The four hundred feet to the school appeared to be immeasurable miles, the ceiling lights receding to Pittsburgh and beyond.
Boo was already out of sight. Maybe he had taken a shortcut through another dimension to the school boiler room.
I wished I’d been hanging on to his tail.
CHAPTER 33
WHEN I HAD SPRINTED ABOUT A HUNDRED feet, I heard the cooling-tower door slam open. The crash boomed like a shotgun blast through the service passageway.
Tommy Cloudwalker’s Mojave pal, the three-headed poster boy for the evils of smoking, seemed more likely to exist than did the skeletonized boogeyman that now coveted my bones. But fear of this thing was a rational fear.
Brother Timothy had been sweet, kind, and devout; yet look what happened to him. A shiftless, unemployed, smart-ass specimen like me, who had never exercised his precious American right to vote, who had accepted a compliment at the expense of the late James Dean, ought to expect a fate even more gruesome than Tim’s, though I couldn’t imagine one.
I glanced over my shoulder.
As it advanced through alternating pools of shadow and light, my pursuer’s method of locomotion could not clearly be discerned, though these were not steps that it had learned at a dance studio. It seemed to be marshaling some of its numerous bones into stubby legs, but not all were legs of the same design, and they moved independently of one another, foiling one another and causing the eager creature to lurch.
I was still moving, repeatedly glancing back, not standing in thoughtful contemplation and making notes of my impressions of the beast, but in retrospect I think that I was most alarmed to see it progressing not on the floor but along the junction of the ceiling and the right-hand wall. It was a climber, which meant the children’s quarters on the second floor would be more difficult to defend than I had hoped.
Furthermore, as it came, the entire structure of it appeared to turn ceaselessly, as if it were drilling forward like an auger boring through wood. The word machine came to mind, as it had when I watched another of these things flexing itself into one elaborate new pattern after another, against the reception-lounge window.
Tripping again, my pursuer lost its perch and clattered down the wall to the floor. Scissoring jacks of bone cranked it erect, and it came forward, eager but uncertain.
Perhaps it was learning its capabilities, as does any newborn. Maybe this was a Kodak moment, baby’s first steps.
By the time I reached the intersection with the passageway that evidently led to the new abbey, I felt confident that I would be able to outrun the thing—unless its learning curve was very steep.
Glancing back again, I saw that it was not just clumsy but also had become translucent. The light from the overhead fixtures did not play across its contours any longer, but seemed to pass through it, as if it were made of milky glass.
For a moment, as it faltered to a halt, I thought it was going to dematerialize, not at all like a machine but like a spirit. Then the translucency passed from it, and it became solid again, and it surged forward.
A familiar keening drew my attention toward the intersecting passage. Far uphill, in the voice that I had heard earlier in the storm, another of these things expressed its sincere desire to have a tête-à-tête with me.
From this distance, I couldn’t be certain of its size, but I suspected that it was considerably larger than the lovely that had come out of the chrysalis. It moved with confidence, too, with grace, glissading without benefit of snow, legs churning in a faultless rhythm, with centipede swiftness.
So I did one of the things that I do best: I ran like a sonofabitch.
I only had two legs instead of a hundred, and I was wearing ski boots when I should have been in athletic shoes with air-cushioned insoles, but I had the benefit of wild desperation and the energy provided by Sister Regina Marie’s superb beef sandwich. I almost made it to the boiler room safely ahead of Satan and Satan Junior, or whatever they were.
Then something tangled around my feet. I cried out, fell, and scrambled up at once, flailing at my assailant until I realized that it was the quilted thermal jacket I had shucked off earlier because of the whistling noise it made.
As if a chorus line of frenzied skeletons were tapping out the final bars of the show’s big number, the clickety-clack of my pursuer rose to a crescendo.
I turned, and it was right there.
As one, the regimented legs, different from but as hideous as those of a Jerusalem cricket, clattered to a halt. Although knuckled, knobbed, ribbed, and bristling, the forward half of the twelve-foot apparition rose off the floor with serpentine elegance.
We were face to face, or would have been if I hadn’t been the only one of us with a face.
Across the whole of it, patterns of elaborately integrated bones blossomed, withered, were replaced by new forms and patterns, but in a tickless, clickless quicksilver hush.
This silent exhibition was intended to display its absolute and otherworldly control of its physiology, and to leave me terrified and abashed at my comparative weakness. As when I had watched it at the window, I sensed an overweening vanity in its display of itself, an arrogance that was eerily human, a pompousness and boastfulness that exceeded mere vanity and that might be called vainglory.
I backed up a step, another. “Kiss my ass, you ugly bastard.”
