The Odd Thomas Series 4-Book Bundle

by Dean Koontz

  And later: “You saved cities.”

  “The killing. Her eyes. I see them.”

  “Cities, odd one. Cities.”

  She could not console me, and I heard myself saying, as from a distance, “All death, death, death,” as if by chanting I could do penance.

  A time of silence heavier than thunder. The fog behind us. To the east, a disturbing geography of black hills. To the west, a dark sea and a setting moon.

  “Life is hard,” she said, and her statement needed no argument or clarification.

  Miles later, I realized that she had followed those three words with six more that I had not then been ready to hear: “But it was not always so.”

  Well before dawn, she stopped in an empty parking lot at a state beach. She came around the car and opened my door.

  “The stars, odd one. They’re beautiful. Will you show me the constellation Cassiopeia?”

  She could not have known. Yet she knew. I did not ask how. That she knew was grace enough.

  We stood together on the cracked blacktop while I searched the heavens.

  Stormy Llewellyn had been the daughter of Cassiopeia, who had died in my sweet girl’s childhood. Together, we had often picked out the points of the constellation, because doing so made Stormy feel closer to her lost mother.

  “There,” I said, “and there, and there,” and star by star I drew the Cassiopeia of classic mythology, and recognized in that familiar pattern the mother of my lost girl, and in the mother I saw also the daughter, there above, beautiful and bright, for all eternity, her timeless light shining upon me, until one day I at last stepped out of time and joined her.

  This fourth Odd adventure is dedicated to Bruce, Carolyn, and Michael Rouleau.

  To Michael because he makes his parents proud.

  To Carolyn because she makes Bruce happy.

  To Bruce because he has been so reliable all these years, and because he truly knows what it means to love a good dog.

  ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

  The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • Brother Odd • The Husband • Forever Odd • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • Odd Thomas • 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

  DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN

  Book One: Prodigal Son • with Kevin J. Anderson

  Book Two: City of Night • with Ed Gorman

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

  Correspondence for the author should be addressed to:

  Dean Koontz

  P.O. Box 9529

  Newport Beach, California 92658

  ODD THOMAS IS BACK.

  His mysterious journey of suspense and discovery

  moves to a dangerous new level

  in his most riveting adventure to date.…

  by #1 New York Times bestselling author

  DEAN KOONTZ

  On sale in hardcover

  Summer 2012

  1

  We are buried when we’re born. The world is a place of graves occupied and graves potential. Life is what happens while we wait for our appointment with the mortician.

  You are no more likely to see that sentiment on a Starbucks cup than you are the words COFFEE KILLS.

  Sorry, but I have recently been in a mood. I’ll cheer up soon. I always do. Regardless of what horror transpires, given a little time, I am as reliably buoyant as a helium balloon.

  I don’t know the reason for that buoyancy. Understanding it might be a key part of my life assignment. Perhaps when I realize why I can find humor in the darkest of darknesses, the mortician will call my number and the time will have come to choose my casket.

  Actually, I don’t expect to have a casket. The Celestial Office of Life Themes—or whatever it might be called—seems to have decided that my journey through this world will be especially complicated by absurdity and violence of the kind in which the human species takes such pride. Consequently, I’ll probably be torn limb from limb by an angry mob of antiwar protesters and thrown on a bonfire. Or I’ll be struck down by a Rolls-Royce driven by an advocate for the poor, knocked into an open storm drain, and washed out to sea, where my remains will be enthusiastically consumed by the teeming fish in a federally enforced no-fishing zone.

  Anyway, at four o’clock that February morning, I was dreaming of Auschwitz.

  My characteristic buoyancy will not occur just yet.

  I woke to a familiar cry from beyond the half-open window of my suite in Roseland’s guest house. As silvery as the pipes in a Celtic song, the wail sewed threads of sorrow and longing through the night and the woods. It came again, nearer, and then a third time from a distance.

  These lamentations were always brief, but when they woke me too near dawn, I could not sleep anymore that night. The cry was like a wire in the blood, conducting a current through every artery and vein. I’d never heard a lonelier sound, and it electrified me with a dread that I could not explain.

  In this instance, I awakened from the Nazi death camp. I am not a Jew, but in the nightmare I was Jewish and terrified of dying twice. Dying twice made perfect sense in sleep, but not in the waking world, and the eerie call in the night at once pricked the air out of the vivid dream, which shriveled away from me.

  According to the current master of Roseland and everyone who worked for him, the source of the disturbing cry was a loon. They were either ignorant or lying.

  I don’t mean to insult my host and his staff. After all, I am ignorant of many things because I am required to maintain a narrow focus. An ever-increasing number of people seem determined to kill me, so that I need to concentrate on staying alive.

  But even in the desert, where I was born and raised, there are ponds and lakes, man-made yet adequate for loons. Their cries were melancholy but never desolate like this, curiously hopeful whereas these were despairing.

