The Darkest Evening of the Year. Dean Koontz

was the sentinel on duty. Gradually her heart stopped pounding, stopped racing, and all was still and dark and as it should be.

Chapter 14

      At the windows, dawn descended, pressing darkness down and westward, and away.

      Traffic noise began to arise from the street, the wheels of commerce and occasionally a far voice.

      On the kitchen table lay the drawing of Nickie and two studies, from memory, of her eyes. The second study included less surrounding facial structure than the first.

      Brian had begun a third study. This one involved only the eyes in their deep sockets, the space between, the expressive eyebrows, and the lush lashes.

      He continued to be enchanted by the task that he had set for himself. He also remained convinced that he had seen something in the dog’s gaze that was of great importance, an ineffable quality that words could not describe but that his inexplicably enhanced talent, his seemingly possessed drawing hand, might be able to dredge from his subconscious and capture in an image, capture and define.

      The irrationality of this conviction was not lost on him. An ineffable quality is, by its nature, one that can’t be defined, only felt.

      His determination to draw and redraw the dog’s eyes, until he found what he sought, was nothing less than a compulsion. The extreme mental focus and the emotional intensity that he brought to the task perplexed him, even worried him—though not sufficiently to make him put down the pencil.

      In Rembrandt’s famous Lady with a Pink, the subject doesn’t communicate directly with the viewer but is portrayed in a reverie that makes you want to enter her contemplation and understand the object of it. The artist gives her nearer eye a heightened color contrast, a clear iris, and a perfectly inserted highlight that suggests a mind, behind the eye, that is no stranger to profound feeling.

      Brian had no illusions that his talent approached Rembrandt’s. The subtlety of the translucent shadows and luminous refractions in this latest version of the dog’s eyes was so far superior to the quality of anything he’d drawn before, both in concept and execution, that he wondered how he could have created it.

      He half doubted that the drawing was his.

      Although he was the only presence in the apartment, although he had watched the series of pencils in his hand produce the image, he became increasingly convinced that he did not possess the genius or the artistry required to lay down upon paper the startling dimension or the luminous mystery that now informed these finished eyes.

      In his thirty-four years, he had no slightest experience of the supernatural, nor any interest in it. As an architect, he believed in line and light, in form and function, in the beauty of things built to last.

      As he tore the most recent drawing from the tablet and put it aside, however, he could not dismiss the uncanny feeling that the talent on display here was not his own.

      Perhaps this was what psychologists called a flow state, what professional athletes referred to as being in the zone, a moment of transcendence when the mind raises no barriers of self-doubt and therefore allows a talent to be expressed more fully than has ever been possible previously.

      The problem with that explanation was, he didn’t feel in full control, whereas in a flow state, you were supposed to experience absolute mastery of your gifts.

      In front of him, the blank page in the tablet insisted on his attention.

      Go even closer on the eyes this time, he thought. Go all the way into the eyes.

      First, he needed a break. He put down the pencil—but at once picked it up, without even pausing to stretch and flex his fingers, as if his hand had a will of its own.

      Almost as though observing from a distance, he watched himself use the X-acto knife to carve away the wood and point the pencil.

      After he sharpened a variety of leads, to give them typical points, blunt points, and chisel points, and after he finished each on a block of sandpaper, he put the last pencil and the knife aside.

      He pushed his chair back from the table, got up, and went to the kitchen sink to splash cold water in his face.

      As he reached for the faucet handle, he realized that he had a pencil in his right hand.

      He glanced at the table. The pencil that he thought he had left beside the art tablet was not there.

      Before Amy had called him to assist on the rescue mission, he’d had only an hour’s sleep. Weariness explained his current state of mind, these small confusions.

      He put the pencil on the cutting board beside the sink and stared at it for a moment, as if expecting it to rise on point and doodle its way back to him.

      After repeatedly immersing his face in double handfuls of cold water, he dried off with paper towels, yawned, rubbed his beard stubble with one hand, and then stretched luxuriously.

      He needed caffeine. In the refrigerator were cans of Red Bull, which he kept on hand for those design deadlines that sometimes required him to pull an all-nighter.

      The pencil was not clutched in his right hand when he opened the refrigerator door. It was in his left.

      “Weariness, my ass.”

      He put the pencil on a glass shelf in the refrigerator, in front of a Tupperware container full of leftover pesto pasta.

      After popping the tab on a Red Bull and taking a long swallow, he closed the fridge without retrieving the pencil. He clearly saw it on the shelf in front of the pesto pasta as the door swung shut.

      When he returned to the table and put down the Red Bull, he realized that the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt contained a pencil.

      This had to be a different pencil from the one in the fridge. It must have been in the pocket since he’d risen from the table to wash his face.

      He counted the pencils on the table. Two should be missing: the one in his pocket, the one in the fridge. But he was short only one.

      Disbelieving, he returned to the refrigerator. The pencil that he had left on the shelf in front of the Tupperware container was no longer there.

      Now you see it. Now you don’t.

      Sitting at the table again, Brian took the pencil from his shirt pocket. With flourishes and a nimbleness akin to prestidigitation, his fingers manipulated the instrument into the proper drawing grip.

      He had not consciously intended to play with the pencil in that fashion. His fingers appeared to be expressing a memory of diligent practice from a previous life when he had been a magician.

      The point touched the paper, and graphite seemed to flow almost as swiftly as a liquid, pouring forth the enigmas of luminous flux and translucent veils in the dog’s far-seeing eye.

      He gave less thought to what he would draw, then less, then none at all. Independent of him, his inspired hand swiftly shaped shadows and suggested light.

      On the nape of his neck, the fine hairs rose, but he was neither frightened nor even apprehensive. A quiet amazement had overtaken him.

      As he had half suspected—and now knew beyond doubt—he could not claim to be the artist here. He was as much an instrument as was the pencil that he held. The artist remained unknown.

Chapter 15

      After a few hours of sleep, Amy woke at 7:30, showered, dressed, served three bowls of kibble, and took the kids for a morning walk.

      Three big dogs could have been a test of Amy’s control and balance. Fortunately, Nickie seemed to have received good training. Each time Amy dropped the leashes to blue-bag the poop, Nickie respected a sit-and-stay command as reliably as did Fred and Ethel.