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?”