It’s an insult,” Rafael declared, indignant. “One of them said maybe Tim went to Reno for ’some R and R — rum and roulette.’ “
If one of Wyatt Porter’s men in Pico Mundo had said such a thing, the chief would have put him on probation without pay and, depending on the officer’s response to a dressing down, might have fired him.
Brother Knuckles’s suggestion that I keep a low profile with these authorities appeared to have been wise advice.
“What’re we going to do?” Brother Rafael worried.
I shook my head. I didn’t have an answer.
Hurrying out of the room, speaking more to himself now than to me, he repeated, “What’re we going to do?”
I consulted my wristwatch and then went to a front window.
Elvis phased through the closed door and stood outside in the sheeting snow, a striking figure in his black flamenco outfit with red cummerbund.
The time was 8:40 a.m.
Only the tire tracks of the recently departed police vehicles marked the path of the driveway. Otherwise, the storm had plastered over the variety and the roughness of the land, smoothing it into a white-on-white geometry of soft planes and gentle undulations.
From the look of things, eight or ten inches had piled up in about seven and a half hours. The snow was falling much faster now than it had fallen earlier.
Outside, Elvis stood with his head tipped back and his tongue out, in a fruitless attempt to catch flakes. Of course he was but a spirit, unable to feel the cold or taste the snow. Something about the effort he made, however, charmed me … and saddened me, as well.
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
The previous evening, the TV weather report had predicted a minimum two-foot accumulation. Storms in the High Sierra could be prolonged, brutal, and might result in an even deeper accumulation than what had been forecast.
By this afternoon, certainly before the early winter dusk, St. Bartholomew’s Abbey would be snowbound. Isolated.
CHAPTER 13
ITRIED TO BE THE SHERLOCK HOLMES THAT Brother Knuckles hoped I could be, but my deductive reasoning led me through a maze of facts and suspicions that brought me back to where I started: clueless.
Because I am not much fun when I’m pretending to be a thinker, Elvis left me alone in the library. He might have gone to the church, hoping that Brother Fletcher intended to practice on the choir organ.
Even in death, he likes to be around music; and in life he had recorded six albums of gospel and inspirational songs, plus three Christmas albums. He might have preferred to dance to something with a backbeat, but you don’t get much rock and roll in a monastery.
A poltergeist could have blasted out “All Shook Up” on the organ, could have pounded through “Hound Dog” on the piano in the guesthouse receiving room, the same way that Brother Constantine, deceased, rings church bells when in the mood. But poltergeists are angry; their rage is the source of their power.
Elvis could never be a poltergeist. He is a sweet spirit.
The wintry morning ticked toward whatever disaster might be coming. Recently I had learned that really brainy guys divide the day into units amounting to one-millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, which made each whole second that I dithered seem to be an unconscionable waste of time.
I wandered out of the receiving room, from cloister to grand cloister, thereafter into other wings of the abbey, trusting that my intuition would lead me toward some clue to the source of the pending violence that had drawn the bodachs.
No offense intended, but my intuition is better than yours. Maybe you took an umbrella to work on a sunny day and needed it by afternoon. Maybe you declined to date an apparently ideal man, for reasons you didn’t understand, only to see him on the evening news, months later, arrested for having sexual relations with his pet llama. Maybe you bought a lottery ticket, using the date of your last proctological examination to select your numbers, and won ten million bucks. My intuition is still way better than yours.
The spookiest aspect of my intuition is what I call psychic magnetism. In Pico Mundo, when I had needed to find someone who was not where I expected him to be, I kept his name or face in mind while driving at random from street to street. Usually I found him within minutes.
Psychic magnetism isn’t always reliable. Nothing is one hundred percent reliable this side of paradise, except that your cellphone provider will never fulfill the service promises that you were naive enough to believe.
St. Bartholomew’s population is a tiny fraction of that in Pico Mundo. Here, when giving myself to psychic magnetism, I proceed on foot instead of cruising in a car.
Initially, I kept Brother Timothy in mind: his kind eyes, his legendary blush. Now that the deputies were gone, if I found the monk’s body, I faced no risk of being taken away to the nearest sheriff’s station for questioning.
Seeking murder victims where their killers have hidden them is not as much fun as an Easter-egg hunt, although if you overlook an egg and find it a month later, the smells can be similar. Because the condition of the cadaver might provide a clue to the identity of the killer, might even suggest his ultimate intentions, the search was essential.
