Читать книгу Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5 - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 74

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, time 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.”