Odd Is on Our Side – Read Now and Download Mobi

Odd Is on Our Side is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

Text copyright © 2010 by Dean Koontz
Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Queenie Chan

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “You’re the Devil in Disguise” Words and Music by Bill Grant, Bernie Baum and Florence Kaye Copyright © 1963; Renewed 1991 Elvis Presley Music (BMI) Worldrights Rights for Elvis Presley Music Administered by Cherry River Music Co. International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved Reprinted by permission.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52832-2

Cover Design—David Stevenson

Toning Assistant—Dee DuPuy

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Other Books by This Author

ODD IS ON OUR SIDE

ABOUT THE CREATORS

An Excerpt from FOREVER ODD

ARTIST’S SKETCHBOOK

SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT

Also by Dean Koontz

Breathless • Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me • Odd Hours • The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • Brother Odd • The Husband • Forever Odd • Velocity • Life Expectancy • The Taking • Odd Thomas • The Face • By the Light of the Moon • One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye • False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder • Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight • Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms • Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills • Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight • The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight • The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon • The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound • Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor • Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed

DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN
Book One: Prodigal Son
Book Two: City of Night
Book Three: Dead and Alive
Book Four: Lost Souls

Also by Queenie Chan

The Dreaming, volumes 1—3
In Odd We Trust

ABOUT THE CREATORS

DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Gerda, in Southern California.

QUEENIE CHAN was born in Hong Kong and emigrated to Australia when she was six years old. She is the creator of the mystery-horror graphic novel series The Dreaming and illustrated two graphic novels based on Dean Koontz’s character Odd Thomas. She provided art for the Boy’s Book of Positive Quotations by Steve Deger and draws a number of online comic strips on her personal website: www.queeniechan.com

FRED VAN LENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of Incredible Hercules (with Greg Pak) and three entries in the Marvel Zombies series, as well as the American Library Association award-winning Action Philosophers. His original graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens (co-written with Andrew Foley) is being adapted into motion picture form by Dreamworks and Universal. Visit his website at www.fredvanlente.com

Odd’s adventures continue in a series of full-length novels by Dean Koontz. The first novel is Odd Thomas, which was excerpted in the graphic novel In Odd We Trust. Here you can read a sample chapter of Forever Odd, second in the series. When a childhood friend disappears, Odd discovers something worse than a dead body … and embarks on a heart-stopping battle of will and wits with an enemy of exceptional cunning.

ONE

WAKING, I HEARD A WARM WIND STRUMMING the loose screen at the open window, and I thought Stormy, but it was not.

The desert air smelled faintly of roses, which were not in bloom, and of dust, which in the Mojave flourishes twelve months of the year.

Precipitation falls on the town of Pico Mundo only during our brief winter. This mild February night was not, however, sweetened by the scent of rain.

I hoped to hear the fading rumble of thunder. If a peal had awakened me, it must have been thunder in a dream.

Holding my breath, I lay listening to the silence, and felt the silence listening to me.

The nightstand clock painted glowing numbers on the gloom—2:41 A.M.

For a moment I considered remaining in bed. But these days I do not sleep as well as I did when I was young. I am twenty-one and much older than when I was twenty.

Certain that I had company, expecting to find two Elvises watching over me, one with a cocky smile and one with sad concern, I sat up and switched on the lamp.

A single Elvis stood in a corner: a life-size cardboard figure that had been part of a theater-lobby display for Blue Hawaii. In a Hawaiian shirt and a lei, he looked self-confident and happy.

Back in 1961, he’d had much to be happy about. Blue Hawaii was a hit film, and the album went to number one. He had six gold records that year, including “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and he was falling in love with Priscilla Beaulieu.

Less happily, at the insistence of his manager, Tom Parker, he had turned down the lead in West Side Story in favor of mediocre movie fare like Follow That Dream. Gladys Presley, his beloved mother, had been dead three years, and still he felt the loss of her, acutely. Only twenty-six, he’d begun to have weight problems.

Cardboard Elvis smiles eternally, forever young, incapable of error or regret, untouched by grief, a stranger to despair.

I envy him. There is no cardboard replica of me as I once was and as I can never be again.

The lamplight revealed another presence, as patient as he was desperate. Evidently he had been watching me sleep, waiting for me to wake.

I said, “Hello, Dr. Jessup.”

Dr. Wilbur Jessup was incapable of a response. Anguish flooded his face. His eyes were desolate pools; all hope had drowned in those lonely depths.

