Maybe my fear of fire was, in this case, like my suspicion of the Zorro impersonators: misguided.
Although a survey of selected mechanical systems had given me no reason to believe that impending flames had drawn the bodachs to St. Bart’s School, I remained concerned that fire was a danger. No other threat seemed to pose such a challenge to a large community of the mentally and physically disabled.
Earthquakes were not as common or as powerful in the mountains of California as in the valleys and the flatlands. Besides, the new abbey had been built to the standards of a fortress, and the old one had been reconstructed with such diligence that it should be able to ride out violent and extended temblors.
This high in the Sierra, bedrock lay close underfoot; in some places, great granite bones breached the surface. Our two buildings were anchored in bedrock.
Here we have no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no active volcanoes, no killer bees.
We do have something more dangerous than all those things. We have people.
The monks in the abbey and the nuns in the convent seemed to be unlikely villains. Evil can disguise itself in piety and charity, but I had difficulty picturing any of the brothers or sisters running amok with a chain saw or a machine gun.
Even Brother Timothy, on a dangerous sugar high and crazed by Kit Kat guilt, didn’t scare me.
The glowering Russian staying on the second floor of the guesthouse was a more deserving object of suspicion. He did not wear a porkpie hat, but he had a dour demeanor and secretive ways.
My months of peace and contemplation were at an end.
The demands of my gift, the silent but insistent pleas of the lingering dead, the terrible losses that I had not always been able to prevent: These things had driven me to the seclusion of St. Bartholomew’s Abbey. I needed to simplify my life.
I had not come to this high redoubt forever. I had only asked God for a time-out, which had been granted, but now the clock was ticking again.
When I backed out of the heating-and-cooling-system schema, the computer monitor went to black with a simple white menu. In that more reflective screen, I saw movement behind me.
For seven months, the abbey had been a still point in the river, where I turned in a lazy gyre, always in sight of the same familiar shore, but now the true rhythm of the river asserted itself. Sullen, untamed, and intractable, it washed away my sense of peace and washed me toward my destiny once more.
Expecting a hard blow or the thrust of something sharp, I spun the office chair around, toward the source of the reflection in the computer screen.
CHAPTER 4
MY SPINE HAD GONE TO ICE AND MY MOUTH to dust in fear of a nun.
Batman would have sneered at me, and Odysseus would have cut me no slack, but I would have told them that I had never claimed to be a hero. At heart, I am only a fry cook, currently unemployed.
In my defense, I must note that the worthy who had entered the computer room was not just any nun, but Sister Angela, whom the others call Mother Superior. She has the sweet face of a beloved grandmother, yes, but the steely determination of the Terminator.
Of course I mean the good Terminator from the second movie in the series.
Although Benedictine sisters usually wear gray habits or black, these nuns wear white because they are a twice-reformed order of a previously reformed order of post-reform Benedictines, although they would not want to be thought of as being aligned with either Trappist or Cistercian principles.
You don’t need to know what that means. God Himself is still trying to figure it out.
The essence of all this reformation is that these sisters are more orthodox than those modern nuns who seem to consider themselves social workers who don’t date. They pray in Latin, never eat meat on Friday, and with a withering stare would silence the voice and guitar of any folksinger who dared to offer a socially relevant tune during Mass.
Sister Angela says she and her sisters hark back to a time in the first third of the previous century when the Church was confident of its timelessness and when “the bishops weren’t crazy.” Although she wasn’t born until 1945 and never knew the era she admires, she says that she would prefer to live in the ’30s than in the age of the Internet and shock jocks broadcasting via satellite.
I have some sympathy for her position. In those days, there were no nuclear weapons, either, no organized terrorists eager to blow up women and children, and you could buy Black Jack chewing gum anywhere, and for no more than a nickel a pack.
This bit of gum trivia comes from a novel. I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.
Settling into the second chair, Sister Angela said, “Another restless night, Odd Thomas?”
From previous conversations, she knew that I don’t sleep as well these days as I once did. Sleep is a kind of peace, and I have not yet earned peace.
“I couldn’t go to bed until the snow began to fall,” I told her. “I wanted to see the world turn white.”
“The blizzard still hasn’t broken. But a basement room is a most peculiar place to stand watch for it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She has a certain lovely smile that she can sustain for a long time in patient expectancy. If she held a sword over your head, it would not be as effective an instrument of interrogation as that forbearing smile.
After a silence that was a test of wills, I said, “Ma’am, you look as though you think I’m hiding something.”
“Are you hiding something, Oddie?”
“No, ma’am.” I indicated the computer. “I was just checking on the school’s mechanical systems.”
“I see. Then you’re covering for Brother Timothy? Has he been committed to a clinic for Kit Kat addiction?”
“I just like to learn new things around here…to make myself useful,” I said.
“Your breakfast pancakes every weekend are a greater grace than any guest of the abbey has ever brought to us.”
“Nobody’s cakes are fluffier than mine.”
