We talked about bodachs. Stormy is still of the opinion that they are demonic spirits and that the black room was the gate to Hell, opening in Robertson's study.
Because of my experiences of lost and gained time related to the black room, I have developed a more disturbing theory. Maybe in our future, time travel becomes possible. Maybe they can't journey to the past in the flesh but can return in
Perhaps the violence that sweeps our world daily into greater darkness has led to a future so brutal, so corrupt, that our twisted descendants return to watch us suffer, charmed by festivals of blood. The appearance of the bodachs might have nothing to do with what those travelers from the future really look like; they probably pretty much resemble you and me; instead, the bodachs may be the shape of their deformed and diseased souls,
Stormy insists they are demons on a three-day pass from Hell.
I find her explanation less frightening than mine. I wish that I could embrace it without doubt.
The dirty dishes stacked higher. We finished most of the truly unhealthy food and, not wanting to venture out, began to eat more-sensible fare.
The phone had been ringing constantly. We'd never taken it off the answering machine. The calls were all from reporters and other media types. We turned the speaker volume off, so we wouldn't have to hear their voices. At the end of each day, I erased the messages without listening to them.
At night, in bed, we held each other, we cuddled, we kissed, but we went no further. Delayed gratification had never felt so good. I cherished every moment with her, and decided that we might have to delay the marriage only two weeks instead of a month.
On the morning of the fifth day, the reporters were rousted by the Pico Mundo Police Department, on the grounds that they were a public nuisance. They seemed ready to go, anyway. Maybe they had decided that Stormy and I weren't in residence, after all.
That evening, as we readied for bed, Stormy did something so beautiful that my heart soared, and I could believe that in time I might put the events at the mall behind me.
She came to me without her blouse, naked from the waist up. She took my right hand, turned it palm up, and traced my birthmark with her forefinger.
My mark is a crescent, half an inch wide, an inch and a half from point to point, as white as milk against the pink flush of my hand.
Her mark is identical to mine except that it is brown and on the sweet slope of her right breast. If I cup her breast in the most natural manner, our birthmarks perfectly align.
As we stood smiling at each other, I told her that I have always known hers is a tattoo. This doesn't trouble me. The fact that she wanted so much to prove that we share a destiny only deepens my love for her.
On the bed, under the card from the fortune-telling machine, we held each other chastely, but for my hand upon her breast.
For me, time always seems suspended in Stormy's apartment.
In these rooms I am at peace. I forget my worries. The problems of pancakes and poltergeists are lifted from me.
Here I cannot be harmed.
Here I know my destiny and am content with it.
Here Stormy lives, and where she lives, I flourish.
We slept.
The following morning, as we were having breakfast, someone knocked on the door. When we didn't answer, Terri Stambaugh called loudly from the hall. 'It's me, Oddie. Open up. It's time to open up now.'
I couldn't say no to Terri, my mentor, my lifeline. When I opened the door, I found that she hadn't come alone. The chief and Karla Porter were in the hall. And Little Ozzie. All the people who know my secret-that I see the dead-were here together.
'We've been calling you,' Terri said.
'I figured it was reporters,' I said. 'They won't leave me and Stormy alone.'
They came into the apartment, and Little Ozzie closed the door behind them.
'We were having breakfast,' I said. 'Can we get you something?'
The chief put one hand on my shoulder. That hangdog face, those sad eyes. He said, 'It's got to stop now, son.'
Karla brought a gift of some kind. Bronze. An urn. She said, 'Sweetheart, the coroner released her poor body. These are her ashes.'
SIXTY-SIX
FOR A WHILE I HAD GONE MAD. MADNESS RUNS IN MY family. We have a long history of retreating from reality.
A part of me had known from the moment Stormy came to me in the ICU that she had become one of the lingering dead. The truth hurt too much to accept. In my condition that Wednesday afternoon, her death would have been one wound too many, and I would have let go of this life.
The dead don't talk. I don't know why. So I spoke for Stormy in the conversations that she and I had shared during the past week. I said for her what I knew she wanted to say. I can almost read her mind. We are immeasurably closer than best friends, closer than mere lovers. Stormy Llewellyn and I are each other's destiny.
In spite of his bandaged wounds, the chief held me tightly and let me pour out my grief in his fatherly arms.
Later, Little Ozzie led me to the living-room sofa. He sat with me, tipping the furniture in his direction.
The chief pulled a chair close to us. Karla sat on the arm of the sofa, at my side. Terri settled on the floor in front of me, one hand on my knee.
My beautiful Stormy stood apart, watching. I have never seen on any human face a look more loving than the one with which she favored me in that terrible moment.
Taking my hand, Little Ozzie said, 'You know you've got to let her go, dear boy.'
I nodded, for I could not speak.
Long after the day of which I now write, Ozzie had told me to keep the tone of this manuscript as light as possible by being an unreliable narrator, like the lead character in Agatha Christie's
'Yes.'
'She hasn't left your side for a moment, has she?'
I shook my head.
'You don't want your love for her and hers for you to trap her here when she needs to move on.'
'No.'
'That's not fair to her, Oddie. Not fair to either of you.'
I said, 'She deserves… her next adventure.'
'It's time, Oddie,' said Terri, whose memory of Kelsey, her lost husband, is etched
