Odd Thomas: Deeply Odd Part 7

After her many years of living, perhaps even from her childhood, Mrs. Fischer's eyes were the sky reflected in the sea, eternity mirrored in the everlasting waters. Even if she had not given voice to the next thing that she said, meeting her gaze, I would have known that the secrets to which she often alluded were real and profound and no less strange than my own. She said, "Something big is coming, Oddie. Something so very big that the world will change. I know you feel it, too."

"Yes, ma'am."

"How long have you felt it?"

"Almost all my life. But more so lately."

"Much more so lately," she agreed. "Child, do you know where truly great courage comes from, the kind of courage that will never back down?"

I said, "Faith."

"And love," she said. "Faith is a kind of love, you know. Love of what is unseen but certain. Love makes us strong and brave."

I thought of Stormy and how the loss of her had tempered my steel. "Yes."

"Heath and I never had children. I believe that I wasn't given any children because I needed to save all that love for a time late in my life when I would need it to give me courage."

Suddenly the rising wind rose faster, buffeted the limousine, and conjured a dust devil full of leaves and litter that whirled up from the gutter and followed a drunkard's path down the center of the street.

She said, "You see, many years ago, three times I had the same vivid dream about a motherless, fatherless boy who was nevertheless not an orphan. Are you without a mother and father, Oddie?"

"They're still alive, ma'am, but they were never a mother and father to me. I've been on my own since I was sixteen."

"When I saw you standing beside the Coast Highway, I recognized you from the dream, though you are not a boy any longer."

Several pages of a newspaper flocked along the street, faux birds of ill omen, flapping ungainly wings of words.

"What's the story of your dream?" I asked. "What happens in it?"

"A true and lovely thing. That's all I'll say for now. But I will never, as you suggest, get on with my life by leaving you here and driving away. If you must go by foot now and alone, so be it. But I'll get on with my life by waiting right here until you come back."

"I wish you wouldn't."

She opened her voluminous purse. "Take the gun."

I thought of the premonition: universal war, all against all. If such a conflict was coming, it wouldn't happen in the next day or the next week, probably not even in the next year. Maybe it wouldn't ever happen. The future isn't set. Our free will creates our future.

Mrs. Fischer plucked the weapon from her purse and pressed it into my hands. "Take, take. I've got others."

As I tucked the pistol in my waistband and under my sweats.h.i.+rt, I said, "You seem to be prepared for anything."

"We all better be prepared, child." Her eyes remained solemn even when she smiled. She reached out and gently pinched my cheek. "Be safe, Oddie. Come home."

Nine.

WHEN I GOT OUT OF THE LIMOUSINE, THE WIND TOSSED my hair and threw dust in my eyes, as if it were a malicious spirit. The day was chilly for Southern California in early March, especially considering that the storm front had come in from the southwest. The sea, which this gruff wind would have bullied into whitecaps, must have been unusually cold. I could faintly smell the distant sh.o.r.e, mostly the astringent scent of iodine given off by certain seaweeds when they are tossed onto the beach to decompose above the tide line.

I walked past the thrift shop to the nearby corner and turned left. The two- and three-story buildings were old, mostly of painted brick with cast-stone Art Deco details in their parapeted roofs and pedimented windows. Phoenix palms lined the street, more stately than the neighborhood in which they flourished.

Instead of consciously choosing a route, I went where psychic magnetism drew me, never sure when I might find myself before a door and know that my quarry waited beyond it, or round a corner and come face-to-face with him, or hear the word dirtbag spoken behind me and turn to discover that my talent for attraction had drawn him to me instead of me to him, his silencer-equipped Sig Sauer in my face-or crotch.

Ahead of me, from high in a wind-tossed phoenix palm, four rats that were remarkably fat for these lean times descended from their fair-weather nest in the thick dry skirt just below the glorious spray of green fronds. Like a precision drill team, they came one behind the other, nose to tail, legs synchronized. At the bottom of the tree, the quartet spilled over the curb, into the gutter, and disappeared through the bars of a drainage grate, as disciplined as any human family in the vast flat Midwest when the tornado sirens wailed and the house had to be abandoned for the storm cellar in the backyard.

Although I know the world is an intricately more complex place than it appears to most people, although I understand in my blood and bones that humanity is a turbulent family aboard an endless train, on an infinite journey to sh.o.r.es that can only dimly be imagined by the living, I don't see signs and portents everywhere I look. Most often, a haloed moon means nothing more than that reflective volcanic ash has made its way into the stratosphere, and a two-headed goat is only a genetic curiosity. The mommy-p.o.r.n genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture's sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.

