Read Odd Interlude Part Three for Free Online

flutter to darker corners as if the shadows will save them from me, and then I return to the hallway, proceeding toward the foyer and the front rooms.
    I am no less afraid, but my fear is tempered now by a healthy detestation and by a conviction that my mission is something even more important than freeing the Harmony family from this curse. In some fundamental sense, I am here to perform an exorcism.

TWENTY-THREE
     
    So here we are, inside Wyvern, and might as well be a thousand miles away from Oddie for all the help we can give him. We hear him crash into the house as planned, but right after that we lose contact with him, because the car is probably smashed up and all. Ed says the Jeep is still transmitting a signal, and so is the smartphone. He’s sure that Odd is alive and well. Okay, so Ed’s super-smart, but that doesn’t mean he knows everything, he’s not like God or anything. As you can imagine, I want him to call that phone and see if Oddie’s all right, but Ed says not yet, give Oddie time to orient himself, we don’t want to distract him at a critical moment.
    One of our three big worries, if we can limit them to three, is that when Oddie rocketed into the house, the boom of it alerted the county firefighting crew, and that they’ll rush to the house, see what Hiskott cannot afford for them to see, and lots of people will die before it’s over. But Ed is monitoring the emergency-band radio traffic plus all phone and cell-phone calls from anywhere in the Corner, and he says nobody seems to have noticed. The sirens, wind, fire, and just general commotion must have provided enough cover for Oddie.
    I’m half sick thinking about it, but one of our other biggest worries is that Hiskott will use someone in my family to kill Oddie or that Oddie will have to kill some people in my family when he’s attacked. Either way, you know, it’s like I might just die myself if that happens, or if I don’t die, then something in me will die, and I won’t ever be the same or want to be.
    If you want to know, the third thing that’s making us nuts—or making me nuts, since Ed just isn’t capable of being made nuts—is thinking about those three guests of the motor court that Hiskott took into his house over the years, those loners nobody missed, and they never came out again. Ed thinks maybe crazy old Hiskott might have done something more than mind-control them. He says maybe, after that injection of alien cells and over time, Hiskott is more alien now than human, and so he was able to infect those three and turn them into something alien, too. You know, like with a vampire bite or something less stupid than a vampire bite. Ed knows everything Hiskott and his team learned about the ETs, because he has access to those files. He says it’s major scarifying stuff. So whatever Oddie’s got to deal with in that house, it’s not a close encounter of the third kind in the cuddly Spielberg style.
    Over the past five years, I’ve said my best prayers every night, haven’t missed a night, though I gotta admit, if it wouldn’t break my mother’s heart, I’d probably have stopped a year ago. I mean,praying to be free of Hiskott only makes me expect to be free
soon
, and then when the prayer’s never answered, you feel even worse, and you wonder what’s the point. I’m not criticizing God, if that’s what you think, because nobody knows why God does things or how He thinks, and He’s humongously smarter than any of us, even smarter than Ed. They say He works in
mysterious ways
, which is for sure true. What I’m saying is, maybe the whole praying business is a human idea, maybe God never asked us to do it. Yeah, all right, He wants us to like Him, and He wants us to respect Him, so we’ll live right and do good. But God is good—right?—and to be really good you’ve got to have humility, we all know that, so then if God is the best of the best, then He’s also the humblest of the humble. Right? So maybe it