by Dean Koontz
I pressed my fingertips to his throat, which was still warm, and felt for the artery. I thought I detected a pulse.
Because my hands were half numb with cold and therefore less sensitive to heat, I might not have felt a faint exhalation, when I had touched his lips.
As I leaned forward to put my ear to his mouth, hoping to hear at least a sigh of breath, I was struck from behind.
No doubt the assailant meant to shatter my skull. He swung just as I bent forward, and the club grazed the back of my head, thumped hard off my left shoulder.
I pitched forward, rolled to the left, rolled again, scrambled to my feet, ran. I had no weapon. He had a club and maybe something worse, a knife.
The hands-on kind of killers, the gunless kind, might stave in with a club or strangle with a scarf, but most of them carry blades, as well, for backup, or for entertainment that might come as foreplay or as aftermath.
The guys in the porkpie hats, mentioned earlier, had blackjacks and guns and even a hydraulic automobile press, and still they had carried knives. If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.
Although life has made me old for my age, I am still fast in my youth. Hoping my assailant was older and therefore slower, I sprinted away from the abbey, into the open yard, where there were no corners in which to be cornered.
I hurled myself through the snowfall, so it seemed as though a wind had sprung up, pasting flakes to my lashes.
In this second minute of the storm, the ground remained black, unchanged by the blizzard’s brush. Within a few bounding steps, the land began to slope gently toward woods that I could not see, open dark descending toward a bristling dark.
Intuition insisted that the forest would be the death of me. Running into it, I would be running to my grave.
The wilds are not my natural habitat. I am a town boy, at home with pavement under my feet, a whiz with a library card, a master at the gas grill and griddle.
If my pursuer was a beast of the new barbarism, he might not be able to make a fire with two sticks and a stone, might not be able to discern true north from the growth of moss on trees, but his lawless nature would make him more at home in the woods than I would ever be.
I needed a weapon, but I had nothing except my universal key, a Kleenex, and insufficient martial-arts knowledge to make a deadly weapon of them.
Cut grass relented to tall grass, and ten yards later, nature put weapons under my feet: loose stones that tested my agility and balance. I skidded to a halt, stooped, scooped up two stones the size of plums, turned, and threw one, threw it hard, and then the other.
The stones vanished into snow and gloom. I had either lost my pursuer or, intuiting my intent, he had circled around me when I stopped and stooped.
I clawed more missiles off the ground, turned 360 degrees, and surveyed the night, ready to pelt him with a couple of half-pound stones.
Nothing moved but the snow, seeming to come down in skeins as straight as the strands of a beaded curtain, yet each flake turning as it fell.
I could see no more than fifteen feet. I had never realized that snow could fall heavily enough to limit visibility this much.
Once, twice, I thought I glimpsed someone moving at the limits of vision, but it must have been an illusion of movement because I couldn’t fix on any shape. The patterns of snow on night gradually dizzied me.
Holding my breath, I listened. The snow did not even whisper its way to the earth, but seemed to salt the night with silence.
I waited. I’m good at waiting. I waited sixteen years for my disturbed mother to kill me in my sleep before at last I moved out and left her home alone with her beloved gun.
If, in spite of the periodic peril that comes with my gift, I should live an average life span, I’ve got another sixty years before I will see Stormy Llewellyn again, in the next world. That will be a long wait, but I am patient.
My left shoulder ached, and the back of my head, grazed by the club, felt less than wonderful. I was cold to the bone.
For some reason, I had not been pursued.
If the storm had been storming long enough to whiten the ground, I could have stretched out on my back and made snow angels. But the conditions were not yet right for play. Maybe later.
The abbey was out of sight. I wasn’t sure from which direction I had come, but I wasn’t worried that I would lose my way. I have never been lost.
Announcing my return with an uncontrollable chattering of teeth, holding a stone in each hand, I warily retraced my route across the meadow, found the short grass of the yard again. Out of the silent storm, the abbey loomed.
When I reached the corner of the library where I had nearly fallen over the prone monk, I found neither victim nor assailant. Concerned that the man might have regained consciousness and, badly hurt and disoriented, might have crawled away, only to pass out once more, I searched in a widening arc, but found no one.
The library formed an L with the back wall of the guest wing, from which I had set out in pursuit of a bodach little more than an hour ago. At last I dropped the stones around which my hands were clenched and half frozen, unlocked the door to the back stairs, and climbed to the third floor.
In the highest hallway, the door to my small suite stood open, as I’d left it. Waiting for snow, I’d been sitting in candlelight, but now a brighter light spilled from my front room.
CHAPTER 8
At shortly past one in the morning, the guestmaster, Brother Roland, was not likely to be changing the bed linens or delivering a portion of the “two hogsheads of wine” that St. Benedict, when he wrote the Rule that established monastic order in the sixth century, had specified as a necessary provision for every guesthouse.
St. Bartholomew’s does not provide any wine. The small under-the-counter refrigerator in my bathroom contains cans of Coke and bottles of iced tea.
Entering my front room, prepared to shout “Varlet,” or “Black-guard,” or some other epithet that would sound appropriate to the medieval atmosphere, I found not an enemy, but a friend. Brother Knuckles, known sometimes as Brother Salvatore, stood at the window, peering out at the falling snow.
