Dean Koontz - Forever Odd

Heavy brutish features. A stare as direct as Datura's, but not as readable as hers.

They were not merely guarded eyes, but deeply enigmatic as none others I had ever seen. I had the weird feeling that behind those eyes lay a mind with a landscape so different from that of the ordinary human mind that it might as well have belonged to an entity born on another world.

Given his physical power, the shotgun seemed superfluous. He carried it to the window and held it in both hands as he stared at the desert afternoon.

The second man was beefy but not as pumped as the first. Though young, he had a dissolute look, the puffy eyes and ruddy cheeks of a barroom brawler who would be content to spend his life drinking and fighting, both of which he no doubt did well.

He met my eyes, but not boldly as had the human locomotive. His gaze slid away from me, as if I made him uneasy, though that seemed unlikely. A charging bull probably wouldn't make him uneasy.

Although he carried no weapon that I could see, he might have had a handgun holstered under his summer-weight cotton sports coat.

He pulled a chair out from the table, sat, and poured some of the wine that I had declined.

Like the woman, both men dressed in black. I suspected that their outfits matched not by happenstance, that Datura liked black and that they dressed to her instructions.

They must have been guarding the staircases. She had not called them on a phone or sent them a text message, yet somehow they had known that I had gotten past them and was with her.

"This," she told me, indicating the brute at the window, "is Cheval Andre."

He didn't glance at me. He didn't say Pleased to meet you .

As the brawler drank a third of a glass of wine in one swallow, Datura said, "This is Cheval Robert."

Robert glowered at the candles on the table.

“Andre and Robert Cheval," I said. "Brothers?"

"Cheval is not their last name," she said, "as you well know. Cheval means 'horse.' As you well know."

"Horse Andre and Horse Robert," I said. "Lady, I have to tell you, even considering the strange life I lead, all this is getting too weird for me."

"If you show me spirits, and everything I want to see, I might not have them kill you, after all. Wouldn't you like to be my Cheval Odd?"

"Gee, I suppose it's an offer most young men might envy, but I don't know what my duties would be as a horse, what the pay is, if there's health insurance-"

“Andre and Robert's duty is to do what I tell them, anything I tell them, as you well know. As compensation, I give them what they need, anytime they need it. And once in a while, as with Dr. Jessup, I give them what they want ."

The two men looked at her with a hunger that seemed only in part to be lust. I sensed in them another need that had nothing to do with sex, a need that only she could satisfy, a need so grotesque that I hoped never to learn its nature.

She smiled. "They are such needy boys."

Lightning with a dragon's worth of teeth flashed across the black clouds, sharp and bright, and flashed again. Thunder crashed. The sky convulsed and shook off a million silvery scales of rain, and then millions more.

THE HEAVY DOWNPOUR SEEMED TO WASH OUT OF THE air some of the light that managed to penetrate the storm clouds, and the afternoon grew both murky and dismal, as if the rain were not only weather but also a moral judgment on the land.

With less light from the window, the glow of the candles swelled. Red and orange chimeras prowled the walls and shook their manes across the ceiling.

Cheval Andre put down his shotgun on the floor and faced the tempest, placing both enormous hands flat against the window glass, as if drawing power from the storm.

Cheval Robert remained at the table, gazing at the candles. An ever-shifting tattoo of victory and money played across his broad face.

When Datura pulled another chair out from the table and told me to sit, I saw no reason to defy her. As I had said, my intention was to buy time and wait for fate to take a turn in my favor. As if I were already a good horse, I sat without objection.

She stalked the room, drank wine, stopped again and again to smell the roses, frequently stretched like a cat, ripe and lithe and acutely aware of how she looked.

Whether moving or standing in place, head tipped back and gazing at the nimbuses of candlelight pulsing on the ceiling, she talked and taunted.

"There's a woman in San Francisco who levitates when she chants. Only the select are invited to observe her on the solstices or All Saints' Eve. But I'm sure you've been there, and know her name."

"We've never met," I assured her.

"There's a fine house in Savannah, inherited by a special young woman, willed to her by an uncle, who also left to her a diary in which he described murdering nineteen children and burying them in his basement. He knew that she would understand and not disclose his crimes to the authorities even though he was dead. You've no doubt visited more than once."

"I don't travel," I said.

"I've been invited several times. If the planets are properly aligned and the guests are of the right caliber, you can hear the voices of the dead speaking from their graves in the floor and walls. Lost children pleading for their lives, as if they don't know they're dead, crying for release. It's a riveting experience, as you well know."

Andre stood and Robert sat, eyes on the storm in the first case, on the candles in the second, perhaps mesmerized by Datura's singular voice. Neither had yet spoken a word. They were unusually silent men, and uncannily still.

She came to my chair, leaned toward me, and extracted a pendant from her ample cleavage: a teardrop stone, red, perhaps a ruby, as large as a peach pit.

"I have captured thirty in this," she said.

"You told me on the phone. Thirty… thirty something in an amulet."

"You know what I said. Thirty ti bon ange ."

"I imagine that took a while, collecting thirty."

"You can see them in there," she said, holding the stone close to my eyes. "Others can't, but I'm sure you can."

"They're cute little things," I said.

"Your pretense of ignorance would be convincing to most people, but you don't fool me. With thirty, I am invincible."

"You said before. I'm sure being invincible is comforting."

"I need one more ti bon ange , and this one must be special. It must be yours."

"I'm flattered."

“As you know, there are two ways I can collect it," she said, tucking the stone between her breasts again. She poured more wine. "I can take it from you through a water ritual. That is the painless method of extraction."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"Or Andre and Robert can force you to swallow the stone. Then I can gut you like a fish and take it from your steaming stomach as you die."

If her two horses had heard what she proposed, they were not surprised by it. They remained as still as coiled snakes.

Picking up the glass of wine, moving toward the roses, she said, "If you show me ghosts, I'll take your ti bon ange the painless way. But if you insist on playing ignorant, this is going to be a very bad day for you. You're going to know agony of a degree that few men ever experience."

THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD. YOU MIGHT HAVE ARGUED against that contention twenty years ago, but if you argue it in our time, you only prove that you, too, live in delusion.

In an asylum world, the likes of Datura rise to the top, the crème de la crème of the insane. They rise not by merit but by the force of their will.

When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices.