by Dean Koontz
Either the drawing cast a dark enchantment over the scientist monk or he did not trust himself to meet our eyes.
“You suspected what had happened, and you put your research on hold—but twisted pride made you return to it recently. Now Brother Timothy is dead … and even at this hour, you stalk your son through this monstrous surrogate.”
With his gaze still upon the drawing, a pulse jumping in his temples, Brother John said tightly, “I long ago accused myself of my sins against my son and his mother.”
“And I believe your confession was even sincere,” Romanovich conceded.
“I received absolution.”
“You confessed and were forgiven, but some darker self within you did not confess and did not think he needed to be forgiven.”
“Sir, Brother Timothy’s murder last night was … horrendous, inhuman. You have to help us stop this.”
All this time later, I am saddened to write that when Brother John’s eyes welled with tears, which he managed not to spill, I half believed they were not for Tim but for himself.
Romanovich said, “You progressed from postulant to novice, to professed monk. But you yourself have said you were spooked when your research led you to believe in a created universe, so you came to God in fear.”
Straining the words through his teeth, Brother John said, “The motivation matters less than the contrition.”
“Perhaps,” Romanovich allowed. “But most come to Him in love. And some part of you, some Other John, has not come to Him at all.”
With sudden intuition, I said, “Brother John, the Other is an angry child.”
At last he looked up from the drawing and met my eyes.
“The child who, far too young, saw anarchy in the world and feared it. The child who resented being born into such a disordered world, who saw chaos and yearned to find order in it.”
Behind his violet windows, the Other regarded me with the contempt and self-regard of a child not yet acquainted with empathy and compassion, a child from whom the Better John had separated himself but from whom he had not escaped.
I called his attention to the drawing once more. “Sir, the obsessed child who built a model of quantum foam out of forty-seven sets of Lego blocks is the same child who conceived of this complex mechanism of cold bones and efficient joints.”
As he studied the architecture of the bone beast, reluctantly he recognized that the obsession behind the Lego model was the same that inspired this eerie construction.
“Sir, there is still time. Time for that little boy to give up his anger and have his pain lifted.”
The surface tension of his pent-up tears abruptly broke, and one tracked down each cheek.
He looked up at me and, in a voice thick with sadness but also with bitterness, he said, “No. It’s too late.”
CHAPTER 53
For all I know, Death had been in the room when the curved walls had bloomed with colorful patterns of imagined God thought, and had moved as our heads had turned, to stay always just out of our line of sight. But it came at me now as if it had just swept into the chamber in a cold fury, seized me, lifted me, pulled me face to face with it.
Instead of the previous void in the hood, confronting me was a brutal version of the face of Brother John, angular where his was round, hard where his was soft, a child’s idea less of the face of Death than of the face of Power personified. The young genius who had recognized and feared the chaos of the world but who had been powerless to bring order to it had now empowered himself.
His breath was that of a machine, rife with the reek of smoking copper and scalding steel.
He threw me over the wingback chair, as if I were but a knotted mass of rags. I slammed into the cool, curved wall and jacked myself up from the floor even as I landed.
A wingback chair flew, I ducked and scooted, the wall rang like a glass bell, as it had not done when I struck it, the chair stayed where it fell, but I kept moving. And here came Death again.
At the window, the bronze rails and muntins strain and slightly tweak but do not fail. The keening of the frustrated attacker grows louder than the clatter of its busy bones.
“This geek,” Brother Maxwell decides, “isn’t scared of us.”
“It’s gonna be before we’re done,” Knuckles assures him.
Out of the kaleidoscopic beast and through one of the empty spaces where a windowpane had been, an urgent thrusting tentacle of scissoring bones invades five feet into the room.
The brothers stagger back in surprise.
The extruded form breaks off or is ejected from the mother mass, and collapses to the floor. Instantly the severed limb assembles into a version of the larger creature.
Pincered, spined, barbed, and hooked, as big as an industrial vacuum cleaner, it comes roach-quick, and Knuckles swings for the bleachers.
The Louisville Slugger slams some corrective discipline into the delinquent, splintering off clusters of bones. Knuckles steps toward the thing as it shudders backward, demolishes it with a second swing.
Through the window comes another thrusting tentacle, and as it detaches, Brother Maxwell shouts to Brother Fletcher, “Get Jacob out of here!”
Brother Fletcher, having played some dangerous gigs in his salad days as a saxophonist, knows how to split a dive when customers start trading gunfire, so he is already scramming from the room with Jacob before Maxwell shouts. Entering the hallway, he hears Brother Gregory cry out that something is in the elevator shaft and is furiously intent on getting through the roof of the blocking cab.
As Death rushed me again, Rodion Romanovich rushed Death, with all the fearlessness of a natural-born mortician, and opened fire with the Desert Eagle.
His promise of incredible noise was fulfilled. The crash of the pistol sounded just a few decibels softer than the thunder of mortar fire.
I didn’t count how many rounds Romanovich squeezed off, but Death burst apart into geometric debris, as it had done when leaping down from the bell tower, the fragmenting robe as brittle as the form it clothed.
