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

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

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

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

About the Author

Also by Dean Koontz

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

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 beardless.

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, according 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 and 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. Sometimes 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 remains 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 myself 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 midnight-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 newspapers 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 passenger’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 personified. 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.

CHAPTER 2

BLACKTOP TO CONCRETE, CONCRETE TO grass, alongside 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 jewels 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 direction 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 slomo 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 competition 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, leading 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.

We were in a family room. All the furniture was oriented toward a big-screen TV as large as a pair of refrigerators.

The gigantic head of the female host of the Today show was terrifying in such magnified detail. In these dimensions, her perky smile had the warmth of a barracuda’s grin. Her twinkly eyes, here the size of lemons, seemed to glitter maniacally.

In this open floor plan, the family room flowed into the kitchen with only a breakfast bar intervening.

The woman had chosen to make a stand in the kitchen. She gripped a telephone in one hand and a butcher knife in the other.

Harlo stood at the threshold between rooms, trying to decide if a twentysomething housewife in too-cute, sailor-suit pajamas would really have the nerve to gut him alive.

She brandished the knife as she shouted into the phone. “He’s inside, he’s right here!”

Past her, on a far counter, smoke poured from a toaster. Some kind of pop-up pastry had failed to pop. It smelled like strawberries and smoldering rubber. The lady was having a bad morning.

Harlo threw a bar stool at me and ran out of the family room, toward the front of the house.

Ducking the stool, I said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry about the mess,” and I went looking for Penny’s killer.

Behind me, the woman screamed, “Stevie, lock your door! Stevie, lock your door!”

By the time I reached the foot of the open stairs in the foyer, Harlo had climbed to the landing.

I saw why he had been drawn upward instead of fleeing the house: At the second floor stood a wide-eyed little boy, about five years old, wearing only undershorts. Holding a blue teddy bear by one of its feet, the kid looked as vulnerable as a puppy stranded in the middle of a busy freeway.

Prime hostage material.

“Stevie, lock your door!”

Dropping the blue bear, the kid bolted for his room.

Harlo charged up the second flight of stairs.

Sneezing out the tickle of chlorine and the tang of burning strawberry jam, dripping, squishing, I ascended with somewhat less heroic flair than John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima.

I was more scared than my quarry because I had something to lose, not least of all Stormy Llewellyn and our future together that the fortune-telling machine had seemed to promise. If I encountered a husband with a handgun, he’d shoot me as unhesitatingly as he would Harlo.

Overhead, a door slammed hard. Stevie had done as his mother instructed.

If he’d had a pot of boiling lead, in the tradition of Quasimodo, Harlo Landerson would have poured it on me. Instead came a sideboard that evidently had stood in the second-floor hall, opposite the head of the stairs.

Surprised to discover that I had the agility and the balance of a monkey, albeit a wet monkey, I scrambled off the stairs, onto the railing. The deadfall rocked past step by step, drawers gaping open and snapping shut repeatedly, as if the furniture were possessed by the spirit of a crocodile.

Off the railing, up the stairs, I reached the second-floor hall as Harlo began to break down the kid’s bedroom door.

Aware that I was coming, he kicked harder. Wood splintered with a dry crack, and the door flew inward.

Harlo flew with it, as if he’d been sucked out of the hall by an energy vortex.

Rushing across the threshold, pushing aside the rebounding door, I saw the boy trying to wriggle under the bed. Harlo had seized him by the left foot.

I snatched a smiling panda-bear lamp off the red nightstand and smashed it over Harlo’s head. A ceramic carnage of perky black ears, fractured white face, black paws, and chunks of white belly exploded across the room.

In a world where biological systems and the laws of physics functioned with the absolute dependability that scientists claim for them, Harlo would have dropped stone-cold unconscious as surely as the lamp shattered. Unfortunately, this isn’t such a world.

As love empowers some frantic mothers to find the superhuman strength to lift overturned cars to free their trapped children, so depravity gave Harlo the will to endure a panda pounding without significant effect. He let go of Stevie and rounded on me.

Although his eyes lacked elliptical pupils, they reminded me of the eyes of a snake, keen with venomous intent, and though his bared teeth included no hooked or dramatically elongated canines, the rage of a rabid jackal gleamed in his silent snarl.

This wasn’t the person whom I had known in high school so few years ago, not the shy kid who found magic and meaning in the patient restoration of a Pontiac Firebird.

Here was a diseased and twisted bramble of a soul, thorny and cankerous, which perhaps until recently had been imprisoned in a deep turning of Harlo’s mental labyrinth. It had broken down the bars of its cell and climbed up through the castle keep, deposing the man who had been Harlo; and now it ruled.

Released, Stevie squirmed all the way under his bed, but no bed offered shelter to me, and I had no blankets to pull over my head.

I can’t pretend that I remember the next minute with clarity. We struck at each other when we saw an opening. We grabbed anything that might serve as a weapon, swung it, flung it. A flurry of blows staggered both of us into a clinch, and I felt his hot breath on my face, a spray of spittle, and heard his teeth snapping, snapping at my right ear, as panic pressed upon him the tactics of a beast.

I broke the clinch, shoved him away with an elbow under the chin and with a knee that missed the crotch for which it was intended.

Sirens arose in the distance just as Stevie’s mom appeared at the open door, butcher knife glinting and ready: two cavalries, one in pajamas, the other in the blue-and-black uniform of the Pico Mundo Police Department.

Harlo couldn’t get past both me and the armed woman. He couldn’t reach Stevie, his longed-for shield, under the bed. If he threw open a window and climbed onto the front-porch roof, he would be fleeing directly into the arms of the arriving cops.

As the sirens swelled louder, nearer, Harlo backed into a corner where he stood gasping, shuddering. Wringing his hands, his face gray with anguish, he looked at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, not in the manner of a trapped man assessing the dimensions of his cage, but with bewilderment, as though he could not recall how he had come to be in this place and predicament.

Unlike the beasts of the wild, the many cruel varieties of human monsters, when at last cornered, seldom fight with greater ferocity. Instead, they reveal the cowardice at the core of their brutality.

Harlo’s wringing hands twisted free of each other and covered his face. Through the chinks in that ten-fingered armor, I could see his eyes twitching with bright terror.

Back jammed into the corner, he slid down the junction of walls and sat on the floor with his legs splayed in front of him, hiding behind his hands as though they were a mask of invisibility that would allow him to escape the attention of justice.

The sirens reached a peak of volume half a block away, and then subsided from squeal to growl to waning groan in front of the house.

The day had dawned less than an hour ago, and I had spent every minute of the morning living up to my name.

CHAPTER 3

THE DEAD DON’T TALK. I DON’T KNOW why. Harlo Landerson had been taken away by the authorities. In his wallet they had found two Polaroids of Penny Kallisto. In the first, she was naked and alive. In the second, she was dead.

Stevie was downstairs, in his mother’s arms.

Wyatt Porter, chief of the Pico Mundo Police Department, had asked me to wait in Stevie’s room. I sat on the edge of the boy’s unmade bed.

I had not been alone long when Penny Kallisto walked through a wall and sat beside me. The ligature marks were gone from her neck. She looked as though she had never been strangled, had never died.

As before, she remained mute.

I tend to believe in the traditional architecture of life and the afterlife. This world is a journey of discovery and purification. The next world consists of two destinations: One is a palace for the spirit and an endless kingdom of wonder, while the other is cold and dark and unthinkable.

Call me simple-minded. Others do.

Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes instead that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to evil are evaluated at the end of our days here, and that if we come up to muster, we will be conscripted into an army of souls engaged in some great mission in the next world. Those who fail the test simply cease to exist.

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, there’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.

CHAPTER 4

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 Copan, 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.

I don’t believe they ever passed through this world in human form or knew this life as we know it. I suspect they don’t belong here, that a realm of eternal darkness is their intended home.

Their shape is liquid. Their substance is no greater than that of shadows. Their movement is soundless. Their intentions, though mysterious, are not benign.

Often they slink like cats, though cats as big as men. At times they run semi-erect like dream creatures that are half man, half dog.

I do not see them often. When they appear, their presence always signifies oncoming trouble of a greater than usual intensity and a darker than usual dimension.

They are not shades to me now. I call them bodachs.

Bodach is a word that I heard a visiting six-year-old English boy use to describe these creatures when, in my company, he glimpsed a pack of them roaming a Pico Mundo twilight. A bodach is a small, vile, and supposedly mythical beast of the British Isles, who comes down chimneys to carry off naughty children.

I don’t believe these spirits that I see are actually bodachs. I don’t think the English boy believed so, either. The word popped into his mind only because he had no better name for them. Neither do I.

He was the only person I have ever known who shared my special sight. Minutes after he spoke the word bodach in my presence, he was crushed to death between a runaway truck and a concrete-block wall.

By the time I reached the Grille, the three bodachs had joined in a pack. They ran far ahead of me, shimmered around a corner, and disappeared, as though they had been nothing more than heat imps, mere tricks of the desert air and the grueling sun.

Fat chance.

Some days, I find it difficult to concentrate on being the best short-order cook that I can be. This morning, I would need more than the usual discipline to focus my mind on my work and to ensure that the omelets, home fries, burgers, and bacon melts that came off my griddle were equal to my reputation.

CHAPTER 5

“EGGS—WRECK ’EM AND STRETCH ’EM,” said Helen Arches. “One Porky sitting, hash browns, cardiac shingles.”

She clipped the ticket to the order rail, snatched up a fresh pot of coffee, and went to offer refills to her customers.

Helen has been an excellent waitress for forty-two years, since she was eighteen. After so much good work, her ankles have stiffened and her feet have flattened, so when she walks, her shoes slap the floor with each step.

