Here in the early afternoon, the Lesser Silence should have been observed to the extent that work allowed, but the monks were voluble. They worried about their missing brother, Timothy, and were alarmed by the possibility that persons unknown intended to harm the children at the school. They sounded fearful, humbled, yet exhilarated that they might be called upon to be brave defenders of the innocent.
Brother Alfonse asked, “Odd, are all of us going to die?”
“I hope none of us is going to die,” I replied.
“If all of us died, the sheriff would be disgraced.”
“I fail to understand,” said Brother Rupert, “the moral calculus that all of us dying would be balanced by the sheriff’s disgrace.”
“I assure you, Brother,” Alfonse said, “I didn’t mean to imply that mass death would be an acceptable price for the sheriff’s defeat in the next election.”
Brother Quentin, who had been a police officer at one time, first a beat patrolman and then a robbery-and-homicide detective, said, “Odd, who are these kid-killer wannabes?”
“We don’t know for sure,” I said, turning in my seat to look back at him. “But we know something’s coming.”
“What’s the evidence? Obviously something that’s not concrete enough to impress the sheriff. Threatening phone calls, like that?”
“The phones have gone down,” I said evasively, “so there won’t be any threatening calls now.”
“Are you being evasive?” Brother Quentin asked.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“You’re terrible at being evasive.”
“Well, I do my best, sir.”
“We need to know the name of our enemy,” said Brother Quentin.
Brother Alfonse said, “We know the name. His name is legion.”
“I don’t mean our ultimate enemy,” said Quentin. “Odd, we aren’t going up against Satan with baseball bats, are we?”
“If it’s Satan, I haven’t noticed a sulfurous smell.”
“You’re being evasive again.”
“Yes, sir.”
From the third row, Brother Augustine said, “Why would you have to be evasive about whether or not it’s Satan? We all know it’s not Satan himself, it’s got to be some anti-faith zealots or something, doesn’t it?”
“Militant atheists,” said someone at the back of the vehicle.
Another fourth-row passenger chimed in: “Islamofascists. The president of Iran said, ‘The world will be cleaner when there’s no one whose day of worship is Saturday. When they’re all dead, we’ll kill the Sunday crowd.’”
Brother Knuckles, behind the wheel, said, “No reason to work yourselves up about it. We get to the school—Abbot Bernard, he’s gonna give you the straight poop, as far as we know it.”
Surprised, indicating the SUV ahead of us, I said, “Is the abbot with them?”
Knuckles shrugged. “He insisted, son. Maybe he don’t weigh more than a wet cat, but he’s a plus to the team. There’s not a thing in this world could scare the abbot.”
I said, “There might be a thing.”
From the second row, Brother Quentin put a hand on my shoulder, returning to his main issue with the persistence of a cop skilled at interrogation. “All I’m saying, Odd, is we need to know the name of our enemy. We don’t exactly have a crew of trained warriors here. When push comes to shove, if they don’t know who they’re supposed to be defending against, they’ll get so jittery, they’ll start swinging baseball bats at one another.”
Brother Augustine gently admonished, “Do not underestimate us, Brother Quentin.”
“Maybe the abbot will bless the baseball bats,” said Brother Kevin from the third row.
Brother Rupert said, “I doubt the abbot would think it proper to bless a baseball bat to ensure a game-winning home run, let alone to make it a more effective weapon for braining someone.”
“I certainly hope,” said Brother Kevin, “we don’t have to brain anyone. The thought sickens me.”
“Swing low,” Brother Knuckles advised, “and take ’em out at the knees. Some guy with his knees all busted ain’t an immediate threat, but the damage ain’t permanent, neither. He’s gonna heal back to normal. Mostly.”
“We have a profound moral dilemma here,” Brother Kevin said. “We must, of course, protect the children, but busting knees is not by any stretch of theology a Christian response.”
“Christ,” Brother Augustine reminded him, “physically threw the money changers out of the temple.”
