LITMIR.BIZ

       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 region of the universe where the ancient stars were burnt-out cinders. The bone-brittling cold, deeper here than elsewhere in the house, and the oppressive silence argued as well that this was some bleak way station in the interstellar vacuum.

      More peculiar than anything else: The hallway light failed to penetrate even a fraction of an inch into the realm beyond the door. The demarcation of light and utter lightlessness was as sharp as a painted line at the inner edge of the threshold, up the jamb, and across the header. The perfect gloom did not merely resist the intrusion of light but foiled it entirely.

      This seemed to be a wall of blackest obsidian, though obsidian that lacked polish and glimmer.

      I am not fearless. Toss me in a cage with a hungry tiger, and if I should escape, I will need a bath and clean pants as surely as will the next guy.

      My unique path through life has led me, however, to fear known threats but seldom the unknown, while most people fear both.

      Fire scares me, yes, and earthquakes, and venomous snakes. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.

      To me, however, the most daunting mysteries of existence—death and what lies beyond—have no fright factor because I deal with the dead each day. Besides, I have faith that where I am ultimately going is not to mere oblivion.

      In spooky movies, do you rail at the beleaguered characters to get the hell out of the haunted house, to get smart and leave? They poke into rooms with a history of bloody murder, into attics hung with cobwebs and shadows, into cellars acrawl with cockroaches and cacodemons, and when they are chopped-stabbed-gutted-beheaded-burned with the flamboyance necessary to satisfy Hollywood’s most psychotic directors, we gasp and shudder, and then we say, “Idiot,” for by their stupidity they have earned their fate.

      I’m not stupid, but I am one of those who will never flee the haunted place. The special gift of paranormal sight, with which I was born, impels me to explore, and I can no more resist the demands of my talent than a musical prodigy can resist the magnetic pull of a piano; I am no more deterred by the mortal risks than is a fighter pilot eager to take flight into war-torn skies.

      This is part of the reason why Stormy occasionally wonders if my gift might be instead a curse.

      On the brink of unblemished blackness, I raised my right hand as if I were taking an oath—and pressed my palm to the apparent barrier before me. Although this darkness could fend off light, it offered no resistance whatsoever to the pressure that I applied. My hand disappeared into the tarry gloom.

      By “disappeared,” I mean that I could perceive not even the vaguest impression of my wiggling fingers beyond the surface of this wall of blackness. My wrist ended as abruptly as that of an amputee.

      I must admit that my heart raced, though I felt no pain, and that I exhaled with relief—and without sound—when I withdrew my hand and saw that all my digits were intact. I felt as though I had survived an illusion performed by those self-proclaimed bad boys of magic, Penn and Teller.

      When I stepped across the threshold, however, holding fast to the door casing with one hand, I entered not an illusion but a real place that seemed more unreal than any dream. The blackness ahead remained uncannily pure; the cold was unrelenting; and the silence cloyed as effectively as congealed blood in the ears of a head-shot dead man.

      Although from the far side of the doorway I had been unable to discern one scintilla of this room, I could look out from within it and see the hallway in normal light, unobstructed. This view shed no more illumination into the room than would have a painting of a sunny landscape.

      I half expected to find that Fungus Man had returned and that he was staring at the only part of me now visible from out there: my hooked fingers desperately clutching the casing. Fortunately, I was still alone.

      Having discovered that I could see the exit to the hall and therefore could find my way out, I let go of the doorway. I eased entirely into this lightless chamber and, turning away from the sight of the hall, became at once as blind as I was deaf.

      Without either sound or vision, I quickly grew disoriented. I felt for a light switch, found it, flicked it up and down and up again without effect.

      I grew aware of a small red light that I was certain hadn’t been there a moment earlier: the murderous red of a sullen and bloody eye, though it was not an eye.

      My sense of spatial reality and my ability to gauge distance with accuracy abandoned me, for the tiny beacon seemed to be miles from my position, like the mast light of a ship far away on a night sea. This small house, of course, could not contain such a vastness as I imagined lay before me.

      When I let go of the useless light switch, I felt as unnervingly buoyant as a hapless drunkard inflated by the fumes of alcohol. My feet seemed not quite to touch the floor as I determinedly approached the red light.

      Wishing that I’d had a second scoop of coconut cherry chocolate chunk while I’d had the chance, I took six steps, ten, twenty. The beacon didn’t increase in size and seemed in fact to recede from me at precisely the speed at which I approached it.

      I stopped, turned, and peered back at the door. Although I had made no progress toward the light, I had traveled what appeared to be approximately forty feet.

      Of more interest than the distance covered was the figure now silhouetted in the open door. Not Fungus Man. Backlit by the hallway light stood ... me.

      Although the mysteries of the universe do not greatly frighten me, I’ve not lost my capacity for astonishment, amazement, and awe. Now, across the keyboard of my mind played arpeggios of those three sentiments.

      Convinced that this wasn’t a mirror effect and that I was in fact gazing at another me, I nevertheless tested my certainty by waving. The other Odd Thomas didn’t return my wave, as a reflection would have done.

      Because I stood submerged in this swampish blackness, he could not see me, and so I tried to shout to him. In my throat, I felt the quiver of strummed vocal chords, but if sound was produced, I could not hear it. Most likely he, too, was deaf to that cry.

      As tentatively as I had done, this second Odd Thomas reached into the palpable dark with one questing hand, marveling as I had done at the illusion of amputation.

      This timid intrusion seemed to disturb a delicate equilibrium, and abruptly the black room shifted like the pivot mountings of a gyroscope, while the red light at the center remained fixed. Flung by forces beyond my control, much as a surfer might be tossed from his board in the collapsing barrel of a mammoth wave, I was magically churned out of that weird chamber and—

      —into the drab living room.

      I found myself not tumbled in a heap, as I might have expected to be, but standing approximately where I

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