He looked up and saw me watching him. Clutching the hat in one hand as if it were a purse filled with treasure, he picked up what appeared to be a large attaché case, rather than a toolbox, and turned toward the school.
Around us, the wind seemed to be full of words, all angry and growing rapidly angrier, in a brutal language ideal for imprecation, malediction, blasphemy, and threat.
The veiled sky folded down to meet the hidden land, and the vanishment of the horizon was swiftly followed by the disappearance of every structure of man and nature. A perfect consistency of light throughout the bleak day, allowing no shadow, did not illuminate but blinded. In that white obscurity, all contours of the land faded from sight, except those directly underfoot, and we were plunged into a total whiteout.
With psychic magnetism, I am never lost. But at least a couple of the brothers might have wandered off forever, within mere yards of the school, if they had not stayed close to one another and had not received some guidance from the rapidly vanishing patches of blacktop exposed earlier by the plows.
More walking boneyards might be near, and I suspected that they would not be blinded by the whiteout, as we were. Whatever senses they possessed were not analogous—but perhaps superior—to ours.
Two steps before blundering into the segmented roll-up garage door, I saw it and halted. When the others had gathered around me, I did a count to be sure that all sixteen monks were present. They numbered seventeen. The Russian was there, but I had not mistakenly included him in the count.
I led them past the large door to a smaller, man-size entrance. With my universal key, I let us into the garage.
When everyone had passed safely inside, I closed and dead-bolted the door.
The brothers dropped their burdens on the floor, brushed snow from themselves, and pulled back their hoods.
The seventeenth monk proved to be Brother Leopold, the novice who often came and went with the stealth of a ghost. His freckled face looked less wholesome than it had always been before, and his usual sunny smile was not in evidence.
Leopold stood next to the Russian, and there was an ineffable quality to their attitudes and postures that suggested they were in some way allied.
CHAPTER 40
ROMANOVICH WENT TO ONE KNEE ON THE garage floor, and from his bearskin hat, he spilled a collection of the white cubes onto the concrete.
The larger specimens were about an inch and a half square, the smaller perhaps half an inch. They were so polished and smooth that they might have been dice without spots, and looked not like natural objects but like manufactured items.
They twitched and rattled against one another, as though life yet existed in them. Perhaps they were agitated by the memory of the bone they had been, were programmed to reconstitute that structure but lacked the power.
I was reminded of jumping beans, those seeds of Mexican spurge that are animated by the movements of the moth larvae living in them.
Although I didn’t believe that the agitation of these cubes was caused by the equivalent of moth larvae, I wasn’t going to try to bite one open to confirm my opinion.
As the brothers gathered around to observe the blank dice, one of the larger specimens shook more violently—and rattled into four smaller, identical cubes.
Perhaps triggered by that action, a smaller cube turned end over end and rendered itself into four diminished replicas.
Glancing up from the self-dividing geometrics, Romanovich locked eyes with Brother Leopold.
“Quantumizing,” the novice said.
The Russian nodded in agreement.
I said, “What’s going on here?”
Instead of answering me, Romanovich returned his attention to the dice and said, almost to himself, “Incredible. But where’s the heat?”
As if this question alarmed him, Leopold took two steps back.
“You would want to be twenty miles from here,” Romanovich told the novice. “A bit late for that.”
“You knew each other before coming here,” I said.
With increasing rapidity, the cubes were breaking down into ever-smaller units.
Turning my attention to the brothers, expecting them to support my demand for answers from the Russian, I discovered their attention fixed not on Romanovich or Leopold, but instead half on me and half on the strange—and ever-tinier—objects on the floor.
Brother Alfonse said, “Odd, in the SUV, when we saw that thing come out of the snow, you didn’t seem stunned by the sight of it like the rest of us were.”
“I was…just speechless,” I said.
“There’s that eye-twitch tell,” said Brother Quentin, pointing at me, frowning as he must have frowned at numerous suspects in the homicide-division interrogation room.
As the cubes continued dividing, growing dramatically in number, the collective mass of them should have remained the same. Cube an apple, and the pieces will weigh as much as the whole fruit. But mass was disappearing here.
This suggested that, after all, the beast had been supernatural, manifesting in a material with more apparent substance—but no more real physical existence—than ectoplasm.
The problems with that theory were many. For one thing, Brother Timothy was dead, and no mere spirit had killed him. The SUV had not been overturned by the anger of a poltergeist.
Judging by the ghastly expression that had drained all the sunny Iowan charm from his boyish face, Brother Leopold was clearly focused on an explanation different from—and far more terrifying than—any supernatural manifestation.
On the floor, the cubes had become so numerous and tiny that they appeared to be only a spill of salt. And then…the concrete was bare again, as though the Russian had never emptied anything out of his hat.
Color began to seep back into Brother Leopold’s face, and he shuddered with relief.
Masterfully deflecting curiosity that might have been directed at him, Romanovich rose to his feet and, to reinforce the brothers’ intuitive belief that I knew more about this situation than they did, he said, “Mr. Thomas, what was that thing out there?”
