Odd Thomas

retrospect, I realized that the drawers and the cupboard doors had opened and closed with only the softest whisper, as though constructed with frictionless slides and hinges.
        When I moved toward the open doorway between the kitchen and the next room, the cold air seemed to thicken, further muffling the transmission of sound.
        The sparsely furnished living room proved to be as dreary and as marked by disorder as the kitchen. Old battered paperbacks, no doubt purchased at a used-book store, and magazines littered the floor, the couch, the coffee table.
        The magazines were what you might expect. Photos of nude women were featured between articles about extreme sports, fast cars, and pathetic seduction techniques, all surrounded by ads for virility herbs and for devices guaranteed to increase the size of the average man's favorite body part, by which I do not mean his brain.
        My favorite body part is my heart because it is the only thing I have to give Stormy Llewellyn. Furthermore, the beat of it, when I wake each morning, is my first best evidence that I have not, during the night, joined the community of the stubbornly lingering dead.
        The paperbacks surprised me. They were romance novels. Judging by the cover illustrations, these were of the more chaste variety, in which bosoms seldom heaved and bodices were not often lustily ripped open. They were stories less concerned with sex than with love, and they were a peculiar counterpoint to the magazines full of women fondling their breasts, spreading their legs, and licking their lips lasciviously.
        When I picked up one of the books and thumbed through it, the riffling pages made no noise.
        By this point, I seemed to be able to hear no sounds except those that had an internal origin: the thud of my heart, the rush of blood in my ears.
        I should have fled right then. The eerie muffling effect of the malign atmosphere in the house ought to have alarmed me.
        Because my days are characterized as much by strange experiences as by the aroma of meat smoke and the sizzle of fat on the griddle, I don't alarm easily. Furthermore, I admit to a tendency, sometimes regrettable, to surrender always to my curiosity.
        Riffling the soundless pages of the romance novel, I thought that perhaps Fungus Man did not live here alone. These books might have been the preferred reading material of his companion.
        This possibility turned out not to be supported by the evidence in his bedroom. The closet contained only his clothes. The unmade bed, the scatter of yesterday's underwear and socks, and a half-eaten raisin Danish on a paper plate, on the nightstand, argued against the civilizing presence of a woman.
        An air conditioner, mounted in the window, wasn't running. No breeze blew from its vents.
        The faint foul smell first detected in the kitchen grew stronger here, reminiscent of the malodor of a shorting electrical cord, but not quite that, with a hint of ammonia and a trace of coal dust and a whiff of nutmeg, but not quite any of those things, either.
        The short hallway that served the bedroom also led to the bath. The mirror needed to be cleaned. On the counter, the toothpaste tube had not been capped. A small wastebasket overflowed with used Kleenex and other trash.
        Across the hall from Fungus Man's bedroom stood another door. I assumed it led either to a closet or to a second bedroom.
        At that threshold, the air grew so chilled that I could see my breath, a pale plume.
        Icy against my palm, the doorknob turned. Beyond lay a vortex of silence that sucked the last sound out of my ears, leaving me for the moment deaf even to the labor of my heart.
        The black room waited.
        

CHAPTER 10
        
        DURING MY TWENTY YEARS, I HAVE BEEN IN many dark places, some lacking light and others devoid of hope. In my experience, none had been darker than that strange room in the home of Fungus Man.
        Either this chamber had no windows or all the windows had been boarded over and caulked against every prying blade of sunshine. No lamps glowed. In this profound gloom, had there been a digital clock with an LED readout, the faint radiance of its numerals would have seemed like a blazing beacon.
        At the threshold, I squinted into such absolute blackness that I seemed to be peering not into a room at all but into dead space in a far