Odd Thomas (Odd Thomas, #1)

by Dean Koontz

“So it was a bomb?” “A very small one, affixed to the sculpture during the night, with a timer that allowed these ‘serpents who feed on filth and venom’ to be far from the crime when the blast came. That’s not Shakespeare, either. Voltaire writing on critics.”

Ozzie invited me to make myself comfortable in his living room while he fetched the Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, and thus I found myself alone with Terrible Chester. This cat is not fat, but he is big and fearless. I once saw him stand off an aggressive German shepherd sheerly with attitude.

Finally turning his head, he regarded me appraisingly, with contempt so thick that I expected to hear it drizzle to the floor with a spattering sound. Then he shifted his attention once more to the window.

Something outside had so disturbed him that he rose to his feet on the windowsill, arched his back, and bristled his hackles. Although clearly I was not the cause of his agitation, I slid to the edge of my armchair, poised for flight. Chester hissed again, then clawed the glass. The skreeeek of his nails on the window made the fluid quiver in the hollows of my spine.

When Chester raked the glass again, I got to my feet. I eased toward the window with caution, not because I feared that a Molotov cocktail would crash through it but because I didn’t want the vexated cat to misunderstand my motives.

Outside, at the picket fence, facing the house, stood the Fungus Man, Bob Robertson.

CHAPT...

Robertson had gone, and quickly, as if with an urgent purpose.

When I finished telling him about Robertson, the black room, and the file cabinets packed with thick case histories of homicidal maniacs, he said, “Odd, I wish you would get a gun.”

“What are you going to do about this Bob Robertson?” I shrugged. Ozzie pressed me: “You’ve got to do something if he knows that you were in his house this afternoon and already he’s following you around.” “All I can do is be careful. And wait for Chief Porter to get something on him. Anyway, maybe he wasn’t actually following me. Maybe he heard about your exploding cow and stopped by to gawk at the ruins.”

At the end of the hall lay the kitchen. On a black-granite counter stood the bottle, uncorked to let the wine breathe. Although the front rooms had been comfortably air-conditioned, the kitchen proved to be surprisingly warm. Entering, I thought for an instant that all four ovens must be filled with baking treats. Then I saw that the back door stood open. The desert evening, still broiling in the stubborn summer sun, had sucked the coolness from the kitchen.

When I stepped to the door to close it, I saw Bob Robertson in the backyard, as pale and fungoid as ever he had looked.

CHAPT...

ROBERTSON STOOD FACING THE HOUSE, AS though waiting for me to see him. Then he turned and walked tow...

I tacked quickly but warily through the woods, north to south, then south to north, first in silence, then calling his name—“Mr. Robertson?”—but he didn’t answer.

In the kitchen again, I closed the door. I engaged the deadbolt lock. And the security chain.

When I returned to the living room with the bottle of Cabernet, half the cheese had disappeared from the canape plate, and Little Ozzie was still ensconced in his commodious chair, where he himself had once said that he looked as cozy as the Toad King on his throne.

“Now that you’re up,” I said, “I think you should lock the door behind me. And keep all the doors locked till this thing is resolved. Don’t answer the bell unless you can see who rang it.” “I’m not afraid of him,” Ozzie declared. “My well-padded vital organs are hard to reach with either blade or bullet. And I know a few things about self-defense.”

Ozzie dismissed my concern with a wave of his six-fingered hand. “Unlike you, I’ve got a gun. More than one.” “Start keeping them handy. I’m so sorry to have drawn him here.” “Nonsense. He was just something stuck to your shoe that you didn’t know was there.”

I waited on the porch until he closed the door and until I heard the deadbolt being engaged. As I negotiated the cow-strewn front walk and then rounded the Mustang to the driver’s door, I surveyed the quiet street. Neither Robertson nor his dusty Ford Explorer was to be seen.

CHAPTER 18

The Mojave sun is not a timid little Boston sun or even a don’t-worry-be-happy Caribbean sun. The Mojave sun is a fierce, aggressive beast that isn’t going to be intimidated by the shadows of five-story apartment buildings.

With her raven hair and jet-black eyes, she might have been the bride of a pharaoh, swept forward in time from ancient Egypt. In her eyes are mysteries to rival those of the Sphinx and those of all the pyramids that ever were or ever will be excavated from the sands of the Sahara.

Father Sean Llewellyn, rector of St. Bart’s, is Stormy’s uncle. He knows she loves the tower, and he indulges her with a key.

Three sides of the belfry were open above a waist-high wall, presenting splendid views of Pico Mundo, the Maravilla Valley, and the hills beyond. We stationed ourselves at the west side, the better to enjoy the sunset.

We don’t eat in this perch every evening, only two or three times a month, when Stormy needs to be high above the world. And closer to Heaven.

“To Ozzie,” Stormy said, raising her glass in a toast. “With the hope that one day there’ll be an end to all his losses.”

“The sky’s so clear,” Stormy said. “We’ll be able to see Cassiopeia tonight.” She referred to a northern constellation named after a figure of classic mythology, but Cassiopeia was also the name of Stormy’s mother, who had died when Stormy was seven years old. Her father had perished in the same plane crash. With no family but her uncle, the priest, she had been placed for adoption. When in three months the adoption failed for good reason, she made it explicitly clear that she didn’t want new parents, only the return of those whom she had loved and lost. Until the age of seventeen, when she graduated from high school, she was raised in an orphanage. Thereafter, until she was eighteen, she had lived under the legal guardianship of her uncle. For the niece of a priest, Stormy has a strange relationship with God. There is anger in it—always a little, sometimes a lot.

