Although Bern Eckles refused interrogation, the investigation into the conspiracy had proceeded rapidly, thanks to the fact that a man named Kevin Gosset, having been run down by a forklift, was talking his hateful head off.
Gosset, Eckles, and Varner had been bent a long time. At the age of fourteen, they developed an interest in satanism. Maybe it was a game for a while. Quickly it grew serious.
On a mutual dare, they killed for the first time when they were fifteen. They enjoyed it. And satanism justified it. Gosset called it “just another way of believing.”
When they were sixteen, they pledged to their god that they would go into law enforcement because it would give them excellent cover and because one of the requirements of a devout satanist is to undermine the trusted institutions of society whenever possible.
Eckles and Varner eventually became cops, but Gosset became a schoolteacher. Corrupting the young was important work, too.
The three childhood pals had met Bob Robertson sixteen months previously through a satanic cult from which they cautiously sought out others with their interests. The cult had proved to be a gaggle of wannabes playing at goth games, but Robertson had interested them because of his mother’s wealth.
Their first intention had been to kill him and his mother for whatever valuables might be in their house—but when they discovered that Robertson was eager to bankroll what he called nasty news, they formed a partnership with him. They murdered his mother, made it appear that she’d died and been all but entirely consumed in an accidental fire—and gave Robertson her ears as a souvenir.
Indeed, the contents of the Rubbermaid containers in Robertson’s freezer had come from the collections of Eckles, Varner, and Gosset. Robertson himself had never had the guts to waste anyone, but because of his generosity, they wanted to make him feel like a genuine part of their family.
With Robertson’s money behind them, they were full of big plans. Gosset didn’t recall who first proposed targeting a town and turning it into Hell on Earth with a series of well-planned horrors, with the cold intention of ultimately destroying it entirely. They checked out numerous communities and decided that Pico Mundo was ideal, neither too large to be beyond ruination nor too small to be uninteresting.
Green Moon Mall was their first target. They intended to murder the chief and parlay the mall disaster—and a list of other complex and Machiavellian moves—into firm control of the police department. Thereafter, the steady destruction of the town would be their sport and their form of worship.
Bob Robertson moved into Camp’s End because the neighborhood offered him a low profile. Besides, he wanted to manage his money wisely, to ensure that he could buy as much fun as possible.
By the time Chief Porter got around to telling me and Stormy how he was going to protect me and help me to keep the secret of my sixth sense, his face had grown haggard, and I imagine I looked worse. Through Karla, I’d gotten word to him about Robertson’s body out there at the Church of the Whispering Comet, so he’d been able to work that bizarre detail into his cover story. He’d always done well by me in the past, but this Porter-spun narrative left me in stunned admiration.
Stormy said it was a work of genius. Clearly, the chief had not been spending all his time recuperating.
SIXTY-FIVE
MY WOUNDS PROVED TO BE NOT AS BAD AS I HAD feared in the ICU, and the doctor discharged me from County General the following Wednesday, one week to the day after the events at the mall.
To foil the media, they had been told that I’d be in the hospital another day. Chief Porter conspired to have me and Stormy conveyed secretly in the department’s beige undercover van, the same one from which Eckles had watched Stormy’s apartment that night.
If Eckles had seen me leaving, he would have arranged to have me caught in my apartment with the body of Bob Robertson. When I had slipped out the back, he had figured that I must be staying the night with my girl, and eventually he had given up the stakeout.
Leaving the hospital, I had no desire to return to my apartment above Mrs. Sanchez’s garage. I’d never be able to use the bathroom there without remembering Robertson’s corpse.
The chief and Karla didn’t think it was wise to go to Stormy’s place, either, because the reporters knew about her, too. Neither Stormy nor I was of a mind to accept the Porters’ hospitality. We wanted to be alone, just us, at last. Reluctantly, they delivered us to her place through the alley.
