ONE

MY NAME IS ODD THOMAS, THOUGH IN THIS AGE WHEN fame is the altar at
which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I
am or that I exist.

I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have
never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a
kidney for transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have
no desire to be a celebrity.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that
People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but
might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on
the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is
powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into
oblivion.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than
a child. To any child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to
be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and
beardless.

Consequently, a demographics expert might conclude that my sole
audience is other young men and women currently adrift between
their twentieth and twenty-first birthdays.

In truth, I have nothing to say to that narrow audience. In my
experience, I don't care about most of the things that other
twenty-year-old Americans care about. Except survival, of
course.

I lead an unusual life.

By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I'm sure
that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and
abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after
all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.

I mean only that my life is not typical. Peculiar things happen to
me that don't happen to other people with regularity, if
ever.

For example, I would never have written this memoir if I had not
been commanded to do so by a four-hundred-pound man with six
fingers on his left hand.

His name is P. Oswald Boone. Everyone calls him Little Ozzie
because his father, Big Ozzie, is still alive.

Little Ozzie has a cat named Terrible Chester. He loves that cat.
In fact, if Terrible Chester were to use up his ninth life under
the wheels of a Peterbilt, I am afraid that Little Ozzie's big
heart would not survive the loss.

Personally, I do not have great affection for Terrible Chester
because, for one thing, he has on several occasions peed on my
shoes.

His reason for doing so, as explained by Ozzie, seems credible, but
I am not convinced of his truthfulness. I mean to say that I am
suspicious of Terrible Chester's veracity, not Ozzie's.

Besides, I simply cannot fully trust a cat who claims to be
fifty-eight years old. Although photographic evidence exists to
support this claim, I persist in believing that it's bogus.

For reasons that will become obvious, this manuscript cannot be
published during my lifetime, and my effort will not be repaid with
royalties while I'm alive. Little Ozzie suggests that I should
leave my literary estate to the loving maintenance of Terrible
Chester, who, according to him, will outlive all of us.

I will choose another charity. One that has not peed on me.

Anyway, I'm not writing this for money. I am writing it to save my
sanity and to discover if I can convince myself that my life has
purpose and meaning enough to justify continued existence.

Don't worry: These ramblings will not be insufferably gloomy. P.
Oswald Boone has sternly instructed me to keep the tone
light.

"If you don't keep it light," Ozzie said, "I'll sit my
four-hundred-pound ass on you, and that's not the way you want to
die."

Ozzie is bragging. His ass, while grand enough, probably weighs no
more than a hundred and fifty pounds. The other two hundred fifty
are distributed across the rest of his suffering skeleton.

When at first I proved unable to keep the tone light, Ozzie
suggested that I be an unreliable narrator. "It worked for Agatha
Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," he said.

In that first-person mystery novel, the nice-guy narrator turns out
to be the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, a fact he conceals from the
reader until the end.

Understand, I am not a murderer. I have done nothing evil that I am
concealing from you. My unreliability as a narrator has to do
largely with the tense of certain verbs.

Don't worry about it. You'll know the truth soon enough.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of my story. Little Ozzie and Terrible
Chester do not enter the picture until after the cow
explodes.

This story began on a Tuesday.

For you, that is the day after Monday. For me, it is a day that,
like the other six, brims with the potential for mystery,
adventure, and terror.

You should not take this to mean that my life is romantic and
magical. Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much
adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.

Without the help of an alarm clock, I woke that Tuesday morning at
five, from a dream about dead bowling-alley employees.

I never set the alarm because my internal clock is so reliable. If
I wish to wake promptly at five, then before going to bed I tell
myself three times that I must be awake sharply at 4:45.

While reliable, my internal alarm clock for some reason runs
fifteen minutes slow. I learned this years ago and have adjusted to
the problem.

The dream about the dead bowling-alley employees has troubled my
sleep once or twice a month for three years. The details are not
yet specific enough to act upon. I will have to wait and hope that
clarification doesn't come to me too late.

So I woke at five, sat up in bed, and said, "Spare me that I may
serve," which is the morning prayer that my Granny Sugars taught me
to say when I was little.

Pearl Sugars was my mother's mother. If she had been my father's
mother, my name would be Odd Sugars, further complicating my
life.

Granny Sugars believed in bargaining with God. She called Him "that
old rug merchant."

Before every poker game, she promised God to spread His holy word
or to share her good fortune with orphans in return for a few
unbeatable hands. Throughout her life, winnings from card games
remained a significant source of income.

Being a hard-drinking woman with numerous interests in addition to
poker, Granny Sugars didn't always spend as much time spreading
God's word as she promised Him that she would. She believed that
God expected to be conned more often than not and that He would be
a good sport about it.

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so
with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and
verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously
entertaining thing you'll do next.

He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an
amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable
millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in
life.

Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any
serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due
for the promises you didn't keep.

In spite of drinking lumberjacks under the table, regularly winning
at poker with stone-hearted psychopaths who didn't like to lose,
driving fast cars with utter contempt for the laws of physics (but
never while intoxicated), and eating a diet rich in pork fat,
Granny Sugars died peacefully in her sleep at the age of
seventy-two. They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy
on the nightstand, a book by her favorite novelist turned to the
last page, and a smile on her face.

Judging by all available evidence, Granny and God understood each
other pretty well.

