Free Forever Odd by Dean Koontz Page A

self-confidence would lead me to another fate different from the one that I desire, making a lie of the fortune-machine card that is framed above my bed.
    This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.
    I would not call Chief Porter. If my heart said I alone must go after Danny, I would obey my heart.

THIRTEEN
    AT MY APARTMENT, I STUFFED A SMALL BACK-PACK with items I might need, including two flashlights and a package of spare batteries.
    In the bedroom, I stood at the foot of the bed, silently reading the framed card on the wall: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
    I wanted to pry out the backing and remove the card from the frame, to take it with me. I would feel safer with it, protected.
    This was a variety of irrational thought that could never serve me well. A card dispensed by a machine in a carnival arcade is not the equivalent of a fragment of the true cross.
    Another and even less rational thought tormented me. In pursuit of Danny and his father, I might die, and having crossed the sea of death, arriving on the shore of the next world, I would want to have the card to present to whatever Presence met me there.
    This,
I would say,
is the promise I was made. She came here ahead of me, and now you must take me to her.
    In truth, although the circumstances in which we had gotten this fortune from the machine had seemed extraordinary and meaningful, no miracle had been involved. The promise was not of divine origin; it was one that she and I had made to each other, with mutual trust in the mercy of God to grant us the grace of eternity together.
    If a Presence meets me on the farther shore, I cannot prove a divine contract merely with a card from a fortune-telling machine. If the afterlife I envision is different from the one Heaven has planned for me, I can’t invoke the threat of litigation and demand the name of a good attorney.
    Conversely, if this grace should be granted and the promise of the card fulfilled, the Presence who meets me on that distant shore will be Bronwen Llewellyn herself, my Stormy.
    The proper place for the card was in the frame. There it would be safe and could continue to inspire me if I returned from this expedition alive.
    When I went into the kitchen to call Terri Stambaugh at the Pico Mundo Grille, Elvis was sitting at the table, weeping.
    I hate seeing him like this. The King of Rock ’n’ Roll should never cry.
    He shouldn’t pick his nose, either, but occasionally he does. I am sure this is a joke. A ghost has no need to pick its nose. Sometimes he pretends to find a nugget and to flick it at me, then grins boyishly.
    Lately, he’d been reliably cheerful. But he suffered sudden mood swings.
    Dead more than twenty-seven years, with no purpose in this world but unable to move on, as lonely as only the lingering dead can be, he had reason to wallow in melancholy. The cause of his distress, however, appeared to be the salt and pepper shakers on the table.
    Terri, as devoted a Presley fan and authority as anyone alive, had given me the two ceramic Elvises, each four inches high, which dated to 1962. The one dressed in white dispensed salt from his guitar; the one in black gave pepper from his pompadour.
    Elvis looked at me, pointed at the salt shaker, at the pepper, then at himself.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked, though I knew that he would not answer.
    He turned his face to the ceiling, as though to Heaven, with an expression of abject misery, sobbing silently.
    The salt and pepper shakers had stood on the table since the day after Christmas. He had previously been amused by them.
    I doubted that he had been moved to despair by the long-delayed realization that his image had been exploited to sell cheap, cheesy merchandise. Of the hundreds if not thousands of Elvis items that had been marketed over the years, scores were tackier than these ceramic collectibles, and he had not