Odd Thomas Read online

  Twice I glanced back toward the open door to the hallway but didn’t see myself on either occasion. Nevertheless, I experienced that sudden gyroscopic spin, as before, and I was again churned out of that strange chamber—

  —this time into the hot July afternoon, where I found myself walking out of the shadows under the carport, into sunshine that stabbed like fistfuls of golden needles at my eyes.

  I halted, squinted against the glare, and retreated to the gloom.

  The profound silence that reigned in the house did not extend beyond those walls. A dog barked lazily in the distance. An old Pontiac with a knocking engine and a squealing fan belt passed in the street.

  Certain that I had spent no more than a minute in the black room, I consulted my wristwatch again. Apparently I had been not only cast out of the house but also five or six minutes into the future.

  Out in the half-burnt yard and in the bristling weeds along the chain-link fence between this property and the next, cicadas buzzed, buzzed, as though the sunlit portion of the world were plagued by myriad short circuits.

  Many questions arose in my mind. None of them concerned either the benefits of a career in tires or the financial strategy by which a twenty-year-old short-order cook might best begin to prepare for his retirement at sixty-five.

  I wondered if a man living behind a perpetual half-wit smile, a man incapable of keeping a neat house, a man conflicted enough to split his reading time between skin magazines and romance novels, could be a closet supergenius who, with electronic components from Radio Shack, would be able to transform one room of his humble home into a time machine. Year by year, weird experience has squeezed all but a few drops of skepticism from me, but the supergenius explanation didn’t satisfy.

  I wondered if Fungus Man was really a man at all—or something new to the neighborhood.

  I wondered how long he had lived here, who he pretended to be, and what the hell his intentions were.

  I wondered if the black room might be not a time machine but something even stranger than that. The time-related occurrences might be nothing more than side effects of its primary function.

  I wondered how long I was going to stand in the shade of the sagging carport, brooding about the situation instead of doing something.

  The door between the carport and the kitchen, through which I had initially entered the house, had automatically locked behind me when I had first gone inside. Again I popped the latch bolt with my laminated driver’s license, pleased to know that finally I was getting something back for the state income taxes that I had paid.

  In the kitchen, the browning banana peel continued to shrivel on the cutting board. No time-traveling housemaid had attended to the dirty dishes in the sink.

  Soft-core pornography and romance novels still littered the living room, but when I had crossed halfway to the hallway arch, I stopped abruptly, struck by what had changed.

  I could hear normally. My footsteps had crackled the ancient linoleum in the kitchen, and the swinging door to the living room had squeaked on unoiled hinges. That vortex of silence no longer sucked all sound out of the house.

  The air, which had been freezing, was now merely cool. And getting warmer.

  The singular foul odor that smelled like not-exactly-burning-electrical-cord blended with not-exactly-ammonia-coal-dust-nutmeg had grown far more pungent than before but no easier to identify.

  Ordinary instinct, rather than any sixth sense, told me not to proceed to the black room. In fact, I felt an urgent need to retreat from the nearby hallway arch.

  I returned to the kitchen and hid behind the swinging door, holding it open two inches to see from whom, if anyone, I had fled.

  Only seconds after I had reached concealment, bodachs swarmed out of the hallway into the living room.

  TWELVE

  A GROUP OF BODACHS ON THE MOVE SOMETIMES brings to mind a pack of stalking wolves. On other occasions they remind me of a pride of slinking cats.

  Pouring through the hallway arch into the living room, this particular swarm had an unnerving insectile quality. They exhibited the cautiously questing yet liquid-swift progress of a colony of cockroaches.

  They came in roachlike numbers, too. Twenty, thirty, forty: They quivered into the room as silent and as black as shadows but, unlike shadows, they were untethered from any entities that might have cast them.

  To the ill-fitted front door, to the poorly caulked living-room windows, they streamed as if they were billows of soot drawn by a draft. Through crack and chink, they fled the house, into the sun-drenched afternoon of Camp’s End.

  Still they swarmed out of the hallway: fifty, sixty, seventy, and more. I had never before encountered so many bodachs at one time.

  Although, from my position in the kitchen, I couldn’t see around the living-room archway and down the hall, I knew where the intruders must have entered the house. They had not arisen spontaneously from among the gray dust balls and the moldering socks under Fungus Man’s unmade bed. Nor had they manifested out of a boogeyman-infested closet, out of a bathroom faucet, from the toilet bowl. They had arrived in the house by way of the black room.

  They seemed eager to leave this place behind them and to explore Pico Mundo—until one of them separated from the churning swarm. It abruptly halted in the center of the living room.

  In the kitchen, I considered that no available cutlery, no toxic household cleanser, no weapon known to me would wound this beast that had no substance. I held my breath.

  The bodach stood so hunched that its hands, if they were hands, dangled at its knees. Turning its lowered head from side to side, it scanned the carpet for the spoor of its prey.

  No troll, crouched in the darkness beneath its bridge, relishing the scent of a child’s blood, had ever looked more malevolent.

  At the gap between jamb and door, my left eye felt pinched, as though my curiosity had become the serrated jaws of a vise that held me immobile even when it seemed wise to exit at a sprint.

