by Dean Koontz
In short, Stormy sees this life as boot camp. She calls the next life “service.”
I sure hope she’s wrong, because one of the implications of her cosmology is that the many terrors we know here are an inoculation against worse in the world to come.
Stormy says that whatever’s expected of us in the next life will be worth enduring, partly for the sheer adventure of it but primarily because the reward for service comes in our third life.
Personally, I’d prefer to receive my reward one life sooner than she foresees.
Stormy, however, is into delayed gratification. If on Monday she thirsts for a root-beer float, she’ll wait until Tuesday or Wednesday to treat herself to one. She insists that the wait makes the float taste better.
My point of view is this: If you like root-beer floats so much, have one on Monday, another on Tuesday, and a third on Wednesday.
According to Stormy, if I live by this philosophy too long, I’m going to be one of those eight-hundred-pound men who, when they fall ill, must be extracted from their homes by construction crews and cranes.
“If you want to suffer the humiliation of being hauled to the hospital on a flatbed truck,” she once said, “don’t expect me to sit on your great bloated gut like Jiminy Cricket on the brow of the whale, singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’”
I’m reasonably sure that in Disney’s Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket never sits on the brow of the whale. In fact I’m not convinced that he himself encounters the whale.
If I were to make this observation to Stormy, however, she would favor me with one of those wry looks that means Are you hopelessly stupid or just being pissy? This is a look to be avoided if not dreaded.
As I waited there on the edge of the boy’s bed, even thinking about Stormy couldn’t lift my spirits. Indeed, if the grinning images of Scooby-Doo, imprinted on the sheets, didn’t cheer me, perhaps nothing could.
I kept thinking about Harlo losing his mother at six, about how his life might have been a memorial to her, about how instead he had shamed her memory.
And I thought about Penny, of course: her life brought to such an early end, the terrible loss to her family, the enduring pain that had changed their lives forever.
Penny put her left hand in my right and squeezed reassuringly.
Her hand felt as real as that of a living child, as firm, as warm. I didn’t understand how she could be this real to me and yet walk through walls, this real to me and yet invisible to others.
I wept a little. Sometimes I do. I’m not embarrassed by tears. At times like this, tears exorcise emotions that would otherwise haunt me and, by their haunting, embitter me.
Even as my vision blurred at the first shimmer of tears not yet spent, Penny clasped my hand in both of hers. She smiled, and winked as if to say, It’s all right, Odd Thomas. Get it out, be rid of it.
The dead are sensitive to the living. They have walked this path ahead of us and know our fears, our failings, our desperate hopes, and how much we cherish what cannot last. They pity us, I think, and no doubt they should.
When my tears dried, Penny rose to her feet, smiled again, and with one hand smoothed the hair back from my brow. Good-bye, this gesture seemed to say. Thank you, and good-bye.
She walked across the room, through the wall, into the August morning one story above the front yard—or into another realm even brighter than a Pico Mundo summer.
A moment later, Wyatt Porter appeared in the bedroom doorway.
Our chief of police is a big man, but he isn’t threatening in appearance. With basset eyes and bloodhound jowls, his face has been affected by Earth’s gravity more than has the rest of him. I’ve seen him move fast and decisively, but in action and in repose he seems to carry a great weight on his beefy, rounded shoulders.
Over the years, as the low hills encircling our town have been sculpted into neighborhoods of tract houses, swelling our population, and as the meanness of an ever crueler world has crept into the last havens of civility, like Pico Mundo, perhaps Chief Porter has seen too much of human treachery. Perhaps the weight he carries is a load of memories that he would prefer to shed, but can’t.
“So here we are again,” he said, entering the room.
“Here we are,” I agreed.
“Busted patio door, busted furniture.”
“Didn’t bust most of it myself. Except the lamp.”
“But you created the situation that led to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t you come to me, give me a chance to figure a way Harlo could entrap himself?”
We had worked together in that fashion in the past.
“My feeling,” I said, “was that he needed to be confronted right away, that maybe he was going to do it again real soon.”
“Your feeling.”
“Yes, sir. That’s what I think Penny wanted to convey. There was a quiet urgency about her.”
“Penny Kallisto.”
“Yes, sir.”
The chief sighed. He settled upon the only chair in the room: a child-size, purple upholstered number on which Barney the dinosaur’s torso and head served as the back support. He appeared to be sitting in Barney’s lap. “Son, you sure complicate my life.”
“They complicate your life, sir, and mine much more than yours,” I said, meaning the dead.
“True enough. If I were you, I’d have gone crazy years ago.”
“I’ve considered it,” I admitted.
“Now listen, Odd, I want to find a way to keep you out of the courtroom on this one, if it comes to that.”
“I want to find a way, too.”
Few people know any of my strange secrets. Only Stormy Llewellyn knows all of them.
I want anonymity, a simple and quiet life, or at least as simple as the spirits will allow.
The chief said, “I think he’s going to give us a confession in the presence of his attorney. There may be no trial. But if there is, we’ll say that he opened his wallet to pay some bet he’d made with you, maybe on a baseball game, and the Polaroids of Penny fell out.”