Pleased to be alive that Tuesday morning, on the dark side of the
dawn, I switched on my nightstand lamp and surveyed the chamber
that served as my bedroom, living room, kitchen, and dining room. I
never get out of bed until I know who, if anyone, is waiting for
me.

If visitors either benign or malevolent had spent part of the night
watching me sleep, they had not lingered for a breakfast chat.
Sometimes simply getting from bed to bathroom can take the charm
out of a new day.

Only Elvis was there, wearing the lei of orchids, smiling, and
pointing one finger at me as if it were a cocked gun.

Although I enjoy living above this particular two-car garage, and
though I find my quarters cozy, Architectural Digest will not be
seeking an exclusive photo layout. If one of their glamour scouts
saw my place, he'd probably note, with disdain, that the second
word in the magazine's name is not, after all, Indigestion.

The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby
display promoting Blue Hawaii, was where I'd left it. Occasionally,
it moves--or is moved--during the night.

I showered with peach-scented soap and peach shampoo, which were
given to me by Stormy Llewellyn. Her real first name is Bronwen,
but she thinks that makes her sound like an elf.

My real name actually is Odd.

According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate
error. Sometimes she says they intended to name me Todd. Other
times she says it was Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle.

My father insists that they always intended to name me Odd,
although he won't tell me why. He notes that I don't have a
Czechoslovakian uncle.

My mother vigorously asserts the existence of the uncle, though she
refuses to explain why I've never met either him or her sister,
Cymry, to whom he is supposedly married.

Although my father acknowledges the existence of Cymry, he is
adamant that she has never married. He says that she is a freak,
but what he means by this I don't know, for he will say no
more.

My mother becomes infuriated at the suggestion that her sister is
any kind of freak. She calls Cymry a gift from God but otherwise
remains uncommunicative on the subject.

I find it easier to live with the name Odd than to contest it. By
the time I was old enough to realize that it was an unusual name, I
had grown comfortable with it.

Stormy Llewellyn and I are more than friends. We believe that we
are soul mates.

For one thing, we have a card from a carnival fortune-telling
machine that says we're destined to be together forever.

We also have matching birthmarks.

Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely. I would throw
myself off a high cliff for her if she asked me to jump. I would,
of course, need to understand the reasoning behind her
request.

Fortunately for me, Stormy is not the kind of person to ask such a
thing lightly. She expects nothing of others that she herself would
not do. In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral
anchor the size of a ship.

She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty
cents that she found in the change-return slot of a pay phone. At
last she mailed it to the telephone company.

Returning to the cliff for a moment, I don't mean to imply that I'm
afraid of Death. I'm just not ready to go out on a date with
him.

Smelling like a peach, as Stormy likes me, not afraid of Death,
having eaten a blueberry muffin, saying good-bye to Elvis with the
words "Taking care of business" in a lousy imitation of his voice,
I set off for work at the Pico Mundo Grille.

Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into
a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon.

The town of Pico Mundo is in that part of southern California where
you can never forget that in spite of all the water imported by the
state aqueduct system, the true condition of the territory is
desert. In March we bake. In August, which this was, we
broil.

The ocean lay so far to the west that it was no more real to us
than the Sea of Tranquility, that vast dark plain on the face of
the moon.

Occasionally, when excavating for a new subdivision of tract homes
on the outskirts of town, developers had struck rich veins of
seashells in their deeper diggings. Once upon an ancient age, waves
lapped these shores.

If you put one of those shells to your ear, you will not hear the
surf breaking but only a dry mournful wind, as if the shell has
forgotten its origins.

At the foot of the exterior steps that led down from my small
apartment, in the early sun, Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on
a shore. She wore red sneakers, white shorts, and a sleeveless
white blouse.

Ordinarily, Penny had none of that preadolescent despair to which
some kids prove so susceptible these days. She was an ebullient
twelve-year-old, outgoing and quick to laugh.

This morning, however, she looked solemn. Her blue eyes darkened as
does the sea under the passage of a cloud.

I glanced toward the house, fifty feet away, where my landlady,
Rosalia Sanchez, would be expecting me at any minute to confirm
that she had not disappeared during the night. The sight of herself
in a mirror was never sufficient to put her fear to rest.

Without a word, Penny turned away from the stairs. She walked
toward the front of the property.

Like a pair of looms, using sunshine and their own silhouettes, two
enormous California live oaks wove veils of gold and purple, which
they flung across the driveway.

Penny appeared to shimmer and to darkle as she passed through this
intricate lace of light and shade. A black mantilla of shadow
dimmed the luster of her blond hair, its elaborate pattern changing
as she moved.

Afraid of losing her, I hurried down the last of the steps and
followed the girl. Mrs. Sanchez would have to wait, and
worry.

Penny led me past the house, off the driveway, to a birdbath on the
front lawn. Around the base of the pedestal that supported the
basin, Rosalia Sanchez had arranged a collection of dozens of the
seashells, all shapes and sizes, that had been scooped from the
hills of Pico Mundo.

Penny stooped, selected a specimen about the size of an orange,
stood once more, and held it out to me.

The architecture resembled that of a conch. The rough exterior was
brown and white, the polished interior shone pearly pink.

Cupping her right hand as though she still held the shell, Penny
brought it to her ear. She cocked her head to listen, thus
indicating what she wanted me to do.

When I put the shell to my ear, I did not hear the sea. Neither did
I hear the melancholy desert wind that I mentioned
previously.

Excerpted from ODD THOMAS © Copyright 2003 by Dean Koontz.
Reprinted with permission by Bantam, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved.