Odd Thomas Series Books 1-5. Dean Koontz

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       CHAPTER 33

      AFTER CLOSING THE LEVOLOR AT THE window, leaving the lights off, I went to the bureau, which was near the bed. In this one room, everything could be found near the bed, including the sofa and the microwave.

      In the bottom drawer of the bureau I kept my only spare set of bed linens. Under the pillowcases, I found the neatly pressed and folded top sheet.

      Although without a doubt the situation warranted the sacrifice of good bedclothes, I regretted having to give up that sheet. Well-made cotton bedding is not cheap, and I am mildly allergic to many of the synthetic fabrics commonly used for such items.

      In the bathroom, I opened the sheet on the floor.

      Being dead and therefore indifferent to my problems, Robertson could not be expected to make my job easier; however, I was surprised when he resisted being hauled out of the tub. This wasn’t the active counterforce of conscious opposition, but the passive resistance of rigor mortis.

      He proved to be as stiff and difficult to manage as a pile of boards nailed together at odd angles.

      Reluctantly, I put a hand to his face. He felt colder than I’d expected that he would.

      Perhaps adjustments needed to be made in my understanding of the events of the previous evening. Unthinkingly, I had made certain assumptions that Robertson’s condition didn’t support.

      To learn the truth, I had to examine him further. Because he had been lying facedown in the tub when I’d found him, before I’d turned him over, I now unbuttoned his shirt.

      This task filled me with loathing and repugnance, which I had anticipated, but I wasn’t prepared for the abhorrent sense of intimacy that spawned a slithering nausea.

      My fingers were damp with sweat. The pearlized buttons proved slippery.

      I glanced at Robertson’s face, certain that his gaze would have refocused from some otherworldly sight to my fumbling hands. Of course his expression of shock and terror had not changed, and he continued staring at something beyond the veil that separates this world and the next.

      His lips were slightly parted, as though with his last breath he had greeted Death or had spoken an unanswered plea.

      Looking at his face had only made my heebie-jeebies worse. When I lowered my head, I imagined that his eyes tracked the shifting of my attention to the stubborn buttons. If I had felt a fetid breath exhaled against my brow, I might have screamed, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.

      No corpse had ever creeped me out as badly as this one. For the most part, the deceased with whom I interact are apparitions, and I am spared too much familiarity with the messy biological aspect of death.

      In this instance, I was troubled less by the scents and sights of early-stage corruption than by the physical peculiarities of the dead man, mostly that spongy fungoid quality that had marked him in life, but also by his extraordinary fascination—as revealed in his files—for torture, brutal murder, dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism.

      I undid the final button. I folded back his shirt.

      Because he wore no undershirt, I saw the advanced lividity at once. After death, blood settles through the tissues to the lowest points of the body, giving those areas a badly bruised appearance. Robertson’s flabby chest and sagging belly were mottled, dark, and repulsive.

      The coolness of his skin, the rigor mortis, and the advanced lividity suggested that he had not died within the past hour or two but much earlier. The warmth of my apartment would have accelerated the deterioration of the corpse, but not to this extent.

      Very likely, in St. Bart’s cemetery, when Robertson had given me the finger as I’d looked down on him from the bell tower, he had not been a living man but an apparition.

      I tried to recall if Stormy had seen him. She had been stooping to retrieve the cheese and crackers from the picnic hamper. I had accidentally knocked them from her hands, spilling them across the catwalk ...

      No. She hadn’t seen Robertson. By the time she got up and leaned against the parapet to look down at the graveyard, he had gone.

      Moments later, when I opened the front door of the church and encountered Robertson ascending the steps, Stormy had been behind me. I had let the door fall shut and had hustled her out of the narthex, into the nave, toward the front of the church.

      Before going to St. Bart’s, I’d seen Robertson twice at Little Ozzie’s place in Jack Flats. The first time, he had been standing on the public sidewalk in front of the house, later in the backyard.

      In neither instance had Ozzie been in a position to confirm that this visitor was a real, live person.