The corpse gurgled alarmingly as I wrapped it in the sheet. He hadsuffered no illusions about his chances of ever rising above the lower ranks of the high-school caste system. If I were you, I'd have gone crazy years ago." His name is P. Oswald Boone. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain." I'm so sorry to have drawn him here." I suspect Karla is the reason that Wyatt's job has not worn him down to total ruin. "A flipped fork flicked my forehead." I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. After Johnny and his love departed, Stormy and I took our turn with Gypsy Mummy. Gypsy Mummy had given us, for a single quarter, what that other couple couldn't buy at any price. "Elvis Presley is here? I couldn't think of the words that would explain the acronym on Varner's arm, but I had no doubt that I had identified Robertson's kill buddy. I needed to be certain that no bodachs followed Viola and her daughters. After turning Eckles on his side to ensure that he wouldn't choke on his own blood and saliva, I searched for something to tie his hands and feet. When I got out of the car, the fierce heat of the Mojave was matched by its stillness, a nearly perfect silence found perhaps nowhere else but in a dioramic snow scene sealed in Lucite. Nice boys. Karla Porter, Wyatt's wife, answered the door. Over several weeks, the condition rapidly grew worse. When I reentered the room, I gagged again, anyway. I picked up the plate. Instead, I sat in the office chair. "Police," I lied. Struggling to recover my composure, I said, "Some days are so difficult that if we didn't let wine Page 78 steal our wits, how would we sleep?" Page 43 EIGHT PALE, PUFFY, HIS WATERY GRAY GAZE FLOATING OVER store windows, looking almost as bemused as an Alzheimer's patient who has wandered out of his care facility into a world he no longer recognizes, Fungus Man carried stuffed shopping bags from two department stores. Most likely Fungus Man was unaware that his sanctum served not merely as a catalogued repository for his homicidal fantasies but also as a terminal admitting bodachs to a holiday of blood. Terrible experience, perhaps from the cradle to the sound of the shot that killed her, had left her in a poverty of imagination, unable to envision a world beyond this one, where love was a promise fulfilled. I didn't expect you'd be able to make it." Always things to do here. I didn't want to see a newspaper. The first time, he had been standing on the public sidewalk in front of the house, later in the backyard. "No, sir. As spooked as I had been to see this strange man at the picket fence, I was still more disturbed to have lost sight of him. I'm seeing bodachs everywhere. Considering that bodachs seem to have no more substance than do shadows, I'm not sure how they could harm me. I switched off the phone. They seemed terribly small and fragile. Her frown had evaporated along with the alcohol gel. Ordinarily I have no fear of the night. She wore plain white cotton panties and a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt. The chief's place blazed brighter than any other. Apparently they had been killed with a silencer-fitted pistol, because the shots had not attracted attention. It's just harvesting cash." Though I prayed that the chief would recover quickly, I worried about what he might say when he regained consciousness. I stopped. "Don't throw it away here." We are immeasurably closer than best friends, closer thanmere lovers. You couldn't show castration on the screen back then." Down the ambulatory, past the choir enclosure, through the gate in the communion railing, I half expected Robertson to spring at us from Page 97 unlikely cover. "There's always insurance," I agreed. In fact, I felt nothing unusual. He did, he said, have some vanity. If I went in there and discovered that she had been murdered as a consequence of my actions, I doubted that I would have the will to deal with Robertson's body. I wished that I had some caffeine tablets. Behind me, she said, "Just go." Like Eckles, he carried spares on a utility belt. Unfortunately, a full-out run for cover would require that I take my attention off the pack. "Something." When he realized that he could not make me cower, Robertson lowered his hand from my neck. An old Pontiac with a knocking engine and a squealing fen belt passed in the street. I had seen evidence of this on numerous occasions. "That takes money. One day off work isn't going to destroy your chances of fulfilling the dream." "They're big, but they're not all of you. Not to the movies, not anywhere." In moments like these, however, I can't restrain myself from action. (in writing), vet check up, first As she continued to finger the card, a frown took possession of her face as gradually as an image rising out of the murk on Polaroid film. I know that to pursue much greater involvement with the supernatural would be to lose touch