The Odd Thomas Series 4-Book Bundle

by Dean Koontz

  “They have a lot of respect for you, sir.”

  “It’s like sitting on a beach.”

  “What is?” I asked, smoothly avoiding Huh?

  “Here, in the quiet hours after midnight. Like sitting on a beach. The night rolls and breaks and tosses up our losses like bits of wreckage, all that’s left of one ship or another.”

  I said, “I suppose that’s true,” because in fact I thought I understood his mood if not his full meaning.

  “We ceaselessly examine the bits of wreckage in the surf, as though we can put the past together again, but that’s just torturing ourselves.”

  That sentiment had teeth. I, too, had felt its bite. “Brother John, I’ve got an odd question.”

  “Of course you do,” he said, either commenting on the arcane nature of my curiosity or on my name.

  “Sir, this may seem to be an ignorant question, but I have good reason to ask it. Is there a remote possibility that your work here might … blow up or something?”

  He bowed his head, raised one hand from the arm of his chair, and stroked his chin, apparently pondering my question.

  Although I was grateful to him for giving me a well-considered answer, I would have been happier if he had without hesitation said, Nope, no chance, impossible, absurd.

  Brother John was part of a long tradition of monk and priest scientists. The Church had created the concept of the university and had established the first of them in the twelfth century. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk, was arguably the greatest mathematician of the thirteenth century. Bishop Robert Grosseteste was the first man to write down the necessary steps for performing a scientific experiment. Jesuits had built the first reflecting telescopes, microscopes, barometers, were first to calculate the constant of gravity, the first to measure the height of the mountains on the moon, the first to develop an accurate method of calculating a planet’s orbit, the first to devise and publish a coherent description of atomic theory.

  As far as I knew, over the centuries, not one of those guys had accidentally blown up a monastery.

  Of course, I don’t know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it’s probably more accurate to say that I don’t know anything.

  Maybe monk scientists have occasionally blown a monastery to bits. I am pretty sure, however, they never did it intentionally.

  I could not imagine Brother John, philanthropist and cookie-maker, in a weirdly lighted laboratory, cackling a mad-scientist cackle and scheming to destroy the world. Although brilliant, he was human, so I could easily see him looking up in alarm from an experiment and saying Whoops, just before unintentionally reducing the abbey to a puddle of nano-goo.

  “Something,” he finally said.

  “Sir?”

  He raised his head to look at me directly again. “Yes, perhaps something.”

  “Something, sir?”

  “Yes. You asked whether there was a possibility that my work here might blow up or something. I can’t see a way it could blow up. I mean, not the work itself.”

  “Oh. But something else could happen.”

  “Maybe yes, probably no. Something.”

  “But maybe yes. Like what?”

  “Whatever.”

  “What whatever?” I asked.

  “Whatever can be imagined.”

  “Sir?”

  “Have another cookie.”

  “Sir, anything can be imagined.”

  “Yes. That’s right. Imagination knows no limits.”

  “So anything might go wrong?”

  “Might isn’t will. Any terrible, disastrous thing might happen, but probably nothing will.”

  “Probably?”

  “Probability is an important factor, Odd Thomas. A blood vessel might burst in your brain, killing you an instant from now.”

  At once I regretted not having taken a second cookie.

  He smiled. He looked at his watch. He looked at me. He shrugged. “See? The probability was low.”

  “The anything that might happen,” I said, “supposing that it did happen, could it result in a lot of people dying horribly?”

  “Horribly?”

  “Yes, sir. Horribly.”

  “That’s a subjective judgment. Horrible to one person might not be the same as horrible to another.”

  “Shattering bones, bursting hearts, exploding heads, burning flesh, blood, pain, screaming—that kind of horrible.”

  “Maybe yes, probably no.”

  “This again.”

  “More likely, they would just cease to exist.”

  “That’s death.”

  “No, it’s different. Death leaves a corpse.”

  I had been reaching for a cookie. I pulled my hand back without taking one from the plate.

  “Sir, you’re scaring me.”

  A settled blue heron astonishes when it reveals its true height by unfolding its long sticklike legs; likewise, Brother John proved even taller than I remembered when he rose from his chair. “I’ve been badly scared myself, badly, for quite a few years now. You learn to live with it.”

  Getting to my feet, I said, “Brother John … whatever this work is you do here, are you sure you should be doing it?”

  “My intellect is God-given. I’ve a sacred obligation to use it.”

  His words resonated with me. When one of the lingering dead has been murdered and comes to me for justice, I always feel obliged to help the poor soul.

  The difference is that I rely both on reason and on something that you might call a sixth sense, while in his research Brother John is strictly using his intellect.

  A sixth sense is a miraculous thing, which in itself suggests a supernatural order. The human intellect, however, for all its power and triumphs, is largely formed by this world and is therefore corruptible.

  This monk’s hands, like his intellect, were also God-given, but he could choose to use them to strangle babies.

  I did not need to remind him of this. I only said, “I had a terrible dream. I’m worried about the children at the school.”

