Saint Odd (Odd Thomas 7)

Directly ahead, the ground-floor hallway led to the kitchen at the back of the house. Living-room archway to the right. Past the archway, stairs also on the right. One flight visible, and the landing between floors. Two more doors on the right. Four doors on the left. Kitchen door closed at the farther end of the hall.

Silence. No blood on the floor. The fourth cultist had escaped the living room without being wounded.

I did not want to enter rooms to clear them and risk being cleared myself by a barrage fired through a window, felled by my own trick. The fourth cultist might be anywhere in the house … or he might be stalking me instead from outside.

By pushing a door open wide, I could scan most of a room and be reasonably content that no one lurked there. But the moment in the doorway, scanning, was an instant on the brink of death.

Yeats, the poet, wrote, Many times man lives and dies / Between his two eternities. The eternity before birth and the eternity after. Only in life do we die many times, from the mortal pain of loss and from all the griefs and fears with which this world can assail us. I wouldn’t die in every doorway, perhaps only in one. I would, however, expect to die in each, and the expectation of death could, much like psychic magnetism, draw it to me.

Since I had returned to Pico Mundo, my usually keen intuition had been sharper and more reliable than ever. If I could not trust it without reservation on this night of nights, then when?

I passed doors without determining what lay behind them, passed rooms and perhaps a closet, and most likely a half-bath. At the third room on the left, I stopped. The door was neither closed nor open wide, but ajar. I stood by the jamb on the left and thrust the door open. When I heard something other than gunfire, I leaned forward and risked my face.

A study. Shelves of books. Sofa. Armchair and footstool. A handsome mahogany desk.

The fourth cultist stood behind the desk, at the farther end of the room. A woman. Dressed all in black like the others. She had put aside the hot ski mask, as well as the goggles that were of no use here. She stood with the stock of the rifle firmly in the crook of her right shoulder, aiming at the doorway. Perhaps what I had heard was her thin mewl of frustration, which issued from her again, as she worked the two-stage trigger without success. She pushed down repeatedly on the dual-paddle bolt catch, but either it failed to send the locked bolt forward or the bolt wasn’t locked in the first place. Maybe she was out of ammunition. Whatever the case, she let loose a cry of vexation and threw the weapon at me, and it clattered to the floor short of the doorway.

I crossed the threshold, kicked the useless gun aside, and let her gaze into the muzzle of my combat rifle.

She preferred to stare at me, and with such hatred and anger that I could not doubt she wished me dead and by some method that would be intensely painful.

Returning her stare, I thought that my expression must have been a strange combination of dread and curiosity.

There might have been at least a bit of fear in her, too, because her contorted face reminded me of the faces of the drowned people in the submerged Pico Mundo of my dream.

But then it seemed that resignation took the place of rage. Her features relaxed. She shook her head. Wiped her face with one hand. Chewed her bottom lip for a moment. She let out a long sigh.

Regarding me now with weary indifference, she said, “Just do it already. Don’t toy with me.”

Although it is a cliché, appearances can be deceiving. Hers was so deceptive as to be fraud of the highest order. She was pretty, but her beauty alone was not the primary aspect of the deception. Skin so flawless that she wore no makeup, wide-set pellucid blue eyes that seemed incapable of guile, golden hair that an artist might bestow on paintings of angels, a brow so smooth it seemed never to have been furrowed by a negative emotion: She stood before me with an aura of childlike innocence that was belied only by the combat rifle with which she had tried to shoot me.

“Do it,” she repeated.

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Why do you care?”

“How old are you?”

She said nothing.

“You don’t belong in this,” I said.

“It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged.”

“With these maniacs?”

“They aren’t maniacs.”

“What are they, then?”

“Free,” she said.

“Free? Free from what?”

“From everything.”

“Freedom from everything is slavery.”

“Oh? What am I enslaved to?”

“The void.”

Her look of indifference was matched now by an insensibility in her voice that didn’t fit well with the words she chose. “Just kill me, asshole.”

I didn’t pull the trigger. “All this tonight … what’s it about?”

“Why do you care?”

“That’s what I do. It’s all I know. What’s the point of being here if we don’t care what happens?”

“The point is, there is no point.” Whether her apathy was real or feigned, I could not tell. “To be and then not be.” We stared at each other, as though the English we spoke was, in this instance, two different languages. Then she said, “Who are you?”

“Me? I’m nobody.”

“You’re somebody.”

“Just a guy.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “You’re him.”

“Nobody special.”

Another silence. If she really didn’t care how this ended, then it could end only in a way that would haunt me.

She said, “You can’t kill a girl, can you?”

“I’ve killed a few.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I wish it weren’t.”

“But not an unarmed girl.”

I didn’t confirm her suspicion.

She smiled. “See how it is?”

“How is it?”

“I know what free is,” she said. “You’re not free. If you were free, I’d be dead now.”

I understood her logic. It was the logic of the asylum.

“So I can just walk out of here,” she said.

“No. I can’t allow that.”

“Why not? You have to have a good reason. Your way of thinking requires good reasons.”

“You’re a murderer.”

“So are you,” she said.

“No. I kill. You murder.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I kill murderers.”

“Is this a riddle or something?”

“It’s just the truth.”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

With sorrow, I said, “No.”

After a silence, she said, “Now what?”

I indicated a door framed by bookshelves. “Maybe that’s a closet. Open it and show me.”

She did as I asked, and it was a walk-in closet.

“You’ll step in there,” I told her. “I’ll tip a chair under the knob to brace it, so you can’t get out. Then I’ll call the police.”

“What if I won’t?”

I thrust the rifle toward her. “Then I’ll have to hurt you.”

“Been established, hasn’t it? You won’t kill an unarmed girl.”

“No. But I’ll shoot to wound.”

She studied me, trying to calculate a way out.

“Get in the closet.”

She didn’t move.

“Get in the closet.”

When still she didn’t move, I squeezed off a three-shot burst past her left hip, into the shelves of books.

“Four inches,” I said. “That was the only difference between you walking normally or being crippled for the rest of your life.”

Again her words were too edgy for her apathetic tone. “How many girls have you murdered, choirboy?”

“Killed,” I corrected.

“How many? Are you ashamed to say how many?”