Saint Odd by Dean Koontz Page A

as they ripened toward their fate, to thrill at the imminence of their death by stroking them with hands and licking them with tongues that they could never feel. But not one of those featureless, shadowy connoisseurs of violence was in evidence.
    Without consciously making my way to Marigold Lane, I found myself on that familiar street, in a neighborhood where Victorian houses seemed to have been transported, entire blocks at a time, out of the eastern cities from which many of Pico Mundo’s oldest families had migrated during the early decades of the twentieth century.
    In the still red but fading light, I pulled to the curb in front of the house owned by Rosalia Sanchez. For a few years, when I lived in the small studio apartment above her detached garage, she had been my landlady and my friend.
    She would be sixty-five now, with that saintly face worn by so much caring for others, by loss and grief, by waiting patiently for what she would never receive in this life.
    Back in 2001, she had awakened one day to the discovery that her much-loved husband, Herman, had died beside her in his sleep and lay there cold and pale, one eye closed and the other open, staring. Later that same year, still in mourning, she had bowed out of a long-planned vacation to New England that she and Herman had intended to take with her three sisters and their families. On the morning of September 11, Rosalia woke to the news that their return flight out of Boston had been hijacked and flown into one of the World Trade Center towers.
    Having lost every relative in one year, while she was sleeping, without a child of her own to whom she could turn for solace, Rosalia went a little mad. Intellectually, she knew that they were all dead, but in this case, emotion trumped reason. She would never speak of terrorists or plane crashes, nor would she listen to such talk. She chose to believe instead that as a consequence of some rare natural phenomenon, everyone she loved had turned invisible. She held fast, as well, to the theory that soon this event, like a magnetic field, would be reversed, rendering her loved ones visible again.
    Her madness involved no resentment or anger, and she posed no danger either to herself or to others. She continued to keep her house immaculate, to bake her marvelous cakes and cookies as gifts for friends and neighbors, to attend her church, and to be a force for good in her community. And to wait for her family to be returned to visibility.
    I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me. Either way, my life had been full ofthem—and they had enriched it. I suspected eccentricity was often if not always a response to pain, a defense mechanism against anguish and torment and sorrow. With a father who played no positive role in my life and with a mother whose behavior often made her a candidate for an asylum, I am sure that I would have been the eccentric I became even if I’d never been gifted or cursed with my sixth sense.
    No bodachs were in view along Marigold Lane.
    As the last light bled out of the day, less than fully aware of how I had gotten there, I found myself parked across the street from St. Bartholomew’s Church, where Stormy’s uncle, Sean Llewellyn, still served as the priest and rector.
    Some of the happiest times that she and I shared were on the open deck of St. Bart’s bell tower, to which we would sometimes climb with a picnic dinner, to dine there among the immense but silenced bells, surrounded by the best view in Pico Mundo. We felt that we were above all strife in that high redoubt, our future together no less enduring than the town we overlooked.
    With the approach of night, the tower was up-lit, and a red aircraft warn-off light served as finial at the peak of the belfry roof. As I watched it winking, I recalled how spectacular the sunset had been the last time that Stormy and I had climbed up there with a picnic hamper, on what we could not know would be the