  Unlike Sister Angela, he did not instantly recognize that my dream was a lie. He said, “Have your dreams come true in the past?”

  “No, sir. But this was very … real.”

  He pulled his hood over his head. “Try to dream of something pleasant, Odd Thomas.”

  “I can’t control my dreams, sir.”

  In a fatherly way, he put an arm around my shoulders. “Then perhaps you shouldn’t sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.”

  I was not conscious of crossing the room with him, but now the arrangement of armchairs lay behind us, and before me, a door slid soundlessly open. Beyond the door lay the antechamber awash in red light.

  Having crossed the threshold alone, I turned to look back at Brother John.

  “Sir, when you traded being just a scientist for being a monk scientist, did you ever consider, instead, being a tire salesman?”

  “What’s the punch line?”

  “It’s not a joke, sir. When my life became too complicated and I had to give up being a fry cook, I considered the tire life. But I came here instead.”

  He said nothing.

  “If I could be a tire salesman, help people get rolling on good rubber, at a fair price, that would be useful work. If I could be a tire salesman and nothing else, just a good tire salesman with a little apartment and this girl I once knew, that would be enough.”

  His violet eyes were ruddy with the light of the vestibule. He shook his head, rejecting the tire life. “I want to know.”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “Everything,” he said, and the door slid shut between us.

  Polished-steel letters on brushed steel: PER OMNIA SAECULA

  SAECULORUM.

  For ever and ever.

  Through hissing doors, through buttery light and blue, I went to the surface, into the night, and locked the
bronze door with my universal key.

  LIBERA NOS A MALO said the door.

  Deliver us from evil.

  As I climbed the stone steps to the abbey yard, snow began to fall. Huge flakes turned gracefully in the windless dark, turned as if to a waltz that I could not hear.

  The night did not seem as frigid as it had been earlier. Perhaps I had been colder in John’s Mew than I realized, and by comparison to that realm, the winter night seemed mild.

  In moments, the flakes as big as frosted flowers gave way to smaller formations. The air filled with fine shavings of the unseen clouds.

  This was the moment that I had been waiting for at the window of my small guest suite, before Boo and bodach had appeared in the yard below.

  Until coming to this monastery, I had spent my life in the town of Pico Mundo, in the California desert. I had never seen snow fall until, earlier in the night, the sky had spit out a few flakes in a false start.

  Here in the first minute of the true storm, I stood transfixed by the spectacle, taking on faith what I had heard, that no two snowflakes are alike.

  The beauty took my breath, the way the snow fell and yet the night was still, the intricacy of the simplicity. Although the night would have been even more beautiful if she had been here to share it with me, for a moment all was well, all manner of things were well, and then of course someone screamed.

  CHAPTER 7

  The sharp cry of alarm was so brief that you might have thought it was imagined or that a night bird, chased by snow to the shelter of the forest, had shrilled just as it flew overhead and away.

  In the summer of the previous year, when gunmen stormed the mall in Pico Mundo, I had heard so many screams that I hoped my ears would fail me thereafter. Forty-one innocent people had been shot. Nineteen perished. I would have traded music and the voices of my friends for a silence that would exclude for the rest of my life all human cries of pain and mortal terror.

  We so often hope for the wrong things, and my selfish hope was not fulfilled. I am not deaf to pain or blind to blood—or dead, as for a while I might have wished to be.

  Instinctively, I hurried around the nearby corner of the abbey. I turned north along the refectory, in which the monks take their meals, and no lights were aglow at one o’clock in the morning.

  Squinting through the screening snow, I scanned the night toward the western forest. If someone was out there, the storm hid him.

  The refectory formed an inner corner with the library wing. I headed west again, past deep-set windows beyond which lay a darkness of ordered books.

  As I turned the southwest corner of the library, I almost fell over a man lying facedown on the ground. He wore the hooded black habit of a monk.

  Surprise brought cold air suddenly into my lungs—a brief ache in the chest—and expelled it in a pale rushing plume.

  I dropped to my knees at the monk’s side, but then hesitated to touch him, for fear that I would find he had not merely fallen, that he had been beaten to the ground.

  The world beyond this mountain retreat was largely barbarian, a condition it had been striving toward for perhaps a century and a half. A once-glorious civilization was now only a pretense, a mask allowing barbarians to commit ever greater cruelties in the name of virtues that a truly civilized world would have recognized as evils.

  Having fled that barbaric disorder, I was reluctant to admit that no place was safe, no retreat beyond the reach of anarchy. The huddled form on the ground beside me might be proof, more solid than bodachs, that no haven existed to which I could safely withdraw.

  Anticipating his smashed face, his slashed face, I touched him as snow ornamented his plain tunic. With a shudder of expectation, I turned him on his back.

  The falling snow seemed to bring light to the night, but it was a ghost light that illuminated nothing. Although the hood had slipped back from the victim’s face, I could not see him clearly enough to identify him.

  Putting a hand to his mouth, I felt no breath, also no beard. Some of the brothers wear beards, but some do not.

