Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1)

by Dean Koontz

Each time I visited the showroom to stroll the aisles and mull a career change, Tom realized that I saw him, and he acknowledged me with a look or a nod. Once he even winked at me, conspiratorially. He had not, however, made any attempt to communicate either his purpose or his needs. He was a reticent ghost. Some days I wish more of them were like him.

As a rule, ghosts are serious about their condition and solemn in their demeanor. They belong on the Other Side but are stuck here, for whatever reasons, and they are impatient to move on. Once in a while, however, I encounter a spirit with his sense of humor intact. For my amusement, Tom even conspired to pick his nose with the forefinger of his severed arm. I prefer ghosts to be somber. There’s something about a walking dead man trying to get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked—as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves.

Inside this cavernous retail mecca, most of the stores appeared to be only moderately busy, but the Burke Bailey’s ice-cream parlor drew a crowd. Stormy Llewellyn has worked at Burke Bailey’s since she was sixteen. At twenty, she’s the manager. Her plan is to own a shop of her own by the time she’s twenty-four.

According to her, she’s not ambitious, just easily bored and in need of stimulation. I have frequently offered to stimulate her. She says she’s talking about mental stimulation. I tell her that, in case she hasn’t noticed, I do have a brain. She says there’s definitely no brain in my one-eyed snake and that what might be in my big head is still open to debate. “Why do you think I sometimes call you Pooh?” she once asked. “Because I’m cuddly?” “Because Pooh’s head is full of stuffin’.”

In five minutes, Stormy came out of Burke Bailey’s with two cones of ice cream. I enjoyed watching her walk toward me. Her uniform included pink shoes, white socks, a hot-pink skirt, a matching pink-and-white blouse, and a perky pink cap. With her Mediterranean complexion, jet-black hair, and mysterious dark eyes, she looked like a sultry espionage agent who had gone undercover as a hospital candy striper.

Stormy gave one of the cones to me, and for a minute or two we sat in silence, watching shoppers stroll past, enjoying our ice cream.

“How’d you get out here?” “Terri’s Mustang.” “You been missing me?” “Always. But I’m looking for someone.” I told her about Fungus Man. “This is where my instinct brought me.”

When someone isn’t where I expect to find him, neither at home nor at work, then sometimes I cruise around on my bicycle or in a borrowed car, turning randomly from street to street. Usually in less than half an hour, I cross paths with the one I seek. I need a face or a name for focus, but then I’m better than a bloodhound. This is a talent for which I have no name. Stormy calls it “psychic magnetism.”

“And here he comes now,” I said, referring to Fungus Man, who ambled along the promenade, following the descending rapids toward the tropical koi pond. Stormy didn’t have to ask me to point the guy out to her. Among the other shoppers, he was as obvious as a duck in a dog parade. Although I had nearly finished the ice cream without being chilled, I shivered at the sight of this strange m...

CHAP...

Fungus Man carried stuffed shopping bags from two department stores. “What’s that yellow thing on his head?” Stormy asked. “Hair.” “I think it’s a crocheted yarmulke.” “No, it’s hair.”

“Are the bodachs still with him?” Stormy asked. “Not as many as before. Just three.” “And they’re in my store with him?” “Yeah. They all went inside.” “This is bad for business,” she said ominously.

Through the windows of Burke Bailey’s, I could see Fungus Man at the counter. He studied the flavor menu, then placed an order. Stormy herself didn’t serve him but hovered nearby, behind the counter, on some pretense.

“You have a messiah complex, got to save the world.” “I don’t have a messiah complex. I just have…this gift. It wouldn’t have been given to me if I wasn’t supposed to use it.” “Maybe it’s not a gift. Maybe it’s a curse.” “It’s a gift.” Tapping my head, I said, “I’ve still got the box it came in.”

When Fungus Man began to move, heading upstream toward the waterfall, two bodachs accompanied him. For the moment, the third remained in Burke Bailey’s.

We had not yet reached the street when I realized that none of the bodachs had accompanied the smiley man when he’d left the mall. None were currently in the Explorer with him, and none loped after it, either. Earlier, he had departed the Grille with an entourage of at least twenty, which had shrunk to three when he arrived at Burke Bailey’s. The bodachs are usually devout in their attendance to any man who will be the source of terrible violence, and they do not desert him until the last drop of blood has been spilled.

CHAPTER 9

Fungus Man’s destination was a pale-yellow stucco casita with a faded blue front door. The carport leaned precipitously, as if the weight of sunshine alone might collapse it.

I parked across the street from the house, in front of an empty lot full of parched jimson weed and brambles as intricately woven as a dreamcatcher.

As I put down the car windows and switched off the engine, I watched Fungus Man carry his ice cream and other packages into the house. He entered by a side door in the carport shadows.

After forty minutes, Fungus Man reappeared. He locked the side door of the house, which suggested that no one remained at home, and got behind the wheel of his dust-shrouded Explorer.

Instead of going to the blue front door and making a greater spectacle of myself, I sought the shadows of the carport and knocked on the side door that Fungus Man had used. No one answered.

