by Dean Koontz
The lingering dead are generally a bummed-out bunch, more often than not tethered to the place where they died. They aren’t able to zip off to the multiplex to catch the latest Hollywood comedy of ill manners and to enjoy a thirty-dollar bag of free-range popcorn cooked in government-approved fish oil. After years of constant worrying about what waits for them on the Other Side, after clinging for so long to this world in the hope of seeing their murderers brought to justice, they really need some fun.
I could picture those two spirits, the woman and the horse, racing across Roseland, laughing heartily—if silently—at how easily they conned gullible Odd Thomas into scampering up a tree, sheltering there, and shivering in anticipation of a nonexistent boogeyman, when in fact the worst thing I really had to fear was being pooped upon by a bird on a higher branch.
Then the boogeyman arrived.
Boogeymen.
The first indication that I had not been duped by a ghost came when the faint bleachy smell sliced through the foliage, adding its sharp edge to the soft fragrances of the oak bark and the green leaves and the weather-split acorns that still hung like damaged ornaments in the tree.
Although the ozone odor was far less pungent here than in the stable, it was no less out of place. In the open air, it wasn’t as likely to intensify to the degree that it did in a closed room. But I had little doubt that, just as before, this smell was a herald of something weirder and more dangerous than spirits of the dead.
A swift change in the quality of light solidified my expectation of another encounter with the stinky pack that could see in the dark. The golden morning sunshine twinkling in the gaps between the leaves became yellow-orange as its angle of origin shifted east to west.
I might not be able to understand the inscrutable stuff that half the people I meet say to me, but I am reliably dead-on when I anticipate mayhem. If I could find a national competition of confused and paranoid psychics, I would win the trophy and retire.
Carpeted with the small, oval, dry leaves of the live oaks, the woods didn’t allow any living thing to pass through quietly. Anyway, the pack that had hoped to extract me from the feed bin was not in the least concerned with stealth. They arrived in a blundering rush, so boisterously tramping across the sheddings of the trees that the crunching-crackling masked any snarling and snorting in which they might have been engaged.
I squinted this way and that, through the layered foliage, but what limited views I had of the ground revealed nothing useful about the recent arrivals. The oaks threw down more darkness than before, and the jack-o’-lantern light did not thrust through the limbs in crisp blades as had the morning sun, but fluttered through, fitful and sullen, as if a breeze that I could not feel fanned flames that I could not see, blowing reflections of fire through the woods.
Of the pack, nothing was visible except shadowy shapes, some of them swift but others lurching, all of them agitated and seeming to be urgently seeking something. Most likely they were not searching for maidens of good reputation to marry and to have children who would spend long evenings with them, hearthside, playing flutes and violins in family musicales.
Both the lithe and the clumsy among them followed the same erratic path through the oaks, as though they were crazed, weaving away to the east, to the north, then south. Their frantic progress was easy to track by the trampling of a million dry oak leaves.
Each time they drew near, I could again hear their grunting and growling as in the stable. But to me on my high perch, those guttural noises had a somewhat different character from what I thought that I had heard through the screened ventilation holes of the feed bin.
They were still like the sounds that animals made, but they were not only animal in nature. I thought that I heard a human quality in some of these exclamations: a wordless expression of desperation, a pathetic whine of anxiety that I might have unconsciously issued myself in a moment of great stress and danger, and a tortured snarl of anger that wasn’t mere animal rage but expressed a bitter, brooding resentment suggestive of emotions that come only with intelligence.
The air was not cold. My light sweater and jeans were adequate to the day. A chill crept through me nonetheless.
This was as much a mob as it was a pack.
An animal pack is a group of individuals, all sharing much the same personality of their species, operating according to their best instincts and the habits of their kind.
On the other hand, a mob of people is disorderly and lawless. They are stirred to a peak of excitement not by the hunt, as is an animal, not by a worthy need for sustenance, but by an idea that might be true or a lie—and that is most often the latter. When it is an evil idea, which a lie always must be, those swept up by it are immeasurably more dangerous than any animal that ever lived upon the Earth in all its history. People in a lie-driven mob are savage, cruel, and capable of such violence that a mere lion would flee from them in terror, and a fierce crocodile would seek the safety of swamp waters.
Judging by the sound of them, there were many more here than had been in the stable, perhaps a score of them or even twice that.
A greater urgency informed their actions, too. By the moment, the sounds they made suggested that they were driving themselves into a frenzy of such intensity that nothing could appease them but blood and plenty of it.
Three times they had rushed past the tree in which I hid, and their sense of smell—or whatever other perception served them best—had thus far failed them. As they poured past a fourth time, I still could see nothing of the beasts except shadows that seemed to promise fantastic deformities as they jostled one another in their eagerness to find me.
Already the yellow-orange sunlight was beginning to turn deep orange. I wasn’t likely to get a better look at these creatures unless they took their search vertical and came face-to-face with me in my oaken redoubt.
What we fear too much we often bring to pass.
They were almost gone away to the north of the woods when abruptly they turned back. These things of shadow, half-perceived sinister shapes, flowed around the tree, like a sea tide washing around a pinnacle of offshore rock.
