by Dean Koontz
In the candlelit kitchen, Mazie topped off the four glasses of champagne, and we carried them downstairs to the basement, Big Dog in the lead.
This subterranean level, as large as the main floor, was the heart of their campaign of principled resistance. A wide corridor offered rooms to the front of the house on the left, to the back of the house on the right. We were headed to the armory, but first we stopped at a chamber on the left that was occupied by four computer workstations, racks of servers, and all manner of other electronics that I didn’t recognize. For all I knew, the young couple currently laboring there might be hacking the CIA or in communication with extraterrestrials in an orbiting mother ship, or playing video games.
The man, in his late twenties, was Leander, Kipp and Mazie’s son. He had one of his father’s green eyes, having lost the other one during a tour of duty, as a marine, in Afghanistan, a year before his father crossed the senator. Leander had two-thirds of his dad’s winning smile, the last third having been twisted by the scar tissue that disfigured the left side of his face. His wife, Harmony, was as cute as Goldie Hawn in her prime, looked fit and tough enough to win an iron-man contest, and spoke with a Georgia drawl.
As we shook hands, Harmony asked, “Where do I know you from?”
“I’m sure we’ve never met, ma’am.”
“Maybe, but I’ve seen you. I have an honest-to-God spooky memory for faces,” she declared.
“Well, I do have a spooky face.”
“Yeah, right. About as spooky as any guy in a crazy-popular boy band. I’ll remember you before you leave, pilgrim.”
“Boy band?” I grimaced. “That’s a low blow.”
The next big room on the left contained an impressive array of printing presses, scanners, laminators, engraving machines, and other equipment used to forge documents. This appeared to be the domain of Tracker and his second wife, Justine. Leander’s identical twin, Tracker had served in Iraq but had returned without wounds. On his first day back, however, he walked in on his wife, Karen, in bed with two men, and twenty-four hours later, he filed for divorce. He had struck gold the second time, not just because of how Justine looked, which was really fine, but also because she radiated intelligence as surely as a lamp gave off light.
Farther along the hall and on the right, we came to the largest chamber in the basement, the armory, which contained more weapons and ammunition than the average gun shop, even more than the average rap star’s recreation room. Kipp and Mazie set to work fulfilling our order, and Mrs. Fischer assisted, seemingly as familiar with their stock as they were.
Big Dog padded up and down the aisles between tall metal shelves of inventory, sniffing with apparent approval. After all, in addition to being a pet, he was also a guard dog, and he appreciated the need for a strong defense.
At one point, as he was showing me the pair of Glock pistols he thought best for relatively in-close work, Kipp must have detected my antipathy to guns. He said, “We have no choice, Tom. The world is going mad, overseas and here. Year by year, the government ever more aggressively militarizes state and local police forces and even its most seemingly benign agencies. In August of last year, the Social Security Administration purchased one hundred seventy-four thousand rounds of hollow-point ammunition for distribution to forty-one of its offices around the country. They must expect Grandpa and Granny to get really pissed about something the SSA intends to do. The Environmental Protection Agency, too. And Homeland Security ordered seven hundred and fifty million rounds in various calibers last August. Now, either they expect a hell of a lot of terrorist attacks or a civil war, and no matter whether the enemy is shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘God bless America,’ they must figure they’ll have to kill a lot of people.”
I stared at him, speechless. His grin was as winning as ever. Finally, I said, “You’re a scary guy.”
“Good. It’s a scary world. You do know guns, don’t you?”
“I have some experience of them, sir.”
Leander appeared in the doorway to the hall and said, “Mom, Harmony wants to talk to you about something.”
After Mazie left, Kipp finished putting everything together and stuffed it into a gunnysack with a drawstring top. Mrs. Fischer paid him, and all of us followed Biggy into the hallway.
Mazie and Harmony were waiting for me. They had a printout of a newspaper story about the mall shootings in Pico Mundo nineteen months earlier. My high-school yearbook picture was featured under a headline that claimed too much credit for me.