This soft flap-flap-flap is one of the fundamental rhythms of the beautiful music of the Pico Mundo Grille, along with the sizzle and sputter of things cooking, the clink of flatware, and the clatter of dishes. The conversation of customers and employees provides the melody.

We were busy that Tuesday morning. All the booths were occupied, as were two-thirds of the stools at the counter.

I like being busy. The short-order station is the center stage of the restaurant, in full view, and I draw fans as surely as does any actor on the Broadway boards.

Being a short-order cook on a slow shift must be akin to being a symphony conductor without either musicians or an audience. You stand poised for action in an apron instead of a tuxedo, holding a spatula rather than a baton, longing to interpret the art not of composers but of chickens.

The egg is art, sure enough. Given a choice between Beethoven and a pair of eggs fried in butter, a hungry man will invariably choose the eggs—or in fact the chicken—and will find his spirits lifted at least as much as they might be by a requiem, rhapsody, or sonata.

Anyone can crack a shell and spill the essence into pan, pot, or pipkin, but few can turn out omelets as flavorful, scrambled eggs as fluffy, and sunnysides as sunny as mine.

This is not pride talking. Well, yes it is, but this is the pride of accomplishment, rather than vanity or boastfulness.

I was not born with the artistry of a gifted hash-slinger. I learned by study and practice, under the tutelage of Terri Stambaugh, who owns the Pico Mundo Grille.

When others saw in me no promise, Terri believed in my potential and gave me a chance. I strive to repay her faith with cheeseburgers of exemplary quality and pancakes almost light enough to float off the plate.

She isn’t merely my employer but also my culinary mentor, my surrogate mother, and my friend.

In addition, she is my primary authority on Elvis Presley. If you cite any day in the life of the King of Rock-’n’-Roll, Terri will without hesitation tell you where he was on that date and what he was doing.

I, on the other hand, am more familiar with his activities since his death.

Without referencing Helen’s ticket on the rail, I stretched an order of eggs, which means that I added a third egg to our usual serving of two. Then I wrecked ’em: scrambled them.

A “Porky sitting” is fried ham. A pig sits on its ham. It lies on its abdomen, which is the source of bacon, so “one Porky lying” would have called for a rasher with the eggs.

“Cardiac shingles” is an order of toast with extra butter.

Hash browns are merely hash browns. Not every word we speak during the day is diner lingo, just as not every short-order cook sees dead people.

I saw only the living in the Pico Mundo Grille during that Tuesday shift. You can always spot the dead in a diner because the dead don’t eat.

Toward the end of the breakfast rush, Chief Wyatt Porter came in. He sat alone in a booth.

As usual, he washed down a tablet of Pepcid AC with a glass of low-fat moo juice before he ordered the mess of eggs and the home fries that he’d mentioned earlier. His complexion was as milky gray as carbolic-acid solution.

The chief smiled thinly at me and nodded. I raised my spatula in reply.

Although eventually I might trade hash-slinging for tire sales, I’ll never contemplate a career in law enforcement. It’s stomach-corroding work, and thankless.

Besides, I’m spooked by guns.

Half the booths and all but two of the counter stools had been vacated by the time a bodach came into the diner.

Their kind don’t appear to be able to walk through walls as do the dead like Penny Kallisto. Instead they slip through any crevice or crack, or keyhole.

This one seeped through the thread-thin gap between the glass door and the metal jamb. Like an undulant ribbon of smoke, as insubstantial as fumes but not translucent, ink-black, the bodach entered.

Standing rather than slinking on all fours, fluid in shape and without discernible features, yet suggestive of something half man and half canine, this unwanted customer slouched silently from the front to the back of the diner, unseen by all but me.

It seemed to turn its head toward each of our patrons as it glided along the aisle between the counter stools and the booths, hesitating in a few instances, as though certain people were of greater interest to it than were others. Although it possessed no discernible facial features, a portion of its silhouette appeared headlike, with a suggestion of a dog’s muzzle.

Eventually this creature returned from the back of the diner and stood on the public side of the counter, eyeless but surely watching me as I worked at the short-order station.

Pretending to be unaware of my observer, I focused more intently on the grille and griddle than was necessary now that the breakfast rush had largely passed. From time to time, when I looked up, I never glanced at the bodach but at the customers, at Helen serving with her signature slap-slap-slap, at our other waitress—sweet Bertie Orbic, round in name and fact—at the big windows and the well-baked street beyond, where jacaranda trees cast shadows too lacy to cool and where heat snakes were charmed off the blacktop not by flute music but by the silent sizzle of the sun.

As on this occasion, bodachs sometimes take a special interest in me. I don’t know why.

I don’t think they realize that I am aware of them. If they knew that I can see their kind, I might be in danger.

Considering that bodachs seem to have no more substance than do shadows, I’m not sure how they could harm me. I’m in no hurry to find out.

The current specimen, apparently fascinated by the rituals of short-order cookery, lost interest in me only when a customer of peculiar demeanor entered the restaurant.

In a desert summer that had toasted every resident of Pico Mundo, this newcomer remained as pale as bread dough. Across his skull spread short, sour-yellow hair furrier than a yeasty mold.

He sat at the counter, not far from the short-order station. Turning his stool left and right, left and right, as might a fidgety child, he gazed at the griddle, at the milkshake mixers and the soft-drink dispensers, appearing to be slightly bewildered and amused.

Having lost interest in me, the bodach crowded the new arrival and focused intently on him. If this inky entity’s head was in fact a head, then its head cocked left, cocked right, as though it were puzzling over the smiley man. If the snout-shaped portion was in fact a snout, then the shade sniffed with wolfish interest.

From the service side of the counter, Bertie Orbic greeted the newcomer. “Honey, what can I do you for?”

Managing to smile and talk at the same time, he spoke so softly that I couldn’t hear what he said. Bertie looked surprised, but then she began to scribble on her order pad.

Magnified by round, wire-framed lenses, the customer’s eyes disturbed me. His smoky gray gaze floated across me as a shadow across a woodland pool, registering no more awareness of me than the shadow has of the water.

The soft features of his wan face brought to mind pale mushrooms that I once glimpsed in a dark dank corner of a basement, and mealy puffballs clustered in moist mounds of forest mast.

Busy with his mess of eggs, Chief Porter appeared to be no more aware of Fungus Man than he was of the observing bodach. Evidently, his intuition did not tell him that this new customer warranted special attention or concern.

I, however, found Fungus Man worrisome—in part but not entirely because the bodach remained fascinated by him.

Although, in a sense, I commune with the dead, I don’t also have premonitions—except sometimes while fast asleep and dreaming. Awake, I am as vulnerable to mortal surprises as anyone is. My death might be delivered through the barrel of a terrorist’s gun or by a falling stone cornice in an earthquake, and I would not suspect the danger until I heard the crack of the fatal shot or felt the earth leap violently beneath my feet.

My wariness of this man came from suspicion based not on reason, either, but on crude instinct. Anyone who smiled this relentlessly was a simpleton—or a deceiver with something to hide.

Those smoke-gray eyes appeared to be bemused and no more than half-focused, but I saw no stupidity in them. Indeed, I thought that I detected a cunningly veiled watchfulness, like that of a stone-still snake feigning prestrike indifference to a juicy mouse.

Clipping the ticket to the rail, Bertie Orbic relayed his order: “Two cows, make ’em cry, give ’em blankets, and mate ’em with pigs.”

Two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.

In her sweet clear voice, which sounds like it belongs in a ten-year-old girl destined for a scholarship to Juilliard, she continued: “Double spuds twice in Hell.”

Two orders of French fries made extra crispy.

She said: “Burn two British, send ’em to Philly for fish.”

Two English muffins with cream cheese and lox.

She wasn’t finished: “Clean up the kitchen, plus midnight whistleberries with zeppelins.”

An order of hash, and an order of black beans with sausages.

I said, “Should I fire this or wait till his friends join him?”

“Fire it,” Bertie replied. “This is for one. A skinny boy like you wouldn’t understand.”

“What’s he want first?”

“Whatever you want to make.”

Fungus Man smiled dreamily at a salt shaker, which he turned around and around on the counter in front of him, as if the white crystalline contents fascinated and mystified him.

Although the guy didn’t have a buffed physique that would qualify him as a spokesman for a health club, he wasn’t fat, just gently rounded in his mushroom way. If his every meal was this elaborate, he must have the metabolism of a Tasmanian devil on methamphetamine.

I toasted and finished the muffins first, while Bertie prepared both a chocolate milkshake and a vanilla Coke. Our star eater was also a two-fisted drinker.

By the time I followed the muffins with the hash and sausages, a second bodach had appeared. This one and the first moved through the diner with an air of agitation, back and forth, here and there, always returning to the smiley gourmand, who remained oblivious of them.

When the bacon cheeseburgers and the well-done fries were ready, I slapped one hand against the bell that rested beside the griddle, to alert Bertie that the order was up. She served it hot, kissing plate to counter without a rattle, as she always does.

Three bodachs had gathered at the front window, persistent shadows that remained impervious to the wilting power of the desert sun, peering in at us as though we were on exhibit.

Months often pass during which I encounter none of their kind. The running pack that I’d seen earlier in the street and now this convocation suggested that Pico Mundo was in for hard times.

Bodachs are associated with death much the way that bees seek the nectar of flowers. They seem to sip of it.

Ordinary death, however, does not draw a single bodach, let alone a swarm of them. I’ve never seen one of these beasts hovering at the bedside of a terminal cancer patient or in the vicinity of someone about to suffer a fatal heart attack.

