Saint Odd by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page B

had not seen their faces. Although I knew their first names, they were anonymous. A strange thought disturbed me: If they should kill me, and if we met eventually in some place beyond the grave, they would know me, but I would not know them.
    Given more time to recall what I had learned about bats from Ozzie Boone, I remembered that a minimum thirty percent of any colony would reliably be infected with rabies.
    Darkness so perfect it made my eyes ache, the fetid air so thick that the stink became also a foul taste, the whispery sounds of the carnivorous beetles feeding on the tiny carcasses of rabies-infected bats, the occasional ruffle of wings as members of the colony stirred in their sleep, the expectation that they would abruptly take flight and prove Ozzie wrong regarding their affinity for human hair: In that poisonous atmosphere, I became more disoriented minute by grim minute. Decomposing dung releases sulfurous gas, deadly in sufficient concentration, and if not ultimately lethal here, at least capable of making me lightheaded, even delirious. I grew convinced that a time would soon come when, like an astronaut in zero gravity, I would have no sense of up or down. If I dropped the flashlight, I just
knew
I wouldn’t be able to locate it, and when I attempted to escape this room, the door wouldn’t be where I expected to find it.
    Alarmed by what I do not know, the entire colony erupted from the overhead grid of rods from which they hung, and they broke into what seemed to be chaotic flight, though according to Ozzie, there was always orderliness in bat formations, each individual aware of its assigned position.
    At once I slid down against the concrete wall until I was squatting, trying to stay well below their flight path, the multitude of shrill voices giving rise to gooseflesh on my gooseflesh. Their squeaking is why people think of them as flying rodents, and although they really aren’t rodents, I felt as if I were in some whacked-out low-budget movie about a rat storm.
    Their wings beat fourteen times a second, another bit of trivia,courtesy of Ozzie. Although none of them brushed against me as they whirled around the room, I felt the wind of their passage, which stirred even more intense odors from the air as surely as a chef’s ladle would stir more appealing aromas from a soup pot.
    However they might have exited, they didn’t leave by the door. The flutter of their wings inspired sympathetic vibrations deep in my ears, so that I shivered uncontrollably until their numbers had significantly diminished. Then the last were gone, silence fell upon the room in their wake, and I rose to my full height, shaken and nauseated.
    When the bats erupted out of the mall by whatever route, they would quickly realize that dawn was coming. The day world was not theirs, and the moment that their alarm subsided and instinct guided them once more, they would return. Perhaps in the next minute or two. Agitated. Bats were capable of anger. Especially vampire bats. The males frequently fought. I didn’t want to hang around to find out if they would ignore me or instead focus on me as the primary object of their rage.
    The door featured a lever handle that worked with a minimum of noise. I opened it, wincing at the faint creak of the hinges, and faced a service corridor as pitch-black as the room behind me.
    For a moment, I listened to the eerie quiet, cocking my head to the left, to the right. If Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene were still lurking in the immediate vicinity, they should have heard the exodus of the bats, even through the closed door, should have switched on their flashlights and found me when I was betrayed by the hinges.
    I stepped across the threshold and eased the door shut behind me. By comparison to the wretched stink I’d just escaped, the air here smelled so sweet that I wanted to draw great noisy breaths,but in the interest of avoiding a bullet in the head, I refrained. After listening for another half