Although we were besieged by the media, the next few days were bliss. They rang the doorbell, they knocked, but we didn’t respond. They gathered in the street, a regular circus, and a few times we peeked at these vultures through the curtains, but we never revealed ourselves. We had each other, and that was enough to hold off not merely reporters but armies.
We ate food that wasn’t healthy. We let dirty dishes stack up in the sink. We slept too much.
We talked about everything, everything but the slaughter at the mall. Our past, our future. We planned. We dreamed.
We talked about bodachs. Stormy is still of the opinion that they are demonic spirits and that the black room was the gate to Hell, opening in Robertson’s study.
Because of my experiences of lost and gained time related to the black room, I have developed a more disturbing theory. Maybe in our future, time travel becomes possible. Maybe they can’t journey to the past in the flesh but can return in virtual bodies in which their minds are embodied, virtual bodies that can be seen only by me. Me and one long-dead British child.
Perhaps the violence that sweeps our world daily into greater darkness has led to a future so brutal, so corrupt, that our twisted descendants return to watch us suffer, charmed by festivals of blood. The appearance of the bodachs might have nothing to do with what those travelers from the future really look like; they probably pretty much resemble you and me; instead, the bodachs may be the shape of their deformed and diseased souls.
Stormy insists they are demons on a three-day pass from Hell.
I find her explanation less frightening than mine. I wish that I could embrace it without doubt.
The dirty dishes stacked higher. We finished most of the truly unhealthy food and, not wanting to venture out, began to eat more-sensible fare.
The phone had been ringing constantly. We’d never taken it off the answering machine. The calls were all from reporters and other media types. We turned the speaker volume off, so we wouldn’t have to hear their voices. At the end of each day, I erased the messages without listening to them.
At night, in bed, we held each other, we cuddled, we kissed, but we went no further. Delayed gratification had never felt so good. I cherished every moment with her, and decided that we might have to delay the marriage only two weeks instead of a month.
On the morning of the fifth day, the reporters were rousted by the Pico Mundo Police Department, on the grounds that they were a public nuisance. They seemed ready to go, anyway. Maybe they had decided that Stormy and I weren’t in residence, after all.
That evening, as we readied for bed, Stormy did something so beautiful that my heart soared, and I could believe that in time I might put the events at the mall behind me.
She came to me without her blouse, naked from the waist up. She took my right hand, turned it palm up, and traced my birthmark with her forefinger.
My mark is a crescent, half an inch wide, an inch and a half from point to point, as white as milk against the pink flush of my hand.
Her mark is identical to mine except that it is brown and on the sweet slope of her right breast. If I cup her breast in the most natural manner, our birthmarks perfectly align.
As we stood smiling at each other, I told her that I have always known hers is a tattoo. This doesn’t trouble me. The fact that she wanted so much to prove that we share a destiny only deepens my love for her.
On the bed, under the card from the fortune-telling machine, we held each other chastely, but for my hand upon her breast.
For me, ti
me always seems suspended in Stormy’s apartment.
In these rooms I am at peace. I forget my worries. The problems of pancakes and poltergeists are lifted from me.
Here I cannot be harmed.
Here I know my destiny and am content with it.
Here Stormy lives, and where she lives, I flourish.
We slept.
The following morning, as we were having breakfast, someone knocked on the door. When we didn’t answer, Terri Stambaugh called loudly from the hall. “It’s me, Oddie. Open up. It’s time to open up now.”
I couldn’t say no to Terri, my mentor, my lifeline. When I opened the door, I found that she hadn’t come alone. The chief and Karla Porter were in the hall. And Little Ozzie. All the people who know my secret—that I see the dead—were here together.
“We’ve been calling you,” Terri said.
“I figured it was reporters,” I said. “They won’t leave me and Stormy alone.”
They came into the apartment, and Little Ozzie closed the door behind them.
“We were having breakfast,” I said. “Can we get you something?”
The chief put one hand on my shoulder. That hangdog face, those sad eyes. He said, “It’s got to stop now, son.”
Karla brought a gift of some kind. Bronze. An urn. She said, “Sweetheart, the coroner released her poor body. These are her ashes.”
