by Dean Koontz
I carried my empty glass and bare plate to the main sink and began to rinse them.
Sister Regina Marie appeared as if from an Arabian lamp. “I’ll wash them, Oddie.”
As she attacked the dish with a soapy sponge, I said, “So Mr. Romanovich has baked quite a lot of sheet cakes for the lunch dessert.”
“For dinner,” she said. “They smell so good that I’m afraid they’re decadent.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would enjoy a culinary pastime.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t strike you that way,” she agreed, “but he loves to bake. And he’s very talented.”
“You mean you’ve eaten his desserts before?”
“Many times. You have, too.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“The lemon-syrup cake with coconut icing last week. That was by Mr. Romanovich. And the week before, the polenta cake with almonds and pistachios.”
I said, “Oh.”
“And surely you remember the banana-and-lime cake with the icing made from lime-juice reduction.”
I nodded. “Surely. Yes, I remember. Delicious.”
A sudden great tolling of bells shook through the old abbey, as though Rodion Romanovich had arranged for this clangorous performance to mock me for being so gullible.
The bells were rung for a variety of services in the new abbey, but seldom here, and never at this hour.
Frowning, Sister Regina Marie looked up at the ceiling, and then in the direction of the convent church and bell tower. “Oh, dear. Do you think Brother Constantine is back?”
Brother Constantine, the dead monk, the infamous suicide who lingers stubbornly in this world.
“Excuse me, Sister,” I said, and I hurried out of the kitchen, digging in a pocket of my jeans for my universal key.
CHAPTER 24
After the construction of the new abbey, the church in the former abbey had not been deconsecrated. Twice every day, a priest came downhill to say Mass; half the sisters attended the first service, half the second.
The late Brother Constantine almost exclusively haunted the new abbey and the new church, though he twice made memorable appearances, sans bells, at the school. He had hanged himself in the new bell tower, and when previously his restless spirit had raised a tolling, the clamor had been in that same structure.
Heeding my warning to Sister Angela, I did not go out into the storm, but followed a ground-floor hallway into the former novitiate wing, and entered the sacristy by the back door.
As loud as the bells had seemed before, they were twice that loud when I stepped out of the sacristy into the church. The vaulted ceiling reverberated not with a celebratory tintinnabulation, not with a glory-of-Christmas sound, not with the joyful ringing that follows a wedding. This was an angry tumult of bronze clappers, a pandemoniacal bong-and-clang.
By the murky stormlight that penetrated the stained-glass windows, I stepped down through the choir stalls. I passed through the sanctuary gate and hurried along the center aisle of the nave, sliding a little in my stocking feet.
My haste did not mean that I looked forward with pleasure to another encounter with the spirit of Brother Constantine. He is about as much fun as strep throat.
Because this noisy manifestation was occurring here instead of in the tower where he had killed himself, it might be in some way related to the violence that was bearing down on the children of St. Bart’s School. I had learned virtually nothing about that impending event thus far, and I hoped that Brother Constantine would have a clue or two for me.
In the narthex, I flicked a light switch, turned right, and came to the bell-tower door, which was kept locked out of concern that one of the more physically able children might slip out of supervision and wander this far. Were a child to get to the top of the tower, he would be at risk of falling out of the belfry or down the stairs.
As I turned my key in the lock, I warned myself that I was as susceptible to a fatal plunge as was a wandering child. I didn’t mind dying—and being reunited with Stormy, whether in Heaven or in the unknown great adventure she calls “service”—but not until the threat to the children had been identified and met.
If I failed this time, if some were spared but others died, as at the mall during the shooting spree, I would have no place to flee that could promise more solitude and peace than a mountain monastery. And you already know what a crock that promise turned out to be.
The spiral staircase in the tower was not heated. The rubberized treads felt cold under my stocking feet, but they were not slippery.
Here the bedlam of bells caused the walls to resonate like a drum membrane responding to peals of thunder. As I climbed, I slid my hand along the curved wall, and the plaster hummed under my palm.
By the time I reached the top of the stairs, my teeth discretely vibrated like thirty-two tuning forks. The hairs in my nose tickled, and my ears ached. I could feel the boom of the bells in my bones.
This was an auditory experience for which every thrashed-out heavy-metal rhapsodist had been searching all his life: tuned-bronze walls of sound crashing down in deafening avalanches.
I stepped into the belfry, where the air was freezing.
Before me was not a three-bell carillon like the one at the new abbey. This tower was wider, the belfry more spacious than the one in the building upslope. In earlier decades, the monks clearly had taken more exuberant pleasure in their tolling, for they had constructed a two-level, five-bell carillon, and the bells were enormous, as well.
No ropes or crankwheels were required to swing these bronze behemoths. Brother Constantine rode them as if he were a rodeo cowboy leaping from one back to another among a herd of bucking bulls.
His restless spirit, energized by frustration and fury, had become a raging poltergeist. An immaterial entity, he had no weight or leverage with which to move the heavy bells, but from him throbbed concentric waves of power as invisible to other people as was the dead monk himself, though visible to me.
