The four hundred feet to the school appeared to be immeasurable miles, the ceiling lights receding to Pittsburgh and beyond.
Boo was already out of sight. Maybe he had taken a shortcut through another dimension to the school boiler room.
I wished I’d been hanging on to his tail.
CHAPTER 33
WHEN I HAD SPRINTED ABOUT A HUNDRED feet, I heard the cooling-tower door slam open. The crash boomed like a shotgun blast through the service passageway.
Tommy Cloudwalker’s Mojave pal, the three-headed poster boy for the evils of smoking, seemed more likely to exist than did the skeletonized boogeyman that now coveted my bones. But fear of this thing was a rational fear.
Brother Timothy had been sweet, kind, and devout; yet look what happened to him. A shiftless, unemployed, smart-ass specimen like me, who had never exercised his precious American right to vote, who had accepted a compliment at the expense of the late James Dean, ought to expect a fate even more gruesome than Tim’s, though I couldn’t imagine one.
I glanced over my shoulder.
As it advanced through alternating pools of shadow and light, my pursuer’s method of locomotion could not clearly be discerned, though these were not steps that it had learned at a dance studio. It seemed to be marshaling some of its numerous bones into stubby legs, but not all were legs of the same design, and they moved independently of one another, foiling one another and causing the eager creature to lurch.
I was still moving, repeatedly glancing back, not standing in thoughtful contemplation and making notes of my impressions of the beast, but in retrospect I think that I was most alarmed to see it progressing not on the floor but along the junction of the ceiling and the right-hand wall. It was a climber, which meant the children’s quarters on the second floor would be more difficult to defend than I had hoped.
Furthermore, as it came, the entire structure of it appeared to turn ceaselessly, as if it were drilling forward like an auger boring through wood. The word machine came to mind, as it had when I watched another of these things flexing itself into one elaborate new pattern after another, against the reception-lounge window.
Tripping again, my pursuer lost its perch and clattered down the wall to the floor. Scissoring jacks of bone cranked it erect, and it came forward, eager but uncertain.
Perhaps it was learning its capabilities, as does any newborn. Maybe this was a Kodak moment, baby’s first steps.
By the time I reached the intersection with the passageway that evidently led to the new abbey, I felt confident that I would be able to outrun the thing—unless its learning curve was very steep.
Glancing back again, I saw that it was not just clumsy but also had become translucent. The light from the overhead fixtures did not play across its contours any longer, but seemed to pass through it, as if it were made of milky glass.
For a moment, as it faltered to a halt, I thought it was going to dematerialize, not at all like a machine but like a spirit. Then the translucency passed from it, and it became solid again, and it surged forward.
A familiar keening drew my attention toward the intersecting passage. Far uphill, in the voice that I had heard earlier in the storm, another of these things expressed its sincere desire to have a tête-à-tête with me.
From this distance, I couldn’t be certain of its size, but I suspected that it was considerably larger than the lovely that had come out of the chrysalis. It moved with confidence, too, with grace, glissading without benefit of snow, legs churning in a faultless rhythm, with centipede swiftness.
So I did one of the things that I do best: I ran like a sonofabitch.
I only had two legs instead of a hundred, and I was wearing ski boots when I should have been in athletic shoes with air-cushioned insoles, but I had the benefit of wild desperation and the energy provided by Sister Regina Marie’s superb beef sandwich. I almost made it to the boiler room safely ahead of Satan and Satan Junior, or whatever they were.
Then something tangled around my feet. I cried out, fell, and scrambled up at once, flailing at my assailant until I realized that it was the quilted thermal jacket I had shucked off earlier because of the whistling noise it made.
As if a chorus line of frenzied skeletons were tapping out the final bars of the show’s big number, the clickety-clack of my pursuer rose to a crescendo.
I turned, and it was right there.
As one, the regimented legs, different from but as hideous as those of a Jerusalem cricket, clattered to a halt. Although knuckled, knobbed, ribbed, and bristling, the forward half of the twelve-foot apparition rose off the floor with serpentine elegance.
We were face to face, or would have been if I hadn’t been the only one of us with a face.
Across the whole of it, patterns of elaborately integrated bones blossomed, withered, were replaced by new forms and patterns, but in a tickless, clickless quicksilver hush.
This silent exhibition was intended to display its absolute and otherworldly control of its physiology, and to leave me terrified and abashed at my comparative weakness. As when I had watched it at the window, I sensed an overweening vanity in its display of itself, an arrogance that was eerily human, a pompousness and boastfulness that exceeded mere vanity and that might be called vainglory.
I backed up a step, another. “Kiss my ass, you ugly bastard.”
In a rending fury, it fell upon me, ice-cold and merciless. Uncountable maxillas and mandibles chewed, spurred heelbones ripped, stiletto-sharp phalanges gouged, a whiplike spine with hooked and razored vertebrae slashed me open from abdomen to throat, and my heart was found and torn apart, and thereafter what I could do for the children of St. Bartholomew’s School was limited to what power I might have as one of the lingering dead.
