Free Brother Odd by Dean Koontz Page A

had been tenderized by the mysterious assailant’s club. The muscles relaxed, but the ache remained.
    The pain wasn’t severe. It didn’t concern me. Physical pain, unlike some other kinds, eventually goes away.
    When I turned off the water, big white Boo was staring at me through the steam-clouded glass door.
    After I had toweled dry and pulled on a pair of briefs, I knelt on the bathroom floor and rubbed the dog behind the ears, which made him grin with pleasure.
    “Where were you hiding?” I asked him. “Where were you when some miscreant tried to make my brain squirt out my ears? Huh?”
    He didn’t answer. He only grinned. I like old Marx Brothers movies, and Boo is the Harpo Marx of dogs in more ways than one.
    My toothbrush seemed to weigh five pounds. Even in exhaustion, I am diligent about brushing my teeth.
    A few years previously, I had witnessed an autopsy in which the medical examiner, during a preliminary review of the corpse, remarked for his recorder that the deceased was guilty of poor dental hygiene. I had been embarrassed for the dead man, who had been a friend of mine.
    I hope that no attendants at
my
autopsy will have any reason to be embarrassed for me.
    You might think this is pride of a particularly foolish kind. You’re probably right.
    Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.
    I have persuaded myself, however, that brushing my teeth in anticipation of my untimely demise is simply consideration for the feelings of any autopsy witness who might have known me when I was alive. Embarrassment for a friend, arising from his shortcomings, is never as awful as being mortified by the exposure of your own faults, but it is piercing.
    Boo was in bed, curled up against the footboard, when I came out of the bathroom.
    “No belly rub, no more ear scratching,” I told him. “I’m coming down like a plane that’s lost all engines.”
    His yawn was superfluous for a dog like him; he was here for companionship, not for sleep.
    Lacking enough energy to put on pajamas, I fell into bed in my briefs. The coroner always strips the body, anyway.
    After pulling the covers to my chin, I realized that I had left the light on in the adjacent bathroom.
    In spite of John Heineman’s four-billion-dollar endowment, the brothers at the abbey live frugally, in respect of their vows of poverty. They do not waste resources.
    The light seemed far away, growing more distant by the second, and the blankets were turning to stone. To hell with it. I wasn’t a monk yet, not even a novice.
    I wasn’t a fry cook anymore, either—except when I made pancakes on Sundays—or a tire salesman, or much of anything. We not-much-of-anything types don’t worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.
    Nevertheless, I worried. In spite of worrying, I slept.
    I dreamed, but not about exploding boilers. Not about nuns on fire, screaming through a snowy night, either.
    In the dream, I was sleeping but then awoke to see a bodach standing at the foot of my bed. This dream bodach, unlike those in the waking world, had fierce eyes that glistered with reflections of the light from the half-open bathroom door.
    As always, I pretended that I did not see the beast. I watched it through half-closed eyes.
    When it moved, it morphed, as things do in dreams, and became not a bodach any longer. At the foot of my bed stood the glowering Russian, Rodion Romanovich, the only other visitor currently staying in the guesthouse.
    Boo was in the dream, standing on the bed, baring his teeth at the intruder, but silent.
    Romanovich went around the bed to the nightstand.
    Boo sprang from the bed to the wall, as though he were a cat, and clung there on the vertical, defying gravity, glaring at the Russian.
    Interesting.
    Romanovich picked up the picture frame that stood beside the nightstand clock.
    The frame protects a small card from a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy. It declares YOU ARE