As these pulses washed through the belfry, the suspended bronze forms swung wildly. The immense clappers hammered out a more violent knelling than their makers had intended or imagined possible.
I could not feel those waves of power as they washed over me. A poltergeist cannot harm a living person either by touch or directly by his emanations.
If one of the bells broke loose of its mountings and fell on me, however, I nonetheless would be squashed.
Brother Constantine had been gentle in life, so he could not have become evil in death. If he unintentionally harmed me, he would be cast into a deeper despair than the one he currently endured.
In spite of his deeply felt remorse, I would remain squashed.
Back and forth along the carillon, up and down and up the two levels, the dead monk capered. Although he didn’t appear demonic, I do not feel that I am being unfair to him by using the word demented.
Any lingering spirit is irrational, having lost his way in the vertical of sacred order. A poltergeist is irrational and pissed.
Warily, I moved along the walkway that encircled the bells. They swung in wider arcs than usual, intruding on the pathway and forcing me to remain near the perimeter of the space.
Columns stood on the waist-high outer wall, supporting the overhanging roof. Between the columns, on a clear day, were views of the new abbey, of the rising and descending slopes of the Sierra, of a pristine vastness of forest.
The blizzard screened from sight the new abbey and the forest. I could see only the slate roofs and the cobblestone courtyards of the old abbey immediately below.
The storm shrieked as before, but it could not be heard above the booming bells. Wind-harried twists of snow chased one another through the belfry, and out again.
As I slowly circled him, Brother Constantine was aware that I had arrived. Like a robed and hooded goblin, he leaped from bell to bell, his attention always on me.
His eyes bulged grotesquely, not as they had in
life, but as the strangling noose had caused them to bulge when his neck had snapped and his trachea had collapsed.
I stopped with my back turned to one of the columns and spread my arms wide, both palms turned up, as if to ask, What’s the point of this, Brother? How does this benefit you?
Although he knew what I meant, he did not want to contemplate the ultimate ineffectiveness of his rage. He looked away from me and flung himself more frenetically through the bells.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and yawned. I assumed a bored expression. When he looked at me again, I yawned exaggeratedly and shook my head as an actor does when playing to the back rows, as though sadly expressing my disappointment in him.
Here was proof that even in its most desperate hours, when the bones are gnawed by a sharp-toothed chill and the nerves fray in fear of what the next circuit of the clock may bring, life retains a comic quality. The clangor had reduced me to a mime.
This swelling of bells proved to be Brother Constantine’s final flare of rage. The concentric waves of power stopped radiating from him, and at once the bells swung less violently, their arcs rapidly diminishing.
Although my socks were thick and made for winter sports, an icy cold pressed through them from the stone floor. My teeth began to chatter as I strove to continue feigning boredom.
Soon the clappers bumped gently against the bronze, producing soft, clear, mellow notes that were the essential theme music for a melancholy mood.
The voice of the wind did not return in a howling rush because my brutalized ears were still thrumming with the memory of the recent cacophony.
Like one of those masters of martial mayhem in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who could leap gracefully to rooftops and then descend in an aerial ballet, Brother Constantine glided down from the bells and landed near me on the belfry deck.
He no longer chose to be goggle-eyed. His face was as it had been before the cinching noose, though perhaps he had never looked this mournful in life.
As I was about to speak to him, I became aware of movement on the farther side of the belfry, a dark presence glimpsed between the curves of silenced bronze, silhouetted against the stifled light of the snow-choked day.
Brother Constantine followed my gaze and seemed to identify the new arrival from what little could be seen. Although nothing in this world could harm him anymore, the dead monk shrank back as though in dread.
I had moved away from the head of the stairs, and as the figure circled the bells, it came between me and that sole exit from the belfry.
As my temporary deafness faded and as the cry of the wind rose like a chorus of angry voices, the figure emerged from behind the screening bells. Here was the black-habited monk whom I had seen in the open door to the stairwell, as I’d turned away from Sister Miriam at the nurses’ station, little more than twenty minutes ago.
I was closer to him now than I had been then, but I could still see only blackness inside his hood, not the merest suggestion of a face. The wind billowed his tunic but revealed no feet, and at the ends of his sleeves, there were no hands to be seen.
Afforded more than a glimpse of him this time, I realized that his tunic was longer than those the brothers wore, that it trailed on the floor. The fabric was not as common as that from which the monks’ habits were fashioned; it had the luster of silk.
He wore a necklace of human teeth strung like pearls, with three fingers, just bleached bones, pendant at the center.
Instead of a cloth cincture at the waist, to gather in the tunic and the scapular, he wore a woven cord of what appeared to be clean, shiny human hair.
He drifted toward me. Although I intended to stand my ground, I stepped back from him as he approached, as reluctant to make contact as was my dead companion, Brother Constantine.
CHAPTER 25
Had not the soles of my feet been stung by cold as sharp as needles, had not a burning kind of numbness begun to cramp my toes, I might have thought that I had never awakened to find the red light and the blue light of sheriff’s-department vehicles twinkling in the frosted windows of my guesthouse bedroom, that I was still asleep and dreaming.
