by Dean Koontz
“He might’ve been a Methodist, not a Lutheran. He shoots Needles but only wounds him in the shoulder, and Needles pulls his piece and shoots Hoobner dead.”
“So the preacher would shoot somebody, but he wouldn’t steal.”
“I’m not sayin’ that’s traditional Methodist teachin’.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“Fact is, now I think on it, the preacher was maybe a Unitarian. Anyway, he was a preacher, and he was shot dead, so bad things can happen to anyone, even a monk.”
Although the chill of the winter night had not entirely left me, I pressed the cold can of Coke to my forehead. “This problem we have here involves bodachs.”
Because he was one of my few confidants at St. Bartholomew’s, I told him about the three demonic shadows hovering at Justine’s bed.
“And they was hangin’ around the monk you almost stumbled over?”
“No, sir. They’re here for something bigger than one monk being knocked unconscious.”
“You’re right. That ain’t the kind of fight card that draws a crowd anywhere.”
He got up from his chair and went to the window. He gazed out at the night for a moment.
Then: “I wonder.… You think maybe my past life is catchin’ up with me?”
“That was fifteen years ago. Isn’t the Eggbeater in prison?”
“He died in stir. But some of those other mugs, they got long memories.”
“If a hit man tracked you down, sir, wouldn’t you be dead by now?”
“For sure. I’d be parked in an unpadded waitin’-room chair, readin’ old magazines in Purgatory.”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with who you used to be.”
He turned from the window. “From your lips to God’s ear. Worst thing would be anyone here hurt because of me.”
“Everyone here’s been lifted up because of you,” I assured him.
The slabs and lumps of his face shifted into a smile that you would have found scary if you didn’t know him. “You’re a good kid. If I ever would’ve had me a kid, it’s nice to think he might’ve been a little like you.”
“Being me isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, sir.”
“Though if I was your dad,” Brother Knuckles continued, “you’d probably be shorter and thicker, with your head set closer to your shoulders.”
“I don’t need a neck anyway,” I said. “I never wear ties.”
“No, son, you need a neck so you can stick it out. That’s what you do. That’s who you are.”
“Lately, I’ve been thinking I might get myself measured for a habit, become a novice.”
He returned to his chair but only sat on the arm of it, studying me. After consideration, he said, “Maybe someday you’ll hear the call. But not anytime soon. You’re of the world, and need to be.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I need to be of the world.”
“The world needs you to be out there in it. You got things to do, son.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. The things I’ll have to do.”
“The monastery ain’t a hideout. A mug wants to come in here, take the vows, he should come because he wants to open himself to somethin’ bigger than the world, not because he wants to close himself up in a little ball like a pill bug.”
“Some things you just have to close yourself away from, sir.”
“You mean the summer before last, the shootings at the mall. You don’t need no one’s forgiveness, son.”
“I knew it was coming, they were coming, the gunmen. I should’ve been able to stop it. Nineteen people died.”
“Everyone says, without you, hundreds would’ve died.”
“I’m no hero. If people knew about my gift and knew still I couldn’t stop it, they wouldn’t call me a hero.”
“You ain’t God, neither. You did all you could, anyone could.”
As I put down the Coke, picked up the bottle of aspirin, and shook two more tablets onto my palm, I changed the subject. “Are you going to wake the abbot and tell him that I fell over an unconscious monk?”
He stared at me, trying to decide whether to allow me to change the subject. Then: “Maybe in a while. First, I’m gonna try to take an unofficial bed count, see if maybe I can find someone holdin’ ice to a lump on his head.”
“The monk I fell over.”
“Exactly. We got two questions. Second, why would some guy club a monk? But first, why would a monk be out at this hour where he could get himself clubbed?”
“I guess you don’t want to get a brother in trouble.”
“If there’s sin involved, I ain’t gonna help him keep what he done from his confessor. That won’t be no favor to his soul. But if it was just some kinda foolishness, the prior maybe don’t have to know.”
A prior is a monastery’s disciplinarian.
St. Bartholomew’s prior was Father Reinhart, an older monk with thin lips and a narrow nose, less than half the nose of which Brother Knuckles could boast. His eyes and eyebrows and hair were all the color of an Ash Wednesday forehead spot.
Walking, Father Reinhart appeared to float like a spirit across the ground, and he was uncannily quiet. Many of the brothers called him the Gray Ghost, though with affection.
Father Reinhart was a firm disciplinarian, though not harsh or unfair. Having once been a Catholic-school principal, he warned that he had a paddle, as yet never used, in which he had drilled holes to reduce wind resistance. “Just so you know,” he had said with a wink.
Brother Knuckles went to the door, hesitated, looked back at me. “If somethin’ bad is comin’, how long we got?”
“After the first bodachs show up … it’s sometimes as little as a day, usually two.”
“You sure you ain’t got a concussion or nothin’?”
“Nothing that four aspirin won’t help,” I assured him. I popped the second pair of tablets into my mouth and chewed them.
Knuckles grimaced. “What’re you, a tough guy?”