“I’m sorry to see you here,” I said.

He made fists of his hands, not with the intention of striking anything, but as an expression of frustration. He pressed his fists to his chest.

Dr. Jessup had never previously visited my apartment; and I knew in my heart that he no longer belonged in Pico Mundo. But I clung to denial, and I spoke to him again as I got out of bed.

“Did I leave the door unlocked?”

He shook his head. Tears blurred his eyes, but he did not wail or even whimper.

Fetching a pair of jeans from the closet, slipping into them, I said, “I’ve been forgetful lately.”

He opened his fists and stared at his palms. His hands trembled. He buried his face in them.

“There’s so much I’d like to forget,” I continued as I pulled on socks and shoes, “but only the small stuff slips my mind—like where I left the keys, whether I locked the door, that I’m out of milk.…”

Dr. Jessup, a radiologist at County General Hospital, was a gentle man, and quiet, although he had never before been this quiet.

Because I had not worn a T-shirt to bed, I plucked a white one from a drawer.

I have a few black T-shirts, but mostly white. In addition to a selection of blue jeans, I have two pair of white chinos.

This apartment provides only a small closet. Half of it is empty. So are the bottom drawers of my dresser.

I do not own a suit. Or a tie. Or shoes that need to be shined.

For cool weather, I own two crew-neck sweaters.

Once I bought a sweater vest. Temporary insanity. Realizing that I had introduced an unthinkable level of complexity to my wardrobe, I returned it to the store the next day.

My four-hundred-pound friend and mentor, P. Oswald Boone, has warned me that my sartorial style represents a serious threat to the apparel industry.

I’ve noted more than once that the articles in Ozzie’s wardrobe are of such enormous dimensions that he keeps in business those fabric mills I might otherwise put in jeopardy.

Barefoot, Dr. Jessup wore cotton pajamas. They were wrinkled from the rigors of restless sleep.

“Sir, I wish you’d say something,” I told him. “I really wish you would.”

Instead of obliging me, the radiologist lowered his hands from his face, turned, and walked out of the bedroom.

I glanced at the wall above the bed. Framed behind glass is a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine. It promises YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

Each morning, I begin my day by reading those seven words. Each night, I read them again, sometimes more than once, before sleep, if sleep will come to me.

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.

From a nightstand, I retrieved my cell phone. The first number on speed dial is the office of Wyatt Porter, chief of the Pico Mundo Police Department. The second is his home number. The third is his cell phone.

More likely than not, I would be calling Chief Porter, one place or another, before dawn.

In the living room, I turned on a light and discovered that Dr. Jessup had been standing in the dark, among the thrift-shop treasures with which the place is furnished.

When I went to the front door and opened it, he did not follow. Although he had sought my assistance, he couldn’t find the courage for what lay ahead.

In the rubescent light from an old bronze lamp with a beaded shade, the eclectic decor—Stickley-style armchairs, plump Victorian footstools, Maxfield Parrish prints, carnival-glass vases—evidently appealed to him.

“No offense,” I said, “but you don’t belong here, sir.”

Dr. Jessup silently regarded me with what might have been supplication.

“This place is filled to the brim with the past. There’s room for Elvis and me, and memories, but not for anyone new.”

I stepped into the public hall and pulled the door shut.

My apartment is one of two on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. Once a rambling single-family home, the place still offers considerable charm.

For years I lived in one rented room above a garage. My bed had been just a few steps from my refrigerator. Life was simpler then, and the future clear.

I traded that place for this not because I needed more space, but because my heart is here now, and forever.

The front door of the house featured an oval of leaded glass. The night beyond looked sharply beveled and organized into a pattern that anyone could understand.

When I stepped onto the porch, this night proved to be like all others: deep, mysterious, trembling with the potential for chaos.

From porch steps to flagstone path, to public sidewalk, I looked around for Dr. Jessup but didn’t see him.

In the high desert, which rises far east beyond Pico Mundo, winter can be chilly, while our low-desert nights remain mild even in February. The curbside Indian laurels sighed and whispered in the balmy wind, and moths soared to street lamps.

The surrounding houses were as quiet as their windows were dark. No dogs barked. No owls hooted.

No pedestrians were out, no traffic on the streets. The town looked as if the Rapture had occurred, as if only I had been left behind to endure the reign of Hell on Earth.

