Dean Koontz - Forever Odd

Weaving around and climbing over these amorphous and slippery obstacles proved treacherous. In places, the floor felt as if it had bowed, suggesting that the heat at the height of the blaze had been so terrible that rebar embedded inside the concrete had begun to melt and had almost failed.

The air here was more foul than in the shaft, bitter, almost rancid, yet seemed thin, as if I were at some great altitude. The singular texture of the soot gave me intolerable ideas about the source of it, and I tried to think instead about the iguanasaurs, but saw Datura in my mind's eye, Datura with a necklace of human skulls.

I crawled on hands and knees, slithered on my belly, squeezed through a heat-smoothed sphincter of metal in a blast-blown bulkhead of rubble, and thought of Orpheus in Hell.

In the Greek myth, Orpheus goes to Hell to seek Eurydice, his wife, who has gone there upon her death. He charms Hades and wins permission to take her out of the realm of damnation.

I could not be Orpheus, however, because Stormy Llewellyn, my Eurydice, had not gone to Hell, but to a far better place, which she so well deserved. If this was Hell and if I had come here on a rescue mission, the soul that I struggled to save must be my own.

As I began to conclude that the trapdoor between this crawlspace and the second level of the hotel must have been plated over with twisted and melted metal, I almost fell through a hole in the floor. Beyond that hole, my light played across the skeletal walls of what might have once been a supply room.

The trapdoor and ladder were gone, reduced to ashes. Relieved, I dropped into the space below, landed on my feet, stumbled, but kept my balance.

I stepped between the twisted steel studs of a missing wall, into the main corridor. Only one floor above ground level, I should be able to escape the hotel without resorting to the guarded stairs.

The first thing my flashlight fell upon were tracks that looked like those I had seen when I first entered the Panamint. They had made me think saber-tooth .

The second thing the light revealed were human footprints, which led within a few steps to Datura, who switched on her flashlight the moment that mine found her.

WHAT A BITCH. AND I MEAN THAT IN EVERY SENSE OF the phrase.

"Hey, boyfriend," Datura said.

In addition to a flashlight, she held a pistol.

She said, "I was at the bottom of the north stairs, having some wine, staying loose, waiting to feel the power, you know, your power, drawing me, the way Danny the Geek said it could."

"Don't talk," I pleaded. "Just shoot me."

Ignoring my interruption, she continued: "I got bored. I get bored easy. Earlier, I noticed these big cat prints in the ashes at the foot of the stairs. They're on the stairs, too. So I decided to follow them."

The fire had raged with special ferocity in this part of the hotel. Most of the inner walls had burned away, leaving a vast and gloomy space, the ceiling supported by red-steel columns encased in concrete. Over the years, ashes and dust had continued to settle, laying a smooth, lush carpet, over which my saber-toothed tiger had recently been wandering this way and that.

"The beast has been all over this place," she said. "I got so interested in the way it went in circles and meandered back on itself, I completely forgot about you. Completely forgot. And that's just when I heard you coming and switched off my flashlight. Mondo cool, boyfriend. I thought I was following the cat, but I was being drawn to you when I least expected. You are one strange dude, you know that?"

"I know that," I admitted.

"Is there really a cat, or were the prints made by a phantom you conjured up to lead me here?"

"There's really a cat," I assured her.

I was very tired. And dirty. I wanted to be done with this, go home, and take a bath.

Approximately twelve feet separated us. If we had been a few feet closer, I might have tried to rush her, duck in under her arm and take the gun away from her.

If I could keep her talking, an opportunity to turn the tables might arise. Fortunately, keeping her talking would require no more effort on my part than would breathing.

"I knew this prince from Nigeria," Datura said, "he claimed to be an isangoma , said he could change into a panther after midnight."

"Why not at ten o'clock?"

"I don't think he really could. I think he was lying because he wanted to screw me."

"You don't have to worry about that with me," I said.

"This must be a phantom cat, some sort of eidolon. Why would a real cat be prowling around in this smelly dump?"

I said, "Close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro, around nineteen thousand feet, there's the dried, frozen carcass of a leopard."

"The mountain in Africa?"

I quoted, '"No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.'"

She frowned. "I don't get it. What's the mystery? He's a mean damn leopard, he can go anywhere he wants."

"It's a line from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro.'"

Gesturing with the gun, she expressed her impatience.

I explained: "That's a short story by Ernest Hemingway."

"The guy with the line of furniture? What's Hemingway got to do with this?"

I shrugged. "I have a friend who's always thrilled when I make a literary allusion. He thinks I could be a writer."

“Are the two of you gay or something?" she asked.

"No. He's hugely fat, and I'm supernaturally gifted, that's all."

"Boyfriend, sometimes you don't make a lot of sense. Did you kill Robert?"

Except for our two swords of light, shining past each other, the second floor receded into unrelieved darkness. While I had been in the crawlspaces and the vertical chase, the last light had washed out of the winter day.

I didn't mind dying, but this cavernous fire-blackened pit was an ugly place to do it.

"Did you kill Robert?" she repeated.

"He fell off a balcony."

"Yeah, after you shot him." She didn't sound upset. In fact she regarded me with the calculation of a black widow spider deciding whether to take a mate. "You play clueless pretty well, but you're for sure a mundunugu ."

"Something was wrong with Robert."

She frowned. "I don't know what it is. My needy boys don't always stay with me as long as I'd like."

"They don't?"

"Except Andre. He's a real bull, Andre is."

"I thought he was a horse. Cheval Andre."

"A total stallion," she said. "Where's Danny the Geek? I want him back. He's a funny little monkey."

"I cut his throat and pitched him down a shaft." My claim electrified her. Her nostrils flared, and a hard pulse appeared in her slender throat.

"If he didn't die in the fall," I told her, "he's bled to death by now. Or drowned. The shaft's got twenty or thirty feet of water at the bottom."

"Why would you have done that?"

"He betrayed me. He told you my secrets."

Datura licked her lips as though she had just finished eating a tasty dessert. "You've got as many layers as an onion, boyfriend."

I had decided to play the we're-two-of-a-kind-why-don't-we-join-forces game, but another opportunity arose.

She said, "The Nigerian prince was full of shit, but I might believe you can become a panther after midnight."

"It's not a panther," I said.

"Yeah? So what is it you become?"

"It's not a saber-toothed tiger, either."

"Do you become a leopard, like on Kilimanjaro?" she asked.

"It's a mountain lion."

The California mountain lion, one of the world's most formidable predators, prefers to live in rugged mountains and forests, but it adapts well to rolling hills and low scrub.

Mountain lions thrive in the dense, almost lush scrub in the hills and canyons around Pico Mundo, and often they venture into adjoining territory that would be classified as true desert. A male mountain lion will claim as much as a hundred square miles as his hunting range, and he likes to roam.