Koontz, Dean- (2003) - Odd Thomas

by Odd Thomas(Lit)

  In an ordinary church, the pyx contains the Eucharist, communion wafers of unleavened bread. This box brimmed with coal-black crack­ers flecked with red.

  Unleavened bread exudes a subtle, appealing aroma. The contents of this pyx had an equally faint but repellent odor. First whiff - herbal. Second whiff - burnt matches. Third whiff - vomit.

  The highboy contained other satanic paraphernalia; but I'd seen enough.

  I couldn't fathom how adults could take seriously the Hollywood trappings and hokey rituals of glamorized satanism. Certain fourteen-year-old boys, yes, because some of them were washed half loose from reason by shifting tides of hormones. But not adults. Even so­ciopaths like Bob Robertson and his unknown pal, as enthralled by vi­olence and as crackbrained as they were, must have some clarity of perception, surely enough to see the absurdity of such Halloween games.

  After replacing the items in the highboy, I closed the drawers.

  A knocking startled me. The soft rap of knuckles.

  I looked at the bedroom window, expecting to see a face at the glass, perhaps a neighbor tapping the pane. Only the hard desert light, tree shadows, and the brown backyard.

  The knocking came again, as quiet as before. Not just three or four brisk raps. A stutter of small blows lasting fifteen or twenty seconds.

  In the living room, I went to the window beside the front door and carefully parted the greasy drapes. No one waited on the stoop out­side.

  Mrs. Sanchez's Chevy was the only vehicle at the curb. The weary dog that had slouched along the street the day before now traveled it again, head held low, tail lower than its head.

  Recalling the racket of the quarrelsome crows on the roof during my previous visit, I turned from the window and studied the ceiling, listening.

  After a minute, when the knocking didn't come again, I stepped into the kitchen. In places, the ancient linoleum crackled underfoot.

  Needing a name to put to Robertson's collaborator, I could think of no place in a kitchen likely to contain such information. I looked through all the drawers and cupboards, anyway. Most were empty: only a few dishes, half a dozen glasses, a small clatter of flatware.

  I went to the refrigerator because eventually Stormy would ask if this time I had checked for severed heads. When I opened the door, I found beer, soft drinks, part of a canned ham on a platter, half a strawberry pie, as well as the usual staples and condiments.

  Next to the strawberry pie, a clear plastic package held four black candles, eight-inch tapers. Maybe he kept them in the fridge because they would soften and distort if left in this summer heat, in a house without air conditioning.

  Beside the candles stood a jar without a label, filled with what ap­peared to be loose teeth. A closer look confirmed the contents: dozens of molars, bicuspids, incisors, canines. Human teeth. Enough to fill at least five or six mouths.

  I stared at the jar for a long moment, trying to imagine how he had obtained this strange collection. When I decided that I'd rather not think about it, I closed the door.

  Had I found nothing unusual in the refrigerator, I would not have

  opened the freezer compartment. Now I felt obligated to explore further.

  The freezer was a deep roll-out compartment under the fridge. The hot kitchen sucked a quick plume of cold fog from the drawer when I pulled it open.

  Two bright pink-and-yellow containers were familiar: the Burke & Bailey's ice cream that Robertson had purchased the previous after­noon. Maple walnut and mandarin-orange chocolate.

  In addition, the compartment held about ten opaque Rubbermaid containers with red lids, the shape and the size in which to store left­over deep-dish lasagna. I would not have opened these if the topmost containers hadn't featured freezer-proof hand-printed labels: HEATHER

  JOHNSON, JAMES DEERFIELD.

  After all, I was looking specifically for names.

  When I lifted aside the top containers, I saw more names on the lids under them: LISA BELMONT, ALYSSA RODRIQUEZ, BENJAMIN NADER....

  I started with Heather Johnson. When I pried off the red lid, I found a woman's breasts.

  FORTY-NINE

  SOUVENIRS. TROPHIES. OBJECTS TO SPUR THE IMAGINATION and thrill the heart on lonely nights.

