Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views, believes that our passage through this world is intended to toughen us for the next life. She says that our honesty, integrity, courage, and determined resistance to evil are evaluated at the end of our days here, and that if we come up to muster, we will be conscripted into an army of souls engaged in some great mission in the next world. Those who fail the test simply fail to exist.
In short, Stormy sees this life as boot camp. She calls the next life "service."
Stormy and I are more than friends. We believe that we are soul mates.
For one thing, we have a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine that promises YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER. I begin my day by reading those seven words. Each night, I read them again, sometimes more than once.
We also have matching birthmarks.
Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely. I would throw myself off a high cliff for her if she asked me to jump. I would, of course, need to understand the reasoning behind her request.
Fortunately for me, Stormy is not the kind of person to ask such a thing lightly. She expects nothing of others that she herself would not do. In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.
She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty cents that she found in the change-return slot of a pay phone. At last she mailed it to the telephone company.
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- Excerpted from ODD THOMAS Copyright © 2003, FOREVER ODD Copyright © 2005, and BROTHER ODD Copyright © 2006, all by Dean Koontz. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
