The Complete Odd Thomas 8-Book Bundle, page 217
She scowled. “Who’re you? What’re you doin’ in my house?”
“There’s a dead man—” I began.
“Yeah, Kurt. He moved in on me, moved in smooth as butter. I didn’t see the snake he was till too late. Bastard Kurt, stone dead now, sick bastard, stone dead.” She grinned as though I had told her that she’d won the lottery. “I chopped on him real good, damn if I didn’t. Me, useless old Roberta, I finally done it.” She appeared to be amazed that she had been capable of killing Kurt. “I chopped him like he weren’t but a rack of ribs. Wish I’d chopped him a couple hundred times, chopped him up and down, ’fore I killed him. Wish I’d had the nerve years ago.”
Apparently Stormy decided no threat existed here, or maybe she thought I looked ridiculous as I brandished the rolling pin, because she handed me the stainless-steel baton. The emotionally fragile Roberta, struggling with the manacle lock, had begun to cry. Stormy went to her, put a hand on her shoulder as though to console her, and relieved her of the keys.
Voice trembling more with anger than with fear, the blonde said, “I was on my way to work. It wasn’t even dawn yet. He came up behind me. It happened so fast.”
As Stormy examined the keys, Roberta explained herself through a veil of tears: “He brung this one other girl last year, just like he brung Kristen this mornin’. He beat me near to death ’cause I said just please let Hannah go. Hannah was her name. He kept her in this here same room. Treated her like she weren’t nothin’ but a thing. He broke that girl, just like he broke me, broke her bad.”
Stormy was having trouble finding the key to the manacle.
Trembling, alert for some sudden attack, Kristen said, “Where are the cops? Why didn’t you call the cops?”
“No cell-phone service out here,” I said.
“Use the house line.”
“There ain’t none,” Roberta declared, wiping away tears, still an unstable brew of emotions, phasing now from sorrow to anger in an instant. “The mean sonofabitch never let me have no phone. When he’d go out, he locked me down in the cellar, like you wouldn’t even lock up some dog.”
Stormy said, “Kurt had more keys than a prison warden, but none of them work.” She looked at me. “Why would he lead us here?”
“Vengeance, I guess. Even the wicked feel justified in wanting vengeance.”
I thought of the kitchen, the collection of “pigurines” and the needlework samplers that suggested a time before Kurt, when Roberta had evidently led a simple but happy life in this house. I recalled the moment when the framed samplers rattled against the walls and the pigs clinked against one another, as if in a mild earthquake—just as Kurt’s angry spirit had manifested.
Evidently my expression revealed my alarm, because Stormy said, “What’s wrong?”
Before I could reply, the spirit of Kurt rose into the room, as though for the past few minutes he’d been wandering and lost between the kitchen ceiling and the bedroom floor. Once more, he manifested with his mortal wounds, soaked in blood, a demonic figure around which the air was smoky, murky, as if he pulled with him some of the darkness from the realm of the dead where he belonged. Glaring at Roberta and then at me, he pointed repeatedly to the meat cleaver in his neck, as if I might have failed to notice it. Thrusting an accusatory finger at the woman who killed him, he looked equally furious and exasperated, having apparently reached the conclusion that I had the IQ of an amoeba.
“You’ve already gotten the justice you deserved,” I told him. “You don’t belong here anymore. Just move on.”
Roberta said, “Who’re you talkin’ to?”
Enraged by my failure to beat the woman to death with either the martial-arts baton or the rolling pin, Kurt pulled the cleaver from his neck and threw it at me. Because it wasn’t a real blade, only the idea of one, it passed harmlessly through me.
“You can’t do any more damage in this world,” I told him.
“Who’s he talkin’ to?” Roberta asked Stormy.
“Nobody,” Stormy said. “He’s just quirky. Are there other keys?”
“Quirky?” Kristen was alarmed by the possibility of an encounter with another homicidal lunatic. “What do you mean, quirky?”