with reality, to spiral down into a genteel madness, whereafter I would be no good to anyone. Varner had been hired first and had paved the way for Eckles. I. Patterns of darkness and light. I couldn't count - and didn't care to remember - how often I had heard this challenge before. He was expected to make a full recovery. In addition to the usual range of private and semiprivate rooms, the fourth floor offered a few fancier co-payment accommodations that could pass for hotel rooms. I enjoyed watching her walk toward me. I had come seeking a confrontation that would enlighten me, though I didn't understand what it needed to be or what I could learn from it that would help me to find Robertson's collaborator. I could have cut the shoelace that secured the top of the shroud the one at the foot had broken the previous night - and rolled the body out of its wrapping. Thirty-some years older than I am, lean and sinewy, Poke has a Mojave-cured face and gunfighter eyes. Each folded and bagged copy of the Tuesday edition of the Maravilla County Times spun through the air and landed with a soft thwop on a driveway or a front walk, precisely where the subscriber preferred to have it. Here was the answer. When my father met her, she was just moody enough and dangerous enough to infatuate him. I, on the other hand, am more familiar with his activities since his death. Nine million of them are diehards who belong to bowling leagues and regularly compete in amateur tournaments. Give me a break." The second stalker took its cue from the first and stood its ground. broken." She is an object of fascination for some of the other employees, and she doesn't want to give them fuel for gossip. "I'll be the first." The stroke must have killed him at the precise moment when he crossed the crest of a hill - at the bottom of which stood the English boy Accident-scene analysis by the police determined that the lateral angle of the slope, in relationship to the cross street below, should have carried the unpiloted truck away from the boy, impacting the wall thirty feet from where it actually came to a deadly stop. His bloodless lips drew back from teeth that had seen too little of a brush. Logic put it between 5:30 and 7:45. Ride shotgun, give me cover. Call me simple-minded. Page 230 Because tarantulas are timid and because I believe there are no coincidences, I raced to the Chevy, threw the scissors and flashlight in the shopping bag, started the engine, and stomped the accelerator. He wore boat shoes, khaki slacks, and a Hawaiian shirt. He tried to trap me and Stormy in the church belfry - " "What were you doing in the belfry?" In the afternoon that's for the girls." When I failed to answer Viola's question at once, she thought that I'd seen something wrong with her daughters, and she took a step toward the bed. All records relating to the lake burned in the courthouse fire of 1954, when a man named Mel Gibson protested the seizure of his property for nonpayment of taxes. Sleepy eyes. "And in your dream, tomorrow is the day?" The dead don't need to walk where they want to go - or ride in a car, for that matter. Stormy asked. She's too tough for easy tears. Summer afternoons in Pico Mundo are long and blistering, with little hope of wind and none of rain. When I popped open the glove box, I found it empty. He drew me aside and walked with me to the far end of the pool, so we could talk in private. Maybe my wits hadn't shifted into low gear, as they seemed to have, but I didn't like my chances if I had to go one-on-one with Robertson's kill buddy, who must have enjoyed a better night's sleep than I had. Along the far rim of the tub, a thin smear of blood had dried on the porcelain. From the living room, I saw Stormy in the kitchen, and I went to her side. She stood behind the bar, drawing draft beer from one of the taps. The swinging door to the kitchen could not have been what I heard. I turned away from Burke & Bailey's and took several steps toward the department store at the south end of the mall. "You think he was shot by somebody he knew?" The only difference was that I didn't know the blonde and Viola was a friend. He has a voice that makes Barry White and James Earl Jones sound like carnival barkers with strep throat. Page 125 I couldn't know for sure what they were doing, but I imagined that they were drawn to the very life energy of Nicolina and Levanna - and were somehow basking in it. She sat on the top step, beside a picnic hamper. Odd needs to speak to you." "I mean, I'd like to understand it - what it is, how it works." "To Ozzie," Stormy said, raising her glass in a toast. Like Mrs. Sanchez's place, most houses in this neighborhood are Victorian in style, with varying degrees of gingerbread. Ozzie settled down, as well, but his chair made a noisier issue of it than mine did. Unthinkingly, I had made certain assumptions that Robertson's condition didn't support. Wringing