Brother Odd (Odd Thomas 3)

like crazy,” said Brother Quentin.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Knuckles shook his head. “No twitch.”

We had covered two-thirds of the distance between the new abbey and the school when out of the storm came a scissoring, scuttling, serpentine bewilderment of bones.

CHAPTER 38

ALTHOUGH BROTHER TIMOTHY HAD BEEN KILLED— and worse than killed—by one of these creatures, a part of me, the Pollyanna part I can’t entirely wring out of myself, had wanted to believe that the ever-moving mosaic of bones at the school window and my pursuers in the cooling-tower service tunnel had been apparitions, fearsome but, in the end, less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U.S. senator with an idea.

Pollyanna Odd half expected, as with the lingering dead and the bodachs, that these entities would prove to be invisible to anyone but me, and that what happened to Timothy was somehow a singularity, because supernatural presences, after all, do not have the power to harm the living.

That hopeful possibility was flushed down the wishful-thinking drain with the appearance of the keening banshee of bones and the immediate reactions of Knuckles and his brothers.

As tall and long as two horses running nose to tail, ceaselessly kaleidoscopic even when traversing the meadow, the thing came out of the white wind and crossed the pavement in front of the first SUV.

In Dante’s Inferno, in the ice and snowy mist of the frozen lowest level of Hell, the imprisoned Satan had appeared to the poet out of the winds made by his three sets of great leathery wings. The fallen angel, once beautiful but now hideous, had reeked of despair and misery and evil.

Likewise, here was misery and despair embodied in the calcium and phosphate of bone, and evil in the marrow. Its intentions were evident in its design, in its swift motion, and its every intention was pernicious.

Not one brother reacted to this manifestation with wonder or even with mere fear of the unknown, and none with disbelief. Without exception they regarded it at once as an abomination, and viewed it with as much disgust as terror, with loathing and with a righteous kind of hatred, as though upon seeing it for the first time they recognized it as an ancient and enduring beast.

If any was stunned to silence, he found his voice quickly, and the SUV was filled with exclamations. There were appeals to Christ and to the Holy Mother, and I heard no hesitation or embarrassment about labeling the thing before us with the names of demons or with the name of the father of all demons, though I’m reasonably sure the first words from Brother Knuckles were Mamma mia.

Rodion Romanovich brought his SUV to a full stop as the white demon passed in front of him.

When Knuckles braked, the chain-wrapped tires stuttered on the icy pavement but didn’t slide, and we, too, shuddered to a halt.

The pistoning bony legs cast up plumes of snow from the meadow as the thing crossed the road and kept going, as though it was not aware of us. The trail it left in the fresh powder and the way the falling snow whirled in the currents of its wake dispelled any doubt about its reality.

Certain that the beast’s disinterest in us was pretense and that it would return, I said to Knuckles, “Let’s go. Don’t just sit here. Go, go, get us inside.”

“I can’t go till he does,” Knuckles said, indicating the SUV that blocked the road in front of us.

To the right, south, rose a steep bank, which the uberskeleton had descended in a centipedal scurry. We might not bog down in the deep drift, but the angle of incline would surely roll us.

In the northern meadow, the dismal light of the sunless day and shrouds of snow folded around the fantastic architecture of restless bones, but we had not seen the last of it.

Rodion Romanovich still stood on his brake pedal, and in the red taillights, snow came down in bloody showers.

To the left, the meadow dropped two feet from the driveway. We could probably have driven around Romanovich; but that was a needless risk.

“He’s waiting for another look at it,” I said. “Is he nuts? Give him the horn.”

Knuckles pumped the horn, and the brake lights on Romanovich’s SUV fluttered, and Knuckles used the horn again, and the Russian began to coast forward, but then braked once more.

Out of the north came the monster, harrowing the field of snow, moving less quickly than before, a sense of ominous intention in its more measured approach.

Amazement, fear, curiosity, disbelief: Whatever had immobilized Romanovich, he broke free of its hold. The SUV rolled forward.

Before Romanovich could build any speed, the creature arrived, reared up, extruded intricately pincered arms, seized its prey, and tipped the vehicle on its side.

CHAPTER 39

THE SUV LAY ON ITS STARBOARD SIDE. THE slowly turning tires on the port side uselessly sought traction in the snow-shot air.

The Russian and the eight monks could exit only by the back hatch or by the doors turned to the sky, but not with ease and not with haste.