“I knew I’d seen your face,” Harmony said. “I’m sorry I said the boy-band thing. You’re no boy-band phony.”
“I’m not what that paper calls me, either.”
“Once a decade or so,” she said, “the newspaper gets something right, and I think they did this time.”
Mazie said, “If you understand the true and hidden nature of the world, you know that even the smallest details are of profound importance. Like a silly nickname. You’re not Thomas as in Tom. Odd Thomas. Odd doesn’t mean curious or peculiar or eccentric. Something is odd when it can’t be matched, when it’s singular, alone of its kind.”
“Please, ma’am,” I objected. “My name is nothing but my name. In a drawer of mismatched socks, every one of them is odd. Nothing glorious about that. A mistake on the birth certificate left the T off Todd.”
Here came again that smile of pure grace. “Nothing so mundane as that. At your birth it was known what name best suited you, and if your parents had wished to name you Bob, the certificate would nevertheless have shown you to be Odd.”
Her eyes were night sky again, so dark but full of the infinite possibilities to which the stars bear witness, and I didn’t know what to say to her.
She said, “May I touch your heart, Odd Thomas?”
Uncertain of her meaning, I said, “Ma’am?”
She put her right hand flat to my breast. Nothing in her gesture was forward or improper, but tender and loving to such an extent that she almost brought tears to my eyes.
“Women are drawn to you, Odd, not as they may be drawn to other men. I’m sure that your life is full of women who are drawn to you. Because they know or sense that you take a vow seriously, that you’re faithful forever, that you recognize and cherish in good women what qualities you loved in the one you lost, that you respect them, that you care deeply about their dignity perhaps even when they don’t, that you will never walk away from one in need.”
I couldn’t let her think of me in such elevated terms, for the truth was not so defined by chivalry as she imagined. I could barely summon enough power of voice to reveal that truth in a whisper: “Ma’am, I’ve killed two women. Shot them to death.”
Perhaps she was by nature a romantic, or more sentimental than she seemed, because my words had no effect on her smile. “If you killed them, they were murderers who had murdered before and would have murdered you.”
“I shot them, ma’am. The circumstances don’t change that fact. I shot them.”
Mazie took one of my hands in both of hers. “Believe me, when your time comes, it will be women who hold you and comfort you during your last moments in this world, who carry you into the next, and who greet you there.”
Mazie kissed me on the forehead, as if bestowing a benediction, and I said, “I have done terrible things.” Harmony took my hand that her mother-in-law relinquished, her touch another tender benediction, and I said, “I’ll do terrible things again.” Justine put one hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek in what I at once recognized as the way that I had sometimes kissed the urn containing my Stormy’s ashes.
Their reverence was too much for me, to be mistaken for the man that I might want to be but am not, to be thought brave for only going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. I was no less uncertain and unsteady than anyone else in this broken world, often a fumbler and a fool, with more failures than successes. These were good women, good people, and their kindness consoled me. I could neve
r fulfill such lofty expectations, however, and a quiet yet compelling embarrassment drove me to leave as politely and as quickly as possible.
The limousine waited under the portico.
With Big Dog scowling at the surrounding night to ward off any man or animal with ill intentions, Kipp stowed our purchases in the passenger compartment.
Beyond the overhang, rain chased past the house at an extreme angle in an escalating wind.
Mrs. Fischer drove, and I rode in the front passenger seat, the face of the rhinestone cowboy in my mind’s eye.
Twenty-three
* * *
We rode in silence along the shale—and snakeless—track, the length of the gravel lane, and across the potholed blacktop to the interstate, where Mrs. Fischer turned east once more, continuing our interrupted pursuit of the missing children and the men who had taken them.