All the brothers were staring at me, and I realized that I—with my universal key and sometimes enigmatic behavior—had always been a more mysterious figure to them than was either the Russian or Brother Leopold.
“I don’t know what it was,” I said. “I wish I did.”
Brother Quentin said, “No eye-twitch tell. Have you learned to suppress it or are you really not being evasive?”
Before I could respond, Abbot Bernard said, “Odd, I would like you to tell these brothers about your exceptional abilities.”
Surveying the faces of the monks, each shining with curiosity, I said, “In all the world, sir, there aren’t half this many people who know my secret. It feels like…going public.”
“I am instructing them herewith,” the abbot said, “to regard your revelations as a confession. As your confessors, your secrets are to them a sacred trust.”
“Not to all of them,” I said, not bothering to accuse Brother Leopold of being insincere in his postulancy and in the profession of his vows as a novice, but addressing myself solely to Romanovich.
“I am not leaving,” the Russian said, returning the bearskin hat to his head as if to punctuate his declaration.
I had known that he would insist on hearing what I had to tell the others, but I said, “Don’t you have a couple of poisoned cakes to decorate?”
“No, Mr. Thomas, I have finished all ten.”
After once more surveying the earnest faces of the monks, I said, “I see the lingering dead.”
“This guy,” said Brother Knuckles, “maybe he evades a question when he’s gotta, but he don’t know how to lie any better than a two-year-old.”
I said, “Thanks. I think.”
“In my other life, before God called me,” Knuckles continued, “I lived in a filthy sea of liars and lies, and I swam as good as any of those mugs. Odd—he ain’t like them, ain’t like I once was. Fact
is, he ain’t like nobody I ever known before.”
After that sweet and heartfelt endorsement, I told my story as succinctly as possible, including that I had for years worked with the chief of police in Pico Mundo, who had vouched for me with Abbot Bernard.
The brothers listened, rapt, and expressed no doubts. Although ghosts and bodachs were not included in the doctrines of their faith, they were men who had given their lives to an absolute conviction that the universe was God-created and that it had a vertical sacred order. Having found a way to understand the existence of the monster in the storm—by defining it as a demon—they would not now be cast into spiritual or intellectual turmoil merely by being asked to believe that a nobody smart-ass fry cook was visited by the restless dead and tried to bring them justice as best he could.
They were emotional at the news that Brother Constantine had not committed suicide. But the faceless figure of Death in the bell tower intrigued more than frightened them, and they were in agreement that if a traditional exorcism would be effective with either of these two recent apparitions, it would be more likely to work on the tower phantom than on an uberskeleton that could overturn an SUV.
I couldn’t tell whether Brother Leopold and Rodion Romanovich believed me, but I didn’t owe those two any evidence beyond the sincerity of my story.
To Leopold, I said, “I don’t believe that an exorcism will work in either case—do you?”
The novice lowered his gaze to the place on the floor where the cubes had been. He nervously licked his lips.
The Russian spared his comrade the need to answer: “Mr. Thomas, I am fully prepared to believe that you live on a ledge between this world and the next, that you see what we cannot. And now you have seen apparitions previously unknown to you.”
“Are they previously unknown to you?” I asked.
“I am merely a librarian, Mr. Thomas, with no sixth sense. But I am a man of faith, whether you believe that or not, and now that I have heard your story, I am worried about the children as much as you are. How much time do we have? Whatever will happen, when will it happen?”
I shook my head. “I only saw seven bodachs this morning. There would be more if the violence was imminent.”
“That was this morning. Do you think we should have a look now—past one-thirty in the afternoon?”
“Bring all your tools and the…weapons,” Abbot Bernard advised his brothers.
The snow had melted off my boots. I wiped them on the mat at the door between the garage and the basement of the school, while the other men, who were all veterans of winter and all more considerate than I, shucked off their zippered rubber boots and left them behind.
With lunch finished, most of the kids were in the rehabilitation and recreation rooms, each of which I visited with the abbot, a few brothers, and Romanovich.
Sooty shadows, cast by nothing in this world, slid through these rooms and along the hallway, quivering with anticipation, wolfish and eager, seeming to thrill to the sight of so many innocent children who they somehow knew would in time be screaming in terror and agony. I counted seventy-two bodachs and knew that others would be prowling the corridors on the second floor.
“Soon,” I told the abbot. “It’s coming soon.”
CHAPTER 41
WHILE THE SIXTEEN WARRIOR MONKS AND the one duplicitous novice determined how to fortify the two stairwells that served the second floor of the school, Sister Angela was present to ensure that her nuns were prepared to offer any assistance that might be wanted.
As I headed toward the northwest nurses’ station, she fell in beside me. “Oddie, I hear something happened on the trip back from the abbey.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sure did. I don’t have time to go into it now, but your insurance carrier is going to have a lot of questions.”
“Do we have bodachs here?”
I looked left and right into the rooms we passed. “The place is crawling with them, Sister.”