“Indeed, but I’ve seen nowhere in Scripture where our Lord busted their knees in the process.”
Brother Alfonse said, “Perhaps we really are all going to die.”
His hand still on my shoulder, Brother Quentin said, “Something more than a threatening call has you alarmed. Maybe…did you find Brother Timothy? Did you, Odd? Dead or alive?”
At this point, I wasn’t going to say that I had found him dead and alive, and that he had suddenly transformed from Tim to something not Tim. Instead, I replied, “No, sir, not dead or alive.”
Quentin’s eyes narrowed. “You’re being evasive again.”
“How could you possibly know, sir?”
“You’ve got a tell.”
“A what?”
“Every time you’re being evasive, your left eye twitches ever so slightly. You have an eye-twitch tell that betrays your intention to be evasive.”
As I turned front to deny Brother Quentin a view of my twitchy eye, I saw Boo bounding gleefully downhill through the snow.
Behind the grinning dog came Elvis, capering as if he were a child, leaving no prints behind himself, arms raised above his head, waving both hands high as some inspired evangelicals do when they shout Hallelujah.
Boo turned away from the plowed pavement and sprinted friskily across the meadow. Laughing and jubilant, Elvis ran after him. The rocker and the rollicking dog receded from view, neither troubled by the stormscape nor troubling it.
Most days, I wish that my special powers of vision and intuition had never been bestowed on me, that the grief they have brought to me could be lifted from my heart, that everything I have seen of the supernatural could be expunged from memory, and that I could be what, but for this gift, I otherwise am—no one special, just one soul in a sea of souls, swimming through the days toward a hope of that final sanctuary beyond all fear and pain.
Once in a while, however, there are moments for which the burden seems worth carrying: moments of transcendent joy, of inexpressible beauty, of wonder that overwhelms the mind with awe, or in this case a moment of such piercing charm that the world seems more right than it really is and offers a glimpse of what Eden might have been before we pulled it down.
Although Boo would remain at my side for days to come, Elvis would not be with me much longer. But I know that the image of them racing through the storm in rapturous delight will be with me vividly through all my days in this world, and forever after.
“Son?” Knuckles said, curious.
I realized that, although a smile was not appropriate to the moment, I was smiling.
“Sir, I think the King is about ready to move out of that place down at the end of Lonely Street.”
“Heartbreak Hotel,” said Knuckles.
“Yeah. It was never the five-star kind of joint where he should be booked to play.”
Knuckles brightened. “Hey, that’s swell, ain’t it.”
“It’s swell,” I agreed.
“Must feel good that you opened the big door for him.”
“I didn’t open the door,” I said. “I just showed him where the knob was and which way it turned.”
Behind me, Brother Quentin said, “What’re you two talking about? I don’t follow.”
Without turning in my seat, I said, “In time, sir. You’ll follow him in time. We’ll all follow him in time.”
“Him who?”
“Elvis Presley, sir.”
“I’ll bet your left eye is twitching
like crazy,” said Brother Quentin.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Knuckles shook his head. “No twitch.”
We had covered two-thirds of the distance between the new abbey and the school when out of the storm came a scissoring, scuttling, serpentine bewilderment of bones.
CHAPTER 38
ALTHOUGH BROTHER TIMOTHY HAD BEEN KILLED— and worse than killed—by one of these creatures, a part of me, the Pollyanna part I can’t entirely wring out of myself, had wanted to believe that the ever-moving mosaic of bones at the school window and my pursuers in the cooling-tower service tunnel had been apparitions, fearsome but, in the end, less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U.S. senator with an idea.
Pollyanna Odd half expected, as with the lingering dead and the bodachs, that these entities would prove to be invisible to anyone but me, and that what happened to Timothy was somehow a singularity, because supernatural presences, after all, do not have the power to harm the living.
That hopeful possibility was flushed down the wishful-thinking drain with the appearance of the keening banshee of bones and the immediate reactions of Knuckles and his brothers.
