Saint Odd. Dean Koontz
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with me from the coast. I found my way by flashlight down a long, wide ramp that led to an immense segmented garage door through which countless eighteen-wheelers had once driven with loads of merchandise for the department stores and the many smaller shops.
The moon was down, the glimmering constellations so distant, and even in May the Mojave night was as mild as baby-bottle milk. On flanking concrete walls that loomed higher as the ramp descended, pale reflections of the flashlight drifted alongside me as if they were spirit companions.
I knew a great deal about the ghosts that haunted this world. I saw those who had died but who, for whatever reasons, would not or could not cross over to whatever came next. My life had been shaped by those lingering dead, by their regrets, their hopes, their needs, their melancholy. In my twenty-two years of life, I had come to regard even angry spirits with equanimity, reserving my dread for certain still-living human beings and the horrors of which they were capable.
To the left of the enormous roll-up door was one of ordinary dimensions, secured with both a mortise lock and a large padlock. I propped my flashlight against the door frame, with its beam angled upward.
Using the long-handled bolt cutter, I severed the shackle from the case of the padlock. I unhooked the padlock from the slotted strap and threw it aside.
The rimless lock cylinder could not be gripped with lever-wrench pliers and pulled out of the escutcheon. From my shirt pocket, I took a wedge-shaped steel tap with a broad head, and I pounded the tap into the keyway of the mortise lock. The poll of the hammer rang off its target, the pin tumblers in the keyway shrieked as the guts of the lock were distorted, and the stricken door clattered in its frame.
I had no concern that the racket I raised would draw unwanted attention. The deserted mall was surrounded by a vastness of empty parking lot, which was these days encircled by chain-link fencing crowned with concertina wire to discourage romantically inclined teenagers in cars, homeless people with their worldly possessions packed in shopping carts, and whatever creeps might be drawn to the place by its history of violence. The police chose not to patrol the property anymore because, after all, everything on it was scheduled for demolition in a few months.
My version of the “Anvil Chorus” was brief. When I’d driven the tap fully into the keyway, the deadbolt rattled loosely in the latch assembly, and a narrow gap opened between door and jamb, although the bolt remained seated in the faceplate. I applied the crowbar and worked up a sweat before I broke into what had been the subterranean loading docks and the employee parking lot beneath Green Moon Mall, leaving my tools behind.
I am a fry cook, at my best when working the griddle, master of the spatula, maker of pancakes so light they seem about to float off your plate. I am a fry cook and wish to be nothing more, but the many threats I face have required me to develop skills not needed in the kitchen of a diner—like breaking and entering.
Stained concrete underfoot, overhead, on all sides, the ceiling supported by columns so thick that I couldn’t have gotten my arms around one: As a deep-sea diver in his pressurized suit and armored helmet might nevertheless sense the tremendous tonnage of the ocean pressing upon him, so I felt the great mass of the two-story mall and the anchoring pair of three-story department stores above me. For a moment, I felt buried, as if I had died on that day of violence and now must be a spirit haunting this elaborate catacomb.
Here and there lay small piles of trash: the splintered boards of a broken packing crate, empty and moldering cardboard boxes, and items not easily identified in the flare of the beam and the dance of shadows.
The rubber soles of my sneakers failed to disturb the absolute silence, as though I had no substance. Then a short-lived rustling sound rose from my left. It must have been a rat disturbed in a nest of trash, but nevertheless I said, “Hello?” The only response was the echo of that word, which in the colonnaded darkness returned to me from all sides.
When last I’d been here, the place had hummed with activity as numerous trucks off-loaded merchandise and harried stockroom clerks prepared it for delivery to the holding rooms and the sales floor, using forklifts and electric carts and hand trucks.
The elevated loading dock ran the full length of the enormous structure. I climbed a set of steel rungs embedded in the face of it, crossed the dock, and pushed through a pair of extra-wide double doors into a spacious corridor with concrete walls painted white. Two freight elevators waited on the left; but even if they were still operative—which I doubted—I didn’t want to be boxed in one of them. I opened a door labeled STAIRS, and I climbed.
From a ground-floor stockroom, I proceeded into what had been a department store. Silence pooled in the cavernous building, and I felt as if something akin to sharks swam through the waterless dark, circling me beyond the reach of the flashlight.
Sometimes entities appear to me that no one else can see, inky and undulant, as quick and sleek as wolves, though without features, terrible and predatory shadows that can enter a room by the narrowest crack between a door and jamb or through a keyhole. I call them bodachs, although only because an English boy, visiting Pico Mundo, once saw them in my company and gave them that name. Seconds later, a runaway truck crushed him to death between its front bumper and a concrete-block wall.
He was the first person I’d ever known with my ability to see the lingering dead and bodachs. Later I discovered that bodachs were mythical beasts of the British Isles; they were said to squirm down chimneys at night to carry off naughty children. The creatures that I saw were too real, and they were interested not solely in naughty children.
They appeared only for horrific events: at an industrial explosion, at a nursing-home collapse during an earthquake, at a mass murder in a shopping mall. They seemed to feed on human suffering and death, as if they were psychic vampires to whom our terror, pain, and grief were far sweeter than blood.
I didn’t know where they came from. I didn’t know where they went when they weren’t around. I had theories, of course, but all of my theories bundled together proved nothing except that I was no Einstein.
Now, in the abandoned department store, if bodachs had been swarming in the farther reaches of that gloomy chamber, I would not have seen them, black forms in blackness. No doubt I was alone, because in that desolate and unpopulated structure, there were no crowds for a gunman to cut down in the quantities that appealed to bodachs. They never deigned to manifest for a single death or even two, or three; their taste was for operatic violence.
Back in the awful day, when I’d come out of the busy department store into the even busier promenade that served the other shops, I had seen hundreds—perhaps thousands—of bodachs gathered along the second-floor balustrade, peering down, excited, twitching and swaying in anticipation of bloodshed.
And I had come to think that they were mocking me, that perhaps they had always known I could see them. Instead of putting an end to me with a runaway truck and a concrete-block wall, maybe they had schemed to manipulate me toward my loss, toward the fathomless grief that would be born from that loss. Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.
At the north end of the mall, the ground-floor promenade had once featured a forty-foot-high waterfall that cascaded down man-made rocks and flowed to the south, terminating in a koi pond. From sea to shining sea, the country had built glittering malls that were as much entertainments as they were places to shop, and Pico Mundo prided itself on satisfying Americans’ taste for spectacle even when buying socks. No water flowed anymore.
By flashlight, I walked south along the public concourse. All the signage had long ago been taken down. I could no longer remember what stores had occupied which spaces. Some of the show windows were shattered, drifted glass glittering against the bases on which the large panes had stood. Other sheets of intact glass were filmed with dust.
I had come there with determination, but as I approached the southern end of the building, I moved slower, and then slower still, overcome by cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the abandoned shopping mall. In memory, I heard the gunfire, the screams, the piercing cries of terror, the slap-slap-slap of running feet on travertine.
At the south end of the concourse