  As others of its kind continued to roil and ripple past it, my nemesis rose from its crouch. The shoulders straightened. The head lifted, turned slowly left, then right.

  I regretted using peach-scented shampoo, and suddenly I could smell the meaty essence that the greasy smoke from the griddle had deposited upon my skin and hair. A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse.

  The all but featureless, ink-black bodach had the suggestion of a snout but no visible nostrils, no apparent ears, and if it had eyes, I could not discern them. Yet it searched the living room for the source of whatever scent or sound had snared its attention.

  The creature appeared to focus on the door to the kitchen. As eyeless as Samson in Gaza, it nevertheless detected me.

  I had studied the story of Samson in some detail, for he was a classic example of the suffering and the dark fate that can befall those who are…gifted.

  Standing very erect now, taller than me, the bodach was an imposing figure in spite of its insubstantiality. Its bold poise and a quality of arrogance in the lift of its head suggested that I was to it as the mouse is to the panther, that it had the power to strike me dead in an instant.

  Pent-up breath swelled in my lungs.

  The urge to flee became almost overpowering, but I remained frozen for fear that if the bodach had not for certain seen me, then even the small movement of the swinging door would bring it at a run.

  Grim expectation made seconds seem like minutes—and then to my surprise, the phantom slumped into a crouch once more and loped away with the others. With the suppleness of black silk ribbon, it slipped between window sash and sill, into sunlight.

  I blew out my sour breath and sucked sweet air, watching as a final score of bodachs spilled through the hallway arch.

  When these last foul spirits had departed for the Mojave heat, I returned to the living room. Cautiously.

  At least a hundred of them had passed through this room. More likely, there had been half
again that many.

  In spite of all that traffic, not one page of any magazine or romance novel had been ruffled. Their passage had left no slightest impression in the nap of the carpet.

  At one of the front windows, I peered out at the blighted lawn and the sun-scorched street. As far as I could determine, none of the recently departed pack lingered in the neighborhood.

  The unnatural chill in this small house had gone the way of the bodachs. The desert day penetrated the thin walls until every surface in the living room seemed to be as radiant as the coils of an electric heater.

  During their passage, that tumult of purposeful shadows had left no stain on the hallway walls. No trace of the burning-electrical-cord smell remained, either.

  For the third time, I stepped up to that doorway.

  The black room was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  BEYOND THE THRESHOLD LAY AN ORDINARY chamber, not infinite in its dimensions, as it had seemed earlier, measuring no more than twelve by fourteen feet.

  A single window looked out through the branches of a lacy melaleuca that screened much of the sunlight. Nevertheless, I could see well enough to determine that no source existed for a sullen red light either in the center of this humble space or in any corner.

  The mysterious power that had transformed and controlled this room—casting me minutes back, and then forward, in time—was no longer in evidence.

  Apparently, this served as Fungus Man’s study. A bank of four-drawer filing cabinets, an office chair, and a gray metal desk with a laminated imitation-wood-grain top were the only furnishings.

  Side by side on the wall opposite the desk hung three black-and-white, poster-size photographs that appeared to have been printed on a draftsman’s digital plotter. They were head shots, portraits of men—one with feverish eyes and a gleeful smile, the other two glowering in the gloom.

  All three were familiar, but I could at first put a name to only the one with the smile: Charles Manson, the vicious manipulator whose fantasies of revolution and race war had exposed a cancer at the core of the flower-power generation and had led to the demise of the Age of Aquarius. He had carved a swastika on his forehead.

  Whoever the other two might be, they didn’t have the look of either Vegas comics or famous philosophers.

  Perhaps my imagination, as much as the melaleuca-filtered sunlight, imparted a faint silvery luminescence to each man’s intense gaze. This glow reminded me of the milky radiance that informs the hungry glare of animate corpses in movies about the living dead.

  In part to alter the quality of those eyes, I switched on the overhead light.

  The dust and disorder that characterized the rest of the house were not in evidence here. When he crossed this threshold, Fungus Man left his slovenliness behind and became a paragon of neatness.

  The file cabinets proved to contain meticulously kept folders filled with articles clipped from publications and downloaded from the Internet. Drawer after drawer contained dossiers on serial killers and mass murderers.

  The subjects ranged from Victorian England’s Jack the Ripper to Osama bin Laden, for whom Hell had prepared a special suite of fiery rooms. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Charles Whitman, the sniper who killed sixteen in Austin, Texas, in 1966. John Wayne Gacy: He liked to dress up as a clown at children’s parties, had his picture taken at a political event with First Lady Rosalyn Carter, and buried numerous dismembered bodies in his backyard and under his house.

  A particularly thick file had been assembled for Ed Gein, who had been the inspiration for both Norman Bates in Psycho and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Gein had enjoyed eating soup from a human skull and had fashioned a fancy belt from the nipples of his victims.

  The unknown dangers of the black room had not daunted me, but here was a known evil, entirely comprehensible. Cabinet by cabinet, my chest tightened with dread and my hands trembled, until I slammed shut a file drawer and resolved to open no more of them.

  Memory freshened by what I’d seen in those folders, I could now put names to the poster-size photographs that flanked Charles Manson.

