Eleven.

HALFWAY TOWARD THE MIDFLOOR LANDING, I WAS overcome once more by the perception that these concrete walls were not concrete at all, but were instead the idea of concrete, a thought that first occurred to me back at Star Truck, when Shower 5 in the real world abruptly became Shower 5 Elsewhere. I didn't know what I meant by that, but my suspicion was evoked by the continuity of color and texture: an unvarying gray without the smallest stain, without a single line or trace of wood grain from the lumber forms into which the concrete would have been poured, no surface voids or exposed aggregate.

When I slid my left hand along the inner wall, the surface felt at first like concrete, but then like fiberboard with a high-gloss finish, although to my lying eyes it remained curiously perfect concrete. When I put my right hand to the outer wall, my questing fingers slid across bricks and recessed mortar joints that I could not see, although a moment later the texture of a smooth concrete surface returned.

I didn't know what to make of all this, except that my reality and Elsewhere seemed to occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same time. In Elsewhere, my world floated just below the surface of things; and in my world, Elsewhere was submerged and waiting. Whether this was true everywhere that I might go or only in some locations, I could not know for sure, but I suspected that the two realities intersected only rarely, as in some rooms of Star Truck and in this abandoned industrial building.

Wherever and whatever Elsewhere might be, I didn't think that it was a world like ours, that it was either peopled by different versions of ourselves or by another race entirely. The cowboy trucker had parked his rig here, leaving the keys in the ignition, because he knew that in Elsewhere it would remain undiscovered and safe, which suggested that Elsewhere was a dead zone of sorts, populated neither by anyone nor anything.

The midfloor landing had no windows. I paused to listen but heard nothing other than my stomach grumbling about not yet having received the cheese meatloaf, steak fries, and coleslaw that I had all but sworn an oath to consume back at the truck stop. I continued upward and, at the top of the second flight, I came to a landing door on my right, with more stairs on my left leading to the third floor.

I didn't need to seek the highest vantage point. Any second-floor window would satisfy my curiosity about the untimely darkness that seemed to lie beyond these walls.

In my world, this building was perhaps eighty years old, dirty and battered and unoccupied if not even abandoned; it had not in any recent decade been refurbished. Judging by the design and the details of its construction, the metal door on the landing was as old as the building. It should have been scratched and dimpled, as no doubt it was in my reality, though here it appeared to be as unmarked as it was on the day it had been installed.

The immaculate condition of the door seemed not just improbable but impossible. And when I concentrated closely and entirely upon it, searching its smooth surface for a sign of wear, I was more than half persuaded that it was merely the drawn image of a door, like that in a clever trompe l'oeil painting or on the backdrop of a cunningly designed stage setting, convincing not because of elaborate detail but because the artist's use of perspective and light was masterful.

Nevertheless, the k.n.o.b felt solid in my grasp, and it turned without resistance. The knuckles of the barrel hinges revolved soundlessly around the pivot pins, and the door opened as smoothly as one liquid flowing into another, so that I could almost believe that I was adventuring in my sleep.

Beyond lay a hallway. The ceiling, walls, and floor were as uniformly gray and smooth as in the garage and stairwell. Overhead hung the usual crude lamps. When I stared hard at the nearest one, it produced less light, not because the bulb dimmed but because the bulb, the shade, and the chain all seemed to diminish in substance when studied intently, as if sufficient scrutiny might in time cause them to disappear altogether. I didn't test that hypothesis because I didn't want to be left whimpering in the dark.

On both sides of the corridor were a few doors like the one through which I had just come. America's primary inst.i.tution of learning-the movies-has taught us that when we find ourselves in a strange and eerily quiet place with lots of doors, waiting behind one of them will be either a psychopathic killer or a monster of supernatural or extraterrestrial origin. Of course, if it's an Adam Sandler comedy, behind the door will lurk a goofy dude waiting to deliver a joke involving p.o.o.p, pee, or genitals. I wasn't in such a comedy, but that was all right, because I preferred a psychopath or a monster.

When I opened the nearest door on the right, nothing bit off my head. A single lamp hung in the center of the unfurnished gray room.

