Odd Hours

TWENTY

A DOVE DESCENDING THROUGH CANDESCENT air, a bush bursting into fire and from the fire a voice, stars shifting from their timeless constellations to form new and meaningful patterns in the heavens…

Those were some of the signs upon which prophets historically had based their predictions and their actions. I received, instead, two stopped clocks.

If I am not just a freak whose extrasensory perceptions are the result of a few mutated synapses making strange connections in my brain, if my gift has a giver other than indifferent Nature and comes with a purpose, then the angel in charge of the Odd Thomas account must be operating on a shoestring budget.

Making my way through Magic Beach, toward the address I had found in the wallet of Sam Whittle-alias Sam Bittel, known to me affectionately as Flashlight Guy-I felt as if the fog drowning the town had flooded into my head. In that internal mist, my thoughts were as disconnected as, in the outer world, houses on the same block seemed to be separate islands, each a stranger to the other, in a white sea.

More traffic rolled through the quiet night than I had seen earlier.

Some of the vehicles were at such a distance, passing across the streets on which I traveled, that I could make out little more than the submerged glow of their headlights. Perhaps some were driven by ordinary men and women engaged upon the mundane tasks of daily life, with neither an unworthy thought nor an evil purpose among them.

At the first sight of any vehicle that shared a street with me, I hid behind the nearest cover and, from concealment, watched as it drifted past. One after another proved either to be labeled HARBOR DEPARTMENT or to be a police car.

Perhaps the police had put their entire motor pool on the streets because the cloaking fog facilitated burglary and other crimes. Call me paranoid, but I suspected the authorities were out in force only to support certain friends in the harbor department.

Through windshields and side windows, I glimpsed a few faces barely and queerly revealed in the glow of instrument panels and computer screens. None looked suitable for a poster celebrating the friendliness and selflessness of our public servants.

I felt as though extraterrestrial seeds, come quietly to Earth behind the curtains of fog, had grown swiftly into large pods that had been busily disgorging men who were not men.

Sam Whittle lived on Oaks Avenue, which was not grand enough to warrant being called an avenue, and was not shaded by oaks. Formerly called Founders Street, it had been renamed in honor of John Oaks, a sports star who never lived in Magic Beach or even visited, but whose cousin-or a woman who claimed to be his cousin-served on the city council.

Whittle lived in a bungalow as unremarkable as a cracker box, graced by no ornamental millwork, as plain as the fog that embraced it. The front porch was unfurnished, the yard devoid of landscape lighting, and the back porch as empty as the front.

No light brightened any window. No vehicle stood in the carport.

At the back door, I took a laminated driver’s license from Sam Whittle’s wallet and used it to loid the lock. The deadbolt had not been engaged, and when the license pressed back the latch, the door swung inward with a faint creak of hinges.

For a moment I remained on the porch, letting the fog precede me, searching the perfect darkness within, listening for the telltale sound of an impatient adversary shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he waited for the fly to come into the web.

Warily I stepped across the threshold. I left the door open for the moment, to facilitate sudden flight.

The digital clocks on the oven and the microwave had not frozen at a minute until midnight, but neither did the green glow of those numbers alleviate the gloom.

I smelled some kind of whiskey, and I hoped that it didn’t come to me on the exhalations of a man with a gun.

When I held my breath, I heard nothing-except perhaps another man holding his breath.

Finally I committed. I closed the door behind me.

Had someone been in the room, he would have switched on a light just then, and I would have seen my fate in the muzzle of his gun.

Perhaps I had done more damage to Flashlight Guy than he had done to me, requiring him to visit a hospital emergency room for a few stitches in the scalp. The suturing would not have taken long, but the emergency-admissions clerk would have required him to fill out, read, and sign six pounds of paperwork, including ninety legal disclaimers and liability-release forms; thereafter, they might keep him an hour or two for observation. In any case, he would be home soon.

Counseling myself to be out of this house in five minutes or less, I switched on Annamaria’s flashlight, with which I had led the way from her apartment into the garage below it.

Narrowing the beam with two spread fingers, I sectioned the room-a kitchen-left to right. The blade of light, in the fourth slice, found the source of the whiskey smell.

A bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass stood on the dinette table. The cap was off the bottle, and the glass held bourbon that appeared to have been watered down, perhaps by melted ice.

Another glass lay on its side. A small puddle of spilled bourbon glistened on the table.

