Forever Odd

  Having by now eaten in excess of five thousand bananas, she might understandably have lost her taste for them—particularly if she had done the math relating to her remaining obligation. With 974 years to live (as a serpent, small s), she had approximately 710,000 more bananas in her future.

  I find it so much easier being a Catholic. Especially one who doesn’t get to church every week.

  So much about Datura was foolish, even pitiable, but her fatuity and ignorance made her no less dangerous. Throughout history, fools and their followers, willfully ignorant but in love with themselves and with power, have murdered millions.

  When she had consumed the banana and calmed the spirit of the snake entwined through her ribs, we were ready to visit the casino.

  A squirming against my groin startled me, and I thrust my hand into my pocket before realizing that I felt only Terri Stambaugh’s satellite phone.

  Having seen, Datura said, “What have you got there?”

  I had no choice but to reveal it. “Just my phone. I had it set to vibrate instead of ring. It surprised me.”

  “Is it vibrating still?”

  “Yes.” I held it in the palm of my hand, and we stared at it for a moment, until the caller hung up. “It stopped.”

  “I’d forgotten your phone,” she said. “I don’t think we should leave it with you.”

  I had no choice but to give it to her.

  She took it into the bathroom and slammed it into a hard countertop. Slammed it again.

  When she returned, she smiled and said, “We were at the movies once, and this dork took two phone calls during the film. Later we followed him, and Andre broke both his legs with a baseball bat.”

  This proved that even the most evil people could occasionally have a socially responsible impulse.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  I had entered Room 1203 with a flashlight. I left with it, too—switched off, clipped to my belt—and no one objected.

  Carrying a Coleman lantern, Robert led the way to the nearest stairs and descended at the front of our procession. Andre came last with the second lantern.

  Between those big somber men, Datura and I followed the wide stairs, not one behind the other, single file, but side by side at her insistence.

  Down the first flight to the landing at the eleventh floor, I heard a steady menacing hiss. I half convinced myself that this must be the voice of the serpent spirit that she claimed to carry within her. Then I realized it was the sound of the burning gas in the saclike wicks of the lamps.

  On the second flight, she took my hand. I might have pulled free of her grip in revulsion if I hadn’t thought her capable of ordering Andre to lop my hand off at the wrist as punishment for the insult.

  More than fear, however, encouraged me to accept her touch. She did not seize my hand boldly, but took it hesitantly, almost shyly, and then held it firmly as a child might in anticipation of a spooky adventure.

  I would not have bet on the proposition that this demented and corrupted woman harbored within her any wisp of the innocent child that she once must have been. Yet the quality of submissive trust with which she inserted her hand in mine and the shiver that passed through her at the prospect of what lay ahead suggested childlike vulnerability.

  In the eldritch light, which cast about her an aura that seemed almost supernatural, she looked at me, her eyes adance with wonder. This was not the usual Medusa stare; it lacked her characteristic cold hunger and calculation.

  Likewise, her grin was without mockery or menace, but expressed a natural and wholesome delight in conspiratorial feats of daring.

  I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced—and their effects reversed—by sufficient acts of kindness.

  She might not have been formed by trauma. She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.

  Besides, even if trauma shaped her, that didn’t excuse what had been done to Dr. Jessup.

  I remembered a naturalist who, having come to despise humanity and to despair of it, set out to make a documentary about the moral superiority of animals, particularly of bears. He saw in them not only a harmonious relationship with nature that humankind could not achieve, but also a playfulness beyond human capacity, a dignity, a compassion for other animals, and even a mystical quality that he found moving, humbling. A bear ate him.

  Long before I could precipitate a fog of self-delusion equal to that of the devoured naturalist, in fact by the time we had descended only three flights of stairs, Datura herself brought me sharply to my senses by launching into another of her charming anecdotes. She liked the sound of her own voice so much that she could not allow the good impression, made by her smile and silence, to stand for long.

  “In Port-au-Prince, if you are invited under the protection of a respected juju adept, it’s possible to attend a ceremony of one of the forbidden secret societies shunned by most voodooists. In my case, it was the Couchon Gris, the ‘Gray Pigs.’ Everyone on the island lives in terror of them, and in the more rural areas, they rule the night.”

  I suspected that the Gray Pigs would prove to have little in common with, say, the Salvation Army.

  “From time to time, the Couchon Gris perform a human sacrifice—and sample the flesh. Visitors may only observe. The sacrifice is made on a massive black stone hanging on two thick chains suspended from a great iron bar embedded in the walls near the ceiling.”

  Her hand tightened in mine as she recalled this horror.

  “The person being sacrificed is killed with a knife through the heart, and in that instant, the chains begin to sing. The gros bon ange flies at once from this world, but the ti bon ange, restrained by the ceremony, can only travel up and down the chains.”

  My hand grew damp and chill.

  I knew she must feel the change.

  The faint, disturbing scent that I had smelled earlier, when I’d considered climbing these stairs, arose again. Musky, mushroomy, and strangely suggestive of raw meat.

