As a novelist but also as a man who has never tried to extinguish the child in himself, I love spectacle. Abandoning wine and cheese and Mr. Dickens, I managed to ascend from the armchair with my usual strained dignity and made my way to the front door and then onto the porch.
Never in my considerable experience had a sky been so crazed with storm light, great bolts beyond counting, crackling across the heavens in curious patterns, one bolt arcing to the next, revealing the clouds in such a way as to make it appear that they were in fact the crumbled and tumbling remains of some great and ancient stone city sliding down a mountainside to bury Pico Mundo in ruins. When the rain came a moment later, it fell in torrents that the word cloudburst cannot begin to describe. Throughout the rainfall, the lightning did not cease, nor the thunder—until the entire spectacle ended in an instant. Stunned, I looked at my watch and saw that it was 11:22 to the second. The entire storm lasted precisely three minutes. An hour later, when I returned to the porch, the sky had entirely cleared, and an infinity of stars shone brightly. I found that abbreviated tempest remarkable.
I do not often sleep well. Sleep seems to me to be a preview of death, and I do not like to be reminded of that coming attraction.
At one o’clock in the morning, in the darkness of that dismal May, as I sat reading Bleak House, Wyatt and Karla Porter rang the doorbell and brought me news of the dear boy’s death. I almost died myself to hear of it. I wanted to die, and for once not by eating myself into the grave. We held one another in silence for a moment; I am large enough to be hugged by two at once. When I could speak, I asked when Oddie had passed, but then I answered the question before they had a chance to respond—“It was at eleven-nineteen”—and they confirmed my intuition.
We sat around the kitchen table for a while, with coffee and memories, as we would do often in the days that followed. More than once, I put the lie to my image as a hard-boiled writer of tough-guy mysteries when I succumbed to choking grief.
After Wyatt and Karla left, with night yet remaining and with the dawn unwelcome, I could not read Dickens or taste the wine or want the cheese. I went into my office, intending to unlock the metal cabinet in which I kept the seven manuscripts that Oddie had written, the accounts of his adventures, memoirs beginning with the story of the shootings at the Green Moon Mall and the death of Stormy.
He had written much in a little time, for he was as gifted with language and story as with his sixth sense, though because of his singular humility, he would never have taken such praise seriously. For obvious reasons, the seven books were not to be published until his death.
I didn’t unlock the cabinet that night, for when I entered my office, I found my computer humming, though I had switched it off hours before. The printer pumped out pages, of what I could not imagine.
Mystified, I took the stack already in the tray and found that in my hands I held his eighth and final manuscript. I am certain you can imagine that my reaction included amazement and astonishment, but exceeded them. Amazement and astonishment express the momentary overwhelming of the mind by something beyond expectation. Amazement is an emotional response, astonishment an intellectual one. Wonder, yes, in wonder I waited for the manuscript to finish printing, and in wonder I carried it to the kitchen, where I brewed another pot of coffee and sat to read in another fortified chair.
There was no title page, because he had never titled his books. He left that to me. Instead, the top sheet had this simple message: Sir, here is the last of it, a pile of strange pages. You will think they can’t have been written in the few hours since my death, but I do not live in time anymore. I can accomplish a lifetime of work in what would seem, from your side of the veil, to be mere minutes. I know that you will take my passing hard, because you are a kind man with a tender heart. But don’t mourn for me. As you will learn from this story, all is well. The promise that mattered has been kept, and I have found work that, believe it or not, I enjoy even a great deal more than being a fry cook at the Pico Mundo Grille. I will miss you terribly until I see you.
—Odd Thomas.
Amazement, astonishment, wonder, and now awe. In awe, one’s mind yields to something grand in character, formidable in power. I yielded without reservation.
Terrible Chester was not a cat who found it necessary or even just pleasant to console or be consoled. But as I sat at the kitchen table, reading my beloved friend’s manuscript, Chester sprang into my generous lap and curled there and slept until I turned the final page.
As with the other seven memoirs, I have now changed a few of the names. For instance, those enemies of Edie Fischer who do not already know her real name should not be told it, and I concocted this nom de guerre to conceal her true identity in both this volume and in the one that came before it, Deeply Odd. I made no other alterations.
For this final book, I never considered any title but Saint Odd. Oh, how he would dislike the saint part! He would want me to call it The Fry Cook Meets His End or Odd as Ever, or perhaps Fumbling My Way to Eternity. But what other word so well fits a young man who would give his life to save a friend or even an innocent stranger, and who, in giving it, would think he had not done enough?
I have his ashes in a mortuary urn. I keep them on the mantel above the living-room fireplace, where Stormy’s ashes are in an urn beside his. I look up at them from time to time when I am reading, and I smile to think that he would make jokes about the hard-boiled mystery writer being a sentimental basket case. I carry in my wallet the fortune-teller’s card that he carried in his—YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER—and I dare to believe that it means not just Odd and Stormy, but all of us.
This book is dedicated to Frank Redman, who has more than once reminded me of Odd Thomas.
By Dean Koontz