  I pressed my fingertips to his throat, which was still warm, and felt for the artery. I thought I detected a pulse.

  Because my hands were half numb with cold and therefore less sensitive to heat, I might not have felt a faint exhalation, when I had touched his lips.

  As I leaned forward to put my ear to his mouth, hoping to hear at least a sigh of breath, I was struck from behind.

  No doubt the assailant meant to shatter my skull. He swung just as I bent forward, and the club grazed the back of my head, thumped hard off my left shoulder.

  I pitched forward, rolled to the left, rolled again, scrambled to my feet, ran. I had no weapon. He had a club and maybe something worse, a knife.

  The hands-on kind of killers, the gunless kind, might stave in with a club or strangle with a scarf, but most of them carry blades, as well, for backup, or for entertainment that might come as foreplay or as aftermath.

  The guys in the porkpie hats, mentioned earlier, had blackjacks and guns and even a hydraulic automobile press, and still they had carried knives. If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.

  Although life has made me old for my age, I am still fast in my youth. Hoping my assailant was older and therefore slower, I sprinted away from the abbey, into the open yard, where there were no corners in which to be cornered.

  I hurled myself through the snowfall, so it seemed as though a wind had sprung up, pasting flakes to my lashes.

  In this second minute of the storm, the ground remained black, unchanged by the blizzard’s brush. Within a few bounding steps, the land began to slope gently toward woods that I could not see, open dark descending toward a bristling dark.

  Intuition insisted that the forest would be the death of me. Running into it, I would be running to my grave.

  The wilds are not my natural habitat. I am a town boy, at home with pavement under my feet, a whiz with a library card, a master at the gas grill and griddle.

  If my pursuer was a beast of the new barbarism, he might not be able to make a fire with two sticks and a stone, might not be able to discern true north from the growth of moss on trees, but his lawless nature would make him more at home in the woods than I would ever be.

  I needed a weapon, but I had nothing except my universal key, a Kleenex, and insufficient martial-arts knowledge to make a deadly weapon of them.

  Cut grass relented to tall grass, and ten yards later, nature put weapons under my feet: loose stones that tested my agility and balance. I skidded to a halt, stooped, scooped up two stones the size of plums, turned, and threw one, threw it hard, and then the other.

  The stones vanished into snow and gloom. I had either lost my pursuer or, intuiting my intent, he had circled around me when I stopped and stooped.

  I clawed more missiles off the ground, turned 360 degrees, and surveyed the night, ready to pelt him with a couple of half-pound stones.

  Nothing moved but the snow, seeming to come down in skeins as straight as the strands of a beaded curtain, yet each flake turning as it fell.

  I could see no more than fifteen feet. I had never realized that snow could fall heavily enough to limit visibility this much.

  Once, twice, I thought I glimpsed someone moving at the limits of vision, but it must have been an illusion of movement because I couldn’t fix on any shape. The patterns of snow on night gradually dizzied me.

  Holding my breath, I listened. The snow did not even whisper its way to the earth, but seemed to salt the night with silence.

  I waited. I’m good at waiting. I waited sixteen years for my disturbed mother to kill me in my sleep before at last I moved out and left her home alone with her beloved gun.

  If, in spite of the periodic peril that comes with my gift, I should live an average life span, I’ve got another sixty years before I will see Stormy Llewellyn again, in the next world. That will
be a long wait, but I am patient.

  My left shoulder ached, and the back of my head, grazed by the club, felt less than wonderful. I was cold to the bone.

  For some reason, I had not been pursued.

  If the storm had been storming long enough to whiten the ground, I could have stretched out on my back and made snow angels. But the conditions were not yet right for play. Maybe later.

  The abbey was out of sight. I wasn’t sure from which direction I had come, but I wasn’t worried that I would lose my way. I have never been lost.

  Announcing my return with an uncontrollable chattering of teeth, holding a stone in each hand, I warily retraced my route across the meadow, found the short grass of the yard again. Out of the silent storm, the abbey loomed.

  When I reached the corner of the library where I had nearly fallen over the prone monk, I found neither victim nor assailant. Concerned that the man might have regained consciousness and, badly hurt and disoriented, might have crawled away, only to pass out once more, I searched in a widening arc, but found no one.

  The library formed an L with the back wall of the guest wing, from which I had set out in pursuit of a bodach little more than an hour ago. At last I dropped the stones around which my hands were clenched and half frozen, unlocked the door to the back stairs, and climbed to the third floor.

  In the highest hallway, the door to my small suite stood open, as I’d left it. Waiting for snow, I’d been sitting in candlelight, but now a brighter light spilled from my front room.

  CHAPTER 8

  At shortly past one in the morning, the guestmaster, Brother Roland, was not likely to be changing the bed linens or delivering a portion of the “two hogsheads of wine” that St. Benedict, when he wrote the Rule that established monastic order in the sixth century, had specified as a necessary provision for every guesthouse.

  St. Bartholomew’s does not provide any wine. The small under-the-counter refrigerator in my bathroom contains cans of Coke and bottles of iced tea.