Forever Odd Read Free

desperation of crimson hand prints on a wall were the victim’s sign language:
Spare me, help me, remember me, avenge me.
    On the floor, near the foot of the bed, lay the body of Dr. Wilbur Jessup, savagely battered.
    Even for one who
knows
that the body is but the vessel and that the spirit is the essence, a brutalized cadaver depresses, offends.
    This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.
    The door to the adjacent bathroom stood half open. I nudged it with one foot.
    Although blood-dimmed by a drenched shade, the bedroom lamplight reached into the bathroom to reveal no surprises.
    Aware that this was a crime scene, I touched nothing. I stepped cautiously, with respect for evidence.
    Some wish to believe that greed is the root of murder, but greed seldom motivates a killer. Most homicide has the same dreary cause: The bloody-minded murder those whom they envy, and for what they covet.
    That is not merely a central tragedy of human existence: It is also the political history of the world.
    Common sense, not psychic power, told me that in this case, the killer coveted the happy marriage that, until recently, Dr. Jessup had enjoyed. Fourteen years previously, the radiologist had wed Carol Makepeace. They had been perfect for each other.
    Carol came into their marriage with a seven-year-old son, Danny. Dr. Jessup adopted him.
    Danny had been a friend of mine since we were six, when we had discovered a mutual interest in Monster Gum trading cards. I traded him a Martian brain-eating centipede for a Venusian methane slime beast, which bonded us on first encounter and ensured a lifelong brotherly affection.
    We’ve also been drawn close by the fact that we are different, each in his way, from other people. I see the lingering dead, and Danny has osteogenesis imperfecta, also called brittle bones.
    Our lives have been defined—and deformed—by our afflictions. My deformations are primarily social; his are largely physical.
    A year ago, Carol had died of cancer. Now Dr. Jessup was gone, too, and Danny was alone.
    I left the master bedroom and hurried quietly along the hallway toward the back of the house. Passing two closed rooms, heading toward the open door that was the second source of light, I worried about leaving unsearched spaces behind me.
    After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.
    I worried about that asteroid until I realized I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I am not Superman. I am a short-order cook on a leave of absence from his grill and griddle.
    For a longer while, I worried about the TV news lady. What kind of person can deliver such terrifying news—and then smile?
    If I ever did open a white paneled door and get skewered through the throat, the iron pike—or whatever—would probably be wielded by that anchorwoman.
    I reached the next open door, stepped into the light, crossed the threshold. No victim, no killer.
    The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.
    Unquestionably, this was Danny’s room. On the wall behind the disheveled bed hung a poster of John Merrick, the real-life Elephant Man.
    Danny had a sense of humor about the deformities—mostly of the limbs—with which his condition had left him. He looked nothing like Merrick, but the Elephant Man was his hero.
    They exhibited him as a freak,
Danny once explained.
Women fainted at the sight of him, children wept, tough men flinched. He was loathed and reviled. Yet a century later a movie was based on his life, and we know his name. Who knows the name of the bastard who owned him and put him on exhibit, or the names of those who fainted or wept, or