by Dean Koontz
While he watched, and no doubt schemed to snatch up one of my bags and load it, I stowed my belongings in the trunk. When I slammed the lid and looked up, I discovered that all the brothers, who should have been at Mass, had gathered silently on the guesthouse steps.
Sister Angela and a dozen of the nuns were there as well. She said, “Oddie, may I show you something?”
I went to her as she unrolled a tube that proved to be a large sheet of drawing paper. Jacob had executed a perfect portrait of me.
“This is very good. And very sweet of him.”
“But it’s not for you,” she said. “It’s for my office wall.”
“That company is too rarefied for me, ma’am.”
“Young man, it’s not for you to say whose likeness I wish to look upon each day. The riddle?”
I had already tried on her the fortitude answer that Rodion Romanovich had made sound so convincing.
“Ma’am, intellectually I’ve run dry.”
She said, “Did you know that after the Revolutionary War, the founders of our country offered to make George Washington king, and that he declined?”
“No, ma’am. I didn’t know that.”
“Did you know that Flannery O’Connor lived so quietly in her community that many of her fellow townspeople did not know that she was one of the greatest writers of her time?”
“A Southern eccentric, I suppose.”
“Is that what you suppose?”
“I guess if there’s going to be a test on this material, I will fail it. I never was much good in school.”
“Harper Lee,” said Sister Angela, “who was offered a thousand honorary doctorates and untold prizes for her fine book, did not accept them. And she politely turned away the adoring reporters and professors who made pilgrimages to her door.”
“You shouldn’t blame her for that, ma’am. So much uninvited company would be a terrible annoyance.”
I don’t think her periwinkle eyes had ever sparkled brighter than they did on the guesthouse steps that morning.
“Dominus vobiscum, Oddie.”
“And also with you, Sister.”
I had never been kissed by a nun before. I had never kissed one, either. Her cheek was so soft.
When I got into the Cadillac, I saw that Boo and Elvis were sitting in the backseat.
The brothers and sisters stood there on the guesthouse steps in silence, and as we drove away, I more than once looked back at them, looked back until the road descended and turned out of sight of St. Bartholomew’s.
CHAPTER 56
The Cadillac had been structurally reinforced to support Ozzie’s weight without listing, and the driver’s seat had been handcrafted to his dimensions.
He handled his Cadillac as sweet as a NASCAR driver, and we flew out of the mountains into lower lands with a grace that should not have been possible at those speeds.
After a while, I said to him, “Sir, you are a wealthy man by any standard.”
“I have been both fortunate and industrious,” he agreed.
“I want to ask you for a favor so big that I’m ashamed to say it.”
Grinning with delight, he said, “You never allow anything to be done for you. Yet you’re like a son to me. Who am I going to leave all this money to? Terrible Chester will never need all of it.”
Terrible Chester was his cat, who had not been born with the name but had earned it.
“There is a little girl at the school.”
“St. Bartholomew’s?”
“Yes. Her name is Flossie Bodenblatt.”
“Oh, my.”
“She has suffered, sir, but she shines.”
“What is it that you want?”
“Could you open a trust fund for her, sir, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars, after tax?”
“Consider it done.”
“For the purpose of establishing her in life when she leaves the school, for establishing her in a life where she can work with dogs.”
“I shall have the attorney specify it exactly that way. And shall I be the one to personally oversee her transition from the school to the outside world, when the time comes?”
“I would be forever grateful, sir, if you would.”
“Well,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel just long enough to dust them briskly together, “that was as easy as eating cream pie. Who shall we set up a trust for next?”
Justine’s profound brain damage could not be restored by a trust fund. Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world, but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.
We cruised awhile, talking of Christmas, when suddenly I was struck by intuition more powerful by far than I had ever experienced before.
“Sir, could you pull off the road?”
The tone of my voice caused his generous, jowly face to form a frown of overlapping layers. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not anything wrong. But something … very important.”