“Peculiar,” Stormy replied. “But in a good way. He’s quirky but adorable.” To Roberta, she said again, “Are there any other keys?”
His head now seated firmly on his neck, face contorted by fury, Kurt raised his hands, and from his palms issued concentric pulses of energy visible to me but to no one else.
I said, “Uh-oh.”
Spirits lingering in this world have only one way to harm the rest of us. If their lives were marbled with many evil acts, if they are spiritually malignant to a sufficient degree, they are able to convert their demonic rage into destructive energy and vent it upon the inanimate.
Kurt was going poltergeist.
“There’s no point in this,” I counseled him. “All you’re doing is delaying the inevitable and ensuring yourself greater suffering when you finally cross over.”
“He’s weird,” Kristen said, referring to me.
“Quirky,” Stormy insisted.
Not susceptible to my charms, Kristen said, “Roberta! Are there other keys anywhere?”
Roberta felt her pockets, looked surprised, “Maybe these,” she said, producing a ring of ten or twelve keys.
The pulses of energy that Kurt emitted grew brighter, concentric ripples issuing from him faster, faster.
The bedroom door crashed shut before anyone could move toward it. Roberta dropped the new set of keys, hurried across the room, and wrenched the knob back and forth.
I scooped up the keys and tossed them to Stormy.
When the door wouldn’t relent, Roberta returned to us, shivering and shaking her right hand as if the doorknob had been freezing.
“There!” Stormy declared, having found the right key to unlock the manacle.
Freed, Kristen sprang at once off the bed, as though it were saturated with some pestilence infinitely more horrific than the black plague. Although Roberta had saved her life, she shied from the woman, too, as if not convinced that everything was as it seemed to be. Stormy and I excited her suspicion, as well. She ran to the door, but she had no more success with it than had Roberta.
Nightstand drawers opened of their own accord, slammed shut, slid open, shut, and now the dresser drawers, whispering on their slides, banging shut, banging, banging. A mahogany highboy spat out its drawers entirely, spilling their contents as they clattered to the floor.
Roberta’s stew of emotions—sorrow, anger, frantic gladness—had boiled down to a thick reduction of fear. She stood awestruck, turning this way and that, arguing against the clear evidence of her senses—“This ain’t happenin’, no way, no, no”—and raising her already bruised arms to ward off whatever missiles might come her way.
The six-foot length of chain fixed to the ringbolt on the bed frame rattled up from the mattress, weaving in the air as if it were a charmed serpent, the manacle like a cobra’s head poised to bite.
A ginger-jar nightstand lamp levitated, its cord taut. The plug pulled from the wall socket. The lamp flew past my head, shattering against a wall, showering Kristen with ceramic shards.
In spite of all their violent thrashing and vindictive wrath, poltergeists cannot control the malevolent energy that issues from them, cannot target anyone or aim with precision. They are able to harm us only by indirection, by ricochet, by the luckiest of lucky blows. If, however, a flung fireplace poker spears through your eye, through your brain, and out the back of your head, the fact that it found you by sheerest chance will not be much consolation.
Roberta began to scream and Kristen joined her, which seemed to inspire the late, unlamented Kurt to new heights of supernatural ire. The mattress flipped off the bed, and the coils of steel in the box springs sang as though something with a thousand claws plucked and strummed them. Emptied of all its drawers, the highboy lurched away from the wall, rocked to its left, rocked to its right, as if it were the Frankenstein’s monster of furniture, lumbering this way and that in search of a victim, before it suddenly rocketed to the ceiling with such force that it broke apart and brought down with it a hail of shattered plaster.
Over the cacophony, Stormy called to me: “Do something!”
“Do what?” I shouted.
“How would I know? I work in an ice-cream shop.”
“Do something!” Kristen demanded.
“I’m just a fry cook,” I lied. “I don’t know what’s happening here.”
The twanging steel coils in the box springs began to break free from their ties, unwinding as they tore loose, ripping through the covering fabric like baby snakes emerging from a nest, greeted by the manacle-and-chain serpent that still undulated like a cobra in the thrall of flute music.