Violence attracts them. And terror. They seem to know when it’s coming. They gather like tourists waiting for the predictable eruption of a reliable geyser in Yellowstone Park.

I never saw one of them shadowing Harlo Landerson in the days before he murdered Penny Kallisto. I doubt that any bodachs were in attendance when he raped and throttled the girl.

For Penny, death had come with terrible pain and intolerable fear; surely each of us prays—or merely hopes, depending on his certainty of God—that his death will not be as brutal as hers. To bodachs, however, a quiet strangulation apparently isn’t sufficiently exciting to bestir them from whatever lairs they inhabit in whatever strange realm is their true home.

Their appetite is for operatic terror. The violence they crave is of the most extreme variety: multiple untimely deaths spiced with protracted horror, served with cruelty as thick as bad gravy.

When I was nine years old, a drug-whacked teenager named Gary Tolliver sedated his family—little brother, little sister, mother, father—by doctoring a pot of homemade chicken soup. He shackled them while they were unconscious, waited for them to wake, and then spent a weekend torturing them before he killed them with a power drill.

During the week preceding these atrocities, I had twice crossed Tolliver’s path. On the first occasion, he’d been followed closely by three eager bodachs. On the second occasion: not three but fourteen.

I have no doubt that those inky forms roamed the Tolliver house throughout that bloody weekend, invisible to the victims and to the killer alike, slinking from room to room as the scene of the action shifted. Observing. Feeding.

Two years later, a moving van, driven by a drunk, sheered off the gasoline pumps at a busy service station out on Green Moon Road, triggering an explosion and fire that killed seven. That morning, I had seen a dozen bodachs lingering there like misplaced shadows in the early sun.

Nature’s wrath draws them as well. They were seething over the ruins of the Buena Vista Nursing Home after the earthquake eighteen months ago, and did not leave until the last injured survivor had been extracted from the rubble.

If I had passed by Buena Vista prior to the quake, surely I would have seen them gathering. Perhaps I could have saved some lives.

When I was a child, I first thought that these shades might be malevolent spirits who fostered evil in those people around whom they swarmed. I’ve since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

I’ve come to believe that bodachs don’t foster terror, after all, but take sustenance from it in some fashion. I think of them as psychic vampires, similar to but even scarier than the hosts of daytime-TV talk shows that feature emotionally disturbed and self-destructive guests who are encouraged to bare their damaged souls.

Attended now by four bodachs inside the Pico Mundo Grille and also watched by others at the windows, Fungus Man washed down the final bites of his burgers and fries with the last of his milkshake and vanilla Coke. He left a generous tip for Bertie, paid his check at the cashier’s station, and departed the diner with his slinking entourage of slithery shadows.

Through dazzles of sunlight, through shimmering curtains of heat rising from the baked blacktop, I watched him cross the street. The bodachs at his sides and in his wake were difficult to count as they swarmed over one another, but I would have bet a week’s wages that they numbered no fewer than twenty.

CHAPTER 6

ALTHOUGH HER EYES ARE NEITHER golden nor heavenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all the ways that you are fallen from a state of grace.

She’s forty-one, therefore old enough to be my mother. She is not, however, eccentric enough to be my mother. Not by half.

Terri inherited the Grille from her folks and runs it to the high standard that they established. She’s a fair boss and a hard worker.

Her only offbeat quality is her obsession with Elvis and all things Elvisian.

Because she enjoyed having her encyclopedic knowledge tested, I said, “Nineteen sixty-three.”

“Okay.”

“May.”

“What day?”

I picked one at random: “The twenty-ninth.”

“That was a Wednesday,” Terri said.

The lunch rush had passed. My workday had ended at two o’clock. We were in a booth at the back of the Grille, waiting for a second-shift waitress, Viola Peabody, to bring our lunch.

I had been relieved at the short-order station by Poke Barnet. Thirty-some years older than I am, lean and sinewy, Poke has a Mojave-cured face and gunfighter eyes. He is as silent as a Gila monster sunning on a rock, as self-contained as any cactus.

If Poke had lived a previous life in the Old West, he had more likely been a marshal with a lightning-quick draw, or even one of the Dalton gang, rather than a chuck-wagon cook. With or without past-life experience, however, he was a good man at grill and griddle.

“On Wednesday, May 29, 1963,” Terri said, “Priscilla graduated from Immaculate Conception High School in Memphis.”

“Priscilla Presley?”

“She was Priscilla Beaulieu back then. During the graduation ceremony, Elvis waited in a car outside the school.”

“He wasn’t invited?”

“Sure he was. But his presence in the auditorium would have been a major disruption.”

“When were they married?”

“Too easy. May 1, 1967, shortly before noon, in a suite in the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas.”

Terri was fifteen when Elvis died. He wasn’t a heartthrob in those days. By then he had become a bloated caricature of himself in embroidered, rhinestone-spangled jumpsuits more appropriate for Liberace than for the bluesy singer with a hard rhythm edge who had first hit the top of the charts in 1956, with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Terri hadn’t yet been born in 1956. Her fascination with Presley had not begun until sixteen years after his death.

The origins of this obsession are in part mysterious to her. One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day.

I suspect that Terri is obsessed with Elvis partly because, on an unconscious level, she has been aware that he has moved among us here in Pico Mundo at least since my childhood, perhaps ever since his death, a truth that I revealed to her only a year ago. I suspect she is a latent medium, that she may sense his spiritual presence, and that as a consequence she is powerfully drawn to the study of his life and career.

I have no idea why the King of Rock-’n’-Roll has not moved on to the Other Side but continues, after so many years, to haunt this world. After all, Buddy Holly hasn’t hung around; he’s gotten on with death in the proper fashion.

And why does Elvis linger in Pico Mundo instead of in Memphis or Vegas?

According to Terri, who knows everything there is to know about all the days of Elvis’s busy forty-two years, he never visited our town when he was alive. In all the literature of the paranormal, no mention is made of such a geographically dislocated haunting.

We were puzzling over this mystery, not for the first time, when Viola Peabody brought our late lunch. Viola is as black as Bertie Orbic is round, as thin as Helen Arches is flat-footed.

Depositing our plates on the table, Viola said, “Odd, will you read me?”

More than a few folks in Pico Mundo think that I’m some sort of psychic: perhaps a clairvoyant, a thaumaturge, seer, soothsayer, something. Only a handful know that I see the restless dead. The others have whittled an image of me with the distorting knives of rumor until I am a different piece of scrimshaw to each of them.

“I’ve told you, Viola, I’m not a palmist or a head-bump reader. And tea leaves aren’t anything to me but garbage.”

“So read my face,” she said. “Tell me—do you see what I saw in a dream last night?”

Viola was usually a cheerful person, even though her husband, Rafael, had traded up to a waitress at a fancy steak house over in Arroyo City, thereafter providing neither counsel nor support for their two children. On this occasion, however, Viola appeared solemn as never before, and worried.

I told her, “The last thing I can read is faces.”

Every human face is more enigmatic than the time-worn expression on the famous Sphinx out there in the sands of Egypt.

“In my dream,” Viola said, “I saw myself, and my face was ... broken, dead. I had a hole in my forehead.”

“Maybe it was a dream about why you married Rafael.”

“Not funny,” Terri admonished me.

“I think maybe I’d been shot,” Viola said.

“Honey,” Terri comforted her, “when’s the last time you had a dream come true?”

“I guess never,” Viola said.

“Then I wouldn’t worry about this one.”

“Best I can remember,” Viola said, “I’ve never before seen myself face-on in a dream.”

Even in my nightmares, which sometimes do come true, I’ve never glimpsed my face, either.

“I had a hole in my forehead,” she repeated, “and my face was ... spooky, all out of kilter.”

A high-powered round of significant caliber, upon puncturing the forehead, would release tremendous energy that might distort the structure of the entire skull, resulting in a subtle but disturbing new arrangement of the features.

“My right eye,” Viola added, “was bloodshot and seemed to ... to swell half out of the socket.”

In our dreams, we are not detached observers, as are the characters who dream in movies. These internal dramas are usually seen strictly from the dreamer’s point of view. In nightmares, we can’t look into our own eyes except by indirection, perhaps because we fear discovering that therein lie the worst monsters plaguing us.

Viola’s face, sweet as milk chocolate, was now distorted by a beseeching expression. “Tell me the truth, Odd. Do you see death in me?”

I didn’t say to her that death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.

Although not one small detail of Viola’s future, whether grim or bright, had been revealed to me, the delicious aroma of my untouched cheeseburger induced me to lie in order to get on with lunch: “You’ll live a long happy life and pass away in your sleep, of old age.”

“Really?”

Smiling and nodding, I was unashamed of this deception. For one thing, it might be true. I see no real harm in giving people hope. Besides, I had not sought to be her oracle.

In a better mood than she’d arrived, Viola departed, returning to the paying customers.

Picking up my cheeseburger, I said to Terri, “October 23, 1958.”

“Elvis was in the army then,” she said, hesitating only to chew a bite of her grilled-cheese sandwich. “He was stationed in Germany.”

“That’s not very specific.”

“The evening of the twenty-third, he went into Frankfurt to attend a Bill Haley concert.”

“You could be making this up.”

“You know I’m not.” Her crisp dill pickle crunched audibly when she bit it. “Backstage, he met Haley and a Swedish rock-’n’-roll star named Little Gerhard.”

“Little Gerhard? That can’t be true.”

“Inspired, I guess, by Little Richard. I don’t know for sure. I never heard Little Gerhard sing. Is Viola going to be shot in the head?”

“I don’t know.” Juicy and cooked medium-well, the meat in the cheeseburger had been enhanced with a perfect pinch of seasoned salt. Poke was a contender. “Like you said, dreams are just dreams.”