I assumed the beast would either pry open the doors and reach inside for the nine men or pluck them as they tried to escape. How it would do to them what it had done to Brother Timothy, I didn’t know, but I was certain that it would methodically gather them to itself, one by one.

When they were harvested, it would carry them away to crucify them on a wall as it had done with Timothy, transforming their mortal forms into nine chrysalises. Or it would then come after us, here in the second truck, and later in the day, the cooling tower would be crowded with eighteen chrysalises.

Instead of proceeding with its usual mechanical insistence, the thing retreated from the overturned SUV and waited, retaining its basic form but continuously folding in upon itself and blooming out new vaned and petaled patterns.

With the nerveless aplomb of an experienced getaway driver, Brother Knuckles engaged his safety harness, raised the steel plow off the pavement, shifted gears, and reversed up the driveway.

“We can’t leave them trapped,” I said, and the brothers behind me were in vociferous agreement.

“We ain’t leavin’ nobody,” Knuckles assured me. “I just hope they’re scared enough to stay put.”

Like a macabre motorized sculpture crafted by graverobbers, the bone heap stood sentinel by the side of the road, perhaps waiting for the doors on the overturned SUV to open.

When we had reversed fifty yards, the tipped truck became a blur on the road below, and the sheeting snow almost entirely camouflaged the bony specter.

I strapped myself into the shoulder harness—and heard the brothers buckling up behind me. Even when God is your co-pilot, it pays to pack a parachute.

Brother Knuckles slowed to a stop. With one foot on the brake, he shifted into drive.

Except for the sound of their breathing, the monks had fallen silent.

Then Brother Alfonse said, “Libera nos a malo.”

Deliver us from evil.

Knuckles traded the brake pedal for the accelerator. The engine growled, the tire chains rang rhythms from the pavement, and we raced downhill, aiming to sweep past the overturned SUV and take out the fiend.

Our target seemed oblivious of us until the penultimate moment, or perhaps it had no fear.

Plow-first we slammed into the thing and instantly lost most of our forward momentum.

A furious hail crashed down. The windshield crazed, dissolved, fell in upon us, and with it came both loose bones and articulated structures.

An elaborately jointed array of bones landed in my lap, spasming like a broken crab. My cry was every bit as manly as that of a young schoolgirl surprised by a hairy spider. I knocked the thing off me, onto the floor.

It felt cold and slick, yet not greasy or wet, had seemed to harbor no warmth of life.

The castoff scrabbled at my feet, not with intent to harm but as the decapitated body of a snake lashes mindlessly. Nevertheless, I quickly pulled my feet onto the seat and would have gathered my petticoats tightly around me if I had been wearing an

y.

After coming to a stop ten yards past the overturned vehicle, we reversed until we were beside it once more, things snapping and crunching loudly under the tires.

When I got out of the truck, I found the pavement littered with twitching constructs of bones, splintered remnants of the beast’s fragmented anatomy. Some were as large as vacuum cleaners, many the size of kitchen appliances—flexing, irising, folding, unfolding as if striving to obey the conjuring call of a sorcerer.

Thousands of single bones of all shapes and sizes were also scattered on the roadway. These rattled in place as if the ground were shaking under them, but I could not feel any earth tremors through the soles of my ski boots.

Kicking the debris aside, I cleared a path to the overturned SUV and climbed onto the flank of it. Inside, tumbled brothers looked up at me, wide-eyed and blinking, through the side windows.

I pulled open a door, and Brother Rupert clambered up to assist. Soon we had pulled the Russian and the monks from the vehicle.

Some were bruised and all were shaken; but none of them had sustained a serious injury.

Every tire on the second SUV had been punctured by broken shafts of bone. The vehicle sat on flat rubber. We would have to walk the remaining hundred yards to the school.

No one needed to express the opinion that if one impossible ambulatory kaleidoscope of bones could exist, others might follow. In fact, whether because of shock or fear, few words were exchanged, and those were spoken in the softest voices.

Everyone worked urgently to unload all the tools and the other gear that had been brought to defend and fortify the school.

The rattling skeletal debris slowly grew quieter, and some bones began to break down into cubes in a variety of sizes, as though they had not been bones, after all, but structures formed from smaller interlocking pieces.

As we were setting out for the school, Rodion Romanovich took off his hat, stooped, and with one gloved hand scooped some of the cubes into that bearskin sack.