  As before, I flashed back to the dead face of the man whom I had hauled out of the water in the storm drain.

  “When you listen closely to the singing chains,” Datura continued, “you realize it isn’t just the sound of twisting links grinding against one another. There’s a voice expressing in the chains, a wail of fear and despair, a wordless urgent pleading.”

  Wordlessly, urgently, I pleaded with her to shut up.

  “This anguished voice continues as long as the Couchon Gris continue to sample the flesh on the altar, usually half an hour. When they’re done, the chains immediately stop singing because the ti bon ange dissipates, to be absorbed in equal measure by all those who tasted the sacrifice.”

  We were three flights from the ground floor, and I wanted to hear no more of this. Yet it seemed to me that if this story was true—and I believed that it was—the victim deserved the dignity of an identity, and should not be spoken of as if he or she were but a fattened calf.

  “Who?” I asked, my voice thin.

  “Who what?”

  “The sacrifice. Who was it that night?”

  “A Haitian girl. About eighteen. Not all that pretty. A homely thing. Someone said she had been a seamstress.”

  My right hand grew too weak to maintain a grip, and I let go of Datura with relief.

  She smiled at me, amused, this woman who was physical perfection by almost any standard, whose beauty—icy or not—would turn heads wherever she went.

  And I thought of a line from Shakespeare: O, what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

  Little Ozzie, my literary mentor, who despairs that I am not more well read in the classics, would have
been proud to hear that a line from the immortal bard had come to me, in fully accurate quotation and appropriate to the moment.

  He would also have lectured me on the stupidity of my continued aversion to firearms in light of the fact that I had chosen to put myself in the company of people whose idea of holiday fun was to book tickets not to a Broadway play but to a human sacrifice.

  As we descended the final flight, Datura said: “The experience was fascinating. The voice in those chains had the identical tonal qualities of the voice of the little seamstress when she lay not yet dead on that black stone.”

  “Did she have a name?”

  “Who?”

  “The seamstress.”

  “Why?”

  “Did she have a name?” I repeated.

  “I’m sure she did. One of those funny Haitian names. I never heard it. The thing is, her ti bon ange didn’t materialize in any way. I want to see. But there was nothing to see. That part was disappointing. I want to see.”

  Each time that she said I want to see, she sounded like a pouting child.

  “You won’t disappoint me, will you, Odd Thomas?”

  “No.”

  We reached the ground floor, and Robert continued to lead the way, holding his lantern higher than he had on the stairs.

  En route to the casino, I remained alert to the topography of the rubble and the burned-out spaces, committing them to memory as best I could.

  THIRTY-SIX

  IN THE WINDOWLESS CASINO, THE PLEASANT-LOOKING man with receding hair sat at one of the two remaining blackjack tables, where I had first seen him, where for five years he had been waiting to be dealt another hand.

  He smiled at me and nodded—but regarded Datura and her boys with a frown.

  At my request, Andre and Robert put the Coleman lanterns on the floor, about twenty feet apart. I asked for a couple of adjustments—bring that one a foot this way, move the other one six inches to the left—as if the precise placement of the lamps was essential to some ritual that I intended to perform. This was all for Datura’s benefit, to help convince her that there was a process about which she needed to be patient.

  The farther reaches of the vast chamber remained dark, but the center had enough light for my purpose.

  “Sixty-four died in the casino,” Datura told me. “The heat was so intense in some areas that even bones burned.”

  The patient blackjack player remained the only spirit in sight. The others would come eventually, as many as lingered this side of death.

  “Baby, look at those melted slot machines. Casinos, they’re always advertising they have hot slots, but this time they weren’t bullshitting.”

  Of the eight spirits who had been here previously, only one might serve my purpose.

  “They found the remains of this old lady. The quake tipped over a bank of slot machines, trapped her under them.”

  I didn’t want to hear Datura’s grisly details. By now, I knew there was no way that I could dissuade her from providing them, and vividly.

  “Her remains were so twisted up with melted metal and plastic, the coroner couldn’t completely extract them.”

  Under the time-mellowed rankness of char and sulfur and myriad toxic residues, I detected the half-fungal, half-fleshy odor from the stairwell. Elusive but not imagined, it swelled and faded breath by breath.

  “The coroner thought the old bitch should be cremated, since the job was already half done, and since that was the only way to separate her from the melted machine.”

  Out of shadows came the elderly lady with the long face and the vacant eyes. Perhaps she had been the one trapped under the bank of one-armed bandits.

  “But her family—they didn’t want cremation, they wanted a traditional burial.”

  From the corner of my eye, I detected movement, turned, and discovered the cocktail waitress in the Indian-princess uniform. I was saddened to see her. I had thought—and hoped—that she might have moved on at last.

  “So the casket contained part of the slot machine that the hag had been fused with. Is that nuts or what?”

  Here came the uniformed guard, walking a little bit like John Wayne, one hand on the gun at his hip.

  “Are any of them here?” Datura asked.