“She’s had things hard. She doesn’t need this.”

“Shot in the head? Who does need it?”

“Will you look after her?” Terri asked.

“How would I do that?”

“Put out your psychic feelers. Maybe you can stop the thing before it happens.”

“I don’t have psychic feelers.”

“Then ask one of your dead friends. They sometimes know things that are going to happen, don’t they?”

“They’re generally not friends. Just passing acquaintances. Anyway, they’re helpful only when they want to be helpful.”

“If I was dead, I’d help you,” Terri assured me.

“You’re sweet. I almost wish you were dead.” I put down the cheeseburger and licked my fingers. “If somebody in Pico Mundo is going to start shooting people, it’ll be Fungus Man.”

“Who’s he?”

“Sat at the counter a while ago. Ordered enough food for three people. Ate like a ravenous swine.”

“That’s my kind of customer. But I didn’t see him.”

“You were in the kitchen. He was pale, soft, with all rounded edges, like something that would grow in Hannibal Lecter’s cellar.”

“He put off bad vibes?”

“By the time he left, Fungus Man had an entourage of bodachs.”

Terri stiffened and looked warily around the restaurant. “Any of them here now?”

“Nope. The worst thing on the premises at the moment is Bob Sphincter.”

The real name of the pinchpenny in question was Spinker, but he earned the secret name we gave him. Regardless of the total of his bill, he always tipped a quarter.

Bob Sphincter fancied himself to be two and a half times more generous than John D. Rockefeller, the oil billionaire. According to legend, even in the elegant restaurants of Manhattan, Rockefeller had routinely tipped a dime.

Of course in John D’s day, which included the Great Depression, a dime would purchase a newspaper and lunch at an Automat. Currently, a quarter will get you just a newspaper, and you won’t want to read anything in it unless you’re a sadist, a masochist, or a suicidally lonely wretch desperate to find true love in the personal ads.

Terri said, “Maybe this Fungus Man was just passing through town, and he hit the highway as soon as he cleaned his plate.”

“Got a hunch he’s still hanging around.”

“You gonna check him out?”

“If I can find him.”

“You need to borrow my car?” she asked.

“Maybe for a couple hours.”

I walk to and from work. For longer trips, I have a bicycle. In special cases, I use Stormy Llewellyn’s car, or Terri’s.

So many things are beyond my control: the endless dead with all their requests, the bodachs, the prophetic dreams. I’d probably long ago have gone seven kinds of crazy, one for each day of the week, if I didn’t simplify my life in every area where I do have some control. These are my defensive strategies: no car, no life insurance, no more clothes than I absolutely need—mostly T-shirts, chinos, and jeans—no vacations to exotic places, no grand ambitions.

Terri slid her car keys across the table.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Just don’t haul any dead people around in it. Okay?”

“The dead don’t need a ride. They can appear when they want, where they want. They walk through air. They fly.”

“All I’m saying is, if you tell me some dead person was sitting in my car, I’ll waste a whole day scrubbing the upholstery. It creeps me out.”

“What if it’s Elvis?”

“That’s different.” She finished her dill pickle. “How was Rosalia this morning?” she asked, meaning Rosalia Sanchez, my landlady.

“Visible,” I said.

“Good for her.”

CHAPTER 7

GREEN MOON MALL STANDS ALONG GREEN Moon Road, between old-town Pico Mundo and its modern western neighborhoods. The huge structure, with walls the color of sand, had been designed to suggest humble adobe construction, as though it were a home built by a family of gigantic Native Americans averaging forty feet in height.

In spite of this curious attempt at environmentally harmonious but deeply illogical architecture, patrons of the mall can still be Starbucked, Gapped, Donna Karaned, and Crate & Barreled as easily in Pico Mundo as in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, or Miami.

In a corner of the vast parking lot, remote from the mall, stands Tire World. Here the architecture is more playful.

The single-story building supports a tower crowned by a giant globe. This model of Earth, rotating lazily, seems to represent a world of peace and innocence lost when the snake entered Eden.

Like Saturn, this planet sports a ring, not of ice crystals and rocks and dust but of rubber. Encircling the globe is a tire that both rotates and oscillates.

Five service bays ensure that customers will not wait long to have new tires installed. The technicians wear crisp uniforms. They are polite. They smile easily. They seem happy.

Car batteries can be purchased here, as well, and oil changes are offered. Tires, however, remain the soul of the operation.

The showroom is saturated with the enchanting scent of rubber waiting for the road.

That Tuesday afternoon, I wandered the aisles for ten or fifteen minutes, undisturbed. Some employees said hello to me, but none tried to sell me anything.

I visit from time to time, and they know that I am interested in the tire life.

The owner of Tire World is Mr. Joseph Mangione. He is the father of Anthony Mangione, who was a friend of mine in high school.

Anthony attends UCLA. He hopes to have a career in medicine.

Mr. Mangione is proud that his boy will be a doctor, but he is disappointed, as well, that Anthony has no interest in the family business. He would welcome me to the payroll and would no doubt treat me as a surrogate son.

Here, tires are available for cars, SUVs, trucks, motorcycles. The sizes and degrees of quality are many; but once the inventory is memorized, no stress would be associated with any job at Tire World.

That Tuesday, I had no intention of resigning my spatula at the Pico Mundo Grille anytime soon, although short-order cooking can be stressful when the tables are full, tickets are backed up on the order rail, and your head is buzzing with diner lingo. On those days that also feature an unusual number of encounters with the dead, in addition to a bustling breakfast and lunch trade, my stomach sours and I know that I am courting not merely burnout but also early-onset gastrointestinal reflux disease.

At times like that, the tire life seems to be a refuge almost as serene as a monastery.

However, even Mr. Mangione’s rubber-scented corner of paradise was haunted. One ghost stubbornly inhabited the showroom.

Tom Jedd, a well-regarded local stonemason, had died eight months previous. His car careened off Panorama Road after midnight, broke through rotted guardrails, tumbled down a rocky hundred-foot embankment, and sank in Malo Suerte Lake.

Three fishermen had been in a boat, sixty yards offshore, when Tom went swimming in his PT Cruiser. They called the cops on a cell phone, but emergency-rescue services arrived too late to save him.

Tom’s left arm had been severed in the crash. The county coroner declared himself undecided as to whether Tom had bled to death or drowned first.

Since then, the poor guy had been moping around Tire World. I didn’t know why. His accident had not been caused by a defective tire.

He’d been drinking at a roadhouse called Country Cousin. The autopsy cited a blood-alcohol level of 1.18, well over the legal limit. He either lost control of the vehicle due to inebriation or he fell asleep at the wheel.

Each time I visited the showroom to stroll the aisles and mull a career change, Tom realized that I saw him, and he acknowledged me with a look or a nod. Once he even winked at me, conspiratorially.

He had not, however, made any attempt to communicate either his purpose or his needs. He was a reticent ghost.

Some days I wish more of them were like him.

He had died in a parrot-patterned Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and white sneakers worn without socks. He always appeared in those clothes when he roamed Tire World.

Sometimes he was dry, but at other times he appeared to be soaked, as if he’d just walked out of Malo Suerte Lake. Usually he had both arms, but occasionally his left arm was missing.

You can tell a lot about a dead person’s state of mind by the condition in which he manifests. When dry, Tom Jedd seemed to be resigned to his fate if not fully at peace with it. When wet, he looked angry or distressed, or sullen.

On this occasion, he was dry. His hair had been combed. He appeared to be relaxed.

Tom had both arms this time, but the left wasn’t attached to his shoulder. He carried his left arm in his right hand, casually, as though it were a golf club, gripping it by the biceps.

This grotesque behavior did not include gore. Fortunately, I had never seen him bloody, perhaps because he was squeamish or because he remained in denial that he had bled to death.

Twice, when he knew that I was looking, he used his severed arm as a back scratcher. He clawed between his shoulder blades with the stiff fingers of that detached limb.

As a rule, ghosts are serious about their condition and solemn in their demeanor. They belong on the Other Side but are stuck here, for whatever reasons, and they are impatient to move on.

Once in a while, however, I encounter a spirit with his sense of humor intact. For my amusement, Tom even conspired to pick his nose with the forefinger of his severed arm.

I prefer ghosts to be somber. There’s something about a walking dead man trying to get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked—as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves.

If Tom Jedd had been in less of a jokey mood, I might have lingered longer at Tire World. His shtick disturbed me, as did his twinkly-eyed smile.

As I walked to Terri’s Mustang, Tom stood at a showroom window, vigorously and clownishly waving good-bye with his severed arm.

I drove across sun-scorched acres of parking lot and found a space for the Mustang near the main entrance to the mall, where workmen were hanging a banner announcing the big annual summer sale that would run Wednesday through Sunday.

Inside this cavernous retail mecca, most of the stores appeared to be only moderately busy, but the Burke & Bailey’s ice-cream parlor drew a crowd.

Stormy Llewellyn has worked at Burke & Bailey’s since she was sixteen. At twenty, she’s the manager. Her plan is to own a shop of her own by the time she’s twenty-four.

If she had gone into astronaut training after high school, she would have a lemonade stand on the moon by now.

According to her, she’s not ambitious, just easily bored and in need of stimulation. I have frequently offered to stimulate her.

She says she’s talking about mental stimulation.

I tell her that, in case she hasn’t noticed, I do have a brain.

She says there’s definitely no brain in my one-eyed snake and that what might be in my big head is still open to debate.

“Why do you think I sometimes call you Pooh?” she once asked.

“Because I’m cuddly?”

“Because Pooh’s head is full of stuffin’.”