  A portrait of Timothy McVeigh hung to the right of Manson. McVeigh had been convicted and executed for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, where 168 people were killed in 1995.

  To the left hung Mohammed Atta, who had flown an airliner into one of the World Trade Center towers, killing thousands. I had seen no evidence that Fungus Man sympathized with the cause of radical Islamic fascists. As with Manson and McVeigh, he apparently admired Atta for the terrorist’s cruel vision, brutal actions, and accomplishments in the service of evil.

  This room was less of a study than it was a shrine.

  Having seen enough, too much, I wanted to get out of the house. I yearned to return to Tire World, breathe the scent of rubber ready for the road, and think about what to do next.

  Instead, I sat in the office chair. I am not squeamish, but I cringed slightly when I put my hands on the arms of the chair where his hands might have rested.

  On the desk were a computer, a printer, a brass lamp, and a day-date calendar. Not a speck of dust or lint could be seen on any surface.

  From this perch, I surveyed the study, trying to understand how it could have become the black room and then could have reverted to this ordinary space again.

  No residual St. Elmo’s fire of supernatural energy glimmered along the metal edges of the file cabinets. No otherworldly presences revealed themselves.

  For a while, this room had been transformed into…a portal, a doorway between Pico Mundo and somewhere far stranger, by which I do not mean Los Angeles or even Bakersfield. Perhaps for a while this house had been a train station between our world and Hell, if Hell exists.

  Or if I had reached the bloody red light at the center of that otherwise perfect darkness, perhaps I would have found myself on a planet in a remote arm of the galaxy, where bodachs ruled. Lacking a boarding pass, I had instead been flung into the living room and the past, then into the carport and the future.

  Of course I examined the possibility that what I had seen could have been mere delusion. I might be as crazy as a laboratory rat that has been fed a diet of psychosis-inducing toxins and forced to watch TV “reality” shows that explore in detail the daily lives of washed-up supermodels and aging rock stars.

  From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.

  I saw no reason to search the study for a hidden switch that might convert it again into the black room. Logic suggested that the formidable power needed to open that mysterious doorway had been projected not from here but from the other side, wherever that might be.

  Most likely Fungus Man was unaware that his sanctum served not merely as a catalogued repository for his homicidal fantasies but also as a terminal admitting bodachs to a holiday of blood. Without my sixth sense, perhaps he could sit here, happily working on one of his grisly files, and not be conscious of the ominous transformation of the room or of the arriving hordes of demonic entities.

  From nearby came a tick-tick-tick, a bone-on-bone rattle that brought to mind Halloween images of ambulatory skeletons, and then a brief scuttling sound.

  I rose from the chair and listened, alert.

  Tickless seconds passed. A rattle-free half minute.

  A rat, perhaps, had stirred in the walls or attic, made sick and restless by the heat.

  I sat once more and opened the desk drawers one by one.

  In addition to pencils, pens, paper clips, a stapler, scissors, and other mundane items, I found two recent bank statements and a checkbook. All three were addressed to Robert Thomas Robertson at this house in Camp’s End.

  Good-bye, Fungus Man; hello, Bob.

  Bob Robertson didn’t have the necessary malevolent ring for the name of a would-be mass murderer. It sounded more like a jovial car salesman.

  The four-page statement from B
ank of America reported upon a savings account, two six-month certificates of deposit, a money-market account, and a stock-trading account. The combined value of all Robertson’s assets at Bank of America amounted to $786,542.10.

  I scanned the figure three times, certain that I must be misreading the placement of the comma and the decimal point.

  The four-page statement from Wells Fargo Bank, accounting for investments in its care, showed a combined value of $463,125.43.

  Robertson’s handwriting was sloppy, but he faithfully kept a running balance in his checkbook. The current available resources in this account totaled $198,648.21.

  That a man with liquid assets of nearly one and a half million dollars should make his home in a shabby, sweltering casita in Camp’s End seemed downright perverse.

  If I had this much green at my command, I might continue to cook short-order now and then purely for the artistic satisfaction, but never for a living. The tire life might not in the least appeal to me any longer.

  Perhaps Robertson required few luxuries because he found all the pleasure he needed in ceaseless bloody fantasies that gouted through his imagination.

  A sudden frenzied flapping-rattling almost brought me up from the chair again, but then a sharp and repeated skreek identified the source as crows pecking out their turf on the roof. They come out early on summer mornings, before the heat is insufferable, spend the afternoon in leafy bowers, and venture out again when the gradually retreating sun begins to lose some of its blistering power.

  I am not afraid of crows.

  In the checkbook register, I pored back through three months of entries but found only the usual payments to utilities, credit-card companies, and the like. The sole oddity was that Robertson had also written a surprising number of checks to cash.

  During the past month alone, he had withdrawn a total of $32,000 in $2,000 and $4,000 increments. For the past two months, the total reached $58,000.

  Even with his prodigious appetite, he couldn’t eat that much Burke Bailey’s ice cream.

  Evidently he had expensive tastes, after all. And whatever indulgence he allowed himself, it was one that he couldn’t purchase openly with checks or credit cards.