Fortunately, I had skipped breakfast.
When intuition brought me three times to three different outside doors, I stopped resisting the compulsion to take the search into the storm. I zippered shut my jacket, pulled up the hood, tightened it under my chin with a Velcro closure, and put on a pair of gloves that were tucked in a jacket pocket.
The snowfall that I had welcomed the previous night, with my face turned to the sky and my mouth open as if I were a turkey, had been a pathetic production compared to the extravaganza of snow that befell the mountain now, a wide-screen storm as directed by Peter Jackson on steroids.
The wind contradicted itself, seeming to slam into me from the west, then from the north, then from both directions at once, as if it surely must spend itself against itself, and be extinguished by its own fury.
Such schizophrenic wind threw-spun-whipped flakes in stinging sheets, in funnels, in icy lashes, a spectacle some poet once called “the frolic architecture of snow,” but in this instance, there was a lot less frolic than fusillade, wind booming as loud as mortar fire and the snow like shrapnel.
My special intuition led me first north toward the front of the abbey, then east, then south…. After a while I realized that I had trudged more than once in a circle.
Perhaps psychic magnetism didn’t work well in such a distracting environment: the white tumult of the storm, the caterwauling wind, the cold that pinched my face, that stung tears from my eyes and froze them on my cheeks.
As a desert-town boy, I was raised in fierce dry heat, which does not distract, but tends either to enervate or to toughen the sinews of the mind and focus thought. I felt displaced in this cold and whirling chaos, and not entirely myself.
I might have been hampered, as well, by a dread of looking into Brother Timothy’s dead face. What I needed to find was, in this case, not what I wanted to find.
Repurposing my search, I let Brother Timothy rest and thought instead of bodachs and wondered what terror might be coming, and in general gave myself to worry about the indefinable threat, with the hope that I would be drawn toward some person or some place that in some way as yet unknowable would prove to be connected to the pending violence.
On the spectrum of detective work, this plan was a dismaying distance from the Sherlock end and closer to the tea-leaf-reading end than I cared to acknowledge.
I found myself, nevertheless, breaking out of the meaningless ramble on which I had been engaged. Moving with more purpose, I slogged east through the ten-inch-deep mantle of snow toward the convent and the school.
Halfway across the meadow, I succumbed to a sudden alarm and ducked, turned, flinched, certain that I was about to receive a blow.
I stood alone.
In spite of the evidence of my eyes, I didn’t feel that I was alone. I felt watched. More than watched. Stalked.
A sound in the storm but not of the storm, a keening different from the shrill lament of the wind, drew near, receded, drew near, and once more receded.
To the west, the abbey stood barely visible through a thousand shifting veils, white drifts obscuring its foundations, wind-pasted snow erasing portions of its mighty stone walls. The bell tower grew less visible as it rose, seeming to dissolve toward the top, and the steeple — and the cross — could not be seen at all.
Downhill and to the east, the school was as obscure as a ghost ship becalmed in fog, less seen than suggested, a paleness in the lesser paleness of the blizzard.
No one at a window in either building would be able to see me at this distance, in these conditions. My scream would not carry in the wind.
The keening rose again, needful and agitated.
I turned in a circle, seeking the source. Much was obscured by the falling snow and by clouds of already-fallen snow whisked off the ground, and the bleak light deceived.
Although I had only turned in place, the school had entirely vanished along with the lower portion of the meadow. Uphill, the abbey shimmered like a mirage, rippled like an image painted on a sheer curtain.
Because I live with the dead, my tolerance for the macabre is so high that I am seldom spooked. The part-shriek-part-squeal-part-buzz, however, was so otherworldly that my imagination failed to conjure a creature that might have made it, and the marrow in my bones seemed to shrink in the way that mercury, in winter, contracts to the bottom of a thermometer.
I took one step toward where the school ought to be, but then halted, retracted that step. I turned uphill but dared not retreat to the abbey. Something unseen in the camouflaging storm, something with an alien voice full of need and fury, seemed to await me no matter in which direction I proceeded.
CHAPTER 14
STRIPPING VELCRO FROM VELCRO, PUSHING BACK the insulated hood of my jacket, I raised my head, turned my head, cocked my head, striving to determine from which point of the compass the cry arose.
Icy wind tossed my hair and frosted it with snow, boxed my ears and made them burn.