Those four brown rats, however, descending at precisely that moment instead of any other, impressed me as being more than merely rodents on the run from threatening weather. For one thing, at the curb, before slinking into the gutter, each turned its head toward me, its whiteless eyes as glossy as black gla.s.s, its scaly tail las.h.i.+ng back and forth twice before it continued out of sight into the drain.

I found myself drawn to the curb, where I stood staring at the large rectangular grate, s.h.i.+vering with recognition. It was made in an age when public works were elegant and well crafted instead of slipshod. The parallel iron bars met a four-inch iron ring in the center of the design. Within the ring, a stylized iron lightning-bolt angled from right to left. On a fogbound night in Magic Beach, more than a month previously, on a street deserted but for me, I had been drawn to such a grating, below which grotesque shadows capered in pulses of eerie light.

On that occasion, in the grip of curiosity, I had knelt to peer between the bars, into the culvert, seeking an explanation for this unusual display. I had been by some means induced into a half trance, so that I lowered my face ever closer to the drain, overcome not only by a compulsion to learn what might lie below but also by the intense expectation that, whatever it proved to be, I needed it as surely as I needed air and water and food to sustain life.

The sudden arrival of an unexpected ally on that lonely street in Magic Beach had broken the spell and had brought me to my feet. Later, I felt that I had been close to discovering something that might have been the end of me-not merely death but a more terrible and enduring end.

Now, I did not follow the rats to the grate, but turned away and walked swiftly, not quite running. I went four blocks, the battalions of incoming storm clouds forgotten, oblivious of the wind, the rats banished from my mind. Rather, I succ.u.mbed to one of those fugues that sometimes strike us when, below the age of ten, we chance upon a truth meant only for adults, a sharp truth that stabs darkness into the light of innocence, that makes us at once rebel against this a.s.sault on wonder, that sends us away to games and bicycles and all manner of distractions, from which we rise in a few hours, like a sleeper from a dream, having spun a coc.o.o.n of denial to protect us from that piercing truth, although it is a fragile coc.o.o.n that in time will dissolve.

Halting at a street corner, looking back the way I'd come, I had no memory of the buildings I had pa.s.sed, only of the lightning-bolt grate that lay four blocks to the south. For that distance, I'd even forgotten why I'd come here. Now I remembered the rhinestone cowboy, his spiky white hair, his pitiless stare, his vacation-in-h.e.l.l tan.

My heart lagged my brain, beating hard and fast, as if I were still within a step of the ominous drain grating. Giving it time to settle into a rhythm less suggestive of a crisis in an ER, I studied my surroundings.

I had arrived in a district of old industrial buildings, mostly constructed of dark-red or pale-yellow brick with slate or tile or corrugated-metal roofs, others of stucco cracked and stigmatized with stains of such disturbing shapes that they might have depicted Armageddon reflected in a fun-house mirror. Some structures appeared still to be in use. Others were untenanted or abandoned, diminished by missing windowpanes, months of debris compacted by wind and rain in their doorways, and weeds bristling from cracks in the pavement of the adjacent parking yards, around which chain-link fencing sagged.

As the last blue sky shrank northward, thunderheads towered as if they were mountains thrusting violently from the earth's crust in a fierce seismic and volcanic age millions of years before any living thing yet crawled the planet.

I walked south, into the wind, retracing my route for a block and a half-noticing that other street drains lacked the lightning bolt-until I arrived at the mouth of a wide alleyway similarly lined with industrial buildings and warehouses. In some other pockets of this neighborhood, workers labored, deliveries were being made and s.h.i.+pments loaded. But here, in spite of wind-stirred power-company lines that softly whistled overhead, there lay a stillness more suited to a ghost town than to any place in a living city.

As I entered the alley, the sun abruptly submerged in clouds, and the bleak, black shadows of utility poles melted into the potholed pavement. On both sides were elevated loading docks, man-size doors, big roll-ups, and latticed windows of many small panes so filthy that they were all but opaque.

Past the middle of the block, I was drawn to a building narrower than the others, with a man door and three roll-ups large enough to admit trucks of any size. The windows were as blinded with dust as all the others, but lights inside lent the gla.s.s a silvery sheen.

Beyond doubt, the cowboy trucker was nearby. The image of him in my mind's eye grew brighter and more colorful and so fearsome that, to prevent him from fulfilling his threat, I wished fervently that I had bought a Kevlar jockstrap.