his hands, his face gray with anguish, he looked at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, not in the manner of a trapped man assessing the dimensions of his cage, but with bewilderment, as though he could not recall how he had come to be in this place and predicament. They looked like this: The dots were raised on one side of the card, depressed on the other. He had this this melancholy look, as if he was taking pity on me for some reason." As vividly as possible, I described Fungus Man, who had been at the Grille during the first shift, before Viola had arrived for work. I'll take you and the girls to your sister's." I needed antacids. He said that such a talent was a gift and that I had a moral obligation to use it. "Soon. When the residue of lemony fluid evaporated, I could smell the body again, though not at full strength because I continued to breathe through my mouth. I'm frightened to think that such a simple thing as rising from a chair should tax him so much. Harlo charged up the second flight of stairs. She snipped off eight inches of stem with the bloom. You might expect that his pissed-off spirit would have lurked in my bathroom or kitchenette, waiting for me to come home, eager to threaten and harass me as he had done at the church. Page 128 "Then trust me on this, Viola. "You made all that weird stuff too real. She is a sweet person and reluctant to give offense even at evidence of flagrant fraud. I'd rather not say." At the living-room archway, I cautiously peeked into the hallway and spotted the other me standing at the open door of the black room. I'm whipped." Currently, a quarter will get you just a newspaper, and you won't want to read anything in it unless you're a sadist, a masochist, or a suicidally lonely wretch desperate to find true love in the personal ads. Because she has a comfortable income without the need to work and because she prefers life as a recluse, her true condition is not widely recognized in Pico Mundo. She fed me one. Page 245 Although the motion of the colorful fish ought to have turned me inside out, the nausea passed in a moment. "Usually they come without the bumps. Besides, there was no reason for him to have done so instead of assaulting us directly. THE RECENT construction of a five-story apartment building made longtime residents dizzy with an unwanted sense of metropolitan crowding and led to editorials in the Maravilla County Times that used phrases like "high-rise blight," and worried about a future of "heartless canyons of bleak design, in which people are reduced to the status of drones in a hive, and into which the sun never fully reaches." In ordinary circumstances, that look alone would indeed have dispatched me. I plucked those morsels off my T-shirt and ate them, buying time to think furiously, before I said, "So,.. you mean you're accepting my proposal?" The dirty dishes stacked higher. "Why?" Others would not be so quick to declare me innocent under Page 150 questionable circumstances, and if for no reason but appearances, the chief might have to park me in a cell for a day, until he could find a way to resolve matters in my favor. But it's true, the last thing you need is some hysterical bitch always on your case." His assertion infuriates my mother, who denies Cymry's freakhood and calls her a gift from God. Maybe DOR Did Officer Simon Varner, of the Pico Mundo Police Department, wear the name of this same master on his left arm? Trembling in fear of life without Stormy, I rose from the sofa and hesitantly went to her. "Don't even advise this time," Stormy said. He smiled for me. " Giving attribution to the quote, I said, "Mark Twain." Behind me, she wielded the knife of alienation as only she can cut with it: "The whole time I carried you, I thought you were dead inside me, dead and rotting." Released, Stevie squirmed all the way under his bed, but no bed offered shelter to me, and I had no blankets to pull over my head. He went down as hard as the Prince of Darkness himself had been cast out of Heaven, into Hell. "Take a drive out in the desert, where there's nobody around, drive fast, throw it out the window, let the wind take it." In the car, when I switched on the engine, I suddenly expected to be blown up like the Holstein. Stormy asked. Otherwise I would not have fully recognized the depth of concern in her face, her eyes; in fact, she Page 131 seemed to be gripped not by mere anxiety but by a quiet terror. On a counter in front of the security monitors lay the pistol that Eckles had used to kill the guards. She pressed the muzzle against her throat, angling it slightly toward her chin, the better to blow out her brains. Just three." So I spoke for Stormy in the conversations that she and I had shared during the past week. I couldn't allow her to endanger herself like that. "Now? Through crack and chink, they fled the house, into the sun-drenched afternoon of