He piloted the Cadillac into a lay-by, in the shade of several majestic pines, and switched off the engine.
“Oddie?”
“Give me a moment, sir.”
We sat in silence as pinions of sunlight and the feathered shadows of the pines fluttered on the windshield.
The intuition became so intense that to ignore it would be to deny who and what I am.
My life is not mine. I would have given my life to save my lost girl’s, but that trade had not been on Fate’s agenda. Now I live a life I don’t need, and know that the day will come when I will give it in the right cause.
“I have to get out here, sir.”
“What—don’t you feel well?”
“I feel fine, sir. Psychic magnetism. I have to walk from here.”
“But you’re coming home for Christmas.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Walk from here? Walk where?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’ll find out in the walking.”
He would not remain behind the wheel, and when I took only one bag from the trunk of the car, he said, “You can’t just walk away with only that.”
“It has everything I need,” I assured him.
“What trouble are you going to?”
“Maybe not trouble, sir.”
“What else would it be?”
“Maybe trouble,” I said. “But maybe peace. I can’t tell. But it sure is calling me.”
He was crestfallen. “But I was so looking forward …”
“So was I, sir.”
“You are so missed in Pico Mundo.”
“And I miss everyone there. But this is the way it has to be. You know how things are with me, sir.”
I closed the lid of the trunk.
He did not want to drive away and leave me there.
“I’ve got Elvis and Boo,” I told him. “I’m not alone.”
He is a hard man to hug, with so much ground to cover.
“You have been a father to me,” I told him. “I love you, sir.”
He could say only, “Son.”
Standing in the lay-by, I watched him drive away until his car had dwindled out of sight.
Then I began to walk along the shoulder of the highway, where intuition seemed to lead me.
Boo fell in at my side. He is the only ghost dog I have ever seen. Animals always move on. For some reason he had lingered more than a year at the abbey. Perhaps waiting for me.
For a while, Elvis ambled at my side, and then he began to walk backward in front of me, grinning like he’d just played the biggest trick ever on me and I didn’t know it yet.
“I thought you’d have moved on by now,” I told him. “You know you’re ready.”
He nodded, still grinning like a fool.
“Then go. I’ll be all right. They’re all waiting for you. Go.”
Still walking backward, he began to wave good-bye, and step by backw
ard step, the King of Rock and Roll faded, until he was gone from this world forever.
We were well out of the mountains. In this California valley, the day was a mild presence on the land, and the trees rose up to its brightness, and the birds.
Perhaps I had gone a hundred yards since Elvis’s departure before I realized that someone walked at my side.
Surprised, I looked at him and said, “Good afternoon, sir.”
He walked with his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He smiled that winning smile.
“I’m sure this will be interesting,” I said, “and I am honored if it’s possible that I can do for you what I did for him.”
He pulled on the brim of his hat, as if tipping it without taking it off, and winked.
With Christmas only days away, we followed the shoulder of the highway, walking toward the unknown, which is where every walk ever taken always leads: me, my dog Boo, and the spirit of Frank Sinatra.
To some folks I’ve known a long time and admire
because they do good work and are good people:
Peter Styles, Richard Boukes, Bill Anderson (Hello, Danielle),
Dave Gaulke, and Tom Fenner (Hello, Gabriella, Katia, and Troy).
We’ll have a fine party on the Other Side,
but let’s not be in a hurry.
NOTE
The books that changed Brother Knuckles’s life were both written by Kate DiCamillo. They are The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The Tale of Despereaux, and they are wonderful stories. How they could have turned Knuckles from a life of crime to a life of goodness and hope more than a decade before they were actually published, I do not know. I can only say that life is filled with mystery, and that Ms. DiCamillo’s magic may have had something to do with it.
—Odd Thomas
ODD HOURS
A Bantam Book / June 2008
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 by Dean Koontz
Title page photograph by Lynne Lancaster
Illustration on this page © 2003 by Phil Parks
A signed, limited edition has been privately printed by Charnel House.
