by Dean Koontz
I don’t think they know that I can see them, too. If they did know, I believe that they would show me less mercy than mad mullahs show their victims when in a mood to behead and dismember.
At the sight of this one, my first impulse was to shrink from the window and seek communion with the dust bunnies under my bed. My second impulse was to pee.
Resisting both cowardice and the call of the bladder, I raced from my quarters into the hallway. The third floor of the guesthouse offers two small suites. The other currently had no occupant.
On the second floor, the glowering Russian was no doubt scowling in his sleep. The solid construction of the abbey would not translate my footfalls into his dreams.
The guesthouse has an enclosed spiral staircase, stone walls encircling granite steps. The treads alternate between black and white, making me think of harlequins and piano keys, and of a treacly old song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.
Although stone stairs are unforgiving and the black-and-white pattern can be disorienting, I plunged toward the ground floor, risking damage to the granite if I fell and struck it with my head.
Sixteen months ago, I lost what was most precious to me and found my world in ruins; nevertheless, I am not usually reckless. I have less to live for than I once did, but my life still has purpose, and I struggle to find meaning in the days.
Leaving the stairs in the condition that I found them, I hurried across the main parlor, where only a night lamp with a beaded shade relieved the gloom. I pushed through a heavy oak door with a stained-glass window, and saw my breath plume before me in the winter night.
The guesthouse cloister surrounds a courtyard with a reflecting pool and a white marble statue of St. Bartholomew. He is arguably the least known of the twelve apostles.
Here depicted, a solemn St. Bartholomew stands with his right hand over his heart, left arm extended. In his upturned palm is what appears to be a pumpkin but might be a related variety of squash.
The symbolic meaning of the squash eludes me.
At this time of year, the pool was drained, and no scent of wet limestone rose from it, as in warmer days. I detected, instead, the faintest smell of ozone, as after lightning in a spring rain, and wondered about it, but kept moving.
I followed the colonnade to the door of the guesthouse receiving room, went inside, crossed that shadowy chamber, and returned to the December night through the front door of the abbey.
Our white shepherd mix, Boo, standing on the driveway, as I had last seen him from my third-floor window, turned his head to look at me as I descended the broad front steps. His stare was clear and blue, with none of the eerie eyeshine common to animals at night.
Without benefit of stars or moon, most of the expansive yard receded into murk. If a bodach lurked out there, I could not see it.
“Boo, where’s it gone?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer. My life is strange but not so strange that it includes talking canines.
With wary purpose, however, the dog moved off the driveway, onto the yard. He headed east, past the formidable abbey, which appears almost to have been carved from a single great mass of rock, so tight are the mortar joints between its stones.
No wind ruffled the night, and darkness hung with folded wings.
Seared brown by winter, the trampled grass crunched underfoot. Boo moved with far greater stealth than I could manage.
Feeling watched, I looked up at the windows, but I didn’t see anyone, no light other than the faint flicker of the candle in my quarters, no pale face peering through a dark pane.
I had rushed out of the guest wing wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. December stropped its teeth on my bare arms.
We proceeded eastward alongside the church, which is part of the abbey, not a separate building.
A sanctuary lamp glows perpetually, but it isn’t sufficient to fire the colorful stained glass. Through window after window, that dim light seemed to watch us as though it were the single sullen eye of something in a bloody mood.
Having led me to the northeast corner of the building, Boo turned south, past the back of the church. We continued to the wing of the abbey that, on the first floor, contains the novitiate.
Not yet having taken their vows, the novices slept here. Of the five who were currently taking instruction, I liked and trusted four.
Suddenly Boo abandoned his cautious pace. He ran due east, away from the abbey, and I pursued him.
As the yard relented to the untamed meadow, grass lashed my knees. Soon the first heavy snow would compact these tall dry blades.
For a few hundred feet, the land sloped gently before leveling off, whereupon the knee-high grass became a mown lawn again. Before us in the gloom rose St. Bartholomew’s School.
In part the word school is a euphemism. These students are unwanted elsewhere, and the school is also their home, perhaps the only one that some of them will ever have.
This is the original abbey, internally remodeled but still an impressive pile of stone. The structure also houses the convent in which reside the nuns who teach the students and care for them.
Behind the former abbey, the forest bristled against the storm-ready sky, black boughs sheltering blind pathways that led far into the lonely dark.
Evidently tracking the bodach, the dog went up the broad steps to the front door of the school, and through.
Few doors in the abbey are ever locked. But for the protection of the students, the school is routinely secured.
Only the abbot, the mother superior, and I possess a universal key that allows admittance everywhere. No guest before me has been entrusted with such access.
I take no pride in their trust. It is a burden. In my pocket, the simple key sometimes feels like an iron fate drawn to a lodestone deep in the earth.
The key allows me quickly to seek Brother Constantine, the dead monk, when he manifests with a ringing of bells in one of the towers or with some other kind of cacophony elsewhere.
In Pico Mundo, the desert town in which I had lived for most of my time on earth, the spirits of many men and women linger. But here we have just Brother Constantine, who is no less disturbing than all of Pico Mundo’s dead combined, one ghost but one too many.
