Dean R. Koontz - Odd Thomas

DEAN KOONTZ

ODD THOMAS

ODD THOMAS A Bantam Book / December 2003

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.

Photographs on pages iv and xi from Corbis Stock Market

Book design by Virginia Norey

A signed, limited edition has been privately printed by Charnel House. Charnelhouse.

com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

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)

Odd Thomas / Dean Koontz.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-553-80249-6

1. Cooks—Fiction. 2. Mediums—Fiction. 3. Deserts—Fiction. 4. Young

men—Fiction. 5. Murderers—Fiction. I. Title. PS3561.055033 2004 $13'.54—dc22

2003057901

Manufactured in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada

BVG 10 98765432 1

To the Old Girls:

Mary Crowe, Gerda Koontz,

Vicky Page, and Jana Prais.

We'll get together. We'll nosh.

We'll tipple. We'll dish, dish, dish.

Hope requires the contender

Who sees no virtue in surrender.

From the cradle to the bier.

The heart must persevere.

—The Book of Counted Joys

ONE

MY NAME IS ODD THOMAS, THOUGH IN THIS AGE WHEN fame is the altar

at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I

exist.

I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to,

never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for transplantation into any

celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine

not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to

subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my

noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any

child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the

magical community of the short and beard-less.

Consequently, a demographics expert might conclude that my sole

audience is other young men and women currently adrift between their twentieth and

twenty-first birthdays.

In truth, I have nothing to say to that narrow audience. In my experience, I don't care

about most of the things that other twenty-year-old Americans care about. Except

survival, of course.

I lead an unusual life.

By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I'm sure that your life is filled

with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish.

Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.

I mean only that my life is not typical. Peculiar things happen to me that don't

happen to other people with regularity, if ever.

For example, I would never have written this memoir if I had not been commanded

to do so by a four-hundred-pound man with six fingers on his left hand.

His name is P. Oswald Boone. Everyone calls him Little Ozzie because his father,

Big Ozzie, is still alive.

Little Ozzie has a cat named Terrible Chester. He loves that cat. In fact, if Terrible

Chester were to use up his ninth life under the wheels of a Peterbilt, I am afraid that

Little Ozzie's big heart would not survive the loss.

Personally, I do not have great affection for Terrible Chester because, for one thing,

he has on several occasions peed on my shoes.

His reason for doing so, as explained by Ozzie, seems credible, but I am not

convinced of his truthfulness. I mean to say that I am suspicious of Terrible

Chester's veracity, not Ozzie's.

Besides, I simply cannot fully trust a cat who claims to be fifty-eight years old.

Although photographic evidence exists to support this claim, I persist in believing

that it's bogus.

For reasons that will become obvious, this manuscript cannot be published during

my lifetime, and my effort will not be repaid with

royalties while I'm alive. Little Ozzie suggests that I should leave my literary estate to

the loving maintenance of Terrible Chester, who, ac cording to him, will outlive all of

us.

i will choose another charity One that has not peed on me.

Anyway, I'm not writing this for money. I am writing it to save my sanity and to

discover if I can convince myself that my life has purpose and meaning enough to

justify continued existence.

Don't worry: These ramblings will not be insufferably gloomy. P. Oswald Boone has

sternly instructed me to keep the tone light.

"If you don't keep it light," Ozzie said, "I'll sit my four-hundred-pound ass on you,

and that's not the way you want to die."

Ozzie is bragging. His ass, while grand enough, probably weighs no more than a

hundred and fifty pounds. The other two hundred fifty are distributed across the rest

of his suffering skeleton.

When at first I proved unable to keep the tone light, Ozzie suggested that I be an

unreliable narrator. "It worked for Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger

Ackroyd," he said.

In that first-person mystery novel, the nice-guy narrator turns out to be the murderer

of Roger Ackroyd, a fact he conceals from the reader until the end.

Understand, I am not a murderer. I have done nothing evil that I am concealing from

you. My unreliability as a narrator has to do largely with the tense of certain verbs.

Don't worry about it. You'll know the truth soon enough.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of my story Little Ozzie and Terrible Chester do not enter

the picture until after the cow explodes.

This story began on a Tuesday.

For you, that is the day after Monday. For me, it is a day that, like the other six,

brims with the potential for mystery, adventure, and terror.