  “Yeah. Four.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Right now they’re only manifesting to me.”

  “So show me.”

  “There should be one more. I have to wait until they’re all gathered.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s just the way it is.”

  “Don’t screw with me,” she warned.

  “You’ll get what you want,” I assured her.

  Although Datura’s customary self-possession had given way to an evident excitement, to a twitchy anticipation, Andre and Robert exhibited all the enthusiasm of a pair of boulders. Each stood by his lantern, waiting.

  Andre stared off into the gloom beyond the lamplight. He did not seem to be looking at anything in this universe. His features were slack. His eyes seldom blinked. The only emotion that he’d exhibited thus far had been when he had suckled at her thorn-pricked hand, and even then he had not revealed an ability to emote any greater than that of the average oak stump.

  While Andre seemed perpetually anchored in placid waters, Robert occasionally revealed, by a fleeting expression or a furtive glance, that he rode a marginally more active inner sea. Now his hands had his complete attention as he used the fingernails of his left to clean under the fingernails of his right, slowly, meticulously, as though he would be content to spend hours at the task.

  At first I had decided that both were on the stupid side of dumb, but I had begun to rethink that judgment. I couldn’t believe that their interior lives were rich in intellectual pursuit and philosophical contemplation, but I did suspect that they were more formidable, mentally, than they appeared to be.

  Perhaps they had been with Datura for enough years and through enough ghost hunts that the prospect of supernatural experiences no longer interested them. Even the most exotic excursions can become tedious through repetition.

  And after years of listening to her all but constant chatter, they could be excused for taking refuge in silence, for creating redoubts of inner quietude to which they could retreat, letting her ceaseless crazy talk wash over them.

  “All right, you’re waiting for a fifth spirit,” she said, plucking at my T-shirt. “But tell me about those that are here already. Where are they? Who are they?”

  To placate her and to avoid worrying that the dead man I most needed to see might not put in an appearance, I described the player at the blackjack table, his kind face, full mouth and dimpled chin.

  “So he’s manifesting the way that he was before the fire?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When you conjure him for me, I want to see him both ways—as he was in life, and what the fire did to him.”

  “All right,” I agreed, because she would never be persuaded that I lacked the power to compel such revelations.

  “All of them, I want to see what it did to them. Their wounds, their suffering.”

  “All right.”

  “Who else?” she asked.

  One by one, I pointed to where they stood: the elderly woman, the guard, the cocktail waitress.

  Datura found only the waitress intriguing. “You said she was a brunette. Is that right—or is her hair black?”

  Peering more closely at the apparition, which moved toward me in response to my interest, I said, “Black. Raven hair.”

  “Gray eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know about her. There’s a story about her,” Datura said with an avidness that made me uneasy.

  Now focusing on Datura, the young waitress came closer still, to within a few feet of us.

  Squinting, trying to see the spirit, but staring to one side of it, Datura asked, “Why does she linger?”

  “I don’t know. The dead don’t talk
to me. When I command them to be visible to you, maybe you’ll be able to get them to speak.”

  I scanned the casino shadows, searching for the lurking form of the tall, broad man with buzz-cut hair. Still no sign of him, and he was my only hope.

  Speaking of the cocktail waitress, Datura said, “Ask if her name was…Maryann Morris.”

  Surprised, the waitress moved closer and put a hand on Datura’s arm, a contact that went unnoticed, for only I can feel the touch of the dead.

  “It must be Maryann,” I said. “She reacted to the name.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Directly in front of you, within arm’s reach.”

  In the manner of a domesticated creature reverting to a wilder state, Datura’s delicate nostrils flared, her eyes shone with feral excitement, and her lips pulled back from her white-white teeth as if in anticipation of blood sport.

  “I know why Maryann can’t move on,” Datura said. “There was a story about her in the news accounts. She had two sisters. Both of them worked here.”

  “She’s nodding,” I told Datura, and at once wished that I had not facilitated this encounter.

  “I’ll bet Maryann doesn’t know what happened to her sisters, whether they lived or died. She doesn’t want to move on until she knows what happened to them.”

  The apprehensive expression on the spirit’s face, which was not entirely without a fragile hope, revealed that Datura had intuited the reason Maryann lingered. Reluctant to encourage her, I didn’t confirm the accuracy of her insight.

  She needed no encouragement from me. “One sister was a waitress working the ballroom that night.”

  The Lady Luck Ballroom. The collapsed ceiling. The crushing, skewering weight of the massive chandelier.

  “The other sister worked as a hostess in the main restaurant,” Datura said. “Maryann had used her contacts to get jobs for them.”

  If that was true, the cocktail waitress might feel responsible for her sisters having been in the Panamint when the quake struck. Hearing that they had survived, she would most likely feel free to shake off the chains that bound her to this world, these ruins.

  Even if her sisters had died, the sad truth was likely to release her from her self-imposed purgatory. Although her sense of guilt might increase, that would be trumped by her hope of a reunion with her loved ones in the next world.