With a bodach on the prowl, Brother Constantine was the least of my worries.
Shivering, I used my key, and hinges squeaked, and I followed the dog into the school.
Two night-lights staved off total gloom in the reception lounge. Multiple arrangements of sofas and armchairs suggested a hotel lobby.
I hurried past the unmanned information desk and went through a swinging door into a corridor lighted by an emergency lamp and red EXIT signs.
On this ground floor were the classrooms, the rehabilitation clinic, the infirmary, the kitchen, and the communal dining room. Those sisters with a culinary gift were not yet preparing breakfast. Silence ruled these spaces, as it would for hours yet.
I climbed the south stairs and found Boo waiting for me on the second-floor landing. He remained in a solemn mood. His tail did not wag, and he did not grin in greeting.
Two long and two short hallways formed a rectangle, serving the student quarters. The residents roomed in pairs.
At the southeast and northwest junctions of the corridors were nurses’ stations, both of which I could see when I came out of the stairs in the southwest corner of the building.
At the northwest station, a nun sat at the counter, reading. From this distance, I could not identify her.
Besides, her face was half concealed by a wimple. These are not modern nuns who dress like meter maids. These sisters wear old-style habits that can make them seem as formidable as warriors in armor.
The southeast station was deserted. The nun on duty must have been making her rounds or tending to one of her charges.
When Boo padded away to the right, heading southeast, I followed without calling to the reading nun. By the time that I had taken three steps, she was out of my line of sight.
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Many of the sisters have nursing degrees, but they strive to make the second floor feel more like a cozy dormitory than like a hospital. With Christmas twenty days away, the halls were hung with garlands of fake evergreen boughs and festooned with genuine tinsel.
In respect of the sleeping students, the lights had been dimmed. The tinsel glimmered only here and there, and mostly darkled into tremulous shadows.
The doors of some student rooms were closed, others ajar. They featured not just numbers but also names.
Halfway between the stairwell and the nurses’ station, Boo paused at Room 32, where the door was not fully closed. On block-lettered plaques were the names ANNAMARIE and JUSTINE.
This time I was close enough to Boo to see that indeed his hackles were raised.
The dog passed inside, but propriety made me hesitate. I ought to have asked a nun to accompany me into these students’ quarters.
But I wanted to avoid having to explain bodachs to her. More important, I didn’t want to risk being overheard by one of those malevolent spirits as I was talking about them.
Officially, only one person at the abbey and one at the convent know about my gift—if in fact it is a gift rather than a curse. Sister Angela, the mother superior, shares my secret, as does Father Bernard, the abbot.
Courtesy had required that they fully understand the troubled young man whom they would be welcoming as a long-term guest.
To assure Sister Angela and Abbot Bernard that I was neither a fraud nor a fool, Wyatt Porter, the chief of police in Pico Mundo, my hometown, shared with them the details of some murder cases with which I had assisted him.
Likewise, Father Sean Llewellyn vouched for me. He is the Catholic priest in Pico Mundo.
Father Llewellyn is also the uncle of Stormy Llewellyn, whom I had loved and lost. Whom I will forever cherish.
During the seven months I had lived in this mountain retreat, I’d shared the truth of my life with one other, Brother Knuckles, a monk. His real name is Salvatore, but we call him Knuckles more often than not.
Brother Knuckles would not have hesitated on the threshold of Room 32. He is a monk of action. In an instant he would have decided that the threat posed by the bodach trumped propriety. He would have rushed through the door as boldly as did the dog, although with less grace and with a lot more noise.
I pushed the door open wider, and went inside.
In the two hospital beds lay Annamarie, closest to the door, and Justine. Both were asleep.
On the wall behind each girl hung a lamp controlled by a switch at the end of a cord looped around the bed rail. It could provide various intensities of light.
Annamarie, who was ten years old but small for her age, had set her lamp low, as a night-light. She feared the dark.
Her wheelchair stood beside the bed. From one of the hand grips at the back of the chair hung a quilted, insulated jacket. From the other hand grip hung a woolen cap. On winter nights, she insisted that these garments be close at hand.
The girl slept with the top sheet clenched in her frail hands, as if ready to throw off the bedclothes. Her face was taut with an expression of concerned anticipation, less than anxiety, more than mere disquiet.
Although she slept soundly, she appeared to be prepared to flee at the slightest provocation.
One day each week, of her own accord, with eyes closed tight, Annamarie practiced piloting her battery-powered wheelchair to each of two elevators. One lay in the east wing, the other in the west.
In spite of her limitations and her suffering, she was a happy child. These preparations for flight were out of character.
Although she would not talk about it, she seemed to sense that a night of terror was coming, a hostile darkness through which she would need to find her way. She might be prescient.
The bodach, first glimpsed from my high window, had come here, but not alone. Three of them, silent wolflike shadows, were gathered around the second bed, in which Justine slept.
A single bodach signals impending violence that may be either near and probable or remote and less certain. If they appear in twos and threes, the danger is more immediate.