Charnelhouse.com
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Koontz, Dean R. (Dean Ray), 1945–Odd hours / Dean Koontz.
p. cm.
1. Cooks—Fiction 2. Mediums—Fiction. I. TItle
PS3561.O55 O3 2008
813'.54 22 2008010411
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90501-4
v3.0_r2
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Odd Hours
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
—Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”
CHAPTER 1
It’s only life. We all get through it.
Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.
I still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all of my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I’d call it a triumph.
When I raised the window shades in my bedroom, the cocooned sky was gray and swollen, windless and still, but pregnant with a promise of change.
Overnight, according to the radio, an airliner had crashed in Ohio. Hundreds perished. The sole survivor, a ten-month-old child, had been found upright and unscathed in a battered seat that stood in a field of scorched and twisted debris.
Throughout the morning, under the expectant sky, low sluggish waves exhausted themselves on the shore. The Pacific was gray and awash with inky shadows, as if sinuous sea beasts of fantastical form swam just below the surface.
During the night, I had twice awakened from a dream in which the tide flowed red and the sea throbbed with a terrible light.
As nightmares go, I’m sure you’ve had worse. The problem is that a few of my dreams have come true, and people have died.
While I prepared breakfast for my employer, the kitchen radio brought news that the jihadists who had the previous day seized an ocean liner in the Mediterranean were now beheading passengers.
Years ago I stopped watching news programs on television. I can tolerate words and the knowledge they impart, but the images undo me.
Because he was an insomniac who went to bed at dawn, Hutch ate breakfast at noon. He paid me well, and he was kind, so I cooked to his schedule without complaint.
Hutch took his meals in the dining room, where the draperies were always closed. Not one bright sliver of any windowpane remained exposed.
He often enjoyed a film while he ate, lingering over coffee until the credits rolled. That day, rather than cable news, he watched Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century.
Eighty-eight years old, born in the era of silent films, when Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino were stars, and having later been a successful actor, Hutch thought less in words than in images, and he dwelt in fantasy.
Beside his plate stood a bottle of Purell sanitizing gel. He lavished it on his hands not only before and after eating, but also at least twice during a meal.
Like most Americans in the first decade of the new century, Hutch feared everything except what he ought to fear.
When TV-news programs ran out of stories about drunk, drug-addled, murderous, and otherwise crazed celebrities—which happened perhaps twice a year—they sometimes filled the brief gap with a sensationalistic piece on that rare flesh-eating bacteria.
Consequently, Hutch feared contracting the ravenous germ. From time to time, like a dour character in a tale by Poe, he huddled in his lamplit study, brooding about his fate, about the fragility of his flesh, about the insatiable appetite o
f his microscopic foe.
He especially dreaded that his nose might be eaten away.
Long ago, his face had been famous. Although time had disguised him, he still took pride in his appearance.
I had seen a few of Lawrence Hutchison’s movies from the 1940s and ’50s. I liked them. He’d been a commanding presence on screen.
Because he had not appeared on camera for five decades, Hutch was less known for his acting than for his children’s books about a swashbuckling rabbit named Nibbles. Unlike his creator, Nibbles was fearless.
Film money, book royalties, and a habit of regarding investment opportunities with paranoid suspicion had left Hutch financially secure in his old age. Nevertheless, he worried that an explosive rise in the price of oil or a total collapse in the price of oil would lead to a worldwide financial crisis that would leave him penniless.
His house faced the boardwalk, the beach, the ocean. Surf broke less than a minute’s stroll from his front door.
Over the years, he had come to fear the sea. He could not bear to sleep on the west side of the house, where he might hear the waves crawling along the shore.
Therefore, I was quartered in the ocean-facing master suite at the front of the house. He slept in a guest room at the back.
Within a day of arriving in Magic Beach, more than a month previous to the red-tide dream, I had taken a job as Hutch’s cook, doubling as his chauffeur on those infrequent occasions when he wanted to go out.