By the time I reached the corner, Dr. Jessup rejoined me. His pajamas and the lateness of the hour suggested that he had come to my apartment from his home on Jacaranda Way, five blocks north in a better neighborhood than mine. Now he led me in that direction.

He could fly, but he plodded. I ran, drawing ahead of him.

Although I dreaded what I would find no less than he might have dreaded revealing it to me, I wanted to get to it quickly. As far as I knew, a life might still be in jeopardy.

Halfway there, I realized that I could have taken the Chevy. For most of my driving life, having no car of my own, I borrowed from friends as needed. The previous autumn, I had inherited a 1980 Chevrolet Camaro Berlinetta Coupe.

Often I still act as though I have no wheels. Owning a few thousand pounds of vehicle oppresses me when I think about it too much. Because I try not to think about it, I sometimes forget I have it.

Under the cratered face of the blind moon, I ran.

On Jacaranda Way, the Jessup residence is a white- brick Georgian with elegant ornamentation. It is flanked by a delightful American Victorian with so many decorative moldings that it resembles a wedding cake, and by a house that is baroque in all the wrong ways.

None of these architectural styles seems right for the desert, shaded by palm trees, brightened by climbing bougainvillea. Our town was founded in 1900 by newcomers from the East Coast, who fled the harsh winters but brought with them cold-climate architecture and attitude.

Terri Stambaugh, my friend and employer, owner of the Pico Mundo Grille, tells me that this displaced architecture is better than the dreary acres of stucco and graveled roofs in many California desert towns.

I assume that she is right. I have seldom crossed the city line of Pico Mundo and have never been beyond the boundaries of Maravilla County.

My life is too full to allow either a jaunt or a journey. I don’t even watch the Travel Channel.

The joys of life can be found anywhere. Far places only offer exotic ways to suffer.

Besides, the world beyond Pico Mundo is haunted by strangers, and I find it difficult enough to cope with the dead who, in life, were known to me.

Upstairs and down, soft lamplight shone at some windows of the Jessup residence. Most panes were dark.

By the time I reached the foot of the front-porch steps, Dr. Wilbur Jessup waited there.

The wind stirred his hair and ruffled his pajamas, although why he should be subject to the wind, I do not know. The moonlight found him, too, and shadow.

The grieving radiologist needed comforting before he could summon sufficient strength to lead me into his house, where he himself no doubt lay dead, and perhaps another.

I embraced him. Only a spirit, he was invisible to everyone but me, yet he felt warm and solid.

Perhaps I see the dead affected by the weather of this world, and see them touched by light and shadow, and find them as warm as the living, not because this is the way they are but because this is the way I want them to be. Perhaps by this device, I mean to deny the power of death.

My supernatural gift might reside not in my mind but instead in my heart. The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.

Dr. Jessup had no substance, but he leaned heavily upon me, a weight. He shook with the sobs that he could not voice.

The dead don’t talk. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from them.

In this moment, my ability to speak gave me no advantage. Words would not soothe him.

Nothing but justice could relieve his anguish. Perhaps not even justice.

When he’d been alive, he had known me as Odd Thomas, a local character. I am regarded by some people—wrongly—as a hero, as an eccentric by nearly everyone.

Odd is not a nickname; it’s my legal handle.

The story of my name is interesting, I suppose, but I’ve told it before. What it boils down to is that my parents are dysfunctional. Big-time.

I believe that in life Dr. Jessup had found me intriguing, amusing, puzzling. I think he had liked me.

Only in death did he know me for what I am: a companion to the lingering dead.

I see them and wish I did not. I cherish life too much to turn the dead away, however, for they deserve my compassion by virtue of having suffered this world.

When Dr. Jessup stepped back from me, he had changed. His wounds were now manifest.

He had been hit in the face with a blunt object, maybe a length of pipe or a hammer. Repeatedly. His skull was broken, his features distorted.

Torn, cracked, splintered, his hands suggested that he had desperately tried to defend himself—or that he had come to the aid of someone. The only person living with him was his son, Danny.

My pity was quickly exceeded by a kind of righteous rage, which is a dangerous emotion, clouding judgment, precluding caution.

In this condition, which I do not seek, which frightens me, which comes over me as though I have been possessed, I can’t turn away from what must be done. I plunge.

My friends, those few who know my secrets, think my compulsion has a divine inspiration. Maybe it’s just temporary insanity.

Step to step, ascending, then crossing the porch, I considered phoning Chief Wyatt Porter. I worried, however, that Danny might perish while I placed the call and waited for the authorities.

