Free Deeply Odd by Dean Koontz

more traditional manner, in time to see him floating down the first flight, his feet a few inches above the treads.
    As I followed, looking down on him, I decided he had manifested not as he had been late in life but as he had been in his early fifties, hair still dark but receding, the beginning of a bald spot at the crown of his head. He was born in 1899, so his fifties were the 1950s, a decade in which he made
Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man
, and
Vertigo
, more classic films than most directors produce in a lifetime.
Rebecca
, the first version of
The Man Who Knew Too Much, Notorious, Spellbound, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt
, and so many other great works were already in his past.
Psycho, The Birds
, and others were in his future.
    We descended four flights, which put us in the basement. With the aplomb that he exhibited routinely in life, the director floated through another closed door, and I discovered that beyond it lay the mechanical heart of the truck stop, a chamber that perhaps seemed more vast than it was, housing huge boilers, chillers, a maze of big PVC pipes serving the heating-cooling system, andbanks of circuit breakers. There was also much equipment that I could not identify, in fact so much that I might very well have been in the engine room of a starship.
    Cold harsh light fell from the fluorescent fixtures. Shadows had sharp edges, and the stainless-steel housings of the various machines glistened as if crusted in ice.
    Mr. Hitchcock cast no shadow at any time, of course, and my own shrank under my feet as we came to a halt beneath a large array of fluorescents in what seemed to be the center of the room. He put one finger to his lips, suggesting silence, and then tilted his head to the right, cupping a hand around that ear in a theatrical gesture, which reminded me that he had begun his long career in silent films.
    I cocked my head, too, and we stood there in a comic posture, as if we were Laurel and Hardy puzzling over the source of a peculiar sound that would prove to be a block-and-tackle failing in the moment before a piano dropped on our heads. The humming and purring of the machinery had no menace, however, and I heard nothing else, certainly nothing that would put the hairs up on the nape of my neck.
    But then I
did
hear something, two men arguing, their words muffled and not quite decipherable—yet close. Surprised, I turned, but no one shared the open center of the room with us, and between the banks of machinery, the aisle by which we had arrived here was also deserted. Other passageways serving additional rows of machines waited to be explored, but I didn’t think I’d find the two men in any of them. That angry pair seemed near but not quite real, their voices sonorous and distorted like those of malevolent presences in a dream.
    Their conversation faded, then returned, louder and closer than before, though still indecipherable, as if they were just a few feet away but on the farther side of a wall that I couldn’t see. I turned again, and an infuriated man in jeans and a black-leather jacket stalked past close enough to touch, oblivious of me.
    His face was hard and seemed subtly broken, the countenance of a stubborn but inept boxer who had taken too many devastating punches. Fierce under heavy lids, his eyes shifted here, there, here with the desperation of a beast born to be free but caged from an early age.
    And he was semitransparent.
    The lingering dead look as real to me as they would have appeared in life. If they don’t manifest with mortal wounds—as did the decapitated woman crossing the street—and if they don’t pass through walls or float inches above the ground, I am not often able to recognize them as spirits.
    This stocky, thick-necked man with the fractured-stone face was not a spirit. His voice, though seeming to be filtered through a foot or two of cotton batting and distorted like a