As tall and long as two horses running nose to tail, ceaselessly kaleidoscopic even when traversing the meadow, the thing came out of the white wind and crossed the pavement in front of the first SUV.
In Dante’s Inferno, in the ice and snowy mist of the frozen lowest level of Hell, the imprisoned Satan had appeared to the poet out of the winds made by his three sets of great leathery wings. The fallen angel, once beautiful but now hideous, had reeked of despair and misery and evil.
Likewise, here was misery and despair embodied in the calcium and phosphate of bone, and evil in the marrow. Its intentions were evident in its design, in its swift motion, and its every intention was pernicious.
Not one brother reacted to this manifestation with wonder or even with mere fear of the unknown, and none with disbelief. Without exception they regarded it at once as an abomination, and viewed it with as much disgust as terror, with loathing and with a righteous kind of hatred, as though upon seeing it for the first time they recognized it as an ancient and enduring beast.
If any was stunned to silence, he found his voice quickly, and the SUV was filled with exclamations. There were appeals to Christ and to the Holy Mother, and I heard no hesitation or embarrassment about labeling the thing before us with the names of demons or with the name of the father of all demons, though I’m reasonably sure the first words from Brother Knuckles were Mamma mia.
Rodion Romanovich brought his SUV to a full stop as the white demon passed in front of him.
When Knuckles braked, the chain-wrapped tires stuttered on the icy pavement but didn’t slide, and we, too, shuddered to a halt.
The pistoning bony legs cast up plumes of snow from the meadow as the thing crossed the road and kept going, as though it was not aware of us. The trail it left in the fresh powder and the way the falling snow whirled in the currents of its wake dispelled any doubt about its reality.
Certain that the beast’s disinterest in us was pretense and that it would return, I said to Knuckles, “Let’s go. Don’t just sit here. Go, go, get us inside.”
“I can’t go till he does,” Knuckles said, indicating the SUV that blocked the road in front of us.
To the right, south, rose a steep bank, which the uberskeleton had descended in a centipedal scurry. We might not bog down in the deep drift, but the angle of incline would surely roll us.
In the northern meadow, the dismal light of the sunless day and shrouds of snow folded around the fantastic architecture of restless bones, but we had not seen the last of it.
Rodion Romanovich still stood on his brake pedal, and in the red taillights, snow came down in bloody showers.
To the left, the meadow dropped two feet from the driveway. We could probably have driven around Romanovich; but that was a needless risk.
“He’s waiting for another look at it,” I said. “Is he nuts? Give him the horn.”
Knuckles pumped the horn, and the brake lights on Romanovich’s SUV fluttered, and Knuckles used the horn again, and the Russian began to coast forward, but then braked once more.
Out of the north came the monster, harrowing the field of snow, moving less quickly than before, a sense of ominous intention in its more measured approach.
Amazement, fear, curiosity, disbelief: Whatever had immobilized Romanovich, he broke free of its hold. The SUV rolled forward.
Before Romanovich could build any speed, the creature arrived, reared up, extruded intricately pincered arms, seized its prey, and tipped the vehicle on its side.
CHAPTER 39
THE SUV LAY ON ITS STARBOARD SIDE. THE slowly turning tires on the port side uselessly sought traction in the snow-shot air.
The Russian and the eight monks could exit only by the back hatch or by the doors turned to the sky, but not with ease and not with haste.
I assumed the beast would either pry open the doors and reach inside for the nine men or pluck them as they tried to escape. How it would do to them what it had done to Brother Timothy, I didn’t know, but I was certain that it would methodically gather them to itself, one by one.
When they were harvested, it would carry them away to crucify them on a wall as it had done with Timothy, transforming their mortal forms into nine chrysalises. Or it would then come after us, here in the second truck, and later in the day, the cooling tower would be crowded with eighteen chrysalises.