“I read that they’re absorbed into your bloodstream faster this way, through the tissue in your mouth.”
“What—you get a flu shot, you have the doc inject it in your tongue? Get a few hours’ sleep.”
“I’ll try.”
“Find me after Lauds, before Mass, I’ll tell you who got himself conked—and maybe why, if he knows why. Christ be with you, son.”
“And with you.”
He left and closed the door behind him.
The doors of the suites in the guesthouse, like those of the monks’ rooms in another wing, have no locks. Everyone here respects the privacy of others.
I carried a straight-backed chair to the door and wedged it under the knob, to prevent anyone from entering.
Maybe chewing aspirin and letting them dissolve in your mouth speeds up absorption of the medication, but they taste like crap.
When I drank some Coke to wash out the bad taste, the crushed tablets reacted with the soft drink, and I found myself foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
When it comes to tragic figures, I’ve got a much greater talent for slapstick than Hamlet did, and whereas King Lear would step over a banana peel in his path, my foot will find it every time.
CHAPTER 9
The comfortable but simple guest suite had a shower so small that I felt as if I were standing in a coffin.
For ten minutes I let the hot water beat on my left shoulder, which had been tenderized by the mysterious assailant’s club. The muscles relaxed, but the ache remained.
The pain wasn’t severe. It didn’t concern me. Physical pain, unlike some other kinds, eventually goes away.
When I turned off the water, big white Boo was staring at me through the steam-clouded glass door.
After I had toweled dry and pulled on a pair of briefs, I knelt on the bathroom floor and rubbed the dog behind the ears, which made him grin with pleasure.
“Where were you hiding?” I asked him. “Where were you when som
e miscreant tried to make my brain squirt out my ears? Huh?”
He didn’t answer. He only grinned. I like old Marx Brothers movies, and Boo is the Harpo Marx of dogs in more ways than one.
My toothbrush seemed to weigh five pounds. Even in exhaustion, I am diligent about brushing my teeth.
A few years previously, I had witnessed an autopsy in which the medical examiner, during a preliminary review of the corpse, remarked for his recorder that the deceased was guilty of poor dental hygiene. I had been embarrassed for the dead man, who had been a friend of mine.
I hope that no attendants at my autopsy will have any reason to be embarrassed for me.
You might think this is pride of a particularly foolish kind. You’re probably right.
Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.
I have persuaded myself, however, that brushing my teeth in anticipation of my untimely demise is simply consideration for the feelings of any autopsy witness who might have known me when I was alive. Embarrassment for a friend, arising from his shortcomings, is never as awful as being mortified by the exposure of your own faults, but it is piercing.
Boo was in bed, curled up against the footboard, when I came out of the bathroom.
“No belly rub, no more ear scratching,” I told him. “I’m coming down like a plane that’s lost all engines.”
His yawn was superfluous for a dog like him; he was here for companionship, not for sleep.
Lacking enough energy to put on pajamas, I fell into bed in my briefs. The coroner always strips the body, anyway.
After pulling the covers to my chin, I realized that I had left the light on in the adjacent bathroom.
In spite of John Heineman’s four-billion-dollar endowment, the brothers at the abbey live frugally, in respect of their vows of poverty. They do not waste resources.
The light seemed far away, growing more distant by the second, and the blankets were turning to stone. To hell with it. I wasn’t a monk yet, not even a novice.
I wasn’t a fry cook anymore, either—except when I made pancakes on Sundays—or a tire salesman, or much of anything. We not-much-of-anything types don’t worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.
Nevertheless, I worried. In spite of worrying, I slept.
I dreamed, but not about exploding boilers. Not about nuns on fire, screaming through a snowy night, either.
In the dream, I was sleeping but then awoke to see a bodach standing at the foot of my bed. This dream bodach, unlike those in the waking world, had fierce eyes that glistered with reflections of the light from the half-open bathroom door.
As always, I pretended that I did not see the beast. I watched it through half-closed eyes.
When it moved, it morphed, as things do in dreams, and became not a bodach any longer. At the foot of my bed stood the glowering Russian, Rodion Romanovich, the only other visitor currently staying in the guesthouse.
Boo was in the dream, standing on the bed, baring his teeth at the intruder, but silent.
Romanovich went around the bed to the nightstand.
Boo sprang from the bed to the wall, as though he were a cat, and clung there on the vertical, defying gravity, glaring at the Russian.
Interesting.
Romanovich picked up the picture frame that stood beside the nightstand clock.
The frame protects a small card from a carnival fortune-telling machine called Gypsy Mummy. It declares YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
In my first manuscript, I recounted the curious history of this object, which is sacred to me. Suffice to say that Stormy Llewellyn and I received it in return for the first coin we fed the machine, after a guy and his fiancée, in line before us, got nothing but bad news for their eight quarters.
Because Gypsy Mummy did not accurately forecast events in this world, because Stormy is dead and I am alone, I know the card means that we will be together forever in the next world. This promise is more important than food to me, than air.