Rodion Romanovich followed us with the authoritarian air of one of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.
“How is Mr. Romanovich assisting here?” Sister Angela asked.
“He isn’t assisting, ma’am.”
“Then what’s he doing?”
“Scheming, most likely.”
“Shall I throw him out?” she asked.
Through my mind flickered a short film of the mother superior wrenching the Russian’s arm up hard behind his back in some clever tae kwon do move, muscling him downstairs to the kitchen, and making him sit in a corner on a stool for the duration.
“Actually, ma’am, I’d rather have him hovering over me than have to wonder where he is and what he’s up to.”
At the nurses’ station, Sister Miriam, with Thanks be to God forever on her lips, or at least forever on the lower one, was still behind the counter.
She said, “Dear, the dark clouds of mystery surrounding you are getting so thick I soon won’t be able to see you. This sooty whirl of smog will go past, and people will say, ‘There’s Odd Thomas. Wonder what he looks like these days.’”
“Ma’am, I need your help. You know Justine in Room Thirty-two?”
“Dear, I not only know every child here, but I love them like they were my own.”
“When she was four, her father drowned her in the bathtub but didn’t finish the job the way he did with her mother. Is that correct, do I have it right?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to think in what sort of place his soul is festering now.” She glanced at her mother superior and said, with an edge of guilt in her voice, “Actually, I not only sometimes think about it, I enjoy thinking about it.”
“What I need to know, Sister, is maybe he did finish the job, and Justine was dead for a couple minutes before the police or the paramedics revived her. Could that have happened?”
Sister Angela said, “Yes, Oddie. We can check her file, but I believe that was the case. She suffered brain damage from prolonged lack of oxygen, and in fact had no vital signs when the police broke into the house and found her.”
This was why the girl could serve as a bridge between our world and the next: She had once been over there, if only briefly, and had been pulled back by men who had all the best intentions. Stormy had been able to reach out to me through Justine because Justine belonged on the Other Side more than she did here.
I asked, “Are there other children here who suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation?”
“A few,” Sister Miriam confirmed.
“Are they—are any of them—more alert than Justine? No, that’s not the issue. Are they capable of speech? That’s what I need to know.”
Having moved to the counter beside the mother superior, Rodion Romanovich scowled intently at me, like a mortician who, in need of work, believed that I would soon be a candidate for embalming.
“Yes,” said Sister Angela. “There are at least two.”
“Three,” Sister Miriam amended.
“Ma’am, were any of the three clinically dead and then revived by police or paramedics, the way Justine was?”
Frowning, Sister Miriam looked at her mother superior. “Do you know?”
Sister Angela shook her head. “I suppose it would be in the patient records.”
“How long will it take you to review the records, ma’am?”
“Half an hour, forty minutes? Maybe we’ll find something like that in the first file.”
“Would you please do it, Sister, fast as you can? I need a child who was dead once but can still talk.”
Of the three of them, only Sister Miriam knew nothing about my sixth sense. “Dear, you are starting to get downright spooky.”
“I’ve always been, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 42
IN ROOM 14, JACOB HAD FINISHED THE LATEST portrait of his mother and had sprayed
it with fixative. He carefully sharpened each of his many pencils on the sandpaper block, in anticipation of the blank page of the drawing tablet on the slantboard.
Also on the table was a lunch tray laden with empty dishes and dirty flatware.
No bodachs were currently present, although the darksome spirit who called himself Rodion Romanovich stood in the open doorway, his coat draped over one arm but his fur hat still on his head. I had forbidden him to enter the room because his glowering presence might intimidate the shy young artist.
If the Russian entered against my wishes, I would snatch his hat from his head, park my butt on it, and threaten to scent it with essence of Odd if he didn’t back off. I can be ruthless.
I sat across the table from Jacob and said, “It’s me again. The Odd Thomas.”
Toward the end of my previous visit, he had met my every comment and question with such silence that I’d become convinced he had gone into an internal redoubt where he didn’t any longer hear me or even recognize that I was present.
“The new portrait of your mother came out very well. It’s one of your best.”
I had hoped that he would be in a more garrulous mood than when I had last seen him. This proved to be a false hope.
“She must have been very proud of your talent.”
Jacob finished sharpening the last of the pencils, kept it in his hand, and shifted his attention to the drawing tablet, studying the blank page.
“Since I was last here,” I told him, “I had a wonderful roast-beef sandwich and a crisp dill pickle that probably wasn’t poisoned.”
His thick tongue appeared, and he bit gently on it, perhaps deciding what his first pencil strokes should be.
“Then this nasty guy almost hanged me from the bell tower, and I got chased through a tunnel by a big bad scary thing, and I went on a snow adventure with Elvis Presley.”
He began lightly and fluidly to sketch the outline of something that I could not recognize at once from my upside-down point of view.
At the doorway, Romanovich sighed impatiently.
Without looking at him, I said, “Sorry. I know my interrogation techniques aren’t as direct as those of a librarian.”