The front door stood ajar.

I glanced back and saw that Dr. Jessup preferred to haunt the yard instead of the house. He lingered in the grass.

His wounds had vanished. He appeared as he had appeared before Death had found him—and he looked scared.

Until they move on from this world, even the dead can know fear. You would think they have nothing to lose, but sometimes they are wretched with anxiety, not about what might lie Beyond, but about those whom they have left behind.

I pushed the door inward. It moved as smoothly, as silently as the mechanism of a well-crafted, spring-loaded trap.

ARTIST’S SKETCHBOOK

This is the second graphic novel to star Odd Thomas, following In Odd We Trust. In that first book, artist Queenie Chan established the visual appearance of Odd, Stormy, and Chief Porter. In Odd Is On Our Side, her challenge was to come up with the look of another major character, bestselling mystery novelist Ozzie Boone, as well as his New York editor, Valerie Malavont.

MERYL STREEP LOOKALIKE. NEW YORK LITERARY TYPE.

Ms. Malavont was approved right away, but Ozzie proved to pose a challenge!

FOR SOME STRANGE REASON, I THOUGHT OZZIE WAS BLACK. AFTER IT WAS CONFIRMED THAT HE WASN’T, I REREAD THE BOOKS–AND WHILE THERE WAS NOTHING THERE THAT SAID OZZIE WAS BLACK, I DIDN’T SPOT ANYTHING THAT SAID HE WAS WHITE, EITHER. SINCE OZZIE WAS KNOWN FOR BEING SAGACIOUS, I PROBABLY SUBCONSCIOUSLY THOUGHT OF HIM AS MORPHEUS FROM THE MATRIX MOVIES (HENCE WHY HE WAS BLACK IN MY MIND).

Dean’s immediate comment was that Ozzie is not black. Queenie wrote back,

“For some reason I’ve always imagined him as dark-skinned. I guess I’ve had this image of Ozzie in my mind from the start of reading Odd Thomas, and couldn’t separate myself from it. I’m perfectly happy to do a redesign.”

The second sketch wasn’t right either.

WHEN IT TURNED OUT THAT OZZIE LOOKED MORE LIKE ORSON WELLES, I IMMEDIATELY ASSUMED HE LOOKED LIKE THE OLDER, MORE INTENSE ORSON (RATHER THAN THE YOUNGER VERSION). HOWEVER, I PERSONALLY DIDN’T FEEL THIS IMAGE SUITED THE CHARACTER OF OZZIE (AND INDEED, IT DIDN’T REALLY).

“All we know about Ozzie’s appearance is that he’s HUGE, and not much more,” Queenie wrote after this sketch was rejected. “Perhaps Dean can suggest another celebrity who looks like Ozzie, like he did with Valerie and Chief Porter. That makes it infinitely easier.”

Dean replied: “Ozzie Boone is in his late forties, weighs 400-plus pounds, and has a sweet but not babyish face. Herewith several photos of the comedian Lou Costello. He was not as heavy as Ozzie, but his face is a good place to begin. He had a sweet pudgy face but in his way he was handsome, too. His hair would work well for Ozzie, also.”

THIS FINAL OZZIE SKETCH, BASED ON LOU COSTELLO, WAS DEFINITELY THE ONE I LIKED THE MOST.

Queenie put pen to paper once again, and the final result was approved.

THE GREAT BODACH STRUGGLE

The other artistic challenge in Odd Is On Our Side was that of the bodachs, the supernatural heralds of death and disaster. The bodachs feature heavily in the Odd Thomas books, and yet they proved difficult to render in a way that communicates the menace and evil they embody in the novels. Here is Queenie’s first attempt:

This proved to have too much of a specific form. Dean described the bodachs as slinky, wolfish shadows that flow from place to place. He asked Queenie to try again.

Still not quite right. This guidance came back:

“Delete all the curlicues. This design element makes the creature seem too cute and almost friendly. It takes away from the menace they are supposed to convey. Imagine what it would look like if you drop black ink in a pan of water. There would be no pattern to how the ink moves in the water from time to time. Rather, it’s an amorphous blob shifting.”

BECAUSE THE FIRST SKETCH WAS TOO “PRECISE,” I DECIDED TO DRAW THE NEXT TWO SKETCHES AS LOOSELY AS I COULD.