Her eyes are the same merry blue as the periwinkles on the Royal Doulton china that my mother owned, pieces of which Mom, from time to time, threw at the walls or at me. “You must have had quite a loyal following at the diner where you worked.”
“I was a star with a spatula.”
She smiled at me. Smiled and waited.
“I’ll make hash browns this Sunday. You’ve never tasted my hash browns.”
Smiling, she fingered the beaded chain on her pectoral cross.
I said, “The thing is, I had a bad dream about an exploding boiler.”
“An exploding-boiler dream?”
“That’s right.”
“A real nightmare, was it?”
“It left me very anxious.”
“Was it one of our boilers exploding?”
“It might have been. In the dream, the place wasn’t clear. You know how dreams are.”
A twinkle brightened her periwinkle eyes. “In this dream, did you see nuns on fire, screaming through a snowy night?”
“No, ma’am. Good heavens, no. Just the boiler exploding.”
“Did you see disabled children flinging themselves from windows full of flame?”
I tried silence and a smile of my own.
She said, “Are your nightmares always so thinly plotted, Oddie?”
“Not always, ma’am.”
She said, “Now and then I dream of Frankenstein because of a movie I saw when I was a little girl. In my dream, there’s an ancient windmill hung with ragged rotting sails creaking ’round in a storm. A ferocity of rain, sky-splitting bolts of lightning, leaping shadows, stairwells of cold stone, hidden doors in bookcases, candlelit secret passageways, bizarre machines with gold-plated gyroscopes, crackling arcs of electricity, a demented hunchback with lantern eyes, always the lumbering monster close behind me, and a scientist in a white lab coat carrying his own severed head.”
Finished, she smiled at me.
“Just an ex
ploding boiler,” I said.
“God has many reasons to love you, Oddie, but for certain He loves you because you’re such an inexperienced and incompetent liar.”
“I’ve told some whoppers in my time,” I assured her.
“The claim that you have told whoppers is the biggest whopper you have told.”
“At nun school, you must’ve been president of the debating team.”
“Fess up, young man. You didn’t dream about an exploding boiler. Something else has you worried.”
I shrugged.
“You were checking on the children in their rooms.”
She knew that I saw the lingering dead. But I had not told her or Abbot Bernard about bodachs.
Because these bloodthirsty spirits are drawn by events with high body counts, I hadn’t expected to encounter them in a place as remote as this. Towns and cities are their natural hunting grounds.
Besides, those who accept my assertion that I see the lingering dead are less likely to believe me if too soon in our acquaintance I begin to talk, as well, about sinuous shadowy demons that delight in scenes of death and destruction.
A man who has one pet monkey might be viewed as charmingly eccentric. But a man who has made his home into a monkey house, with scores of chattering chimpanzees capering through the rooms, will have lost credibility with the mental-health authorities.
I decided to unburden myself, however, because Sister Angela is a good listener and has a reliable ear for insincerity. Two reliable ears. Perhaps the wimple around her face serves as a sound-focusing device that brings to her greater nuances in other people’s speech than those of us without wimples are able to hear.
I’m not saying that nuns have the technical expertise of Q, the genius inventor who supplies James Bond with way-cool gadgets in the movies. It’s a theory I won’t dismiss out of hand, but I can’t prove anything.
Trusting in her goodwill and in the crap-detecting capability made possible by her wimple, I told her about the bodachs.
She listened intently, her face impassive, giving no indication whether or not she thought I was psychotic.
With the power of her personality, Sister Angela can compel you to meet her eyes. Perhaps a few strong-willed people are able to look away from her stare after she has locked on to their eyes, but I’m not one of them. By the time I told her all about bodachs, I felt pickled in periwinkle.
When I finished, she studied me in silence, her expression unreadable, and just when I thought she had decided to pray for my sanity, she accepted the truth of everything I’d told her by saying simply, “What must be done?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a most unsatisfactory answer.”
“Most,” I agreed. “The thing is, the bodachs showed up only half an hour ago. I haven’t observed them long enough to be able to guess what’s drawn them here.”
Cowled by voluminous sleeves, her hands closed into pink, white-knuckled fists. “Something’s going to happen to the children.”
“Not necessarily all the children. Maybe some of them. And maybe not just to the children.”
“How much time do we have until…whatever?”
“Usually they show up a day or two ahead of the event. To savor the sight of those who are…” I was reluctant to say more.
Sister Angela finished my sentence: “…soon to die.”
“If there’s a killer involved, a human agent instead of, say, an exploding propane-fired boiler, they’re sometimes as fascinated with him as with the potential victims.”
“We have no murderers here,” said Sister Angela.
“What do we really know about Rodion Romanovich?”
“The Russian gentleman in the abbey guesthouse?”
“He glowers,” I said.
“At times, so do I.”
“Yes, ma’am, but it’s a concerned sort of glower, and you’re a nun.”
“And he’s a spiritual pilgrim.”
“We have proof you’re a nun, but we only have his word about what he is.”
“Have you seen bodachs following him around?”
