Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

Don’t get me wrong. I do not seek death. I love life, and I love the world as its exquisite design is revealed in each small portion of the whole.

No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.

I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend. I don’t love them to excess, and I stand in awe of them only to the extent that an architect might stand in the receiving room of a magnificent palace, amazed and thrilled by what he sees, while knowing that all this is as nothing compared to the wondrous sights that lie beyond the next threshold.

Since that day of death in Pico Mundo, seventeen months earlier, my life had not been mine. I had been spared for a reason I could not understand. I had known the day would come when I would give my life in the right cause.

Will you die for me?

Yes.

Instantly upon hearing the fateful question, I felt that I had been waiting to hear it since Stormy’s death, and that the answer had been on my tongue before the question had been spoken.

Although I had committed myself to this cause with no knowledge of it, I was nevertheless curious about what the men on the pier were planning, how Annamaria figured in their plans, and why she needed my protection.

With the silver chain around my neck and the small bell pendant against my breastbone, I said, “Where is your husband?”

“I’m not married.”

I waited for her to say more.

With her fork she held down a fig, and with her knife trimmed off the stem.

“Where do you work?” I asked.

Setting the knife aside, she said, “I don’t work.” She patted her swollen abdomen, and smiled. “I labor.”

Surveying the modest accommodations, I said, “I suppose the rent is low.”

“Very low. I stay here free.”

“The people in the house are relatives?”

“No. Before me, a poor family of three lived here free for two years, until they had saved enough to move on.”

“So the owners are just…good people?”

“You can’t be surprised by that.”

“Maybe.”

“You have known many good people in your young life.”

I thought of Ozzie Boone, Chief Wyatt Porter and his wife, Karla, Terri Stambaugh, and all of my friends in Pico Mundo, thought of the monks at St. Bartholomew’s, of Sister Angela and the nuns who ran the orphanage and school for special-needs children.

“Even in this rough and cynical age,” she said, “you’re neither rough nor cynical yourself.”

“With all due respect, Annamaria, you don’t really know me.”

“I know you well,” she disagreed.

“How?”

“Be patient and you’ll understand.”

“All things in their time, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“I sort of think the time is now.”

“But you are wrong.”

“How can I help you if I don’t know what kind of fix you’re in?”

“I’m not in a fix.”

“Okay, then what kind of mess, what kind of pickle, what kind of trap?”

Finished eating, she blotted her mouth with a paper napkin.

“No mess, pickle, or trap,” she said, with a trace of amusement in her gentle voice.

“Then what would you call it?”

“The way of things.”

“You’re in the way of things? What things are you standing in the way of?”

“You misheard me. What lies before me is just the way of things, not a fix from which I need to be extricated.”

Out of the shallow bowl, she retrieved one of the huge floating flowers, and she placed it on her folded napkin.

“Then why did you ask that question, why did you give me the bell, what do you need me to do for you?”

“Keep them from killing me,” she said.

“Well, there you go. That sounds like a pickle to me.”

She plucked one thick white petal from the flower and set it aside on the table.

I said, “Who wants to kill you?”

“The men on the pier,” she replied, plucking another petal from the flower. “And others.”

“How many others?”

“Innumerable.”

“Innumerable-as in countless, as in the countless grains of sand on the oceans’ shores?”

“That would be more like infinite . Those who want me dead can be counted, and have been, but there are too many for the number to matter.”

“Well, I don’t know. I think it matters to me.”

“But you’re wrong about that,” she quietly assured me.

She continued to disassemble the flower. She had made a separate pile of half its petals.

Her self-possession and calm demeanor did not change when she spoke of being the target of killers.

For a while I waited for her eyes to meet mine again, but her attention remained on the flower.

I said, “The men on the pier-who are they?”

“I don’t know their names.”

“Why do they want to kill you?”

“They don’t yet know they want to kill me.”

After considering that response for a moment and being unable to make sense of it, I said, “When will they know that they want to kill you?”

“Soon enough.”

“I see,” I lied.

“You will,” she said.

Impurities in the wicks periodically caused the flames to leap, flutter, and subside. The reflections on the ceiling swelled, shrank, shivered.

I said, “And when these guys finally realize that they want to kill you, why will they want to kill you?”

“For the wrong reason.”

“Okay. All right. What would the wrong reason be?”

“Because they’ll think that I know what horror they intend to perpetrate.”

“Do you know what horror they intend to perpetrate?”

“Only in the most general terms.”

“Why not share those general terms with me?”

“Many deaths,” she said, “and much destruction.”

“Those are some spooky terms. And way too general.”

“My knowledge here is limited,” she said. “I’m only human, like you.”

“Does that mean-a little bit psychic like me?”

“Not psychic. It only means that I am human, not omniscient.”

She had plucked all the petals from the flower, leaving only the fleshy green receptacle, the sepals that had protected the petals, a spray of stamens, and the pistil.

I plunged into our monkey-barrel conversation once more: “When you say they’ll want to kill you for the wrong reason, that implies there’s a right reason for them to want to kill you.”

“Not a right reason,” she corrected, “but from their point of view, a better one.”

“And what would be that better reason?”

At last she met my eyes. “What have I done to this flower, odd one?”

Stormy and only Stormy had sometimes called me “odd one.”

Annamaria smiled, as though she knew what thought had passed through my mind, what association she had triggered.

Indicating the pile of petals, I said, “You’re just nervous, that’s all.”

“I’m not nervous,” she said with quiet conviction. “I was not asking you why I did it, only to tell me what it is that I’ve done to the flower.”

“You’ve trashed it.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Unless you’re going to make a potpourri with it.”

“When the flower was floating in the bowl, although it had been cut from the tree, how did it look?”