Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

“Something to distract him.”

The blown tire began to shred, but the grade was too steep for the vehicle to be stopped or even much slowed by that friction. The Expedition pulled to the left as it descended, the bared wheel rim shrieking on blacktop, chunks of rubber torn loose and knocking against the undercarriage.

Fog licked thick tongues around the SUV, then swallowed it whole, and there was only the glow of its lights going down the gullet. Rattles and clatters rose as small obstructions were encountered and plowed aside.

“If he’s coming, he’s coming here,” Amy said.

As if she understood, Nickie led them across the road, onto the slope north of it, into scattered trees and universal fog.

Waiting for the gunfire that will signal the game has begun, Harrow stands in the open kitchen door, fog seething past him and into the house.

He would have assisted Billy except for two reasons, the first of which is that, for this kind of work, Billy is the best man Harrow has ever encountered. Billy is a machine. A perpetual-motion machine, free of friction. He reliably functions flawlessly.

Billy is also brutal, without an instant’s hesitation in his brutality, utterly without remorse or second thoughts. Yet unlike most other men with these qualities, he is highly intelligent and sane .

Billy is a jewel, a treasure, irreplaceable. Harrow regrets the necessity of killing him later.

The other reason Harrow does not want to participate in the early stages of the action is because he has a program written for the evening, one that he has refined for months. He wants the full enjoyment of realizing the show as he conceived it.

He prefers to delay his entrance, giving Amy an hour or more to anticipate his arrival. She must be humiliated, emotionally broken, and in a state of terror before he appears.

Harrow will see his ex-wife after she has been reduced to the condition of a caged breeder dog in those puppy mills against which she crusades. Then he will prove to her that worse horrors exist.

At gunpoint, she and the architect will undress. They will be chained to chairs.

Then Billy will leave, and Harrow will listen from an adjoining room as Moongirl breaks down Amy.

He will enter when she can’t stop sobbing, and all that he will do at first is fix open her eyes so she cannot close them.

He wants her to see what Moongirl will do to Brian. The father of the freak will end the evening as a eunuch.

No transgression exists that won’t be committed here this night.

Harriet Weaver would be proud of him. She’d been his nanny, who from the cradle quietly schooled him to understand that the values of his family were repressive, that the world was a more exciting place for the transgressors than for the submissives. They had shared such thrilling secrets from the earliest days of his memory.

At Harriet’s instruction, he exhibited behavior problems that she convinced the family could be resolved by home-schooling, with her as the only tutor, and when all his time was spent with her, he obliged by behaving much better. She hated the Coglands and all their kind, and she was right, for in the end he hated them, too.

The incoming fog carries a chill and the fecund scent of the sea. Harrow is invigorated by it, and by anticipation.

At the first burst of gunfire, he steps across the threshold, out of the house, onto the brick deck, alert, standing tall and stiff with expectation.

An answering weapon, of a different character from the first, damps his excitement but does not greatly discourage him.

He stands motionless, listening. Perhaps Billy moved in on them with a gun in each hand, Old-West style. Billy does have flair.

When half a minute passes, a minute, with no further gunplay, it seems that the two-gun theory might be correct.

Then the engine roar swells, as if Billy is driving them down to the house when he was instructed to walk them, cuffed together. But with the engine noise comes others: a banshee shriek of tortured metal, a series of small collisions that suggests a runaway vehicle.

Harrow backs off the deck, into the open doorway.

Headlights dimly announcing it, the Expedition careens through the fog, across the corner of the deck, and across the rocks toward the oval yard.

Because the SUV passes so close and because the interior lights are on, Harrow can see that no one is behind the wheel.

The yard is lost in fog, and when he hears the Expedition come to a violent stop, he can only assume that it has crashed into the giant Montezuma pine.

He steps into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind him.

At the table, Moongirl has been arranging surgical instruments. The commotion outside has caused her to pause in her preparations.

“Trouble,” he says.

“Watch out for the dog.”

“You’re the one afraid of it.”

“I’m not afraid. It can’t smell me.”

He can make no sense of that.

“I just want it dead,” she says.

“I think it is.”

She stares at him.

Harriet Weaver had such eyes, though gray, not bottle-green.

He says, “Amy and Brian are probably dead, too.”

“Billy? Why would he?”

“We had a weird conversation earlier.”

She waits.

“He was testing me somehow.”

“That could get him dead.”

“I gave him all the pieces of this. I should have split it up.”

“It’s over just like that?”

“Billy figured out he’s the last link between me and Amy, no future in that. So he kills them to show me no hard feelings, but he’s not coming down here.”

“You’ll find him.”

“He’s going ‘on vacation.’ Which means new name, new look, and he’ll do it right.”

“They got off easy.”

“I’ll check the Expedition. Maybe they’re not dead on the floor. Maybe he just wounded them for us.”

“I’m sick of this place.”

“We’ll go to the desert.”

“I hate the gulls and the damp.”

“You’ll like the desert.”

“Not with Piggy.”

Her elegant fingers move across the blades on the table, but she seems unable to decide upon a favorite.

He says, “You want to do her tonight?”

She nods. “Tonight.”

“How?”

“Hard, the little freak. Real hard.”

She leaves the room without a scalpel.

Daylight had begun to fail; and the white mist silvered.

After they had gone twenty yards north, staying pack-close in the fog, Amy and Brian followed Nickie downslope, sixty or eighty yards, out of the trees, onto open ground.

At a distance stood a door in the fog, dimly defined by light in a room beyond.

Out of pistol range, a woman came through the door, carrying something, turned west, and at once vanished in the murk.

“Vanessa,” Brian whispered.

As the sky tarnished and the silvering mist developed a darker patina, the automated-lighthouse program engaged. The lantern room high in the night brightened with a thousand watts of halogen glare. The rays were reflected by the prismatic rings of the Fresnel lens, amplified, concentrated, and beamed out into the Pacific.

Apart of Amy was in the past, on another coast, where the sweep of such a light had been the sharp scythe of Death. And a vision of aftermath flashed through her mind, Nickie dead at her father’s hand.

Her heart, so steady through so much, steady even through the killing of the shooter, slammed now, and her soaring blood pressure muffled her hearing until she stretched her jaw, cracked her ears.

Brian said, “Wait,” but she ran toward the lighted door, which was already fading in a thicker current of fog.