“I can sell that,” I assured him.
“I’ll speak with Horton Barks. He’ll minimize your involvement when he writes it up.”
Horton Barks was the publisher of the Maravilla County Times. Twenty years ago in the Oregon woods, while hiking, he’d had dinner with Big Foot—if you can call some trail mix and canned sausages dinner.
In truth, I don’t know for a fact that Horton had dinner with Big Foot, but that’s what he claims. Given my daily experiences, I’m in no position to doubt Horton or anyone else who has a story to tell about an encounter with anything from aliens to leprechauns.
“You all right?” Chief Porter asked.
“Pretty much. But I sure hate being late for work. This is the busiest time at the Grille.”
“You called in?”
“Yeah.” I held up my little cell phone, which had been clipped to my belt when I went into the pool. “Still works.”
“I’ll probably stop in later, have a pile of home fries and a mess of eggs.”
“Breakfast all day,” I said, which has been a solemn promise of the Pico Mundo Grille since 1946.
Chief Porter shifted from one butt cheek to the other, causing Barney to groan. “Son, you figure to be a short-order cook forever?”
“No, sir. I’ve been thinking about a career change to tires.”
“Tires?”
“Maybe sales first, then installation. They’ve always got job openings out at Tire World.”
“Why tires?”
I shrugged. “People need them. And it’s something I don’t know, something new to learn. I’d like to see what that life’s like, the tire life.”
We sat there half a minute or so, neither of us saying anything. Then he asked, “And that’s the only thing you see on the horizon? Tires, I mean.”
“Swimming-pool maintenance looks intriguing. With all these new communities going in around us, th
ere’s a new pool about every day.”
Chief Porter nodded thoughtfully.
“And it must be nice working in a bowling alley,” I said. “All the new people coming and going, the excitement of competition.”
“What would you do in a bowling alley?”
“For one thing, take care of the rental shoes. They need to be irradiated or something between uses. And polished. You have to check the laces regularly.”
The chief nodded, and the purple Barney chair squeaked more like a mouse than like a dinosaur.
My clothes had nearly dried, but they were badly wrinkled. I checked my watch. “I better get moving. I’m going to have to change before I can go to the Grille.”
We both rose to our feet.
The Barney chair collapsed.
Looking at the purple ruins, Chief Porter said, “That could have happened when you were fighting Harlo.”
“Could have,” I said.
“Insurance will cover it with the rest.”
“There’s always insurance,” I agreed.
We went downstairs, where Stevie was sitting on a stool in the kitchen, happily eating a lemon cupcake.
“I’m sorry, but I broke your bedroom chair,” Chief Porter told him, for the chief is not a liar.
“That’s just a stupid old Barney chair, anyway,” the boy said. “I outgrew that stupid old Barney stuff weeks ago.”
With a broom and a dustpan, Stevie’s mom was sweeping up the broken glass.
Chief Porter told her about the chair, and she was inclined to dismiss it as unimportant, but he secured from her a promise that she would look up the original cost and let him know the figure.
He offered me a ride home, but I said, “Quickest for me is just to go back the way I came.”
I left the house through the hole where the glass door had been, walked around the pool instead of splashing through it, climbed the slumpstone wall, crossed the narrow alleyway, climbed the wrought-iron fence, walked the lawn around another house, crossed Marigold Lane, and returned to my apartment above the garage.
FOUR
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. BUT THEN, BY GOD, I DO something about it.
This proactive strategy is rewarding but dangerous. Some days it results in an unusual amount of laundry.
After I changed into clean jeans and a fresh white T-shirt, I went around to Mrs. Sanchez’s back porch to confirm for her that she was visible, which I did every morning. Through the screen door, I saw her sitting at the kitchen table.
I knocked, and she said, “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I hear you just fine.”
“Who do you hear?”
“You. Rosalia Sanchez.”
“Come in then, Odd Thomas,” she said.
Her kitchen smelled like chiles and corn flour, fried eggs and jack cheese. I’m a terrific short-order cook, but Rosalia Sanchez is a natural-born chef.
Everything in her kitchen is old and well worn but scrupulously clean. Antiques are more valuable when time and wear have laid a warm patina on them. Mrs. Sanchez’s kitchen is as beautiful as the finest antique, with the priceless patina of a life’s work and of cooking done with pleasure and with love.
I sat across the table from her.
Her hands were clasped tightly around a coffee mug to keep them from shaking. “You’re late this morning, Odd Thomas.”
Invariably she uses both names. I sometimes suspect she thinks Odd is not a name but a royal title, like Prince or Duke, and that protocol absolutely requires that it be used by commoners when they address me.
Perhaps she thinks that I am the son of a deposed king, reduced to tattered circumstances but nonetheless deserving of respect.
I said, “Late, yes, I’m sorry. It’s been a strange morning.”
She doesn’t know about my special relationship with the deceased. She’s got enough problems without having to worry about dead people making pilgrimages to her garage.
“Can you see what I’m wearing?” she asked worriedly.
“Pale yellow slacks. A dark yellow and brown blouse.”
She turned sly. “Do you like the butterfly barrette in my hair, Odd Thomas?”