Yes, it could have gone as badly as that, but in fact I just lied to you. The truth is stranger than the lie, though considerably less traumatic.
Everything in my account is true through the point at which I told the bag of bones to kiss my posterior. After issuing that heartfelt vulgarity, I did take one step backward, and then one more.
Because I believed that I had nothing to lose, that my life was already forfeited, I turned boldly from the apparition. I dropped to my hands and knees, and crawled through the four-foot-square aperture between the service passageway and the boiler room.
I expected the thing to snare my feet and to haul me back into its realm. When I reached the boiler room unharmed, I rolled onto my back and scooted away from the open service access, anticipating the intrusion of a questing, pincered, bony appendage.
No keening arose from beyond the wall, but no clitterclatter of retreat, either, though the rumble of the boiler-room pumps might have masked all but the loudest of those noises.
I listened to my thundering heart, delighted to still have it. And all my fingers, and all my teeth, my precious little spleen, and both buttocks.
Considering the walking boneyard’s ability to manifest in infinite iterations, I saw no reason why it wouldn’t follow me into the boiler room. Even in its current configuration, it would have no trouble passing through the four-foot-square opening.
If the creature entered, I had no weapon with which to drive it back. But if I failed to make a stand, I’d be conceding it access to the school, where at this moment most of the children were at lunch in the ground-floor refectory, others in their rooms on the second floor.
Feeling foolish and inadequate, I erupted to my feet, snatched a fire extinguisher from its wall rack, and held it ready, as though I might be able to kill those bundled bones of contention with a fog of ammonium phosphate, as in bad early sci-fi movies where the heroes are apt to discover, in the penultimate scene, that the rampaging and apparently indestructible monster can be dissolved by something as mundane as salt or laundry bleach, or lavender-scented hairspray.
I could not even be sure that this thing was alive in the sense that people and animals and insects are alive, or even in the sense that plants are al
ive. I could not explain how a three-dimensional collage of bones, regardless of how astoundingly intricate it might appear, could be alive when it lacked flesh, blood, and visible sense organs. And if it wasn’t alive, it couldn’t be killed.
A supernatural explanation eluded me, too. Nothing in the theology of any major religion proposed the existence of an entity like this, nor anything in any body of folklore with which I was familiar.
Boo appeared from among the boilers. He studied me and my ammonium-phosphate-fog weapon. He sat, cocked his head, and grinned. He seemed to find me amusing.
Armed with the fire extinguisher and, if that failed, with only Black Jack chewing gum, I stood my ground for a minute, two minutes, three.
Nothing came from beyond the wall. Nothing waited at the threshold, tapping its fleshless toes impatiently.
I set aside the fire extinguisher.
Staying ten feet back from the low opening, I got on my hands and knees to peer into the passageway. I saw the lighted concrete corridor dwindling toward the cooling tower, but nothing that would make me want to call Ghostbusters.
Boo went closer to the service aperture than I dared, peered in, then glanced at me, perplexed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t get it.”
I replaced the stainless-steel panel. As I inserted the first bolt and tightened it with the special tool, I expected something to slam against the farther side, rip the panel away, and drag me out of the boiler room. Didn’t happen.
Whatever had prevented the beast of bones from doing to me what it had done to Brother Timothy, I do not know, though I am certain it had wanted me and had intended to take me. I’m pretty sure that my insult—Kiss my ass, you ugly bastard—did not cause it to sulk away with hurt feelings.
CHAPTER 34
RODION ROMANOVICH ARRIVED IN THE GARAGE wearing a handsome bearskin hat, a white silk neck scarf, a black three-quarter-length lined leather coat with fur collar and fur cuffs, and—no surprise—zippered rubber boots that rose to his knees. He looked as if he had dressed for a horse-drawn sleigh-ride with the czar.
After my experience with the galloping boneyard, I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, trying to calm myself, waiting for my legs to stop trembling and regain some strength.
Standing over me, peering down, he said, “You are a peculiar young man, Mr. Thomas.”
“Yes, sir. I am aware.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“Recovering from a bad scare.”
“What scared you?”
“A sudden recognition of my mortality.”
“Have you not previously realized you are mortal?”
“Yes, sir, I’ve been aware of it for a while. I was just, you know, overcome by a sense of the unknown.”
“What unknown, Mr. Thomas?”
“The great unknown, sir. I’m not a particularly vulnerable person. Little unknowns don’t disconcert me.”
“How does lying on a garage floor console you?”
“The water stains on the ceiling are lovely. They relax me.”
Looking at the concrete overhead, he said, “I find them ugly.”
“No, no. All the soft shadings of gray and black and rust, just a hint of green, gently blending together, all free-form shapes, not anything that looks as defined and rigid as a bone.”
“Bone, did you say?”
“Yes, sir, I did. Is that a bearskin hat, sir?”
“Yes. I know it is not politically correct to wear fur, but I refuse to apologize for it to anyone.”
