I didn’t like the arrogant expression of the dragon in the woven wool, or the way bright threads lent violence to its eyes. I shifted my left foot to cover its face.
“Sir, maybe I don’t mention my gift or bodachs. I could just say I found a monk on the ground, then I was clubbed by someone.”
“What was you doin’ out at that hour? Where was you comin’ from, goin’ to, what was you up to? Why your funny name? You mean you’re the kid was a hero at the Green Moon Mall summer before last? How come trouble follows you, or is it maybe you yourself are trouble?”
He was playing the devil’s advocate.
I half believed I could feel the carpet dragon squirming under my foot.
“I don’t really have much to tell them that would be helpful,” I relented. “I guess we could wait until they find the body.”
“They won’t find it,” Brother Knuckles said. “They ain’t lookin’ for a Brother Tim who’s been murdered, the body hidden. What they’re lookin’ for is a Brother Tim somewhere who slashed his wrists or hung himself from a rafter.”
I stared at him, not fully comprehending.
“It’s only two years since Brother Constantine committed suicide,” he reminded me.
Constantine is the dead monk who lingers in this world, and sometimes manifests as an energetic poltergeist in unexpected ways.
For reasons no one understands, he climbed into the church tower one night, while his brothers slept, tied one end of a rope around the mechanism that turns the three-bell carillon, knotted the other end around his neck, climbed onto the tower parapet, and jumped, ringing awake the entire community of St. Bartholomew’s.
Among men of faith, perhaps self-destruction is the most damning of all transgressions. The effect on the brothers had been profound; time had not diminished it.
Knuckles said, “Sheriff thinks we’re a rough crew, he can’t trust us. He’s the kind believes albino-monk assassins live here in secret catacombs, goin’ out to murder in the night, all that old Ku Klux Klan anti-Catholic stuff, though maybe he don’t know it’s from the KKK. Funny how people that don’t believe in nothin’ are so quick to believe every crazy story about people like us.”
“So they expect that Brother Timothy killed himself.”
“Sheriff probably thinks we’ll all kill ourselves before we’re done. Like those Jim Jones Kool-Aid drinkers.”
I thought wistfully of Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald. “Saw an old movie the other night—Going My Way.”
“That wasn’t just another time, son. That was another planet.”
The outer door of the parlor opened. A sheriff’s deputy and four monks entered. They had come to search the guesthouse, though it was not likely that a suicidal brother would have repaired to this wing to drink a quart of Clorox.
Brother Knuckles recited the last few lines of a prayer and made the sign of the cross, and I followed his example, as though we had retreated here to pray together for Brother Timothy’s safe return.
I don’t know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we’re rocketing along at high velocity.
Knuckles had convinced me that I would find no friends among these authorities, that I must remain a free agent to discover the nature of the looming violence that drew the bodachs. Consequently, I preferred to avoid the deputies without appearing to be dodging them.
Brother Fletcher, the monastery’s cantor and music director, one of the four monks with the deputy, asked for permission to search my suite. I gave it without hesitation.
For the benefit of the deputy, whose eyes were compressed to slits by the weight of his suspicion, Knuckles asked me to help search the pantries and storerooms that were his domain, as cellarer.
When we stepped out of the parlor, into the guesthouse cloister, where wind blustered among the columns, Elvis was waiting for me.
In my previous two manuscripts, I have recounted my experiences with the lingering spirit of Elvis Presley in Pico Mundo. When I left that desert town for a mountain monastery, he had come with me.
Instead of haunting a place, especially an appropriate place like Graceland, he haunts me. He thinks that, through me, he will in time find the courage to move on to a higher place.
I suppose I should be glad that I’m being haunted by Elvis instead of, say, by a punker like Sid Vicious. The King is an easy spirit with a sense of humor and with concern for me, though once in a while he weeps uncontrollably. Silently, of course, but copiously.
Because the dead don’t talk or even carry text-messaging devices, I needed a long time to learn why Elvis hangs around our troubled world. At first I thought he was reluctant to leave here because this world had been so good to him.
The truth is, he’s desperate to see his mother, Gladys, in the next world, but he’s reluctant to cross over because he’s filled with anxiety about the reunion.
Few men have loved their mothers more than Elvis loved Gladys. She died young, and he grieved for her until his death.
He fears, however, that his use of drugs and his other personal failures in the years that followed her passage must have shamed her. He is embarrassed by his ignominious death—overdosed on prescription medications, facedown in vomit—though this seems to be the preferred exit scene for a significant percentage of rock-and-roll royalty.
I have often assured him that there can be no shame, no anger, no disappointment where Gladys waits, only love and understanding. I tell him that she will open her arms to him on the Other Side.
Thus far my assurances have not convinced him. Of course there is no reason why they should. Remember: In Chapter Six, I admitted that I don’t know anything.
So as we entered the passageway between the guest and the grand cloisters, I said to Brother Knuckles, “Elvis is here.”
“Yeah? What movie’s he in?”