Our life together isn’t always a New Wave Abbott & Costello routine. Sometimes she’s Rocky and I’m Bullwinkle.

I went to the counter in Burke & Bailey’s and said, “I need something hot and sweet.”

“We specialize in cold,” Stormy said. “Go sit out there in the promenade and be good. I’ll bring you something.”

Although busy, the parlor offered a few empty tables; however, Stormy prefers not to chat on the premises. She is an object of fascination for some of the other employees, and she doesn’t want to give them fuel for gossip.

I understand precisely how they feel about her. She’s an object of fascination for me, too.

Therefore I stepped out of Burke & Bailey’s, into the public promenade, and sat with the fish.

Retail sales and theater have joined forces in America: Movies are full of product placements, and malls are designed with drama in mind. At one end of Green Moon Mall, a forty-foot waterfall tumbled down a cliff of man-made rocks. From the falls, a stream coursed the length of the building, over a series of diminishing rapids.

At the end of a compulsive-shopping spree, if you realized that you had bankrupted yourself in Nordstroms, you could fling yourself into this water feature and drown.

Outside Burke & Bailey’s, the stream ended in a tropical pond surrounded by palm trees and lush ferns. Great care had been taken to make this vignette look real. Faint recorded bird calls echoed hauntingly through the greenery.

Except for the lack of enormous insects, suffocating humidity, malaria victims groaning in death throes, poisonous vipers as thick as mosquitoes, and rabid jungle cats madly devouring their own feet, you would have sworn you were in the Amazon rainforest.

In the pond swam brightly colored koi. Many were large enough to serve as a hearty dinner. According to the mall publicity, some of these exotic fish were valued as high as four thousand dollars each; tasty or not, they weren’t within everyone’s grocery budget.

I sat on a bench with my back to the koi, unimpressed by their flashy fins and precious scales.

In five minutes, Stormy came out of Burke & Bailey’s with two cones of ice cream. I enjoyed watching her walk toward me.

Her uniform included pink shoes, white socks, a hot-pink skirt, a matching pink-and-white blouse, and a perky pink cap. With her Mediterranean complexion, jet-black hair, and mysterious dark eyes, she looked like a sultry espionage agent who had gone undercover as a hospital candy striper.

Sensing my thoughts, as usual, she sat beside me on the bench and said, “When I have my own shop, the employees won’t have to wear stupid uniforms.”

“I think you look adorable.”

“I look like a goth Gidget.”

Stormy gave one of the cones to me, and for a minute or two we sat in silence, watching shoppers stroll past, enjoying our ice cream.

“Under the hamburger and bacon grease,” she said, “I can still smell the peach shampoo.”

“I’m an olfactory delight.”

“Maybe one day when I have my own shop, we can work together and smell the same.”

“The ice-cream business doesn’t move me. I love to fry.”

“I guess it’s true,” she said.

“What?”

“Opposites attract.”

“Is this the new flavor came in last week?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Cherry chocolate coconut chunk?”

“Coconut cherry chocolate chunk,” she corrected. “You’ve got to get the proper adjective in front of chunk or you’re screwed.”

“I didn’t realize the grammar of the ice-cream industry was so rigid.”

“Describe it your way, and some weasel customers will eat the whole thing and then ask for their money back because there weren’t chunks of coconut in it. And don’t ever call me adorable again. Puppies are adorable.”

“As you were coming toward me, I thought you looked sultry.”

“The smart thing for you would be to stay away from adjectives altogether.”

“Good ice cream,” I said. “Is this the first taste you’ve had?”

“Everyone’s been raving about it. But I didn’t want to rush the experience.”

“Delayed gratification.”

“Yeah, it makes everything sweeter.”

“Wait too long, and what was sweet and creamy can turn sour.”

“Move over Socrates. Odd Thomas takes the podium.”

I know when the thin ice under me has begun to crack. I changed the subject. “Sitting with my back to all those koi creeps me out.”

“You think they’re up to something?” she asked.

“They’re too flashy for fish. I don’t trust them.”

She glanced over her shoulder, at the pond, then turned her attention once more to the ice cream. “They’re just fornicating.”

“How can you tell?”

“The only thing fish ever do is eat, excrete, and fornicate.”

“The good life.”

“They excrete in the same water where they eat, and they eat in the semen-clouded water where they fornicate. Fish are disgusting.”

“I never thought so until now,” I said.

“How’d you get out here?”

“Terri’s Mustang.”

“You been missing me?”

“Always. But I’m looking for someone.” I told her about Fungus Man. “This is where my instinct brought me.”

When someone isn’t where I expect to find him, neither at home nor at work, then sometimes I cruise around on my bicycle or in a borrowed car, turning randomly from street to street. Usually in less than half an hour, I cross paths with the one I seek. I need a face or a name for focus, but then I’m better than a bloodhound.

This is a talent for which I have no name. Stormy calls it “psychic magnetism.”

“And here he comes now,” I said, referring to Fungus Man, who ambled along the promenade, following the descending rapids toward the tropical koi pond.

Stormy didn’t have to ask me to point the guy out to her. Among the other shoppers, he was as obvious as a duck in a dog parade.

Although I had nearly finished the ice cream without being chilled, I shivered at the sight of this strange man. He trod the travertine promenade, but my teeth chattered as if he had just walked across my grave.

CHAPTER 8

PALE, PUFFY, HIS WATERY GRAY GAZE floating over store windows, looking almost as bemused as an Alzheimer’s patient who has wandered out of his care facility into a world he no longer recognizes, Fungus Man carried stuffed shopping bags from two department stores.

“What’s that yellow thing on his head?” Stormy asked.

“Hair.”

“I think it’s a crocheted yarmulke.”

“No, it’s hair.”

Fungus Man went into Burke & Bailey’s.

“Are the bodachs still with him?” Stormy asked.

“Not as many as before. Just three.”

“And they’re in my store with him?”

“Yeah. They all went inside.”

“This is bad for business,” she said ominously.

“Why? None of your customers can see them.”

“How could slinky, slithering evil spirits be good for business?” she countered. “Wait here.”

I sat with the fornicating koi at my back and the unfinished ice cream in my right hand. I had lost my appetite.

Through the windows of Burke & Bailey’s, I could see Fungus Man at the counter. He studied the flavor menu, then placed an order.

Stormy herself didn’t serve him but hovered nearby, behind the counter, on some pretense.

I didn’t like her being in there with him. I sensed that she was in danger.

Although experience has taught me to trust my feelings, I did not go inside to stand guard near her. She had asked me to wait on the bench. I had no intention of crossing her. Like most men, I find it mortifying to be ass-kicked by a woman who doesn’t even weigh 110 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner.

If I’d had a lamp and a genie and one wish, I would have wished myself back to Tire World, to the serenity of that showroom with its aisles of soothingly round rubber forms.

I thought of poor Tom Jedd, waving good-bye with his severed arm, and I decided to finish my ice cream, after all. None of us ever knows when he’s approaching the end of his road. Maybe this was the last scoop of coconut cherry chocolate chunk that I’d ever have a chance to eat.

As I finished the final bite, Stormy returned and sat beside me again. “He’s ordered takeout. One quart of maple walnut and one quart of mandarin-orange chocolate.”

“Are the flavors significant?”

“That’s for you to decide. I’m just reporting in. He’s sure one megaweird son of a bitch. I wish you’d just forget about him.”

“You know I can’t.”

“You have a messiah complex, got to save the world.”

“I don’t have a messiah complex. I just have ... this gift. It wouldn’t have been given to me if I wasn’t supposed to use it.”

“Maybe it’s not a gift. Maybe it’s a curse.”

“It’s a gift.” Tapping my head, I said, “I’ve still got the box it came in.”

Fungus Man stepped out of Burke & Bailey’s. In addition to the two department-store bundles, he carried a quilted, insulated bag that contained the ice cream.

He looked right, looked left, and right again, as though not certain from which direction he had arrived here. His vague smile, which seemed to be as permanent as a tattoo, widened briefly, and he nodded as though in cheerful agreement with something that he’d said to himself.

When Fungus Man began to move, heading upstream toward the waterfall, two bodachs accompanied him. For the moment, the third remained in Burke & Bailey’s.

Rising from the bench, I said, “I’ll see you for dinner, Goth Gidget.”

“Try to show up alive,” she said. “Because, remember, I can’t see the dead.”

I left her there, all pink and white and sultry, in the palmy tropics with the scent of amorous koi, and I followed the human mushroom to the main entrance of the mall and then out into sunshine almost sharp enough to peel the corneas off my eyes.

The griddle-hot blacktop seemed but one degree cooler than the molten tar pits that had sucked down dinosaurs in distant millennia. The air flash-dried my lips and brought to me that summer scent of desert towns that is a melange of superheated silica, cactus pollen, mesquite resin, the salts of long-dead seas, and exhaust fumes suspended in the motionless dry air like faint nebulae of mineral particles spiraling through rock crystal.

Fungus Man’s dusty Ford Explorer stood in the row behind mine and four spaces farther west. If my psychic magnetism had been any stronger, we would have been parked bumper to bumper.

He opened the tailgate of the SUV and put in the shopping bags. He had brought a Styrofoam cooler to protect the ice cream, and he snugged both quarts in that insulated hamper.

Earlier, I had forgotten to prop the reflective sun barrier against the windshield in the Mustang. It was folded and tucked between the passenger’s seat and the console. Consequently, the steering wheel had grown too hot to touch.

I started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, and used my rearview and side mirrors to monitor Fungus Man.

Fortunately, his movements were nearly as slow and methodical as the growth of mildew. By the time he backed out of his parking space, I was able to follow him without leaving scraps of blistered skin on the steering wheel.