I crossed to the windows and was stunned to see the sprawling suburbs of the valley cast in darkness, not one streetlamp or building light to be seen. Far beyond the Hollywood hills, to the southwest, no faintest glow rose from the flatlands of Los Angeles and environs, though on an ordinary night, the incandescence of civilization would shimmer in the air and paint the bellies of the clouds a burnt-b.u.t.ter yellow. Above the black land, the blacker sky had been swept clean of moon and stars.

In the middle distance, three widely separated lakes of low flames glimmered and twinkled red-orange-blue, like the baleful campfires of savage and malevolent settlements. They burned without illuminating their surroundings, as if the night air had unnatural weight sufficient to prevent the light from rising.

Although the uncanny gloom flooded the land before, between, and beyond the pooling fires, the realm on the farther side of the windows was not blind-dark. I was able to discern that the street in front of this building had vanished, replaced by barren ground. And suddenly I knew that the suburbs and the city they encircled had not merely gone dark in a power outage but had ceased to exist either as intact structures or as ruins. In my reality, this building stood in an industrial neighborhood, but in Elsewhere, it seemed to loom alone above a blackened wasteland.

I had wanted a window with a view. Now I wanted a quiet corner in which I could curl up in a ball and suck my thumb until my fairy G.o.dmother came and took me away from this hostile, empty world.

In this blighted kingdom, however, wishes were answered in such a perverse way that they were far better left unwished. Twenty feet below, where the street should have been, something moved, a vertical shadow in the otherwise still and amorphous dark. Squinting, I saw what might have been a man, but he was so little differentiated from the murk around him that I couldn't make out his face or determine what he wore. One thing about him was certain: He didn't have fairy wings.

If the weak light in the room around me filtered through the gla.s.s, none of it reached as far as the figure below, although it revealed me to him. He halted, I sensed him looking up, but I did not draw back from the window. I had already been seen. He would come to me or he wouldn't. After a moment, he approached the front of the building, disappearing into the recessed entrance.

Pistol in hand, I returned to the second-floor hall. Moments before, I had climbed the west stairs, which originated at the garage in back. The door at the east end of the hallway suggested another stairwell rising from the front of the building, which was probably the one by which he would come to me.

My keen intuition, which had often been my salvation, was largely a mental faculty, its physical expression limited to an occasional tingle at the nape of the neck, the hairs bristling on the backs of my hands and-unseemly but true-a certain tightening of the s.c.r.o.t.u.m, although that last reaction was about as erotic as a spinal tap. In this instance, a swift series of chills quivered violently through me, as if I were constructed entirely of taut harpstrings that thrummed with glissandos of foreboding.

At all costs, I needed to avoid a confrontation with that shadowy figure. I didn't know why I must keep my distance from the man, if man he was, and I had no one to ask, because intuition is a one-way communication from G.o.d, who never seems inclined to satisfy our curiosity, perhaps because, given the chance, every one of us would be like a child on a family road trip, endlessly asking Are we there yet? or the equivalent.

I turned away from the east end of the corridor and hurried to the west stairs, by which I had come up from the garage. Going down again seemed foolhardy, in part because leaving the building wasn't an option. If I ventured outside into unknown conditions, I might find it difficult if not impossible to get back inside. I a.s.sumed that I would have to be within the envelope of the building to be able to return to my reality when the shift occurred again, which might be hours or mere minutes from now.

After bolting up two flights to the top of the stairs, I pulled on the door, which swung open as silently as those before it, as if its lever handle, latch, and hinges operated with zero friction. For a long moment, I stood on the landing, listening.

When the stairwell door opened on the second floor, I didn't hear a sound. No sudden draft alerted me. I knew the visitor from the wasteland had entered the stairs only when his shadow preceded him, flowing onto the midfloor landing below in such a sinuous fashion as to suggest that the man yet unseen would prove to be in part a serpent.

I slipped into the hallway and eased the door shut, although left to gravity, it would most likely have closed without a click.

The third floor seemed identical to the second. I doubted that I had time to race all the way to the east stairs before my pursuer would arrive and see me.

Besides, switching stairwells for hours on end was not a strategy, hardly even worthy of the word tactic. That gambit was certain to result, sooner or later, in the two of us coming face-to-face in a doorway, which might not end well for me even though I had a pistol.