“Not yet.”
Sister Angela frowned, short of a glower, and said, “He’s been kind to us here at the school.”
“I’m not accusing Mr. Romanovich of anything. I’m just curious about him.”
“After Lauds, I’ll speak to Abbot Bernard about the need for vigilance in general.”
Lauds is morning prayer, the second of seven periods in the daily Divine Office that the monks observe.
At St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, Lauds immediately follows Matins—the singing of psalms and readings from the saints—which begins at 5:45 in the morning. It concludes no later than 6:30.
I switched off the computer and got to my feet. “I’m going to look around some more.”
In a billow of white habit, Sister Angela rose from her chair. “If tomorrow is to be a day of crisis, I’d better get some sleep. But in an emergency, don’t hesitate to call me on my cell number at any hour.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The world turns and the world changes. Nuns with cell phones.”
“An easy thing to get your mind around,” she said. “Easier than factoring into your philosophy a fry cook who sees dead people.”
“True. I guess the equivalent of me would actually be like in that old TV show—a flying nun.”
“I don’t allow flying nuns in my convent,” she said. “They tend to be frivolous, and during night flight, they’re prone to crashing through windows.”
CHAPTER 5
WHEN I RETURNED FROM THE BASEMENT computer room, no bodachs swarmed the corridors of the second floor. Perhaps they were gathered over the beds of other children, but I didn’t think so. The place felt clean of them.
They might have been on the third floor, where nuns slept unaware. The sisters, too, might be destined to die in an explosion.
I couldn’t go uninvited onto the third floor, except in an emergency. Instead I went out of the school and into the night once more.
The meadow and the surrounding trees and the abbey upslope still waited to be white.
The bellied sky, the storm unborn, could not be seen, for the mountain was nearly as dark as the heavens and reflected nothing on the undersides of the clouds.
Boo had abandoned me. Although he likes my company, I am not his master. He has no master here. He is an independent agent and pursues his own agenda.
Not sure how to proceed or where to seek another clue of what had drawn the bodachs, I crossed the front yard of the school, moving toward the abbey.
The temperature of blood and bone had fallen with the arrival of the bodachs; but malevolent spirits and December air, together, could not explain the cold that curled through me.
The true source of the chill might have been an understanding that our only choice is pyre or pyre, that we live and breathe to be consumed by fire or fire, not just now and at St. Bartholomew’s, but always and anywhere. Consumed or purified by fire.
The earth rumbled, and the ground shivered underfoot, and the tall grass trembled though no breeze had yet arisen.
Although this was a subtle sound, a gentle movement, that most likely had not awakened even one monk, instinct said earthquake. I suspected, however, that Brother John might be responsible for the shuddering earth.
From the meadow rose the scent of ozone. I had detected the same scent earlier, in the guesthouse cloister, passing the statue of St. Bartholomew offering a pumpkin.
When after half a minute the earth stopped rumbling, I realized that the primary potential for fire and cataclysm might not be the propane tank and the boilers that heated our buildings. Brother John, at work in his subterranean retreat, exploring the very structure of reality, required serious consideration.
I hurried to the abbey, past the quarters of the novitiates, and south past the abbot’s office. Abbot Bernard’s personal quarters wer
e above the office, on the second floor.
On the third floor, his small chapel provided him with a place for private prayer. Faint lambent light shivered along the beveled edges of those cold windows.
At 12:35 in the morning, the abbot was more likely to be snoring than praying. The trembling paleness that traced the cut lines in the glass must have issued from a devotional lamp, a single flickering candle.
I rounded the southeast corner of the abbey and headed west, past the last rooms of the novitiate, past the chapter room and the kitchen. Before the refectory, I came to a set of stone stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, a single bulb revealed a bronze door. A cast bronze panel above this entrance bore the Latin words LIBERA NOS A MALO.
Deliver us from evil.
My universal key unlocked the heavy bolt. Pivoting silently on ball-bearing hinges, the door swung inward, a half-ton weight so perfectly balanced that I could move it with one finger.
Beyond lay a stone corridor bathed in blue light.
The slab of bronze swung shut and locked behind me as I walked to a second door of brushed stainless steel. In this grained surface were embedded polished letters that spelled three Latin words: LUMIN DE LUMINE.
Light from light.
A wide steel architrave surrounded this formidable barrier. Inlaid in the architrave was a twelve-inch plasma screen.
Upon being touched, the screen brightened. I pressed my hand flat against it.
I could not see or feel the scanner reading my fingerprints, but I was nonetheless identified and approved. With a pneumatic hiss, the door slid open.
Brother John says the hiss is not an inevitable consequence of the operation of the door. It could have been made to open silently.
He incorporated the hiss to remind himself that in every human enterprise, no matter with what virtuous intentions it is undertaken, a serpent lurks.
Beyond the steel door waited an eight-foot-square chamber that appeared to be a seamless, wax-yellow, porcelain vessel. I entered and stood there like a lone seed inside a hollow, polished gourd.