In a rending fury, it fell upon me, ice-cold and merciless. Uncountable maxillas and mandibles chewed, spurred heelbones ripped, stiletto-sharp phalanges gouged, a whiplike spine with hooked and razored vertebrae slashed me open from abdomen to throat, and my heart was found and torn apart, and thereafter what I could do for the children of St. Bartholomew’s School was limited to what power I might have as one of the lingering dead.
Yes, it could have gone as badly as that, but in fact I just lied to you. The truth is stranger than the lie, though considerably less traumatic.
Everything in my account is true through the point at which I told the bag of bones to kiss my posterior. After issuing that heartfelt vulgarity, I did take one step backward, and then one more.
Because I believed that I had nothing to lose, that my life was already forfeited, I turned boldly from the apparition. I dropped to my hands and knees, and crawled through the four-foot-square aperture between the service passageway and the boiler room.
I expected the thing to snare my feet and to haul me back into its realm. When I reached the boiler room unharmed, I rolled onto my back and scooted away from the open service access, anticipating the intrusion of a questing, pincered, bony appendage.
No keening arose from beyond the wall, but no clitterclatter of retreat, either, though the rumble of the boiler-room pumps might have masked all but the loudest of those noises.
I listened to my thundering heart, delighted to still have it. And all my fingers, and all my teeth, my precious little spleen, and both buttocks.
Considering the walking boneyard’s ability to manifest in infinite iterations, I saw no reason why it wouldn’t follow me into the boiler room. Even in its current configuration, it would have no trouble passing through the four-foot-square opening.
If the creature entered, I had no weapon with which to drive it back. But if I failed to make a stand, I’d be conceding it access to the school, where at this moment most of the children were at lunch in the ground-floor refectory, others in their rooms on the second floor.
Feeling foolish and inadequate, I erupted to my feet, snatched a fire extinguisher from its wall rack, and held it ready, as though I might be able to kill those bundled bones of contention with a fog of ammonium phosphate, as in bad early sci-fi movies where the heroes are apt to discover, in the penultimate scene, that the rampaging and apparently indestructible monster can be dissolved by something as mundane as salt or laundry bleach, or lavender-scented hairspray.
I could not even be sure that this thing was alive in the sense that people and animals and insects are alive, or even in the sense that plants are al
ive. I could not explain how a three-dimensional collage of bones, regardless of how astoundingly intricate it might appear, could be alive when it lacked flesh, blood, and visible sense organs. And if it wasn’t alive, it couldn’t be killed.
A supernatural explanation eluded me, too. Nothing in the theology of any major religion proposed the existence of an entity like this, nor anything in any body of folklore with which I was familiar.
Boo appeared from among the boilers. He studied me and my ammonium-phosphate-fog weapon. He sat, cocked his head, and grinned. He seemed to find me amusing.
Armed with the fire extinguisher and, if that failed, with only Black Jack chewing gum, I stood my ground for a minute, two minutes, three.
Nothing came from beyond the wall. Nothing waited at the threshold, tapping its fleshless toes impatiently.
I set aside the fire extinguisher.
Staying ten feet back from the low opening, I got on my hands and knees to peer into the passageway. I saw the lighted concrete corridor dwindling toward the cooling tower, but nothing that would make me want to call Ghostbusters.
Boo went closer to the service aperture than I dared, peered in, then glanced at me, perplexed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t get it.”
I replaced the stainless-steel panel. As I inserted the first bolt and tightened it with the special tool, I expected something to slam against the farther side, rip the panel away, and drag me out of the boiler room. Didn’t happen.
Whatever had prevented the beast of bones from doing to me what it had done to Brother Timothy, I do not know, though I am certain it had wanted me and had intended to take me. I’m pretty sure that my insult—Kiss my ass, you ugly bastard—did not cause it to sulk away with hurt feelings.
CHAPTER 34
RODION ROMANOVICH ARRIVED IN THE GARAGE wearing a handsome bearskin hat, a white silk neck scarf, a black three-quarter-length lined leather coat with fur collar and fur cuffs, and—no surprise—zippered rubber boots that rose to his knees. He looked as if he had dressed for a horse-drawn sleigh-ride with the czar.
After my experience with the galloping boneyard, I was lying on my back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, trying to calm myself, waiting for my legs to stop trembling and regain some strength.
Standing over me, peering down, he said, “You are a peculiar young man, Mr. Thomas.”
“Yes, sir. I am aware.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“Recovering from a bad scare.”
“What scared you?”
“A sudden recognition of my mortality.”
“Have you not previously realized you are mortal?”