This was Knuckles’s way of asking how the King was dressed.
Other lingering spirits manifest only in the clothes they were wearing when they died. Donny Mosquith, a former mayor of Pico Mundo, had a heart attack during vigorous and kinky intimacy with a young woman. Cross-dressing in spike heels and women’s underwear stimulated him. Hairy in lace, wobbling along the streets of a town that named a park after him when he was alive but later renamed it after a game-show host, Mayor Mosquith does not make a pretty ghost.
In death as in life, Elvis exudes cool. He appears in costumes from his movies and stage performances, as he chooses. Now he wore black boots, tight black tuxedo trousers, a tight and open black jacket that came only to the waistline, a red cummerbund, a ruffled white shirt, and an elaborate black foulard.
“It’s the flamenco-dancer outfit from Fun in Acapulco,” I told Knuckles.
“In a Sierra winter?”
“He can’t feel the cold.”
“Ain’t exactly suitable to a monastery, neither.”
“He didn’t make any monk movies.”
Walking at my side, as we neared the end of the passageway, Elvis put an arm around my shoulders, as though to comfort me. It felt no less substantial than the arm of a living person.
I do not know why ghosts feel solid to me, why their touch is warm instead of cold, yet they walk through walls or dematerialize at will. It’s a mystery that I most likely will never solve—like the popularity of aerosol cheese in a can or Mr. William Shatner’s brief post-Star Trek turn as a lounge singer.
In the large courtyard of the grand cloister, wind rushed down the three-story walls, wielding lashes of brittle snow, whipping up clouds of the softer early snow from the cobblestone floor, thrashing between columns as we hurried along the colonnade toward the kitchen door in the south wing.
Like a crumbling ceiling shedding plaster, the sky lowered on St. Bart’s, and the day seemed to be collapsing upon us, great white walls more formidable than the stone abbey, alabaster ruins burying all, soft and yet imprisoning.
/> CHAPTER 12
KNUCKLES AND I DID IN FACT SEARCH THE pantry and associated storerooms, though we found no trace of Brother Timothy.
Elvis admired the jars of peanut butter that filled one shelf, perhaps recalling the fried-banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches that had been a staple of his diet when he was alive.
For a while, monks and deputies were busy in the hallways, the refectory, the kitchen, and other nearby rooms. Then quiet descended, except for the wind at windows, as the quest moved elsewhere.
After the library had been searched, I retreated there to worry and to keep a low profile until the authorities departed.
Elvis went with me, but Knuckles wanted to spend a few minutes at his desk in a storeroom, reviewing invoices, before going to Mass. As distressing as Brother Tim’s disappearance was, work must go on.
It is a fundamental of the brothers’ faith that when the Day comes and time ends, being taken while at honest work is as good as being taken while in prayer.
In the library, Elvis wandered the aisles, sometimes phasing through the stacks, reading the spines of the books.
He had periodically been a reader. Following his early fame, he ordered twenty hardcovers at a time from a Memphis bookstore.
The abbey offers sixty thousand volumes. A purpose of monks, especially Benedictines, has always been to preserve knowledge.
Many Old World monasteries were built like fortresses, on peaks, with one approach that could be blockaded. The knowledge of nearly two millennia, including the great works of the ancient Greeks and the Romans, had been preserved through the efforts of monks when invasions of barbarians—the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals—repeatedly destroyed Western civilization, and twice when Islamic armies nearly conquered Europe in some of the bloodiest campaigns in history.
Civilization—says my friend Ozzie Boone—exists only because the world has barely enough of two kinds of people: those who are able to build with a trowel in one hand, a sword in the other; and those who believe that in the beginning was the Word, and will risk death to preserve all books for the truths they might contain.
I think a few fry cooks are essential, as well. To build, to fight, to risk death in a good cause requires high morale. Nothing boosts morale like a perfectly prepared plate of eggs sunny-side up and a pile of crispy hash browns.
Restlessly wandering the library aisles, I turned a corner and came face to face with the Russian, Rodion Romanovich, most recently seen in a dream.
I never claimed to possess James Bond’s aplomb, so I’m not embarrassed to admit I startled backward and said, “Sonofabitch!”
Bearish, glowering so hard that his bushy eyebrows knitted together, he spoke with a faint accent: “What’s wrong with you?”
“You frightened me.”
“I certainly did not.”
“Well, it felt like frightened.”
“You frightened yourself.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“For my language,” I said.
“I speak English.”
“You do, yes, and so well. Better than I speak Russian, for sure.”
“Do you speak Russian?”
“No, sir. Not a word.”
“You are a peculiar young man.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
At perhaps fifty, Romanovich did not appear old, but time had battered his face with much experience. Across his broad forehead lay a stitchery of tiny white scars. His laugh lines did not suggest that he had spent a life smiling; they were deep, severe, like old wounds sustained in a sword fight.
Clarifying, I said, “I meant I was sorry for my bad language.”
