Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

For an instant, I did not understand why I had chosen Raphael instead of Fido. Later, I would realize what had inspired the name.

When asked my name, I said it was Todd.

This was not exactly a lie. My parents insisted that they meant to name me Todd but a mistake had been made on my birth certificate-which did not explain why they had called me Odd forever thereafter.

Besides, when I say that my name is Odd, a series of tiresome misunderstandings and explanations ensues. After my adventures since late afternoon, I did not have the patience to thread the needle of my true name for the minister.

We knelt by the dog as he drank, and Reverend Moran asked if I was new in town.

I said that I had been there about a month, and he asked if I was looking for a church to join. I told him that I had stopped in this evening to pray because my life had taken a wrong turn.

The reverend proved discreet enough not to press me about the nature of my troubles, trusting in his counseling skills to tease my story from me in the course of easy conversation.

Although I had come to Magic Beach alone-but for Boo and Frank Sinatra-I was incomplete without a family of close friends. I am no good alone. I need bonds, vows real if unspoken, shared laughter, and people who depend on me as I depend on them.

Hutch was turned too far inward to be more than a casual friend. I had not known the wonderful Blossom Rosedale long enough to share the truest things with her.

At ease on the floor with the dog, the reverend had a relaxed manner and an open heart. Speaking with him for a few minutes made me feel less alone.

I did not tell him more about myself, but somehow we got around to the subject of Armageddon. That was not surprising. These days, with most people, doomsday seemed to crop up in conversation more than it once did.

Eventually Reverend Moran asked if Raphael might be as hungry as he had been thirsty, and I said maybe so, but I did not want him to bother himself about it. He said it was no bother, he had a dog of his own, and he went away to get some biscuits from the pantry in the rectory.

Charles Moran’s companionship had taken the edge off the fear that my premonition of total destruction had aggressively sharpened.

The dog solicited more attention, and I was pleased to respond, because in the human-dog relationship, both are therapists.

After a few minutes, however, Raphael scrambled to his feet. His ears lifted as much as a retriever’s ears could lift. He stood alert, staring at the sacristy door at the back of the sanctuary.

I assumed that Reverend Moran must be returning with biscuits and that the dog had smelled them at a distance.

When Raphael shifted his attention from the sacristy door to the back of the church, peering toward the narthex, toward the main door through which we had earlier entered, I got up from the floor.

EVERYONE A NEIGHBOR, EVERY NEIGHBOR A FRIEND.

Maybe the community motto did not apply to newcomers until they had been in residence a year. I had not read the fine print on the sign that welcomed visitors at the town limits. Maybe during your first year, you were fair game.

Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.

I went to the third pew on the right. A long wooden pocket on the back of the second-row pews held hymnals for use by those who sat in the third row.

From my left hip pocket, I fished out Sam Whittle’s wallet, the possession of which would be incriminating now that he lay dead in his bathtub. Hymnals were lined up in the holding pocket, but there were spaces between them. I dropped the wallet in one of those gaps.

Nothing would be gained by revealing more about myself than the name Todd. I fished my wallet from my other hip pocket and secreted it with Whittle’s.

I returned to the dog and stood with him, glancing from the sacristy door to the narthex, sacristy to narthex…

The first two police officers came through the main entrance, crossed the narthex, and stepped into the nave. They did not draw their pistols, but they approached along the center aisle with their hands on the butts of those weapons.

A policeman also stepped out of the sacristy, onto the altar platform. He was in his late forties, a decade older than the two officers in the center aisle. His prematurely gray hair was shorn close on the sides, as flat on top as brush bristles.

He possessed an air of authority that had nothing to do with his uniform. If you encountered him in his undershorts, you would still call him sir and do what he told you to do-or be prepared to pay a high price for disobedience.

Reverend Charles Moran followed Brush Cut out of the sacristy. He met my gaze and did not look away, but his eyes were not as merry as they had been earlier.

I asked him why, and when he did not answer, I asked him again, but the reverend seemed not to hear me, and he would not speak to me, though we were both alive and neither of us governed by the law of silence imposed on the lingering dead.

I HAD RIDDEN IN A SQUAD CAR BEFORE, BACK IN Pico Mundo. Although this was not my first time, it was still kind of cool.

Police headquarters-which included a small jail-was a Greek Revival building that stood adjacent to the courthouse, on the park, in one of the most picturesque parts of town. Now it beetled in the fog like a medieval fortress.

The watch officer’s desk, the booking station, and all of that would be on the main floor at the front of the building. The two young officers parked in an alleyway behind the building and took me in through a back door.

Earlier at the church, they had searched me for weapons. Here, I expected them to take my wristwatch and the silver-bell pendant, and ask me to sign a receipt acknowledging that they had confiscated no additional items of value.

I also expected them to fingerprint me and take my photo. And it was my understanding that they might allow me to call an attorney if not book an appearance on a reality-TV courtroom show.

Instead, they escorted me along a hallway with depressing blue-speckled linoleum and walls the color of tubercular phlegm, through a door, down two flights of stairs, along another hallway with an intriguingly stained concrete floor, through another door, and into a bleak windowless room that smelled of a pine-scented disinfectant strong enough to kill asthmatics and, under that, subtly of vomit.

This chamber measured about twelve by fifteen feet. A concrete floor, concrete walls, and a low concrete ceiling offered little to work with for even the most talented interior designer.

A square metal table and two chairs stood in the center of the room.

A third chair had been placed in a corner. Maybe that was where they would make me sit if I didn’t behave.

One of the officers pulled out a chair for me, which seemed to be a hopeful sign that they were respectful of a prisoner’s innate human dignity.

But then the other guy shackled my right ankle to a ringbolt that was built in to the table leg. Although he did not handle me roughly, he did seem to be contemptuous of me.

Without informing me of what crime I was suspected of having committed, not bothering to explain the system for ordering a snack if I should want one, they went out and closed the door, leaving me alone.

Coming in, I had noticed that the door was so thick it must have been designed by a paranoid. It closed with the solid clunk of one thousand pounds of steel.

They had left me with nothing to do except contemplate my pain threshold and my mortality, which was probably their intention.

The table to which I had been shackled seemed heavy but not immovable. I felt sure that I could drag it around my windowless prison, but as the room offered nothing to see or do, I remained seated.