from the back of the diner and stood on the public side of the counter, eyeless but surely watching me as I worked at the short-order station.
Pretending to be unaware of my observer, I focused more intently on the grille and griddle than was necessary now that the breakfast rush had largely passed. From time to time, when I looked up, I never glanced at the bodach but at the customers, at Helen serving with her signature slap-slap-slap, at our other waitress—sweet Bertie Orbic, round in name and fact—at the big windows and the well-baked street beyond, where jacaranda trees cast shadows too lacy to cool and where heat snakes were charmed off the blacktop not by flute music but by the silent sizzle of the sun.
As on this occasion, bodachs sometimes take a special interest in me. I don’t know why.
I don’t think they realize that I am aware of them. If they knew that I can see their kind, I might be in danger.
Considering that bodachs seem to have no more substance than do shadows, I’m not sure how they could harm me. I’m in no hurry to find out.
The current specimen, apparently fascinated by the rituals of short-order cookery, lost interest in me only when a customer of peculiar demeanor entered the restaurant.
In a desert summer that had toasted every resident of Pico Mundo, this newcomer remained as pale as bread dough. Across his skull spread short, sour-yellow hair furrier than a yeasty mold.
He sat at the counter, not far from the short-order station. Turning his stool left and right, left and right, as might a fidgety child, he gazed at the griddle, at the milkshake mixers and the soft-drink dispensers, appearing to be slightly bewildered and amused.
Having lost interest in me, the bodach crowded the new arrival and focused intently on him. If this inky entity’s head was in fact a head, then its head cocked left, cocked right, as though it were puzzling over the smiley man. If the snout-shaped portion was in fact a snout, then the shade sniffed with wolfish interest.
From the service side of the counter, Bertie Orbic greeted the newcomer. “Honey, what can I do you for?”
Managing to smile and talk at the same time, he spoke so softly that I couldn’t hear what he said. Bertie looked surprised, but then she began to scribble on her order pad.
Magnified by round, wire-framed lenses, the customer’s eyes disturbed me. His smoky gray gaze floated across me as a shadow across a woodland pool, registering no more awareness of me than the shadow has of the water.
The soft features of his wan face brought to mind pale mushrooms that I once glimpsed in a dark dank corner of a basement, and mealy puffballs clustered in moist mounds of forest mast.
Busy with his mess of eggs, Chief Porter appeared to be no more aware of Fungus Man than he was of the observing bodach. Evidently, his intuition did not tell him that this new customer warranted special attention or concern.
I, however, found Fungus Man worrisome—in part but not entirely because the bodach remained fascinated by him.
Although, in a sense, I commune with the dead, I don’t also have premonitions—except sometimes while fast asleep and dreaming. Awake, I am as vulnerable to mortal surprises as anyone is. My death might be delivered through the barrel of a terrorist’s gun or by a falling stone cornice in an earthquake, and I would not suspect the danger until I heard the crack of the fatal shot or felt the earth leap violently beneath my feet.
My wariness of this man came from suspicion based not on reason, either, but on crude instinct. Anyone who smiled this relentlessly was a simpleton—or a deceiver with something to hide.
Those smoke-gray eyes appeared to be bemused and no more than half-focused, but I saw no stupidity in them. Indeed, I thought that I detected a cunningly veiled watchfulness, like that of a stone-still snake feigning prestrike indifference to a juicy mouse.
Clipping the ticket to the rail, Bertie Orbic relayed his order: “Two cows, make ’em cry, give ’em blankets, and mate ’em with pigs.”
Two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.
In her sweet clear voice, which sounds like it belongs in a ten-year-old girl destined for a scholarship to Juilliard, she continued: “Double spuds twice in Hell.”
Two orders of French fries made extra crispy.
She said: “Burn two British, send ’em to Philly for fish.”
Two English muffins with cream cheese and lox.
She wasn’t finished: “Clean up the kitchen, plus midnight whistleberries with zeppelins.”
An order of hash, and an order of black beans with sausages.
I said, “Should I fire this or wait till his friends join him?”
“Fire it,” Bertie replied. “This is for one. A skinny boy like you wouldn’t understand.”
“What’s he want first?”
“Whatever you want to make.”
Fungus Man smiled dreamily at a salt shaker, which he turned around and around on the counter in front of him, as if the white crystalline contents fascinated and mystified him.
Although the guy didn’t have a buffed physique that would qualify him as a spokesman for a health club, he wasn’t fat, just gently rounded in his mushroom way. If his every meal was this elaborate, he must have the metabolism of a Tasmanian devil on methamphetamine.
I toasted and finished the muffins first, while Bertie prepared both a chocolate milkshake and a vanilla Coke. Our star eater was also a two-fisted drinker.
By the time I followed the muffins with the hash and sausages, a second bodach had appeared. This one and the first moved through the diner with an air of agitation, back and forth, here and there, always returning to the smiley gourmand, who remained oblivious of them.
When the bacon cheeseburgers and the well-done fries were ready, I slapped one hand against the bell that rested beside the griddle, to alert Bertie that the order was up. She served it hot, kissing plate to counter without a rattle, as she always does.
Three bodachs had gathered at the front window, persistent shadows that remained impervious to the wilting power of the desert sun, peering in at us as though we were on exhibit.
Months often pass during which I encounter none of their kind. The running pack that I’d seen earlier in the street and now this convocation suggested that Pico Mundo was in for hard times.
Bodachs are associated with death much the way that bees seek the nectar of flowers. They seem to sip of it.
Ordinary death, however, does not draw a single bodach, let alone a swarm of them. I’ve never seen one of these beasts hovering at the bedside of a terminal cancer patient or in the vicinity of someone about to suffer a fatal heart attack.
Violence attracts them. And terror. They seem to know when it’s coming. They gather like tourists waiting for the predictable eruption of a reliable geyser in Yellowstone Park.
I never saw one of them shadowing Harlo Landerson in the days before he murdered Penny Kallisto. I doubt that any bodachs were in attendance when he raped and throttled the girl.
For Penny, death had come with terrible pain and intolerable fear; surely each of us prays—or merely hopes, depending on his certainty of God—that his death will not be as brutal as hers. To bodachs, however, a quiet strangulation apparently isn’t sufficiently exciting to bestir them from whatever lairs they inhabit in whatever strange realm is their true home.
Their appetite is for operatic terror. The violence they crave is of the most extreme variety: multiple untimely deaths spiced with protracted horror, served with cruelty as thick as bad gravy.
When I was nine years old, a drug-whacked teenager named Gary Tolliver sedated his family—little brother, little sister, mother, father—by doctoring a pot of homemade chicken soup. He shackled them while they were unconscious, waited for them to