Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5. Dean Koontz
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Название: Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5
Автор: Dean Koontz
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007518746
isbn:
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician—but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
Although I employ no sleight of hand, though what I offer is truth glimpsed by supernatural means, I am aware not only of the magician’s vulnerability but also of the danger of being the boy who cried wolf—or in this case, the boy who cried Fungus Man.
Most people desperately desire to believe that they are part of a great mystery, that Creation is a work of grace and glory, not merely the result of random forces colliding. Yet each time that they are given but one reason to doubt, a worm in the apple of the heart makes them turn away from a thousand proofs of the miraculous, whereupon they have a drunkard’s thirst for cynicism, and they feed upon despair as a starving man upon a loaf of bread.
As a miracle worker of sorts, I walk a wire, too high to make one misstep and survive.
Chief Porter is a good man, but he is human. He would be slow to turn against me, but if he was made to feel foolish and gullible more than once, that turn would surely occur.
I could have used my cell phone to call Stormy’s uncle, Father Sean, in the rectory. He would come to our aid without delay and without too many awkward questions.
Robertson, however, was a human monster, not one of supernatural origin. If he was lurking in the churchyard, he would not be deterred from violence by the sight of a Roman collar or by the brandishing of a crucifix.
Having put Stormy in jeopardy, I shrank at once from the idea of endangering her uncle, as well.
Two sacristy doors. The outer led to the churchyard. The inner led to the sanctuary.
Having heard nothing at either exit, I had to rely on intuition. I chose the door to the sanctuary.
Apparently the bouncing ball of Stormy’s intuition hadn’t yet rattled to a stop on any number. She put her hand atop mine as I took hold of the lock.
Our eyes met for a moment. Then we turned our heads to stare at the outer door.
This was an instance when the card that we had drawn from that carnival fortune-telling machine and our matching birthmarks seemed indisputably to be meaningful.
Without exchanging a word, we arrived at a plan that we both understood. I remained at the door to the sanctuary. Stormy returned to the churchyard door.
If when I unlocked my door, Robertson lunged for me, Stormy would throw open the outer door and bolt from the sanctuary, shouting for help. I would attempt to follow her—and stay alive.
THAT MOMENT IN THE SACRISTY DISTILLED the essence of my entire existence: always between two doors, between a life with the living and a life with the dead, between transcendence and terror.
Across the room, Stormy nodded.
On the prie-dieu, a small book of prayers waited for a kneeling priest.
No doubt bottles of sacramental wine were stored in one of the cabinets. I could have used a little spiritual fortification.
I leaned hard against the sanctuary door to brace it. When I disengaged the lock, the bolt made a thin sound reminiscent of a razor sharpening against a strop.
Had Robertson been poised to burst in upon me, he ought to have reacted to the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the door frame. Of course he might be less of a hothead and more cunning than he had appeared to be when he’d stood in the graveyard, flipping us the finger.
Perhaps he suspected that I was wedging the door shut with my body and that I would snap the lock in place the instant that he tried to shove into the sacristy. Insane as he might be, he would nonetheless have some intuition of his own.
The Bob Robertson who left his kitchen strewn with dirty dishes, banana peels, and crumbs was too sloppy to be a wise strategist. The Robertson who kept the neat study and maintained the meticulous files in those cabinets of dread was, however, a different man from the one whose living room had featured drifts of sleazy magazines and well-read paperback romances.
I couldn’t know which Bob Robertson might be, at this moment, beyond the door.
When I glanced at Stormy, she made a gesture that meant either “get on with it” or “up yours.”
Leaning against the door with undiminished purpose, I turned the knob all the way to the left. It squeaked. I would have been amazed if it hadn’t.
I shifted my weight and let the door ease open half an inch ... an inch ... and all the way.
If Robertson waited at either entrance to the sacristy, he was outside in the churchyard. Standing in the ruddy reduction of the last red light, he must have looked like something that belonged under a granite headstone.
Stormy stepped away from her station. Together we quickly returned to the sanctuary from which we had been so eager to flee only two minutes ago.
The moth danced across the light, and again Christ seemed to twist upon the cross.
The lingering incense smelled not sweet, as before, but had a new astringency, and the votive flames throbbed with the urgency of arterial aneurysms about to burst.
Down the ambulatory, past the choir enclosure, through the gate in the communion railing, I half expected Robertson to spring at us from unlikely cover. He had grown into such a menacing figure in my mind that I would not have been surprised if he had dropped upon us from the vaulted ceiling, suddenly having sprouted wings, a furious dark angel with death upon his breath.
We were in the main aisle when a great crash and shattering of glass shook away the churchly silence behind us. We spun, we looked, but saw no wreckage.
The sacristy had been windowless, and there’d been no glass in the door to the churchyard. Nevertheless, that chamber, which we’d just left, seemed to be the source of these sounds of destruction. They rose again, louder than before.
I heard what might have been the vesting bench slamming against the vestment closets, heard wine bottles smashing, heard the silver chalice and other sacred vessels ricocheting off walls and cabinets with a reverberant metallic clatter.
In our haste to escape, we had left the light on in that room. Now, through the open door, secondhand movement was visible: a farrago of leaping shadows and flares of shimmery light.
I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t intend to return to the sacristy for a look. Holding Stormy’s hand again, I ran with her along the center aisle, the length of the nave, and through a door into the narthex.
Out of the church, down the steps, we fled into a twilight that had nearly bled to death, had little red left to give, and had begun to pull purple shrouds over the streets of Pico Mundo.
For a moment I couldn’t fit the trembling key in the Mustang’s СКАЧАТЬ