You should not take this to mean that my life is romantic and

magical. Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is

exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

Without the help of an alarm clock, I woke that Tuesday morning at five, from a

dream about dead bowling-alley employees.

I never set the alarm because my internal clock is so reliable. If I wish to wake

promptly at five, then before going to bed I tell myself three times that I must be

awake sharply at 4:45.

While reliable, my internal alarm clock for some reason runs fifteen minutes slow. I

learned this years ago and have adjusted to the problem.

The dream about the dead bowling-alley employees has troubled my sleep once or

twice a month for three years. The details are not yet specific enough to act upon. I

will have to wait and hope that clarification doesn't come to me too late.

So I woke at five, sat up in bed, and said, "Spare me that I may serve," which is the

morning prayer that my Granny Sugars taught me to say when I was little.

Pearl Sugars was my mother's mother. If she had been my father's mother, my name

would be Odd Sugars, further complicating my life.

Granny Sugars believed in bargaining with God. She called Him "that old rug

merchant."

Before every poker game, she promised God to spread His holy word or to share

her good fortune with orphans in return for a few unbeatable hands. Throughout her

life, winnings from card games remained a significant source of income.

Being a hard-drinking woman with numerous interests in addition to poker, Granny

Sugars didn't always spend as much time spreading God's word as she promised

Him that she would. She believed that God expected to be conned more often than

not and that He would be a good sport about it.

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and

wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see

what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion.

Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid

people get along just fine in life.

Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or

you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for the promises you didn't

keep.

In spite of drinking lumberjacks under the table, regularly winning at poker with

stone-hearted psychopaths who didn't like to lose, driving fast cars with utter

contempt for the laws of physics (but never while intoxicated), and eating a diet rich

in pork fat, Granny Sugars died peacefully in her sleep at the age of seventy-two.

They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy on the nightstand, a book by

her favorite novelist turned to the last page, and a smile on her face.

Judging by all available evidence, Granny and God understood each other pretty

well.

Pleased to be alive that Tuesday morning, on the dark side of the dawn, I switched

on my nightstand lamp and surveyed the chamber that served as my bedroom, living

room, kitchen, and dining room. I never get out of bed until I know who, if anyone,

is waiting for me.

If visitors either benign or malevolent had spent part of the night watching me sleep,

they had not lingered for a breakfast chat. Some times simply getting from bed to

bathroom can take the charm out of a new day.

Only Elvis was there, wearing the lei of orchids, smiling, and pointing one finger at

me as if it were a cocked gun.

Although I enjoy living above this particular two-car garage, and

though I find my quarters cozy, Architectural Digest will not be seeking an exclusive

photo layout. If one of their glamour scouts saw my place, he'd probably note, with

disdain, that the second word in the magazine's name is not, after all, Indigestion.

The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display promoting

Blue Hawaii, was where I'd left it. Occasionally, it moves—or is moved—during

the night.

I showered with peach-scented soap and peach shampoo, which were given to me

by Stormy Llewellyn. Her real first name is Bronwen, but she thinks that makes her

sound like an elf.

My real name actually is Odd.

According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error. Sometimes

she says they intended to name me Todd. Other times she says it was Dobb, after a

Czechoslovakian uncle.

My father insists that they always intended to name me Odd, although he won't tell

me why. He notes that I don't have a Czechoslovakian uncle.

My mother vigorously asserts the existence of the uncle, though she refuses to

explain why I've never met either him or her sister, Cymry to whom he is supposedly

married.

Although my father acknowledges the existence of Cymry, he is adamant that she

has never married. He says that she is a freak, but what he means by this I don't

know, for he will say no more.

My mother becomes infuriated at the suggestion that her sister is any kind of freak.

She calls Cymry a gift from God but otherwise re mains uncommunicative on the

subject.

I find it easier to live with the name Odd than to contest it. By the time I was old

enough to realize that it was an unusual name, I had grown comfortable with it.

Stormy Llewellyn and I are more than friends. We believe that we are soul mates.

For one thing, we have a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine that says we're

destined to be together forever.

We also have matching birthmarks.

Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely. I would throw my self off a high

cliff for her if she asked me to jump. I would, of course, need to understand the

reasoning behind her request.