  Roseland, a private estate, was a mile from the California coast. But loons are loons wherever they nest; they don’t alter their voices to conform to the landscape. They’re birds, not politicians.

  Besides, loons aren’t roosters with a timely duty. Yet this wailing always came between midnight and dawn, never in the evening, never in sunlight. The earlier it came in the new day, the more often it was repeated during the remaining hours of darkness.

  I threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed, and said, “Spare me that I may serve,” which is a morning prayer that my Granny Sugars taught me to say when I was a little boy.

  Pearl Sugars was a professional poker player who frequently sat in private games against card sharks twice her size, guys who didn’t lose with a smile. They didn’t even smile when they won. My grandma was a hard drinker. She ate a boatload of pork fat in various forms. Only when sober, Granny Sugars drove so fast that police in several Southwestern states knew her as Pedal-to-the-Metal Pearl. Yet she lived long and died in her sleep.

  I hoped her prayer worked as well for me as it did for her; but recently I had taken to following that first request with another. This morning, it was: “Please don’t let anyone kill me by shoving an angry lizard down my throat.”

  That might seem like a snarky request to make of God, but a psychotic and enormous man once threatened to
force-feed me an exotic sharp-toothed lizard that was in a frenzy after being dosed with methamphetamine. He would have succeeded, too, if we hadn’t been on a construction site and if I hadn’t found a way to use an insulation-foam sprayer as a weapon. He promised to track me down when released from prison and finish the job with a different lizard.

  On other days during the past week, I had asked God to spare me from death by a car-crushing machine in a salvage yard, from death by a nail gun, from death by being chained to dead men and dropped in a lake.… These were ordeals that I should not have survived in days past, and I figured that if I ever faced one of those threats again, I wouldn’t be lucky enough to escape the same fate twice.

  My name isn’t Lucky Thomas. It’s Odd Thomas.

  It really is. Odd.

  My beautiful but psychotic mother claims the birth certificate was supposed to read Todd. My father, who lusts after teenage girls and peddles property on the moon—though from a comfortable office here on Earth—sometimes says they meant to name me Odd.

  I tend to believe my father in this matter. Although if he isn’t lying, this might be the only entirely truthful thing he’s ever said to me.

  Having showered before retiring the previous evening, I now dressed without delay, to be ready for … whatever.

  Day by day, Roseland felt more like a trap. I sensed hidden deadfalls that might be triggered with a misstep, bringing down a crushing weight upon me.

  Although I wanted to leave, I had an obligation to remain, a duty to the Lady of the Bell. She had come with me from Magic Beach, which lay farther north along the coast, where I’d almost been killed in a variety of ways.

  Duty doesn’t need to call; it only needs to whisper. And if you heed the call, no matter what happens, you have no need for regret.

  Stormy Llewellyn, whom I loved and lost, believed that this strife-torn world is boot camp, preparation for the great adventure that comes between our first life and our eternal life. She said that we go wrong only when we are deaf to duty.

  We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself.

  Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.

  The stone tower in the eucalyptus grove, where I currently lived, was a thing of rough beauty, in part because of the contrast between its solemn mass and the delicacy of the silvery-green leaves that cascaded across the limbs of the surrounding trees.

  Square rather than columnar, thirty feet on a side, the tower stood sixty feet high if you counted the bronze dome but not the unusual finial that looked like the much-enlarged stem, crown, and case bow of an old pocket watch.

  They called the tower a guest house, but surely it had not always been used for that purpose. The narrow casement windows opened inward to admit fresh air, because vertical iron bars prevented them from opening outward.

  Barred windows suggested a prison or a fortress. In either case, an enemy was implied.

  The door was ironbound timber that looked as though it had been crafted to withstand a battering ram if not even cannonballs. Beyond lay a stone-walled vestibule.

  In the vestibule, to the left, stairs led to a higher apartment. Annamaria, the Lady of the Bell, was staying there.

  The inner vestibule door, directly opposite the outer, opened to the ground-floor unit, where the current owner of Roseland, Noah Wolflaw, had invited me to stay.

  My quarters consisted of a comfortable sitting room, a smaller bedroom, both paneled in mahogany, and a richly tiled bathroom that dated to the 1920s. The style was craftsman: heavy wood-and-cushion armchairs, trestle tables with mortise joints and peg decoration.

  I don’t know if the stained-glass lamps were genuine Tiffany, but they might have been. Perhaps they were bought back in the day when they weren’t yet museum pieces of fantastic value, and they remained here in this out-of-the-way tower simply because they had always been here. One quality of Roseland was a casual indifference to the wealth that it represented.

  Each guest suite featured a kitchenette in which the pantry and the refrigerator had been stocked with the essentials. I could cook simple meals or have any reasonable request filled by the estate’s chef, Mr. Shilshom, who would send over a tray from the main house.

  Breakfast more than an hour before dawn didn’t appeal to me. I would feel like a condemned man trying to squeeze in as many meals as possible on his last day, before submitting to a lethal injection.