At the man-size door, I stood with my head c.o.c.ked, listening. When I heard nothing, I drew the pistol from my waistband. I tried the lever handle, and the unlocked door opened a crack. Emboldened by the enduring silence, I eased inside and closed the door quietly behind me.

I stood in a brick-walled garage brightened by overhead banks of fluorescent tubes. Only the middle of the three bays contained a vehicle, a white Ford van, one of those small delivery vans used by florists and caterers, although this one had no company name or logo emblazoned on it.

When I opened the van, the cargo area contained nothing, though perhaps soon it would imprison three bound, gagged, and terrified children meant for burning. For the sake of silence, I left the vehicle open.

In the back wall of the garage, opposite the roll-ups, two doors flanked a freight elevator. There is a cla.s.sic short story in which a man must open one of two doors, aware that a beautiful lady waits behind one and a hungry tiger behind the other, but he doesn't know which door is which. Given my luck, I expected to find tigers to the left and right. The freight route didn't appeal, either.

Compelled to the door on the right, I found ascending stairs. They were concrete with glued-on rubber treads for safety, which also served to mute my footsteps. I eased the door shut behind me.

I had climbed halfway to the first landing when I heard two male voices above me in the stairwell. The words bounced between the brick wall on my right and the easy-clean glossy-yellow fiberboard on my left, and were distorted so that I couldn't be certain that either speaker was the cowboy trucker.

With the pistol, I could intimidate them. But if my quarry was not one of the two, I would have no way of knowing whether or not I might be threatening innocent men.

I hurriedly descended the stairs, entered the garage-and found it changed. Instead of overhead fluorescents, three single-bulb lamps with cone-shaped shades hung on chains. The poor light shone just bright enough for me to see that the brick walls were gone and that bare concrete replaced them.

More startling than any of that was the red-and-black ProStar+ with sparkly silver striping and its long black trailer, which stood in the center bay where the white van had been only seconds earlier. In this enclosed s.p.a.ce, the eighteen-wheeler looked even bigger than it had appeared to be on the open road, and although an inanimate object of any size, lacking consciousness and intention, cannot be malevolent, this truck seemed as malign as the Death Star with which Darth Vader atomized entire planets.

Ten.

THE PROSTAR+ STOOD IN THE TRANSFORMED GARAGE as though it had eaten the Ford van. I wondered if I should reconsider my disdain for possessed-vehicle movies like The Car, Maximum Overdrive, and The Love Bug.

After a life of supernatural engagement, I was not paralyzed by this seeming impossibility. I scurried around the eighteen-wheeler to the side farther from the door that I left open behind me, sheltering there until I could get a glimpse, at an angle through the driver's window and the winds.h.i.+eld, of who followed me out of the stairwell. If one of them was the rhinestone cowboy, I might still get the drop on him. If that proved to be impossible-if, say, he appeared with the flamethrower that he intended to use on the children-I could retreat through the outer door by which I'd entered the building and hide elsewhere along the alley, at a position from which I could monitor events.

No one came out of the stairwell, but I heard two men talking. They seemed to be nearby, yet their voices were veiled. The words were distorted beyond understanding, as when the cowboy and the man with the battered-boxer face-semitransparent and unaware of me-had been in urgent angry conversation in the bas.e.m.e.nt machine room at the truck stop.

This time, they did not appear even in phantom form. I had only their voices, by which I could not precisely place them. And then they fell silent.

I was concerned that they had become aware of me, as I had been aware of them in the machine room. Perhaps our circ.u.mstances had been reversed and I was semitransparent to them while they were invisible to me.

The next twenty or thirty seconds were as sharp as saw teeth, working on my taut-wire nerves, as I waited to feel the singular chill of one of these men pa.s.sing through the s.p.a.ce that I occupied.

Instead, I heard an engine turn over, not that of the ProStar+, but that of a much smaller truck, though it was m.u.f.fled and hollow, filtered through some barrier just as the voices had been filtered. I could only a.s.sume that it was the white Ford van, which had become invisible to me.

A moment later, a rattling and low rumbling perplexed me for a moment. But then I realized that this was the distorted sound of a big segmented door rolling on its tracks.

I turned toward the alleyway, but none of the three roll-ups was in motion, all snugged down tight.

I listened to the unseen van reverse away from me, out of the garage. Following its departure came the rumble of the huge segmented door descending, although the door behind the ProStar+ and the two flanking it were already down and locked.

In high school, the spirit world frequently distracted me from science studies, and my interest in higher mathematics was no greater than my interest in self-immolation, but I scored well in English. I possessed the ability and the skills to write about the coexistent garages. But I sadly lacked the knowledge to intelligently express a theory explaining how such a thing could be-or, for that matter, why fire makes water boil.

