Saint Odd by Dean Koontz Page B

final night of her life.
    No bodachs crept the front stairs of the church or climbed the walls, or danced in glee upon the bell-tower roof.
    Four minutes till seven o’clock. I pulled back into traffic.
    Stormy had lived in one of four apartments in a house three blocks from the Pico Mundo Grille. In my not-so-random drive through town, I next parked across the street from that place.
    Orphaned young, supporting herself as a counter girl and then as the manager of an ice-cream shop, she had been poor by almost any definition. She had furnished her humble rooms with items from thrift shops, and yet her apartment had been stylish and comfortable. Old silk-shaded floor lamps with beaded fringes. Upholstered Victorian footstools paired with crude imitations of Stickley-style chairs. Maxfield Parrish prints. Carnival-glass vases. Cheap bronze castings of various breeds of dogs displayed on end tables and windowsills. The eclectic mix shouldn’t have worked, but it did, because she had magic in her and because she could see the magic in everyday things.
    I had moved out of my studio apartment above the garage and into Stormy’s place after she died. I lived there for a year, until I left town on my journey of discovery. Her things had been packed away and stored in a room at Ozzie Boone’s house. I could dispose of nothing. Every item she owned, however inexpensive it might be, was to me a treasure, a store of memory and a memento of love unrivaled and undying.
    How long I sat there, across the street from the house in which she had lived, I couldn’t be sure. I drove away only when my tremors stopped, only when the world gradually regained its detail and ceased to be just a blur.
    Now that night had fully claimed Pico Mundo, I allowed intuition to guide me and cruised to the town square, at the center of which lay Memorial Park with its handsome bronze statue of three soldiers from World War II. Unlike the other streets of the historic district, those four blocks surrounding the park were lined not with flowering jacarandas but with magnificent old phoenix palms with enormous crowns of fronds.
    Couples occupied the park benches, cuddling in the light of thethree-globe cast-iron lampposts. The many restaurants were open, of course, but also all of the specialty shops, which catered as much to tourists as to locals. People were window-shopping, some of them carrying cones of ice cream as they ambled from shop to shop, some sipping from Starbucks cups, some walking their dogs, some talking and laughing. Although my perception might have been distorted by melancholy, it seemed to me that most of those people were in pairs, the larger percentage of them holding hands, as if they were extras in a movie of high romance, accessorizing a scene for which the director’s purpose might have been to say that life was a parade lived two-by-two, as it had been since before Noah’s fabled ark and as it would be always.
    No bodachs capered among the crowd. None slithered under the benches on which couples shared moments of affection.
    Neither circling the town square nor cruising any of the other streets before this had I received the slightest psychic impression that one day the town would be submerged, a community of drowned and drifting cadavers. Indeed, if Pico Mundo were inundated because of the collapse of Malo Suerte Dam, the town would not stand underwater in precisely the same condition as now, which is how it had appeared in the dream; the rushing waters would do great damage, tumbling cars along the streets, uprooting trees, ripping down awnings, smashing windows.… No rational scenario allowed for the lights to remain aglow in the aftermath of such a disaster, as they had been when I had floated through my nightmare.
    Brooding about that, I circled Memorial Park a second time and saw an enormous banner that I had somehow overlooked before. It was strung across an intersection: big red and black letters on a white background,