Odd Thomas

When I was a child, I first thought that these shades might be malevolent spirits who fostered evil in those people around whom they swarmed. I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

I've come to believe that bodachs don't foster terror, after all, but take sustenance from it in some fashion. I think of them as psychic vampires, similar to but even scarier than the hosts of daytime-TV talk shows that feature emotionally disturbed and self-destructive guests who are encouraged to bare their damaged souls.

Attended now by four bodachs inside the Pico Mundo Grille and also watched by others at the windows, Fungus Man washed down the final bites of his burgers and fries with the last of his milkshake and vanilla Coke. He left a generous tip for Bertie, paid his check at the cashier's station, and departed the diner with his slinking entourage of slithery shadows.

Through dazzles of sunlight, through shimmering curtains of heat rising from the baked blacktop, I watched him cross the street. The bodachs at his sides and in his wake were difficult to count as they swarmed over one another, but I would have bet a week's wages that they numbered no fewer than twenty.

SIX

ALTHOUGH HER EYES ARE NEITHER GOLDEN NOR HEAVenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all the ways that you are fallen from a state of grace.

She's forty-one, therefore old enough to be my mother. She is not, however, eccentric enough to be my mother. Not by half.

Terri inherited the Grille from her folks and runs it to the high standard that they established. She's a fair boss and a hard worker.

Her only offbeat quality is her obsession with Elvis and all things Elvisian.

Because she enjoyed having her encyclopedic knowledge tested, I said, 'Nineteen sixty-three.'

'Okay.'

'May.'

'What day?'

I picked one at random: 'The twenty-ninth.'

'That was a Wednesday,' Terri said.

The lunch rush had passed. My workday had ended at two o'clock.

We were in a booth at the back of the Grille, waiting for a second-shift waitress, Viola Peabody, to bring our lunch.

I had been relieved at the short-order station by Poke Barnet. Thirty-some years older than I am, lean and sinewy, Poke has a Mojave-cured face and gunfighter eyes. He is as silent as a Gila monster sunning on a rock, as self-contained as any cactus.

If Poke had lived a previous life in the Old West, he had more likely been a marshal with a lightning-quick draw, or even one of the Dalton gang, rather than a chuck-wagon cook. With or without past-life experience, however, he was a good man at grill and griddle.

'On Wednesday, May 29, 1963,' Terri said, 'Priscilla graduated from Immaculate Conception High School in Memphis.'

'Priscilla Presley?'

'She was Priscilla Beaulieu back then. During the graduation ceremony, Elvis waited in a car outside the school.'

'He wasn't invited?'

'Sure he was. But his presence in the auditorium would have been a major disruption.'

'When were they married?'

'Too easy. May 1, 1967, shortly before noon, in a suite in the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas.'

Terri was fifteen when Elvis died. He wasn't a heartthrob in those days. By then he had become a bloated caricature of himself in embroidered, rhinestone-spangled jumpsuits more appropriate for Liberace than for the bluesy singer with a hard rhythm edge who had first hit the top of the charts in 1956, with 'Heartbreak Hotel.'

Terri hadn't yet been born in 1956. Her fascination with Presley had not begun until sixteen years after his death.

The origins of this obsession are in part mysterious to her. One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life- affirming, therefore relevant.

By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day.

I suspect that Terri is obsessed with Elvis partly because, on an unconscious level, she has been aware that he has moved among us here in Pico Mundo at least since my childhood, perhaps ever since his death, a truth that I revealed to her only a year ago. I suspect she is a latent medium, that she may sense his spiritual presence, and that as a consequence she is powerfully drawn to the study of his life and career.

I have no idea why the King of Rock-'n'-Roll has not moved on to the Other Side but continues, after so many years, to haunt this world. After all, Buddy Holly hasn't hung around; he's gotten on with death in the proper fashion.

And why does Elvis linger in Pico Mundo instead of in Memphis or Vegas?

According to Terri, who knows everything there is to know about all the days of Elvis's busy forty-two years, he never visited our town when he was alive. In all the literature of the paranormal, no mention is made of such a geographically dislocated haunting.

We were puzzling over this mystery, not for the first time, when Viola Peabody brought our late lunch. Viola is as black as Bertie Orbic is round, as thin as Helen Arches is flat-footed.

Depositing our plates on the table, Viola said, 'Odd, will you read me?'

More than a few folks in Pico Mundo think that I'm some sort of psychic: perhaps a clairvoyant, a thaumaturge, seer, soothsayer, something. Only a handful know that I see the restless dead. The others have whittled an image of me with the distorting knives of rumor until I am a different piece of scrimshaw to each of them.

'I've told you, Viola, I'm not a palmist or a head-bump reader. And tea leaves aren't anything to me but garbage.'

'So read my face,' she said. 'Tell me-do you see what I saw in a dream last night?'

Viola was usually a cheerful person, even though her husband, Rafael, had traded up to a waitress at a fancy steakhouse over in Arroyo City, thereafter providing neither counsel nor support for their two children. On this occasion, however, Viola appeared solemn as never before, and worried.

I told her, 'The lost thing I can read is faces.'

Every human face is more enigmatic than the timeworn expression on the famous Sphinx out there in the sands of Egypt.

'In my dream,' Viola said, 'I saw myself, and my face was… broken, dead. I had a hole in my forehead.'

'Maybe it was a dream about why you married Rafael.'