Instantly, the shards and scraps and splinters of this unnatural construct twitched and jumped with what looked like life but was not—and within seconds remanifested.
When it turned toward Romanovich, he emptied the pistol, ejected the depleted magazine, and frantically dug the spare out of his pants pocket.
Less shattered by the second barrage of gunfire than by the first, Death rose swiftly from ruin.
John, not a brother at this moment, but now a smug child, stood with eyes closed, thinking the Death figure into existence again, and when he opened his eyes, they were not those of a man of God.
Brother Maxwell slams a home run through the second intruder in Room 14, then sees that Knuckles is again hammering at the first one, which has rattled itself back together with the swiftness of a rose blooming in stop-motion photography.
A third scuttling extrusion of the mother mass assaults, and Maxwell knocks it apart with both a swing and backswing, but the one he had first demolished, now reassembled, rushes him in full bristle and drives two thick barbed spines through his chest.
When Brother Knuckles turns, he witnesses Maxwell pierced and, with horror, sees his brother transformed, as if by contamination, into a kaleidoscope of flexing-pivoting-rotating bones that shreds out of the storm suit as if stripping away a cocoon, and combines with the bone machine that pierced it.
Fleeing the room, Knuckles frantically pulls shut the door and, holding it closed, shouts for help.
Some consideration has been given to such a predicament as this, and two brothers arrive with a chain, which they loop to the levered handle of the door. They join that handle to the one at the adjacent room, ensuring that each door serves as the lock of the other.
The noise from the elevator shaft grows tremendous, rocking the walls. From behind the closed lift doors comes the sound of the cab roof buckling, as well as the thrum and twang of cables tested nearly to destruction.
Jacob is where he will be safest, between Sister Angela and Sister Miriam, whom surely even the devil himself will treat with wary circumspection.
Reborn again, Death shunned me and turned toward the Russian, who proved just two steps faster than the Reaper. Snapping the spare magazine into the Desert Eagle, Romanovich moved toward the man whom I had once admired and shot him twice.
The impact of .50-caliber rounds knocked John Heineman off his feet. When he went down, he stayed down. He wasn’t able to imagine himself reconstructed, because no matter what that lost dark part of his soul might believe, he was not his own creation.
The Death figure reached Romanovich and laid a hand on his shoulder, but did not assault him. The phantom focused instead on Heineman, as if thunderstruck that its lowercase god had been laid low like any mortal.
This time Death deconstructed into a spill of cubes that split into more cubes, a mound of dancing dice, and they cast themselves with larval frenzy, rattling their dotless faces against one another until they were only a fizz of molecules, and then atoms, and then nothing at all but a memory of hubris.
CHAPTER 54
By eleven o’clock that night, as the storm began to wane, the initial contingent of National Security agents—twenty of them—arrived in snow-eating monster trucks. With the phones down, I had no idea how Romanovich contacted them, but by then I had conceded that the clouds of mystery gathered around him made my clouds of mystery look like a light mist by comparison.
By Friday afternoon, the twenty agents had grown to fifty, and the grounds of the abbey and all buildings lay under their authority. The brothers, the sisters, and one shaken guest were exhaustively debriefed, though the children, at the insistence of the nuns, were not disturbed with questions.
The NSA concocted cover stories regarding the deaths of Brother Timothy, Brother Maxwell, and John Heineman. Timothy’s and Maxwell’s families would be told that they had perished in an SUV accident and that their remains were too grisly to allow open-casket funerals.
Already, a funeral Mass had been said for each of them. In the spring, though there were no remains to bury, headstones would be erected in the cemetery by the edge of the forest. At least their names in stone would stand with those whom they had known and loved, and by whom they themselves had been loved.
John Heineman, for whom also a Mass had been offered, would be kept in cold storage. After a year, when his death would not seem coincidental with those of Timothy and Maxwell, an announcement would be made to the effect that he had died of a massive heart attack.
He had no family except the son he had never accepted. In spite of the terror and grief that Heineman had brought to St. Bartholomew’s, the brothers and sisters were agreed that in a spirit of forgiveness, he should be buried in their cemetery, though at a discreet distance from the others who were at rest in that place.
Heineman’s array of supercomputers were impounded by the NSA. They would eventually be removed from John’s Mew and trucked away. All the strange rooms and the creation machine would be studied, meticulously disassembled, and removed.
The brothers and sisters—and yours truly—were required to sign oaths of silence, and we understood that the carefully spelled-out penalties for violation would be strictly enforced. I don’t think the feds were worried about the monks and nuns, whose lives are about the fulfillment of oaths, but they spent a lot of time vividly explaining to me all the nuances of suffering embodied in the words “rot in prison.”
I wrote this manuscript nonetheless, as writing is my therapy and a kind of penance. If ever, my story will be published only when I have moved on from this world to glory or damnation, where even the NSA cannot reach me.
Although Abbot Bernard had no responsibility for John Heineman’s research or actions, he insisted that he would step down from his position between Christmas and the new year.
