The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 21

The rustle and hiss and crumpcrump-crumpcrump rose behind Brian, quieter than the first time, almost stealthy. He turned in his chair to look, but he remained alone in the kitchen.

When the sound repeated, he glanced at the ceiling, wondering if wind might be troubling something on the roof. But the window revealed a morning as still as that on an airless world.

As he worked obsessively on the center of the current drawing of the dog’s eye, he broke a lead point. A second. A third.

While he sharpened the pencils, only the crisp scraping of the X-acto blade punctuated the expectant hush.

At its loudest, the unidentified sound had seemed terrible not because it struck fear in him-which it did, a little-but because it suggested an immense and humbling power.

Born in a tornado, Brian had considerable respect for the chaos that nature could spawn and for the sudden order-call it fate-that was often revealed when the apparent chaos clarified. This strange sound of many parts had a chaotic quality; but he sensed in it his fate.

Pencils sharpened, he returned to the drawing.

Moments later, when the sound occurred yet again, he was pretty sure that it had come from overhead. Perhaps from the attic.

The drawing had reestablished its hypnotic hold on him, however, and again he felt an impending revelation. Discovering the source of the sound was a less urgent task than completing the petal-over-petal pattern of light and shadow at the center of the image.

He bent forward. The drawing seemed to fold open to fill his field of vision.

After he’d been working for a few minutes, a shadow swept across the page. Although shapeless and swift, it inspired in him an alarm akin to what he’d felt at the first-and loudest-of the sounds, and he startled up from the chair.

Because it had one curtained window, the kitchen would have been gloomy without the overhead light.

A moth might have arced around the ceiling fixture, casting down an exaggerated silhouette. Nothing but a moth could have swooped so silently.

Brian turned in a circle, searching the room. If the insect had come to rest anywhere, he could not spot it.

To his right, at the periphery of vision, he glimpsed another shadow shiver up the wall. Or thought he did. He turned his head, raised his eyes, saw nothing-

– and then fleetingly caught sight of a sharkish shadow darting across the floor. Or thought he did.

His gaze descended to the unfinished drawing. His hands were trembling too badly to make good use of a pencil.

Alert, Brian stood in the center of the room. No more shadows took flight, but the strange sound issued faintly from elsewhere in the apartment.

He hesitated, then stepped out of the kitchen.

His reflection in a hallway mirror dismayed him. His face was pale except for the ashy look of the skin under his bloodshot eyes.

At the end of the hall, he stood under a trapdoor to the attic. To reach the recessed handle, he would need a stepladder.

The longer he stared at the trap, the more he became convinced that something crouched in the higher chamber, or hung upside down from a rafter, listening.

Exhaustion whetted his imagination even as it dulled his mind. Reason had deserted him. Nothing but dust waited in the attic, dust and spiders.

He’d had only one hour of sleep in the past thirty-six. Hour after hour of compulsive drawing had further drained him.

In the bedroom, without undressing, he stretched out on his disheveled bed, from which Amy’s phone call had roused him nearly twelve hours previously.

The blinds were closed. A fan of gray light spread through the open doorway, from the hall.

His eyes were hot and grainy, but he did not close them. On the ceiling, none of the mottled shadows moved.

From memory rose the crystalline voice of the child singing in Celtic.

Her eyes, a purple shade of blue.

Carl Brockman’s eyes like shotgun barrels.

The word pigkeeper on his computer screen.

Desperate for rest, Brian dreaded closing his eyes. He had the crazy idea that Death waited to take him in his sleep. In dreams, a winged presence would descend on him, cover his mouth with hers, and suck the breath of life from him.