A sense of duty was as real to me as the pounding rain, and I felt that I might drown in it as easily as in a flash flood. Duty is a good thing, a calling without which no civilization can survive, but it is also a weight and chain that sometimes seems sure to sink you to the airless bottom of a dark pool. I wasn’t burdened by a fear of death but instead by a fear of failure. If there were seventeen hostages and I rescued even sixteen, the one lost would be too sharp a reminder of another loss, nineteen months earlier, in the mall in Pico Mundo. I wished—and more than wished—that this responsibility might be lifted from me, but I knew that it would not be lifted.
I believe that Mrs. Fischer gave me the gift of silence because she knew that I had left Casa Bolthole in a state of embarrassment, that I felt inadequate to the challenges of my strange life, and that the more anyone told me that I was equal to those challenges, the more I would feel that I was not. The greatest danger, of course, was to believe that I was equal to them, because assurance can morph into arrogance that Death loves to prove unfounded.
The broad highway led east-northeast, and mile by mile, I felt more strongly the black-hole gravity of the cowboy.
Associating with bad men, even for the purpose of defeating them, can make you vulnerable to the allure of evil. A sense of duty can be corrupted into self-righteousness, which can inspire a self-exemption from all laws, an embrace of power and the will to use it ruthlessly. Power is the central promise of evil, the dark light of that lamp, because nothing extinguishes the soul more quickly than pride in power.
Mazie’s approval had seemed close to veneration. To endure such extreme praise was dangerous enough. If I came to believe that I had earned it, I would lose everything that mattered.
I was only a fry cook with paranormal abilities that were not a blessing but a weight to carry. And considering that I had no job, I couldn’t claim to be even a fry cook, but simply a man with a burden, which was one of the most common creatures on the earth.
The rain fell in torrents sufficient to float an ark. The world condensed into a highway that, for all I could see beyond it, might have ribboned through a void as deep as interstellar space.
We were racing so fast that the cataracts of rain crashing into the windshield were all but blinding, and yet Mrs. Fischer appeared confident about her ability to control the limo under these or any conditions. Humming one tune or another, each of them cheery, my elderly guide, the spiritual daughter of Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans and the bride of Tonto, was clearly unconcerned about the poor visibility, as though she—or the vehicle itself—could see for miles ahead in these or even worse conditions. I decided not to look at the speedometer.
Finally I said, “What amazing thing did Gideon and Chandelle do in Pennsylvania last December?”
After a hesitation, she said, “You’re only just coming into an awareness that you’re not alone, Oddie. It’s best to ease into a full understanding of the resistance.”
“Resistance? Sounds too political for me.”
“It’s not political in the least, child. It’s been going on through all the ages and all the countries of the world, no matter who the ruler is—prime minister, king, emperor, dictator, mullah. Our adversaries exist in every profession, every race, every ethnicity, every class, every political faction—but our friends abide also in all those places.”
She looked away from the interstate and smiled. Her brooch, the jeweled exclamation point, sparkled in the dashboard glow.
I asked, “Why is it best to ease into an understanding?”
Returning her attention to the highway, she said, “It’s best because you need to be able to cope with your fear, which will be perhaps too great to bear if you’re abruptly plunged into the full truth. In the thrall of absolute terror, you’re less likely to survive what’s coming in the hours ahead. Trust me, dear. Take this discovery moment by moment, event by event, allowing fear to increase at the same pace as your understanding. Then you’ll grow into your fear and be able to function with it.”
Earlier, I had thought that she seemed like the mother of Yoda, the pint-size sage from the Star Wars movies. Now she almost sounded like him, except that her syntax was correct.
The rain began to relent somewhat, and I suspected that we might be outrunning the storm once more.
Although the downpour still obscured much of the night here in the emptiness of the Mojave, I saw the sign welcoming us to Nevada, which we flew past as if we were degenerate gamblers desperate for the games of Las Vegas.
