Whenever the crisis arrived, we wouldn’t have easy communication between the abbey and the school.
“Back when I worked for the Eggbeater, we had a thing we said when there was too many funny coincidences.”
“‘There are no coincidences’ ” I quoted.
“No, that ain’t it. We said, ‘Somebody amongst us musta let the FBI put a bug up his rectum.’ “
“That’s colorful, sir, but I’d be happy if this were the FBI.”
“Well, I was on the dark side back then. You better tell the Russian he don’t have a round-trip ticket.”
“You’ve got his keys.”
Carrying a toolbox in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, the last of the storm-suited brothers shouldered through the front door. The Russian wasn’t in the room.
As Brother Knuckles and I stepped out into the snow, Rodion Romanovich drove away in the first SUV, which was fully loaded with monks.
“I’ll be damned.”
“Whoa. Careful with that, son.”
“He took both sets of keys off the peg,” I said.
Romanovich drove halfway back along the side of the church and then stopped, as though waiting for me to follow.
“This is bad,” I said.
“Maybe this is God at work, son, and you just can’t see the good in it yet.”
“Is that confident faith talking, or is it the warm-and-fuzzy optimism of the mouse who saved the princess?”
“They’re sort of one and the same, son. You want to drive?”
I handed him the keys to the second SUV. “No. I just want to sit quietly and stew in my stupidity.”
CHAPTER 37
THE LINT-WHITE SKY SEEMED TO BRIGHTEN THE day less than did the blanketed land, as if the sun were dying and the earth were evolving into a new sun, though a cold one, that would illuminate little and warm nothing.
Brother Knuckles drove, following the devious faux librarian at a safe distance, and I rode shotgun without a shotgun. Eight brothers and their gear occupied the second, third, and fourth rows of seats in the extended SUV.
You might expect that a truckful of monks would be quiet, all the passengers in silent prayer or meditating on the state of their souls, or scheming each in his own way to conceal from humankind that the Church is an organization of extraterrestrials determined to rule the world through mind control, a dark truth known to Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, which we can prove by citing his most famous self-portrait, in which he depicted himself wearing a pyramid-shaped tinfoil hat.
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.