Brother Knuckles is acutely aware of the world around him, of the slightest sounds and telltale scents, which is why he survived the world he operated in before becoming a monk. Even as I stepped silently across the threshold, he said, “You’ll catch your death, traipsin’ about on a night like this, dressed like that.”
“I wasn’t traipsing,” I said, closing the door quietly behind me. “I was skulking.”
He turned from the window to face me. “I was in the kitchen, scarfin’ down some roast beef and provolone, when I seen you come up the stairs from John’s Mew.”
“There weren’t any lights in the kitchen, sir. I would’ve noticed.”
“The fridge light is enough to make a snack, and you can eat good by the glow from the clock on the microwave.”
“Committing the sin of gluttony in the dark, were you?”
“The cellarer’s gotta be sure things are fresh, don’t he?”
As the abbey’s cellarer, Brother Knuckles purchased, stocked, and inventoried the food, beverages, and other material goods for the monastery and school.
“Anyway,” he said, “a guy, he eats at night in a bright kitchen that’s got no window blinds—he’s a guy tastin’ his last sandwich.”
“Even if the guy’s a monk in a monastery?”
Brother Knuckles shrugged. “You can never be too careful.”
In exercise sweats instead of his habit, at five feet seven and two hundred pounds of bone and muscle, he looked like a die-casting machine that had been covered in a gray-flannel cozy.
The rainwater eyes, the hard angles and blunt edges of brow and jaw, should have given him a cruel or even threatening appearance. In his previous life, people had feared him, and for good reason.
Twelve years in a monastery,
years of remorse and contrition, had brought warmth to those once-icy eyes and had inspired in him a kindness that transformed his unfortunate face. Now, at fifty-five, he might be mistaken for a prizefighter who stayed in the sport too long: cauliflower ears, portobello nose, the humility of a basically sweet palooka who has learned the hard way that brute strength does not a champion make.
A small glob of icy slush slid down my forehead and along my right cheek.
“You’re wearin’ snow like a poofy white hat.” Knuckles headed toward the bathroom. “I’ll get you a towel.”
“There’s a bottle of aspirin by the sink. I need aspirin.”
He returned with a towel and the aspirin. “You want some water to wash ’em down, maybe a Coke?”
“Give me a hogshead of wine.”
“They must’ve had livers of iron back in Saint Benny’s day. A hogshead was like sixty-three gallons.”
“Then I’ll only need half a hogshead.”
By the time I toweled my hair half dry, he had brought me a Coke. “You come up the stairs from John’s Mew and stood there lookin’ up at the snow the way a turkey stares up at the rain with its mouth open till it drowns.”
“Well, sir, I never saw snow before.”
“Then, boom, you’re off like a shot around the corner of the refectory.”
Settling into an armchair and shaking two aspirin out of the bottle, I said, “I heard someone scream.”
“I didn’t hear no scream.”
“You were inside,” I reminded him, “and making a lot of chewing noises.”
Knuckles sat in the other armchair. “So who screamed?”
I washed down two aspirin with Coke and said, “I found one of the brothers facedown on the ground by the library. Didn’t see him at first in his black habit, almost fell over him.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know. A heavy guy. I rolled him over, couldn’t see his face in the dark—then someone tried to brain me from behind.”
His brush-cut hair seemed to bristle with indignation. “This don’t sound like St. Bart’s.”
“The club, whatever it was, grazed the back of my head, and my left shoulder took the worst of it.”
“We might as well be in Jersey, stuff like this goin’ down.”
“I’ve never been to New Jersey.”
“You’d like it. Even where it’s bad, Jersey is always real.”
“They’ve got one of the world’s largest used-tire dumps. You’ve probably seen it.”
“Never did. Ain’t that sad? You live in a place most of your life, you take it for granted.”
“You didn’t even know about the tire dump, sir?”
“People, they live in New York City all their lives, never go to the top of the Empire State Building. You okay, son? Your shoulder?”
“I’ve been worse.”
“Maybe you should go to the infirmary, ring Brother Gregory, have your shoulder examined.”
Brother Gregory is the infirmarian. He has a nursing degree.
The size of the monastic community isn’t sufficient to justify a full-time infirmarian—especially since the sisters have one of their own for the convent and for the children at the school—so Brother Gregory also does the laundry with Brother Norbert.
“I’ll be okay, sir,” I assured him.
“So who tried to knock your block off?”
“Never got a look at him.”
I explained how I had rolled and run, thinking my assailant was at my heels, and how the monk I’d almost fallen over was gone when I returned.
“So we don’t know,” said Knuckles, “did he get up on his own and walk away or was he carried.”
“We don’t know, either, if he was just unconscious or dead.”
Frowning, Knuckles said, “I don’t like dead. Anyway, it don’t make sense. Who would kill a monk?”
“Yes, sir, but who would knock one unconscious?”
Knuckles brooded for a moment. “One time this guy whacked a Lutheran preacher, but he didn’t mean to.”
“I don’t think you should be telling me this, sir.”
