaps accelerated by terror, Angela’s contractions brought her to the moment of delivery quicker than Cora expected. With the funnel having passed but with the storm still raging overhead, frightened for her unborn child, weeping for her husband, Angela gave birth.

Cora pulled a Coleman lantern from a shelf, lit it, and by that eerie gaslight, she delivered her grandson with a calm and skill that had not been lost with the generations of her family who had first settled the plains above.

“In the dream, I watched myself be born,” Brian said. “I was a wrinkled, red-faced, cranky little bundle.”

“Some things don’t change,” Amy observed.

Because not all twisters descend with suddenness, because some storm watches can last hours, the cellar had been furnished with two old mattresses on frames. Angela delivered her baby on one of these, and the cover was wet with amniotic fluid, blood, and afterbirth.

Cora unpacked plastic-wrapped blankets from a shelf, dressed the clean mattress, and encouraged her daughter to transfer to it with the newborn.

As it turned out, the storm had piled a great weight of debris against the shelter door, and they would have to wait nine hours for rescuers to locate and extract them.

“So my grandmother,” Brian said, “dressed the mattress with what little she had, but with as much care as if it were a guestroom bed being prepared for an important visitor. When she finished tucking the covers around my mother and me-the infant me-it was a perfect little nest, so neat, so tidy, so cozy. She smoothed the wrinkles out of the blanket, smoothed them with such tenderness, smiling down at my mother…”

The scene still lived in his memory as no scene from a dream had ever before endured.

Amy said, ” And then?”

“Oh. Yeah. Suddenly I’m not an observer of the dream, I’m a part of it, I’m the baby, gazing up at my grandmother. She smiles down at me and her eyes are amazing, so full of love, so much more vivid than anything else in the most vivid dream I’ve ever had. And she winks. The last thing I saw was Grandma’s wink. Then I woke up. And that’s the incredible thing. The bed is like you see it now. Perfectly made. I’m lying on top of the covers, and the bed is neat enough to pass a military inspection.”

He expected amazement. She stared at him.

“All right, see, when you hauled me out of here last night to go save a dog from a crazy-drunk-violent guy, I left the bed a mess. And when I crashed for a nap this afternoon, it was still a mess.”

“So?”

“Spread hanging over the footboard, sheets tangled, a pillow on the floor. But I wake up, and the bed’s been made under me, as if my grandmother in the dream turned around and straightened up this one after getting my mother and baby-me settled.”

“‘Baby-me’?”

“Come on, Amy. You understand what I’m saying.”

“Do you ever sleepwalk?”

“No. Why?”

“Maybe you made the bed in your sleep.”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t. That’s impossible.”

“Yeah. It makes much more sense that your dead grandmother came out of a dream and made it for you.”

Eye to eye with her, he chewed for a moment on his lower lip, and then he said, “Why are you being like this?”

“I’m not being like anything. I’m just being practical, prudent, levelheaded, smart, sober, and rational.”

He took a deep breath. He blew it out. “What if, okay, what if I believe Antoine the blind dog can drive?”

“The dog isn’t blind.”

Brian put his hands on her shoulders again. “It’s not just the bed, Amy. It’s the uncanny vividness of the dream, so bright and so detailed, like real life, and being shown the night I was born. It’s the way those drawings flowed through me, just poured out of the pencil. And the hallucinations-that sound, those shadows-except they were not hallucinations. Amy, something is happening here.”

She put one hand to his face, feeling his beard stubble. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“No. I drank a Red Bull. I’m not hungry.”

“Sweetie, why don’t I make you something to eat?”

“I’m not hallucinating from hunger, Amy. If you could have seen Grandma’s eyes, that wink .”

“I’ll make pasta. You have a jar of that terrific pesto sauce?”

Brian leaned closer to her and narrowed his eyes. He could tell that she wanted to look away from him and that she didn’t dare.

“Something’s happened to you, too,” he said. “You do have a story of your own. I thought so earlier. What’s happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

“Just a thing,” she said uneasily.

“What thing?”

“It’s just the way Nickie is.”

“What way is she?”

“Watchful. Wise. Mysterious. I don’t know. Actually, it’s not even new. Sometimes you get a dog and you think, This is an old soul. ”

“Come on. What else, Amy?”

“Nothing. Really. Just a bedroom-slipper thing.”

She was fingering the cameo locket at her throat. When she saw him take note of it, she lowered her hand.

“Bedroom-slipper thing? Tell me.”

“I can’t. Not now. It’s nothing. It couldn’t be anything.”

“Now I am agitated,” he said.