SIXTY-SIX
FOR A WHILE I HAD GONE MAD. MADNESS RUNS in my family. We have a long history of retreating from reality.
A part of me had known from the moment Stormy came to me in the ICU that she had become one of the lingering dead. The truth hurt too much to accept. In my condition that Wednesday afternoon, her death would have been one wound too many, and I would have let go of this life.
The dead don’t talk. I don’t know why. So I spoke for Stormy in the conversations that she and I had shared during the past week. I said for her what I knew she wanted to say. I can almost read her mind. We are immeasurably closer than best friends, closer than mere lovers. Stormy Llewellyn and I are each other’s destiny.
In spite of his bandaged wounds, the chief held me tightly and let me pour out my grief in his fatherly arms.
Later, Little Ozzie led me to the living-room sofa. He sat with me, tipping the furniture in his direction.
The chief pulled a chair close to us. Karla sat on the arm of the sofa, at my side. Terri settled on the floor in front of me, one hand on my knee.
My beautiful Stormy stood apart, watching. I have never seen on any human face a look more loving than the one with which she favored me in that terrible moment.
Taking my hand, Little Ozzie said, “You know you’ve got to let her go, dear boy.”
I nodded, for I could not speak.
Long after the day of which I now write, Ozzie had told me to keep the tone of this manuscript as light as possible by being an unreliable narrator, like the lead character in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I have played tricks with certain verbs. Throughout, I have often written of Stormy and our future together in the present tense, as if we are still together in this life. No more.
Ozzie said, “She’s here now, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She hasn’t left your side for a moment, has she?”
I shook my head.
“You don’t want your love for her and hers for you to trap her here when she needs to move on.”
“No.”
“That’s not fair to her, Oddie. Not fair to either of you.”
I said, “She deserves…her next adventure.”
“It’s time, Oddie,” said Terri, whose memory of Kelsey, her lost husband, is etched on her soul.
Trembling in fear of life without Stormy, I rose from the sofa and hesitantly went to her. She still wore her Burke Bailey’s uniform, of course, without the perky pink hat, yet she had never looked lovelier.
My friends had not known where she stood until I stepped before her and put one hand to her precious face. So warm to me.
The dead cannot speak, but Stormy spoke three words silently, allowing me to read her lips. I love you.
I kissed her, my dead love, so tenderly, so chastely. I held her in my arms, my face buried in her hair, her throat.
After a while, she put a hand under my chin. I raised my head.
Three more words. Be happy. Persevere.
“I’ll see you in service,” I promised, which is what she calls the life that comes after boot camp.
Her eyes. Her smile. Now mine only in memory.
I let her go. She turned away and took three steps, fading. She looked over her shoulder, and I reached out to her, and she was gone.
SIXTY-SEVEN
THESE DAYS I LIVE ALONE IN STORMY’S APARTMENT with her eclectic mix of thrift-shop furniture. The old floor lamps with silk shades and beaded fringes. The Stickley-style chairs and the contrasting Victorian footstools. The Maxfield Parrish prints and the carnival-glass vases.
She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king’s palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.
I still see dead people, and from time to time I am required to do something about it. As before, this proactive strategy often results in an unusual amount of laundry.
Sometimes, coming awake in the night, I think I hear her voice saying, Loop me in, odd one. I look for her, but she is never there. Yet she is always there. So I loop her in, telling her all that has happened to me recently.
Elvis hangs out with me more than he used to. He likes to watch me eat. I have purchased several of his CDs, and we sit together in the living room, in the low silken light, and listen to him when he was young and alive and knew where he belonged.
Stormy believed that we are in this boot camp to learn, that if we don’t persevere through all this world’s obstacles and all its wounds, we won’t earn our next life of great adventure. To be with her again, I will have the perseverance of a bulldog, but it seems to me that the training is unnecessarily hard.
My name is Odd Thomas. I am a fry cook. I lead an unusual life, here in my pico mundo, my little world. I am at peace.