Immediately west of St. Bart’s is a cemetery very much in the old style: not bronze plaques set in granite flush with the grass, as in most modern graveyards, but vertical headstones and monuments. An iron fence with spear-point pickets surrounds those three acres. Although a few California live oaks, more than a century old, shade portions of the burial ground, most of the green aisles are open to the sun.

In the fiery glow of that Tuesday twilight, the grass appeared to have a bronze undertone, the shadows were as black as char, the polished surfaces of the granite markers mirrored the scarlet sky—and Robertson stood as still as any headstone in the churchyard, not under the cover of a tree but out where he could be easily seen.

With his head tipped back, with his eyes fixed on me where I stood at the belfry parapet, the singular intensity of his interest all but crackled from him like arcing electricity.

Robertson had arrived with nightfall.

Down on the darkening grass, Robertson had thus far stood with his arms at his sides, a slump-shoulder hulk. Aware that I was as fixated on him as he was on me, he now raised his right arm almost as if in a Nazi salute.

Initially I thought he might be shaking his fist at me, but in spite of the poor—and rapidly fading—light, I soon saw that the gesture was even less polite than it had seemed at first. His middle finger was extended, and he thrust it toward me with short, angry jabs. “Robertson’s here,” I told her. “Who?” “Fungus Man.” Suddenly he was on the move, walking between the headstones, toward the church. “We better forget dinner,” I said, drawing Stormy to her feet with the intention of hustling her out of the belfry. “Let’s get down from here.” Resisting me, she turned to the parapet. “I don’t let anyone intimidate me.” “Oh, I do. If they’re crazy enough.” “Where is he? I don’t see him.” Leaning out, peering down, I couldn’t see him either. Apparently he had reached the front or the back of the church and had turned a corner. “The door at the bottom of the steps,” I said, “did it lock behind us automatically when we came into the tower?” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

We had left the lights on in the tower. But the spiral stairs were enclosed, and I couldn’t see all the way to the bottom, only as far as the continuously curving walls allowed. Below, all was quiet. “Hurry,” I urged Stormy, and without using the handrail, I preceded her down those steep steps, setting a pace too fast to be safe.

CHAPTER 19

When we reached the bottom without encountering him, we found the lower door unlocked. I opened it cautiously.

When I opened the centermost of three front doors, I saw Robertson climbing the church steps from the sidewalk. Although not racing toward me, he approached with the grim implacability of a tank crossing a battlefield.

Robertson was bigger than me, but soft. Had his anger been that of an ordinary man, perhaps pumped up by one beer too many, I might have confronted him and would have been confident of taking him down. He was a lunatic, however, an object of fascination to bodachs, and an idolizer of mass murderers and serial killers. I had to assume that he carried a gun, a knife, and that in the middle of a fight, he might begin to bite like a dog.

As far as I could tell, Robertson had not arrived. If he had entered the nave, surely he would have come directly after us, along the center aisle.

Stormy’s instinct was in sync with mine. Surveying the geometric shadows of pews, aisles, and colonnades, she whispered, “He’s closer than you think. He’s very close.”

We quickly crossed the room to the outer sacristy door. I knew that beyond lay the east churchyard, the one without tombstones, and a flagstone path leading to the rectory where her uncle lived. This door also was locked. From within the sacristy, the lock could be released without a key. I gripped the thumb-turn…but hesitated. Perhaps we had not heard or seen Robertson enter the nave from the narthex for the simple reason that he’d never come into the front of the church after I had glimpsed him ascending the steps. And perhaps, anticipating that we would try to flee from the back of the church, he had circled the building to wait for us outside the sacristy. This might explain why I had sensed that we were moving toward danger rather than away from it.

I waited. I listened. I grew increasingly uneasy. Stepping away from the outer door, I whispered to Stormy, “Let’s go back the way we came.”

Two sacristy doors. The outer led to the churchyard. The inner led to the sanctuary. Having heard nothing at either exit, I had to rely on intuition. I chose the door to the sanctuary.

Without exchanging a word, we arrived at a plan that we both understood. I remained at the door to the sanctuary. Stormy returned to the churchyard door. If when I unlocked my door, Robertson lunged for me, Stormy would throw open the outer door and bolt from the sanctuary, shouting for help. I would attempt to follow her—and stay alive.

CHAPTER 20

We were in the main aisle when a great crash and shattering of glass shook away the churchly silence behind us. We spun, we looked, but saw no wreckage. The sacristy had been windowless, and there’d been no glass in the door to the churchyard. Nevertheless, that chamber, which we’d just left, seemed to be the source of these sounds of destruction. They rose again, louder than before.

In our haste to escape, we had left the light on in that room. Now, through the open door, secondhand movement was visible: a farrago of leaping shadows and flares of shimmery light. I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t intend to return to the sacristy for a look. Holding Stormy’s hand again, I ran with her along the center aisle, the length of the nave, and through a door into the narthex. Out of the church, down the steps, we fled into a twilight that had nearly bled to death, had little red left to give, and had begun to pull purple shrouds over the streets of Pico Mundo.

Stormy urged me to hurry, as if hurrying weren’t already my intention, and finally the key mated as it should, and the engine roared to life. Leaving a significant offering of rubber in front of St. Bart’s, we traveled a block and a half on smoking tires, so fast that we almost seemed to have teleported, before I had the breath to say, “Call the chief.”

“Tell me about Robertson. I have a man watching his house in Camp’s End, but he hasn’t gone home yet.” I said, “He was down in the graveyard, saw us up in the belfry. He gave us the rude number one with lots of emphasis and then came after us.” “You think he knows you were in his house?” the chief asked. “If he hasn’t been home since I was there, I don’t see how he could know, but he must. Excuse me a second, sir.”