During the seven months I had lived in this mountain retreat, I’d shared the truth of my life with one other, Brother Knuckles, a monk. His real name is Salvatore, but we call him Knuckles more often than not.
Brother Knuckles would not have hesitated on the threshold of Room 32. He is a monk of action. In an instant he would have decided that the threat posed by the bodach trumped propriety. He would have rushed through the door as boldly as did the dog, although with less grace and with a lot more noise.
I pushed the door open wider, and went inside.
In the two hospital beds lay Annamarie, closest to the door, and Justine. Both were asleep.
On the wall behind each girl hung a lamp controlled by a switch at the end of a cord looped around the bed rail. It could provide various intensities of light.
Annamarie, who was ten years old but small for her age, had set her lamp low, as a night-light. She feared the dark.
Her wheelchair stood beside the bed. From one of the hand grips at the back of the chair hung a quilted, insulated jacket. From the other hand grip hung a woolen cap. On winter nights, she insisted that these garments be close at hand.
The girl slept with the top sheet clenched in her frail hands, as if ready to throw off the bedclothes. Her face was taut with an expression of concerned anticipation, less than anxiety, more than mere disquiet.
Although she slept soundly, she appeared to be prepared to flee at the slightest provocation.
One day each week, of her own accord, with eyes closed tight, Annamarie practiced piloting her battery-powered wheelchair to each of two elevators. One lay in the east wing, the other in the west.
In spite of her limitations and her suffering, she was a happy child. These preparations for flight were out of character.
Although she would not talk about it, she seemed to sense that a night of terror was coming, a hostile darkness through which she would need to find her way. She might be prescient.
The bodach, first glimpsed from my high window, had come here, but not alone. Three of them, silent wolflike shadows, were gathered around the second bed, in which Justine slept.
A single bodach signals impending violence that may be either near and probable or remote and less certain. If they appear in twos and threes, the danger is more immediate.
In my experience, when they appear in packs, the pending danger has become imminent peril, and the deaths of many people are days or hours away. Although the sight of three of them chilled me, I was grateful that they didn’t number thirty.
Trembling with evident excitement, the bodachs bent over Justine while she slept, as if studying her intently. As if feeding on her.
CHAPTER 2
THE LAMP ABOVE THE SECOND BED HAD BEEN turned low, but Justine had not adjusted it herself. A nun had selected the dimmest setting, hoping that it might please the girl.
Justine did little for herself and asked for nothing. She was partially paralyzed and could not speak.
When Justine had been four years old, her father had strangled her mother to death. They say that after she had died, he put a rose between her teeth—but with the long thorny stem down her throat.
He drowned little Justine in the bathtub, or thought he did. He left her for dead, but she survived with brain damage from prolonged lack of oxygen.
For weeks, she lingered in a coma, though that was years ago. These days she slept and woke, but when awake, her capacity for engagement with her caregivers fluctuated.
Photographs of Justine at four reveal a child of exceptional beauty. In those snapshots, she looks impish and full of delight.
Eight years after the tub, at twelve, she was more beautiful than ever. Brain damage had not resulted in facial paralysis or distorted expressions. Curiously, a life spent largely indoors had not left her pale and drawn. Her face had color, and not a blemish.
Her beauty was chaste, like that of a Botticelli madonna, and ethereal. For everyone who knew Justine, her beauty stirred neither envy nor desire, but inspired a surprising reverence and, inexplicably, something like hope.
I suspect that the three menacing figures, hunched over her with keen interest, were not drawn by her beauty. Her enduring innocence attracted them, as did their expectation—their certain knowledge?—that she would soon be dead by violence and, at last, ugly.
These purposeful shadows, as black as scraps of starless night sky, have no eyes, yet I could sense them leering; no mouths, though I could almost hear the greedy sounds of them feasting on the promise of this girl’s death.
I once saw them gathered at a nursing home in the hours before an earthquake leveled it. At a service station prior to an explosion and tragic fire. Following a teenager named Gary Tolliver in the days before he tortured and murdered his entire family.
A single death does not draw them, or two deaths, or even three. They prefer operatic violence, and for them the performance is not over when the fat lady sings, but only when she is torn to pieces.
They seem incapable of affecting our world, as though they are not fully present in this place and this time, but are in some way virtual presences. They are travelers, observers, aficionados of our pain.
Yet I fear them, and not solely because their presence signals oncoming horror. While they seem unable to affect this world in any significant way, I suspect that I am an exception to the rules that limit them, that I am vulnerable to them, as vulnerable as an ant in the shadow of a descending shoe.
Seeming whiter than usual in the company of inky bodachs, Boo did not growl, but watched these spirits with suspicion and disgust.
I pretended to have come here to assure myself that the thermostat had been properly set, to raise the pleated shades and confirm that the window had been firmly closed against all drafts, to dredge some wax from my right ear and to pry a shred of lettuce from between two teeth, though not with the same finger.
The bodachs ignored me—or pretended to ignore me.
Sleeping Justine had their complete attention. Their hands or paws hovered a few inches over the girl, and their fingers or talons described circles in the air above her, as if they were novelty-act musicians playing an instrument composed of drinking glasses, rubbing eerie music from the wet crystal rims.
Perhaps, like an insistent rhythm, her innocence excited them. Perhaps her humble circumstances, her lamblike grace, her complete vulnerability were the movements of a symphony to them.
I can only theorize about bodachs. I know nothing for certain about their nature or about their origins.
This is true not only of bodachs. The file labeled THINGS ABOUT
WHICH ODD THOMAS KNOWS NOTHING is no less immense than the universe.
The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know. Maybe there is wisdom in that recognition. Unfortunately, I have found no comfort in it.
Having been bent over Justine, the three bodachs abruptly stood upright and, as one, turned their wolfish heads toward the door, as if in response to a summoning trumpet that I could not hear.
Evidently Boo could not hear it, either, for his ears did not prick up. His attention remained on the dark spirits.
Like shadows chased by sudden light, the bodachs whirled from the bed, swooped to the door, and vanished into the hallway.
Inclined to follow them, I hesitated when I discovered Justine staring at me. Her blue eyes were limpid pools: so clear, seemingly without mystery, yet bottomless.
Sometimes you can be sure she sees you. Other times, like this, you sense that, to her, you are as transparent as glass, that she can look through everything in this world.
I said to her, “Don’t be afraid,” which was twice presumptuous. First, I didn’t know that she was frightened or that she was even capable of fear. Second, my words implied a guarantee of protection that, in the coming crisis, I might not be able to fulfill.
Too wise and humble to play the hero, Boo had left the room.
As I headed toward the door, Annamarie, in the first bed, murmured, “Odd.”
Her eyes remained closed. Knots of bedsheet were still clutched in her hands. She breathed shallowly, rhythmically.
As I paused at the foot of her bed, the girl spoke again, more clearly than before: “Odd.”
Annamarie had been born with myelocele spina bifida. Her hips were dislocated, her legs deformed. Her head on the pillow seemed almost as large as the shrunken body under the blanket.
She appeared to be asleep, but I whispered, “What is it, sweetie?”
“Odd one,” she said.
Her mental retardation was not severe and did not reveal itself in her voice, which wasn’t thick or slurred, but was high and sweet and charming.
“Odd one.”
A chill prickled through me equal to the sharpest bite of the winter night outside.
Something like intuition drew my attention to Justine in the second bed. Her head had turned to follow me. For the first time, her eyes fixed on mine.
Justine’s mouth moved, but she did not produce even one of the wordless sounds of which, in her deeper retardation, she was capable.
While Justine strove unsuccessfully to speak, Annamarie spoke again: “Odd one.”