In my experience, sometimes the guy on the other side of the door possessed something more formidable than a handgun, such as a submachine gun or an automatic shotgun, or an enraged ferret that he threw in my face. Or he was clothed head to foot in body armor and held a surface-to-air missile that, if fired horizontally, could reduce you to a pile of flaming entrails. Or he was wearing a nine-sheath spring-loaded antique-Chinese automatic-knife breastplate, which in a split second could skewer you with enough stilettos to kill you and, should you have one, your cat as well.

Trusting to luck, such as it was, I hurried halfway along the corridor and chose a door to my left. Beyond, a dimly lighted flight of stairs led up to another door. I was pretty sure the building featured no more than three stories. Maybe these stairs went to an attic.

I don't like attics any more than I like cellars.

Most people have never found anything in an attic more off-putting than silverfish, dry rot, and faded high-school photographs that remind them of how much promise they once had and of how little it has been fulfilled.

In my case, however, I tend to find things like a collection of shrunken heads hanging by their hair from the rafters or a fighting falcon trained to swoop down and pluck out an intruder's eyes, or a tripwire-activated capture net that drops over any unwanted visitor and cinches ever tighter around him until he's immobilized.

In spite of my experiences of attics, looking back the way I had come, when I saw the door begin to open at the west end of the hallway, I stepped across the threshold onto the landing. I drew the door shut behind me.

Once I was on the roof, I would be outside of the building's envelope, with nowhere to run and with more than a forty-foot drop to the ground below. Nevertheless, I hastily climbed this last flight of stairs because, for one thing, when confronted with the Unknown, of which this man from the wasteland was an embodiment, it was never wise to be confrontational, and because rational optimism is required of anyone who hopes to be a survivor, and finally because there was nowhere else to go.

Twelve.

THE DOOR AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS OPENED NOT into an attic but instead into a ten-foot-square room as featureless and somehow artificial as all those before it, which soon proved to be a kind of shed on the roof. Directly opposite the entrance door waited an exit, through which I stepped onto the flat and parapeted top of the building, closing that last door behind me.

Without a window between me and this absolute-black sky, the effect of such undetailed heavens was profound, frightening not just because of the uncanny darkness but also for a reason that eluded me. Or perhaps the reason was not elusive. Maybe I dreaded acknowledging and considering it, for fear that contemplation would soon sweep me out of the main currents of sanity, into a tributary of madness.

Indeed, the roof was a lunatic place, disorienting under a moonless and starless vault that seemed at first to be an eternal void, but the next moment might have been the low ceiling of a cavern deep in Earth's crust, and then again a void. In spite of the distant lakes of fire, if they were truly fire, the land around this isolated structure lay nearly as dark as the sky above, providing so little ambient light that I could not see as far as any edge of the roof, which in my reality had been guarded by an Art Deco parapet. Even in the remote reaches of the Mojave, even on a night when two thousand feet of dense ecliptical clouds separated the desert from the glowing wonders of the universe, the land gave off at least a dim light, the product of natural radiation, of minerals in the soil, and of certain vaguely luminous plants. Not here. This outer darkness, so complete, seemed to be capable of a kind of osmosis, gradually penetrating me to blacken my thoughts and eventually extinguish my hope.

I could barely see the pale forms of my hands-one fisted, the other clenching the pistol. As I took a two-hand grip on the weapon, it remained all but invisible, and I almost squeezed off a shot just to see the muzzle flash and know that I wasn't going blind.

Although I wanted to put more distance between me and the door of the shed, wanted to find something behind which I could hide-chimney stacks, air-conditioner housings, anything-my feet seemed to be embedded ankle-deep in long-settled roof tar. But my inability to move was entirely psychological, the blackness above pressing down like deep strata of soil and rock, squeezing upon me from all sides, until it seemed that Fate, in league with Nature, intended that I should become nothing more than a brittle fossil in a thick vein of anthracite.

With effort, I shuffled backward a step, another and another, but then halted as a dizziness overcame me and as I began to think that I must be turning as I retreated, gradually arcing away from the roof shed, where the man from the wasteland might at any moment appear. I needed to keep the pistol trained upon that door, because if the stranger came through it with the obvious intent to attack, he would be backlighted only briefly. I would have but a second to discern his intent and another second to squeeze off a shot before the door fell shut.