The last of them lapped into place, and the crackle of leaves splitting underfoot ceased. They went mute, as well, as hushed as those monsters that hide under a child’s bed and, by their perfect silence, tempt him to feel safe enough to lean out, lift the covers, and look under.
I was not tempted to feel safe. They had found me.
Thirteen
BEING TREED WAS NOT AS HOPELESS AS BEING BOXED IN a feed bin. Because I had escaped the latter, I thought I might survive this predicament in the oak.
Having been mostly jobless since I left Pico Mundo, having recently become rootless, I had no health insurance. Consequently, I was motivated not merely to live but also to avoid hideous disfigurement that the state was too bankrupt to have repaired for me and that would require me to live in the subcellar of an opera house. I’ve never much cared for opera, but jazz clubs don’t have subcellars.
In the open air, the aggregate stench of the crowd around the oak didn’t induce nausea as rapidly as in the stable, but I pinched my nose and breathed through my mouth. The smell wasn’t as lovely as stale sweat and rotten breath; I thought they must also have stink glands, like skunks, except that skunks were considerate enough to limit their malodor to their spray, while these things seemed to ooze it continually from every pore.
Squint as I might, I could not see the true forms or the faces of those gathered below and, presumably, gazing up at me. Again, dusk had come too early, long before noon. The dwindling light grew red-orange. Where it lay like a radiant dust upon the figures at the base of the oak, it revealed nothing, as if I were studying them through a pair of infrared goggles in which the batteries were nearly dead.
And then as the darkness slowly deepened, their eyes began to glow. Pink at first and almost pretty, like little fairy lights, they rapidly became as red as I imagined the eyes of wolves might be at night
, although these creatures were nothing as endearing as wolves.
In the past, I had found myself pitted against murderers, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, a misguided former billionaire and monk, kidnappers, terrorists, and others who at some point in their lives had slipped or been dragged, or plunged gleefully, into the dark side. I don’t do battle against vampires and werewolves for the simple reason that they don’t exist.
Nevertheless, gazing down through the oak branches at the red-eyed mob, I was tempted to picture a few dozen escapees from a young-adult novel who were looking for blood and new girlfriends. Whatever they were, however, I sensed that they wouldn’t be sufficiently good-looking to get dates for the prom.
There was a reasonably good chance that these beasts were not climbers. Mountain lions can climb, but coyotes can’t. Bears can climb, but wolves can’t. Squirrels are great at it, rabbits embarrass themselves trying. I might merely have to wait out these creatures until this strange twilight relented, as it had done before.
One of them began to climb.
Abandoning the first crotch of the tree, I scampered up as quickly as a boy playing monkey.
Glancing down, I was heartened to see that my pursuer—no more than a shadowy form—was struggling to ascend. It seemed to be poorly equipped for climbing. Judging by its growls, its squeals of rage, and the furious thrashing of greenery, the thing regarded the tree as a conscious adversary that was willfully thwarting it, and it retaliated by smashing at the branches and shaking from them great sprays of leaves.
The higher I went, the less foliage between me and the sky, the better the light should have become. But this sun sought the sea as fast as a burning ship that had taken cannonballs through its hull.
In a couple of minutes, I would have no light at all. Feeling my way blindly through an oaken maze, high above the earth, seemed as sure a way to die as any.
Before I ran out of twilight, I began to run out of tree. These higher limbs were less formidable than lower ones, and they sagged treacherously. My feet slipped frequently, and my hands ached from gripping with such intensity.
I halted and eased down to sit with my back against the much-diminished main trunk. I straddled a limb that didn’t offer much of a butt rest and that would restore to me a boys’-choir voice if my weight suddenly shifted.
Even over my rough breathing, I could hear thrashing far below, as the infuriated creature tried to ascend by beating the oak into submission. I took comfort that its IQ, while no doubt high enough to allow it to run for elective office, seemed to be only a fraction of mine.
The ozone odor remained with me, faint but persistent. At what must have been a height of sixty feet, however, I could smell nothing of the mob below.
A minute or two later, that stink began to rise to me once more, and I realized that the climber must be making progress, after all.
Darkness took the sky above, and for a moment I could only feel and imagine the black limbs of the oak, not see them.
The loss of light didn’t bring the beast below to a halt. It continued to thrash vigorously through the resisting tree, snapping branch-lets, raising such commotion in the leaves as a squall of wind might have done. Grunts of satisfaction seemed to indicate that safe footing had been found, while snarls and squeals of frustration no doubt marked those moments when the way upward was neither obvious nor easy. Twice, an ugly wet chortling, disturbing and protracted, seemed to suggest that the thing was delighted by the prospect of tearing off my face, putting it on a kaiser roll with mustard, and eating it.
As the odor of the creature grew stronger, I began to feel like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, except that instead of the implacable Inspector Javert, my pursuer was a red-eyed demonic mutant something.
The absolute darkness was now relieved by what appeared to be the light of a rising yellowish moon. The oak around me reappeared, though like a less than fully imagined tree in a dream. I remained unable to see the climber below.
