I fired again, again, and twice again, but four bullets had no greater effect than two. Even if he had been wearing a Kevlar vest, the impact of the rounds would have been like fist blows, staggering him if not dropping him to his knees.
He pulled me closer, and he seemed to be whispering something, but the gunfire had left me temporarily half deaf, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Although he wasn’t choking me, just holding fast to my throat, I inhaled no less violently than a man trapped in a submerged car as he hungrily sought the last air in the bubble near the ceiling.
Relinquishing my double grip on the pistol, I felt for his face and found his chin, which I tried to force upward with the heel of my left hand. With my right, I thrust the business end of the weapon against his exposed throat. Because my arm was trapped between us and my elbow jammed firmly against my abdomen, the recoil was absorbed so that the muzzle didn’t jump off target, and I emptied the magazine of the last four rounds.
Even though the first six shots had had no effect, I steeled myself for gouting blood, a spray of flesh and bone and brains, but these last four rounds were likewise ineffective, as if the pistol had been loaded with blanks.
I dropped the gun or it was wrenched out of my hand, and we were at each other in what should have been evenly matched combat, but he was stronger, uncannily strong. Only a spirit could be impervious to ten bullets, but no spirit could harm me except by going poltergeist, not with its hands, only with inanimate objects hurled in raptures of rage with streams of spiritual power drawn from a malignant well.
With one hand against the back of my head, the other on my throat, unfazed by my punches, he succeeded in drawing me closer, until our foreheads knocked together. Still I was unable to see anything of the Other in this father of all darknesses.
His lips were close to mine, but I couldn’t feel the barest exhalation issue with his words when he said urgently, roughly, “I need your breath.”
Clutching his throat with both hands, I tried to strangle him, while he seemed to want to force me into an unholy kiss. I found the muscles of his throat flaccid, soft, disgusting, as though in spite of his great strength, no life existed in him. The tissues of his neck compressed under my throttling hands, but I couldn’t choke him, as if he had no breath that could be denied him, no blood in his carotid arteries that might be withheld from his brain. And yet he was strong, insistent, an immovable object and at the same time an irresistible force.
“Your breath, piglet,” he demanded in a wolfish snarl, “your breath.”
His flesh felt more gelid than that of a room-temperature corpse before the heat of decomposition begins to warm it again, chill and clammy and reminiscent of a fish pulled from a cold lake. I felt in the presence of something unclean, although no smell whatsoever rose from him, neither pleasant nor offensive, which further suggested that what animated him was not life as we think of it.
As he chanted your breath, I somehow knew that I still must not speak, that to say anything would be to concede that he might be worthy of my curses, and in so acknowledging him, I would give him some crucial advantage in our struggle, which was growing more desperate by the moment.
His voice was mine but sinister, suited to the pitch-darkness enveloping us, a voice from the endless night, of the endless night. He was so close to administering the kiss of death that, although I could not feel his exhalations, his words vibrated faintly against my lips: “Give me your breath, piglet, your breath, and the sweet fruit at the end of it.”
I couldn’t shove him away, couldn’t pull away, couldn’t wound or stagger him. He was as deadly as a tar pit, quicksand personified, and he would draw the life from me as greedily as a henhouse fox draining yolk and egg white out of a bitten shell.
Abruptly, gray light from a storm sky dispelled the darkness, and with the reappearance of the filtered sun fell cool rain in torrents, thousands of silvery droplets performing a fairy dance across the roof. The Other had vanished. The resurrected city of my reality lay round about, blurred by the downpour. The parapet again marked the perimeter of the building. Evidently, I didn’t need to be within the envelope of the structure to be returned here, only in contact with it, and it seemed that while I could move between worlds, albeit involuntarily, the Other Odd Thomas—whatever it had been—could not, a creature solely of that wasteland.
Although I have a competent command of language, I cannot string together a beadwork of words sufficient to express the gratitude I felt for being brought out of that dark land into this world of light and hope, this manifest yet mystical world of ours, where sorrowful mysteries are outnumbered two to one by those that are joyful and glorious. Trembling violently, I sank to my knees. In disgust, with one hand and then with the other, I scrubbed my lips, although the thing that would have kissed away my life—and more than my life—had not quite been able to do so.