BUT AS IT TURNED OUT, BODACHS HAD NO DEFINITE SHAPE SINCE THEY LOOKED MORE LIKE BLOTCHES OF INK FLOATING IN WATER, SO I JUST DECIDED TO DRAW THEM DIRECTLY ONTO THE PAGES.

This final version was approved. Said Queenie: “It’s hard to make a shape-shifting blob look menacing … so I gave them glowing eyes.”

SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT

Adaptor Fred Van Lente had the task of turning Dean’s story for Odd Is On Our Side into a panel-by-panel script. Questions came up as he did so, not all of which could be answered by reference to the novels. Odd fans will be interested to learn these details.

Fred: Does Odd automatically know the identity of every ghost he comes into contact with?

Dean: When Odd looks at the lingering spirit of someone he didn’t know in life, he has to figure out who they are by the context of their apparition (as, for example, the various ghosts in the burnt-out casino in Forever Odd). He does not automatically intuit the spirits identity.

Fred: Can Odd tell at first glance whether someone is a ghost?

Dean: Odd knows a ghost is a ghost only if he knew the dead person or if the apparition displays its mortal wounds. As in the first book in the series—with “Fungus Man,” alias Bob Roberts—Odd sometimes can mistake a lingering spirit for a living person, until the entity is either unable to speak (the dead don’t talk) or does something ghostlike, such as walk through a wall, whereupon Odd knows with what he’s dealing.

The ghost has no aura or identifying essence. Of course, if Odd sees someone but Stormy or another living person doesn’t see them, Odd knows at once that he’s seeing a ghost.

OZZIE BOONE

The script introduced Dean’s character Ozzie Boone, bestselling novelist, to graphic novel readers for the first time, and Dean wanted to make sure that the Ozzie readers meet in this book is the same in all details as the Ozzie we get to know and love in the novels. In the first-draft script, Fred included a few lines indicating that Ozzie knew how to defuse the bomb inside the spider piñata because of research he’d undertaken to write a book series about a police bomb squad expert named Paddy McSorely. Dean wrote back:

Dear Fred,

Ozzie’s famous detective series are described in Odd Thomas, in chapter sixteen: The first is about a very “fat detective of incomparable brilliance who solves crimes while tossing off hilarious bon mots. He relies on his beautiful and highly athletic wife (who utterly adores him) to undertake all the investigative footwork and to perform all the derring-do.” The second series involves “a likable heroine in spite of numerous neuroses and bulimia.” Ozzie proudly—and slyly—proclaims that no novels in the history of literature have featured so much vomiting to the delight of so many readers. I want to avoid adding character facts that contradict those in the books, so I’d like to avoid this series about Boston Bomb Squad inspector Paddy McSorely. Being a mystery writer and a demon for detail, Ozzie will know something about bombs when he needs to act late in the story; he should just mention, at the time, having written a story about a mad bomber.

THE VILLAIN

Early in the process, Fred proposed a religion-based motive for Norman Turley, the villain of Odd Is On Our Side, to have poisoned a number of trick-or-treaters. Dean responded with this:

The Odd Thomas stories try to avoid both politically correct villains and needlessly negative characterizations of whole groups. Consequently, I would like to see Norman Turley not be a crazy Christian trying to warn people about a “pagan” holiday. Maybe make him the owner of a flower shop and a neighborhood greenhouse who got tired of having his windows soaped by trick-or-treaters. Then he might use a plant poison to contaminate the candy he gave out.

Dean provided helpful details about what type of poison would work best for such a plan:

Strychnine is almost too powerful a poison for this. It’s a Class 6 toxin, with a victim-reaction time of ten to twenty minutes, and faster in children. It wouldn’t be logical to assume that most—or in fact any—of the kids who ate that candy survived. Better to go with something like the seeds of corn cockle—a Class 4 toxin—which would give authorities time to recognize the symptoms as those of poisoning and time for physicians to successfully treat the victims. Corn cockle is sometimes grown as an ornamental plant. If Norman Turley was a florist/greenhouse operator, he might use corn cockle as filler in some flower arrangements and would know the power of the seeds. It might be fun if he was caught because the symptoms of poisoned children—nausea, acute gastroenteritis, fever, giddiness, delirium, weakness, depressed breathing, sharp pains in the spine—were reminiscent of those Turley’s wife suffered before she died three years before the little girl who was costumed as a ghost. Mrs. Turley was thought to have died of anaphylactic shock caused by an unspecified allergic reaction. But when Turley replayed the trick on the kids, Wyatt Porter made the connection.