Dean Koontz - Odd Hours

Gradually I became aware of a continuous susurration, like the soft voice of a thin flow of water sliding over a lightly textured surface.

I surveyed the dreary stores behind me. No source for the sound was evident.

The mannequins had not moved in the window of the used-clothing shop. As I made that observation, I wondered why I had expected that they might have changed positions.

The store awnings were tattered and not as taut as they ought to have been. They swagged like funeral bunting, but no water drizzled from them.

The mysterious sound swelled into something more like numerous whispering voices echoing through a cavernous space.

Although the fog denied me a clear view of the shops across the street, I was pretty sure this noise originated closer at hand.

In front of me, in the gutter, light rippled from right to left, and right to left again: Halloween light here in January, like the flickering orange of a candle reflecting off the carved flesh inside a jack-o’-lantern’s hollow head.

They said that curiosity killed the cat, and I had seen enough feline road kill to confirm that diagnosis. Nevertheless, I got up from the bench and took a step forward to the curb.

In the pavement, a large rectangular grate covered a drain. It dated from an era when even public works had style. The parallel iron bars joined to a four-inch iron ring in the center of the rectangle. Captured within the ring, a stylized iron lightning bolt angled from right to left.

The susurration issued from the grating. Although the source lay in the drain, the sound no longer suggested water in motion. Now I thought it was also less like people whispering than it had been, and instead like the shuffling of many feet.

The elegance of the encircled lightning bolt appealed to me, but I wondered if it represented something other than foul weather, if it was the logo of the maker, that it should have been incorporated in a drain cover.

Grinning-pumpkin light flickered below the patterned ironwork, through the culvert that lay under the street. For a moment, the drain cover seemed like a perforated furnace door.

Standing, I was too far from the grating to discern the source of the quick spasms of luminosity. I stepped off the curb and knelt beside the ironwork.

Shoe leather sliding on concrete might have made such a sound, a platoon of weary soldiers dragging their heavy feet, bound from one battle to another-if this had been a war zone and if soldiers had been in the habit of traveling underground.

I lowered my face closer to the grating.

A faint cool draft rose from below and with it an odor, not one that I recalled having smelled before, not offensive, but peculiar. Foreign. A curiously dry scent, considering from where it came. I took three deep breaths, trying to identify the source-then realized that the odor had raised the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

When the orange light came a third time, I expected to see what, if anything, moved through the culvert. But each throb chased twisted shadows across the curved walls, and those leaping phantoms confused the eye, obscuring whatever cast them.

Perhaps I unconsciously worried my split lip with my tongue or bit it. Although it had not been bleeding, a fresh drop of blood fell on the back of my right hand, which rested on the grating beside the ring that encircled the lightning bolt.

Another drop passed through a gap and fell into the dark storm drain.

My hand seemed to have found its way to the grating without my conscious guidance.

Once more the light pulsed below, rapid diastole and systole, and the grotesque shadows appeared to swell larger than before, to thrash with greater agitation, although their provenance remained concealed.

When the fluttering light gave way to blackness again, I saw that the fingers of my right hand were straining to reach through the grate.

I registered this fact with concern, but I felt powerless to retract my hand. Something more than curiosity drew me, and I felt as perhaps a light-sodden moth feels as it beats its wings against the flame that will destroy them.

As I considered resting my brow against the ironwork, the better to see the truth that lay below when next the light came, I heard a sigh of brakes. A car, to which I had been oblivious, stopped in the street, immediately behind me.

AS IF COMING OUT OF A TRANCE, I ROSE FROM the drain grating and turned, expecting a squad car and a couple of officers with hard smiles and harder truncheons.

Instead, before me stood a 1959 Cadillac Sedan DeVille that could have rolled off the showroom floor an hour previously. Massive, black, loaded with chrome detail, featuring big tail fins, it looked suitable for either interstate or interstellar travel.

The driver peered at me through the front passenger window, which she had put down. She appeared to be half again as old as the car, a heavyset, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked lady with a huge church-choir bosom. She wore white gloves and a little gray hat with a yellow band and yellow feathers.

“You all right, child?” she asked.

I leaned down to the open window. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You lose somethin’ through the grating?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I lied because I had no idea what had happened-or had almost happened. “But it wasn’t anything important.”

She cocked her head, studied me for a moment, and said, “It wasn’t unimportant, neither. You seem like a boy needs a friend.”

Below the nearby lightning-bolt grate, the storm drain remained dark.

“What happened to your lip?” the woman asked.

“A disagreement over singers. Rod Stewart or Sinatra.”

“Sinatra,” she said.

“That was my position, ma’am.” I glanced at a pawnshop, then at the mannequins in used clothing. “The fog has me confused. I don’t recognize this part of town.”

“Where you goin’?”

“To the harbor.”

“I’m goin’ that way,” she said. “Give you a lift?”

“You shouldn’t pick up strangers, ma’am.”

“Folks I know all have cars. Most won’t walk to the end of the block to see a parade of elephants. I don’t pick up strangers, who am I gonna pick up?”

I got in the car, closed the door, and said, “I was almost trampled by an elephant once.”

Putting up the power window, she said, “They go mad sometimes. Just like people. Though they don’t tend to shoot up classrooms and leave crazy videos behind.”

“This wasn’t the elephant’s fault,” I said. “A bad man injected Jumbo with drugs to enrage him, then locked the two of us in a barn.”

“I’ve known bad men in my time,” she said, “but none that ever schemed to do homicide by elephant. Why do they always have to name them Jumbo?”

“A sad lack of imagination in the circus, ma’am.”

She took her foot off the brake, and the car drifted forward. “Name’s Birdena Hopkins. Folks just call me Birdie. What do folks call you?”

“Harry. Harry Lime.”

“A nice clean name. Crisp. Conjures nice thoughts. Pleased to meet you, Harry Lime.”

“Thank you, Birdie. Likewise.”

On both sides of the street, the shops appeared to recede into the fog, as though they were ships outbound from Magic Beach to even stranger shores.

“You from around here?” Birdie asked.

“Visiting, ma’am. Thought I might stay. Not so sure now.”

“Not a bad town,” she said. “Though way too many tourists come for the spring harvest festival.”

“They harvest something in the spring around here?”

“No. Used to be two festivals, they combined them into one. Now each spring at plantin’ time, they celebrate the harvest to come in the autumn.”

“I didn’t think this was farm country.”