“Good for you, sir. I’ll bet you killed the bear yourself.”
“Are you an animal activist, Mr. Thomas?”
“I have nothing against animals, but I’m usually too busy to march on their behalf.”
“Then I will tell you that I did, indeed, kill the bear from which this hat was fashioned and from which the fur came for the collar and cuffs of this coat.”
“That isn’t much to have gotten from a whole bear.”
“I have other fur items in my wardrobe, Mr. Thomas. I wonder how you knew that I killed the bear.”
“I mean no offense by this, sir, but in addition to the fur for various garments, you received into yourself something of the spirit of the bear when you killed it.”
From my extreme perspective, his many frown lines looked like terrible dark saber scars. “That sounds New Age and not Catholic.”
“I’m speaking metaphorically, not literally, and with some irony, sir.”
“When I was your age, I did not have the luxury of irony. Will you get up from there?”
“In a minute, sir. Eagle Creek Park, Garfield Park, White River State Park—Indianapolis has some very nice parks, but I didn’t know there were bears in them.”
“As I am sure you realize, I hunted the bear and shot it when I was a young man in Russia.”
“I keep forgetting you’re Russian. Wow, librarians are a tougher bunch in Russia than here, hunting bear and all.”
“Everyone had it tough. It was the Soviet era. But I was not a librarian in Russia.”
“I’m in the middle of a career change myself. What were you in Russia?”
“A mortician.”
“Is that right? You embalmed people and stuff.”
“I prepared people for death, Mr. Thomas.”
“That’s a peculiar way of putting it.”
“Not at all. That’s how we said it in my former country.” He spoke a few words in Russian and then translated: “‘I am a mortician. I prepare people for death.’ Now, of course, I am a librarian at the Indiana State Library opposite the Capitol, at one-forty North Senate Avenue.”
I lay in silence for a moment. Then I said, “You’re quite droll, Mr. Romanovich.”
“But I hope not grotesque.”
“I’m still thinking about that.” I pointed to the second SUV. “You’re driving that one. You’ll find the keys tagged with the license number in a wall box over there.”
“Has your meditation on the ceiling stains ameliorated your fear of the great unknown?”
“As much as could be expected, sir. Would you like to take a few minutes to meditate on them?”
“No thank you, Mr. Thomas. The great unknown does not trouble me.” He went to get the keys.
When I rose to my feet, my legs were steadier than they had been recently.
Ozzie Boone, a four-hundred-pound best-selling mystery writer who is my friend and mentor in Pico Mundo, insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.
Considering the gruesome death of Brother Timothy, the awful discoveries yet to be revealed in this account, and the grievous losses forthcoming, I doubt that the tone of this narrative would be half as light as it is if Rodion Romanovich had not been part of it. I do not mean that he turned out to be a swell guy. I mean only that he had wit.
These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil. Most good people have a sense of humor. The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are mostly humorless, though in the movies they frequently get some of the best lines. With few exceptions, the morally bipolar are too preoccupied with justifying their contradictory behaviors to learn to laugh at themselves, and I’ve noticed they laugh at other people more than with them.
Burly, fur-hatted, and looking as solemn as a man should who prepares people for death, Rodion Romanovich returned with the keys to the second SUV.
“Mr. Thomas, any scientist will tell you that in nature many syste
ms appear to be chaotic, but when you study them long enough and closely enough, strange order always underlies the appearance of chaos.”
I said, “How about that.”
“The winter storm into which we are going will seem chaotic—the shifting winds and the churning snow and the brightness that obscures more than it reveals—but if you could view it not at the level of a meteorological event, view it instead at the micro scale of fluid and particle and energy flux, you would see a warp and woof suggestive of a well-woven fabric.”
“I left my micro-scale eyeglasses in my room.”
“If you were to view it at the atomic level, the event might seem chaotic again, but proceeding into the subatomic, strange order appears once more, an even more intricate design than warp and woof. Always, beneath every apparent chaos, order waits to be revealed.”
“You haven’t seen my sock drawer.”
“The two of us might seem to be in this place, at this time, only by coincidence, but both an honest scientist and a true man of faith will tell you there are no coincidences.”
I shook my head. “They sure did make you do some pretty deep thinking at that mortician’s school.”
Neither a spot nor a wrinkle marred his clothes, and his rubber boots gleamed like patent leather.
Stoic, seamed, and solid, his face was a mask of perfect order.
He said, “Do not bother to ask for the name of the mortician’s school, Mr. Thomas. I never attended one.”
“This is the first time I’ve known anyone,” I said, “who embalmed without a license.”
His eyes revealed an order even more rigorous than that exemplified by his wardrobe and his face.
He said, “I obtained a license without the need for schooling. I had a natural-born talent for the trade.”
“Some kids are born with perfect pitch, with a genius for math, and you were born knowing how to prepare people for death.”
“That is exactly correct, Mr. Thomas.”
“You must have come from interesting genetic stock.”