  As though it had burned my hands, I dropped the container back in the freezer. I shot to my feet and kicked the drawer shut.

  I must have turned away from the refrigerator, must have crossed the kitchen, but I was not aware of going to the sink until I found my­self there. Leaning against the counter, bent forward, I struggled to re­press the urge to surrender Mrs. Sanchez's cookies.

  Throughout my life, I have seen terrible things. Some have been worse than the contents of the Rubbermaid container. Experience has not immunized me to horror, however, and human cruelty still has the power to devastate me, to loosen the locking pins in my knees.

  Although I wanted to wash my hands and then splash cold water in my face, I preferred not to touch Robertson's faucets. I shrank from the thought of using his soap.

  Nine more containers waited in the freezer. Someone else would have to open them. I had no curiosity about the rest of the grotesque collection.

  In the file folder that bore his name, Robertson had included noth­ing but the calendar page for August 15, suggesting that his own ca­reer as a murderer would begin on this date. Yet evidence in the freezer suggested that his file should already be thick.

  Sweat sheathed me, hot on my face, cold along my spine. I might as well not have showered at the hospital.

  I consulted my wristwatch - 10:02.

  The bowling alley didn't open for business until one o'clock. The first showing of the hot-ticket dog movie was also scheduled for one o'clock.

  If my prophetic dream was about to be fulfilled, evidence sug­gested that I might have no more than three hours to find Robertson's collaborator and stop him.

  I undipped the cell phone from my belt. Flipped it open. Pulled out the antenna. Pressed the power button. Watched the maker's logo ap­pear and listened to the electronic signature music.

  Chief Porter might not yet have regained consciousness. Even if he surfaced, his thoughts would be muddled by the lingering effects of anesthetic, by morphine or its equivalent, and by pain. He would have neither the strength nor presence of mind to give instructions to his subordinates.

  To one extent or another, I knew all the officers on the PMPD. None had been made aware of my paranormal gift, however, and none had ever been as good a friend to me as was Chief Porter.

  If I brought the police to this house, revealed to them the contents of the freezer, and urged them to apply all their resources to learning the name of Robertson's kill buddy, they would need hours to wrap their minds around the situation. Because they did not share my sixth sense and would not easily be persuaded that it was real, they wouldn't share my urgency

  They would detain me here while they investigated the situation. In

  their eyes, I would be as suspect as Robertson, for I had entered his house illegally. Who was to say that I hadn't harvested these body parts myself and hadn't planted the ten Rubbermaid containers in his freezer to incriminate him?

  If ever they found Bob Robertson's body, and if the chief - God for­bid - succumbed to postoperative complications, I would surely be ar­rested and charged with murder.

  I switched off the phone.

  Without a name to focus my psychic magnetism, without anyone to turn to for assistance, I had hit a wall, and the impact rattled my teeth.

  Something crashed to the floor in another room: not just the thump of a closing door this time, not merely a soft rapping, but a hard thud and the sound of breakage.

  Driven by frustration so intense that it allowed no caution, I headed for the swinging door, trying to clip the phone to my belt. I dropped it, left it for later, and shoved through the swinging door, into the living room.

  A lamp had been knocked to the floor. The ceramic base had shat­tered.


  When I tore open the front door and saw no one on the stoop or on the lawn, I slammed it shut. Hard. The boom shook the house, and making noise greatly pleased me after so much pussyfooting. My anger felt good.

  I rushed through the archway, into the narrow hall, seeking the per­petrator. Bedroom, closet, study, closet, bathroom. No one.

  Crows on the roof hadn't knocked over the lamp. Nor a draft. Nor an earthquake.

  When I returned to the kitchen to pick up my phone and get out of the house, Robertson was waiting there for me.

  FIFTY

  FOR A DEAD MAN WHO NO LONGER HAD A STAKE IN THE schemes and games of this world, Robertson lingered with singular ferocity, as infuriated as he had been when I had watched him from the bell tower at St. Bart's. His mushroom-colony body now seemed powerful, even in its lumpiness. His soft face and blurry features hard­ened and sharpened with rage.

