Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

“Yes.”

“Whatever Vanessa’s done,” Amy said, “what’s important now is, you might get a chance to make it right.”

This was the “big thing” of which he’d spoken earlier, bigger than the drawings that he had done of Nickie’s eyes, bigger than the auditory hallucinations and the mysterious shadows he had glimpsed at the periphery of vision, bigger than his dream and waking up on the inexplicably made bed. After ten years, he might be able to get his daughter back.

Amy had read his e-mail to Vanessa, in which he avoided argument and manipulation: I am at your mercy. I have no power over you, and you have every power over me. If one day you will let me have what I want, that will be because it serves you best to relent, not because I have earned it or deserve it.

After waking from his dream of storm-racked Kansas, Brian had found a reply from her. He held it in his hand now, as he stood at the window.

You still want your little piglet? You piss me off, there in your cozy life, everything the way you like it, never sacrificed a damn thing. You want this little freak on your back? All right. I’m ready for that. But I want something from you. Stand by.

The quality of light had changed enough to permit upon the pane a transparent reflection of Amy’s face.

With his secrets all revealed, and with his own face forming on the glass before him, Brian turned now toward Amy.

She joined him at his window and took his hand.

He said, “She’s going to want every dime, everything I own.”

Smiling, Amy repeated, in this new context, what she had said earlier. “Not everything. There’s still you and me.”

The severed limbs, the headless torso, the eyeless head, and the pried-out glass eyes of the doll are arranged beside the lunch tray on the desk, where Moongirl carefully placed them.

Not once during the dismemberment and beheading did Piggy appear to notice the destruction her mother was committing. Now she ignores the ruins.

Harrow suspects that, this time, Piggy has outwitted her mother. Instead of giving the most elaborate dress of her creation to her favorite doll, perhaps she has given it to her least favorite.

This is a small triumph, but in the child’s life, there is no other kind.

If Moongirl realizes that she has been deceived, she will make Piggy pay dearly. Even now, Harrow can see how the woman struggles to contain her fury at the child’s indifference to the savaging of the doll.

Like Harrow, Moongirl has the cold intellect of a machine and a body that is machinelike in the perfection of its form and function, but she only pretends to understand and control her emotions as Harrow understands and controls his.

The range of her emotions is limited to anger, hatred, envy, greed, desire, and self-love. He is not sure if she realizes this or if she thinks she is complete.

While she cannot exert iron control of herself, she understands that she empowers herself by repressing her emotions. The longer that anger and hatred are unexpressed or only partly expressed, the purer and more poisonous they become, until they make a more potent elixir than any that a wizard could concoct.

She sits beside the desk, glaring at her daughter, and though her long-distilled hatred is lethal, she will not strike a murderous blow yet. She will wait through this night and the following day, until-very soon now-she can have all the deaths that she most wants.

“I bought the potato salad special for you, Piggy.”

The blades of light penetrating the cracks in the storm shutters are not pellucid or golden any longer, but a murky orange. The cut-glass vase has gone dark. The auroral glimmer has disappeared from the ceiling over Piggy’s head.

Thin spears of orange sunlight touch only the wood surfaces of the furniture, here a decorative pillow, there an oil painting of a seascape.

Yet by some curious mechanism of soft reflection, elfin light twinkles in unlikely corners of the shadowy room: in the glass beads of the shade on the lamp that stands on the far side of the child’s bed, in the glass knob on a distant closet door…

“Piggy?”

“Okay.”

“The potato salad.”

“Okay.”

“I’m waiting.”

“I had two cookies.”

“Cookies aren’t enough.”

“And a sandwich.”

“Why do you do this to me?”

Piggy says nothing.

“You’re a little ingrate.”

“I’m full.”

“You know what an ingrate is?”

“No.”

“You don’t know much, do you?”

Piggy shakes her head.

“Eat the potato salad.”

“Okay.”

“When?”

“Later,” says Piggy.

“No. Now.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t just say okay. Do it.”

The child neither speaks nor reaches for the potato salad.

Diamonds dark at throat and wrist in spite of the desk lamp, Moongirl rises from her chair, snatches up the potato salad, and throws it.

The container strikes a wall and bursts open, splattering the plaster and showering the floor with spit-spiced potato salad.

Bright tears sting Piggy’s eyes, and her wet cheeks shine.

“Clean it up.”

“Okay.”

From the desk, Moongirl seizes the pieces of the ruined doll and throws them hard across the room. She grabs as well the open bag of cookies and throws that.

“Clean it up.”

“Okay.”

“Every smear and crumb.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t give me tears, you little fat-faced fraud.”

Moongirl turns and, diamonds darkling, strides from the room, no doubt to settle herself with her collection of cleansing solutions and emollient lotions for face and body, in a dreamy two-hour regimen that seldom fails to leave her in a better mood.

Perched on the arm of the upholstered chair, Harrow watches the child. As simple as she is, and plain and slow, she has about her a mystery that intrigues him and that seems in some way deeper than the mystery of her mother’s madness.

Piggy sits for a minute, unmoving.

As though her tears are as astringent as rubbing alcohol, they swiftly evaporate from her cheeks. In remarkably short order, her eyes are dry as well.

She opens the second lunchbox bag of potato chips and eats one. Then another. Then a third. Slowly she empties the bag.

After wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, she pushes aside the tray and picks up the doll on which she was working when her mother and Harrow first entered the room. She merely holds the doll, does nothing with it other than study its face.

The odd thought occurs to him that Piggy, plain simple Piggy, may be the only person he has ever known who is only and exactly who she appears to be, which may be why she seems mysterious.

And here, unexpectedly, is the Look that Harrow has lately seen subtly transform the child’s features, the quality that is not beauty but that might be akin to it. The defining word for the Look still eludes him.

Outside, the wounded day issues a bloody glow that lacks the strength to press through the cracks in the shutters. Only the desk lamp illuminates the room.

Yet elfin lights persist in the crystal beads of the lampshade in the darkest corner, in the glass doorknob far from the desk, in a gold-leaf detail of a picture frame, in window glass that is not at an angle to reflect the desk lamp.

Harrow has the peculiar feeling that he and the child are not alone in the room, though of course they are.

Piggy will not clean up the mess her mother made as long as Harrow remains to watch her. She stoops to such tasks only when she is alone.

He rises from the arm of the chair, stands watching her for a moment, walks to the door, turns, and looks at her again.