Odd Thomas

repugnance, which I had anticipated, but I wasn't prepared for the abhorrent sense of intimacy that spawned a slithering nausea.
        My fingers were damp with sweat. The pearlized buttons proved slippery.
        I glanced at Robertson's face, certain that his gaze would have refocused from some otherworldly sight to my fumbling hands. Of course his expression of shock and terror had not changed, and he continued staring at something beyond the veil that separates this world and the next.
        His lips were slightly parted, as though with his last breath he had greeted Death or had spoken an unanswered plea.
        Looking at his face had only made my heebie-jeebies worse. When I lowered my head, I imagined that his eyes tracked the shifting of my attention to the stubborn buttons. If I had felt a fetid breath exhaled against my brow, I might have screamed, but I wouldn't have been surprised.
        No corpse had ever creeped me out as badly as this one. For the most part, the deceased with whom I interact are apparitions, and I am spared too much familiarity with the messy biological aspect of death.
        In this instance, I was troubled less by the scents and sights of early-stage corruption than by the physical peculiarities of the dead man, mostly that spongy fungoid quality that had marked him in life, but also by his extraordinary fascination - as revealed in his files - for torture, brutal murder, dismemberment, decapitation, and cannibalism.
        I undid the final button. I folded back his shirt.
        Because he wore no undershirt, I saw the advanced lividity at once. After death, blood settles through the tissues to the lowest points of the body, giving those areas a badly bruised appearance. Robertson's flabby chest and sagging belly were mottled, dark, and repulsive.
        The coolness of his skin, the rigor mortis, and the advanced lividity suggested that he had not died within the past hour or two but much earlier. The warmth of my apartment would have accelerated the deterioration of the corpse, but not to this extent.
        Very likely, in St. Bart's cemetery, when Robertson had given me the finger as I'd looked down on him from the bell tower, he had not been a living man but an apparition.
        I tried to recall if Stormy had seen him. She had been stooping to retrieve the cheese and crackers from the picnic hamper. I had accidentally knocked them from her hands, spilling them across the catwalk…
        No. She hadn't seen Robertson. By the time she got up and leaned against the parapet to look down at the graveyard, he had gone.
        Moments later, when I opened the front door of the church and encountered Robertson ascending the steps, Stormy had been behind me. I had let the door fall shut and had hustled her out of the narthex, into the nave, toward the front of the church.
        Before going to St. Bart's, I'd seen Robertson twice at Little Ozzie's place in Jack Flats. The first time, he had been standing on the public sidewalk in front of the house, later in the backyard.
        In neither instance had Ozzie been in a position to confirm that this visitor was a real, live person.
        From his perch on the windowsill, Terrible Chester had seen the man at the front fence and had strongly reacted to him. But this did not mean that Robertson had been there in the flesh.
        On many occasions, I have witnessed dogs and cats responding to the presence of spirits - though they don't see bodachs. Usually animals do not react in any dramatic fashion, only subtly; they seem to be totally cool with ghosts.
        Terrible Chester's hostility was probably a reaction not to the fact that Robertson was an apparition but to the man's abiding aura of evil, which characterized him both in life and death.
        The evidence suggested that the last time I'd seen Robertson alive had been when he'd left his house in Camp's End, just before I had loided the lock, gone inside, and found the black room.
        He had haunted me since, and angrily. As though he blamed me for his death.
        Although he'd been murdered in my apartment, he must know that I hadn't pulled the trigger. Facing his killer, he'd been shot from a distance of no more than a few inches.
        What he and his killer had been doing in my apartment, I could not imagine. I needed more time and calmer circumstances to think.
        You might expect that his pissed-off spirit