If two garages existed in the same place, in different worlds or dimensions or whatever, I seemed to be, for the moment, in the world/dimension/whatever that was different from mine. And the two men whose voices I heard had evidently driven the Ford van away into the world from which I had come.

In Shower 5 at Star Truck, in the bas.e.m.e.nt machine room of that same facility, and now in the garage of this industrial building, two realities crossed. Shower 5 Elsewhere had not been a shower room at all but a barren place, just as Bas.e.m.e.nt Machine Room Elsewhere had been devoid of machinery, and this garage in Elsewhere was likewise a stark concrete box. I had been shot to death in the Elsewhere shower but remained alive in the real Shower 5. Now the rhinestone cowboy parked his truck in Elsewhere and, with some a.s.sociate, drove away into my reality, perhaps fearing that authorities were looking for the ProStar+ because he had run me off the road with it-or for a reason I couldn't fathom. This guy was able to do things that people failed to see, like shoot an innocent cantaloupe to bits, and he could step out of reality into Elsewhere when it suited him.

My skull hurt. My brain felt abused. I needed a plate of my own berfluffy pancakes to restore my full cognitive function.

The cowboy might have as many paranormal talents as I possessed, or even more. Maybe. Except ... Well, it seemed to me that anyone with such astonis.h.i.+ng abilities would not dress so ridiculously. Not that I'm saying that every superhumanly gifted person ought to wear jeans and sweats.h.i.+rts or T-s.h.i.+rts, as I do, or all Ralph Lauren. But boots of carved leather with fancy snakeskin inlays? A black sports coat with red lapels and collar crusted with sequins, as if he was a Grand Ole Opry wannabe? The Joker, Bane, Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin: They all had better taste in clothing than this guy.

Besides, in the real world, as opposed to the worlds of comic books, a guy with paranormal powers would not want to draw attention to himself. Trust me.

Alone with the eighteen-wheeler, I decided to check it out. He had left a set of keys in the ignition, evidently certain that there were no thieves in Elsewhere. The driver's compartment contained nothing of interest other than the string of red beads and little carved-bone skulls, which hung from the overhead CB radio.

On closer inspection than I had been able to do previously, I found that the long vertical latch bolts on the back of the trailer were secured by custom shackles. One of the keys released them.

When I opened the tall doors, a row of LED bulbs brightened along the center of the trailer ceiling, front to back. Immediately inside the doors, a two-panel stainless-steel gate blocked entrance. Into a series of vertical one-inch bars, a talented metalworker had incorporated three pentagrams, a Celtic cross, a Maltese cross, a Latin cross, an ankh, two swastikas, and perhaps a dozen symbols that I couldn't name. Work by an artisan this masterful-not a weld showing, the steel regrained after construction, the dazzling design harmonious in spite of its disparate elements-would have cost many thousands of dollars.

Beyond the gate, the three walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the trailer were painted with the same symbols, sun-yellow forms on a black background. The lighting revealed no cargo.

In fact, it looked like a trailer that never carried freight, and if that should be the case, I wondered what purpose it served for the cowboy. Evidently, he wasn't a true trucker after all, just a man who drove a truck. He must earn his living in some other way, though I doubted that, even in this transgressive age, anyone could sustain a paying career as a burner of defenseless children.

Although no lock was apparent, the halves of this gate were firmly secured to each other. I could neither pull nor push them apart.

Only as I began to close the doors did I suspect the trailer might not be as vacant as it appeared. Through the steel filigree issued a disturbing scent as sweet as incense and yet suggestive of decomposition, like nothing I'd ever smelled before. Perhaps it was an odor lingering from a previous cargo, but I had not detected it initially. With the malodor came a sudden chill, not internal to me, less than a draft, a mere breath, an icy effluence that, like spicules of sleet, p.r.i.c.kled my face.

Convinced that whatever the cowboy hauled, he didn't merely deal in loads of consumer electronics or goods for the Pottery Barn, I closed the trailer doors. Shot the long bolts. Engaged the shackles.

Although I can't explain why, following exposure to the stink and the chill, I wanted to spend a couple of hours in a bathtub filled with Purell sanitizing gel, maybe take a few turns being irradiated on the carousel of a human-size microwave oven, spend an hour inhaling steam made with water from the shrine at Lourdes, and have my blood drained from my left arm, processed through a state-of-the-art filtration machine, and returned into my right arm free of all contaminants. Afterward, a lollipop would be nice.