Five
The ceiling joists creaked and shuddered. Cracks appeared in the plaster overhead, from which a powdery debris rained down upon us. Within the walls of the room, the studs groaned as though they might buckle under some tremendous weight, and underfoot the floor began to thrum, so that I thought the room might implode upon us.
Kurt’s angry spirit, a poltergeist of singular power unique in my experience, whirled like a tornado, careening around the debris-littered bedroom, vanishing into—and reappearing out of—the walls. He passed through the door, and when an instant later he rushed back into the bedroom, he split the door in two. The portion on hinges swung open, and the other half crashed to the floor.
None of us needed prompting. We rushed across the fallen half of the door, into the upstairs hallway, and sprinted toward the stairs. Retreating from a poltergeist is not cowardly any more than running with the bulls in Pamplona is courageous; the former is an act of reasoned prudence, and the latter is foolishness bordering on lunacy. I am pleased to report that, in my haste to escape Kurt’s wrathful spirit, I only considered muscling ahead of the three women, but in fact followed them through the door, down the stairs, and out of the house. Chivalry lives.
We departed by the front door and reached the yard in time to hear what sounded like second-floor windows exploding at the back of the house and a shower of glass raining upon the porch roof there. The thump-bang-rattle of Kurt’s postmortem temper tantrum continued in our absence, though I hoped that in spite of his singular power, he would be unable to follow us. Having initiated its frenzied destruction, the average poltergeist thrashes mindlessly until exhausted, whereupon it wanders off into whatever purgatorial zone serves as its retreat between our world and the next, perhaps for a while as confused as any living person with advanced dementia.
Roberta’s trembling right hand spidered across her face as if she expected to discover bleeding lacerations, and when she found nothing, she wrapped her pale bruised arms around herself, shivering as if the Mojave were as cold as the Alaskan tundra. “It’s him,” she said. “Ain’t no way it’s anythin’ else.”
“Him who?” Kristen asked. “What’re you talking about?”
“I chopped him with the cleaver, so he come back for revenge.”
“Came back from the dead?” Kristen said. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I believe in what I seen,” Roberta insisted.
“There’s a word for a destructive spirit,” I said. “Something like … polyanthus.”
“That’s a flower,” Stormy said.
“Or maybe it’s poltroon.”
“That’s a craven coward,” she said.
“Polonaise?”
“A Polish dance.”
“Well, I’m just a fry cook.”
The fracas on the second floor seemed to be winding down.
“Poltergeist,” said Roberta.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think that’s it.”
“That’s it, all right,” Stormy said.
“Poltergeist,” Roberta insisted.
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
Kristen looked at me as if I were a candidate for the Idiots’ Hall of Fame, which was a look that I had seen before on the faces of a number of pretty girls. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Of course it’s poltergeist.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.
“I don’t. We’re not talking about what happened up there. We’re just talking about a word.”
“Well,” I said, “if it wasn’t a pollinosis up there, then what was it?”
“Hay fever,” Stormy said, defining the word pollinosis.
“Poltergeist,” Roberta repeated. “But we ain’t never gonna say what it was, if we know what’s good for us.”
“Polonium,” I suggested.
Stormy said, “A radioactive element.”
The battered woman continued: “What we best say is Kurt done trashed the room while alive. Knocked me around some, too, give me all these bruises, black eye. Then he tried takin’ Kristen out to the shed, to the old cold cellar deep down under, where he done killed poor Hannah and hung her body, where he’d soon of killed and hung me, too. We say how I caught up with him, me all crazy with fear, and my mind snapped, and I chopped him to save Kristen.”
Beginning to shake violently again, Roberta broke into tears.
Kristen put an arm around her and said, “You saved me.”
In the house, all had gone quiet.
Before either of the women could start to wonder why Stormy and I had shown up in the first place, my girl said, “It’s over now. You two wait here. We’ll drive out to the highway, where there’s cell-phone service, and we’ll call the police.”