Camp's End. And Little Ozzie. Don't answer the bell unless you can see who rang it." That's kind of you." "I'm thinking of going to college, after all, eventually getting a doctorate, building an academic career, like you." "No, no. Once those things are in place, we then look at type. The slightest fever or sore throat that troubled me was a crisis with which she could not deal. "Well, it's a mystery to me," I assured her. "We've been through this. "I was just sure you knew about such things, Odd, about all that's Otherly and Beyond." Some flowers offered sun-pricked petals of blood in bursting sprays. Except survival, of course. "Green," Viola said. Bad mojo. I didn't like the idea of being trapped at the top of the tower, even though we could shout for help and surely be heard. Herman, her sisters, her nieces, her nephews had been the center of her life. Sonny Wexler, the tallest and toughest and softest-spoken of the group, extended one brawny arm as if to stop me from rushing past him to the house. I had finished the second peach brandy. "No. I want her to be at least content. "Not just out of surgery but all the way home on his own two feet." When these last foul spirits had departed for the Mojave heat, I returned to the living room. And if Robertson's killer had visited her, he had surely not left her alive. The gun. Sensing my thoughts, as usual, she sat beside me on the bench and said, "When I have my own shop, the employees wont have to wear stupid uniforms." One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. Fungus Man's dusty Ford Explorer stood in the row behind mine and four spaces farther west. Page 121 I thought of the guy behind the shoe-rental counter at Green Moon Lanes, the blonde drawing beer behind the bar - both in their new work uniforms. "We've all got to die of something. The short hallway that served the bedroom also led to the bath. As I waited there on the edge of the boy's bed, even thinking about Stormy couldn't lift my spirits. Wanderlust, the lure of rich card games in fabled cities - Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans, Memphis - a need for adventure and excitement kept her away from Pico Mundo more than half the year. Pale beige stucco walls reflected the sun during the day and cooled quickly with the coming of night. The day had dawned less than an hour ago, and I had spent every minute of the morning living up to my name. Turning my back on her for what felt like forever, I hurried along the side of the house toward the street. Both sacristy doors had been locked from the inside. I am twenty years old. I can't. Perched on the edge of an armchair, Viola was as slim as a girl. They called the cops on a cell phone, but emergency-rescue services arrived too late to save him. The violence they crave is of the most extreme variety: multiple untimely deaths spiced with protracted horror, served with cruelty as thick as bad gravy. "What's that?" Numerous specialty shops occupied the two levels between those leviathans. With hard words and cold indifference, she can turn away anyone she chooses, but sometimes those weapons have not been sufficiently effective in our turbulent relationship. Lying on the floor with four legs in the air, forepaws bent in submission, Posey solicited a belly rub, which the girls were quick to provide. Page 62 Evidently he had expensive tastes, after all. Year 2008, Dean R Koontz - DEAN KOONTZ A Bantam Book / December 2003 Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc. New, DEAN KOONTZ ODD THOMAS ODD THOMAS A Bantam Book / December 2003 Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc, DEAN KOONTZ ODD THOMAS ODD THOMAS A Bantam Book / December 2003 Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc. New York,New York This is a work of fiction. The air quivered with them, a sight similar to the concentric ripples that spread across water from the impact point of a stone. As soon as I spoke, I regretted my words: "Why're you afraid of sex?" "Where are you going?" I was not born with the artistry of a gifted hash-slinger. I said to Viola, "In your dream, this house wasn't where you were gunned down. "Fate isn't one straight road," I said, becoming the oracle that earlier in the day I had declined to Page 123 be for her. They came into the apartment, and Little Ozzie closed the door behind them. "Me neither," I assured him, By the time Chief Porter and I finished talking, Stormy had gathered all our dinner wrappings and containers, and had stuffed them into one bag. When I recognized the vehicle, I knew a sadness equal to my fear. She said that she was still in the ICU waiting room. What I saw was unusual for a Wednesday in summer: a packed parking lot. "Besides," I said, "what's her reaction going to be if I walk over to the bar and tell her she's going to be shot to death if she doesn't get out of here?" 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