Fortunately for me, Stormy is not the kind of person to ask such a thing lightly. She

expects nothing of others that she herself would not do. In treacherous currents, she

is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.

She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty cents that she found

in the change-return slot of a pay phone. At last she mailed it to the telephone

company.

Returning to the cliff for a moment, I don't mean to imply that I'm afraid of Death.

I'm just not ready to go out on a date with him.

Smelling like a peach, as Stormy likes me, not afraid of Death, having eaten a

blueberry muffin, saying good-bye to Elvis with the words "Taking care of business"

in a lousy imitation of his voice, I set off for work at the Pico Mundo Grille.

Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk

on the eastern horizon.

The town of Pico Mundo is in that part of southern California where you can never

forget that in spite of all the water imported by the state aqueduct system, the true

condition of the territory is desert. In March we bake. In August, which this was, we

broil.

The ocean lay so far to the west that it was no more real to us than the Sea of

Tranquility, that vast dark plain on the face of the moon.

Occasionally, when excavating for a new subdivision of tract homes on the outskirts

of town, developers had struck rich veins of seashells in their deeper diggings. Once

upon an ancient age, waves lapped these shores.

If you put one of those shells to your ear, you will not hear the surf breaking but

only a dry mournful wind, as if the shell has forgotten its origins.

At the foot of the exterior steps that led down from my small apartment, in the early

sun, Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on a shore. She wore red sneakers, white

shorts, and a sleeveless white blouse.

Ordinarily, Penny had none of that preadolescent despair to which some kids prove

so susceptible these days. She was an ebullient twelve-year-old, outgoing and quick

to laugh.

This morning, however, she looked solemn. Her blue eyes darkened as does the sea

under the passage of a cloud.

I glanced toward the house, fifty feet away, where my landlady, Rosalia Sanchez,

would be expecting me at any minute to confirm that she had not disappeared during

the night. The sight of herself in a mirror was never sufficient to put her fear to rest.

Without a word, Penny turned away from the stairs. She walked toward the front of

the property.

Like a pair of looms, using sunshine and their own silhouettes, two enormous

California live oaks wove veils of gold and purple, which they flung across the

driveway.

Penny appeared to shimmer and to darkle as she passed through this intricate lace of

light and shade. A black mantilla of shadow dimmed the luster of her blond hair, its

elaborate pattern changing as she moved.

Afraid of losing her, I hurried down the last of the steps and followed the girl. Mrs.

Sanchez would have to wait, and worry.

Penny led me past the house, off the driveway, to a birdbath on the front lawn.

Around the base of the pedestal that supported the basin, Rosalia Sanchez had

arranged a collection of dozens of the seashells, all shapes and sizes, that had been

scooped from the hills of Pico Mundo.

Penny stooped, selected a specimen about the size of an orange, stood once more,

and held it out to me.

The architecture resembled that of a conch. The rough exterior was brown and

white, the polished interior shone pearly pink.

Cupping her right hand as though she still held the shell, Penny brought it to her ear.

She cocked her head to listen, thus indicating what she wanted me to do.

When I put the shell to my ear, I did not hear the sea. Neither did I hear the

melancholy desert wind that I mentioned previously.

Instead, from the shell came the rough breathing of a beast. The urgent rhythm of a

cruel need, the grunt of mad desire.

Here in the summer desert, winter found my blood.

When she saw from my expression that I had heard what she wished me to hear,

Penny crossed the lawn to the public sidewalk. She stood at the curb, gazing toward

the west end of Marigold Lane.

I dropped the shell, went to her side, and waited with her.

Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.

Old Indian laurels line this street. Their great gnarled surface roots have in places

cracked and buckled the concrete walkway.

Not a whisper of air moved through the trees. The morning lay as uncannily still as

dawn on Judgment Day one breath before the sky would crack open.

Like Mrs. Sanchez's place, most houses in this neighborhood are Victorian in style,

with varying degrees of gingerbread. When Pico Mundo was founded, in 1900,

many residents were immigrants from the East Coast, and they preferred

architectures better suited to that distant colder, damper shore.

Perhaps they thought they could bring to this valley only those things they loved,

leaving behind all ugliness.

We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with

which it must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have

brought along a suitcase or two of darkness, and misery.