We had not yet reached the street when I realized that none of the bodachs had accompanied the smiley man when he’d left the mall. None were currently in the Explorer with him, and none loped after it, either.

Earlier, he had departed the Grille with an entourage of at least twenty, which had shrunk to three when he arrived at Burke & Bailey’s. The bodachs are usually devout in their attendance to any man who will be the source of terrible violence, and they do not desert him until the last drop of blood has been spilled.

I wondered if Fungus Man was, after all, the evil incarnation of Death that I had taken him to be.

The lake of blacktop glistened with so much stored heat that it appeared to have no more surface tension than water, and yet the Explorer cruised across it without leaving wake or wimple.

Even in the absence of bodachs, I continued to trail my quarry. My shift at the Grille was done. The rest of the afternoon as well as the evening lay ahead. No one is more restless than a short-order cook at loose ends.

CHAPTER 9

CAMP’S END IS NOT A TOWN IN ITSELF BUT a neighborhood of Pico Mundo that is the living memory of hard times even when the rest of our community is experiencing an economic boom. More lawns are dead than not, and some are gravel. Most of the small houses need new stucco, fresh paint, and a truce with termites.

Shacks were built here in the late 1800s, when prospectors with more dreams than common sense were drawn to the area by silver and rumors of silver. They discovered rich veins of the latter.

Over time, as the prospectors became legend and could not be found anymore in the flesh, the weathered shacks were replaced by cottages, shingled bungalows, and casitas with barrel-tile roofs.

In Camp’s End, however, renovation turned to ruin faster than elsewhere. Generation after generation, the neighborhood retained its essential character, an air not so much of defeat as of weary patience: the sag, the peel, the rust, the bleak and blanched but never quite hopeless spirit of a precinct in purgatory.

Hard luck seemed to seep out of the ground itself, as though the devil’s rooms in Hades were directly beneath these streets, his sleeping loft so near the surface that his fetid breath, expelled with every snore, percolated through the soil.

Fungus Man’s destination was a pale-yellow stucco casita with a faded blue front door. The carport leaned precipitously, as if the weight of sunshine alone might collapse it.

I parked across the street from the house, in front of an empty lot full of parched jimson weed and brambles as intricately woven as a dreamcatcher. They had caught only crumpled papers, empty beer cans, and what appeared to be a tattered pair of men’s boxer shorts.

As I put down the car windows and switched off the engine, I watched Fungus Man carry his ice cream and other packages into the house. He entered by a side door in the carport shadows.

Summer afternoons in Pico Mundo are long and blistering, with little hope of wind and none of rain. Although my wristwatch and the car clock agreed on 4:48, hours of searing sunshine remained ahead.

The morning weather forecast had called for a high of 110 degrees, by no means a record for the Mojave. I suspected that this prediction had been exceeded.

When cool-climate relatives and friends are astonished to hear such temperatures, Pico Mundians put a chamber-of-commerce spin on our meteorology, noting that the humidity is a mere fifteen or twenty percent. Our average summer day, they insist, isn’t like a sweltering steam bath but like a refreshing sauna.

Even in the shade of a huge old Indian laurel with roots no doubt deep enough to tap the Styx, I couldn’t pretend that I was being coddled in a sauna. I felt like a child who had wandered into the gingerbread house of a Black Forest witch and had been popped into her oven with the control at SLOW BAKE.

Occasionally a car passed, but no pedestrians appeared.

No children were at play. No homeowner ventured forth to putter in a withered garden.

One dog slumped past, head low, tongue lolling, as if it were stubbornly tracking the mirage of a cat.

Soon my body provided the humidity that the air lacked, until I sat in a puddle of sweat.

I could have started the Mustang and switched on the air conditioning, but I didn’t want to waste Terri’s gasoline or overheat the engine. Besides, as any desert denizen knows, repeated heating and cooling may temper some metals, but it softens the human mind.

After forty minutes, Fungus Man reappeared. He locked the side door of the house, which suggested that no one remained at home, and got behind the wheel of his dust-shrouded Explorer.

I slid down in my seat, below the window, listening as the SUV drove past and left a trail of sound that dwindled into silence.

Crossing to the pale-yellow house, I didn’t worry unduly about being watched from any of the sun-silvered windows along the street. Living in Camp’s End inspired alienation rather than the community spirit needed to form a Neighborhood Watch committee.

Instead of going to the blue front door and making a greater spectacle of myself, I sought the shadows of the carport and knocked on the side door that Fungus Man had used. No one answered.

If the door had featured a deadbolt lock, I would have had to force a window. Confronted by a mere latch bolt, I was confident that, like other young Americans, I had been so well educated by TV cop dramas that I could slip easily into the house.

To simplify my life, I keep no bank accounts and pay only cash; therefore, I have no credit cards. California had thoughtfully issued to me a laminated driver’s license stiff enough to loid the lock.

As I’d anticipated, the kitchen wasn’t a shrine either to Martha Stewart decor or to cleanliness. The place couldn’t be fairly called a pig stye, either; it was just plagued by a general disarray, with here and there an offering of crumbs to ants if they wished to visit.

A faint but unpleasant smell laced the well-cooled air. I could not identify the source, and at first I thought that it must be the singular fragrance of Fungus Man, for he appeared to be one who would issue strange and noxious odors if not also deadly spoors.

I didn’t know what I sought here, but I expected to recognize it when I saw it. Something had drawn the bodachs to this man, and I had followed in their wake with the hope of discovering a clue to the reason for their interest.

After I circled the kitchen, trying but failing to find meaning in a mug half filled with cold coffee, in a browning banana peel left on a cutting board, in the unwashed dishes in the sink, and in the ordinary contents of drawers and cupboards, I realized that the air was not just cool but inexplicably chilly. For the most part, the sweat on my exposed skin had dried. On the nape of my neck, it felt as though it had turned to ice.

The pervasive chill was inexplicable because even in the Mojave, where air conditioning was essential, a house as old and as humble as this rarely had central cooling. Window-mounted units, each serving a single chamber, were a viable alternative to the costly retrofitting of a dwelling that didn’t merit the expense.

The kitchen had no such window units.

Often in a home like this, the residents held the heat at bay only at night and only in the bedroom. Sleep might otherwise be difficult. Even in this small house, however, an air conditioner in the bedroom would not be able to cool the entire structure. Certainly it could not have made an icebox of the kitchen.

Besides, window-mounted units were noisy: the chug and hum of the compressor, the rattle of the fan. I heard none of that here.

As I stood, head cocked, listening, the house waited in silence. On consideration, I suddenly found this stillness to be unnatural.

My shoes should have teased noise from the cracked linoleum, from floorboards loosened by time, heat, and shrinking aridity. Yet when I moved, I had the stealth of a cat on pillows.

In retrospect, I realized that the drawers and the cupboard doors had opened and closed with only the softest whisper, as though constructed with frictionless slides and hinges.

When I moved toward the open doorway between the kitchen and the next room, the cold air seemed to thicken, further muffling the transmission of sound.

The sparsely furnished living room proved to be as dreary and as marked by disorder as the kitchen. Old battered paperbacks, no doubt purchased at a used-book store, and magazines littered the floor, the couch, the coffee table.

The magazines were what you might expect. Photos of nude women were featured between articles about extreme sports, fast cars, and pathetic seduction techniques, all surrounded by ads for virility herbs and for devices guaranteed to increase the size of the average man’s favorite body part, by which I do not mean his brain.

My favorite body part is my heart because it is the only thing I have to give Stormy Llewellyn. Furthermore, the beat of it, when I wake each morning, is my first best evidence that I have not, during the night, joined the community of the stubbornly lingering dead.

The paperbacks surprised me. They were romance novels. Judging by the cover illustrations, these were of the more chaste variety, in which bosoms seldom heaved and bodices were not often lustily ripped open. They were stories less concerned with sex than with love, and they were a peculiar counterpoint to the magazines full of women fondling their breasts, spreading their legs, and licking their lips lasciviously.

When I picked up one of the books and thumbed through it, the riffling pages made no noise.

By this point, I seemed to be able to hear no sounds except those that had an internal origin: the thud of my heart, the rush of blood in my ears.

I should have fled right then. The eerie muffling effect of the malign atmosphere in the house ought to have alarmed me.

Because my days are characterized as much by strange experiences as by the aroma of meat smoke and the sizzle of fat on the griddle, I don’t alarm easily. Furthermore, I admit to a tendency, sometimes regrettable, to surrender always to my curiosity.

Riffling the soundless pages of the romance novel, I thought that perhaps Fungus Man did not live here alone. These books might have been the preferred reading material of his companion.

This possibility turned out not to be supported by the evidence in his bedroom. The closet contained only his clothes. The unmade bed, the scatter of yesterday’s underwear and socks, and a half-eaten raisin Danish on a paper plate, on the nightstand, argued against the civilizing presence of a woman.

An air conditioner, mounted in the window, wasn’t running. No breeze blew from its vents.

The faint foul smell first detected in the kitchen grew stronger here, reminiscent of the malodor of a shorting electrical cord, but not quite that, with a hint of ammonia and a trace of coal dust and a whiff of nutmeg, but not quite any of those things, either.

The short hallway that served the bedroom also led to the bath. The mirror needed to be cleaned. On the counter, the toothpaste tube had not been capped. A small wastebasket overflowed with used Kleenex and other trash.

Across the hall from Fungus Man’s bedroom stood another door. I assumed it led either to a closet or to a second bedroom.

At that threshold, the air grew so chilled that I could see my breath, a pale plume.

Icy against my palm, the doorknob turned. Beyond lay a vortex of silence that sucked the last sound out of my ears, leaving me for the moment deaf even to the labor of my heart.

