The Darkest Evening of the Year

documents related to the woman’s name change. Well, this was the real world, so you shouldn’t expect many thrills.
    She had also been Amy in her previous life, but she had swapped the surname Cogland for Redwing . Of this, Vern approved. Redwing was a cool name, even good enough for a Second Life avatar.
    She had received a new Social Security card under this name, a passport, and a Connecticut driver’s license, which she had no doubt used to obtain a California license after moving across country.
    Accompanying the documents was a copy of a judge’s order sealing the court’s actions and removing them from public record.
    Intrigued, Vern read the legal documents more closely than he had the first time. He suspected that the name Cogland ought to ring a whole tabernacle’s worth of bells, but it didn’t.
    If Redwing had been in the news during her Cogland life, Vern might not have read or heard about her. He had never been interested in the news.
    Before Second Life, he’d spent most of his leisure time playing in on-line game groups of the Dungeons and Dragons variety. He had slain a vast menagerie of monsters, and no dungeon had held him long.
    Vern put all of these papers in the white trash bag with the photographs and the digital-camera memory cards.
    Occasionally, Redwing might reach under the desk drawer and feel the envelope to confirm that the hidden material remained where she had put it.
    Vern took several sheets of paper from her computer printer. He folded them and inserted them in the envelope to approximate the feel of the original documents.
    With the brass clasp, he secured the flap. From the dispenser on her desk, he pulled a length of tape and sealed the flap just as it had been, and then he taped the envelope under the drawer, where he had found it.
    He was left with only the lengths of old tape. He wadded them in a ball and dropped them in the white trash bag.
    Although Vernon had searched the half bath off the kitchen, he had not yet explored the full bath that adjoined her bedroom. He had been concerned that, in a moment of reckless bravado, he would be tempted to leave his traditional signature.
    He was a professional, he had a job to finish, and he needed the money for his island of fantastic creatures.
    In her bathroom, the lid of the toilet stood open, exposing the seat and the bowl. At once he put it down.
    He took the lid off the tank. Sometimes people sealed things in a plastic bag and submerged it in the toilet tank. Not Redwing.
    If he squinted when he looked in the mirror above the sink, he could see Von Longwood. Vern smiled and said, “Lookin’ good, dude.”

 
    Chapter
19
    S hortly before nine o’clock, Thursday morning, Brian heard his three employees coming to work in the offices below his apartment.
    Earlier he had left a voice mail for Gretchen, his assistant, asking her to reschedule his Thursday appointments to the following week. He told her that inspiration had seized him, that he would be drawing in his apartment, and that he should not be interrupted.
    Inspiration had more than seized him. A singularly persistent muse—insistent, incandescent—had overwhelmed him, filled him with a quiet excitement, and he labored in a state of enchantment.
    Supposedly true tales of the supernatural had never struck him as credible; yet Brian now sensed that he was channeling a talent greater than his own. If what he felt was true, then the presence working through him must be benign, for he had seldom in his life felt this happy.
    Although he had put a slantboard under the art-paper tablet, his fingers should have ached, and his hand should have cramped. He had been at this for at least five hours, with intense focus.
    As if the laws of physics and physiology had been suspended, he suffered no stiffness in his hand, no slightest pain. The longer he drew, the more fluidly the images appeared upon the paper.
    The eyes of the dog…Brian stopped drawing the surrounding facial structures, yielding to a fascination with just the glistening curves from lid to lid, from inner to outer canthus, the mysterious play of light upon and within the cornea, iris, lens, and pupil.
    In each new drawing, the quality of the incoming light was different from that in previous renditions, was received by the eyes at different angles, obliquely and directly.
    Out of his pencil flowed larger and still larger eyes, in pairs, filling the entire page.
    Then he began rendering one eye per page,