The Darkest Evening of the Year (28 page)

Amy made a small bird cry, and Brian turned to see Vanessa behind her, and Amy’s face as white as the whites of her eyes.

Running horses on stone could have clopped no harder than his heart, and he hesitated to shoot because Amy was blocking Vanessa.

His hesitation coincided with movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye, and he saw a man, surely Michael, coming through the open kitchen door, a pistol in his fist.

Brian wasn’t familiar with the gun that he had taken off the shooter earlier, but he didn’t hesitate to fire before being fired upon. The weapon was a machine pistol; a quick squeeze pumped out five, six rounds.

Michael went down, but maybe not because he was hit, maybe only for cover, and as Brian turned back to Vanessa, he saw her stab Amy a second time, with another down stroke, and then she surprised him by shoving Amy toward him and surprised him again by coming at him as Amy fell forward between them. She might have half climbed over Amy to slash his face, but he emptied the gun at her, and she was done.

Quaking with terror, he threw aside his gun, dropped to his knees beside Amy, whose face had darkened from white to pale gray, and took her pistol.

Looking under the table, he saw Michael across the room, lying in blood, looking as if his shade had already left his flesh and was boarding the Hellbound train. His arm was stretched out in front of him, his pistol pointed at Brian, and enough of a quiver of life remained in him to pull the trigger.

The round hit Brian in the abdomen, knocked him off his knees, and onto the floor beside Amy, where his left hand fell into her upturned right palm.

If he was going out for good, he wanted to squeeze her hand, but he didn’t have the strength, and neither did she.

The pain was so fierce, a furious white heat, that his vision blurred, but he nevertheless saw Hope toddering through the back door, trying to stay on her feet as Nickie dragged her with all the power of a team of sled dogs. In fact, as Brian began to go blind, in the strange euphoria accompanying massive blood loss, he saw Nickie fly over the table, toward them, and Hope flying, too, one hand clutched around the dog’s collar.

Chapter
66

A
my and Brian agreed that they were not cut out to kill people. They just didn’t have the right stuff.

For one thing, they regretted having to pull the trigger even on certifiable sociopaths like Philip Marlowe. That turned out to be the born moniker of Billy Pilgrim et al., a name he never used because he hated all that it stood for.

Their regret did not go as far as maturing into remorse. But when they thought about pulling the trigger on Billy and Michael and Vanessa, they sometimes felt a little sick to their stomachs, though Alka-Seltzer usually helped, also Rolaids Softchews.

Another thing they were not good at anymore was skepticism in spiritual matters. Amy always had been a believer with an open mind, although stories about phone calls from dead nuns would once have tested the limits of her credulity.

Brian traveled a greater arc than she had; now he acknowledges layers of mystery in the world, and he recognizes that what he saw in Nickie’s eyes was the light of a divine presence, perhaps the innocent soul of Amy’s murdered daughter empowered to return for a brief time and a limited purpose, or an angel.

He is certain now that the sound he heard in his apartment, when he obsessively rendered Nickie’s eyes, had been the laboring of enormous wings, which argued for the angel answer. Amy’s view is that, since the job-assignment and promotion policies in celestial realms are not known to any living person, there is every reason to assume that the entity in Nickie was
both
her lost daughter and an angel, which were one and the same.

A thing Amy and Brian
were
good at was dying without serious consequences. They had been mortally wounded in the kitchen of the caretaker’s house. They entertain no doubt about that, yet here they are, not only alive but without scars.

The way Hope tells it—and she does not lie—Nickie dragged her into the kitchen and
flew
with her over the table. Hope had seen dead people often enough, but she had never flown on a dog before. She let go of the collar and “sat down plop and said
Whoa
.”

Nickie spread herself over the wounded Amy and Brian as if she were a furry blanket. Their pale faces regained color, their eyes fluttered open, a few minor blemishes unrelated to the shooting and stabbing cleared up, Brian’s beard stubble vanished, Amy remembered where she had misplaced a recipe for fudge a year earlier, Brian found he’d regrown the wisdom teeth he’d had pulled years ago, and all the blood on their clothes and on the floor just “kinda went somewhere some way.”

Hope also says Nickie did a “really silly lot of face licking” during the first few minutes of the healing, which explains why Brian’s first complaint after resurrection was that his lips tasted funny.

Neither Amy nor Brian has any doubt that in addition to physical healing, they received psychological and emotional healing, for they have found peace sooner than their experiences would seem to allow. Likewise, considering how well-adjusted Hope is after the ten years of hell in her mother’s care, she may have received a similar grace.

Hope has learned to read and write at a seventh-grade level. She has not called herself dumb in many months. She has to give back a dime of her allowance every time she does.

Having experienced a number of those small supernatural moments that can arguably be explained away with psychology or science—such as still having a pencil in your hand every time you put it down—they were also parties to a genuine miracle, with the result that they have become more aware than ever of the mysterious patterns in life. This does not mean that they cope with life any better because of their perceptions. Seeing a pattern and making sense of it are different things, and maybe the only people who make sense of the patterns
and
properly shape their lives to them are saints in the making or the pleasant kind of lunatics. Hi-ho.

Fred, Ethel, and Nickie continue to share life with Amy and Brian, and they are a happy bunch of kids. Three days after the events that September, the winged Nickie in the furry Nickie went back to her forever home. After a particularly long and sweet cuddle on the sofa, she signaled her departure with a joyous sound of wings that reverberated from one end of the bungalow to another. Now Nickie, bought for two thousand dollars—a bargain—from a crazy drunk guy, is just a good dog, nothing more, though a good dog is one of the best of all things to be.

Millie and Barry Packard’s blind dog, Daisy, regained her sight one day after the visit by Nickie, but three-legged Mortimer did not grow a fourth. So it goes.

Golden Heart thrives. The estate of a man named Georgie Jobbs (no relation to Steve Jobs), who was thought to have been a person of modest—and mysterious—means was settled entirely on Golden Heart, to the tune of $1.26 million. No one knew he admired goldens until, in his last will and testament, he said that the only person in his life who ever loved him was a golden named Harley. Amy’s dream center for goldens may someday be built.

Too many dogs continue to be abused and abandoned—one is too many—and people continue to kill people for money and envy and no reason at all. Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that’s not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognized, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved, and, yes, Amy and Brian were married.

To Gerda,
who will one day be greeted
jubilantly in the next life by the
golden daughter whom she loved so well
and with such selfless tenderness in
this world.

AND TO

Father Jerome Molokie,
for his many
kindnesses, for his good cheer,
for his friendship, and for his
inspiring devotion to what is
first, true, and infinite.

About the Author

D
EAN
K
OONTZ
, the author of many #1
New York Times
bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.

Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

Dean Koontz

P.O. Box 9529

Newport Beach, California 92658