None of the many elements in the bony mosaic trembled, but I had an impression that it was tight with tension.
Although my breath bloomed directly against the window, the surface did not cloud, most likely because my exhalations remained shallow, expelled with little force.
I had the disturbing thought, however, that my breath was without warmth, too frigid to cloud the glass, and that I inhaled darkness with the air but breathed no darkness out, which was a strange notion even for me.
I stripped off my gloves, shoved them in my jacket pockets, and placed one hand lightly on the cold glass.
Again the bones clicked, fanned, seemed almost to shuffle in the manner of a deck of cards, and rearranged themselves.
Shavings of ice in fact peeled from the outside of the window.
This new pattern of bones must have expressed a primal image of evil that spoke to my unconscious mind, for I saw nothing of beauty anymore, but felt as though something with a thin flicking tail had skittered the length of my spine.
My curiosity had ripened into a less healthy fascination, and fascination had become something darker. I wondered if I might be spellbound, somehow mesmerized, but I figured that I could not be spellbound if I remained capable of considering the possibility, though I was something, if not spellbound, because I found myself contemplating a return to the front steps to consider this visitor without the hampering interface of ice and glass.
A splintering sound came from a couple of the wooden muntins that divided the window into panes. I saw a hairline crack open in the white paint that sealed the wood; the fissure traced a crooked path along a vertical muntin, across a horizontal.
Under the hand that I still pressed to the window, the pane cracked.
The single brittle snap of failing glass alarmed me, broke the spell. I snatched my hand back and retreated three steps from the window.
No loose glass fell. The fractured pane remained within the framing muntins.
The thing of bone or ectoplasm flexed once more, conjuring yet another but no less menacing pattern, as if seeking a new arrangement of its elements that would apply greater pressure to the stubborn window.
Although it changed from one malignant mosaic to another, the effect was nonetheless elegant, as economical as the movements of an efficient machine.
The word machine resonated in my mind, seemed important, seemed revealing, though I knew this could not be a machine. If this world could not produce such a biological structure as the one to which I now stood fearful witness—and it could not—then just as surely, human beings did not possess the knowledge to engineer and build a machine with this phenomenal dexterity.
The storm-born thing flexed again. This newest kaleidoscopic wonder of bones suggested that, just as no two snowflakes in history have been alike, so no two of the thing’s manifestations would produce the same pattern.
My expectation was not merely that the glass would shatter, all eight bright panes at once, but also that every muntin would burst into splinters and that the frame would tear out of the wall, taking chunks of plaster with it, and that the thing would clamber into the school behind a cascade of debris.
I wished that I had a hundred gallons of molten tar, an angry cross-eyed ferret, or at least a toaster.
Abruptly, the apparition flexed away from the window, ceased to present a malevolent bony pattern. I thought it must be rearing back to throw itself through that barrier, but the attack did not come. This spawn of the storm became again just a pale blur, a trembling potential seen through frosted glass.
A moment later, it seemed to return to the storm. No movement shadowed the window, and the eight panes were as lifeless as eight TV screens tuned to a dead channel.
One square of glass remained cracked.
I suppose I knew then how the heart in a rabbit’s breast feels to the rabbit, how it feels like a leaping thing alive within, when the coyote is eye to eye and peels its lips back from teeth stained by years of blood.
No keening rose in the storm. Only the wind huffed at the window and whistled through the keyhole in the door.
Even to one accustomed to encounters with the supernatural, the aftermath of such an unlikely event sometimes includes equal measures of wonder and doubt. A fear that makes you shrink from the prospect of any further such experience is matched by a compulsion to see more and to understand.
I felt compelled to unlock and open the door. I quashed that compulsion, did not lift a foot, did not raise a hand, just stood with my arms wrapped around myself, as if holding myself together, and took long shuddery breaths until Sister Clare Marie arrived and politely insisted that I remove my ski boots.
CHAPTER 16
GAZING AT THE WINDOW, TRYING TO UNDERSTAND what I had seen and silently congratulating myself on the fact that I still had clean underwear, I didn’t realize that Sister Clare Marie had entered the reception lounge. She circled around from behind me, coming between me and the window, as white and silent as an orbiting moon.
In her habit, with her soft pink face, button nose, and slight overbite, she needed only a pair of long furry ears to call herself a rabbit and attend a costume party.
“Child,” she said, “you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Are you all right?”
“No, Sister.”
Twitching her nose, as though she detected a scent that alarmed her, she said, “Child?”
I do not know why she calls me child. I have never heard her address anyone else that way, not even any of the children in the school.
Because Sister Clare Marie was a sweet gentle person, I did not want to alarm her, especially considering that the threat had passed, at least for the moment, and considering as well that, being a nun, she didn’t carry the hand grenades I would need before venturing again into the storm.
“It’s just the snow,” I said.
“The snow?”
“The wind and cold and snow. I’m a desert boy, ma’am. I’m not used to weather like this. It’s mean out there.”
“The weather isn’t mean,” she assured me with a smile. “The weather is glorious. The world is beautiful and glorious. Humanity can be mean, and turn away from what’s good. But weather is a gift.”
“All right,” I said.
Sensing that I
hadn’t been convinced, she continued: “Blizzards dress the land in a clean habit, lightning and thunder make a music of celebration, wind blows away all that’s stale, even floods raise up everything green. For cold there’s hot. For dry there’s wet. For wind there’s calm. For night there’s day, which might not seem like weather to you, but it is. Embrace the weather, child, and you’ll understand the balance of the world.”
I am twenty-one, have known the misery of an indifferent father and a hostile mother, have had a part of my heart cut out by a sharp knife of loss, have killed men in self-defense and to spare the lives of innocents, and have left behind all the friends whom I cherished in Pico Mundo. I believe all this must show that I am a page on which the past has written clearly for anyone to read. Yet Sister Clare Marie sees some reason to call me—and only me—child, which sometimes I hope means that she possesses some understanding I do not have, but which most often I suspect means that she is as naïve as she is sweet and that she does not know me at all.
“Embrace the weather,” she said, “but please don’t puddle on the floor.”
This seemed to be an admonition that once might have been better directed at Boo than at me. Then I realized that my ski boots were caked with snow, which was melting on the limestone.
“Oh. Sorry, Sister.”
When I took off my jacket, she hung it on a coatrack, and when I shucked off my boots, she picked them up to put them on the rubber mat under the rack.
As she moved away with the boots, I pulled the bottom of my sweater over my head, and used it as a towel to blot my soaked hair and damp face.
I heard the door open and the wind shriek.
Panicked, I pulled down my sweater and saw Sister Clare Marie standing on the threshold, looking less like a rabbit than like an array of sails on a vessel on course in Arctic straits, vigorously knocking my boots together so the snow caked on them would be left outside.