When he was no longer silhouetted by the lighted shed, I might discover that he could see in the lightlessness of this wretched reality as well as I was able to see in the full sun of the day. He could then stalk me at his leisure, while in a growing panic I shot at phantoms until I expended all ten rounds in the pistol's magazine.

Although I am an optimist, my imagination can conjure countless deadly hands from any shuffled deck before the cards are dealt. I am, therefore, perplexed by so many people who, whether they're optimists or pessimists, trust any dealer as long as he claims to share their vision of how all things ought to be, who trust their own vision to the extent that they never question it, and who believe that four of a kind and royal flushes always fall by chance in a world without meaning. To such folks, Hitler was a distant and half-comic figure-until he wasn't; and mad mullahs promising to use nuclear weapons as soon as they obtain them are likewise harmless-until they aren't. I, on the other hand, believe life has profound meaning and that the meaning of Creation itself is benign, but I also know that there are such things as card mechanics who can manipulate any deck to their great advantage. In life, little happens by chance, and most bad hands we're dealt are the consequence of our actions, which are shaped by our wisdom and our ignorance. In my experience, survival depends on hoping for the best while recognizing that disaster is more likely and that it can't be averted if it can't be imagined.

The roof-shed door opened. The man out of the wasteland appeared with the jaundice-yellow light behind him, a silhouette of which I could see no details whatsoever.

Standing five-ten or five-eleven, he seemed to have an athletic physique, though he wasn't the hulking terminator or the sinuous shape-shifter that I might have feared. As far as I could tell, he held no weapon.

No light from the stairs managed to leak out onto the roof, as if some magical barrier contained it, and I couldn't know whether or not he saw me. But he didn't slip quickly out of the shed and dodge to one side; he paused in the doorway instead, blocking the door with his body, giving me plenty of time to kill him. His confidence seemed to suggest that he didn't bear me any ill will and therefore a.s.sumed I would not harm him, that he was merely curious about me and antic.i.p.ated nothing more than curiosity in return.

The longer he dared to stand there, however, the more his confidence seemed to be a troubling boldness, even effrontery. His continued silence made little sense if his sole reason for pursuing me was mere curiosity. Moment by moment, I found his att.i.tude more arrogant and threatening.

Unless his vision was cat-clear in the dark, he could not know that I held a pistol. He might be convinced to explain himself if he was made aware that, at a distance of perhaps fifteen feet, I could blow him out of this hostile world into another.

Intuition told me not to speak a word. His stillness might be a taunt, inviting me to ask who he was and what he intended. If he wanted me to speak first, then my doing so would in some way surely disadvantage me.

As much as it is anything else, my life is a series of pursuits and confrontations. Suddenly I realized that when this man appeared and came after me, I fell into my usual habits and routines, allowing the strangeness of this dark world to recede from my awareness, as if I were grateful to escape into the familiar game of cat and mouse. As a result, giving myself to action, I'd failed to consider that the issues and ideas and needs motivating this man might be as different from my desires and motives as his world was different from mine.

Whatever his hesitation in the doorway might imply, whatever his silence was meant to convey, my interpretation of his behavior would most likely be wrong. I was in new territory in every sense of the word, standing waist-deep in the surging waters of the unknown, which is the worst place to find oneself, for that riverbed is treacherous underfoot and those currents are as unpredictable as they are deadly.

Intuition and reason told me to remain mute and to be prepared that when he spoke, if he spoke, what little I thought I knew about this place and this man would be washed away. And then events would rush forward in waves, in drowning cataracts.

My expectation was fulfilled a moment later, when the silhouette declared, "My name is Odd Thomas. I see the spirits of the lingering dead." His voice was mine.

He stepped forward, and the door swung shut behind him, sweeping away the dirty-yellow light in the stairwell.

Thirteen.

THERE CAN BE NO MORE DREAMLIKE MOMENT THAN TO encounter yourself in a dark place and to know in your marrow as surely as in your mind that only one of you will leave this rendezvous alive.

Yet this was not a dream.

In the worst nightmares, a threshold of terror is reached at which your pounding heart achieves a pace that would set off a cardiac-monitor alarm if you were in an ER, hyperventilation and elevated blood pressure lead to an attack of pulmonary hypertension, and you are violently ejected from sleep, heart hammering so loud that your eardrums seem about to split from the concussions, chest aching, unable to draw an adequate breath. For a moment, you are convinced that the malevolent presence from the nightmare, whatever its nature, is still upon you, smothering you, but within seconds, the familiarity of the waking world is an antidote for your panic.