I could no longer afford to wait for this unscheduled night to recede and to take the mysterious creatures with it, as happened in the stable. This event had already lasted longer than the first, and I had no reason to expect that in another minute I would find myself freed from the current weirdness and returned to the daylight of that kinder, gentler Roseland.
As the stench grew, I rose gingerly, pressing my back to the trunk, and gripped a branch above me, first with one hand, then with both. I turned on the limb to peer down into the quadrant of the great oak through which the thing was making its way.
The action I intended might result in losing my footing, losing my overhead grip, and plunging through battering, skewering phalanxes of limbs and branches with a cry far less triumphant than the cry with which Tarzan conquered jungles. But I could see nothing else to do but wait for the beast to appear below me and, as it attempted to clamber up to my level, kick it repeatedly in the face until it lost its grip—or bit off my foot.
Sometimes I wish I liked guns.
I’ve had to resort to them at times, but always with reluctance. The terrifying games that my disturbed mother played with a pistol when I was a boy have left me with an abiding aversion to firearms and a preference for simpler weapons—in this case as simple as my foot—that might sooner or later get me killed.
The singular stink had become nearly thick enough to make my eyes water, but the climber had not yet appeared, although the noise of its ascent was greater and closer.
Only when something swung around from the farther side of the oak onto my limb, behind me and slightly to my left, did I realize there had been at least one other climber in addition to the freak that I’d been tracking. It seized my right shoulder in one brutish hand, and I knew next would come a bite, a slash.
Before claws or teeth could draw blood, I thrust backward with my entire body. My feet slipped off the curve of bark—and treaded empty air. I was hanging only from the limb above my head, but with that sudden move I also knocked my attacker off the tree. Clutching fast to my shoulder was its only hope, but its terrible weight was such that I felt as if, in its grasp, my muscle might be separating from the shoulder bone. Pain shot up my arm and into my right hand, which slipped off the branch.
I hung now only by my left hand, but the abrupt change in my position jolted the creature clinging to me, and its hand—which felt poorly articulated, of limited dexterity—slipped off my shoulder. With a howl, the thing fell away and quickly had the howl knocked out of it as it slammed through the unforgiving architecture of the oak. The beast, of which I hadn’t a single glimpse, must have crashed into the mob at the base of the tree, because shrieks of pain and outrage rose from below.
As those cries began to subside, the crepitation of a thousand long, leathery wings reverberated through the blind-dark woods. The swarm, most likely the same that I had seen descending out of the northwest the previous evening, seethed among the oaks, attacking the beasts below, who squealed in terror.
As I restored my two-hand grip on the overhead limb and began to swing gently back and forth in the hope of regaining my footing, I steeled myself against the likelihood that one of the immense bats—if that’s what they were—would soar up through the branches below me and tear off a piece of my face. At the taste of me, it would call up others of its kind, and an Odd feast would begin.
I regained my footing, not expecting to keep it long. But as I shivered, listening to the tumult and the screaming below, I dared to hope that the prey at ground level might be so plentiful that the flock, the colony, whatever it should be called, would be satiated by what it killed on the woodland floor.
From a TV documentary, I remembered a variety of bat that had curved incisors as sharp as razors and another variety that possessed claws so sharp and so precisely hooked that it could rip fish out of the water and fly away with them. Nature films can inspire as many nightmares as any blood-soaked monster movie ever made.
Abruptly the darkness ebbed as morning lig
ht once more flowed down over me and through the branches to the floor of the woods. The tide of sunshine washed away the creatures that the unnatural night had brought with it, as if they had never existed. As far as I could see, nothing dead or alive waited on the carpet of leaves below.
Fourteen
ALL IN WHITE AND IMMENSE, LIKE AN ARRAY OF TAUT mainsails and topsails and staysails, Chef Shilshom seemed about to glide away wherever the wind might carry him. But the kitchen, of course, was windless, and the chef was intent upon adding to a pile of eyes on the cutting board beside the sink, where he was blinding several pounds of potatoes before peeling them.
My morning had been exhausting, especially as I’d eaten nothing but an almond croissant, and I needed to fill my fuel tank. “Sir, I don’t want to bother you, but Roseland is taking a lot out of me today. I could use some protein.”
“Mmmmm,” he said, and pointed to a warm quiche on a cooling rack and to a fresh cheesecake to which the lemon glaze had recently been applied.
As a guest granted kitchen privileges, I could have made a ham sandwich or searched out a leftover chicken breast. Instead I cut and plated a wedge of the quiche and a slice of the cheesecake, and poured a glass of milk.
I don’t worry about cholesterol. Considering my gift and the limited life expectancy it almost certainly ensures, my arteries will be as squeaky-clean as those of a newborn when I die, even if I eat nothing but ice cream at every meal.
Sitting on a stool at the island nearest to the chef, I watched him carve the faults out of the potatoes with an intensity that was a little disturbing. Tip of the tongue pinched between his teeth, plump cheeks rosier than usual, eyes slitted as if with contempt, and a fine dew of perspiration on his forehead all seemed to indicate that in his imagination he was cutting the eyes from something potentially more responsive than potatoes.