The black room waited.

CHAPTER 10

DURING MY TWENTY YEARS, I HAVE BEEN in many dark places, some lacking light and others devoid of hope. In my experience, none had been darker than that strange room in the home of Fungus Man.

Either this chamber had no windows or all the windows had been boarded over and caulked against every prying blade of sunshine. No lamps glowed. In this profound gloom, had there been a digital clock with an LED readout, the faint radiance of its numerals would have seemed like a blazing beacon.

At the threshold, I squinted into such absolute blackness that I seemed to be peering not into a room at all but into dead space in a far region of the universe where the ancient stars were burnt-out cinders. The bone-brittling cold, deeper here than elsewhere in the house, and the oppressive silence argued as well that this was some bleak way station in the interstellar vacuum.

More peculiar than anything else: The hallway light failed to penetrate even a fraction of an inch into the realm beyond the door. The demarcation of light and utter lightlessness was as sharp as a painted line at the inner edge of the threshold, up the jamb, and across the header. The perfect gloom did not merely resist the intrusion of light but foiled it entirely.

This seemed to be a wall of blackest obsidian, though obsidian that lacked polish and glimmer.

I am not fearless. Toss me in a cage with a hungry tiger, and if I should escape, I will need a bath and clean pants as surely as will the next guy.

My unique path through life has led me, however, to fear known threats but seldom the unknown, while most people fear both.

Fire scares me, yes, and earthquakes, and venomous snakes. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.

To me, however, the most daunting mysteries of existence—death and what lies beyond—have no fright factor because I deal with the dead each day. Besides, I have faith that where I am ultimately going is not to mere oblivion.

In spooky movies, do you rail at the beleaguered characters to get the hell out of the haunted house, to get smart and leave? They poke into rooms with a history of bloody murder, into attics hung with cobwebs and shadows, into cellars acrawl with cockroaches and cacodemons, and when they are chopped-stabbed-gutted-beheaded-burned with the flamboyance necessary to satisfy Hollywood’s most psychotic directors, we gasp and shudder, and then we say, “Idiot,” for by their stupidity they have earned their fate.

I’m not stupid, but I am one of those who will never flee the haunted place. The special gift of paranormal sight, with which I was born, impels me to explore, and I can no more resist the demands of my talent than a musical prodigy can resist the magnetic pull of a piano; I am no more deterred by the mortal risks than is a fighter pilot eager to take flight into war-torn skies.

This is part of the reason why Stormy occasionally wonders if my gift might be instead a curse.

On the brink of unblemished blackness, I raised my right hand as if I were taking an oath—and pressed my palm to the apparent barrier before me. Although this darkness could fend off light, it offered no resistance whatsoever to the pressure that I applied. My hand disappeared into the tarry gloom.

By “disappeared,” I mean that I could perceive not even the vaguest impression of my wiggling fingers beyond the surface of this wall of blackness. My wrist ended as abruptly as that of an amputee.

I must admit that my heart raced, though I felt no pain, and that I exhaled with relief—and without sound—when I withdrew my hand and saw that all my digits were intact. I felt as though I had survived an illusion performed by those self-proclaimed bad boys of magic, Penn and Teller.

When I stepped across the threshold, however, holding fast to the door casing with one hand, I entered not an illusion but a real place that seemed more unreal than any dream. The blackness ahead remained uncannily pure; the cold was unrelenting; and the silence cloyed as effectively as congealed blood in the ears of a head-shot dead man.

Although from the far side of the doorway I had been unable to discern one scintilla of this room, I could look out from within it and see the hallway in normal light, unobstructed. This view shed no more illumination into the room than would have a painting of a sunny landscape.

I half expected to find that Fungus Man had returned and that he was staring at the only part of me now visible from out there: my hooked fingers desperately clutching the casing. Fortunately, I was still alone.

Having discovered that I could see the exit to the hall and therefore could find my way out, I let go of the doorway. I eased entirely into this lightless chamber and, turning away from the sight of the hall, became at once as blind as I was deaf.

Without either sound or vision, I quickly grew disoriented. I felt for a light switch, found it, flicked it up and down and up again without effect.

I grew aware of a small red light that I was certain hadn’t been there a moment earlier: the murderous red of a sullen and bloody eye, though it was not an eye.

My sense of spatial reality and my ability to gauge distance with accuracy abandoned me, for the tiny beacon seemed to be miles from my position, like the mast light of a ship far away on a night sea. This small house, of course, could not contain such a vastness as I imagined lay before me.

When I let go of the useless light switch, I felt as unnervingly buoyant as a hapless drunkard inflated by the fumes of alcohol. My feet seemed not quite to touch the floor as I determinedly approached the red light.

Wishing that I’d had a second scoop of coconut cherry chocolate chunk while I’d had the chance, I took six steps, ten, twenty. The beacon didn’t increase in size and seemed in fact to recede from me at precisely the speed at which I approached it.

I stopped, turned, and peered back at the door. Although I had made no progress toward the light, I had traveled what appeared to be approximately forty feet.

Of more interest than the distance covered was the figure now silhouetted in the open door. Not Fungus Man. Backlit by the hallway light stood ... me.

Although the mysteries of the universe do not greatly frighten me, I’ve not lost my capacity for astonishment, amazement, and awe. Now, across the keyboard of my mind played arpeggios of those three sentiments.

Convinced that this wasn’t a mirror effect and that I was in fact gazing at another me, I nevertheless tested my certainty by waving. The other Odd Thomas didn’t return my wave, as a reflection would have done.

Because I stood submerged in this swampish blackness, he could not see me, and so I tried to shout to him. In my throat, I felt the quiver of strummed vocal chords, but if sound was produced, I could not hear it. Most likely he, too, was deaf to that cry.

As tentatively as I had done, this second Odd Thomas reached into the palpable dark with one questing hand, marveling as I had done at the illusion of amputation.

This timid intrusion seemed to disturb a delicate equilibrium, and abruptly the black room shifted like the pivot mountings of a gyroscope, while the red light at the center remained fixed. Flung by forces beyond my control, much as a surfer might be tossed from his board in the collapsing barrel of a mammoth wave, I was magically churned out of that weird chamber and—

—into the drab living room.

I found myself not tumbled in a heap, as I might have expected to be, but standing approximately where I had stood earlier. I picked up one of the paperback romance novels. As before, the pages made no noise, and I could hear only those sounds of internal origin, such as my heart beating.

Glancing at my wristwatch, I convinced myself that this was, indeed, earlier. I had not merely been magically transported from the black room to the living room but also had been cast a few minutes backward in time.

Since I had a moment ago seen myself peering into the blackness from the hall doorway, I could assume that by the grace of some anomaly in the laws of physics, two of me now existed simultaneously in this house. There were the me here with a Nora Roberts novel in my hands and the other me in some nearby room.

At the start, I warned you that I lead an unusual life.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness. This flexibility allowed me to adjust to these events and accept the reality of time travel more quickly than you would have done, which does not reflect badly on you, considering that you would have been wise enough to get the hell out of the house.

I didn’t flee. Neither did I at once retrace my original route to Fungus Man’s bedroom—with its scatter of underwear and socks, the half-eaten raisin Danish on the nightstand—or to his bathroom.

Instead, I put down the romance novel and stood quite still, carefully thinking through the possible ramifications of encountering the other Odd Thomas, responsibly calculating the safest and most rational course of action.

Okay, that’s bullshit. I could worry about the ramifications, but I didn’t have either enough phenomenal experience or the brain power to imagine all of them, let alone to figure out the best way to extract myself from this bizarre situation.

I’m less skilled at extracting myself from trouble than I am at plunging into it.

At the living-room archway, I cautiously peeked into the hallway and spotted the other me standing at the open door of the black room. This must have been the earlier me that had not yet crossed that threshold.

If all sound had not by now been entirely suppressed within the house, I would have been able to call out to that other Odd Thomas. I’m not sure that would have been prudent, and I’m grateful that the circumstances prevented me from hailing him.

If I had been able to speak to him, I’m not certain what I would have said. How’s it hanging?

Were I to walk up to him and give him a narcissistic hug, the paradox of two Odd Thomases might at once be resolved. One of us might disappear. Or perhaps both of us would explode.

Big-browed physicists tell us that two objects cannot under any circumstances occupy the same place at the same time. They warn that any effort to put two objects in the same place at the same time will have catastrophic consequences.

When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

Assuming that two of me could not coexist without calamity, not charmed by the prospect of exploding, I remained in the archway, watching, until the other Odd Thomas stepped across the threshold into the black room.

You no doubt suppose that upon his departure the time paradox had been resolved and that the crisis described by those doomsaying scientists was at an end, but your optimism is a result of the fact that you are happy in your world of the five standard senses. You are not, as I am, compelled to action by a paranormal talent that you do not understand and cannot fully control.

Lucky you.

As soon as that Odd Thomas stepped for the first time across the threshold into the lightless chamber, I walked directly to the door that he’d left open behind him. I could not see him, of course, out there in the mysteries of the black room, but I assumed that soon he would turn, look back, and see me—an event that in my experience had already come to pass.

When I judged that he’d spotted the sullen red light and had progressed about twenty paces toward it, when he’d had time to look back and see me standing here, I checked my wristwatch to establish the beginning of this episode, reached into the blackness with my right hand, just to be sure nothing felt different about that strange realm, and then I crossed the threshold once more.

CHAPTER 11

MY GREATEST CONCERN, ASIDE FROM exploding and aside from being late for dinner with Stormy, was that I might find myself caught in a time loop, doomed to follow myself repeatedly through Fungus Man’s house and through the door into the black room, over and over for all of eternity.