For half a minute, the only movement was that of a hawk gliding high above,

glimpsed between laurel branches.

The hawk and I were hunters this morning.

Penny Kallisto must have sensed my fear. She took my right hand in her left.

I was grateful for this kindness. Her grip proved firm, and her hand did not feel cold.

I drew courage from her strong spirit.

Because the car was idling in gear, rolling at just a few miles per hour, I didn't hear

anything until it turned the corner. When I recognized the vehicle, I knew a sadness

equal to my fear.

This 1968 Pontiac Firebird 400 had been restored with loving care. The two-door,

midnight-blue convertible appeared to glide toward us with all tires a fraction of an

inch off the pavement, shimmering like a mirage in the morning heat.

Harlo Landerson and I had been in the same high-school class. During his junior and

senior years, Harlo rebuilt this car from the axles up, until it looked as cherry as it

had in the autumn of '67, when it had first stood on a showroom floor.

Self-effacing, somewhat shy, Harlo had not labored on the car with the hope either

that it would be a babe magnet or that those who had thought of him as tepid would

suddenly think he was cool enough to freeze the mercury in a thermometer. He'd had

no social ambitions. He had suffered no illusions about his chances of ever rising

above the lower ranks of the high-school caste system.

With a 335-horsepower V-8 engine, the Firebird could sprint from zero to sixty miles

per hour in under eight seconds. Yet Harlo wasn't a street racer; he took no special

pride in having wheels of fury.

He devoted much time, labor, and money to the Firebird because

the beauty of its design and function enchanted him. This was a labor of the heart, a

passion almost spiritual in its purity and intensity.

I sometimes thought the Pontiac figured so large in Harlo's life because he had no

one to whom he could give the love that he lavished on the car. His mom died when

he was six. His dad was a mean drunk.

A car can't return the love you give it. But if you're lonely enough, maybe the sparkle

of the chrome, the luster of the paint, and the purr of the engine can be mistaken for

affection.

Harlo and I hadn't been buddies, just friendly. I liked the guy. He was quiet, but quiet

was better than the boast and bluster with which many kids jockeyed for social

position in high school.

With Penny Kallisto still at my side, I raised my left hand and waved at Harlo.

Since high school, he'd worked hard. Nine to five, he unloaded trucks at Super

Food and moved stock from storeroom to shelves.

Before that, beginning at 4:00 A.M., he dropped hundreds of news-papers at homes

on the east side of Pico Mundo. Once each week, he also delivered to every house a

plastic bag full of advertising flyers and discount-coupon books.

This morning, he distributed only newspapers, tossing them with a snap of the wrist,

as though they were boomerangs. Each folded and bagged copy of the Tuesday

edition of the Maravilla County Times spun through the air and landed with a soft

thwop on a driveway or a front walk, precisely where the subscriber preferred to

have it.

Harlo was working the far side of the street. When he reached the house opposite

me, he braked the coasting Pontiac to a stop.

Penny and I crossed to the car, and Harlo said, "Good mornin', Odd. How're you

this fine day?"

"Bleak," I replied. "Sad. Confused."

He frowned with concern. "What's wrong? Anything I can do?"

"Something you've already done," I said.

Letting go of Penny's hand, I leaned into the Firebird from the pas-senger's side,

switched off the engine, and plucked the key from the ignition.

Startled, Harlo grabbed for the keys but missed. "Hey, Odd, no foolin' around,

okay? I have a tight schedule."

I never heard Penny's voice, but in the rich yet silent language of the soul, she must

have spoken to me.

What I said to Harlo Landerson was the essence of what the girl revealed: "You have

her blood in your pocket."

An innocent man would have been baffled by my statement. Harlo stared at me, his

eyes suddenly owlish not with wisdom but with fear.

"On that night," I said, "you took with you three small squares of white felt."

One hand still on the wheel, Harlo looked away from me, through the windshield, as

if willing the Pontiac to move.

'After using the girl, you collected some of her virgin blood with the squares of felt,"

Harlo shivered. His face flushed red, perhaps with shame.

Anguish thickened my voice. "They dried stiff and dark, brittle like crackers."

His shivers swelled into violent tremors.

"You carry one of them with you at all times." My voice shook with emotion. "You

like to smell it. Oh, God, Harlo. Sometimes you put it between your teeth. And bite

on it."