In my experience, when they appear in packs, the pending danger has become imminent peril, and the deaths of many people are days or hours away. Although the sight of three of them chilled me, I was grateful that they didn’t number thirty.
Trembling with evident excitement, the bodachs bent over Justine while she slept, as if studying her intently. As if feeding on her.
CHAPTER 2
The lamp above the second bed had been turned low, but Justine had not adjusted it herself. A nun had selected the dimmest setting, hoping that it might please the girl.
Justine did little for herself and asked for nothing. She was partially paralyzed and could not speak.
When Justine had been four years old, her father had strangled her mother to death. They say that after she had died, he put a rose between her teeth—but with the long thorny stem down her throat.
He drowned little Justine in the bathtub, or thought he did. He left her for dead, but she survived with brain damage from prolonged lack of oxygen.
For weeks, she lingered in a coma, though that was years ago. These days she slept and woke, but when awake, her capacity for engagement with her caregivers fluctuated.
Photographs of Justine at four reveal a child of exceptional beauty. In those snapshots, she looks impish and full of delight.
Eight years after the tub, at twelve, she was more beautiful than ever. Brain damage had not resulted in facial paralysis or distorted expressions. Curiously, a life spent largely indoors had not left her pale and drawn. Her face had color, and not a blemish.
Her beauty was chaste, like that of a Botticelli madonna, and ethereal. For everyone who knew Justine, her beauty stirred neither envy nor desire, but inspired a surprising reverence and, inexplicably, something like hope.
I suspect that the three menacing figures, hunched over her with keen interest, were not drawn by her beauty. Her enduring innocence attracted them, as did their expectation—their certain knowledge?—that she would soon be dead by violence and, at last, ugly.
These purposeful shadows, as black as scraps of starless night sky, have no eyes, yet I could sense them leering; no mouths, though I could almost hear the greedy sounds of them feasting on the promise of this girl’s death.
I once saw them gathered at a nursing home in the hours before an earthquake leveled it. At a service station prior to an explosion and tragic fire. Following a teenager named Gary Tolliver in the days before he tortured and murdered his entire family.
A single death does not draw them, or two deaths, or even three. They prefer operatic violence, and for them the performance is not over when the fat lady sings, but only when she is torn to pieces.
They seem incapable of affecting our world, as though they are not fully present in this place and this time, but are in some way virtual presences. They are travelers, observers, aficionados of our pain.
Yet I fear them, and not solely because their presence signals oncoming horror. While they seem unable to affect this world in any significant way, I suspect that I am an exception to the rules that limit them, that I am vulnerable to them, as vulnerable as an ant in the shadow of a descending shoe.
Seeming whiter than usual in the company of inky bodachs, Boo did not growl, but watched these spirits with suspicion and disgust.
I pretended to have come here to assure myself that the thermostat had been properly set, to raise the pleated shades and confirm that the window had been firmly closed against all drafts, to dredge some wax from my right ear and to pry a shred of lettuce from between two teeth, though not with the same finger.
The bodachs ignored me—or pretended to ignore me.
Sleeping Justine had their complete attention. Their hands or paws hovered a few inches over the girl, and their fingers or talons described circles in the air above her, as if they were novelty-act mu
sicians playing an instrument composed of drinking glasses, rubbing eerie music from the wet crystal rims.
Perhaps, like an insistent rhythm, her innocence excited them. Perhaps her humble circumstances, her lamblike grace, her complete vulnerability were the movements of a symphony to them.
I can only theorize about bodachs. I know nothing for certain about their nature or about their origins.
This is true not only of bodachs. The file labeled THINGS ABOUT
WHICH ODD THOMAS KNOWS NOTHING is no less immense than the universe.
The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know. Maybe there is wisdom in that recognition. Unfortunately, I have found no comfort in it.
Having been bent over Justine, the three bodachs abruptly stood upright and, as one, turned their wolfish heads toward the door, as if in response to a summoning trumpet that I could not hear.
Evidently Boo could not hear it, either, for his ears did not prick up. His attention remained on the dark spirits.
Like shadows chased by sudden light, the bodachs whirled from the bed, swooped to the door, and vanished into the hallway.
Inclined to follow them, I hesitated when I discovered Justine staring at me. Her blue eyes were limpid pools: so clear, seemingly without mystery, yet bottomless.
Sometimes you can be sure she sees you. Other times, like this, you sense that, to her, you are as transparent as glass, that she can look through everything in this world.
I said to her, “Don’t be afraid,” which was twice presumptuous. First, I didn’t know that she was frightened or that she was even capable of fear. Second, my words implied a guarantee of protection that, in the coming crisis, I might not be able to fulfill.
Too wise and humble to play the hero, Boo had left the room.
As I headed toward the door, Annamarie, in the first bed, murmured, “Odd.”
Her eyes remained closed. Knots of bedsheet were still clutched in her hands. She breathed shallowly, rhythmically.
As I paused at the foot of her bed, the girl spoke again, more clearly than before: “Odd.”
