Brother Odd

CHAPTER 52

THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE MEW WAS NOT healthy, which is like saying that you might not want to have a picnic in the cone of a dormant volcano if the ground is rumbling underfoot.

Brother John's feelings had been hurt when his miraculous work had been received with less enthusiasm than he had expected. And his disappointment had about it a quality of wounded pride, a thinly masked resentment, a disturbing childlike peevishness.

The cute, creepy, cuddly, soulless floppy sat on the floor, playing with its feet, making all the noises of a creature that was wonderfully amused with itself, showing off for us, as if confident that we would at any moment coo with admiration for it. Its giggle, however, sounded more humorless by the second.

The bone beasts, the tower phantom, and now this demonic Beanie Baby had exhibited a vanity unseen in genuine supernatural entities. They existed outside the vertical sacred order of human beings and spirits. Their vanity reflected the vanity of their troubled creator.

I thought of Tommy Cloudwalker's three-headed coyote-man and realized that another difference between the genuinely supernatural and the bizarre things we had seen in the past twelve hours was the fundamentally organic character of what is supernatural, which is no surprise, really, since true spirits once lived as flesh.

The bone beasts had seemed not organic but like machines. When Death had leaped from the bell tower, it had disassembled in flight, had broken apart into geometric fragments, as might a failed machine. The floppy was not the equivalent of a puppy or a kitten, but of a wind-up toy.

Standing with his hands in the pockets of his coat, as if he would at any moment withdraw the.50-caliber Desert Eagle and blow the floppy to smithereens, Rodion Romanovich said, "Dr. Heineman, what you have made is not life. Upon death, it does not decompose. It deconstructs itself in some process similar to fission but not fission, producing no heat, leaving nothing. What you have created is anti-life."

"You simply do not grasp the achievement," said Brother John. Like the facade of a summer hotel being boarded up for the off-season, his face steadily put away its former light and animation.

"Doctor," Romanovich continued, "I am sure that you built the school as atonement for abandoning your son, and I am sure that you had Jacob brought here as an act of contrition."

Brother John stared at him, still withdrawing behind shutters and boarded windows.

"But the man you were is still within the man you are, and he had his own motivations."

This accusation aroused Brother John from his withdrawal. "What are you implying?"

Pointing to the floppy, Romanovich said, "How can you put an end to that thing?"

"I am able to think it out of existence as efficiently as I created it."

"Then for the love of God, do so."

For a moment, Brother John's jaw clenched, his eyes narrowed, and he did not appear disposed to oblige the request.

The Russian radiated not just the authority of an officer of the state but also moral authority. He removed his left hand from a coat pocket and made a hurry-up gesture.

Closing his eyes, furrowing his forehead, Brother John imagined the floppy out of existence. Mercifully, the giggling stopped. Then the thing disassembled into rattling, twitching cubes. It vanished.

When the scientist monk opened his eyes, Romanovich said, "You yourself noted that you have been obsessed with order all your life."

"Any sane man sides with order over anarchy, order over chaos," said Brother John.

"I agree, Dr. Heineman. But as a young man, you were so obsessed with order that you not only decried disorder, you despised it as if it were a personal affront. You abhorred it, recoiled from it. You had no patience for anyone whom you felt furthered disorder in society. Ironically, you exhibited what might be called an intellectual rather than an emotional obsessive-compulsive disorder."

"You have been talking to envious men," said Brother John.

"When your son was born, his deformities and disabilities struck you as biological disorder, the more intolerable because it came from your loins. You disowned him. You wanted him to die."

"I never wanted him to die. That is outrageous."

I felt a little like a traitor to him when I said, "Sir, Jacob remembers when you visited him in the hospital and urged his mother to let his infection run its course untreated."

Atop his tall lanky body, his round face bobbed like a balloon on the end of a string, and I could not tell whether he was nodding in agreement or shaking his head in denial. He might have been doing both. He could not speak.

In a voice no longer characterized by accusation, opting for a note of quiet entreaty, Romanovich said, "Dr. Heineman, have you any conscious awareness that you have been creating abominations that have materialized outside this room, that have killed?"

At the school, in Room 14, Brother Maxwell stands tense, his baseball bat raised, while Brother Knuckles, having dealt with more than his share of wiseguys in years past, and having recently mowed down an uberskeleton with an SUV, is wary but not wound tight.

In fact, leaning almost insouciantly on his bat as if it is a cane, Knuckles says, "Some big guys, they think struttin' the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they got is strut, they ain't got the guts to back up the brag."

"This thing," says Maxwell, "doesn't have either guts or muscle, it's all bones."

"Ain't that what I'm tellin' you?"

Half the cracked pane breaks out of the bronze muntins, shatters on the floor.

"No way this chump gets through the window, not with all them little squares."

The remaining portion of the broken pane cracks loose and falls to the floor.

"You don't scare me," Knuckles tells the dog of the Neverwas.