We drove steadily farther away from Pico Mundo, and yet I sensed that somehow I was coming full circle to it, that when I stood before the cowboy, I would discover some unfinished business with which I thought I had dealt in my hometown long before I’d left there. The adventures of which I’d written in multiple volumes of memoirs were in fact a single adventure, during which my understanding of reality evolved until now I seemed to be drawing steadily closer to what Annamaria—and later Mazie—called “the true and hidden nature of the world,” which Mrs. Fischer warned would give new meaning to the word terror.
Miles later, when again we had driven out of the rain, the glow of Vegas was a sullen fan-shaped beacon on the horizon, a scene like you might see on a poster for a science-fiction movie: lonely highway dwindling toward the eerie light of some interstellar vessel come down to Earth and waiting just beyond the next hill to fill your soul with wonder. But this glow was only Las Vegas, about which there was nothing transcendent, unless your idea of transcendence was topless dancers, a show by Blue Man Group, a run of luck at the blackjack tables, an abundance of free drinks culminating in a system-purging puke, unconsciousness, and a hangover in the brain-searing morning light of the desert.
Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, the image of the rhinestone cowboy grew brighter, more detailed.
“Next exit, ma’am,” I said. “North.”
The ramp led to a two-lane blacktop state route that took us past an array of unidentified large buildings that might have been warehouses, considering that many national companies distributed their products out of Nevada because it had no inventory tax. We passed a few modest clustered houses, then a few more assorted isolated structures, and a roadside business whose owner called it JEB’S TRADING POST, which included gasoline pumps.
Soon the road rose through rolling hills of desert brush and colonies of pampas grass with tall pale plumes, and then climbed at a steeper angle than before. The spectacle of Las Vegas lights, still miles away and not directly visible, refracting through the moisture-laden low clouds, fading with the distance from the source, paled the sky just enough to silhouette the mountains ahead of us.
As we drew nearer to the cowboy and as the incline increased, my gut tightened, much as it does when you’re ten years old and aboard a roller coaster, though what I felt was pure apprehension, with none of the pleasant anticipation of a thrill ride.
Stunted scrub pines appeared, rising twisted and misshapen from the dry, sandy soil. Increasing altitude meant a lower average annual temperature, some slow-release snowpack higher than we would go, and richer soil, where now full
-scale pines towered over the roadway.
We arrived at a plateau of deep woods and small meadows. On the right, a blacktop lane that led away among the trees was secured by a low wooden ranch-style gate between two stacked-stone columns. I knew at once that it would lead me to the rhinestone cowboy, but I urged Mrs. Fischer to keep driving.
The plateau was broad. On both sides of the state route, a few more gated lanes led to private properties far back in the forest. Just when the pavement began to rise again, the headlights caught a sign on the left that announced FIRE ROAD / FORESTRY DEPT ONLY.
In the absence of a fire, no one would be using that rough dirt track. Mrs. Fischer parked on it, facing out toward the state route, but in far enough among the trees to avoid being seen by passing traffic, of which we had encountered none since turning off the interstate. She damped the headlights, cut the engine.
When I got out of the limousine, the flanking woods were quiet except for the metallic tick-and-ping of the cooling engine. The air smelled of pines and of something I couldn’t name.
On all sides, the night seemed to watch me as if the columnar trees were elements of a coliseum, as if I were the martyr of the hour, as if the darkness were full of lions.
In the passenger compartment of the limo, through the open privacy panel, I said, “Ma’am, I hope this boat is big enough to take all those kids.”
“It can comfortably seat ten adults in back, dear. I’m confident we can accommodate at least seventeen wee children.”
I opened the gunnysack, withdrew everything that we had gotten from Kipp and Mazie, and began to prepare myself by the frosty glow of the small LED flashlight.
“Ma’am, one thing I didn’t ask, and I’m curious.”
“What is that, dear?”
“Purdy Feltenham.”
“Heath’s best man at our wedding. He was such a charmer.”
“Why did he have to go everywhere with a sack over his head?”