The great pendular lobes of bronze, to which fevered Freud would have attributed the sleaziest symbolic meaning, and the groin-vaulted ceiling of the belfry, which was also fraught with meaning not solely because of its name but also because of its curves and shadows, made the perfect landscape for a dream, surrounded by the virginal white of the frigid storm.
This minimalist figure of Death, robed and hooded, neither ripe with rot nor squirming with maggots as he would be in comic books and in cheesy slice-and-dice movies, but as clean as a dark polar wind, was as real as the Reaper in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. At the same time, he had the qualities of a threatening phantom in a nightmare, amorphous and unknowable, most sharply seen from the corner of the eye.
Death raised his right arm, and from the sleeve appeared a long pale hand, not skeletal but fully fleshed. Although a void remained within the hood, the hand reached toward me, and the finger pointed.
Now I was reminded of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Here was the last of the three spirits to visit the miserly master of the counting house, the ominous silent spirit that Scrooge named the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The ghost had been what Scrooge called it but also something worse, because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours.
From Death’s left sleeve, another pale hand appeared, and this one held a rope, the end of which had been fashioned into a noose. The spirit—or whatever it might be—traded the noose from his left hand to his right, and raveled out an unlikely length of rope from within his tunic.
When he withdrew the loose end of the rope from his sleeve, he tossed it over the rocking bar that, when turned by a crankwheel at the bottom of the tower, would set the five-bell carillon to ringing. He fashioned a gallows knot with such ease that it seemed not like the skill of a seasoned executioner but like a good magician’s sleight of hand.
All this had the feel of kabuki, that Japanese form of highly stylized theater. The surreal sets, the elaborate costumes, the bold masks, the wigs, the extravagant emotions, and the broad melodramatic gestures of the actors should make Japanese theater as laughable as America’s brand of professional wrestling. Yet by some mysterious effect, to the knowledgeable audience, kabuki becomes as real as a razor drawn across a thumb.
In the silence of the bells, with the storm seeming to roar its approval of his performance, Death pointed at me, and I knew that he intended the noose for my neck.
Spirits cannot harm the living. This is our world, not theirs.
Death is not actually a figure that stalks the world in costume, collecting souls.
Both of those things were true, which meant that this menacing Reaper could not do me any harm.
Because my imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty, I could nevertheless imagine the coarse fibers of the rope against my throat, my Adam’s apple cinched to sauce.
Taking courage from the fact that he was already dead, Brother Constantine stepped forward, as if to draw Death’s attention and give me a chance to make a break for the stairs.
The monk leaped to the bells again, but he no longer could summon the rage required to produce psychokinetic phenomena. He appeared instead to be overcome by fear for me. He wrung his hands, and his mouth wrenched wide in a silent scream.
My confidence that no spirit could harm me was shaken by Brother Constantine’s conviction that I was toast.
Although the Reaper was a simpler figure than the kaleidoscope of bones that had stalked me through the storm, I sensed that they were alike in that they were theatrical, mannered, self-conscious in a way that the lingering dead never are. Even a poltergeist at the summit of his wrath does not design his rampage for maximum effect on the living, has no intention of spooking anyone, but wants only to work off his frustration, his self-loathing, his rag
e at being stuck in a kind of purgatory between two worlds.
The dazzling transformations of the bone beast at the window had smacked of vanity: Behold the wonder of me, stand in awe, and tremble. Likewise, the Reaper moved as might a conceited dancer on a stage, ostentatious, in expectation of applause.
Vanity is strictly a human weakness. No animal is capable of vanity. People sometimes say cats are vain, but cats are haughty. They are confident of their superiority and do not crave admiration, as do vain men and women.
The lingering dead, though they might have been vain in life, have been stripped of vanity by the discovery of their mortality.
Now this Reaper made a mocking come-to-me gesture, as if I should be so intimidated by his fearsome appearance and his grandeur that I would put the noose around my neck and spare him the struggle to snare me.
The recognition that those two apparitions shared an all-too-human vanity, a conceit unseen in all that is truly otherworldly, was significant. But I didn’t know why.
In response to his come-to-me gesture, I stepped back from him, and he flew at me with sudden ferocity.
Before I could raise an arm to block him, he got his right hand around my throat and, exhibiting inhuman strength, lifted me off the floor with one hand.
The Reaper’s arm was so unnaturally long that I couldn’t strike at him or claw at the perfect blackness that pooled within his hood. I was reduced to tearing at the hand that gripped me, trying to pry back his fingers.
Although his hand looked like flesh, flexed like flesh, I could not claw blood from it. My fingernails scraping across his pale skin produced the sound they would have raised from a slate chalkboard.
He slammed me against a column, and the back of my head rapped the stone. For a moment, the blizzard seemed to find its way inside my skull, and a whirl of white behind my eyes almost spun me away into an eternal winter.
When I kicked and kicked, my feet landed without effect in soft billows of black tunic, and his body, if one existed under those silken folds, seemed to have no more solidity than quicksand or than the sucking tar into which Jurassic behemoths had blundered to their destruction.