He threw open the driver's door and fled.

I'm not the law. I'm not vigilante justice. I'm not vengeance per-sonified. I don't

really know what I am, or why.

In moments like these, however, I can't restrain myself from action. A kind of

madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from

what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.

As Harlo burst from the Pontiac, I looked down at Penny Kallisto and saw the

ligature marks on her throat, which had not been visible when she had first appeared

to me. The depth to which the garroting cloth had scored her flesh revealed the

singular fury with which he had strangled her to death.

Pity tore at me, and I went after Harlo Landerson, for whom I had no pity

whatsoever.

TWO

BLACKTOP TO CONCRETE, CONCRETE TO GRASS, ALONG-side the house

that lay across the street from Mrs. Sanchez's place, through the rear yard, to a

wrought-iron fence and over, then across a narrow alleyway, up a slumpstone wall,

Harlo Landerson ran and clambered and flung himself.

I wondered where he might be going. He couldn't outrun either me or justice, and he

certainly couldn't outrun who he was.

Beyond the slumpstone wall lay a backyard, a swimming pool. Dappled with

morning light and tree shadows, the water glimmered in shades of blue from sapphire

to turquoise, as might a trove of jew-els left by long-dead pirates who had sailed a

sea since vanished.

On the farther side of the pool, behind a sliding glass door, a young woman stood in

pajamas, holding a mug of whatever brew gave her the courage to face the day

When he spotted this startled observer, Harlo changed directions toward her. Maybe

he thought he needed a shield, a hostage. Whatever, he wasn't looking for coffee.

I closed on him, snared his shirt, hooked him off his feet. The two of us plunged

into the deep end of the pool.

Having banked a summer's worth of desert heat, the water wasn't cold. Thousands

of bubbles like shimmering showers of silver coins flipped across my eyes, rang

against my ears.

Thrashing, we touched bottom, and on the way up, he kicked, he flailed. With elbow

or knee, or foot, he struck my throat.

Although the impeding water robbed the blow of most of its force, I gasped,

swallowed, choked on the taste of chlorine flavored with tanning oil. Losing my grip

on Harlo, I tumbled in slow-mo through undulant curtains of green light, blue

shadow, and broke the surface into spangles of sunshine.

I was in the middle of the pool, and Harlo was at the edge. He grabbed the coping

and jacked himself onto the concrete deck.

Coughing, venting atomized water from both nostrils, I splashed noisily after him. As

a swimmer, I have less potential for Olympic com-petition than for drowning.

On a particularly dispiriting night when I was sixteen, I found myself chained to a

pair of dead men and dumped off a boat in Malo Suerte Lake. Ever since then, I've

had an aversion to aquatic sports.

That man-made lake lies beyond the city limits of Pico Mundo. Malo Suerte means

"bad luck."

Constructed during the Great Depression as a project of the Works Progress

Administration, the lake originally had been named after an obscure politician.

Although they have a thousand stories about its treacherous waters, nobody around

these parts can quite pin down when or why the place was officially renamed Malo

Suerte.

All records relating to the lake burned in the courthouse fire of 1954, when a man

named Mel Gibson protested the seizure of his

property for nonpayment of taxes. Mr. Gibson's protest took the form of

self-immolation.

He wasn't related to the Australian actor with the same name who would decades

later become a movie star. Indeed, by all reports, he was neither talented nor

physically attractive.

Now, because I hadn't been burdened on this occasion by a pair of men too dead to

swim for themselves, I reached the edge of the pool in a few swift strokes. I levered

myself out of the water.

Having arrived at the sliding door, Harlo Landerson found it locked.

The pajamaed woman had disappeared.

As I scrambled to my feet and started to move, Harlo backed away from the door

far enough to get momentum. Then he ran at it, lead-ing with his left shoulder, his

head tucked down.

I winced in expectation of gouting blood, severed limbs, a head guillotined by a

blade of glass.

Of course the safety pane shattered into cascades of tiny, gummy pieces. Harlo

crashed into the house with all his limbs intact and his head still attached to his neck.

Glass crunched and clinked under my shoes when I entered in his wake. I smelled

something burning.

Dean R. Koontz - Odd Thomas

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