I’m not sure that such a thing as a time loop is possible. The average physicist might laugh smugly at my concern and charge me with ignorance. This was my crisis, however, and I felt free to speculate without restraint.

Rest assured that no time loop became established: The remainder of my story will not consist of endless repetitions of the events immediately heretofore described—although there are reasons that I wish it did.

Less hesitant on my second visit to the black room, I strode more boldly, yet with that same queasy-making buoyancy, toward the crimson beacon at the center of the chamber. This mysterious lamp seemed to shed a more ominous light than it had previously, though as before it did not relieve the gloom.

Twice I glanced back toward the open door to the hallway but didn’t see myself on either occasion. Nevertheless, I experienced that sudden gyroscopic spin, as before, and I was again churned out of that strange chamber—

—this time into the hot July afternoon, where I found myself walking out of the shadows under the carport, into sunshine that stabbed like fistfuls of golden needles at my eyes.

I halted, squinted against the glare, and retreated to the gloom.

The profound silence that reigned in the house did not extend beyond those walls. A dog barked lazily in the distance. An old Pontiac with a knocking engine and a squealing fan belt passed in the street.

Certain that I had spent no more than a minute in the black room, I consulted my wristwatch again. Apparently I had been not only cast out of the house but also five or six minutes into the future.

Out in the half-burnt yard and in the bristling weeds along the chain-link fence between this property and the next, cicadas buzzed, buzzed, as though the sunlit portion of the world were plagued by myriad short circuits.

Many questions arose in my mind. None of them concerned either the benefits of a career in tires or the financial strategy by which a twenty-year-old short-order cook might best begin to prepare for his retirement at sixty-five.

I wondered if a man living behind a perpetual half-wit smile, a man incapable of keeping a neat house, a man conflicted enough to split his reading time between skin magazines and romance novels, could be a closet supergenius who, with electronic components from Radio Shack, would be able to transform one room of his humble home into a time machine. Year by year, weird experience has squeezed all but a few drops of skepticism from me, but the supergenius explanation didn’t satisfy.

I wondered if Fungus Man was really a man at all—or something new to the neighborhood.

I wondered how long he had lived here, who he pretended to be, and what the hell his intentions were.

I wondered if the black room might be not a time machine but something even stranger than that. The time-related occurrences might be nothing more than side effects of its primary function.

I wondered how long I was going to stand in the shade of the sagging carport, brooding about the situation instead of doing something.

The door between the carport and the kitchen, through which I had initially entered the house, had automatically locked behind me when I had first gone inside. Again I popped the latch bolt with my laminated driver’s license, pleased to know that finally I was getting something back for the state income taxes that I had paid.

In the kitchen, the browning banana peel continued to shrivel on the cutting board. No time-traveling housemaid had attended to the dirty dishes in the sink.

Softcore pornography and romance novels still littered the living room, but when I had crossed halfway to the hallway arch, I stopped abruptly, struck by what had changed.

I could hear normally. My footsteps had crackled the ancient linoleum in the kitchen, and the swinging door to the living room had squeaked on unoiled hinges. That vortex of silence no longer sucked all sound out of the house.

The air, which had been freezing, was now merely cool. And getting warmer.

The singular foul odor that smelled like not-exactly-burning-electrical-cord blended with not-exactly-ammonia-coal-dust-nutmeg had grown far more pungent than before but no easier to identify.

Ordinary instinct, rather than any sixth sense, told me not to proceed to the black room. In fact, I felt an urgent need to retreat from the nearby hallway arch.

I returned to the kitchen and hid behind the swinging door, holding it open two inches to see from whom, if anyone, I had fled.

Only seconds after I had reached concealment, bodachs swarmed out of the hallway into the living room.

CHAPTER 12

A GROUP OF BODACHS ON THE MOVE sometimes brings to mind a pack of stalking wolves. On other occasions they remind me of a pride of slinking cats.

Pouring through the hallway arch into the living room, this particular swarm had an unnerving insectile quality. They exhibited the cautiously questing yet liquid-swift progress of a colony of cockroaches.

They came in roachlike numbers, too. Twenty, thirty, forty: They quivered into the room as silent and as black as shadows but, unlike shadows, they were untethered from any entities that might have cast them.

To the ill-fitted front door, to the poorly caulked living-room windows, they streamed as if they were billows of soot drawn by a draft. Through crack and chink, they fled the house, into the sun-drenched afternoon of Camp’s End.

Still they swarmed out of the hallway: fifty, sixty, seventy, and more. I had never before encountered so many bodachs at one time.

Although, from my position in the kitchen, I couldn’t see around the living-room archway and down the hall, I knew where the intruders must have entered the house. They had not arisen spontaneously from among the gray dust balls and the moldering socks under Fungus Man’s unmade bed. Nor had they manifested out of a boogeyman-infested closet, out of a bathroom faucet, from the toilet bowl. They had arrived in the house by way of the black room.

They seemed eager to leave this place behind them and to explore Pico Mundo—until one of them separated from the churning swarm. It abruptly halted in the center of the living room.

In the kitchen, I considered that no available cutlery, no toxic household cleanser, no weapon known to me would wound this beast that had no substance. I held my breath.

The bodach stood so hunched that its hands, if they were hands, dangled at its knees. Turning its lowered head from side to side, it scanned the carpet for the spoor of its prey.

No troll, crouched in the darkness beneath its bridge, relishing the scent of a child’s blood, had ever looked more malevolent.

At the gap between jamb and door, my left eye felt pinched, as though my curiosity had become the serrated jaws of a vise that held me immobile even when it seemed wise to exit at a sprint.

As others of its kind continued to roil and ripple past it, my nemesis rose from its crouch. The shoulders straightened. The head lifted, turned slowly left, then right.

I regretted using peach-scented shampoo, and suddenly I could smell the meaty essence that the greasy smoke from the griddle had deposited upon my skin and hair. A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse.

The all but featureless, ink-black bodach had the suggestion of a snout but no visible nostrils, no apparent ears, and if it had eyes, I could not discern them. Yet it searched the living room for the source of whatever scent or sound had snared its attention.

The creature appeared to focus on the door to the kitchen. As eyeless as Samson in Gaza, it nevertheless detected me.

I had studied the story of Samson in some detail, for he was a classic example of the suffering and the dark fate that can befall those who are ... gifted.

Standing very erect now, taller than me, the bodach was an imposing figure in spite of its insubstantiality. Its bold poise and a quality of arrogance in the lift of its head suggested that I was to it as the mouse is to the panther, that it had the power to strike me dead in an instant.

Pent-up breath swelled in my lungs.

The urge to flee became almost overpowering, but I remained frozen for fear that if the bodach had not for certain seen me, then even the small movement of the swinging door would bring it at a run.

Grim expectation made seconds seem like minutes—and then to my surprise, the phantom slumped into a crouch once more and loped away with the others. With the suppleness of black silk ribbon, it slipped between window sash and sill, into sunlight.

I blew out my sour breath and sucked sweet air, watching as a final score of bodachs spilled through the hallway arch.

When these last foul spirits had departed for the Mojave heat, I returned to the living room. Cautiously.

At least a hundred of them had passed through this room. More likely, there had been half again that many.

In spite of all that traffic, not one page of any magazine or romance novel had been ruffled. Their passage had left no slightest impression in the nap of the carpet.

At one of the front windows, I peered out at the blighted lawn and the sun-scorched street. As far as I could determine, none of the recently departed pack lingered in the neighborhood.

The unnatural chill in this small house had gone the way of the bodachs. The desert day penetrated the thin walls until every surface in the living room seemed to be as radiant as the coils of an electric heater.

During their passage, that tumult of purposeful shadows had left no stain on the hallway walls. No trace of the burning-electrical-cord smell remained, either.

For the third time, I stepped up to that doorway.

The black room was gone.

CHAPTER 13

BEYOND THE THRESHOLD LAY AN ORDINARY chamber, not infinite in its dimensions, as it had seemed earlier, measuring no more than twelve by fourteen feet.

A single window looked out through the branches of a lacy melaleuca that screened much of the sunlight. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to determine that no source existed for a sullen red light either in the center of this humble space or in any corner.

The mysterious power that had transformed and controlled this room—casting me minutes back, and then forward, in time—was no longer in evidence.

Apparently, this served as Fungus Man’s study. A bank of four-drawer filing cabinets, an office chair, and a gray metal desk with a laminated imitation-wood-grain top were the only furnishings.

Side by side on the wall opposite the desk hung three black- and-white, poster-size photographs that appeared to have been printed on a draftsman’s digital plotter. They were head shots, portraits of men—one with feverish eyes and a gleeful smile, the other two glowering in the gloom.

All three were familiar, but I could at first put a name to only the one with the smile: Charles Manson, the vicious manipulator whose fantasies of revolution and race war had exposed a cancer at the core of the flower-power generation and had led to the demise of the Age of Aquarius. He had carved a swastika on his forehead.

Whoever the other two might be, they didn’t have the look of either Vegas comics or famous philosophers.

Perhaps my imagination, as much as the melaleuca-filtered sunlight, imparted a faint silvery luminescence to each man’s intense gaze. This glow reminded me of the milky radiance that informs the hungry glare of animate corpses in movies about the living dead.

In part to alter the quality of those eyes, I switched on the overhead light.

The dust and disorder that characterized the rest of the house were not in evidence here. When he crossed this threshold, Fungus Man left his slovenliness behind and became a paragon of neatness.

The file cabinets proved to contain meticulously kept folders filled with articles clipped from publications and downloaded from the Internet. Drawer after drawer contained dossiers on serial killers and mass murderers.