The evidence suggested Whittle had returned home after regaining consciousness, and had left again in too much of a hurry to clean up the spill.

Two chairs stood away from the table. Before leaving, the drinkers had not taken time to tuck the chairs where they belonged.

A pair of unlaced men’s shoes were under the table, one lying on its side. Whittle could have changed shoes before leaving. Or he might still be here.

Because vinyl blinds had been drawn down tight at every window, I stopped pinching the flashlight beam and let it flourish.

A narrow hallway led from the kitchen past a living room full of lifeless furniture, where the draperies were drawn shut and where no art adorned the walls.

I had been in the house approximately one minute.

Across the hall from the living room lay a study with a couch, a desk, a chair, bookshelves. Here, too, the blinds allowed no view of the night.

The desk top had been swept bare. The bookshelves were empty.

I suspected that this place had been rented furnished and that Sam Whittle had not lived here more than a few weeks, having made no plans to settle in long-term.

Nevertheless, I wanted to search the desk drawers, although not until I determined Whittle was not here, either awake or sleeping.

In the final room, the bedclothes were disheveled. A pillow had fallen to the floor.

On the carpet, a damaged earthworm slowly writhed. It must have been brought in on someone’s shoe or pants leg. If it had been there more than a little while, it would already have died.

Outside, a truck engine growled in the distance and swiftly approached. I switched off the flashlight, although the windows were covered.

The vehicle seemed to take forever to pass, but eventually the engine noise faded.

When I switched on the flashlight, the dying earthworm had nearly finished flexing.

Although the house was small, I felt that I was a long way from an outside door and a quick escape.

I clicked off the light again, drew open a set of draperies, and unlatched the double-hung window. Concerned that the wood might be swollen in the humid night, I was relieved when the bottom sash slid up with little noise.

I closed the window but did not lock it. I pulled the draperies across the window before switching on the flashlight again.

Two minutes.

The sliding doors of the closet were shut. I disliked turning my back on them.

Yet intuition drew me toward the bathroom. The gap at the base of that door admitted no light from the other side; but I have not survived by ignoring intuition.

When I put my hand on the knob, a shiver of trepidation climbed my spine, from sacrum to topmost vertebrae, and it seemed like a worm wriggled in the very axis on which my head turned.

Without realizing what I was doing, I had raised my left hand to my chest. Through the sweatshirt and the T-shirt, I could feel the thimble-size bell that hung from the silver chain around my neck.

I turned the knob. The door opened inward. No one flung himself at me or struck out.

The flashlight played across the surfaces of a bathroom from the 1940s: a field of glossy white ceramic tiles on the floor, enhanced with inlays of small pastel-green tiles, the grout cracked with age and dirty; a reversal of that scheme on the walls, a pale-green field punctuated by white inlays.

From directly ahead came a silvery splash of flashlight flaring off a mirror, then my reflection uplighted by the beam bouncing off the floor.

To my left a shower stall featured a frosted-glass door in an aluminum frame crusted with white corrosion.

To my right lay a bathtub, and in the tub a dead man languished, he who had been Flashlight Guy.

The shock of such a discovery would provide the ideal moment for an assailant to strike. Glancing at myself in the mirror, I saw with relief that no one loomed in the bedroom behind me.

Sharing this small space with a corpse, I wanted more light than the flashlight could provide. A shutter covered the only window in the bathroom, so I risked switching on the overhead light.

Sam Whittle had died in a sitting position. He remained that way because his shirt collar was snared on the hot-water faucet. His head lolled to the left.

Duct tape sealed his mouth, and something-most likely a rag-bulged behind it. They had gagged him because they had not killed him quickly.

His wrists had been taped together in front of him, and his shoeless feet had been fettered at the ankles with tape, as well.

Bathed in blood, he apparently had been shot once in each leg, once in each arm, and-after writhing not unlike a dying worm-had finally been shot in the forehead.

In the cauldron tub, he was as fearsome as any witch’s brew.

A starburst hemorrhage obscured his left eye, but the right stared at me, wide in the expression of disbelief with which he must have regarded his murderer. He had not expected death to come in the form of whoever had killed him.

No matter how many dead bodies one has discovered-and I have found more of them than has the average fry cook-the sight instantly focuses the mind, draws the nerves taut, and puts a sharp point on instinct.

Almost three minutes.

When I glanced at the mirror again and saw a man behind me, I ducked and turned and punched.