Maxwell says, "It scares me."

"No it don't," Knuckles assures him. "You're good, Brother, you're solid."

A clutching gnarl of flexing bones gropes through the hole in the casement window.

Another pane cracks, and a third explodes, spraying shards of glass onto the two monks' shoes.

Toward the farther end of the room, Jacob sits with the pillow on his lap, his head bowed to his embroidery, exhibiting no fear, creating beautiful order out of blank white cloth and peach thread, while the disorderly creation at the window shatters two more panes of glass and strains against the bronze muntins.

Brother Fletcher steps in from the hall. "Showtime. You need some backup?"

Brother Maxwell says yes, but Brother Knuckles says, "Seen tougher mugs than this in Jersey. You watchin' the elevator?"

"It's covered," Brother Fletcher assures him.

"Then maybe stay beside Jacob, move him out fast if this chump gets through the window."

Brother Maxwell protests: "You said it won't get through."

"It ain't gonna, Brother. Yeah, it's makin' a big show, but the true fact is-this geek, he's scared of us."

The stressed bronze muntins and rails of the casement window creaked, groaned.

"Abominations?" Brother John's round face seemed to swell and redden with the pressure of new dark possibilities that his mind could barely contain. "Create without conscious awareness? It isn't possible."

"If it is not possible," Romanovich said, "then have you created them intentionally? Because they do exist. We have seen them."

I unzipped my jacket and removed from within a folded page that I had torn out of Jacob's tablet. As I opened the sheet of paper, the drawing of the beast flexed with an illusion of movement.

"Your son has seen this at his window, sir. He says it is the dog of the Neverwas. Jennifer called you the Neverwas."

Brother John accepted the drawing, spellbound by it. The doubt and fear in his face belied the confidence in his voice when he said, "This is meaningless. The boy is retarded. This is the fantasy of a deformed mind."

"Dr. Heineman," the Russian said, "twenty-seven months ago, from things you said to your former colleagues in calls and E-mails, they inferred that you might have already… created something."

"I did. Yes. I showed it to you moments ago."

"That pathetic flop-eared creature?"

Pity more than scorn informed Romanovich's voice, and Brother John met it with silence. Vanity receives pity as a wasp receives a threat to its nest, and a desire to sting brought an unholy venomous shine to the monk's violet, hooded eyes.

"If you have advanced no further in these twenty-seven months," Romanovich said, "could it be because something happened about two years ago that frightened you off your research, and you have only recently begun again to power up this god-machine of yours and 'create'?"

"Brother Constantine's suicide," I said.

"Which was not a suicide," said Romanovich. "Unconsciously, you had dispatched some abomination into the night, Dr. Heineman, and when Constantine saw it, he could not be allowed to live."

Either the drawing cast a dark enchantment over the scientist monk or he did not trust himself to meet our eyes.

"You suspected what had happened, and you put your research on hold-but twisted pride made you return to it recently. Now Brother Timothy is dead… and even at this hour, you stalk your son through this monstrous surrogate."

With his gaze still upon the drawing, a pulse jumping in his temples, Brother John said tightly, "I long ago accused myself of my sins against my son and his mother."

"And I believe your confession was even sincere," Romanovich conceded.

"I received absolution."

"You confessed and were forgiven, but some darker self within you did not confess and did not think he needed to be forgiven."

"Sir, Brother Timothy's murder last night was… horrendous, inhuman. You have to help us stop this."

All this time later, I am saddened to write that when Brother John's eyes welled with tears, which he managed not to spill, I half believed they were not for Tim but for himself.

Romanovich said, "You progressed from postulant to novice, to professed monk. But you yourself have said you were spooked when your research led you to believe in a created universe, so you came to God in fear."

Straining the words through his teeth, Brother John said, "The motivation matters less than the contrition."

"Perhaps," Romanovich allowed. "But most come to Him in love. And some part of you, some Other John, has not come to Him at all."

With sudden intuition, I said, "Brother John, the Other is an angry child."

At last he looked up from the drawing and met my eyes.

"The child who, far too young, saw anarchy in the world and feared it. The child who resented being born into such a disordered world, who saw chaos and yearned to find order in it."

Behind his violet windows, the Other regarded me with the contempt and self-regard of a child not yet acquainted with empathy and compassion, a child from whom the Better John had separated himself but from whom he had not escaped.

I called his attention to the drawing once more. "Sir, the obsessed child who built a model of quantum foam out of forty-seven sets of Lego blocks is the same child who conceived of this complex mechanism of cold bones and efficient joints."

As he studied the architecture of the bone beast, reluctantly he recognized that the obsession behind the Lego model was the same that inspired this eerie construction.

"Sir, there is still time. Time for that little boy to give up his anger and have his pain lifted."

The surface tension of his pent-up tears abruptly broke, and one tracked down each cheek.

He looked up at me and, in a voice thick with sadness but also with bitterness, he said, "No. It's too late."