“Why would I frighten you?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“I did not realize you were here, either,” he said, “but you did not frighten me.”
“I don’t have the equipment.”
“What equipment?”
“I mean, I’m not a scary guy. I’m innocuous.”
“And I am a scary guy?” he asked.
“No, sir. Not really. No. Imposing.”
“I am imposing?”
“Yes, sir. Quite imposing.”
“Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them? Or do you know what innocuous means?”
“It means ‘harmless,’ sir.”
“Yes. And you are certainly not innocuous.”
“It’s just the black ski boots, sir. They tend to make anybody look like he could kick butt.”
“You appear clear, direct, even simple.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But you are complex, complicated, even intricate, I suspect.”
“What you see is what you get,” I assured him. “I’m just a fry cook.”
“Yes, you make that quite plausible, with your exceptionally fluffy pancakes. And I am a librarian from Indianapolis.”
I indicated the book in his hand, which he held in such a way that I could not see the title. “What do you like to read?”
“It is about poisons and the great poisoners in history.”
“Not the uplifting stuff you’d expect in an abbey library.”
“It is an important aspect of Church history,” said Romanovich. “Throughout the centuries, clergymen have been poisoned by royals and politicians. Catherine de’ Medicis murdered the Cardinal of Lorraine with poison-saturated money. The toxin penetrated through his skin, and he was dead within five minutes.”
“I guess it’s good we’re moving toward a cashless economy.”
“Why,” Romanovich asked, “would just-a-fry-cook spend months in a monastery guesthouse?”
“No rent. Griddle exhaustion. Carpal tunnel syndrome from bad spatula technique. A need for spiritual revitalization.”
“Is that common to fry cooks—a periodic quest for spiritual revitalization?”
“It might be the defining characteristic of the profession, sir. Poke Barnett has to go out to a shack in the desert twice a year to meditate.”
Layering a frown over his glower, Romanovich said, “What is Poke Barnett?”
“He’s the other fry cook at the diner where I used to work. He buys like two hundred boxes of ammunition for his pistol, drives out in the Mojave fifty miles from anyone, and spends a few days blasting the living hell out of cactuses.”
“He shoots cactuses?”
“Poke has many fine qualities, sir, but he’s not much of an environmentalist.”
“You said that he went into the desert to meditate.”
“While shooting the cactuses, Poke says he thinks about the meaning of life.”
The Russian stared at me.
He had the least readable eyes of anyone I had ever met. From his eyes, I could learn nothing more about him than a paramecium on a glass slide, gazing up at the lens of a microscope, would be able to learn about the examining scientist’s opinion of it.
After a silence, Rodion Romanovich changed the subject: “What book are you looking for, Mr. Thomas?”
“Anything with a china bunny on a magical journey, or mice who save princesses.”
“I doubt you will find that kind of thing in this section.”
“You’re probably right. Bunnies and mice generally don’t go around poisoning people.”
That statement earned another brief silence from the Russian. I don’t believe that he was pondering his own opinion of the homicidal tendencies of bunnies and mice. I think, instead, he was trying to decide whether my words implied that I might be suspicious of him.
“You are a peculiar young man, Mr. Thomas.”
“I don’t try to be, sir.”
“And droll.”
“But not grotesque,” I hoped.
“No. Not grotesque. But droll.”
He turned and walked away with his book, which might have been about poisons and famous poisoners in history. Or not.
At the far end
of the aisle, Elvis appeared, still dressed as a flamenco dancer. He approached as Romanovich receded, slouching his shoulders and imitating the Russian’s hulking, troll-like shamble, scowling at the man as he passed him.
When Rodion Romanovich reached the end of these stacks, before turning out of sight, he paused, looked back, and said, “I do not judge you by your name, Odd Thomas. You should not judge me by mine.”
He departed, leaving me to wonder what he had meant. He had not, after all, been named for the mass murderer Joseph Stalin.
By the time Elvis reached me, he had contorted his face into a recognizable and comic impression of the Russian.
Watching the King as he mugged for me, I realized how unusual it was that neither I nor Romanovich had mentioned either Brother Timothy being missing or the deputies swarming the grounds in search of him. In the closed world of a monastery, where deviations from routine are rare, the disturbing events of the morning ought to have been the first subject of which we spoke.
Our mutual failure to remark on Brother Timothy’s disappearance, even in passing, seemed to suggest some shared perception of events, or at least a shared attitude, that made us in some important way alike. I had no idea what I meant by that, but I intuited the truth of it.
When Elvis couldn’t tease a smile from me with his impression of the somber Russian, he stuck one finger up his left nostril all the way to the third knuckle, pretending to be mining deep for boogers.
Death had not relieved him of his compulsion to entertain. As a voiceless spirit, he could no longer sing or tell jokes. Sometimes he danced, remembering a simple routine from one of his movies or from his Las Vegas act, though he was no more Fred Astaire than was Abbot Bernard. Sadly, in his desperation, he sometimes resorted to juvenile humor that was not worthy of him.