Читать книгу The Darkest Evening of the Year - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 14

Chapter 9

Although Brian McCarthy had a talent for portraiture, he was not usually capable of swift execution.

The human head presents so many subtleties of form, structure, and proportion, so many complexities in the relationship of its features, that even Rembrandt, the greatest portrait painter of all time, struggled with his art and refined his craft until he died.

The head of a dog presented no less—and arguably a greater—challenge to an artist than did the human head. Many a master of their mediums, who could precisely render any man or woman, had been defeated in their attempts to portray dogs in full reality.

Remarkably, with this first effort at canine portraiture, sitting at his kitchen table, Brian found the speed that eluded him when he drew a human face. Decisions regarding form, structure, proportion, and tone did not require the ponderous consideration he usually brought to them. He worked with an assurance he had not known before, with a new grace in his hand.

The drawing appeared with such uncanny ease and swiftness that it almost seemed as if the whole image had been rendered earlier and stored magically in the pencil, from which it now flowed as smoothly as music from a recording.

During his courtship of Amy, his heart had been opened to many things, not least of all to the beauty and the joy of dogs, yet he still did not have one of his own. He didn’t trust himself to be equal to the responsibility.

At first he didn’t know that he was rendering not merely the ideal of a golden retriever but also a specific individual. As the face resolved in detail, he realized that from his pencils had come Nickie, so recently rescued.

He did not have more difficulty drawing eyes than he did any other detail of anatomy. This time, however, he achieved effects of line and tone and grading that continually surprised him.

To look real, the eyes must be full of light and marked by the mystery that light evokes in even the most forthright gaze. Brian focused with, for him, such unprecedented passion on the portrayal of this light, this mystery, that he might have been a medieval monk depicting the receiver of the Annunciation.

When he finished the drawing, he stared at it for a long time. Somehow the creation of the portrait had lifted his heart. Vanessa’s hateful e-mails had left him under a pall of sorrow, which now weighed less heavily on him.

Hope and Nickie seemed inextricably entwined, and he felt that he could not have one without the other. He did not know exactly what he meant by this—or why it should be so.

In the study once more, he composed an e-mail to Vanessa, alias pigkeeper. He read the message half a dozen times before sending it.

I am at your mercy. I have no power over you, and you have every power over me. If one day you will let me have what I want, that will be because it serves you best to relent, not because I have earned it or deserve it.

In previous e-mail exchanges, he had either argued with Vanessa or had attempted to manipulate her, although never as obviously as she worked to sharpen his guilt and to put a point on his sorrow. This time he avoided all appeals to reason and all power games, and just acknowledged his helplessness.

He expected neither an immediate response nor any response at all; and even if his plea elicited only vitriol, he would not reply in kind. Over the years, she had humbled him, then further humbled him, until he harbored no more anger toward her than a wizened sailor of a thousand journeys harbored resentment toward the raging sea.

In the kitchen, at the table, he turned to a fresh page in the art- paper tablet. He sharpened his pencils.

An inexplicable exhilaration had overcome him, a perception that new possibilities lay before him. He felt as if he were on the brink of a revelation that would change his life.

He began to draw the dog’s head, but this time not in a slight turn to the left with a moderate up view. Instead, he approached the subject straight on.

Furthermore, he intended to depict the face only from brow line to the part of the cheek called the cushion, thereby focusing on the eyes and the structures immediately surrounding them.

He marveled that his memory of the dog’s appearance should be so exquisitely detailed. He’d seen her only on one occasion and not for long, yet in his mind’s eye, she was as vivid as a fine photograph, a hologram.

From mind to hand to pencil to page, the golden’s gaze took form in shades of gray. From this new perspective and proximity, the eyes were huge and deep, and full of light, of shadow.

Brian was seeking something, a unique quality that he had seen in this dog but that he had not at once consciously recognized. His subconscious wanted now to bring forth what had been glimpsed, to see it rendered and to understand it.

A tremulous expectation filled him, but his hand remained steady and swift.