Brother Odd

CHAPTER 32

MORE ACCURATELY: BROTHER TIMOTHY'S eyelids lifted, but he could not open his eyes because he didn't possess eyes any longer. In his sockets were matching kaleidoscopic patterns of tiny bonelike forms. The pattern in the left socket irised into new shapes; the pattern in the right did likewise; then both changed in perfect synchronization.

I felt well advised to take a step back from him.

Tongueless and toothless, his mouth sagged open. In the wide-ness of his silent scream, a layered construct of bony forms, jointed in ways that defied analysis and description, flexed and rotated and thrust forward only to fold inward, as if he were trying to swallow a colony of hard-shelled arachnids that were alive and reluctant to be consumed.

The skin split from the corners of his mouth to his ears. With not one bead of blood, his upper lip peeled toward his scalp, the way the lid of a sardine can rolls back with the twist of a key, and the lower part of his face peeled down over his chin.

While the intention had been to mock the crucifixion of Christ, Brother Timothy's body had also been a chrysalis from which something less charming than a butterfly strove to emerge.

Beneath the veneer of a face lay the fullness of what I had only glimpsed in the eye sockets, in the yawning mouth: a phantasmagoria of bony forms linked by hinge joints, by pivot joints, by ellipsoidal joints, by ball-and-socket joints, and by joints for which no names existed, and which were not natural to this world.

The apparition appeared to be a solid mass of bones combined so intimately that they must be fused, compacted so completely that they could have no room to rotate or flex. Yet they did rotate and flex and pivot and more, seemed to move not merely in three dimensions but in four, in an unceasing exhibition of dexterity that astonished and amazed.

Imagine that all the universe and all of time are together kept in right motion and in perfect balance by an infinite gearbox, and in your mind look down into that intricate mechanism, and you will have a sense of my incomprehension, awe, and terror as I stood before the uberskeleton that churned and ticked and flexed and clicked, peeling the gossamer remnants of Brother Tim away from itself.

Something moved vigorously under the dead monk's tunic.

If popcorn, Pepsi, and a comfortable chair had been available, I might have stayed. But the cooling tower was an inhospitable place, dusty and drafty, offering no refreshments.

Besides, I had an appointment with the Hoosier librarian cake-baker in the school garage. I am loath to be late for an engagement. Tardiness is rude.

A piton popped out of the wall. The fibrous tether reeled that wedge into the kaleidoscopic boneworks, incorporating it in a wink. Another piton came loose, raveled back to Papa.

This rough beast, its hour come 'round at last, didn't need to slouch to Bethlehem to be born. Sharp white blades slashed through the tunic from within, shredding it. No need for Rosemary; no need to waste years as a baby.

The time had come either to light the black candles and start chanting in admiration-or blow this dump.

Boo had already scrammed. I vamoosed.

I pulled the door shut between the cooling tower and the service passage and fumbled with my key for a moment before I realized that the lock only kept people out; I couldn't lock anyone inside.

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.