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Odd Hours
Dean Koontz
From the mind of Dean Koontz, the 400 million copy worldwide bestseller, comes this supernatural tale of good and evil, and life and death. Find out why Odd Thomas is the master storyteller’s most talked about creation.Strange times need strange heroes.Odd Thomas lives always between two worlds. He can see the lingering dead and knows that even in chaos, there is order, purpose, and strange meaning that invites our understanding but often thwarts it.Intuition has brought Odd Thomas to the quaint town of Magic Beach on the California coast. As he waits to learn why he has been drawn there, he finds work as a cook and assistant to a once-famous film actor who, at eighty has become an eccentric with as long a list of fears as he has stories about Hollywood’s golden days.Odd is having dreams of a red tide, vague but worrisome. By day he senses a free-floating fear in the air of the town, as if unleashed by the crashing waves. But nothing prepares him for the hard truth of what he will discover as he comes face to face with a form of evil that will test him as never before…
Copyright (#ulink_fd458b01-4f48-5868-aa7d-b9dec8a76118)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
Copyright © Dean Koontz 2008
Dean Koontz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007267552
Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007287314
Version: 2017-10-16
This fourth Odd adventure is dedicated to Bruce, Carolyn, and Michael Rouleau.
To Michael because he makes his parents proud.
To Carolyn because she makes Bruce happy.
To Bruce because he has been so reliable all these years, and because he truly knows what it means to love a good dog.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
—Theodore Roethke, “The Waking”
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u3e90792a-d8ac-51c0-acce-dd34ef8ca0d6)
Copyright (#u9a17524e-f6a6-5519-9d3b-b2117170e409)
Dedication (#u12450d96-93f7-5be3-9bab-1880fc6512bd)
Epigraph (#u79b1ab40-3785-5c03-8bd3-ac4a4b1f0ae5)
Chapter 1 (#u2843aea8-ff58-58fb-bbfe-6d43aab4c6d4)
Chapter 2 (#ue6bc56f0-56c8-5676-814d-f5fe18329845)
Chapter 3 (#u72e73255-0d9e-5fec-8b9b-05b7fe646fd9)
Chapter 4 (#u078bf2c6-b406-53dd-8e0f-039c9599cf86)
Chapter 5 (#u7ad6d2ec-9611-583e-8638-b6ba35457c5f)
Chapter 6 (#u6652864d-5b09-586c-826d-c01e82adef97)
Chapter 7 (#u4d76b038-6752-535d-8d04-aa0f303be8a7)
Chapter 8 (#u0fcf8ee3-006c-5469-9a32-c411aaefa8ad)
Chapter 9 (#u06977325-bd76-5253-9c65-d99179d3bf4f)
Chapter 10 (#u58942ceb-b306-5bee-ae85-cefe3b82ab29)
Chapter 11 (#u5c4f141a-9f80-557b-b05a-8d998be1270a)
Chapter 12 (#u9a9e2604-0bd1-532f-ae90-5e7ef4c75316)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Dean Koontz (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_c7d34e06-f07c-58b3-905e-9e824142108a)
It’s only life. We all get through it.
Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through the years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.
I still possessed both legs and both eyes, and even my hair looked all right when I rose that Wednesday morning in late January. If I returned to bed sixteen hours later, having lost all of my hair but nothing else, I would consider the day a triumph. Even minus a few teeth, I’d call it a triumph.
When I raised the window shades in my bedroom, the cocooned sky was gray and swollen, windless and still, but pregnant with a promise of change.
Overnight, according to the radio, an airliner had crashed in Ohio. Hundreds perished. The sole survivor, a ten-month-old child, had been found upright and unscathed in a battered seat that stood in a field of scorched and twisted debris.
Throughout the morning, under the expectant sky, low sluggish waves exhausted themselves on the shore. The Pacific was gray and awash with inky shadows, as if sinuous sea beasts of fantastical form swam just below the surface.
During the night, I had twice awakened from a dream in which the tide flowed red and the sea throbbed with a terrible light.
As nightmares go, I’m sure you’ve had worse. The problem is that a few of my dreams have come true, and people have died.
While I prepared breakfast for my employer, the kitchen radio brought news that the jihadists who had the previous day seized an ocean liner in the Mediterranean were now beheading passengers.
Years ago I stopped watching news programs on television. I can tolerate words and the knowledge they impart, but the images undo me.
Because he was an insomniac who went to bed at dawn, Hutch ate breakfast at noon. He paid me well, and he was kind, so I cooked to his schedule without complaint.
Hutch took his meals in the dining room, where the draperies were always closed. Not one bright sliver of any windowpane remained exposed.
He often enjoyed a film while he ate, lingering over coffee until the credits rolled. That day, rather than cable news, he watched Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century.
Eighty-eight years old, born in the era of silent films, when Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino were stars, and having later been a successful actor, Hutch thought less in words than in images, and he dwelt in fantasy.
Beside his plate stood a bottle of Purell sanitizing gel. He lavished it on his hands not only before and after eating, but also at least twice during a meal.
Like most Americans in the first decade of the new century, Hutch feared everything except what he ought to fear.
When TV-news programs ran out of stories about drunk, drug-addled, murderous, and otherwise crazed celebrities—which happened perhaps twice a year—they sometimes filled the brief gap with a sensationalistic piece on that rare flesh-eating bacteria.