“There’s no barrette. You’re holding your hair back with a yellow ribbon. It looks nice that way.”
As a young woman, Rosalia Sanchez must have been remarkably beautiful. At sixty-three, having added a few pounds, having acquired the seams and crinkles of seasoning experience, she possessed the deeper beauty of the beatified: the sweet humility and the tenderness that time can teach, the appealing glow of care and character that, in their last years on this earth, no doubt marked the faces of those who were later canonized as saints.
“When you didn’t come at the usual time,” she said, “I thought you’d been here but couldn’t see me. And I thought I couldn’t see you anymore, either, that when I became invisible to you, you also became invisible to me.”
“Just late,” I assured her.
“It would be terrible to be invisible.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t have to shave as often.”
When discussing invisibility, Mrs. Sanchez refused to be amused. Her saintly face found a frown of disapproval.
“When I’ve worried about becoming invisible, I’ve always thought I’d be able to see other people, they just wouldn’t be able to see or hear me.”
“In those old Invisible Man movies,” I said, “you could see his breath when he went out in really cold weather.”
“But if other people become invisible to me when I’m invisible to them,” she continued, “then it’s like I’m the last person in the world, all of it empty except for me wandering around alone.”
She shuddered. Clasped in her hands, the coffee mug knocked against the table.
When Mrs. Sanchez talks about invisibility, she’s talking about death, but I’m not sure she realizes this.
If the true first year of the new millennium, 2001, had not been good for the world in general, it had been bleak for Rosalia Sanchez in particular, beginning with the loss of her husband, Herman, on a night in April. She had gone to sleep next to the man whom she had loved for more than forty years—and awakened beside a cold cadaver. For Herman, death had come as gently as it ever does, in sleep, but for Rosalia, the shock of waking with the dead had been traumatic.
Later that year, still mourning her husband, she had not gone with her three sisters and their families on a long-planned vacation to New England. On the morning of September 11, she awakened to the news that their return flight out of Boston had been hijacked and used as a guided missile in one of the most infamous acts in history.
Although Rosalia had wanted children, God had given her none. Herman, her sisters, her nieces, her nephews had been the center of her life. She lost them all while sleeping.
Sometime between that September and that Christmas, Rosalia had gone a little crazy with grief. Quietly crazy, because she had lived her entire life quietly and knew no other way to be.
In her gentle madness, she would not acknowledge that they were dead. They had merely become invisible to her. Nature in a quirky mood had resorted to a rare phenomenon that might at any moment be reversed, like a magnetic field, making all her lost loved ones visible to her again.
The details of all the disappearances of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle were known to Rosalia Sanchez. She’d read every book that she could find on the subject.
She knew about the inexplicable, apparently overnight vanishment of hundreds of thousands of Mayans from the cities of Copán, Piedras Negras, and Palenque in A.D. 610.
If you allowed Rosalia to bend your ear, she would nearly break it off in an earnest discussion of historical disappearances. For instance, I know more than I care to know and immeasurably more than I need to know about the evaporation, to a man, of a division of three thousand Chinese soldiers near Nanking, in 1939.
“Well,” I said, “at least you’re visible this morning. You’ve
got another whole day of visibility to look forward to, and that’s a blessing.”
Rosalia’s biggest fear is that on the same day when her loved ones are made visible again, she herself will vanish.
Though she longs for their return, she dreads the consequences.
She crossed herself, looked around her homey kitchen, and at last smiled. “I could bake something.”
“You could bake anything,” I said.
“What would you like me to bake for you, Odd Thomas?”
“Surprise me.” I consulted my watch. “I better get to work.”
She accompanied me to the door and gave me a good-bye hug. “You are a good boy, Odd Thomas.”
“You remind me of my Granny Sugars,” I said, “except you don’t play poker, drink whiskey, or drive fast cars.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “You know, I thought the world and all of Pearl Sugars. She was so feminine but also…”
“Kick-ass,” I suggested.
“Exactly. At the church’s strawberry festival one year, there was this rowdy man, mean on drugs or drink. Pearl put him down with just two punches.”
“She had a terrific left hook.”
“Of course, first she kicked him in that special tender place. But I think she could have handled him with the punches alone. I’ve sometimes wished I could be more like her.”
From Mrs. Sanchez’s house, I walked the six blocks to the Pico Mundo Grille, which is in the heart of downtown Pico Mundo.
Every minute that it advanced from sunrise, the morning became hotter. The gods of the Mojave don’t know the meaning of the word moderation.
Long morning shadows grew shorter before my eyes, retreating from steadily warming lawns, from broiling blacktop, from concrete sidewalks as suitable for the frying of eggs as the griddle that I would soon be attending.
The air lacked the energy to move. Trees hung limp. Birds either retreated to leafy roosts or flew higher than they had at dawn, far up where thinner air held the heat less tenaciously.
In this wilted stillness, between Mrs. Sanchez’s house and the Grille, I saw three shadows moving. All were independent of a source, for they were not ordinary shadows.
When I was much younger, I called these entities shades. But that is just another word for ghosts, and they are not ghosts like Penny Kallisto.