As the man who claimed to be me approached and as the door fell shut behind him, leaving us in an abyssal dark, my heart achieved the requisite pace to trigger an alarm, my breathing became so fast and shallow that a pain rose in my breast, but I did not wake because I was not sleeping.

Intuition urgently insisted that I move quickly to my right and squeeze off three spread shots at where the Other Odd Thomas would be if he continued on a straight line toward my original position. I regret to say that I allowed my intuition to be overruled by instinct-which urged me to Shoot now, this instant, shoot or run, run!-but which simultaneously raised in me an existential horror of shooting someone who claimed to be me and who sounded exactly like me. In human beings, low superst.i.tion is inevitably entwined with instinct-one struggling for dominance over the other in moments of high risk-a linkage that no doubt dates to our caveman days. And so fright shivered through muscle, sinew, and blood-a dread that if I killed this Other, I would at the same time kill myself.

Instinct is an animal faculty, independent of instruction and reasoning, but far inferior to intuition, which is a grace unique to humanity. Instinct will never mislead a deer that senses a hunter in the woods and bolts for the cover of a thicker stand of trees, because animals are not subject to superst.i.tion that can pollute pure instinct, as we are.

Besides, instinct always triggers instant action, the fight-or-flight impulse. But because modern human beings are accustomed to the comforts of Starbucks and smartphones and aerosol cheese and athletic shoes with air-cushion insoles, we rarely find ourselves in crises that can be resolved as easily as choosing to run or attack, other than in the compet.i.tive crowds at an electronics store on the first bargain-price shopping day after Thanksgiving. Intuition, on the other hand, arises from the perpetual calm in the core of the soul, and it requires of us discrimination and adroitness if it is to serve us well.

During that blackout on the roof, I was no more discriminating and adroit than a night-grazing rabbit abruptly paralyzed by a double flash of lightning and a hammerstrike of thunder loud enough to cleave stone. The Other had spoken in my voice, therefore I was him and he was me, and to shoot seemed to be suicide.

In my defense, I was stupidly immobilized only for a moment, but that proved long enough for him to seize me by the throat with both hands. His touch was cold, his grip tight.

Even at less than arm's length, I couldn't discern the barest outlines of his face. If I had been able to see him, to stare into my own face sans mirror, perhaps I would have been further inhibited, but blindness allowed me to squeeze the trigger, and I pumped two rounds into his chest at point-blank range. The hard reports echoed through the darkness, not only out across the vast wasteland but off something overhead, as though the sky might in fact be plated over with a material more substantial than clouds.

Unfortunately, two hollow-point 9-mm slugs seemed to have less effect on him than flea bites. His left hand continued to clutch my throat as if his fingers were the steel digits of a robot, but now he clasped the back of my head with his right hand and pulled my face closer to his.

I fired again, again, and twice again, but four bullets had no greater effect than two. Even if he had been wearing a Kevlar vest, the impact of the rounds would have been like fist blows, staggering him if not dropping him to his knees.

He pulled me closer, and he seemed to be whispering something, but the gunfire had left me temporarily half deaf, and I couldn't understand what he was saying.

Although he wasn't choking me, just holding fast to my throat, I inhaled no less violently than a man trapped in a submerged car as he hungrily sought the last air in the bubble near the ceiling.

Relinquishing my double grip on the pistol, I felt for his face and found his chin, which I tried to force upward with the heel of my left hand. With my right, I thrust the business end of the weapon against his exposed throat. Because my arm was trapped between us and my elbow jammed firmly against my abdomen, the recoil was absorbed so that the muzzle didn't jump off target, and I emptied the magazine of the last four rounds.

Even though the first six shots had had no effect, I steeled myself for gouting blood, a spray of flesh and bone and brains, but these last four rounds were likewise ineffective, as if the pistol had been loaded with blanks.

I dropped the gun or it was wrenched out of my hand, and we were at each other in what should have been evenly matched combat, but he was stronger, uncannily strong. Only a spirit could be impervious to ten bullets, but no spirit could harm me except by going poltergeist, not with its hands, only with inanimate objects hurled in raptures of rage with streams of spiritual power drawn from a malignant well.