He had called John’s Mew the adytum, which is the most sacred part of a place of worship, shrine of shrines. He had embraced the false idea that God can be known through science, which pained him considerably, but his greatest remorse arose from the fact that he had been unable to see that John Heineman had been motivated not by a wholesome pride in his God-given genius but by a vanity and a secret simmering anger that corrupted his every achievement.
A sadness settled over the community of St. Bartholomew’s, and I doubted that it would lift for a year, if even then. Because the beasts of bone that breached the second-floor defenses of the school had collapsed into diminishing cubes at the moment of Heineman’s demise, as had the figure of Death, only Brother Maxwell had perished in the battle. But Maxwell, Timothy, and again poor Constantine would be mourned anew in each season that life here went on without them.
Saturday evening, three days after the crisis, Rodion Romanovich came to my room in the guesthouse, bringing two bottles of good red wine, fresh bread, cheese, cold roast beef, and various condiments, none of which he had poisoned.
Boo spent much of the evening lying on my feet, as if he feared they might be cold.
Elvis stopped by for a while. I thought he might have moved on by now, as Constantine appeared to have done, but the King remained. He worried about me. I suspected also that he might be choosing his moment with a sense of the drama and style that had made him famous.
Near midnight, as we sat at a small table by the window at which a few days earlier I had been waiting for the snow, Rodion said, “You will be free to leave Monday if you wish. Or will you stay?”
“I may come back one day,” I said, “but now this isn’t the place for me.”
“I believe without exception the brothers and the sisters feel this will forever be the place for you. You saved them all, son.”
“No, sir. Not all.”
“All of the children. Timothy was killed within the hour you saw the first bodach. There was nothing you could have done for him. And I am more at fault for Maxwell than you are. If I had understood the situation and had shot Heineman sooner, Maxwell might have lived.”
“Sir, you’re surprisingly kind for a man who prepares people for death.”
“Well, you know, in some cases, death is a kindness not only to the person who receives it but to the people he himself might have destroyed. When will you leave?”
“Next week.”
“Where will you go, son?”
“Home to Pico Mundo. You? Back to your beloved Indianapolis?”
“I am sadly certain that the Indiana State Library at one-forty North Senate Avenue has become a shambles in my absence. But I will be going, instead, to the high desert in California, to meet Mrs. Romanovich on her return from space.”
We had a certain rhythm for these things that required me to take a sip of wine and savor it before asking, “From space—do you mean like the moon, sir?”
“Not so far away as the moon this time. For a month, the lovely Mrs. Romanovich has been doing work for this wonderful country aboard a certain orbiting platform about which I can say no more.”
“Will she make America safe forever, sir?”
“Nothing is forever, son. But if I had to commend the fate of the nation to a single pair of hands, I could think of none I would trust more than hers.”
“I wish I could meet her, sir.”
“Perhaps one day you will.”
Elvis lured Boo away for a belly rub, and I said, “I do worry about the data in Dr. Heineman’s computers. In the wrong hands …”
Leaning close, he whispered, “Worry not, my boy. The data in those computers is applesauce. I made sure of that before I called in my posse.”
I raised my glass in a toast. “To the sons of assassins and the husbands of space heroes.”
“And to your lost girl,” he said, clinking my glass with his, “who, in her new adventure, holds you in her heart as you hold her.”
CHAPTER 55
The early sky was clear and deep. the snow-mantled meadow lay as bright and clean as the morning after death, when time
will have defeated time and all will have been redeemed.
I had said my good-byes the night before and had chosen to leave while the brothers were at Mass and the sisters busy with the waking children.
The roads were clear and dry, and the customized Cadillac purred into view without a clank of chains. He pulled up at the steps to the guesthouse, where I waited.
I hurried to advise him not to get out, but he refused to remain behind the wheel.
My friend and mentor, Ozzie Boone, the famous mystery writer of whom I have written much in my first two manuscripts, is a gloriously fat man, four hundred pounds at his slimmest. He insists that he is in better condition than most sumo wrestlers, and perhaps he is, but I worry every time he gets up from a chair, as it seems this will be one demand too many on his great heart.
“Dear Odd,” he said as he gave me a fierce bear hug by the open driver’s door. “You have lost weight, I fear. You are a wisp.”
“No, sir. I weigh the same as when you dropped me off here. It may be that I seem smaller to you because you’ve gotten larger.”
“I have a colossal bag of fine dark chocolates in the car. With the proper commitment, you can gain five pounds by the time we get back to Pico Mundo. Let me put your luggage in the trunk.”
“No, no, sir. I can manage.”
“Dear Odd, you have been trembling in anticipation of my death for years, and you will be trembling in anticipation of my death ten years from now. I will be such a massive inconvenience to all who will handle my body that God, if he has any mercy for morticians, will keep me alive perhaps forever.”
“Sir, let’s not talk about death. Christmas is coming. ’Tis the season to be jolly.”
“By all means, we shall talk about silver bells roasting on an open fire and all things Christmas.”