  Our host had warned me to remain indoors between midnight and dawn. One or more mountain lions had recently been marauding through other estates in the area, killing a couple of dogs, a horse, and peacocks kept as pets. The beast might be bold enough to chow down on a wandering guest of Roseland if given a chance.

  I was sufficiently informed about mountain lions to know that they were as likely to hunt in the evening as after midnight, and in daylight, for that matter. I suspected that Noah Wolflaw’s warning was intended to ensure that I would hesitate to investigate the so-called loon and other peculiarities of Roseland by night.

  Before dawn on that Monday in February, I left the guest tower and locked the ironbound door behind me.

  Both Annamaria and I had been given keys and had been sternly instructed to keep the tower locked at all times. When I noted that mountain lions could not turn a knob and open a door, whether it was locked or not, Mr. Wolflaw declared that we were living in the early days of a new dark age, that walled estates and the guarded redoubts of the wealthy were not secure anymore, that “bold thieves, rapists, journalists, murderous revolutionaries, and far worse” might turn up anywhere.

  His eyes didn’t spin like pinwheels, neither did smoke curl from his ears when he issued this warning, though his dour expression and ominous tone struck me as cartoonish. I still thought that he must be kidding, until I met his eyes long enough to discern that he was as paranoid as a three-legged cat encircled by wolves.

  Whether his paranoia was justified or not, I suspected that neither thieves nor rapists, nor journalists, nor revolutionaries were what worried him. His terror was reserved for the undefined “far worse.”

  Leaving the guest tower, I followed a flagstone footpath through the fragrant eucalyptus grove to the brink of the gentle slope that led up to the main house. The vast manicured lawn before me was as smooth as carpet underfoot.

  In the wild fields around the periphery of the estate, through which I had rambled on other days, snowy wood rush and ribbon grass and feathertop thrived among the majestic California live oaks that seemed to have been planted in cryptic but harmonious patterns.

  No place of my experience had ever been more beautiful than Roseland, and no place had ever felt more evil.

  Some people will say that a place is just a place, after all, that it cannot be good or evil. Others will say that evil as a real power or entity is a hopelessly old-fashioned idea, that the wicked acts of men and women can be explained by one psychological theory or another.

  Those are people to whom I never listen. If I listened to them, I would already be dead.

  Regardless of the weather, daylight in Roseland always seemed to be the product of a sun different from the one that brightened the rest of the world. Here, the familiar appeared strange, and even the most solid, brightly illuminated object had the quality of a mirage.

  Afoot at night, as now, I had no sense of privacy. I felt that I was followed, watched.

  On other occasions, I had heard a rustle that the still air could not explain, a muttered word or two not quite comprehensible, hurried footsteps. My stalker, if I had one, was always screened by shrubbery or by moonshadows, or he monitored me from around a corner.

  And then there were the horse and rider that only I could see. I was alert for them, often looking behind me because the stallion’s hooves made no sound, and the rider was as silent as any spirit.

  I have certain talents. In addition to be
ing a pretty good short-order cook, I have an occasional prophetic dream. And in the waking world, I sometimes see the spirits of the lingering dead who, for various reasons, are reluctant to move on to the Other Side.

  Because my sixth sense complicates my existence, I try otherwise to keep my life simple. I have fewer possessions than a monk. I have no time or peace to build a career as a fry cook or as anything else. I never plan for the future, but wander into it with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and the hair up on the nape of my neck.

  If spurning a gift weren’t ungrateful, I would at once return my supernatural sight. I would be content to spend my days whipping up omelets that make you groan with pleasure and pancakes so fluffy that the slightest breeze might float them off your plate.

  Every talent is unearned, however, and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and wisely as possible. If I didn’t believe in the miraculous nature of talent and in the sacred duty of the recipient, I would have gone mad by now.

  Be assured that I am not insane, neither as a serial killer is insane nor in the sense that a man is insane who wears a colander as a hat to prevent the CIA from controlling his mind. I dislike hats of any kind, though I have nothing against colanders properly used.

  I have killed more than once, but always in self-defense or to protect the innocent. Such killing cannot be called murder. If you think that it is murder, you’ve led a sheltered life, and I envy you.

  A suspicion of homicide motivated me to prowl Roseland by night. The woman on the horse often manifested in a pristine white nightgown—but on other occasions the garment was mottled with blood. Surely she was a victim of someone, haunting Roseland in search of justice.

  Far to the east of the house, out of sight beyond a hurst of live oaks, was a riding ring bristling with weeds. A half-collapsed ranch fence encircled it.

  The stables, however, looked as if they had been built last week. Curiously, all the stalls were spotless; not one piece of straw or a single cobweb could be found, no dust, as though the place was thoroughly scrubbed on a regular basis. Judging by that tidiness, and by a smell as crisp and pure as that of a winter day after a snowfall, no horses had been kept there in decades; evidently, the woman in white had been dead a long time.