In my experience, the spirits of truly evil people didn’t linger long in this world, if at all. When they were reluctant to cross to the Other Side, they were soon taken across against their will, as if by a bill collector for some lender to whom they owed a big debt.
Because I couldn’t share that knowledge with these women without blowing my fry-cook cover, I worried that we were leaving them in a state of high anxiety. “Will you be all right here? The sun’s pretty hot. You could move onto the shade of the porch. It’ll be safe on the porch.”
“I’ll keep myself right here,” Roberta said, “and to hell with the porch.”
“It’s over now,” I assured them. “It really is. Or you could move into the shade of the cottonwoods. I mean, if you don’t think the porch is safe. But it is safe. The porch, I mean.”
Kristen regarded me with a mix of pity and exasperation. To Stormy, she said, “Do you usually drive or does he?”
“I will,” Stormy said. “Let’s go, Oddie.”
Stormy and I started toward the cottonwoods, but then I had to hurry back to Roberta to return her rolling pin. I didn’t look at Kristen again.
Six
While Stormy drove us to the fairground, I called Chief Wyatt Porter, who was something of a surrogate father to me, and told him what had happened, when, and where. As usual, he would do his best to keep me out of the official story.
In the fairground parking lot, Stormy wanted to sit in silence, with the windows up and the air conditioner running. We watched the late-afternoon light darkle from peach to apricot to cherry, and after a few minutes she closed her eyes, whereupon I looked not at the colorful western sky but at her.
Eventually she said, “When high school’s over and real life starts, can you go on being a fry cook?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“With everything … everything else in your life?”
“Because of everything else, being a fry cook keeps me sane.”
“Sooner or later, it’s all going to overwhelm you—what you see, what you can do, what you are.”
“I’m getting a better handle on it all the time,” I assured her. “If my messed-up parents couldn’t drive me crazy, I’m not going to go nuts just because I can see the lingering dead.”
“And have prophetic dreams.”
“Not a big deal.”
“And have psychic magnetism,” she said, referring to another gift of mine that played no role in that day’s adventure.
After a silence, I said, “Maybe what you’re really wondering is if eventually it’s all going to overwhelm you.”
“Maybe.”
“I’m not an easy date.”
She said nothing.
The next silence was excruciating, and I became the one who at last broke it. “What I want most of all isn’t you. What I want most of all is for you to have a happy life.”
Her thick eyelashes suddenly glistened with tears that she held back. “I really want that ice-cream shop of my own.”
“I bet you’ll have a chain of them.”
“This far in life, I’ve been nobody.”
“You’ve been somebody to me. You’re everything.”
“I want to be somebody, odd one. I want to have a business that I can be proud of, a place where people like to go. When people hear my name, I want them to think of ice cream. I want my name to make them happy, the way ice cream makes them happy.”
If I assured her that she would achieve her dream, I would be failing to provide her with the one thing that she demanded of me: the truth, whether it was easy or hard to hear. I could not see the future. If I happy-talked her through this moment, if I insisted that my paranormal gifts would only enhance our lives together and would all but guarantee her success, if I minimized the difficulty of my own struggles with my sixth sense, I would be lying to her.
At last I said, “What do you want to do?”
Without opening her eyes, she reached out to me, and we held hands as the desert darkened and the carnival on the midway painted the night with more color than the aurora borealis.
After a minute, she opened her eyes, smiled at me, and answered my question with seven words that were a welcome reprieve. “I want to go to the carnival.”
We ate snow cones with orange syrup, cheeseburgers, and jalapeño french fries. We rode not just the Tilt-a-Whirl but also the Whip, the Big Drop, and the Caterpillar. Neither of us threw up.
From time to time, I saw Mr. Presley wandering the midway. He was watching people eat the hot dogs, burgers, fried ice cream, fried Almond Joys, and french-fried butter that he could no longer consume.