  No bullet hole, scorch mark, or stain marred his shirt. Unlike Tom Jedd, who carried his severed arm and pretended to use it as a back scratcher out there at Tire World, Robertson was in denial of his death, and he chose not to sport his mortal wound, just as Penny Kallisto had initially manifested without evidence of strangulation, ac­quiring the ligature marks only in the company of Harlo Landerson, her killer.

  In high agitation, Robertson circled the kitchen. He glared at me, his eyes wilder and more fevered than those of the coyotes at the Church of the Whispering Comet.

  When I had begun to out him, I had unintentionally made him a li­ability to his collaborator, setting him up for murder, but I had not

  pulled the trigger. Evidently, his hatred for me nonetheless exceeded what he harbored for the man who had killed him; otherwise, he would have done his haunting elsewhere.

  Ovens to refrigerator, to sink, to ovens, he circled while I stooped and picked up the cell phone that I'd dropped earlier. Dead, he didn't worry me a fraction as much as he had when I had thought he'd been alive in the churchyard.

  As I clipped the phone to my belt, Robertson came to me. Loomed before me. His eyes were the gray of dirty ice, yet they conveyed the heat of his fury.

  I met his stare and didn't retreat from him. I've learned that it's not wise to show fear in these cases.

  His heavy face indeed had the quality of a fungus, but a meaty vari­ety. Very portobello. His bloodless lips drew back from teeth that had seen too little of a brush.

  He reached past my face and cupped his right hand against the back of my neck.

  Penny Kallisto's hand had been dry and warm. Robertson's felt damp, cold. This was not his real hand, of course, only part of an ap­parition, a spirit image, that only I could have felt; but the nature of such a touch reveals the character of the soul.

  Although I refused to shy from this unearthly contact, I cringed in­wardly at the thought of the creep playing with the ten souvenirs in his freezer. The visual stimulation of those frozen trophies might not always satisfy. Perhaps he thawed them now and then to increase his tactile pleasure and to conjure a more vivid memory of each kill - tweaking, pinching, petting, caressing, planting tender kisses upon those mementos.

  No spirit, however evil, can harm a living person merely by touch. This is our world, not theirs. Their blows pass through us, and their bites draw no blood.

  When he realized that he could not make me cower, Robertson lowered his hand from my neck. His fury doubled, trebled, wrenching his face into a gargoyle mask.

  One way exists for certain spirits to harm the living. If their charac­ter is sufficiently pernicious, if they give their hearts to evil until malevolence ripens into incurable spiritual malignancy, they are able to summon the energy of their demonic rage and vent it upon the inanimate.

  We call them poltergeists. I once lost a brand-new music system to such an entity, as well as the handsome award plaque for creative writ­ing that I had won in that high-school competition judged by Little Ozzie.

  As he had done in the sacristy at St. Bart's, Robertson's wrathful spirit stormed through the kitchen, and from his hands streamed pulses of energy that were visible to me. The air quivered with them, a sight similar to the concentric ripples that spread across water from the impact point of a stone.

  Cabinet doors flew open, slammed shut, open, shut, banging even louder and with less meaning than the jaws of ranting politicians. Dishes erupted from shelves, each cutting through the air with the whoosh of a discus thrown by an Olympian.

  I ducked a drinking glass, which exploded into an oven door, spray­ing sparkling shrapnel. Other glasses spun wide of me, shattered against walls, cabinets, countertops.

  Poltergeists are all blind fury and thrashing torment, without aim or control. They can harm you only by indirection, a lucky blow. Even by indirection and chance, however, decapitation can ruin your day.

  Accompanied by the hardwood applause of clapping cabinet doors, Robertson flung bolts of power from his hands. Two chairs danced in place at the dinette table, tapping on the linoleum, clattering against the table legs.

  At the cooktop, untouched, four knobs turned. Four rings of gas flames shimmered eerie blue light into the otherwise gloomy kitchen.

  Alert for deadly projectiles, I edged away from Robertson and toward the door by which I'd entered the house.