With one hand against the back of my head, the other on my throat, unfazed by my punches, he succeeded in drawing me closer, until our foreheads knocked together. Still I was unable to see anything of the Other in this father of all darknesses.

His lips were close to mine, but I couldn't feel the barest exhalation issue with his words when he said urgently, roughly, "I need your breath."

Clutching his throat with both hands, I tried to strangle him, while he seemed to want to force me into an unholy kiss. I found the muscles of his throat flaccid, soft, disgusting, as though in spite of his great strength, no life existed in him. The tissues of his neck compressed under my throttling hands, but I couldn't choke him, as if he had no breath that could be denied him, no blood in his carotid arteries that might be withheld from his brain. And yet he was strong, insistent, an immovable object and at the same time an irresistible force.

"Your breath, piglet," he demanded in a wolfish snarl, "your breath."

His flesh felt more gelid than that of a room-temperature corpse before the heat of decomposition begins to warm it again, chill and clammy and reminiscent of a fish pulled from a cold lake. I felt in the presence of something unclean, although no smell whatsoever rose from him, neither pleasant nor offensive, which further suggested that what animated him was not life as we think of it.

As he chanted your breath, I somehow knew that I still must not speak, that to say anything would be to concede that he might be worthy of my curses, and in so acknowledging him, I would give him some crucial advantage in our struggle, which was growing more desperate by the moment.

His voice was mine but sinister, suited to the pitch-darkness enveloping us, a voice from the endless night, of the endless night. He was so close to administering the kiss of death that, although I could not feel his exhalations, his words vibrated faintly against my lips: "Give me your breath, piglet, your breath, and the sweet fruit at the end of it."

I couldn't shove him away, couldn't pull away, couldn't wound or stagger him. He was as deadly as a tar pit, quicksand personified, and he would draw the life from me as greedily as a henhouse fox draining yolk and egg white out of a bitten sh.e.l.l.

Abruptly, gray light from a storm sky dispelled the darkness, and with the reappearance of the filtered sun fell cool rain in torrents, thousands of silvery droplets performing a fairy dance across the roof. The Other had vanished. The resurrected city of my reality lay round about, blurred by the downpour. The parapet again marked the perimeter of the building. Evidently, I didn't need to be within the envelope of the structure to be returned here, only in contact with it, and it seemed that while I could move between worlds, albeit involuntarily, the Other Odd Thomas-whatever it had been-could not, a creature solely of that wasteland.

Although I have a competent command of language, I cannot string together a beadwork of words sufficient to express the grat.i.tude I felt for being brought out of that dark land into this world of light and hope, this manifest yet mystical world of ours, where sorrowful mysteries are outnumbered two to one by those that are joyful and glorious. Trembling violently, I sank to my knees. In disgust, with one hand and then with the other, I scrubbed my lips, although the thing that would have kissed away my life-and more than my life-had not quite been able to do so.

I didn't mind being soaked to the skin and chilled, because the rain washed from me the feeling that I was unclean where the Other had touched me. With relief but also with some apprehension that the blinding dark might again depose the daylight, I recovered the dropped pistol, crossed the roof to the shed, and opened the door.

The interior of the shed was not as clean and featureless as it had been when I first ascended to it in that other realm. Enough storm light found its way inside to reveal abandoned spiderworks tattering in the corners of the ceiling, a generous layer of dust on the shelves, and a litter of paper sc.r.a.ps and broken gla.s.s across the floor. On the shelves stood a few oddly shaped cans so old and rusted that their labels could not be read.

The air was redolent of wood rot and a lacquerlike smell that came from something that for weeks or months had been oozing from one of the rusty containers. I realized that in the other-world version of this building, there had been no odors, either foul or sweet, just as there had been no sounds except those that I made.

When I opened the creaking door at the head of the single flight of narrow stairs, I smelled mold and dust. The shaft was dark except for watery light below, where the lower door hung open and askew on two of three hinges.

In the third-floor hallway, I discovered the source of that vague illumination: three skylights. The hollow rataplan of rain on the slanted panes unnerved me because it masked other sounds that I might need to hear, and I hurried to the west stairwell.