sound. My name is Odd. Odd Thomas.”
“Nothing wrong with the Thomas part.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And, you know, Odd isn’t as bad as some things parents do to kids. Parents can wreck you, man. My parents were the nastiest—”
To complete Kenny’s observation of his parents as he made it, conjure in your mind several words, never spoken in polite company, that suggest incest, self-gratification, gross violations of laws protecting animals from the perverse desires of human beings, erotic obsession with the product of a major cereal company, and the most bizarre use of the tongue that you can imagine. …
On second thought, forget it. Kenny’s characterization of his parents was unique in the colorful history of gutter speech. No matter how long you pondered the puzzle I’ve set before you, your solution would be the palest approximation of what he said.
Then he continued: “My born last name is Keister. You know what Keister means?”
Although we seemed to be laying the foundations of a friendship, I suspected that I could go from Kenny’s A-list to his death list from one second to the next. I was concerned that acknowledging my awareness of the meaning of the word Keister might light his fuse.
But he had asked. So I said, “Well, sir, it’s slang, and some people use it to mean a person’s bottom, you know, like what you sit on, you know, like the seat of your pants, or even sometimes, well, buttocks.”
“Ass,” he declared, managing to hiss and growl the word at the same time, while thundering it out loud enough to rattle the stable windows. “Keister means ass.”
I dared to glance to my left, and I saw that the western windows admitted more and much ruddier light than had shone through them only a few minutes earlier.
“You know what my first name was, my born name?” Kenny asked, though in such a way as to make the question a demand.
Meeting his gaze again and finding it no less disturbing, I said, “I guess it wasn’t Kenny.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, his face squinched as if he must be preparing himself for a difficult revelation.
For an instant I considered bolting for the nearer door, but I was afraid that by trying to flee I would put the lie to my pretense of friendship, motivating the forsaken Kenny to shoot me in the back.
Although they were to one degree or another eccentric, everyone else at Roseland tried to maintain an air of normalcy. This colorful giant, this walking armory with screaming-hyena tattoos snarling on his massive arms, made no such effort. I found it all but impossible to see him working with the other members of the estate-security team whom I had met. The safest assumption was that he was not a Roseland guard and not to be trusted for a second.
He took another deep breath, blew it out, opened his eyes, and said, “My born first name was Jack. They named me Jack Keister.”
“That’s just cruel, sir.”
“Sonofabitch bastards,” he said, which I inferred to be a less infuriated reference to his parents. “I got teased from day one in preschool, the little sonsofbitches couldn’t even wait till first grade. Minute I turned eighteen, I went to court to change my name.”
I almost said To Kenny Keister? but fortunately held my tongue.
“Kenneth Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten,” he said, rolling the names across his tongue with all the authority of the finest British stage actor.
“Impressive,” I declared, “and may I say, exactly fitting.”
He almost blushed with pleasure. “They’re names I always liked, so I strung ’em together.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of anything more to say to him. Unless Kenny Mountbatten proved to be a more gifted raconteur than all the evidence thus far indicated, we had reached the conclusion of our conversation.
I would not have been surprised if he punctuated his final line of dialogue by shooting me in the gut.
Instead, he glanced left and then right, suddenly aware of the rapid change in the quality of light at the windows. An expression of such alarm came over him that in spite of his grievous scars, hideous teeth, and crocodilian eyes, I could see in his face a bit of the tormented little boy he had once been.
“I’m late,” he said, a tremor of distress in his voice, “late, late, late.”
He turned away from me and ran to the door through which we had both entered. Still repeating that word, he fled the building less like the Terminator that he had seemed to be and more like the White Rabbit frightened of what discipline might be imposed if he were late for tea with the Mad Hatter.
On the east side of the stable, the windows allowed in far less light than seemed possible for a morning that had so recently dawned nearly cloudless. Every pane of the western windows, however, glowed like a bright ruby.
A rapidly incoming overcast might have explained the declining light at the east windows, but not the fiery glow at those to the west. The possibility of a wildfire occurred to me, masses of dark smoke to the east, flames roaring to the west, but I didn’t smell smoke, and surely no fire could have gone from an arsonist’s match to a roaring inferno in mere minutes.
Not wanting to tread on Kenny’s heels, much preferring that he forget all about me, I hesitated before going to the door by which he had departed. It now stood open about three feet.
At the threshold, I hesitated, for the world outside wasn’t as it ought to have been.
Ten feet of bare earth lay past the door, as before, although not the rock and not the crumpled Coke can, each of which had earlier cast a single shadow, just as I did. The weeds rose beyond the barren zone, and at some distance a familiar copse of live oaks spread black limbs.
But it was all bathed in the ominous light out of which had flown the hellish bats bigger than eagles. Directly overhead and to the west, high-altitude rivers of ash and soot serpentined through a yellow sky. The eastern heavens were dark mustard fading to black. The night brimmed the mountains and the foothills, on the verge of spilling toward me, a night in which no starlight could pierce the apocalyptic mantle encircling the world.
Minutes ago, the morning was fresh, and now the day was creeping toward its bed in the far Pacific. The mystery of the building’s two shadows still played out, but I was not a good enough detective to deduce the meaning of them or to predict the resolution that seemed to be rushing toward me.
Intuition warned me, however, that to venture into this sudden yellow twilight would be dangerous if not suicidal. Beyond lay a Roseland somehow terribly different from the estate that I knew. And whatever the nature of that difference, it would not be anything as benign as that this Roseland would have roses.
I rolled the bronze door shut and could find no way to lock it. For fear of fire, perhaps no one locked in horses. And from the time when Roseland had been built, in the 1920s, there had been no gangs of horse thieves in California who needed to be locked out.
As I retreated along the stone- and copper-decorated aisle to the center of the building, the sconces on the stall posts