All magic had been snuffed from the storm. The grace of falling snow was now a graceless wildness, a churning maelstrom as raw and flaying as human rage.
I had the strange perception, beyond my power to explain, that reality had shifted, down there twenty powers of ten below the level of protons, that nothing was as it had been, nothing as it should be.
Even with my hood off, I could not locate the source of the eerie keening. The wind might be distorting and displacing the sound, but perhaps the cry seemed to come from every side because more than one shrieking entity prowled the snowblind morning.
Reason asserted that anything stalking me must be of the Sierra, but this didn’t sound like wolves or mountain lions. And bears were cavebound now, lost in dreams of fruit and honey.
I am not a guy who likes to pack a gun. My mother’s affection for her pistol — and the threats of suicide that she employed to control me when I was a child — left me with a preference for other forms of self-defense.
Over the years, in pinches and crunches, I have survived — often just barely — by the effective use of such weapons as fists, feet, knees, elbows, a baseball bat, a shovel, a knife, a rubber snake, a real snake, three expensive antique porcelain vases, about a hundred gallons of molten tar, a bucket, a lug wrench, an angry cross-eyed ferret, a broom, a frying pan, a toaster, butter, a fire hose, and a large bratwurst.
As reckless as this strategy might be in my case, I prefer to rely on my wits rather than on a personal armory. Unfortunately, at that moment in the meadow, my wits were so dry that I could wring from them no idea except that perhaps I should make snowballs.
Because I doubted that my eerily keening, unknown stalkers were mischievous ten-year-old boys, I rejected the snowball defense. I pulled the hood over my half-frozen head and fixed the Velcro clasp under my chin.
These cries were purposeful, but in spite of how different they were from other chaotic blusterings of the storm, perhaps they were only wind noises, after all.
When my wits fail me, I resort to self-deception.
I started toward the school again and at once detected movement to my left, at the periphery of vision.
Turning to confront the threat, I saw something white and quick, visible only because it was angular and bristling in contrast to the undulant billow and whirl of falling and upswept snow. Like a goblin in a dream, it was gone even as it appeared, infolding into the downfall, leaving a vague impression of sharp points, hard edges, gloss and translucency.
The keening stopped. The groan and hiss and whistle of the wind sounded almost welcoming without that other craving cry.
Movies offer no wisdom and have little to do with real life, but I remembered old adventure films in which the ceaseless pounding of jungle drums had put the sweaty pith-helmeted explorers on edge. The abrupt cessation of the drumming was never the relief that it ought to have been, however, because often the silence signaled imminent attack.
I suspected Hollywood had gotten that one right.
Sensing that I was soon to receive something worse and stranger than a poison dart in the throat or an arrow through an eye, I cast aside indecision and hurried toward the school.
Something loomed in the storm ahead and to the right, veiled by snow, suggestive of the bare frosted limbs of a tree thrashing in the wind. Not a tree. No trees stood in the meadow between the abbey and the school.
Instead, I had glimpsed a narrow aspect of a mysterious presence that was more aware than wood, that moved not as the wind commanded it but with a fierce purpose of its own.
Having revealed only enough to make of itself a deeper enigma than it had been previously, the thing drew cloaks of snow around itself, vanishing. It had not gone away, still paralleled me out of sight, like a lion pacing a gazelle that had become separated from its herd.
Intuitively perceived but not seen, another predator rose at my back. I became convinced that I would be seized from behind and that my head would be ripped off as if it were the pull-tab on a can of cola.
I do not want a fancy funeral. I would be embarrassed by flowery tributes delivered over my casket. On the other hand, I do not want my death to be observed solely by the belch of some beast that has slaked its thirst with my precious bodily fluids.
As I plunged across the sloping meadow, kicking through drifts, heart knocking, the all-enveloping whiteness of the blizzard bleached my vision. The fluorescence of the snow made my eyes ache, and the driven flakes appeared to strobe.
In this further-reduced visibility, something crossed my path, perhaps ten feet ahead, from right to left, its size and shape and nature obscured, but not simply obscured, also distorted, surely distorted, because the quick scuttling something, judging by the portion briefly glimpsed in glare, appeared to be a construct of bones jacketed in ice. With its impossible biological architecture, it should have moved, if at all, with a shambling instability but instead exhibited a wicked kind of grace, a visual glissando of rippling motion, gliding past, gone.