Confronted by a mere latch bolt, I was confident that, like other young Americans, I had been so well educated by TV cop dramas that I could slip easily into the house.

I didn’t know what I sought here, but I expected to recognize it when I saw it. Something had drawn the bodachs to this man, and I had followed in their wake with the hope of discovering a clue to the reason for their interest.

I realized that the air was not just cool but inexplicably chilly. For the most part, the sweat on my exposed skin had dried. On the nape of my neck, it felt as though it had turned to ice.

As I stood, head cocked, listening, the house waited in silence. On consideration, I suddenly found this stillness to be unnatural.

When I moved toward the open doorway between the kitchen and the next room, the cold air seemed to thicken, further muffling the transmission of sound.

When I picked up one of the books and thumbed through it, the riffling pages made no noise.

By this point, I seemed to be able to hear no sounds except those that had an internal origin: the thud of my heart, the rush of blood in my ears. I should have fled right then. The eerie muffling effect of the malign atmosphere in the house ought to have alarmed me.

Riffling the soundless pages of the romance novel, I thought that perhaps Fungus Man did not live here alone. These books might have been the preferred reading material of his companion. This possibility turned out not to be supported by the evidence in his bedroom. The closet contained only his clothes. The unmade bed, the scatter of yesterday’s underwear and socks, and a half-eaten raisin Danish on a paper plate, on the nightstand, argued against the civilizing presence of a woman.

Across the hall from Fungus Man’s bedroom stood another door. I assumed it led either to a closet or to a second bedroom. At that threshold, the air grew so chilled that I could see my breath, a pale plume. Icy against my palm, the doorknob turned. Beyond lay a vortex of silence that sucked the last sound out of my ears, leaving me for the moment deaf even to the labor of my heart. The black room waited.

CHAPTER 10

DURING MY TWENTY YEARS, I HAVE BEEN IN MANY dark places, some lacking light and others devoid of hope. In my experience, none had been darker than th...

At the threshold, I squinted into such absolute blackness that I seemed to be peering not into a room at all but into dead space in a far region of the universe where the ancient stars were burnt-out cinders. The bone-brittling cold, deeper here than elsewhere in the house, and the oppressive silence argued as well that this was some bleak way station in the interstellar vacuum.

I’m not stupid, but I am one of those who will never flee the haunted place. The special gift of paranormal sight, with which I was born, impels me to explore, and I can no more resist the demands of my talent than a musical prodigy can resist the magnetic pull of a piano; I am no more deterred by the mortal risks than is a fighter pilot eager to take flight into war-torn skies.

On the brink of unblemished blackness, I raised my right hand as if I were taking an oath—and pressed my palm to the apparent barrier before me. Although this darkness could fend off light, it offered no resistance whatsoever to the pressure that I applied. My hand disappeared into the tarry gloom.

Having discovered that I could see the exit to the hall and therefore could find my way out, I let go of the doorway. I eased entirely into this lightless chamber and, turning away from the sight of the hall, became at once as blind as I was deaf.

Wishing that I’d had a second scoop of coconut cherry chocolate chunk while I’d had the chance, I took six steps, ten, twenty. The beacon didn’t increase in size and seemed in fact to recede from me at precisely the speed at which I approached it.

Of more interest than the distance covered was the figure now silhouetted in the open door. Not Fungus Man. Backlit by the hallway light stood…me.

Convinced that this wasn’t a mirror effect and that I was in fact gazing at another me, I nevertheless tested my certainty by waving. The other Odd Thomas didn’t return my wave, as a reflection would have done.

Glancing at my wristwatch, I convinced myself that this was, indeed, earlier. I had not merely been magically transported from the black room to the living room but also had been cast a few minutes backward in time.

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. This must have been the earlier me that had not yet crossed that threshold.

Assuming that two of me could not coexist without calamity, not charmed by the prospect of exploding, I remained in the archway, watching, until the other Odd Thomas stepped across the threshold into the black room.

When I judged that he’d spotted the sullen red light and had progressed about twenty paces toward it, when he’d had time to look back and see me standing here, I checked my wristwatch to establish the beginning of this episode, reached into the blackness with my right hand, just to be sure nothing felt different about that strange realm, and then I crossed the threshold once more.

CHAPTER 11

The profound silence that reigned in the house did not extend beyond those walls. A dog barked lazily in the distance. An old Pontiac with a knocking engine and a squealing fan belt passed in the street.

Certain that I had spent no more than a minute in the black room, I consulted my wristwatch again. Apparently I had been not only cast out of the house but also five or six minutes into the future.

I wondered if Fungus Man was really a man at all—or something new to the neighborhood. I wondered how long he had lived here, who he pretended to be, and what the hell his intentions were.

I wondered if the black room might be not a time machine but something even stranger than that. The time-related occurrences might be nothing more than side effects of its primary function.

I stopped abruptly, struck by what had changed. I could hear normally. My footsteps had crackled the ancient linoleum in the kitchen, and the swinging door to the living room had squeaked on unoiled hinges. That vortex of silence no longer sucked all sound out of the house.