Although the light from the bathroom did not reach far enough to allow Romanovich to read the words on the framed card, he read them anyway because, being a dream Russian, he could do anything that he wanted, just as dream horses can fly and dream spiders can have the heads of human babies.
In a murmur, in accented speech, he spoke the words aloud: “You are destined to be together forever.”
His solemn yet mellifluous voice was suitable for a poet, and those seven words sounded like a line of lyrical verse.
I saw Stormy as she’d been that evening at the carnival, and the dream became about her, about us, about a sweet past beyond recovery.
After less than four hours of troubled sleep, I woke before dawn.
The leaded window showed a black sky, and snow fairies danced down the glass. In the bottom panes, a few ferns of frost twinkled with a strange light, alternately red and blue.
The digital clock on the nightstand was where it had been when I’d fallen into bed, but the framed fortune-teller’s card appeared to have been moved. I felt certain it had been standing upright in front of the lamp. Now it lay flat.
I threw aside the bedclothes and got up. I walked out to the living room, turned on a lamp.
The straight-backed chair remained wedged under the knob of the door to the third-floor hallway. I tested it. Secure.
Before communism bled them of so much of their faith, the Russian people had a history of both Christian and Judaic mysticism. They weren’t known, however, for walking through locked doors or solid walls.
The living-room window was three stories above the ground and not approachable by a ledge. I checked the latch anyhow, and found it engaged.
Although lacking nuns on fire, lacking spiders with the heads of human babies, the night disturbance had been a dream. Nothing but a dream.
Looking down from the latch, I discovered the source of the pulsing light that throbbed in the filigree of frost along the edges of the glass. A thick blanket of snow had been drawn over the land while I slept, and three Ford Explorers, each with the word SHERIFF on its roof, stood idling on the driveway, clouds of exhaust pluming from their tailpipes, emergency beacons flashing.
Although still windless, the storm had not relented. Through the screening cold confetti, I glimpsed six widely separated flashlights wielded by unseen men moving in coordinated fashion, as if quartering the meadow in search of something.
CHAPTER 10
By the time I changed into thermal long johns, pulled on jeans and a crewneck sweater, got feet into ski boots, grabbed my Gore-Tex/Thermolite jacket, rushed downstairs, crossed the parlor, and pushed through the oak door into the guesthouse cloister, dawn had come.
Sullen light brushed a gray veneer over the limestone columns encircling the courtyard. Under the cloister ceiling, darkness held fast, as if the night were so unimpressed by the dreary morning that it might not retreat.
In the courtyard, without ski boots, St. Bartholomew stood in fresh powder, offering a winterized pumpkin in his outstretched hand.
On the east side of the cloister, directly across from the point at which I burst into it, was the guesthouse entrance to the abbatial church. Voices raised in prayer and a tolling bell echoed to me not from the church but instead along a passageway ahead and to my right.
Four steps led up to that barrel-vaulted stone corridor, which itself led twenty feet into the grand cloister. Here a courtyard four times larger than the first was framed by an even more impressive colonnade.
The forty-six brothers and five novices were gathered in this open courtyard in full habit, facing Abbot Bernard, who stood on the bell dais, with one hand rhythmically drawing upon the toll rope.
Matins had concluded, and near the end of Lauds, they had come out of the church for the final prayer and the abbot’s address.
The prayer was the Angelus, which is beautiful in Latin, when raised with many voices.
A chanted response rose from the b
rothers as I arrived: “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.” Then abbot and all said, “Ave Maria.”
Two sheriff’s deputies waited in the shelter of the cloister as the brothers in the courtyard finished the prayer. The cops were big men and more solemn than the monks.
They stared at me. Clearly I was not a cop, and apparently I was not a monk. My indeterminate status made me a person of interest.
Their stares were so intense that I wouldn’t have been surprised if, in the bitter air, their eyes had begun to steam as did their every exhalation.
Having had much experience of police, I knew better than to approach them with the suggestion that their suspicions would best be directed at the glowering Russian, wherever he might coil at this moment. As a consequence, their interest in me would only intensify.
Although anxious to know the reason that the sheriff had been called, I resisted the urge to ask them. They would be inclined to view my ignorance as merely a pretense of ignorance, and they would regard me with greater suspicion than they did now.
Once a cop has found you of even passing interest, regarding a criminal matter, you can do nothing to remove yourself from his list of potential suspects. Only events beyond your control can clear you. Like being stabbed, shot, or strangled by the real villain.
“Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi,” said the brothers, and the abbot said, “Oremus,” which meant “Let us pray.”
Less than half a minute later, the Angelus concluded.
Usually, after the Angelus, the abbot’s address consists of a brief commentary on some sacred text and its application to monastic life. Then he does a soft-shoe number while singing “Tea for Two.”
All right, I made up the soft-shoe and “Tea for Two.” Abbot Bernard does resemble Fred Astaire, which is why I’ve never been able to get this irreverent image out of my head.
Instead of his usual address, the abbot announced a dispensation from attendance at morning Mass to all those who might be needed to assist the sheriff’s deputies in a thorough search of the buildings.
The time was 6:28. Mass would begin at seven o’clock.