Instead of proceeding with its usual mechanical insistence, the thing retreated from the overturned SUV and waited, retaining its basic form but continuously folding in upon itself and blooming out new vaned and petaled patterns.
With the nerveless aplomb of an experienced getaway driver, Brother Knuckles engaged his safety harness, raised the steel plow off the pavement, shifted gears, and reversed up the driveway.
“We can’t leave them trapped,” I said, and the brothers behind me were in vociferous agreement.
“We ain’t leavin’ nobody,” Knuckles assured me. “I just hope they’re scared enough to stay put.”
Like a macabre motorized sculpture crafted by graverobbers, the bone heap stood sentinel by the side of the road, perhaps waiting for the doors on the overturned SUV to open.
When we had reversed fifty yards, the tipped truck became a blur on the road below, and the sheeting snow almost entirely camouflaged the bony specter.
I strapped myself into the shoulder harness—and heard the brothers buckling up behind me. Even when God is your co-pilot, it pays to pack a parachute.
Brother Knuckles slowed to a stop. With one foot on the brake, he shifted into drive.
Except for the sound of their breathing, the monks had fallen silent.
Then Brother Alfonse said, “Libera nos a malo.”
Deliver us from evil.
Knuckles traded the brake pedal for the accelerator. The engine growled, the tire chains rang rhythms from the pavement, and we raced downhill, aiming to sweep past the overturned SUV and take out the fiend.
Our target seemed oblivious of us until the penultimate moment, or perhaps it had no fear.
Plow-first we slammed into the thing and instantly lost most of our forward momentum.
A furious hail crashed down. The windshield crazed, dissolved, fell in upon us, and with it came both loose bones and articulated structures.
An elaborately jointed array of bones landed in my lap, spasming like a broken crab. My cry was every bit as manly as that of a young schoolgirl surprised by a hairy spider. I knocked the thing off me, onto the floor.
It felt cold and slick, yet not greasy or wet, had seemed to harbor no warmth of life.
The castoff scrabbled at my feet, not with intent to harm but as the decapitated body of a snake lashes mindlessly. Nevertheless, I quickly pulled my feet onto the seat and would have gathered my petticoats tightly around me if I had been wearing an
y.
After coming to a stop ten yards past the overturned vehicle, we reversed until we were beside it once more, things snapping and crunching loudly under the tires.
When I got out of the truck, I found the pavement littered with twitching constructs of bones, splintered remnants of the beast’s fragmented anatomy. Some were as large as vacuum cleaners, many the size of kitchen appliances—flexing, irising, folding, unfolding as if striving to obey the conjuring call of a sorcerer.
Thousands of single bones of all shapes and sizes were also scattered on the roadway. These rattled in place as if the ground were shaking under them, but I could not feel any earth tremors through the soles of my ski boots.
Kicking the debris aside, I cleared a path to the overturned SUV and climbed onto the flank of it. Inside, tumbled brothers looked up at me, wide-eyed and blinking, through the side windows.
I pulled open a door, and Brother Rupert clambered up to assist. Soon we had pulled the Russian and the monks from the vehicle.
Some were bruised and all were shaken; but none of them had sustained a serious injury.
Every tire on the second SUV had been punctured by broken shafts of bone. The vehicle sat on flat rubber. We would have to walk the remaining hundred yards to the school.
No one needed to express the opinion that if one impossible ambulatory kaleidoscope of bones could exist, others might follow. In fact, whether because of shock or fear, few words were exchanged, and those were spoken in the softest voices.
Everyone worked urgently to unload all the tools and the other gear that had been brought to defend and fortify the school.
The rattling skeletal debris slowly grew quieter, and some bones began to break down into cubes in a variety of sizes, as though they had not been bones, after all, but structures formed from smaller interlocking pieces.
As we were setting out for the school, Rodion Romanovich took off his hat, stooped, and with one gloved hand scooped some of the cubes into that bearskin sack.