  A drawer shot open, and a cacophony of flatware exploded out of it, glittering and clinking in a levitated frenzy, as if starving ghosts were carving-forking-spooning a dinner as invisible as they were themselves.

  I saw those utensils coming - they passed through Robertson with no effect on his ectoplasmic form - and I turned aside, brought up my arms to shield my face. The flatware found me as iron will find a mag­net, pummeled me. One fork speared past my defenses, stabbed my forehead, and raked back through my hair.

  When this brittle rain of stainless steel rang to the floor behind me, I dared to lower my arms.

  Like some great troll capering to a dark music that only he could hear, Robertson punched-clawed-twisted the air, appearing to howl and shout, but thrashing in the utter silence of the mute departed.

  The upper compartment of the ancient Frigidaire sprang open, dis­gorging beer, soft drinks, the plate of ham, strawberry pie, a vomitous deluge that splashed and clattered across the floor. Ring tabs popped; beer and soda gouted from spinning cans.

  The refrigerator itself began to vibrate, violently knocking side to side against the flanking cabinetry Vegetable drawers chattered; wire shelves jangled.

  Kicking aside rolling cans of beer and scattered flatware, I contin­ued toward the door to the carport.

  A juggernaut rumble alerted me to the fast approach of sliding death.

  I dodged to my left, skidded on a foamy sludge of beer and a bent spoon.

  With its grisly freight of frozen body parts still nestled in the freezer drawer, the Frigidaire slid past me and crashed into the wall hard enough to make the studs crack behind the plaster.

  I plunged outside, into the shadows under the carport, and slammed the door behind me.

  Inside, the tumult continued, the thump and crash, the rattle and bang.

  I didn't expect Robertson's tortured spirit to follow me, at least not for a while. Once committed to a frenzy of destruction, a poltergeist will usually thrash out of control until it exhausts itself and wanders off in confusion to drift again in a purgatory zone between this world and the next.

  FIFTY-ONE

  AT THE CONVENIENCE STORE WHERE I PURCHASED THE No-Doz and the Pepsi, I bought another cola, Bactine, and a package of large-patch Band-Aids.

  The cashier, a man with a face made for astonishment, put aside the sports section of the Los Angeles Times and said, "Hey, you're bleeding."

  Being polite is not only the right way to respond to people but also the easiest. Life is so filled with unavoidable conflict that I see no rea­son to promote more confrontations.

  At that moment, however, I happened to be in a rare bad mood. Time was flushing away at a frightening rate, the hour of the gun rap­idly
drawing near, and I still had no name to hang on Robertson's col­laborator.

  "Do you know you're bleeding?" he asked.

  "I had a suspicion."

  "That looks nasty."

  "My apologies."

  "What happened to your forehead?"

  "A fork."

  "A fork?"

  "Yes, sir. I wish I'd been eating with a spoon."

  "You stabbed yourself with a fork?"

  "It flipped."

  "Flipped?"

  "The fork."

  "A flipped fork?"

  "It flicked my forehead."

  Pausing in the counting of my change, he gave me a narrow look.

  "That's right," I said. "A flipped fork flicked my forehead."

  He decided not to have any further involvement with me. He gave me my change, bagged the items, and returned to the sports pages.

  In the men's room at the service station next door, I washed my bloody face, cleaned the wound, treated it with Bactine, and applied a compress of paper towels. The punctures and scratches were shallow, and the bleeding soon stopped.

  This wasn't the first time - nor the last - that I wished my super­natural gift included the power to heal.

  Band-Aid applied, I returned to the Chevy. Sitting behind the wheel, engine running, air-conditioning vents aimed at my face, I chugged cold Pepsi.

  Only bad news on my wristwatch - 10:48.

  My muscles ached. My eyes were sore. I felt tired, weak. 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.

  I'd taken two caffeine tablets no more than an hour ago, so I couldn't justify swilling down two more. Besides, already the acid in my stomach had soured into a corrosive strength sufficient to etch steel, and I had grown simultaneously exhausted and jumpy, which is not a condition conducive to survival.