could speak, they didn’t have to ponder that choice in a soliloquy.
Wedged in the first crotch of the tree, I soon began to feel foolish. As a card-carrying member of the human species, I have within me a bottomless well of foolishness and a kind of perverse thirst for it.Just because I’d never met a spirit with the capacity to deceive didn’t mean that all of them would, for the rest of my life, prove to be incapable of steering me wrong.
The lingering dead are generally a bummed-out bunch, more often than not tethered to the place where they died. They aren’t able to zip off to the multiplex to catch the latest Hollywood comedy of ill manners and to enjoy a thirty-dollar bag of free-range popcorn cooked in government-approved fish oil. After years of constant worrying about what waits for them on the Other Side, after clinging for so long to this world in the hope of seeing their murderers brought to justice, they really need some fun.
I could picture those two spirits, the woman and the horse, racing across Roseland, laughing heartily—if silently—at how easily they conned gullible Odd Thomas into scampering up a tree, sheltering there, and shivering in anticipation of a nonexistent boogeyman, when in fact the worst thing I really had to fear was being pooped upon by a bird on a higher branch.
Then the boogeyman arrived.
Boogey
men
.
The first indication that I had not been duped by a ghost came when the faint bleachy smell sliced through the foliage, adding its sharp edge to the soft fragrances of the oak bark and the green leaves and the weather-split acorns that still hung like damaged ornaments in the tree.
Although the ozone odor was far less pungent here than in the stable, it was no less out of place. In the open air, it wasn’t as likely to intensify to the degree that it did in a closed room. But I had little doubt that, just as before, this smell was a herald of something weirder and more dangerous than spirits of the dead.
A swift change in the quality of light solidified my expectation of another encounter with the stinky pack that could see in the dark.The golden morning sunshine twinkling in the gaps between the leaves became yellow-orange as its angle of origin shifted east to west.
I might not be able to understand the inscrutable stuff that half the people I meet say to me, but I am reliably dead-on when I anticipate mayhem. If I could find a national competition of confused and paranoid psychics, I would win the trophy and retire.
Carpeted with the small, oval, dry leaves of the live oaks, the woods didn’t allow any living thing to pass through quietly. Anyway, the pack that had hoped to extract me from the feed bin was not in the least concerned with stealth. They arrived in a blundering rush, so boisterously tramping across the sheddings of the trees that the crunching-crackling masked any snarling and snorting in which they might have been engaged.
I squinted this way and that, through the layered foliage, but what limited views I had of the ground revealed nothing useful about the recent arrivals. The oaks threw down more darkness than before, and the jack-o’-lantern light did not thrust through the limbs in crisp blades as had the morning sun, but fluttered through, fitful and sullen, as if a breeze that I could not feel fanned flames that I could not see, blowing reflections of fire through the woods.
Of the pack, nothing was visible except shadowy shapes, some of them swift but others lurching, all of them agitated and seeming to be urgently seeking something. Most likely they were not searching for maidens of good reputation to marry and to have children who would spend long evenings with them, hearthside, playing flutes and violins in family musicales.
Both the lithe and the clumsy among them followed the same erratic path through the oaks, as though they were crazed, weaving away to the east, to the north, then south. Their frantic progress was easy to track by the
Wedged in the first crotch of the tree, I soon began to feel foolish. As a card-carrying member of the human species, I have within me a bottomless well of foolishness and a kind of perverse thirst for it.Just because I’d never met a spirit with the capacity to deceive didn’t mean that all of them would, for the rest of my life, prove to be incapable of steering me wrong.
The lingering dead are generally a bummed-out bunch, more often than not tethered to the place where they died. They aren’t able to zip off to the multiplex to catch the latest Hollywood comedy of ill manners and to enjoy a thirty-dollar bag of free-range popcorn cooked in government-approved fish oil. After years of constant worrying about what waits for them on the Other Side, after clinging for so long to this world in the hope of seeing their murderers brought to justice, they really need some fun.
I could picture those two spirits, the woman and the horse, racing across Roseland, laughing heartily—if silently—at how easily they conned gullible Odd Thomas into scampering up a tree, sheltering there, and shivering in anticipation of a nonexistent boogeyman, when in fact the worst thing I really had to fear was being pooped upon by a bird on a higher branch.
Then the boogeyman arrived.
Boogey
men
.
The first indication that I had not been duped by a ghost came when the faint bleachy smell sliced through the foliage, adding its sharp edge to the soft fragrances of the oak bark and the green leaves and the weather-split acorns that still hung like damaged ornaments in the tree.
Although the ozone odor was far less pungent here than in the stable, it was no less out of place. In the open air, it wasn’t as likely to intensify to the degree that it did in a closed room. But I had little doubt that, just as before, this smell was a herald of something weirder and more dangerous than spirits of the dead.
A swift change in the quality of light solidified my expectation of another encounter with the stinky pack that could see in the dark.The golden morning sunshine twinkling in the gaps between the leaves became yellow-orange as its angle of origin shifted east to west.
I might not be able to understand the inscrutable stuff that half the people I meet say to me, but I am reliably dead-on when I anticipate mayhem. If I could find a national competition of confused and paranoid psychics, I would win the trophy and retire.
Carpeted with the small, oval, dry leaves of the live oaks, the woods didn’t allow any living thing to pass through quietly. Anyway, the pack that had hoped to extract me from the feed bin was not in the least concerned with stealth. They arrived in a blundering rush, so boisterously tramping across the sheddings of the trees that the crunching-crackling masked any snarling and snorting in which they might have been engaged.
I squinted this way and that, through the layered foliage, but what limited views I had of the ground revealed nothing useful about the recent arrivals. The oaks threw down more darkness than before, and the jack-o’-lantern light did not thrust through the limbs in crisp blades as had the morning sun, but fluttered through, fitful and sullen, as if a breeze that I could not feel fanned flames that I could not see, blowing reflections of fire through the woods.
Of the pack, nothing was visible except shadowy shapes, some of them swift but others lurching, all of them agitated and seeming to be urgently seeking something. Most likely they were not searching for maidens of good reputation to marry and to have children who would spend long evenings with them, hearthside, playing flutes and violins in family musicales.
Both the lithe and the clumsy among them followed the same erratic path through the oaks, as though they were crazed, weaving away to the east, to the north, then south. Their frantic progress was easy to track by the
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