With a wave of a hand, he dismissed my concern. His strong hands appear to be all knuckles, hence his nickname.
“I don’t mean it was me. I told you, I never done the big one. You do believe me on that score, don’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir. But you did say this was an accidental whack.”
“Never offed no one accidental either.”
“All right then.”
Brother Knuckles, formerly Salvatore Giancomo, had been well-paid muscle for the mob before God turned his life around.
“Busted faces, broke some legs, but I never chilled no one.”
When he was forty, Knuckles had begun to have second thoughts about his career path. He felt “empty, driftin’, like a rowboat out on the sea and nobody in it.”
During this crisis of confidence, because of death threats to his boss—Tony “the Eggbeater” Martinelli—Knuckles and some other guys like him were sleeping-over at the boss’s home. It wasn’t a pajamas-and-s’mores kind of sleepover, but the kind of sleepover where everyone brings his two favorite automatic weapons. Anyway, one evening, Knuckles found himself reading a story to the Eggbeater’s six-year-old daughter.
The tale was about a toy, a china-rabbit doll, that was proud of his appearance and thoroughly self-satisfied. Then the rabbit endured a series of terrible misfortunes that humbled him, and with humility came empathy for the suffering of others.
The girl fell asleep with half the story still to be read. Knuckles needed in the worst way to know what happened to the rabbit, but he didn’t want his fellow face-busters to think that he was really interested in a kid’s book.
A few days later, when the threat to the Eggbeater had passed, Knuckles went to a bookstore and bought a copy of the rabbit’s tale. He started from the beginning, and by the time he reached the end, when the china rabbit found its way back to the little girl who had loved him, Knuckles broke down and wept.
Never before had he shed tears. That afternoon, in the kitchen of his row house, where he lived alone, he sobbed like a child.
In those days, no one who knew Salvatore “Knuckles” Giancomo, not even his mother, would have said he was an introspective kind of guy, but he nevertheless realized that he was not crying only about the china rabbit’s return home. He was crying about the rabbit, all right, but also about something else.
For a while, he could not imagine what that something else might be. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, eating stacks of his mother’s pizzelles, repeatedly recovering his composure, only to break down and weep again.
Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he’d been a boy.
This realization left him conflicted. He still wanted to be tough, took pride in being strong and stoic. Yet it seemed that he had become weak and emotional.
Over the next month, he read and reread the rabbit’s story. He began to understand that when Edward, the rabbit, discovered humility and learned to sympathize with other people’s losses, he did not grow weak but in fact became stronger.
Knuckles bought another book by the same author. This one concerned an outcast big-eared mouse who saved a princess.
The mouse had less impact on him than the bunny did, but, oh, he loved the mouse, too. He loved the mouse for its courage and for its willingness to sacrifice itself for love.
Three months after he first read the story of the china rabbit, Knuckles arranged a meeting with the FBI. He offered to turn state’s evidence against his boss and a slew of other mugs.
He ratted them out in part to redeem himself but no less because he wanted to save the little girl to whom he had read part of the rabbit’s story. He hoped to spare her from the cold and crippling life of a crime boss’s daughter that daily would harden around her, as imprisoning
as concrete.
Thereafter, Knuckles had been placed in Vermont, in the Witness Protection Program. His new name was Bob Loudermilk.
Vermont proved to be too much culture shock. Birkenstocks, flannel shirts, and fifty-year-old men with ponytails annoyed him.
He tried to resist the worst temptations of the world with a growing library of kids’ books. He discovered that some book writers seemed subtly to approve of the kind of behavior and the values that he had once embraced, and they scared him. He couldn’t find enough thoughtful china rabbits and courageous big-eared mice.
Having dinner in a mediocre Italian restaurant, yearning for Jersey, he suddenly got the calling to the monastic life. It happened shortly after a waiter put before him an order of bad gnocchi, as chewy as caramels, but that’s a story for later.
As a novice, following the path of regret to remorse to absolute contrition, Knuckles found the first unalloyed happiness of his life. At St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, he thrived.
Now, on this snowy night years later, as I considered taking two more aspirin, he said, “This minister, name’s Hoobner, he felt real bad about American Indians, the way they lost their land and all, so he was always losin’ money at blackjack in their casinos. Some of it was a high-vigorish loan from Tony Martinelli.”
“I’m surprised the Eggbeater would lend to a preacher.”
“Tony figured if Hoobner couldn’t keep payin’ eight percent a week from his own pocket, then he could steal it from the Sunday collection plate. As it shook down, though, Hoobner would gamble and butt-pinch the cocktail waitresses, but he wouldn’t steal. So when he stops payin’ the vig, Tony sends a guy to discuss Hoobner’s moral dilemma with him.”
“A guy not you,” I said.
“A guy not me, we called him Needles.”
“I don’t think I want to know why you called him Needles.”
“No, you don’t,” Knuckles agreed. “Anyway, Needles gives Hoobner one last chance to pay up, and instead of receivin’ this request with Christian consideration, the preacher says ‘Go to hell.’ Then he pulls a pistol and tries to punch Needles’s ticket for the trip.”
“The preacher shoots Needles?”