Odd Apocalypse (43 page)

Yesterday, shortly after Tim took his morning shower, he was overcome by the feeling that he was still dirty. He showered again, and then a third time. After that I found him washing his hands incessantly at the kitchen sink, and weeping.

He did not know why he felt this way, but I knew it was the years at Roseland that he had not yet forgotten as thoroughly as he needed to forget them.

Even Annamaria could not soothe him, so I took him to the front porch, just us guys, with a Mr. Goodbar for each of us. As we watched the shorebirds kiting in the sky, I told him about the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always
be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

Tim said he didn’t understand me any more than I understand Annamaria, but he felt better. That’s all that matters, really: that we can make each other feel better.

For a while I did
not
feel at all good about how I had turned away Mr. Hitchcock in that glen in Roseland. I worried that he wouldn’t return to seek my help.

This morning, however, as I sat on the front porch drinking coffee, he strolled by on the beach in a three-piece suit and black wingtips. He waved at me and kept walking, but I suspect that any day now, when I come out for coffee on the porch, he’ll be there.

It’s a little daunting to consider what the director of
Psycho
might wish to convey to me. But then he was also the director of
North by Northwest
and other films that were as funny as they were suspenseful. And he made some great love stories. I’m a sucker for love stories, as you probably know by now.

And so I wait for the bell to ring in the night. I dream of Stormy, I walk in search of Annamaria’s mysterious tree, I go down to the sea to swim in the shallows with Tim, and I wait for the bell to ring.

77 Shadow Street • What the Night Knows
•
Breathless • Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me
•
The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy
•
The Husband • Velocity • Life Expectancy
•
The Taking • The Face • By the Light of the Moon
•
One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye
•
False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder
•
Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place
•
Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes
•
Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision
•
The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered
•
The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight
•
The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight
•
The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon
•
The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound
•
Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock
•
The Funhouse • Demon Seed

ODD THOMAS

Odd Thomas • Forever Odd • Brother Odd
•
Odd Hours • Odd Apocalypse

FRANKENSTEIN

Prodigal Son • City of Night • Dead and Alive
•
Lost Souls • The Dead Town

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie

DEAN KOONTZ, the author of many #1
New York Times
bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie.

Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

Dean Koontz

P.O. Box 9529

Newport Beach, California 92658

Things are about to get …

Deeply
Odd

by #1
New York Times
bestselling author

DEAN KOONTZ

Coming Spring 2013

Please turn the page for a
special advance preview.

BEFORE DAWN, I WOKE IN DARKNESS TO the ringing of a tiny bell, the thimble-size bell that I wore on a chain around my neck: three bursts of silvery sound, a brief silence after each. I was lying on my back in bed, utterly motionless, yet the bell rang three times again. The vibrations that shivered through my bare chest seemed much too strong to have been produced by such a tiny clapper. A third set of three rings followed, and then only silence. I waited and wondered until dawn crept down the sky and across the bedroom windows.

Later that morning in early March, when I walked downtown to buy blue jeans and a few pairs of socks, I met a guy who had a .45 pistol and a desire to commit a few murders. From that encounter, the day grew uglier as surely as the sun moved from east to west.

My name is Odd Thomas. I have accepted my oddness. And I am no longer surprised that I am drawn to trouble as reliably as iron to a magnet.

Nineteen months ago, when I was twenty, I should have been riddled with bullets in that big-news shopping-mall shootout in Pico Mundo, a desert town in California. They say that I saved a lot of people in my hometown. Yet many died. I didn’t. I have to live with that.

Stormy Llewellyn, the girl I loved more than life itself, was one of those who died that day. I saved others, but I couldn’t save her. I have to live with that, too. Living is the price I pay for failing her, a high price that must be paid every morning that I wake.

In the nineteen months since that day of death, I have traveled in search of the meaning of my life. I learn by going where I have to go.

Currently I rented a quaint, furnished three-bedroom cottage in a quiet coastal town a couple of hundred miles from Pico Mundo. The front porch faced the sea, and yellow bougainvillea cascaded across half the roof.

Annamaria, whom I had known only since late January, occupied one of the bedrooms. She appeared to be ready to give birth in about a month, but she claimed that she had been pregnant for a long time and insisted that she would be pregnant longer still.

Although she said many things that I failed to understand, I believed that she always spoke the truth. She was mysterious but not deceptive.

We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through with moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion.

The afternoon when I set out on a shopping expedition, Annamaria followed me as far as the porch. She said, “Daylight savings time doesn’t start for another five days.”

At the bottom of the steps, I turned to look at her. She wasn’t a beauty, but she wasn’t plain, either. Her clear pale skin appeared to be as smooth as soap, and her large dark eyes, which reflected the sparkling sea, seemed as deep as galaxies. In sneakers, gray-khaki pants, and a baggy sweater, she was so petite that she might have been a child dressed in her father’s clothes.

Not sure why she had mentioned daylight savings time, I said, “I won’t be long. I’ll be back hours before sunset.”

“Darkness doesn’t fall to a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know too well.”

She once told me that there are people who want to kill her. Although she had said no more and had not identified her would-be murderers, I believed that she was as truthful about this as about all other things.

“I’ll stay here if you’re in danger.”

“You’re the one in danger, young man. Here or there, anywhere, you’re the one perpetually on the cliff’s edge.”

She was eighteen, and I was nearly twenty-two, but when she called me
young man
, it always felt right. She possessed an air of timelessness, as if she might have lived in any century of recorded history, or in all of them.

“Do what you must,” she said, “but come back to us.”

Do what you must
sounded ominously significant, not the language one might use to send a friend off to buy socks.

From behind Annamaria and beyond a window, Tim watched solemnly. Crowding close to him on the left and right, paws on the window sill, gazing out at me, were our two dogs, a golden retriever named Raphael and a white German shepherd named Boo. Only nine years old, Tim had been with us for over one month, after we rescued him from an estate called Roseland, in the sleepy town of Montecito. I’ve written about that ordeal in a previous volume of these memoirs. We were his only family now. Because of his unique history, we would soon need to fabricate an identity into which he could grow in the years to come.

My life is as odd as my name.

Tim waved at me. I waved at Tim.

Just before stepping out of the house, I had asked the boy if he wanted to accompany me. But with a most benign smile, Annamaria had said that neither Xerxes nor Leonidas had invited small children to accompany them to Thermopylae.