The lingering dead are generally a bummed-out bunch, more often than not tethered to the place where they died. They aren’t able to zip off to the multiplex to catch the latest Hollywood comedy of ill manners and to enjoy a thirty-dollar bag of free-range popcorn cooked in government-approved fish oil. After years of constant worrying about what waits for them on the Other Side, after clinging for so long to this world in the hope of seeing their murderers brought to justice, they really need some fun.
I could picture those two spirits, the woman and the horse, racing across Roseland, laughing heartily—if silently—at how easily they conned gullible Odd Thomas into scampering up a tree, sheltering there, and shivering in anticipation of a nonexistent boogeyman, when in fact the worst thing I really had to fear was being pooped upon by a bird on a higher branch.
Then the boogeyman arrived.
Boogeymen.
The first indication that I had not been duped by a ghost came when the faint bleachy smell sliced through the foliage, adding its sharp edge to the soft fragrances of the oak bark and the green leaves and the weather-split acorns that still hung like damaged ornaments in the tree.
Although the ozone odor was far less pungent here than in the stable, it was no less out of place. In the open air, it wasn’t as likely to intensify to the degree that it did in a closed room. But I had little doubt that, just as before, this smell was a herald of something weirder and more dangerous than spirits of the dead.
A swift change in the quality of light solidified my expectation of another encounter with the stinky pack that could see in the dark. The golden morning sunshine twinkling in the gaps between the leaves became yellow-orange as its angle of origin shifted east to west.
I might not be able to understand the inscrutable stuff that half the people I meet say to me, but I am reliably dead-on when I anticipate mayhem. If I could find a national competition of confused and paranoid psychics, I would win the trophy and retire.
Carpeted with the small, oval, dry leaves of the live oaks, the woods didn’t allow any living thing to pass through quietly. Anyway, the pack that had hoped to extract me from the feed bin was not in the least concerned with stealth. They arrived in a blundering rush, so boisterously tramping across the sheddings of the trees that the crunching-crackling masked any snarling and snorting in which they might have been engaged.
I squinted this way and that, through the layered foliage, but what limited views I had of the ground revealed nothing useful about the recent arrivals. The oaks threw down more darkness than before, and the jack-o’-lantern light did not thrust through the limbs in crisp blades as had the morning sun, but fluttered through, fitful and sullen, as if a breeze that I could not feel fanned flames that I could not see, blowing reflections of fire through the woods.
Of the pack, nothing was visible except shadowy shapes, some of them swift but others lurching, all of them agitated and seeming to be urgently seeking something. Most likely they were not searching for maidens of good reputation to marry and to have children who would spend long evenings with them, hearthside, playing flutes and violins in family musicales.
Both the lithe and the clumsy among them followed the same erratic path through the oaks, as though they were crazed, weaving away to the east, to the north, then south. Their frantic progress was easy to track by the trampling of a million dry oak leaves.
Each time they drew near, I could again hear their grunting and growling as in the stable. But to me on my high perch, those guttural noises had a somewhat different character from what I thought that I had heard through the screened ventilation holes of the feed bin.
They were still like the sounds that animals made, but they were not only animal in nature. I thought that I heard a human quality in some of these exclamations: a wordless expression of desperation, a pathetic whine of anxiety that I might have unconsciously issued myself in a moment of great stress and danger, and a tortured snarl of anger that wasn’t mere animal rage but expressed a bitter, brooding resentment suggestive of emotions that come only with intelligence.
The air was not cold. My light sweater and jeans were adequate to the day. A chill crept through me nonetheless.
This was as much a mob as it was a pack.
An animal pack is a group of individuals, all sharing much the same personality of their species, operating according to their best instincts and the habits of their kind.
On the other hand, a mob of people is disorderly and lawless. They are stirred to a peak of excitement not by the hunt, as is an animal, not by a worthy need for sustenance, but by an idea that might be true or a lie—and that is most often the latter. When it is an evil idea, which a lie always must be, those swept up by it are immeasurably more dangerous than any animal that ever lived upon the Earth in all its history. People in a lie-driven mob are savage, cruel, and capable of such violence that a mere lion would flee from them in terror, and a fierce crocodile would seek the safety of swamp waters.
Judging by the sound of them, there were many more here than had been in the stable, perhaps a score of them or even twice that.
A greater urgency informed their actions, too. By the moment, the sounds they made suggested that they were driving themselves into a frenzy of such intensity that nothing could appease them but blood and plenty of it.
Three times they had rushed past the tree in which I hid, and their sense of smell—or whatever other perception served them best—had thus far failed them. As they poured past a fourth time, I still could see nothing of the beasts except shadows that seemed to promise fantastic deformities as they jostled one another in their eagerness to find me.
Already the yellow-orange sunlight was beginning to turn deep orange. I wasn’t likely to get a better look at these creatures unless they took their search vertical and came face-to-face with me in my oaken redoubt.
What we fear too much we often bring to pass.
They were almost gone away to the north of the woods when abruptly they turned back. These things of shadow, half-perceived sinister shapes, flowed around the tree, like a sea tide washing around a pinnacle of offshore rock.
The last of them lapped into place, and the crackle of leaves splitting underfoot ceased. They went mute, as well, as hushed as those monsters that hide under a child’s bed and, by their perfect silence, tempt him to feel safe enough to lean out, lift the covers, and look under.
I was not tempted to feel safe. They had found me.
Thirteen
BEING TREED WAS NOT AS HOPELESS AS BEING BOXED IN a feed bin. Because I had escaped the latter, I thought I might survive this predicament in the oak.
Having been mostly jobless since I left Pico Mundo, having recently become rootless, I had no health insurance. Consequently, I was motivated not merely to live but also to avoid hideous disfigurement that the state was too bankrupt to have repaired for me and that would require me to live in the subcellar of an opera house. I’ve never much cared for opera, but jazz clubs don’t have subcellars.
In the open air, the aggregate stench of the crowd around the oak didn’t induce nausea as rapidly as in the stable, but I pinched my nose and breathed through my mouth. The smell wasn’t as lovely as stale sweat and rotten breath; I thought they must also have stink glands, like skunks, except that skunks were considerate enough to limit their malodor to their spray, while these things seemed to ooze it continually from every pore.
Squint as I might, I could not see the true forms or the faces of those gathered below and, presumably, gazing up at me. Again, dusk had come too early, long before noon. The dwindling light grew red-orange. Where it lay like a radiant dust upon the figures at the base of the oak, it revealed nothing, as if I were studying them through a pair of infrared goggles in which the batteries were nearly dead.
And then as the darkness slowly deepened, their eyes began to glow. Pink at first and almost pretty, like little fairy lights, they rapidly became as red as I imagined the eyes of wolves might be at night
, although these creatures were nothing as endearing as wolves.
In the past, I had found myself pitted against murderers, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, a misguided former billionaire and monk, kidnappers, terrorists, and others who at some point in their lives had slipped or been dragged, or plunged gleefully, into the dark side. I don’t do battle against vampires and werewolves for the simple reason that they don’t exist.
Nevertheless, gazing down through the oak branches at the red-eyed mob, I was tempted to picture a few dozen escapees from a young-adult novel who were looking for blood and new girlfriends. Whatever they were, however, I sensed that they wouldn’t be sufficiently good-looking to get dates for the prom.
There was a reasonably good chance that these beasts were not climbers. Mountain lions can climb, but coyotes can’t. Bears can climb, but wolves can’t. Squirrels are great at it, rabbits embarrass themselves trying. I might merely have to wait out these creatures until this strange twilight relented, as it had done before.
One of them began to climb.