I found myself backing away from the trailer and realized that my skittish heart was cantering again, as it had when I'd seen the drainage grate with the lightning bolt.

Suddenly the black-and-red eighteen-wheeler, with its sparkly silver striping, seemed as if it might be some kind of carnival truck, which had unpleasant a.s.sociations for me. I know that most carnival folks are nothing like their public image. The majority are good people who just don't fit in anywhere else, and they have a complex, charming social structure of their own. I read this book, Twilight Eyes, all about them. But I once had a bad experience with two carnies.

This guy named p.e.c.k.e.r-I don't think it was his baptismal name-operated a ring-toss concession. His woolly hair was teased precisely as high as the long beard that depended from his chin, so he almost looked like Siamese twins joined at the tops of their heads. He and his joyfully wicked friend Bucket, the owner-operator of cotton-candy and snow-cone machines, had hoped to establish an after-hours carnival concession, at 3:00 one summer morning, in which I would be gagged and lashed to a tree to serve as the target. The two of them intended to take turns throwing hatchets at me. I had done something that annoyed them. Fortunately, I am quick on my feet, tougher than I look (which I would have to be), and I was in the company of a friendly poltergeist that left them bewildered by beating them senseless with a hundred baseb.a.l.l.s from the milk-bottle-pyramid concession.

Anyway, having at last gotten the peek into the trailer that I long had wanted, reasonably sure that my quarry had driven away in the white Ford van, I decided to leave this garage in Elsewhere. I intended to depart through the door by which I had entered, expecting that I would step back into my world as magically as I had previously stepped out of it.

Approaching that exit, however, I noticed for the first time that the only light came from the three overhead bulbs dangling in cone-shaped shades, none whatsoever from the three-foot-high bank of latticed windows above the man door and the three roll-ups. Only perfect blackness lay beyond those panes. I had arrived in the early afternoon, and no more than five minutes had pa.s.sed since then. The coming storm couldn't have seethed in so quickly; even if threatening clouds lowered over the city from horizon to horizon, no storm could have banished every last trace of sunlight. At the door, I paused, pistol in my right hand, left hand on the lever handle.

I sensed that opening this door would be as stupid as seeking the source of gas fumes in a dark bas.e.m.e.nt by striking a match.

Intuition is the highest form of knowledge. What we learn from others can be mistaught by those not a fraction as knowledgeable as they pretend or by those who are propagandists with agendas. We are born with intuition, however, which includes the natural law, a sense of right and wrong. A lot of people rebel so continually against natural law that not only does that part of their intuition atrophy but also every other aspect of it. They strike the match, open the door, give their money to an investment adviser named Slick, and trust that if they are really nice to the thug with the switchblade, he'll be nice to them.

Whatever waited outside this garage in Elsewhere would not be as easy to deal with as a psychopath with a knife.

I backed away from the door, glanced again at the high windows, wis.h.i.+ng that the darkness would give way to the murky light of an overcast sky. This was as effective as wis.h.i.+ng for world peace.

To look through those windows into the alleyway, I would have to climb to the top of the trailer, an easy enough feat. But the odor and the chill that had pa.s.sed through the ornamental gate were fresh in memory, and I was possessed by the-perhaps irrational-fear that a trap in the trailer roof would open under my feet and drop me into a kind of trouble that I had never known before.

In need of a room with a view, I returned to the open stairwell door to listen. The quiet was profound, a stillness as in a vacuum. If anyone waited on the upper floor, he must be dead or Death.

Previously, the wall on the left had been paneled in easy-to-clean yellow fiberboard, and the wall on the right had been brick. Now they were both concrete. On the steps, the glued-on rubber treads were missing. The first time I entered this stairwell, before hastily retreating at the sound of voices, it had been in my world. Now it was in some parallel reality.

Some days I wonder about my sanity. A good cheeseburger usually restores my confidence. If that doesn't work, I watch an episode of some reality-TV show like The Real Housewives of Wherever, and by comparison with the stars of the program, I feel as solid as a blacksmith's anvil.

The stairwell seemed unnaturally clean. In the becalmed air and the cold light, no dust motes drifted in suspension. Not one tattered strand of spider silk waited for a draft to flutter. No desiccated flies or shriveled moths or single sc.r.a.p of lint littered the stairs.

No cracks or water stains marred the surrounding concrete. Stepping across the threshold, onto the bottom landing, I felt that I must be somewhere outside of time, the only living creature in a place to which even the spirits of the lingering dead never ventured.

Warily, I climbed the stairs.